The Reluctant Vampire taf-15

by Lynsay Sands

  “Well, perhaps a little,” Leonora conceded.

  “I hate the smelly cats,” Alessandro vowed, and Drina thought she heard a shudder in his voice. “They smell like-Like that!” he cried, as the smell apparently reached him. “Make her to go away, Teddy!”

  “How the hell am I supposed to make it go away, Alessandro?”

  “Throw the ball of the snow at it,” Alessandro said, and Drina nodded. It was exactly what she’d suggested.

  “He can’t do that, dear,” Leonora said soothingly.

  “Why not?” Alessandro demanded.

  “Because the damned thing has nowhere to go,” Teddy snapped. “Drina’s in the way. It’s trapped in the corner of the garden. Throwing snowballs at it will just piss it off and make it spray again, and I have no intention of getting sprayed.”

  “Then you must to get the bella Alexandrina out of the way,” Alessandro said with distress. “We must to get the smelly cat to go away.”

  “Drina, pull yourself toward my voice a few feet. I can help you up and out of its way then,” Teddy called.

  “Pull myself?” she asked with disbelief, and then demanded, “Come here and help me. I can’t even see.”

  “I can’t. You’re too close to the skunk,” Teddy explained. “Just pull yourself this way.”

  “Where the hell is Mr. Big Brave Police Chief who was willing to take on a rabid rogue?” she asked dryly. “A rabid rogue, by the way, who could twist you into pretzel shapes and laugh while he did it?”

  “Rabid rogues are one thing, skunks are another entirely,” Teddy said dryly. “Just pull yourself over here and-”

  He fell silent as the sound of smashing glass sounded.

  “What was that?” Drina asked sharply.

  “It came from the back of the house,” Teddy said sharply, and then she heard Harper shout and Stephanie scream, and Teddy barked, “Wait here.”

  “What? Wait!” she cried, then cursed and forced her hands from her eyes to try to see as she heard his footsteps rush away. She could hear Leonora and Alessandro moving away as well but couldn’t see a damned thing. Opening her eyes merely brought on the pain again and forced her to close them once more. Though she thought this time they hurt a little less. Maybe.

  Adrenaline rushing through her, Drina started to roll onto her stomach to get up, ignoring the growl the action immediately caused from the corner of the yard. Worried sick about Harper and Stephanie, she merely snarled, “Go ahead and spray me again, bitch! My eyes are closed, and I can’t smell any worse than I do now.”

  Drina staggered to her feet and stumbled blindly toward where she thought Leonora’s and Alessandro’s voices had been coming from earlier. She’d only taken a couple of steps when she stumbled into what felt like a snow-covered boulder and fell face-first in the snow. Releasing a string of curses she’d learned while a pirate, Drina started to scramble back to her feet, then froze as a faint waft of smoke reached her nose. Lifting her head, she sniffed the air, but whatever she’d smelled was gone. All she could smell was some horrible combination of rotten eggs, burning rubber, and very strong garlic. She could hear the hungry rush of flames, though, coming from what she thought was the side of the house.

  Gritting her teeth, Drina didn’t bother trying to get up and risk running into something else but began to crawl forward on her hands and knees. She’d only moved a foot or so when her senses made her pause and stiffen.

  Drina’s head rose like a deer scenting the air for danger though she apparently had no sense of smell at the moment, and it was sound she was testing the air for. Someone was there. She knew it. She could feel their presence in the prickling along her spine.

  Her first instinct was to go for her gun, but she no longer had that. She must have dropped it when she’d fallen back after being sprayed, Drina realized. Christ, she was a blind idiot, crawling around in the dark without a damned weapon, she thought bitterly, and then recalled the crossbow hanging from her shoulder. Not that it would be much use since she was presently blind. She might as well be wearing a stupid nightie and wailing please don’t kill me.

  “Screw that,” Drina muttered, and immediately fell back to sit in the snow, reaching back to snatch an arrow from the quiver and slinging the crossbow around at the same time. She was practiced enough at the task that even blind she managed to arm the crossbow in a heartbeat. The problem then became where to aim the damned thing, but she lifted the weapon and strained to hear any sound that would give away the person’s location.

