Page 182 of White Wolf

An electric jolt went down her spine when she found what she’d been looking for: the one that got away.

“Jamie Anderson,” she read aloud. “Assaulted on his way home from the bar.” That had been just last night.

She jotted his address down on a Post-It and slipped it in her pocket, rather than use her official PNB.

She checked her phone for the time, shocked to find that she’d been at this for three hours. It was almost midnight. Shit.

She sank down into one of the swivel chairs, only then realizing how exhausted she was. Poring over files had a way of tiring out a person’s back and neck and legs in a way that, unlike the pleasant burn of a good workout, left you achy and dizzy.

She let her head drop onto the back of the chair and stared up at the ceiling, where thin stripes of streetlamp light from the cracked blinds cast shadows like prison bars.

She needed to check on Lanny.

She needed to find the vampire who was preying on the city.

If she hadn’t already met him tonight, that was.

Damn.

A loud bang from out in the bullpen startled her upright. Her heart lurched, and a dozen potentially-horrifying scenarios unfurled in her mind. Man-shaped creatures with fangs dripping blood. Four-legged shaggy beasts with Sasha’s pale hair. And, strongest of all after last night, she imagined the eerily-composed, robed and bearded figure of Grigory Rasputin. Our Friend. Coming back to claim Philippe’s bell.

She grabbed at her leg, as Nikita had done in her glimpse of the past, but it wasn’t there; it was tucked safely at home in her sock drawer.

Another bang sounded, and her pulse pounded in her ears. She reached instead for her hip, her Smith & Wesson .45. She was afraid in a way she hadn’t been before, breathless and shaking.

She–

“Hello?” The night janitor poked his head through the door. “Anybody in here? Oh,” he said when he spotted her. “I saw the light on. Working late on a big case?”

The adrenaline rushed out of her, leaving her limp and weak. She let out a deep breath. “Yeah. Something like that. I was just about to leave, Stan, so you can vacuum in here.”

“Take your time.”

But she didn’t. She scraped all the files and photos together, put them back where they belonged, and got the hell out.

It was true that New York never slept, but after midnight there was a certain muted, bottom-of-a-glass quality to its wakefulness. The shadows seemed dense and liquid tonight, hiding secrets; the halos of light – hazy sodium and the bright punch of pink and blue and red and green neon – buzzed with a sinister, grating sort of energy. Everything seemed sharp-edged, but fuzzy in the center, like she’d been drinking

Nerves, she thought. Fatigue. An intense worry for Lanny that was growing moment-by-moment as she walked to the parking lot, keys in one hand, the fingers of the other resting on the butt of her gun. She shouldn’t have let him walk off, she thought now, regretting what she’d said, even though it was true.

At another time, she would have walked, but tonight she took the unmarked cruiser, driving over to Lanny’s building and squeezing the sedan into a spot on the street. She felt flayed, bloody and vulnerable, and she sat in the car a long moment after she shut off the engine, wondering if Lanny was even home, wanting badly to crawl under a heap of blankets on her bed and hope that tomorrow dawned to prove it all a bad dream.

Finding out that the creatures from her childhood imaginings existed made her revert to childishness, it turned out.

She scanned the street for a long moment, searching for ghosts that weren’t there, before finally climbing out – double checking that the doors were locked – and heading inside. She had a key to the building, and let herself in, walked across a quiet lobby, rode up alone in the elevator. By the time she reached his door, her heartbeat was leaping, pulsing in her fingertips and toes and ears.

To her surprise, Lanny snatched the door open before she finished knocking.

He looked awful: hair mussed, eyes red-rimmed and glassy, clothes rumpled. He’d changed when he got home, apparently, into threadbare gray sweatpants and an old gym t-shirt, all of it wrinkled like he’d dug it out of the bottom of the laundry basket. His bare feet – pale like that strip of stomach she’d glimpsed that morning – struck her as terribly vulnerable, toes wiggling against the rug.

“What?” he said.

The same moment she said, “Have you been drinking?”

They stared at one another.

Lanny made a frustrated sound. “No. Get inside if you’re gonna accuse somebody of being a drunk. Damn.”

Lanny had bought his place – in cash – at the height of his boxing career. The first time she was invited over, Trina had joked that she’d expected to see overwrought Greek statuary and fake sports memorabilia he’d paid way too much for on eBay. Lanny had joked that he’d had to sell all that when he became a cop.

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