Sara, being the latter, was not as impressed with our surroundings.
She gestured at the bags, and I soon had a frown that matched hers. They were both open.
No wonder the chauffeur had urged us to leave our bags. Perhaps Royce had underplayed just how strained his relationship with Clyde truly was. The master vampire of Los Angeles might have thought well enough of our skills to offer me and Sara a job, but he obviously didn’t think we were totally above board.
Funny, considering I thought the same of him.
We knelt by our stuff, checking for anything missing. The phone was gone. My Rolodex wasn’t missing anything, but I had no doubt somebody had gone through it. Nothing much important was in my bag—clothes, mostly—but the thought that someone had been poking around my underwear and had taken the phone was enough to send my blood pressure spiking through the roof.
If Clyde wanted to play hardball, fine. We’d play hardball.
“You have the detectors?”
“Yeah, one sec.” She dug around in her purse, pulling out two small, black boxes. They bore a resemblance to a walkie-talkie, but they both had a red-tinted lens near the top. She tossed one to me. “You get the wireless, I use the lens finder?”
“Sure.”
She did a slow turn, studying the decorations and artwork hanging on the walls, peering through the lens.
She found what we were looking for first. “Camera’s over here,” she said, pointing to a vase sitting on the mantel in the room beyond the entrance. No doubt the camera had a decent view of anyone who might enter or leave. Sara had something similar in her house, and I’d helped install one just like it in her sister’s apartment a couple of years ago.
We both moved closer to check if it was a make we were familiar with. Judging by the way the pinpoint gleam of the lens matched the dull shine of the rest of the series of small, dark stones circling the base of the vase, whoever had made the piece knew what he or she was doing. Not well enough to hide it from someone who made a point of supplementing her income by selling similar gadgets on a regular basis and knew enough to carry a bug detector at all times, but it was a clever touch if you were a paranoid master vampire who wanted to keep tabs on unexpected—and unsuspecting—guests.
“Do you think the bedrooms are bugged?”
Sara shrugged. “Wouldn’t put it past him. I doubt he expects us to do anything stupid while we’re here, but we might as well play it safe. Check around before you shower or change your clothes.”
We wandered around, exploring our new temporary home, getting a feel for the place. Most of the lights were already on, and we discovered the place had a full kitchen, fully stocked wet bar in the living room, a small sauna and exercise room, half a dozen bedrooms, and a sizeable dining room with an impressive set of china on display. Like the entrance, the rest of the place was full of delicate, gold-trimmed, expensive things—and a number of additional cameras that were hidden nearly as well as the one aimed at the front door. Even the matching furniture appeared to be more for display than comfort. The one personal touch was provided by enormous vases of gardenias, their scent overpowering every room.
Sara chose one of the bedrooms that looked out over the garden and walkway leading up to the main house. I took the one across the hall from her, preferring the view of untamed hillside and a sliver of the ocean beyond. The hills might have been dry and dead, but it felt more natural than the man-made wonderland out front and suited my dark mood.
Sweeping the room for bugs turned out to be a damned good idea. I found no less than three in the bedroom and another one in the tissue box on the vanity in the bathroom. Finding them was a pain in the ass, but disabling them took no time at all, as they were wireless; all I had to do was toss a cloth over the lens or turn them toward the wall. The alarm clock beside the bed had an SD card. Popping it out and flushing it down the john wasn’t totally necessary, but it still made me feel better.
After we dragged our bags into our respective rooms, Sara sat down next to me where I had exhaustedly slumped onto a bed. I wasn’t sure if it was the travel catching up with me or how draining it was to realize just how deep a hole I was currently in. Across the country from all I had ever known and loved, under surveillance by our host, and stuck doing a job that would no doubt get us in even deeper trouble than we were already in. The only bright side was that I was sharing this impromptu adventure with the only person I had ever been able to count on. Sadly, she was probably ready to throttle me. When I glanced over at her, she was looking down at her folded hands, not at me.
“Sara,” I said, then hesitated. What to say to her?
She darted a look at me, then back down to her hands. One slid up to twine a few blond strands around her fingers. “The business is probably in default by now. I haven’t been able to reach Jenny, but our rent should still be paid. I asked Janine to take care of it while I’m gone.”
Damn it. Sara must have contacted Janine directly after she had hung up with Arnold. I’d forgotten to make that call. Running a hand down my face, I mumbled against my palm. “Cripes. I really am sorry. For everything. This is all my fault. It’s like I fuck up everything I touch.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. It’s my fault Others became interested in the business, and in you, and my fault H&W is as good as gone. My fault we’re across the country as guests to some strange vampire. My fault my dad disowned me.”
“Hey,” she said, her voice sharp enough to draw my wide-eyed gaze over to hers. “Don’t start that. He loves you, and I’m sure he didn’t mean whatever he said. We’ll get through this. We always do. If things get too weird here, you know Janine has some property she bought out here. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I borrowed the beach house.”
Beach house. I’d forgotten about Janine’s home-away-from-home in Malibu. Sara and I had spent a week “borrowing” the house for a vacation getaway a few years ago. We spent most of the time sipping margaritas on the deck and watching dolphins pass in the waves as the sun tinted the surf unreal shades of red and orange. That didn’t sound like such a bad time to revisit.
“What happened with Rob, anyway? What did he say to you?”
I cringed and looked away, not wanting to face the concern etched in the fine lines around her cornflower blue eyes. Though I was no longer as torn up over it as I had been at first, it still hurt to think about. “Dad was pissed because he saw the article that said I might have been infected. That’s how he found out I was contracted to Royce. I had never told Mom or Dad. He didn’t know. Didn’t even suspect. Said I wasn’t a Waynest anymore, and that I should never come home again. I should have said something—”
“Oh, stop. There’s nothing you could have said that would have made it okay. Just give him a little time. I’m sure he’ll get over it.”
I gave her a look.
“Okay, maybe not over it, per se, but he’ll learn to live with it.”
That prompted a humorless smirk out of me. “Yeah, I suppose. He can’t stay mad forever, right?”
She scooted over to put an arm around me in a hug. Though the memory of my father’s voice, thick with the cigarettes and whiskey he never touched save for when he was stressed, replayed over and over in the back of my head, I didn’t feel like reaching for my guns and hunting Chaz to the ends of the earth anymore. All I felt now was that I was getting far too old for this shit.
Sara’s fingers tightened briefly on my shoulder. “We’ll handle this somehow. We’ll find a way to make it right. H&W isn’t gone, it’s just on hiatus. Until then, stop it. Don’t worry about what you can’t change. By the time we get back, he should have cooled off.”