by Molly Harper
“I knew he was in town and may have mentioned to him that we might need the help of a vampire you couldn’t manipulate,” Cal said defensively when I smacked his arm. “You can’t protect someone properly if that person has you wrapped around her little finger.”
“She doesn’t have me wrapped around her little finger!” Collin protested. “I am an impartial bystander!”
“Inappropriately long hugs, Collin,” Miranda reminded him.
Collin wrinkled up his face in the most undignified expression I’d ever seen him make. “Curses!”
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the concern Iris’s vampire friends showed for one another was part of the reason I loved them so much. Threatening them all with Cal’s silver spray would be a poor return for that care.
But seriously, one more hug, and I was going to snap.
“Cal, bringing fanged personnel to the office with me is only going to make me look immature and incapable to my coworkers, who don’t show much respect for humans anyway. It’s going to make my job that much harder.”
“Yes, because keeping up appearances is so much more important than your personal safety,” Cal muttered.
“Look, you’ve done everything you can to prepare me for hostile interactions with a vampire, including finding a martial-arts instructor who shouted incorrect Sun Tzu quotes and ‘Mercy is for the weak’ at me while he tossed me around the mat like a rag doll,” I said. “And the good news is that it worked. Thanks to what I learned and the bag of tricks you gave me, I was able to defend myself. The worst injuries I sustained tonight were from falling on my face after the guy ran off. So unless you can protect me from gravity, I’d say you’ve done all that you can. So I don’t need some vampire version of the Rock following me around, checking the bathroom stalls for potential assailants.”
“Actually, a vampire version of the Rock doesn’t sound that bad,” Miranda murmured. “Can one of you get on that? For the greater good?”
“Gigi, you have made a series of cogent and intelligent points,” Cal said, his head cocking toward the front door as if he was listening for something. “And you may be right . . . in some small way. I might have jumped the gun in calling in my friend for support.”
“Thank you.”
“But none of that matters now, because he’s standing on our front porch,” he said, dashing around me to answer the knock before it was even finished.
“What?” I spat. “Damn it, Cal!”’
I heard Cal at the front door, conversing in hushed Russian with a somewhat familiar second voice. I reached into my purse so I could at least wipe some of the smeared lip gloss from my cheek. The moment our guest stepped through the door, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. There he was in all his blond glory, the guy who had been following, kissing, and, most recently, attacking me.
“Motherfudger!” I yelled, dropping my purse and holding my stake hairbrush in a stabby position.
Iris frowned. “Gigi?”
I clicked the silver stake into place and demanded, “I didn’t smack you around enough the first time, jackass? You had to come back for seconds?”
Mr. Tall, Blond, and Bite-y stared, tilting his gorgeous head and staring at me as if I was a particularly interesting specimen at the zoo. He was wearing different clothes, jeans and a thin green cashmere sweater that brought out the lighter amber flecks in his stupid, beautiful eyes.
It was difficult getting past the “so damn cute” to focus on the “violent possible sociopath” of this situation. But I would do it, for puppies and feminism and for no other reason than that I’d already committed to this road by pulling a stake on a guest.
“Gigi, what are you doing?” Iris asked through a tightly wrought, awkward smile. All of the other vampires stood cautiously, not quite sure why I appeared to be losing my mind in front of our guest. “Kind of being rude to Cal’s friend.”
“This is the vampire who attacked me.”
Cal scoffed. “Don’t be silly, Geeg, this is my friend, Nikolai Dragomirov. Nik for short, because no one needs that many syllables.”
“Well, I’m telling you that your ‘friend’ Nik tried to bite me in the parking lot tonight. Which I think means he is no longer a friend but an acquaintance, at best. I don’t care what you did in Constantinople.”
Nik wandered closer, towering over me, completely oblivious to the fact that I was pressing the tip of a silver stake to his chest. Seriously, I had time to adjust my placement two or three times to make sure I had the heart, and he didn’t even glance down.
