Under Attack (28 page)

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Authors: Hannah Jayne

BOOK: Under Attack
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I heard the sharp cut of Will's words before I saw him. When we turned the corner he was there, standing in front of one of the fire trucks, barking orders at the firemen, who scattered in perfectly organized chaos, dragging fat hoses and lining up at the edge of the burning house. He was wearing his uniform and again his big yellow coat was streaked with black lines of soot and debris. His helmet had a nick in it and was almost totally blackened. He stopped midsentence when he saw me and strode toward Alex and me, nudging in just before the paramedic made his way toward us.
“Sophie?” The playful lilt he'd had when we talked the other day was gone from his voice.
I nodded, too stunned to speak.
“Are you okay? What are you doing here?”
I saw a glint—of what, jealousy?—in Alex's eyes as he sized Will up. “You're the guardian?” he asked finally.
Will straightened a bit and looked over his shoulder, then stepped closer to us. He nodded.
Alex used the end of his shirt to dab at a cut on my cheek. “Hell of a job you're doing, buddy.”
I put my hand on Alex's arm and stepped aside, just out of his reach. “It's not his fault.”
Will and I exchanged glances and Alex put up his hands, palms out, and sucked in an exasperated breath. “Okay, fine, whatever. We need to find Nina. If your buddy here wants to come along, he can follow us.”
“I'm looking after Sophie,” Will said.
“So am I,” Alex replied.
The men exchanged staunch, tight-lipped glares and under any other circumstance I would be updating my Facebook status, letting the world know that two incredibly hot men were fighting over me. Instead, I stepped between them.
“We have to find Nina. Now.”
Another fireman ran up to us. He looked from Alex to me and then expectantly at Will. “Are you taking care of this, Sherman?”
Will nodded curtly. “The detective here was just telling me what happened.”
“Fire bomb,” Alex reported, his eyes focused on the second fireman, who wore a water-slicked yellow coat with the name ALLEN sewn on it. “Thrown from the outside when Ms. Lawson was inside.”
Allen nodded and Will raised a suspicious eyebrow. “And Ms. Lawson was inside because?”
Alex cleared his throat. “She was with me. I was escorting her back to her apartment after a second round of questioning when a call came in about a suspected burglar at this address. I asked her to stay in the car. It's not like anyone was guarding her though.” Will's eyes flashed as Alex continued. “She must have just slid in behind me.”
I watched the gold flecks in Will's eyes glitter angrily at the bit of smile that hung on Alex's lips. Allen looked at the three of us, oblivious to the volumes of subtext going on, and nodded. “Looks like you fellas have got this under control. Just make sure to escort the lady home.”
Will stepped toward me and Alex cut him off, blocking me with his body. He clamped a hand on my upper arm. “I've got this under control,” he told Will.
Will went eyebrows up but stepped back. Alex steered me away from the clutch of firemen and flashing lights, and when we were out of earshot, I shrugged him off.
“What was that? You've got this under control? Don't you mean you've got
me
under control? And what was the stare-down for?”
“Really, Lawson? We're going to do the woman's lib thing here in the shadow of your father's raging inferno?”
“I guess not,” I relented. “But that doesn't mean it's over!”
“I wouldn't expect anything less,” Alex said.
I glanced over my shoulder at the smoldering house, at the firefighters working to tame the huge flames that thrust out of windows and licked the tops of nearby trees. I felt an odd sense of loss; I had just found my father—I saw his collection of books, what he kept in the fridge (nothing), the way he decorated a room for his daughter—and now it was gone. Going up in smoke.
I walked up to the neighbors pushing against the wooden barricade. A woman in a velour housecoat was clutching her lapel. Her eyes were so intensely fixed on the fire that I could see flicks of yellow flame reflected in them.
“Did you know the family that lived there well?” I asked her. “What were they like?”
The woman looked down, blinking at me as if I had just materialized out of thin air. “The family that lived there?” she asked. “No, honey, nobody lives in that house—and thank God, now. It's the model home for the new development going up just over there.” She pointed to a clutch of houses one street over, all glaring with brand-new beige stucco and eco-friendly trim.
“What? But I went inside. It was furnished.”
“Yeah,” the woman said, turning back to watch the flames, “they decorate the house as if someone lives there, but everything inside is fake. Fake plants, fake books, even fake computers and TVs. They just put it up so people feel comfortable, so they can see what their houses will look like once they're lived in.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage.
