Greywalker - Kat Richardson [84]
His mother made a face.
“Oh, come on, Mom. It’s a joke.”
She mumbled her discomfort.
“Mom, can you live with it?”
This time, Colleen played with her glass. “I suppose I don’t have a choice. You’re my son. I can’t just pretend you’ve ceased to exist. I can’t—I couldn’t bring myself to . . . do anything to you. Are—are you really all right?”
“As all right as this gets. Better, now that you know. Harper and I are working on the rest. See, I have a plan now, like you always tell me to. So it’s going to be OK. But I could use some of your help, too, Mom.”
“My help? What can I do?” She sounded younger than her son.
“We’ll have to work out some new arrangements with the trust—I can’t go to classes in the daytime. And I need to make some new living arrangements, too. My car’s nice, but the trunk is kind of cramped.”
Her smile wobbled. “I’m sure we can think of something. Oh, Cameron, why couldn’t you have gotten into some normal kind of trouble?”
“Just precocious, I guess.”
We sat around the white room for another hour, working out details—including my billing. By the time I left I was envying Cam his cozy bed in the trunk of the Camaro. I dragged myself home to my own, head bobbing like a somnolent drinky-bird’s all the way.
When I got out of bed, noon was cracking overhead with the bing-bang-bong of the Catholic clock. I rushed for my office.
My first job was contacting Lenore Fabrette to say I could pay for the information. She replied that she’d gotten it and would bring it on Thursday, as planned.
I tried to make a little more sense out of the TPM papers I already had and the new ones that came in over the fax, but most of it was too dense with corporate legalese to plow through with speed. I set the pile aside and made more phone calls, phone calls, phone calls. I had a date for dinner with a friend and I didn’t want to miss a moment of normalcy before diving into an evening of interviewing vampires.
Even at a quarter to eleven, it seemed that the vampire community was still just waking up. It was nearly midnight before I found Alice in the top-floor lounge of a downtown hotel.
The host at the door pointed her out to me: a petite woman with deep red hair and the same shadowy, filmy-gleaming eyes that Cameron exhibited. She lurked at a corner table, watching. I skirted around the dance floor and approached.
“Hi,” I started. “Are you Alice Liddell?”
She looked up from under arched brows. “At the moment.” She stretched one corner of her broad mouth into a smile and floated a hand at my side of the table. Alternating waves of heat and cold flushed over me. “Why don’t you sit down?” she offered. My knees resisted a bit as I sat across from her, frowning as I wrestled with my sense of familiarity.
Her amused, silent evaluation hammered my spine with spikes of frozen fire. I didn’t have to look sideways to see that all light around her seemed to have been sucked away, leaving a pulsing corona of dark red around her pale face. I checked my shudder and stared back at her. My stomach did a slow roll. Apparently, vampires brought their Grey effects with them, whether I liked it or not.
Her voice was chill velvet, stroking over my skin. “How do you happen to come looking for me?”
I had to swallow before I could talk. “Cameron Shadley sent me. My name is Harper Blaine—”
She seemed to be on the verge of laughing—a sound I did not want to hear. “Yes, I know. Do you smoke?” she purred, picking up an old-fashioned cigarette case from the table. “Oh, no. Of course you don’t. You’re one of those delicious, healthy people.” She extracted a pale cigarette from the case with the tips of her long, manicured nails and placed it between her lips with all the slow tease of a golden-age movie siren. She could