Running in the Dark Read online

  “Last time,” I said in a tone I’d never have used with a vampire who had real power. “Somebody signs for this, or I mark it undeliverable as addressed and incinerate it.”

  Stevie Hood stomped back into the glow of the Tercel’s headlights, grabbed the board and scratched out a single name, Livia. The inside of my nose began to burn and I blinked hard as I extracted the padded envelope from my bag, double-checking the address. Livia took it, and I backed up a couple more steps as the pepper cloud wafted toward me.

  She stared at the package, turning it slowly in her hands. The blood-flush drained from her face. Maybe I’d used too much. Maybe in high enough concentrations, pepper spray was toxic to suckers, with their heightened senses.

  I’d be in so much trouble if I killed a vampire on the job.

  She looked at me and her fangs dropped. I stopped breathing. Then she turned her head, as if to call over her shoulder, and vomited a stream of blood. I leaped back with a startled yell. The other vamp darted away from the slat fence he’d been leaning on, and held Livia upright while maneuvering to avoid her line of fire. She heaved out a couple more pints, then wiped her mouth on her cape. Her shirt rode up and I nearly gagged at the sight of her belly, the veiny skin stretched so tight it was nearly translucent. Her giant gondolier picked her up and carried her to the low warehouse.

  The door slammed, then squealed as it swung back open a few inches. The blood on the ground steamed in the cool air. Creepy. I climbed into my car, set my bag on the passenger’s seat and aimed for the next address on the list. I’d expected a silent, scary entourage engaging in icy intimidation and sly attempts to deceive or seduce. I’d gotten a powerless glutton with bad fashion sense and no manners.

  They weren’t making vampires like they used to.

  * * *

  I pulled into the garage of Carla’s Mensajero y Correos at a quarter past five in the morning. Not only wasn’t I late, mine wasn’t even the last car in. I resisted the urge to squeal with joy and commando roll over the hood of the car. Yeah, my self-control is pretty stellar. Or maybe I just didn’t want to be fired for idiocy.

  Carla squinted through the window between the garage and office as she talked on the phone. Her eyes went from the car to my bag and back again, searching for a reason for me to have returned early. She was somewhere between a hard forty and mild fifty, and had converted the repair shop she’d inherited from an uncle into a low-security courier shop.

  During my interview, she alluded to having been a runner herself, but she was fairly calm and very feminine and, every once in awhile, talked down to us in a way that indicated she had no idea what happened on the streets after dark.

  She was a fair enough employer so far, though the rules in Chile were different from those in the States. Runners here worked the same number of hours—low—and earned an hourly wage, also low, with bonuses for completing express deliveries. Since I was the new girl, I got the milk run. For me, nothing was urgent, which meant nothing paid well.

  The building boasted a small, bright office and three car bays. The traps in the floor had been covered over, though the last bay—mine—still had a working lift for quick repairs that didn’t require a real garage. Which is where Mickey the wonder mechanic came in. Mickey, who was wandering toward me with worry in her big, brown eyes and a greasy rag in her small, strong hands.

  “What is wrong with the car, Aerin?” Mickey’s real name was Maricela, but only Carla called her that, and only when she was angry. She spoke excellent English, which I’d discovered when she’d handed me the keys to my car, then proceeded to describe the myriad defects. “It does not work?”

  “Running just fine.” I bit the inside of my lip to keep from grinning as I pulled the clipboard from my bag and headed for Carla. Behind me, the hood release popped.

  “Fine?” Mickey asked. “She is never fine. Why does the inside of the car smell like lemons?”

  “Olfactory camouflage,” I said. I’d slathered my clothes in oregano, aquarium water and furniture polish before coming to work. Even though Carla wasn’t big on her runners hiding their natural scents from the local vamps, I kept it up. She thought the odds of a vampire crossing a runner’s path outside of work were too low for it to be an issue. Vamps track blood best of all, but their senses are good enough that they can identify humans by scent. Evasive driving and disguises might keep humans from following me home, but suckers require a bit more effort, effort I was absolutely willing to make. Someday I might even find something that didn’t make me want to tear my clothes off and bathe in a public fountain by midnight.

