Blood Truth, page 15
As Helania teared up, Boone held something out. A handkerchief. And of course it was monogrammed, as befitting his station. She wanted to tell him no-thank-you, but she couldn’t stand the crying. For godsakes, if she couldn’t handle speaking about Isobel’s death without losing it, how in the hell was she going to be strong enough to find the killer?
Accepting what he offered, she put the soft folds to her cheeks. “Thank you.”
“Would you like some water?”
“No, I just want to get through this.” She took another deep breath and backtracked, names and faces jamming in her head, syllables getting twisted in her throat. “That night, Isobel . . . Isobel and her two friends went to Pyre. From what I was told, her friends lost track of her in the crowd at the club. When it was time to go, they couldn’t find her and tried her phone. They told me they even went down to the lower level, but they didn’t see anything or scent anything out of the ordinary. They went home, thinking she’d gone to their place, and they were worried when she wasn’t there.”
“So how did they find her?”
“One of them went back. She broke into each of the storage areas, and that was where . . .” Helania pressed the handkerchief into her stinging eyes. “That was where the female found Isobel hanging from a hook on the ceiling. Her throat had been . . . cut. She was stiff, I was told. Cold. The—ah, the one who found her called the other friend. Together, they removed her from the scene. There are so many humans at that club, as you know. They couldn’t leave her, especially with the dawn coming.”
“Of course they couldn’t.”
Helania glanced down at his phone and watched the numbers go up for a little bit. “I will never forget what the knock on our apartment door sounded like. Four a.m. Knocking. I knew something bad had happened because no one ever came to see us. Isobel always went out. Anyway, I went to check the peephole . . . there was a female on the other side and she was crying. I opened the door, and she all but collapsed into me. It took her three tries to get it all out, and I don’t know whether that was because I couldn’t hear right or because she couldn’t speak right. The next thing I knew, we were driving across town. I don’t even remember what kind of car it was, but good thing she had it, as we were both too upset to dematerialize.”
Glancing up from the phone’s counter, she focused on Boone’s face. “I could smell my sister’s blood in that car. It was what they had used to move her.”
Boone squeezed his eyes shut and cursed. “I can’t even imagine.”
“I just kept thinking, she can’t be dead. She can’t be dead . . . she can’t be dead. It just seemed—I mean, Isobel was the most alive person I knew. How could anyone like her not be breathing?”
Helania folded the handkerchief and dabbed at her face. As she breathed in, she caught the whiff of a delicate smell, as if the square of fine cotton had been handwashed in something as gentle as it was expensive.
She continued, “It was a proper house that we went to. A nice house, not as fancy as this by far, but set back from the road with lots of bushes and an attached garage.” She blinked and saw the place clear as moonlight in her mind. “It was clean inside, and the furnishings were all new and fresh. Isobel . . . she was on the floor in the living room, wrapped in white. A sheet, it was. Like a mummy. They had laid her out on the hardwood floor. The scent of her blood was more intense, and even wrapped up like that, I could see a red stain spreading on the back of where her neck was.
“Her friend, the one who found her, and I washed her for the Fade Ceremony. The other friend hung back and watched. At nightfall, the three of us took her out to a state park that has a lot of very hidden places in the woods. It was early June, so the ground was soft. The friend who found her and I had shovels. We dug down ten feet. It took us hours. We put her there. I don’t know who cried more.” Helania held up her palms. “I tore my hands apart.”
Boone leaned in. “You have scars.”
“I wanted to remember Isobel.” Helania drew in a long and slow breath, and stared at her right palm. “When I got home, I put my hand in salt water. As a tribute.”
She traced the network of ridges that crossed where her lifeline was, running her fingertip over the remnants of all those blisters. As a vampire, any wounded skin on her body didn’t merely repair itself but regenerated, so that ordinarily, she could never find any traces of any injury.
If you were to bring a wound or broken area of flesh into contact with salt, however? You had those scars for life.
“I just wanted to honor her in some way.”
“Of course you did. How could you not?”
Helania looked him. “That’s the reason I’ve been going to that club. Why I watched that female the night before yesterday. Why I checked on her. I need to find out who did this to Isobel, and I don’t want them doing it to anyone else—and I’ve already failed once, or you and I wouldn’t be talking.”
Boone frowned. “Listen, Helania. I’m not saying you can’t handle yourself—I stared down the barrel of your gun, remember? Just please don’t be a hero at the expense of your own safety.”
“I’m not going to stop going to Pyre,” she said sharply.
“I’m not asking you to. Just call me. Anytime. If you see something, if you think you’re in danger, don’t hesitate to call me. I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”
A strange feeling came over her, and it took a moment to figure out what it was. With Isobel there to look after her, even after Helania had gone through her transition, she had always had a protector. Now, Boone seemed to want to step into that tragically vacated role, and the idea that she might have someone to turn to again eased her on deep levels.
“Promise me,” he said. “That you’ll call.”
“I promise,” she heard herself reply. “Is that all? For this interview?”
