Dead Over Heels (wyndham werewolf)

by MaryJanice Davidson

  She gave me a look of such scorn, my eyebrows nearly scorched.

  “O-kay, don’t look at me like that.” I yawned and scratched. “I guess I better get dressed.”

  “Please,” Jessica begged. “And leave your armpit alone; you look like an ape when you do that. A tall, blond, vampiric ape.”

  “I cannot believe the shit I’ve had to eat, and I’ve only been awake for five minutes! Leave that alone,” I added, because Jessica was tugging at the shoe in the wall.

  “It won’t budge,” she gasped. “What did you do?”

  “Some things will never be told.” I opened the door, put a firm hand in the middle of her back, and pushed. “Later, gator.”

  The door had no sooner shut when it opened, and my husband (would I ever get tired of that phrase? prob’ly not) stood in the doorway.

  “Ready for our big day?” I asked.

  “I’d rather,” he replied, eyeing me up and down, “stay in tonight and discuss world politics while chewing on your labia.”

  “That’s . . . sweet. But you promised.”

  He sighed, which was unnecessary for a vampire. I guess his old habits died hard, too. “Let me see the list again.”

  This was a stall technique, since I knew full well he remembered all the stuff I wanted to do. Still, I obligingly dug in my purse and extracted an index card, on which I’d scrawled all the tourist-type things I wanted to do today: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty . . . like that.

  Sinclair never changed expression, but the farther down the list he went, the farther the left corner of his mouth turned down. Meanwhile, I was rapidly dressing in a bra, panties, linen walking shorts, a cherry red sweater, and a pair of René Caovilla walking sandals.

  “You look like a gladiator in those,” was his only comment as he handed my list back.

  “I am a gladiator. Now let’s go!”

  “Must we take the subway?” he whined. “We have a private car at our disposal, thanks to Jessica’s finely honed sense of guilt.”

  “It’s all part of the definitive New York experience,” I said, “so yes.”

  “So is getting mugged,” he muttered, courteously holding the door open for me.

  “Don’t tease. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Something cool to tell my mom.”

  “Awesome,” he replied tonelessly, and followed me out.

  Chapter 9

  Wow! It’s a good thing I’m dead, or I’d be exhausted.” “As opposed to simply bored out of your charming little mind.”

  “Oh, shut up. How could we not go up in the building King Kong climbed with Naomi Watts?”

  “But darling, he didn’t actually climb—”

  “Stop it, you’re ruining the whole thing!”

  “The remake, the original, or the evening?”

  “You’re so talented, you’re wrecking all three. Now, what’s next?”

  “Thankfully, we have completed your interminable list of chores—”

  “Five things!”

  “—and can now return to the hotel where we will be insulted and threatened by Detective Berry.”

  We walked on in silence for a moment while I thought about that.

  “You can’t really blame him for being scared, can you?” I asked quietly.

  There was another long pause, and finally Sinclair forced out a reluctant, “No.”

  “We essentially raped his brain, you know.”

  No comment from the king of the vampires.

  “Just sayin’.”

  Still no comment. I decided to drop the subject. For the time being.

  We were walking hand in hand down Broadway and I still couldn’t get over the noise. It sounded like noon, and it was nearly midnight! But on the flip side, the cool thing about NYC is that everything was open, practically all the time. We’d had no trouble knocking off my list, even though back in Minnesota, everything would have been closed by nine at the latest. Seven, in winter.

  “Spare change?” the zillionth homeless guy asked us, and I smiled at him and gave him a dollar. Sinclair disapproved of this, being a self-made man, but what the hell. I was a rich woman now; legally half of his was mine, and I could do what I liked with my one dollar bills.

  But—this was weird—I could hear the homeless guy fall into step behind us. Did he want more? Because that was just being greedy. It was one thing to be out of work and ask people for money, but to—

  I felt something sharp and pointy against the back of my neck.

  “Alley, now, fuckers!”

  “Which one?” I asked, which I thought was a pretty reasonable question, but he just dug the knife in a little more, pissing me off, and nudged me to the right.

