Peace, Blood, and Understanding Page 20

  “Aw, that’s very sweet, but I don’t think that would help the situation between Dick and Weston,” I told her.

  “Just don’t declare that you’re going to ‘date yourself’ for a while, because that is always very, very sad,” Miranda told me.

  I nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Libby tilted her head and squeezed my hand. “You were already thinking that, weren’t you?”

  “No comment,” I said, pinching my lips.

  “You were!” Jane cackled.

  “No comment!”

  13

  There is no great technique to opening yourself to the truth of the universe. Honestly, you just have to sit down, stay still, and shut up.

  —Peace, Blood, and Understanding: A Living Guide for Vampires Embracing Pacifism

  I was right. It was a bad idea to date your neighbors—because it was just so very uncomfortable when things went south. You would have thought my generation’s years of watching Friends would have been sufficient warning, but no, I could feel the awkwardness seething at me through our shared wall.

  It took some doing, but we managed to largely avoid each other at the Council office. It was a question of leaving for work super early, as in immediately after the sun set. And then I had to jet as soon as my hours ended, which got me home before Weston left the office. At least I was able to relax on the nights I worked at the shop. Weston would never go there willingly.

  Fortunately I had plenty to distract me at home, sitting on the couch with a bottle of blood, going through the Martin documents—which I probably shouldn’t have removed from the office in the first place. I’d spent hours reading over what happened to be extremely meticulous notes of Jonas’s time in Martin, down to where he stayed, what types of blood he drank each night, and who he spoke to outside of work.

  It became clear that Jonas suspected someone with the Council office was using their position to skim cash off of expenditures, paying far too much for substandard office supplies from Dick—which, frankly, sounded like the tamer of Dick’s former business enterprises—and pocketing the difference. Weston had told me pretty much the same thing, so it was good to have it confirmed that Weston wasn’t completely exaggerating. But I still didn’t believe Dick would kill someone over illicit office supply profits. He was much more likely to try to make compensation to the Council with counterfeit eight-track tapes and irregular bell-bottoms.

  Jonas also noted that there seemed to be system-wide issues at the office involving purchasing, provisioning blood supplies for employees, and keeping door codes updated. In one report, he wrote that he thought that the handrails for the staircases had been cleaned with a very weak colloidal silver solution, as almost every vampire employee suffered minor burns to their hands on his second night at the office.

  Something about this sounded very familiar. While the thing with Dick’s office supplies was an issue, all of the Martin office’s problems were in the same vein as ours. Just like in Martin, all of our “incidents” that had occurred since Weston showed up—the e-mail virus, the ghoul, the poisoned coffee creamer—had to have been instigated by someone inside the building, someone who the other staff wouldn’t think twice about seeing around. Someone who had access to passwords for the anonymous usernames we used for new staff, someone who could mess with the magnetic lock systems on the secured floors, someone who had access to the kitchen where Sammy stored his supplies. Someone who was trusted with managing our facilities. I just wished I could get a copy of the Martin personnel lists from that year, so I could…

  Oh, great bouncing balls of catnip.

  I was an idiot.

  I stood up, ignoring the fact that I’d just spilled blood all over the floor, and ran for the door, snagging my purse along the way. I slipped into my flats and glanced over my shoulder to watch the dark stain spreading across my cheap IKEA rug.

  “I can get a new one!” I reminded myself, locking the door behind me. I slid down the banister, landing in a full run. All of my usual tricks for amusing myself, springing onto rooftops and sliding down light poles, were used to speed along to the office that much faster. I hit the doors and presented my ID badge, grateful that I didn’t need to breathe heavily after such a sprint, because otherwise, I don’t think Arjun and Nina would have let me in. They already seemed a little suspicious at my after-hours arrival.

  “Meadow? I thought you checked out for the night,” Arjun said, smiling at me.

  “Forgot my phone charger on my desk.” I sighed. “Stupid technology.”

  “That’s why I keep backups upon backups.” Nina chuckled. “Just get in and get out before someone tries to make you coffee.”