Rubbing his eyes as if he were tired, Boone seemed to have to refo-cus. “Actually, about the boyfriend. Did you ever hear from him after the death? Did he try to contact her phone, her social media, you or any of her friends?”
“I don’t know about her friends. And I’m assuming he tried her on her phone, but I don’t know where it is.”
“You don’t have her phone?”
“It was lost that night.” When Boone frowned and sat back, she knew exactly where he went in his head. “It was not the boyfriend, I’m telling you. She was thrilled whenever she spoke about him. I’d never seen her so happy, those last couple of months.”
“I believe you. It’s just . . . you don’t know his name, you never met him, and he didn’t show up looking for her after she was gone. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
Helania wanted to argue the point, but the truth was, she had sometimes wondered about the very same things. Yet calling into question Isobel’s true love had seemed disloyal.
“I was not part of her scene.” Helania took a deep breath. “And if he was trying to find her by calling that phone, I would never know, would I.”
“What about the clothes she was wearing? Did any of those get saved?”
“Her friend told me they threw them out because they were ruined.”
“We really need to speak with those two females. What are their names?”
“I don’t know what their given names are. But I can find them on social media. I cannot forget either of their faces.”
“That would be really helpful.”
Helania let herself fall back into the armchair. Closing her eyes was a bad idea. The world got to spinning.
“Are you all right?” Boone asked.
“Just a little woozy.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
Helania forced her lids to open as she started to do that math. When the hours added up—and kept adding—she frowned.
“You need to eat.” Boone reached out and turned off the phone. “And so do I. Let’s take a break and have First Meal together.”
Her knee-jerk reaction was to say no, conclude the meeting, and go back home to change. She could still make it over to Pyre and have plenty of time there before dawn. Except . . . just as all that stick-to-theplan, find-the-killer, keep-your-distance occurred to her, from out of nowhere, she pictured her sister.
Isobel had always worn her hair short and spiky, the red color even louder and brighter that way, untempered with the blond that marked Helania’s far longer waves. And she had had bright blue eyes. Brilliantly blue, like a robin’s egg. And a super-white, ultrawide smile.
Even her coloring had been vivid.
Add to all that her laugh? Isobel had been captivating to people. The few times Helania had gone out and watched on the sidelines as her sister had charmed friends and strangers alike, she had been astounded by the presence of the female. Just like everyone else.
There had been so many times over the last eight months that Helania had regretted the fact that she had been the survivor. Isobel had always been better at living. Why had the recluse been the one to stay on the planet? And to that point, if her sister had been offered a nice meal with a nice male when she was starving? She wouldn’t have said yes. She would have hell-yeah’d that idea—and then made sure that the conversation was even better than the food.
Helania looked into Boone’s eyes. They were . . . beautiful eyes. Thickly lashed. Deeply set.
She thought of the dead body she had found the night before last. If that female had known that she was going to die that evening, if she had had the date of her demise given to her, what would she have done differently?
I am alive, Helania thought to herself. Right now, I am not dead.
So it was about time she started living, wasn’t it.
“Yes,” she heard herself say. “I would like to eat with you. Where, though? Here?”
Boone’s eyebrows popped, as if her acceptance of the invite had surprised him. Except then he rushed on. “The doggen are busy in the kitchen serving the folks here. But I know a great place to take you. You’re going to love it.”
The Remington Hotel was a Caldwell fixture, a throwback to the Roaring Twenties that had somehow survived the modernization of downtown. Surrounded by skyscrapers, the thirty-floor, bi-winged building was a gracious grande dame in the company of robots, its courtyard the kind of thing that was in every tourism ad for the city. It was the sort of place where people had Sunday tea in their dress clothes, and couples got engaged in the formal dining room, and there were suites with plaques on the doors pointing out that President Taft had stayed there in 1911 and Hemingway in 1956 and President Clinton in 1994.
Boone rematerialized in the alley beside the hotel, and for a split second, as he stood in the cold alone, he wondered whether Helania was going to change her mind and reroute in her molecular form to somewhere else.
But then she was beside him. In the flesh.
“I’m dressed casually,” she said as she indicated her parka and jeans.
He nodded down at his set of leathers. “As I am. That’s why we’re going to Remi’s.”
As he motioned to the head of the alley, they walked together toward the cars that were passing by on East Main Street.
Say something, he thought. Say . . . anything—
“You mean the movie?”
Boone shook his head. “What?”
“Say Anything. You know, with John Cusack?” When he gave Helania a blank look, she said, “It has that classic scene with him holding the boom box over his head and Peter Gabriel playing. What made you think of it?”
Okaaaaaaaaaaaay, he must have spoken that out loud. “Ah, sure . . . it’s one of my favorites.”
“Mine, too.” She laughed a little. “Cameron Crowe’s best, in my opinion. I also like all the John Hughes movies from the eighties. I had a crush on Jake Ryan forever—you’re really limping, by the way.”
Was he? He couldn’t feel his face, much less his legs—and talk about pop culture refs. Thank you, the Weeknd.
“How were you hurt?” she asked. “Were you fighting?”
