I spent the next week cramming for the Bar—or trying to anyway. Every time I tried to concentrate on torts and precedents, I kept seeing Jude’s face or hearing his deep voice in my ear. The look in his eyes when he’d looked up after giving me that first, soft kiss and the way he’d murmured, “Delicious.”
It was silly, really, and I told myself so over and over again. A were couldn’t love a vamp any more than a dog could love a cat. What I was feeling was a mild infatuation because I wasn’t used to dating and having any kind of intimate contact with men. So there was no way I was in love with him after such a short acquaintance. If anything I might be a little bit in lust but that was all—absolutely all, I told myself.
I’d forgotten all about the money aspect of our deal but apparently Jude hadn’t. The next time I went to check my bank balance online my jaw dropped at the sizable chunk he’d deposited in my account. I was tempted to be offended but it was the exact amount he’d mentioned when we’d first talked so I decided to let it go. After all, if anybody was paying for sexual favors, even in a roundabout way, I ought to be paying him. In the meantime, I was grateful that the money kept me from worrying about finding a new job, at least for a while, and I concentrated on studying.
I took the Bar about a week after my first encounter with Jude and couldn’t believe how easy it was. Not that the test itself was easy—the material was very difficult but I knew it all cold. And without the panic buzzing in my brain and jangling my nerves, I was able to concentrate.
At first I was worried. As soon as the test began, I felt the familiar tightness in my chest. My palms started to sweat and my breath began to catch in my throat. Before things could get too far, though, I closed my eyes and thought of Jude. Thought of his pale green eyes that turned to burning red when he wanted me, the feel of his hands and mouth on me, and most of all, the delicious dulce de leche taste of his blood. A warm feeling of safety and comfort enveloped me and the panic floated away, like a rain cloud going to find someone else to bother.
It was wonderful.
After the test ended I felt elated. Of course, I didn’t know for sure that I’d passed—I wouldn’t know for certain until the test results came in—but I was ninety-nine percent certain that I had. I wanted to celebrate, wanted to spread the good news that I was finally moving forward with my career. Crappy economy or not, there were plenty of law offices that would like to have a genuine were attorney on staff. Soon I’d be able to move out of my apartment in the dangerous part of Ybor City and find myself a neat little condo in Hyde Park or anyplace, really, where you didn’t have to worry about your car getting stolen and your house broken into every night. That would be nice.
I had Jude to thank and I wished I could get him on the phone but it was still daylight outside so he was probably asleep. We hadn’t talked much in the week preceding our first appointment but he’d left several thoughtful little messages on my phone, letting me know he was thinking of me and looking forward to seeing me again. It was nice the way he was interested but unobtrusive while I was busy. I was beginning to think that if he wasn’t a vampire I would have felt like I’d stumbled onto the perfect man. But of course he was a vampire, which meant there was no use in thinking like that.
Since Jude wasn’t available for at least another hour, I decided to call home. Stupid, I know, but I just felt so high, so incredibly invincible that I grabbed my phone and started dialing the moment I got out into the sunlight.
The heat of the late August afternoon actually felt good after the chilly air-conditioned courthouse where I’d taken the Bar. I felt good—confident and happy for the first time in a long time. Then my mom picked up the phone.
“Luz, how are you? We don’t hear from you too often anymore,” she said, after I identified myself.
“I know, Mom. I’ve been busy with work.” It was my standard excuse and she accepted it as always—nobody really wants a non-shifter around no matter what they say. “Listen, I’ve got some great news,” I told her. “Wonderful news.”
“Really, you do?” There was a spark of excitement in her voice that had been lacking for years—ever since I hit puberty and failed to change with the full moon. “Did you finally make the change, sweetheart? Did you finally shift?”
Abruptly, I felt deflated. Of course I shouldn’t be surprised. Where else would her mind go when I told her I had wonderful news?
“Uh, not exactly, Mom,” I said, still trying to sound upbeat. “But I passed my test—the Bar exam. You know, the one I’ve been trying to pass for so long?”
“Oh, really? Well, that’s…that’s great, honey. Really great. So you got the news in the mail that you passed?”
“Well, no…” I could feel myself getting lower and lower as I spoke. Suddenly the heat from the sun, which sat on the edge of the horizon like a ball of fire, seemed oppressive again. “I just… I took it again and this time I didn’t get upset. I was able to finish with no problems,” I said, realizing as I did how weak the words sounded.
“Well, that’s great. I’m sure you passed and you’ll find out for sure real soon.” Her voice was flat again, my wonderful surprise nothing more than wishful thinking.
