5
Little annoyances will build up in any workplace. Keep the big picture in mind when filing complaints with HR. Is that stolen stapler really worth the hassle of a severed jugular?
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
Even in the dark, I could see Iris fuming behind the wheel of the van.
“Oh, hell.” I sighed as Nik shoved me behind his back, his body silhouetted against the headlights of the Dorkmobile.
Cal and Iris climbed out of the van. Cal was eyeing the security cameras warily, while Iris slammed the driver’s-side door. She was dressed in her usual work outfit of a slim black pencil skirt and a sage-colored cardigan but somehow managed to look intimidating as she stormed toward us.
“Gigi!” Iris cried. “Seriously?”
“What are you even doing here, Iris? This is not normal sibling behavior.”
“We were bringing you dinner,” Iris said, holding up a yellow Beeline lunch cooler, which the drivers typically used to transport vampire clients’ blood. “To try to make amends for crossing a few lines the other night. But now we find you doing exactly what we asked you not to do! Where is your head, Gigi?”
“Argh,” I groaned, thumping my head between Nik’s shoulder blades.
“It is rather sweet that they are concerned for you,” Nik whispered over his shoulder. I jabbed him in the ribs, making him add, “Though clearly annoying and very wrong.”
Iris dashed around Nik and pulled me toward the car before whirling around to stick her finger in Nik’s face. “You stay away from my sister, do you hear me? You stay away from her, or I will end you. I will find a way.”
“You are very young, and you are Cal’s wife, so I will forgive the finger-pointing,” Nik said. “But do not presume to threaten me.”
“Hey, let’s not escalate this beyond what we can salvage with apologies,” I insisted.
“And you are very old,” Iris said, her voice going deadly quiet, as if I hadn’t even spoken. “And I think you are underestimating the resourcefulness of someone who worked with your kind for years before she was turned and knows exactly how to sneak into a sleeping vampire’s home to use a variety of tricks to make sure that vampire never wakes up again.”
“Aaaaaand now it’s gone too far.” I sighed, rolling my eyes toward the moonlit sky.
“So, Gigi,” Iris said, pursing her lips, “is your death wish so strong that you’ve decided to lie to us full-time now?”
“It wasn’t so much lying as—” I began.
“It was lying. You left out major chunks of truth. The effect is the same. Listen, I’m trying to stay calm. I’m not going to yell or act like a banshee. But this can’t continue until we figure out what is happening to Nik,” she said, her voice quiet and more Iris-like than I’d heard her in days. “I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here, Geeg. It’s not like you’re madly in love. You barely know each other.”
Ouch.
I looked up at Nik, hoping for some reaction from him. But his face was inscrutable. Stupid handsome vampires capable of suppressing their facial emotions.
“Just ‘barely know each other’ for a few more weeks . . . or months. Maybe years. Just until we know what’s going on. Or, you know, you meet someone else.”
“Subtle, Iris,” I muttered.
“Nik, we have been friends for a long time, but I cannot allow you near Gigi,” Cal said, urging Iris back toward the car. “Also, we’ve talked about you kissing her. I believe the words ‘ass-kicking of an immortal lifetime’ were used.”
“I would not hurt her,” Nik insisted.
“Not consciously, but I can’t trust you not to lose control over yourself again.”
“Well, that is going to be difficult, considering that Ophelia has hired me on for a long-term assignment at the Council offices, where Gigi will be working.”
Before Iris could even open her mouth, I told her, “I’m not quitting!”
“Well, you are not to see Nik outside of the office,” Cal told me. “And when you are in the office, you must have at least one vampire chaperone to watch over you.”
“Cal, you can’t ask me to—I’m an adult. I am not sixteen years old anymore!” I cried.
“No, but secretly associating with a vampire when you were sixteen didn’t work out for you, either, did it?” he asked.
My eyes narrowed while Nik sent a questioning look my way. “That was a low blow, Cal.”
Cal raised his hands. “You’re right. You’re right. I’m being unreasonable.” He suddenly grabbed Nik by the collar and tossed him toward the open van door.
“Where are you taking him?”
“Away!” Cal said.
“You can’t do this!” I exclaimed.
