Turn Coat Read Online Free Page A

took the tops off, clinked, and then he sat down on the chair across from the couch as we drank.
    “Okay,” he said. “What’s up?”
    “Trouble,” I replied. I told him about Morgan.
    Thomas scowled. “Empty night, Harry. Morgan? Morgan!? What’s wrong with your head?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t think he did it.”
    “Who cares? Morgan wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire,” Thomas growled. “He’s finally getting his comeuppance. Why should you lift a finger?”
    “Because I don’t think he did it,” I said. “Besides. You haven’t thought it through.”
    Thomas slouched back in the chair and regarded me with narrowed eyes as he sipped at his beer. I joined him, and let him mull it over in silence. There was nothing wrong with Thomas’s brain.
    “Okay,” he said, grudgingly. “I can think of a couple of reasons you’d want to cover his homicidal ass.”
    “I need the medical stuff I left with you.”
    He rose and went to the hall closet—which was packed to groaning with all manner of household articles that build up when you stay in one place for a while. He removed a white toolbox with a red cross painted on the side of it, and calmly caught a softball that rolled off the top shelf before it hit his head. He shut everything in again, got a cooler out of his fridge, and put it and the medical kit on the floor next to me.
    “Please don’t tell me that this is all I can do,” he said.
    “No. There’s something else.”
    He spread his hands. “Well?”
    “I’d like you to find out what the Vampire Courts know about the manhunt. And I need you to stay under the radar while you do it.”
    He stared at me for a moment, and then exhaled slowly. “Why?”
    I shrugged. “I’ve got to know more about what’s going on. I can’t ask my people. And if a bunch of people know you’re asking around, someone is going to connect some dots and take a harder look at Chicago.”
    My brother the vampire went completely still for a moment. It isn’t something human beings can do. All of him, even the sense of his presence in the room, just . . . stopped. I felt like I was staring at a wax figure.
    “You’re asking me to bring Justine into this,” he said.
    Justine was the girl who had been willing to give her life for my brother. And who he’d nearly killed himself to protect. “Love” didn’t begin to cover what they had. Neither did “broken.”
    My brother was a vampire of the White Court. For him, love hurt. Thomas and Justine couldn’t ever be together.
    “She’s the personal aide of the leader of the White Court,” I said. “If anyone’s in a good position to find out, she is.”
    He rose, the motion a little too quick to be wholly human, and paced back and forth in agitation. “She’s already taking enough risks, feeding information on the White Court’s activities back to you when it’s safe for her to do it. I don’t want her taking more chances.”
    “I get that,” I said. “But situations like this are the whole reason she went undercover in the first place. This is exactly the kind of thing she wanted to do when she went in.”
    Thomas mutely shook his head.
    I sighed. “Look, I’m not asking her to deactivate the tractor beam, rescue the princess, and escape to the fourth moon of Yavin. I just need to know what she’s heard and what she can find out without blowing her cover.”
    He paced for another half a minute or so before he stopped and stared at me hard. “Promise me something, first.”
    “What?”
    “Promise me that you won’t put her in any more danger than she already is. Promise me that you won’t act on any information they could trace back to her.”
    “Dammit, Thomas,” I said wearily. “That just isn’t possible. There’s no way to know exactly which information will be safe to use, and no way to know for certain which bits of data might be misinformation.”
    “Promise me,” he said, emphasizing both words.
    I shook