Page 28 of Vacation with the Vampire
“I have done precisely that,” I sharply retorted, not liking this feeling of inadequacy. I did not want her to think less of me for failing to do something as simple as “texting.”
“You typed three words,” she pointed out with a laugh. Her shoulder brushed mine, her bare arm grazing the wool of my jacket. She was so comfortable being close, so at ease in her touch now that we’d become lovers. I relished that.
“They were sufficient,” I told her, but the feeling of failure was already fading. I’d master this too, soon enough; it was just a tiny hiccup now. The progress humans had made in just two short centuries was astounding, and far more than I had expected, but I’d adjust. I always did.
She leaned in, reading. “‘We will meet.’ Raoul, that’s not a text; that’s a proclamation.” She chuckled, her blue eyes sparkling likesapphires. As ominous and dire as it felt to arrange a meeting with a shadowy, unknown sorcerer, I was still happy she was at my side.
“It conveys clarity,” I said, and there was nothing wrong with clarity, especially when talking to a centuries-old sorcerer, even via screen. It was like scrying through a mirror, only everyone could do it. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing yet.
“It conveys that you might be a serial killer,” she said. Ah, serial killer, a word that did not need an explanation to convey what it meant. I turned my head slowly to look at her and allowed myself a faint smile. She winced, but I knew she didn’t actually wonder if I was one; I could sense her trust in me had not wavered.
I looked back down at the device and discovered a reply had already come. It was as short and impersonal as my own message: a time and a location. No pleasantries, no negotiation, not even a demand to know who I was. It was very efficient and eerily impersonal.
I slipped the phone back into my pocket, my unease settling deeper than I cared to acknowledge. I had agreed to this course; this was my choice, and yet… As much as I liked having her beside me, fearless and bold, I didn’t like bringing her into it. Not when it meant meeting a sorcerer and putting us in a situation I couldn’t fully predict.
The car door opened for us, and the driver, as silent and unobtrusive as ever, was waiting beside it with patient stillness. If the man had heard anything of what we were up to, he did notlet on. Too young for me to have known him back in eighteen hundred, I vowed that I needed to check his credentials with Thibault.
Susie slid in first, casting me a look that suggested she knew I was thinking too much again. She was correct, but she often was—already knowing me better than even Thibault and Louis did. I slid onto the bench beside her, my arm wrapping around her shoulders so I could tuck her close. The meeting was in just a short while, twenty minutes. The sorcerer hadn’t left us much time to cross the city and reach the address. Our discreet vampire driver confidently assured me we’d make it.
The city changed as we drove. Paris, at its heart, was elegance layered upon history, stone and iron and memory intertwined. Even in its modernity, it retained a certain reverence for beauty. That changed as we left the heart—the streets I’d walked before—and followed a massive flow of cars to the new outskirts. Houses, built so differently from what I was used to, soon gave way to something else entirely.
Before long, we’d left the busy road and all the cars behind and swung into a place as abandoned and dead as the catacombs I’d slept in for two centuries. No, this was even more abandoned than the catacombs.
The car swung into a black-paved lot and came to a smooth stop. I stepped out and stared, only on the periphery aware of the driver assisting Susie out before murmuring that he’d wait around the corner and driving off.
The buildings rose like blunt instruments, all harsh lines and indifferent surfaces. Concrete stretched in vast, joylessexpanses, used in such quantities that I struggled to wrap my head around it. The gray was broken by rusted metal and the skeletal remains of industry. There was no artistry here, each building made without any intent beyond function. It felt like the place had been abandoned by taste itself. I frowned. “These are hideous.”
Susie came to stand beside me, casting a careful glance around, her mouth pursed. “They’re warehouses,” she pointed out. I knew what warehouses were; there were many such places along the Seine all over Paris, and I’d been to many a clandestine meeting in a warehouse over the years.
“They are an affront,” I said, pointing at a particularly ugly section of wavy metal roof. Rust had leaked down the side of the concrete wall in streaks of orange and brown. Disgusting.
“They’re practical,” Susie pointed out, but she was smiling, not really arguing, just trying to be the voice of reason. Perhaps we were both using the mundane conversation to distract ourselves from our meeting with the sorcerer. He wasn’t here yet, and with the car vanishing around the corner, we were all alone in the lot.
“They are offensive to the eye,” I said just to keep things going, but my attention had begun to shift, my senses stretching wide as I tried to figure out if he was already there, if this was a trap, or something else.
She snorted softly, but her amusement was masking a surge of nerves; I could sense them through our bond. “You’re such a snob,” she said.
“I have standards,” I said. She shook her head, smiling despite herself, but I could feel the subtle tension beneath it. She sensed it too, the wrongness of this place. The way sound seemed to travel strangely, as though swallowed and reshaped by the empty space.
I reached for her hand without thinking, and she let me take it, clinging to my fingers with a tight grip. We had barely taken a few steps when the air shifted. It was not a sound, not at first. It felt to me like pressure; a presence. It was that instinctive awareness of being watched.
They emerged from the periphery like a closing net. Shapes resolving into bodies, bodies into faces, some human, some not entirely. The scent hit me next: wildness, musk, the unmistakable signature of shifters. At their center, a pulse of magic.
“Susie,” I said quietly, my gaze settling on the man stepping forward, “you neglected to mention that your former lover was a warlock.” It wasn’t something I’d sensed from a distance in the hotel lobby before, but the talent was weak.
She didn’t even blink at the news. “Actually, that explains a lot,” she said flatly. It did; it explained why he was involved in trying to send some powerful person here in Paris that little piece of jade.
Logan smiled, though it lacked warmth. “Nice to see you too, Susie.” He had the kind of golden good looks that screamed wealth and education. Smooth skin, smoother hands, and sleek clothes. His hair was wavy blond, his eyes a piercing blue, and his physique lean, due to diet and a lack of hard physical labor.
He stepped around the bulky shape of what I suspected was a bear shifter, and I studied him more closely. Yes, the magic was there, faint but undeniable. It was undisciplined and untempered by skill and training. Magic he wore poorly. “A weak one,” I added, almost idly, to Susie. “But a warlock nonetheless.”
His smile tightened; he’d heard me and taken offense, not that I cared. “Hand over the stone,” he barked. Direct. Crude. It was exactly the kind of thing I expected him to say. He spoke to Susie on the phone like he had no regard for manners or civilization, and now he spoke to me the same way.
I sighed softly, adopting a casual posture to indicate I wasn’t threatened by their presence. “No introduction? No attempt at civility? You disappoint me.” I pulled Susie subtly behind me, and she shifted willingly to stand just behind my shoulder. Good, clever girl.
“I’m not here to chat,” Logan spat. He grabbed the bear’s shoulder to shove him aside and pushed to the front of the small pack of would-be assailants.
“No,” I agreed, my gaze flicking briefly over the surrounding shifters, measuring, assessing. “You are here on behalf of someone else.” A flicker crossed their faces, in eyes already lit with a supernatural glow in anticipation of the coming fight. Subtle, but present.