I let Alex lead me to the car. He all but clicked me in my seat belt as I gazed dumbly ahead of me.
“It was all made up,” I mumbled.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, plugging his key in the ignition.
“The house. Everything in it. It was fake.”
Poor, poor baby sister ...
Ophelia whispered.
Losing the childhood home she never even had. No home, no daddy, and now, no best friend.
Ophelia giggled in my ear while the fury reawakened in me. I tensed.
“You're shaking, Lawson. What's going on?” Alex asked, coasting to a stop at the light.
“Ophelia. Get her out of my head.” I could feel the unattractive flare of my nostrils, feel the ache in my jaw from gritting my teeth. “She's always going to be one step ahead of us as long as she's in my mind. If we're ever going to save Nina, I have to get her out.”
“Okay,” Alex said, staring through the windshield.
I grabbed his shoulder, feeling my fingers digging into his warm skin. “Tell me how, Alex. Tell me how to get rid of her. You have to know a way.”
“Well, there is one way. The mind reading—”
“Mind-hijacking is more like it.”
“Well, it's not an exact science. Every time she gets in your head, you're generally on your own, right?”
I frowned. “Or with you.”
Alex ignored me and continued. “The more people who are around—the more distraction—the more difficult it will be for Ophelia to get a handle on your thoughts. She'll find it difficult to find you and get in your mind.”
“Okay, fine, so we go somewhere with a lot of distraction.”
“Somewhere with a lot of people. Generally, people who won't notice a stray or weird thought poking into their head. There needs to be something entertaining them.”
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “Okay, but I don't think we can make it down to Disneyland before Ophelia lays waste to my entire life.”
Alex remained silent, thinking. Suddenly, he jerked the car toward the highway on-ramp, wheels squealing as he took the corner at full speed. “I know a place.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I fiddled around with the car stereo and finally found a soccer game being broadcast on the Spanish channel. I turned it up to earsplitting level, hoping the hiss of the crowd would drown out any Ophelia-influenced thoughts. We were inching our way through the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza when Alex turned the volume down and looked at me.
“Since when do you like soccer?”
“It's called football,” I murmured.
“Okay. Since when do you like football?”
Since I've had a psychopath taking up valuable real estate in my brain. Since Will walked into my life and try as I might, I can't get the soft English lilt of his voice out of my head, can't deny the knight-in-shining-armor way he looks in his firefighter uniform.
I thought
.
I was stabbed with a pang of guilt when I glanced at Alex, at the sincere worry in his eye.
He's not staying around... .
This time the voice in my head was my own, and the truth of the words squeezed at my heart.
“I just want to focus on finding Nina,” I said to the windshield.
“Where would Ophelia take Nina?” Alex mumbled.
“Vlad.”
“What?” Alex cut behind a Muni bus, causing the man in the Zipcar behind us to lay on his horn. “Do you think Vlad might have a better lead on Nina? Vampire connection or something?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, Vlad is right there.”
I pointed, and Alex followed my gaze out the driver's side window to the garish lights of the Roxie Theater. Vlad and his fellow VERMers—all dressed in the standard-issue velvet smoking jackets and ascots—were marching in a neat oval, their wooden-stake signs illuminated by the red and yellow lights of the Roxie. There was a small group of teenagers gathered around them, and when Alex rolled down his window we could hear their faint chant as they thrust pale fists into the air.
“What's he doing?”
I unhooked my seat belt. “Protesting.” Before Alex could say anything I was bundling myself against the late-afternoon city fog and dodging cars. I crossed the street and made a beeline for Vlad, who, while marching, was clearly being followed by an adoring clutch of teenage breather girls.
“Vlad,” I said when I saw him.
He glanced over his shoulder at me, a kind smile spreading across his lips. “Are you joining us?”
I felt thin fingers clutching at my elbow, and I whirled, only to go face-to-face with a young girl, her cheeks ruddy and shiny, her forehead broken out and partially covered by a failed attempt at Sandra Bullock side-swept bangs.
“You know him?” the girl asked, her grey eyes heavy with awe.
I rolled my eyes.
