Page 24 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

B roken Dreams was awful.

It wasn’t unusual to find buildings like it in LA, but the best term to cover what had happened to it was urban blight.

Charles had still owned the property upon his death, but the club itself had closed many years before, and he’d put no effort into keeping it up in the years between the club’s closing and the modern day. Any building after almost thirty years of decay wasn’t pretty.

The parking lot needed to be replaced, more pothole than blacktop remaining. The building was at least mostly intact, but there were broken windows, and the door wasn’t just unlocked, but mostly gone. It looked like people had squatted inside at some point, but not recently.

Now, it was probably too overrun with rats for people to want to stick around.

Me? I liked rats. Rats were friendly, community-minded creatures.

They were naturally inclined to help others because their wellbeing depended upon each other.

While the wild sort that lived in buildings like Broken Dreams tended to be suspicious of humans, my ability to speak to them always instantly wiped that away.

Humans were frightening because their intentions couldn’t be known, and they were unpredictable. Once I spoke to the first rat, told them I intended them no harm, they believed me.

Why would they do anything else?

Lying was a very human concept. While we weren’t the only creatures that did it, we were the ones who did it most, and we were the best at it. Sure, orcas did it too. Lots of hunters specialized in misdirection. But true deception was something else.

A female rat caught sight of me the moment I walked into the building, but before she could scuttle off into the darkness, I called out. “I’m not here to harm you or your fellows. I’m just looking for information.”

Cautiously, she turned back to me, her whiskers twitching wildly. “Information? The great green food bin is empty right now. Your people will refill it soon enough, though. They always do. So kind, sometimes, in the strangest ways. Hating us, but feeding us.”

I didn’t know how to explain to her that what she thought of as a food bin, humans thought of as garbage, and they didn’t want it. They weren’t deliberately feeding the rats, just being wasteful in the eyes of rats.

Still, it wasn’t as though the humans would ever stop producing trash, regardless of how much they wished it didn’t attract rats. So the rats would always eat well for as long as they settled near humans.

“I’ve got some beef jerky, if you’re hungry,” I told the rat. It had been the first food fail ever for Twist, because it was hard to chew with her relatively slender baby teeth. Rats, though? Rats didn’t have a single problem with tough food.

So I took the bag out of my pocket—my left pocket, rather than the inside one I’d started thinking of as my kitten’s domain—and tore off a bit of meat, tossing it to her.

“The information I need is about humans who’ve been here,” I told her as she nibbled at my offering.

“I know you try not to get too close to them, but anything you can tell me would be helpful.”

“Old man,” she said after a moment. “That’s what the white hair means, yes? Old. He came sometimes. Came a lot lately. Came to see others.”

Charles, then. I just nodded, tossing her another piece of jerky. Not that the food depended on her help. I kind of planned to give her the rest of the bag regardless. No reason to carry it around if Twist couldn’t eat it.

“Woman who slunk as good as a rat. Very impressive. She did not like old man. Told him he was trying to get her killed.” The rat nibbled at the meat, tutting between bites. “Humans always trying to get killed.”

I wasn’t quite sure of the context she was going for, but she probably wasn’t wrong regardless. Humans were careless and casually violent, and neither of those things made sense to a rat. “Humans are usually trouble,” I agreed with her. “What did the annoyed woman look like?”

“Brown,” was all she had to offer, which...well. Could mean anything. Especially since rats were colorblind to red. I’d learned that lesson well when trying to get their help to track down that stolen painting. They weren’t the most reliable creatures to turn to for artistic viewpoints.

“Sad woman cried,” she said. “Perhaps old man hurt her babies? Humans kill babies.”

I winced at that, because well...yeah. On the other hand, Charles had never been much for baby killing, probably not even rat babies. “Do you remember anything else about her?”

“Gold,” she said, which was rather a lot like ‘brown,’ but at least maybe now I knew one woman had been a brunette and one a blonde.

Maybe.

“Big, too,” she added after that. “Well fed. Rich human. Very pretty.”

