Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

“I can relate.”

“Yeah, and then, after hours and hours and hours, like I’m surprised they didn’t have his manicurist on there or some—”

“Fred.”

“So, anyway, I got bored and went out to eat with the guys. Then I stopped off at a place and had a couple drinks. And later decided to shoot some pool. And when I came back, they were still working on the safe. I mean—”

“Fred!”

“Okay, okay. So, anyway—”

“No! No ‘anyways’! No ‘and thens.’ No nothing! What was in the safe?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

He nodded. “That was the real kicker. Bastard had pranked us all. There wasn’t anything in there.”

I stared at him. “And you’re telling me this why?”

He blinked. “It’s the only story I know about a safe?”

I shut my eyes.

And then opened them again a second later, when Teddy said, “Got it.”

“Got what?” I asked, leaning forward, terribly afraid I was going to see a big old lot of nothing.

But there was definitely something in there.

A lot of something.

“Looks like this was where she kept all her personal stuff,” he told me, pulling out jewel case after jewel case, along with envelopes of what looked like official documents, a passport, a bunch of different kinds of currency from a wide span of time—which, yeah, would be a smart thing to have around, wouldn’t it? And photo albums. Lots and lots of photo albums.

Some looked relatively new; others had to be fifty or more years old, worn and scratched and crumbly around the edges. The photos, the ones leaking out the sides because clusters of them had just been stacked in there, were similar. Some were old enough to have the little crinkly edges they used to put on them; others had that weird, seventies-era color. A few were even Polaroids. But as interesting as they were, I didn’t look at them. Because what I wanted . . .

Wasn’t there.

“No,” I said, searching through the papers on the floor. And then through the envelopes. And then through the thick spines on the albums, in case the little bottle had somehow gotten wedged down in there.

But it hadn’t.

It wasn’t there.

Chapter Forty

“You’re going to eat something,” Tami told me. It was not a question.

She put a tray on the bedside table and left, shutting the door. But somebody slipped in before she did. Somebody huge, but so quick and so quiet, I doubt she even noticed him. Vamps move like shadows when they want to, and Marco was no exception. Of course, he usually didn’t bother, preferring to bellow and bluster and make the puny masses tremble in fear.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t.

I’d grown up with vamps, learned to sense them in all their moods, even the quiet ones. Especially the quiet ones. That was when you were supposed to watch them the closest, because you never knew what they were up to. But I didn’t watch him now. I stayed where I was, sitting beside the bed.

The curtains were closed, like they usually were in daytime. Masters could handle daylight, but why suffer the power drain when you didn’t have to? But someone had been careless, or maybe one of the girls had been peeking out at the Strip, far below, and left a blackout curtain slightly ajar. Only it wasn’t sunlight that was spilling in.

A spear of bloody light rippled over the bed and onto the floor like a crimson stream, the overflow from the big neon Dante’s sign not far away. It normally added a barely discernable tinge to the day, a sultry haze on Vegas’ already dust-reddened landscape. But the darkness of the room and the peculiar angle of the slant left only neon penetrating the gloom.