Shadows and Light
an excerpt

After Jace had found out the bartender he wanted to speak to about a Mage of interest was Steph, he'd made it a point of surreptitiously learning of her work schedule, in hopes of finding a time to speak to her when she was least likely to be surrounded by curious club patrons.

He discovered that on the first Monday of the month, she came in early to do a careful inventory of the blood supply, being not only the senior bartender on staff, but, apparently, also the one entrusted with the ordering of supplies from the local blood bank. Word was that she had an in with one of their staff, but whatever the reason, it worked out well for Jace that the first Monday of the month fell just a few days after the enforcer had learned that she was the Vampyre to talk to.

It had taken quite a bit of convincing on his part for Kestrel to let him conduct the interview on his own, but given that the reason he was even here was because Juliet had said this Steph had gone on a rant about a “Mage bitch”, Jace wasn't sure bringing a Mage Bitch of his own along would be very productive. Something told Jace that having a Mage enforcer present might not only make Steph be less then forthcoming, but might make the whole experience take on more of a violent edge then it needed to have otherwise.

In the end what little rationality the brunette Mage seemed to have won out, and she agreed that he could conduct the interview on his own, under certain fairly strict conditions. One, that he report in very vivid and minute detail everything that occurred during said interview. And two, that if they managed to discover the identity of said “Mage Bitch”, the same thing would occur in reverse.

The deal didn't seem so bad to him. After all, there was no guarantee that they would find out the mystery Mage's name, and even if they did, it didn't seem like such a hardship to let Kestrel conduct that interview on her own. Quid pro quo, and all that jazz.

The result, though, was that he now found himself in the cellar of The Cavern, in some place he was sure had once been designed to be a wine cellar, he was quite sure, but now held an awful lot of blood. The sight nearly turned his stomach, and he drank the stuff to survive. He could not really imagine what Kestrel's reaction would have been, given her feelings about his race.

He also found himself faced with a Vampyre that personified the idea of punk rock chick. Steph had long black hair, and, as opposed to three quarters of the clientèle that frequented the club they currently stood under, Steph's appeared to be natural. It parted in the middle, and had bangs long enough to brush the dark, thick eyebrows above her bright blue eyes. One of those brows were pierced, as well as her bottom lip. Those piercings and both arms that were covered in tattoos alerted Jace to the fact that she wasn't long turned. Neither one were things that could have been done to a Vampyre, and had to be done when she was still human, more then likely in a time when it was not totally beyond belief for a woman to have done such things to her body. Somewhere in the last 30 years or less, at the most, he would guess. And yet, Steph had none of that newbie stink that Anja had had. She wasn't a wannabe. From the looks of it, she had chosen her life with full foreknowledge, because, as far as Jace could tell, the Vampyre looked very comfortable in it.

She was wearing tight red leather pants, a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off that read “You can't have Manslaughter without laughter”, and an expression on her face that said she had been expecting him.

“You don't seem all that surprised to see me,” Jace pointed out, noting that he'd barely been worth a glance up from her clipboard inventory when he'd come down the stairs.

“We both know that I heard you coming when your boot hit the top step. And we both know that I knew you'd be coming as soon as Juliet could get to a phone after she'd given you my name. She's good at serving drinks and great at answering questions, but if you're looking for someone to keep a secret, that girl is not your it.”

“That right?” he grinned, somehow not surprised. A waitress in a bar that was also a gossip? It was so cliché that it was almost tragic. “I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm trying to plan a nefarious scheme.”

“This was a nefarious scheme?” she shot over her shoulder as she continued to carelessly take her inventory. “Wow.....your standards for dastardly deeds are really low. They're really low for a boy scout. For a Vampyre enforcer, they're deplorable and embarrassing.”

Her comment actually surprised a full throated laugh out of him, and he relaxed and let it happen. “It's a good thing, then, that, in this particular instance, I wasn't actually going for nefarious then, isn't it?” He found himself liking this bartender, and he hoped that the interview went well. It was a rare occasion that he found someone of his clan that he could actually tolerate as a person and not just a Vampyre, and he was liking this Steph creature already. She had balls.

He walked forward and extended a hand for her to shake as he introduced himself. “Jace.”

“Just Jace?” she asked, as she stood, turning to face him and take his hand to give it a proper shake.

“Well, you know us Vampyres,” Jace responded, finding her handshake firm and admirable. “The older we get, the less we go for formalities like last names. Adds to that whole mystique thing.” He gave her a sardonic grin.

“Ah, so that's it. Guess I'm just young enough to still hang on to that pesky human custom. Steph Thorbert at your service.” She crossed her arms across her clipboard, pinning in to her chest with her forearms. “What can I do you for?”

“Well,” Jace began, “if Juliet has that big of a mouth, I'm sure you know why I'm here as much as you knew that I was coming.”

“You'd guess right, but I'd prefer to hear it firsthand then through the distorted vision of a gossip monger.” He narrowed his eyes at her in question. “Juliet's a sweet enough girl, I suppose, but I try not to take the word of a girl that will repeat it so quickly.”

“Good philosophy,” he told her. And it was. Steph appeared to have a very solid head on her shoulders. She really couldn't have been a Vampyre very long. A girl with as solid a brain as she had, under Callis's employee wouldn't stay a simple bartender for long, not if he'd noticed her. Unless she'd managed to escape the figurehead's notice. But that was a question for another time. Though it was an interesting situation, it wasn't the reason he was here. He pushed it to the back of his mind, and made a note to look into things with Steph Thorbert further when his murder case was solved.

But, for now, murder was the reason he was here. In specific, he was here because Steph had information about a Mage asking about Sebastian. That was what he needed to concentrate on.