Kate. She was describing Kate, who was rather on the plump side for a vampire. I thought she was cute, but then, who cared what I thought about a woman’s looks? It was like what a cow thought of almond trees.

It sort of fit what I knew of Kate, her being sad and maybe crying. Probably tried to talk Charles out of turning on my mother, but if he’d been at Broken Dreams to meet with potential traitors, he couldn’t out himself by telling her the truth.

A brown woman who had been annoyed could either be the blonde-highlighted brunette Carmen, or Wu Mei, with her inky blue-black hair.

Unfortunately, a rat certainly wasn’t going to be able to pick out the differences in accents.

I suspected it had been Carmen, since Kate had mentioned Mei going to his home office, and she’d never struck me as the type to set foot in a filthy place like Broken Dreams.

Besides, Mei had identified as a rat, so some irrational part of me thought the rats should be able to see she was one of them.

Carmen? Carmen was a woman who wasn’t afraid to get a little dirty to get what she wanted in life, regardless of whether she thought rats were disgusting.

I tossed the rat another piece of meat, not asking questions, just thinking.

“Angry man yelled,” she added around a mouthful.

“I didn’t like him. He tried to step on Spitter.

Mean one, that, even for a human.” She froze at that, meat right in front of her mouth, ready for another bite, then looked at me.

“But different humans than you, all of them. You’re a hot one.

Very unusual. These were all the cold kind.

We always steer clear of them when we can. ”

Vampires. Once again, rats were damned sensible.

“Smart,” I told her, trying not to hang on me being both hot and unusual, because I doubted the rat had any more information than that.

She wasn’t keeping secrets, just speaking everything she knew.

So instead of dwelling on the tidbit, I told her, “Cold humans are more likely to kill you than normal ones.”

“I know,” she agreed. “Sometimes they eat us. Regular humans almost never do that.”

Almost. Ugh. I didn’t want to think about what made a human—or even a vampire—so desperate for food that they would kill and eat a rat. Not with the reputation rats had as disease vectors.

“The Shade came when the angry man was there. They come sometimes.”

“The shade?”

For a moment, she stared at me as though I was out of my mind.

“The Shade,” she reiterated, and this time I could almost hear the capital letters in the words.

“The Shade lives in the shadows. Maybe a cold human. Maybe a magic human who made themself so very cold. They watch. Always from the shadows. When the Shade came, I knew they would die.”

And that? Well that was fucking unsettling.

The implication that the rat knew Charles was dead.

The notion of some vampiric rat god wandering through the city at night.

The fact that this imaginary god was so linked with death that the rat almost saw it as a perfect absolute.

It meant that many generations of rats had seen this “shade” kill, and that was never what a guy like to hear.

That was all the information she had, but she took me back to where her people were congregated and I dumped the rest of the jerky out on the floor for them, asking if any of them remembered any more about the humans.

They did, of course. The angry man was gray.

The sad woman came later than the others had, toward the end of the night, almost day, and left crying.

The annoyed woman had come in a big car with a giant man driving it.

The Shade had stood on a walkway high above them all, near the rafters.

None of it was especially useful, though. None of it had anything to do with Charles’s death, since he hadn’t been attacked in the building.

The Shade was unsettling, but there wasn’t much I could do with the information. I could, and did, presume that they were Whisper, but it was just an assumption based on the thin information I had. For all I knew, it was an actual rat god, and had nothing to do with the whole situation.

The best I could do was try to return at night and see if Whisper ever showed up.

It seemed unlikely, even if they had previously used the building all the time, which seemed unlikely after having seen it myself.

Besides, gossip spread fast in vamp circles, so likely by now everyone—except Gerald Forsyth—knew that Broken Dreams was on the police radar.

Since it was my only lead, though, I suspected I would give it a shot.

I thanked the rat colony, wishing them luck with the great green food bin, and headed back out.

I had a kitten waiting, asleep on a warm sunny corner of my new desk, a partner who was even now doing necessary work for our new business, and—I stopped to check my watch—another appointment to speak to people who wanted to rent the shop next door in under an hour.

Time for me to go.