Vampires, as a whole, are an attractive lot. Vlad, immortally sixteen, and with the wiry, smooth muscles, chiseled jaw, and brooding countenance of the attractive, misunderstood, teenage ne'er-do-well, was all but irresistible to the under-eighteen female set. It wasn't the first time I'd witnessed girls falling all over themselves to brush a finger through his thick black pompadour while attempting to lose themselves in his black-as-coal eyes. Since his last crush had tried to kill me, I was wary.
I shook off the girl. “Trust me, you're better off.” I turned back to Vlad. “This is the theater you're protesting?”
Vlad shrugged. “As a warm-up. We thought the Roxie would be sort of a dry run before we took on the big guns.”
“The Metreon?” I guessed. I felt the fingers on my arm again, and when I glanced back, the teenage girl was nearly pressed up against me, eyes glazed and fixed firmly on Vlad. I looked back at him, saw the sly smile creep across his lips.
“Well, hello,” he said over my shoulder.
The girl's grip on my arm tightened and I stared at her fingers in awe. “Who are you?”
She ignored me. “I—I want to be with you,” she said to Vlad, her voice breathy.
Vlad raised an interested eyebrow.
“I know what you are. I understand you,” she continued, seeming to muster courage from her ever-tightening grip on my arm. I shrugged her away a second time and she simply pushed past me and went directly to Vlad.
“I get you.”
The smile disappeared from Vlad's lips. “You get me?”
“I know you don't want to be this way.”
“Oh, here we go,” I muttered.
“We can be together. I want to help you.” The girl yanked up her sleeve, exposing the fleshy part of her arm, pink with youth and baby fat. “I want to be a donor.”
I watched Vlad's nostrils flare. “Then go to Red Cross.” He hitched up his sign and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Later, Soph.”
I grabbed his shoulder. “Have you seen Nina?”
Vlad shrugged. “Not since last night.”
I felt the grip of fear starting at the pit of my stomach. “She's missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?”
I leaned closer, turning Vlad from the group of glamoured teens who were trying to inch their way toward the other VERMers. “Ophelia. Ophelia has kidnapped her.”
The teenage angst/smugness dropped from Vlad's face all at once. Fear shot through his eyes and his expression was soft, a momentary glimpse into what he may have looked like, pre-fang. He dropped his protest sign and gripped my arm, pulling him along with me.
“Where's the angel?”
Vlad and I piled into Alex's car and Alex pushed the gas pedal to the ground. We hit thirty-five before being cut off by a trolley stuffed with grinning wedding guests, their cheeks ruddy with champagne and the cold grey air.
“I hate this town,” Vlad muttered.
“We need to get Sophie somewhere where Ophelia can't get into her head. Loud noises, lots of action—it'll confuse her.”
Vlad climbed over the center console and turned down the blaring radio. “Is that why you're broadcasting the soccer game?”
“It's called football,” Alex and I said in unison.
“Do we have any idea where we're going?”
“I know a place,” Alex said, expertly weaving through traffic. He skidded into a parking spot and I gripped the car door to save myself from sliding across the seat.
“Parking karma,” he said with a shrug when I gaped at him. “Are you coming?”
I slammed the car door shut and looked up, the flashing lights from the two-hundred-foot-tall sign glaring down at me. The yellow chaser lights spelled out
BIG AL'S
, the words platforming an enormous, angry-looking mobster in a pinstriped suit carrying a tommy gun.
Vlad snorted—although whether it was a snort of disgust or humor I couldn't tell.
“Really?” I snarled at Alex. “Really? This is the
only
place in the entire city that you could think of that would offer distraction?”
Big Al's was an adult superstore, housing all manner of sexual vices and advertising each one in bold, multicolored neon lights. The lights pulsed to the sound of a thrumming bass coming from somewhere inside, and the sidewalks were littered with throngs of people zigzagging their way through sidewalk displays of half-naked women arching wantonly on glossy poster board. Interspersed were big, angry-looking men with crossed arms who guarded darkened doorways, and the occasional few who danced around out front, slapping fliers in the hands of unsuspecting passersby and yelling things like “Ladies always free!” and “You fellas like to dance, don'tcha?”
“Just come on,” Alex said, threading his arm through mine.
To my relief, we passed Big Al's and its gaudy assortment of neon-colored paraphernalia. I yanked on Vlad's arm, dragging him behind me as he started to slow down, his dark eyes going big and wide at the splashy photography. He may have been of age—way, way of age—but to me he was still my best friend's sixteen-year-old nephew and I was in charge.