“I know you,” he said. “I have seen you before.”
“Of course you have,” Cal said, and when Iris sent him a questioning look, he hastily added, “I sent pictures of the wedding.”
“Which probably helped when you were following me around Half-Moon Hollow during Christmas break. Also, you saw me earlier when you were attacking me. How is that not breaking through?” I asked, digging the stake in just enough to make him wince. And yes, I was still willfully omitting the kissing part, because I wanted to escape this situation without Iris trying to ground me to my room like a preteen.
“What about Christmas?” Iris asked, frowning.
Double damn it.
I tried to cobble together a coherent, plausible explanation for what I had just said, but all I could produce was a series of increasingly twitchy facial expressions that communicated guilt or nausea. Or maybe both.
“Gigi, what aren’t you telling us?” Iris asked, her voice deceptively calm.
I locked eyes with Nik, who seemed just as confused as Cal and Iris. Because he wasn’t aware that I’d omitted a large portion of our less-than-adorable “how we met” story. And neither was Jane, because she immediately piped up, “Of course he’s seen her. One of the first clear pictures I got from Nik was of him standing near Gigi at McDonough’s Tree Farm, watching her and wanting to talk to her and . . . judging from the expressions on your faces, I should just stop talking right now, shouldn’t I?”
I cringed and nodded. Sometimes it really sucked to hang out with a mind-reader. “Jane, maybe you shouldn’t go poking around in Nik’s head. It seems like a violation of a lot of different civil rights.”
“Let’s worry about vampire Fifth Amendment issues when you’re not attracted to a man who seems to have Gigi-based rage blackouts.” Iris snorted. “Also, you were seeing him over Christmas break, and you didn’t think to tell us?”
“I wasn’t seeing him as in dating him. I was seeing him as in possibly hallucinating him!” I cried. “And I don’t know how that is relevant to the current conversation.”
Nik’s smile was indulgent as he stepped closer to me. “I am certain I would remember attacking someone as pretty as you, sladkaya.”
“What did you call me?” I asked, arching a brow as Iris pushed Nik back a step away from me.
“He called you ‘sweetheart,’ ” Cal said, glaring at the back of his friend’s head. “He’s Russian. He calls every woman he meets under the age of seventy ‘sweetheart.’ It doesn’t mean anything.” Cal’s glare intensified. “It doesn’t mean anything, right, Nik?”
“Why wouldn’t it mean anything?” I growled, though I wasn’t sure who was on the receiving end. “Look, you actually spoke to me this time, don’t you remember that?”
Nik turned back to Cal, completely ignoring the question. “You said she was a bit of a genius. Does that mean she is also a little bit . . .” Nik made a hand gesture near his head that was considerably less flattering than the “little off” gesture Miranda had made for Collin.
“Oh, I’m crazy now?” Seething, I reached down and squeezed his thigh, right over the spot where I’d stabbed him with silver. He didn’t even bother defending himself. In fact, he looked downright intrigued when I reached toward his thigh. But when I applied the pressure, he yowled and backed
away. “Do you remember how you sustained this limp? Because that’s how I left you, Skippy, with a gaping, difficult-to-heal silver wound.”
He looked almost amused by the fact that I’d left a big wound on his leg. “You stabbed me?”
“What?” Cal watched, his expression horrified, as a bright bloody patch spread across the leg of Nik’s jeans.
“I told you, I stabbed him in the thigh with my hairbrush stake. Am I the only person in the room following this conversation?”
I heard several murmurs of “Possibly” and “Probably.” I was more worried about the intensity of Cal’s glare, which, by rights, should have melted Nik’s forehead.
“Cal, was this one of your training exercises gone wrong?” Iris demanded, as Cal slid between me and Nik and gently shoved me out of striking distance. “Did you send your friend to attack Gigi in a parking lot? I can appreciate that you want her to be prepared, but I think you’ve gone too far.”
“Of course I didn’t!” Cal exclaimed. “Nik, did you attack Gigi in a parking lot?”