  I laughed like everything was totally normal, and walked in a suspiciously casual fashion to the elevator. Once I finally made it to the archive floor, I sprinted back to the dummy wall of filing cabinets meant to hide the red files. Staff directories. It was such a brilliantly innocuous thing to weigh down those dummy cabinets. Who would ever come looking for directories of employees of Council branches? Just someone who wanted to locate the employees of other branches in years past. It had been here the whole time, and I hadn’t thought to look.

  I yanked open the dummy drawer marked “Martin, Tennessee.” It contained directories starting in the 1930s, which was sort of terrifying. They were pretty well preserved, considering they were almost a hundred years old. Each directory listing contained the name of the employee, the position they held, and their phone number, along with a small black-and-white picture starting in 1946. That was the sort of thing people needed back before the Internet.

  I skipped through to 1978, when Jonas had been investigating the Martin office. The staff had expanded by then to more than a hundred people. There were no computers, after all, so they needed actual people to do data entry and answer phones and run the mail room. So it took me a while to sort through everybody. But finally, I got to the end of the alphabet, to the “housekeeping” department, which I imagined was the equivalent of facilities management. I scanned the names and stopped at Cloris Darley, which was sort of funny because it almost sounded like…

  I looked at the grainy color photo of a very familiar face with dark hair styled in Farrah Fawcett waves. And on her very broad lapel, she’d pinned a pretty pink star-shaped bloom.

  “Oh, no.” I sighed, dropping my head against the nearest drawer. “Shit, shit, shit. Brain, why can’t you process things faster?”

  And just then I smelled starflower, that strange cucumber-and-honey-sweet smell. The problem with my gift was that I couldn’t determine the distance from the source of the scent. She could be anywhere in the archive, standing right behind me or still lurking near the elevator. I closed the drawer with a quiet snick.

  I had two choices: run like hell and try to get to the elevator door without her catching me, or confront her head-on and risk having a giant stack of filing cabinets pushed over on me.

  Right.

  If I made it out of here, I owed Peter Crown a considerable apology.

  I would send him a note.

  “Chloe?” I called. “You might as well come out. I know it was you.”

  If I got out of this, I was going to have to have a talk with Jane about working in a space with only one entrance and exit.

  Chloe stepped out of the shadows, her icy, smug expression out of sync with her “I’d rather be knitting” cartoon panda T-shirt. She was holding a bottle of Faux Type O in one hand and a pointy wooden stake in the other.

  “You just couldn’t let it go, could you?” she asked as I edged toward the open aisle between stacks. The smell of starflower was nearly overwhelming now. Starflower and the sickly bilious stink of insane rage. How could someone look so cold yet have such anger boiling inside of her? “I knew the minute I saw you ‘casually’ rushing through security that you’d figured something out.”

  “Well, maybe if you didn’t rub yourself down with the stankiest perfume oil in the world, I wouldn’t have pick
ed up on the clues.”

  She lifted her eyebrow, sniffed her hand, and then grumbled. “That stupid hand lotion. You know, this is what I get for listening to my mother about a lady having a signature scent. But surely that wasn’t the only thing that gave me away.”

  She veered left, cutting me off from the elevator. It was like staring down a cobra, trying to guess which way you could move without getting bitten.

  “I’m not going to do the whole supervillain-unburdening thing with you,” I told her.

  I was totally doing the whole supervillain-unburdening thing with her. Because I wanted to stall for time and figure out how the hell to get out of this.

  “Oh, come on, Meadow, we’ve always been so close.” She sneered. “With your patronizing little compliments and fake friendship.”

  “I don’t fake friendship.”

  “Well, then I’m sad for you.” She sighed.

  “Why would you do all this? The computer virus, the ghoul, the creamer. Did you really want to embarrass Jane and Dick that badly? What did they ever do to you?” I asked, creeping toward another aisle, trying to make another dodge.