“It will be fine, Gigi,” Nik said, sounding almost bored as Cal slung the van door shut. “Go back to work. I will see you soon.”
“No, you won’t!” Iris yelled, and pulled the van out of the lot with a squeal of rubber.
As the Dorkmobile’s taillights disappeared into the night, I tilted my head up to the sky and prayed for patience and the strength not to smack all of my vampire loved ones with a tack hammer. I glanced down at the Styrofoam carrier, which was resting safely on the little concrete pad outside the employee entrance.
I hoped my coworkers liked cold coffee.
• • •
I was hiding under my covers, because that’s what grown-ups did when they were faced with problems, right?
I’d managed to finish my workday with some dignity, delivering coffee to my grateful coworkers and doing some actual work. And I’d avoided having any of my teeth forcibly pulled, so I considered that a win. Coming home and avoiding contact with either Iris or Cal, who were both working in their office because three a.m. was the middle of the workday for vampires, was another mark in my victory column.
I put on my softest, comfiest pajamas and climbed under the covers, pretending the previous twelve hours were a surreal and upsetting dream. All except for the second kiss with Nik, which, again, made the old paradigm its bitch.
And I could not explain that in a rational manner, endorsed by a sense of self-preservation. Nik was the opposite of every person I’d been attracted to in the past. From what I could remember, John had played up the wounded, soulful, brooding creature of the night thing. Ben was the poster child for boys you’d gladly allow your daughter to date. And Nik was kind of, well, untrustworthy, but at least he was up front about it.
I liked it. I liked his weird, dry sense of humor. I liked that he called me on sassing him. I liked that he seemed to take my threats of violence seriously, instead of considering them cute, like the other members of Team Vampire did. He was the one vampire in Half-Moon Hollow who hadn’t seen me go through my awkward adolescent Gigi phase.
The irony that I’d mocked Iris’s fascination with paperback romances for years—and I was basically infatuated with the template for every “naughty duke” cover hero she’d ever swooned over—was not lost on me.
The last thought I had before drifting off was that once she got over being wicked pissed at me, Iris was going to mock me mercilessly. And I was indeed drifting, floating in that unstable twilight space between sleep and waking, where everything is formless and quiet and dizzy. Images floated freely through my head. My desk at the office was perched on the edge of an abyss, and unless I continued working, I would fall off. Then the desk became a table at Jane’s shop, Specialty Books, where stacks of file folders loomed over my head. Nik’s wry grin became Marty’s strangely confident face as we shuffled out of the staff meeting. My delicious midnight coffee was thick and metallic in my mouth, like sucking on pennies. I threw the cup away from my lips and watched it splatter the walls of my bedroom in thick rivers of red. The very sight of the mess was enough to send me running. But now I was sprinting down the hallway at the Council offices with an athame, a double-edged ceremonial blade, clutched in my hand, the gray walls melting all around me into fog. And even though I couldn’t see anyone in the offices, I could hear the click-clack of computer keys. Someone was typing, and from the sound of it, the code was angry. Click-clack-clackity-clack-click. I turned corners at random, searching for a door, an elevator, anything that would get me away from some invisible menace that seemed to be hovering closer and closer at my heels. Click-click-clack-click-clackity-clack. I was afraid to look back, afraid to see what might be chasing me. I turned again, and there was Nik, standing at the end of the hallway, in front of the staff exit, and he was roaring with rage, baring his bloodstained fangs.
Clack-click-clack-clack-clackity-click.
I bolted up from bed, clutching the comforter to my chest, sucking in deep, gulping breaths, as if I’d been shoved underwater. I threw the covers aside and rubbed my hands over my face.
Click-clack-clackity-clack.
What the fracking frack?
I turned toward the source of the noise and saw Nik, with his knees propped up on the planter box outside my window, tapping his fingernails lightly against the glass.
“Ni— Wha!” I hissed, clapping my hand over my mouth so my shouts wouldn’t draw attention from Cal and Iris.
Now that he had my attention, Nik waved casually, as if it was totally normal to be balancing on a planter outside a girl’s bedroom window. Using every trick Cal had taught me, I crept noiselessly over to the window. My room was the only one in the house without sunproof shades, but it also required its own keypad and a thumbprint scanner to open from the inside. So Nik had to wait a while for me to negotiate with my brother-in-law’s insane security system.
