Under Attack

Chapter Twenty-Two

I fiddled around with the car stereo and finally found a soccer game being broadcast on the Spanish channel. I turned it up to earsplitting level, hoping the hiss of the crowd would drown out any Ophelia-influenced thoughts. We were inching our way through the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza when Alex turned the volume down and looked at me.

“Since when do you like soccer?”

“It’s called football,” I murmured.

“Okay. Since when do you like football?”

Since I’ve had a psychopath taking up valuable real estate in my brain. Since Will walked into my life and try as I might, I can’t get the soft English lilt of his voice out of my head, can’t deny the knight-in-shining-armor way he looks in his firefighter uniform. I thought. I was stabbed with a pang of guilt when I glanced at Alex, at the sincere worry in his eye.

He’s not staying around... . This time the voice in my head was my own, and the truth of the words squeezed at my heart.

“I just want to focus on finding Nina,” I said to the windshield.

“Where would Ophelia take Nina?” Alex mumbled.

“Vlad.”

“What?” Alex cut behind a Muni bus, causing the man in the Zipcar behind us to lay on his horn. “Do you think Vlad might have a better lead on Nina? Vampire connection or something?”

I rolled my eyes. “No, Vlad is right there.”

I pointed, and Alex followed my gaze out the driver’s side window to the garish lights of the Roxie Theater. Vlad and his fellow VERMers—all dressed in the standard-issue velvet smoking jackets and ascots—were marching in a neat oval, their wooden-stake signs illuminated by the red and yellow lights of the Roxie. There was a small group of teenagers gathered around them, and when Alex rolled down his window we could hear their faint chant as they thrust pale fists into the air.

“What’s he doing?”

I unhooked my seat belt. “Protesting.” Before Alex could say anything I was bundling myself against the late-afternoon city fog and dodging cars. I crossed the street and made a beeline for Vlad, who, while marching, was clearly being followed by an adoring clutch of teenage breather girls.

“Vlad,” I said when I saw him.

He glanced over his shoulder at me, a kind smile spreading across his lips. “Are you joining us?”

I felt thin fingers clutching at my elbow, and I whirled, only to go face-to-face with a young girl, her cheeks ruddy and shiny, her forehead broken out and partially covered by a failed attempt at Sandra Bullock side-swept bangs.

“You know him?” the girl asked, her grey eyes heavy with awe.

I rolled my eyes.

Vampires, as a whole, are an attractive lot. Vlad, immortally sixteen, and with the wiry, smooth muscles, chiseled jaw, and brooding countenance of the attractive, misunderstood, teenage ne’er-do-well, was all but irresistible to the under-eighteen female set. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed girls falling all over themselves to brush a finger through his thick black pompadour while attempting to lose themselves in his black-as-coal eyes. Since his last crush had tried to kill me, I was wary.

I shook off the girl. “Trust me, you’re better off.” I turned back to Vlad. “This is the theater you’re protesting?”

Vlad shrugged. “As a warm-up. We thought the Roxie would be sort of a dry run before we took on the big guns.”

“The Metreon?” I guessed. I felt the fingers on my arm again, and when I glanced back, the teenage girl was nearly pressed up against me, eyes glazed and fixed firmly on Vlad. I looked back at him, saw the sly smile creep across his lips.

“Well, hello,” he said over my shoulder.

The girl’s grip on my arm tightened and I stared at her fingers in awe. “Who are you?”

She ignored me. “I—I want to be with you,” she said to Vlad, her voice breathy.

Vlad raised an interested eyebrow.

“I know what you are. I understand you,” she continued, seeming to muster courage from her ever-tightening grip on my arm. I shrugged her away a second time and she simply pushed past me and went directly to Vlad.

“I get you.”

The smile disappeared from Vlad’s lips. “You get me?”

“I know you don’t want to be this way.”

“Oh, here we go,” I muttered.

“We can be together. I want to help you.” The girl yanked up her sleeve, exposing the fleshy part of her arm, pink with youth and baby fat. “I want to be a donor.”

I watched Vlad’s nostrils flare. “Then go to Red Cross.” He hitched up his sign and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Later, Soph.”

I grabbed his shoulder. “Have you seen Nina?”

Vlad shrugged. “Not since last night.”

I felt the grip of fear starting at the pit of my stomach. “She’s missing.”

“What do you mean, missing?”

