by Rose Wulf
Swallowing the remark that wanted so badly to fall off her tongue, Veronica said, “It was.” She turned a fake smile toward Cliff before adding, “Thanks.”
“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” Cliff assured her. He was smiling broadly and she couldn’t help but wonder if he even remembered what had happened the last time. He certainly wasn’t acting like it.
Veronica posed beside her mother, the drink making station behind them to one side, and they waited patiently with their broad smiles until the camera flashed. Carol released her a second later, starting toward Cliff and saying, “Let me see.” Cliff obediently handed over the camera and they watched as she examined the picture before finally smiling and declaring, “Perfect. You’re an amazing photographer, Cliff. Okay, your turn now. Veronica, sweetheart, stay right there.”
You’ve got to be kidding. Why hadn’t she expected this? She knew her mother. It only made sense that her mother would insist on taking a picture of the two of them—she had probably already named their grandchildren. But, like before, she pushed back the foul taste rising in her mouth and did as she was told.
Cliff eagerly moved into Carol’s vacant spot at Veronica’s side, standing directly beside her so that their arms were touching. “Should we say ‘cheese’?” he asked with a laugh.
Veronica was spared having to reply when Carol said, “Hold those poses. We’ll take two pictures for posterity. Ready?”
Two pictures? One was bad enough!
The camera flashed and Veronica could only hope her smile hadn’t faltered at the wrong moment. She knew better than to move, so she settled for shifting her weight and wondering why on earth there weren’t any customers coming in when she really needed them. She barely heard Carol’s exclamation that the picture was ‘excellent,’ and then her mother added that they should do something ‘cute’ for the second picture.
But before she could even wonder what that was supposed to mean Cliff was saying, “You got it, Mrs. Wyndham.” She was willing to bet he’d even winked when he said it.
Carol raised the camera again and said, “All right, on three!”
She started counting down and Veronica was seriously considering putting bunny ears on his head—or at least making an immature face—when Cliff grabbed her around the waist and spun her toward him. She had just enough warning to know what he was about to do, and by then it was too late. His lips landed heavily on hers and held there as the camera clicked.
Veronica froze just long enough for the picture to take before her instincts kicked in and she reached up, intending to shove him the hell off of her, but he was stepping back at the same time and all she succeeded in doing was making the whole situation look worse.
“Oh, what a perfect picture! I’ll have to be sure to get this one developed,” Carol exclaimed, entirely oblivious to Veronica’s building rage. She lowered the camera and added, “I didn’t know you two were a couple.”
“Well, technically we’re not,” Cliff admitted before Veronica could get a word in. He grinned, glancing at Veronica before adding, “But I’m working on it.”
She wanted to scream. She wanted to smack Cliff so hard that his face would hurt every time he even thought about kissing a woman, and definitely hard enough to chase him out of her life for good. She wanted to tell her mother never to make her associate with him again and to delete those pictures before she did it herself. But she couldn’t do any of those things—not in the middle of the coffee shop, with customers and her coworkers watching every moment. She was just grateful that another customer had—finally—shown up.
“I have to get back to work,” she declared bluntly, knowing her voice was harsh. She felt a twinge of guilt for the flash of confusion and hurt in her mother’s eyes but she was too upset to let it linger. She was wide-awake now, but she still couldn’t wait to get out of there. Fortunately, Nikki had had the foresight to make her mother’s and Cliff’s drinks, so she didn’t actually have to talk to him again that day.
Cliff and Carol left a minute later with Carol calling back a quiet, “I’ll talk to you later, sweetheart.” That twinge of guilt flared again, but it was still too soon for her to dwell on it. She would talk to her mother later, and when she did she’d explain her non-existent relationship with Cliff. In the meantime, she just needed to find a way to explain it without hurting her mother’s feelings.
Since Nikki was still in the drink station Veronica took up a position behind the register, drawing in a deep breath before finally turning her attention to the customer. All she’d noticed about him as she’d walked past was that he was tall and male. “What can I—?” The question died in her throat when she realized she was looking up, into Jasen’s faintly-amused eyes.
“That was interesting,” Jasen declared. “Who’s the guy?”
Jackass. Smile falling away, Veronica replied, “Someone my mother mistakenly thinks I’m interested in. Do you know what you want?” Oh, it was a good thing her boss wasn’t there. She would definitely hear it from him if he heard her talking to a customer that way.
“I get the feeling he has that same impression. Large mint mocha, extra hot, and one of those butter croissants,” he said smoothly.
She was actually slightly surprised that he was ordering something so vastly different than Seth’s usual, but she typed it in anyway. “That’s because he’s an idiot who can’t take a hint.” She quoted him the price as she moved to the display case to grab the croissant before asking, “Heated?”
“Please,” Jasen said as he slid the exact change onto the counter. When she returned to the counter to take his money he added, “And maybe you need to upgrade your hints.” He turned without another word or waiting for a response and moved to the pickup shelf.
Veronica glared at his back for a full three seconds before she realized what she was doing and yanked her attention back to her job. She was so glad her shift was almost over.