  My grin slid away as Jacinta, Carla’s longest-tenured runner, glanced up at me from a battered love seat in front of bay one. “You forget something, novato?” Jace asked, swinging one long leg off the end of the couch. She had a good four inches on me, putting her somewhere around five foot ten, and was built solid. She wore her hair in a long, well-conditioned ponytail over shorn sides, and had a talent for skeletal black-and-white makeup. In a black leather bustier, she looked like a Halloween warrior princess with a pug nose.

  She also had something I wanted, the premium route. She got the best—meaning most lucrative—of Carla’s regular deliveries, as well as first choice on last-minute calls. I had a pile of scraps and no say. Of course, I was working under an assumed name and hadn’t presented any references when I applied, so I didn’t have a reputation. Yet. Tonight was step one in changing that.

  “Thought I’d knock off early and come see how the other half live.” I stepped over her leg when she wouldn’t move it. The door to bay two opened and Tilde’s white Peugeot rolled in behind me.

  Carla surged through the office door, her silky turquoise skirt swishing, her plump caramel arms pumping. “Aerin, you cannot return until you have finished the entire run. If you have trouble, you call and we figure it out. How many are left?”

  I slid the signature sheets off the clipboard and handed them over without taking my eyes off Jace, who sniffed dismissively. But not before I saw the concern in her eyes. Jace was top dog but this was a small shop, and while I hadn’t seen her drive, she seemed sloppy.

  Sloppy meant picking up a tail and leading fang-bangers or rival gangs to customers, or forgetting to switch your plates and getting jacked by punks seeking to intercept or ransom correspondence. Sloppy meant letting vampires know your weaknesses, which was the same as giving them a means to corrupt you. Sloppy meant dead, or good as.

  Jacinta was bright enough to sense her position might be at risk, so maybe she’d step up her game. Mickey wandered up, wiping at a smudge on her cheek with a rag. She peeked over Carla’s shoulder, then grinned at me.

  “Well done! Drinks are so very much on you tonight!”

  Chapter Two

  “They call us witches, even though they know we’re nothing like those sangijuelas de mierda,” Jace slurred.

  “Motherfucking leeches,” Tilde translated pleasantly. Carla and the other runners defaulted to speaking English as a courtesy to me and Tilde, since she understood English far better than any of us spoke Swedish. But every once in awhile they dropped phrases that baffled my dictionary.

  I smiled my thanks and glanced around the bar. The people who quickly shifted away from my gaze weren’t a problem. Regular people didn’t tend to stare at messengers. Jace raised a finger and pointed at me

  “Are you listening?”

  “Oh, totally. This is fascinating.”

  “You know, my brother really is a witch.” She nodded to herself. “He could show them.”

  “He’s no brujo,” Carla said conspiratorially. “He was a computer hacker. Got caught by Interpol. Now he lives with his mother with a…” She set her foot on the seat of my chair and wrapped both hands around her lower leg.

  “Ankle bracelet?”

  “Sí, sí.” She clinked glasses with Jace and Tilde. They each downed a shot. Carla let out a little squeak. Jace shook her head rapidly, then tossed her head back and ho
wled. I shifted, glancing around from beneath my lashes. Low profile, that was us. Tilde merely licked her lips. She was waifish, with a white-blond pixie cut, but she was matching Jace shot for shot. The tiny Swede could drink.

  “Why do they call us witches?” I asked around the mouth of my beer bottle. Carla rolled her eyes.

  “Not us. I am a businesswoman.” She waved her hand as though shooing off a bug. “It’s a name for messengers.”

  I narrowed my eyes. There was no way she’d ever handled a run in her life. Veterans of the job didn’t dismiss it, and those who’d tried and couldn’t cut it were either bitter or awed, never scornful.

  “The Spanish—the Catholics among them—back then believed that vampires were devils, and that any who consorted with them and lived must be enchanted. Really, it was because certain humans were in business with vampires and not giving the church a…a…”

  “A cut? A percentage?”

