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JOSEF
The thing was, Beth would make an excellent vampire. Josef could practically taste how she would be as one. She understood the necessity of secrets, for all that she was a born investigator. But... she had been twisted by trauma young. Josef didn't agree with Coraline's methods, but she had given Mick a fucking gift in Beth. Just maybe not exactly how she'd intended the gift to go. Or maybe she had intended it – who knew? With her penchant for mind games and twisted fuckery, maybe Coraline had meant Beth to be exactly the gift she was.
“There's a problem. I need you to help me take care of it,” she said, with the pretense of shame on her lips but the certainty of death in her eyes.
Josef smiled, the charming little boy of Bohemia (sharp and hungry, a child of the Third Estate). “Ms. Turner, you know you can count on me.”
It amused him, that she was more honestly herself with him, whom she didn't even particularly like, than with Mick. It amused him that she would make a better vampire than his friend did, even now, even twice-turned. It amused him that she would never be a vampire, because Mick needed her to be mortal so he could stay just a little bit human.
“It's ADA Talbot. My boss. He's been asking a lot of questions and I checked out his office. I found this.” She handed him a printout.
Josef graciously took the papers with a smirk, which fell off his face like the slide of burnt flesh off the bone when he saw what was written on it. He held in his hands the names of every vampire in the Greater Los Angeles area. He was moving before before thought kicked in, trapping Beth against the wall, her breath hitching in fear (but not terror – Beth as a vampire would be fierce and terrifying in her power).
“How.”
“I don't know. But someone has betrayed you.”
Josef always said he was a lover, but in his deepest heart he was a fighter. Not a soldier, not a warrior, but a fighter. He had been fighting his whole life – fighting for every scrap of food and every pleasure he could eke out of the world, fighting under the boot of poverty and disease, and then everything was lost when he was 19 years old and the world had turned to murder and madness (years later, newborn in blood and hunger on one of many, many battlefields upon which he feasted, when he learned that it had all started when three gentlemen were thrown out a window for money and religion, he'd laughed and laughed and vowed never to be poor and expendable again). Josef was a fighter and had been for over 400 years – nobody was taking his life away from him again. He knew he was selfish, but he'd burn down the world before he'd let anyone take what was his. His life, his money, his friends.
“Help me figure this out, Josef.”
“Of course, Ms. Turner.”
“Ben... ADA Talbot doesn't know what the list means yet, I think. But.”
“But if he finds out, I will do what's necessary. Just like that paparazzo.”
She met his eyes solidly. “I know.”
LOGAN
Having Josef Konstan in his house was making Logan nervous. The older ones always made him nervous. Mick's girlfriend being there wasn't mitigating his nervousness at all. She was totally too intense for him. Like, whoa.
Mick never made him nervous. Probably because they were both SoCal kids, albeit a generation apart. Vamps like Konstan had grown up in a different world, and it showed, even with how suave and sophisticated they pretended to be. Logan liked historical video games, but that didn't mean that he was under any sort of delusion that he could have survived back then.
One of Logan's earliest memories was VE-Day. He'd been 5 years old and he'd fallen and started crying, but his mother didn't come so he'd gotten up and found her crying in front of the radio and that had been wrong, she was his mother, she wasn't supposed to cry. She'd told him that everything would be alright, that daddy (whom he didn't remember) would be coming home soon, and then she took him out for ice cream and everyone in the world was smiling that sunny day in May.
It had been a lie. Nothing was alright when daddy came home. Logan learned to hide. But it was still a good memory.
When he was 18, Logan knew what he'd do with his life. NASA had just been formed and he was going off to college to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering and he was going to build spaceships, not missiles, even though his dad sneered and talked about the Commie threat and the possibility of preventive nuclear war with his RAND friends.
Only, his college roommate had been in college for a couple hundred years and Logan was smarter and more curious than savvy and defensive with his friends and he'd ended up a vampire. He couldn't work for NASA then, because they were the best and the brightest and if he'd figured it out, surely they would, too (and he didn't want to work for RAND, even though he was fairly certain that the odd hours that some of those guys kept positively screamed bloodsucker), so he'd ended up working nighttime radio for a few years (decades), until the whole computer revolution peaked his interest and he went back to college (but not with his Sire, this time, who was in Med school for the fourth time somewhere back East).
Like engineering, programming and computer work was solitary and mathematical. He didn't need to interact with or understand people much, as long as they paid his fees (blood, cash, couriered check, money transfer into his account...), and that was the way he liked it. He did solid jobs working on Microsoft SQL Server software applications for insurance companies and the like, but he also did some more fun jobs for his fellow vampires. Mick St. John had been a particularly prolific customer in the later category lately. He blamed Mick for Josef Konstan and Beth Turner being in his sanctum right now, he really did.
His name was on the list. Logan was very, very careful about who knew who he was, so that meant it was someone smart. Possibly someone connected to Emma and Jackson Monaghan. Which gave him a starting place to look.
“Can you guys, like, stop hovering?” he demanded, a tickle in his throat threatening to make him swallow.
“This is important, Logan,” Beth said, intense and disappointed, so much like his father.
“Yeah, I know, but you two are the opposite of comforting and I need some time to find out where this e-mail came from, OK? Just... go over there and stop looking at me while I work.”
Logan found a name and handed it over to Konstan. Konstan left without a word. Beth said not to worry about it. Logan ruefully wondered if he should ask for his usual fee. Better not. Some people, you just had to hide from because getting noticed meant bad things. He'd had enough of interacting with people for the day, so he shut down his work computer and turned on his newest video game.
