"Are there rules?"

"Of course there are rules."

"Restrictions?"

"Those too."

"Oaths of loyalty?"

"Now you're just stabbing in the dark," I accused. "A House is all that s.h.i.t and more. Under the best of circ.u.mstances, it's a family. It's your backup. On paper it's very Three Musketeers-one for all, all for one, blah blah blah blah. In real life, it's just like belonging to the mob. Sometimes it works for you, and sometimes it works against you. It depends on who's in charge and how willing you are to follow rules."

"So, the Atlanta House. Is it a bad one? Bad vampires in charge, bad rules?"

He didn't know the half of it. I told him the truth without telling him anything. "I've never been part of the Atlanta House. I'm not from around here, okay? I've never tangled with them, and I don't care to. Largely because, as you've so astutely noticed, I don't have any House of my own to back me up."

"But you must know something something about it." about it."

Well, yeah. I knew that the Barrington House of Atlanta was not the House with which you wanted to f.u.c.k-and if his little sister had been brought on board there, she should've been in pretty secure company. If the House had turned her over for...for what, medical experimentation? Like in that Monty Python movie? Then she'd probably done something to royally p.i.s.s somebody off.

Vampires tend to take care of problem members "in House" you might say. They don't outsource their problem people. They find other ways to make examples out of them. Unless the times, they were a-changing.

So I decided to tell him, "Look, I know what you're thinking."

"You do?"

"I'm psychic. A little." May as well stick to the truth while it was convenient. The rest was easy to guess. "You're thinking that if there's some organizational structure in place, you can infiltrate it or at least learn enough to navigate it. And you're wrong. The Atlanta House"-I made a point not to tell him its name-"isn't just bulletproof. It's nuke nuke-proof. You'll have better luck fighting Uncle Sam, and your corpse will be more readily identifiable when he's done with you."

"What about you?"

"Me? If you think I'm going to go around ringing doorbells, looking to find out what happened to your sister, you've got another think coming."

"What if I could pay you?"

"You can't," I said flatly.

He asked, "How do you know? Name a price."

"There isn't enough money."

"In a drag queen's stash?"

"In the world," I specified. "Now are we going to dig up your sister here, or what?"

Adrian scowled, and shivered.

It was cold out there in Memorial Lawn. Not as cold as Minnesota, but cold enough that I was uncomfortable. They don't tell you that about Georgia. They tell you it's all peaches and sunshine, but it isn't. It's a sauna in the summer and, come winter, it's cold enough to freeze. Cold enough to snow, sometimes. But I'm pretty sure I've never seen that on any of their tourism brochures.

Adrian hoisted the shovel up high and straight, and drove it down into the gra.s.s in front of the headstone. I did likewise. Together in the near-perfect dark, we swung and shoved, grunting and flinging dirt over our shoulders, onto the graves nearby. Every now and again one of us would hit a rock or a particularly tough root, and the steel shovels would chime like church bells-pinging loud and clear in the emptiness.

The whole time we worked, no one drove by on the road where we'd left the Cherokee. And even though I kept one eye on that road the whole time, I never saw a single person come or go, as if the cemetery and all its surroundings were truly abandoned, and forgotten, or avoided.

Finally, after fully four feet of mud, worms, and rocks as big as frogs, my shovel sc.r.a.ped up against something decidedly un-dirt-like.

I stopped. I tapped at the something and Adrian did likewise, probing at the ma.s.s with the tip of the shovel and prying out a corner on his side of the corpseless grave.

With some wiggling, cursing, and further excavation, we were able to pop it up out of its spot and onto the gra.s.s. I looked for a place to sit that wasn't covered with loose dirt, but gave up and sat down on a little heap of it. Adrian came to sit beside me. He held the box on his lap and picked at the latches.

The box wasn't terribly interesting; it was just a metal jobbie that he'd put inside a very thick plastic bag to keep the rust and rot off. The bag had mostly held up and the box was mostly intact, though threads of rust ate the corners and the latches. One of them broke off in his hand. The other took only a small tug to release.

Adrian had thoughtfully wrapped the interior contents in plastic, too, so they looked pretty good. Some of the edges were curling, and some of the pages were turning the color of an old photograph, but everything appeared intact.

Impatiently, I took the lump out of the box and set it in my own lap, peeling the plastic away even more. "Is this everything?" I asked.