  “Rings, wallet, purse,” he chanted, once we were off busy Broadway. Obviously a professional.

  “I can’t believe it!” I gasped.

  “I can,” Sinclair said with his usual air of morbid disdain. “And if he keeps jabbing you with that pin, I’ll be forced to make him eat it.”

  “We’re being mugged! We saw the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Met, Ellis Island, and the Central Park Zoo, and now we’re finishing the day like real tourists!”

  “I hate zoos.”

  “What kind of a communist psycho hates zoos?”

  “I’ll never get the smell of monkey out of my trousers.”

  “Rings, wallet, purse, now, fuckers!”

  “I can’t wait to tell my mom!”

  “About my trousers?”

  “Are you people fucking deaf?” Another jab. Sinclair snarled, but so quietly only I could hear him. “This is a robbery and you gotta give me your shit!”

  “Oh, I know what this is,” I assured him. I whipped around, faster than he could track, and snatched the knife out of his hand. I bent the blade with my thumb until it was useless as a weapon, then handed it back to him. This was really for his own safety, as God knew what Sinclair would have done to him.

  He stared at it, then stared at me, then turned to run. I thrust my ankle between his and he hit the street.

  “You know, I haven’t had a bite since we got here,” I said. “I mean, besides you.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  We fell on him.

  Chapter 10

  You’ve got an alibi,” Nick grumped at dinner the next night. It was early—about seven thirty—which was good, because I had places to be, and couldn’t suck down my drinks fast enough.

  “Besides our word?” Sinclair asked mildly. He’d given up any semblance of politeness and had brought the paper to dinner, which he was carefully reading. Although we’d been talking for ten minutes, this was the first time Sinclair had spoken up.

  “Yeah. Coroner placed the kid’s time of death between ten and eleven that night—”

  “While the four of us were having dinner,” I finished.

  “Well, duh, Nick,” Jessica said kindly. “You must have known it was a fresh crime scene. Betsy and Sinclair didn’t have time to ditch us, kill a child, and return to the table to argue over dessert.”

  “Mmmff,” Nick grunted.

  “Yes, an intelligent, unbiased professional would have known that,” Sinclair said to the paper.

  Astonishingly, Nick didn’t rise to the bait. A crisis of conscience, maybe?

  “Do you think it was someone here at the hotel?” I asked, almost whispering.

  Nick sent me a look of sizzling scorn; I almost wanted to duck. “Of course.”

  “I doubt it,” Sinclair replied absently.

  “Come on! If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s a fucking duck.”

  “I have no idea what ducks have to do with your crime scene.”

  Nick leaned forward, his blonde hair flopping into his eyes. He pushed it back impatiently and said, “I mean, right around the corner from a hotel run by vampires, with vampire guests, a kid gets killed—by a vampire—and you’re saying it’s got nothing to do with this pl
ace?”

  “I would be surprised. As Betsy said, vampires don’t shit where they eat.”

  “The smart ones, anyway.”

  “I’d actually agree with her”—he nearly gagged as he said it—“but what if it’s a message?”

  “You mean like a note? Except left on the body of a kid?” I felt my gorge rise.

  “Yeah. A message for the king and queen. They knew you were coming, right?”

  “Of course,” Sinclair said carefully. He’d actually laid the paper down.

  “So, maybe someone in here is trying to impress you. Pay tribute. Whatever.”

  “They pay tribute with blood oranges, not ritual sacrifice.”

  “And they oughta know killing a kid is the last thing that will impress us,” I snapped.

  “Will they?” Nick asked quietly. “Your predecessors were pretty bloodthirsty, right? And aren’t you having some trouble being taken seriously by the teeming hordes of the undead?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it like that,” I grumbled, downing my Cosmo (hey, we were in New York) in a hurry.

  “All they know is that there’s a new sheriff in town. My bet is that they’re trying to impress you or freak you out. Either way, he—or she—or they—killed that kid to get to you two.”

  “So what do you suggest we do, Detective Berry?”