“Good evening, sladkaya.” He smiled as I opened the window, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. His soft, sensual, filthy mouth.
“Are you nuts?” I hissed. “My surrogate parents have superpowers!”
He hopped gracefully through the open window, landing catlike on silent feet. “I only wanted to see if you were sleeping well after the stressful events of this evening.”
“Shh!” I hissed, pressing my fingers against his lips. He parted them ever so slightly and gently bit down on my fingertip. I used my free hand to tweak his nose, making him shake his head.
“Do not worry about being overheard. Cal is currently distracting your sister with a very thorough massage.”
I recoiled as if I’d been slapped in the face with a salmon. “Gross. And it should have been clear to you the minute you looked through my window that I was sleeping just fine,” I told him. “And if you think you are going to sneak into my room to watch me sleep, I am not above stabbing you again.”
“It did not look as though you were sleeping just fine at all,” he told me, with an innocent expression far too practiced to be natural. “You were tossing back and forth and muttering to yourself. What were you saying?”
“I don’t know, I was asleep,” I murmured. “Now, get away from my window before we get into trouble.”
“You are not what you would call a ‘morning person,’ are you, my Gigi? How long would I have to wait after you wake to have a civilized conversation with you?”
“Well, if you keep up that condescending tone, it could be a while,” I told him. “And if you make enough noise to draw Cal or Iris up here, a lot longer.”
I was suddenly very self-conscious of my room, which had not changed since my senior year of high school. It was the one area of the house left untouched during Cal and Iris’s remodeling rampage, because Iris knew I needed to come back to a space that was familiar. While I loved that she knew me so well, for the first time, I wished that she’d updated the denim-blue walls, the quilted blue-and-white bedspread, the beaten-up bookshelves containing my old beaten-up paperbacks. And then there was my pinboard, which also hadn’t changed since high school, with the same pictures of me with my friends at volleyball games, parties, and dances. And pictures of Ben. What felt like an inordinate number of pictures of me with Ben.
Aw, hell.
Why hadn’t I pulled those down? Stupid ex-
boyfriend clutter blindness. I thought I’d gotten rid of all of those.
“I pictured something a little more genie-in-a-bottle, big, round bed covered in pillows and scarves.” He scanned my pink checked pajama pants and tank top. “And I pictured you wearing less.”
I grinned. “Oh, you did?”
“A lot less,” he said. “And I have imagined it frequently over the past few days, fantasized about it shamelessly.”
I ran the tip of my tongue along the blunt edges of my canine teeth. They weren’t as brilliantly white or razor-sharp as his, but the action certainly caught his attention, if the dilated golden glow of his eyes was any indicator. “Did you, now?”
“Shamelessly,” he said again, bending to kiss me.
“No, none of that,” I told him, dodging him. “We need to talk without the distraction of your sexy mouth.”
He frowned with said sexy mouth. “That does not make any sense.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I do not. But I would like to. Why do we not go outside for a conversation, so you feel more comfortable speaking at full volume?”
“Eh,” I said, letting the corners of my mouth tug down as I glanced out the window.
“It is a lovely night,” he added, in a lilting, crooning tone.
“This is literally how every horror movie starts. Also, you’ve attacked me before. I know it seems petty to harp on that, but . . . I think I will anyway.”
“Are you always this stubborn?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“If you are worried about getting out of the house unnoticed, I can hold you as I jump to the ground from the window.”
I arched an eyebrow. “My brother-in-law put me through ninja training. You don’t think he taught me how to land safely from a second-story jump?”
He grinned. “You do not like being patronized, do you?”
“No, which is why they call it ‘patronizing,’ with the negative connation.”
“I know the connotation. I have spoken English for many years,” he insisted, more than a little affronted.
I shushed him. “I know, that’s not—OK, I’ll jump, but maybe hop down there and be ready, just in case.”
“Excellent,” he said, swooshing out of my room like a gust of wind.
I peered down from my window at the handsome blond man beckoning with a fang-tipped smile. Like many a damsel before me, I wondered at the wisdom of joining my moonlit paramour. A smart woman would have smiled, waved good night, and not joined the man who’d recently attempted to maul her on a midnight stroll.
