Chapter 2: Chapter 2: VLOOD and Whispers
Alastair goes to work as soon as he gets home. He gets his parents on a conference call without his siblings since he has no hope of being taken seriously with them babbling and taking selfies in the background. His parents are severe and clear and he responds in kind with a robotic practice he has perfected over many years of dealing with the business side of his parents. Not that he had seen another, more emotional, side to his parents except for the occasional wince over something his siblings had done.
It takes a full hour to convince them he can handle this endeavor and he curses himself for not drawing up a few flow charts before he began his pitch. Business people love charts; it most certainly would have cut the conversation in half. Regardless, he lets himself dwell on the elation of success for only a passing moment before calling his brother and telling him in excruciating detail what was to be done to open the cafe in less than a month.
This timetable would be absolutely absurd to anyone outside of the Lenoir family, but his parents believe challenges are character building and, well, they have the money to make things move fast should things go south. Alastair suspects they gave him such a short timeline because they have their own plans and need time to bury this mistake should VLOOD fail.
Which it might, despite Alastair’s best efforts, given his brother just asked him why they need to bother interviewing the staff.
“Do we really need to pay them? Everyone is doing that internship stuff now and I’d bet we’d blow mom and dad away with the numbers if we could cut that out of the budget,” Azazel chips with such unearned enthusiasm.
Alastair only just keeps from shaking him. It’s been a few weeks now and construction plastic still lines many of the newly installed kitchen and tables. They’re not off track, exactly, given the time crunch was always going to bring them down to the wire, but things are stressful nonetheless.
“Yes, we need to pay them. Yes, we will offer them insurance,” Alastair intones as they circle the place and inspect the work being done. “Everything is going well, Azazel, you should be pleased,” Alastair reminds him as he checks a few messages on his phone.
“Oh! I am, I am pleased,” Azazel rushes, “I just think I-we can do even better.”
He trails off into silence despite the fact that Alastair does not even blink at his verbal fumble. He knows all credit will be given to Azazel. That is the point. Alastair wants his brother and he wants to stay out of the limelight.
If Azazel succeeds, then their parents succeed, and Alastair can take at least a week long vacation out of the state to recover. This rarely happens, but he longs for a break and, by the looks of their rate of process, he just might get it. However, Alastair’s small ember of hope is nearly pulled from his grasp as some gossip from a few of the workers perks up his supernatural hearing.
“I thought vegan blood was already a thing?”
Alastair ticks his head slightly in the speaker's direction then focuses on Azazel still prattling on about budget cuts they might make.
It’s a female presenting worker, gossiping with her neighbor.
“You’re lying,” the neighbor gasps, effectively abandoning their task to give their full attention.
“No, I’m serious!” She insists.
“Imagine how bad that would make the Lenoirs look,” The other sniggers.
“Shhhh! Lower your voice,” the woman warns.
“I think we’re done for the day,” Alastair says, effectively startling his brother out of continuing his irrational rant. Azazel blinks at him and then around the room.
“Oh? Do you think so? I suppose we have done a lot today,” he replies with the secret smile of someone who thinks they’ve done the first worthwhile thing of their life.
Alastair softens toward him, never finding it in his heart to inform him that his part in this journey has been a minor nuisance at best, let alone any kind of help worthy of praise. Alastair lets his lips quirk up slightly and he gives him and nod before seeing him out and tuning back into the gossip his brother was too busy chatting to hear.
“I stopped into a cafe on my way here and they definitely had vegan blood on the menu,” the woman worker says in a hushed voice that any normal human would never hear above the racket of the saws and hammers.
Such is the curse of forgetting for a moment that you live in a world where the monsters that once hunted the night now service your cars and tweet opinions on bloodletting in modern medicine. Alastair may not burn in the sun, nor can he run a mile any faster than any professional runner out there, though he might do it with a bit more ease.
He cannot lift a car or tear someone apart with his bare hands, but he can hear a gossiping mouse from three miles away if he puts his mind to it. This is a gift from the vampiric line he descends from, but also a skill he has honed over years of dealing with fame and infamy in rotation by association.
Alastair approaches the two construction workers just as the woman says the company name.
“Hyacinth’s Rest, I think. He said he named it after his cat, which is so sad because I think it might be dying…I..I’m so sorry what were we just doing?”
The woman blinks at her colleague and then at the screwdriver in her hands. The other seems confused for a moment then laughs and shakes his head.
“Finishing this sink, I think?”
Alastair’s eye’s dim down from blood red to their normal shade of mahogany before placing his sunglasses back on and spinning around to exit. It’s not technically legal for vampires to alter people’s minds these days, but that’s a tough thing to regulate when someone can, you know, alter minds. It doesn’t work on everyone anyway and can get you into a lot of trouble if you try and fail. However, Alastair does not brag when he says he is a practiced expert in the field.
“Hyacinth's Rest,” Alastair repeats to himself.
Well, he’d just have to pay this little shop a visit. Better for him to go shut them down quietly than any other member of his family find out and make it a spectacle. His parents are the inventors of vegan blood. Alastair has tasted the stuff and seen the science, so either this person is consciously hawking something misnamed to prey on people, or they have illegally discovered the same recipe his parents have devised.
Either way, action must be taken.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone