Free The Tenants of 7C by Alice Degan Page B

finished cutting Clare’s cake, and she brought the plate and the mug of tea over herself. She was stopped as she came out from behind the counter by a greasy-haired man in a blue windbreaker, who seemed to have some urgent question to ask her. She arrived at Clare’s table finally, smiling and shaking her head.
    “He has it fixed in his mind that we used to serve dim sum here,” she told Clare as she set down the plate and mug. “‘When are you going to bring back the dim sum?’ he asks every time he comes in. I try to explain that we’re not a Chinese restaurant, but … ” She shrugged.
    She was a slight woman a little older than Clare, with dark hair cut in a short, careless style. She was dressed in an almost outrageously frumpy combination of a long floral skirt and a bulky grey sweatshirt. Maybe she hadn’t heard that you could buy fashionable maternity clothes, Clare though charitably. She wasn’t hugely pregnant yet, but she was getting there.
    “Can I get you anything else?” the woman asked. “And please don’t say barbecue pork buns .”
    “I’m fine, thanks,” said Clare. On an impulse she added: “This place is pretty hard to find.”
    The woman cocked up one dark eyebrow quizzically. “We do try to keep it that way.”
    “What? Don’t you like having customers?”
    She studied Clare a moment longer. “How did you find out about my bakery?”
    Her bakery? She couldn’t be the owner, Clare thought. Dressed like that? But then, the bakery wasn’t much to look at, either.
    “Oh, I just happened by.”
    The woman looked for a moment as though she didn’t believe her. Then she smiled. “Enjoy your cake.”
    Clare did enjoy the cake. She had chosen something which she had thought was chocolate, but it turned out to be a sort of gingerbread. It was just as she had imagined from the smell: quite simple, but nearly perfect. The tea she didn’t care for; it tasted strangely of flowers.
    Her cake finished, she sat thinking about what to do next. According to the map, she was at the right place, but that was worth nothing if she couldn’t visually verify and classify the actual target. There might be a glitch in the app; it might have been reading residual energy from something that was here a long time ago. If that was even the right term. Energy? I mean, she thought, it must be something like that. “Go with your gut,” Seevers had said. Back to the basics, blah blah. She needed to come back with a lot more information than she had now, if she was going to turn this into the basis for a successful hunt. There was just one other thing she thought she could rely on, which might save her having to creep back to the office, mission unaccomplished, to make her boss’s day. There was the smell.
    It wasn’t something that you sensed in the same way as an ordinary smell; you had to concentrate in a certain way, a bit like listening to the sound of your own heart. Clare had never heard the principle behind it explained, though she assumed it was something that all of Stake’s field agents could do. She tried it now. The result was strange; there was definitely something here, but it was hard to tell what. When she focussed her attention she still smelled the warm, sweet food scents of the bakery. It was like hearing music when you tried to listen for your heartbeat. As far as she knew, it shouldn’t have been possible. She closed her eyes and concentrated harder.
    At first she got nothing, then underlying the bakery smell there was something a little salty, faintly like the sea. It was unfamiliar, not what she was looking for, but obviously somehow the same type of thing. It grew stronger for a moment, and then, just briefly, she caught a whiff of the earthy, metallic smell that she was used to: the vampire smell. She opened her eyes. The frumpy pregnant woman was standing beside her table, regarding her with faint amusement. Out of the corner of her eye, Clare saw the sulky girl disappearing