“Stop staring,” I muttered to him, pulling him along.
Alex dodged the ladies who pranced around us in garter belts and plastic heels and I did my best to keep up with him, growling, “This is not going to help.” I stepped around a weaving crowd of beer-soaked bachelors. “How do you expect this to help? My best friend has been kidnapped! She could be dying and we're here at”—I paused, looked up—“The Roaring Twenties?”
The Roaring Twenties was Big Al's slightly more upscale neighbor—a throwback to a 1920s speakeasy, complete with dancers in period costumes (when they wore costumes) and heavy, carved double doors. The outside walls were lined with sepia-toned prints of the San Francisco of yesteryear, interspersed with the women of Saturday night. Even the doorman—a burley black guy with a bald head and a puffy black mustache—was dressed in authentic-looking 1920s garb.
At The Roaring Twenties, you got some history with your lap dance.
Vlad grinned, his fangs catching the reflection of the blinking lights of Broadway. “I loved the twenties. Pretty girls, lots of neck action.”
I shot him a look and his gleeful smile faded. “Sorry,” he said with a disgusted groan.
I squeezed Alex's arm and steeled myself. “I'm not going in there. What are you thinking? That Ophelia sold Nina into white slavery and now she's working as a naked historian?”
“I'm thinking that you should trust me and keep walking.” Our train shimmied through the thickening crowds on the busy streets and my head throbbed with the pulsing lights and the heavy bass that thumped behind the closed doors. My legs were aching from the gradual uphill climb and still stung from the shower of soot and glass at my father's house.
I just wanted to find Nina. I felt a hopeless lump rising in my chest as Alex grabbed my arm and steered me around a sharp corner, then hustled me through a set of double glass doors. I instinctively clamped my eyes shut and sputtered, “I don't want to see any naked ladies!”
I was greeted with a wall of silence and the bitter smell of coffee, tinged with the slightest hint of brown sugar. I opened one eye and saw the bakery cases, the round black tables scattered with tea drinkers staring curiously up at me. I glanced around, seeing the flashing lights of Big Al's in the distance, reflected on the plate-glass windows.
“We're not at a strip club?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Lawson,” Alex said with a smug shrug.
I felt a flood of embarrassment from hair follicles to toenails. “Oh.” I dropped into a chair. “Can you get me a cannoli then?”
Vlad sat down next to me. “I don't understand what any of this has to do with finding my aunt.”
Alex ordered a round of cannoli and coffee, then sat down.
“Hopefully, it's buying us enough time to confuse and annoy Ophelia. It'll be harder to read Sophie's mind with everything going on—the crowds, the lights on Broadway—”
Vlad scowled. “Well, if that was working, why are we here?”
Before Alex could answer, the mournful wail of a harmonica cut through the cinnamon-scented air, followed by a smattering of applause and the tuning of a guitar.
“Chaotic enough?”
The hum of quiet conversation raised to a din, punctuated by the clattering of dishes and live music. I looked around nervously, locking eyes with a heavyset man behind the counter. When he bent down to take something out of the dessert case, I nudged Vlad.
“That guy's staring at me. There's something about him. Can you get a scent on him?”
Vlad's nostrils flared and he nonchalantly sniffed at the air, then shrugged. “Not unless he's a cinnamon scone or a caramel macchiato.”
I rubbed my temples with my fingers. “Okay, we've got to find Nina. If you were a raging lunatic with a vampire captive, where would you go?”
“Someplace private,” Vlad suggested.
“Someplace that means a lot to you. That's why she took you to your dad's house.”
Vlad's eyes widened. “You went to Hell?”
“No—Marin. I can't think with all this distraction.”
Alex put his hand on mine. “We need the distraction. As much as it's bothering you, it's worse on her end. We can't let her know what you're thinking. So, focus.”
A slim waitress with an apron double-tied around her waist deposited a plate of cannoli in front of us. I took one and chewed absently.
Vlad tapped his finger on the table, the sound adding to the roar. I glared at him and he stopped. “This really isn't doing us any good,” he said.
Alex's eyes were intense as he stared me down. “Where would she take Nina that would get to you?”
I polished off the first cannoli and was reaching for my second. “I don't know.”

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