Page 3 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

T he drive down from the hills into Avalon proper was always nice. It was heavily wooded, with beautiful multi-million-dollar homes and stunning landscaping and best of all, glimpses of the ocean along the way.

Relaxing.

Unless I was preoccupied by thoughts of my mother trying to force me into business with strange dinner-eating vampires.

Because Davin had proceeded to eat all of his soup, three dinner rolls, the main course of chicken cordon bleu with crispy roasted brussels sprouts with bacon and balsamic glaze, and then a plate with scoops of pistachio, almond, and peach mousses arranged like the Irish flag for dessert.

The man had cleaned every plate like he was starving to death, and I’d almost been surprised he hadn’t picked up the last one and licked it clean, he’d been so enthusiastic about the dessert.

I’d barely managed to hide one dinner roll in my pocket to toss to my raven friend on the way out, and I’d actually felt a little bad about that.

Maybe Davin had a...condition, or something.

Maybe he needed all that food for something.

How the hell would I know? He’d nodded along with everything my mother had said and answered the odd question she had asked, but for the most part he’d been silent throughout dinner.

He was like a freaking rock.

A rock who was apparently my new business partner.

Plus I had to raise eighty thousand dollars.

Eighty.

Thousand.

Dollars.

I’d never even seen eighty-thousand dollars.

Okay, I wasn’t going to pretend, even to myself, that I’d grown up anything but rich and privileged.

My mother hadn’t simply home-schooled me; she’d hired a literal teacher just for me.

I’d been a classroom of one, and I’d learned everything I would have learned at a public school and then some.

If I’d needed a thing, it was provided. If I’d wanted a thing, chances were my mother had gotten it for me, with rare exceptions.

When I passed my test to become a private investigator, she literally gave me a multi-million dollar building. Just like that.

I did not have a hard life.

I was not poor, and I never had been.

But...I also didn’t actually make much money.

For instance, my mother’s friend Bethany had indeed contracted me to investigate the theft of her Picasso almost a year earlier.

With the help of a flock of magpies and some industrious rats, I’d tracked the painting to a warehouse on the docks, where they were going to send it overseas to be auctioned off—an unknown painting clearly by the great master that might be worth millions.

Bethany had—quite generously, I’d thought—given me twenty thousand dollars for the weeks of work I’d put in on the case.

And then I hadn’t gotten another job for six months, so that twenty grand had fed me for a long time.

Sure, I could probably ask my mother for money, but who wanted to do that? Besides, I had a job. I was a private investigator. It just wasn’t a regular job with steady income, and I hadn’t managed to build up a reputation or regular clientele yet.

Probably because I hadn’t been trying all that hard.

I’d also had a string of random other jobs through my twenties, before becoming an investigator.

I’d worked everywhere from the local frozen yogurt place one summer as a teenager, to the Avalon Aquarium for the three months I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. I hadn’t ever managed more than three months in any one place, and I’d made a whole lot—or rather, little—of minimum wage.

Fortunately, you could survive on minimum wage in California, if not live particularly well, especially if you didn’t have to pay rent.

It sure wasn’t going to result in eighty-thousand dollars that I could give the state, not even if I could manage to keep a job for the whole year instead of three months. Not even if I could split myself into two people and work two full-time minimum wage jobs for the whole year.

And even if that were a thing, I still had to eat. I’d probably need four full-time jobs in order to make the eighty grand and also eat and buy gas for my bike.

So what the hell was I going to do? If I did what she said and started a business with Davin Byrne, he’d be the one bringing in all the steady money with the whole monitored security system thing. How could I keep any of that cash if it was only coming in because of him? That wasn’t okay.

I didn’t want to take advantage of some stranger.

A muscle car being driven by a jackass swerved its way around me—apparently the speed limit was not fast enough for him on the winding downhill road into town.

I kept an eye on him as he whipped past, since I knew well that was the sort of driver who ran people like me off the road and didn’t so much as stop to call for an ambulance.

