Peace, Blood, and Understanding Read online

  But the busywork could only distract me for so long. The next night, I woke up still tumbling the problem of that red file around in my head. I was bound for the shop that night, which was good because it would keep me from asking Jane inappropriate questions about the red files. And it would keep me from snatching them back from Jane’s desk and running off with them to sift through Luke’s file.

  So I opened Everlasting Health as scheduled. I handled all of the shop’s daily chores, including sweeping, restocking, and dusting the shelves. When I looked up at the clock, I realized a whopping hour and forty-five minutes had passed. I slumped against the counter next to my computer. “Damn you, laws of time and relativity.”

  And of course, thanks to all that time, my brain had bounced back from its pudding state and started causing problems. Why would Jane suspect Luke of sabotaging her? What had she seen in Luke that I hadn’t? I liked to pride myself on my ability to judge character. But… I’d been fooled before.

  And even worse, what if Luke had caused trouble in the office? Had I somehow brought Luke into Jane’s orbit, allowing him the access he needed to hurt Jane? What if this was my fault?

  Hands shaking, I opened my rarely used laptop. After updating the software on my badly outdated browser, I searched the first name I could remember from the list that wasn’t Luke. Margaret Coggins, who had served as Ophelia’s assistant, was known around the break room for having been so loyal to Ophelia that she had sabotaged Jane’s schedule and left sexually explicit misspellings in Jane’s correspondence. (The way she misspelled “county” was considered particularly offensive.) And she’d funneled a lot of slush funds to cat charities when she thought she was about to be fired. That was something the Council took very seriously—do not mess with the Council’s money. But according to several search engines, she was an otherwise unremarkable citizen. Considering the free access Margaret had enjoyed around the office, and how well she knew the systems there, it seemed sensible to suspect her.

  According to the local paper’s online archives, Harvey Mulgrove, the second name on the list, had threatened to blow up the Council office with homemade C-4 after he was denied a promotion to head of the research department. That definitely merited inclusion in the scary red file pile.

  Another entry, Charlie Zbornak, was fired from the Council after he’d been caught catfishing human senior ladies out of their retirement funds, which in itself wasn’t a problem for the Council, but he’d used his office hours and Council computer to lure his elderly paramours, and the Council bean counters would not abide that. Made sense, considering these were the same people who were perfectly fine with Ophelia attempting to contract Gigi’s death as long as she filed the proper paperwork and didn’t misspend Council funds.

  The Council had to file a restraining order against Essie Allen after she was refused a position with the Council’s administrative staff and was found in the office parking lot bashing in windshields with a crowbar. Mentally, I filed Essie’s name with the people it seemed reasonable to suspect.

  I could understand why any one of these people would be considered a danger to the Council infrastructure, but Luke… I searched multiple databases for Luke’s full name and the name of his company. I found nothing beyond his business website, which sort of eased my anxiety. At the same time, why was he on the list if he had no history with the Council?

  What the hell was in Luke’s file?

  I groaned. This was silly. Luke wouldn’t respond to losing out on a job by swearing interoffice revenge. Though compared to C-4 and broken windshields, a no-harm-done computer virus didn’t seem that bad.

  But how was Luke going to convince Jane of that? And how was I supposed to talk to him after this? How was I supposed to look him in the eye and not let my face betray every thought I was having? Especially when most of those thoughts were along the lines of What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?

  Not that this was all about me and my feelings.

  The bell over my front door jangled, and Chloe Darley walked in, wearing a spectacularly cute T-shirt featuring rainbow kittencorns.

  “Hey, Meadow, how’s it going?” she asked, grinning at me.

  Instantly, I felt guilty for looking up what amounted to Council matters outside of my scope as an archivist. I shut my laptop and promised to make up the karmic workplace imbalance by giving Chloe some sort of crazy discount. I put on my best shopkeeper’s smile.

  “Hi, Chloe. It’s good to see you. I don’t think you’ve ever been down to the shop before.”

