Getting Out of Dodge
The casino was nearly deserted when Grace pushed through the doors, and three more people left when she arrived, looking at their watches and muttering to one another about the curfew and how it was such a bitch to come to a place like this and not even be able to stay out after dark. The vampire heard something like, "Fucking army bastards..." before the little group departed, and she really couldn't agree more. A girl couldn't unlive like this.
Well, at least she was almost out of here, onto freer, if not greener, pastures.
She'd arranged to meet Darian tonight, and she looked around for the Dealmaker before making her way over to the bar. One drink, maybe two. As she lowered her weight onto a padded stool, she lit up a smoke, wondering where the hell the past two years had gone.
Meanwhile, Darian was at a craps table, talking it up with the dealer. The demon seemed stoic tonight, more himself. His hands were in his suit pockets, and the beard he'd grown out was gone. He watched the dealer talk, leaning back when her hands gestured a little too enthusiastically. If there was one thing Darian hated, it was someone coming uninvited into his personal space.
Becoming more disinterested by the moment, his eyes wandered over the hardcore gamblers, still were scattered about the casino and bellying up to the bar. When he caught sight of Grace, he interrupted the dealer with a hand gesture and walked over. "I'm curious," he said, "If you get caught outside, does that government identification still get you out of hot water?" He brushed a piece of lint off the nearest stool and took a seat.
"I wouldn't know, they haven't caught me yet. I'm a fuckiin' shadow of a shadow." Grace already had her drink in front of her, a double bourbon with no ice from the top shelf, and she was nursing it while watching the few other patrons wander back and forth from the craps table to the slots machines, and occasionally to the bar. "Why, you worried they might not buy you as one of them anymore?"
She swiped an ashtray from the spot two seats away from her, tapped her cigarette into it. "Business gettin' sparse?" she asked Darian. "Or is the current ambiance just adding to the desperation?"
"Desperation?" Darian raised an eyebrow at her. That was interesting, but he didn't speak until after ordering his drink. "I hope you mean theirs and not mine. Otherwise, you're too critical of your own company." The drink came quickly, because there was no one else ordering. Darian set the tumbler on a bar napkin.
While he unbuttoned his jacket, he ran their last encounter through his head. The Federal raid on Davey's Locker was in progress. Darian was captured at gunpoint, but got out of the cage with relative ease. When he took over the driver's spot in the transport van, Grace joined him for a minute. Logic suggested that Grace knew what happened to the van after he drove it away. Wreck, camera crew, media nightmare, project collapse. While Agent Markowitz and the botched spell out at Searchlight were the nails in the coffin, he had no small hand in stirring up the trouble.
"Business is fine." He looked in his glass before drinking.
"Mmm. Right, I forgot, you never sweat."
Grace looked at Darian with something that might have been called affectionate amusement, but her mind was already somewhere down the road. "You shaved," she remarked. "Too bad, made ya look rakish. Guess it cuts down on the beard rash, though. Your ladylove must be relieved."
She drank half the contents of her glass at one go, took another long drag off of her smoke. "I'm leavin' the country," she told the demon, blowing bluish smoke across the surface of the bar. "It's gettin' too crowded here, with all the wrong sorts of attention focusin' on things. I need to be someplace else."
The Dealmaker cut his eyes at Grace, giving her an annoyed look. "I'd ask your opinion on beard rash, but your sire's too young to grow one." He tucked his tie into his coat and slid the glass closer. "For your information, business is fine because I no longer need it. My loyalty during Atia's little 'reign of terror' paid off." He looked straight ahead. The bar had a mirror behind it, like most did, probably to let the tender know he had a customer when his back was turned. So long as the customer wasn't a vampire with a bourbon habit.
"Where are you going?" Darian looked at her, from head to waist. "No. Wait. I can guess. Mexico."
"You are certainly free to think of Reuben whatever you would like," Grace said mildly, tapping more ash off of her cigarette. "He might be a sodbuster, but he's my sodbuster, more or less. He can't help it he ain't a city boy."
She fell silent, watching the thin trail of smoke rise into the air before disappearing from sight, then added, "Mexico first, probably. I can drink tequila and lay around in bed for a few weeks, see if things down there are as fucked as they are here. After that, maybe overseas. I haven't been to Europe in years. It'd be nice to see if the trains are still runnin' on time in Germany."
Darian chuckled, or at least did his version of one. It was a dry sound. "It's a small world, Grace." When the bartender came near, he gestured that he wanted a refill. In a hurry, a new glass was set on the bar. The brown liquor sloshed up the sides of it, onto the cheap napkin underneath. He watched the stain spread. "We're leaving the city. Bethany still has business contacts in Europe. I haven't lived overseas since the 20s, but I can make mine anywhere."
