Bite Somebody Else
Page 22
Heidi almost tumbled from her seat. “Jesus in short pants!”
“Yeah, it does that.” Imogene went to the kitchen for another beer and cracked it open on her way back to the living room. “You wanna give her the long story or the short?”
Celia looked up at Ian.
“Well,” he said, “there are people here who want to steal the baby.”
Heidi’s too-tan face crumbled into a grimace.
“But we’re working on it. Imogene is, um, practicing glamouring. And Dr. Savage and Dean—you remember them?”
“’Course. Matrix looking motherfuckers.”
Ian smiled. “Right. They’re preparing. Plus, we have help from Nicholas.”
“Who’s Nicholas?”
“An asshole,” Imogene said.
Ian ignored her. “He’s Celia’s doctor. He knows the people who’re trying to steal the baby, and he’s, I guess, making a plan to stop them.”
“Adding the security system was a good step.” Heidi nodded. “Can you trust this Nicholas guy?”
“Yes,” Celia said. “Completely.”
Imogene rolled her eyes.
“Then, I’ll sleep on your couch.”
“Wha…” Celia said.
“That’s actually a good idea,” Imogene said. “Having a hunter on site. And where’d you get a pitchfork?”
Heidi’s lips curled up. “I always carry a pitchfork.”
Imogene nodded.
“Who are these folks who wanna steal your baby, anyway?”
Celia put her hands over her belly. “They’re with an organization known as the Stadium Lamia. Olivier and Amora are their names.”
“Stadium Lamia?” Heidi pursed her thin lips. “Sounds like a piece of female anatomy.”
“That’s what I said.” Imogene gulped her beer.
She went home soon after to do a bit of dealing, as if everything was totally normal when everything was totally not. Imogene was comforted by the thought of Heidi being with her friends, although on her way out, Heidi was already shouting about using their cable to watch the newest episode of True Crime—her TV obsession. Yeah, it would be annoying to have Heidi around all the time, but it was better than ending up deaded. Imogene couldn’t even think about Ian without a heartbeat or Celia without a head.
As the sun began to rise, she stomped upstairs and pushed open the door to her bedroom. Her blankets were a tangle of fabric. Without further thought, she closed her bedroom door and walked to the guest room. She fell face-first onto the bed that once belonged to Nicholas and was not surprised to find his scent hiding along the edge of a pillowcase and in the corner of a white sheet. She stuffed her face into the fabric and breathed.
Then, for good measure, she texted him: I. Hate. You.
Thirty seconds later, her phone played the beginning notes of “Sunglasses at Night.”
He responded with: Good.
She scrolled through her phone and fell asleep to Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
Chapter Seventeen
The following night, Heidi cooed over Nicholas like he was a little leprechaun that might grant her a wish—even though his hair wasn’t completely red and he wasn’t Irish or short. Heidi also had trouble believing he was a vampire, considering she said he looked “fresh as a baby’s ass.”
“Whatever the hell that means,” Imogene muttered before shoving him toward the bedroom, where Celia waited for her doctor visit.
Of course, Ian and Imogene stayed close. Subconsciously—or maybe consciously—Imogene wasn’t leaving Nicholas alone with her pregnant friend. No way. At least he was sober, unlike the night before, and he was back to wearing suits again: a black one with a black pin-striped shirt that made him look like a gangster but, like, a cute gangster who would buy you flowers before killing you.
“How do you feel?” he asked Celia.
She bit her lip and smiled up at him. “Okay. You?”
“Who gives a shit how he feels?” Imogene asked.
Nicholas cleared his throat and knelt at the side of Celia’s bed before reaching into his bag and pulling out a stethoscope. “May I inquire about the mad woman in your living room?”
“Oh, she’s my ex-landlady. She’s a serial killer. But she only kills her husbands.”
“I think it’s called a black widow,” Ian said.
“Ah. Right. Ian?”
Ian held out his hand. Celia’s check-ups were practically choreographed by then. Nicholas used the warm palm of Ian’s hand to warm the stethoscope before putting it on Celia’s belly.
