Page 17 of Missing Piece
“I don’t think so. What’s wrong with him? Did he get mugged again?”
“You could say that,” Ophelia said. “Cliff is nursing a disgusting sunburn on Tariq’s couch right now.”
“How bad?” Vincent pressed. He placed the call on speaker and motioned for Petrov to move closer.
“If he were human, I’d say third-degree burns. He’s tearing through our back stock just to get the skin on his hands to grow back,” she said.
“Let me talk to him,” a gentle voice with a slight accent said in the background.
“I got it,” she said.
“Child, hand me the phone.”
“Ugh, fine. Dad wants to talk to you,” Ophelia groaned.
“Thanks darling,” Vincent said as he heard the handset passing hands. It sounded like she was feigning a gag at the term of affection in the background, making him chuckle despite receiving the news. “You there Marcus?”
“I’m here. She was being honest, Cliff is in bad shape.”
“What happened?” Petrov asked.
“Cliff pulled over to wait out the sun at a rest stop between here and Joliet after he did his pickups. He called for help and when Tariq got to him, the whole truck was on fire, and everything was destroyed,” Marcus said.
“It looked like they stole the beer,” chimed Tariq from the background.
“And the blood?” Vincent demanded, casting a worried glance toward Petrov.
“Destroyed,” Marcus said, his tone grim. Vincent could hear a tinge of anger in his old friend’s words. Now that was rare. Marcus always seemed to be the most level-headed of the vampires in their little city. Probably because he was nearly a hundred years older than the rest of them.
Vincent shook his head, dragging his fingers across his scalp. That truck was supposed to get them through the next month, both in terms of keeping them all fed and keeping the more exclusive customers of Wild Side and Marcus’s downtown nightclub happy. “If we don’t get a new source before the next pick-up date, we’re both going to be royally fucked in less than a month,” he said. “Can we call in a favor with one of the others? Doesn’t Jae still work at the hospital?”
“He does, but after the last incident that required him to smuggle bags out, they keep the bank locked down like they’re hiding the Ark of the Covenant in there,” Marcus said. “We might just have to, what’s the phrase, take it on the chin?”
“Fuck,” Vincent muttered.
“Why are you worried? I heard you have a new house guest who can help in that area?” Marcus mused.
Vincent eyed Petrov, but the big man just shook his head and fingerspelled Ophelia’s name. He wondered for amoment which one of the brothers had told her, but honestly, Luka probably told her in one of their group chats the same night Vincent brought Adam home. “Your child has a loud mouth.”
“She is quite good like that,” Marcus said. “You should have mentioned it before you did it, though. We don’t know what kind of family connections he has or if missing posters are going to go up. You should have been more careful.”
Now was not the time for one of Marcus Graves’s “responsible vampirism” lectures. He already endured enough of those for two lifetimes. “It wasn’t planned. It was sort of heat of the moment,” he admitted, looking away from the speaker as though Marcus would somehow be able to see him through the earpiece.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I haven’t felt this kind of…embarrassment since I was human.
“You haven’t been a heat-of-the-moment guy in a very long time,” Marcus said, a scratchy noise coming through the speaker like he was scratching at his stubble. “Have you, um, started the process with him?”
Vincent hated how concerned Marcus sounded. They had had an on-off kind of friendship for years, but when things seemed at their worst, the old bastard always came through for him, whether it be getting ready for a fight or just lending him an ear. He hated it. Relying on Marcus and the brothers. On Ophelia. But they were the closest thing he had to a family. And they usually steered him in the right direction.
It would be helpful to talk to Marcus about his…conflicted feelings around Adam.
Just not yet.
“Not really,” Vincent finally said after Petrov arched a browat his growing silence. “This isn’t about that right now. We need to figure out what to do about this attack first. Do we know if hunters were involved?”
“Oh definitely,” Ophelia said from somewhere in the same room as Marcus. “Cliff mentioned they came ready with all sorts of behead-y type weapons, and as soon as he tried to get them off the truck, they started yanking off his daytime gear. That dumb fucking cowboy hat he wears probably saved his skin. Literally.”
“Ophelia, language,” Marcus scolded. She muttered something indecipherable even to Vincent’s ears, drawing a sharp rebuke from Marcus in Japanese. “Despite her word choice, she is correct. Probably hunters. Newer ones if they couldn’t take out one injured vampire.”