  “I should have come by a long time ago. This is gorgeous! I love what you did with the space! Lots of color and light and… yeah, that’s a lot of smells. But it’s not a bad combination, just a lot of layers. What kind of HVAC system are you using? Are you using HEPA filters? Because that would probably reduce the amount of dusting you have to do. I mean, it’s spotless in here, but with all of these jars, keeping up with it can’t be easy. I could send you some links for what we use at the office.”

  I grinned. Chloe was always coming up with ways to run the Council building more effectively. She was the one who’d switched the office over to motion-activated lighting for areas of the building that were not frequently used. She’d gotten a local distributor to provide those fancy “mix it your way” soda fountains in the break rooms for the human employees, to reduce the use of plastic bottles and the theft of coworkers’ sodas from the office fridge. (It also made more room in the fridge for the vampires’ bottled blood.) She had a way of giving people what was good for them, while making it sound like they were getting away with something, too—which was salesmanship I really needed to pick up.

  “That would be great, thanks, Chloe. What brings you in, besides my substandard ventilation?” I asked.

  “I’ve been craving that Soul Center tea you made for the office a few weeks ago, and I wanted to pick some up.”

  “That’s great!” I exclaimed, grabbing an enormous glass jar of blended tea from the shelf behind me and scooping some into one of the shop’s sealable take-home packets. “Sammy always says you’re one of his most dependable customers, so I appreciate you giving me a chance.”

  “Just between you and me, I can’t stand the taste of coffee, even when it’s mixed with blood. It’s one of those weird things I carried over from being human. But I like Sammy a lot, and I think the coffee stand is important to employee morale, so I order a bloodychino every night and give it to one of the janitorial staff.”

  “Well, that’s very sweet of you, and I won’t tell a soul,” I told her, sealing up her packet. “Do you want me to make you a to-go cup? On the house?”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging and settling onto one of three leather stools near my counter. “So the new guy at the office seems to be paying you a lot of attention.”

  “New guy—you mean Weston? He’s not really a new guy, he’s just sort of a temporary… annoyance.”

  “Still, he’s pretty cute. And his eyes are always on you,” she said as I blended the blood and hot water over the tea ball.

  “Eh, he’s probably trying to figure out how to get me fired as some sort of unrepentant time thief,” I said. “Which I didn’t even know was a thing, by the way. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but there are people who ‘steal time’ by goofing off when they’re supposed to be working and their employers hate them.”

  She burst out laughing. “Sweetie, I’ve been at this office for a long time, way before Jane took over, working behind the scenes,” she said. “I’ve seen people stare at Pop-Tarts with less intensity than that guy looks at you.”

  “Again, I put forward my ‘time thief’ theory.”

  “Well, if you want to know where you can sneak away for an interoffice quickie, I have a list of locations organized by floor,” she said, smirking at me.

  I cackled as I slid her cup across the counter. “That is not responsible Council-related behavior, and you are a very poor influence.” />
  Chloe made a flourish with her hands, like a flamenco dancer who had just completed her best move. “I regret nothing.”

  My laugh was interrupted by the jangling of my doorbell. Stanley Bollinger, just as rumpled and breakfast-scented as he had been the night he showed up at my apartment. I tried not to let my annoyance show on my face, so as not to disturb Chloe, but come on. It was one thing to show up at my apartment, but at my place of business? What was next? Showing up in the middle of my pedicure at the Half-Moon Hollow Spa and TV Repair?

  “I’ll be with you in just a moment, sir,” I said through an absolutely false smile. “Thanks for coming by, Chloe. I’ll see you at work.”

  Given the way her eyes darted between Mr. Bollinger and me, Chloe seemed to pick up on my discomfort. “Sure, hon. I’ll e-mail you that information on the air filters. As long as you’re OK…”

  I patted her hand, giving her a more genuine smile. “I’m fine, thanks for asking. See you soon.”

