Page 23 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
It had all gone onto a list in my head that was mentally titled “things you’re currently failing at,” and that was not a short list.
I sighed and picked up a couple bags, heading for the back of the building. Might as well have done with it.
Not that I was going to admit to him that I was glad the stuff was gone. It was rude to throw away someone’s stuff without asking. Sure, I could have opened the bags up and retrieved things, but I wasn’t sure any of it was actually worth retrieving.
So we carried the stuff to the dumpster, and like any vampire, he managed to lift three times as many bags as me—only stymied by the fact that he had two hands rather than by the weight he was capable of carrying.
Also faster than any human, Davin dumped the bags he’d grabbed and went back for the filing cabinet, the old TV, and the broken office chair in the time it took me to dump just the bags I’d managed to carry.
And that was it. The back office was cleared out and the stuff was gone.
I turned back toward my bike in the parking lot, but he motioned toward a shiny black car.
A very familiar shiny black car.
My mother’s sixty-nine Camaro, that she’d never once let me drive, on pain of death. Not even when I was sixteen, got my license, and begged her to give it to me as my only birthday present for the rest of my life. She’d bought me a boring new Audi SUV instead, citing safety tests or whatever that said I was less likely to die while driving it.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Are you driving my mother’s car?”
He looked to the car, then me, and finally shrugged. “Mine now. I bought it from her. I told her I needed a car when I got here, and she told me to pick one of hers.”
I glared at him, stepping in close, where I could feel his breath on me. Warm breath. Weird again. “Are you my brother?”
He jerked back, eyes wide, staring at me in shock, which quickly morphed into vaguely annoyed disbelief. “Cop on, pal.”
“I—what? Is that a yes? I mean, my mother is being nicer to you than she’s ever been to anyone in my whole life, including me.”
“So you think she’d have two sons and treat them different?” He huffed, then took my shoulder and turned me toward the car, giving me a bit of a shove in the back as well to get me moving again. “She just feels bad for me.”
Normally, I’d have thrown a fit at the manhandling, but for some reason this felt natural. Normal. Like we were just two guys who were always shoving each other around. Given that he was a vampire, I knew he could have shoved me hard enough to truly force the matter—as proven by the television and filing cabinet a few moments earlier—but he didn’t. Plus his hand was warm where it pressed into my back, and I could feel it all the way through my jacket.
Weirdest vampire ever.
Also, I wanted to know more, so I slid into the passenger seat of the Camaro and waited for him to join me, so we could get going.
“My mother doesn’t even feel bad when she sees those starving children commercials. Want to tell me why she’d feel bad for you?”
His nose scrunched in disgust. “Your mam isn’t responsible for those starving children, and she’s not a billionaire. She can’t fix the whole world and she’s sensible enough to know it. But when vampires act like arseholes, she does feel like that’s on her, whether it is or not.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong about that. It was why she’d lobbied to become the senator of Los Angeles. The guy who’dbeen in charge when I was a kid, Liam Harte, had been a disaster, letting vamps create other vamps, not even trying to stay within the senate’s rules for population caps, and then letting them play power games that resulted in deaths, gang wars, and even public riots in the city. So fifteen years earlier, when his term had been up, Mother had asked the Senate to consider her for the position. As had Charles and a handful of other people, all of them intending to clean the city up. And she had done an excellent job of it, even if I was her son and I was supposed to say that.
Mother would have been the first person to tell me that I shouldn’t give out unwarranted compliments, not even to her.
She had made arrangements to lower the population by sending the extra vamps to places that had room for them, and instituted stronger rules about creating new vampires. She’d even killed an elder who wouldn’t follow the rules and kept making unwilling humans into vampires, as an example to everyone else.
It had earned her a lot of fans, and a lot of haters. Haters like Gerald Forsyth, who thought that humans were food and their rules were for each other, so vampires should be able to do as they liked.
Before I had a chance to ask Davin anything about why my mother might be protective of him, he turned the tables. “Who do you think killed your man Charles?”
And well, it was technically more important than finding out more about Davin. So I sat back and considered. “The cops are going off a list that had been on his desk. The subject line was my mother, with a line under it, and then it was...basically, it was a list of all her political enemies who live here in the city.”
“Was Charles one of them? Do you think he was plotting a coup? The Senate doesn’t usually go in for that, but it’s been known to happen in cities that are especially badly run.” BeforeI could even start to get offended on Mother’s behalf, he made a face. “I don’t think that they would make an exception for a coup here though. Lord Caspian himself told me that Los Angeles is one of the best run cities in the world. Said that if I could do well anywhere, it’d be here.”
Lord Caspian. Holy hell. Caspian was one of the three Consuls of The Senate. One of the three highest ranking vampires in the world.
It was kind of nice to know that Mother had his support, but not a huge shock. They were friends who’d known each other long before Europeans came to America.
Still, it was a good point. The Senate wouldn’t abide a coup in Los Angeles, because as long as my mother was in charge, any coup would be by troublemakers and against the rule of common sense. Unlike humans, vampires weren’t easily taken in by slick con artists playing at leader. Most of them were over a hundred years old, and they’d seen that before, so they recognized it when it tried to crop up.
