Luckily, the bottoms of my feet were unharmed, and standing was actually more comfortable than sitting down.
About an hour after dark, Harry Gallagher walked in and took a seat at the bar.
“Just couldn’t stay away?” I said in greeting. “I’m flattered. Or is it just our whiskey selection?”
He laughed. “A little bit of both. A glass of Midleton, please.”
I poured him a shot in one of our special glasses Sam kept for top-shelf spirits and set it down. He picked it up and spent a full minute inhaling the scent with his eyes closed.
“Sometimes, one must savor those things that make life worth living,” he said.
He opened his eyes—those incredible deep green eyes—and turned them on me. “How are you doing? I heard you had a bit of a dustup the other night.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be more entranced with his eyes or his accent. I took a deep breath and said, “And where would you be hearing such gossip? Draped over the backyard fence whilst hanging your laundry?” My Irish accent wasn’t that good, but I had spent six months in Ireland on an Illuminati mission, and from listening to Jenny and Sam so much, I thought I had the lilt and cadence down pretty well.
Gallagher must have thought so, too, because he laughed. “Oh, a wee little birdie dropped by and told me.” His face grew serious. “You seem to be all right, save for that spot on your cheek. Were you hurt?”
I shrugged. “Banged up a little bit. Bruised. Nothing that a few potions and some time won’t fix. I am surprised to see you out, though. I would think you’d be hunkered down and staying close to home.”
“Considering some people’s willingness to exceed the bounds of propriety, I’m not sure it matters,” Gallagher said and took a sip of his whiskey. “Obviously Rodrick doesn’t consider an invitation necessary before coming to call.”
“So, it’s not just me who thinks Barclay was responsible,” I said.
Gallagher snorted. “I certainly have nothing to gain by pissing Flynn off, and it’s not Eileen’s style.”
“Oh? What is Miss Montgomery’s style?” I asked.
He smirked at me. “She’d hire someone like you to slip into Rodrick’s bed and stake him at dawn.”
“Why, Mr. Gallagher, I do find that incredibly offensive,” I said in my best Southern drawl—which probably wasn’t very good, but I’d seen Gone with the Wind only once.
He took another sip of his whiskey and winked at me over the rim of the glass. “Miss Scarlett,” he said, “your sense of humor is showing.”
As long as he was in a good mood, I decided to take a chance.
“I read somewhere that when vampires go to war, they increase the number of,” I almost said victims but caught myself, “people that they turn. Is that true?”
Gallagher’s deep green eyes—like pools I could fall into and drown—went flat, and his body stiffened. His lips twitched, as though he was contemplating biting me for my impertinence, and I could almost feel the anger my question had caused rolling off him. Then he relaxed, but his eyes didn’t change.
“What a quaint idea. Now, why would we do that?”
I knew a vampire couldn’t feel mage magic, so I shielded before I said, “Increase the cannon fodder? I doubt seriously that Barclay sent any of his favorites into battle against Flynn.”
Before he could answer, I was distracted by someone entering the club, and he turned to see what I was looking at.
I always felt a brush of magic when people came into the club, an artifact of the magical ward Sam had cast on the door. I glanced over to the door and was surprised to see Frankie Jones and Detective Mackle. Frankie headed straight for the bar but faltered as she saw Gallagher. She recovered quickly, though, and chose a seat that left two empty stools between them. Mackle sat on her far side.
Frankie was the kind of woman who radiated self-confidence. At six feet tall and athletic, with dark-brown skin, she stood out anywhere she went.
“What can I get you, ladies?” I asked.
“A cosmo for me,” Frankie said.
I raised an eyebrow at Mackle. “Margarita.”
As I turned away to mix their drinks, I heard Frankie say, “I would think you’d be staying in, helping your employees stack sandbags.”
“Good evening, Frankie,” Gallagher said in return. “Nice to see you out and about.”
I glanced back toward them and saw Gallagher down his drink, drop some bills on the bar, and walk out.
“Are you and Mr. Gallagher old friends?” I asked as I served the ladies their drinks.
Frankie chuckled. “When I was a prosecutor, I took him to court for bribing city officials to get a waste-hauling contract, and made sure all the court appearances were in the middle of the day. We ended up winning a six-million-dollar settlement, but I didn’t get a criminal conviction. Shall we say, he’s not my biggest fan.”