Once he was past me I went back to my musing, but just a few seconds later, noise and motion grabbed my full attention back to the road: the squealing of brakes, and the asshole car who’d just swerved around me stopping in the lane right in front of me.

I had plenty of time to slow down, since you know, I actually followed the rules of traffic while driving, and left plenty of room between myself and other vehicles. My mother had freaked out enough about me having a motorcycle, I wasn’t going to drive recklessly on top of that.

Whoever the guy was, he laid a trail of rubber on the road behind him, came to a near stop, then did a weird little swerve maneuver and sped off again.

What the hell?

That was when I noticed the little black lump at the end of the skid marks he’d left. I glanced back at the rapidly disappearing car and committed his license plate to memory, then gave my bike a little gas to get up to the scene of the fucking crime.

A kitten.

He’d hit a kitten going too damn fast.

What was a literal kitten doing this far out into the hills, alone? We were a mile or more away from any house it could have come from, and I wasn’t aware of any feral colonies in the area.

I turned my bike off and walked over to where the poor thing lay, splayed out. Dropping to one knee next to it, I yanked off one glove and shoved it in my pocket, reaching out to touch the thing.

It was still breathing.

One bright blue eye opened to take me in, and it made a little whining sound in its throat that my brain couldn’t even translate into words. All I got from it was pain.

The flutter of wings sounded a few feet away, but before I could shoo off any possible carrion birds, I looked up to find a raven.

My friend the raven.

She hopped her way over slowly, looking at the kitten, tutting in an oddly motherly way.

“Poor thing. Just a baby.”

“It’s alive, though. I can?—”

She leaned in close, inspecting the kitten with one beady black eye, then looked up at me and gave a nod. “Yes. If you take her to a mage doctor, she can still be helped. That’s a lot of money, though, isn’t it?”

Animals didn’t usually think about money, but my raven friend was an anomaly in a lot of ways.

I shrugged. “It costs what it costs. Who gets to decide how much a life is worth?”

She cocked her head at me, feigning confusion. “The doctor. He’s going to make you pay him. Not her.”

It was an excellent point, I supposed, but that was for the doctor to decide on. For myself, I couldn’t put a monetary limit on the value of life. So yeah, I would end up paying what they charged me.

I reached into my pockets, frowning when all I came away with was my one glove that I’d taken off. That wouldn’t help. I struck gold on the inside pocket of my jacket, though: a knit beanie I always wore in the winter.

Perfect.

I reached down and ran a finger along the kitten’s side. “Sorry little friend. This is probably going to hurt, but I have to get you out of here.”

As gently as I could, I lifted the kitten into the woolen hat, then tucked the hat back into the inside pocket of my jacket, with the kitten’s little head poking out.

She—as I assumed my raven friend had that right—blinked at me again, giving a tiny mew then closing her eyes once more.

I rushed back to my bike and rode the edge of “too fast” as I continued my way into town. I knew just the place to go.

In the way of so many clever slackers in the world, I had an incredibly good memory. Eidetic memory, my teacher had called it after I’d told her exactly which page in our shared history book had the information she was looking for.

Not exactly photographic, but a near thing.

All that was to say that I grew up with the Vampiric Senator of the greater Los Angeles Statistical Area, so I knew the name and address of every single one of the three-hundred-and-some odd vampires who lived in LA.

Basically, my mom was their boss, so I’d at least seen every one of them at some point, even if my mother had never encouraged me to hang out with them.

Vampires could only live in very large cities, so each one had an assigned senator.

That made my mother one of the seven-hundred most important vampires in the world.

Higher than that, really, since LA was one of the biggest cities in the world, so she was in charge of more vamps than most senators.

The fact that I knew all the local vampires was important in this case because of Doc. Doctor Carson Boone, who’d been a mage and a doctor in his human life some two hundred years ago, and who was one of my mother’s vampiric subjects in the modern day.

He wasn’t a vet, but he’d been a doctor in the old west. He wasn’t squeamish or arrogant, and I was sure he wouldn’t think he was too good to use his magic to treat a kitten.

Also, he lived less than ten minutes from where I was, which was important, given the fact that my little friend was seriously injured.