Kicking It

Kicking It Page 29

“I’ve got a problem, Aunt Linds. And I think you’re the only one who can help.”

—

With apologies to the training group, Luc, Rachel, and I reconvened next door in the Operations Room. Rachel sat in a chair at one end of the large conference table, the messenger bag in her lap. I sat beside her, and Luc edged a hip onto the table across from us.

“Any niece of Lindsey’s is a niece of mine,” he said.

“Great-great-great-niece,” I clarified.

“That just makes you sound older,” Rachel said with a grin. It was my sister’s grin, or the hint of it that had managed to make its way through the generations. The look clutched at my heart, filled me with longing.

“So why haven’t we met you before?” Luc asked.

“I try to keep the family out of our drama,” I said, smiling conspiratorially at her. “It’s like a vampire soap opera around here. The Young and the Fanged.”

“That’s kind of the thing,” she said, tracing a nervous finger across the tabletop. “Something happened, and I’m not really sure what to do about it. And I think it falls in your territory.”

“Start at the beginning,” I suggested.

She nodded, fidgeted in her seat. “So you know I share a house near campus with my friends Emily and Georgia, right?”

“Right,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I remembered Emily and Georgia. Like most girls her age, she had a fluid roommate situation. But that wasn’t the point, so I nodded.

“I just finished a really massive lab project. I didn’t even leave campus for twenty-four hours. I got back home last night, and when I did, I found this.”

She opened her messenger bag and pulled out a magazine, which she placed on the table.

It was a copy of the Chicago World Weekly, a gossip magazine. With vampires being at our most popular, the Weekly kept paparazzi stationed outside the House and followed us around town. In this particular issue, my face stared back at me, my eyes hidden by dark glasses, and I was wearing stilettos and jeans that couldn’t have been any tighter or more flattering.

But the denim was hardly the point.

Someone had scattered thick red ink across the page, so it looked like my body was riddled with bullet holes. And scratched across the bottom of the cover was a message:

Dearest Rose:

Madmen know nothing, but I know everything.

Come home, Rose.

I pushed down a bolt of recognition—and fear. That was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time, hadn’t expected to see again, and shouldn’t be seeing now.

I pushed the magazine closer to Luc for his review.

“Where did you find this?” I asked her.

“On my bed,” Rachel said, nibbling her lip nervously. “In my house. Why, Aunt Lindsey? Are you in trouble? How did they know we were related? And who’s Rose?”

“I’m not in trouble,” I firmly said. “This is from someone trying to cause trouble. Someone from my past. They left it with you because they knew you’d come to me, and they knew I’d pay attention.”

“What kind of trouble?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Not exactly.” But it was serious enough that they’d mocked up a magazine and delivered it to my niece. I made a quick decision. “How did you get here?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again, confused by the sudden change in topic. “I drove. Emily let me borrow her car. Why?”

“Because I want you to stay at the House for a few days while I deal with this.” I put my hand on hers, could feel her trembling with fear, and that killed me. My past, my issues, shouldn’t be used against her. That wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t how the game was played.

“Get your car warmed up,” I said. Her chaotic emotions—fear for herself, concern for me, and a small stitch of intrigue—bobbed at the edge of my consciousness. “Pull up right in front of the House’s gate. I’ll get my car and follow you back to the house. You can drop off Emily’s car and pick up some clothes.”

Rachel was a good girl—a smart girl—and she knew when to get moving. She rose and nodded, slinging the messenger pack over her shoulder. “I’ll be out front.”

I waited until she’d disappeared into the hallway before looking back at Luc.

“That damn magazine cover,” I said, a headache beginning to throb behind my eyes. “I should have known it would lead to something nasty. I should have been more careful.”

“You know what this is,” Luc said, his voice infinitely calmer than mine. But that was his job, after all—responding to crises.

“Just an idea.”

He looked at me for a moment. “This is about New York,” he concluded. “When you were still ‘Rose.’”

