Chapter 30
I got home and shot off a text to Dean Hobbes: I have something for u.
He replied immediately: Excellent! Where shall we meet?
Me: How about the first place we ever met?
Dean the Vamp: See you in 20m.
“Where are you going?” Sanja asked, alarmed to see me heading for the front door.
I held up the pill bottle. “To deliver and collect.”
I had told both Sanja and Beckett on the way back to my apartment about what had happened upstairs. I may have left out a few sordid details about what Kellan had done with me—to me—but they got the gist. Beckett was upset that I had killed a vampire for money and had dropped us off, angry, tearing off down the street in his car. I would have to deal with him later.
She frowned. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I sighed and walked over to her. “I know you don’t, but I just want this done. I don’t think I’ll be doing this again, so you don’t have to worry.”
Narrowing her eyes at me, she said, “I somehow doubt that.”
“Wanna come?” I asked, plastering on a cheesy grin.
“I don’t think either of us should be out when you just committed murder like an hour ago. You’re going to have the entire Vlasé looking for you.”
I shook my head. “Kellan told me he’d cover for me.”
She raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms across her chest. “And you believe that crazy vampire?”
I laughed. “Yes, I do. You coming or not?”
She shook her head. “Like I’d let you go alone. Let me change.” She disappeared into bathroom and came out wearing yoga pants and a hoodie. I was still wearing my dress but had flats on, and I grabbed a sweater on the way out.
* * *
“This is it?” Dean asked, holding the pill bottle in the palm of his hand.
“I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to collect vampire ashes, but it’s not exactly easy on plush, high-dollar carpet. You’re lucky I got that much.”
He shook his head. “I don’t even know if these are hers.”
“Are you for real? Like, how would you know if they were hers if I had given you all of them?” I asked, incredulous.
“Her scent. It’s faintly there, but I don’t know.” He opened the lid and inhaled again.
Sanja made a face. “That’s really gross.”
Dean ignored her and pierced me with his beady brown eyes. Without breaking eye contact, he handed me a wad of bills.
I handed them to Sanja and said, “Count it.”
“Gosh, I feel so Breaking Bad right now,” she said, peeling off the rubber band and licking her finger.
“We done here?” Dean asked as he turned to walk away, his trench coat swishing at his feet.
“She stole your woman away from you, didn’t she?” I asked curiously, wondering if I was right.
He stopped in his tracks and turned around. “How did you know that?”
“She was married to a very prominent member of the Vlasé, you know. A doctor. I’m pretty sure he’s royally pissed at his wife’s death.”
He snorted. “I did not know much about her. Met her at a fetish club, and she took Janine and me home to play. Two weeks later, Janine tells me she’s leaving me for Elda, never saw her again. That was two years ago. Janine and I had been married for thirty years.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling bad for the little weasel now. “I didn’t stay at the party long enough to see if there was a Janine there, but I can try to find her for you.”
He waved a dismissive hand and said, “Nah. I don’t want to see the bitch ever again.”
“So you just wanted Elda dead just because?”
He chuckled and walked down the alley. “Yep. Thank you.”
“It’s all here,” Sanja said. “Nineteen hundred.”
I handed her five one-hundred dollar bills and said, “Thanks for your help.”
She grinned and pocketed the money.
* * *
Ryder had me up against his car at the top of Wolfe Point and was kissing me crazy. “I’m sorry for everything. God, I’ve missed you. We shouldn’t go a month without seeing each other.”
I hugged him tight. “I’ve missed you, too. You still set to graduate in May?”
He nodded. “Yep. Then we can figure out what you’re going to do. Maybe we can move in together.”
I snorted. “We’ve been together five years, We should do something or break up.”
He pulled back and looked down at me, a mix of hurt and shock on his face. “Wow that sounded defensive. We’ve both been too busy to play house. We are still young…”
“Stop,” I said. “I did not mean that to sound the way it did. Sometimes I don’t think before I speak.”
“Sooo, you really do feel that way?”
I sighed. “In a roundabout way, yes, but not as harsh as it came out.”
Feeling increasingly more twitchy and agitated, I walked away and said, “You guys have fun hunting. I’ll be in the trailer trying to avoid mirrors and razors.”
With that, I went inside, stripped off all my clothes, and waited for the fever to hit me. And then spent the rest of the night eating pizza and washing it down with a blood bag, while I watched DVDs on my laptop I’d brought.