  “Sí. The name remained when humans began working as couriers. You were not called such things where you come from?” She asked the question lightly, but her entire body focused on me, shoulders arching forward, eyebrows rising in encouragement.

  “No.” I made a show of shaking my empty bottle, seeking a distraction. As if on cue, Mickey ejected out of the tight crowd. She landed at the table with another couple of beers and my change, which turned out to be the same bill I’d given her.

  “What, did you steal them?”

  “A man bought them for us.” She squinted toward the bar, then waved to someone. “He asked if he could speak to you. He is very polite. A gentleman.”

  I turned and caught sight of a tall, slender man with light, reddish hair. He was handsome, almost pretty, with blue eyes so bright I could see the color across the room. He sipped from a short glass of amber liquor, seemingly oblivious to the slosh of the late-night crowd. A chill ran through me and I grabbed the edge of the table to anchor myself. The population was higher in Santiago than in Anchorage, so there were more of them, but it was still a surprise every time I noticed a vampire. A lone vampire, anyway. They tended to avoid human establishments, and when they did go out, they usually went in groups. That always brought to mind images of animals on the hunt, but in reality the groupings probably had more to do with self-preservation. They might be faster and stronger, but humans outnumbered suckers thousands to one, and they weren’t exactly popular.

  This guy just looked like he was stopping off for a nightcap on his way home. He turned back to the bar and I glanced at Mickey, wondering if she had unwittingly been glamoured by the vampire. She shook her head and pointed farther to my right. A stout man with a mullet glowered imperiously back at us from over an abundance of chest hair. He winked. I choked back a laugh and jabbed the neck of my bottle into Mickey’s ribs. She whimpered dramatically and fell into Carla’s lap.

  “If he is a gentleman, then I am a fucking fairy princess.” I downed half my beer and glanced at my watch. Sunrise was just over an hour off. I hadn’t seen Malcolm in three nights, and while I had no guarantee he’d be home tonight, maybe I’d get lucky.

  I’d come to Chile with Malcolm Kelly even though I’d only known him for the equivalent of a few days. But those days had been intense, and he’d been watching over me before I even knew I was in trouble. He was resourceful, obscenely good-looking, and funny. He needed to be all those things to balance the fact that he was also a vampire—the one type of male that was off-limits to a runner.

  He also treated me better than any living man ever had.

  “Mierda.” Glass rattled when Jace slapped her hand on the table. She raised her phone and everyone leaned in to read the screen. Mickey sucked in a breath and angled her head toward me.

  “Text from her brother,” she whispered. “Two dead girls. Down in Lo Espejo. Covered in bites.”

  Around us, phones beeped and the laughter and drunken end-of-the-night banter dimmed. The fear of vampires, even though we lived alongside them, worked with them, lined up to get into their clubs, never truly went away. Stories of vampire violence were sharp reminders of this and spread fast, riding a tide of subliminal fear. The morning news would run a short segment—approved by the vampires’ PR machine—followed by the reminder that humans still killed humans far more frequently than vampires did. Elsewhere in the world, in places where suckers were not welcomed by the local government, the stories would be angry condemnations.

  Mickey raised her beer and whispered something that sounded like a prayer. Bottles and glasses rose and fell quickly. Carla exhaled sharply, shaking her head as she poured another round of shots. The volume around us rose again in hesitant steps, the voices tighter, and I could feel all eyes turning to our corner table. Brujas. Humans doing business with devils. As if the world wasn’t full of human devils as well.

  “All right, ladies.” I gathered my bag and dropped a couple bills on the table. “Have another round on me. I am off.”

  “You completed your first run with time to spare tonight,” Tilde said in her lilting accent. She stood and rounded the table, the top of her head just reaching my eyes. “That deserves a toast.”

  She raised a shot glass and smiled, pale skin crinkling around bloodshot eyes. The job was taking a toll on her. She’d only been in the country two months, but unlike me, she’d come with a recommendation from some top-shelf joint in Scandinavia. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had doctored their résumé, then been overwhelmed by the demands of the job. I raised my beer and smiled back. I had no problem going through her to get Jace’s position. I might even be doing her a service. Runners don’t just burn out. They crash, hard. Better for her to get bumped out of her spot alive and move on to a different profession, something she was capable of handling.

