Frankly, it was a miracle he could concentrate well enough to ghost out. Then again, saving Erika’s life was one fuck of a motivator.
When he re-formed, it was downtown, and as he checked the address he was looking for on his phone, a pedestrian walked right into him. Rearing back, he went for one of his daggers—
“Oh, sorry, mate,” the guy said in a British accent. “Wasn’t watching where I was going.”
The human held up his own phone by way of explanation, and then went back to texting and walking.
“Fuck,” Balz muttered as he looked down at his shitkickers.
In all his distraction, he’d re-formed in the middle of the sidewalk, no more than six feet away from a streetlight. So, yeah, if Mr. Downton Abbey had been paying attention, the poor bastard would have gotten one helluva hi-how’re-ya.
“Fucking concentrate.”
It was a multi-f-bomb kind of night.
The block he was on was two down from where he’d intended to be, so he got his hoof-it on, striding over the concrete pavers, kicking a crumpled McDonald’s bag out of his way, checking behind himself. Across the street. And in the dark windows of the rundown shops he was going by.
Not a great part of town, he thought. But when he’d Googled what he’d been looking for, this was the only one that came up.
The Bloody Bookshoppe, 8999 Trade Street.
There’d been a telephone number, but all he’d cared about were the hours of operation. Eight p.m. close was a winner for him.
And check it, they were keeping their promise to their customers. As he came up to the tiny storefront, light the color of a urine sample glowed in windows that were so dirty, it was like they had privacy curtains drawn. The door was inset and structural soundness was the only thing it had going in its favor, the dark paint thick and cracked, its chicken wire window hanging by a thread in its glazing.
When he gripped the knob, he wasn’t surprised something registered as sticky, and he thought of Syphon. His cousin hated sticky anything, unless it involved cinnamon rolls—which he refused to put into his body temple now that he was a food martyr.
As a corollary, his least favorite word was “moist.”
Pushing his way inside, Balz wiped his hand on the ass of his leathers as a little bell tinkled overhead. The smell was dust, mothballs, and atomized age, and talk about hoarding tendencies. The place was crammed with overstuffed, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, little handwritten tabs Scotch-taped to each shelf, the printing so wobbly, there was no telling what the labels said. A quick look around, and it was clear there was no rational plan to the aisles, to any of it, really, the layout obviously an iterative kind of thing, grown over time as the owner had continued buying, but not kept up with the selling side of the business.
“Welcome,” said an elderly voice from the back. “Come on in.”
And you don’t even know that you’re talking to Dracula, Balz said to himself.
It was always funny when humans tripped over their own fake mythology about vampires.
Moving in between the stacks, Balz had to turn sideways to accommodate his shoulders, and under the treads of his shitkickers, the floorboards creaked like there were no joists or supports under them. As his nose tickled, he sucked back a sneeze. After the amount of cocaine he’d done during the day, his septum couldn’t take any more deviation without blowing apart like a Christmas popper.
He was going to need a different upper, but that was a problem he had at least ten hours left to solve.
First things first.
As he rounded a particularly wide shelf that housed a matched set of black-and-gold volumes that seemed to number in the hundreds, he—
Froze.
Blinked a couple of times.
Couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
Against all reason and probability, it appeared as if Detective Erika Saunders of the Caldwell Police Department was standing at the check-out counter of the bookstore, talking to a man who was old enough to be considered a fossil. She was focused on the shop owner, but Balz would recognize that profile anywhere—and now she was turning her head to him.
As they locked eyes, she paled. Then she put her hand out to steady herself, patting around a pile of books on the counter, looking for purchase—and not the cash-in-exchange kind. She seemed like she was going to have another seizure.
On the far side of the old-fashioned cash register, the elderly man tilted his head, his loose skin shifting to one side as his features found a new equilibrium.
“Oh, you are friends, I see,” he murmured in that quavering voice. “How nice.”