My joy was almost gone as I trudged along the sidewalk, trying to find the lot where I’d parked my car. “Is Diego there?” I asked desperately. My little brother was the only one in my family who still treated me the same. When we were kids he’d idolized me and somehow, despite my non-shifter status, he’d never stopped. He was in his early twenties now but I was still his wonderful big sister and I knew he would be excited about my news even if nobody else at my parents’ house was.
“Sure.” My mom sounded relieved to get off the phone. “I’ll get him.”
In a moment my little brother’s voice filled my ear. “Hey, hermana! Haven’t heard from you in a wolf’s age. How’s it going?”
“Hey, hermano,” I returned. Though the rest of my immediate family had somehow lost their Hispanic heritage in the ever-increasing quest to climb the social ladder, Diego had stubbornly clung to his. He’d taken Spanish all through high school and had even spent a semester abroad in Spain. Of course, the Castilian Spanish spoken there was a far cry from the fast-paced Cuban-influenced dialect more common in Tampa but Diego was fairly fluent and every time we talked he tried to teach me new words.
I decided to get right to the point. “I took the Bar exam again today,” I told him, finally finding my car and slipping my key in the lock. It was like an oven inside and I winced as I jammed the key in the ignition and twisted it before turning the AC on full blast.
“Hey, cool. So how’d you do?” Diego’s words were casual but I knew he was just trying to be careful of my feelings. He, more than anyone else in my family, understood my struggle during important tests.
“It went well this time.” I felt my joy bubbling back to the surface. “Really well, in fact. I’m sure I passed.”
“You did? Awesome! That’s great, Luz—I knew you could do it.” His immediate affirmation was like a balm to my wounded soul. I had to blink tears out of my eyes before I could back out of the parking lot.
“Thanks, little brother. That means a lot.”
“Aw, don’t get all mushy on me.” Like most males, Diego was uncomfortable around emotional females so I made an effort to butch up.
“Sorry. It’s just…nobody else understands. I’ve been working for this for so long.”
“You sure as hell have. So what was different this time? You didn’t feel nervous?”
Nervous was an understatement as anyone who’s ever had a full-fledged panic attack can attest to, but I was willing to let it slide. “No, I wasn’t,” I told my brother. “I met someone who helped me.”
“What—like a therapist?”
“Not exactly…” I hesitated. No one in my family would approve of what I had done—what I was in the process of doing, really, since I still had to see Jude again at least twice more. But I wanted so badly to share my joy that I decided to take a chance. “He’s a vampire,” I said and waited for a minute to let it sink in.
“A what?” Diego’s voice sounded as horrified as though I’d told him I had found a friendly talking rattlesnake to help me pass the Bar.
“A vampire,” I said, determined not to let his reaction throw me. “His name is Jude Jacobson. You’d like him.” I said this with a little less conviction. But then again, who could help liking Jude? He was so kind and gentle and polite—well, to me anyway. Even my brother, alpha wolf that he was, would like a vampire like Jude.
But Diego was making sputtering sounds at the other end of the phone. At last I realized he was so upset he could barely get the words out. “Jude Jacobson?” he managed to spit out at last. “The Jude Jacobson?”
“What do you mean, the Jude Jacobson? How many can there be?” I demanded.
“Jude Jacobson who runs half the Tampa Bay area and has the other half in his pocket? Jude Jacobson even other vampires are afraid of because he’s such a ruthless bastard?”
“That’s crazy,” I said dismissively, honking my horn at the guy in front of me who was stopped at a green light fumbling with his cell phone. “That must be someone else. My Jude isn’t like that.”
“Listen to you—your Jude,” Diego sneered.
“Well, he’s not.” I felt put on the defensive and wished I hadn’t said anything at all. “There must be two different vampire Judes because what you’re describing isn’t anything like him.” Well, not when he’s with me, anyway, I thought, remembering the menacing darkness I’d seen peeking out from his polite outer façade when he’d been pissed off at Banner that first night.
“Trust me, there’s only one of this guy. If there were two we’d all be fucked.” My little brother took a deep breath that sounded like static on my end of the line. “Big guy—six four or five? Blond hair, shoulders like a linebacker?”
“Well…yes,” I said slowly. “But listen, Diego, he’s a nice guy and he really helped me out.”
“What—by helping you study? Showing you flashcards—that kind of shit?”
“Not exactly,” I hedged.
“Then how?”
