Texas Hold 'Em

by PATRICK KAMPMAN

  Copyright © 2012 Patrick Kampman

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Dark Fiction

  ISBN: 0983592233

  ISBN-13: 9780983592235

  E-Book ISBN: 9780983592242

  Credits

  Cover Design by Deborah Grieves

  cynnalia.deviantart.com

  Edited By Sarah J. Stevenson

  www.sarahjamilastevenson.com

  Layout by Russell Godwin

  argo-marketing.com

  Dedication

  To the great State of Texas and gamblers everywhere.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my wife and to my sister for providing all of the early draft feedback. To Sarah J. Stevenson for all of those pesky commas and quotation marks. To Deborah for putting up with my constant litany of (sometimes contradictory) feedback on the cover art. To Russell for getting everything presentable. And a grudging thanks to my cats who, after hunting down and killing my mouse and the hand that was using it, have taught me that it’s possible to write a book “single-handedly.”

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Credits

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I was trapped in my apartment with a vampire, the same type of creature that had killed my friends and burned down my house.

  Vampires are efficient killers. They’re supernaturally strong, with amazing regenerative powers, lightning-fast reflexes, and preternatural senses. In close quarters the chances of surviving an encounter with one are next to nothing, and these were definitely close quarters.

  My pulse quickened. I knew I should do something, but I couldn’t bring myself to act. Normally I was unaffected by the mind control vampires possessed. That anomaly helped me in my vocation: until last week, I was a vampire hunter.

  This one held me captive, frozen in its gaze. Her name was Megan, and she stood in my kitchen, hip cocked, watching me with raised brows. In one hand she held a bottle of French red wine; from the other dangled a potted fern.

  But Megan happened to be a really cute vampire, and the hammering in my chest had less to do with being confronted by a monster than with being very close to an overdressed, vertically challenged, blue-eyed brunette who had just cleared her throat for what might have been the second time.

  I shouldn’t be nervous. After all, I had invited her in knowing full well there would be repercussions. Now here we were, alone together, and it was a little late to be having second thoughts.

  A week ago my state of apprehension would have been the result of an entirely different range of emotions. But I was still hunting vampires then. They were creatures I killed with little thought and no remorse. That changed with my last job. I had been living in Austin, putting myself through school and moonlighting as a vampire hunter. But then the beasts killed my friends, assaulted my family, and turned their attention to me. So I fled here to Northern California, under the pretense of taking what I thought was an easy job. I hoped to lie low until things cooled off.

  As it turned out, the work was anything but easy, and I most certainly did not escape vampires. But this time it was different: they were on my side. Mostly. And the one currently wearing a slinky black dress and a mischievous grin had actually saved my life.

  My eyes drifted downwards, roving from the criminally pretty face to the sinful lines of her flawless body. Now I was anticipating an entirely different type of encounter with the creature in front of me.

  I gulped at the thought, and then frowned as my gaze found a silver chain around her neck. It was new, or at least something I hadn’t seen her wear before. A small cross hung from it. I wasn’t sure if she believed, or just wore it for the irony. We had entered a church recently to exorcise a host of demons. It was the first time she’d been in one in decades. Maybe it affected her.

  “Well?” Megan asked, stopping a foot in front of me. She raised each hand an inch and wiggled them a bit to emphasize the housewarming gifts she had been holding since she came in.

  “Huh?” My eyes snapped back to hers.

  “Never mind!” Exasperated, she turned and put the plant down next to the full grocery bags that had been sitting on the counter since I got back from the store a couple of hours ago.

  Still holding the bottle of wine, Megan started searching through the apartment’s kitchen. She muttered as she opened cupboard after cupboard to find them all bare. My brother Bryan and I had moved into the place that afternoon, and it still lacked the basic necessities.

  Bryan expected to be staying in California for the foreseeable future. As for me, now that my vampire hunting days were finished, I planned on switching to a career that wouldn’t guarantee me an untimely death. So I decided to concentrate on completing school. I was scheduled to start my senior year at the University of Texas in a couple of days.

  Granted, I was majoring in physical education, so the eventual outcome was only slightly less bleak than vampire hunting, but I hoped that the degree would at least land me something better than my current part-time job as assistant manager at Game Shack. Heck, maybe with a degree and a little perseverance I could make full manager someday.

  Vampire hunting didn’t exactly pay the bills; it was more of a hobby born out of the need for revenge. Strangely, I found the need was gone now, and I was anxious to fill the void it left. The Texas vampires were still out there—the ones that killed my team. But I was hoping their issues with me had ended when they killed my mentor Robert. After all, he’d been the one they were after. The rest of us had been collateral damage. Maybe I would be the one they let get away.

  I knew it was unlikely. Vampires, particularly the ones who had their sights on me, seemed to have memories as long as their lives. At some point I would have to deal with them. But until then, maybe I could move on with a nice normal life and forget about vampires and the assorted other things that go bump in the night.