'Juliet mentioned that you were,” he looked for a better word then 'bitching', “complaining vehemently about a Mage woman that was inquiring about Sebastian sometime last week.”

“That I was.”

He waited her to elaborate, but that was clearly all that she had to say on the subject.

“Nothing else to say?”

She quirked an eyebrow at him and gave him a mischievous grin, and Jace wondered what he'd done to give her the impression that he'd be okay with her teasing him. “I was waiting for you to ask an actual question.”

“Aren't you intimidated by me in the least?” he asked her. “I am a clan enforcer, you know. From what I hear around, I'm one of the best.”

“Ah, now that was a question.” She smiled, and her hands dropped to her sides. “Nope, not intimidated. If you were meaning to intimidate me, you would have brought your Mage partner. You didn't. I'm assuming, since she's not the kind to go quietly, Kestrel Mayfield, that it was quiet a battle to leave her behind. So am I remiss in thinking you did so to make me comfortable?” He shook his head in answer to her question. “Therefore, no reason to be intimidated.”

“And why are you just a bartender?” he asked her, amazed at her logic, and her study of human, or in this case, Vampyre nature.
“Just biding my time,” she told him with a mysterious smile on her lips. “You'll notice that I'm answering any time that you ask an actual question, right?”

“Of course.”

“Just pointing out that you might want to be asking your questions now.” There was that sardonic little grin again.

Jace chuckled. Well, this interrogation certainly wasn't going in quite the way that he'd expected. In fact, the conversation had taken such a tangent that he'd nearly forgotten the original reason that he'd come here. She was amusing, and there was far little about this case that had managed to amuse him.

“Okay, let's try that then, shall we?” She nodded in an over serious fashion. “All right, then. Juliet said that you were vociferously voicing your opinion on some, and I quote, 'Mage Bitch', that was demanding to speak to Sebastian. What can you tell me about the whole situation?”

She motioned him towards a wooden crate near where he was standing, and took a seat on a similar one herself before beginning to formulate her answer. “I guess it was a week and a half, maybe two weeks ago? I'm sorry that I don't rightly remember. Nights seem to blur into each other when you tend bar in a nightclub.”

He could relate, and he couldn't really fault her for not paying closer attention. After all, at the time she couldn't have known that it the incident may become noteworthy later. He nodded at her to continue her story.

“So, it was late-ish, after midnight, I'd say, and rather raucous, so chances are it was a Wednesday or a Thursday night, because I do remember it being not busy enough to be a weekend.” Her tongue flicked out to worry her lip ring, and he could see her eyes unfocus just a bit as she concentrated on the past events. “So this real high maintenance blonde comes striding up to the bar, pushing her way in front of all of the legitimate customers, and leans way over the bar to get in my face. She was in a business suit and all perfectly coiffed. I remembered thinking she looked like corporate secretary Barbie. She was enough in my face that I could feel that she was a Mage, you know?” He nodded silently, not wanting to break the flow of her tale. “And she starts telling me that she needs to see Sebastian like now. Not now, but right fucking now, though not in those words. And she's a real bitch about it, in that my shit don't stink kind of way.” Steph rolled her eyes at the memory. “It's been a long time since I actually wanted to sink my teeth into something alive, but that bitch came real damned close.” The female Vampyre paused there, turning her eyes towards Jace to study him intently, as if it mattered very much what he thought of her last statement. He tried to simply be very neutral about it, and silently willed her to continue with her story. “So she's getting really demanding now, and saying crap about how powerful she is and who she works for and all this shit, like I care. I work for Callis Maximillion, hello? That kind of crap rolls off my back.”

“Yeah, can't say name dropping really impresses me either,” Jace agreed with her.

That caused the other Vampyre to smirk, and she leaned back on her arms, palms flat against the crates holding her up. “I actually thought I was going to have to call the bouncers on her perfect ass when next thing I know, Sebastian himself stalks up to the bar and grabs her by the scruff of her pretty little business suit like she's a wayward kitten or something. He must have hauled her off to the private offices or something, but the backlog she'd created at the bar was getting a little feisty, so I really didn't bother to watch what the fuck he did with her, I was just glad he'd got her the hell away from my zone, you know?”

He could only imagine. He hated people on power trips that deserved to be on them. People that didn't were ten times worse. “Yeah, I know. And I can't say that I blame you for that at all.”

“I'm sorry that I can't tell you any more then that, man,” she apologized.

“It's more than all right, Steph. What you told me was enough.” He stood from his makeshift seat, and she took that as her cue and stood as well, gathering her clipboard as she did. “Thanks for your help.”

“I was helpful, huh?” Her grin, if Jace was reading it right, was a little flirtatious, and he felt a pang that his heart was tied up so inexorably in Kestrel bloody Mayfield, because things had been, for a few moments in time, so easy down here in a cellar full of blood with Steph that he kind of wished he could grin back full bore and encourage her. But it was no good. His heart wasn't his own.

“Well, you answered some questions that Kestrel and I had.” At the mention of his partner, the female Vampyre's grin turned wistful, and he wondered not for the first or the millionth time if people could see his heart in his eyes at the mer mention of Kestrel's name. “Can we contact you if we think of anything else?” he asked her.

“Sure thing, you or the Mage.” Steph told him, and this time her grin was friendly and accommodating. “It's not the clan I had a problem with, it was the powerbitch part that I took issue at.”

“I'll let you get back to your inventory then.” He turned and headed up the stairs.

“See you around, enforcer guy,” Steph called from down below. And for some reason, Jace knew that she would be.