Exiting the elevator into the pitch-black area under the building, she navigated it without turning on the small flashlight she had in one of the pockets of her cargo pants. It had taken her some time to find a workable pathway after she’d returned to the city with wings, but she now moved through the darkness with confidence, easily avoiding the heavy pillars that were the foundations of the building.
Reaching the scarred and graffitied metal door meant to discourage any intruder who got this far, she coded herself in using another concealed keypad, then put her eye to the retinal scanner. The door slid open seconds later, inviting her into a solid metal cubicle where she was scanned three ways to Sunday in a new layer of security, her weapons noted.
“That way,” Vivek had told her, the first time she’d visited after the upgrade, “if you turn out to be a bad guy, I can gas you, and bye-bye, Evil Elena.”
“Funny,” she’d said at the time, thinking about just how much trust they put in Vivek down here—all of them dead certain that trust would never be broken. He might be occasionally petty, but Vivek was nothing if not loyal to the Guild.
When the doors opened to release her from the steel cubicle, she knew it hadn’t been an automatic action; Vivek personally cleared all incoming and outgoing traffic.
“Ohayoˉ, Vivek,” she said to the air.
“Gozaimasu, Elena.” A pause. “Seriously? That one was so easy even Ransom would’ve got it.”
“I’m going to tell him you said that.” She waited patiently as she was scanned a second time, wondering what other tricks he had up his sleeve; she wouldn’t put it past him to have had automatic gun ports built into the walls.
“Hey, I think I might have to double-check your identity.” Vivek’s voice came out strong and resonant through the speakers. “You usually start bitching about how long the scan takes the second after you walk in.”
Fingers tightening on the piece of paper she’d crushed beyond any hope of repair, she rolled her eyes. “Next time you complain about the bitching, I’m going to remind you of this little conversation.”
A chest-deep laugh, an unexpected sound when it came to the often moody hunter, before the final doors opened in front of her. She headed straight to the reinforced core from where Vivek held court, his steel hand controlling all aspects of the Cellars. That, however, was only a sideline—his true job was keeping watch on anything and everything that might affect the Guild or its hunters.
Today, he buzzed her into his inner sanctum without making her jump through any further hoops. “You’re in a good mood,” she said, when she entered to see him grinning from ear to ear.
“I just had dirty, dirty cybersex with a smoking-hot brunette from Italy. Let’s hear it for intimate international relations.”
“Too much information.” Grabbing a chair, she swiveled it around to sit with her arms braced along the back. In front of her was the large wall-mounted screen where they most often played Scrabble, below it a sleek bank of computers, merely one set of the many that filled the core.
“I go to the trouble of getting a chair constructed to support wings,” Vivek complained, “and you always do that.”
“If you ever get rid of that chair, I’ll never forgive you.”
Pretending to think about it, he brought up a game. “I hope you have tissues—because I plan to make you cry like a widdle baby.”
He was in such a good mood, she thought again. Vivek was often sarcastic, sometimes sulky, more than a few times curt, but truly happy? It was an uncommon thing. She didn’t want to change the tone of this conversation, wanted to leave him as happy as she’d found him.
“You want the first move?” he asked, after the computer allocated their letters.
Shaking her head and knowing a delay would only make this more difficult, she reached out to put her hand over the one on the arm of his wheelchair, though she was conscious he couldn’t feel the contact. He saw it, though, curiosity alive in those dark brown eyes. “What’s the matter, Ellie?”
“I have a question to ask you.” Shifting her hand from his, she used it to grip her chairback. “It’s a question that might piss you off. If it does, I’m sorry—but know I’m only asking because I love you.”
Smile fading, he turned his wheelchair around to face her. When he didn’t say anything, just waited, she thought about simply showing him the crushed paper in her other hand, but that would be a cowardly act, not worthy of their friendship. “If you were a viable Candidate,” she said into a silence underwritten with the quiet hum of Vivek’s computers, “would you want to become a vampire?”