“No?” He shrugged and resumed his seat, crossing his legs again and clasping his hands in his lap. “So, how did we get to this point, Trish?”
“You’re a dick?” I suggested.
He inclined his head, letting the insult roll off. “I must offer you my apologies again. I should’ve handled things differently. Forgive my . . . enthusiasm.”
“Enthusiasm?” I repeated. “You can shove your enthusiasm up your ass.”
He tsked disapprovingly. “Now, now. Let’s not get belligerent. I merely want to have a friendly chat.”
“Bite me.”
“Oh, but someone else already has,” Ian drawled. At this he leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his eyes widening with eagerness. “How’d he do it?”
I frowned at him. “How did who do what?”
“Dracula,” he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement.
My stomach dropped at warp speed. “What are you talking about?”
Ian chuckled, shaking his head. “You always were a bad liar, Trish, so don’t even try to deny Dracula has been stalking you. We’ve been aware of it for a while.”
No, shit, I thought, remembering the asshole who’d taken photographs of Nicky and me outside Happy Endings.
“So, what if he has?” I replied. “What’s it to you?”
“I’ve got to know how he managed it.” A disturbing light came into his eyes, an eagerness that made me seriously uneasy. “How did he bite you?”
My frown deepened. “Uh . . . fangs?” Ian was a dickhead, but he wasn’t stupid. What the hell was he getting at?
“Obviously,” Ian conceded. “But how? How did he get to you?”
“I don’t know. The same way he gets to everyone.” I shook my head, confused. “Why are you asking this? I’m guessing you know as much as I do about Dracula—probably more, knowing you and those other Agency assholes. So, why don’t we cut the bullshit, Ian, and get to what you’re really after?”
If he had been a Tale, such an opening would’ve resulted in Ian spilling his guts in a grand soliloquy. Tale villains really just can’t help themselves. It’s a compulsion. They have to gloat about their plans, hold it over the heroine’s head, thereby providing valuable time to come up with a way for said heroine to take them down in an exciting climax. I guess it’s true what they say: You can take the Tale out of Make Believe, but you can’t take Make Believe out of the Tale. I just hoped Ian was arrogant enough to fall into the same trap.
Ian’s lips curved into a grin. “You’re right,” he said, nodding. “Why screw around? We’ve known all along that Dracula was attempting to contact Tess Little—”
They did?
“—but it was a bit of a surprise when he switched things up and started contacting you.”
“Yeah, it was to me, too,” I admitted, not seeing any point in denying what Ian already knew. “How’d you find out?”
Ian’s smile grew, reminding me of the grin Nicky often wore when conducting business. But Ian’s wasn’t nearly so charming—and was twice as deadly. Nicky’s smile had a conscience. Ian’s . . . well, he’d proven over and over that he had no inner Jiminy Cricket. “It seems starving a vampire has some unintended consequences. Makes them bat-shit crazy, as it turns out.” He chuckled at his pun. “We were hoping only to control him, keep him weak enough not to try to escape again. We never expected him to spill his guts in those rants of his.”
I stared at Ian, my mind racing. They actually had Dracula in custody? All this time we’d been operating under the assumption that Dracula was roaming free, that the vampires Nicky had taken down were somehow his creations meant to exact revenge against the FMA and create the army of undead he needed to claim the power he so desperately sought. God—how wrong we’d been. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how to play the situation with Ian without letting on that he’d just totally blindsided me. Luckily, for an Ordinary, he was surprisingly forthcoming with the info. Sweet.
“So, how long has Dracula been here?” I asked, keeping my voice even to appear unimpressed with his revelations.
Ian shrugged. “Two years? It was right after the thing with Sebille Fenwick. Happened to catch him off-guard when he was feeding on some whore in an alley. Total fluke. Right place, right time, and all that. Lost two agents trying to take him down, but it was worth it.”
So, they finally had captured themselves a Tale. . . . And not just any Tale—an extremely powerful Tale with the kinds of abilities they’d been dying to carve up and study for decades. I hated to think what they might’ve discovered about our kind in the last couple of years. “When did you realize he was trying to contact someone on the outside?”
“Soon after he turned the first person,” Ian admitted. “It only took a few weeks to starve him into submission. Unfortunately, he was so ravenous when we finally fed him that he drained dry the first woman we gave him, so we sent in another one. He didn’t kill her, but drained her enough that she was near death. And then he gave her his blood before we could stop him.”
Holy shit. So he had been behind the vamps. . . .
“What happened to her?”
“She was useful. For a while, anyway. But being a one-off, she wasn’t as easy to control. We had . . . issues. And that bastard the Spider ended up taking her out before we could bring her back in. Did us a favor, really. But the rest of the ones he killed? Well, we didn’t appreciate that so much.”
“A one-off?” I repeated. “What do you mean by that?”
“They were human—well, Ordinaries, to you,” Ian explained, brushing the leg of his trousers as if he was bored out of his mind. “Our attempts to make Dracula turn a Tale were . . . unsuccessful.”
I blinked at him in dismay. “How many?” I demanded, my throat tight. “How many Tales have you killed in this twisted little experiment of yours?”
Ian tilted his eyes up to the ceiling, mulling over my question. “Oh, perhaps a dozen? Maybe more.” He chuckled. “I really can’t say. We had to dump the bodies quickly before Nate Grimm showed up to collect them. But don’t worry—for the most part, the Tales we chose were nobodies, nameless characters from literature, generalizations and archetypes from mythology. I doubt their deaths even made the Tale newspaper.”
“They were still people, you son of a bitch!” I hurled at him, advancing a few angry steps, my fists balled up at my sides to keep from beating the arrogant indifference off his face.
But if Ian was intimidated, he didn’t let on. “We’re supposed to be having a civilized conversation, remember?” he smirked. “Don’t make me resort to more aggressive methods.” When I frowned at him, not understanding, he motioned to the sprinkler system. “Holy water. We’ve found it works quite well when our vamps get out of hand. I’d hate to have to give you a little demonstration.”
I almost laughed at the absurdity of his threat, but then I realized he wasn’t joking. He actually thought that I was a vampire. That must’ve been why he was so wary at the crash site and why he kept his distance now. I certainly couldn’t explain what had happened after the accident, how I’d been briefly endowed with superhuman strength, but I sure as hell wasn’t a vampire. But, hey, if the rep gave me an edge, I’d roll with it.
I glanced at the ceiling, trying to appear worried. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“You always were a bright girl,” Ian drawled. “I almost regret the way things turned out between us, Trish.”
“Yeah, well,” I drawled, “guess you’ll just have to live with the disappointment.”
“Not for much longer,” he assured me. At this he rose from his chair and strolled toward me. “I’m tired of dicking around, Trish,” he snapped, walking a slow circle around me, his leisurely pace a direct contradiction to his dangerous tone. “So, let’s try this again. How the hell did Dracula turn you from here in his cell? And when? Ordinaries turn within minutes—is it different with the Tales? Your abilities don’t seem to be fully functional yet.”