Rans tried on an answering half-smile, though it struggled to lighten his wan expression. “All part of my cunning plan, of course.”
Guthrie eyed us, taking in the pale cast of Rans’ face and the smudges under his eyes. “You look like you need a neck to drain. I’d suggest the guy who lives downstairs in Unit 7B. He has awful taste in music, and plays his damned stereo at all hours of the day and night.”
Rans let out a small breath of amusement. “Perhaps in a bit.”
With a nod of understanding, Guthrie turned his full attention to me. “How about you, Zorah? How are you doing?”
My chest ached.
“I lost my dad,” I said truthfully. “I mean... I guess I lost him a long time ago. Maybe that should make it easier, but... it doesn’t, really?”
“No,” Guthrie said. “I don’t imagine it does.”
I took a deep breath. “Though—in other news, my grandfather and the guy I’m desperately in love with are both safe. That’s... pretty huge, in my world.”
Guthrie’s face softened. “I suppose it is, at that.” He sobered. “So—I’ve got no idea if this is presumptuous or not. But, if you want me to, I can help you with your dad’s final arrangements. Do you know if he had a will?”
A couple of tears spilled over, and I swiped them away with the ball of my thumb. Rans curled his fingers around my free hand and squeezed.
“Yeah,” I said unsteadily. “I can use all the help I can get right now. He was an accountant—not to mention OCD as hell. I expect he’s got papers signed, sealed, and notarized in a safe deposit box somewhere. Chicago, probably.”
“We’ll get it figured out,” Guthrie assured me, and another tear slid free. He leaned over and plucked a Kleenex from a box on the edge of the desk, handing it to me.
I accepted it and cleaned away the evidence of bloody vampire tears. “Thanks. Mom’s buried here in St. Louis. Well, her ashes are, I mean. I’m pretty sure that’s where he’d want to be, too.”
“All right,” Guthrie said. “There will be paperwork to fill out at the hospital. The three of us can head over there in a few hours when the administrative offices open. In the meantime, I’ll run a couple of searches and see if I can track down any information on an attorney’s office, or documents on file with the state.”
I swallowed the thickness in my throat, oddly relieved to have things to do—stuff that would keep me busy instead of thinking.
“I think I know which bank he was using in Chicago.” I glanced up at Rans, standing quietly beside me. “Rans, are you—” Somehow, continuing with the words ‘all right’ seemed ridiculous. I tried a different tack. “Is there... any reason we can’t stick around here for a few days while I tie up loose ends?”
He brushed gentle fingers over my cheekbone. “Of course there isn’t, love. The only thing hanging over our heads at the moment is Nigellus and his scheming. But as far as I’m concerned, he can cool his heels until we’re good and ready to deal with him.”
“Okay,” I said, gradually taking on board the idea that we might be... safe. It was surprisingly hard to wrap my brain around the concept.
Guthrie nodded. “Okay, then,” he echoed, with finality. “Zorah, you look like you could use way more rest than you got. Rans—you just look like shit. Go drink my annoying downstairs neighbor’s blood before you fall over.”
Rans snorted softly.
Warm fondness swirled through the sea of grief locked inside my chest, easing it momentarily. “What about you?” I asked.
Guthrie quirked an eyebrow at me. “I’ve still got over eight hundred emails in my inbox, and last time I checked, ‘because I got turned into a vampire and dragged into a supernatural war’ isn’t a valid excuse for failing to sign paperwork and file earnings reports.”
The warmth grew. “Well if it’s not, it totally should be,” I told him. “Come and get me when it’s time to... uh... go to the hospital. Until then, I think maybe I will try to sleep some more.”
Rans gave my hand a final squeeze. “Save me some space on the bed. I’ll be along as soon as I’ve dealt with Guthrie’s irritating tenant in 7B.”
* * *
The day of my father’s funeral dawned chilly and gray. Somehow, Rans had, in fact, managed to convince all of the relevant people at the hospital that what looked like a fatal gunshot wound and quacked like a fatal gunshot wound was actually a myocardial infarction resulting from long-term arteriosclerosis.