  Chloe nodded, giving Bollinger a hard look as she passed him—which came across as only mildly scathing, given her T-shirt. As soon as she left the shop, Bollinger approached the counter and climbed onto one of my stools.

  “Mr. Bollinger. I believe we’ve discussed the fact that I am not, in fact, Elizabeth Somerfield.”

  “Yeah, but you are,” he said, sliding across a picture of me at a fraternity sweetheart dance about six months before I was turned. My hair was much lighter then, thanks to the regular attentions of my mother’s stylist, not to mention much fluffier and sporting regrettable bangs that we thought were far superior to the gravity-defying bangs of the ‘80s. (We were wrong.) And I was wearing what was considered a daring (in the 1990s) ice-blue formal gown with spaghetti straps and a knee-length skirt overlaid by transparent layers of ankle-length tulle. Oh, poor vintage me. There were so many things she needed to learn about what it was that made her guileless-yet-self-satisfied smile possible.

  “I was willing to play along in front of your boyfriend and pretend that I’d made a mistake.” He smirked. “That’s the kind of discretion you develop when you’ve been working in the business as long as I have. But now it’s just you and me, and you need to drop the act. You’re Elizabeth Somerfield, and I’ve been hired by your parents to find you and get you back into contact with them.”

  He slid a very thick envelope from my parents’ law firm across the counter.

  I slid the envelope back across the counter. “No, thank you.”

  His jaw dropped and he pushed the envelope back. “Do you have any idea what your parents are trying to give you?”

  “They’re not my parents. Elizabeth Somerfield died in 1998. There was a funeral and everything.”

  A funeral with an empty casket topped by an oversized spray of white lilies, next to a poster-sized, carefully posed picture of me. My foster sire had shown me a photo taken at the funeral, in a gesture meant to comfort me, to show me that my parents did care about me. But all it showed me was that a fake funeral and fake tears were more acceptable to my parents than having their fake friends know I was a vampire. I could only imagine the lengths they would go to to prevent those friends from finding out that my getting turned was their fault.

  He set his jowly face into what I’m sure was a very intimidating expression… to someone who didn’t have superstrength and superhuman agility. “I’m not interested in playing word games, Ms. Somerfield.”

  “My name is Meadow Schwartz. My mother’s name was Leona Schwartz. I have no business with anyone named Somerfield. The best thing for you to do would be to go back to your bosses and tell them you couldn’t find her.”

  I slid the letter back to him, and his confusion only increased. “Don’t you think you should at least open it? They’re your parents, honey, and they’re getting older and they want to make peace with you. Don’t you think you at least owe it to them to read a measly letter from them?”

  My eyes narrowed at him as he pushed the envelope back at me. He did not just “honey” me. That was one of the most frustrating things about being a forever-young woman in the South. I would be getting that tone for the rest of eternity.

  Also, whatever was in this envelope did not look like some “measly letter.” It looked like a thick legal document. It wasn’t going to be a matter of reading it and sighing—Oh, those parents of mine—and then never thinking of it again. Whatever they had to say was going to stay with me forever, and I wouldn’t subject myself to that—but I wouldn’t subject myself to Mr. Bollinger’s showing up at my shop to bother me anymore, either.

  So I took one of the empty apothecary jars from under the counter—allowing myself to feel a small thrill that I’d sold so much tea that a jar was empty—and put one of my lit tea lights at the bottom. Mr. Bollinger frowned, confused as to what I could be doing, until I dropped the letter inside and the linen paper flashed into a full flame. Maybe expensive paper burned faster than cheap?

  “I guess not,” I told him. “I hope this ends the measly letter argument, Mr. Bollinger. Good night.”

  “But you have no idea what it took me just to find that you might be in Half-Moon Hollow,” he whined, all attempts to be the stern patriarchal figure gone. “Your parents didn’t think you’d still be in the state. I had to show that picture around to damn near everybody in town before anybody would tell me you were ‘that sweet girl Meadow, who runs that weird hippie shop on Paxton.’ ”

  I dropped my head, conflicted between happiness that my neighbors called me “that sweet girl” and disappointment that that was how people described my business.

