Page 45 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
Vampires. Once again, rats were damned sensible. “Smart,” I told her, trying not to hang on me being both hot and unusual, because I doubted the rat had any more information than that. She wasn’t keeping secrets, just speaking everything she knew. So instead of dwelling on the tidbit, I told her, “Cold humans are more likely to kill you than normal ones.”
“I know,” she agreed. “Sometimes they eat us. Regular humans almost never do that.”
Almost. Ugh. I didn’t want to think about what made a human—or even a vampire—so desperate for food that they would kill and eat a rat. Not with the reputation rats had as disease vectors.
“The Shade came when the angry man was there. They come sometimes.”
“The shade?”
For a moment, she stared at me as though I was out of my mind. “The Shade,” she reiterated, and this time I could almost hear the capital letters in the words. “The Shade lives in the shadows. Maybe a cold human. Maybe a magic human who made themself so very cold. They watch. Always from the shadows. When the Shade came, I knew they would die.”
And that? Well that was fucking unsettling. The implication that the rat knew Charles was dead. The notion of some vampiric rat god wandering through the city at night. The fact that this imaginary god was so linked with death that the rat almost saw it as a perfect absolute. It meant that many generations of rats had seen this “shade” kill, and that was never what a guy like to hear.
That was all the information she had, but she took me back to where her people were congregated and I dumped the rest of the jerky out on the floor for them, asking if any of them remembered any more about the humans. They did, of course.The angry man was gray. The sad woman came later than the others had, toward the end of the night, almost day, and left crying. The annoyed woman had come in a big car with a giant man driving it. The Shade had stood on a walkway high above them all, near the rafters.
None of it was especially useful, though. None of it had anything to do with Charles’s death, since he hadn’t been attacked in the building.
The Shade was unsettling, but there wasn’t much I could do with the information. I could, and did, presume that they were Whisper, but it was just an assumption based on the thin information I had. For all I knew, it was an actual rat god, and had nothing to do with the whole situation.
The best I could do was try to return at night and see if Whisper ever showed up. It seemed unlikely, even if they had previously used the building all the time, which seemed unlikely after having seen it myself. Besides, gossip spread fast in vamp circles, so likely by now everyone—except Gerald Forsyth—knew that Broken Dreams was on the police radar.
Since it was my only lead, though, I suspected I would give it a shot.
I thanked the rat colony, wishing them luck with the great green food bin, and headed back out. I had a kitten waiting, asleep on a warm sunny corner of my new desk, a partner who was even now doing necessary work for our new business, and—I stopped to check my watch—another appointment to speak to people who wanted to rent the shop next door in under an hour.
Time for me to go.
CHAPTER 19
When I got back to the office, There was a sleazy guy hanging around right outside the front of the shop, and I didn’t like that at all. Normally I didn’t like to judge people based on appearances, but he seemed like he was about to open his trench coat and offer to sell me a “real” Rolex. He was also stopping every other person who walked by, and they had to brush him off, one by one, all looking highly displeased.
Suzy was eyeing him up like maybe she was gonna do something about him in a moment. Here I’d been starting to worry that she was falling down on the job.
I didn’t especially want the guy’s attention, or to have to brush him off myself, so I slipped around behind the building and let myself in the back door. Sure, I was willing to have a confrontation if it mattered, but if I could avoid it, then why not do that?
As I opened the door into the back office area, a robotic female voice announced, “Back door open.”
That was new and weird.
Davin glanced up at me from where he was...he was rearranging sets of shelves that had definitely not been therewhen I’d left, in a side area of the back that I’d never messed with much. I’d mostly used the furniture setup of couch and chairs, a few tables, and the wet bar that served as a half-assed kitchen. This spot was an alcove that slotted like a puzzle piece against the bathroom and closet, like a short hallway inside the back office.
Apparently, it was now a storage alcove, because it was lined on both sides with wire shelves, and they werecoveredwith...stuff. Little white boxes and coiled cords and other multicolored boxes and little black things that looked like cameras to my untrained eyes. Or maybe they were cameras.
“Saw your man out front did you?”
“Myman?”
“The fella who looked like he was here to sell us something,” he clarified.
I wasn’t sure why the hell that made the guymyman, but I nodded. “Yeah, he seemed skeevy as fuck, and he was harassing random passersby. Is that why you’re back here?”
Davin stopped and cocked his head. “Skeevy?”
“Um, sketchy? Seems like the kind of guy you wouldn’t trust to watch your wallet?”
He scoffed at that, then nodded. “Skeevy. I like that. Yeah. Skeevy arsehole was your next appointment. I told him the place was already rented, but he keeps hanging around out there. I think he thinks I’m an employee and he’ll eventually find the real owner and get a different answer.”
For some reason, my first instinct wasn’t to berate him for sending someone away without talking to me first. Nope. I was grateful I hadn’t had to make that call myself. “Should I ask what he did to inspire that reaction?”
