Her smile turned dreamy as she stared out the front window—or she would have, had it not been covered in blackout curtains. Then she ripped her gaze back to mine. “What about you?”
“I’ll get cuter, too. It’s what I do.”
She blew on her coffee, which lacked whipped cream so she could fit into her wedding dress. “What about the future?”
“I don’t think about the future,” I said, and at the time it was true. “Or the past, for that matter.”
“You and Shane can’t go on forever like this. I see it in his eyes when he looks at you.” She curled her hands around her mug. “He wants you to belong to him.”
I laughed at her melodrama. “I do belong to him.”
“Not officially.”
“That’s what’s so great about it.”
She lifted her cinnamon roll as if to lob it at my head. “How can you be so casual about true love?”
“I’m not casual, just realistic. Unlike him, I won’t stay young forever.”
“You really think he cares about that?”
“I care.” I stirred the whipped cream to melt it into the steaming coffee. “Jeremy once said I’m with Shane because it doesn’t threaten my independence, because one day we’ll break up and I can blame it all on the human-vampire thing, not on my own inability to commit or be a good girlfriend.”
“Let me guess: Jeremy’s solution is for you to become a vampire.”
“Pretty much.” We shared a smirk at the expense of our morbid friend, the sole human DJ at WVMP. “That’s his solution for everything, including static cling.”
“But he might have a point. Not about you becoming a vampire but about your commitment phobia.”
“He might.” I sipped the Irish coffee, hoping its warmth would soothe my apprehension. “I never want to break up with Shane. But I couldn’t stand losing him for normal reasons—because of something I did or because I wasn’t good enough. So I know that eventually I’ll start making a bigger deal about how different we are, until one day it’s true, and we’ll have proven that a vampire and a human can’t go the distance together.”
“If any human and vampire could, it would be you and Shane. If you ask me, it’s better to have a few years or decades with someone who rocks your world than a whole lifetime with someone who makes you yawn.” She studied my face. “What if he headed you off at the pass?”
“By breaking up with me?” Just uttering the thought made my voice squeak.
“By proposing.”
I closed my eyes and imagined the moment. He’d come up with something clever and charming and sexy, like the hero of a romantic comedy movie. He’d be almost impossible to resist.
“I’d say no,” I told her.
Maybe he’d ask again and again, and I’d say no again and again, and eventually he would give up.
And then the end would begin. He’d leave home earlier in the evening, start sleeping at the station. I’d be relieved to wake up alone.
Then, one night, he would leave for good. It would hurt him too much to know I couldn’t give him forever.
Just imagining it made my lungs ache. But the alternative—marrying him, growing old, and finally dying while he stayed young—stopped my breath altogether.
In the battle over my state of consciousness, the whiskey kicked the coffee’s ass, and I was asleep by eleven o’clock. I barely had the presence of mind to take off my clothes before crawling under the covers.
I didn’t know Shane was there until he slipped his arms around my waist and buried his face in the back of my neck. The soft scrape of his cotton shirt against my skin said he couldn’t wait to hold me, not even long enough to undress.
I twined my fingers with his and kept my voice sleepy, as if my words were a reflex, which they never were. “I love you.”
He sighed, deep and soft. I tightened my grip on his hand and tried not to picture him as he was fifteen years ago this moment, lying dead in his maker Regina’s arms.
His next breath was nothing but my name. I turned to face him. In the dim glow of the nightlight, I could see the mix of joy and agony in his pale blue eyes. They were dry but crinkled and a little swollen around the edges, as if he had a head cold.
Though I longed to do much, much, much more, I simply kissed him softly on the tip of his perfect nose, then on his lips. I stroked the sharp angles of his cheek and jaw with the tips of my fingers, then slid my hand into the light brown hair that grazed his neck.
“Welcome home,” I said.
He kissed me then, as gently as I had kissed him, but with lips parted, his tongue beckoning. The sudden wet contact shot a bolt of desire down my spine, pooling liquid heat in my core.
Despite our month-long separation, we didn’t crash together in a desperate, grabby lustfest. We touched like we were sculpting glass in our bare hands, as if pieces of us would break off if we grasped too hard.
When his clothes were gone, he guided my leg over his hip and entered me. We lay side by side, facing each other, kissing deeper, saying nothing. I crested slowly, building higher and higher over what seemed like hours. Then suddenly I was clutching Shane’s shoulder, my nails sinking deep into his skin to hold myself together.
He groaned against my neck and pressed his mouth hard to my flesh. Through his lips I felt his fangs and knew that part of him wanted to pierce me, taste my blood at its sweetest, at the height of my ecstasy.
But that would have made me something more and less than his beloved. We wanted to dwell in the fragile, human bliss we’d created.
So he just held my body tight to his as he came. Pulsing deep inside me, breathing warm against my skin, he had as much life as I’d ever need.
5
Destination Unknown
In a sure sign of the universe’s cruelty, I had to go to work later that morning. I hated leaving Shane alone on his death-iversary, but at least Dexter would be there to cheer him up with random acts of laziness.
