The W Concern

Blood money

Nick and Carmen met Roger outside in the parking lot. He was wearing a black leather jacket, tight jeans and was smoking a cigar. He was handsome in a contrived way - like he had picked up the cover of a romance novel and then tried to model himself off the bad boy hero on the front. His hair was black, lightly disheveled, his gaze purposefully dark and smouldering. He gave them both withering looks.
    "This is what they give me?" Roger said.
    "Roger," Alessandra said sternly. She was wearing a black leather jump suit with an oversized zipper. Leather was kind of a thing with the vampire hunters. Nick didn't know why. It didn't seem comfortable or particularly useful for fighting in. It just looked cool.
    "New recruits," Roger huffed. He didn't look that much older than Nick but he had a short thick, very groomed beard that he probably thought made him seem older and cooler than everyone else.
    "They're not new," Alessandra said, her arms crossed. "They're just from the shifter department."
    "Shifters," Roger growled.
    "Yeah?" Nick said.
    Roger ignored him, took one last deep suck on his cigar, discarded it onto the pavement and then stomped it out with the heel of his black leather boots with a grunt. He jerked his head toward his car. A black Maserati with heavily tinted windows. Nick wasn't much of a car guy but he knew enough to know that that was a very expensive car, probably worth more than what a team of well paid vampire hunters could make.
    "Get in," Roger said grufffly. "And try not to piss on the seats."
    Carmen gave Nick a discreet sideways look as if to say Who the fuck is this guy?
    Nick in turn gave Alessandra a look that said You told me he had a bit of an attitude, I can see now you lied to me to get me on this mission.
"Yeah because that's what I do whenever I am in a car," Nick said with an eye roll as he got into the passenger side seat. "I just piss on the seats."
    "Don't be a smart ass," Roger said. His voice sounded like he was fifty and he had been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day since he was a baby. It was like gravel with a side of whiskey.
    Before Carmen had time to put her seat belt on properly in the back Roger was squealing out of the parking lot driving in a way that suggested they were either being chased or were a stunt car in an action movie. Carmen was flung sideways and Nick shoved back into his seat with the force of the movement.
    Nick caught a glimpse of Alessandra standing in the parking lot, painted in the red lights of Roger's taillights, hands extended by her side like exclamation points, her mouth agape as Roger sped away.
    "Look Roger," Nick started to say but then stopped. He wasn't sure when Roger had had a chance to do it but he had put on a pair of fancy sunglasses. At night.
    "I have very sensitive eyes," Roger said by way of explanation. He was now tearing down a road at about 30 kilometres over the speed limit, weaving around cars and pedestrians with the kind of careless abandon Nick had only ever been able to muster when playing Grand Theft Auto.
    "Can you slow down?" Nick demanded.
    "I told you not to piss your pants," Roger said. "But listen to you. What are they feeding you in the shifter deparment? Baby formula?"
"What?" Nick was normally a little quicker than that but the insult made so little sense that was all he could think to blurt out.
"You heard me," Roger stamped harder on the accelerator.
Nick tried to get a read on where they were going. Based on the sheer height of the buildings they were zooming past they were in the financial district which was where Alessandra had told them they were headed. So at least that checked out.
    Roger spun the wheel abruptly and they headed down a ramp into an underground parking lot. Nick didn't recognize the exact location and the speed they were going at was almost nauseating. He caught a glimpse of Carmen's face in the side mirror, lips pinched together, eyes wide and thought she looked how he felt. Scared and confused.
    But that was the job, right.
    They would be fine.
    They'd been in worse than this before.
    He just needed to cook up a new plan.
    While being whipped around around in a fancy car at speeds that didn't seem possible to manage in a confined space.
    He wanted to puke.
    Roger stopped the car abruptly. He'd parked it, backward. Perfectly. Between two other cars that looked just like it.
    Roger got out of the car and slammed his door.
    Nick took a second to get his nausea under control then got out. He wanted to punch Roger but that wasn't part of the new plan. Too bad.
    "You're an asshole," Carmen said.
    "What's that?" Roger was relatively tall and Carmen was petite. He towered over her but she stuck her chin out and met his gaze with fire.
    "You heard me, you're an asshole. You didn't need to drive like that. But you did because what, you wanted to scare us?"
    Roger laughed. It was a big laugh but had no warmth at all to it.  He leaned in close, bending down slightly to do it. "I drive like that cause that's the only way to drive," He said. He stood back all the way up and started walking without looking back. "You kids coming?"
    "What a dick," Carmen seethed.
    "More of a .. clown," Nick said. He shook his head.
    Carmen dropped her voice to the softest whisper. "He's a vampire, right?"
    "Oh yeah," Nick said.