  “Oh, nothing, honestly. Jane and Dick are better than a lot of the representatives who have come through this office. But I need them out of the way. What better way to move up the ladder than to destroy the people above you? And Weston’s arrival was the perfect opportunity.”

  “You think you’re going to be hired as the next head representative? You’re the facilities manager,” I said, my arms dropping by my side. “You’re about one step ahead of the interns. I have a higher clearance than you do.”

  I probably shouldn’t have said that.

  Given the increasingly pissed-off expression on her face, I definitely shouldn’t have said that. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve been hearing it from college-girl snots like you for years,” she seethed. “ ‘Sorry about the mess, Cloris,’ and ‘You’re basically a maid, Cloris,’ and ‘Don’t you have something to clean, Cloris?’ You think I don’t know what you think of me?”

  “Actually, up until about three minutes ago, I thought you were a pretty likeable person,” I said, shrugging. “Of course, now I think you’re a raging sociopath who has no grasp of how unlikely she is to be promoted from janitor to head representative.”

  She smirked. “Well, I don’t think I’m going to be immediately promoted to head representative, but I’ll be here to help the new head representative adjust, and after a few months, I’ll start to subtly disrupt their tenure. And when they’re fired, I’ll do the same to their successor, and theirs, until in a few years, I’m the most senior person on staff by a few decades, and the Council has no choice but to appoint me to oversee this troubled office. I’m a remarkably patient woman, Meadow.”

  I scoffed. “Not really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You escalated so fast, even I recognized the pattern of sabotage. And it’s been pointed out to me that I’m one of the most trusting people ever. It doesn’t matter what you do to me; Jane’s going to pick up on it. She’s probably aware of it now, she’s just playing a long game, letting you have enough rope to hang yourself.”

  She smirked at me. “Unlikely. I saw her an hour ago, and she complimented this awful freaking T-shirt. And then she asked me about helping her with her Wi-Fi setup at home.”

  Dang it, Jane. We both needed to be less trusting.

  “So I’m assuming you’re the one who killed Jonas Hauer?” I said, giving up on sidling and leaning against a drawer. Super casual, super normal.

  Chloe grumbled. “He ruined all of my plans. I had to move to a different office and start over. I had to delay plans for years because I wanted to avoid suspicion.”

  “That must be very frustrating for you.”

  “Don’t you give me your fake sympathy,” she snapped. “I don’t need it. All I need from you is the final push for Weston to get rid of Jane and Dick for good. You’re going to drink this. There’s just enough colloidal silver in it to eat your insides like battery acid. It won’t be a quick death, but it will be painful and leave a very ugly corpse.”

  “And why would I drink that?” I scoffed, my muscles tensing.

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll stake you. So far, I have been too subtle, so I need to step up my efforts.”

  This time, the laughter was real. “Really? Releasing a ghoul into the building was subtle?”

  “Trust me, sweetie, the things that we’re storing here? It could have been much worse,” she said. “And now, having an employee die in the building, on Jane’s watch… That’s a stain she can’t remove.”

  “And I’m supposed to just stand here and let that happen?” I asked, shaking my head at her.

  “Oh, Meadow, everybody knows about you being a ‘pacifist.’ You’re just so afraid to be angry that you wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she cooed as she advanced on me. “You might put up a token effort, but you just don’t have that killer instinct—”

  It’s hard to finish a sentence with a faceful of filing drawer.

  She cried out, flailing backward.

  “I’m a pacifist, not a moron,” I retorted.

  The sad thing was that she really hadn’t expected me to do anything to defend myself, much less pull the drawer out, letting it smack her in the face. I moved lightning fast to kick the blood bottle out of her hand. She rolled to her feet before I could grab at the stake. So I ran for the elevator, making it as far as the hall of meeting notes before she tackled me from behind, wrapping her arms around my legs. We toppled to the floor, and she clutched either side of my head, bashing it into the stone floor.