  He ticked our options off on his fingers. “One: leave town. Now. Tonight. Two: interview every vampire in this building. Thr—”

  “Pardon me, Your Majesty.” We all looked up and saw the bellboy (bellman) who’d tried to help unpack my shoes when we got here. “The rest of the staff has arrived and await your convenience.”

  “Thank you, O’Neill. I’ll meet with them when we’ve finished here.”

  “As you wish, Majesty.” He bowed in my direction. “My queen.” He ignored Jessica and Nick, but Sinclair must have said they were okay, because otherwise he wouldn’t have come up to the table in the first place.

  And then he trotted off. I was relieved that he hadn’t drowned himself or jumped off a high building after I’d snapped at him our first night, though I’d had no idea he was a vampire.

  “You dog!” Jessica exclaimed. “That’s why you weren’t in the room earlier . . . you were out interviewing suspects.”

  “Of course. I am not unaware of my responsibilities, though it is always refreshing to have someone less than half my age point them out to me.”

  Score! I thought it, but didn’t say it. Nick had the grace to look abashed. Or was it annoyed? Then he went back into jerk mode and said, “I want to be there for the interviews.”

  “No,” Sinclair said coolly.

  “Sinclair, you’re not a cop. There’s stuff you might miss.”

  My husband laughed politely.

  “Maybe you should—” Jessica began tentatively.

  Doing an eerie impersonation of Nick, Sinclair started ticking points off his long fingers. “One: he’s out of his jurisdiction. Two: even if he wasn’t, this is a vampire matter. Three: with his prejudice, he will be more a hindrance than a help, and four: although there is a killer in the city—perhaps more than one—I owe my people protection. Which does not include letting a human policeman find out they’re undead.”

  “Besides,” I said, “you have to help me do something instead. Now that Sinclair’s going to be tied up.”

  Nick managed to look mollified and pissed at the same time.

  Chapter 11

  I knew I looked like a dork, twirling around like Maria in The Sound of Music, but I couldn’t help it. “Oh, it’s all sooooo beautiful!” I cried. “This is a shoe store,” Nick informed me.

  “This is the Beverly Feldman shoe store,” Jessica said. “It’s Betsy’s Graceland.”

  I rushed from one gorgeous shoe to the next. Pumps, flats, sandals! Lace, leather, sequins! Ballet flats! I tried to talk but gurgled instead.

  Nick picked up a gorgeous pump with white lace and a brown bow. “This one is called ‘Calm.’ So maybe you should buy it.”

  “Oh, I’ll buy it. I’ll—miss?”

  The saleswoman, an attractive brunette in her thirties, glided over to me. Unobtrusive, yet helpful: just the way I liked ’em. “May I help you?”

  I whipped out one of my wedding presents . . . a Black American Express card. I hadn’t even known they made them in black. Turns out if you spend more than—I forget exactly, but I think it was two hundred grand—if you spend more than that with Amex in a year, you get a black card. Sinclair had given me mine the day after we got married.

  The saleswoman smiled at it.

  “I’d like to see Calm, Dabble, Mystery, Ravish2, Splendid, Adore, Amazing, Angelic, Heaven, Infinite, Neat, Phantom, Goblin, Fairy, and Rosella. Oh, and will you deliver these to my hotel?”

  “Of course.”

  “You can’t remember to buy milk,” Jessica said, “but you memorized most of the Fall Feldman line?”

  “Do not ruin this for me. Do not.”

  Once the saleswoman disappeared, Nick took out his gun. I wasn’t sure if he was going to shoot me or himself, and frankly, I had other things to worry about. Luckily, he put it away when she came back, staggering under the load of shoe boxes.

  I actually clapped my hands like a kid when I saw her.

  Chapter 12

  That bastard,” Nick fumed in the cab on the way back to the hotel. “He knew what he was getting out of. And he knew what you were sticking me with.”

  “Oh, come on, it wasn’t so bad.”

  “Six hours of shoe shopping!”

  “It was only two.”

  “Well, it felt like a thousand.”

  “Hey, you wanted to come along on this trip.”

