2
Vampires have a very strong startle response. Try to stay calm. Imagine you’re working with a nervous cat strapped to a stick of old dynamite.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
He ran.
I sat there, completely bewildered, clutching my hairbrush just in case Blond-and-Gone came back. I couldn’t believe that after five months of fantasizing about my mystery vampire, he’d just run off. That is, after kissing me and jumping me in a parking lot, and not in the fun way.
What the hell just happened?
“Gigi!” I heard a familiar voice yell from behind the cars. “Gigi, where are you?”
“Here!” I shouted.
Dick Cheney—the vampire, not the former vice president—materialized in front of me, nearly sliding under the SUV, he’d been running so fast. “I’ve got her.” Dick spoke into the cell phone pressed to his ear. “She seems to be OK. I’ll call in a few minutes.”
I was dazed enough that I didn’t move out of his way as he hung up the phone and scooted closer.
“Gigi,” he whispered, ever so gently lifting my chin so he could inspect the pavement scrapes on my cheek. “What happened?”
Tall and rangy, with mischievous seawater eyes and dirty-blond hair, Dick Cheney represented an unlikely blend of fierce loyalty and pure sketchiness. He filled the “unreliable but adorable uncle” role in my life, while his lovely wife, Andrea, was my grown-up fashion icon. Dick had taken pains to become more legitimate over the years under Andrea’s positive influence. He’d stopped wearing quite so many inappropriate T-shirts and invested in a number of legal businesses, but deep down, he would always be the guy you called when you needed the number for a topless housekeeping service.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, stretching my jaw to check for breaks.
“The panic button on your key sends an alarm to Cal’s cell phone,” he said, almost sheepishly. “And I might have been waiting a block away so I could follow you on the drive home. Because Cal asked me to, not because I’m creepy or anything. When your alarm went off, he called me and told me to get my butt down here on the double.”
I rolled my eyes, but the movement made me dizzy, so I just glared at him. “You, sir, are enabling a helicopter vampire.”
“Cal’s just concerned for you!” he exclaimed, gesturing to my face. “And rightly so. What happened to you?”
“A vampire attacked me, the deceitful bastard.”
Dick frowned. “Deceitful?”
“Never mind.”
“Did you recognize the vampire who attacked you?”
“No,” I wheezed, the weird, unsure tone of my voice undone by the pain provoked when Dick pressed his thumbs against my jaw. Technically, it was true. I didn’t recognize him. I had no clue who he was. That didn’t stop my feelings from being hurt. Jerk. “He just came up behind me and grabbed me.”
Dick tilted my face away from him so he could search my neck for wounds. “But he didn’t bite you.”
“He didn’t even try,” I told him. “Which I thought was weird. But he might not have had time. I unleashed the full complement of antivampire Cal-tech on him.”
“Really?” He beamed at me.
I laughed and realized I must have split my lip when my face smacked the ground. Hissing, I pressed my hand over it.
Dick took out a pocket-sized first-aid kit and dabbed at my mouth with an antiseptic wipe. At my raised eyebrow, he explained, “When you work with Jane Jameson, you learn to be prepared for anything.”
I recalled Jane’s supernatural origin story, which involved being mistaken for a deer, shot by a drunk hunter, and turned into a vampire. “Fair enough.”
He pulled me to my feet and tried to pick me up.
“I am not four years old,” I told him. “I will walk. Now, where the hell are my shoes?”
His lips quirked into a fond little smile, reminding me of why I’d entertained a brief but intense schoolgirl crush on Dick for the first few months after my sister was adopted into his social circle. Buried deep underneath the many layers of sketchiness, he was sweet vampire nougat. “Come on, baby doll, let’s get you home.”