Chapter Thirteen
The end of the workday didn’t provide Veronica with any relief. She was fantasizing about taking a nice, long nap in her two-nights-cold bed as she let herself into her house with Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s mail tucked under one arm. But she was barely in the entry, the door swinging shut behind her, when her eyes landed on the man sitting on her couch. And, even as her body tensed in preparation for some sort of confrontation, she couldn’t help but think that this was the worst Thursday in existence. That was the only possible explanation for why Dennis Claypool was sitting uninvited in her house.
Dennis sat up, letting the newspaper he’d been reading drop into his lap, and called, “I wasn’t sure when you got off work, so I thought I’d make myself comfortable. Hope you don’t mind.”
Veronica stared at him in dumbfounded silence for a long beat. There were so many reactions she had to this situation that it took her a minute to settle on one. “You hope I don’t mind? What, are you crazy? Of course I mind! You broke into my house to, what, chit-chat? But you know I don’t want to have anything to do with you!”
Dennis frowned. “I know we haven’t had the best start, and what I told you before was a lot to take in. But it’s been a couple of days and I thought it was time we really talked about everything.”
Her anger quickly mounting, Veronica stomped forward in order to slam her mail down onto her old coffee table so that she could properly plant her fists on her hips as she snapped, “I don’t have anything to say to you!” She took a deep breath, fists tightening, and added pointedly, “I would greatly appreciate it if you got up and let yourself out. Now.”
“That sort of seems unreasonable to me,” Dennis argued, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “All I want to do is talk. Don’t you want to know about your heritage?”
Veronica opened her mouth to say something scathing, but her voice failed her as her eyes landed on his gesturing hand. The last time she’d seen him that wrist had been encased in a very solid cast—a cast she knew was recent, because Seth had admitted to brea
king his wrist. Now, however, the cast was gone. There wasn’t even a splint or an ace-bandage. That’s impossible. According to Seth’s timeline it had only been about two weeks—give or take a day—since his first altercation with Dennis. Broken bones didn’t heal in just two weeks.
Despite herself, Veronica’s arms fell back to her sides and she asked, “What happened to your cast?”
Dennis blinked up at her, looked down at his wrist, and finally smiled as he looked back up. “It healed. One of the perks of having Slayer blood—we heal faster than regular people. Haven’t you ever hurt yourself and noticed that it doesn’t take too long to get better?”
That was a good question. Growing up she had certainly had her share of spills and scraped knees, but she’d only ever broken one bone—a finger, during P.E. in junior high. Her father had wrapped it up, bracing it with the finger beside it, and told her that the pain would go away soon enough. “Before you know it,” she corrected herself silently. He said it would go away before I knew it. And when her mother had come home later that day he’d only told her it was a sprain. At the time she’d just thought he was trying to keep her from overreacting—or maybe to keep Veronica from overreacting—but now she wasn’t so sure.
“I take it that’s a yes,” Dennis said, pulling her out of her memories as he leaned back into the couch. “And I’m guessing Ron never explained that to you. Don’t worry, though. Unless you end up with a Slayer you won’t have to explain it to your kids. The blood’ll be too diluted to affect ‘em.”
Veronica stepped back from her coffee table, pressing the heel of her palm to her forehead as she groaned, “This is too much.”
“Maybe you should sit down,” Dennis offered, patting the open area of the couch.
“No,” Veronica replied, arm falling back to her side. She would take some pills for the headache later. Narrowing her eyes at him, she said, “You waltz into my life and tell me things about my father that don’t add up to the man I knew and you act like we can all hug and forget that you tried to kill me or that you want to kill someone I care about, and that’s not happening. I want nothing to do with you, do you understand that? So you might as well pack up and go find a new city to terrorize.”
Sometime during her rant Dennis’ eyes had hardened, his lips forming a thin line. This expression matched the crossbow-wielding man who’d first tried to kill her. “You’re telling me you care about that fang?” Something about the cold stare in his eyes and the dangerous tone of his voice sent chills down her spine.
She had the irrational urge to get in his face and loudly declare that, as a matter of fact, she loved ‘that fang,’ but she knew better. In the space of a heartbeat he’d transformed from annoying, kind of creepy, and pushy to intense, terrifying, and dangerous. This was not the man to argue with—this was the man to get as far away from as possible as quickly as possible. So she swallowed, managed not to take a step back, and said, “Yes. It might go back to that ‘you tried to kill me’ and, oh, by the way, ‘he saved me’ thing.”
“I already apologized for trying to shoot you,” Dennis said, pushing to his feet. “But if you’re really going to insist on siding with that vampire over me then you’re not leaving me a lot of choices.”
She did take a step backwards this time. She really did not like the way he’d said that. “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
He was definitely in predator-mode now, she could see it in his eyes right before he said, “You had a point. That fang took a stake for you. So if I want to kill him all I’ll really need is bait.”
Veronica’s mouth went dry at his words. Some part of her suspected she’d known he was going to say something like that, but hearing it aloud was infinitely worse. I guess it’s either ‘let’s be a family’ or ‘let me use you to kill someone you love’ with him. Some family. And in the space of an instant her fear took a back seat to her anger.