And yet . . .
“I am not a smart person,” I muttered, slipping into my sneakers, which were a lovely complement to my pink gingham pajama pants and tank top. I braced my arms against the windowsill. It was maybe fifteen feet to the ground. I cut the difference, dangling from the planter box ever so briefly and dropping to the soft grass on both feet with a quiet oof.
Oh, thank Cthulhu that worked, because otherwise, I would be very embarrassed.
I wriggled both ankles to make sure they were intact. I listened for some weird alarm from Cal to sound or for Iris to come screaming out of the house.
Nothing.
Nik smiled and offered me his arm. It was all I could do not to hold my pajama leg up like a hoop skirt.
“I think I owe you information,” he said, as we sauntered through Iris’s elaborate garden. In high summer, her beloved flower beds were bursting with night-blooming plants: delicately scented jasmine, proud, trumpetlike moonflower, and night gladiolus (in my honor, thank you very much). Cal and Sam even dug a small pond in the center of the yard so she could plant night-blooming water lilies, in bright pinks and white. Thanks to Cal’s influence, it reminded me of Persephone’s garden, delicate and beautiful but still shrouded in the darkness of the underworld. Iris, a lifelong gardener, was careful to mix some color into her palette, the sturdy pink evening primrose and flaring yellow of narrow-leaved sundrops, to remind her of the joys of daytime living even while the moonlight reflected, bright and brilliant, against the petals.
Even though she clearly loved her life with Cal, even though I knew that vampirism was the only option if she wanted a long-term commitment with him, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad for my sister, having lost the sun, cut off from the growth cycle that had meant so much to her. I wondered if I would be able to make the best of it, as she had; if I would be able to give up feeling the sun on my face, the crackle of popcorn on my tongue, the velvety softness of chocolate. Probably not; Iris had always been better at adapting.
For now, I was grateful that the scents and colors gave me something to cling to, to focus on, rather than the pounding of my nervous heart. I was counting on the droning of crickets to drown it out for Nik’s sensitive ears.
Nik folded his arms behind his back as we walked, with a strange, almost military stance that made me wonder whether he was used to more formal “walk-and-talks” or he just didn’t know what to do with his hands. We wandered closer to the edge of the woods, ducking into the trees.
I stopped just a few feet in, far enough that Iris wouldn’t be able to see us if she glanced out the window but not so far that I couldn’t see the lights of the house. That counted as some semblance of common sense, right?
Nik cleared his throat, leaning back against a tree. Despite my desire to look just as casual, I did not want to risk bark scrapes or getting my hair caught in low-hanging branches. Nik tilted his head, studying me. “If I recall, the last time we were together, you were interrupted before you could ask me anything.”
“I suppose my first question would have to be, are you an evil vampire hell-bent on my death and/or destruction?” I retorted with more snark than I probably deserved to use.
“I am not evil, that I am aware of,” he said evenly, though he sounded as if he was about to laugh. “And I do not think I am hell-bent on your destruction, though my actions apparently lead you to believe otherwise.”
“Which, I suppose, is your way of saying that you don’t know why you’re going into anti-Gigi fugue states,” I muttered.
“I really have no idea. But for now, can we pretend that we are two normal people on a normal outing, in which we are exchanging the background information one would expect to learn when one of them is not blacking out large portions of his history?”
“You mean the kind of conversation that usually takes place before getting to second base with somebody?”
He leaned forward, trapping me against the trunk of a large oak tree by placing a hand on either side of my head. “I am not familiar with the base system, but I am fairly certain we did not get to any of the interesting ones. As a man, I insist that I would remember touching a body like yours. The sense memory alone would be enough to carry through to my conscious memory.”
He flashed that megawatt grin at me, and my lady bits did a little happy dance. It just wasn’t fair. The man should come with a warning label. “Caution: May Cause Panties to Spontaneously Combust.”
OK, Scanlon, you are a grown, modern woman, with plenty of practice controlling your hormones. This is no different from any date with any attractive man. You just have to set boundaries and keep the blood directed above your waist. You’ll be fine. Now, keep him at a distance, so you can concentrate on producing words of more than one syllable.
