by P. N. Elrod
I kept one hand under the table, near a number of tools I thought I might need, all the way through the meal, and waited for the other shoe to drop—only it never did. Connie and Irwin chattered away like any young couple, snuggled up to one another on adjacent chairs. The girl was charming, funny, and a playful flirt, but Irwin didn’t seem discomfited by it. I kept my responses restrained anyway. I didn’t want to find out a couple of seconds too late that the seemingly innocent banter was how Connie got her psychic hooks into me.
But a couple of hours went by, and nothing.
“Irwin’s never told me anything about his father,” Connie said.
“I don’t know much,” Irwin said. “He’s … kept his distance over the years. I’ve looked for him a couple of times, but I never wanted to push him.”
“How mysterious,” Connie said.
I nodded. “For someone like him, I think the word ‘eccentric’ might apply better.”
“He’s rich?” Connie asked.
“I feel comfortable saying that money isn’t one of his concerns,” I said.
“I knew it!” Connie said, and looked slyly at Irwin. “There had to be a reason. I’m only into you for your money.”
Instead of answering, Irwin calmly picked Connie up out of her chair, using just the muscles of his shoulders and arms, and deposited her on his lap. “Sure you are.”
Connie made a little groaning sound and bit her lower lip. “God. I know it’s not PC, but I’ve got to say—I am into it when you get all caveman on me, Pounder.”
“I know.” Irwin kissed the tip of her nose and turned to me. “So, Harry. What brings you to Norman?”
“I was passing through,” I said easily. “Your dad asked me to look in on you.”
“Just casually,” Irwin said, his dark eyes probing. “Because he’s such a casual guy.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Not that I mind seeing you,” Irwin said, “but in case you missed it, I’m all grown-up now. I don’t need a babysitter. Even a cool, expensive one.”
“If you did, my rates are very reasonable,” Connie said.
“We’ll talk,” Irwin replied, sliding his arms around her waist. The girl wasn’t exactly a junior petite, but she looked tiny on Irwin’s scale. She hopped up, and said, “I’m going to go make sure there isn’t barbecue sauce on my nose, and then we can take the picture. Okay?”
“Sure,” Irwin said, smiling. “Go.”
Once she was gone from sight, Irwin looked at me and dropped his smile. “Okay,” he said resignedly. “What does he want this time?”
There wasn’t loads of time, so I didn’t get all coy with the subject matter. “He’s worried about you. He thinks you may be in danger.”
Irwin arched his eyebrows. “From what?”
I just looked at him.
His expression suddenly turned into a scowl, and the air around grew absolutely thick with energy that seethed for a point of discharge. “Wait. This is about Connie?”
I couldn’t answer him for a second, the air felt so close. The last time I’d felt this much latent, waiting power, I’d been standing next to my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, when he was gathering his strength for a spell.
That pretty much answered my questions about River Shoulders’s people having access to magical power. The kid was a freaking dynamo of it. I had to be careful. I didn’t want to be the guy who was unlucky enough to ground out that storm cloud of waiting power. So I answered Irwin cautiously and calmly.
“I’m not sure yet. But I know for a fact that she’s not exactly what she seems to be.”
His nostrils flared, and I saw him make an effort to remain collected. His voice was fairly even. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’m not sure yet,” I said.
“So what? You’re going to hang around here butting into my life?”
I held up both hands. “It isn’t like that.”
“It’s just like that,” Irwin said. “My dad spends my whole life anywhere else but here, and now he thinks he can just decide when to intrude on it?”
“Irwin,” I said, “I’m not here to try to make you do anything. He asked me to look in on you. I promised I would. And that’s all.”
He scowled for a moment, then smoothed that expression away. “No sense in being mad at the messenger, I guess,” he said. “What do you mean about Connie?”
“She’s…” I faltered, there. You don’t just sit down with a guy and tell him, “Hey, your girlfriend is a vampire, could you pass the ketchup?” I sighed. “Look, Irwin. Everybody sees the world a certain way. And we all kind of … well, we all sort of decide together what’s real and what isn’t real, right?”
“Magic’s real,” Irwin said impatiently. “Monsters are real. Supernatural stuff actually exists. You’re a professional wizard.”
I blinked at him, several times.
“What?” he asked, and smiled gently. “Don’t let the brow ridge fool you. I’m not an idiot, man. You think you can walk into my life the way you have, twice, and not leave me with an itch to scratch? You made me ask questions. I went and got answers.”
“Uh. How?” I asked.
“Wasn’t hard. There’s an Internet. And this organization called the ‘Paranet’ of all the cockamamie things, that got started a few years ago. Took me like ten minutes to find it online and start reading through their message boards. I can’t believe everyone in the world doesn’t see this stuff. It’s not like anyone is trying very hard to keep it secret.”
“People don’t want to know the truth,” I said. “That makes it simple to hide. Wow, ten minutes? Really? I guess I’m not really an Internetty person.”
“Internetty,” Irwin said, seriously. “I guess you aren’t.”
