The Last Vampire: Book One—Read Ch. 1-3 below!
Welcome, and thank you for checking out The Last Vampire: Book One! Please be aware that this novel contains descriptions of graphic violence and graphic sex. Also, swearing. If you’re okay with the subject matter, read on and enjoy!
-R. A. Steffan
ONE
I WAS SIX YEARS OLD when I learned that human beings weren’t supposed to have red, gaping holes through their chests. That’s not the sort of lesson that a person ever wants to repeat—and yet, here I was, staring down at the corpse stuffed into my garden shed like a discarded marionette.
I’d only wanted to mow my freaking lawn. It was supposed to rain later today, and the grass in the back yard already looked ragged and unkempt. So much of my life felt out of control—was it too much to ask for nicely manicured landscaping? Around the edges of my thoughts, I could feel panic swirling, threatening to drag me back to the long-ago autumn day when a little girl lost her innocence and her mother in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
My unease had begun to build the moment I noticed the broken padlock on the shed door. That sinking feeling in the stomach; the realization that someone has been poking around in your stuff and has probably stolen whatever looked most valuable. In this case, that meant my lawnmower. Aside from that and the weed whip, the shed mostly contained a collection of seldom-used gardening tools that had seen better days.
Bracing myself for the loss of a couple hundred dollars’ worth of equipment, I’d opened the door and peered inside. The good news was that the lawnmower was still there. So were the weed whip and the plastic gas can.
The bad news was that my access to them was blocked by the collapsed body of a man with a gaping gunshot wound through his chest. He looked to be in his early thirties, with tousled black hair a bit longer than was fashionable, and a face like something from the artwork of Raphael or Michelangelo. If one of the old masters had sculpted a dark angel, it would have looked like this man—tragic and beautiful and dangerous.
He was wearing black jeans, combat boots, a white tailored shirt with a couple of buttons undone at the neck, and a black leather vest, open at the front. The shirt was ripped and soaked with blood, the stain covering the entire chest area. And the flesh beneath—
I swallowed hard.
I’d like to be able to say that I immediately sprung into action, checking his vital signs and running back to the house to grab my phone and call the police. The truth was that I stood there for a really long time, frozen, my thoughts flying away to PTSD-land like frightened, fluttering sparrows.
There was no one else in sight. Every house in this neighborhood had a privacy fence around the back yard, the blank, six-foot wooden walls giving the illusion of isolation. I could see no sign of how he got here. The gate to the yard was closed and latched. No horrific stains or bloody handprints splattered the wood.
Paralysis finally broken, I crouched down on shaky, creaking knees. I reached a trembling hand out, feeling sick, and pressed it under the dark-stubbled planes of the man’s jaw like I’d seen people do on TV. His skin was cool in the balmy afternoon air. Far cooler than it should have been. I couldn’t detect the telltale throb of a beating pulse, though I made myself feel around the side of his neck thoroughly.
For good measure, I held my hand a hairsbreadth above his nose and mouth for long seconds, checking his breathing. Nothing. The dark angel in my tool shed was long gone, his body cooling to the marble chill of the statue I’d mentally compared him to.
I felt faint. Frightened. Useless. It occurred to me all at once that I might be in danger. Had the killer brought him here to hide the body? Was a madman with a gun even now sneaking around my property, ready to silence any potential witnesses?
My heart, which had been tripping away in a shocked, thready beat, pounded into triple time. I staggered upright, backing away from the shed door, suddenly certain that a murderer was lurking on the far side of the ramshackle structure, just out of my line of sight. I shook my head, trying to clear it, the headache that had been plaguing me all day throbbing in time with my thundering pulse.
I needed to get my shit together. I was losing it, and I had to stop. Whoever had done this was probably long gone. This wasn’t rocket science. When someone dumped a dead guy on your property, you secured the scene as best you could and called the cops. I could do those things. They weren’t difficult.
So… secure the scene.
I closed the door on the grisly tableau inside. The little hinged latch was undamaged. The padlock that was supposed to secure it was broken, but when I threaded the shackle through the latch and twisted it closed, it wasn’t very obvious that it hadn’t locked properly.
I gave a final nervous look around the yard—still empty and quiet. Exercising the better part of valor, I didn’t look behind the shed to see if a murderer was crouched there. Instead, I retreated to the sliding glass patio door and yanked it open, slipping inside before closing and locking it. Why the hell had I never listened to Dad when he’d told me to buy a length of board to jam in the door’s track as an added security measure?