I dragged myself up the rickety stairs of the tiny station building and knocked on the front door. It unlocked and opened only from the inside, to prevent vampire flameouts.
The knob turned and the door popped open, sticking to the frame due to the foggy day’s humidity. At that moment, I happened to be in the middle of a wide, uncovered yawn.
“Oh, that’s attractive.” Franklin, the sales director, waved me into the office. “Come inside before flies lay eggs under your tongue.”
“Welcome home to you, too,” I told him as I pushed past.
“I never left,” he snapped.
“Maybe you should consider it.”
“Love to, but then I’d miss all the free pie.”
“What free—” I stopped as I approached my desk in the small, open main office area. On the surface sat a pie with a crumb topping and what looked like a homemade crust.
I looked back at Franklin. “Did you—”
“Don’t get excited.” He opened the credenza next to the bricked-up fireplace and pulled out a stack of paper plates and napkins with some plastic utensils. “Aaron hates rhubarb, so I used you as an excuse to make an extra pie for Easter.”
I poked my finger through the crust. Apples, too. My all-time favorite. “Is that a candied walnut topping?”
“I used whatever was lying around the house.” He slapped the plates, napkins, and utensils on my desk. “Candied walnuts, the crumbs at the bottom of the dog biscuit box…”
I grabbed a plastic knife and sliced the pie. “You are the worst coworker ever.”
“You’re the worst coworker in two or three evers,” he said as he took the first piece.
It was as close as we’d ever come to saying “I missed you.”
David’s raised voice came from behind his office door, which was shut but so thin it might as well have been open.
“Mom, we’re not really eloping. I would never do that to you.” A pause. “No, I promise I’ll talk Lori out of it.”
I decided to save hi
s butt, though after that fib, I was more interested in kicking it. I dialed an interior extension so his phone would ring.
“Mom, I gotta take this call,” he said. “Love you. Bye.” He picked up the other line. “Agent Griffin, I presume.”
“Got a minute for Control talk? Or an hour or a day?”
“Yep. Bring pie.”
I was cutting David a slice when he opened his office door. He stopped at the threshold, where his sharp green eyes examined my frame. “Did you get taller?”
I hid a smile, secretly proud of my unprecedented level of physical fitness. “They stretched me on the rack until I told them where I hid Dracula’s bones.” I hooked my pinky through the loop of my thermos and carried our pie slices into his office.
David shut the door behind us and moved quickly out of my personal space to the other side of his desk. The minuscule general manager’s office was lined with shelves of music books and filing cabinets of supernatural facts. As a result, it contained approximately five square feet of floor space.
He sat in his chair and straightened his sport coat. “How was Indoc?”
“It’s all against my nature.” I passed him his slice of pie. “Taking orders, working on a team—not to mention learning how to kill vampires.” I poured myself a pre-sugared cup of coffee from my thermos. “But Lanham said I either did what they wanted or Shane would spend the rest of his unlife north of the Arctic Circle.”
David let out a heavy sigh and picked up his fork. “They drive a hard bargain. But remember, the colonel’s done a lot for you. A lot for us. He looked the other way while you were pretending to be Elizabeth so we could keep the station.”
“I know,” I said, in a junior-high sullen voice. After the station owner, Elizabeth, had died for good, I’d “borrowed” her identity to keep the station from being liquidated. Lanham and the Control had looked the other way.
“So where did they assign you?”
I hesitated. David knew about my “anti-holy” power, so my future work wouldn’t be a secret to him. And he’d been close to the Control—when he wasn’t actually in it—all his life. Maybe he could teach me how to keep my commanders happy without compromising my few moral principles.
“Something called the Immanence Corps.”
His fork halted on the way to his mouth. The morsel of pie tumbled back to the plate.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
I blinked. Unlike the rest of us, David rarely used profanity. It was sort of adorable. It also let us know when he was really upset.
“Why would I kid about that?”
“I was afraid this would—” He slammed down his fork, flipping a shower of candied walnuts against his shirt. “What are they thinking?”
“I don’t know. What are you thinking? What’s wrong with the Immanence Corps, besides being a band of freaks?”
“They killed my father.”
The pie’s crumb topping turned to sawdust in my mouth. “He was assassinated?”
“Not directly.” David set his elbows on the desk and rubbed his eyes, which had grown tight with tension. “More like driven to his death.”
“I thought he was an enforcement agent like you were.”
“He started out that way.” David sank back into his squeaky office chair and rolled his palms over the curves of its arms. “When I was really young, I didn’t know what he did for a living. But I knew he was happy.” His expression softened as his gaze turned distant. “Sometimes he would dance with my mom even when there was no music playing.”
I stabbed another bite of pie. “So what happened?”
“He got promoted into management. His command experience snagged him a high-level directorship.”
“Of the Immanence Corps?”
“No. Internal Affairs.”
I frowned around my fork. “Rat Patrol? That sounds like punishment, not promotion.”
David lifted an eyebrow in assent. “So we settled down here. I started high school, and he started—” He drew a heavy hand through his dark brown hair. “The only word that fits is ‘fading.’ Like old vampires when the modern world becomes too much for them? My dad withdrew from us. He smoked and drank more than ever. Over the next seven years, Mom and I watched that job kill him.”
