Bloodshot (35 page)

“Hey there!” said someone less authoritative and decidedly younger than the original speaker. The kid was a teenager, maybe a couple of years older than Domino. In the back of my head I had an idea that this was an activity for the eighteen-and-older crowd, but I wasn’t about to start quoting chapter and verse from fictional guide manuals within five seconds of entering the room.

So instead I just said “Hey there” back.

The room had quieted considerably, merely by virtue of—I realized almost immediately—the presence of a woman. I was the center of attention, and conspicuous without even trying any fangy little tricks. Almost parroting Cal, I said, “This where the parkour people meet up?”

A large grunt of a man stood arms folded, dressed and posed like a GI Joe action figure. He said, “This is it.”

He was maybe in his early thirties. Hard to say. Narrow face with few lines, but deep ones. Crew cut that had his sandy brown hair as tidy as a low-shag velour. He looked to be in charge and I assumed he was the lieutenant, but I didn’t accuse him of it.

I let myself shrink, doing that shy thing where you make yourself look smaller and talk somewhat softer, as if gosh darn it, you’re only a girl, and lookit all these big strong men. Because I have no shame, that’s why.

“Wow, okay. Cool,” I said, hoping I was approximating the speech of kids these days, in case I might pass for a teenager myself. I probably didn’t, but I knew I looked young and I made myself sound young. “I’m here to learn about it. Is that what this is for?”

“That’s what this is for,” he said. “Come on in, find yourself a seat. We’re just getting started.”

“Great,” I said, picking a spot toward the back and on the end. There were only four rows of metal folding chairs, each row about six chairs long. Most of the chairs were empty, but half a dozen were occupied—and three or four other guys, the veterans of the group, I guessed, were lurking in the background. They sat up against a folding table like the kind you see at church potlucks, and they fiddled with a coffeemaker or with cigarettes they weren’t supposed to be smoking indoors.

Or were they?

In Seattle, there are all these laws about where you can and can’t smoke, and mostly the laws amount to “you can’t smoke anywhere indoors, and only a few places outdoors.” So I might’ve only been surprised to see it because I’d been in the Northwest so long. Or there was always the chance that D.C. was every bit as strict, and the young bucks over there were demonstrating their powers of rebellion.

I settled into the chair, which creaked under my weight and stank faintly of rust, and I checked out my surroundings in the usual way—scanning for exits (two: the way I’d come in, and a second door on the far side of the room), counting my fellow occupants (ten, including GI Bolton up there), and calculating whether or not I could fight my way out if push came to shove (totally).

No one was sitting on either side of me; my nearest seatmate was three chairs down. He too looked young, and he was looking at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. Apparently a girl in the midst is a real treat at a sausage-fest like this.

Even if I hadn’t appeared supernaturally young, and if I’d only been the early-twenty-something I’d been at death—I still would’ve been the oldest person present except for Cal and the cross-armed boy-doll up front.

He glanced at his watch, decided that we were it for the night, and started talking.

“All right, guys … and, uh, lady. Welcome to the District’s first and premiere parkour field group and urban exploration society. I’m Tyler Bolton and this is my clubhouse, and you can take it or leave it if you like—but I’m here to make sure that everyone knows the rules, knows what to expect, and stays out of trouble. So if you don’t want to listen to me, then fuck off and get yourself arrested on somebody else’s time.”

Nods of agreement went bobbing around the largely unfinished space, echoing off the drywall, the ceiling timbers, and the incongruously shiny wood floors.

I did not nod. I did not move.

Like any other vampire, I can do the spooky no-motion thing, the one Adrian had already called me out over. If I’m paying attention, I can hide it fairly well, though not perfectly. If I’m
not
paying attention, or if I’m perfectly happy to have it noticed, I stick out like a dead squirrel in a pile of puppies.

So I did my best to stick out. And although I got the intermittent side-eye glance or outright leer, at no point did I feel that I was making anyone nervous, or interested in any fashion beyond the prurient.

GI Bolton continued. “After this general introduction, we’ll be adjourning to Rock Creek Park for some low-level introductory parkour—by which I mean, the kind that isn’t likely to get you killed, but ought to be fun.”

More nods. More murmurs. Not from me.

