Under Suspicion

Chapter Nineteen

I heard her before I saw her. The unmistakable pounding of Jimmy Choo stilettos backed by 102 pounds of pissed-off vampire was thundering up the three flights of stairs toward the apartment. The front door flew open; and although I knew it was coming, I jumped, my skin immediately feeling too tight for my body.

“Nina?” I asked.

If the flames of Hell were to live in a woman, Nina would be that woman. Her coal black eyes had a glossy, smoky sheen to them; her lips were pursed tightly, the corners pulling down, and her hands were clutching what remained of a photocopy of a typed business letter.

“Can you believe this?” She shook the letter over her head. “I’m incensed. I’m going to file a UDA-V injunction, then suck the crap out of Lilia Hagen Literary Management.”

“Something wrong, hon?” I asked, trying on sweetness and light.

Nina’s nostrils flared. “Is something wrong? Yes, Sophie, something is very wrong. Listen to this.” Nina whipped the letter back in front of her; electricity shot through the room. “‘Dear Author.’” She slapped the paper against her thigh. “Can you believe that? ‘Dear Author’? Don’t they know who I am?”

I knew better than to answer one of Nina’s rhetorical questions (and yes, I found out the hard, pointy-toothed way), so I knitted my brows and worked up the best indignant/disgusted look I could muster. “I can’t believe that!”

“Oh,” Nina spat, “it gets better. ‘Thank you for your manuscript submission. However, I didn’t feel compelled enough to keep turning the pages.’”

Nina gaped at me, eyes glittering, saliva at the corners of her mouth. “I am going to compel that woman to kiss my cold, dead ass!”

I pried the letter from Nina’s hand before she threw herself on the couch in a diva move that would make Streisand envious. “Well, look, Neens. She says that another agent might feel different and she wishes you the best of luck. That’s nice, right?”

“Nice? Nice? I practically opened a vein for that woman and she thinks another agent might feel different?”

“With all due respect you don’t”—I pointed to my wrist, then thought better of it—“You know what? You’re right. Who is this Lilia Hagen, anyway? What does she know?” I went to tear the offending missive down the middle, but Nina sprang up, eyes wide, cold fingers snatching the letter from mine.

“Lilia Hagen is a legend! She’s a genius. If she doesn’t think I have talent, then maybe it’s over for me.” Nina sank to her knees on the high-pile carpet. “Maybe I’m just no good!” I watched my best friend slump over and draw her knees to her chest, cradling her legs and whimpering. ChaCha trotted over and gave her a precursory sniff, then went on to her dog bowl.

“Wanna get a bite?”

Nina rolled over and blinked up at me, her lips spliting into a smile. “Oh, Soph. You always know the right thing to say. I’ll drive.”

It didn’t take us too long to find a restaurant in North Beach that served homemade gnocchi and had a cache of blood donor waiters—mainly because there is only one restaurant in North Beach with homemade gnocchi and blood donor waiters. I noshed my way through the bread basket while Nina scanned the waiters passing by, deciding whom to order. She frowned, pulling on her bottom lip.

“I can’t decide what I want,” she groaned as a particularly anemic-looking blond strode by. “Why didn’t you tell me this was going to be so hard?”

“Ordering lunch? You usually go for that meaty guy, Toby.”

“Not eating lunch! And yes, Toby sounds good. I mean with my career!”

“At UDA?”

Nina’s eyes rolled back like slot machines. “No! My writing career!”

“Oh?” I popped another piece of bread in my mouth. “That.”

I learned early on to keep my nose out of Nina’s extracurricular activities—except for the one time she decided she had a real future in toddler beauty pageant coaching. Then I had to bail her out of jail and explain why a grown woman trolling elementary schools for “Auntie Nina’s Perfect Princesses” was a very bad idea.

I was pushing around the remaining bites of spaghetti and meatballs, and Nina was polishing off what remained of a bag of Toby, when I put down my fork and took a deep breath. Nina cocked an eyebrow, knitted her hands, and rested her chin.

“I heard you coming in awfully early this morning.” She grinned, her fangs tinted a healthy pink. “Anything you want to tell me?”

It had been close to dawn when Will and I had returned from Bettina’s hotel. Though I know Nina doesn’t sleep, her door was closed and all the lights were out, so I decided against disturbing her—especially since what I needed to tell her was so disturbing to me.

“Alex called.”

Nina’s ears perked. “Ooh, I bet he heard about all this time you’re spending with Will. I bet he’s jealous.”

“He wanted Will and me to go to a hotel.”

“Jealous and kinky!”

“Nina, I went to a hotel where Bettina checked in. She wasn’t there. It was a crime scene.”

Nina stopped. “What do you mean?”

“Bettina ...” I gulped. “Her body wasn’t there. Oh, Nina, it was horrible. There was blood everywhere.”

