Page 21 of Bought for Blood

She goes silent after that. So do I.

He’ll come back after dark. He’ll take what he paid for, for as long as it stays interesting to him.

And then?

I don’t let myself finish that thought. Best case, I go back on the line when he’s done: the needles, the yellow paint. Worst case—

Don’t think about that.

I tuck both blankets around me and wait for whatever comes with the dark.

I’m awake when the boots outside change over for the evening shift.

Chapter 8

Bastien

Crowe keeps an office above a transmission shop on the east side of the river, and it hasn’t changed since my last visit. Same steel desk. Same two chairs. Same window painted shut over the yard, where a man is running an engine with the hood up and the light going blue-white off the concrete.

He doesn’t stand when I come in. He caps his pen and sits back.

“After I told you what we wanted, I thought you weren’t coming back,” he says.

“I’m here.”

“Nine days later.”

“I went to look for myself instead.” I take the other chair. It’s a bad chair, low in the seat, and I don’t settle into it so much as perch on the edge, elbows on my knees.

Two nights since I sat in a different chair, across a different kind of table, and I haven’t gone back yet. I’ve been telling myself that’s discipline.

“You’d have shown me files. Photographs. Timelines. I dislike being told what a thing is when I can go and see it.”

“And?”

“And now I’m in your bad chair. Tell me what the Court actually wants.”

“The source.” He rolls the pen once across the blotter and stops it under two fingers. “The people running that place answer to nobody. No Court law, no territory rights, no rules on the stock. When quotas tighten, they drain to the floor. Bodies surface. Bodies get autopsied. Two dry corpses in the wrong county and some mortal coroner with a vampire hobby puts every one of us on the evening news. The Court has spent hundreds of years staying out of the news.” He leaves the pen alone. “You know all this. I said most of it when you came for our meeting, and you poured a drink and let it bounce off you.”

“You appealed to my civic feeling. I don’t carry one.”

“I appealed to your conscience. It bounced. So what got past it?”

The engine in the yard shuts off. The quiet comes up through the floor.

“Boredom,” I say. “You should have led with that.”

Crowe lets the question sit. He has a patient face. He’s waited out better liars than most, and I let him wait now.

“Nine days ago, you were bored,” he says. “You’d been bored for a decade. I put the job in front of you and boredom didn’t take it. Then you spent one evening inside that place on your own account, and now you’re here volunteering.” He tips his head half an inch. “Something in that building landed.”

“The brandy’s excellent.”

“I’m sure.”

“You wanted a buyer nobody questions. You have one. I’ll trace their supply to whoever holds the top of it. I’ll hand your Court the name. I’ll be entertained. Everyone profits.”

“And your terms?”