Tales of the Otherworld (48 page)

The deeper reason for the prejudice, though, was that vampires posed
a theoretical threat to Cabal power. Unlike werewolves, vampires resented being kept out of Cabal life. They had an innate sense of entitlement, reinforced by their semi-immortality and invulnerability. Shouldn’t they, not sorcerers, stand at the apex of the supernatural world?

Most prominent vampires, like Cassandra and Aaron, had no interest in running a supernatural corporation, so the threat of a vampire uprising remained unrealized. Yet a threat it remained. Here was the perfect opportunity to dispel it…and few supernaturals would complain.

The other two Cabals were expected in Portland by dawn. That meant Paige and I had only those few hours to investigate before they swept us aside. While we had little hope of exonerating Spencer Geddes, we might at least be able to reconstruct the events before the Cabals did their own creative reconstruction.

My father gave us full access to Kepler and the crime scene, along with the services of the crime-scene technician he was flying in with the doctor. He didn’t support the St. Cloud proposal, so he had little reason to block me.

The doctor and crime-scene technician arrived shortly thereafter. The technician was a shaman named Simon—a man I’d worked with before, which smoothed the process.

Reichs’s body had been found inside Spencer Geddes’s cell. He’d been bitten, but that wasn’t the cause of death. It takes time to drain a man’s blood, and Geddes could hardly afford to do that with Kepler presumably nearby. Geddes would have only bitten Reichs to render him unconscious and kill him. Then Geddes had gone upstairs, encountered Kepler, disabled him with a bite, then fled.

All the evidence Simon found supported this theory, including the bite marks in Reichs’s neck. This was no repeat of the chupacabra killing—a “bloodthirsty monster” blamed for a human attack. Spencer Geddes had bitten these men. But there were still questions.

How had Geddes managed to get Reichs into the cell in the first place? If the bite disabled Reichs, why strangle him? If he felt the need to kill Reichs, why not Kepler? Was there an element of self-defense? Of provocation? If there was anything to be said in Geddes’s defense, I needed to find it—quickly.

The doctor had examined Kepler and confirmed the bite on his neck did, like Reichs’s, come from a vampire. Kepler’s leg, while badly bruised, did not appear to be broken, so there was no need to fly him to Miami for further examination. We were then free to interview him.

We started with inquiries into Kepler’s health and condolences on the death of his superior officer. Paige had brought coffee and a pastry assortment from down the road, and by the time we launched into our questions, Kepler’s initial nervousness had vanished.

“This is what I was doing when Geddes escaped,” he said, lifting his coffee cup. “Caffeine run, probably from the same place. Mr. Cortez lets us do that, as long as one person stays with the prisoner and stays away from the cell.”

“Was there a scheduled time for your coffee runs?” I asked.

“Nah, just whenever we needed the boost or the break.”

“You say you were warned to stay away from Spencer Geddes when the other was gone.”

“Uh-huh. To avoid being hypnotized…or whatever it is vamps do.”

“Do you know why Reichs would break that rule?”

Kepler dropped his gaze. “No, sir.”

A lie, but I pushed onward. “And then you returned …”

“I came in through the back door. The vampire was right there, like he’d heard me. I went for him, but he pushed me over a pile of boxes and that must be how I hurt my leg. I don’t remember. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in the back hall when you guys found me.”

“Do you have any idea why Geddes would kill Reichs? He’d disabled him and could have simply taken his gun for self-defense.”

“Well, sir, he is a vampire. They don’t like us. He probably killed Reichs just because he could. Maybe revenge for getting locked up.”

“Then why not kill you, too?”

As I held Kepler’s gaze, he reddened. “I—I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, sir. Reichs was a great guy. He taught me a lot. He just…He didn’t like vampires. A lot of us don’t.”

“But Reichs didn’t bother to hide it,” Paige murmured, remembering his comments the night they captured Geddes.

“Did Reichs make his feelings known to Geddes?” I asked.

