Trying to exude calm, I touched Ben’s arm.
“You going to take that information back to him?” Ben asked.
“No,” he said.
“Rick—how did you find me?”
“Matt gave me your address.”
Matt, the engineer from KNOB, my old radio station. “Okay, now did he give it to you, or did you, let’s see, how do I put this . . . persuade him to give it to you?”
“He, ah, might have taken a little persuading.” He actually smiled at that.
I rolled my eyes. I was sure Matt was fine. Rick probably hadn’t needed to do more than look him in the eyes and work a little of his vampire mojo on him. If I asked Matt, he wouldn’t remember what had happened.
“Can we sit down somewhere?” Rick said.
We retreated to the living room. Ben and I sat on the sofa, and Rick found a chair to pull across from us. He sat, then leaned forward, elbows on knees. He seemed casual, almost friendly, at odds with the usual vampire sense of sophistication. Most vampires liked to be the coolest thing in the room. Rick usually didn’t bother with the pretension. The BMW notwithstanding.
He hesitated, studying me and Ben both, sizing us up. I didn’t look straight back at him. Didn’t meet that hypnotic gaze.
“I need your help,” he said.
I couldn’t guess what he could possibly need from me that would drag him all the way out here from Denver. “What kind of help do you need that you couldn’t just call?”
He said, “I’m going to move against Arturo. I’m looking for backing.”
He surprised me into staring back at him. He wanted to stage a coup and take over Denver? I hadn’t thought he had that kind of ambition in him. Hell, he’d told me he didn’t have that kind of ambition. Something had changed, obviously.
“Why?”
From an inside pocket of his overcoat, he drew out a folded piece of paper—a newspaper article. After unfolding it, he offered it to me. It showed a front-page story about a series of attacks that had taken place at a downtown nightclub. No one had been killed, but at least three people had been taken to the hospital with severe bite wounds. The victims claimed vampires had attacked them—though the vampires must have been pretty sloppy if the people even remembered being attacked. According to the article, the authorities were skeptical, but in this day and age they were considering all options. The article also included a quote from the CDC assuring people that a simple bite from a vampire would not infect them with vampirism. That didn’t stop people from freaking out.
The fact that Rick was showing me this suggested it really had been vampires.
“I’m afraid he’s losing control.”
Part of a city’s Master’s job was to keep things like this from happening. Keep the city’s vampires under control. If they weren’t controlled, people could die. When people died, the authorities got interested, and vampires didn’t want that kind of attention if they expected to maintain their little empires.
“There’s more,” Rick continued. “If he’s perceived as weak by outsiders, others could move in to take control. He’s in danger of losing his authority. If he seeks help from outside, he’s in danger of losing his autonomy entirely.”
“Other Masters are moving in? Besides you?”
“It’s complicated. But I don’t want to see control of the region fall into the wrong hands.”
“And your hands are the right ones?”
He presented those hands in a gesture of offering.
My gut feeling liked Rick. But I didn’t know much more about him than that. Not enough to feel confident that his hands were the right ones. But I trusted him more than I trusted Arturo. Arturo hated my show and had tried to have me killed to get me to stop. Just on that basis I’d rather have Rick in charge.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“The Denver werewolves will side with Arturo. Arturo has Carl and Meg’s allegiance.” Carl and Meg, the alpha pair that headed the Denver pack. Not my favorite people in the world by a long shot. In fact, I’d be happy if I never heard their names again.
I did not like where this was going.
Rick said, “If you could take over the pack—”