Page 13 of Nexus
“Back to Lord Gilden’s building.”
“Do you have a coffin in the basement?” I joked.
“The building has residential apartments as well as offices. As one of Lord Gilden’s most trusted employees, I live in close proximity to him.”
“Drake lives in that silver tower?” I asked in surprise.
“His apartment takes up the top floor.”
“Of course he has a penthouse,” I said in complete lack of surprise. “Have you been inside it? What does it look like? Is everything made of gold?”
From the way his eyebrows pinched together, he found my barrage of questions to be annoying. “Few are invited into Lord Gilden’s private dwelling place. I have no idea what it looks like, or how it’s been furnished.”
“I’m sticking with my gold theme,” I said, trying to picture an apartment filled with lavish stuff and failing miserably. I didn’t have much experience with luxury. Drake’s office was the swankiest room I’d ever seen in my life.
Ruen subsided into silence again, so I sang along to the radio. Crossing his arms, he resolutely ignored my terrible voice, keeping his face stony and devoid of expression. I could tell being partnered with him was going to be a barrel of laughs.
“I have a question,” I said when we were a few blocks away from our destination. Ruen tilted his head towards me fractionally. “Why did your boss use the Den of Iniquity to have a fancy party rather than holding it in his tower?”
“The Den is one of many properties that belong to our employer,” he advised me, emphasizing ‘our’ to remind me the dragon was my boss as well now. “He prefers to keep his social and business lives apart.”
“Yeah, but there has to be nicer places to hold a party than a nightclub,” I argued. “Everyone at that party looked rich and snobby. It seems like a bit of an insult to host it at a nightclub.”
“The Den has a private back entrance where the guests can enter without being seen by humans,” he said as I pulled up out front of the silver tower. “Most of our kind prefer to keep a low profile.” He scanned my hair, bright tattoos and sexy outfit, as if I was the antithesis of his idea of keeping a low profile.
“What can I say? I like to stand out,” I said with a smirk. It wasn’t like I could blend in with humans considering my height, hair and eye coloring anyway. “What happens now?” I asked when he put his hand on the doorhandle. “Who’ll be giving us our jobs?”
“We’ll discuss everything tomorrow night when I pick you up,” he replied, then flashed away before I could ask him any further questions.
“Damned vampire speed,” I muttered as my hair fluttered around my face from the force of him slamming the door shut. I texted mom that I was on my way home and asked her to have coffee ready for me. It would take a while to fill her in on my exploits. I took off, ignoring the security guard’s smirk at my brightly colored, horribly dented car. It stood out just as much as I did, which was kind of fitting, I guessed.
Chapter Eleven
NOW THAT THE ACTION was over, I was feeling a bit tired by the time I parked in front of our bungalow. My adrenalin rush could only last so long and I always felt wrung out after a hunt. Coffee and a meal would perk me up again. Mom had both waiting for me when I joined her in the dining room.
“Park your butt and tell me everything,” she ordered.
I sat down and scarfed down the sandwiches she’d made, while drinking coffee and filling her in. “You told me dragon shifters were dangerous, but I didn’t know they were that powerful,” I finished up after telling her about the smoke that had wafted from Lord Gilden’s nostrils when he’d paid me my due. She’d viewed the photos I’d taken of the vampires’ ash piles before handing my phone back to me.
“I’d had my suspicions that a weredragon was in charge of Nexus,” she said. “It was all hush-hush back in my day, but I guess things have changed since I retired. Everyone seems to know this Drake Gilden guy is the boss now.”
“You’ve really never heard of him before?”
She shook her head, chewing the last bite of her sandwich, then washed it down with the dregs of her second mug of coffee. “Bounty hunters like me didn’t exactly mix with the elite back then. We did our jobs, got paid by our boss and did our best to keep the rogues under control.”
“Lenny says hi, by the way,” I told her. “He remembers you fondly.”
“Good old Lenny,” she said with a grin. “I miss him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was a zombie?”
“Didn’t I?” she asked in surprise. “I suppose I got so used to him that I stopped thinking of him as the living dead.”
“He’s missing an ear, a couple of fingers and he has a milky eye,” I reminded her. “If you looked up zombie in the dictionary, his picture would be beside it.”
“Does he still wear ugly shirts?” she asked when we stopped snickering.
“The one he was wearing tonight was pretty horrible,” I confirmed.