I reached up to toy with the collar of his shirt. “Well, I’m combining the lovely languid kisses with the aggressive biting attempts, which rounds up to second.”
Traitorous lady bits!
Clearly, the parts of my brain not controlled by pheromones had lost the fight. They were probably tied up and shoved into a storage space somewhere in my oculomotor section, the part of my brain that controlled eyelash fluttering and giving Nik the “come closer” looks. Stupid trampy brain parts.
Nik’s nose brushed against the curve of my forehead, running along my hairline. “What do you want to know?”
Nik knelt to the ground, silent in the dry, rain-
deprived grass. Fear flared through me like a warning bell. What if this was some weird sex thing I wasn’t ready for? What if he sank his fangs into my thigh? He slid off the rubber ballet flats I used as house shoes and dropped them to the ground. Yeah, that didn’t make me feel much better, in terms of potentially weird sexual things.
Even in the moonlight filtering through the overhead canopy of leaves, I could see the iridescent red polish on my toes, with little golden House Lannister lions painted on my big toes and R-O-A-R written on the others. His eyebrows rose in surprise.
“I noticed these before, in your bedroom. As much as I want to use my question on something profound, this begs explanation,” he said, waggling my foot.
“Jane and I paint our toes with the different house sigils while we watch Game of Thrones reruns,” I told him, slipping my foot back into my shoe. “Last week, we had House Tully trout swimming across our feet. Jane’s got a much steadier hand with the polish than I do. I’m more of a House Stark girl, but we don’t play favorites.”
He stood, pulling me gently as we went deeper into the woods. “You are an interesting group.”
“We find ways to enjoy our time together,” I said, as he threaded my fingers through his. He compared the size of our hands. The verdict? His were huge, even compared with my long, tapered fingers. The same flaring feeling thrilled through my belly, but it was less fear-based and more giddy nerve-giggles. “Iris can’t watch Game of Thrones anymore. Every time she starts to like a character, that character dies in some spectacularly horrible way. So she sticks with nice, safe network comedies that don’t feature regular beheadings. But Jane likes the show, so she comes over to watch it and get a little time away from the testosterone cesspool at her house.”
Nik took a lock of my dark hair and twirled it around his long, deft fingers. “I envy your closeness. It has been a long time since I have shared that sort of camaraderie with anyone, even Cal, whom I would consider a close friend. And I have not seen him in centuries.”
“Still, to come running when he asked you to harass my classmate on my behalf, that’s a pretty tight bond,” I said. “Also, before we really start the Q-and-A portion of this evening, I need to tell you something. Because I don’t want you to find out some other way and get upset. I may have gone into the office server last night to look for your employee file.”
He stopped to stare at me, golden eyebrows at full mast. “You did what?”
“I didn’t know if I would ever get to see you again, and I had all of these questions that Cal refused to answer. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to violate your privacy. I just wanted to know more about you. I thought I should tell you myself.”
“How did you find my employee file?”
I winced. “Technically, I didn’t. I found what was supposed to be your employee file, but it was empty.”
He laughed and pulled me against his side, tucked neatly under his arm. “The fact that you were able to find the empty file was impressive. My actual file fills most of a storage room at the Council archives in Prague.”
I would take time to be frightened by that later. “So you’re not mad?”
“Mad that the girl who has occupied most of my waking thoughts since the moment I remember meeting her is equally curious about me? No, I am not angry, quite the contrary. I am glad you want to know more about me. And I am intrigued that you have the skill and cunning to accomplish your goal. All wrapped up in that sweet, deceptively guileless package. You surprise me, Gigi.”
“Well, I’m glad you appreciate my sexy curiosity, because I have questions galore. What’s your origin story? And as a follow-up subquery, how do you know Cal?”
“Are you allowed a ‘subquery’?”
“Yes, I am,” I said airily. “Entertain me, Nikolai.”