“Frankie, you’ll never get any dates if you’re mean to the boys,” I said with a grin.
Frankie grinned back and Mackle laughed.
Mackle watched Gallagher until he disappeared through the door, then swung back around and said, “You gotta admit, though, he is top-notch eye candy.”
“Oh,” Frankie said, “I’ve seen other men that good-looking, and without the baggage.”
“Name one,” Mackle said.
Frankie shrugged. “I don’t know. The magazines didn’t name the models in the ads.”
We laughed, and then I asked, “Are you ladies dining with us tonight?” Receiving two nods, I handed them menus and moved down the bar to fill other customers’ orders.
After Frankie and Mackle finished their dinners, I cleared their dishes and asked, “How’s Lieutenant Blair doing?”
“He’s on leave for a week,” Frankie said. “Damned vamp took a chunk out of his neck, and the doctors ordered him to rest. And you? You seem to have recovered rather well, considering what Cindy told me about your injuries.”
“Cindy?”
Mackle grinned and toasted me with her glass. “That’s me.”
“Oh. Well, the potions I took did a pretty good job of healing me, but I’m still rather sore, and it will take a while for all the bruises to fade. But if it wasn’t for Blair, I have no idea where I’d be, or what condition I would be in.”
“Well,” Frankie said, “I got that information on missing persons that you asked Blair about. Starting around four or five months ago, there has been a spike in reports, and it’s not getting better. So, why did you ask about it?”
I told them about my theory that the vampire contenders for control of the city were recruiting and turning new vampires.
“I’m willing to bet that a lot of those people who went missing tended to hang out either at The Devil’s Den or at Necropolis,” I said. “I’m rather curious as to what you do if a person is reported missing, and they later turn up sporting a new set of fangs. Do you arrest the vamp who turned them for murder?”
“I wish,” Mackle said.
Frankie shook her head. “Technically, they aren’t dead, since vampires don’t exist. There isn’t anything in our laws forbidding what they do, unless we can catch them during the first three days. And then the case would fall apart when the new vamp rises. We just hope they don’t go munching on their old family and friends.”
“Does anyone know how many vampires there are in this area?” I asked.
Mackle shook her head. “A year ago, someone estimated about five hundred. I don’t know where he got that number. We had forty or fifty attacks reported last year. But we’ve had over two thousand attacks in the past five months, and you know that most of those were by the newly-turned.”
Trevor came in later that night. He said he’d been by the bar a couple of times while I slept, but Sam wouldn’t let anyone disturb me.
He hinted around asking me for a date, as he sometimes did, and I put him off again, as I always did. I liked him a lot, but my attraction for Harry Gallagher had me confused. I had no problem turning down Flynn’s advances, so why did Gallagher affect me so much? The only man I’d actually been on a date with was Lieutenant Blair, but I had held him at arm’s length after that.
But Trevor was funny and interesting, and we sometimes went out for pizza together. He had found out that Jolene was giving me spell-casting lessons, and just happened to drop by her place when I was there. And she kept pushing me to go out with him. But as much as I was drawn to him, in the back of my mind I was afraid. Suppose it didn’t work out with us and I lost him as a friend?
I talked to him about the vampires ‘recruiting’ new members and what Mackle had said about the ramp-up in attacks.
“She’s just talking about attacks on norms,” he said. “There are gangs of vamps giving the shifters a lot of grief, and those don’t get reported. The three major shifter packs here are talking about coordinating and doing something about it.”
“Lizzy told me once that the Fae are concerned about the chaos,” I said. Trevor was one of the few people I could talk to about the Fae. He and Lizzy had been a couple at university, and he knew her family.
His head jerked, and he stared at me. “That’s not good.”
“I know.”
Despite some of the Fae looking like people and the fact that they could even interbreed with people, their thinking was very different. People talked about vampires being immortal, but few were even a thousand years old. A lot of the Fae still held personal grudges against Jesus for starting a new religion that encroached on their sovereignty. They didn’t think the way we did, and their motivations were a complete mystery to most other thinking creatures.
Chapter 8
I talked to Sam the following morning, and we decided that until the whole vampire mess settled down, I should just stay at the apartment over the bar. I called Trevor, and he drove over to help me move.