  When Drina turned in the general direction of the side of the house, or what she thought was the side of the house where the cornered skunk had been or still was, there was a sudden flurry of sound that definitely wasn’t the skunk. Whatever made it was big, human-sized big, judging by the thud of footsteps as they fled in what she thought was the direction of the gate.

  Drina followed the sound with her crossbow, and when her instincts screamed to release it, loosed her arrow. She heard a grunt, but the footsteps didn’t slow, and she cursed under her breath, suspecting she’d only winged whoever it was.

  Drina sighed, but rearmed the crossbow just in case and listened blindly for another moment before she heard approaching sirens.

  “Fire trucks,” she muttered, beginning to shuffle backward on her butt in the direction she thought the stairs were, using one hand and her legs to move herself. The entire time, she continued to point her crossbow blindly in the general direction of where she thought the yard’s front gate was.

  “Well, they put out the fire,” Teddy Brunswick announced wearily, stomping his feet on the mat as he entered his kitchen and began to remove his coat.

  Drina glanced to him from the stool Anders had silently set beside the back door for her. . as far from his own position at the far end of the attached dining room as he could get her without sticking her outside. Her vision was still blurry, but she could see well enough to make out the way the police chief’s nose wrinkled as he caught her scent. She also didn’t miss how quickly he scooted out of the kitchen and into the dining room, straight across the room to the desk against the far wall, where Anders was busily punching away at Teddy’s computer keyboard. He was searching the Internet for suggestions to remove skunk spray from a person.

  Sighing miserably, Drina glanced toward the ceiling, wondering how Harper and Stephanie were. They had been placed in one of the two bedrooms upstairs in this tiny, two-floor house of Teddy’s. Dawn, Leonora, and Alessandro were tending to them. Tiny had been moved to the second bedroom, with Mirabeau and Edward continuing to oversee his turning.

  Teddy had arranged to have them brought here to his home while the fire trucks were still working on putting out the fire at Casey Cottage. It had taken two ambulances and his deputy’s car to transport them. Everyone else had gone in the ambulances, and Drina had been the only one in the police car. While she hadn’t yet been able to see at that point, she was sure she’d heard the deputy making muffled sounds that could have been either gagging or weeping. Either was possible considering how she smelled, and the fact that the deputy had been in such a rush to get her where he had to take her that he hadn’t thought to put anything down on his seats before ushering her quickly into the back of his car. His car could very well carry that horrible smell forever for all she knew. Drina could certainly understand if he’d been sobbing over that.

  It turned out the sound of breaking glass they’d heard had been a rock crashing through one of the windows in the second-floor porch. It had been followed by a Molotov cocktail that had shattered just inches from the blanket. The fuel inside had splashed across the blankets, pillows, and Harper and Stephanie. The two had apparently come staggering out of the room in flames.

  Edward and Anders had heard their shouts and were the first to reach them, with Teddy, Leonora, and Alessandro hard on their heels. They’d somehow doused the flames eating away at Harper and Stephanie, and then-afraid the fire would move through the entire house-had gotten every
one out, along with as much blood as they could grab.

  Drina had been the last one anyone had thought of, which she didn’t mind since she wasn’t seriously hurt or anything, but the whole thing had been incredibly frustrating and frightening. She’d been worried sick about Stephanie and Harper and as useless as a baby as she dragged herself to the front porch and inside. It was the firemen, charging into the house, who had found her using the door frame to pull herself to her feet in the foyer, shouting frantically for Harper and Stephanie. One of the men had led her through the house to the back door and out into the yard with the others.

  “Damage?” Anders’s voice made Drina leave her self-pitying thoughts and tune in to their conversation.

  “Surprisingly little,” Teddy said, and did sound surprised. “Apparently the house is double-walled brick, and that helped prevent the fire from spreading from the porch to the rest of the house. Both the upper porch and the one below it are write-offs, of course, and the hallway between the porch and Elvi and Victor’s room took some damage before the firemen arrived. There was a good bit of smoke damage, though,” he added with a grimace. “And the fire chief said no one can stay there for a bit due to the possibility of hot ashes starting the fire up again and something about toxic air and residue through the house.”