I leaned closer, turning Vlad from the group of glamoured teens who were trying to inch their way toward the other VERMers. “Ophelia. Ophelia has kidnapped her.”

The teenage angst/smugness dropped from Vlad’s face all at once. Fear shot through his eyes and his expression was soft, a momentary glimpse into what he may have looked like, pre-fang. He dropped his protest sign and gripped my arm, pulling him along with me.

“Where’s the angel?”

Vlad and I piled into Alex’s car and Alex pushed the gas pedal to the ground. We hit thirty-five before being cut off by a trolley stuffed with grinning wedding guests, their cheeks ruddy with champagne and the cold grey air.

“I hate this town,” Vlad muttered.

“We need to get Sophie somewhere where Ophelia can’t get into her head. Loud noises, lots of action—it’ll confuse her.”

Vlad climbed over the center console and turned down the blaring radio. “Is that why you’re broadcasting the soccer game?”

“It’s called football,” Alex and I said in unison.

“Do we have any idea where we’re going?”

“I know a place,” Alex said, expertly weaving through traffic. He skidded into a parking spot and I gripped the car door to save myself from sliding across the seat.

“Parking karma,” he said with a shrug when I gaped at him. “Are you coming?”

I slammed the car door shut and looked up, the flashing lights from the two-hundred-foot-tall sign glaring down at me. The yellow chaser lights spelled out BIG AL’S, the words platforming an enormous, angry-looking mobster in a pinstriped suit carrying a tommy gun.

Vlad snorted—although whether it was a snort of disgust or humor I couldn’t tell.

“Really?” I snarled at Alex. “Really? This is the only place in the entire city that you could think of that would offer distraction?”

Big Al’s was an adult superstore, housing all manner of sexual vices and advertising each one in bold, multicolored neon lights. The lights pulsed to the sound of a thrumming bass coming from somewhere inside, and the sidewalks were littered with throngs of people zigzagging their way through sidewalk displays of half-naked women arching wantonly on glossy poster board. Interspersed were big, angry-looking men with crossed arms who guarded darkened doorways, and the occasional few who danced around out front, slapping fliers in the hands of unsuspecting passersby and yelling things like “Ladies always free!” and “You fellas like to dance, don’tcha?”

“Just come on,” Alex said, threading his arm through mine.

To my relief, we passed Big Al’s and its gaudy assortment of neon-colored paraphernalia. I yanked on Vlad’s arm, dragging him behind me as he started to slow down, his dark eyes going big and wide at the splashy photography. He may have been of age—way, way of age—but to me he was still my best friend’s sixteen-year-old nephew and I was in charge.

“Stop staring,” I muttered to him, pulling him along.

Alex dodged the ladies who pranced around us in garter belts and plastic heels and I did my best to keep up with him, growling, “This is not going to help.” I stepped around a weaving crowd of beer-soaked bachelors. “How do you expect this to help? My best friend has been kidnapped! She could be dying and we’re here at”—I paused, looked up—“The Roaring Twenties?”

The Roaring Twenties was Big Al’s slightly more upscale neighbor—a throwback to a 1920s speakeasy, complete with dancers in period costumes (when they wore costumes) and heavy, carved double doors. The outside walls were lined with sepia-toned prints of the San Francisco of yesteryear, interspersed with the women of Saturday night. Even the doorman—a burley black guy with a bald head and a puffy black mustache—was dressed in authentic-looking 1920s garb.

At The Roaring Twenties, you got some history with your lap dance.

Vlad grinned, his fangs catching the reflection of the blinking lights of Broadway. “I loved the twenties. Pretty girls, lots of neck action.”

I shot him a look and his gleeful smile faded. “Sorry,” he said with a disgusted groan.

I squeezed Alex’s arm and steeled myself. “I’m not going in there. What are you thinking? That Ophelia sold Nina into white slavery and now she’s working as a naked historian?”

“I’m thinking that you should trust me and keep walking.” Our train shimmied through the thickening crowds on the busy streets and my head throbbed with the pulsing lights and the heavy bass that thumped behind the closed doors. My legs were aching from the gradual uphill climb and still stung from the shower of soot and glass at my father’s house.

I just wanted to find Nina. I felt a hopeless lump rising in my chest as Alex grabbed my arm and steered me around a sharp corner, then hustled me through a set of double glass doors. I instinctively clamped my eyes shut and sputtered, “I don’t want to see any naked ladies!”

