I sure could have stood a longer ride and more delay.
We parked on the street in front of the mansion, for so it seemed to me. Bill opened my door for me. I stood for a moment, reluctant to start the—project. I knew there were vampires inside, lots of them. I knew it the same way I would be able to discern that humans were waiting. But instead of positive surges of thought, the kind I’d get to indicate people, I got mental pictures of . . . how can I put it? There were holes in the air inside the house. Each hole represented a vampire. I went a few feet down the short sidewalk to the front door, and there, finally, I caught a mental whiff of human.
The light over the door was on, so I could tell the house was of beige brick with white trim. The light, too, was for my benefit; any vampire could see far better than the sharpest-eyed human. Isabel led the way to the front door, which was framed in graduating arches of brick. There was a tasteful wreath of grapevines and dried flowers on the door, which almost disguised the peephole. This was clever mainstreaming. I realized there was nothing apparent in this house’s appearance to indicate that it was any different from any of the other oversized houses we’d passed, no outward indication that within lived vampires.
But they were there, in force. As I followed Isabel inside, I counted four in the main room onto which the front door opened, and there were two in the hall and at least six in the vast kitchen, which looked designed to produce meals for twenty people at a time. I knew immediately that the house had been purchased, not built, by a vampire, because vampires always plan tiny kitchens, or leave the kitchen out entirely. All they need is a refrigerator, for the synthetic blood, and a microwave, to heat it up. What are they going to cook?
At the sink, a tall, lanky human was washing a few dishes, so perhaps some humans did live here. He half-turned as we passed through, and nodded to me. He was wearing glasses and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. I didn’t have a chance to speak, because Isabel was ushering us into what appeared to be the dining room.
Bill was tense. I might not be able to read his mind, but I knew him well enough to interpret the set of his shoulders. No vampire is ever comfortable entering another vamp’s territory. Vampires have as many rules and regulations as any other society; they just try to keep them secret. But I was figuring things out.
Among all the vampires in the house, I quickly spotted the leader. He was one of those sitting at the long table in the large dining room. He was a total geek. That was my first impression. Then I realized that he was carefully disguised as a geek: he was quite . . . other. His sandy hair was slicked back, his physique was narrow and unimpressive, his black-rimmed glasses were sheer camouflage, and his pinstriped oxford cloth shirt was tucked into cotton-polyester blend pants. He was pale—well, duh—and freckled, with invisible eyelashes and minimal eyebrows.
“Bill Compton,” the geek said.
“Stan Davis,” Bill said.
“Yeah, welcome to the city.” There was a faint trace of foreign accent in the geek’s voice.
He used to be Stanislaus Davidowitz,
I thought, and then wiped my mind clean like a slate. If any of them found out that every now and then I picked a stray thought out of the silence of their minds, I’d be bloodless before I hit the floor.
Even Bill didn’t know that.
I packed the fear down in the cellar of my mind as the pale eyes fixed on me and scrutinized me feature by feature.
“She comes in an agreeable package,” he said to Bill, and I supposed that was meant to be a compliment, a pat on the back, for Bill.
Bill inclined his head.
Vampires didn’t waste time saying a lot of things humans would under similar circumstances. A human executive would ask Bill how Eric, his boss, was doing; would threaten Bill a little in case I didn’t perform; would maybe introduce Bill and me to at least the more important people in the room. Not Stan Davis, head vampire. He lifted his hand, and a young Hispanic vampire with bristly black hair left the room and returned with a human girl in tow. When she saw me, she gave a screech and lunged, trying to break free of the grip the vampire had on her upper arm.
“Help me,” she shrieked. “You have to help me!”
I knew right away that she was stupid. After all, what could I do against a roomful of vampires? Her appeal was ridiculous. I told myself that several times, very fast, so I could go through with what I had to do.
I caught her eyes, and held up my finger to tell her to be silent. Once she’d looked at me, locked on to me, she obeyed. I don’t have the hypnotic eyes of a vamp, but I don’t look the least bit threatening. I look exactly like the girl you’d see in a low-paying job any place in any town in the South: blond and bosomy and tan and young. Possibly, I don’t look very bright. But I think it’s more that people (and vampires) assume that if you’re pretty and blond and have a low-paying job, you are ipso facto dumb.