  “Yeah, well, I was expecting treachery and betrayal and felony assault. Not this!”

  “Knock it off, you two,” Jessica ordered, massaging her temples. “I’ve got a splitting headache.”

  In a nanosecond, Nick became a totally different person.

  “Babe? You okay? Maybe we better get you back so you can lie down.”

  “I’m fine, Nick, it’s not the cancer. I just have a headache.”

  Nick was in the middle; I was on his left, and Jessica was on his right. If she hadn’t been so thin, it never would have worked. But it did work, which is why I opened my purse, rummaged, then handed Nick a bottle of Advil. He shot me a look of pure gratitude—I almost fell out of the cab—and shook two into his palm, then gave them to Jess, who dry-swallowed them.

  “Thanks for coming along, you guys.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it,” Jessica said, leaning back and closing her eyes.

  “She’s only speaking for herself,” Nick added.

  “I still can’t decide which pair is my favorite,” I said dreamily. “Infinite, or Fairy.”

  “How about Goblin?” Nick muttered. “You just—hey, you’re going past our hotel!”

  “Sorry, mahn,” the driver said calmly. “Got to admit, tough to see dis place on de street.”

  He had that right. The Grange really blended, which was weird, given how scary and old-fashioned it looked.

  “That’s okay,” Nick said. “Just take a left and drop us off around the corner.”

  “Not at all, mahn. I will get you dere.” I could see his dark eyes in the rearview mirror, heard him pop the car into reverse, and then we were speeding backward.

  “This is a one-way street!” Nick practically shrieked.

  “Dis is New York, mahn.”

  We came to a shuddering halt right outside the lobby steps, and Nick and Jessica couldn’t scramble out fast enough.

  I handed the driver my last fifty and said, “You got some plums on you, big guy. Keep the change.”

  He touched two fingers to an imaginary hat and grinned, his teeth very white in his dark face. “Anyt’ing for a pretty lady.”

  I got out and watched him drive away.

  Now that was cool. Hideously dangerous and illegal, but cool.
>
  “New York, New York, it’s a helluva town,” I hummed, trotting up the steps to catch up with Nick and Jess.

  Chapter 13

  I spotted Sinclair waiting for us in the lounge; he’d already ordered me a Cosmo. I ran up to him, easily outpacing Nick and Jessica, and flung my arms around his neck so hard he rocked back in his chair.

  He kissed my temple and said into my hair, “Did you have fun shoe shopping?”

  “Oh my God, you would not believe it!”

  He flinched at “God,” rallied, then said, “I’ll believe it very well when the American Express bill comes.”

  “Well, I had to replace the one that’s stuck in the wall.”

  “Ah, so you only bought one pair,” he teased.

  Before I could give him a piece of my mind, or throw my drink at him, Nick and Jess were sitting down at our table. We’d all agreed to compare notes at the end of the evening. Interestingly, now that we were off Nick’s suspect list (not that I truly thought we’d ever really been on it) we were sort of a crime-fighting team.

  Maybe he’d hate us again when we all got back home. Maybe he still hated us but was using us to solve a murder, which would be very Nick-like (and cop-like). Or maybe hanging out with us was loosening him up a little. There was absolutely no way to tell.

  “You dirty rotten son of a bitch,” Nick started. Okay, maybe there was one way to tell. “You knew what her little errand was.”

  Sinclair actually giggled. Giggled. “Which did you like best, Detective Berry? Calm or Infinite?”

  Nick stuck a finger in my husband’s face, which was a good way to get bitten. “If I didn’t hate you with every fiber of my being before, I absolutely do now.”

  “Somehow,” he yawned, “I will try to recover from the remorse.”

  A pretty waitress—short, good figure, gorgeous green eyes, black hair—bounced up to our table. “Good evening, Majesties! May I bring your guests a drink?”

  “Hi,” I said, sticking out a hand. Startled, she shook it. “I’m Betsy. This is Nick and Jessica. She’ll have a Screwdriver, heavy on the vodka, no ice. He’ll have a Bud.”