Gaze down again, Kepler nodded. “He liked to taunt him. He told him about the St. Cloud proposal. Told him it didn’t matter what you guys found, the Cabals planned to execute him. Geddes would get so mad…. It scared me, sir. I wondered if I should tell anyone, but I didn’t want to get Reichs in trouble.”

Kepler went silent and I let him.

After a moment, he said, “I think that’s why Reichs was near the cell. He knew it made me uncomfortable—teasing the vampire like that—so he was doing it while I wasn’t there. That’s probably why Geddes killed him, too. Reichs pushed him too far.”

A few minutes later, my father came in to tell us the St. Clouds’ plane had landed. The meeting would begin in an hour. Now it was time to take a step we both dreaded: telling Cassandra.

Paige phoned and told her about the St. Cloud proposal. If Cassandra was surprised, she gave no sign. Cassandra was adroit enough to know such a threat had always been possible. She wanted to be at the meeting, of course, which we’d foreseen, and my father had agreed to.

Before Paige signed off, she said, “Quick question. We’re trying to figure out how Spencer Geddes’s cell got opened. We know Reichs was alone with him at the time and may have approached the cell. Could Geddes have charmed him into opening it?”

Paige listened to Cassandra’s answer, interjecting a few “uh-huh” and “I see” responses.

When she hung up, she turned to me. “Short answer? No.”

I nodded. “Because vampires charm not by hypnotizing their prey, but by inducing a highly suggestible state. Meaning if Reichs had no desire to open that door, Geddes couldn’t make him do it.”

“Begging the question: What would ever possess a guy to open the door for a pissed-off vampire?”

S
EAN SAT AT THE MEETING TABLE BETWEEN
his uncle and his grandfather and, at that moment, it was the last place he wanted to be.

His uncle’s words still burned.
Suck it in and do your duty to the family.
As incredibly insensitive as that was, his uncle had made one valid point. If Sean left the Cabal, he’d hurt the two people he cared about most: Bryce and his grandfather.

With his uncle’s words, any fantasy of being accepted by his family had evaporated. They
did
accept it…as long as he didn’t let his sexual orientation stand in the way of his duties to marry and have children. The need to provide heirs was just an excuse—any gay man could still have children via surrogacy. But Nasts had to uphold the Cabal culture of machismo. Being gay wasn’t an option.

So Sean was trapped between two impossible choices: abandoning his family or living a lie. This wasn’t a choice to be made today, or even this month; perhaps not for years. Yet he knew one thing. He wouldn’t play the hypocrite. He wouldn’t flaunt it, but neither would he date women and marry.

Things would eventually come to a head. But for now, he’d start carving his own path, making the decisions that were right for him rather than the ones that would make the fewest waves. In some ways, he’d already been doing that—as with his relationship with Savannah—but he’d no longer feel guilty or torn.

The meeting got off to an explosive start a few minutes later when Lucas and Paige joined them. The grumbles rose to ill-concealed gasps of
surprise and grunts of outrage when Cassandra DuCharme followed them in. The few who hadn’t met her after the Edward and Natasha problem were promptly educated by their neighbors, and a fresh round of shock and outrage surged.

Cassandra’s gaze lighted on Sean’s with a faint frown. He’d met her several times, and always got the same look, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should know him. He smiled and she nodded, favoring him with a faint, regal smile.

Frank Boyd pushed to his feet. “This is most inappropriate—”

“I know,” Cassandra said. “It’s rude of me, and I apologize. It’s much simpler to condemn a race when one of them isn’t sitting in the room.”

Benicio rose and pulled out a chair on his left as he gestured for Lucas and Paige to sit at his right. Cassandra took her place and removed a leather-bound notebook from her purse, then a gold pen. When she looked up to see everyone watching her, she smiled.

“Please, proceed. Consider me merely an observer. I’m most interested to hear what you have to say on this matter.”

And so the discussion began, not flowing and rising to the fever pitch of impassioned debate, but limping along. It was indeed harder to condemn all vampires when one was sitting there listening. Especially when that vampire wasn’t a belligerent asshole like Spencer Geddes, but the sort of attractive, well-mannered woman you could imagine gracing the halls of your own organization.