    "Why would the department...don't they screen...?"
    Nick shrugged. "Good question."
    "But that means this is clearly a trap. Abort?"
    Nick had been considering this. They could probably take Roger out in that underground parking lot on their own without much of an issue but what had the plan been there? Get two agents and then what? Also, how had they figured out where the agency was and infiltrated it in the first place?
    "Nah, let's see where this goes," Nick said. "Maybe they're all equally stupid."
    They found Roger waiting by the elevator, sunglasses still on, posture suggesting he was bored and annoyed at having to wait for them. "You talking shit about my driving?" He said.
    "Yup," Nick replied.
    "Fucking babies," Roger said. "I bet that was the ride of your life."
    Carmen stared at him. "What is that even supposed to mean?"
    Roger snorted. "Don't act like you don't know."
    Carmen and Nick exchanged glances.
    In the elevator Roger scanned a card and punched in a floor. He pulled his sunglasses down enough to look over the top of them and then looked Carmen and Nick up and down. Nick was wearing a rumpled t shirt and loose jeans, Carmen a pair of black yoga pants with cargo pockets and a thin black bomber jacket over a sports bra.
    "You guys aren't even dressed right," Roger snorted. "Amateurs."
    "Do you think negging us is going to distract from the fact that you're a vampire?" Nick said.
    Roger stared at him. Then he burst out laughing very loudly and awkwardly. "That's a good one. I'm not a vampire."
    "Right," Nick said.
    The elevator glided to a halt at the top floor and the doors slid open. They were at a rooftop restaurant with a large terrace, tiki torches, panoramic views of the city at night and lots of tropical plants. All the furniture was deep purple velvet, the tiles were classic black and white and thin Corinthian columns were scattered throughout the place. It was filled with people dressed in track pants and hoodies or full suits. Tech bros and Bay Street financiers.
    Roger pulled them in close with a gesture and then dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. "Alright, Alessandra briefed you noobs on the plan right?"
    "Figure out who the vampires are, knock them out with the black bane," Nick said.
    "Right except meet me in that room," He pointed at a door set off from the lobby that read "staff only", "When you figure out who the vampires are. We can't risk being wrong."
    "We're not going to be wrong. Spotting vampires is easy," Nick said pointedly.
    "Look, I'm the commanding officer here, right? You do what I say without questions, okay?" Roger gave him a hard stare. "Fucking nod, noob."
    Nick gave a slight head incline that was almost a nod.
    Roger slapped him and Carmen on the back. "Don't fuck this up you two."
    He sped off into the crowd and was quickly waved over by a woman in a sleek red cocktail dress and a man in stylish joggers, a hoodie and a white tank top. The woman hugged Roger with all the enthusiasm of someone embracing a chair but the man pulled him from a handshake to a shoulder slap and then laughed loudly at something he had said.
    "Why do you think he brought us here?" Carmen whispered.
    "Two more meals?"
    "What if he isn't a vampire?"
    "I mean, maybe. He could just be a shitty person."
    "Right."
    Nick glanced at his watch. "Let's mix and mingle. Back here in 15 minutes. My guess - vampires don't need crypto schemes to make money. They've been alive since whenever and have all the money they need. This is a front for something else. A way to get people in the door."
    "So they can eat them?"
    "No, even they couldn't kill this many people at once and get away with it. They're looking for specific targets." He rubbed his chin. "We just need to see if we can figure out who they are looking for and how they figured out who we were."
    Carmen gave him a deeply skeptical look. "In 15 minutes?"
    "Maybe."
    They set about their work, Nick starting on one side of the gathering, Carmen on the other. People kept trying to bring Nick free drinks but he kept refusing. He didn't drink alcohol which confused everyone. They acted like he had just said he had two heads or he liked killing people. Even worse was when people kept trying to talk to him about how the block chain was going to change everything and how "web 2.0 was dead". He wanted to tell them what he really thought - that this was all a lot of hype created by people who thought code alone could change the world but who neglected to factor in obvious human behaviour into the equation - but this was not the time or place. He had to pretend, horrifyingly, that he was into this bullshit. That he thought it was the coolest thing ever.
    After about ten minutes of that Nick had learned nothing except that the vampires had decided to call their cryptocurrency, of all things, Blood Money. He was always starting to get anxious. He had texted Dani that he was pretty sure the op was a bust and that Roger was a vampire but he had yet to hear back from her which was odd. Maybe the night had picked up after all. But that much? So much so that she wouldn't at least acknowledge him? Or offer back up given that Roger was compromised. That wasn't like her at all.
    The Dani he knew would be on her way over already.