“What happened?”

I swung my head, pushing my plate away. “It looked like she had been attacked. It looked like someone pushed her into the ground, and there was blood everywhere. She couldn’t have survived it, Neens. There was no way. The person who attacked her must have come back. He must have come back, and now she’s dead.”

Nina looked away; her bottom lashes glistened. “This is real, isn’t it?”

I swallowed hard. “It’s real, and it’s not going away.”

Nina pressed her keys across the table toward me. “Will you take the car home?”

I reached out and squeezed her marble-cold hand. “I can drive you home, Neens.”

She gathered her purse and started to scooch out of the booth. “I need to go see Harley right now.”

I flopped on the couch, blowing out a miserable sigh.

ChaCha, my ever-faithful companion, was snuggled up in her dog bed. She cracked one dark eye open to witness my misery; then flopped around and went back to snoring. I tried to soothe my jangled nerves with a tall glass of ice water and something on KQED—okay, it was a bottle of Yoo-hoo recovered from the back of the fridge and a Real World marathon—but I was still filled with the overwhelming sense of dread. I had sat and watched, frozen, as Nina’s black hair swished across her back when she walked out of the restaurant to go find Harley—a man who wrote off demons for a living.

In print.

And it made him millions.

My breath caught in my throat and I hiccupped chocolate Yoo-hoo. I fumbled through the highbrow reading material we kept stacked on the coffee table—InStyle, US Weekly, a three-month-old Cosmo—until I found what I was looking for.

Nina’s copy of Harley Cavanaugh’s book Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Things That Don’t Exist was on the bottom of the stack. I ran my fingers over the raised letters and groaned when I read the message Harley had inscribed to Nina in his quick, slanted scrawl: To the beautiful woman standing before me—maybe I should reconsider whether angels exist? Truly, Harley.

I gagged so loudly that ChaCha jumped from her bed, yipping.

“Sorry, Cha,” I mumbled, turning the page and settling in for the read.

I paged through Harley’s introduction, where he established himself as one of the foremost debunkers of so-called spooks, haunts, and legends. I yawned when he opened chapter one with a meant-to-be-humorous anecdote about dressing up for Halloween. I was halfway through his description of a drugstore-purchased Dracula costume when I jumped to the index, looking for trigger words.

Is Harley more than just a bigoted blowhard?

I flipped until I found Underworld, The pg 67.

I found the page and scanned. The Underworld is just that—a world under our own.

I snorted. “Way to use a dictionary, Professor Cavanaugh.”

I continued reading.

There are many differing beliefs about this Underworld. Some will argue that it is a parallel universe that encompasses all manner of human evils. Here on Earth (the “upper” world) exists God (or central protector/creator), light, growth, life, and humanity. The Underworld is looked over by Satan and embraces demons, fire, chaos, and death. It is signified by its absence of light.

I thought of the brightly lit UDA hallways, the orderly lines, and the neat stacks of paperwork that were handed over by my smiling (well, for the ones that had lips) UDA regulars. Then I thought of the fires that I’d experienced—my father’s house, my old job—and the chaos that ensued. Both were in Harley’s “upper world.”

The description continued:

The inhabitants of the Underworld are demons with horrible features, faces, and traits, and those not demonic have been banished to this alternate world for being obstinate in their evil. Some well-intentioned humans have slipped into the Underworld via portals, curses, or mistakes, and those poor souls are tortured and fed upon by the demonic population.

I scanned Harley’s reasoning about the fallacy of the Underworld (Earth-core drilling has not encountered Satan’s underworld bachelor pad, for starters) and started to feel a little better, betting that Harley’s book was nothing more than a scientist on a soapbox, until I got to the chapter titled “Demon Races.” I sucked in a breath and read over Harley’s vampire mathematics (wildly flawed, as vampires do not “turn” or kill every person on whom they feed) and grimaced at his detailed description of loony bin–ready “vampire slayers.” I tossed the book back on the coffee table, but it thunked on the ground, instead. It fell open to a handful of colored pages right in the center. The book fell open on a page entitled simply “Weaponry.” And under that, “A cataloging of actual tools used in the hunt and eradication of demon races.”

There was an ornately carved wooden stake (vampires), a clefted silver knife (Kishi demons), silver bullets (werewolves).

A long, thick club.

Banshees.

My heard thudded in my chest.

Bettina.

I kicked aside Harley’s book and beelined for the kitchen, tearing through our newspaper recycling stack. I found last week’s Chronicle, with a big, torn hole in the “Books” section, and groaned.

“She’s going to go see him.” I sucked in a terrified breath. “She’s going to see him and he’s going to figure out what she is.” I crumpled the paper and yanked the door to Nina’s bedroom open, then sighed.