“Is she still—”
“Fuck!” the baby shouted.
“Yep,” Nicholas said.
“I mean, we’ve been really careful about cussing in front of her, because we don’t want her entire vocabulary to be, you know, out of a Quentin Tarantino movie.”
“Oh, we shouldn’t have watched Pulp Fiction the other night,” Ian said.
“Oh, shit, you’re so right.” Celia put her hands to her forehead. “Nicholas, I can’t help feeling I’m going to be a terrible mother. I mean, I just let my baby listen to Pulp Fiction! What kind of mother does that?”
He moved the little metal circle up and down her stomach. “You’re going to be a fine mother, Celia.”
“Celia!”
They all froze.
“Celia!”
“Did you hear that?” Nicholas said.
Celia’s hands went from her forehead to her mouth. “She said my name!”
Ian sat down on the bed next to his wife and put his hand on Celia’s stomach. His smile was bright enough to power two solar systems. “No, you silly girl,” he whispered. “Say mommy.”
At the sound of Ian’s voice, Imogene watched Celia’s skin jump and witnessed the shape of a tiny foot kicking for a soccer ball. “Ian! Ian! Ianianianian!”
Ian laughed when his daughter started shouting his name but soon, his eyes turned wet and red. He smiled through his tears. He kissed Celia’s hand, her wrist, and the inside of her elbow. “I love you so much,” he said.
Celia smiled. “Tell her that!”
Ian kissed Celia’s stomach. “I love you, little girl.”
“Ian!” the baby shouted again.
Nicholas shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never even heard of anything like this.”
The shape of a hand pressed from within Celia’s skin and quietly, as if from the bottom of a pond, they heard, “Nicholas.”
Nicholas looked up at Imogene, eyes aflame in hues of green and gold. He smiled, and she couldn’t help but smile back. She tussled his hair. Even when he wrapped his arms around her thighs and rested his head against her hip, she hugged him back.
“Imogene, say something,” Celia said. “Let her hear you!”
Imogene shook her head.
“Come on, love.” Nicholas squeezed her legs.
“Uh, hi, talking baby.” She chortled. “Shit, are you going to give her a fucking name?”
“Geeeeeene!” the baby said. She said it with the vigor she reserved for the f-word, which only seemed fitting.
“Close enough.” Imogene pulled herself from Nicholas’s grasp. “That is too weird, man.”
They all laughed when the baby agreed with a resounding, “Fuck!”
Celia grabbed Nicholas’s hand. “It’s gotta be soon. Right? The baby.”
“We’ve got to move fast.” Nicholas looked up at Imogene, eyes big as Vixen’s fake breasts.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
He stood and pulled his cell phone from the inside of his suit coat. “We’re going out, Imogene.”
“What?”
“Look, Olivier and Amora invited us out this evening. I declined, obviously, considering you hate me.”
“She doesn’t hate you. She can’t—”
“Zip it, Merk. Why would they want to go out with me?”
He texted as he talked. “They want to get to know you better, probably to
see how powerful you are—possibly to even recruit you. Although I know you to be…” He cleared his throat. “Although I know you to be a loving and caring person, your reputation precedes you and would lead people to think, well, that you might be callous and serve the SL in a similar capacity as myself. Doing dirty work for a very sizeable amount of money.”
She crossed her arms. “How sizeable?”
He tilted his head down and looked at her from beneath lowered brows.
“I’m kidding.”
Celia leaned up on the bed. “Is it safe for her to be around them?”
Nicholas put his phone back in his pocket. “She’s safe with me. They’re at a bar called Euphemia Haye.”
“Shit, I’m not paying twenty bucks for a drink.”
Nicholas sighed. “I will.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? And do we have to act like a couple?”
“I know it makes your skin crawl, but if you could manage.”
“To what end?”
He moved a step closer and lowered his voice. “Women don’t often break it off with me, Imogene. It would be very suspicious to them, Amora in particular, if you did.”
She smirked. “Oh, how humble of you.”