I turned to Stan Davis, very grateful that Bill was right behind me. “Mr. Davis, you understand that I need more privacy when I question this girl. And I have to know what you need from her.”
The girl began to sob. It was slow and heartrending, and almost unbelievably irritating under the circumstances.
Davis’s pale eyes fastened on mine. He was not trying to glamour me, or subdue me; he was just examining me. “I understood your escort knew the terms of my agreement with his leader,” Stan Davis said. All right, I got the point. I was beneath contempt since I was a human. My talking to Stan was like a chicken talking to the buyer from KFC. But still, I had to know our goal. “I’m aware you met Area 5’s conditions,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could, “and I’m going to do my best. But without a goal, I can’t get started.”
“We need to know where our brother is,” he said, after a pause.
I tried not to look as astonished as I felt.
As I’ve said, some vampires, like Bill, live by themselves. Others feel more secure in a cluster, called a nest. They call each other brother and sister when they’ve been in the same nest for a while, and some nests lasted decades. (One in New Orleans has lasted two centuries.) I knew from Bill’s briefing before we left Louisiana that the Dallas vampires lived in an especially large nest.
I’m no brain surgeon, but even I realized that for a vampire as powerful as Stan to be missing one of his nest brothers was not only very unusual, it was humiliating.
Vampires like to be humiliated about as much as people do.
“Explain the circumstances, please,” I said in my most neutral voice.
“My brother Farrell has not returned to his nest for five nights,” Stan Davis said.
I knew they would have checked Farrell’s favorite hunting grounds, have asked every other vampire in the Dallas nest to find out if Farrell had been seen. Nevertheless, I opened my mouth to ask, as humans are compelled to do. But Bill touched my shoulder, and I glanced behind me to see a tiny headshake. My questions would be taken as a serious insult.
“This girl?” I asked instead. She was still quiet, but she was shivering and shaking. The Hispanic vampire seemed to be the only thing holding her up.
“Works in the club where he was last seen. It’s one we own, The Bat’s Wing.” Bars were favorite enterprises for vampires, naturally, because their heaviest traffic came at night. Somehow, fanged all-night dry cleaners didn’t have the same allure that a vampirestudded bar did.
In the past two years, vampire bars had become the hottest form of nightlife a city could boast. The pathetic humans who became obsessed with vampires—fangbangers—hung out in vampire bars, often in costumes, in the hopes of attracting the attention of the real thing. Tourists came in to gape at the undead and the fangbangers. These bars weren’t the safest place to work.
I caught the eyes of the Hispanic vampire, and indicated a chair on my side of the long table. He eased the girl into it. I looked down at her, preparing to slide into her thoughts. Her mind had no protection whatsoever. I closed my eyes.
Her name was Bethany. She was twenty-one, and she had thought of herself as a wild child, a real bad girl. She had had no idea what trouble that could get her into, until now. Getting a job at the Bat’s Wing had been the rebellious gesture of her life, and it might just turn out to be fatal.
I turned my eyes back to Stan Davis. “You understand,” I said, taking a great risk, “that if she yields the information you want, she goes free, unharmed.” He’d said he understood the terms, but I had to be sure.
Bill heaved a sigh behind me. Not a happy camper. Stan Davis’s eyes actually glowed for a second, so angry was he. “Yes,” he said, biting out the words, his fangs half out, “I agreed.” We met each other’s eyes for a second. We both knew that even two years ago, the vampires of Dallas would have kidnapped Bethany and tortured her until they had every scrap of information she had stored in her brain, and some she’d made up.
Mainstreaming, going public with the fact of their existence, had many benefits—but it also had its price. In this instance, the price was my service.
“What does Farrell look like?”
“Like a cowboy.” Stan said this without a trace of humor. “He wears one of those string ties, jeans, and shirts with fake pearl snaps.”
The Dallas vampires didn’t seem to be into haute couture. Maybe I could have worn my barmaid outfit after all. “What color hair and eyes?”
