“I’m sorry to do this to you. I know you wanted nothing to do with the vampires, but this is your mess. You can’t keep running from them forever.”
I never planned to run forever. Just the next hundred years or so. Maybe once I could protect myself, I’d feel safe interacting with them, though I doubted it.
“If I don’t do the job?” I asked.
His sigh was heavy. “You’ll be cut loose. You’ll have no protection. It won’t just be the vampires after you then. Any spook could come gunning for you. I don’t think even the sorcerer’s mark could protect you from all of them.”
“Fine. I get it. I’ll do the job.”
I did get it. He had to look out for himself and his people. As much help as he’d given me, I wasn’t one of them. Not really.
We hung up.
Despite what Liam had said, I still planned to do other jobs. Some of these had been on my schedule for weeks. No way was I letting another courier take over my routes. The bastards would refuse to give them back.
I couldn’t stop a snort of laughter, thinking about what Liam and Thomas wanted. I needed to find Thomas’s descendants. Well, shit.
The part that bugged me was how Thomas didn’t recognize me when I was sitting across from him. You would think he would have leapt at evidence that his little performance problem was a thing of the past. He was the one who’d turned me after all. Instead he acted like he’d never met me before in my life.
* * *
My first run of the night took me to a bar just north of Clintonville. The many bike paths the city had developed made short work of getting me to my destination. I didn’t even have to brave many streets or their crazy drivers.
The brisk air felt nice on my face and helped clear my head of some of the negative emotions and thoughts from the meeting with Liam and Thomas.
The ride brought a few things into perspective. Just because I took the job with the vampires didn’t mean I had to produce results. Nothing in my contract stipulated a penalty should I fail to find the descendants or the witch.
I checked the contract after my conversation with Jerry. No penalty clause had been added. That left me a lot of wiggle room to work with. As long as I made them think I was doing my best, I should be safe. Ish.
The bar I was supposed to meet my client at was a sad looking building with a bright sign out front saying the Blue Pepper. A sombrero perched on the P. Despite the general air of disrepair, the parking lot seemed full enough. People didn’t seem to care what their watering hole looked like as long as it served good drinks.
Of course some of the draw may have been more magical in nature.
I propped my bike against a pole and wrapped my bike lock around it before heading around to the back.
The shadows were thick here. While the parking lot had adequate lighting, the owner never bothered to put more than one light out back and that hung over the door employees used to take a smoke break.
My contact stood under that light, puffing away on a cigarette as she stared into the shadows.
“How is that djinn cuff working for you?” she asked, without turning her eyes toward me.
I stopped besides her, not even questioning how she knew that I’d put it to use. “So far so good.”
“You know, when I gave you that, I didn’t expect you to turn around and use it on a sorcerer.”
Neither had I.
Its use had been born partly from desperation and partly from impulse.
“You never said not to.”
She snorted. “Of course not. I didn’t think I had to spell out what a bad idea it would be to constrain a sorcerer. Kind of like I shouldn’t have to point out the utter stupidity of pulling a tiger’s tail.” She took another puff of her cigarette. “You’re lucky it was Barrett’s former apprentice you used it on or otherwise you’d be dead by now.”
Some luck. I was pretty sure he was going to kill me as soon as I took that thing off. Since I was indebted to him for the next hundred years, it wasn’t like I could remove it and then hide until he forgot who locked him away from his power.
“What can I say, Dahlia? I like to live dangerously.”
Not really. I preferred a life of peace but that never quite worked out for me.
