“Cryin’ shame. I been waitin’ for you all this time, an’ now you just walk on by.”
Brigit had proceeded a few more steps, but she stopped then, a tingle of awareness dancing up her spine. Turning to look at the old man, she saw that he had a very nice-looking satchel beside him. Brown, leather, with two buckles holding its flap top closed.
“You’ve been waiting for me, have you?” she asked.
“If you’re the one. You got a purpose, have ya? A calling?”
She rolled her eyes. “You must be talking about my brother,” she said, a hint of sarcasm welling up in her chest, though she knew the man was just talking nonsense.
“Nope, nope, nope, I think it’s you. Came for this, didn’t-cha?” He tapped the bag with a flat filthy palm.
She narrowed her eyes. “The one I came for is in the next alley.”
“Was. Till I brought it to this one.”
“Why did you do that?” She stepped a little closer, growing more and more curious about this blind man.
“It’s what I was told to do. Move the bag so those fancy suits snoopin’ around wouldn’t get their hands on it. Hold it here for you. I got the sight, ya see. Not the eyesight, mind’ja. But the sight.”
She frowned, and suddenly she didn’t doubt him for a second. Hell, she’d been raised by vampires. She wasn’t going to doubt a homeless, blind, self-pro-claimed psychic in an alley. Even a skeptical mortal would find this guy a lot easier to swallow than a blood-drinking, night-walking immortal. “You’re some kind of psychic, are you?”
“I see things,” he said. “Seen you. Pretty thing, you are. Hair like sunlight at high noon, real pale. Pale blue seawater eyes. Power, too. Power they wouldn’t even show me. Said I didn’t need to know, but that I’d do well not to piss you off. I ain’t, am I? Pissin’ you off?”
“Depends,” she said. “Are you going to give me the bag?”
“Soon as you tell me one thing. I’m s’posed to ask, you see. To make sure you’re the one. So here it is, little lady. Here’s the question. Makes no sense to me. But here it is, all the same. How were you born?”
“I was born dead,” she replied, quickly and without even thinking about her answer.
He pressed his lips tight, shook his head in apparent wonder. “Damned if that ain’t what they told me you’d say. Alrighty, then, here it is.” He held up the bag.
She took it, surprised by its weight, eager to dig through it to see just what the good professor wanted so badly. But first, she thought she ought to give the old guy something for his trouble. She dug in her pockets, finding a handful of crumpled bills she’d forgotten were there, and, leaning forward, she pressed them into his hand. “Take this for your trouble,” she said.
“No need.”
“Take it,” she said. And then she smiled a little. “Or you’ll piss me off.”
“Well, now, I guess I don’t wanna do that. I thank you, little lady. An’ I’ll tell you one last thing before you go—which you’d best do soon, since those suits are headin’ this way as we speak.”
She looked up and down the alley, but saw and sensed no one.
“You do have a callin’, a purpose,” the old man told her. “You do. An’ it’s a big one.”
Brigit’s throat went tight and her eyes burned, even as her mind muttered bullshit.
“Go on now. Git.”
“I’m already gone,” she told him, and then she was. But as she headed back along the sidewalk toward her car, she spotted the suits hurrying down the side walk, intent on the old man’s alley. And she had no doubt they had counterparts on the other end. The old fuck had been dead-on balls accurate about those suits heading their way.
Damn. How, then, could he have been so wrong about her?
She hefted the bag’s strap up onto her shoulder and picked up the pace.
James followed Rhiannon back through the false wall and into the main part of the dilapidated mansion. Through the bedroom into the second story corridor, and then down the curving staircase into the foyer that had once been fit for royalty.
She led him down another hallway, where the plaster was disintegrating. His steps crushed fallen chunks of it into fine white powder that stuck to his shoes, and the bare lath showed through the walls like the skeleton beneath a corpse’s skin.