But I caught the lieutenant’s eye. Or he caught mine, as the case may be. Regardless, I saw him looking just a smidge too long, and something about the gaze felt intensely curious beyond the expected. I wanted to close my eyes—they were getting dry, pried open corpse-like as I sat there—but I didn’t. I held my unblinking ground and tried to use my psychic feelers, even though they were kind of shit in this sort of situation.

Too many people. Hard to single out just one. Too many shit-head boys thinking inappropriate (yet immensely flattering) thoughts about me.

Mostly I made them uncertain, it seemed. They didn’t know girls were invited into this clubhouse, and at least one asshole in the front row was hoping that I wasn’t any good at this parkour thing. I swear, some men just can’t stand the thought of being beaten by a woman. At anything. Funny. In my experience, and as a matter of irony, they’re the men who most desperately need a good ass-kicking.

I was aware of Cal’s … well, not his
thoughts
exactly. More like the presence of thoughts, or the presence of
him
—sitting ramrod-straight in his chair, displaying better posture than I’d seen him use yet. He was antsy, and fighting the impulse to look over his shoulder at me. For reassurance? For confirmation that I was present? I couldn’t tell. His motives were too tangled for me to do more than scan him. I wished for a second that I had Ian’s link with him, and I could pass along a tiny nudge of encouragement. But I didn’t have that link, so when I concentrated hard and thought, right at the back of his head,
You’re doing a good job. Keep your eyes on the beefy grunt up front
. I had no way of knowing whether or not he’d heard me.

“We have a van outside to take us to the park,” the grunt up front announced, and I realized I’d probably missed a few key phrases while I was doing my amateur-hour psychic spelunking. “Though the park is open to the public, we have special permission from the park service to cordon off one acre for use with our activities. Some of you guys who’ve been doing this longer can go ahead and get your pissing and moaning out of the way now, but the newbies have to start somewhere, and this is a safe place to test your physical capacity and your commitment to the sport. Any questions?”

I raised my hand so swiftly that it would’ve shocked anyone who’d watched me do it. But no one was watching, much to my
chagrin. The hand successfully drew Bolton’s attention, though, and he pointed at me. The finger-point was accompanied by that gaze, the same one that I’d felt earlier. It was not exactly a knowing gaze, but a suspicious one.

I had the floor, so I asked, “I know what parkour is and I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine, but I want to know what that other thing is.”

“What other thing?”

“The other thing you said, at the beginning. Urban exploring. What’s that?” As if I didn’t know. I thought of my storehouse, and of Domino and Pepper, and it was all I could do to keep from seething.

I felt it more intensely, when he looked at me now. His interest was less a vague fog in a room full of mist, and more like a flashlight beam. “We’ll get to that later.”

“Well, before we get to it, I want to know what it is.” Really, I wanted to get his attention and get him talking. I wanted him to look at me and know that something was wrong.

I lucked out and a couple of the other guys in front of me were ignorant on the matter, and they mumbled that they, too, would like some information. I was half afraid Cal would chime in, but he didn’t.

Good ghoul, Cal. Don’t agree with me too much. Don’t even notice me. Don’t forget, you’re mostly here in case something goes horribly, horribly wrong
.

“All right,” Bolton relented. The irritated twitch to one eyebrow told me that this was considered jumping some gun, somewhere, and that I’d derailed his evening’s lesson plans. But he was game, and so he said, “Urban exploration is, at its core, a propensity toward trespassing in abandoned buildings. It doesn’t always go hand in hand with parkour, but you could … I don’t know. You could think of it as a master’s class in parkour, if you wanted to.”

“A master’s class with night-vision goggles and burglary gear?”
I followed up, knowing I was pushing my luck and wondering if it wasn’t too much—if he didn’t have some secret panic button hidden in his uniform, or a lackey at the table behind me. Any moment, the doors could burst in and armed maniacs from Project Bloodshot (or whatever it’d morphed into) would take me away and drop me in a basement on an island, never to be seen again.

Or I could needle the fucker a little more and trust my powers of bullshit and escape to see me through. I squeezed the handles of my go-bag and it gave me confidence. Maybe undue confidence. It didn’t matter.

“No,” he barked. “We don’t do that kind of thing.”

