Home Early

5:32 a.m.

Vanya's night shift at the warehouse ended at 5:40. It would take her about 18 minutes to walk here from the subway station.

In 900 years on this earth, through countless dynasties, through so many wars and the collapse of so many empires, Victor had never felt this. The feeling of counting the minutes, waiting for one human being to appear.

He had already checked the pot on the stove twice. He had moved the chair by the door so it sat at a better angle to the stairs, then moved it back. He had caught himself listening for the rattle of the elevated train that would mean she had reached the station, and he had made himself stop listening, and then he had started again.

He tried to name this pitiless feeling using his store of ancient languages.

Was it Athanatos in ancient Greek—the longing of an immortal for death?

Or was it Curiositas in Latin—scientific curiosity about a specimen that could resist compulsion?

Or Sehnsucht in old German—a vague longing for something you have never had?

Or Aethel in Anglo-Saxon?

Every one of those dead words failed. None of them could explain why the head of a vampire house was sitting here, counting the seconds just to hear a skinny assassin's footsteps on the stairs.

The only word that came close was a modern one, and it embarrassed him. Worried. He was worried about a professional assassin walking home from the subway in Queens.

Click.

The lock on the front door sounded. Vanya was home 10 minutes earlier than usual.

Ten minutes. In 19 days, she had never once come home early. Victor's mind registered that fact and set off every alarm it had, a fraction of a second too late.

Victor was in the middle of the second-floor hallway, lifting a steel crate of plumbing parts that weighed more than 150 pounds to move it into the storeroom. Distracted by exhaustion and hunger, he had picked it up with one hand—as easily as picking up a sack of cotton.

Vanya came around the corner of the stairs. Her cold gray eyes instantly locked onto his arm—the arm of a 60-year-old woman balancing a block of steel twice the body weight of an ordinary person.

Her face gave away nothing. It never did. But he had spent 19 days learning that face, and he could see the exact moment the numbers began to add up behind her eyes.

"Martha?" Vanya's voice rang out, full of wariness.

The air seemed to freeze. The second slip of the day should have ended Victor's game on the spot.

But he was a professional liar. Nine centuries of honed reflexes wouldn't let him fall apart. He let go at once, let the steel crate drop to the floor with a jarring BANG, then pretended to stagger back, clutching his chest and gasping for breath.

"Oh, good heavens!" he cried in a husky voice, coughing hard. "This crate... who on earth left it right on the edge of the landing like that! I was just about to push it in when the wheels slipped, and it nearly broke this old back of mine!"

His face crumpled in fake pain. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the hem of the wool sweater and gave her an easy, sheepish smile:

"Thank goodness you got home in time, Vanya. I'm getting old, my eyes aren't what they were, and I almost made a nuisance of myself."

Vanya looked at him. Those pale gray eyes bored into his face for 10 seconds. She said nothing, walked over, lifted the steel crate with ease, and pushed it neatly into the corner of the storeroom.

"You should be more careful," she said, then turned and walked back to her room.

She had lifted it with her legs, the way soldiers are taught, and let none of the strain show. He watched her walk away and thought that in nine centuries he had met perhaps six people who were that hard to fool.

Victor let out a breath of relief. But as she turned away, he saw her fingers slip out a pen, and in the small notebook tucked at her side, she quietly added one more note.

She was writing him down. He knew it with the same certainty he knew the time of sunset. Somewhere in that little notebook was a list of Martha's mistakes, and it was getting longer.

Victor went back into the storeroom, sat down on an upturned bucket among the mops, and put his face in his old woman's hands. He was not sure whether he wanted to laugh or to be sick. He had not felt either impulse in a very long time.

In the dark room at the end of the hallway, Vanya had barely shut the door when the encrypted earpiece tucked into her collar started beeping rapidly.

Jonah's voice came over the radio frequency, twice as fast and frantic as usual:

"Vanya! Listen to me, something really bad is going on!"

Vanya dropped into a ready stance at once, her fingers on the handle of her knife: "What is it?"

"Someone's pulling your personal file. And it's not coming from outside... it's coming from inside Aegis's central server!" Jonah was panting, his keyboard clattering nonstop on the other end of the line.

"They're using the internal directory to pull everything tagged to your operator number," Jonah went on, the words tumbling over each other. "Assignments, pay records, medical, the works. They started an hour ago, and they're not being subtle about it."

"I just had to trigger the protocol that wipes your entire history and original file off the system — don't ask me why, and do not trust anyone at Aegis right now!"

"Who is it?" Vanya gripped the earpiece, every muscle in her body pulled tight as a bowstring.

"I can't trace a specific IP, because it's using Rourke's own encryption layer," Jonah whispered over the hum of a cooling fan.

"Someone with admin access is digging through every file on you since the day you joined Aegis. Vanya, if I hadn't pulled the data in time, they'd know everything about the scar, about Siberian Shadow, even about your night-shift schedule at the warehouse."

"Come in," Jonah said. "Please. I've got a safe house in Hoboken, nobody knows about it but me and a very old cat."

"No." Vanya was already moving, pulling the go-bag out from under the mattress. "If someone's inside the system, every safe house is on the same server."

A long silence crackled on the line. "Okay. That's terrifying, and also correct, and I hate both of those things."

"Stay off the grid tonight, Jonah. Don't go to the office."

"You're telling me to be careful?" His laugh came out thin. "Now I'm actually scared."

Vanya said nothing. A breath of cold air crept through the torn window screen and brushed her forehead.

If whoever pulled her file was inside Aegis, then the contract on Victor Blackwood had never been an ordinary job from the very beginning. Someone wanted her dead, or wanted to use her to trap Victor.

"Thanks, Jonah," Vanya said hoarsely. "Keep your end secure. I'll handle the rest myself."

She stood in the dark with the dead earpiece in her hand and thought about Rourke pouring her a glass of warm water with his own hands. Rourke asking whether she was sleeping. Rourke telling her, softly, that she could take as long as she needed.

She didn't let herself finish the thought. She put it in a box, the way she put everything in boxes, and closed the lid, and knew it would still be there when she opened it again.

She cut the connection. Outside the window, the New York night was still pouring down a cold, stinging drizzle. Vanya opened a drawer, checked how many silver rounds she had left, then left the apartment and went down to the underground garage—where her pickup truck was waiting in the dark.