Dragging in deep, steadying breaths, I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my phone off the counter. Twenty-six years old, and this was the first time I’d ever dialed emergency services, I realized.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” The voice on the other end of the phone call answered promptly. She sounded bored.
“Hello. There’s… uh… there’s a dead body in my back yard shed. I was going to mow the lawn and—”
“Your name, please?”
“Zorah Bright.” I spelled it out, forestalling the inevitable question about the ‘h.’
The woman rattled off my cell phone number from the caller ID and asked me to confirm that it was correct.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Address?” she asked, still sounding like she wished her shift would hurry up and finish.
“Three-eighteen Evian Street, St. Louis, six-three-one-one-eight.”
“Thank you. Do you need an ambulance?”
I blinked. “Not… really. The guy’s dead.”
“Did you check his vital signs?”
“Yes,” I said. “His skin’s cold. No pulse. No breathing. Big hole through his chest.”
My nausea rose, and grayness threatened the edges of my vision again.
“Police and ambulance services are on their way to your location.”
Still with the ambulance. I wondered if they got a lot of people calling in dead bodies that turned out not to be dead.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
I felt shaky, but wired. If I tried to sit down, I knew I’d be crawling out of my skin in five minutes flat, so I paced instead. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to wait. The idea was that they were supposed to get to you in only a few minutes, but I’d caught an exposé piece on the local news not too long ago about how slow police response in the city could be. Sometimes it took them half an hour or more. The talking heads on television had argued back and forth about how much of the problem was down to poor management, and how much was due to insufficient budgetary allocations.
No matter the cause of the problem, the practical upshot was that it might be a while.
Maybe the wait would give any murderers hiding in my back yard enough time to sneak away, so the ultimate police confrontation could take place somewhere besides my house. Preferably, someplace far, far away from here.
I checked the time on my phone obsessively, still pacing despite my throbbing head and aching body. The seven-minute mark had just passed when I heard pounding noises. I froze, my feet abruptly glued to the worn hardwood floor. It wasn’t the pounding of police officers at my front door. There’d been no sound of sirens, and the sound was coming from the back of the house, not the front.
Heart in throat, I crept toward the sliding patio door. This hadn’t been the noise of a fist against glass. More like noise from a neighbor working on some kind of construction project. But… it had sounded closer than that. I sidled up to the wall next to the glass door, feeling vaguely ridiculous as I darted a peek into the yard.
Nothing.
The pounding came again, and I chanced a longer look, not so concerned now about trying to stay hidden.
Thump.
My eyes were drawn to the shed.
Thump, thump.
The shed door rattled against its hinges ominously.
Crash!
The latch and one of the hinges tore loose, the door half-falling open.
My jaw went slack. I stared like an idiot at the damaged shed, watching open-mouthed as a figure stepped past the twisted remains of the door. Red stained the front of his torn white shirt, drying to a darker shade of rust around the edges. He staggered a bit, catching himself on the doorframe with one hand as he looked around, clearly disoriented.
Unerringly… inevitably… his gaze settled on the glass door, peering directly at me through a too-long fringe of black hair. Even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were the same color as the ice in the center of a glacier—a blue so cold and brilliant that they seemed to be glowing from within.
I stood unmoving as he approached, those eyes pinning me like a cobra mesmerizing prey.
He’d been dead. I was sure of it. He had a freaking hole in his freaking chest, for Christ’s sake. And why wouldn’t my feet move? He stopped on the other side of the door, and we regarded each other through the flimsy barrier of glass. His eyes still glowed with that unnatural blue light.
“Open the door.”
His voice was muffled, but not so much that I couldn’t make out a panty-melting British accent. My hand crept toward the little lever that controlled the lock without conscious thought. I gasped and yanked it back just in time, appalled at myself. I would have staggered backward a step, but my feet were still rooted beneath me.
His brow furrowed as if I’d surprised him, two tiny lines marring the perfect planes of his face. “Right, then,” he muttered, and lifted a hand to the door handle. A single, sharp jerk and the inadequate lock popped open, the sliding door jumping a bit on its track in the wake of the force he’d applied.
He stepped over the threshold, frowning down at me. His skin looked like alabaster, it was so pale.
Run, I thought furiously. Why are you standing here, you idiot? Run!
“Apologies for this, pet.” His voice was low—maybe even a bit distracted. His hand, when it curled around my nape, was gentle. His skin still held that unnatural coolness. “I don’t normally eat and run.”
