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mood |
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 calm |
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Ever since his run in with that vampire in that alley, Joseph had kept himself to himself. It made sense. He didn't want to draw too much attention to himself, and they had probably noticed they were one vampire short. Hopefully they would just assume the guard got peckish one night and ran into trouble he couldn't handle; but the more time Joseph spent sitting around, the less chance he had of getting Ben back in one piece.
He just knew that rushing something like this would lead to nothing, and he didn't think he could tell Becky that Ben was dead. It was bad enough he had spent a lot of time in New York delivering bad news and holding wailing women as they mourned their loss of family, sometimes children. Nobody else had wanted to do it, nobody else had the balls for it.
Joseph was nursing a headache with a glass of whiskey, ice long ago melted and cigarette left burning from between the callused fingers that clasped it. He reached up and scrubbed at the dark strands of his hair, attempting to ease the tension in the back of his neck by pressing the width of his palm against his skin and exerting enough strength and pressure to circle the tangled knots, forcing them outwards until the tips of his fingers could catch them.
"Rough day?" the barmaid asked, looking over at Joseph with a soft sympathetic smile that she wouldn't have given anyone else, but this was Joseph and she'd always thought he was a nice guy, and he was cute; it helped.
Joseph looked up and offered her a smile. "Could say that."
She smiled back and gestured. "You want another?"
"Please," Joseph affirmed with a nod of his head.
Las Vegas was not Connor's favorite place. Too many reminders of Los Angeles, he supposed; the noise, the traffic, the way the buildings seemed to close in on you if you stood still for too long. The presence of Wolfram and Hart didn't help, either. He'd stood out on the sidewalk near the branch in the city, staring up at the skyscraper until both physical and emotional vertigo drove him elsewhere. So no, not his favorite place at all.
But he'd been unable to reach Rhiannon on her cell phone, and the feeling it gave him was like finding a spider crawling on the back of his neck. Maybe it was just paranoia, but when paranoia was a close enough companion, it paid off to listen to it sometimes. The Slayer had told him that she wasn't going anywhere, wasn't going to disappear, and he needed to believe that for the sake of his own well-being. The Destroyer wandered down the sidewalk, pondered swinging by her place unannounced. If she was there, if she was annoyed at him for worrying when there was nothing to worry about, then so much the better. He'd take her annoyance over her unexplained absence.
The cast he'd earned at Fang Noir had come off of his arm without ceremony, and the limb felt no worse for wear as he dug both hands into his pockets, coming up with a few bills and some change. He'd stop off and have one beer, then decide what to do. He'd been supposed to go meet Justine later anyway, so it wasn't like he had no other reason to be loitering here for the afternoon.
( Invisible Spider )
( Crazy Ex-Girlfriends )
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