Took shifted. He didn’t want to talk about how broken he was, about the way vampirism had stitched his body back together—untidy as it was—but left his brain fractured like a dropped glass. So far, Madoc only seemed to have noticed the surface stuff, and Took didn’t want to dredge the rest of it out. He couldn’t sleep behind a locked door, even in a hotel, and he sleepwalked through most days because he refused to adapt to a nocturnal schedule. He didn’t want Madoc to look at him the way everyone else did, like the best they could ever expect of Took again was fuckingfunctional. “You have your phone?”
Madoc raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t you make your one call in jail?”
He had. They hadn’t picked up. Took couldn’t blame West for that, but… he did a bit. That—him and West, their first kiss to the never-quite-ended relationship—had always been off-limits for Madoc. It just hadn’t felt… fair. Took didn’t plan to break that rule now.
“Phone or not?”
Madoc leaned back and unfastened his jacket so he could reach inside and pull out a thin rectangle of glass and plastic. Tech had never been Took’s passion, so he didn’t recognize it, but he assumed it was expensive. Madoc held it out over the table and then twitched it away as Took reached for it.
“I’ve changed my passcode,” he warned with a hint of his old sly smile.
Took rolled his eyes and grabbed the phone. He wasn’tthatrusty. This was an old game, and he hadn’t lost a round since Madoc had cheated and used face recognition. The thing Madoc could never quite believe was that the code didn’t matter, it was the person who input it that didn’t change.
If Took could work out why Killer Vampire A only bit people who’d bought a Klondike bar from the corner of Main and James Street, then he could figure out the sequence of numbers Madoc thought he’d remember. For reasons both professional and personal, Took had spent a lot more time in the study of Cardinal Madoc than he had of Case File 92.
Every three months Madoc changed his passcode. So he’d changed it, at most, twelve times since Took had last guessed it. Maybe less, he might have slacked off during the investigation into Took’s kidnapping.
Occupied in the puzzle, Took let that thought skate over the surface of his brain. It almost didn’t sting, and it reminded him of something.
“Got it,” he said after a minute. The screen cleared from black to the minimalist apps and empty background that Madoc favored. TOOK35. The anniversary of his kidnapping had been three years ago in May, last month. “Try five. Asshole.”
Madoc rubbed his thumb over his lower lip. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe I just wanted you to know it hasn’t been forgotten. I’m still looking for him.”
Him.
Although, of course, it could have been her. Or both. More. A random stranger. A vampire with a grudge. Took, with his brain full of blank spaces, certainly couldn’t tell you.
Took stared at the phone in his hands and the faint, distorted reflection that slid in and out of the glass. Or it could have been the vampire sitting opposite him—his partner, his friend, and one of the few people who knew where Took had been headed that day.
The suspicion tasted like old blood and ingratitude in the back of Took’s throat, but he couldn’t quite dismiss it either. Madoc was used to getting what he wanted, and he’d wanted Took… back then.
He connected to the internet and backdoored into his server to pull down a file.
There was no evidence, but there was no exoneration either. Took just had to live with the possibility.
“Storm Warning,” he said, his voice rough and uneasy in his throat as he pushed the phone back over the table. At least, that’s what he’d called himself online, as he gave the Breathing Rights movement an appealing face. A young man with fair hair and a strawberry birthmark around his eye stared out of the screen with a tentative smile. Madoc knew the face. “Although his legal name is Dominic Waring. His parents think VINE got it wrong. That you got it wrong.”
Chapter Four
IN TOOK’Spicture, Dominic Waring was seventeen years old, played football because his father expected it, and dated a girl called Mikaila Blake who didn’t expect to be treated very well. He had 20,000 followers on his streaming channel and clowned to demand. The year before he’d run away from home to hitch to LA, although he’d been picked up a week later just outside of Michigan, and in roughly four months he would run away again.
This photo was the one his parents used for the missing-person appeal, teary-eyed on TV screens and social media. For a while it had been everywhere, until another photo supplanted it in the public consciousness. In it, Dominic had been thin and fevered, with a shaved head and blood all over his shirt from the family he’d murdered.
“His parents think he’s innocent?” he asked as he flicked the photo off-screen. The underlying folder structure spread out over the screen of his phone—a chaos of unnamed files, random stacks of photos, and a dozen identical shortcuts. Took’s filing system had always been enough to make a cat wince, and despite the old wives’ tales about vampiric OCD, it obviously hadn’t changed. “He was caught red-handed. Literally.”
“They think VINE framed him.”
Madoc sat back and raised his eyebrows. “You know better than that,” he said. “So why take the case?”
The arrival of the coffee meant that Madoc had to wait for his answer. He watched Took as Nick slammed the coffee down on the table in front of them and brown liquid splashed over the white Formica. For a second, it had been his old partner slouched across from him, ice-pick mind at work behind that pretty, surfer-boy face. Then it was gone, and the brittle, glassy shell had clicked back into place.
Maybe Madoc should have just opened his phone himself, but he didn’t think it was that.
“Choke on it,” Nick said loudly for his audience of yokels. His hands shook as shoved a wedge of pie and sloppily applied whipped cream across the table. “I hope your bit—”
“Don’t push your luck,” Madoc told him. He plucked a napkin out of the chrome dispenser on the table and fastidiously sopped up the spilled coffee. When he was done, he tucked the sodden paper into the pocket of Nick’s apron. “And take that sign down. If I have to do it, I’ll make you swallow it.”
Nick blanched behind his beard and backed away from the table. This time the jeers from the wannabe Hunters were at him, the solidarity of breath forgotten in the joy of humiliation. An old ember of contempt flickered in the back of Madoc’s mind. If it hadn’t been so easy to convince humans to turn the pitchforks on each other, the Empires of the Undead might have remained nothing but a boyar’s fiefdom.
