16. Cooper

16

COOPER

" I 'll drop you off at your house," I say to Nikki once we're back on the road.

"What? No! I'm not going home. I just watched a real witch do real magic to find my friend who's been kidnapped by a vampire, and you think I'm just going to toddle on home?"

I shrug. "Suit yourself, but you aren't coming to the house when I find her. It's far too dangerous, and I can't be distracted worrying about you."

She looks like she might argue, but if she didn't want to go into Selene's building, she really doesn't want to walk into a vampire's lair. And we both know it. "Okay, but I can help you find her."

I nod. It would definitely help to have more than one person on this job.

The drive is silent for about five minutes, and then Nikki turns in her seat toward me.

"You know the seatbelt doesn't do it's job when you twist around like that," I say.

She ignores me. "So have you and her…" She makes a juvenile hand gesture.

"If we had, she wouldn't be with a vampire right now because I would have marked her."

"What does that mean?"

I sigh. I don't want to do twenty questions right now, but it distracts me at least from what Marcus could be doing to her. Rationally, I know Selene's right. He's waiting for the drugs to clear, and whatever plans he has for her, he'll want to combine it with blood drinking. It's the vampire way.

If they party there's blood drinking. If they're fucking, there's blood drinking. If they're torturing… there's blood drinking. It's a clear and defined pattern.

I glance at the clock on the dash. It's already almost ten-thirty. I hate the idea of Marcus awake in the same building that Rosalie is in—even if he won't touch her again until the sun sets tomorrow. It still doesn't give us a lot of time. And I shift tomorrow night, which makes everything that much more dangerous.

"Hey! Cooper!" Nikki shouts, snapping her fingers next to my face.

"What?"

"What does that mean? Marking her?"

I'm sure Rosalie's friend is going to love this. "I have to bite her and mix our blood while we're having sex."

She's quiet for a long time. I'm not sure if her mouth is gaping open because I'm watching the road and trying to keep us between the lines. Finally she says, "What do you mean mix your blood?"

"I'll bite her, then bite my tongue, and then seal her wound."

"What do you mean… seal her wound?"

I swear it's like being in the car with a toddler. So I just ignore her and focus on driving.

Finally after several more minutes of blissful silence, she says, "What's going to happen to Rosalie?"

"Nothing. I'm going to find her." I have to keep telling myself this. I have to believe I'll find her before the sun sets tomorrow.

"No, I mean, what's going to happen after the mating thing?"

"What happens after two humans get married? They blend their lives together."

"Are you planning to isolate her from her friends and family like you've been doing up until this point?"

"No."

Nikki makes a huffing sound. "I don't like you or any of this, but if you get my friend back in one piece I'll consider tolerating you."

"Glad to hear it."

I pick us up some food at a drive through—yes more food. I'm still hungry—then take us back into the city to the public records building. We have a whole separate building for that purpose annexed off from the courthouse.

Nikki follows me up to the door, carrying our bag of food and our drinks. "Hey, what are we doing here? It's closed."

"I've got a key and the security code." I was supposed to return it to Greg two days ago.

"And why do you have a key?"

"You ask a lot of questions. I run the top architecture firm in this city. I use the public records office a lot."

She crosses her arms over her chest while I try to use the dim street light several yards away to find the key on my ring.

"Oh, so you're telling me architects get their own keys to government buildings?"

"No, I didn't say that. I'm friends with the City Clerk." Greg also happens to be a wolf shifter, but I don't mention this to Nikki.

"And he's allowed to just hand out keys to government buildings?"

"Probably not," I admit. Finally, I find the key and let us into the building. I punch in the security code.

Nikki flips on the lights, and I quickly turn them back off.

"What? We need to be able to see."

"We don't need that light. I don't want to draw police attention."

Nikki shrugs and follows me back to the main offices, away from the street facing windows. I flip on the lights and take our food to a long empty table. We eat and then get to work.

I turn on a couple of computers and consult the map Selene gave me, praying she isn't sending me on a wild goose chase. If she is, I'll kill her. It's almost the full moon, and if she causes my mate to die due to petty jealousy, I will end her before my own slow descent into madness can take hold.

"This will take all night," I say.

"Isn't there a database you can search? Like: houses with basements."

"It's where we'll start but we need to account for every house inside this radius and not all of them will be in the database."

"Why not?" Nikki says, swirling a french fry in her chocolate shake.

"Some of the older house plans are filed in boxes in the records room in the basement."

"And we think it's an older house?"

I shrug. "I don't know. Marcus could have had this safe house for a while."

I decide to run a quick search for basements in the area anyway. Nothing.

"Does that mean there are no basements in the database?" She's hovering over me, slurping the last remnants of her shake.

"Not necessarily. This search feature isn't the best in the world." I don't tell her that I also suspect that if Marcus bothered to put strong wards up, he probably doesn't want anything about his house to be in any kind of searchable database at all.

I pull up Google Maps and take a look at the area in question. "I think we can eliminate a third of this area," I say.

"Why?"

"It's not upscale enough. Part of this radius is a very wealthy neighborhood. Vampires tend to be extravagant, so there's no way he'll live in a middle class neighborhood, even as a temporary residence."

I set Nikki up on one of the computers and show her what we're doing. She takes half of the streets on the remaining map, and we compile a list of all the houses.

It's tedious work, but finally we've got a list of thirty-six homes, and with any luck Marcus is inside one of them. I'm grateful for the nicer neighborhoods with generous lawns. If we were dealing with anything else, we'd have a lot more houses to eliminate.

No basements are found, and fifteen of the houses aren't in the database.

"So that leaves the records room," she says.

I nod, grimly. The records room isn't the well-oiled machine that the database is, and even finding one set of house plans in this dimly lit dump is going to be nearly impossible.

The search drags on for hours.

"Hey, I found it," Nikki says.

I bolt upright. It's light outside. "What time is it? How could you let me fall asleep?"

"You were exhausted. If you're going to rescue her, you need to be rested."

She's not wrong. It's late afternoon, and Nikki seems like she'll drop at any minute. I'm grateful it's Sunday, and the office is closed for the day, or else I'd have to find a way to explain our presence to local government employees who don't take kindly to rule breakers.

I take the plans from her and confirm, that yes, this house does have a basement. We put everything back the way we found it in the records room and go back upstairs. I type the address into Google Maps, only to find a blank lot.

"Maybe the house never got built," Nikki says, her tone worried like we just did all that work for nothing.

Selene wasn't kidding about the power of his wards, if the building can't even be recorded by technology.

I shake my head. "It got built. Marcus just doesn't want to be found."