“Torn apart,” I echoed. “Was there a lot of blood?”
She shook her head. “Not much. Not like the vamps we found the other day. Those guys looked like they’d been shredded. Black vampire blood splashed all over everything.”
I remembered Lizzy’s mom’s friend.
Frankie wandered in almost an hour later, and she didn’t look like she’d had any more sleep than Mackle. She put a folder on the bar and made a show of hauling herself up on the barstool. Considering her height, that couldn’t have been as difficult as she made it seem.
“Have you eaten?” I asked her. She shook her head, and I gave her a menu. “Read this while I fix your cosmo.”
I took her order and dealt with drink orders for other customers. The dinner crowd was starting to transition to the party crowd, and the waitresses were busy. A group of six men I had labeled as bounty hunters were having what appeared to be a celebration at a table back in a corner.
With some food and coffee, Frankie and Cindy relaxed and looked a little better than the beat-down images they presented when they walked in the door.
“Cindy said you wanted to talk to me?” I prompted.
Frankie opened up the folder and turned it so I could read it. The first page had a list of names, most of which I recognized. Trevor and I had investigated a secret gentlemen’s club called the Columbia Club, whose members were wealthy and influential paranormals and supernaturals. Basically the shadow rulers of the city. One of them was Frankie’s father, a lawyer.
I noted the half-dozen names that Trevor and I hadn’t discovered. Of the thirty-two names listed, eight had asterisks next to them.
“The Columbia Club roster,” I said.
“Yes. The names with the asterisks next to them are people we think may be offering bounties on vamps and shifters.”
I glanced at the table where the bounty hunters were sitting.
“Don’t be too obvious about it,” I said, “but there’s a party going on at a table behind your left shoulder. All new in town, and one of them asked me once about bounties.”
Mackle immediately jumped off her barstool and headed to the ladies’ room, but I could tell she was surveying the room. Frankie turned to watch her go, letting her gaze rest on the table with the celebrants.
“They look like they’re celebrating something,” Frankie said.
“Yeah. I noticed. They’re ordering fancy liquor tonight, which isn’t their usual.” I glanced down at her list, then said, “Word is that vamp heads are bringing two grand, with five hundred for shifter heads. Sounds to me as though we didn’t get rid of everyone who was stirring the pot.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but I’ve got someone on the inside now. My dad really took what Nava did personally.”
I would hope a father would take a threat to his daughter’s life personally, but then again, I didn’t have much experience with normal families. I had a rather jaundiced view of families after my parents sold me to the Illuminati.
“How are the bounties being paid?” I asked.
“Cash, through a dhampir who recently came to town. It seems as though she is the one who organized the scheme and recruited the money men. The actual payouts to her are three thousand for vamps and a thousand for shifters. She’s making bank.”
“Dhampir? Are you certain?”
“Oh, yeah. We’re sure. We inserted an undercover cop as a bounty hunter. As you might imagine, we have quite a collection of vampire heads down at the morgue.”
“So, you’re on your way to solving this thing,” I said, although the tone in her voice didn’t indicate any such thing.
Frankie shook her head. “Our guy turned up dead this morning. He’d been drained.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t a paranormal. We didn’t think it would make a difference. A lot of the people who we think are involved in the trade are norms. No idea what went wrong.”
I saw Mackle threading her way between tables, and she stopped to talk to a couple of witches who were regulars. Their table happened to be fairly close to the celebrating bounty hunters. She spoke to the witches for a few minutes, then made her way back to the bar.
“Find out anything interesting?” I asked.
She grinned. “Just saying hello to my cousin. Of course, I couldn’t help but overhear the assholes in the corner. They think they’re smart, talking in a sort of code, but anyone with a brain can figure it out. That’s why no one is sitting at the tables next to them. Their conversation is a little too bloodthirsty.”
“Nothing you can do about them?” I asked.
“No proof. Any idiot can talk big, but how do you make a charge stick?” Cindy asked.
“We have to catch them in the act,” Frankie said. “Unfortunately, we need to bust them in the middle of murder or transporting heads.”
I suddenly didn’t care for the way Frankie and Mackle were looking at me.
“I’m not volunteering my head,” I said, and went to take Jenny’s order at the other end of the bar. While I made her drinks and took care of some other customers, I occasionally glanced at the two law enforcement officers. They sat with their heads together, intently discussing something.
