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on Veronica
while he was there, too.
    It didn’t take long for his eyes to
land on the smiling face of the woman in question. She was behind the register
this time, which was actually good—it meant he’d have an excuse to speak to her
for a moment.
    When it was his turn to place his
order Veronica looked up, eyes slightly wide for an instant, and then offered
him a new smile. “Good morning,” she said easily. “Usual?”
    His lips twitched a bit at her
question and he inclined his head. “Please. And good morning. How was your evening?”
    Her resulting hesitation was brief—nearly
impossible to spot by most—before she lifted her attention from the register
and replied, “Largely uneventful.”
    Seth deliberately arched one dark
eyebrow above the rim of his sunglasses as he repeated, “Largely?”
    She took his money, counted out the
change, and handed it back as she quietly explained, “I had a couple of…small
paranoia attacks. Nothing to speak of.”
    He inclined his head again,
pretending to buy her words at face-value, and dropped the change in the
donation jar. “That’s good.” She nodded, wishing him a good day, and he stepped
away to wait for his coffee as he thought over her words. He wished there were
some way to know what she meant by ‘small paranoia attacks.’ But without
pulling her aside he wasn’t likely to ever get an answer—unless, perhaps, he
ran into her again after she got off work. That idea was tempting.
    By the time his coffee was ready he
had decided that that was the best way to go, which left only the need to
figure out how to go about it. Should he try following her from work to see if
she went somewhere where he could believably pop up? No. That would be too much
like stalking, and he was not a stalker. So he opted for the straightforward
option and, as he settled in the driver’s seat of his car, he pulled his phone
from his pocket. A quick text asking her to let him know when they could talk
and he was done.
    Now it was time to go see if Robert
had anything useful for him.
     
    He didn’t, of course. All Robert
had was an upset, frustrated wife who didn’t understand why they had had to
cancel their plans or why they had actually stationed a guard outside their
door. There was no word on the disappearance of his friend, and no one Robert
had talked to had seen or heard from the trio of traitors. Seth wasn’t sure he
agreed with the way Robert was handling his end, but that wasn’t for him to
decide. What mattered was that Richards and the Wilsons seemed to have vanished
into thin air.
    This is getting ridiculous, Seth
grunted to himself as he drove past the complex one more time. From his
(admittedly poor) angle, nothing seemed to have changed. Robert had assured him
that he’d contacted the manager and instructed her to call him if she spotted
any of them, but Seth didn’t hold a lot of hope that that would pan out. If
there was one thing he could say about the men he was chasing, it was that they
were good at laying low. Were it not for Veronica they would likely have gotten
away with their planned robbery the night before.
    And that was what concerned him. Veronica
was the reason that their plans had fallen through. A large majority of
vampires had little to no respect for humans as a species anyway, and Seth
doubted that those three were any different. She had painted a large, neon
target on her throat and she didn’t even know it. He needed to find and stop
them before they exacted whatever bloody revenge they had in store for her.
    The ringing of his phone pulled him
from his thoughts, and Seth tapped the small device in his ear, answering with
a slightly-clipped, “Hunter.”
    There was a beat of hesitation
before the caller spoke. “Seth? It’s Veronica…you said something about wanting
to talk?”
    Taking a deep breath, Seth flexed
his fingers around his steering wheel and replied, “I did. Do you have a few
minutes to meet somewhere?”
    “Yeah,”