“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. “You think they might be responsible for putting the undead asleep? To show their living kin what freedom is?” I said incredulously, almost laughing, but David’s expression remained anxious. “Vampires don’t use magic, and that’s what this wave is made of.”
“Well, they’ve been using something to survive without the protection of a master. Why not witch magic?” he said. “What worries me is that up to now they’ve been very timid down to the individual, hiding in the shadows and avoiding conflict. Their entire belief system circles around the original vampire sin and that the only way to save their souls is to promote an immediate second death after the first. That they’d put the masters to sleep doesn’t bother me as much as that they would keep doing it after they realized it promoted vampire violence.” David shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like them.”
But someone was pulling these waves into existence. That the only faction who might want to see an end to the masters didn’t have the chutzpah to do it wasn’t helping. Frustrated, I slumped back against the planter, squinting up at FV mashed into one letter. Behind it, someone had their “magic wall” showing a replica of Edden’s map of vampire violence, the enthusiastic newsman tapping individual dots to bring up the gory details to focus on individual tragedies with the excitement of a close political race.
No undead existence? I thought. Ivy would embrace that, even if she’d never take her second life. Though we’d never talked about it, I knew she was terrified of becoming one of the undead, knowing firsthand what they were capable of in their soulless state and the misery they could heap upon their children, most of them beautiful innocents kept in an intentional childlike state who loved their abusers with the loyalty of an abandoned child suddenly made king.
Kisten had died twice in quick succession, both times in an attempt to keep me alive and unharmed. His final words still haunted me: that God kept their souls for them until they died their second death. To get it back after committing the heinous acts necessary to survive would send them straight to hell—if a hell existed at all. A quick and sudden second death might be the only thing to save a true believer.
Uneasy, I dropped my eyes. Vampires were truly messed up, but I didn’t think a quick second death was the answer.
“I need to talk to a Free Vampire,” I said softly, and David chuckled, a rough hand rubbing