I was about as far from normal as a girl could be, but an article I read in a magazine at the bus station in Dallas said I should have goals. And living a normal life sounded like a great goal to me.
Blair’s head popped up, and he gave me a deer-in-the-headlights look. I turned and walked away, back into the kitchen where I didn’t have to deal with him.
“What’s up?” Steve Dworkin asked.
“Getting away from the cop,” I answered. “I don’t know what his problem is.”
Dworkin snorted, and Donny made a rude gesture with his pelvis.
“Thanks, guys,” I said. “That’s just what I need after dealing with Josh tonight.”
They both blushed and I lost it.
“How the hell would you like it if a bunch of drunk, horny fools came back here and started fondling you? Well?” It only took three steps for me to push Donny against the wall, my hand on his crotch. “You like it? You like having someone force themselves on you? Feels good to get groped, doesn’t it?” His expression told me all I needed to know.
Whirling about, I was on Steve in an instant, bending him back against the grill, my hand squeezing his crotch hard and my mouth against his. “Feels great, huh? Like a dream come true. Gee, ain’t it great to have a woman jumping your bones?”
I stepped back. They stood frozen, their expressions shocked.
“Think about it,” I said. “I put up with that shit every night, and everyone thinks it’s funny. Jenny and Emily put up with it. It isn’t funny. Fuck you. Fuck men. Fuck the world. You’re lucky I don’t start killing people tonight, because I’m tempted.”
I spun around and went back to my station behind the bar. Blair was still there, his money sitting on the check. I picked it up and rang up the transaction, then gave him his change with the receipt.
“I apologize,” Blair said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like I suspected you of anything.”
I was still pissed off. “Suspected? Like suspected that I might say yes if you asked me out? Or suspected I might be a serial killer?”
He stared at me for a moment, then said, “If I suspected you would say yes, then I would ask you to dinner on your next night off. But so far, you haven’t given me any clue that you might be interested.”
“And so far, neither have you.”
We stood there staring at each other, and I gradually realized that we were being stupid.
“Dinner at Delmonico’s? Tuesday night?” he asked.
I realized that my mouth was hanging open. I shut it.
“No,” I said. I took a couple of deep breaths, backing away from him. “Lieutenant Blair, I normally don’t date customers, and I don’t even know you.” Hell, I had never dated anyone unless I intended to kill them. I stared at him and couldn’t figure out what to say. Did I want to make things so final? “But that doesn’t mean that I’ll never say yes.”
A slight smile softened his face. “Fair enough. Good evening,” he said with a bow.
I watched him collect his coat and walk out into the night. He had left his change on the counter, which was a lot more than a normal tip.
What in the hell was I doing, I wondered? I had never had a real date in my life. I knew how to seduce men, but I didn’t know the first thing about relationships—at least about the emotional part. I understood all the mechanical parts. How to dress, what to say, when to make my moves to advance whatever agenda I was pursuing.
Was I supposed to be in love to go on a date? Did it automatically mean sex? What did you do in the morning when the man was still alive? You’d probably have to talk to him. What would you talk about?
I went home that night a complete mess, my mind as confused as I could ever remember. Freedom to be yourself and do whatever you wanted was a very chaotic way to live. No wonder the world was so screwed up. Who was I, and what in the hell did I want to do? So far, I had simply run away from my past, but what was I going to do with my future? I was used to a lot more structure. Day-to-day decisions weren’t something I had been trained to deal with.
And on the other hand, I was scared something fierce of anyone telling me what to do. Nine years of being a ‘good girl’ and following orders proved that my sense of who to trust couldn’t be trusted. Was I simply gullible? Naïve? Or maybe just dumb? I wanted to trust Sam, and I wanted to trust Blair, but how was I to know if that was the right thing to do? Every way I turned seemed to present some kind of danger. Sometimes I just wanted to give up, but I didn’t know how to do that, either.
When I arrived at work the following evening, I went into the kitchen. Steve and Donny gave me guarded looks.
“Hey,” I said. “I want to apologize for last night. I was way out of line.”
I saw them relax, then Donny said, “No, you weren’t. I was. I’m kinda clueless sometimes. Sorry.”
Steve chuckled. “Hell, you were gentle with us. When I went home and told my old lady, she reamed me out good. She’s still pissy about it this morning. Naw, we were the ones out of line. I know how hard it is dealing with drunk assholes, and it’s worse as a woman. I guess we just needed a little reminder.”
Trevor came in alone around six. He sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and asked for a menu.
“I apologize about last night,” he said when I sat his beer down.
“Oh. Was that you grabbing my ass? I thought it was Josh.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
I leaned over the bar. “Why do you constantly feel the need to apologize for him? I mean, if you’re worried that people will lump you together, you’re right. Apologizing for him won’t help that, Trevor. You hang around with a jerk, people are going to assume you’re a jerk, too.”
His face turned bright red. “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me? Use small words. I’m only a girl.”
I thought his face couldn’t get any redder, but it did. “I’ve known Josh since grade school. When kids used to pick on me, he defended me. And now we’re in business together.”
