by Eve Paludan
When she came in the sliding glass door on the ninth floor of our Executive Suite, changing back to her naked woman form, I covered her with a bedspread and hugged her tightly. When I let her go, she hugged Mary Lou. And Fang, too. She even smiled at Dracula, who waved away her hugs.
Then Sam kissed me. It was the kiss of a damsel who was grateful to the prince who’d rescued her. She gushed about the bullet I’d bravely dug from her chest with my teeth at risk to my own demise because werewolves, too, cannot bear silver.
We were all talking at once, packing our luggage and taking turns in the suite’s two bathrooms to get fresh clothes on. Dracula got his magic refilling flask out of the room safe and patted it inside his pants pocket.
Dracula said it best: “The balance of Heaven is restored.”
“You’re a nice guy,” I said. “And you look pretty spiffy in leisure suits.”
“Don’t tell anyone that or I’ll have to kill you,” he said.
I hoped he was joking. It was kind of hard to tell. I changed the topic. “I assume Morrie Pike was the asshole with the silver bullet in his gun?”
Dracula nodded.
“What did you do with him when you took him from me?”
“Morris Pike is on his way to one of my colder lairs. Greenland, if you must know.”
I grimaced. “But he’s a demon vampire. He doesn’t belong up here. What are you going to do with him?”
Dracula smiled coldly. “Anything I want.”
I shuddered. Or maybe it was the start of the grief that threatened to overwhelm me at the thought of what I’d done. I’d spit a spent silver bullet into Jolie Hart’s heart. I knew that her body had to die in order to go into the light, but why did I have to be the one who’d killed her?
Chapter 32
Fang wept bitterly over his loss of Jolie and could not be consoled. He wanted to head home alone on a plane to L.A. with the plan to reopen his blood club as soon as possible. He said he wanted to take some solace in a ‘live donor’ in one of the back rooms. Or maybe he’d apologize to the girlfriend he’d dumped for Jolie.
I wanted to tell him that it was impossible to replace someone like his former guardian angel with someone who would bleed for money. But I didn’t.
“Just shut up, Kingsley,” he said, reading my mind.
“Bro,” I said. “Call me anytime. And bring the Batmobile. We’ll have guy time again.”
Fang nodded. “I’ll see you sooner than later. We can work other cases together.”
“I’d like that,” I admitted. “You gonna be all right?”
“Someday, I will,” Fang said. “Not for a while.”
There’s this saying that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I didn’t think that was likely to be the case with our adventure. Especially not for Fang.
He left us quietly.
* * *
A G-man came to the door of the suite looking for ‘Sid Caesar’ because he was the one who’d bought our tickets.
“Sid Caesar has been dead since 2014,” I said.
The G-man cleared his throat and asked if we had seen a wolf in the concert hall, or a giant bat, or a dragon. We all looked at him like he was crazy. He left.
Bit by bit, the rest of us began to depart.
Dracula had bought a used Cadillac limo and had it delivered. The beautiful car fit his personality. Man, did that vamp have fine taste in vintage cars.
“I also made an appointment with a real estate agent,” he told us.
“Don’t buy a timeshare,” I said. “That’s free legal advice.”
“Sounds sensible.”
And then, he, too—the dragon vampire—was gone from us.
* * *
When Mary Lou walked up to us, Sam gave her a tight hug. “Sometimes, I want to kill you.”
“Likewise.”
“Please say you aren’t really a private investigator,” Samantha said.
“My license is in the mail.”
Sam face-palmed herself. “I blame myself for this.”
“You have an exciting life,” Mary Lou said. “I want one, too, and I want to work with you on more cases. Supernatural cases.”
“That’s not going to happen again,” Sam said.
“I proved myself,” Mary Lou insisted.
“You almost got killed, sis.”
“I liked the adrenaline. I want more gigs where a woman hires me to protect her,” she said.
“She’s dead, Mary Lou!”
“That’s not the point. She’s where she should be,” Mary Lou replied.
“True.” Sam sighed. “I thought you liked Pilates, coaching kids’ soccer, and crochet. And weren’t you working as an insurance claims adjuster?”
“Don’t pigeonhole me, Sam,” Mary Lou said. “I’m gonna take off now. The hubster is waiting at home with our five kids. My three. Your two.” She giggled. “He thinks I’m at a women’s church retreat.”
“You are bad, Mary Lou. So bad.”
“I learned it from you. And look, here we are, working a case together. Wasn’t it fun?”
Sam shook her head. “I love you, but don’t you ever do this to me again.”
“I will, many times,” she promised. Mary Lou now had a rental car and planned to drive home without Sam and me because she wanted to stop at the Coach Purse sale at the Tanger outlet stores in Barstow—Sam didn’t want to be tempted to spend money she didn’t have.
“Goodbye, Beauty,” Mary Lou said to Sam and the sisters kissed each other’s cheeks.
“Goodbye, Beast,” Mary Lou said to me and winked.
“Did you by any chance tell Mary Lou I’m a werewolf?” It worried me that she knew.
“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “But she’s my drinking buddy.”
“Sam?” I asked. “Did you or didn’t you let the dogs out?”
