Брайан Макклеллан - Blood Tally

But that was freed slaves. People whose contracts had been found when OtherOps raided Paronskaft back in the eighties. As far as I could tell, the fact that I was still enslaved made me unique.

And didn’t give me any help with getting free.

I remunerated on this all night, and then I went by Mum’s Hearth and Yard just after opening the next morning. There was only one employee working – a woman in her sixties who identified herself as “Mum” and did not like my questions about either Michael Pavlovich or his girlfriend, Ava. I was met with a curt “Ms. Holmes isn’t in for a couple of days” and a “You leave Mikey alone, he’s a good boy.” She wasn’t the slightest bit impressed by my fake OtherOps jacket, and within a few minutes I found myself back in my truck, watching the entrance to the garden center with no small amount of irritation.

It didn’t help that Maggie found the whole thing hilarious.

I tried a search for an Ava Holmes in the Hinkley area. Nothing came up. I searched for the phone number I’d been given and had the same luck. I fumed for several minutes as I tried to figure out what to do with the brand-new lead I thought I had. Maggie chuckled in the back of my head. Once I’d cooled down, I dashed off an email to a friend of mine who worked for Verizon, asking her to get me an address connected with Ava’s phone number. In return, I got an out-of-office email. I was just about to give up and head home for a couple hours when my phone rang.

“Hey, Alek, it’s Zeke.” Zeke was not a subtle guy, and I could hear in his tone after four words that he was calling to sell me something.

“What is it?” I asked grumpily.

“You having a bad day, big guy? I might have something to cheer you up.” He didn’t wait for me to ask, rushing on with, “You know how you said you’re trying to track down a thrall?”

“Do you have a lead for me?”

“A small one, I think. I’ll hook you up for two hundred dollars.”

“You tell me what it is, and I’ll decide if it’s worth that much,” I retorted. It was the same old song and dance that we both knew well. Who won often depended on if I was getting desperate or if Zeke badly needed money. He must have had a loan shark breathing down his neck, because he took only a few seconds to think about it.

“Okay, okay. Listen to this: Bay Village police department got a quiet tip last night that someone’s been stealing stock from a little local clinic.”

“What, like drugs?” I asked. “That’s not useful.”

“Nope. Blood. Seems that the manager found them two pints short last night. Could be your missing thrall.”

I considered the information. Thralls weren’t exactly like vampires – they didn’t need blood to survive. But being connected to a vampire magically gave them a thirst. Usually their master would grace them with the table scraps, but a thrall on the run wouldn’t have access to those scraps. On the other hand, now that I knew about places like Sip’n’Bite, I wasn’t so sure a thrall would need to steal to survive anyways. I said as much to Zeke.

“Oh, come on. Someone is stealing that blood. Could be your runaway.”

“Or it might be that the manager counted wrong. Have the cops even opened a case, or was this just a tip?”

“Just a tip. These small clinics always try to handle things internally.”

I snorted and was ready to hang up on Zeke when Maggie suggested, He could be avoiding Sip’n’Bites, worried that someone like you is staking them out.

Good point. I guess it’s worth our own stakeout if we’ve got no other leads today. “That,” I told Zeke, “is worth no more than a hundred bucks. If you need it now, I’ll send it over immediately.”

Zeke grumbled a little but agreed. He gave me the address of the clinic. I hung up and sent the payment over digitally, then punched the address into my GPS and started driving. It was in a little strip mall tucked between two hair salons and behind a Walmart. I watched the front for a few minutes, trying to come up with the best course of action. This was a shaky lead at best, but I did have time on my side. For once. “You okay for a stakeout?” I asked Maggie.

I’m game, just park closer.

It wasn’t a big place, so I found a shady spot as close as I could get to the clinic itself. “This work?” I asked Maggie.

Oh yeah, this is perfect. No wards, no magical anything. The place is an open book. I’ll take the first watch. If I get bored, I’ll wake you up.

“Thanks.” I turned up the radio, pulled my hat down over my head, and dozed off to the sound of Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever.”

Stakeouts are by far the most boring part of my job. They are twelve hours of nothing, with as little as a three second window of excitement when you realize it’s all been worth it – and sometimes not even that, when you’ve got the wrong building or are following the wrong guy. Maggie made things infinitely better because she enjoyed people-watching with her jinn senses. We’d play word games, chat about the inanity of life, and sometimes listen to an audiobook.

The day crawled by slowly. I caught up on sleep, pondered the Kimberly Donavon situation, and spent hours reading genealogy forums. I even had a pleasant little daydream about Olivia Martin, though I doubted I’d ever see her again. I’d just gotten back from grabbing coffee from a local shop when a thought struck me. “Hey. You never told me how you know Sting.”

Maggie didn’t respond immediately. When she did, her tone was more coy than usual. I changed my mind.

“Oh, come on, we made a deal.”

It’s embarrassing!

“I told you a secret about Ada. You tell me a secret about yourself. You back out now and you’re no better than her.”

That was a low blow.

I spread my hands. “I’m waiting.”

What if I tell you something else?

“If that something else is as good as how you know Sting.”

I dated Vlad Dracula.

I almost spit my coffee all over my dashboard. Fortunately, I caught myself, managed to swallow and put the cup down before staring at myself in the rearview mirror. “You did not date Dracula.”

Well. What amounted to dating in those days. More like a torrid love affair, I guess you’d call it. It was a few decades before I got trapped in the ring. A few decades after he became a vampire. Funny enough, I was the cougar in that relationship.

I gagged comically.

Oh, pretend like you wouldn’t shack up with someone as famous as that?

“Famous for impaling his enemies on spikes!”

Vladdie was a very conflicted man. And he saved Wallachia from Ottoman incursion.

I laughed out loud at “Vladdie.” The idea of the most famous of the Vampire Lords falling for the wiles of a desert spirit – who would have been a couple hundred years old at the time – was pretty dang funny. “So what was Vladdie like as a little vampire kid?”

Oh, you know. Humans that gain immortality always go through phases – manic, then stupidly reckless, then mopey, then downright depressed. Then they either figure out how to kill themselves or get a hobby. I met Vladdie in Spain right at the end of his reckless phase. I went back to the Carpathian Mountains with him and watched him enter his mopey phase. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Oh?”

Don’t get me wrong. He was dynamite in the sack. He just started crying a lot near the end. I don’t have the temperament for that.

“And I don’t think I needed to know that Dracula is a good lay.”

Knowing is half the battle.

“I’m not sure you’re using that in the right context, G.I. Jane.”