He was very good at hiding.
THE CLEANER
She liked her life. Which was why, when other vampires did stupid things, she cleaned up their messes. She liked her flock of pretty boys and gorgeous girls who took out the trash and made the nighttime world they lived in run smoothly. She especially liked that she didn't have to deal with humans beyond the occasional Freshie when she was feeling that special craving for blood straight from the vein. She was done with dealing with humanity.
She'd been Jill, Molly, Claudia, and a hundred other names (but never again María), but she preferred the anonymity of being the Cleaner. She kept in contact with others like her, other Cleaners in other cities, and to them she was Angela. Angela, the Cleaner of Los Angeles. She liked that. She'd been here since the beginning, after all, when it was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. Most vampires moved, and she had, too, in the beginning. But she always came back to Los Angeles, because no matter how much it changed, the light was always right here. And no one would drive her away permanently.
Mick St. John was a darling boy (he loved Los Angeles, too), if perhaps a bit too human still. She would gladly clean up this mess for him. It was Josef Konstan paying, but it was definitely St. John's mess. Angela had no problem killing, human or vampire (but particularly humans, because while vampires killed for food and fun, it was humans that had put a bounty out on the scalps of their own kind). She didn't lust after the kill, but she didn't dislike it, either. It was necessary, on occasion. And this was certainly one of those occasions.
Angela dialed a number, a contact of her's in Europe, really the only (trustworthy) one she had. Cynthia was determined to punish Mick St. John and his friends for the capture and censure of her longest (only) friend in the world, and she was willing to destroy the Los Angeles vampire community and possibly out them to the world to do it.
“Emilio? Yes, this is Angela. You, too. Business. Do you remember Coraline Duvall? Good, do you remember her little hanger-on, Cynthia? Yes. Yes, that's the one. She's been a very naughty girl...”
Emilio would find and take care of Cynthia and any loose ends in Europe for her. The human loose end here in Los Angeles... Well, Angela was the city's oldest resident, and she knew how to take care of her home.
MICK
When ADA Talbot disappeared, it made all the headlines. When it was discovered that a million dollars in cocaine had also disappeared from the lockup around the same time that Talbot crossed the border into Mexico, the connection was pretty clear.
“So, you didn't suspect a thing?” he asked Beth, who was snuggled into his arms.
“No, I mean, he had me investigating that mall development arson case over in the Valley on the day he fled town. There was something going on with him, I could tell that much. He was being kind of squirrely, but, you know, lawyer.” She laughed, a bit sadly, and he figured she was remembering Josh. Mick didn't regret not turning him when Beth had asked him to, but it was still a painful wall between them.
“Huh. But you're still going to be working for the DA's office?”
“Yeah, I'm a good investigator.”
“You are.” He chuckled. “If you ever wanted to be a P.I., I'd have some stiff competition.”
“Maybe someday we could be partners,” she murmured softly.
He tightened his arms around her, looking down at her, but her eyes were glued to the fire. “I'd like that.”
He'd never really thought about being a P.I. in his human life, although he did love reading Black Mask and the other pulps growing up, whenever he could spare 15 cents. It was a guilty pleasure, during the Depression, but they hadn't been so poor that his family couldn't afford a few luxuries.
Mick had wanted to be a cop. The L.A. County Sheriff's Department had been in his sights, even with all of the connections it had to Dragna and the West Coast Cosa Nostra, because it was the oldest and most prestigious force. The weight of that history of service to a greater cause was inspiring, Mick had thought.
All that was put behind him when the war broke out, of course (except for the Zoot Suit riots, when he'd done his best to stop his mates from doing stupid things, but that didn't really count). It had been a bit of a surprise to be tapped as a Pill Pusher, and not really a happy one. But, you didn't question what the Army wanted to make out of you, and so Mick was trained as a frontline combat medic. It was his job to get wounded soldiers to safety, dragging their broken bodies away from the fight after doing a bit of first aid. It was terrible, and it was the best thing he'd ever done, but he'd failed his best friend in the doing.
After the war (after Ray came home and Lilah was his again), Mick had drifted. He'd had music lessons growing up (his Ma thought it was a sign of refinement, and his Da had laughed and ruffled his hair and told him to be the next Eddie Lang) and since he was in and out of bars so much, he'd gotten involved in the music scene. It was nice to have a few buddies to play with and to make a few bucks on the Hollywood party circuit. He'd really had no ambitions at all, at that point. Meeting Coraline had jump-started his passion for life again. Too bad she'd killed him.
Coraline had money. He'd been something of a kept man, although he'd played and paid for this keep. Josef had been the one to get him interested in being a private investigator. Coraline had been off on one of her European jaunts with Cynthia and so Mick was hanging around with Josef. One of the Freshie boys (Mick preferred the boys when Coraline was out of town, something which Josef always teased him about) he'd had in his lap (the boy's blood, so hot and sweet, in his body) had complained about his neighbor going missing and the LAPD doing nothing about it and Mick had volunteered to find out more. He'd found the girl (run off to Las Vegas to try to make her fortune as a showgirl) and he'd somehow confessed to Josef that, once upon a time, he'd wanted to be a cop.
After his laughter had died down, Josef had promised him a loan to help get a P.I. business off the ground. The rest had been history.
Mick stroked Beth's hair. “Do you want me to look into finding Talbot?” he asked her.
She sighed, still looking away from him. “No. It's not important. I'd rather we just focus on... us.”
“OK.” Mick was so lucky to have her. Beth was truly a gift.
THE END