Free Die and Stay Dead by Nicholas Kaufmann

We waited until we were in the Houston Street subway station before calling 911. I used a pay phone on the platform and said I was a neighbor concerned about a strange smell coming from 6 St. Luke’s Place. I hung up when the operator asked for my name.
    *   *   *
    Back in my room at Citadel, I closed the door, put Kali’s carrier on the floor, and opened the gate at the front. The cat stayed where she was, glaring at me from the door of the carrier.
    “Suit yourself,” I told her.
    I filled a bowl with her food and another with water, and set them against one wall. I set up her litter box in my adjoining bathroom. When I walked back into the bedroom, Kali hadn’t moved an inch. She continued to stare at me.
    I pulled Calliope’s notebook from inside my coat. I was about to open it when I heard Bethany calling for me. There was no time to look at it now. I slid it under my mattress, the same place I used to hide things from Underwood and his crew back in the fallout shelter. Old habits died hard.
    I turned to see Kali still glaring at me.
    “Here’s the deal, cat. We’re stuck with each other, at least for now, so what do you say we try to get along?”
    Kali let out a long, low growl, hissed at me, and went back inside her carrier.

 
    Six
     
    Chinatown at night wasn’t any less crowded than Chinatown during the day. A living sea of pedestrians flowed along the narrow sidewalks and threatened to spill into the streets. As the Escalade idled at a red light, I watched people stream across Canal Street in front of us. Bethany and I had told Isaac we wanted to question Yrouel about Calliope’s murder, and he’d insisted on sending Philip with us as protection in case things went south. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat, Philip grunted and ran a hand through his thick black hair, restless. With the sun finally down, this was his first chance to be outside since last night, but he was spending it stuck in traffic.
    Philip didn’t cast a reflection in the rearview mirror. From where I sat in the backseat, all I could see in the mirror was the empty driver’s seat. It was disconcerting. I could only imagine what the other drivers on the road thought, looking in their rearviews and seeing no one behind the wheel of the Escalade.
    In the passenger seat, Bethany checked the stock of charms in her vest. She was keeping it together pretty well after what we’d seen at Calliope’s house. Better than I was. It was eating me up inside. Calliope had told me she felt like someone was watching her. I should have trusted my instincts and gone back to check up on her yesterday instead of waiting. Maybe then she would still be alive. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been gutted like a fish and spiked to the ceiling of her own bedroom.
    I shook my head to get the image out. The clock on the dashboard read seven forty-five. Fifteen minutes until Calliope’s scheduled appointment with Yrouel. An appointment we intended to keep in her place.
    “So what’s the point of this, anyway?” Philip asked. “What do you care what happened to that girl? Just because we rescued her from Biddy doesn’t mean we’re responsible for her. Why get involved? Why not just let the police handle it?”
    I watched people walking by, talking, laughing, holding hands. Happy. “Because Calliope didn’t have anyone,” I said. “No friends, no family. All she had was her cat. There’s no one out there who cares that she’s dead. No one to make sure she gets justice. We’re all she has. The police can’t do what we can do.”
    I wasn’t sure if he understood. Vampires lived in clans, loose associations of families governed by groups of elders, but at heart they were solitary creatures. They hunted alone. Solitude meant nothing to them. Philip was only a part of the team because of his duty to Isaac. I often got the feeling he would prefer to work alone. It came with the territory of being a predator.
    But Philip didn’t argue. The light