When I came back to them about twenty minutes later, Frankie said, “It’s not your head we need. It’s your smarts and your magic.”
“I know people with a lot better magic.”
“Erin, my father and some of his friends have set up a reward fund to help solve this thing. Get me enough evidence to haul these bastards off to jail, and you can make ten grand.”
I backed away from her until my butt hit the back bar, then I folded my arms across my chest and studied her. First, a vampire lord offers me a million dollars to take his side in the war, then the cops offered me ten thousand dollars to work for them. My poverty must have been more obvious than I thought. Of course, Frankie had seen my apartment when the only furniture I had was a bed.
“Do I really look that stupid?” I blurted out. Everyone I knew—from Lizzy’s mom, to Sam, to Trevor—would kick my butt if I agreed to what she was suggesting.
“You have the strongest shields I’ve ever seen,” Frankie said, leaning across the bar with an earnest expression on her face. “All we need is some pictures, faces, names, times. Where this dhampir is located.”
As if I didn’t have enough to worry about with Barclay gunning for me. I started trying to count how many different sides had their fingers in the chaotic pot that was Westport, and my head spun. Barclay, Flynn, Montgomery, Michaela and her sisters, the cops, the Columbia Club—and who knew how many factions were involved there? Then another dhampir, the bounty hunters, the shifters, and probably a bunch of other people I didn’t know about. Possibly the Illuminati, though I didn’t think so, but there were other shadow organizations—the Rosicrucians, the Knights Magica, and others. The Illuminati had infiltrated the Columbia Club. Were they the only ones?
“No,” I said. “Find yourself another sacrificial lamb. I’m just a bartender.” I turned and walked away.
In the time I’d been in Westport, I had spent most of it at Rosie’s, and even on my days off, I hadn’t seen very much. Part of that was due to not having a car, but part was also due to the fact that it was hard to motivate myself to go do things alone. Even when I was on Illuminati missions, I usually just sat in my hotel and either read or watched TV when I wasn’t working.
But I was always ready if Lizzy or Jolene asked me to go someplace, and since my kiss with Trevor, I suddenly had someone else to do things with. Before we parted the previous day, we had agreed to go out to lunch. He came by and picked me up at eight o’clock in the morning—the crack of dawn for me—and we drove east.
“Where are we going?” I asked, sipping my take-out coffee and trying to wake up.
“Just a drive in the country, and then we’ve been invited to lunch in Killarney Village,” he replied.
“Really?” Killarney Village was where Lizzy lived—a Fae suburb of Westport, east of the city, near the fairy mound that no one knew about. “Lizzy never invited me out there.”
“She didn’t this time, either,” he said with a wink. “Her mother did.” He chuckled. “I got a call out of the blue, and she said that she wanted to treat us to lunch.”
“When did this happen?”
“Yesterday afternoon. Right after I got home.”
He took the freeway going east, through the suburbs, and then into the forest. The road climbed, and occasionally, I could see the tops of peaks in the distance in front of us. We drove along like that for fifteen or twenty minutes, then he took an exit. At the bottom of the off-ramp, he took a right at the stop sign, and we immediately began to climb into the hills on a two-lane road.
“I’ll bet this is pretty in the summer,” I said. The evergreen forest reminded me of home—the area around where the City of the Illuminati had been.
“This is where we come cross-country skiing,” Trevor said. “There’s no snow this low yet, so we’ll be able to drive.” He winked. “There’s a surprise I think you’ll like.”
Twenty minutes later, he slowed and then took the turn onto a narrow dirt road. It was steeper and winding, and a small stream ran by the road on our right.
“This is where we come to ski,” he said. “We park down at the paved road, and this first part is really a bitch, but it levels out before too long.”
True to his word, we topped out at a broad, open valley. The road ended in a large circle at a fence. He pulled over and stopped next to two other cars.
“We walk from here. I was hoping we’d be here alone, but it looks like we’ll have some company.” He grabbed a small backpack from the back seat, locked the car, and we started up a narrow trail along the stream.
We walked for about twenty minutes. The trail was rather steep as we climbed the side of the valley. Looking down, I could imagine the valley both white in winter and green in summer. Miles ahead of us, the white peaks of the mountains could be seen past the valley.