CHAPTER 39

"...and what about the C's, hey? That call last night was absolute shit...."

Leon, it turned out, never shut up. Not for one moment. By the time we'd reached Boston I thought my head might explode.

Scrawny to the point of concern, Leon looked to be about eighteen if you were being generous, with a pimpled, but handsome face and hair the color of dirty straw. He had bright blue eyes, perfect teeth, and was incredibly uncomfortable with any kind of silence.

"Turn here please," I told him, having to talk over his rambling. He turned, but didn't stop talking. I'd figured out about five minutes in that he didn't actually require my participation in the conversation.

He turned down the alley I indicated and I had him park behind my apartment.

"Keep it running," I told him, opening my door. "I'll be five minutes."

My landlord was a girthy fellow with perpetually greasy hair and an endless selection of track suits. He lived in the bigger apartment that sat on the ground floor and had its own entrance. I knocked on his door.

I could hear the sound of the television inside, set to to a woman's talk show. Franky was muttering to the tv, disagreeing with something being said. It took a little time to answer. When he did he wasn't surprised to see me.

"I thought you'd be outta here," he squinted past me to the civic in the alley.

"We have a rental agreement," I handed him a wad of cash. "That's the next two months."

He took it and began flipping through the bills, counting. Franky liked cash, opposed to online payment, having a distinct mistrust of banks in general. It didn't bother me, and I got a bit off the rent for my trouble.

"Yesterday some fancy looking suits came through, took a bunch of your things."

And he'd done nothing to stop them, they could have been anybody. Loyalty and honor at its best.

"It's fine, they're friends," I turned to go.

"Rent will be going up at the end of the summer, four hundred," he called to my back. "Just so's you know."

I stopped and turned back.

"It's already a little high for what I get, don't you think?"

Fanky didn't have the grace to look ashamed.

"Gotta make a living," he shrugged and went back inside, closing the door behind him.

I did some calculating on the way to my apartment, frowning the entire time. Four hundred was a huge increase, I wasn't certain my bank account could handle it. I pushed the worry away. I had two months to figure it out.

"What's up Larry?" I asked the man standing in front of my door trying to jimmy the lock. Larry wasn't his name, I didn't know what his name was, just that he had one of the full suites in the building, without a shared bathroom and his employment record was sketchy. He was a small man, maybe five foot four, with dirty, wrinkled clothes and bugged out eyes. The smell of weed clung to him like a perfume.

"Oh," he startled, straightening from the shit job he was doing on my lock. "I was just checkin' on the place for you," he started sidling away down the hall.

I smiled pleasantly and with lightning speed planted a fist into the wall next to his head. He blinked at me, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

"Oh Larry," I said, shaking my head. "You and I haven't had a discussion yet, have we? I've talked to Noah and James, I've talked to Avery, and even Jasper, but we haven't talked."

Larry shook his head, swallowing heavily. And I put my face in close to his. I immediately wished I hadn't but backing out because of the smell would ruin my tough-girl image.

"I don't give a crap what you do in your own space, I don't care if you break into every home from here to New York, but you will leave my apartment alone. In fact, if I so much as see a tool mark on my lock I will personally come looking for you and our discussion won't be nearly so pleasant, you got me?"

"Yeah...Yeah," Larry was nodding vigorously and desperately looking for an escape route. I pulled my fist out of the drywall and let him go.

If I hadn't been certain he was human the speed with which he disappeared would have had me thinking he was wolf.

Once inside I took inventory. I already knew Anthony's men had been through my clothes, but as I'd suspected, it wasn't just that. I could tell by the way things were shifted around, a cushion here, a stack of papers there, that they'd been thorough. Looking for what, I couldn't say, but an intrusion none the less.

I shifted the frame of my twin-sized bed and knelt, finding the loose tile near the wall. I sighed, relieved, when I looked inside. Everything was there, exactly where I left it. The keys to my father's truck, now long gone, a few rings I'd had in my purse that had belonged to my mother, and the metal identification plate that said: Thostchild RA-3390153.

I ran my fingers over the cold piece of metal, as I'd done thousands of times, but no answers came to me.

My passport and an emergency bundle of cash were tucked along the side of the hollow as well. All undisturbed.

I put the tile back and pushed the bed back into place. The men had cleaned out my closet, and there wasn't really anything else in the apartment I was overly attached to, so I left empty handed, making my way back out to the civic.

"Where to now?" Leon asked before I could even close the door.

My errands took the rest of the afternoon, I'd bought new underwear, a large bag of snacks, some make-up, and made a visit to Dr. Denise to check on my birth control IUD. I didn't normally worry about such things, but Anthony and I had been rather active over the last few days and I was feeling a little paranoid. In general, most medicines and treatments didn't work on wolves, but Denise, being a forward thinking woman herself, had discovered that a particular copper alloy worked on our systems with almost one-hundred percent efficiency. She assured me that everything was working the way that it should.

By the time we were done, even Leon was a little bit tired out.

We had a few hours to kill and the temperature had mellowed to an almost pleasant warmth, so we headed over to Franklin and watched the couples and families in the park as darkness fell.

It was the most normal day I'd had in a while and I was considering the wonder of that when my wolf became suddenly alert.

*Trouble.*

I closed my eyes and let her senses guide me. The city was overwhelming with scent, so much so that my wolf blocked most of it to keep from being driven mad. This one though, was unique enough to catch our attention.

Vampire. And it was heading in our direction.