“Ditto,” Garrett says from where he’s on the phone. I turn and find he’s looking at me. I realize his sensitive shifter hearing, like my vampire hearing, heard Lucius clearly.
I have no idea what to do now, but Lucius speaks. “Go to your hotel, check in with your men, regroup, then return here. Park in the back again, and use code 1852 to enter the back door and the office stairs. We’ll use the office as our war room. Please feel free to share that code with Garrett. That is for the use of him and his mate while this is ongoing. I will inform my people to make sure they both have safe passage. I personally guarantee their safety while in our territory.”
“Yeah, I heard him,” Garrett says to me as he ends the call he was on. “Thanks, Frangelico,” he calls out. I switch the phone to speaker mode.
Lucius chuckles. “Who would have thought it would take a special little human to so utterly unite our two factions with a cooperative and singular purpose of brotherhood?”
“You ain’t kidding,” Garrett says.
“Once she’s safely back with Dexter,” Lucius says, “I shall buy you a drink. Your choice.”
Garrett looks me in the eyes. “We’ll hold off on the toasts until that happens. Then we have another problem to deal with, anyway.”
“The casino project?”
“No,” Garrett says. “I want to know what thefuckthat thing is, and how thehellwe send it the fuck away, so it doesn’t come back.”
27
Eilidh
I cleanout my mailbox and put a hold on my mail. I don’t bother filing a forwarding address because—spoiler alert—not only do I not have one, I’mnotstupid.
Dexter or Garrett, or one of their men, would no doubt be sitting there waiting for me the first time I showed up to get my mail.
I’ll have to invest in a mail forwarding service at some point. For now, the only mail I receive there relates to my income taxes, and that’s easily changed by logging in online and doing it myself.
After I clean out the mailbox, I book it away from that area and grab gas and lunch in Scottsdale, as well as a brand-new trucker’s road atlas of North America.
The problem with being from this region is knowing you can’t easily gettherefromhere. Between the desert and the mountains, there aren’t a lot of major arteries out of the area. I know it’d be too easy for the wolves to send their bikers out on the main arteries, looking for me. And they’d likely catch up with me, too, if I stayed on them.
The only advantage I have right now is time. Lucius and Dexter most likely haven’t received my texts yet, meaning Garrett doesn’t know.
But why make things easier on them?
I immediately scratch the obvious choices—I-10 west, or I-17 north, or US93 to the northwest. I have no desire to head to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, or south into Mexico. On the last point, for starters, my Spanish muy sucks ballsackos.
As I drink my coffee, I start looking at other options and settle, for now, on northeast. I’ll cut up to I-40 and arrive in Albuquerque just around dark. That’s about a seven-hour drive.
From there?
Well, I’ll be able to make a few phone calls to decide my next step. But Albuquerque is large enough I should be able to hide out overnight. As far as I know, there aren’t any vampire nests there. I’m sure the wolves likely have people they know there, but I don’t know any personally.
With a game plan now, I take one last bathroom break, buy a couple of gallons of antifreeze, just in case, and a couple of gallons of drinking water, some snacks, and head out.
Despite my nerves, the drive goes without a hitch. I quickly find a hotel room in a busy section of town far enough from the interstate that I feel comfortable stopping for the night.
And I have to stop for the night. I’m exhausted. I can’t keep my eyes open.
I don’t even bother turning on my phone, either. I know it’ll be full of texts from Dexter, Lucius, Garrett, and others. I want to text Garrett and Amber, but if Dexter hasn’t already told them what’s going on, I damn sure don’t want to admit it yet. I also don’t want there to be any way to ping the phone and locate me.
Fortunately for me, I’m smarter than the average bear, and I save my contacts in Google Contacts so I can retrieve them.
Which is where I refer to, via my laptop, to find a few numbers I need. I sync one of the cheap burners to my contacts and, ten minutes later, I know what my plan will be. But I’ll need to get up before dawn to make some late phone calls. If I reach out too soon, someone might tip off Lucius and Dexter, and give them time to mobilize people to look for me.
Thus, I take a shower, set every alarm I can, and, after bracing the door with a chair, I reluctantly fall asleep.
Unfortunately, my dreams are filled with a mix of nightmares about losing Dexter to my phantom dog, and it attacking Lucius and the others, and Garrett and Amber, and—
