WHEN IN DOUBT AND IN NEED OF INFORMATION, find a snitch and squeeze him. That was one of the very few investigative techniques I was aware of. As a matter of fact, that and the “annoy principals involved until the guilty party decides to kill you” pretty much summed it up for me. Move over, Sherlock.

I was definitely in doubt and in need of information concerning Ghastek’s dead vampire, and I knew just the person to squeeze. He had spiky hair, wore black leather, and called himself Bono after some long-forgotten singer. He was also Ghastek’s journeyman.

If you had a talent for necromancy or necronavigation, the care and piloting of the dead, you qualified as an apprentice. Once you added a bit of knowledge to that, you became a journeyman. To move higher required a genuine power and a drive to succeed. Most People never graduated from journeymanship. Bono was on his second year. His knowledge of the dead was almost encyclopedic. The last time we met, he gave me a cut-out article to put into my Almanac—something about some Slavic corpse-eater creature called an upir. But I had a feeling his expertise ended with theory. My guess was he would not grow into a Master of the Dead any time soon.

Bono was easy to find. He frequented Andriano’s, a peaceful joint as bars went, unlike the newly redesigned establishments of Atlanta Underground, where bars leaned toward the rowdy and most clubs had the word “pain” in their name. Andriano’s occupied a nice little spot on Euclid Avenue in Little Five Points and catered to an almost middle-class crowd.

Bono’s pretty face, his hair, and his jacket made sure he was noticed. Women enjoyed his company. He enjoyed them too, but his focus was on quantity. I’d never seen him with the same woman twice. Once in a while someone tried to kick his ass and left a few smears of their blood on the floor and furniture. Anyone who spent his formative years tending to a stable of vampires proved a hard person to fight.