I was greeted with a wall of silence and the bitter smell of coffee, tinged with the slightest hint of brown sugar. I opened one eye and saw the bakery cases, the round black tables scattered with tea drinkers staring curiously up at me. I glanced around, seeing the flashing lights of Big Al’s in the distance, reflected on the plate-glass windows.

“We’re not at a strip club?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Lawson,” Alex said with a smug shrug.

I felt a flood of embarrassment from hair follicles to toenails. “Oh.” I dropped into a chair. “Can you get me a cannoli then?”

Vlad sat down next to me. “I don’t understand what any of this has to do with finding my aunt.”

Alex ordered a round of cannoli and coffee, then sat down.

“Hopefully, it’s buying us enough time to confuse and annoy Ophelia. It’ll be harder to read Sophie’s mind with everything going on—the crowds, the lights on Broadway—”

Vlad scowled. “Well, if that was working, why are we here?”

Before Alex could answer, the mournful wail of a harmonica cut through the cinnamon-scented air, followed by a smattering of applause and the tuning of a guitar.

“Chaotic enough?”

The hum of quiet conversation raised to a din, punctuated by the clattering of dishes and live music. I looked around nervously, locking eyes with a heavyset man behind the counter. When he bent down to take something out of the dessert case, I nudged Vlad.

“That guy’s staring at me. There’s something about him. Can you get a scent on him?”

Vlad’s nostrils flared and he nonchalantly sniffed at the air, then shrugged. “Not unless he’s a cinnamon scone or a caramel macchiato.”

I rubbed my temples with my fingers. “Okay, we’ve got to find Nina. If you were a raging lunatic with a vampire captive, where would you go?”

“Someplace private,” Vlad suggested.

“Someplace that means a lot to you. That’s why she took you to your dad’s house.”

Vlad’s eyes widened. “You went to Hell?”

“No—Marin. I can’t think with all this distraction.”

Alex put his hand on mine. “We need the distraction. As much as it’s bothering you, it’s worse on her end. We can’t let her know what you’re thinking. So, focus.”

A slim waitress with an apron double-tied around her waist deposited a plate of cannoli in front of us. I took one and chewed absently.

Vlad tapped his finger on the table, the sound adding to the roar. I glared at him and he stopped. “This really isn’t doing us any good,” he said.

Alex’s eyes were intense as he stared me down. “Where would she take Nina that would get to you?”

I polished off the first cannoli and was reaching for my second. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, think. What place means a lot to you? Where do you go a lot?”

“Target. But I doubt she’d hold Nina there. Or Philz Coffee.”

Alex blew out an exasperated sigh. “Someplace that means something to you.”

“Cheap clothing and great coffee do mean something to me.”

Alex glared at me.

I thunked my forehead on the table. “This isn’t working. Look, Alex, I appreciate you bringing me here, but besides the sugar shock and ooginess of walking down Broadway, nothing has changed. Ophelia can’t read my mind because there is nothing in it. I have no idea where she could take Nina that would really get under my skin.”

“Home,” Vlad said simply.

Alex and I both swung our heads to look at him. “What?”

“She got you out of the house, right? And she kidnapped your best friend. She’s aiming at things that are close to you.”

Alex picked a lone chocolate chip off the plate. “Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.”

“She takes up space in your head and it drives you crazy. Doesn’t it make sense that she’d try to invade your home, too?”

Alex and I shared eyebrow shrugs. “He makes a good point,” I said. I felt a mild flush of panic. “She could have been there the whole time, but just made us think that she wasn’t.”

“All right.” Alex pulled his keys out of his pocket and we stood up. Just before we left the table I snagged the remaining cannoli and mashed it in my mouth.

What? It’s not like it was a donut.

We were waiting to pull out into the slow traffic on Broadway. Alex had one hand loosely draped on the steering wheel, was using the other to stroke the soft stubble on his chin. “Does your building have security cameras?”

“Yeah, and they work, too. But Nina won’t show up on film.”

Alex bit his lip. “That’s right. Neither would Ophelia.”

“Really? I didn’t know that about fallen angels,” Vlad said from the backseat.

“Yeah.” Alex looked at his arm, made a fist, and then let it go. “Technically, we’re not corporeal.”

And yet I had felt his corporeal.