Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [93]
“Watch it, mister.”
“I want to know,” he said, and it was clear that he wanted to know before he planned to do any digging.
I flailed, throwing my hands up in a shrug and almost dropping my own digging implement before catching it quickly again. “You want to know what? That there’s a House? I just told you that, and I’ll tell you this, too: You don’t want to go messing with it. That’s a big fat bees’ nest, right there. You poke it with a stick and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
“Okay, I won’t go poking with a stick,” he said drolly, and I only assumed that this meant he’d poke it with a Glock, given half a chance.
“I’m serious,” I stressed.
“You must be. You haven’t said anything about having a House of your own. Do you?”
“What?” I stalled ineffectually.
“Do you belong to a House? You haven’t mentioned one, and your … home”—he said it like he was using the word loosely—“is a lone-wolf bachelor pad if I ever saw one. You live alone, you work alone. You don’t belong to a House. Am I right?”
“Fine, you’re right. I don’t. But I used to, and my reasons for jumping ship were many, varied, and valid. Houses work for plenty of vampires, but they don’t work for me. I don’t … um … play well with others.”
“Are there rules?”
“Of course there are rules.”
“Restrictions?”
“Those too.”
“Oaths of loyalty?”
“Now you’re just stabbing in the dark,” I accused. “A House is all that shit and more. Under the best of circumstances, it’s a family. It’s your backup. On paper it’s very Three Musketeers—one for all, all for one, blah blah blah. In real life, it’s just like belonging to the mob. Sometimes it works for you, and sometimes it works against you. It depends on who’s in charge and how willing you are to follow rules.”
“So, the Atlanta House. Is it a bad one? Bad vampires in charge, bad rules?”
He didn’t know the half of it. I told him the truth without telling him anything. “I’ve never been part of the Atlanta House. I’m not from around here, okay? I’ve never tangled with them, and I don’t care to. Largely because, as you’ve so astutely noticed, I don’t have any House of my own to back me up.”
“But you must know something about it.”
Well, yeah. I knew that the Barrington House of Atlanta was not the House with which you wanted to fuck—and if his little sister had been brought on board there, she should’ve been in pretty secure company. If the House had turned her over for … for what, medical experimentation? Like in that Monty Python movie? Then she’d probably done something to royally piss somebody off.
Vampires tend to take care of problem members “in House” you might say. They don’t outsource their problem people. They find other ways to make examples out of them. Unless the times, they were a-changing.
So I decided to tell him, “Look, I know what you’re thinking.”
“You do?”
“I’m psychic. A little.” May as well stick to the truth while it was convenient. The rest was easy to guess. “You’re thinking that if there’s some organizational structure in place, you can infiltrate it or at least learn enough to navigate it. And you’re wrong. The Atlanta House”—I made a point not to tell him its name—“isn’t just bulletproof. It’s nuke-proof. You’ll have better luck fighting Uncle Sam, and your corpse will be more readily identifiable when he’s done with you.”
“What about you?”
“Me? If you think I’m going to go around ringing doorbells, looking to find out what happened to your sister, you’ve got another think coming.”
“What if I could pay you?”
“You can’t,” I said flatly.
He asked, “How do you know? Name a price.”
“There isn’t enough money.”
“In a drag queen’s stash?”
“In the world,” I specified. “Now are we going to dig up your sister here, or what?”
Adrian scowled, and shivered.
It was cold out there in Memorial Lawn. Not as cold as Minnesota, but cold enough that I was uncomfortable. They don’t tell you that about Georgia. They tell you it’s all peaches and sunshine, but it isn’t. It’s a sauna in the summer and, come winter, it’s cold enough