My skin prickled into gooseflesh as he gazed down at me from a six-inch advantage of height. I opened my mouth, but my voice had fled at the same time as control of my limbs, apparently. I couldn’t look away from his glowing, pellucid eyes.
The fingers tracing the fine hair at the back of my neck caressed my skin like a lover’s. “Don’t fight me. Don’t be afraid. I give you my word—you won’t remember a thing about this once I’m gone.”
I stared at him.
You won’t remember a thing.
No. I refused. I might not have control of my body, but I would not relinquish my mind. I still couldn’t speak to tell him so. What the hell was happening to me?
He slipped around my body like a shadow, keeping a careful inch of space between us. The only point of contact was his hand, the touch sparking heat down my nerve endings despite the cool temperature of his skin. His fingers entwined in the tight, dark spirals of my hair, using the grip to ease my head to the side. My scalp tingled in response to the gentle tug.
Lips closed on the column of my throat from behind. Teeth nipped, searching for the tenderest, most vulnerable skin. A small noise escaped the blockage of my vocal cords. It was the kind of noise shared by both lovers and trapped prey, and not one I could ever remember making before.
Twin points of sharp pain pierced the side of my throat, replaced by drugged heat even before my gasp could wrench free from my lungs. The gasp turned to a moan. I would have swayed, but a second hand steadied me in place. A deep, drawing sensation seemed to pull straight from my neck to a place low in my belly that was growing heavy with liquid warmth.
Stop, I tried to tell my body. You shouldn’t be enjoying this—what the hell is wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you? It was a question I’d heard far too often, and not one that had ever received a satisfactory answer. Right now, I was undeniably getting off on what could only be considered an assault, sliding into a state of blissful lightheadedness reminiscent of a post-orgasmic haze.
A complete stranger had latched his teeth onto my neck and was drinking my blood. I knew what the tableau we made must look like, and I knew how impossible it was for it to actually be what it appeared to be. I also didn’t care.
I didn’t care that vampires apparently existed. I didn’t care that this guy could easily kill me. I didn’t care that I was moaning shamelessly, letting a complete stranger take more and more of my weight as I succumbed to the swirling pleasure of relaxation and acceptance.
I still cared a tiny bit that I was supposed to forget about all of this once the stranger left.
Not happening, I reminded myself firmly.
Vertigo had already started to overcome me when I felt the points penetrating my neck slide free—an unpleasant sensation amongst all the languorous warmth. Lips and tongue soothed the raw wounds, the feeling growing distant as insistent dizziness took up more of my attention.
“Easy, now,” said a low voice. Hands guided me down to a flat surface, though the new position did nothing to ease the spinning sensation. “I’m truly sorry for the intrusion. Just have yourself a nice little kip, and forget I was ever here.”
I was vaguely aware of the brush of fingers pushing my wild curls back from my face.
“No,” I rasped, even as the darkness of sleep—or perhaps unconsciousness—beckoned. I was distantly aware of the sound of the patio door sliding open and shut.
No. I won’t forget.
TWO
“MISS? MISS. CAN YOU open your eyes for me?”
My eyes fluttered open to find two cops crouching over me—a man and a woman. Huh? I let my head flop first to one side, then the other, trying to orient myself. I was… lying on the floor, in what would be my dining room if I actually owned a dining table.
Why was I lying on the floor?
I’d been having some kind of crazy dream—
“Miss?” It was the female cop, an edge of worry coloring her tone.
“Yeah, I’m…” I began, only to trail off in search of the right word. Okay didn’t really seem to cover it, somehow. “… awake,” I finished lamely.
“Are you Zorah Bright?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you remember what happened?” asked the male cop. “You called nine-one-one.”
I blinked, puzzle pieces starting to reassemble inside my scrambled brain. Then I sat up abruptly, every muscle in my body protesting the movement. My head swam, and the female cop shot a hand out to steady my shoulder.
The man. In my shed. He hadn’t been dead. He’d broken the door and—
My hand flew to the side of my neck. It was smooth. Unblemished. I rubbed at the skin, not understanding.
“Take it easy, Ms. Bright,” said the male cop. “We knocked on the front door but there was no answer. So we did a visual inspection through the windows, and saw you collapsed in front of the patio door. It was unlocked.”
Sirens approached from the road out front.
“That’ll be the ambulance,” said the woman. “Go get the EMTs in here for her.”