“I’m not sure.”
Chapter 33
Sam and I went home on a near-empty jet. I was able to buy almost a whole row of middle seats for us with some airline miles I’d stashed long ago. I got all the armrests out of the way. Sam leaned into me, took her shoes off and tucked her feet underneath her. I put my feet up, too, and curved my big arm around her. I held her for almost the whole flight, without even trying to kiss her. It was perhaps the quietest she’d been in some time.
“Vampire on a plane,” I teased. She didn’t smile.
“What’s wrong, Sam?”
She made noises in her throat before she finally spoke. “Kingsley, I don’t think my entity can get into Heaven. Which means I can’t either. If I get killed, I’m doomed to no afterlife.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
After a few minutes of silence, I thought of something happy to talk about. “Remember the Christmas where both Danny and I came to your house? And while you cooked, we talked shop about our legal cases?”
“I remember the night well. It was almost a full moon and later that night, after you and Danny left, I killed a child murderer in my neighborhood.”
I looked at her in alarm.
“Kidding,” she said quickly. “Sheesh, Kingsley. Put your eyeballs back in your head.”
“Bad joke, Sam.”
“I know.” She paused. “It was a good Christmas. I liked it that we were all together for it, singing carols and being a family. Even my idiot ex-husband.”
“Don’t speak ill of those who have gone into the light while doing good deeds,” I said.
“Is that a rule?”
“My rule.”
She nodded. “It was Danny’s last Christmas with Anthony and Tammy. At least, they have that to remember him.”
I kept going. “Remember how we all played board games and ate like it was the apocalypse?”
She nodded. “I remember cooking, but I couldn’t eat food then. I didn’t have my special ring yet.”
“But we had fun that day?”
“A lot of fun. I beat you at Scrabble.”
“I beat
you at Pictionary,” I countered.
I turned on my phone and opened an album. “I don’t know if I ever showed you the photos I took that night.”
“I forgot about that.” She curled tightly into me in a way I loved. It was like spooning while sitting up.
I showed her photos of Danny with their kids, and me with her kids, and even Sam with her kids, her face blurred in the photos. I had shots of Sam and her kids goofing around at the table with the whipped cream and squirting each other.
Later, Danny had gone home to his apartment, and Sam’s kids had gone to bed. Before I’d left, I’d taken a single photo of Sam in the dark yard. She was a shapely silhouette in a red sweater dress, black boots, and long dark hair. It was a candid shot of her in front of the Pep Boys sign, which hung like a god over her back fence.
“You can’t really see me well in the photo,” she complained. “As I remember, the flash didn’t go off.”
“I can see you fine. You have the most beautiful love inside of you. It shines through every bit of evil in the world and lets me see you for who you are.”
“Stop trying to make me feel better about being damned and cheated out of my ticket to Heaven.”
“No, I will not stop,” I said. “And don’t assume that you don’t have a soul to enter Heaven. I think you have a lot of soul.”
She squeezed my hand.
“I almost forgot.” I reached under my seat and handed her two shopping bags stuffed with Las Vegas chotchkes from the World’s Largest Gift Shop.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“The bag with the Vegas boxers and the magic tricks,” I explained, “is for Anthony. The bag with the Vegas hair accessories and the friendship bracelet kit is for Tammy. There are stuffed animals and electronic games, too. I also got them matching custom T-shirts that say, ‘My mom went to Vegas with a werewolf and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.’”
“Kingsley. You’re so freaking sweet.” She got so choked up over the silly junk I’d bought for her kids, but I got her to smile through her tears, which I kissed away. She crawled into my lap and put her ear against my thumping heart. Then she whispered my name like a prayer. I was nearly undone. Such was the power that Samantha Moon had over me.
If I’d learned anything about Sam on this trip, it was that there was no way I was going to ask her to marry me and wreck our genuine connection that was unforced and unhindered by some idealistic romantic vision I had of us marching into eternity together with her clad in a poufy white dress.
I loved her so much that I would probably never again try to define what we were to each other. I vowed to beat down my enormous werewolf ego and put forth my humblest heart for whatever shattered pieces she might want of it.
Samantha Moon was not hundreds of years old, like me. She still had growing to do as a vampire, and I would have to respect that she had her own path, her own destiny. And that love would come, here and there, in its own time.
Her time.
Not mine.
Chapter 34
Back in Yorba Linda—and just in the nick of time for the full moonrise—I’d had one of the hardest turnings ever.
The last thing I remembered was Franklin telling me that a mailed package from Jolie had arrived with my fee in it, all in cash, and that it was in the floor safe with Sam’s secret engagement ring. Almost as soon as he’d said it, we hurried to the basement to lock me up.
Though I didn’t remember it all, I remembered some of it and the memories made me shudder. I didn’t tell anyone that every time I turned, I relived the deaths of every being I’d ever killed in my werewolf form. The murders, because that was what they were, were like live, recurring nightmares that made me howl and scratch up the stone walls with my claws, then chew on the chains and the padlocks of my cell with my sharp teeth.
