“An easy betrayal…”
“What? You think I’m betraying him? Hell no, it was his idea.‘Jimmy,’ he said, and I hate being called Jimmy, he said, ‘Don’t be a hero. When he’—that’s you—‘shows up, and he will show up, give him this. It’s me he’s after. Not you.’ ”
James Chin had turned on the bedside lamp and had rearranged himself into a more comfortable position when Henry returned with the envelope. “You know it’s a trap, right? I’ll give you that for free.”
The envelope held a single piece of paper folded around a name and an address. “What do you assume is going to happen now?” Henry asked, stopping just outside the circle of light.
The answering eye roll was epic. “I assume you’re going to go away so I can get the blood stink out of my apartment and get back to sleep.”
“Because you’re just the messenger?”
“Don’t shoot the messenger, right?” He grinned, showing the kind of perfect teeth that in this century meant his parents had had the money for dentistry.
“You killed Kevin Groves…”
“Ah, ah, ah.” He raised a hand. “Technically, Kevin Groves died while I was doing my job.”
Both Reynolds and the man who’d spoken for the Pride had referred to James Chin as acrazy fucker. They hadn’t been speaking euphemistically; the man was insane.
“Look…” He sighed. “He said you won’t care about the gun…”
“You?”
“Yeah, me. I’m the gun. It’s a metaphor.” The pale blue duvet rose and fell as he crossed his legs at the ankle. “He said you’ll only care about the man who pulled the trigger. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Right? He said, once you have the information you’re after, you’ll leave.”
“And you believe him.”
“I’m a businessman, and there’s a certain amount of trust required in order to be able to do business. Particularly our sort of business.”
“I’m not in your sort of business.”
“Really? Because I somehow doubt that the people who bled all over you were into it.” He held up both hands. “Not kink shaming, mind, I just doubt it. Now, since you have what you came for, go away.”
Henry had come here to make James Chin suffer. He’d intended to make him pay and keep paying for the pain he’d inflicted. He’d intended to bury him so deeply, wrap him so tightly in Darkness that his screams would echo long after his flesh had decayed. But James Chin would not come face-to-face with his personal demons in the Darkness because he had no personal demons. Nothing lingered behind his eyes.
He’d be found eventually, his heart having stopped while he slept. Depending on timing, if corruption allowed, he’d look mildly annoyed and have a bruise on one ankle and another just under his right ear.
No marks of teeth.
No missing blood.
Henry would rather feed from a rotting corpse.
With three hours to dawn, Henry walked up and stopped in front of a gated drive. If the size of the lot was any indication, acreage being at a premium in the Lower Mainland, Robert Alistair Kenwick had made a great deal of money in publishing. A quick search had linked his name with multiple newspapers in multiple countries, newspapers that took cash from the credible and had, for the most part, only a passing association with the truth.
The house shouted,Look at what I am able to do!as loudly as his father’s palace at Greenwich.
Robert Alistair Kenwick, middle-aged and a little plump, sat in a recliner tucked into a comfortable corner in a second-floor library. He held an open book, no mythic nor modern way to take out a vampire visible. No garlic. No mustard seeds. No holy symbols nor holy water. No stakes. No sunlamps.
There were, however, a great many bits of antiquity sharing the shelves with the books. Not enough to give the British Museum a run for its money, but amulets, rings, carved stone and bone, small idols, and pieces of larger statuary filled every empty place. Asian artifacts, including broken and unbroken jade, covered over half of a huge teak desk. Not unexpected; in that same quick search, Henry had found an article about Kenwick recently returning from “a trip to the Far East with the intention of expanding his empire.”
When Henry stepped out of the shadows, Kenwick looked up from his book and sneered. “I see you got my message, Nightwalker. Took you long enough to get here.”
Henry curled his lip, exposing fangs.
“You don’t frighten me,” Kenwick scoffed. “You came when I called.”
Henry allowed the Darkness to show in his eyes.
