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Five. That was how many hiding places Danny had in the city, not counting Sam’s apartment, Clockwork’s mansion, Neverland, or the house on the outskirts he’d usurped from Andrew Ritter via bizarre vampire law. If he counted those, he had nine. If he counted his actual apartment that he rented legally under his real name, it was ten.
But his real apartment was too easy to find, they’d already been to Sam’s and they knew he was in contact with her, Neverland was annoying and required him to deal with Youngblood and Poindexter, Ritter’s house was, well, still Ritter’s house, and he didn’t want to go to Clockwork’s. Because.
So. Five.
The semi-basement, which had the advantage of accessibility and ability to mix with the people who actually rented apartments above.
Then, here, the boarded-up ruins of a failed Master Burger/Dairy King combo, mostly because Danny knew it’d annoy Vlad if he ever found out.
In the old warehouse district, some foreman’s office in a long-abandoned building, which was easily the largest of his hideaways.
A forgotten closet in his old high school, tucked away behind heavy shelving and wonderfully inaccessible to people who looked like adults and weren’t employed by the school district.
Extremely ironically, the attic of a condemned former church, the lingering consecration warding off vampires sensitive to such things.
Five had dropped to four when Danny saw his parents canvassing the street and he’d fled the semi-basement right then and there. Now, four was dropping to three, and he was moving.
With all this moving, Danny almost felt like he’d been sucked into some deranged version of the traveling salesman problem. The traveling vampire problem, or the traveling hunter problem. He’d probably feel it even more if this kept going.
Danny carefully put the last bag of blood (chicken, the vampire butcher had been out of pig; there had been a run on pig after the attack on the clinic) in the cooler and shut the door. This place wasn’t safe anymore. The last few times he went out (invisibly or as mist), he’d noticed people with strange tattoos, jewelry, and too-clean white button-downs hanging around. The Quinceys. Maybe.
He didn’t know how they’d found him - maybe his parents had managed to make some kind of vampire tracker - or even if they had, in fact, found him. Being a vampire living in close proximity to vampire hunters had made him paranoid. Maybe the outfits were just a new style. Maybe the Quinceys were just in the neighborhood by coincidence. They hadn’t made an attempt on Danny’s hideout yet, anyway.
Regardless, Danny was taking his blood and clearing out. Better safe than sorry. He had four other places he could camp out in. He was going to one now, the cozy spot in Amity Park’s warehouse district. It wasn’t as secret as he’d like, the warehouse district was popular with a certain set of vampires, and they had the same bolthole needs he did, but it was far away from here, and vampires were a very different threat than people working with his parents.
Assuming his parents were still working with them, that is. Jazz couldn’t get an answer out of them either way, but Danny held out hope that they had quit.
Either way…
He dissolved into mist to flow through the cracks between the boards over the windows, then returned to partial solidity to stalk invisibly down the street. The warehouse district wasn’t too far away, and traveling there unseen gave him the chance to, hopefully, shake the Quinceys. They’d stand out, here, at this hour. The sun had set a while ago, and hardly anyone else was on the street.
All the warehouses in the district looked more or less the same, but Danny found his and scaled the wall easily, slipping in through a broken window. He let himself solidify, but instead of walking around to the the office, he stopped.
There was a scent in the air. Blood. Human blood. Danny wasn’t alone. But he couldn’t hear–
There was a click, and Danny knew that Valerie Gray had just pointed her silver-plated gun at the back of his head. He didn’t turn to look.
“I knew you’d come here eventually.”
“Aw, you didn’t have to wait for me, Val.”
She snorted. “The flirting is a lot less cute now that you look five years younger than me.”
“Well, if you didn’t come for my charm and you didn’t come to kill me, what did you come for?”
Danny couldn’t think of anything he could have done to piss Valerie off, lately. He generally tried to avoid her, honestly. She wasn’t a vampire or a thrall, but she was a blood eater, and a dangerously successful one at that.
If a human ever-so-carefully tracked their consumption of vampire blood, making sure never to drink too much, even if the vampire in question was dead, to alternate whose blood they were drinking, and to leaven drinking blood with cooking it or baking it into bread, they could reap a whole host of benefits, from scraps of vampiric powers to immunity to the same. Danny had the math for it. Sam and Tucker had considered trying it, back in high school.
They hadn’t. It was the kind of thing that messed you up even if you did everything right.
Vlad was the one who’d put Valerie onto it, sending her little vials of blood through the mail after a vampire attack Danny couldn’t stop had put her father in the hospital. Danny had thought he was trying to enthrall her, when he’d first found out, but it turned out that he’d wanted her like this, because by vampire ‘law’ (using the term very loosely), if she wasn’t his thrall or fledgling, he wasn’t directly responsible for her.
(It was hilarious, that the Vigil was okay with Vlad supplying a hunter with vampire blood, but not with Danny keeping people from being murdered.)
“There’s a story going around hunter circles,” said Valerie, “about how a blood-stealing vampire without any weaknesses knocked out a whole hunting party, almost thirty guys.”
“Aren’t all vampires blood-stealers to you guys?”
“Don’t start,” said Valerie, lightly tapping the back of his head with her gun. “Dani told me about the Bakke Clinic.”