“No, I came here as soon as I rose for the evening,” Nik insisted, the faint Russian accent growing deeper. “She looks familiar, I will admit. But Cal, you know I would never hunt a random human, especially not this close to the Council office. It would be professional suicide.”
I would try not to focus on the “professional suicide” qualifier, I really would.
Cal checked his watch. “You just now rose at two a.m.?”
“I rose late. I have been working longer hours lately. I did not know I was going to need an alibi.”
“OK, how did you end up with that wound on your leg?”
“I do not know.”
“What do you know?” Cal asked.
Nik nodded toward me. “I know that I have seen her before. I do not know how or when or where, but I have seen her before.”
“Of course you have, you idiot. I sent you to her school months ago to ‘talk to’ that boy in her class who wouldn’t stop making unwanted advances on her!” Cal cried, exasperated.
“That was you?” I exclaimed.
“Oh, Cal, you didn’t.” Iris sighed.
“I do not remember that.” Nik shook his head, still staring at me as if I was some precious, fascinating gemstone. A girl could get used to being stared at like that . . . minus the patchy memory and the occasional attempted mugging. And despite the situation, I could feel a little smile forming on my lips.
“Do you remember following me when I was home over Christmas break?” I asked.
Nik shook his head. “No.”
“What?” Iris exclaimed. “What the hell is going on here? Has everyone gone nuts?”
“Do you remember kissing me in front of Jane Jameson’s bookshop?” I asked, ignoring my sister’s growing distress.
“No, but I wish I did remember, truly,” Nik said, grinning cheekily. “You have certainly built up an elaborate pretend relationship between the two of us. I am sorry I missed it.”
“Gladiola Grace Scanlon!” Iris yelled, catching my arm as I surged forward to smack him. Or at least poke him really hard. “You were followed and kissed by a strange vampire, and you didn’t think to tell anybody about it?” Damn it. She broke out my full birth name. That meant I was really in trouble.
“Let’s just focus on the problem at hand,” I told Iris, my violent intent temporarily redirected.
Iris pointed her finger in my face. “We are so going to revisit this.”
Meanwhile, Cal had Nik pressed against the wall by his collar. “You kissed my little sister?”
My stake swung dangerously close to my vampire companions as I threw my arms into the air. “Oh, come on, that you believe, but I’m crazy when I say he attacked me?”
“I don’t know if we should be here right now,” Andrea whispered to Dick.
“If we leave now, we’ll miss a lot, and we’ll just have to catch up later,” Dick whispered back.
“Everyone can hear you,” Jane hissed over both of them.
Suddenly, Nik started laughing and pointing at Dick, who was wearing one of the few shirts Andrea had missed in her legendary purge of his inappropriate T-shirt collection: “Home is where the pants aren’t.” When he realized everybody was staring at him, Nik cried, “What? Is funny, yes?”
Jane slapped her hand over her face. “Oh, God, it’s Russian Dick Cheney.”
Gabriel shuddered. “There are two of them.”
“Hey!” Dick exclaimed. “That hurts my feelings!”
“Let’s get back to the point. Did you kiss my sister?” Cal demanded, shaking Nik back and forth hard enough to make fangs rattle.
“If you say that you don’t remember kissing me, I will choke you out,” I told him.
The room went silent. Even Cal was looking over at me with a doubtful expression that I found insulting.
I amended, “I would try real hard.”
“All right, all right, yes, there is something going on here,” Nik said, clearing his throat and removing Cal’s hands from their locked position around his neck. “And I do not understand what it is. But I do not think that choking me is going to help the situation.”
Somehow, the overly formal language, the precise pronunciation of every syllable without contractions or slang, the mark of someone who’d learned English as a second language decades before, reminded me so much of Cal it made me smile. That sort of sucked, because I was supposed to be all pissed off and badass. It was hard to be badass when you were smiling like a goof.
