Page 10 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)
A nd that’s how I ended up with beer spilled all down the front of my favorite Waylon Jennings shirt, staggering around the edges of the dance floor in a club playing music I’d never heard of, hoping a rat would try to pick my pocket. I love my fiancée, but sometimes I hate her “brilliant” ideas.
I stuck to the edges of the dance floor, shuffling along like the sad old man at the club, bumping up on the odd attractive man or woman.
I didn’t discriminate, and there were a lot of pretty people around, so I managed to annoy at least a dozen in the first hour I was there.
I’d apparently gotten irritating enough that a bouncer came over, tapped me on the shoulder, and invited me to step into the office for a conversation about my behavior.
I demurred, but he insisted, and rather than blow the roof off the club (in a far more literal sense than the sound system was capable of), I let him guide me by the elbow into a dark hallway.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the massive bald man hissed at me once we were off the floor. “The boss doesn’t like surprises, and you seriously surprised him.”
His tone made me think he was way more familiar with me than I was with him, so I dropped my drunk act and looked up at him.
He was nearly seven feet tall and built like the proverbial brick shithouse, but he didn’t seem particularly angry, just annoyed.
“Sorry, pal. I have no fucking clue who you are or who your boss is. So why don’t you just take me to your leader or whatever you were going to do anyway? ”
He gave me a look like I was the stupidest thing he’d seen all night, which was a high bar in a nightclub, and let go of my arm. “Last door on the right. I’m going back to work.” Then he just turned and left me standing there gawking after him.
Not wanting to violate the exceptional amount of trust bestowed upon me, I proceeded down the hall. Okay, yeah, I was really fucking curious now, so I went to the door he indicated and knocked.
“Enter,” came a familiar voice, and I pushed into an office that looked like it was decorated entirely off the set of a Universal monster movie.
And standing in the center of the room was the primo monster himself, my uncle, Count Fucking Dracula.
He turned, because of course he was facing away when I came into the room for greater effect, and I saw that not only was Luke apparently the owner of the bar, but he’d brought my goddamned cat to the bar as well.
Nameless was curled up in the crook of his elbow, glaring at me with his yellow eyes.
“Quincy, what in all the gods’ names are you doing here?” Luke asked.
I looked around the office, all mahogany and red velvet, and spotted the thing I needed most in the world at that moment—the wet bar.
I poured myself a healthy slug of Macallan 18, knocked it back, poured myself another, then decided “fuck it,” and took the bottle with me to sit on the long leather sofa under a painting of the London Bridge.
“Why don’t you sit down and answer the same fucking question for me, Uncle?
And why is my cat here? All the noise can’t be good for him. ”
“Cats go where cats want to go, and after I realized that I was incapable of leaving him behind if he did not want to remain in my apartment, I had custom earplugs made for him.” He turned Nameless so that I could see the little pieces of red molded plastic with strings hanging from the cat’s ears.
“Okay, just as long as I’m not going to come home to a deaf cat next week,” I said, sipping Scotch right from the bottle now.
I set the glass down on an end table. Kind of a “drink Scotch in case of emergency” backup.
“Now what the fuck are you doing here? You own this place? Why didn’t you tell me about it? ”
“Because if I told you I owned a nightclub, you would be here every night drinking up my profits. Remember Dublin?”
“Okay, I might have contributed to the downfall of that pub, but don’t you think naming it The Blarney Stone didn’t do you any favors? You were actually in Ireland. You didn’t have to play up the faux-Irish bullshit.”
“My poor branding does not change the fact that you consumed ten thousand dollars in alcohol in one month.”
“It was a rough month.”
“You did that five months in a row!”
“It was a rough five months,” I said, my defense crumbling in the face of Luke’s accurate recollection of events. I can be excused for not remembering how much I cost him. After all, I was very drunk for about half a year. “But that doesn’t answer the question of how you came to own this bar.”
“I don’t,” he replied, walking over behind the massive desk and sitting in the big bossman chair.
He deposited Nameless onto a perch beside the desk, where the cat immediately curled up and started purring.
Eventually I was going to have to admit that it was his cat now.
But I didn’t want to. I was getting kinda used to being a cat person. Hell, Becks says I’m half-feral anyway.
I turned my attention back to Luke, who was waiting patiently for me to dial back into the conversation.
“As I was saying, I don’t own just this bar.
I own Camp North End. Through a series of shell corporations, of course, and this nightclub is the only business here that I take a direct operational interest in, other than the gelato stand, but I own the entire complex.
I bought the property when it was worthless, and when a developer came to me with an idea to purchase the land from me and turn it into a destination, I agreed. Then I bought the developer.”
My mind whirled. How rich was Luke? I knew he’d been royalty back in the olden days, and I knew he’d invested well, but these were some big-time money moves. “Okay, that all seems pretty smart. But why not tell me?”
“You have been rather occupied the last ten years. Saving the world and all that.”
“You were right there beside me most of that time! How did you even have time to pull something like this off?”
“I have very skilled and trusted employees. But Quincy.” He leaned forward and nailed me with that piercing gaze that made so many people think he was hypnotic. “Why. Are. You. Here?”
Let’s be perfectly clear. Luke cannot mesmerize anyone with his stare. He does not have hypno-eyes, or any other sort of mind control. But he had a massive weight of personality and incredible charisma. He can pressure you into doing whatever he wants, most of the time.
As long as you didn’t grow up around him and build up a century’s worth of resistance to his skills.
Which I have. So I didn’t spill my guts because I fell under the powerful spell of Dracula’s mind control.
I spilled my guts because he’s my uncle, one of the very few people in the world I trust completely, and because if he owned this place, there was a zero percent chance it wasn’t wired to the gills with top-flight security cameras. “I’m hunting were-rats,” I said.
He leaned back, one perfectly sculpted eyebrow climbing toward the sky. “Would you care to elaborate?”
I told him about the meetup at the bookstore, the fight in the bookstore’s coffee shop, and the lead I’d gotten on the North End Whiskers, who supposedly operated out of this part of town.
When I was done, Luke picked up his desk phone and punched in a number.
“Thomas? I need to see you,” he said, with no introduction.
That’s my uncle, all perfect phone manners.
“ Now, Thomas. Thank you. Yes, you may bring one second, but I do not intend to harm you, or allow harm to come to you, while you are on my property.” He gave me what I considered a wholly unnecessarily direct glare when he mentioned not allowing harm to come to whoever was on the end of the line.
“Who was that?” I asked when he hung up the phone.
“That was Thomas. He is the de facto leader of the Whiskers, in as much as a loosely affiliated group of rodent lycanthropes can be said to have one.”
“You have the Whiskers’ Alpha on speed dial?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Luke scoffed. “It would be highly irresponsible for me to commit important numbers to anything as vulnerable as a speed dial. Have I taught you nothing about being a criminal? I memorized it. He will be here momentarily.”
There was nothing to say, so I just sent Becks a mental message to join us in the office and drained the rest of the bottle. And Luke wonders why I drink so much.