He took her hand and dragged her from the bedroom, not without a bit of angry thrashing on Imogene’s part. “This is important, Imogene. Do you want to save your friends lives, save that baby?”
“Duh.”
“Then, you have to glamour a vampire tonight. Give us the upper hand in what promises to be a very messy, very eminent battle. Use the anger you harbor toward me to harness the power I witnessed last night but channel it into one person—one vampire, even if it’s me.”
She crossed her arms tightly. “I hate you so much.”
“And I love you.” His eyes went wide.
Imogene’s emotions felt much too big for her chest.
“Blimey, that was not what I meant to say.”
Ian came shuffling from the bedroom, still wearing a geeky grin. “So do we have a plan?”
“Yeah,” Imogene said. “I’m glamouring a vampire. Tonight.”
Heidi poked her red wigged head around the corner. “It’s not possible.”
“We’ll bloody see about that,” Imogene said. Maybe a little bit of Nicholas had rubbed off on her, as well.
Imogene pulled her black convertible to a sudden halt in the small, unpaved parking lot next to Euphemia Haye, a fancy restaurant well hidden off the main strip of Admiral Key by thick Myrtle Oaks; wild, pink Angel’s Trumpets; and the ultimate Florida accessory, the Bird of Paradise. Nicholas tried to jump immediately from the car, but she grabbed the lapels of his suit.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Even in the dark, she recognized a wrinkled look of disbelief. “What?”
“We’re supposed to be a happy couple, fucking like bunnies. We should smell like each other, right, or they’ll notice.” She tapped her finger against her forehead. “Attention to detail, Nicky.”
He curled his hand into the beginning of a fist.
“Nicholas,” she said. “Nicholas, okay. Just kiss me and get it over with and we’ll go inside.”
He closed the car door and pulled her to him with his hand on the side of her face, his fingers playing with the wild curls at the back of her neck. He kissed her once, quickly, but of course, that wasn’t going to be enough to slather scents back and forth. When he pulled back, Imogene held on. She even managed to swing a long, skinny leg across the gearshift and around the side of Nicholas’s hip.
Surprisingly, he growled.
He must have used his feet to push off from the car door, because he ended up in her lap, Imogene’s legs wrapped around his waist. When his mouth sucked on her throat, she stuttered, “Good goddamn.”
The next thing she knew, she was nibbling his ear. Her hands clawed at his dress shirt, and she cursed the expensive fabric and buttons. He rutted against her until her head flew back and hit the car window. Imogene couldn’t breathe—couldn’t get enough air into her lungs—but who cared? Breathing was boring.
She pulled on his hair until he lifted his mouth from her collarbone and found her lips again. They were a tangle of tongues and gasping breaths. When someone’s random body part accidentally hit the car horn, they both jumped and snapped out of it, whatever it was.
“Christ.” Nicolas leaned back in his seat and adjusted his suit.
“Guess that’ll work,” Imogene said, pulling at her tight t-shirt and shorts. She sat up straight. “Did you undo my bra?”
“Force of habit.” His voice came out gravelly, like he’d spent the last five minutes screaming at her instead of snogging her senseless.
“Well, bravo.” She reached back and re-hooked it before puffing up her purple hair and donning her sunglasses. “Let’s do this shit.”
They walked toward the restaurant that more closely resembled a rich person’s house than a place of business. Instead of entering on the ground floor, Nicholas led her up a set of side steps, grabbing her hand when they reached the door. Inside, she had to flip her sunglasses to the top of her head, because it was practically as dark inside as out.
There were a few dim lamps and even dimmer overhead lighting. The whole place was built of shining, dark wood. Rich men and women loaded the bar—mostly married, by the look of it. In the far corner, a guy with an acoustic guitar played “The Girl from Ipanema,” surrounded by couches and secluded lounge areas, ideal for a secret smooch. She spotted Olivier and Amora alone in the corner at a small, circular table.
Olivier lifted a hand and smiled when he saw them. Imogene wondered if Amora was going to notice Nicholas’s obvious erection, which he was doing his best to hide behind his suit coat. She still tasted him on her mouth—fresh basil—and felt the ghost of his hands against her ribs and ass. She felt like humping something. Anything. A couch cushion. Whatever.