I nodded. I’d been born in Iowa, but the Midwest hadn’t been exciting enough for the vampire who’d made me, Delilah. She preferred the freedom and excitement of New York. New York vampires had rejected the Greenwich Presidium, our former European overlord, and the House system it spawned. In Delilah’s opinion, life was better with freedom. So I’d learned how to be a vampire in a coven that didn’t care about anyone else, human or vampire. We partied until dawn, drank bathtub gin in speakeasies, danced with writers and artists. I took my immortality to heart, and I tested the boundaries.

Luc and I had known each other long enough that I’d given him the flavor of my past in the Big Apple, told him about Prohibition, gangsters, jazz.

“I still can’t imagine you as a baby vamp in New York or otherwise. You have an old soul.”

“I have an old soul because I’m old,” I said. “I mean, you know, for a twenty-nine-year-old.”

“Of course,” Luc said lightly, but his eyes were narrowed with concern. “And the threat?”

That, I wasn’t ready to talk about. Wasn’t ready to think about. “It’s a long story, and I need to get going.”

“Then you can tell me on the way to Rachel’s house.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said, my tone clipped. I was shutting down, and I knew it. Shutting down and shutting him out, preparing to focus on the task at hand.

But Luc insisted. “Going without me isn’t an option.” He stood up and grabbed his coat from the back of the chair behind his desk. “Let’s go.”

—

“Tell me the story,” he said, when he’d gotten permission from Ethan for Rachel’s temporary residence at the House and we were on the road, skirting Lake Michigan as we drove north.

I hesitated. My past wasn’t exactly clean and shiny, and I didn’t like to talk about it. Rehashing the history wouldn’t do any good for anyone, as that magazine proved.

“It still affects you,” Luc said, with his uncanny ability to understand what I was thinking, what worried me. The skill was as irritating as it was relieving.

“It shouldn’t affect me,” I said.

Luc snorted. “That’s all well and good, sunshine, but I’ve got a glossy, paint-spattered magazine that says otherwise. Explain, or I’ll have to call Helen and ask for your personnel file and get all the gory details. And you know she’ll give it to me.”

Helen was Cadogan’s warden, a woman who had very specific taste in vamps. Luc was on her good side; I never had been. That made him right about my personnel file.

I nodded, keeping an eye on the road—and on Rachel’s taillights in front of us. “The first line of the note—‘Madmen know nothing’—is from ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”

“The Poe short story?”

“The same. It was also the password for our favorite speakeasy.”

Luc nodded. “The Sapphire. That was you and the flower girls, right?” He’d taken to calling them that, the vampires I ran with. Violet, Daisy, Iris, and me, Rose.

“This has something to do with them?”

“They died,” I quietly said after a moment. “They got caught in the cross fire of a gangland feud.”

“Bullets don’t kill vampires,” Luc said.

“A couple of bullets? No. That’s not what this was. It was excessive. It was the first real violence I’d seen, and there was so much of it.”

“That’s when you came to Chicago,” he said.

I nodded. “Took a train and started over. And with your gentle and modest instruction, I learned discipline. I learned self-respect. I tried to put the past behind me. I guess that was naive.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” he said. “For letting me know.”

He sounded sincere, and he felt sincere. He hadn’t given me any reason to doubt him. But trust was a funny thing, and not something I knew much about. Not something I was ready for.

The question was, Would I ever be ready?

—

The girls’ house looked like most of the others on the block. Two short stories and a front porch held up by thick square columns. It had probably been built during World War II, when families lived here. Now it was home to three college-aged girls and, on one side of the porch, a well-used gingham couch.

We got out of the car and followed Rachel up the steps and into the living room, which had wooden floors, mismatched furniture, and plants that looked like they received as little sunlight as I did. The house smelled of age and fruity perfume.

“My room’s back here,” she said, leading us through a narrow hallway.

Rachel’s room, unlike the rest of the house, was spotless. Small bed. Nightstand. Bookshelf. Large chest of drawers with a mirror on top in a style that matched the rest of the furniture. Wicker baskets held well-organized odds and ends, and the bed was neatly made.

“Where did you find the magazine?” I asked.

“It was on the bed. I grabbed it, saw what it said, and got in the car.”

“Good head on your shoulders,” Luc said. He walked to the bureau, perused a few frames. “And what do we have here?” he asked contemplatively, then turned the photograph so we all could see.