    He caught Carmen's gaze across the room and she started to walk toward him when she stumbled. Her whole body lurched forward, she dropped the drink she had in hand and then hit the ground, hard. She hadn't even attempted to break the fall. Never mind that Carmen was not the kind of person who tripped or stumbled in the first place.
    Before Nick had time to fully react he realized it was happening everywhere. Everyone was falling. Dropping like someone had cut their strings.
    But not everyone. Roger was standing with a martini glass with one hand, laughing, the two people he had greeted initially standing next to him. The woman watched cooly, distantly while drank his own drink. A fourth woman, on the far side of the terrace, was smiling. This was the kind of woman Nick was surprised he had not noticed earlier. She was shockingly attractive. She looked how he had always imagined an Amazon would look in person - tall, muscular, imposing, deeply tanned, straight backed with a gaze that could level a room.
    And then, suddenly, they were all looking at him.
    He felt like he was standing underneath a thousand watt spotlight.
    "Why the fuck are you standing?" Roger said.
    "No drink," The woman in the red cocktail dress said. She was advancing toward Nick, quickly and smoothly, like a stream running over rocks.
    "You don't drink?" Roger balked. "What a loser."
    "And you are the most obvious vampire, possibly ever," Nick said as he took a step back. He had a pencil that was really a sword in one pocket, his cell phone and three injectibles of black bane.
    A half a breath later the woman in the red cocktail dress was standing behind him tracing sharp fingernails along his neck, breathing into his ear. She was fast. And predictable. Did vampires really have to be so similar? Do all the same creepy things?
    Nick shoved one of the injectibles into her thigh. She reeled backward, shrieking. He'd heard that black bane burned like a lit cigarette pressed against bare skin before knocking its target out. Sorry, not sorry. She fell in a heap behind him. As knocked out as the tech bros and finance types lying all round them.
    He closed his fist around the pencil.
    The guy in the hoodie scratched the back of his neck, looking sideways, sighing. He looked, for a moment, incredibly tired.
    "We could just kill him now Dane," Roger suggested eagerly.
    Hoodie guy - evidently, Dane -  shook his head. "We could but we did promise the lady two vampire hunters, not one."
    "For what?" Nick asked.
    "We're not talking to you," Roger said.
    "For my birthday." It was the shockingly attractive woman. Like the other woman she moved incredibly quickly. In this case Nick hadn't even really seen her move. One moment she had been far enough away that it would have been hard to hear what she was saying. The next she was standing an arm's length away from him. That close he could see her eyes were bright yellow rimmed with a thick line of jet black. It was like someone had drawn the sun with a black permanent marker.  Her skin had a flawless, poreless quality to it and though she looked no older than 25 she seemed much older. Time might not have creased the lines around her mouth and eyes but it had settled on her all the same so that in an instant Nick knew she had lived a life not measured in decades or even centuries but millennia. No one who knew vampires were a real thing could have mistaken her for a human.
    Nick had heard about the Ancients before. The vampire department spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous they were but also how rare they were. They had posters of all the ones they knew about up on a wall in large fancy frames. He didn't recognize this strikingly, inhumanely  beautiful face but then again he also hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to the particulars.
    How the vampire department had managed to not only fuck up the fact that Roger was a vampire but not register that one of these beings was behind the cryptocurrency scam/ cover was beyond him. But also, he wasn't actually surprised. This was just like them. They were always -
    He stopped himself. He needed to concentrate.
    He threw the black bane with a flick of his wrist and it should have gone into her arm but she caught it, smiling as she did so. She crushed the glass and metal with her fingertips as though it were a rose bud. He pulled the pencil from his pocket and for a second surprise and amusement registered on her face. It was enough for him to get close enough to...
    The tip of the silver sword caught her across her shoulder, drawing a thin line of blood. It should have gone straight through her heart.
    He felt the pin prick too late. Teeth on his throat. In the time it had taken him to exhale once, she had slipped around behind him and tipped his neck to the side. It was the same creepy trick but this time he hadn't been quick enough, hadn't seen it coming. Didn't know anyone could move like that. But maybe.... that was a good thing? One part of him was repulsed at that thought and a surge of panic shot through him like a gasp for air but was immediately smothered.
Euphoria bubbled up. He felt radiant and even though he had heard this was a side effect, part of what convinced victims to just let go, he did not want to fight it. He had never been so happy. Or so in love. The thought surged and crystallized. Yes, this was what that feeling was. What writers wrote about in books and actors feigned in cheesy movies but which he had always scorned as silly: Love at first sight, at first touch. It was narcotic and it was real. The woman with her teeth on his neck - had he known another who was so beautiful? Had he ever been so close to someone else?
In his mind a voice, not his. It was musical, feminine, like sunshine floating over water.  Time to go to sleep.