“No!” I said quickly, my thoughts whirling. I couldn’t afford an ambulance ride, much less an ER visit. And if I tried to tell anyone what happened, I’d be lucky not to end up in a straightjacket. Did they still use straightjackets these days?
I shook my head, intending to clear it. Instead, it felt like my brain had melted and was sloshing around inside my skull.
“No,” I said more calmly. “I don’t need the EMTs.”
In fact, there was every chance that I did need the EMTs, but I couldn’t go down that path right now.
“You collapsed,” the female cop said gently.
I thought fast. “No, I… think I just fainted. It happens sometimes. Low blood pressure.” I swallowed, my dry throat rasping. “I just need to, uh, sit quietly for a minute.”
The male cop helped me stagger to my feet and deposited me on one of the bar stools by the stretch of kitchen counter I used as a table. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked.
I glanced between them, noting that the woman had pulled out a pen and notepad, ready to take a report. Again, visions of being carted off to a psych ward danced in my head. They even had an ambulance waiting right out front to transport me to crazytown.
A series of knocks pounded against the front door.
“I’ll let them know what’s going on,” muttered the male cop, heading for the front of the house.
I turned to the woman and cleared my throat. “Right. So… like I told the nine-one-one operator, I went out to the shed to get my lawnmower, and when I got close I saw that the padlock had been broken.”
“Was the shackle cut?” asked the woman, pausing in her note taking. “Like, with bolt cutters?”
I shook my head. “No. It had just been… wrenched open, I guess.”
She raised an eyebrow and made another note, but didn’t comment.
“The door was ajar, but only by a few inches,” I continued. “I opened it, and that’s when I saw the guy with the gunshot wound in his chest.”
“Can you describe him?”
More memories shook loose. “Uh… he was a white guy. In his thirties, maybe? Dark hair. Wearing black jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather vest. His eyes were blue…”
She looked up again. “His eyes were open?”
I hesitated. They hadn’t been. “No, they were closed. Maybe I saw them later. Or… maybe I just thought they were blue.”
She suppressed a sigh. “Go on.”
“He was obviously shot through the chest. There was a lot of blood. I felt for his pulse, and put my hand near his mouth and nose to check for breathing. I couldn’t feel anything, so I closed the shed door and put the broken lock back on the latch to keep it shut. Then I ran inside and called the police.”
She nodded, still writing. “And what happened next?”
This would be the tricky part, I knew. “I was waiting in the house for you guys to arrive—I think it had been about seven minutes. I heard pounding coming from the back yard. When I looked out through the patio door, I saw the door of the shed shaking on its hinges. It burst open, and… well… I guess I must have fainted.”
Movement in the back yard caught my eye as I related the last part of my tale, startling me. The second cop was poking around the damaged shed, examining the door and peering into the musty interior. The woman finished writing and lowered the notebook. The edges of her mouth tugged down.
“I see,” she said.
Her colleague finished whatever investigation he’d been doing and came back inside. His gaze raked over me briefly, but when he spoke, it was to his partner.
“There’s traces of blood on the floor of the shed,” he said. “Doesn’t look like nearly enough to have killed someone. Whoever it was must not’ve been in too bad a shape. The workmanship on the shed is shoddy, but it would still have taken a fair bit of strength to tear out the door latch and one of the hinges from the inside.”
The female cop nodded. “She says she thought he was dead, so she locked the shed door and came in here to make the call. She heard pounding, saw the door rattle, and fainted when it burst open.”
Now both of the cops looked sour.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked carefully. “It wasn’t a prank call. I honestly thought he was dead.”
The female cop sighed. “Here’s the thing, Miss Bright. Your supposed gunshot victim might have grounds to press charges against you for felonious restraint. You locked him in a shed, after all.”
“What?” My stomach twisted. “But… he was on my property! Don’t I have grounds for… I don’t know… trespassing or breaking and entering, or something? And—I told you—I thought he was dead! I was trying to protect a crime scene!”
The woman made a quelling gesture with one hand. “Try to stay calm, Miss Bright. The guy’s not here anymore.” She looked at her partner questioningly.
He shrugged. “There are no obvious clues to show which direction he took off in.”
“Okay,” said the female cop. “So the victim is gone, and aside from putting out a notice to local hospitals about any patients presenting with gunshot wounds, we don’t really have a good way to find him, or even identify him.”
“Assuming it even was a gunshot wound at all,” the other cop muttered.