I waved a hand. “Irwin, you need to know this. Connie isn’t—”
The pretty vampire plopped herself back down into Irwin’s lap and kissed his cheek. “Isn’t what?”
“The kind to stray,” I said, smoothly. “I was just telling Irwin how much I’d like to steal you away from him, but I figure you’re the sort who doesn’t play that kind of game.”
“True enough,” she agreed cheerfully. “I know where I want to sleep tonight.” Maybe it was unconscious, the way she wriggled when she said it, but Irwin’s eyes got a slightly glazed look to them.
I remembered being that age. A girl like Connie would have been a mind-numbing distraction to me back then even if she hadn’t been a vampire. And Irwin was clearly in love, or as close to it as he could manage through the haze of hormones surrounding him. Reasoning with him wasn’t going to accomplish anything—unless I made him angry. Passion is a huge force when you’re Irwin’s age, and I’d taken enough beatings for one lifetime. I’d never be able to explain the danger to him. He just didn’t have a frame of reference …
He just didn’t know.
I stared at Connie for a second with my mouth open.
“What?” she asked.
“You don’t know,” I said.
“Know what?” she asked.
“You don’t know that you’re…” I shook my head, and said to Irwin, “She doesn’t know.”
* * *
“Hang on,” Dean said. “Why is that significant?”
“Vampires are just like people until the first time they feed,” I said. “Connie didn’t know that bad things would happen when she did.”
“What kinda bad things?”
“The first time they feed, they don’t really know it’s coming. They have no control over it, no restraint—and whoever they feed on dies as a result.”
“So she was the threat that Bigfoot dreamed about?”
“I’m getting to it.”
* * *
Irwin’s expression had darkened again, into a glower almost exactly like River Shoulders’s, and he stood up.
Connie was frowning at me as she was abruptly displaced. “Don’t know wh—oof, Pounder!”
“We’re done,�
� Irwin said to me. His voice wasn’t exactly threatening, but it was absolutely certain, and his leashed anger all but made the air crackle. “Nice to see you again, Harry. Tell my dad to call. Or write. Or do anything but try to tell me how to live my life.”
Connie blinked at him. “Wait … wait, what’s wrong?”
Irwin left a few twenties on the table, and said, “We’re going.”
“What? What happened?”
“We’re going,” Irwin said. This time, he did sound a little angry.
Connie’s bewilderment suddenly shifted into some flavor of outrage. She narrowed her lovely eyes, and snapped, “I am not your pet, Pounder.”
“I’m not trying to…” Irwin took a slow, deep breath, and said, more calmly, “I’m upset. I need some space. I’ll explain when I calm down. But we need to go.”
She folded her arms, and said, “Go calm down, then. But I’m not going to be rude to our guest.”
Irwin looked at me, and said, “We going to have a problem?”
Wow. The kid had learned a lot about the world since the last time I’d seen him. He recognized that I wasn’t a playful puppy dog. He realized that if I’d been sent to protect him, and I thought Connie was a threat, that I might do something about it. And he’d just told me that if I did, he was going to object. Strenuously. No protests, no threats, just letting me know that he knew the score and was willing to do something about it if I made him. The guys who are seriously capable handle themselves like that.
“No problem,” I said, and made it a promise. “If I think something needs to be done, we’ll talk first.”
The set of his shoulders eased, and he nodded at me. Then he turned and stalked out. People watched him go, warily.
Connie shook her head slowly, and asked, “What did you say?”
“Um,” I said. “I think he feels like his dad is intruding on his life.”
“You don’t say.” She shook her head. “That’s not your fault. He’s usually so collected. Why is he acting like such a jerk?”
“Issues,” I said, shrugging. “Everyone has a parental issue or two.”
“Still. It’s beneath him to behave that way.” She shook her head. “Sometimes he makes me want to slap him. But I’d need to get a chair to stand on.”
“I don’t take it personally,” I assured her. “Don’t worry.”
“It was about me,” she said quietly. “Wasn’t it? It’s about something I don’t know.”
“Um,” I said.
It was just possible that maybe I’d made a bad call when I decided to meddle between River and his kid. It wasn’t my place to shake the pillars of Irwin’s life. Or Connie’s, for that matter. It was going to be hard enough on her to find out about her supernatural heritage. She didn’t need to have the news broken to her by a stranger, on top of that. You’d think that, after years as a professional, I’d know enough to just take River’s money, help out his kid, and call it a night.
“Maybe we should walk?” I suggested.
“Sure.”
We left and started walking the streets of downtown Norman. The place was alive and growing, like a lot of college towns: plenty of old buildings, some railroad tracks, lots of cracks in the asphalt and the sidewalks. The shops and restaurants had that improvised look that a business district gets when it outlives its original intended purpose and subsequent generations of enterprise take over the space.