I’d had to look that up.
With Guthrie’s help, I’d jumped through all of the legal hoops necessary to claim Dad’s body and begin the probate process. It was going to be a particular mess because there was a missing persons report on him. He’d been kidnapped to Dhuinne months ago, and taken from there to Hell soon afterward. Neither of those things were particularly helpful when it came to the disposition of his assets, such as they were.
Needless to say, I still wasn’t doing well when it came to processing the whole thing. For some strange reason, there was a real shortage of therapists qualified to counsel vampire-succubus hybrids regarding their emotionally distant relatives who’d unexpectedly sacrificed their lives via the medium of demon soul-exchange.
But today, I had the man I loved standing at my right shoulder, and my grandfather standing at my left. I might stumble, but with them at my side, I had no fear of falling.
The funeral was as depressing and awful as I’d feared. Attendance was sparse—a handful of people from the nebulous time before my mother’s murder, along with a few coworkers and acquaintances who’d flown or driven down from Chicago. The graveside service was non-denominational, but still had enough religious-speak involved to make me uncomfortable. I’d been to Hell, and I had no reason to think there was a Heaven.
I really wanted to be able to attach some deep, emotional significance to the burial of Dad’s urn vault in the plot with Mom’s, but... they were just ashes. So I watched, dry-eyed and distant, my hands tangled in Rans’ and Guthrie’s cool grips. When the official was done talking about what a great guy Dad had been, and how much he’d be missed, I dropped a clump of wet earth in the hole.
My palms itched with the desire to be elsewhere as people I barely knew or didn’t know at all told me how very, very sorry they were for my loss. It was only when I glanced up and saw a huge black cat seated at the base of a tree some distance away, tail curled fastidiously around its paws, that fresh grief pierced my cocoon of numbness, and I gasped.
Rans followed my gaze, and stiffened.
Guthrie looked up as well, frowning. “Hey, that’s not—”
“It is,” Rans interrupted.
The small group of other mourners had mostly wandered off, congregating in little clusters to chat, and tut over how young Dad had been to die of a heart attack. I walked toward the cat, aware that the other two were following a couple of steps behind.
“You came,” I said, halting in front of the animal.
The cat-sidhe blinked huge green eyes up at me.
“I... tried to save him,” I said, my voice growing unsteady. “I wanted to save him. But he... didn’t want to be saved.” A tear escaped, behind the protective barrier of my sunglasses. I wiped it away before it could leave a telltale rusty track down my cheek. “I’m sorry.”
It felt strange to be offering an ‘I’m sorry’ to someone else when it was my own father who’d died—especially when that someone was a cat. But along with Edward, I’d gotten the impression the Fae had been one of the closest people to my dad, even if the relationship was odd and one-sided. The cat-sidhe had cared for Darryl Bright as an infant in Dhuinne, and watched over him when he’d been pulled back decades later to that magical and terrible place.
I wasn’t sure if I’d expected the cat to shift into its pixie-like, androgynous alter ego right here in the open, but if so, I was disappointed. Instead, it rose to its feet with a sumptuous stretch, and twined around my ankles a couple of times. Then, it sauntered behind the tree, and a f
lash of orange light marked the appearance and disappearance of a portal.
I blinked at the afterimage and turned to Rans. “I want to go home now, please. Can we just... go home?”
His arm circled my shoulder. “Of course we can, love.”
We’d come from the funeral parlor to the cemetery in a limo as part of the procession including the hearse, but I couldn’t face dealing with other people at the moment. So we flew. Guthrie came with us, and even though letting my stupidly rich grandfather see the less than impressive place where I lived should have been awkward... somehow, it wasn’t.
It was strange how reliant humans were on the little rituals surrounding death. I wanted to offer the others drinks and snacks as a way to fill the empty spaces around my grief. But in the absence of a stash of O-negative blood bags in the fridge, there was no point in it.