Everybody in the room instantly thought he was lying.

He stuck to his guns anyway. “It’s not a master’s class because anybody’s burglarizing anything. It’s a master’s class because there’s a lot of legal legwork to untangle, making sure that the abandoned buildings are actually abandoned, and that they don’t belong to anybody who’ll prosecute if you get caught. Working your way up to urban exploration also means you go out there with a good working knowledge of the distinctions between breaking-and-entering and merely trespassing, and the legal hairsplitting that can mean the difference between jail time and a slap on the wrist. But since that’s the master’s class and this is the bunny slope, we’re going to save that for later, Miss …”

He was clearly cueing me to give him a name, so I said, “Raylene. Raylene Spade.”

“Spade, very nice,” he said, and I felt a stab of condescension that said he knew for a fact that I was lying. I didn’t like the condescension because it had come radiating off him, flaring through my psychic radar like a laser beam, not a flashlight. Oh yes. He knew something now, or he suspected it so positively that the semantics wouldn’t mean the difference between saving my ass and becoming a pain in his.

“Something funny about that?” I played it cool.

“Not at all, Miss Spade. But we’ll save the UE talk for later and for now, if you don’t mind, we’ll talk brass tacks instead.”

What a stupid expression. There were no tacks involved, and not much that any idiot who’d ever seen a cop show on television couldn’t have sussed out. That which followed was a miniature thesis on how to fall without breaking an ankle, how to roll without bashing your head in, and how to climb without tearing all the skin off your knees. It was basically a twenty-minute starter class on stunt falls, and I could see how it might be useful to some of the pasty-faced high-schoolers present, but I had to pretend to give it my rapt attention while my real attention wandered elsewhere.

Near as I could gather—a qualifier that was in no way authoritative—Bolton seemed to be alone, insomuch as he seemed to be the only military representative present. If anyone else was there on Uncle Sam’s dime, he was out of uniform and keeping his allegiances to himself. But as I’d previously speculated, that didn’t mean Bolton didn’t have an easy means of summoning more of his camo-uniformed buddies at a moment’s notice.

I didn’t really know anything. I had nothing but suspicion and a crappy psychic sense urging me to play my cards carefully. I kept an eagle eye on Bolton as he pranced back and forth up front, lacking only a long wooden pointer and a blackboard to be a junior caricature of Patton himself. Wait. Did Patton have either of those things? Or just a big American flag behind him? Maybe I’m confusing him with John Madden.

Things eventually wound down and Bolton quit pacing up front, announcing that this was the time for people to finish up coffee and use the restroom before getting into the van and heading out to the park. And just this once, the line for the men’s room was the slow-moving one.

Actually, I think there was only one bathroom, one small
single-seater with a naked yellow bulb and a box of matches for air freshener. Thank Christ I didn’t need to go. No woman anywhere wants to follow that filthy man-funk parade to a potty. I may have been functionally dead for a few decades, but some things never change. And trust me, that’s one of ’em.

While the boys lined up to do their duty, at least the ones who had to go, I considered sidling up to the lieutenant but he sidled up to me first, giving me quite a start. “Why hello there,” I said, shooting for
casual but idly interested, and ooh, aren’t you kind of cute?
This was a stretch, since his sudden appearance had in no way charmed me and frankly made me a little worried, but this had been the plan, hadn’t it? Figure out if he—or anyone else affiliated with the club—knew about my kind.

I hadn’t thought past the point where he might. If he were utterly clueless, that’d be one thing. I’d write it off and continue exploring the exciting and aerobic world of parkour for fun and fitness (as the awkward marketing text suggested). But if he knew? About me? I hadn’t considered that far in advance. Because it’s always the one thing I don’t think about that turns around to bite me in the ass.

He said, “Hey. You new in town?” Only it didn’t sound like a line. It sounded like he actually wanted to know, in a calculating fashion.

“Sort of.”

“I can’t place your accent.”

“Oh. I wasn’t aware that I had one,” I said coyly. I knew I didn’t have one. I’d been in the Northwest long enough to have matched the bland diction that’s so common there. Unless you want to argue that the absence of an accent is an accent in itself, in which case I’d have to kick you in the shins. And I can kick very hard.