Page 63 of The Elementalist
Ouch. I involuntarily cringed at the client/PI tone of that. “Sure, happy to help.”
“You will call me, won’t you?” She batted her innocent blue eyes at me.
Whew. I smiled back at her. “Absolutely.”
Chapter Thirty-One
A Stiff Drink
Two days later, I found myself again in my office, feet up on the desk, a tumbler glass of scotch in my hand.
Much to no one’s surprise, I hadn’t had any other clients show up. It’s all nostalgic and romantic in movies when the PI can’t get any work, but the reality of that absolutely sucks. Crystal did manage to talk her mother into pressuring the old woman, which resulted in them covering the repairs on my truck as well as sending me a modest bonus for making them aware of Nigel’s apparent scheme to exert influence over the other families. The case might’ve turned my entire worldview on its head, but hey… my landlord got his rent and my truck was getting fixed.
The TV in the corner had been on for a while, though I used it more for background noise, not really watching it. However, when the name Nigel Farrington went by, I looked over at it and started paying attention.
“… was found dead late this morning by three men headed out to fish on Bear Lake. According to Sheriff Justine Waters, Mr. Farrington had been in a disoriented state after being involved in an automobile accident on South Peak Road. Upon wandering into the nearby woods, he fell victim to an unspecified animal attack. Authorities are still investigating.”
I swirled my scotch around, hyper-aware of what I must look like sitting here in my office. “Wow. I am a damn cliché after all.” Chuckling, I held my left hand over the glass and summoned a pair of ice cubes, which fell into the glass with a softclink.“Except for the magic, I suppose.”
The TV moved on to other stories I had little interest in. I reached for the phone, intending to call Hank about the truck, see if it would be ready any time soon. But someone knocked onthe door before I could find him in the contact list. Huh. How about that? A client.
“It’s open.”
They knocked again.
I set the phone and glass on the desk, got up, and cautiously approached the door.
Via the peephole, I observed a young twenty-something woman with straight black hair, leather jacket, spiked bracelets and dog collar, blue miniskirt heavy on the ‘mini.’ Indigo-tinted stockings tinted her pale legs blue. Kind of a punk rock look to her. She shifted around, eyeing her surroundings like a teen who’d just shoplifted and thought someone noticed. Not getting any sense of threat from her, I opened the door.
“Can I help you?”
An air of staleness hung around the girl, like the never-touched bedroom in the house of an old person who lived alone.
“Hi. Are you a private investigator?”
“Unless someone randomly hung a sign accusing me of that on the wall outside, I guess I am.”
“I’d like to hire you.”
She didn’t look like the type of girl who could afford to hire a PI. Hell, she didn’t look like the type who could afford to eat at TGI Fridays, but then again, around here, looks were often deceiving. I’d been learning that the hard way.
I took a step back, waving my arm for her to come in.
She hesitated at the threshold, giving me a look like she tried to come up with something to say without being obvious about it.
Shit. I tensed like an Old West gunslinger about to throw down. “You’re a vampire.”
Her eyes flared wide for a second in an almost ‘shh! Not so loud!’ manner. “Relax,” she said. “I’m here to hire you, not cause trouble. We’re notallbad. If you don’t need the money and don’ttrust me, just say so and you’ll never see me again.”
I studied her, face, body language, searching green eyes, smell… The staleness in the air reminded me of a crypt, but I couldn’t say shestank. Not at all like Piper and Derek. They smelled like an un-embalmed corpse left out in the sun. Hmm. Could that mean this girl wasn’t as ‘evil’? I’d been given elemental magic to create balance here. Balance probably didn’t mean ‘destroy all vampires.’ Speaking of being a cliché, one of these days, a young, vulnerable-looking girl is going to be the death of me. I couldn’t help but feel she had genuinely come here looking for help. Her nervousness made sense now, like a mouse seeking out the old tomcat to ask him something.
“All right. Fine. I’ll hear you out. Please, come inside.”
She relaxed ever so slightly and followed me across the room to sit at the client’s chair in front of my desk.
I walked around my desk, picked up my scotch, and sat. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t offer you a drink.”
The girl fake laughed.