A strange thing happened to his eyebrow. It twitched, and the Dealmaker seemed to be struggling to contain something unpleasant. "Ireland or Scotland," he clarified.
She looked into the mirror behind the bottles on display as if to make eye contact, then turned on her seat to look at his profile. "What's wrong with Ireland?"
She only asked because she'd never seen Darian look even vaguely uncomfortable before. Annoyed, aloof, turned-on, and spent, but never uncomfortable. It was as if his face suddenly belonged to someone else.
"Nothing." Darian schooled his face into an empty expression, but he looked a little worn around the edges. "I'm from Scotland." More importantly, Iain, the magic user that was responsible for Darian's transformation from lower order demon to Dealmaker, had been Gaelic. It happened in the 15th century; Darian killed him around the 19th century. Still, he had nothing but unpleasant associations with the place. He hadn't wasted any time relocating to England, and later America.
"Not all homecomings are sweet," he said dryly.
"Mmm." And she was thinking suddenly of Kentucky, of Lexington, where she hadn't been since....since before she was turned. A brief trip home after she'd left England had led her to the realization that the house the girl she'd been had lived in had been sold, and there was another family residing there. That had been in the late sixties, if she remembered it right, and she'd gone back to the mother country because there was nothing left for her in the states. Her shoulders moved restlessly inside her sweatshirt, and she looked down into her half-full glass.
"I remember that. Kind of distantly, but yeah."
"Here's to Ireland." Darian picked up his glass. "And Germany." While he waited for Grace to toast their respective journeys, he considered what it meant. They might not cross paths after this. He didn't form many attachments beyond the level of acquaintance, but Grace had been a notable, and surprising, exception to that rule. Put frankly, he had gotten used to running into her, and dodging Grace's public displays of affection. Few people got to rib Darian without seriously paying for it.
"To think I didn't like vampires." He raised his glass and drank to it.
"And to sodbusters and ladyloves." Grace lifted her own glass to add to the toast, thinking how peculiar it was that she and Darian should end up something like friends given their numerous differences. Then again, the world was a strange place, and getting stranger all the time.
"Maybe when things calm down, we'll run into each other again and make a go of somethin' else," she offered. "Shouldn't take more than a decade or so, the way people are reactin'. You'd think there was never any evidence that somethin' was fuckin' amiss." She finished off her drink, ordered another.
"And you just hadn't met the right vampire yet, that's all."
"Congratulations. You've convinced me to reconsider the species." A magnanimous claim, one Darian wasn't certain was completely true. He would hardly call Grace, Deanna, and even Dyan grounds to dismiss the blatant stupidity of the lot of them. It was easier for him to assume those three had just been exceptions to the rule. He swallowed and said, "I imagine there'll be profit in this, once the shock wears off. People will be curious. Perhaps they can be persuaded to think the risks are worth the price of admission, to get up close and see what demons are capable of doing." Apparently the Dealmaker had not completely abandoned his plans for a fighting ring, either for exhibition, gambling, or something else.
"Well, if we're in the same area and there's money to be made, I can be found." The vampire was looking down into her newly full glass, then took a drink of the alcohol. "I'm probably leavin' in the next day or so, when it's really late and those army dumb-asses are dozin' at their posts. Tell Bethany..."
Grace looked over at Darian, studied his profile again, maybe thought about what might have been and the things she never seemed able to have. "Tell Bethany I wish her luck in Europe. I'm sure a tough bitch like her will land on her feet like always."
Now his contemplative look disappeared. He gave Grace a doubtful one, but he was amused. "You'd like me to include the 'bitch' portion?" As much as he was surprised by the mutual attraction that happened between Grace and him, he was more confused by the camaraderie between the women, especially taking into account history. Yes, he would leave it at 'camaraderie'. It helped him sleep at night. Darian knew that if he repeated Grace's sentiment word for word, Bethany's mouth would simply turn up at the corners and she'd murmur, 'I'm sure I will,' or, 'The feeling's mutual,' or another equally un-offended thing.
"Don't worry, Ms. Hutchinson." Darian finished off his bourbon. "If you're anywhere near, I'll not only know it, I'll stop by for a drink." He pulled a money clip from an inner pocket and paid for their tab. In a rare moment of mental pause, he got up, but stopped to look at the vampire, as if fixing her in his memory. "Avoid the sharp ends of things." It was as close to 'be safe' as he'd get. The demon took his leave. On his way past her bar stool, he touched Grace's back.