Instead, I sank down on the ratty couch. It hadn’t been in great shape even before Fae-controlled police had ransacked my house. Now, it sported several rips in the upholstery, and released an alarming creak of protesting wood anytime someone tried to sit too close to the left armrest.
Perhaps sensing that I needed a bit of space—or else hoping to avoid an ignominious bout of Total Couch Failure—Rans leaned against the protruding edge of the kitchen counter that acted as a demarcation between the kitchen and the living room. Guthrie took the one armchair I’d managed to salvage from the chaos.
“What about you, though?” I asked him, hoping for distraction from my circling thoughts. “What will you do now, Guthrie?”
Rans looked on with interest. Guthrie didn’t answer right away, giving the question several moments’ thought first.
“I’m not entirely sure yet,” he said eventually. “I’m thinking of staying right here in St. Louis, to be honest.”
“It’s a good city,” I replied absently. Then I paused. “Well... I mean, if you can get past the stagnant wages, high crime rate, and collapsing tax base.”
Guthrie let out a breath that might have been amusement. “Right.” He resettled himself in the chair. “Anyway, I’m not sure this really counts as a ‘normal life,’ what with the blood-drinking and glowing eyes, but it may be the closest I’m likely to get at this point. No more singing for my supper, generating an endless supply of money for other people and waiting for Myrial to drop the ax on my head. Not for a good long while, at least.”
Rans raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Will I need to look elsewhere for an investment manager, then?”
Guthrie waved him off. “Nah. I can offload your account onto Gina. She does most of the legwork already. She might as well pocket the management fee that goes with it, rather than pulling a salary. Really, she should’ve left to do her own thing years ago.”
“But what about you, though?” I pressed. “Any specific plans in mind?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe. I used to daydream about opening up a jazz club in Harlem, way back in the day. The way I see it, Harlem already had its renaissance, but St. Louis could kind of use one right about now. So... maybe I’ll do that for a decade or two.” He looked down, tugging a crease from the sleeve of his dark jacket. “I dunno. It’s still a plan in progress.”
I smiled, the heaviness pressing down on me growing incrementally lighter for a moment. “It’s a good plan. I like that plan.”
* * *
Five days later, I stood in the kitchen of the eighty-year-old bungalow where I’d lived all of my life. The furniture was still here—such as it was—but everything else had been cleaned out. Most of it, I’d gotten rid of. Some of it was in storage. The rest was in a pair of suitcases somewhat more spacious than the carryon bag I’d been living out of for weeks now.
Len stood on the other side of the breakfast counter, looking at me like he was trying to peel back the layers of my skull to understand what was going on inside.
“Are you sure about this, Z?” he asked. “No offense, but it’s kind of a crazy offer.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Crazy? You do remember who you’re talking to, right?”
He snorted.
“Fair point, there—but even so.”
I glanced around at the familiar rooms, made somewhat unfamiliar by the unaccustomed lack of clutter. Then I pushed the key ring toward him.
“I want you to use it, Len. It’s paid off now, and it’s got too much sentimental value for me to think of selling it. But at the same time, it’s also got too many ghosts for me to want to actually live here.”
“And so the logical reaction is to let some guy you barely know live here rent-free, instead of—I don’t know—leasing it out for hundreds of bucks a month?” he asked pointedly.
I shrugged. “I know you well enough, after what we’ve been through. Besides—rich vampire boyfriend, remember? I don’t need the money. And yes, that does feel as strange for me to say as it probably sounds for you to hear me say. But like I said, I want you to use the place.” I paused and swallowed. “The idea makes me happy, and ‘happy’ has kind of been in short supply the last few months.”
A shadow crossed Len’s face. “Yeah. I guess it has, at that.”
With an effort of will, I squared my shoulders and brightened my expression. “So, is that a yes, then?”
Len gave the keys a rueful glance, and lifted his gray eyes to mine. “That’s an ‘I’m so poor and fucked up right now, I’d have to be an idiot to turn down free housing.’ Even if it stings my ego.”