"It's everything I took. And if you want the truth, I don't even know what most of it means," he confessed. "It's coded, like most of the paperwork they filed on me, too."

And there was Ian's serial number.

Right there, in black and white, 636-44-895. I dragged my finger down the page and stopped on it, then kept skimming. "It's too dark to read much out here, right now," I observed. Technically I could see it well enough to read, but Adrian was right and everything was coded anyway. I wanted to take the docs back to my condo and examine them in the comfort of my own home, with the help of my own artificial lighting.

"You promised," Adrian said softly.

"What?"

"You promised you'll use these to help your friend, or your client, or whatever he is. And you'll try to shut the program down. That's what you promised. Did you mean it, or did you only say it so I'd take you here?"

"Oh, I meant it meant it. This-" I said, indicating the paperwork, the program, and everything that was wrapped up with it. "It horrifies me. Do you know what they were doing, here? In these tallies?"

"Not really."

"They were cla.s.sifying people like your sister, and my client, and me me...as animals-and treating the doc.u.mentation like this was all some experiment on apes. Some of the subjects didn't survive. One of the ones who did did survive is maimed for life." I climbed to my feet, and used the plastic-wrapped papers to swat dirt off my pants. "Worse, really. He's maimed for afterlife. And whatever you believe and however you feel about what your sister became, she was a person, and she could still feel pain. She could still be survive is maimed for life." I climbed to my feet, and used the plastic-wrapped papers to swat dirt off my pants. "Worse, really. He's maimed for afterlife. And whatever you believe and however you feel about what your sister became, she was a person, and she could still feel pain. She could still be killed killed. And she deserved better."

Adrian was still holding the empty box, at least until he gazed back down at the hole and tossed the container back inside it. He didn't respond to anything I'd said, which was maybe a little uncool, but he was having a moment there so I didn't disturb him. All he said was, "We should fill this in."

"Why?"

"Because a freshly dug grave in a graveyard is less suspicious than an empty one that somebody dug up. Are we trying to cover our tracks here, or what?"

He had me there. I sighed.

I put the bundle down on top of Isabelle's headstone and retrieved my shovel once more. A fresh grave in an effectively abandoned cemetery was, in my estimation, only marginally less interesting to any pa.s.serby than an empty one, but Adrian was right. In the grand scheme of things, anyone who noticed would be less likely to call the cops if there wasn't a gaping hole in the ground.

We weren't grave robbers, after all. There'd never been a grave.

There'd only been a package of incriminating doc.u.ments, left in memory of a girl who wasn't even a girl anymore when she'd died.

Later that evening, back at the homestead and on the far side of a nice hot shower, I sat at the kitchen bar and busted out my laptop. I had a note from You-Know-Who.

Abigail,You're going to be in D.C. next weekend, you said? Actually, that's pretty convenient. If you do a good job getting inside that Pioneer Square location, I'd like to talk to you about it. a.s.suming you pull it off, can I talk you into coming out on Friday afternoon or Monday morning?Swing by the receptionist's desk on the way in. Give her my name, and she'll point you in the right direction.While you're here, you might want to check out some of the local parkour groups. There's one that meets near my office called Presidential Parkour. You may find it interesting.

Below his name he'd added an address. I demanded that Google Maps give me the satellite view of the location, because two can play at that game, that's why.

Nothing interesting. A boring building in a respectable part of town. I'd file it away and do a better investigation on it later. I'd bought myself until next Monday, after all.

So I wrote a quick email back, pulling it right out of my a.s.s. I hoped the offhanded nature of it came across as juvenile and enthusiastic, rather than floundering in the dark, trying to figure out what the a.s.shole major wanted me to look for-and being careful not to give him anything to rouse his suspicions.

If I played this right, it could be perfect. I'd scored the a.s.signment to investigate my own building. And who better than me to rea.s.sure him that there was nothing at all to see there?

Major,Went poking around at the address you sent me. I'm not sure what you're looking for in there, but I didn't see anything too exciting. It looks like you're right, and there are squatters camping out, maybe. I saw some bedding and some emptied cans of food, and some soda bottles. One of the bathrooms works, and the place has electricity, but not much use for it. Just a couple of bare lightbulbs, one per floor. LOTS of old machinery, though. I think it used to be a factory or something. Everything looks rusted in place, and I don't know what it was ever used for. I couldn't tell. I don't think any of it works. I couldn't find anything that would turn on, anyway.Is there anything you were looking for in particular? I could take another look.~Abigail Once that was sent off, I hung around and messed with the paperwork we'd dug out of Isabelle's fake grave, since Adrian was still in the shower. The water was gushing noisily and the steam smelled like a lavender-and-rose-scented soap that once again reminded me that my temporary roommate was exceptionally secure in his masculinity.