“Trevor, you don’t owe him. I know you think you do, but you don’t. And if you think your business is going to do well, I hope you’re the one dealing with customers.”
He handed me a card. Lost and Found.
“That’s the name of your business?”
Trevor nodded. “We find things.”
“Tell Josh to find a clue,” I said. “What do you want to eat?”
The rest of the evening went fairly smoothly. Trevor sat at the bar and we chatted for more than two hours. He told me some funny stories about things Lost and Found had been employed to find, and I enjoyed it. I found myself wishing that he’d come around without Josh more often. I was sort of dreading having to face Blair again, but he didn’t come in on my shift.
As I was packing up to go out to the bus stop, Lizzy came over. “Hey,” she said. “I have a group of friends who get together for brunch every Sunday. A lot of them are people I’ve known since high school. Would you like to come? Give you a chance to meet some people.”
I was sort of stunned. Making friends was as foreign a concept to me as dating. I had sort of a friend for a couple of years when I first went to live with the Illuminati, but she died in a training accident. Or so I was told. “Uh, sure. I guess. Where is it?”
Lizzy gave me the address. “We meet up around eleven,” she said. “I’ll give you my phone in case you have trouble finding the place.”
She stood there with her phone in her hand looking expectant. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I grabbed a pencil.
“Okay.”
“It would be easier to just tell me your number. I’ll call you, and then we’ll have each other’s numbers.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
Her expression didn’t change at first, then she blinked, then said, “Oh, did you lose it? Wow, that’s a bummer.” She gave me her number, and I wrote it down. “Let me know when you get your new phone,” she said and smil
ed. “See you in the morning.”
As I watched her walk away, I realized how lonely I was. Lizzy reaching out to me, Eleanor’s and Sam’s and Jenny’s kindness were foreign. They knew nothing about me, about what a horrible person I was. I wondered how they would react if they did.
I walked out of the bar at two-thirty in the morning and found Jolene leaning against the wall across the alley. Without a word, she fell into step beside me.
“Hi,” I said.
“We need to talk.”
“Okay.”
We walked around the corner and down the street a ways before she spoke again.
“I don’t want to see Josh hurt.”
“Oh? Well, the easiest way to prevent that is for him to keep his hands to himself.”
Jolene shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. He’s falling for you and I don’t think—”
I stopped. I realized I was staring at her with my mouth open, so I shut it. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She was several steps down the street before she discovered I was no longer with her. She turned back to look at me.
“What is he, twelve years old?” I asked. “I like her, so I call her names and hit her? Dear gods. Between you and Trevor, he doesn’t have to take any responsibility at all, does he? Can he even wipe his own nose?”
She started to open her mouth, but I closed the distance between us. “Don’t worry about your little boy’s feelings. If the son of a bitch touches me again, I’m going to put him in a hospital. As for any kind of romantic attachment, I’d rather date a cockroach. I’ll sleep with a vampire before I sleep with him.”
Furious, I stalked away from her. Worried about poor little Josh’s feelings? She would be better served worrying about his breathing, and whether he would continue to do so.
Josh reminded me so much of a boy, young man, I knew when I was sixteen. Roger was a Hunter trainee a couple of years older than I was, and he took an interest in me. He was cocky and a bit of a bully. He made my life miserable, grabbing my ass or my breasts, trying to get me alone and force me to kiss him. I complained to my Masters about him, but they just told me he had a crush on me and ‘boys will be boys.’
On his first mission, Roger went to Mexico with three older Hunters to take down a rogue werewolf pack. The others returned, but Roger had disobeyed orders, gotten separated from his brethren, and the shifters killed him. I had always thought that if the Masters had slapped him down and held him accountable when he was younger, he might have learned enough discipline to save his life.
I arrived at the bus stop to discover the street light that hung over it was out. Not only that, but I saw the taillights of the bus fading into the distance. I was late, and it would be half an hour until the next bus. Then I heard a noise from the bushes ten feet away. I cautiously moved closer and saw a woman’s foot sticking out from the foliage, twitching and sort of kicking.
Rushing forward, I met my second vampire. He had a girl pinned on the ground with his hand over her mouth and his head lowered to her neck. Her eyes were round with fear, and when I came into her field of vision, she began struggling harder.
I kicked him in the side, and he turned his head toward me. I kicked him in the face and cast a spell that pinned him to the ground. Grabbing the girl by the arm, I pulled her away from him. There was a little blood on her neck, but I couldn’t tell how much he had drained her.
He probably hadn’t done much yet, because she was plenty animated and actively using her limbs to get away from him. The lassitude normally associated with the vampire’s saliva entering her bloodstream hadn’t kicked in yet.
“Scream,” I told her as she staggered away. “Call the cops.” Then I turned back to the vamp. I wasn’t sure what to do with him. Killing him with a witness present wasn’t a good idea. Actually, considering Detective Blair, killing him wasn’t a good idea at all.
The girl definitely wasn’t hurt too badly because her scream about deafened me.