  “My firm has been working this case for almost two years,” he said. “And I get paid on commission. I need to show results.”

  “You’ll find I don’t care,” I told him. “The fact that the Somerfields suddenly want to be in contact with their daughter after all these years? I could not possibly care less. It doesn’t affect me at all. Now, I’ve told you ‘no’ politely, twice now, and you’ve refused to listen. So I’m going to be less polite. You have about ninety seconds to get out of here before I call the vampire cops and tell them that I consider your behavior to be harassment. And if the Council in Half-Moon Hollow thinks you’re threatening one of theirs, they won’t give a damn who sent you.”

  “You realize I’m going to tell your parents how to find you anyway, right? So you might as well just talk to them.”

  “Seventy-four seconds,” I said, pointing at the door.

  “This isn’t over!” he said, stomping toward the exit.

  I sped over to the shop door and locked it behind him, then took the still-flaming apothecary jar into the stockroom, where I could douse it in the sink. I would not cry. I would not panic. Clearly, this was just the universe trying to show me how dangerous and chaos-inducing it was to dig around in people’s personal information without their knowledge. And my punishment, in addition to this current emotional turmoil, was that my shop was going to smell like burned paper and sickly sweet breakfast sweats, which would torture my super-sensitive nose for days.

  I closed the shop early and walked home, careful to avoid a path that would take me past Specialty Books. I was also careful to keep a watch over my shoulder to make sure Bollinger wasn’t following me. The last thing I needed to top off my night was to be thrown into a PI’s stinky car trunk and driven back to my “loving parents.”

  About a block from my apartment, I realized I could still smell that oversweet scent. I raised my hands to my face and found that somehow, Bollinger’s maple sweat had made it onto my fingers, probably from pushing the envelope back and forth over the counter. I gagged slightly and wiped my hands on my jeans, vowing to wash my hands as soon as I got home.

  * * *

  I came home to find a lovely vampire heating my favorite blood for dinner. But it was not the fantasy I’d come to expect. Luke was standing at my counter again, just as comfortable as he had been every other time he’d visited, and yet I felt so awkward, I coul
d barely look at him. Between guilt over my secret Googling and feeling off balance because of Bollinger’s intrusions, I was stretched paper-thin emotionally. And he smelled… off. The bright, spicy apple scent was gone and replaced with the stringent odor of oakmoss. He was hiding something from me, which didn’t exactly help my suspicions with the whole “red file” situation.

  I couldn’t look him in the eye as I crossed into my kitchen and washed my hands with the ultra-powerful dish soap required to get bloodstains out of porcelain. I looked at every surface in my apartment but not his face. And the only thought bouncing around in my head was What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?

  “Hi.” Luke’s dark head tilted as he watched me sort of stumble around my apartment to put down my purse and keys.

  “Hi, I didn’t know you were coming over,” I said.

  “Well, I haven’t heard from you in a while, and I thought I would come over and…” He wiggled his eyebrows as he finished, “Visit.”

  Because “visit” was our code word for getting all naked and sweaty. It wasn’t particularly creative, but it was so commonly used that we could say it in open conversation and no one else knew what we were talking about—unless, of course, Luke was using his sexy voice.

  “I’ve just been busy with work and the shop and everything,” I said, still not making eye contact with him.

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, my tone still incredibly distant. “But I don’t think I’m in the mood for ‘visiting’ tonight.”

  “Oh, well, that’s OK,” he said, shrugging. “We can just have dinner and talk, if you want.”

  Dinner… and talking… when I could barely look at his handsome face. What in the hell would I find to talk about with Luke that wouldn’t involve Jane’s list or the red files or me blurting out, Hey, you’re not a former cult leader or something, right?