Nik smiled back at me, a big, beautiful, open smile, and it set a whole flock of condor-sized butterflies loose in my stomach. And all that doubt about where Nik landed on the fairy-tale-monster line of violence didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. In that moment, forgiving him for that little life-or-death scuffle in the parking lot seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do. Hell, climbing into his lap and nibbling his ears seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.
I might not have been the authority on what was reasonable, at that moment.
Maybe Nik’s secret vampire power was like Dick’s “female persuasion”? Dick could persuade a woman to shave her own head and do the Macarena in the town square if he flirted enough with her, something he rarely put to use because he didn’t consider it sporting.
“Why do I not remember you?” Nik asked me, as if we were the only ones in the room. He reached for my face, like he was about to cup my cheek, only to have his hand diverted by a slap from Cal. “I should remember you.”
“I don’t know.” I chuckled, despite the incredible weirdness of the situation. “But could you maybe say hi from now on? Instead of the skulking and the lunging?”
Nik leaned just a tiny bit closer, his blunt white teeth dragging over that full bottom lip. “I think that could be arranged.”
Cal cleared his throat. And then I realized I was inappropriately infatuated with someone who shared an uncomfortable number of similarities with my surrogate brother-slash-father-figure, and my goofy smile melted away like magic. And then I remembered the parking-lot roughhousing, and I took another step back.
“This is a very sweet moment, but I would really like you to get out of my house,” Iris said, somehow outmuscling her husband and pushing Nik toward the door. “Cal will be in touch. Stay away from Gigi.”
“What if I do not want to leave?” Nik asked, his voice a low, threatening growl, as Cal hovered in front of Nik, preventing him from getting closer to me.
My eyes widened as a ripple of that same fear I had felt in the parking lot zipped down my spine. Jamie moved in front of me in a protective stance, while Iris leapt forward at her inhuman speed and practically tackled Nik to force him out the door. She slammed the door in his face. His beautiful, beautiful face. I would analyze my rapid shifts in attitude toward parking-lot assailant
s at a later time.
“I do not understand what is happening right now.” I sighed.
“You are making very poor decisions,” Iris told me.
“You are not to see that boy again,” Cal said in an authoritative, fatherly tone that was frankly terrifying.
“I am not twelve,” I told him. “And he’s hardly a boy. If he’s an old friend of yours, that probably means he’s, what, four hundred years old?”
Cal muttered something under his breath.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I said it’s closer to five hundred,” he grumbled. “Give or take a decade.” And Iris buried her face in her hands.
“I told you we should have left earlier,” Andrea whispered to Dick. “Now it’s super-awkward, and they’re standing in front of the door.”
3
You are not Norma Rae. Sometimes standing up for what you believe in should take a backseat to survival.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
I would like to say that Cal, Iris, and I bade our trapped guests good evening and had a mature, thoughtful discussion about my options before forming a coherent plan for how to handle the Nik situation.
But instead, they sent me to my room.
This was what I got for not renting my own apartment for the summer.
The next morning, the whole hit-by-a-truck feeling still lingered. Because I couldn’t explain what the hell had happened the night before or how it was going to affect me in the long term, I decided to just continue as if it hadn’t. I restocked my purse with antivampire weapons, packed my own lunch, and drove to work early. Oh, and I downgraded to a business-casual outfit of a pair of khakis and a dark blue cardigan, because I would never wear poly-blend again.
I didn’t know how to process all of the truth explosions lobbed at me in the parlor. There were so many elements to be upset over. Cal sending Nik to my college campus to threaten the mouth-breather from my history class. The fact that Nik couldn’t remember coming to my college campus to threaten said mouth-breather. Nik taking this as an invitation to follow me around the Hollow while I was home for Christmas vacation. The fact that he couldn’t remember following me around the Hollow while I was home for Christmas vacation. Nik attacking me in the parking lot. The fact that he couldn’t remember attacking me in the parking lot. And he forgot the kissing. I couldn’t seem to get past that.