For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
Beckett stopped at the first pharmacy she spotted, braked and nearly slid the bike as she came in on a slant. Righted it, balanced with a foot, and kicked the stand down as she inspected the environs. The hair on the back of her neck stood up as she got looks, and she cased the joint like a cop—or a criminal—before unbuckling the helmet and doing a hair toss as it came off.
She got looks; she always did. It didn't mean anything sinister. Hell, she was bare-armed and not wearing leather, and she'd parked the bike like it was some kind of stunt for a movie, so yeah, they were looking. That didn't make the older woman's sniff of disapproval into a sniff of vampire scenting fresh meat.
Kate pushed open the door and walked inside the mom-and-pop neighborhood pharmacy.
There were quite a lot of supplements she could take if she wasn't allowed his blood.
(And she wasn't. Was not allowed to drink from him until— No. Better not even think that. Just no. Off limits. He was her husband, not her changeling.)
Beckett scanned the aisles, basket hooked over one arm, and cleared the shelves of iron and calcium supplements, gummies only (it was too difficult to swallow a pill when you were that thirsty), and she also knocked a couple of bottles of herbals in after them (they were unproven but it had felt like they'd worked after she'd been shot the first time). She also replenished their first aid kit with additional items, including tweezers, a roll of gauze, and iodine, because at some point, when he was in control of himself, she'd need him to open her back up and fish out the metal fragments of that bullet.
(And then close her back up, with his mouth on her—)
She was both not looking forward to that and also so aroused by the idea, that she had to aggressively stuff that sensation back down into the dark deep hole in which it lived with all the rest.
She had just rung up her purchases at the self-scan and paid when the wail came muffled and muted outside the doors. Her head jerked up; she watched two police cars, lights on, scream past the drug store on their way to a call.
She took a steadying breath, but it was a good reminder that she needed information from the outside world. A way to check on the loft, the status of their flight risk, how far they might be able to get. They were not merely two lovers locked away for a weekend; she was a thing and she had turned him into that thing as well, and there was proof of it on the kitchen floor.
No matter how much Javier and Kevin and Lanie thought they loved her, there were some things that were always unloveable.
(Except to Castle, who loved the macabre, and her, and hopefully those two went together. Please God.)
Kate slung the canvas bag over her shoulder with her purchases and went back out to her bike. She stuffed it into a saddle bag and pulled out her phone, wanting to check news outlets, but realized she probably didn't have enough money paid up to connect to the internet using this burner. She tapped it into her palm and scanned the street.
These days, New York City didn't have many internet cafes. Waypoint on the Lower East Side was the only one she knew of, a quaint throwback, but she didn't need a computer; she just needed a stranger's phone.
She picked the Starbucks and jogged forward, leaving her purchases in the locked saddlebags on the bike, fairly certain they'd remain unmolested. Inside Starbucks, the heavy odor of burnt coffee made her lip curl—Castle wouldn't set foot in Starbucks any longer and he'd be horrified she was here—but she ordered something with green tea for the caffeine boost and the anti-oxidants, and then scouted for a mark.
There. Younger man, white, pale, phone out beside him but using his laptop near the windows. He had a bookish appearance, wearing a jacket despite it being the middle of May, and humid, and the thin brown flop of hair in his eyes made her think of Castle.
She took her iced green tea to the windows and fiddled with her phone in view of the guy, waiting for him to notice her. She leaned into the natural talents of her kind, both vampire and vamp, and it took only twenty seconds for her scent to hit him and his eyes to lift, see her.
She pretended she didn't notice him, pretended she was waiting for someone, let her mind race with thoughts of Castle and the loft and the dead man she had bled dry. Giving it time to work.
He didn't approach her, but he was looking. Likely at her breasts in this shirt, because her bra was black and tan and her shirt was white with pink blooms of blood at the bottom, though no one seemed to know it was blood. Something of her was getting through to him because he even cleared his throat.
She looked at her phone. Would she use a news outlet, maybe a tv station's website, or would that be too slow? She could log into her email remotely; she still had the network address memorized with its string of numbers, but she'd be tracked that way, flagged for the breach in security. Plus it required two-factor authentication, so she'd have to give her phone number—a phone number—to get the code and then that was another point of contact in the chain.
No. That wouldn't work.
But she had an idea of what might. Castle had always said, I just go on Twitter; they know everything before anyone else.
She knew his twitter handle and she knew his followers were rabid. He'd created a profile for her a few years ago, without telling her, and then tried to sucker her into getting on. She'd looked at it away from him, faintly intrigued, but she'd been confounded by the conversations people were apparently having which she couldn't follow, not their origins and not their conclusions, and she'd quietly decided it wasn't for her. But she'd simply told him no, Castle and never mentioned it was too bewildering.
Never gave him the chance to teach her, which was always his favorite thing. To help her.
Why do you always have to go first?
Kate rubbed her forehead and glanced up quickly, caught the bookish kid staring. "Hey," she said, and perked up. "You have a smart phone, right. Can I borrow it?"
He blinked.
She tapped her dumb phone against the wooden ledge of the cafe table and hopped up—God, she was getting old and stiff, wasn't she? she'd twinged her knee again—came around to his side of the table and sat in an unoccupied chair. He was staring at her.
Kate gestured to his phone. "I was gonna check twitter and message him, DM him," she corrected quickly.
"Him?"
She smiled. "My husband." Tilted her head. "Kinda remind me of him, which is why, I guess, I'm asking you."
Bookish guy blushed bright red, cheeks, throat, even his nose. But he grabbed his phone, unlocked it for her, and handed it over without comment.
Kate winked at him. "Thanks. I won't use your app, just the browser." She was playing up the cougar angle a bit too much, but it was hard to turn off the vampire once she gave it free rein, this side of her. She'd used it to her advantage in Vice, she'd made detective so fast because of it, this flair she had with people, this insight into the mind of both victim and criminal, but it had taken an extreme toll.
She'd needed therapy, in the end, because she couldn't bring herself back from that crazed edge.
Oh shit.
Twitter had blown up.
They found a dead man in WriterCastle's loft—and he and the bitch have vanished! #storyat11 #thedetectivedidit #wetoldhimso
Well, shit. They were right this time, weren't they? She'd really done it.
She smiled at the kid, cleared out her search from his twitter, quit the app, handed the phone back.
"Thanks. He's meeting me at Cuppa instead." She hopped up again, fled Starbucks as quickly as possible.
They were out of time.
She had to hope they hadn't closed the tunnels yet.
—-xxx—-