While he bathed, I felt as if I almost had a modic.u.m of privacy.

I threw away the plastic wrapper and used paper towels to take the edge off the dusty, funky, musty flakes of dirt that had acc.u.mulated over however many years the doc.u.ments had been stashed underground. The paper still smelled like mold and tree fungus, and it was itchily dry to the touch, but it was mostly clean and I separated the sheets into piles according to my instinctive sense of what was useful and what wasn't. Some of the cover sheets and filler pages could be discarded, for they were blank. Some of the rest were out of order, and needed rearranging.

Here and there I saw incriminating keywords. Jordan Roe. Holtzer Point. A fistful of serial numbers beginning with 636. Ian's stood out most prominently, but only because I'd seen it before. The others could've belonged to anybody. Adrian hadn't said which one indicated his sister. I skimmed for the kind of contextual information that could've pointed her out to me, but didn't see much. The medical notes seemed either imprecise to me or entirely too precise-and outside my field of expertise.

So I was hanging out, staring at the sheets while Adrian took his shower, when another keyword leaped out and smacked me between the eyes. Literally, for a moment, I could not breathe. I said it aloud, in a feeble attempt to break the spell.

"Bruner."

The man who'd sent a douchebag named Trevor into my storage facility. The man who wanted to hire parcours parcours kids to perform "reconnaissance" on me, or my stuff-or other vampires, and their stuff. Major Bruner, misogynist pig on the phone and sneaky military official in the office. kids to perform "reconnaissance" on me, or my stuff-or other vampires, and their stuff. Major Bruner, misogynist pig on the phone and sneaky military official in the office.

The man I'd just emailed, lying through my teeth and crossing my fingers.

I am absolutely certain that my heart stopped.

Then the shower stopped, and I knew my alone-time was drawing to a close.

Reaching for a drawer, I yanked it open and rifled around through the dried-up pens and broken pencils that acc.u.mulate in every single place where I ever spend more than a week at a time. I hadn't been to my Atlanta condo in quite a while, as I admitted earlier. But still, the trappings of my neuroses were present-as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Finally I found a pencil that had enough lead to leave a mark. I used it to circle all instances of this Major Bruner and I even underlined a serial number-or a shorthand number, maybe-that seemed to be connected with either him or with this project. By the time Adrian exited the bathroom, wearing a fluffy crimson towel and trailing a billowing cloud of steam, I'd scribbled a stack of notes and drawn an army's worth of arrows.

"You okay?" Adrian asked, possibly noting my gritted teeth and manic attention to the musty papers.

"Oh, I'm just ducky, ducky," I a.s.sured him, but I a.s.sume that the frenetic triumph in my eyes told him there was more to the story, so I pointed the pencil down at the sheet and said, "You see this guy? You see his name?"

"Bruner? You know him?" he asked, slinging around behind me to get a better look. He smelled like my soap, my shampoo, and whatever I'd last used to clean the tub.

"We're not friends, but I've spoken to him. Once, on the phone." Suddenly he was suspicious. I wasn't explaining myself too well, so I added, "And several times by email. This a.s.shole's been following me. Or looking into me. Something like that. And I don't like it."

I left the papers on the counter and turned around so I could face him while I offered something like an explanation. "See, I have this...this place place. Let's call it a storage facility. And last week, some dude broke into it. I went through his clothes and his wallet and found-"

"You killed him?" I heard idle curiosity, but no judgment.

So I said, "Yeah, I killed him. He broke into my property, and his name was Trevor and...and he was menacing a couple of homeless kids who pretty much live there. I did the world a favor."

"No need to get defensive."

"Who's defensive?" I asked. "Point is, I went through the guy's stuff and I found a note with a phone number, which led me to this this guy." I punctuated the last two words by jabbing the pencil at the sheet of marked-up paper. "We've been emailing back and forth. I've been trying to figure out what he knows, and why he's looking at me. He thinks he's talking to a teenager named Abigail." guy." I punctuated the last two words by jabbing the pencil at the sheet of marked-up paper. "We've been emailing back and forth. I've been trying to figure out what he knows, and why he's looking at me. He thinks he's talking to a teenager named Abigail."