  Stunned, I lay there, trying to make my head stop ringing. She knelt over me, raising the stake. I slithered out from under her, only to have her flop on top of my legs. I threw her off, bouncing her off of a section marked, “Purchase Orders—Blood.” I ran for my desk. I wasn’t really sure why, in the moment. It wasn’t like I had any self-defense gear inside. I managed to get a grip on my rarely used laptop, just as she took another flying leap at me, sending us both tumbling over my desk. I brought the closed laptop down on her head, over and over again, and since the casing was metal, that had to hurt. She clutched at her face, dropping the stake.

  Behind me, I vaguely registered the elevator doors opening and footsteps. Chloe was stumbling to her feet, wavering, and blinking at me through the blood from a smashed nose. The stake rolled to my feet, and I stooped to grab it before Chloe could get it back.

  “What happened to your peace-loving hippie bullshit?” she spat at my feet.

  “Namaste, bitch!” I cried, raising the stake over my head to plunge into her chest. I felt a hand close around my wrist and stop me midswing. My head whipped around to find Weston behind me, clutching my arm, a concerned expression on his face. Jane and Dick rushed forward, with Nina and Arjun at their heels.

  “Don’t,” he murmured. “Don’t do that to yourself. You wouldn’t be able to live with it.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jane tackle Chloe with what was probably more force than necessary. She pinned Chloe to the floor while Nina applied a pair of silver-lined handcuffs. I dropped the stake and let Weston wrap his arms around me. I didn’t care that we fought. I didn’t care that he insulted my town. He was right. While staking Chloe would have been self-defense, it would have set me back years in terms of my emotional health. I never would have forgiven myself if I’d killed her. He’d stopped me from that because he knew what it would cost me, and I would always appreciate that.

  “How did you know I was down here?” I whispered into his shirt.

  “We’ve been watching Chloe for a few days,” he said. “I came across a couple of discrepancies in her paperwork, ordering materials that she just shouldn’t have, like large stockpiles of colloidal silver, and two pounds of rushmallow, which she ordered months ago, by the way.”

  I gagged slightly.

  “When we saw that she hurried after you into the archive, w
e knew she had to be up to something,” he said.

  “Chloe Darley, you are being taken into Council custody on charges of murder, attempted murder, tampering with facilities, endangering the lives of undead citizens, poisoning undead citizens, and sadly—the most serious charge of all—misappropriation of funds,” Dick growled.

  “She killed Jonas,” I said.

  “I know, the security cameras recorded her whole insane rant,” Weston said. “Which should help simplify things.”

  “Oh, wait, that was the murder charge, wasn’t it?” I sighed. “I’m sorry, she hit me in the head a bunch of times. There wasn’t more than one murder, right?”

  “Not that we know of, but we’re going to have a lot of fun questioning her,” Jane said, grinning viciously. “I might even let Ophelia do it.”

  “So, Mr. Cheney, it appears I owe you an apology—” Weston started, only to have Dick shove him aside and throw his arms around me.

  “I would object to that, if I didn’t suspect that hug was familial,” Weston muttered.

  “Can it, Weston,” Dick said, squeezing me tight. “You OK, Meadow?”

  “I’m OK,” I promised. “I know that the beatdown was wrong, but I am still a work in progress.”

  “I don’t know, I kind of liked ‘Namaste, bitch,’ ” Dick said. “Any of the Real Housewives would be proud of it.”

  “Do you know what ‘namaste’ means?” Weston asked. “I’m afraid you think it means something else.”

  “I regret nothing,” I told him as Arjun hauled Chloe’s limp form to her feet and led her to the elevator. “Except for suspecting Luke, and maybe Sammy, because of the honey smell. Wait, Luke, is innocent, right?”

  Beside me, Weston sighed.

  “I’m only asking because I thought he could be the person ruining everything. I want to make sure I’m wrong,” I told him, sliding my arms around his waist. “You jealous goof.”

  “As far as we know, Chloe acted alone,” Jane said. “But we’ll be going over her records to make sure. Peter Crown isn’t entirely in the clear, but we think, at most, he’s guilty of being a smug asshole. He didn’t sabotage us, he just enjoyed it more than was decent.”