“Eh. Look at it as a live-in housekeeper and groundskeeper position, if that helps,” I told him. “Keep the damn lawn mowed, and we’ll call it even. Seriously, I can’t begin to tell you how much trouble that lawn has gotten me into this year.”
He looked through the patio door, at the backyard and the garden shed sitting in the middle. “I guess it does look a bit ragged.”
“You have no idea,” I agreed. “Now, you’ve got Guthrie’s phone number, right?”
Len’s expression turned wry. “Gramps the Vamp? Yeah, I got it.”
“If you ever get into trouble, call him, Len,” I said. “Seriously. The man’s got more money than god.”
He gave me a sour look. “Sure. If nothing else, it puts a whole new spin on selling plasma to pay the light bill.”
“Ha,” I told him tartly. “First off, that’s not why I gave you his number, and you know it. And second—dude, I don’t need another man in my life with a penchant for bad vampire jokes. Trust me when I say, I’ve heard all of them before. All of them.”
A smile tugged at one corner of Len’s mouth, and he looked down at the counter. I came around and pulled him into a hug. He returned it awkwardly, patting my back.
Easing him back, I met his eyes solemnly. “Take care of yourself, you hear? Don’t make me use the mesmerism thing to make it stick.”
“Back at you, Miss Oops-I-Died-and-Came-Back-as-an-Undead-Creature-of-the-Night,” he shot back.
“Believe me, I’m planning on taking it easy from here on out,” I told him. “No more near-death experiences, no more constant fight or flight battles with the forces of darkness.”
I let him go, and he stepped back, putting space between us.
“Where will you go now?” he asked.
I sighed. “Oh, you know. Straight to Hell, I expect.”
“Yeah... I know the feeling,” Len said.
TWENTY-ONE
“WHAT’S A... VAMPIRE, exactly?” Sharalynn asked, pronouncing the unfamiliar word with care.
Rans and I were visiting my friend and her partner Finn in the titheling village in Hell, while waiting for Nigellus and some other members of the demon’s ruling council to arrive for a meeting with the human elders. From my perspective, the journey here had been surreal—revisiting familiar surroundings and seeing them through new eyes, in more than one sense of the word.
Not only did undead eyesight render the depths of the Moaning Cavern in shades of charcoal gray rather than pitch blackness, but the context of our presence here had also
been turned on its head since the last time I’d visited.
“It’s what I’ve become,” I told her, not entirely sure how to encapsulate centuries of human myth and legend for someone who’d never even been exposed to such a concept.
All of the tithelings had, by definition, arrived in Hell after the last great war between the demons and the Fae had already ended. By that point, all of the vampires in existence had been destroyed—except for Rans. Apparently, the demons hadn’t deemed it necessary or prudent to explain about their doomed vampire allies to the humans in their care.
I was trying really hard not to read anything sinister into that omission.
Rans shifted restlessly against the wall he’d been propping up. I could tell he was ill at ease here despite the knowledge that he was not, in fact, a prisoner in the demon realm. He’d been polite but distant during my reunion with my titheling friends. Now, though, he spoke—saving me from floundering through an overly convoluted explanation.
“Vampires are a form of supernatural creature,” he said in a low tone. “The result of either a vengeful deity or a genetic mutation related to magic, depending on one’s belief system. We don’t age and are impervious to most kinds of injury, but we require human blood from living victims to sustain ourselves.”
Sharalynn blinked.
“Our blood heals humans and slows the aging process,” I added. “Vampire blood is the magical ingredient in the wine the demons provide you. Which... is why we’re here, not to put too fine a point on it.”
Sharalynn’s partner Finn looked between us nervously. Despite myself, I couldn’t help focusing on the way his heart rate had increased when Rans explained that vampires used humans as a food source.
“So... you drink blood?” he asked. “Do you kill people?”
“Only the ones who deserve it,” Rans said—not terribly helpfully, in my opinion.
I shot him a disapproving glare. “No, we don’t have to kill to feed. Making new vampires does involve draining a person to the point of death and then feeding them vampire blood to resurrect them, though.”
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