I took the vampire by the ankles and dragged him close to a nearby tree. Taking a good grip on his ankles, I swung him around in a circle, lifting him off the ground, then stepped toward the tree. The jolt of his head against the trunk jarred him loose from my grip, and he fell to the ground. As far as I could tell, he was unconscious, so I dissolved the holding spell.
Turning around to head back to the bus stop and check on the girl, I saw her leaning against a man who had his arms around her. And then I saw his face. Blair stared at me with a shocked expression.
“Hi, Lieutenant,” I said. “Can I borrow your guillotine? I seem to have forgotten mine.”
He seemed to choke, then took a deep breath. “Ms. McLane. Do you think you can take this young lady to my car while I handcuff the man you just brained?”
“Sure.” I walked up, put my arm around her shoulders, and guided her toward the bus stop where a tan sedan sat with its lights on and its engine running. I opened the back door and guided her into the seat, then glanced back at Blair and the vamp. It looked as though Blair handcuffed him and left him on the ground.
“Where are you coming from?” I asked the girl.
She named one of the strip bars and said she worked there. Blair reached the car at the same time as a regular cop car pulled up. He spent a couple of minutes talking to the cops, who then dragged the vamp to their car and put him in the back seat.
“I need to take a statement from you,” Blair told me after he finished with the uniformed policemen.
“Yeah. I heard noise in the bushes when I came to the bus stop,” I said. I pointed to the broken street light. “He had her pinned down and was biting her neck.”
Blair nodded, making notes in a little book. “And what did you do?”
“I kicked him a couple of times, then dragged her away from him.”
“And picked him up and bashed his head into a tree,” Blair said.
“I didn’t want him to attack me.”
“Of course not. Do you mind telling me how you managed to pick up a two-hundred-pound man and swing him around like he weighed nothing?”
“I work out. He doesn’t weigh nothing. He’s actually pretty heavy.”
He stared at me as though waiting for me to say something else. Finally, he said, “You work out.”
“Yeah. I like to stay in shape.”
Chapter 7
Blair took the stripper to the emergency room on the south edge of downtown, then drove me home. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he didn’t ask me my address, but I was. Obviously, he was watching me. But it didn’t explain why he drove right past my apartment while taking the stripper home, then back the way we’d come to take me home.
“I’ll need you to come down to the station tomorrow and give a formal statement,” he said when he pulled up in front of my apartment building.
“I gave you a statement.”
“Yes, but I’ll need one on the record. I may have more questions for you.”
I glanced at him, trying to figure out whether he was just trying to get more time with me or what he really wanted.
“He bit her on the neck,” I said, and watched for his reaction.
“I noticed that.”
“I didn’t see his mouth,” I said. “Was this one of your guys with funny teeth?”
He gave me a long look, then said, “Do we have to play these games?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re what, five-seven, five-eight, and a hundred thirty-five, forty pounds? You kicked a two-hundred-pound man’s ass. Picked him up like a child and slammed his head into a tree. That’s not normal. Men with fangs biting women in the neck is not normal. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“I’ve been in this city less than a week, and you want me to tell you what’s going on? If you’re so smart, I think you can figure out what’s normal and what’s not. I’m tired, Lieutenant. Unless you have some basis for keeping me up all night, I’m going to take a shower and
go to bed.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Good night, Lieutenant,” I said, opening the door and getting out of the car.
Blair watched me unlock and go through the door of my building. I climbed the steps to the second floor and stopped to watch through the window on the landing as he drove away, then I continued up to my apartment.
As I crawled into bed, I wondered if every city on the continent had a rogue vampire problem, or if I simply got unlucky in my choice of a place to live.
It felt as though I had barely fallen asleep when the cheap alarm clock started ringing. At first, I couldn’t figure out what the noise was. When you don’t go to work until five o’clock in the evening, you usually don’t have a problem getting up on time.
When I turned it off, the little Disney girl on the clock face reminded me of Lizzy and her brunch. Blair had dropped me off at five-thirty in the morning and I’d only had four hours of sleep. I considered rolling over and going back to sleep. But Lizzy had reached out twice, offering friendship. So, I dragged myself out of bed, took a shower, and put on my one dress.
I took a good look at myself in the mirror as I brushed out my hair and decided I should set aside a little money for some makeup—just for the eyes and some lip gloss.
When I walked into the restaurant, I spotted Lizzy immediately at a table with about a dozen young women. She saw me at the same time and waved, then jumped up and came to meet me.
“Most of these girls are norms,” Lizzy said as she gave me a quick hug, “so be careful what you say.”
She led me over to the table and pulled a chair in beside her while she introduced me. A waitress came and handed me a menu. I ordered coffee and orange juice.
I really didn’t know what to expect, but the group was friendly, and other than a few questions that didn’t get too personal, I was able to simply watch and listen. The conversations were mainly about their work, boyfriends, and things to do around town. Before I knew it, two hours had passed and some of the women started asking for their checks, paying, and heading out.
Shadow Hunter Page 5