“Basically, unless you want to file an official complaint against him, we’re willing to let this incident slide. You were trying to do the right thing, but you made a mistake. We can just call it an unfortunate lapse of judgment on both sides and move on.” The female cop looked at me hopefully. It was pretty obvious that neither she nor her partner wanted the headache of trying to deal with this little mystery.
“All right,” I said meekly. At this point, all I wanted was for them to be gone, so I could lick my wounds in private. My fingertips strayed once more to the unblemished side of my neck.
After a few more perfunctory questions about my contact information, they left.
“Oh, by the way,” said the male cop. “The lock on your patio door appears to be broken. You should get that fixed. It’s a security risk.”
Gee, you think so? I couldn’t help the sarcastic mental quip.
“I’ll put it on the list, along with my broken shed door,” I muttered.
He gave me another frown—the kind that said he didn’t appreciate having to deal with sarcastic twenty-somethings who locked wounded intruders in sheds and then fainted while waiting for the police. If I were being brutally honest, I couldn’t really blame him for that. I kept my mouth shut, and closed the front door behind them.
Once I’d confirmed that the squad car had gone, disappearing around the corner onto the main road, I sighed and let the curtain fall back. The stairs up to the loft I used as a bedroom loomed like a towering mountain. I stared at them for a moment, feeling every shaky muscle and every aching joint. Then I headed for the first-floor bathroom instead.
The cheap fluorescent lighting hurt my eyes as it illuminated the paleness beneath the light brown of my skin tone. I looked gray and pasty, dark circles under my sunken chocolate gaze. My kinky hair was half-flattened where I’d lain on it, the rest of it sticking out in every direction. God, I looked like a complete wreck. But I was a complete wreck without a visible mark anywhere on my neck. I leaned forward over the sink to look more closely.
Still nothing.
Was I going insane? Hallucinating? Should I have let the ambulance take me to the hospital for a psych evaluation? I rubbed at the tender skin of my throat, feeling phantom lips there.
I didn’t imagine it, damn it.
But… now what? Vampires were real. Maybe. What was I supposed to do with that?
Falling back on practicalities, I splashed water on my face with shaking hands, and pulled my wayward hair into a ponytail. The pull against my scalp momentarily eased the throbbing of my headache, but I knew in an hour or two it would probably make it worse again.
I wandered listlessly to the kitchen, remembering that they always told you to eat and drink something after you made a blood donation.
Blood donation. I nearly laughed, but if I started I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop.
If memory served, orange juice and a cookie was the preferred menu at the Red Cross. I had OJ—no preservatives added, not from concentrate—but cookies were a no-go with all the gluten and sugar. I grabbed a banana instead.
I’ve been kind of a health disaster since I was a kid, and even more so since puberty. One of the few things that seemed to make any real difference was sticking to an autoimmune diet. The one that seemed to work best was a sort of extra-strict version of Paleo. That—along with regular yoga—made the difference between being a more-or-less functional member of society and being too sick to work half the time.
I drank my juice and ate my banana, debating next steps.
I knew what I wanted to do, and I also knew that doing it would be a bad idea. I wanted to call my father, even though I was fully aware that the conversation was likely to end in tears—metaphorically, if seldom literally these days. In many ways, Dad was all I had left since my mom died, so long ago. In other ways, I’d lost him just as surely as I’d lost her.
Right now, I wanted to hear my father’s voice—even though the realist in me knew it was unlikely that our relationship would spontaneously repair itself now, some twenty years after the fact.
Twenty years.
Christ.
I felt a jolt upon realizing that we were only two weeks out from July Fourth—the anniversary of the day that a lone gunman shot my mother through the heart while she was giving a Senate campaign speech. I found myself reaching for my phone before I even realized I’d done it. If I was reacting like this, how much worse must my father be feeling about the upcoming reminder of our loss? I’d been so young when it happened that my memories of Sasha Hawkins-Bright were hazy. But Dad had been married to her for years.
The call picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
I took a deep breath. “Dad? It’s Zorah.”
A pause.
“Hi, Zorah. Why are you calling?”
Not ‘How are you doing?’ Not ‘Good to hear from you.’
“I… uh… I was wondering if you knew anyone here in St. Louis that I could borrow some tools from?”
I’d grown up here. In this very house, in fact. The moment I’d hit eighteen, though, my dad had taken off like a shot. He’d moved to Chicago, and I hadn’t needed to be a genius to understand that I wasn’t invited. The one charitable thing he’d done for me since then was to let me take over the mortgage payments on the old family home. The house had been refinanced to take advantage of the large amount of equity he and Mom had paid into it, and the low monthly payments that were left were the only reason I was able to live in a decent single-family residence rather than a dodgy apartment somewhere.