Danny was going to throttle her. Of all the hunters out there, Valerie was the least bad, but she was still holding a gun to Danny’s head.
“Anyway,” continued Valerie, conversationally, “you’ve got a price on your head after all that. People died.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“What do you call leaving people unconscious in front of vampires?”
“You do get that they were trying to kill me, right? It wasn’t even the first time they tried to kill me.” Although that had been an even less competent attempt on his life.
“You judge people by the organizations they belong to now?”
“I judge them based on whether or not they’re actively attempting murder.” He licked his dry lips and shut his eyes, the better to avoid an accidental glimpse of his reflection. “What do you want, Valerie?”
“Well, the money would be nice,” said Valerie, “and, did you know, your parents are looking for you, and Vlad’s also put money out for you? A private contract for a select few reliables, he said. For his old friends’ sake.”
Of course his parents would contact Vlad.
“We both know that’s fake,” said Danny. Valerie had helped save Dani from Vlad, that one time.
“Sure. Made it sound like you got thralled, though. Is that fake, too?”
“Do I look that stupid?” lied Danny. “I’m not enthralled. He’s just jealous.”
“Figured,” said Valerie. “But his money’s even nicer than the Quinceys’.”
“But that’s not what you want.”
“No. You know what I want.”
He did. She wanted what any addict wanted. Her next fix. Danny’s blood. Danny could empathize. He was in a similar situation himself.
“I’ve got the stuff laid out all nice on the table just up there, so why don’t you go on and–”
At this point in the conversation, Danny had worked his hand to the end of the cooler’s handle and swung it directly back into Valerie’s stomach, dodging left. He swiped his other hand upward and heard the gun go skittering off across the old factory walkway linoleum. He kept his eyes shut. Valerie knew about his aversion to his reflection. Danny would have to rely on his ears.
Movement, a slight whistle, Danny tried to block with his baton but he missed his mark and the thin edge of a silver knife bit into his shoulder.
Danny cried out and eyes flew open involuntarily. Valerie’s face was right there in front of him, half her face obscured by huge sunglasses. Mirrored sunglasses. Danny’s muscles locked up at the sight of his reflection, thoughts melting into static.
“Hah,” said Valerie, her voice distant over the ringing panic in his ears. “Guess we’re doing this the hard way, Phantom. I thought we had a deal.”
Deal was not the right way to describe the fleeting arrangements the two of them had made in the past. He’d given her blood before, sure. He understood being hungry for blood, and he felt sort of responsible for her being in her situation in the first place. But there had to be a line, somewhere, and breaking into his house and extracting his blood at gunpoint while he was actively being hunted by his parents, the Quinceys, and Vlad was it.
Also, Clockwork didn’t want him to give up his blood that easily.
The teeth in her smile were flat, brilliantly white against her dark skin and red lipstick. “You could have just given me the blood,” she said, “but now I’m just going to take it, and wrap you up all pretty for Vlad. If you’re really thralled, you should thank me. You’ll have a chance to get free.”
She flipped her silver knife over between her fingers a few times, then cocked her head slightly, looking at it. Not enough to remove Danny’s reflection from her sunglasses, unfortunately. If he could just look away… He should have tried to practice this, like Sam said…
Valerie brought the bloody edge of the knife up to her lips and licked it. Behind her sunglasses, her eyes flared red, briefly obscuring part of Danny’s reflection, and he slammed his eyes shut, kicking out. Valerie went flying, hitting a wall with an audible crack. That would be the wall, not Valerie.
Danny reached backwards, finding the broken window and flowing through it. There wasn’t a reason to stick around and fight Valerie. She might be a hunter, she might be addicted to vampire blood, but she was a good person. Usually.
He hit the ground, solidified, and sprinted, the world blurring around him as he took advantage of the long, straight, empty roads. Valerie was behind him, but even with his blood on her lips, she wouldn’t be nearly as fast. Maybe she could catch up on her motorcycle, but he intended to be gone before she could get it started.
Sounds of traffic reached his ears and he slowed, skidding on his heel and taking months off the useful lifespan of his shoes. He turned down the nearest cross-street, then, after a couple of intersections, turned again. It was brighter-lit here, but still far from the dubious protection of the downtown nightlife.
That didn’t matter. He was here for the bus stop. He checked his watch, then looked up, gratified, as the bus rounded the corner and pulled up.
Memorizing bus schedules was a totally normal and not at all vampiric thing to do. It was different from counting. Probably. Danny would stand by that no matter how many times Sam pointed out the train schedule thing in Dracula.
He got on, flashed his transit card, and settled into a seat. Valerie wasn’t going to chase down a bus. He was safe.
He’d thought his hideout was safe, too. That was three of his five places compromised by hunters on the same day. How had he been found? None of them was under his real name, and he hadn’t even been at the third one, so it probably wasn’t sloppiness on his part. What would the other two be like? Was there someone at the church? At the school? If Vlad was hiring Valerie to hunt him down, Skulker was probably looking for Danny, too, and it wasn’t out of the question for Vlad to make an offer to someone like Youngblood or Poindexter.
There was one place, however, that he could be sure was safe.
The window was cool when he laid his head against it, with just the slightest film of condensation. He sighed at the tiny relief it brought his headache.
Danny was going back to Clockwork.