throw out that fucking pager and leave here in the middle of the night and you'll be lucky if you ever see me again.” Val wondered if maybe she was laying it on a bit thick, but he was so infuriating!
Jack invaded her space again, voice lethally quiet. “First of all, you would never escape me. I would hunt you down, wherever you go. And secondly, you will do what I tell you when it comes to her. She is mine!”
Val nodded. He was at a breaking point and this was getting ridiculous. If Lucas hadn't forced this information upon her, she wouldn't have gone digging for information on Marion. She had a damn good reason to leave Marion alone: if Jack found out where she was, he'd try to kill her. And there was a big chance he'd wind up dead.
“You're right. Anything I find goes to you first. I won't do anything to get noticed. But I've made a decision that I can't keep sitting by and waiting for a phone call to hear that you are dead. I'm going to help. Wasn't that one of the problems, Jack? That I turned my back on my family and wouldn't help? Well, here I am. This is what you wanted, so don't try to shut me out.” Val sighed, looking out the window at the lightening sky, “Let's face it, any vampire who wanted me could have killed me a long time ago. I just wasn't worth the time and attention.”
Until now.
“Jack, I'm good at this. Did you know that Lucas is almost 1600 years old? Well, give or take a few centuries, the math is a bit fuzzy. I even know what he looks like.”
He looked at her like she was a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model. Lucas was elusive. Vampires had been tortured and talked of him but neither Jack nor her father had ever seen him.
“And as for Marion, I've found out more about her in my limited time of searching then you have in ten years. You're more likely to get her with my help. That's what you want, right?”
Jack paced away from her. “I don't know. I'm exhausted. I've been up for 36 hours, then I come here and your room is empty, yet you have pictures of Marion everywhere and now....”
Yeah, he'd just seen her come in from shagging her boyfriend and was turning his life upside down. Great night.
So, Lucas was giving them Marion. Guess she should have read the file sooner. He walked over to her desk and started writing. “Whatever you get, you can reach me here.”
He put down the pen, and walked away from her desk towards the door. “Good night.” He opened her door and stood in the doorway, not looking at her. He seemed momentarily frozen, then he rolled his shoulders a little and exhaled. “Val, it’s really nice to see you. I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick.” Then he closed the door and left.
His comment made her smile in a wobbly sort of way. Maybe that was the only conversation they would have about her dating other people. Maybe now they would move on and there wouldn’t be this weirdness between them. She thought about how she might act if she saw Jack the morning after being with someone. Sad. Even after all this time a part of her would think that it should have been her.
Would she always feel that way? That if things had been a little bit different, Jack a little less haunted, that they would have made it work? He was her childhood love. Even though she was grown up, he was still around and in her life. He’d show up, be all alpha male, say something about how important she was to him and she just…couldn’t quite get over him.
He was the fantasy. And a small part of her still hoped that if he killed Marion he’d be free. She could then convince him to give this all up and settle down with her.
She went to the piece of paper and looked at his tightly scrawled writing. The cell phone she had, mailbox she didn't. A secondary email address she'd never seen and a fax number were also listed. All with a strange country code. 420. What was 420? She turned on her computer and looked it up. The Czech Republic. Why was Jack based in the Czech Republic?
She put the papers and Jack's information back into the file and wondered