When he’d been told Alexandre had arranged it so he would be able to easily find the werewolf, he hadn’t thought his master meant the werewolf’s apartment. He’d been more than a little surprised to show up at the designated spot and find a rundown apartment building at the edge of town. If he was just passing by, he wouldn’t have given the location a second glance, willing to ignore the degraded building and all its tenants. He’d left that life behind him when he’d become a vampire, and he preferred to deal with that section of humanity only when he was forced to.

He made sure the apartment was empty before he worked on the lock until it clicked open. His first steps into the apartment were careful and wary, on the lookout for traps or someone he might have missed. The first time he’d broken into a place to steal data for his sire, he hadn’t counted on traps. His time as a human hadn’t been spent on the best side of the legal system, and he’d been quite skilled at getting into places he wasn’t supposed to be in. The difference was the places he broke into when he was a human weren’t typically rigged with deadly traps. It had taken a blast to his chest from a shotgun to teach him just how different and more dangerous the jobs for his sire were.

Once he was sure there wasn’t an immediate threat to his safety, he began to explore. It wasn’t a very large apartment, obviously meant for only one or two people. Azrael knew that in this section of town, however, there was a good chance that several people would be crammed into even the smallest of apartments. When even a low rent was a strain on a family, they did what they could, even if that meant squeezing a family of seven into an apartment meant for a maximum of two.

From what he could see, the werewolf was living in the apartment by himself. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture, though there was plenty of storage space and shelving. The thing that stood out the most was the complete lack of electronics. The most high-tech piece of equipment Azrael could see in the place was the TV. There wasn’t a hint of a computer, not even a USB cable to charge a phone. For someone who was supposedly doing recon, Azrael would have expected a laptop at the very least.

There were a few books on a small table in the bedroom, that seemed to be the only hint of an actual person living in the place. He didn’t know what to expect when he plucked the books from the table, but he laughed softly when he saw the titles. Not one of them said anything about espionage, gathering information, technology, or anything useful for the job the werewolf was supposedly doing while he was in the city.

“Unless the guy is looking for romance,” Azrael said with a chuckle as he placed the obviously frequently-read books back in their place.

The rest of the room held no character or individuality whatsoever. The sheets on the bed, while messy from someone having slept in it, were a plain color. There were no pictures or decorations adorning the walls, and even the light had no cover. The only hints of the werewolf’s character were the microwaveable pot pie containers in the trash, the romance novels beside the bed, and the matchbooks to a local bar Azrael knew well, sitting on the dining room table. Which told him absolutely nothing about what the werewolf had been up to or what he’d discovered since he’d been in the city.

Frowning, Azrael glanced around the apartment, trying to discover its secrets. His eyes fell on the windows facing the apartment building across from the one he was in. He drew closer to the window, glancing down at the street. There was a set of stairs leading down to what looked like a basement door, and an idea burst into life within Azrael’s head. Many of the apartment buildings in the city-housed storage compartments in the basements. They were often used as another bedroom for one or more people from a given apartment. No one would pay one bit of attention to someone who was in the basement for too long, and for safety reasons, they wouldn’t dare pry into their business either.

Careful to make sure everything was where he left it, in case the werewolf returned while he was nosing around downstairs, he closed the door behind him. The dimly-lit hallways of the apartment building were sparsely populated. He remembered just how noisy places like that could be, but the only sound he could detect was the faint arguing of a couple on the floor above. Everyone else was either still out for the night, or fast asleep.

The basement was just as quiet as he slipped into the depths of the building. If there was anyone staying in the basement storage rooms, they were also asleep or keeping a low profile. As with other buildings he’d seen, each storage area was marked according to the apartment it belonged to. After wandering around the narrow hallways, he found his target.

It took only a cursory glance for him to see he’d found the right door. It had more locks than the other doors he’d seen along the way, and he would bet the door was rigged with traps. He bent to inspect the various locks added by the werewolf, and immediately spotted a problem. There was a small collection of new locks on the door, and none of them looked as if they’d come from the local hardware store. For a member of what was supposed to be nothing more than a bunch of half-wild hillbillies, this one was apparently a little more modern. One of the locks was so mechanically complicated that his lock pick set wouldn’t do any good whatsoever. The trickiest was the electronic lock placed right above the door. From the looks of it, while the door appeared to be like the others in the basement, this one was probably reinforced from the inside as well.

“Tricky, tricky,” he muttered to himself as he paused to think about what he should do. He could always leave and return with the tools he needed to get through the door. It had better protection than he predicted, but he could still get through it with the right equipment. He didn’t want to burn more of the night while he still had to deal with the werewolf as well. As long as his target was still wandering around, he was a risk to Azrael. It would be simpler to deal with the werewolf first, which would give him plenty of time to root through the information he’d collected without worrying about being ambushed.

