“All right,” Rick answered. “What is it?”
“The message isn’t for you.”
Rick opened his hands. “Then why am I here?”
“Because they told me . . . I was told that you’d know where I’m supposed to go.”
> “You’re delivering a message but you don’t know where? What are you talking about?”
I watched the back-and-forth, wide-eyed and intrigued. “Cormac. Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”
He scowled, paced a couple of steps, then seemed to come to a decision. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, glancing sidelong at an impatient Rick. Then Cormac told a story.
He’d been hired for a job, he said. An easy job, and he should have known better. If you had to call a job easy it meant there was a catch. For the amount of cash he was offered, he figured he could deal with a catch.
The morning after accepting the job, he found a box outside his apartment door. Inside the box was a padded envelope the size of a magazine, labeled with an address but no name. The address was in Ft. Morgan, a small town about an hour northeast of Denver.
He found the spot on a lane off a dirt county road, and Cormac figured even getting this far was enough to earn his pay. He was careful, he kept a watch out. The job might be easy—feeding sharks was easy—but he didn’t trust it’d be safe. All he found at the end of the lane were a couple of sprawling cottonwood trees and an old plank board farmhouse that had fallen in on itself decades before. No one was here to deliver the message to. He couldn’t find a mailbox to put it in.
Maybe he shouldn’t have assumed the job would be easy.
Cormac studied his maps to see if maybe he’d come to the wrong place. He’d have sent a message to his client to ask for more details, but he couldn’t get a phone connection. The address on the envelope was specific. This was the right spot. He hunted around for some clue, maybe a forwarding address. Except clearly no one had lived here for years.
Finally, he found a note on the front door. Had to dig for it around a collapsed wall and splintered shingles. It was as if someone had tacked the note there before the house collapsed, which seemed weird and unlikely. Maybe the note had been put here to protect it from the weather.
On the outside of the folded page, the same address had been written in the same handwriting as on the envelope. He unpinned the note, unfolded it, read.
“Talk to the vampire.
I know this isn’t expected, but it’s necessary.”
What the hell was this about?
We are in the middle of something strange here, Cormac, Amelia observed. He’d met Amelia in prison, where she had been wrongfully hanged for murder more than a hundred years ago. She’d also been something of a wizard and had managed to preserve her consciousness inside the prison walls. They’d made a bargain: he’d carry her back into the world, and he would get her powers. In the meantime, they had become something like friends.
Was it weird that he immediately thought of talking to Rick, the Master of Denver? He was used to hunting and staking vampires, not talking to them. He could call Kitty, she was friends with the guy, and maybe he’d know what this was about.
So much trouble over such an innocuous envelope. He thought about ripping it open, looking inside it for some sort of clue about where it was supposed to go.
That would be rather unethical, Amelia thought at him.
“If they really wanted this delivered, they should have made it easier,” he grumbled.
If it had been easy they would have done it themselves. I’m telling you, this is odd. I want to know more.
He’d gotten the job via email. He didn’t know anything about who had hired him. It had seemed so simple.
“I guess we have to go talk to the vampire, then,” he said, searching the ruined homestead as if someone might pop out of the broken timbers and explain everything.
Really, it won’t be so bad, will it? Master Rick is a gentleman.
He called Kitty.
“I know it sounds crazy, but here I am. I don’t know if you’re the right vampire, but I had to start somewhere,” Cormac said and handed the note from the farmhouse to Rick, shrugging like he was surrendering all responsibility for their current situation. Cormac was a patient guy, but I’d never known him to like puzzles.
Rick read the page. His gaze narrowed. Then he read it again, and glanced at Cormac, his brow furrowed. Finally he handed the note back. “Wait here a minute.”
He vanished. In actuality, he moved so quickly he seemed to fly down the steps in a blur, his vampiric speed and power disguising him. Returning after just a couple of minutes, Rick walked up the steps at normal speed, holding a small item in his hand. A key.