“Oh, I could entertain you for hours,” he teased me, rubbing his thumb in tight circles around my palm. “But for now, I will tell you that I was born in the 1500s,” he said. “I was the youngest of three sons in a fairly well-off family, for the time. We did not have a title, but we had a very rough version of what could be considered a castle. It was mostly a fortress, deep in the Romincka Forest. My father tended faithfully to his tenants in the village. He made sure they had enough to eat, medicine when they were sick, firewood when they were cold. He was a good man, educated and kind, and so were my brothers. But as the youngest, there was little for me to do or look forward to unless one of my brothers died. And that wasn’t the way I wanted to make my way in the world.
“So one day, when a traveling Romani circus drove past the village, I jumped on the nearest wagon and joined the caravan.”
I hooted. “You ran away with the circus?”
“For a time,” he said, looking pleased that he’d made me laugh. “They were not pleased that I had stowed away on their wagons and made me work for every crust of bread they threw my way. It was a rude awakening for a boy used to servants and soft sheets. But I earned my place.”
“Were you ever a clown?” When my alarmed tone caught his attention, I added, “It’s a fair question.”
“No, I was more of an ‘advance man,’ ” he said. “I went into the towns before the caravan arrived and was sure to tell the locals of my woes down at the nearest tavern. My pretend farmhouse had burned down, my pretend cows had dried up, my pretend wife had left me for my brother, that sort of thing. Conversation would naturally lead to commiserating about similar mishaps in their village, and I would take what I learned back to Mama Katya to use in her palm readings.”
“And no one ever caught on to you?”
“I wore disguises,” he said. “I blackened my hair with boot polish, rubbed walnuts on my teeth to stain them. I learned about subterfuge and sleight of hand. The circus folk may have stolen and lied, but they were very open about it.”
“Once again, your vampire logic is not like my human logic.”
“I suppose it is not,” he said, sliding a cool hand over the delicate bone of my wrist. “I enjoyed myself with the circus. I learned who I was and what I was capable of, and I picked up many of the skills I still use today.” He held up his hand, which was currently dangling my stainless-steel cuff bracelet, inscribed with a swirling G.
“Hey!”
“You did not even feel me take it off,” he said smugly.
“You could have used your vampire speed to do that,” I said, snatching it out of his hand and hooking it around my wrist.
“But I did not,” he said, and somehow, he had managed to get the dang bracelet back and was dangling it from his fingertips again.
“Stop that!”
“When it stops being funny,” he said with what almost sounded like contrition. “I toddled along that way for years, until I sent a very superstitious fellow—who I didn’t know was a vampire—for a palm reading. Katya predicted a long and lonely life for him, and he lashed out, turning me to prove her wrong. He told her that he would keep me with him for all eternity.”
I was not able to suppress my shudder. All of the vampires I knew, with the exception of Andrea, had been turned by people they knew and trusted, or eventually came to know and trust. And Andrea’s horrible sire had been given the Trial, the triple whammy of vampire capital punishment, making way for her husband to take his place as a mentor. I couldn’t imagine being turned by someone who was basically an emotional albatross. “Did that work out for him?”
Nik shook his head. “No, I rose three days later, and the moment he turned his back, I staked him and ran.”
“Seems fair.”
“There are certain benefits to being turned by a vampire who is not particularly smart,” he said. “Or fast.”
“And then what happened?”
He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, as if all that history was boring. “Eh. Enough about me.”
“But your story is so much more interesting than mine,” I protested. “My life story is sadly lacking in circus folk.”
“To you, it is less interesting, maybe. But I have so many questions about a girl named Gladiola Grace and her strange vampire upbringing.”
“We’re coming back to your awkward vampire adolescence,” I told him, but when I pointed my finger at him, I realized my bracelet was missing again. “Damn it, Nik!” I snatched it back from him.
He asked, “So what was it like, growing up with one human parent and one vampire?”
“I didn’t grow up with Cal,” I said, closing my bracelet around my wrist. “He sort of swept in under the wire and filled that big-brother role right before I flung myself out of the nest for college.”
“You are going to have to learn to use fewer metaphors.”
I pulled his hands into mine, so I could study them, trace the outline of his scarred palms with my fingertips. How could hands that still seemed so young and strong have survived for so long? How many countries had these hands touched? How many lives? Trying to estimate made me a little dizzy. How could he stand to see so much, to know so much? How could he drum up enthusiasm for each new stage in history? And how could I seem at all interesting compared with any of that?