“What kind of tools do you need?” came the flat voice from hundreds of miles away.
I dragged my thoughts back to the conversation. “A power drill and a circular saw. Or a Sawzall in a pinch.”
“What do you need them for?”
My jaw worked, recognizing the moment when our conversation would start to deteriorate.
“Someone broke into the garden shed,” I said, trying not to make a big deal of it when all I really wanted to do was pour the story out to him and have him tell me not to worry and that everything would be all right. As if. “The latch is broken and the door’s half off its hinges. Oh, and I need to replace the lock on the patio door, too.”
“All you need for the lock is a screwdriver and a strong wrist,” he muttered over the crackling cellular connection.
“Yeah? Well, a screwdriver’s not going to cut it for the shed,” I said. “Trust me. I have to replace part of the door frame.”
“You should already own those tools. That’s just part of being a responsible homeowner.”
My teeth ground together harder, and I consciously relaxed my jaw. “I should, but I don’t. I can’t afford them. Now, do you know anybody I could borrow them from, or not?”
“You know damn well I don’t keep in touch with anyone from… back then.” He paused. “Just… go rent them from somewhere. I don’t know why you need me to tell you that.”
“Sure,” I said tightly. “Okay. I’ll just go rent them.”
I thought he might mutter some half-assed goodbye and hang up then, but of course he had to get in a final word. A final reminder of my shortcomings in his eyes.
“You need to be more careful about security. I mean… people coming onto your property like that? Breaking locks and getting into things?” He huffed, and I didn’t need to see his frown or rueful headshake in order to picture it, clear as day. “You’re going to come to a bad end one day, Zorah—just like your mother.”
“Uh-huh. Thanks for all your help, Dad,” I said around the tightness in my throat, and disconnected the call.
THREE
I STAYED IN BED for as long as I could get away with the following morning, hoping that the double dose of over-the-counter painkillers I’d taken would be enough to get me through the day. Unfortunately, while they might’ve taken the edge off a bit, it was pretty clear that the score was still Kitchen Floor—one; Zorah—zero.
I should’ve let them drag me to the ER yesterday so I could have gotten some decent pain meds. I should call into work and tell them what happened… except for the vampire part, obviously. My supervisor would probably let me take the night off, under the circumstances.
I didn’t, though. There were bills to pay. Power tools to rent. Lumber and hardware supplies to purchase.
Adulting, man. The struggle was real.
Instead, I stumbled down the stairs that seemed to get steeper every day, and took a very long, very hot shower. I aimed the cheap plastic detachable showerhead at the tight muscles of my neck and shoulders, the pulse of water on the massage setting going some way, in combination with all the ibuprofen I’d downed, toward making me feel human again.
What I needed, I decided, was a hot guy to rub my back with oil before and after every waitressing shift. Well, my back, along with several other areas that needed more attention than they were getting these days. I felt the familiar pull of frustrated sexual need, and eyed the pulsing showerhead speculatively for a moment.
But, no.
Irritated with myself, I put it back in the bracket and finished my routine—lather, shave, rinse. People with chronic health problems weren’t supposed to also be sex addicts. But I wasn’t a damned freak, no matter what my string of exes had to say on the matter.
Jesus, Zorah—what the hell is wrong with you?
You’re draining me dry, woman. It’s not natural.
No one wants to date a goddamned nympho, Zorah.
Either popular culture had lied to me, or I was a magnet for the only men on the planet who didn’t like horny women. So, yeah, maybe I was in the midst of a pretty long dry spell at the moment, but that didn’t mean I was doomed to marry my seven-in-one massaging showerhead quite yet. Especially on a day when I was already running late for my shift.
I worked cacao and shea butter conditioner into my hair, and then rubbed moisturizer over my body. At least I’d gotten a polite vampire yesterday, and he didn’t let me drop like a ton of bricks when he was done using my neck as a sippy cup. There wasn’t a bruise on me unless you counted the dark smudges of exhaustion under my eyes.
Hair, makeup, clothing. I stood before the bathroom mirror, giving myself a calculated onceover. Passable, I decided, though the tips tonight might be a bit on the thin side. Normally, I seemed to possess a talent for motivating the male customers, at least, to tip well. AJ’s City Broiler was a fairly upscale restaurant. The pay was shit, but with tips it was enough for me to stay afloat while still devoting time to my passion project, volunteering for the Missouri Mental Health Alliance.