  At least, I could as soon as I figured out what to do with the one rummaging through my kitchen. Considering I had invited her into my place, it would be bad manners for me to stake her. Besides, that certainly wasn’t what I wanted to do with her. But I was anxious. Up until recently, all I had done was kill vampires. I wasn’t used to the idea of having a relationship with one.

  I watched as she gave up on the cupboards and began rifling through the grocery bags on the counter.

  Bryan and I had picked up a few essentials earlier in the day, then Megan’s roommate Lacey had called as we walked in the door. She needed help cleaning up their house. I didn’t mind. It was kind of my fault their place got trashed in the first place.

  Besides, Bryan had a thing for her, despite the fact that she was way out of his league. My brother was out the door before he had hung up the phone. The timing of the call made me wonder, though. Lacey would have known Megan was coming over, and certai
nly wasn’t above a little ruse to clear Bryan out of the apartment and give Megan and me some alone time.

  “How long have these been sitting here?” Megan asked, setting the bottle of wine down and taking some perishables out of the bags to put them in the small apartment fridge.

  “Um, a few hours?” I had been so preoccupied thinking about the events of the past week and what was going to happen between Megan and me tonight that I had completely forgotten about them.

  “You’re as bad as Lacey. That girl never puts anything away, unless you count dumping everything in a pile on the kitchen table, which I don’t. I wouldn’t mind as much if I actually ate any of it,” she said over her shoulder as she organized the items in the fridge.

  I wondered if she’d eaten yet. I hoped so, because—as she’d pointed out—she couldn’t exactly eat any of the groceries in the house, which pretty much left just me.

  “Bryan’s the same way. I don’t think anyone has actually seen the floor of his room in years.”

  Megan laughed, then quickly turned her head to look at me, her brows drawn in a small frown. She had a tendency toward dramatic switches in focus.

  “Nervous?” she asked, in a tone that made it obvious she knew the answer.

  “Why would I be?” I shifted my weight to the other foot and tried to play it cool. I don’t think I succeeded.

  “I have no idea,” Megan said in mock surprise, abandoning the groceries to walk up to me. “I can hear your heartbeat, you know.”

  “You can?” I resisted the urge to take a step back. Instead, I held steady as she got right up in my personal space. She was only five feet tall, and even wearing four-inch heels, she was still a half-foot shorter than I was.

  “When I’m this close, yes.” She reached out and placed a gentle hand on my chest as she came closer, slowly closing the gap until her hand was all that was between us. “It’s beating fast.”

  “Huh, weird.” I cleared my throat, the croak in my voice betraying my attempt to sound nonchalant.

  “You know what they say...” Her hand moved to undo the top button of my shirt. When her fingers brushed against my skin they were soft and cool. “...when you’re nervous, all you have to do is imagine your audience naked.”

  I took her advice as she undid the next button, but it didn’t help at all.

  “Well, that didn’t seem to work,” she said, coming to the same conclusion. She gave a mock pout while she undid another button. “Maybe that’s only for speeches? Or it could be you’re not trying hard enough. Here, this might help.” She took a step back, reached behind her and unzipped her dress. Next, she hooked a shoulder strap with each thumb and pulled outward, releasing them to let the dress slide down her body and drop to the floor.

  That certainly didn’t calm me down. Granted, she wasn’t completely naked. She wore a matching set of black lace undergarments, so it was possible my imagination was falling a bit short.

  “Oh, hey!” She picked up the bottle of wine from the counter and wiggled it in front of me. “Glasses? I couldn’t find any.”

  “Um.” The topic change had caught me off guard, and it took longer than normal to process the thought and formulate a corresponding verbal response. Finally one got through. “Some cups are in the dishwasher; no wine glasses though.”

  Megan harrumphed, and went to open the dishwasher. I think my jaw dropped a bit as she bent to examine its contents. “Using plastic tumblers for a bottle of seventy-eight Romanée-Conti has to be some sort of punishable offense, but I’ll overlook it. Unless, of course, you want to be punished?” She glanced back at me inquisitively.

  I blinked, unable to answer. She shrugged and hunted around until she found a corkscrew. She poured each glass half full, then brought them to where I still stood, slack-jawed.

  I wasn’t normally like this. I really wasn’t. My last girlfriend and I practically lived together. I saw her naked all the time without much issue, and Megan was still wearing clothes–more or less.

  I would have liked to blame my frozen state on vampire mind games. They could do that with most people. Control you to a certain extent. It was like hypnosis. If they caught your eyes, they had you. It had never worked on me for some reason, though. I was a fluke, some sort of freak of nature. I also could detect the supernatural, which no one else I knew could do. I got a vibe whenever something got close. It was a different vibe for different types of creatures. For vampires, it was as if they radiated cold. The first time I experienced it was the night my girlfriend Kristi was killed by a vampire; the same one got her sister six months later. Kristi’s death was what got me started on the whole monster-slaying business in the first place.