I cleared my throat and shook off those crippling feelings of inadequacy, because I refused to be that girl in this strange undead love story. “Our parents died when I was around twelve. A drunk driver hit their car on the way home from a party. Iris was already in college and she tried to fold me into her life so she could finish up her degree. But that didn’t work. It was hard enough to try to get along, just the two of us, without adding the stress of living in a big city, no connections, no help. Iris gave up school so she could take care of me. We moved back to our parents’ house in the Hollow. For the longest time, it was just Iris and me. We were together, and we were as content as you could hope to be under the circumstances, but it was so hard on Iris, being the only adult in the house. And there was always this fear nagging at the back of our minds. We never talked about it, but I knew it was there, the fear that at any moment, we could lose it all. One bad accident, one slow month with Iris’s business, and we could teeter right into financial disaster. We could have lost the house. We could have ended up living in our car. And then Cal came along with his ‘grrr, I must protect all of the womenfolk’-ness and endless pots of money. And for the first time, we felt safe. So many of our worries seemed to just melt away. We could enjoy each other’s company in a way we hadn’t before. And then there was the added fun of freaking Cal out whenever we could. I mean, the man fought in the Trojan War, but seeing a bra hanging over a shower-curtain rod makes him stammer like a choirboy.”
Nik burst out laughing. “I will have to remember that.”
“Cal was the kind of big brother you always wanted, but he was kind of a nightmare at the same time. He loved us fiercely, but it was always just a little twisted. I mean, he decided he wanted to do an Easter egg hunt the first spring we were all together, and he filled all of the eggs with twenty-dollar bills. But then he buried them because he thought it was funny. He scared the hell out of Ben, even though he liked Ben, just because he could. There was a boy in one of my classes at UK who wouldn’t take no for an answer when I didn’t want to go out with him, and I didn’t know what happened, but I figured Cal threatened him with something, and then next thing I know, this kid runs across the campus when he sees me coming. And then he dropped out of school . . . which I suppose you already know about because you were there. Do you often do favors like that for Cal?”
“When I am not doing business for the Council, I occasionally offer my services to friends, yes.”
“Business like attending terrifying staff meetings where fangs are crushed with pliers?” I asked wryly.
“That was a special favor to Ophelia,” he said. “I am in the Hollow because Ophelia requested my assistance with a series of thefts from vampires in the area. My special talent is well known among vampires. My presence at the meeting gave her intimidating claims more credence. To be honest, I hoped that I would not have to demonstrate in front of the room. I do not particularly like performing in public, even after my circus years.”
I nodded. Almost all vampires had some sort of special talent, like Jane’s mind-reading or Dick’s gift of persuasion. Iris had yet to discover her special vampire gift, which Cal assured us was perfectly normal. It could take years to cultivate a special talent. And even then, it could be something completely off the wall like finding lost objects or talking to woodland creatures. Though, personally, I think the lost-object thing would be kind of cool.
“So far, we haven’t figured out what Iris’s is yet. I am really rooting for that ability to talk to squirrels thing, because that would be weird and awesome. Oh, wait, let me guess yours. Is it wearing clothes really, really well? Or sneaking up on people in locations where they park cars?”
He lowered his head until we were nose-to-nose and growled softly, reminding me once again that I had a bad habit of poking at predators. But then he grinned broadly, and I felt all off-balance again. He was really alarmingly good at that. “My vampiric gift is psychometry. I touch an object, and I get images of past events that occurred around the object.”
“So why don’t you use your gift to try to recover your memories of me?” I exclaimed, smacking his arm.
“I have tried!” he said, batting my swinging hands aside like harmless flies. “Have you not noticed how often I touch you? I am not getting any sort of read from you.”
“But how does it work?”
He thought about it for a long moment, as if trying to find an explanation I could handle. That made me nervous. “Every time you touch an object, you leave fingerprints behind, yes? You also leave an echo of your soul.”
I frowned. “Like a Horcrux in Harry Potter?”
I would never get tired of seeing him rub his hand over his face like that. “No,” he said. “You leave a little bit of the emotions you are feeling when you touch an object. If the emotions are strong, whether they are positive or negative, the echo is much stronger. When I pick up an object, that echo bounces into my head and shows up like a movie on a screen. Only the movies are always unpleasant.”