I didn’t really want to say at this point but I knew Diego would never let it drop until I confessed. “I-I drank some of his blood. It helped me concentrate—kept me from getting all panicky and blowing the test. Okay?”
“No—not okay. Not okay at all. You actually drank his blood?” The disgust in my little brother’s voice was the same as if I’d said I drank a bottle of the vampire’s sweat or some other, even more unmentionable substance.
“Not a lot of it,” I protested, angry at having to defend myself. “A little taste and like I said, it helped me. I’d do it again.”
Diego’s response was immediate. “Don’t you dare! He’s dangerous, Luz—you need to stay away from him. Far away.”
“How do you know so much about him, anyway?” I snapped.
“My pack master, Julio Sanchez. He told us that this Jude Jacobson of yours got angry at the pack master over in Clear Water. He wouldn’t do business with Jacobson or maybe he just looked at him wrong, I don’t know. So—”
“So he doesn’t get along with weres—he’s a vampire, what do you expect?”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say.” Diego’s voice dropped. “I was going to say, so they found the pack master the next night in the woods outside their hunting grounds. He’d been skinned alive and his hide was nailed to a tree.”
“My God.” I would have put a hand to my mouth but since I was still driving with one hand and holding my cell phone with the other, I didn’t have one to spare. “Did he live?” I asked. A human wouldn’t have survived such a horrible fate but shifters are tough.
“Yeah, he made it. But he might never be able to change again. He was skinned while he was in his wolf form and the hide was nailed up with pure silver—completely ruined.”
I was shocked at this last twist. Weres and vampires alike can be hurt and weakened by silver—the purer the metal, the more lasting and painful the damage. Luckily for us, a lot of the more common silver around doesn’t have a high enough content to do a lot of harm and only weakens us a little. But if someone—and I was sure it couldn’t have been Jude—had used pure silver on the pack master’s wolf hide, well… The hide is the essence of a were’s other self—his or her passageway from human to wolf form. Contaminating it with silver would make it pure poison to its owner and render him unable to change.
“That’s really awful,” I said at last, signaling to get off I-4 onto the Ybor City exit. “But just because Jude had a disagreement with the pack master doesn’t mean he’s culpable for what happened afterward.”
“Listen to yourself—defending a vamp. You can’t trust them, Luz.”
“I have good reason to trust this one,” I said stubbornly.
“He’s not your kind.”
“And my kind has treated me so well,” I said bitterly. “Look around you, Diego—there’s more to life than howling at the moon once a month. You and that pack you run with—those Los Lobos—you’re so into being super weres that you think anybody who’s not like you is wrong.”
“That’s not true! We believe in purity of spirit and form—there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“There is too! I heard your pack wouldn’t let people in if they weren’t full-blooded weres for three generations. That if somebody so much as had a drop of non-were blood they couldn’t get it.”
“The membership standards are strict for a reason—” Diego began but I didn’t let him finish.
“Spare me the bullshit. That pack you’re in is no better than a were version of the KKK.”
“Will you stop turning this around on me?” He sounded both hurt and angry. “This is about you, Luz. I’m telling you, stay away from that Jacobson guy. He’s one dangerous hijo de puta. You don’t want to tangle with him.”
“Look, I’m home now. I have to go.” I pulled into the darkness of the parking garage that cost me an arm and a leg every month but kept my car from being stolen or stripped. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Luz—” he began again but I slapped my cell phone closed and turned it on silent. I didn’t want to hear it ring if Diego called me back. I didn’t want to listen to what he had to say. The idea of Jude, who had been so incredibly tender and gentle with me, skinning someone alive was both repulsive and ridiculous. I refused to hear any more about it, refused to hear any more nonsense about a man I was genuinely beginning to like, even if he was a vampire.
As I got out of my car and set the alarm I realized that twilight had fallen and night was rapidly approaching. The patches of sky I could see outside the concrete barricades of the parking garage were the dusky purple color of a fresh bruise.
Diego and I almost never fought and the way our conversation had ended really bothered me. Well, I would have to make it up to him later. Maybe I could take him out to lunch. I sighed and started to trudge to the nearest exit. The air was heavy and unmoving in the mostly enclosed space and the scent of exhaust and old oil pervaded it and stung my sensitive were nose. Which is possibly why I didn’t smell the man who was sneaking up behind me. In fact, I wouldn’t have known anything was amiss if he hadn’t spoken at the last moment.
“Hello, Luz,” he said and then something that glimmered and burned fell over my head and shoulders and I was too busy screaming to hear anything else.