The next problem, however, was how he was going to find him. He could always wait around until the lone werewolf returned to his apartment. It wasn’t his preferred style, since he knew how dangerous it was to ambush someone where they were most comfortable. An ambush in a dark, lonely corner of the city would give him both the element of surprise and take away any home advantage the werewolf would have. The trick would be to find his target in the sprawling city in the first place.

As his mind wandered, he remembered the small pile of matchbooks sitting on the dining table in the apartment. He knew the bar well enough, having been there plenty of times. It wasn’t a classy place but the drinks were decently priced. It was also one of the places one could go where no one would pay the slightest bit of attention to you. He’d used it more than once, both as a human and vampire, to collect information and to feed.

There was no real time limit on eliminating his target and gathering any information, and Azrael preferred to take it slow if it meant surviving the night. He left the basement as quietly as he’d entered it, deciding it would be better to do a little watching of his own. Alexandre might have done a good job finding the werewolf and equipping Azrael for the fight, but it wasn’t the same as Azrael doing a bit of research himself. If he could find the werewolf, he could watch him from a distance and learn enough about his habits to find the prime moment to strike. It beat trying to jump the target while he was sleeping in bed, with probable hiding spots for weapons on hand or escape routes planned.

* * *

The bar was exactly how it had always been. It was dimly lit, poorly maintained, and with a clientele that would give the average customer pause. It wasn’t the kind of place you walked into in hopes of enjoying a good night out. Most of the people who came in kept to their own business, drinking their alcohol and waiting the night out. Like most of that section of town, it was a place for the downtrodden and the bitter to burn time.

Despite the depressing atmosphere, there were always plenty of people willing to sit at the bar, or tucked away in one of the shadowy booths. It was one of the only places around that served alcohol yet wouldn’t tolerate any disruptions. It was rumored that the bar owner was a former gang member, and having retired from active work, had taken to enforcing his own law within the bar. If the rumors were true, it meant the bar owner, whose name Azrael had never known, had both the personal strength to keep the peace and probably the back up of his previous gang as well. It wasn’t the place to settle disputes, it was a place to drink the night away or quietly mutter to your companion in a corner.

Azrael quietly ordered a beer he would never drink, and slipped into one of the many dark corners of the bar. Hardly anyone glanced his way and he couldn’t see anyone who stood out. From what he knew of his target so far, it wasn’t likely the werewolf would do anything to bring attention to himself. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to identify his target when he didn’t have a name or picture to work with. Azrael would have been annoyed by the holes in Alexandre’s information, but he knew his sire well enough, just as Alexandre knew him. Azrael worked very well with minimal information, just enough to get him started. Once on a job, Azrael generally did his own information gathering, rather than relying on what was given to him. It was likely his master had decided to stop putting effort into gathering information when he knew his child would do his own homework anyway.

Azrael’s best bet, as far as he could figure, was to see if there was anyone he didn’t recognize. The bar wasn’t the sort of place that drew in outside patrons or passing trade, most of its clientele were locals and regulars. The occasional stranger would wander in every now and then, but the regulars rarely took heed unless they drew attention to themselves. Azrael had been in the bar enough times that he was sure he was considered a regular to everyone else, and enough that he would notice who belonged and who didn’t.

Azrael scanned the crowd, attempting to discover if there was anyone around that he didn’t recognize. He knew his target was a man, so he skipped over the female patrons. From the way Alexandre had spoken, and the glimpses of the werewolf’s apartment, he felt it was safe to assume his target was also relatively young. As he narrowed down the field of possibility in his mind, he realized there weren’t very many people left to assess. There was no one in the bar, that he could see, who immediately jumped out at him as being out of place. It was the same sea of haggard, slightly angry faces he saw every time he came in.

With a grunt of disgust, he slumped against the back of the bench. It was likely his target came into the bar frequently, but it didn’t look like he was there that night. He would have to lurk in the neighborhood and wait until his target decided to return home. That way, Azrael would know his target’s face and eventually his name. If he gave himself a couple of nights’ worth of information gathering, he would have all he needed to strike.

The dull thump of a door closing in the nearby hallway made Azrael realize he had placed himself near the bathrooms. Over the quiet music playing from a half-broken jukebox, he could hear the sound of footsteps coming down the hall. They were heavy steps from booted feet, a man’s steps. There was still a chance his target was in the bar, all he had to do was wait to see the unknown figure’s face.

He bent his head down low, as if thinking hard and zoning out with his untouched beer. The smell of the beer was awful to his vampiric senses, but he ignored the churning of his stomach as he saw someone from the corner of his eye step out of the hallway. It was definitely a man, but he was too tall for Azrael to see his face without turning toward the guy. The figure walked a few steps past Azrael’s table before hesitating. Azrael felt his muscles coiling in reflex, his instincts telling him the stranger had taken notice of him.

When the man spoke, it wasn’t what Azrael was expecting.

“Gabriel?”