“Mmm-hmm.”
I didn’t remind her of the week she spent as my uninvited guest, the better for me to play nurse to her, after she accidentally drank the blood of someone who had eaten pizza for dinner. Convinced she was going to die from garlic poisoning, she wouldn’t leave my bed or put on clothes, determined to exit the world the way she came into or some such nonsense. Also something she saw in a movie.
After seven days, her lucky number, she rose from the bed and proclaimed herself cured by the grace of—I wasn’t really listening. At that point, I had a week’s worth of naked vampire to wash out of my sheets before I could sleep in my room again. Plus, she had been sipping her warmed blood in bed and spilled it all over my good comforter.
“What will you do if your man sneaks into your room at night?”
“He’s not my man.” Just my future husband. “I’ll stab him with the stake I keep under my pillow.”
Given my line of work, I had to be prepared a vampire might follow me home one day. From where I sat, I figured the trick worked on fiancés who followed me too.
“Bloodthirsty.” She chuckled. “I like it.”
Coming to visit and finding a man pinned to my wall, a macabre butterfly caught midair, would make her century.
“Of course you do.” I nudged her with my foot. “What is that? Are you…purring?”
“Am I? That’s embarrassing.” She touched her lower stomach. “Oh. No. It’s my phone. I set it on vibrate.”
“You set it on vibrate, and then you shoved it down your pants.” I was never borrowing her phone again. No matter how much hand sanitizer she used after the fact. “Like a normal person.”
“I’m not a person,” she said absently. “I’m a creature of the night.”
She bared her fangs half-heartedly and hissed for emphasis.
“Who’s calling?” I nudged her again. “Gustav?” I leaned over. “I noticed you wore his favorite boots.”
Boots.
The reminder gave me a headache. I should have shucked those off first thing. Boaz must have seen them. The way he pointed out my frog slippers…yeah…I had screwed up there. At least he hadn’t called me on it.
Holding the phone as far from her head as her arm allowed, she read off the screen. “The sentinels have put out a BOLO on Angelo, Ron’s lover. Clan Willis is offering a reward for his safe return.”
“Do you think Angelo heard about the murder that fast?”
“The preliminary findings have been uploaded into the cleaners’ database.” Her lips twisted. “I was on-scene. I provided the identification. The gory details can’t have been listed yet, but seeing Ron’s name might have been enough to send Angelo into a tizzy.”
“Vampires are so dramatic.”
“Live as long as we do, and you begin to crave sensation. What is love if not pain? What is loss if not the ultimate agony?” She tapped the end of my nose. “And, as a vampire, he must make the most of it. That includes public displays of mourning, where the depth of his love will be judged by the effort he puts into his appearance.”
“Are you telling me he’s at the tailor’s getting fitted for mourning attire? That he would ditch his clan, tell no one where he’s gone, and duck out just to get a new black ensemble?”
Depending on his age, he might commission enough black suits to last him a full year.
Vampires: the original drama llamas.
“We are what we are, Addie.”
“I held my sister’s hand while she died. I was in my pajamas, and so was she. I cried until I passed out and had to be carried to my room. The last thing on my mind was dashing out for a quick fitting.”
Cass did a thing she hated almost as much as germs. She apologized and meant it.
“I’m sorry.” She touched my leg in a mostly nonsexual way. “Humans love differently than we do. We might have been human once, but we lose that spark. What’s left is an echo of mortality and morality. You have the biggest heart of anyone I know, which is why it was so easy for me to insinuate myself into your life and bend you to my will.”
What she wanted from me at the beginning was a desperate partner in crime, someone willing to do the dirty work. The literal dirty work. Anything that might result in contamination from germs, diseases, so forth and so on. How she made it as a prostitute for so long boggled my mind. Sex was the ultimate fluid-swapping experience, and she had been paid for it long before condoms or birth control, let alone treatment for STDs and other infections.
Unless she had been willing to coexist with germs until after she became a vampire. It happened like that sometimes. A weird trait, a personality quirk, a bizarre affectation ballooned until it overtook them.
“Does that mean you wouldn’t grieve for me if I got my throat ripped out on the job?”
“No.” A low rumble laced her voice. “It means I would rip the flesh from anyone who dared, strip by strip, and feed it to them. I would then hang them from their pinky toes, slash their throats, and let them exsanguinate. Once that was done, I would coffin them in cement and have the block dropped in the ocean.”
Touched by her twisted affection, I had to swallow back tears. “But would you look good doing it?”
“Dearest, darling one.” She plumped her cleavage. “I would look amazing.”
A familiar ringtone had me reaching for my phone. With Dad upstairs and Cass beside me, I had few guesses as to the culprit. “Hello?”
“I’m going to be late,” Boaz said grimly. “Are you sure you want me to come back to your place? I can crash in the barracks. I don’t want to be an imposition.”
The slight pulling sensation in my chest drew me upright, and Cass too. “What happened?”
“There’s been another murder.” A siren muffled him. “I can’t get into the details, but I need to go.”
“Another murder,” I echoed, hearing the dots connect. “Linked to your other cases?”
“Yeah.” He exhaled hard. “I wanted to let you know so you wouldn’t worry.”
Beside me Cass mashed her index fingers together and twisted them back and forth while making kissing noises.
Annoyance with her bled over onto him. “How presumptuous of you.”
“Just a turn of phrase.” His voice came out tired, defeated even. “I didn’t mean to imply, well, anything.”
A frustrated scream rose up my throat, but I couldn’t let it out. Once I started, I might not stop.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you.” Palming Cass’s forehead, I shoved her out of my face then hopped off the couch to begin pacing. “I appreciate the call. I would have worried if I woke and you weren’t here.”
Turning, I bumped into Cass, who had moved on to dry humping the doorframe while pointing at the phone and mouthing Boaz’s name. I wished for bleach or a time machine to undo the last ten minutes of my life. Or the last ten years. I would take what I could get. But, as usual, the goddess left me on read.
“You don’t have to patronize me.”
“I’m not.” I made a fist and hit myself in the forehead. “I’m having a bad night, and it’s wrong for me to take it out on you.”