He thought about this, took a closer look at the sheet, which brought his towel-only self up closer to me, but I wasn't complaining. G.o.dd.a.m.n, he really was good looking. No wonder he made such a hot woman. I also noticed that the tattoo-which he usually kept covered with stage makeup-was on full display. It was typical military ink. Eagles and banners. The kind of thing guys get when they're in a group, drunk to the gills, and excited about the prospect of matching forever.

"That can't be a coincidence," he said.

"Coincidence? Are you s.h.i.tting me? No way. way." Bruner was obviously in this up to his eyeb.a.l.l.s, no doubt fancying himself a puppetmaster or something equally sinister. But how was he coordinating the operation from all these different angles?

Earlier, Adrian had brought up satellites, which was superlatively worrisome-because I'd been tailed, that much was clear. But I hadn't seen or heard or sensed any electronic equipment and I knew d.a.m.n good and well it hadn't been as simple as sending a car after me.

I would've noticed that. I'm old and wily, and I'm not the kind of girl who fails to notice when she's being chased.

From a certain crazy, paranoid, conspiracy-theory slant, observation-from-s.p.a.ce wasn't the dumbest conclusion I could draw. It was frankly terrifying, the idea that Ian and I-and maybe, once upon a time, Isabelle, too-could be watched by some radar or spy satellite, just because this d.i.c.khead Bruner thinks vampires make excellent experimental subjects.

The thought had me glaring down at the paper, in case I could channel all my rage through that signature upon it, sloppy and arrogant, and make the major's head explode.

"It's my own fault," I grumbled.

"What is?"

This time I shook my head, not sure how to tell him what I meant without telling him too much. "I've gotten into this guy's sights, somehow. Just like your sister did, and just like my client did, a long time ago."

"You said that already."

"I meant it, too. See," I said, putting on my teacher voice and refusing to notice that the towel was slipping, "most vampires conduct business through thralls or ghouls-in order to keep their own names and ident.i.ties out of the social security office, or the DMV, or anywhere else. But I've spent a very long time conducting my own business, apart from any of the Houses. As you so astutely gathered."

"Why do do you go it alone? If it's so much safer to work through other people, I mean." you go it alone? If it's so much safer to work through other people, I mean."

"Habit, I guess. I left my House just a few years after I turned." And I wasn't sure why I was telling him all this, except that I so rarely had anyone to talk to, and once I got started talking I found it difficult to stop. Besides, I wasn't telling him anything important. All of this was ancient history as far as I was concerned. "I had a falling-out with the matriarch, a woman who thought I ought to wait on her hand and foot, and take the fall for her...indiscretions."

Talk about your euphemisms. She'd f.u.c.ked and killed her husband's favorite ghoul, and then she tried to pin it on me. I was new to the family, and no one was willing to take my word over hers-even though everyone knew she was lying. It was bulls.h.i.t politics, plain and simple. I never got over it. I never shook the idea that other vampires are exactly as horrible as regular people, except that they have a greater capacity to ruin lives and wreak havoc.

No thank you. Call me lone wolf and leave me the h.e.l.l alone. Besides, I've already mentioned my deep-seated mistrust of ghouls. Houses almost always come with ghouls, often a whole consortium of them. If I don't like and don't trust one one ghoul, you can imagine my comfort level with an entire slave cla.s.s of them. ghoul, you can imagine my comfort level with an entire slave cla.s.s of them.

I went on, "I may have built up more of a paper trail than I thought. And I don't have anyone out there watching my back. Most of the other vampires I know I don't like much. Except Ian.

He's okay."

"He's your client?"

"Yeah. He's the guy I'm working for." It could be argued that I never should've told him this, but he'd already overheard Ian's name and I decided it was all right...because I'd already come to a conclusion. "I think you're going to like him."

Adrian was taken aback. "Like him? When am I ever going to meet him?"

"Sooner rather than later. Bruner's office is in D.C., and I'm interested in paying the major a visit. A very quiet visit. The kind where I rifle through all his s.h.i.t and maybe do him a little bodily harm while I'm at it."

"How do you know where his office is?"

"Because he told me in an email." Something else occurred to me. "And I told him I was going to be in D.C. come the weekend. What's today, Tuesday?"

"Tuesday, going on Wednesday," he said, glancing at the clock as if it were a calendar.