It was agony to be the werewolf and lock myself away during the full moons. Pure agony. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, not even on Morrie. The devil’s agent was now at the mercy of Dracula’s whim when it came to punishment. I didn’t even want to know what The Big D would do to him for saying he was king of the vampires, let alone for pretending to be the boss of Hell.
And yet, despite it all, there were blessings of being a werewolf that no one but a werewolf would ever know. I had lived through the eyes of a werewolf and grown bigger and stronger with each turning. Perhaps I’d grown wiser with each turning, too. I liked to think so. I tried to find some peace in my heart about what I’d done to fulfill Jolie’s requests. I had fulfilled them, but not in the way she’d expected. I wondered if she was looking down on me and hopefully, smiling.
I wondered a lot of things inside my werewolf skin as I clawed the walls and howled out my pain for killing the girl with the voice from Heaven. A place I’d helped send her back to. I was both happy and profoundly sad, all at once. I clawed the walls. I whined and ached for something to counter the pain.
At dawn, when I changed back into a man, Franklin came to unlock my cage. I lay on the cold concrete floor in the blankets I’d shredded on this particularly bad turning.
Franklin’s hand was gentle as he touched on my shoulder. “Sir? Morning has broken.”
Naked, I turned over and groaned. “I hate mornings, and I hate werewolf hangovers.”
“Grumpy, aren’t we?” Franklin quipped.
“Aren’t I always? After?”
“Always. It was a hard one this time, wasn’t it?” Franklin asked more kindly.
“Very hard.”
“I heard you howling more than usual. It was chilling. Did you have to kill someone in Vegas?”
“Yes, and it was heartbreaking.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, but thanks,” I said. “I did help catch a bad guy, but someone else took him away.”
“How bad of a guy?” Franklin asked.
“He was pure evil.”
“Who?”
“A demon who was a talent agent and an agent for the underworld,” I said.
“Their kind are evil, aren’t they?” Franklin said, and offered me a hand up.
“Some are. I guess I’ve defended a few talent agents in court.” I stood and wrapped the shredded blanket around my middle. “How did the skin grafting on your neck go last Friday?”
“Painful, but worth it, I think.” Franklin turned his patchwork face away so I could see the back of his neck. “What do you think?”
“Beautiful job,” I said. “You’re already almost healed up. I can’t even see the seams anymore.”
“I like the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon you got me.”
“I’m glad, Franklin. Only the best for my old friend.”
“Sir, please. You had a Groupon.”
I chuckled. “Yes, I did.”
“You have a guest waiting.”
“Ugh. It’s too early for clients. Who is it?”
She came down the stairs noiselessly and smiled at me. “Samantha Moon, that’s who.”
“Miss Moon, I asked you to please wait upstairs,” Franklin said.
“I know. I was just curious about what was down here.”
“We haven’t redecorated the dungeon since the last time you sneaked down here,” Franklin said.
I shook my head at Franklin. “It’s okay. There’s nothing to see here.”
“There’s you,” she said. “Rrr!”
I was embarrassed and clutched the blanket to me. “You should go upstairs, Sam. I’m going to shower down here in the basement and then I’ll throw on some sweats and come up.”
“I thought…”
“What?”
“I thought you might want a bubble bath. I’m running one upstairs in your master bathroom. I’ll wash your back… or something.”
If I would have been wearing my tail right now, it would have been wagging like crazy. Suddenly, my werewolf hangover was gone. “That sounds really good.”
I looked at my butler. “Franklin, would you like to take the S
UV and go get yourself a coffee and some scones or something? Heck, take the day off. Ms. Moon and I would like to be alone for a while.”
“Certainly, sir.”
After Franklin left, I shucked my blanket and gave Sam a smoldering look.
“Well?” I said.
She smirked. “Are you even bigger than you were a few days ago on the train?”
“Yes, because I grow everywhere with each turning.”
“Oh, you big, bad werewolf,” Sam teased.
I laughed wickedly and gathered her up from the basement stairs.
She squealed in a way that I liked, as if she were prey. I playfully carried her up two more flights of stairs to my master bath. I growled into her neck, making her dissolve into bubbly laughter. This was the Sam I adored.
With a foot, I turned off the bath water just before the bubbles spilled over onto the floor.
She shrieked with laughter as I plopped her into the tub, clothes and all. “Kingsley! I don’t have any dry clothes with me.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to go home in one of my long-sleeved shirts. You look so cute in them. After.”
“Oh, you!” Mirth flashed in her beautiful, odd eyes.
“Look out below!” I warned.
When she moved out of the way, I did a cannonball into the tub after her and water went everywhere.
“Kingsley.” She said my name fondly as bubbles floated in the air—rainbow prisms lit in them by the growing dawn showing through the one-way picture window that overlooked my garden. All of the windows in my house had special UV screens for Sam’s comfort. We playfully splashed each other in the sudsy, hot water and then calmed down to look into each other’s eyes.
“I can’t believe you haven’t seen your eyes in a mirror for nine years,” I said.
“How do they look?”
“Deep. Like a werewolf could get lost in them for a long time.”
“How long?” she asked.
I now knew better than to try to make her commit to some scary “forever” with me. I replied, “How long? You decide.”