  She saw Anders nod acknowledgment.

  “Did you call Lucian?” Teddy asked.

  “No. He likes full reports, so I waited for your return,” Anders said, and then punched more keys and Drina heard a sound she recognized as a computer printer kicking to life.

  “What’s this?” Teddy asked, and his blurry figure moved over to peer down at whatever printed. “Hmm. Carbolic soap, vinegar, and tomato juice.”

  She saw his head swing her way and sat up a little straighter. “Is that how to get rid of this damned smell?”

  Drina had already removed her clothes and now sat there in the kitchen in the rattiest old sheet Anders could find in Teddy’s linen closet. It was almost gauze thin and frayed on the edges, wrapped around her twice or three times and tucked into itself above her breasts. She still smelled horrendous, though. Along with her clothes, the skunk-or smelly cat as Alessandro called it-had gotten her in the face, neck, hair, and hands when he’d sprayed.

  “Yes,” Teddy murmured, and then shifted. “I have some vinegar, but she’ll need more than I have, and I don’t have any tomato juice at all. I can get both at the twenty-four-hour grocery store, but it says here you have to get the carbolic soap at a drugstore and they just recently reduced the hours on what used to be our twenty-four-hour drugstore. It closes at 10 p.m. now.”

  Drina turned to peer at the clock on the kitchen wall and squinted to read the time. When she saw that it was 10:03, she could have wept. Did she have some rotten luck or what?

  “We’ll have to wait till it reopens in the morning,” Teddy said unhappily.

  Drina turned to take in the men’s expressions. Neither Teddy nor Anders looked happy at this news, but she was so miserable about it herself, she had little energy left to care about how they were feeling. It wasn’t just that she was tired of stinking to high heaven, but Anders insisted, and rightly so, that she should stay in the kitchen and not spread her smell through the rest of Teddy’s house. This meant she was stuck right where she was, on the hard vinyl barstool in the kitchen. There would be no creeping upstairs to watch over Harper, no checking on Stephanie, no looking in to see how Tiny’s turn was going. She supposed she’d even be sleeping there on the kitchen floor, like the family dog, if she slept at all.

  It was not being able to go up to Harper that bothered her the most, though. Drina wanted to be at his side, nursing him back to health as he’d done for her when she’d woken after the accident.

  “Well. .” Her gaze slid back to Teddy at that muttered word to see that he was shuffling sideways toward the doorway to the hall. Avoiding her gaze, he mumbled something about checking on the others, and ducked quickly out of the room.

  “Calling Lucian,” Anders announced, following quickly.

  Drina watched them go, suspecting it would be the last she’d see of them until the drugstore opened in. . oh, ten or twelve hours was her guess. . it seemed like a lifetime at that point.

  “I don’t know what the hell Drina thought she was doing playing with the damned thing.”

  Those gruff words drifted through Harper’s consciousness, the sound of Drina’s name, stirring him from sleep.

  “She probably didn’t know what it was, Teddy,” Leonora Cipriano’s calm tones said soothingly. “There aren’t any in Europe.”

  “That is because we no would suffer the smelly cat,” Alessandro announced firmly.

  “No, you’d most likely transport them somewhere else.” Teddy sounded irritated. “That’s probably how we got the little beasts ourselves. You guys put them all on a boat and sent them over here to North America a couple of hundred years ago.”

  “The English maybe would do such a thing. Is what they did with the criminals, so maybe they would send you the smelly cats. But no the Italians. We would no be so cruel.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the hell it was doing out this time of year anyway,” Teddy said. “I thought they hibernated.”

  “They go into a torpor, not a true hibernation,” Leonora explained quietly. “And it was probably hungry. They will sometimes wake up and come out in search of food if it warms a bit, and it did warm up quite a bit last night.” There was a pause, and then Leonora said, “I just feel sorry for the poor little thing having to sit down there in the kitchen all by herself like some sort of outcast. She looked so miserable when I went down to ask Anders if he’d managed to reach Lucian yet.”

