“Guilty as charged,” he said with a laugh, this time putting his accent on full display. “I’m a writer. Seeing America for the first time. I hope to find a novel in it somewhere.”
“Try Borders. I’ve seen a few in there from time to time.” Still, something about him struck me as odd. “Why do you cover up your accent?”
This question seemed to catch him off guard. In the split second he hesitated before answering, I knew whatever came from his mouth would be a lie. “I suppose I just do it automatically. Probably picked up the Yank accent from him.”
I eyed C.K.’s companion, who sat with arms folded across his chest, mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes.
“He doesn’t look very talkative,” I observed casually. “How long have you been in the country?”
Now he grew visibly suspicious about my line of questioning. “About three weeks.”
“Doesn’t seem long enough for a Brit to completely drop his accent.” I reached across the table faster than he could move, and grabbed his wrist.
Ice cold.
“You liar,” I rasped, dropping his arm. “You’re a vampire.”
He shot a panicked glance at the waitress. She hadn’t looked up from her paperback.
Lowering his voice to a barely audible whisper, he leaned in. “How the hell did you know that?”
I forced my transformation, letting him view my true face for just a second. Before the waitress could notice, I shook it off.
“Holy Christ, you’re not Movement, are you?” He reached into his jacket.
“No, I’m not, so leave that stake where it is.” I looked up to make sure his friend wasn’t prepping for a slaughter, either. “But you should be ashamed of yourself!”
His eyes bugged. “Why?”
“I know what you were doing! You were going to try and charm your way into my pants, and then you were going to eat me. It’s disgusting!” I smacked my palm down on the table, and my coffee cup jumped.
This time, the waitress did look up. “Don’t let him bother you, honey. He’s been trying his same tired act on every gal what come in here tonight. And I do mean all night, Mr. Free Refill.”
“Thank you, Ruby,” C.K. muttered through clenched teeth. “For your flawless critique of my wooing style.”
She cracked her gum. “Whatever.”
I grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt and pulled him forward. “So, what’s your game? Why are you really out here?”
With a look of pure disgust, he wrenched his clothing from my grasp. “For your information, I wasn’t lying. I am a writer.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, really. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. George Gordon. More commonly referred to as Lord Byron?” He puffed up his chest like an ostrich doing a mating dance.
“Bullshit.” I leaned back in the booth and gave him the glare I used to reserve for kids in the E.R. who swore they hadn’t seen their overdosing friend using recreational drugs.
“No.” Guiltily, he held up his hands. “I’m not deliberately seeking trouble to serve as its cause. I’m looking for inspiration.”
“Inspiration?” I echoed sarcastically. “I’m supposed to believe Lord Byron has writer’s block?”
“You try writing nonstop for centuries and not need a little help getting the creative juices flowing now and then.” He reached into his jacket. “I’m just going for my cigarettes.”
“I haven’t seen any new work from you. Of course, I’m not a big reader.” I watched him closely, ready to leap into self-defense mode at the least suspicion.
“Well, of course you haven’t. Can’t exactly go by George Gordon, can I?” He produced a package covered with dramatic artwork, and pulled a cigarette made with black paper from it. He held the pack toward me. “Clove?”
I shook my head. “Do you have any idea what those do to your lungs? You’re better off smoking regular cigarettes. So, what have you been writing?”
“My last release was Blood Heat. My pseudonym is Sharon Ekard.” He reached into his pocket, slowly again, and withdrew a glossy bookmark. “You can keep this.”
I scanned the image. A tall, dark and ridiculously muscled man with badly painted fangs held a woman in a sheer, clinging gown in the crook of his elbow. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed in ecstasy as he leaned in for a bite. “You write…vampire romance novels?”
“Guilty as charged.” He shrugged. “But I’m looking for a change of pace. One can tolerate heaving bosoms and turgid members for only so long. My friend here claims to be heading to Death Valley on some kind of top secret mission. I don’t believe a word of it, of course, but a trip like this could easily be parlayed into a humorous travel diary.”
The scary biker in the other booth grunted. Byron turned and waved to him. “That is, if he doesn’t kill me first. Which is a very real possibility, should I continue to release information so carelessly.”
Death Valley. The land of the dead.
The biker flipped the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and shifted in the booth, propping his boots up on the seat. The familiar insignia of the Fangs, a single tooth dripping venom, rested on the arm of his leather jacket in the form of a dusty, embroidered patch. I had to bite my tongue to keep from making a crack about the Girl Scouts, but my mouth gaped when I recognized the symbol hastily painted below it.
A dragon curled around a perfect diamond.
The dragon diamond was the Soul Eater’s pet emblem. It existed in the form of a large pendant “gifted” to the human who would be sacrificed to the Soul Eater at the vampire New Year’s ceremony. Jacob Seymour himself had given the diamond to Nathan’s wife, Marianne, and I’d selected Ziggy to be the wearer the night I’d escaped Cyrus’s house. Neither sacrifice had gone as planned.
Byron leaned over the table, a grin of pure wickedness curving his lips. “So, are you in town long? Long enough for a day of—”
“I did a paper on you in college.” I cocked my head and studied him a bit more closely. He looked more fashionably gaunt than the woodcut in the front of my copy of his collected works made him appear. “What happened?”
