He sat partway up in the bed. “That’s why you have so many books on your living room shelves.” I nodded. “Why don’t you enroll for real? Get your degree?”
I snorted. “In what? And for what purpose? I don’t exactly need a BA to be a register monkey. And there are no other day jobs that would let me dick around with my schedule so I can work for Maven when she needs me. Plus, I don’t have time to deal with homework and exams and all that.” I shrugged. “I just like to learn.”
He leaned forward to kiss me, but I poked him in the ribs. “Your turn. Tell me something that no one knows about you. And make it good.”
The mirth dropped away, replaced by a grimace. “I have a daughter,” he said quietly.
That brought me up short. Quinn never talked about his life as a human in Chicago. All I knew was that he hadn’t started working for Maven by choice, and that at some point he’d hurt or maybe killed his human wife when he lost control of his hunger for blood. In the back of my mind, I’d presumed the two things were sort of connected, like maybe he’d accidentally attacked his wife and the Chicago cardinal vampire had shipped him off to Colorado. But he’d never mentioned having a child, and I hadn’t asked.
Now I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I settled on, “What’s her name?”
“Holly.” He smiled, eyes full of memory. “Holly Noelle. She was born Christmas Day, and my wife insisted.”
It was so strange to hear him talk about this. I checked myself for any signs of jealousy or anger, but I was just sad for him. His family thought he was dead, and the man he’d once been really was dead. At the same time, if Quinn wasn’t that man, who was he? I stroked his cheek.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Twenty, now.” Quinn had been in his mid- or late thirties when he was turned, and now he’d always look that way. “She can’t know I’m . . . still around, for obvious reasons, but I keep tabs on her, within the rules.”
Vampires weren’t allowed to have any contact with their old lives, but Quinn had found a work-around. He probably kept an eye on her online—that was easy these days—but I decided not to ask. Then I could never be made to tell.
“Does Maven know about her?”
“Of course. Holly is the leash I come with,” he said sourly. “‘Here, take Quinn, and if he ever disobeys you, use his daughter against him.’”
“You really think Maven would do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s been decent to me—as domini go, I have no complaints. But all my experience with other vampires has suggested I can’t trust them.”
There it was again. Them. “You know,” I said carefully, “You’ve never told me about how you were turned.”
He was quiet for a long time. I let the silence play out, not sure if he was avoiding the question or trying to decide how to answer. “I was a cop, you know that part,” he said finally. I nodded. “I lived for my job. I had a wife and a little girl, but I was never focused on them. I always wanted to get back to work. I think . . .” He paused for a moment. “I loved my wife, but I rarely thought about her when she wasn’t right in front of me. I treated her like an accessory.” The bitterness was back in his voice, but this time it was all directed at himself.
“Anyway, a few years after I made detective, I got this weird case: young women in their twenties, very beautiful, were vanishing into thin air. Five of them went missing within about three months. I thought maybe I had a serial killer on my hands. And I was thrilled.”
His voice was full of pain and regret, but there was plenty of anger there too. “I dug into the disappearances, and realized they didn’t play out like the average murder, or even the average sexually motivated attack. Each woman packed a bag before she disappeared, which implied they knew they were leaving. But none of them said anything to their friends, their families, or their jobs. At first I thought maybe the murderer had convinced each of them that he was taking them away for the weekend or something, but that didn’t explain why they didn’t tell a soul they were leaving town. One woman’s mother was dying in the hospital; you’d think she’d at least say goodbye. It didn’t add up.”
“So you kept digging.”
“Yes. I was sure this was the case that was going to make my career. At the same time, I would often sort of lose interest in it, practically forgetting the whole thing. Then I would go back to the office and find notes all over my desk, and I’d get interested again. I kept another set of notes at home, and sometimes it’d work the other way around. Later, of course, I realized I was being pressed to forget, but at the time I thought someone was drugging me. I started leaving myself little notes, little clues to remind me to keep pushing. And then I . . . I pushed too hard.”
His voice quieted, so I prompted him. “The women,” I said. “They were being turned into vampires?”
“The ones who survived the process, yeah. As it turns out, there’s this vampire pimp in St. Louis, Oskar. He wanted to add to his stable of hot vampire girls, but we’re not allowed to stay in the same city after we turn.”
“So he came up to Chicago to recruit.”
“More or less. I never did find out if the girls really wanted to be vampires, or if they were being pressed to think something else was happening. All I know is that I eventually got too close to this guy, and he . . . noticed me.”