Olivier stood as they approached. “How wonderful to see you both.” He shook Nicholas’s hand and kissed Imogene’s. “Has anyone ever told you that you smell of strawberries?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but everyone thinks it’s because I drink a lot of rum punch.”
“It’s your skin,” Nicholas whispered.
“Well, then, I guess no one ever had the balls to call me sweet until Lord Nicholas here.” She pulled up a chair to avoid squeezing into the tiny booth next to Amora. She turned the chair backwards and straddled it before glancing at the bartender and glamouring him, which brought him running in their direction. “Speaking of, rum punch. Double.”
The bartender was cute with his thin moustache and crisp, white shirt and bowtie. He nodded, eyes glazed.
“He’ll take a vodka martini, up.” She elbowed Nicholas.
“Right away.” He scurried back to his place behind the bar, surrounded by illuminated bottles of varied colors and expense.
“You’re good at that,” Amora said.
“Very.” Imogene eyed the bitch’s dress of black satin. She looked like she had gold glitter on her cheekbones.
“Just how good are you at glamouring, Imogene?” Olivier slid back into his seat while Nicholas pulled up another chair and sat at Imogene’s side with one hand on her knee.
“Good enough,” she said.
“I’m sure you are a woman of many talents.” Amora sniffed pointedly, obviously sensing Nicholas all over Imogene’s skin. Amazing how her European accent could make even a would-be compliment sound bitchy.
“You have no idea.” Imogene flashed her fangs a bit when she bit her bottom lip, which made Amora smile back at her—not in a nice way. “How does it feel to know I’m fucking the man you’re totally Fatal Attraction over?”
Olivier smiled, and Nicholas just sat there, waiting.
Amora chuckled and ran her tongue over her lips. “I never did much care for insolent, little rabbits. Maybe I’ll boil you someday.”
Imogene matched her amused expression. “Like to see you try.”
Imogene folded her skinny arms across the back of the chair. “Oh, Olivier, we both know that’s not true. Nicky doesn’t have a heart.”
Olivier laughed, and Nicholas leaned back in his seat to allow space for the bartender with their drinks. Imogene took a quick sip and smiled at the mustachioed man. “That is delicious.”
He nodded and wandered back to the bar, weaving a bit, until Imogene blinked and set him free from her power.
“I understand you’re a blood dealer,” Olivier said. He sipped old, peaty scotch. Imogene could smell it from across the table like the scent of burning gauze.
“Yeah. Inherited the business when I chopped a midget’s head off last spring with garden shears. Well, when I say ‘inherited’… maybe more a hostile takeover.”
Olivier clapped his long, thin hands together once. The gray suit he wore matched his gray hair. “My goodness, she’s an animal, isn’t she?”
Nicholas fingered the rim of his martini but didn’t drink it.
“Do you like your job? The blood dealing?”
Imogene flipped her sunglasses down on her nose. “Dunno. You trying to recruit me, Olivier?”
His brown eyes were almost black in the dim light, as were Amora’s. He scratched at the mole on his cheek. “Perhaps. The Stadium Lamia is always looking for talented vampires to add to our midst, and with your glamouring ability, you would fit perfectly within our agenda.”
“That right? What exactly is your agenda?”
“Improving our race. Increasing our power.”
Imogene tilted her head. “Sounds kinda elitist.”
Olivier chuckled. “It is. Only the best of the best, don’t you agree, Nicky?”
Nicholas gave a tight-lipped smile, no teeth.
“Wouldn’t you like a change of scenery, Imogene? You’d like London.”
She clicked her tongue. “Lemme think. Trade clear nights near the ocean for rainy nights in the middle of a polluted, overcrowded city? Mm, don’t think so.”
Amora stood, shaking the table. “Nicky, dance with me.”
Imogene stood, too, putting her sunglasses in the back of her shorts as if prepping for a fight. “I don’t think so, sweetie.” She held out her hand. “Nicholas?”