At least my job allowed me to stay afloat as long as everything didn’t decide to break at once. I brought my push mower and the weed whip into the dining room to discourage anyone from taking advantage of the broken shed door while I was gone. I looked around, my eyes lighting on a straight-backed wooden chair. I jammed the chair sideways into the track of the patio door, spanning its width so that the door would catch against the wooden legs if someone tried to open it. That still left a gap of a couple of inches, but it wasn’t big enough for anyone to squeeze through.
House secured—for a given definition of secure, at least—I shoved my waitressing uniform in my backpack and headed for the bus stop. I did own a car, but apparently 168,000 miles was the limit of what a ’96 Honda Civic’s transmission could handle without making awful grinding noises and smelling like smoke whenever it was in second gear.
Who knew?
So, anyway, the Civic was in the shop while I tried to decide whether it made more sense to spend twenty-five hundred bucks on a new transmission or twenty-five hundred bucks on a different car. Since I didn’t have twenty-five hundred bucks for either of those things, I wasn’t in a huge hurry to make that particular call.
The bus ride was an extra forty minutes I could really have done without today, mostly because it was forty minutes where I had nothing to do but think. I’d done a fair job of avoiding just such a situation in the hours since what I had mentally labeled The Incident.
I felt like my reaction so far to The Incident was not exactly the paragon of mental health. Not that anyone had accused me recently of being a paragon of mental health. Or any other kind of health, for that matter. But feeling relieved by the revelation that vampires existed seemed… kind of strange? After all, it wasn’t like I was happy about the idea of my jugular being on tap.
Really? said a little subversive voice in my head. You seemed pretty into it at the time.
Shut up, I told the voice.
It wasn’t that I was happy about the assault. It was… the validation, I guess. All my life, I’d had this nebulous feeling, like there was something dangerous hidden beneath the fabric of the world. Something more than what you could see on the surface.
Some reason for my mother’s senseless death, besides the delusions of a madman with a gun raving about people being possessed by demons.
In my darker moments, I found myself flirting with conspiracy theories in an attempt to force the world to make sense. Nothing too outrageous—no lizard people from outer space or little gray aliens abducting people for anal probes. Just… things that might explain why the world seemed so fucked up, and why the people who seemed most passionate about making things better so often ended up with their blood splattered across a stage.
I had absolutely no clue whatsoever how the existence of supernatural beings with a hunger for O-positive tied into humanity in general being a raging dumpster fire. I just knew that what I had seen yesterday proved beyond a doubt that there was more to the world than what we’d been told.
Or, y’know, it meant my mind had finally snapped in the wake of childhood trauma, and I’d become delusional. One of those things or the other.
The question was—what was I supposed to do next? So far, my response to this great revelation had been to sleep a whole lot, take a shower, and go to work. Somehow, I doubted Buffy would approve. But, realistically, what else was I going to do right now? The bills still needed to be paid. I also had absolutely no way to track my neck-raping Hugh Grant knockoff, unless vampires were in the habit of visiting the ER to get their gaping gunshot wounds sewn up.
Given the guy’s lack of a heartbeat, I was going with no on that one.
So here I was, pulling up to my stop with a headache, a vague sense of validation, and not much else to show for my brief walk on the paranormal wild side. I got off the bus and trudged to AJ’s.
It was a slow afternoon.
My mind wandered as I stood at the drink station, staring at the practically empty seating area. I hated this shift—especially on Tuesdays. I usually angled for night shifts or lunch shifts since those were the busiest and had the best payoffs, but for whatever reason, I kept getting stuck with the crappy shifts like this one lately. The time in-between lunch and dinner when pretty much nobody came in.
There were only a handful of tables occupied, mostly booths along the back wall of the restaurant. The décor was not extravagant here, but it was pleasant enough. A bar and grill, AJ’s was undeniably on the upscale side, but it wasn’t a stuffy haute cuisine joint. It could get a little noisy here on the weekend nights. Never rowdy, but people still enjoyed themselves.
Brass hardware adorned posts painted a happy shade of Copenhagen blue. Gold and tan accents pointed the way to the well-stocked bar on the right side of the seating area. Mirrors gleamed behind hundreds of bottles, glassware, and the bartender making drinks for a couple of patrons seated along the barstools.
“Zorah, I seated two for you. Table twenty-six.” The hostess said as I bussed one of my empty tables. Sure, we had bussers, but during the slow shifts they sometimes got sent home. And when they were gone, I cleaned my own tables, like today.