As we searched the parking lot for my far-flung pumps, I gave Dick a detailed report on how I had used the silver spray brooch and the brush stake. My only regret was that I didn’t have a chance with the purse-sized flamethrower, because I was in the mood for toasting my mystery vampire like a hot blond Pop-Tart. Dick was thrilled that Cal’s sick little toys had served their purpose and promised to help Cal find me even better tricks for next time. I had a feeling his less reputable connections would be involved somehow.
I filed the appropriate report with Ophelia, who, again, made me wait outside her office while she spoke to Dick. And given the yelling I could hear from Dick, I was sort of glad to be on this particular side of the door. Dick was not impressed with the security offered to the Council’s human employees, and he was making his displeasure as an undead citizen known at vocal decibels I didn’t know existed. This didn’t seem to faze Ophelia in the least, as she tossed Dick out of her office without a word of apology to me.
After informing me that my unflappable boss expected me at my desk at the beginning of my shift the next day—assault was no excuse for tardiness—Dick insisted on leaving his El Camino at the Council office and driving my car home. I would have argued with him, but the adrenaline was slowly draining out of my system, and I felt as if I’d been hit by a truck.
“Is there any sort of bribe I can offer that would allow you to handle this quietly, in a way that will not result in my sister completely freaking out?”
“Well, that is going to be a problem,” Dick said, as we pulled into the driveway to find a half-dozen cars parked in front of our house. I recognized Miranda Puckett’s special black vampire-transport SUV and Gabriel Nightengale’s sensible blue sedan.
I turned in my seat, glaring at Dick. “What did you do?”
“I may have made a few phone calls on the way to get you.”
“You sent up the Bat Signal?” I cried. “Before you even knew what was wrong with me?”
“Somebody had to keep Iris contained!” he exclaimed. “She gets the same alarms from your key fob. I knew it would take that many vampires to hold her down.”
I closed my eyes, shaking my head. “This . . . this is not going to go well.”
Dick patted my arm sympathetically. “No, it is not.”
• • •
I fixed my face as best I could in the makeup mirror and straightened my clothes. There was nothing to be done about the scrape on my cheek, but everything else I could cover with powder. The moment the car engine shut off, Cal and Iris swept out of the house in a blur of movement. Iris got to me first, lifting me off the ground in a bear hug. “Gigi!”
“Human!” I wheezed, as Iris squeezed the breath from my lungs and sobbed into my tattered jacket. Cal wrapped his arms around us both, resting his head against my bruised cheek. Over his shoulder, I saw Jane Jameson-Nightengale step out onto the porch with her tall, dark, and fangsome husband, Gabriel, and her childe, Jamie, who also happened to be my best friend. They stood on the porch, and while they weren’t related, it was amazing that they all wore matching expressions of concern.
Also, I still couldn’t breathe.
“Oxygen!” I wheezed against Iris’s grip. Shrugging loose, I asked, “OK, who’s ready for a thorough discussion of boundaries?”
“Sorry! I’m sorry.” She sniffed, dropping me gently to my feet. “I just got so scared when the alarm went off, and Jamie and Jane had to pin me to the ceiling. And I bit Gabriel’s arm—I’m really sorry about that, Gabriel!” she called back over her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” he said, rubbing absently at his torn sleeve. “It’s better than what Jane would have
done.”
I looked at Jane, who just nodded, because she knew he was right.
Jamie took Iris’s release of my person as an open invitation to jump in and sweep me off my feet, too. As sunny and blond as a teen vampire could be, Jamie was exactly as he had been when we were classmates at Half-Moon Hollow High. Goofy, open, and affectionate, like a Labrador puppy with fangs.
“You gave us a scare, kid,” he muttered into my hair.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “You should see the other guy. Hey, what’s this?” My hand snagged an envelope that was sticking out of Jamie’s back pocket. At this point, I welcomed the distraction and snatched it up for a closer look. “So what’s in the envelope?” I asked Jamie, waving the paper at him. “If you haven’t noticed, I am in desperate need of a subject change.”
“My schedule!” he said, presenting the paperwork with a flourish. “My adjustment counselor at UK sent it in today’s mail!”
