“Of course you will.”
She smirked at that.
The police were in the process of sealing the house as a crime scene. Yellow evidence tags were going up, marking spots in the kitchen—the teacup, the table, spots on the floor, the counter. Yellow tape, fluttering in a light breeze, decorated the front porch. Time for Rick to leave, then. Now and forever. He paused for a last look around the living room. Then he was done.
He drove, at first aimlessly, just wanting to think. Then he headed toward the old neighborhoods, the bar on Colfax and the garage on Champa. The shadows of the way they’d been were visible—the outline of a façade, painted over a dozen times in the succeeding years. Half a century’s worth of skyscrapers, office complexes, and high-end lofts had risen and fallen around them. The streets had widened, the pavement had improved, the signs had changed. The cars had changed, the clothing people wore had changed, though at this hour he only saw a few young men smoking cigarettes outside a club. None of them wore hats.
If Charles Blake was even alive, he’d still be in prison. Did he have relatives? An accomplice he’d hatched a plan of revenge with? Rick could call the Department of Corrections, talk them into releasing any information about Blake. Just to tie off that loose end and finish Helen’s story in his own mind.
Or he could let Detective Hardin do her job. Hardin was right, and Helen’s sixty-year-old criminal life probably had nothing to do with her death. It might have been an accidental shooting. Some gang misfiring on a drive-by. Anything was possible, absolutely anything. Hardin didn’t need his help to find out what.
Time to let Helen go.
He brought her to Arturo’s.
Arturo was the Master vampire of Denver, which meant he made the rules, and any vampire who wanted to live in his territory had to live by those rules. And Rick did, mostly. What he didn’t agree to was living under Arturo’s roof as one of his dozen or so minions. Instead, Rick kept to himself, lived how he wanted, didn’t draw attention, and didn’t challenge Arturo’s authority outright, so Arturo let him have his autonomy. A lot of the other vampires thought Rick was eccentric—even for a vampire—and he was all right with that. In the meantime, Arturo’s was the one place in the city Blake would never find Helen.
Arturo owned the squat brick building east of downtown. The ground floor housed a furniture dealer who did sporadic business, but his real work was deflecting attention from the basement. Underground, away from windows and sunlight, the city’s vampires lived and ran their little empire.
He walked Helen the dozen blocks from Murray’s bar to the furniture store, his arm protectively across her shoulder. She huddled against his body, glancing outward fearfully. Blake would never find them, not the way he moved, casting shadows, pulling her into his influence. But she didn’t know that.
In the back of the furniture shop, a concrete staircase led down, below the street level, to a nondescript door. Rick knocked.
“Blake won’t find you here,” he said.
“I trust you,” she said. She was still looking up the stairs, as if she expected Blake to appear, gun in hand.
What he really ought to do was put her on a train back to whatever town she came from. Tell her to find a good husband and settle down. Instead, he was bringing her here, and she trusted him.
The door opened, and Rick faced the current gatekeeper, a young woman in a straight silk dress ten years out of date—not that she would notice. Estelle hadn’t been above ground during most of that time.
Helen stared. To her, Estelle would look like a girl dressing up in her mother’s cast-off clothes, the skirt too long and the neckline too high.
“Hello, Estelle. I just need a room for a couple of nights.”
“Is Arturo expecting you?” she said, looking Helen up and down, probably drawing conclusions.
“No. But I don’t think he’ll mind. Do you?”
Pouting, she opened the door and let them in.
The hallway within was carpeted and dimly lit with a pair of shaded bulbs.
“Is he in his usual spot?” Rick asked over his shoulder.
“Sure. He’s even in a good mood.”
Helen looked to him for an explanation. He just guided her on, through the doorway at the end of the corridor and into a wide room.
The place had the atmosphere of a turn-of-the-century lounge, close and warm, dense with subdued colors and rich fabrics, Persian rugs and velvet wall hangings. One of Arturo’s dozen minions, Angelo, a young hothead, was smoking, purposefully drawing breath into his lungs and blowing it out again—breathing for no other reason than to smoke. It wasn’t as if the tobacco had any effect on him. Maybe he liked watching the smoke. Or maybe it was just habit. He was only a century old.
Most of Arturo’s vampires were young to Rick’s eyes. Then again, just about everyone was.
Sated with the human blood that kept them alive, they’d most likely been discussing the evening’s exploits. Their latest mode of hunting involved finding a dinner party, inviting themselves over, mesmerizing the whole group, and then having a taste of everyone. They didn’t kill or turn anyone, which would draw too much attention, and the group would wake up in the morning thinking they’d had a marvelous—if strange—evening. Rick sometimes suggested to Arturo that he should open a restaurant or club and let the party come to him.
Arturo—by all accounts dashing, with golden hair swept back from a square face—lay in a wingback armchair, legs draped over one of its arms. He looked at Rick and raised his brows in surprise. “What have you brought for us, Ricardo?”
The dozen vampires, men and women, straightened, perking up to look at Helen like a pack of wolves.