“Always?”
“Almost always. People seem more open to feeling strong negative emotions than positive ones.”
“Well, that’s depressing.” I stuck my bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout.
“I can see what they saw, feel what they felt, hear what they heard. If the echo is very strong, I can hear their thoughts in my head. It takes me away from myself, out of my own head.”
Suddenly, his not needing a laptop for his work made much more sense. He literally had to be “hands-on” while conducting his research for the Council. Not much use for Google there. I tilted my head at a curious angle. “Does it work with people?”
“People have too many emotions going on at once. It is almost impossible to get a clear reading. It is like white noise. If I opened my mind up to it, I would go insane.”
“Well, I’d hate for you to risk that,” I admitted.
He took my hands in his. “I hate the idea that I could not remember our first moments together. I hate that you might feel alone in this. I never want you to feel anything but—”
He stopped, jerking his head toward the house, as if he was hearing something I couldn’t. Which was likely.
“Cal and Iris are moving upstairs,” he said. “Dawn is coming, and I must rest for the day. I will walk you back to the house.”
“Wait, you were going to say something,” I said, as we moved out of the trees. “Something about feelings?”
“Some other time, Gigi. The wonderful thing about being undead is that I have all the time in the world.”
“Well, I don’t. I am a human. I have a limited shelf life,” I protested quietly as we neared my window. Without so much as a by-your-leave, he picked me up bridal-style and leaped up to my open window. He employed the whole catlike-grace thing again, landing with no effort on the windowsill and passing me through the open window. We entered the room noiselessly so as not to provoke my undead housemates.
“You do not have to have a shelf life,” he whispered. “I am sure there are any number of vampires who would be willing to turn you.”
I laughed, even though I knew he was right. Though Iris still held out hope that I would grow up to be a happy, well-adjusted soccer mom, I knew that if it came down to my dying or becoming a vampire, she would turn me. Or Cal would. Jane, Dick, Jamie, or even Gabriel would turn me if I needed help. And frankly, the prospect didn’t scare me. Yes, I recognized that there were things I would have to give up, if and when I was ever turned. Motherhood, graceful aging, a natural death, though, given my circle of friends and family, that was probably unlikely. But I’d had several years to ponder these sacrifices, and as far as I was concerned, they were worth it if I got to live out my days with the people I loved. And of course, being faster, stronger, more attractive, and more likely to win a fight weren’t exactly downsides, either.
Besides, between working for the Council and my usual all-night coding parties, I was basically keeping vampire hours and sun exposure levels already. But these were not issues that I was ready to share with Nik just yet.
“If we can’t have the feelings conversation due to time constraints, we are definitely not having the ‘do you want to be turned’ conversation,” I whispered back. “You just take your Old World charm and frustrating conversational tactics and remove your person from my room, sir.”
He chuckled, brushing my hair back from my face. “Will you see me again?”
My eyes narrowed. “Are you asking me on a date?”
“This does not count as a date?”
“No. This was a walk. In the dark. In my pajamas. Dates include leaving the house for a planned activity. And I didn’t say I would go out with you.”
He grinned at me. “I think I could persuade you.”
Before I could gather my forces of snark, Nik yanked me close, sweeping me into one of those swoony, back-bending kisses also featured on the covers of Iris’s romance novels, all soft, sliding lips and clever flicks of the tongue. My eyes went wide, and I couldn’t help but notice, at this intimate distance, that Nik closed his eyes. Five hundred years on this earth, countless kisses with countless women, and he still closed his eyes when he kissed. I didn’t care if he was potentially evil. My heart melted a little, even when his hands slipped down my back and cupped my ass through my pink pajama pants.
“Still not persuaded,” I told him cheekily, when he finally pulled away.
“I will have to dig deeper into my bag of tricks.”
“I look forward to it.”
“Because you are a perverse, sly creature.” He pecked me on the lips, a quick, mischievous kiss, before he ducked out of the window and back-flipped onto the grass.
I peered down from the open window, shaking my head at his antics. “Good night, Nikolai.”
“Good night, my Gigi.”