I squealed with more excitement than you’d expect over a college class schedule and hopped up and down, hugging Jamie’s neck. After spending two semesters proving that he could function in a community-college classroom without devouring his classmates, Jamie was joining me at the University of Kentucky that September.
While I was thrilled about Jamie’s secondary education, Ophelia was not happy. She couldn’t move three hundred miles to campus with her boyfriend, because she had to stay close to the Council office. She was unhappy about the prospect of Jamie being out of her sight, away from public officials she controlled, near single girls she couldn’t track or intimidate. And she seemed to be blaming me for Jamie’s abandonment, since I had spent months helping Jamie wade through forms, releases, background checks, and other paperwork that vampire students had to file with their applications.
And Ophelia was my new boss.
For someone with above-average intelligence, I didn’t always think my decisions through.
“I can’t wait,” he said. “I’m so excited. Thanks for making this happen for me, Geeg.”
“All I did was help you with the paperwork.” I scoffed. “You’re the one ducking tradition and your bloodmate in order to major in sports medicine.”
“Former jocks have to major in something,” he said. “And I’m not ducking my bloodmate. I am simply following my sire’s advice and getting an education. Ophelia understands.” When I made an indelicate horselike noise, he added, “She will understand, eventually.”
“Yeah, that should make work less awkward if and when Ophelia ever decides to make eye contact with me,” I muttered.
“OK, as happy as I am for you, Jamie—congratulations—can we change the subject back to my sister’s near-death experience?” Iris interjected. “Are you sure you don’t need to go to the emergency room or something, Geeg?” She fussed with my disheveled hair. “Did you bump your head or—internal bleeding! You could have internal bleeding and not even know it. Let’s just load you into the car and pop down to the hospital for an MRI.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted, shaking Iris gently. “Can we all just please go inside? I’d like to get out of this pantsuit and into some natural fibers.”
I walked through the front door, shrugging out of my jacket and tossing it into the closest wastebasket. Cal and Iris had made the house more vampire-friendly after Iris’s transition. Cal’s historical presence was represented in the ancient-but-somehow-in-museum-condition bronze shield over the fireplace in the den and a marble bust of harvest goddess Demeter on the entryway table. But Cal had also made serious structural changes with Sam Clemson’s help, from heavy-duty sunproof shades mounted under the window shades to a security system that made Fort Knox look like the Bank of Mayberry. And the access door to the basement had been replaced with a much sturdier solid steel version, painted to look like wood but able to stand up to several grades of explosives.
I would call Cal paranoid, but the scuff marks on my face made it hard to poke fun at him.
The moment I walked into the parlor, I got a faceful of British vampire for my trouble. Cool, sandy-haired Collin Sutherland, with whom I’d been on a strict handshakes-and-firm-nods-only level for years, swooped in and threw his arms around me with so much enthusiasm that I was once again swept off my feet. It was nice to know I was loved, but the undead tackle-hugging was starting to become a little much.
“I’m so sorry, Gigi,” Collin whispered. “So, so sorry.”
His girlfriend, Miranda, who worked for Iris in Beeline’s vampire-transport department, approached us with a bemused but concerned expression on her puckish face.
“As the only other human here, I’m counting on you to be the voice of reason,” I told her solemnly.
“Who do you think kept them all here?” Miranda said, blowing a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. “Iris tried to rally the others to go to the parking lot and follow the scent trail of whoever hurt you. It was like a small, angry mob with fangs instead of pitchforks. Also, Zeb told me that he’s sorry he couldn’t be here to represent the other human voice of reason, but the twins are going through a gnawing phase. He didn’t want Iris’s furniture to get ruined.”
I shuddered, picturing Jane’s very human childhood best friend, Zeb Lavelle, and his gorgeous werewolf wife, Jolene, trying to corral their adorable but destructive twins. I babysat the kids once so Zeb could take Jolene on a date night. I babysat them once. That was enough to make me question the wisdom of reproduction.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, pointing to Collin, who, for the record, was still holding me several inches off the ground.