He sighed. “Why is it every time vampires meet, they have to share ‘how I was turned’ stories? It’s not all that interesting.”
“Most vampires aren’t major figures in literature.” I sipped my coffee and stared at him. If he lied to me, I would be able to tell. His face hid nothing, no matter how he might think he was fooling me. I could see the compulsion to lie working across his face as he considered what to say.
Finally, he took on a look of complete hopelessness and held up his hands. “Fine. Since you and the whole bloody world know about me, it was the consumption. I was near dead when one of the physicians attending me did the job. Near enough, anyway, that I made it through the burial convincingly.”
“You were buried alive?” A chill went up my spine.
“Undead, actually.” He took a draw off his sickly sweet smelling cigarette. “A writer never sneers at experience, Miss—”
“Harrison,” I lied quickly. No sense in revealing my real name in front of Grizzly Adams, who never stopped watching us for a moment. “You can call me…Maxine.”
“Maxine?” Byron’s elegant nose wrinkled in distaste. “But as I was saying, after the burial, the physician dug me up and I’ve been here ever since.”
“I have to give you credit.” I leaned back in the seat. “I couldn’t have stood it. Claustrophobic.”
“That’s how it was done in those days. Mozart did it. Hugo did it.”
I sat up straighter. “Mozart and Victor Hugo?”
“In the past, if you truly wanted eternal life, you had to work for it,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard my interruption. “Now a vampire is lucky if he or she even sees the mortician’s slab.”
“Lucky?” I thought of Cyrus cold and dead on the gurney in the E.R. “I would hardly call it lucky.”
“So, since you’re bursting to kno
w about my change, you must be dying to talk about yours. What happened? Dark prince of love sweep you off your feet and then never call?” Byron shook his head and blew a sequence of smoke rings into the air between us. “They always promise eternity, don’t they?”
“I was attacked and turned accidentally. It’s not the most interesting of stories.” I rolled my eyes. “Nothing like Blood Heat.”
“Well, of course not. It if were, you’d be on the bestseller list, not me.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “What are you doing out in the desert, Maxine?”
“What are you doing out in the desert, George?” I put the same sarcastic emphasis on his name as he had on my assumed one.
“I already told you mine.” He looked over his shoulder at his companion. “I’m writing the great American novel.”
“You’re British.” I took another drink of my quickly cooling coffee.
His gaze, suddenly intense, never wavered. “You’re looking for something.”
Prickles ran up the back of my neck. The oddest feeling, that he was telling me something I just wasn’t picking up on, slowly worked into my hypersensitive brain. I wanted to shrug it off as paranoia, but something in his eyes told me there were parts to this encounter I had missed.
I looked at the biker. The parts I was missing were the parts Byron couldn’t tell me.
Hopefully, my distress wasn’t obvious to either of them when I looked Byron in the eye and said, “No. I’m not looking for anything.”
“Anybody?” he mouthed, then looked over his shoulder at the biker, who shifted in his seat.
He knows something is up. Don’t say another word, I pleaded inwardly. I had to disentangle myself from this conversation before I revealed too much, or he did. Luckily, the lightening sky gave me the perfect out.
I drained my mug and stood. “Well, I’ve got to be getting to shelter. What are you guys doing?”
“Painted Pony Motor Lodge. It’s on the other side of the highway, but my friend here lives dangerously.” Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, Byron took a long drag on his sickly sweet cigarette. “How about you?”
“Still haven’t found a place.” I certainly didn’t want them knocking on my door at sundown, or worse, torching the van with me in it. “I’ll probably head up to the next exit.”
“You might not make it.” Byron pulled a pen from his pocket and swiped my napkin. “If you’re still alive at sunset, here’s my cell number. Maybe we could get together in a more intimate setting.”
He scribbled hastily on the paper and pushed it back to me. Below his number, where he should have written his name, were the words St. Anne’s.
I looked up sharply, and he gave me a warning glance. I waved at the biker, who lifted two fingers in greeting. “Well, I’ll see you gentlemen down the road.”
Later, cramped in the hot, confining prison of the van, I groggily punched Byron’s number into my cell.
He answered like a man waking after a three-day bender. “What?”
“Are you alone?” I had a fleeting mental image of his hairy traveling companion curled up next to him in bed à la Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but it wasn’t nearly as funny as it should have been.
“Yes, thank God.” There was a long pause, then a noise of disgust. “Did you just call to chat?”
“Why did you write this on the napkin?” I tried, unsuccessfully, to make myself more comfortable on my pallet of sleeping bags.
He gave a lazy yawn. “What? My number? I have no idea. If I’d known you would call in the middle of the day—”
“The other thing. St. Anne’s?” I took a deep breath. “What do you know?”
“I know we’re going there, and I know any vampire in her right mind wouldn’t be traveling through the desert in a van that could break down just for fun. You’re looking for someone. I would place a sizable wager on your intended target and my companion’s being the same person.”
“Are you going to get in my way?” Out of habit, I reached for the ax and stakes tucked beneath my bedding.
