«You're an unusual case. It's a lot harder with other people. Anyway, humor me and answer the question.»
I toyed with a tiny death's-head swizzle stick and wondered why I hesitated. My parents' deaths weren't that hard to talk about. I had memories from my street years that I would never willingly revisit, but as Billy Joe had pointed out, I'd been only four when Tony ordered the hit. My memories before that are hazy: Mom is actually more a smell than anything else—the rose talcum powder she must have liked—and Dad is a sensation. I remember strong hands throwing me into the air and spinning me around when they caught me; I know his laugh, too, a deep, rich chuckle that warmed me down to my toes and made me feel protected. Safe isn't something I feel very often, so maybe that's why the memory is so sharp. Other than that, all I know about them came from the vision I had at age fourteen.
Along with puberty, my cosmic birthday present that year was to see my parents' car explode in an orange and black fireball that left nothing but twisted metal and burning leather seats behind. I'd watched it from Jimmy's car while he made a phone call to the boss. He lit a cigarette and calmly let him know that the hit had gone as planned and that he should pick up the kid from the babysitter before the cops started looking for me. Then it faded, and I was alone in my bedroom at Tony's country estate, shivering with reaction. Childhood pretty much ended for me that night. I'd run away an hour later, as soon as dawn came and all good little vampires were in their safe rooms. I'd been gone three years.
Not having bothered to plan out my escape in advance, I didn't have any of the perks the Feds had thoughtfully provided the second time around to cushion the experience.
There was no fake social security card or birth certificate, no guaranteed employment and no one to go to if things went wrong. I'd also had no real idea how the world worked outside Tony's court, where people might be tortured to death from time to time, but nobody ever dressed poorly or went hungry. If I hadn't had help from an unlikely source, I'd never have made it.
My best friend as a child was Laura, the spirit of the youngest girl in a family Tony had murdered around the turn of the last century. Her family home was an old German-built farmhouse that sat on sixty pretty acres outside Philadelphia. It had some enormous trees that were probably already old when Ben Franklin lived in the area and a stone bridge over a small stream, not that its beauty was the main attraction for Tony. He liked it for the privacy and the fact that it was only an hour's commute to the city, and he didn't take the family's refusal to sell very well. Of course, he could have simply bought another house in the area, but I doubt that even crossed his mind. I guess losing our families to Tony's ambition gave Laura and me a bond. Whatever the reason, she had refused to stay in her grave under the old barn out back and roamed the estate at will.
That was lucky for me, since the only other little girl around Tony's was Christina, a 180-year-old vampire whose idea of playtime wasn't the same as mine, or any other sane person's. Laura was probably close to a century old herself, but she always looked and acted about six. That made her a wise older sibling when I first came to Tony's, who taught me the joys of mud pies and playing practical jokes. Years later, she showed me where to find her dad's hidden safe—with more than ten thousand dollars in it that Tony had missed—and acted as a lookout when I ran away the first time. She made a nearly impossible task feasible, but I never had a chance to thank her. By the time I returned, she had gone. I guess she'd done her job and moved on.
The ten thousand bucks—along with the paranoia I'd learned at Tony's—had allowed me to survive on the streets, but it was still a time I tried to avoid thinking about. The lack of material comforts and occasional danger weren't what convinced me to go back, however. I'd made that decision based on the realization that I'd never be able to get revenge from outside the organization. If I wanted Tony to suffer for what he'd done, I would have to return.
It easily ranked as the hardest thing I've ever done, not only because I hate Tony so much, but also because I didn't know whether his greed would override his anger. Yes, I made him a lot of money and was a useful weapon he could hold over the heads of his competitors. They never knew what I might tell him about them and, while it didn't keep them completely honest, it did cut down on the more blatant cheating. But that didn't reassure me much. Tony isn't always predictable: he's smart, and he usually makes decisions for financially sound reasons, but there are times when his temper gets away from him.
He once took on another master over a minor territorial dispute that could have been solved with negotiators from either side sitting down together for a few hours. Instead, we went to war, always a dangerous business (if the Senate finds out about it, you're dead whether you lose or not), and lost more than thirty vamps. Some of them were among the first Tony ever made. I saw him crying over the bodies after the cleanup crew brought them back to us, but knew it wouldn't make any difference the next time. Nothing ever did. So all things considered, I hadn't known whether to expect open arms or a session in the basement. It had been the former, but I'd always had the feeling that this was as much because I caught Tony on a good day as because I was useful to him.