“Collin’s feeling a little guilty,” she said. “He thinks he should have seen this coming. You know, with his—” Miranda waggled her fingers around her head in a way that I assumed represented Collin’s precognitive gift.
Right. Collin had had a vague and barely helpful premonition over the Christmas break about me being attacked by a vampire. He had predicted that while none of the undead members of my circle of friends would hurt me, a vampire would eventually come after me. It was part of the reason I cooperated when Cal arranged my Hunger Games training.
Poor Collin. He hated to be right.
“Collin, I’m fine,” I assured him. “It’s not fair to beat yourself up over visions. And technically, you did see it coming while I was home for Christmas. And you took the time to warn me. You just didn’t have a lot of details. You did all you could.”
“I never get enough details,” Collin grumbled. “And I could have followed you around in the ensuing months so I could protect you from what I saw.”
“That would have become annoying really quickly,” I assured him. “And we never would have reached the stage in our relationship where we hug for socially inappropriate amounts of time.”
Collin blanched and retracted his arms, dropping me to my feet, while Miranda snickered. By this time, the other vampires had trooped into the living room for what I could only assume would be a debriefing.
“It’s really not a big deal, guys. I got grabbed from behind by a vampire, who probably saw me as an easy midnight snack. I proved him wrong. I don’t have any serious injuries. I call this one a win. Who wants something not-bloody to drink? Miranda?”
“Gigi, do not make light of this,” Cal said, putting his arm around me to prevent my retreat to the vampire-friendly kitchen.
“Making light of things is how I process,” I retorted. “Besides, who could blame the guy for trying? I’m awesome. What self-respecting vampire wouldn’t want a piece of this?”
“And you’re so modest, too.” Iris sighed. “You’re quitting that job.”
Well, at least she’d skipped “I told you so.”
“I will not have you in and out of that parking lot every night, risking another attack,” Iris said. “You’re going to find a nice, safe office job, far, far away from vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, or any other supernatural creatures. I don’t care if you have to become a telemarketer. I will keep you safe.”
“I am not quitting that job, Iris,” I told her calmly. “This is a dream job for a programmer. More money and perks than I could make anywhere else, and I haven’t even finished my degree yet. I’m an adult, and if I choose to work somewhere, as long as it doesn’t involve pasties or a Webcam, you should respect that.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Iris said, snorting.
“It could have just been a random attack,” Dick suggested. “It’s never happened in this group. But it is possible that Gigi crossed paths with a vampire with bad feeding habits, even outside the Council office, where Ophelia made it clear that such habits will result in quick, bloody, permanent death. Some vampires don’t listen and do what they want . . . I’m not helping, am I?”
Andrea patted his arm. “You’re trying, sweetie. It counts.”
Now that my heart rate had finally settled down long enough to let me think clearly, my feelings were more than a little hurt. Why had my vampire tried to hurt me? Before, he’d merely followed me around, skulking in parking lots, all broody and observant. And when he kissed me, it was like something out of a really good old episode of Buffy. Passionate and urgent, just a little bit filthy. I could practically hear the carefully selected indie rock playing in the background.
Was it all a setup? Or had he just wanted to amuse himself by playing with his food? I’d spent all of this time thinking about him, hoping I’d meet up with him again someday. And now I felt like a first-prize idiot for not seeing what was right in front of my face. I was the human equivalent of a cat toy. And through this cloud of brooding and gloom, I heard Cal say, “So I called Nikolai. He can accompany Gigi to work starting tomorrow night.”
My head snapped up, suddenly able to follow the conversation. “Wait, what?”
Clearly, I wasn’t hearing what was right in front of my face, either.
“Cal’s called in a favor from an old friend,” Iris said. “He will be following you to work every night and then home and anytime you leave the house at night. For . . . ever.”