“Yes.” With a down pillow that had had a helluva ground game, as it turned out. “The enemy nearly got the best of me.”
Helania stopped dead. “Oh, my God. Are you serious? Did you see a doctor—”
“I’m sorry, no.” He held up a hand. “Look, I want to impress you. And if I tell you how it actually happened, you’re going to think I’m the biggest planker on the planet.”
“I don’t even know what a planker is.”
As she stared up him, with those big yellow eyes filling her heartshaped face and the wisps of her red and blond hair teased on the wind and that bright flush on her cheeks from the cold . . . she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
All of the aristocratic females in all of the ball gowns in the world couldn’t hold a candle to her.
“Do you mean ‘dweeb’?” she prompted.
“I haven’t heard that word in a million years.”
“Well, to be fair, you brought the eighties into this first.” That slight smile, the one he loved so much, tilted her mouth again. “Tell me how you got hurt. I promise I won’t judge. I mean, come on, I am the most socially inept person you will ever meet. I have lived a whole life through movies that I watched at home. I can quote you a hundred thousand lines from a thousand rom-coms, but you ask me to talk to someone I don’t know? I freeze solid. So I am in no position to judge.”
I want to kiss you, he thought. Right now.
“WhenyoucalledlastnightIwasnakedandIdidn’tthinkthatwasappropriatesoIrantomyclosetandgotdressedandwhenIcamebackIendeduptrippingonapillowdon’taskhowandIstubbedmytoeandsprainedmyankle.”
Helania blinked. And then laughed out loud. “I’m sorry, can you try that again?”
“Naked when you called. Ran to get dressed. Back by the bed, tripped on a pillow. Stubbed toe, sprained ankle. Man-card revoked. Tragedy ensues.”
As she laughed again, he decided he was going to take classes in stand-up. Just so that he could hear that sound.
“So you were naked?” she said.
“Yeah.” Okay, now he was doing the blush thing. “I didn’t want to disrespect you.”
“We weren’t FaceTiming. I couldn’t see anything.”
“But I knew I had no clothes on.”
He meant to keep the tone light and funny. But something in his voice changed, and she picked up on it instantly—because that lovely little smile drifted away from her expression.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said roughly.
“Walk down this alley, you mean?” He tried to bring the mood back around. “I think you’re better suited to the job than I am—”
“No.” She motioned between them. “This.”
Instantly, Boone got serious. “So you feel it, too.”
Her eyes went to the open end of the alley, where the traffic was stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper. There must have been a basketball game that had just gotten out, he thought. Or a concert. A show.
Maybe this had been a mistake to drag her into the human world.
“I don’t want to misrepresent myself.” She shook her head. “Isobel would do something like this. Not me—”
“You’re the one I want to share a meal with. Not anyone else.”
“I just don’t want you to have high expectations. A lot of the time—even before I lost Isobel—I didn’t feel right with other people. It’s like a gear that can’t quite engage. It’s always been that way and I don’t want you to think it’s you. I’m a little off—”
Boone reached out and took her hand. The instant the contact was made, Helania fell silent.
“I’m not expecting anything more than dinner,” he said. “On my honor.”
There was a pause. Then that smile came back even wider, and what do you know—it brought a friend. A dimple popped up, sweet as could be, on one of her cheeks.
Crocking his elbow, he grinned. “May I have your arm?”
Ducking her head, she put her hand through the space he made for her, and then they were walking down the alley together once again.
“You tripped on a pillow?” she murmured.
“At least it was after I’d gotten dressed or God only knows what else I could have hurt on that bedside table.”
Her laugh made him feel taller and stronger, even as his physical dimensions did not change.
And what do you know, Helania was still smiling as they got out onto Main Street proper and entered the Remington’s famous courtyard. Courtesy of the hotel’s two wings, there was a vast open mall created by the embrace of its stone extensions, the main entrance a majestic anchor with its hanging flags and Art Deco details. Illuminated by old-fashioned gas lanterns and marked by rows of trees wound with thousands upon thousands of Christmas lights, it was a fairy tale in the heart of downtown’s steel-and-asphalt anonymity.
“This is so beautiful,” she said as she looked around.
“Yes,” he murmured as he focused on her face. “You are.”
She was so taken by the spectacle that it appeared she didn’t hear him. Probably just as well. Right under his surface was an intensity that he didn’t want to reveal to her. Yet.
“It’s magical.” She reached out a hand and stopped just short of touching one of the lit-up branches. “Something out of a book.”
“The hotel’s famous for this courtyard.”
“I’ve only seen pictures of it before.” She paused and then turned in a slow circle. “The glow reminds me of sunlight back before my transition.”
She was right, he thought as he followed her lead and glanced around. All the little bulbs threw off a mellow, banked illumination similar to a summer sunset’s.
“Did you sneak out of your parents’ house to look at the sun, too?” he asked.
“Isobel told me I had to do it.” Helania smiled. “She said I absolutely had to see the sun before my change. As the older of the pair of us, she’d been through the change already. She showed me where to go through the basement of our family’s house, how to follow the crawl space and get out through an old storm door.”