  “Cheers,” the ladies screeched before Jace stood on her chair and shouted for the waiter. I set my beer down and settled my bag across my body. Tilde grabbed my arm and I frowned at her until she let go.

  “You’ve driven before,” Tilde said.

  “Licensed since I was sixteen.”

  “I mean to say, this is not your first time running for vampires.” Her eyes darted, which had me looking around. The redheaded sucker was gone, the mullet man was gulping from a tankard, and a group of ten had just squeezed in through the front door. Tilde leaned closer. “It took me four weeks to finish that route before sunrise. You’re here less than two, and come in hours early. There are no shortcuts in this business. Where were you before? What happened to bring you here?”

  She sounded sympathetic, probably projecting on me whatever issues had caused her to move from Sweden to Chile, but I wasn’t about to spill. Despite being spread around the world in the cities closest to the poles, the courier community is small. It wouldn’t take much for someone with connections to form the educated—and correct—guess that I’d come from Alaska. And there was only one messenger unaccounted for up there.

  My old alias—Mary Pike—had, for all intents and purposes, died in the Last Frontier. Two people knew where I was and that I was still alive. Malcolm and Master Bronson. A nasty sucker named Richard Abel knew that I was alive, but I fervently hoped that he didn’t know where I was.

  Richard had been the violent left hand of the attempted vampire coup in Anchorage. I’d had a run-in with him while he was sliming around. I’m all for adventure, but the experience hadn’t been pleasant. To get away from him, I’d run, sacrificing my ties with the courier shop that had plucked me off the streets and turned me into a productive member of society. Innsbruck and Oester, In and Out to the runners, I&O to everybody else. I smiled every time I thought about them.

  Richard had a thing for explosives and persistence. Without Malcolm’s help and a whole lot of luck, I would have ended up a cautionary news story. Eventually Mal tracked me to Hawaii, bringing with him suspicion, news of bloodshed back home and, finally, an understanding between us. Unfortunately, Richard had followed him. We’d gotten away, far away, and I’d started working as Aer
in Crane, hiding my real name—Sydney Kildare. But Richard Abel was still out there, somewhere.

  The thought of him, on top of the news of the dead girls, had my pulse jumping. But I wasn’t about to start telling sob stories, not even to a sister runner. Secrets, once spoken, can’t be bottled back up.

  “I’ve just always loved to drive,” I said lamely.

  “And how do you like the route?” Her expression was strangely intense. I smiled carefully. Admitting it was a shitty run was the same as admitting I could appreciate a better one.

  “I could do without the unmarked roads. Have a good night, Tilde.” I took two quick steps, caught a wave of drinkers headed toward a big table past the bar, and rolled out the back door. It thumped closed, shutting off the sound of revelry and replacing it with early-morning silence.

  I skirted a large trash bin, giving it a wide berth in case someone was lurking behind it, and scanned the street before stepping out of the alley. The door to the back thumped again and I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder. Tilde had been on edge, and paranoia begets paranoia. Just because someone left the bar right after me didn’t have to mean they were going to follow me.

  It didn’t have to, but in this instance it did. I jogged across the street, tilting my head toward the closed storefronts, as if window-shopping. A man stepped out of the alley, barely checking for traffic before crossing the street. He was medium height, narrow shouldered inside a trench coat, wearing an angular hat, pulled low. It was possible he wasn’t following me, but after two random turns I doubted it. I increased my pace, starting to breathe hard as I kept one eye on him, the other watching for a taxi. He kept up for a couple of minutes before he started lagging. There was an odd shuffling motion to his stride, and he soon gave up and turned onto a side street. Maybe he was hoping to snatch my purse. More likely he’d heard that couriers were wild and easy. I’d have liked to express to him my feelings on that particular urban legend. Too bad he was too slow—slow like a human.