was tenuous, but it felt right, the way a puzzle piece feels when you slide it into a hole shaped just for it. "If someone wanted to infect a vamp, giving him a disease through sex and dinner would be a good way, but I don't see how a company that makes cancer drugs would also develop a disease." I thought about that for a moment, seeing if the puzzle piece still felt right, and oddly it did.
"There are Blood-Call businesses in Seattle and Sedona and Boston," I guessed.
"Yes, ma'am, there are. Of course there are Blood-Calls in lots of cities in the U.S., and there haven't been takeovers in them. Yet. So I haven't proved a tie-in."
"Huh. I don't know how or if it ties in either, but as a pal of mine says, I stopped believing in coincidences when I stopped believing in Santa. Not bad work, kid. Not bad at all," I said.
I went to my room, picking up the pages as I went. Business partners? Not gonna happen. But temporary contract employees this good, I could live with.
I stepped into my room and stopped. Someone had been in here. I smelled a male and a female, raw fish, tea, powdered sugar, and perfume, something expensive and light. I sniffed, parsing the scent-signatures. Deon, Katie's three-star chef, a friend of sorts, and gayer than an entire line of chorus dancers, had been in my bedroom? Yeah, he had. With him was Christie, one of the girls who worked at Katie's Ladies. I did not want Christie, with her piercings and chains and tats and general air of disdain, in my room. But -
The place had been dusted. The bed was made up. The cobwebs hanging from the ceiling were gone. I walked in and lifted the coverlet. Clean sheets. I bent and sniffed. The corners smelled of Deon and Christie - only the corners, which was a happy discovery. It meant they had handled my sheets, not rolled around on them, which was a mental image I really didn't want to intrude in my psychological space. But there was a major problem. My weapons were gone.
A slow boil started somewhere in my gut, and I dropped the collated pages on the bed, walked out of bedroom, across the foyer, and into the living room. Before I could open my mouth, the Kid said, "In the ordnance room," and pointed at the hole in the wall. I narrowed my eyes and ducked into the hollow space under the stairs. My weapons and Eli's were laid out on the striped mattress, hung on spikes in the mortar of the rock walls, stretched out on trays on a battered bookshelf and on another table, both from upstairs. There wasn't much room to walk, but it was . . . organized. My blades were on the new table in sheaths or laid out by blade length. The stakes were on one end, the silver-tipped ones, then the ones made of ash wood. The vial of holy water was hanging above the table surface. My guns were on the bed by size, from the M4 shotgun to the tiny derringer. Eli's weapons and ordnance, including flashbangs and what looked suspiciously like C4 explosives, were on the other side of the bed and on the bookcase. And there was a lot of it. My hands itched to try out a garrote made to look like a bracelet. Niiice.
I went back into the living room, leaving Eli inspecting his own weapons, his face like a thunderhead. Once the swinging shelving in the main room was in place, the weapons would be better hidden than when they had been kept in the small locked gun safe in my closet. Here, they were safe from children, not that any lived with me any longer. And that was a pain I had no intention of dealing with just now.
Saying nothing, but smelling Eli's irritation, I went back to my room, let my hair down, and showered off before plopping down on the corner chair to read. It was boring stuff, the financial pages of a publicly held company. I was much more interested in the drugs Greyson Labs made, but I couldn't make heads or tales of that part either. Having taken an emergency medical technician course after high school didn't prepare me to understand the making of drugs I couldn't even pronounce. To stay awake, I got out my gun cleaning supplies and started to clean