Though my brain burned with a million questions, I forced myself to slow down and empathize. “I’m sorry. That must’ve been really rough.”
He nodded, then seemed to go far away. I sensed he wasn’t going to say more without prompting.
“But what’s that got to do with the Immanence Corps?”
“He was investigating them when he began his…” David searched for the right word. “Descent.”
“How do you know? Aren’t those cases classified?”
“He made notes. I found them after he died.”
His glance shot to the lowest drawer in his filing cabinet—the one that was always locked. I interpreted this as a hint that the notes were in there for the stealing. If I asked to see them, he’d say no, since that would be against Control rules. Then I’d be officially disobeying him by reading them. This way, we could both pretend he had scruples.
“I’ll keep your warning in mind,” I told David, “but I don’t have a choice. And maybe things have changed. Maybe new management trends have made the IC more soul friendly. That was what, thirty years ago?”
His eyes narrowed. “Fifteen. I’m only thirty-five.”
Ah, a chance to change the subject. “That’s a long time for your poor mother to wait for her only child’s marriage. The least you can do is give her a real wedding to cry at.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. “Lori told you I wanted to elope?”
“She tells me everything. It’s a best friend rule.”
“I thought I was her best friend.”
“Girls can have more than one. That’s another rule.”
“Wait—she tells you everything?”
“As much as I can stomach.” I stood, balancing the pie plate on top of my thermos lid. “I have a month’s worth of trivial e-mail to read, so I really should—”
“Go. Yes.” David shuffled random papers over his desk, avoiding my eyes. “I have, uh, things. To do.”
I shut the door on my way out, satisfied. His mind had traveled far away from the Immanence Corps.
I wish I could’ve said the same for mine.
Before class that night, I went to the history department to meet my professor, who also happened to be Franklin’s long-term boyfriend. In any normal universe, the younger and infinitely cuter Aaron Green would be way out of my coworker’s league. But a normal universe wouldn’t contain vampire DJs.
When I knocked on Aaron’s open door, he looked up from his notes, holding the rim of an empty Styrofoam cup in his mouth. “Hey, Ciara,” came his muffled voice. He lowered the cup and gave me a distracted smile. “Welcome home.”
“It’s good to be back in the real world. Thanks for hating rhubarb so Franklin could bring me pie.”
“I don’t hate rhubarb.” Aaron picked up our latest textbook and placed it in his open briefcase. “He made that pie because he missed you.”
“Then I should go away more often, and Franklin would probably be the first person to agree with that.”
A corner of Aaron’s mouth twitched in response. His gaze traveled around the perimeter of his desk. “What was I…” He scratched the back of his head, tugging the soft waves of sable hair. “I needed something else for tonight’s class.”
He didn’t normally fit the absentminded professor stereotype. “You okay?” I asked him. “Still jet-lagged?”
“No, it’s been a week since I got back from Debrecen.” Aaron’s fingers trickled over the surface of his desk before reaching a stack of papers held together with an alligator clip. “Ah. Here.”
Now that I had his full attention, I said, “Can I talk to you about my term paper on the way to class?”
“Sure.” He shrugged on his dark
brown leather jacket. “Did you plan to pick a topic before the end of the semester?”
“Ha-ha. Yes, I decided on the Legion of the Archangel Michael. The Romanian Iron Guard?”
“Oh, dear.” He motioned for me to precede him out of his office. “You know, just because I’m Jewish doesn’t mean you get extra points for Holocaust topics.”
“That’s not why I picked it.” I kept pace with him down the polished floors of Craddock Hall, passing under a hand-painted banner supporting the Sherwood men’s lacrosse team (Division III defending champions—go Bog Turtles!). “I picked it because out of all the fascist groups, the legion was the only one that used religion as the major motivator.”
He lifted his chin. “Ah, so this is part of your crusade, so to speak, to demonstrate the evils of faith.”
I ignored his jibe. “You know what was so fascinating about them? They didn’t believe they’d find salvation through slaughter. They didn’t think there’d be thirty virgins waiting for them in heaven, or that they’d be canonized for destroying the enemy.” As we descended the marble steps outside the building, I pulled up my hood against the evening breeze. “They knew that the murders they committed were a sin, and they accepted their damnation. In their minds, they were sacrificing their souls for the sake of the fatherland. Isn’t that wild?”
A grunt was his only response, so I continued. “Usually people like that rationalize their evil—they convince themselves it’s what God wants. These fanatics were completely unapologetic.”
As we crossed the grassy commons, Aaron looked to the right, into the dark woods surrounding the western edge of Sherwood College’s campus.
I continued my well-rehearsed pitch. “Most religions are all about the next world. Not your religion, of course. But Christians, Muslims, Buddhists—their earthly lives are less important than the afterlife. So for the legionnaires to sacrifice eternal salvation, their patriotism must have verged on insanity.”
Aaron craned his neck, still looking back into the woods.
To see if he was paying attention, I added, “Unless they thought they were already damned. Or that they were immortal.”
Bring On the Night Page 4