“That giant hamster ball I bought Jane for Christmas is also an option,” Dick suggested.
“Dick, stop helping,” I begged him. “And Cal, what do you mean, ‘old friend’? As in you exchange occasional Christmas cards, or ‘remember that time we sacked Constantinople because we were peckish?’ ” Cal leveled an exasperated look at me, which I ignored. “It’s a valid question.”
“Please take this seriously, Gigi.”
“It’s hard to take this seriously, because I do not need a vampire bodyguard!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you think this is just a little bit of an overreaction? It could have just been a random attack, like Dick said. I may never see this vampire again. Besides, people in this little group have been attacked and kidnapped and had deer parts left on their doorstep, and they never hired a bodyguard.”
“Well, do you notice that all those people are dead now?” Jane nodded toward Andrea and Iris. “OK, they’re vampires, but still. I think Cal is trying to get ahead of the situation, which is something this group has struggled with in the past.”
“How did you even manage to arrange this so quickly?” I asked Cal, who was looking up at the ceiling, being careful not to make eye contact. Something was up. “Unless you’d already made the arrangements and were just waiting for the excuse to call him?” My brother-in-law was still studying the track lighting. “Cal, don’t make me get the flamethrower.”
“I knew he was in town and may have mentioned to him that we might need the help of a vampire you couldn’t manipulate,” Cal said defensively when I smacked his arm. “You can’t protect someone properly if that person has you wrapped around her little finger.”
“She doesn’t have me wrapped around her little finger!” Collin protested. “I am an impartial bystander!”
“Inappropriately long hugs, Collin,” Miranda reminded him.
Collin wrinkled up his face in the most undignified expression I’d ever seen him make. “Curses!”
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the concern Iris’s vampire friends showed for one another was part of the reason I loved them so much. Threatening them all with Cal’s silver spray would be a poor return for that care.
But seriously, one more hug, and I was going to snap.
“Cal, bringing fanged personnel to the office with me is only going to make me look immature and incapable to my coworkers, who don’t show much respect for humans anyway. It’s going to make my job that much harder.”
“Yes, because keeping up appearances is so much more important than your personal safety,” Cal muttered.
“Look, you’ve done everything you can to prepare me for hostile interactions with a vampire, including finding a martial-arts instructor who shouted incorrect Sun Tzu quotes and ‘Mercy is for the weak’ at me while he tossed me around the mat like a rag doll,” I said. “And the good news is that it worked. Thanks to what I learned and the bag of tricks you gave me, I was able to defend myself. The worst injuries I sustained tonight were from falling on my face after the guy ran off. So unless you can protect me from gravity, I’d say you’ve done all that you can. So I don’t need some vampire version of the Rock following me around, checking the bathroom stalls for potential assailants.”
“Actually, a vampire version of the Rock doesn’t sound that bad,” Miranda murmured. “Can one of you get on that? For the greater good?”
“Gigi, you have made a series of cogent and intelligent points,” Cal said, his head cocking toward the front door as if he was listening for something. “And you may be right . . . in some small way. I might have jumped the gun in calling in my friend for support.”
“Thank you.”
“But none of that matters now, because he’s standing on our front porch,” he said, dashing around me to answer the knock before it was even finished.
“What?” I spat. “Damn it, Cal!”’
I heard Cal at the front door, conversing in hushed Russian with a somewhat familiar second voice. I reached into my purse so I could at least wipe some of the smeared lip gloss from my cheek. The moment our guest stepped through the door, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. There he was in all his blond glory, the guy who had been following, kissing, and, most recently, attacking me.
“Motherfudger!” I yelled, dropping my purse and holding my stake hairbrush in a stabby position.
Iris frowned. “Gigi?”
I clicked the silver stake into place and demanded, “I didn’t smack you around enough the first time, jackass? You had to come back for seconds?”
