Page 55 of Stalk the Dark
“Yeah, ghoul bites can prove fatal to humans too. Blood loss kills. But you already know that.” Damn, it was difficult not to look at Atlas when speaking to Black, considering the voice was coming out of his mouth, but I kept my attention on his boss. “I assume this bite acts as more of a toxin to your kind?”
“You assume correctly,” he said. “Now, will you help me?”
Help…he asked for help. Nicely, in fact.
But helping him meant delaying my return to Old Town, which meant I’d have less time with Ordell and Hemlock to strategize our approach to the Exciatio. Still, getting on Kaster’s good side could take us a long way toward building the Order’s influence back up.
I’d make time as long as the team was on board.
Padma’s mouth was pressed in a thin line, but she gave me a curt nod, and the others followed suit.
Looked like I had a full house. “Okay, Mr. Black, we’ll help you. But we’d like something in return.”
A whisper of a smile ghosted across his lips. “Go on…”
“Access to your electronic case database for cross-reference. You can have access to ours in return.” He dropped a nod. “And we need autonomy to do our jobwithoutmembers of your office dropping in to goad us.”
His eyebrow quirked up at that one. “Anything else?”
Fuck it. “A coffee machine. An expensive one.”
The other vampire with them spoke for the first time. “This is bullshit. We don’t have to negotiate with you. This is our territory, and we?—”
“Quiet, Wayne,” Kaster snapped via Atlas. “We accept your terms, Miss Lighthart, but only if our operative is returned to us unharmed.”
“How long has he been held hostage?”
Kaster fixed his gaze on the seething vamp.
“Two hours,” Wayne bit out.
A lot could have happened in two hours, stuff that wasn’t our responsibility. “He could already be bitten.”
“True…” Kaster conceded. “Wayne will go with you and make sure he isn’t bitten when you get there. After that, it’s your responsibility to make sure he remains…unbitten.”
Wayne made a choked-up sound of indignation,but Kaster silenced him with a glare so frosty that even I felt the chill.
That frost melted somewhat when he returned his attention to me. “You have a deal, Miss Lighthart.”
Hmmm, not totally unreasonable, then. Maybe I could work with Mr. Black after all.
I beamed up at him. “Please, call me Orina.”
Chapter 19
“Well, what do you know, Atlas is a mouthpiece,” Edwin said dryly from the driver’s seat of our van.
“He’s Kaster’s vein, after all,” Padma said from behind us. “But I didn’t realize Kaster was mute.”
“And that trick with the voice…” I shuddered against my leather seat.
“I wonder if he was born that way,” Merry said. “Oooh, we should have asked him about what Gunther said. The client thing…”
“Because clients pay.” Padma said what we’d all been thinking.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Guntheristaking payment,” Edwin said, taking a left at the intersection. “It would explain all the unsolved cases dumped in our filing room.”
“Unpaidcases, you mean,” Padma added.