“No. I can’t promise the same from my associate, however.” He paused. “Do you want me to keep our conversation between us?”
“No, I’d like that big, hairy son-of-a-bitch to hunt me down and rip my head right off my neck. What do you think?” I pressed my palm to my forehead. One of the disadvantages of being room temperature was the fact that if the “room” happened to be one-hundred-and-two degrees, you ended up one-hundred-and-two degrees, as well.
The Painted Pony Motor Inn was probably air-conditioned. Byron, you lucky bastard.
There was a heavy sigh on the other end of the line. “Sarcasm is terribly overused in your day and age.”
“You can gripe about it in your book.” I flopped back against the lumpy sleeping bags. “But thanks for the help.”
“No problem. I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but these vampires are no group to trifle with.”
I closed my eyes, praying for strength. “I think I can handle them.”
“If you need help, feel free to call. My associate won’t room with me. He thinks I am, and I quote, ‘a faggot.’” I could hear Byron’s wry smile over the phone. “Good luck, milady.”
And what great luck I had. I didn’t need to worry about finding Cyrus. Like a bookie coming to collect on a gambling debt, Cyrus had found me.
At least, a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew where Cyrus was found me. Since I’d had no idea where to go or what to do when I got there, I would have to take what I could get.
I would just have to follow Byron.
As the policeman poked his flashlight into the hedges, Max thought, This was an incredibly stupid idea.
He’d tracked the bitch-dog here, to Ah-Nab-Awen Park. Max hadn’t been far from where Nathan had allegedly ripped poor Ms. Allen’s throat out when he’d thought the werewolf had picked up his scent. Max’s first instinct had been to hide, not because he was afraid of her but because he didn’t want her to follow him to Nathan. It had never crossed his mind that the steps coming down the path might have belonged to someone else.
Someone like law enforcement.
It also hadn’t occurred to him that lurking in the very same bushes a madman had hidden in before he brutally murdered an innocent pedestrian might look a tad suspicious.
Harrison, you moron.
A loud, resonant howl caused the officer prodding the bushes to jump and drop his light. Max gave silent thanks to the dog.
The officer’s shoulder radio crackled, then a long stream of garbled jargon spewed forth.
“Affirmative,” the officer responded, groping through the foliage with a clumsy hand. “There’s nothing out here, anyway. Everybody seems to be sticking to curfew.”
The dog howled again, just as the cop’s beefy fingers closed on his flashlight. His steps were brisk as he hurried away.
Max waited until he heard a car door close, then flopped onto his back with much rustling of shrubbery. Cold sweat trickled down his back, and only when he noticed his whole body shaking did he realize he was afraid.
Mortally terrified, more like it. There wasn’t much he feared, but the police made that short list. They could cuff you, stick you in the back of their car and drive you off someplace where there was no sun-control.
“You can come out now, coward,” a thickly accented voice called.
Max slapped his hands to his face and stretched the skin out of shape. This is really my night.
Trying to extricate himself from the bushes as painlessly as possible, he stumbled onto the broken-asphalt path. The werewolf waited for him, standing in the middle of the trail in an all-leather getup that could have come from a bad action movie.
Or a very good porn movie.
“Ever hear the word inconspicuous?” He brushed off the torn knees of his jeans.
“Have you ever heard the words ‘I do not care’?” She didn’t move as he stepped closer.
“You know, lupins are usually
easier to intimidate than this.” He grinned at her outraged curse. “You’re not making my job very easy.”
“I am not a lupin. Filthy traitors!” As she crossed herself and spat, her eyes flashed deadly gold. The pupils narrowed to pinpoints, then flared to encompass the irises.
The effect was unnerving, even after all Max had seen. He stepped back.
“Now who is easily intimidated, vampire?”
Was that humor in her voice? If she hadn’t been such a stone-cold bitch until now, Max would have found it easier to believe. “You scared off the cop?”
She nodded, just once.
“Why?”
She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug as she raised her other arm behind her head. Pulling a heavy, medieval-looking crossbow from her back, she looked it over with a critical eye while she answered. “I hate police.”
“We’re on the same page there.” Max scratched his neck and surveyed the area. “So, you think he’s going to revisit the scene of the crime?”
“No.” She popped the bolt from the bow and slung the weapon across her back again. Pulling a scrap of white fabric from her pocket, she gave the air a long sniff. She waved the cloth under her nose a few times and lifted her head. “He hasn’t been here since he killed her.”
Max groaned. “I could have told you that. He’s not a psychopath.”
“No, he is not.” The werewolf frowned and bent to touch the pavement. She lifted her fingers to her nose. “He is not acting as a vampire, either.”
“What do you mean?” Max knelt on the path, and the scent of blood caught in his nostrils. It had been days since Nathan had killed the woman, and the air was damp with rain. There must have been an enormous amount of blood for it not to have all been washed away by now. “God almighty.”
“When you kill, do you leave this much blood behind?” The werewolf regarded him with a raised eyebrow.
Max couldn’t decide if she was being intentionally antagonistic or if her poor manners were due to the fact she was, biologically, a canine. “For your information, I’ve never killed anyone.”
At least, not in the technical sense.
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