Mr. Tall, Blond, and Bite-y stared, tilting his gorgeous head and staring at me as if I was a particularly interesting specimen at the zoo. He was wearing different clothes, jeans and a thin green cashmere sweater that brought out the lighter amber flecks in his stupid, beautiful eyes.
It was difficult getting past the “so damn cute” to focus on the “violent possible sociopath” of this situation. But I would do it, for puppies and feminism and for no other reason than that I’d already committed to this road by pulling a stake on a guest.
“Gigi, what are you doing?” Iris asked through a tightly wrought, awkward smile. All of the other vampires stood cautiously, not quite sure why I appeared to be losing my mind in front of our guest. “Kind of being rude to Cal’s friend.”
“This is the vampire who attacked me.”
Cal scoffed. “Don’t be silly, Geeg, this is my friend, Nikolai Dragomirov. Nik for short, because no one needs that many syllables.”
“Well, I’m telling you that your ‘friend’ Nik tried to bite me in the parking lot tonight. Which I think means he is no longer a friend but an acquaintance, at best. I don’t care what you did in Constantinople.”
Nik wandered closer, towering over me, completely oblivious to the fact that I was pressing the tip of a silver stake to his chest. Seriously, I had time to adjust my placement two or three times to make sure I had the heart, and he didn’t even glance down.
“I know you,” he said. “I have seen you before.”
“Of course you have,” Cal said, and when Iris sent him a questioning look, he hastily added, “I sent pictures of the wedding.”
“Which probably helped when you were following me around Half-Moon Hollow during Christmas break. Also, you saw me earlier when you were attacking me. How is that not breaking through?” I asked, digging the stake in just enough to make him wince. And yes, I was still willfully omitting the kissing part, because I wanted to escape this situation without Iris trying to ground me to my room like a preteen.
“What about Christmas?” Iris asked, frowning.
Double damn it.
I tried to cobble together a coherent, plausible explanation for what I had just said, but all I could produce was a series of increasingly twitchy facial expressions that communicated guilt or nausea. Or maybe both.
“Gigi, what aren’t you telling us?” Iris asked, her voice deceptively calm.
I locked eyes with Nik, who seemed just as confused as Cal and Iris. Because he wasn’t aware that I’d omitted a large portion of our less-than-adorable “how we met” story. And neither was Jane, because she immediately piped up, “Of course he’s seen her. One of the first clear pictures I got from Nik was of him standing near Gigi at McDonough’s Tree Farm, watching her and wanting to talk to her and . . . judging from the expressions on your faces, I should just stop talking right now, shouldn’t I?”
I cringed and nodded. Sometimes it really sucked to hang out with a mind-reader. “Jane, maybe you shouldn’t go poking around in Nik’s head. It seems like a violation of a lot of different civil rights.”
“Let’s worry about vampire Fifth Amendment issues when you’re not attracted to a man who seems to have Gigi-based rage blackouts.” Iris snorted. “Also, you were seeing him over Christmas break, and you didn’t think to tell us?”
“I wasn’t seeing him as in dating him. I was seeing him as in possibly hallucinating him!” I cried. “And I don’t know how that is relevant to the current conversation.”
Nik’s smile was indulgent as he stepped closer to me. “I am certain I would remember attacking someone as pretty as you, sladkaya.”
“What did you call me?” I asked, arching a brow as Iris pushed Nik back a step away from me.
“He called you ‘sweetheart,’ ” Cal said, glaring at the back of his friend’s head. “He’s Russian. He calls every woman he meets under the age of seventy ‘sweetheart.’ It doesn’t mean anything.” Cal’s glare intensified. “It doesn’t mean anything, right, Nik?”
“Why wouldn’t it mean anything?” I growled, though I wasn’t sure who was on the receiving end. “Look, you actually spoke to me this time, don’t you remember that?”
Nik turned back to Cal, completely ignoring the question. “You said she was a bit of a genius. Does that mean she is also a little bit . . .” Nik made a hand gesture near his head that was considerably less flattering than the “little off” gesture Miranda had made for Collin.