The blood bag was a necessity I’d learned to bring with me for each shift. I found it was easy to steal them from blood donation trucks. It sucked to be stuck in the middle like this all the time. I much preferred being the wolf. I felt a comradery with my brothers and sisters when we hunted and shifted together. Now, I was just some freak outcast who could get shot or put on a TV show about Bigfoot if I stayed in the woods. So I just spent the night in the trailer and locked the door for two of the three nights. I’d found by the third night, I did not shift into anything. I’d been taking my own car up the mountain so I didn’t have to waste my time hanging around on the third night.
I always called in sick to my job for the two days I was gone, and sometimes I got lucky and it landed on one or two weekend days so I didn’t have to seem like such a bad employee, but there really wasn’t much choice.
I thought about going into business for myself… as much as I had hated my first vampire kill, I found the next two weren’t so bad. The more I studied them, the more I realized lots of them had been around for decades—even centuries sometimes, and the longer they ‘lived’, the more insane they became. It had been a week since I’d offed Elda. I found myself thinking nonstop about Kellan, but knew that wasn’t such a good idea. Guilt still flooded me when I thought about what we had done that night. What made me feel even guiltier was how much I liked it and wanted to see him again.
I also realized I would have to make a lot more stakes. I didn’t trust that wood wouldn’t splinter or break so I had bought a bunch of metal piping from the hardware store and began sharpening them with my claws. I had also discovered that I could somewhat shift parts of my body on command, like my claws and fangs—like when I had killed that vampire in the alley. The fangs just descended on their own when my body was prepped to kill or defend, I’d learned.
Sanja’s spring break visit was over, and she had gone back to Boulder to finish out her last semester, but she was already talking about staying in Colorado with me instead of going back to Texas. She wanted to open up her own magic and herbal shop downtown.
I was halfway down the mountain at the end of the second day when my phone rang. It was an unknown Denver area code, but I answered it anyway, hoping I wouldn’t lose signal.
“Hello?”
“Ayla?” asked a male voice.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Evan Grant, we spoke a few weeks ago.”
I nodded, remembering the cute but sort of strange hybrid who had approached me at work. I put the phone on speaker because I needed both hands to navigate the Honda down the windy mountain road. “I remember. I was wondering if I was going to hear from you.”
“I understand you went to a big party the Vlasé threw last weekend.”
“Yeah, so?”
I felt nervous and immediately defensive. Did he know I had killed Elda?
He chuckled. “Well, my family and I were there. I was going to approach you and say hi, but you disappeared pretty quickly. Linden was at the party.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? So why didn’t you kill the bastard?”
“He was heavily guarded and only made a brief appearance. When his head of security disappeared upstairs, we were going to make our move, but he was escorted out by about a dozen other vamps. I just wanted you to know that you were close, and that we figured out that he actually lives in the Vlasé’s mansion headquarters there.”
I smiled inside thinking about just how preoccupied his head of security had been. “Yeah, Kellan was upstairs with me.”
A long pause ensued.
“Hello?” I said.
“You were with Kellan? Was that before or after you killed Dr. Stoker’s wife?”
Shit.
“How did you know about Elda?”
He didn’t pry about Kellan, but said, “We know everything.”
“Who else knows about what I did?”
“No one. We have secret cameras in that house, and we watched.”
My cheeks immediately heated. I swallowed hard. “Then I’m sure the Vlasé have cameras in there, too.”
“No. Dr. Stoker prohibited cameras in his office. But we managed to plant one.”
I felt sick. “I trust you will keep that and whatever else happened in that room a secret.”
He laughed. “We’ve already destroyed the tape, but the reason I’m calling is because I’d like for two things to happen.”
I had finally reached the long, stretching highway that would take me back to the city, and breathed a sigh of relief that I was off the small, winding treacherous road. I flipped down the visor to keep the sun out of my face. “And what is that?”
“One, I would like to use your relationship with Kellan Conley to our advantage. You get close enough to him so you can meet Linden. In exchange, my wife and I will train you how to hunt and kill vampires. Because, girl, that metal stake thing you did… not good. Sloppy.”
I smiled despite his insult. “Sloppy, but effective.”
“And that is not how you collect ashes,” he said with a smile in his voice.
“Okay, Evan Grant, you have yourself a deal. When do I start?”
“Tonight, blondie. Meet me at the Griffen Apartments in Lo-Do at eleven p.m.”
I swallowed hard as I felt butterflies invade my stomach. “I’ll be there.”