Page 8 of Bent Out of Shade
3
Sadie babbled happilythrough dinner about her new buddies. Genuinely pleased that she was expanding her circle to kids with magic, I enjoyed her insights on her friends’ personalities. Still, I was relieved when she went to call her boyfriend, Caleb, after we’d cleaned up the remains of our pasta primavera. He was in grade twelve to Sadie’s grade eleven, but both Eli and I had thoroughly vetted the boy and deemed him a good kid, and I’d hate for Sadie’s first relationship to crash and burn over magic.
I was wiping down the counter listening to the radio when the music cut away to the top local news stories. Apparently, it had been a slow weekend, because they were still reporting the headline from Friday about Sabrina Mayhew’s big legal victory.
The young hotshot Crown Counsel prosecutor had taken down Paxton Craig, a local crime boss who’d proven slippery beyond belief. No one had ever gotten charges to stick to the leader of the Hastings Mill gang, much less managed to convict him on money laundering and fraud with a unanimous guilty verdict from the jury.
Sabrina was barely in her thirties; this win allowed her to write her ticket and either have her pick of prosecution cases or jump into the more lucrative criminal defense attorney arena. Good on her. She had to be smart, savvy, and ruthless to have defeated the team of high-priced lawyers that Craig had on staff.
My phone rang.
Speaking of smart, savvy, and ruthless…
“Hi, Tatiana,” I said into my cell to the crisp strikes of a manual typewriter on her end. “Tell me that’s your first chapter and not more emails.”
My boss had recently purchased a Bluetooth keyboard that simulated the look and feel of a vintage typewriter, claiming she’d get more done on her memoirs that way. Except she was so excited by it that she’d decided to send letters to all her old friends with whom she’d lost contact.
“Don’t ask and you won’t be disappointed,” Tatiana said sardonically in her raspy New Yorker accent. “You busy?”
Sadie and I had finished our Sunday night Buffy rewatch last week and had yet to pick our next show for tonight since my kid hadn’t been sure if she’d be up to it after the demon session earlier.
“No, why?”
“You need to go to Vegas,” she said. “A potential client requires our expertise.”
“Yeah?” I transferred the cell to my other shoulder so I could rinse out the rag I’d been using to get grit off the stove. “What’s the gig?”
“Missing person. Vincenzo BatXoha will fill you in when you get there.”
The cloth splatted into the sink. “Since when do we work for vamps?”
When estries, the demons who originally sired vampires, turned humans, their children took on a new surname. It was comprised of the demon’s name plus “bat,” which was Hebrew for “daughter of,” because to estries, all their children were daughters. Even though estries hadn’t been seen in hundreds of years (well, not most of them), and nowadays only the undead created more of their kind, they kept the name of their founding demon in tribute.
Tatiana scoffed. “Did I miss a memo about the devaluation of vampire-owned currency?”
I dried off my hands, raising an eyebrow at her snippiness. “Laurent hasn’t contacted you yet, huh?”
My boss’s snark amped up in direct proportion to her concern, and ever since she and her nephew had exchanged “I love yous,” she’d hovered over him protectively.
Just before he left on this dybbuk hunting job, Laurent had confessed he was fleeing town more to get away from this weird new dynamic between the two of them than to kill the dybbuk. And with him, that was saying something.
“Hmph,” Tatiana said. “He should check in.”
“You’re right.” I grabbed a pen and paper. “He should, but back to the case. Who could a vamp need us to locate?”
“Vincenzo declined to elaborate over the phone.” She paused. “If he wants us to find anyone of interest to Zev, tell him we can’t take him on as a client. He understands that you have authorization to speak on my behalf.”
This was a major victory and I preened. Tatiana was trusting me big-time. Compared to last month when she’d impaled me with a tree root and left me to die, it was also a massive improvement.
I rubbed my gut where the wound had been. Trust aside, it would take time for me to truly forgive her.
And I’d never forget. I wasn’t the same woman who’d reclaimed her magic a few months ago.
I wasn’t even the same woman I’d been two weeks ago. My thirst for knowledge had sent me into the fire, and while I’d come out of the forge hardened, I missed the soft, naïve parts of me that I’d shed and wondered what else I’d lose before my quest to find my parents’ killer was over.
My pen tore through the paper, the heart I’d been tracing and retracing shredded. “Anything about Vincenzo I should know going in? How powerful is he? Zev levels?”
“Hard to say. He’s not as old as Zev, but he was an Ohrist when he was turned, so he’ll have kept that magic. No idea what it is.”