“Oh, I’m crazy now?” Seething, I reached down and squeezed his thigh, right over the spot where I’d stabbed him with silver. He didn’t even bother defending himself. In fact, he looked downright intrigued when I reached toward his thigh. But when I applied the pressure, he yowled and backed away. “Do you remember how you sustained this limp? Because that’s how I left you, Skippy, with a gaping, difficult-to-heal silver wound.”
He looked almost amused by the fact that I’d left a big wound on his leg. “You stabbed me?”
“What?” Cal watched, his expression horrified, as a bright bloody patch spread across the leg of Nik’s jeans.
“I told you, I stabbed him in the thigh with my hairbrush stake. Am I the only person in the room following this conversation?”
I heard several murmurs of “Possibly” and “Probably.” I was more worried about the intensity of Cal’s glare, which, by rights, should have melted Nik’s forehead.
“Cal, was this one of your training exercises gone wrong?” Iris demanded, as Cal slid between me and Nik and gently shoved me out of striking distance. “Did you send your friend to attack Gigi in a parking lot? I can appreciate that you want her to be prepared, but I think you’ve gone too far.”
“Of course I didn’t!” Cal exclaimed. “Nik, did you attack Gigi in a parking lot?”
“No, I came here as soon as I rose for the evening,” Nik insisted, the faint Russian accent growing deeper. “She looks familiar, I will admit. But Cal, you know I would never hunt a random human, especially not this close to the Council office. It would be professional suicide.”
I would try not to focus on the “professional suicide” qualifier, I really would.
Cal checked his watch. “You just now rose at two a.m.?”
“I rose late. I have been working longer hours lately. I did not know I was going to need an alibi.”
“OK, how did you end up with that wound on your leg?”
“I do not know.”
“What do you know?” Cal asked.
Nik nodded toward me. “I know that I have seen her before. I do not know how or when or where, but I have seen her before.”
“Of course you have, you idiot. I sent you to her school months ago to ‘talk to’ that boy in her class who wouldn’t stop making unwanted advances on her!” Cal cried, exasperated.
“That was you?” I exclaimed.
“Oh, Cal, you didn’t.” Iris sighed.
“I do not remember that.” Nik shook his head, still staring at me as if I was some precious, fascinating gemstone. A girl could get used to being stared at like that . . . minus the patchy memory and the occasional attempted mugging. And despite the situation, I could feel a little smile forming on my lips.
“Do you remember following me when I was home over Christmas break?” I asked.
Nik shook his head. “No.”
“What?” Iris exclaimed. “What the hell is going on here? Has everyone gone nuts?”
“Do you remember kissing me in front of Jane Jameson’s bookshop?” I asked, ignoring my sister’s growing distress.
“No, but I wish I did remember, truly,” Nik said, grinning cheekily. “You have certainly built up an elaborate pretend relationship between the two of us. I am sorry I missed it.”
“Gladiola Grace Scanlon!” Iris yelled, catching my arm as I surged forward to smack him. Or at least poke him really hard. “You were followed and kissed by a strange vampire, and you didn’t think to tell anybody about it?” Damn it. She broke out my full birth name. That meant I was really in trouble.
“Let’s just focus on the problem at hand,” I told Iris, my violent intent temporarily redirected.
Iris pointed her finger in my face. “We are so going to revisit this.”
Meanwhile, Cal had Nik pressed against the wall by his collar. “You kissed my little sister?”
My stake swung dangerously close to my vampire companions as I threw my arms into the air. “Oh, come on, that you believe, but I’m crazy when I say he attacked me?”
“I don’t know if we should be here right now,” Andrea whispered to Dick.
“If we leave now, we’ll miss a lot, and we’ll just have to catch up later,” Dick whispered back.
“Everyone can hear you,” Jane hissed over both of them.