We walked in silence for several moments, until Connie finally said, “He’s not an angry person. He’s usually so calm. But when something finally gets to him…”
“It’s hard for him,” I said. “He’s huge and he’s very strong and he knows it. If he loses control of himself, someone could get hurt. He doesn’t like the thought of that. So when he starts feeling angry, it makes him tense. Afraid. He’s more upset about the fact that he feels so angry than about anything I said or did.”
Connie looked up at me pensively for a long moment. Then she said, “Most people wouldn’t realize that.”
I shrugged.
“What don’t I know?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure it’s my place to tell you.”
“But it’s about me.”
“Yeah.”
She smiled faintly. “Then shouldn’t I be the one who gets to decide?”
I thought about that one for a moment. “Connie … you’re mostly right. But … some things, once said, can’t be unsaid. Let me think about it.”
She didn’t answer.
The silence made me uncomfortable. I tried to chat my way clear of it. “How’d you meet Irwin?”
The question, or maybe the subject matter, seemed to relax her a little. “In a closet at a party. Someone spiked the punch. Neither of us had ever been drunk before, and…” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “And he’s just so damned sexy.”
“Lot of people wouldn’t think so,” I noted.
She waved a hand. “He’s not pretty. I know that. It’s not about that. There’s … this energy in him. It’s chemical. Assurance. Power. Not just muscles—it’s who he is.” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, I guess. But once the hangover cleared up, that happened, too.”
“So you love him?” I asked.
Her smile widened, and her eyes shone the way a young woman’s eyes ought to shine. She spoke with calm, simple certainty. “He’s the one.”
About twenty things to say leapt to my mind. I was going to say something about how she was too young to make that kind of decision. I thought about how she hadn’t been out on her own for very long, and how she had no idea where her relationship with Irwin was going to lead. I was going to tell her that only time could tell her if she and Irwin were good for one another and ready to be together, to make that kind of decision. I could have said something about how she needed to stop and think, not make blanket statements about her emotions and the future.
That was when I realized that everything I would have said was something I would have said to a young woman in love—not to a vampire. Not only that, but I heard something in her voice or saw something in her face that told me that my aged wisdom was, at least in this case, dead wrong. My instincts were telling me something that my rational brain had missed.
The kids had something real. I mean, maybe it hadn’t gotten off on the most pure and virtuous foot, but that wasn’t anything lethal in a relationship. The way they related to one another now? There was a connection there. You could imagine saying their names as a unit, and it fit: ConnieandIrwin. Maybe they had some growing to do, but what they had was real.
Not that it mattered. Being in love didn’t change the facts. First, that Connie was a vampire. Second, that vampires had to feed. Third, they fed upon their lovers.
* * *
“Hold on,” Dean said. “You missed something.”
“Eh?”
“Girl’s a vampire, right?”
“Yeah.
“So,” Dean said. “She met the kid in a closet at a party. They already got it on. She done had her first time.”
I frowned. “Yeah.”
“So how come Kid Bigfoot wasn’t dead?”
I nodded. “Exactly. It bothered me, too.”
* * *
The girl was in love with Irwin, and it meant she was dangerous to him. Hell, she was dangerous to almost everyone. She wasn’t even entirely human. How could I possibly spring something that big on her?
At the same time, how could I not?
“I should have taken the gold,” I muttered to myself.
“What?” she asked.
That was when the Town Car pulled up to the curb a few feet ahead of us. Two men got out of the front seat. They wore expensive suits and had thick necks. One of them hadn’t had his suit fitted properly—I could see the slight bulge of a sidearm in a shoulder holster. That one stood on the sidewalk and stared at me, his hands clasped in front of him. The driver went around to the rear passenger door and op
ened it.
“Oh,” Connie said. “Marvelous. This is all I need.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“My father.”
The man who got out of the back of the limo wore a pearl gray suit that made his thugs’ outfits look like secondhand clothing. He was slim, a bit over six feet tall, and his haircut probably cost him more than I made in a week. His hair was dark, with a single swath of silver at each temple, and his skin was weathered and deeply tanned. He wore rings on most of his manicured fingers, all of them sporting large stones.
“Hi, Daddy,” Connie said, smiling. She sounded pleasant enough, but she’d turned herself very slightly away from the man as she spoke. A rule of thumb for reading body language is that almost no one can totally hide physical reflections of their state of mind. They can only minimize the signs of it in their posture and movements. If you mentally exaggerate and magnify their body language, it tells you something about what they’re thinking.
Connie clearly didn’t want to talk to this man. She was ready to flee from her own father should it become necessary. It told me something about the guy. I was almost sure I wasn’t going to like him.
He approached the girl, smiling, and after a microhesitation, they exchanged a brief hug. It didn’t look like something they’d practiced much.
“Connie,” the man said, smiling. He had the same mild drawl his daughter did. He tilted his head to one side and regarded her thoughtfully. “You went blond. It’s … charming.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” Connie said. She was smiling, too. Neither one of them looked sincere to me. “I didn’t know you were in town. If you’d called, we could have made an evening of it.”
“Spur-of-the-moment thing,” he said easily. “I hope you don’t mind.”