The Undead Pool. Kim Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ of touch for almost an hour, I turned my phone back on. “Oh,” I said, pace faltering as I saw all the missed numbers. David.

      Wincing, I stopped, shifting myself up the steps at Fountain Square to get out of the foot traffic. Guilt swam up from the cracks of my busy life. I was not a good female alpha, too involved in my own life’s drama to include much of anyone else’s, but damn it, when I agreed to it, David had said it was only going to be him. That had been the entire point. He’d added to the pack since then, not that I could blame him. He was a fabulous alpha male, and I was beginning to feel as if I was holding him back.

      Sighing, I hit send and tucked my increasingly dilapidated braid out of the way. He answered almost immediately.

      “Rachel!” His pleasant voice sounded worried, and I could picture him, his clean-cut features and tidy suit he wore at his job as an insurance adjuster making his alpha status clear. “Where are you?”

      Head down, I rested my rump on one of the huge planters, feeling about three inches tall. “Ah, downtown Cincy,” I said hesitantly. “I tried to call yesterday, and then that wave came through and—”

      “Ivy said you were at the FIB. I need to talk to you. Do you have some time today?”

      Talk to me about me being a lousy alpha, no doubt. “Sure. What’s good for you?”

      “She also told me what happened at the bridge yesterday. Why don’t you tell me these things?” he said, adding to my guilt. “Okay, that’s funny. Look up.”

      I took my fingers from my forehead, head lifting.

      “No, across the street. See?”

      It was David, standing at the corner beside a newspaper box and waving at me. He was in his long duster, heavy boots, and wide-brimmed hat, which made him look like a thirtysomething Van Helsing. It suited him more than his usual suit and tie, and being an insurance adjuster wasn’t the cushy, pencil-pushing job it sounded like. He had teeth, and he used them to get the real dirt on some of the more interesting Inderlander accidents. That’s how we had met, actually.

      “H-how . . .” I stammered, and he smiled across the street at me.

      “I was trying to get to the FIB before you left,” he said, his lips out of sync with his voice. “I’ve got coffee. Grande, skinny double espresso, shot of raspberry, extra hot, and no foam okay?” he said, taking up a coffee carrier currently sitting on the newspaper box.

      “God, yes,” I said, and he waved me to stay where I was. Smiling, I ended the call. Not only did he know I liked my coffee, but he knew how I liked my coffee.

      Motion easy, the medium-build man loped across the street against traffic, one hand holding the tray with the coffees, the other raised against the cars. Every single one of them slowed to let him pass with nary a horn or shouted curse, such was his assurance. David was the apex of confidence, and very little of it was from the curse I’d innocently given him, accidentally making him the holder of the focus and able to demand the obedience of any alpha, and hence their pack members in turn. He wore the responsibility very well—unlike me.

      “Rachel,” he said as he reached the sidewalk and took the shallow steps two at a time. “You look beat!”

      “I am,” I said, giving him a hug and breathing in the complicated mix of bane, wood smoke, and paper. His black shoulder-length hair pulled back in a tie smelled clean, and I lingered, recognizing the strength in him in both body and mind. When I’d met him, he’d been a loner, and though he had firmly established himself as a pack leader now, he’d retained the individual confidence a loner was known for.

      “Thanks for the coffee,” I said, carefully wedging it out of the carrier as he extended it. “You can hunt me down any day if you bring me coffee.”

      Chuckling, he shook his head, his dark eyes flicking down from the huge vid screen over the square, currently tuned to the day’s national news. Cincy was in it again, and not in a good way. “I didn’t want to talk to you over the phone, and I’ve got the day off. You got a minute?”

      My guilt rushed back, my first sip going bland on my tongue. “I’m sorry, David. I’m a lousy alpha.” I slumped, the coffee he’d brought me—the perfect coffee he knew was my favorite—hanging in my grip. It was never supposed to have been anything other than the two of us. The larger pack just sort of happened.

      Blinking, he fixed his full attention on me, making me wince. “You are not,” he admonished, coffee in hand and leaning against the planter, looking like an ad for Weres’ Wares magazine. “And that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Have you heard of a group called the Free Vampires?”

      Surprised, I relaxed my hunched shoulders. “One of the vamps last night thought I was one, but no. Not really.”

      His eyes shifted to the people around us, the motion furtive enough to pull a ribbon of worry through me. It was busy at the square, knots of people clustered around their laptops and tablets, but none nearby. Leaning closer, he dropped his head to prevent anyone from reading his lips. “They’re also known as Free Curse Vampires or Vampires Without Masters,” he said, sending a chill through me. “They’ve been around since before the Turn. That’s their mark there, up on the vid screen.”

      My eyes followed his twisting head, only now noticing that the huge monitor overlooking Fountain Square did indeed have a gang symbol spray-painted on it, the huge symbol looking as if a V and a F had been typeset over each other, the leg of the F merging seamlessly with the left side of the V to look elegantly aggressive. It also looked impossible to have gotten it up there.

      “Huh,” I said, now remembering seeing it on some of the buses this morning. And in the intersection outside of the FIB. Light poles. Corner mailboxes . . . Concerned, I leaned to pick up one of those flyers, finding it read like wartime propaganda. “How can they survive without a master? I’d think they wouldn’t last a year.”

      David watched me shove the flyer in my bag. “Hiding, mostly, maintaining the same patterns that kept all vampires safe before the Turn. It’s not hard to file their canines flat or take day jobs to avoid their kin. It’s sort of a cult following, one not well represented because, as you guessed, they don’t have a master vampire to protect them. We occasionally insure them, seeing as they can’t go to a vampire-based company. There’s been a jump in their numbers the last couple of days. Some of it could be attributed to the undead being asleep, but—”

      I choked on my coffee, sputtering until I got my last swallow down. “You know about that?” I asked, my watering eyes darting. We were right next to the fountain so it was unlikely anyone would hear, but Edden had made it obvious that it was privileged information.

      Smiling an easy smile, David put his back to the planter and us shoulder to shoulder. “You can gag the news, but you can’t blind an insurance company intent on adjusting a claim. They’re coming out of the woodwork, making me think they’re more represented than previously thought, perhaps the fringe children who aren’t really noticed much and get little protection anyway. They have a statistically improbably high rate of immediate second-death syndrome, which is why I know about them. My boss is tired of paying out on the claims.”

      David took a sip of his coffee, eyes unfocused as he looked across the street. “One of their core beliefs is that the undead existence is an affront to the soul. Rachel, I’m not liking where this is going.”

      I thought about it, the July morning suddenly feeling cold. СКАЧАТЬ