After emptying the dirty dishes into a plastic bin back in the kitchen, I washed my hands then returned to the floor and glanced at twenty-six to see what I had to work with.
One man was dressed in a suit and tie, while the other one, whose back was to me, looked more casual. Suits were generally decent tippers. I called them suits. In fact, I had been at this so long, I had a whole system in place for ranking customers in terms of their likely tipping levels. Call it profiling if you like, but without it, I’d probably never survive financially.
Of course, suits or no, making customers wait was not a good way to get tipped. I quickly grabbed the small tablet from my apron pocket, then checked my appearance and made my way over to the new table.
The pair sat across from each other. The one facing me as I approached was a handsome black man around the age of forty, dressed like a typical businessman—probably an insurance guy or a stockbroker, or something like that.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” I greeted them as I wrote the table number and scribbled some notes. “Can I get you started with some drinks?”
“We’re ready to order, thanks,” the suit answered. “I’ll have a whiskey sour, and the lamb chops, medium, with steamed vegetables and a loaded potato.” As I jotted the order, I couldn’t help but get caught by his eyes. Though nothing unusual came through in his voice, those eyes were sad. Almost haunted.
“Very good,” I said, finishing with my notepad before looking at the second man. “And for you?”
“Just a glass of Clos du Bois Merlot for me,” he said in a familiar English accent.
I froze, my eyes widening.
My undead Hugh Grant looked up, meeting my gaze and lifting a swept brow. He looked a lot less… dead… than he had yesterday. In fact, he looked a hell of a lot better than I felt this afternoon. I wondered how much of that had to do with my unplanned blood donation.
“Problem?” he asked in a cool, urbane tone.
My eyes narrowed.
I wavered, considering my options, unsure whether I was willing to make a scene at a job I couldn’t afford to lose. A million questions and accusations flew through my head while fake Hugh Grant just sat there, looking at me calmly as several different expressions flitted across my face.
For the most part, I was pretty good at figuring out what people wanted, and how to please them. That tended to happen when you’d spent years learning to satisfy customers for a living, but this guy appeared unmoved and unreadable as I studied him.
“I didn’t expect to see you here today,” I managed at length. “You’re certainly looking… better.”
His dark eyes sharpened with interest.
“Ah,” he said. “So you remember that after all, do you?”
My heartbeat jumped a tick or two, pounding a little harder in my chest. I could feel my face start to flush at his reaction. Not for the first time, I was grateful for my dusky complexion’s ability to hide pink cheeks.
“It’s not really the sort of thing you forget,” I retorted.
Jesus Christ. I was playing one-upmanship games with a vampire. What the hell was I thinking?
Both men remained silent for a moment until the business guy looked over at his friend. “You two know each other, Rans?”
I filed the name away. The vampire formerly known as fake Hugh Grant studied me silently for a moment—taking in my face, my reaction. His serious expression disappeared then, replaced with a smile that was one part reckless and two parts dangerous.
“Not yet,” he said, his accent caressing the words.
I was still burning holes through him with my eyes, and I had to admit that the Hugh Grant comparison really only worked when it came to the voice. My disjointed impression from yesterday had been accurate. He had darkly beautiful features—symmetrical and sharply cut. The effect was softened by the sweep of his very fine, very smooth black hair, which fell into the sort of messy waves that rock stars probably spent hours perfecting.
He didn’t strike me as the type to spend hours in front of the mirror with his hair. He did strike me as the type to get himself shot through the chest and then gatecrash an innocent waitress’s day off to drink her blood. But, of course, I might be a bit biased on the subject.
He tipped his head to one side, still regarding me with interest.
“Meet me after your shift is done,” he said with casual confidence.
I frowned at him, my heart still pounding. “Why would I possibly agree to that?”
It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, exactly, but that didn’t mean I trusted the guy either. Still, something had changed in me yesterday. Some epic, glacial shift inside my soul.
Those ice-blue eyes saw right through me. “You’ll agree because you’re dying of curiosity,” he said. “And because you weren’t supposed to remember me.”
Arrogant bastard. He was one hundred percent right, too. What I was about to agree to was crazy. I couldn’t call the cops about him. I couldn’t even drag some poor coworker along with me to act as backup, unless I wanted them to see me babbling about vampires and gunshot wounds. Yet I was going to do this anyway.
“Okay. I’ll come,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. “I get off shift at six… but I have a couple of conditions.”
End of Free Sample
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