  “Had he?” Teddy asked sharply.

  “No, I’m afraid not. He said he’s left several messages, though. I’m sure Lucian will call soon.”

  There was a gusty sigh, and Teddy said, “Well, he’d better. You’re all welcome to stay here, of course. But this is a small house. I only have the two bedrooms. You’ll all be sleeping in shifts until he calls and gives some sort of instruction.”

  Harper was having trouble following the conversation. What the hell was a smelly cat and who had been playing with it? For that matter, what was wrong with playing with a cat? And what was that about Lucian and instructions?

  Harper forced his eyes open and turned his head to peer toward the voices and found he was in bed in a room he didn’t recognize and that Alessandro, Teddy, and Leonora were having their rather strange little discussion by the door.

  Movement beside him in the bed drew his attention, and Harper turned his head the other way to find Stephanie lying beside him. Her eyes were open, and she looked much less confused than he felt.

  “Drina was sprayed by a skunk,” Stephanie explained quietly, apparently reading his confusion. “Alessandro calls them smelly cats.”

  “Ah.” Harper sighed and supposed he should have recalled as much. He had a vague recollection of hearing the name “smelly cat” before from the man, but it had been sometime ago.

  “You’re awake,” Teddy said grimly.

  Harper turned his head to watch the trio approach the bed.

  “How do you feel?” Leonora asked, bending to smooth his hair back from his forehead and check his eyes for he knew not what.

  “Better than I did earlier,” he said dryly, recalling the “earlier” in question. Roaring flames, bubbling skin, the stench of burnt meat, and knowing it was his flesh. Being engulfed by fire was a most unpleasant and terrifying experience. It wasn’t something he’d soon forget.

  Leonora moved around the bed to Stephanie now and repeated the same question and actions; feeling her forehead he realized now, not just brushing hair back, and checking her eyes, perhaps to see if they were clear or how much silver there was in them. It could be a good gage of many things, including passion levels and blood levels.

  Harper heard Stephanie murmur that she was fine. He didn’t believe her for a min
ute. He had no doubt the poor kid was traumatized. Hell, he was traumatized, and he wasn’t a teenager who until just recently had been mortal. Fire was one of the few things that could kill their kind. If they hadn’t gotten out of that room and found help to douse the flames, they could have died there.

  The thought disturbed him and made him shift unhappily. “Where’s Drina?”

  “Er. . She was sprayed by a skunk,” Teddy said with a grimace.

  “Yes, Stephanie said so, but where is she?” What he really wanted to know was why the hell she wasn’t there with him. He’d nearly died, dammit. He wanted her with him.

  “Well, she’s down in the kitchen at the moment.”

  “They won’t let her out of the kitchen because they don’t want her to smell up the house,” Stephanie told him, no doubt plucking the explanation from someone’s head. He didn’t care whose.

  “She’s very worried about you, though,” Leonora reassured him. “She wanted to be here with you both. She’s probably fretting herself sick down there.”

  The words soothed him somewhat but not completely, and Harper sat up and started to get out of bed, pausing when the blankets covering him fell away revealing a Port Henry Police T-shirt and black joggers.

  “Your clothes were pretty much just charred bits melted into your skin. They fell away with the damaged skin as you healed. Teddy was kind enough to loan you those and help Alessandro dress you while Dawn and I dressed Stephanie,” Leonora explained quietly.

  He glanced back to Stephanie to see that she wore a similar getup. Grunting, he stood, his gaze sliding over a garbage bin brimming with empty blood bags. They were really going through them. In fact, he wondered that they’d had enough to deal with the accident, Tiny’s turn, and now this.

  “Leonora opened up the blood bank, and she and Edward brought back a bunch more blood,” Teddy announced, catching where his gaze had gone.

  Harper nodded. Leonora had insisted on coming out of retirement after her turn and taken a position at the local blood bank, which had distressed Alessandro no end. Not that he really minded having a wife who worked. It was just distressing to him because they were still new turns, and Leonora’s position meant she had to leave their bed more frequently than he’d liked when she’d taken it on. Especially when he was wealthy enough that she needn’t work at all if she chose.