  Pushing the thoughts of Kristi aside, I took one of the proffered glasses and tried the wine.

  “Hey, this isn’t bad.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “It’s better than the boxed stuff my mom drinks.”

  Megan coughed, hitting her chest a few times with her palm. “I should hope so,” she finally managed.

  I picked up the bottle and examined the label before setting it back down. “Where did you find a thirty-year-old bottle of wine?”

  “I liberated it from Donovan’s personal stash.” Donovan was the master vampire of these parts, which made Megan one of his minions. Still, she tended to march to her own beat.

  “He won’t miss it?”

  Megan shrugged. “He has an entire wine cellar. It’ll take years for him to notice it’s gone. And even if he does, he won’t know I took it. Of course, I would probably tell him.” Her nose crinkled at her self- professed honesty, then she perked up. “Anyway, isn’t it for a good cause? I mean, this is a special occasion, right?”

  She placed her glass to her lips and took a sip before setting it down on the counter, the whole time staring at me with a suggestion in her cool blue eyes that made my stomach lurch a little. I’d like to have attributed my nervousness to the fact that she could turn on me at any moment, killing me before I realized what was happening—slashing my throat, draining me dry, and leaving me dead on the carpet for my brother to find.

  But I didn’t think that she would. By inviting her in, I had bet my life that she wouldn’t.

  Maybe she was just that beautiful. Or perhaps I was developing feelings for a monster. I don’t know. What I did know was that she was smiling up at me with an amused look that I had to do something about.

  So I moved into her, my free arm wrapping around her waist, pulling her close while I tried to set my glass down next to hers on the counter.

  She met me eagerly, her arms snaking around my neck as we kissed. Her enthusiasm caught me off guard, and I let go of the glass to bring my other arm under her rear as she climbed me, her legs hooking around my waist. I heard my glass bounce off the linoleum as I stumbled backwards into the living room, locked in the deepest kiss I’d ever had.

  When I finally came up for air I flashed a quick look around the near- empty apartment. The furniture consisted of a card table and four folding chairs in the dining area, and a small flat-screen TV sitting all by itself next to a cable box on the floor in the otherwise empty living room.

  “Sorry, we don’t have a whole lot of furniture,” I said.

  “Seriously? You’re thinking about the furniture? Now? God, I’m such a failure.” Megan buried her head in my shoulder.

  “No, it’s not that! I was thinking, um, well, there’s a futon in the bedroom, but we just bought that for Bryan, and…”

  She removed her head from my shoulder and leaned back to look up at me, a look of earnest concern on her face. “Do you really think we’ll need it?”

  My head wasn’t working quite right and I actually paused to think about it. Megan’s eyes grew wide as she realized what I was doing.

  “Floor,” she said quickly, before I could say something stupid.

  Looking at her in my arms, I decided the floor would do nicely. I kissed her again, and her legs tightened around me. I kept o
ne hand under her and another around her back and we sank to the ground, still lip- locked. Our kissing became more passionate, our hands exploring each other. Her lithe body was soft and smooth against mine. Her cool aura surrounded me with a strangely comforting presence.

  Most of my clothes, along with her bra, had been discarded. My hand found her breast and explored its contours while hers unzipped my pants. Things were starting to get interesting as I slid my hand down her back and under her panties. I was removing the last article of her clothing when a loud rattle came from the kitchen.

  Megan paused and pulled away a few inches to look at my phone, which was vibrating its way across the counter. “Are you going to get that?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.” At this point, it was pretty far down my list of priorities. My hand resumed its journey, and now had the sheer black thong midway down her thighs.

  She frowned and rose. I was saddened to see her erase all my hard work; her panties were back in place by the time she stood up. The sudden mood switch confused me. Megan tended to have random unconnected thoughts, but this was a bit much even for her. It was the stomping gait as she headed off to get my phone that made me realize she thought the caller was Toni.

  Toni—short for Antoinette, and never to be confused with some Italian guy with a hairy chest and a gold necklace—was someone else that I had been kind of seeing. Sort of. It’s not as bad as it sounds; it wasn’t like I had made any commitments to anyone. I had barely known either of them for more than a handful of days. But Toni and Megan didn’t exactly see eye to eye. They were kind of competitive, like pit bulls. In their game of tug-of-war, I was the chew toy. You know—the one that usually ends up torn in half and discarded in the back yard.

  I smiled a bit at my analogy, because Toni was a werewolf. Yeah, I know. From monster slayer to monster player in a matter of weeks. It was unsettling even for me, and I was living it.

  In any case, I hoped the caller really wasn’t Toni, because that was going to kill the mood. At least, it would for Megan; my mood was going to be pretty hard to kill. In a desperate attempt to salvage the night, I started to think up excuses for why Toni might be calling me at ten o’ clock at night.