Suddenly, Nik started laughing and pointing at Dick, who was wearing one of the few shirts Andrea had missed in her legendary purge of his inappropriate T-shirt collection: “Home is where the pants aren’t.” When he realized everybody was staring at him, Nik cried, “What? Is funny, yes?”
Jane slapped her hand over her face. “Oh, God, it’s Russian Dick Cheney.”
Gabriel shuddered. “There are two of them.”
“Hey!” Dick exclaimed. “That hurts my feelings!”
“Let’s get back to the point. Did you kiss my sister?” Cal demanded, shaking Nik back and forth hard enough to make fangs rattle.
“If you say that you don’t remember kissing me, I will choke you out,” I told him.
The room went silent. Even Cal was looking over at me with a doubtful expression that I found insulting.
I amended, “I would try real hard.”
“All right, all right, yes, there is something going on here,” Nik said, clearing his throat and removing Cal’s hands from their locked position around his neck. “And I do not understand what it is. But I do not think that choking me is going to help the situation.”
Somehow, the overly formal language, the precise pronunciation of every syllable without contractions or slang, the mark of someone who’d learned English as a second language decades before, reminded me so much of Cal it made me smile. That sort of sucked, because I was supposed to be all pissed off and badass. It was hard to be badass when you were smiling like a goof.
Nik smiled back at me, a big, beautiful, open smile, and it set a whole flock of condor-sized butterflies loose in my stomach. And all that doubt about where Nik landed on the fairy-tale-monster line of violence didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. In that moment, forgiving him for that little life-or-death scuffle in the parking lot seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do. Hell, climbing into his lap and nibbling his ears seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.
I might not have been the authority on what was reasonable, at that moment.
Maybe Nik’s secret vampire power was like Dick’s “female persuasion”? Dick could persuade a woman to shave her own head and do the Macarena in the town square if he flirted enough with her, something he rarely put to use because he didn’t consider it sporting.
“Why do I not remember you?” Nik asked me, as if we were the only ones in the room. He reached for my face, like he was about to cup my cheek, only to have his hand diverted by a slap from Cal. “I should remember you.”
“I don’t know.” I chuckled, despite the incredible weirdness of the situation. “But could you maybe say hi from now on? Instead of the skulking and the lunging?”
Nik leaned just a tiny bit closer, his blunt white teeth dragging over that full bottom lip. “I think that could be arranged.”
Cal cleared his throat. And then I realized I was inappropriately infatuated with someone who shared an uncomfortable number of similarities with my surrogate brother-slash-father-figure, and my goofy smile melted away like magic. And then I remembered the parking-lot roughhousing, and I took another step back.
“This is a very sweet moment, but I would really like you to get out of my house,” Iris said, somehow outmuscling her husband and pushing Nik toward the door. “Cal will be in touch. Stay away from Gigi.”
“What if I do not want to leave?” Nik asked, his voice a low, threatening growl, as Cal hovered in front of Nik, preventing him from getting closer to me.
My eyes widened as a ripple of that same fear I had felt in the parking lot zipped down my spine. Jamie moved in front of me in a protective stance, while Iris leapt forward at her inhuman speed and practically tackled Nik to force him out the door. She slammed the door in his face. His beautiful, beautiful face. I would analyze my rapid shifts in attitude toward parking-lot assailants at a later time.
“I do not understand what is happening right now.” I sighed.
“You are making very poor decisions,” Iris told me.
“You are not to see that boy again,” Cal said in an authoritative, fatherly tone that was frankly terrifying.
“I am not twelve,” I told him. “And he’s hardly a boy. If he’s an old friend of yours, that probably means he’s, what, four hundred years old?”
Cal muttered something under his breath.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I said it’s closer to five hundred,” he grumbled. “Give or take a decade.” And Iris buried her face in her hands.
“I told you we should have left earlier,” Andrea whispered to Dick. “Now it’s super-awkward, and they’re standing in front of the door.”