“Brown hair going gray. Brown eyes. A big jaw. About . . . five feet, eleven inches.” Stan was translating from some other method of measurement. “He would look about thirty-eight, to you,” Stan said. “He’s clean-shaven, and thin.”
“Would you like me to take Bethany somewhere else? You got a smaller room, less crowded?” I tried to look agreeable, because it seemed like such a good idea.
Stan made a movement with his hand, almost too fast for me to detect, and in a second—literally—every vampire, except Stan himself and Bill, had left the kitchen. Without looking, I knew that Bill was standing against the wall, ready for anything. I took a deep breath. Time to start this venture.
“Bethany, how are you?” I said, making my voice gentle.
“How’d you know my name?” she asked, slumping down in her seat. It was a breakfast nook chair on wheels, and I rolled it out from the table and turned it to face the one I now settled in. Stan was still sitting at the head of the table, behind me, slightly to my left.
“I can tell lots of things about you,” I said, trying to look warm and omniscient. I began picking thoughts out of the air, like apples from a laden tree. “You had a dog named Woof when you were little, and your mother makes the best coconut cake in the world. Your dad lost too much money at a card game one time, and you had to hock your VCR to help him pay up, so your mom wouldn’t find out.”
Her mouth was hanging open. As much as it was possible, she had forgotten the fact that she was in terrible danger. “That’s amazing, you’re as good as the psychic on TV, the one in the ads!”
“Well, Bethany, I’m not a psychic,” I said, a little too sharply. “I’m a telepath, and what I do is read your thoughts, even some you maybe didn’t know you had. I’m going to relax you, first, and then we’re going to remember the evening you worked at the bar—not tonight, but five nights ago.” I glanced back at Stan, who nodded.
“But I wasn’t thinking about my mother’s cake!” Bethany said, stuck on what had struck her.
I tried to suppress my sigh.
“You weren’t aware of it, but you did. It slid across your mind when you looked at the palest vampire—Isabel—because her face was as white as the icing for the cake. And you thought of how much you missed your dog when you were thinking of how your parents would miss you.”
I knew that was a mistake as soon as the words went out of my mouth, and sure enough, she began crying again, recalled to her present circumstances.
“So what are you here for?” she asked between sobs.
“I’m here to help you remember.”
“But you said you’re not psychic.”
“And I’m not.” Or was I? Sometimes I thought I had a streak mixed in with my other “gift,” which was what the vampires thought it was. I had always thought of it as more of a curse, myself, until I’d met Bill. “Psychics can touch objects and get information about the wearers. Some psychics see visions of past or future events. Some psychics can communicate with the dead. I’m a telepath. I can read some peoples’ thoughts. Supposedly, I can send thoughts, too, but I’ve never tried that.” Now that I’d met another telepath, the attempt was an exciting possibility, but I stowed that idea away to explore at my leisure. I had to concentrate on the business at hand.
As I sat knee to knee with Bethany, I was making a series of decisions. I was new to the idea of using my “listening in” to some purpose. Most of my life had been spent struggling
not
to hear. Now, hearing was my job, and Bethany’s life probably depended on it. Mine almost certainly did.
“Listen, Bethany, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to remember that evening, and I’m going to go through it with you. In your mind.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No, not a bit.”
“And after that?”
“Why, you’ll go.”
“Go home?”
“Sure.” With an amended memory that wouldn’t include me, or this evening, courtesy of a vampire.
“They won’t kill me?”
“No way.”
“You promise?”
“I do.” I managed to smile at her.
“Okay,” she said, hesitantly. I moved her a little, so she couldn’t see Stan over my shoulder. I had no idea what he was doing. But she didn’t need to see that white face while I was trying to get her to relax.
“You’re pretty,” she said suddenly.
“Thanks, and back at you.” At least, she might be pretty under better circumstances. Bethany had a mouth that was too small for her face, but that was a feature some men found attractive, since it looked like she was always puckered up. She had a great quantity of brown hair, thick and bushy, and a thin body with small breasts. Now that another woman was looking at her, Bethany was worried about her wrinkled clothes and stale makeup.