“Hey,” I yelled through the music. “You all right?”
He nodded once, and then twitched his chin up at the highest platform in the building, on the far side of the dance floor. “Up there.”
I nodded, and Thomas took the lead. We negotiated the maze of catwalks and stairs. They had been purposefully designed to be just barely too narrow for two people to pass one another without touching, as I found out when Thomas and I passed a girl in leather shorts and a bustier, both of which strained to match themselves to a body whose curves were made ripe and inviting by the red light’s primitive rhythm. She slid by Thomas, her eyes locked on his chest, as if she was about to lean over and bite him.
He ignored her, but then the girl reached me—and I take up more room than Thomas. I felt her hip brush me, and she arched her back as I stepped past her, turned sideways. Her breasts pressed against my sternum, pliant, resilient warmth, and her lips were parted, her eyes too bright. Her hand brushed over my thigh, a touch that could have been accidental but wasn’t, and my body was suddenly demanding that I stop for a moment and see where this would lead.
You can’t trust your body when it tells you stuff like that. It doesn’t understand about things like actual affection, interaction, pregnancy, STDs. It just wants. I tried not to pay any attention to it—but there were other people on the catwalks, and evidently there was no such thing as a less than gorgeous woman inside Zero’s walls. Most of them seemed perfectly happy to make sure I knew it as they went by.
So did some of the men, for that matter, but that was less of an issue, as far as my focus went.
It probably didn’t help matters that we were walking by things that I hadn’t ever seen before, not even in movies. There was this one girl doing a thing with her tongue and an ice cube that—
Look, just trust me on this one. It was distracting as hell.
Thomas was walking faster as we approached the stairway leading up to the highest platform, and he took the last steps three at a time. I followed along behind him, scanning around me steadily, trying to be on the lookout for potential bad guys. This had the side effect of me getting to ogle more pretty girls than I’d ever seen in one place at one time. But it was professional ogling. One of them could have been concealing—
Well, actually, I was sort of shocked at what one of them was concealing.
I made it up the last stairway just in time to see Thomas throw himself into a woman’s arms.
Justine wasn’t particularly tall, for a girl, or at least she hadn’t been before she’d put on the boots with the five-inch heels. She looked like I remembered her last—a gorgeous face that still fell into the girl-next-door category, with a heart-melting smile. Her hair was silver-white, and was being held in a tight bun up high on the back of her head with a pair of white chopsticks.
Of course, the last time I’d seen her, she hadn’t been dressed in a formfitting white rubber cat suit that included gloves over her fingers. It emphasized absolutely everything and did it well.
Thomas fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her to him. She twined her rubber-covered arms around his neck and clung tightly. Both of them closed their eyes, and just stood there for a long minute, embracing without moving, just holding each other close.
It was an alien act in that place.
I turned away, leaned on the platform’s safety railing, and stared down at the club, trying to give my brother and the woman he loved a moment of privacy. Justine hadn’t worn the cover-everything suit for the sake of fashion. The touch of honest love, real and selfless love, was anathema to the White Court. Thomas had told me about White Court vampires who had been badly burned by the touch of some wedding rings, or the brush of a sweetheart’s rose. But most dangerous of all to them was the touch of someone who was loved and who loved in return.
I’d seen Thomas give himself a second-degree burn on his lips and mouth the last time he’d kissed Justine.
They hadn’t been together since the night she had laid down her life to save his, offering herself up to his hunger so that he could survive the evening. Thomas, in turn, had refused to devour her, denying his own darker nature. It had nearly killed her anyway, turning her hair white literally overnight. It had taken her years to recover her mind, after a long-term addiction to being fed upon by an incubus, but she’d done it. She was currently an assistant to Thomas’s older sister, Lara, and positioned to find out all kinds of juicy details about the White Court. Being protected by love meant that the vamps couldn’t feed on Justine, which Lara thought ideal in a personal assistant.
It also meant that my brother couldn’t touch the woman he loved. If he’d been like most of the White Court, only interested in feeding his hunger, he’d have been able to have her all he wanted. Instead . . .
Sometimes irony is a lot like a big old kick in the balls.
I stared down at the dance floor for a while, not so much ogling as simply taking in the light and motion as a whole, until I saw them part in my peripheral vision. Then I turned and walked over to join them, as Justine gestured for us to sit on a pair of couches that had been moved to face each other.
Thomas sat down in a corner of the couch, and Justine pressed up close against him, careful to keep what little of her was exposed from touching his skin. I settled down across from them, leaning my elbows forward onto my knees.
I smiled at Justine and nodded to her. The floor and half-wall railing of the platform must have been made from sound-absorbing material. The roar of the club was much reduced up here. “Justine. You look like the Michelin Man’s wet dream.”
She laughed, pink touching her cheeks. “Well. The club has a look we try to maintain. How are you, Harry?”
“Half buzzed on this smoke, and floundering,” I said. “Thomas told me you had some information.”
Justine nodded seriously, and picked up a manila file folder from the couch beside her. “Word is out about a hunt for a renegade Warden,” she said. “There weren’t a lot of details, but I was able to turn up this.”
She slid the folder over to me, and I opened it. The first page was a printout of a Web site of some kind. “What the hell is Craigslist?”
“It’s a site on the Internet,” Justine said. “It’s sort of like a giant classified ads section, only you can get to it from anywhere in the world. People use it to advertise goods they want to buy or sell.”
“Goods,” Thomas put in, “and services. Help wanted, with veiled language for the less-legal things. A lot of shady deals happen there because it’s relatively easy to do so anonymously. Escorts, mercenaries, you name it.”
There was an ad printed on it:
WANTED FOR PERMANENT POSITION,
DONALD MORGAN, 5MIL FINDER’S FEE,
CONSIDERATIONS.
“Hell’s bells,” I cursed quietly.
I passed the page to Thomas. “A wanted poster,” he said.
I nodded. “And not dead or alive, either. They just want him dead.”
Every supernatural hitter on the bloody planet was going to be coming after Morgan. Not so much for the money, probably, as for the favors that the ad promised. They carry a hell of a lot more weight than cash in the world of the weird. The five million was just there to provide scope, a sense of scale for the favors that would come with it.
“Every button man in the world and his brother,” I muttered. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“Why would your people do that?” Justine asked.
“They wouldn’t,” I said.
Thomas frowned. “How do you know?”
“Because the Council solves things in-house,” I said. Which was true. They had their own assassin for jobs like this, when he was needed. I grimaced. “Besides, even if they did put out a hit, they sure as hell wouldn’t use the Internet to do it.”