When Lionel St. Cloud’s nephew, Phil, began reading his prepared notes on vampire behavior, his gaze kept shooting to Cassandra, clearly not as confident in his facts as he’d been when he wrote them.

“May I?” Cassandra said. “I believe I’m something of an expert on the subject.”

Phil nodded and Cassandra began a thorough, dispassionate explanation of vampire life: their powers, their feeding habits, and their required annual kill. Even the last she explained with no apology or emotion, as if it was a simple fact of their life. When asked how they chose their victims, her answer was equally honest and neutral. Vampires ranged from those who used their annual kill to stop criminals, to those who selected the elderly and ill, to those who just picked random strangers.

Vampires killed people. An indisputable fact. Move along. So they did.

Discussion then swung back to known cases of vampire attacks on Cabal members. The St. Clouds and Sean’s uncle trotted out every suspected case in the last two hundred years. A few weeks ago, Sean would have stayed silent. Not today.

Sean signaled for the floor. When his request was granted, he stood.

“And how does that compare, per capita, to half-demon attacks? Or sorcerer attacks? Maybe we can break it down further, save ourselves having to punish all vampires. Is it the women? The whites? The middle-aged?”

“Sean,” his uncle warned under his breath.

“No, this is silly. It’s prejudice and fear and we all know it. Even if we knew that fifty percent of white, middle-aged female vampires will kill a Cabal employee in their lifetimes, how does that justify punishing all of them?”

“And there is another point to consider,” Benicio said, his voice soft but carrying through the room. “While Sean makes a valid case from a humanitarian standpoint, we must also consider the political ramifications of exiling all vampires. First, it will damage our relations with Cabals in other countries. We don’t want vampires here, so we send them there. Beyond that, let’s think this through.” Benicio eased back in his chair. “So we exile all vampires. If I’m a werewolf, that would make me nervous. While a vampire has the advantage of invulnerability, their physical threat is minimal compared to that of a werewolf fearful of losing his territory. So we’ll need to exterminate them, too. Now who is a danger? Witches? Powerful sorcerers living outside the Cabal? With each step, we anger a larger group and reduce the overall supernatural population. Hardly good business sense.”

The debate continued. While Sean would love to believe his speech had some effect, he knew Benicio Cortez’s argument—the coldly political one—would carry more weight.

“One thing we’re forgetting,” his uncle said, “is the need for decisive action. If we hesitate, these vampires will—”

A discreet rap at the door. One of Benicio Cortez’s bodyguards poked his head in.

“Sorry, Mr. Cortez, but—”

Savannah slipped past the guard, who made only a token attempt to stop her. The sophisticated young woman Sean had seen the day before
had vanished, replaced by the Savannah he knew better—wearing sneakers and jeans, her hair in a ponytail, no makeup. Her face was flushed, eyes anxious. Sean pushed his chair back.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I have to talk to Paige. It’s about the murder.”

Sean, closest to her, started to rise. His uncle laid a hand on his arm, a clear warning that while Sean could privately acknowledge Savannah, he should not do so here.

Sean slipped from his uncle’s grasp and went to his sister. Paige and Lucas were right behind him.

“I think I know why that guard went into Geddes’s cell,” Savannah whispered, too low for the others to hear. “And I think it’s my fault.”

C
ASSANDRA STAYED IN THE MEETING ROOM
, not giving the Cabal heads a chance to debate behind her back.

Paige led Savannah past the bodyguards assembled in the hall. Troy leaned over to murmur something as they passed, then pointed, directing her to a room where we could speak in private.

As Sean closed the office door behind us, Savannah said to Paige, “I heard you and Cassandra talking on the phone about whether Geddes could have charmed the guard. After she left, I remembered something. When I was talking to the younger guard, he was going on about vampires, trying to impress me with what he knew.” She rolled her eyes. “Most of it was the kind of stuff you’d find in pulp novels. A supernatural—even a half-demon—should know better.”