Fists clenching at her sides she took a deep breath and snapped, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Do you even realize how moody you are? And, for the record, if that ‘we’re family’ crap meant anything to you, you wouldn’t even be considering that! Dad would never let you get away with this if he were here.”
Something snapped in his eyes and before she could react he had rounded the table, closing the gap between them. His arm swung out, the back of his hand connecting with the side of her face and sending her head snapping to the side as he snarled, “Shut up! The man you remember was a sham, and trying to change himself for you and your idiot mother got him killed!”
Veronica stumbled with the force of his hit, her face screaming in pain, and she wasn’t able to stop from crying out. One hand came up, gingerly cupping the stinging side of her face, and she fought back the tears of pain as her eyes met his again. She’d never been struck before. And as angry as that made her, it was nothing compared to what he’d said. “My father was a good, honest man who cared about people—even the ones he didn’t know. Maybe he used to be more like you, but that was a long time ago. The only lie is the man you remember.”
“Your father was half the man he was before he left,” Dennis bit out, reaching forward again and wrapping one large hand around her upper arm. “If he’d been on his game from the start that fang would never have been able to kill him!”
Veronica’s heart stopped at his words. The pain building in her arm and still throbbing in her cheek fell away as she considered what her uncle was saying. Had a vampire killed her father? The person—or people—responsible had never been caught; they’d never even been identified. The murder weapon—a broken-off piece of a chair leg from his office—had been found at the scene, but with no fingerprints or DNA other than her father’s. But he was stabbed, not bitten.
“You didn’t know that, did you?” Dennis sneered, tightening his fist over her arm. “All it took was a little research to dig up the old case file. He was stabbed right through the heart with a convenient weapon that just so happened to be shaped like a stake, in a city filled to brimming with fangs. No one saw or heard anything, despite the cubicle less than a dozen feet from the bathroom door. And the clincher? Security footage shows a blurry figure in the hall twice—once coming, once going. Idiot police just figured it meant the tape was tampered with.”
Everything was swimming around her now. She remembered overhearing the police explaining to her mother that their best hope for catching a lead had ‘fallen through.’ They had even used the phrase ‘tampered with’ at one point. Was that too big of a coincidence to ignore? Could Dennis be right: had her father been killed by a vampire? She wasn’t sure what to believe.
“It’s okay if you can’t process all of that right now,” Dennis said, shifting and dragging her toward her kitchen. “You’ve got time to think about it. All you need to do from this point forward is sit still and look weak—do your best impression of a damsel.”
She could barely hear him through the thoughts screaming through her head. If her father really had been killed by a vampire…should she try to investigate it? She had always fervently wished that the police had been able to catch the murderer, and she sometimes still lost sleep knowing he was running around out there somewhere. Maybe she could finally change that. Maybe her father’s killer would finally face justice. But she would need help to do that, and she wasn’t so sure she could talk Seth into hunting down his own people to solve a now-sixteen-year-old murder. And she certainly couldn’t count on Jasen’s help.
She was yanked out of her thoughts when she found herself being shoved into one of her wooden kitchen chairs, her knee slamming painfully into the leg of the table. The pain only served to remind her about everything else that hurt. She swallowed back her outcry and managed, “What are you doing?”
Dennis glared at her, irritation shining in his angry blue eyes. “I told you—baiting the fang you’re shacking up with. Now make like bait and shut up.” He lifted his hand again, but instead of striking her he just reached over and pinch
ed a nerve at the back of her throat. And then everything went black.
****
“You’re too attached to her, you know,” Jasen declared casually as he and Seth sifted through the final abandoned apartment.
Seth paused, a few loose papers in his hand, and looked over at his colleague. He was more surprised that Jasen was starting a conversation—let alone that conversation—than he was about what, specifically, he’d said. “I know,” Seth replied at length. There was no point in arguing it when he himself had already come to that conclusion.
Jasen was going through the cupboards in the kitchen when he said, “Are you going to do something about it?”
“Like what?”
“You’ve only got two options,” Jasen stated, pulling open a drawer. “Either leave her now or Turn her.” There was no inflection in his voice to give any indication of which answer he thought was smarter.
Seth ground his teeth. “If I Turn her I’m taking away her life and she’ll lose everyone she has left.”
“Then walk away.”
That was entirely the problem, of course. He was incapable of doing what he knew he should. “Let me worry about that,” he grumbled, attempting to return his focus to the papers he was still holding.
Jasen didn’t say another word as he closed the final cupboard and started down the hall.
Seth set down the papers, pushed to his feet, and froze when he heard his phone start buzzing in his pocket. Somehow he just knew that this was not going to be a good call. And when he read Veronica’s name on the Caller ID his stomach clenched a little tighter. “Veronica?”
“Not exactly,” a faintly-familiar male voice replied. “I’ll give you a hint: you do at least know your blood.”
Seth scowled for an instant before it dawned on him and his stomach sank to his feet. “Claypool. Where’s Veronica?”
“Ah, so she was right,” Claypool said, his tone taunting. “You do care. Well, then I’ll tell you: she’s at home. And if you want to see her again before the funeral then I suggest you get here before sunset.” The line clicked a beat later.