To call Nina’s bedroom a “bedroom” is a radical misnomer, but I could never get used to saying I share a one-bedroom, one-showroom apartment. Having no use for a bed (being a nonsleeping vampire) and needing a ridiculous amount of closet space (being a fashion-whoring vampire), she had expertly turned the entire room into the kind of walk-in closet that would make any fashionista worth her Jimmy Choos weak in the knees. Every item of clothing—from Old Navy today to 1800 antique—was cataloged, grouped by decade, and kept in pristine condition.

And then there were the shoes.

Nina was obsessed with the evolution of shoes and maintained that her affair—and nauseating procurement of shoes—was nothing less than an anthropological, sociological study. She kept a scant collection of greased Victorian boots and bootlets with their delicate buttons from ankle to toe; there was a selection of saddle shoes and Sandra Dee cotton candy-colored pumps, which bled to an earthy collection of shaggy boots and love-beaded sandals (two pairs complete with Woodstock mud). Then came the chunky platforms, the 1980s color blocked pointy numbers, the 1990s fashion flats, and finally a selection of sky-high stilettos, peep-toe booties, and sexy strappy numbers emblazoned with names like Manolo and Louboutin. Her shoe collection alone was worth more than my car and made my current selection—a pair of shaggy Payless Shoe Source slippers in a leopard print—seem that much less exotic or cute.

It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. The torn-out article emblazoned with Harley’s smug, smiling face was pinned to Nina’s wall. I groaned, and my stomach churned as I thought about poor, battered Bettina, Sergio, and Mrs. Henderson—somewhere. Mrs. Henderson was one of the most annoying clients I’d ever met, but I certainly didn’t want her—I gulped—dead.

I grabbed my cell phone and speed dialed Nina, shifting my weight from foot to foot and muttering, “Come on, Neens, come on... .” When the last ring bled into Nina’s voice mail—her gleeful, recorded voice telling me to leave a message—I felt the lump form in my throat. I choked out, “Neens, it’s me. Call me right away.” I paused, then added, “Love you” before hanging up.

I traded in my slippers for boots, shrugged into my coat, snatched up my shoulder bag, and charged into the hallway, where I stopped dead, frowning.

It was the middle of the night and that meant that Nina was at Poe’s.

The vampire coffehouse.

Though I spent forty hours a week surrounded by all manner of the undead, being the only breather in a vampire haven wasn’t exactly tops on my bucket list. I bit my lip and then dialed Alex, squeezing my eyes shut when his voice mail clicked on, sternly telling me to leave a message or dial 911 if this was an actual emergency.

I considered it.

Then I rushed across the hall and sucked in a deep breath before hammering on Will’s door. He was a breather, but still ... two breathers in a vampire bar were better than one, right?

When he didn’t answer, I felt the sting of tears burning my eyes. My best friend could be in serious danger, and everyone I knew—and everyone I knew who owned weapons—was out.

They’d better be planning a surprise party for me.

It was a quick drive to Poe’s, which was tucked between an empty storefront and a Chinese herb shop at the beach end of Clement Street. I had never actually been there before. When I stood out front, I realized the dreary, hand-painted Poe’s sign—complete with a beady-eyed raven—did little to quell my angst.

Ditto with the blacked-out windows.

I paced for a few minutes and left pleading voice mails on everyone’s phones for a second time—something between “I really need your help” and “If I die at the fangs of a rogue vampire tonight, it’ll be on your shoulders.” (Rogue being UDA speak for a nonadherent client.)

Then I called the only other person I could think of... .

“Sophie was right to call Steve,” Steve said with an authoritative pat of my hand while I desperately tried to breathe through my mouth.

Trolls in general—and Steve, in particular—have a very distinctive smell. It’s distinctly horrible. Like an unholy combination of sewer rot and ripe blue cheese. And although Steve was the last person on my call list—and generally the first on my “stay far, far away from” list, I did have a soft spot for the little moldy man ever since he had been instrumental in saving my life. Besides, being a troll, he would give me some badly needed Underworld cred and we should fit right in.

But that didn’t mean I enjoyed hanging out with him. “Now,” Steve started, “Steve thinks Sophie should pretend to be Steve’s love monkey.”

I gave Steve an unamused once-over, which he ignored, threading his graying arm through mine, his lichen-covered knuckles closing over my fingers. I caught our reflection in the blacked-out glass: me, stylishly disheveled in skinny jeans, UGG boots, and a herringbone hooded jacket; Steve, dressed in his trademark velour track suit, dripping with enough gold chains to give Mr. T a run for his money. His stubby troll arms wrapped around my right thigh; his flat, stone gray eyes looked up at me lovingly while his pointed tongue slid over his snaggled yellow teeth lasciviously.

Oh boy, we wouldn’t stand out at all.