by Maren Smith
Compared to what I’ve seen in the past, this is almost palatial, but—I find myself thinking—nothing like what I could provide for her. Were I so inclined, of course.
Which I’m not. Because, don’t be ridiculous.
I’ve already broken my personal rule about playing twice with the same woman. I’m already having a difficult time thinking of her simply as supper. It’s the shirt, I think wryly. She really does wear it exceedingly well. It’s all I can do, when I glance at her, not to lick the tips of my fingers and reach down between her legs, beneath the hem of all that pristine whiteness, and see if I can make her come again. Despite the tenderness my fangs left upon her tasty nether folds. Not to mention her existing unease.
Shutting off the car, I would have done the gentlemanly thing by holding her door and offering her a helping hand out. Braced for a night of incognito sleuthing, I’d decided to exchange the Bugatti for a far more subtle Ferrari LaFerrari, fire engine red with doors that fold up like butterfly wings. I do so love technology. But I’ll also be the first to admit I didn’t quite think this through. The minute the car stops, Merris is out and sprinting for the door as fast as she can go while holding the button-down skirt of my oversized shirt closed in front and down in back.
To say we attract attention would be something of an understatement. Night it might be, but it’s not so late that people aren’t out and about, gathered on their balconies and chatting on the stoop. There’s a perking curiosity that my car stirs just by existing in this parking lot. I doubt anyone even notices Merris, kicking out of her heels the second she gets the main door open. She barely holds it long enough for me to catch up, and then she’s sprinting for the stairs again, all bouncing breasts and sexy bottom barely hidden behind the tail of my shirt.
I like following her. The view is almost worth saying goodbye to all four hubcaps.
That view is also the reason I didn’t notice the familiar and very faint scent of living death the minute I walked into this place. I am all the way up on the second-floor landing, just rounding the bannister to watch as my darling Merris grabs the top of the third-floor rail to swing herself around into the hallway, when suddenly it’s not just in my nose, it’s tickling at all my senses.
The scent is strong.
A vampire wasn’t just here at some point tonight. Whoever it is, he still is.
Merris
I don’t think I’ve ever taken the stairs so fast before. All I can think is—just get home, get inside, get clothes on. I’ve just reached the top of the third-floor steps, when Aleron’s rushing blur cuts me off faster than I can stop. I crash into him and might have fallen backwards right back down the stairs had he not caught me. His arm is like a steel band around my waist, hugging me close as a lover. Which… I guess we kind of are, considering what he did to me over a few snarky comments and a half slice of bacon.
My nipples peak. An Arizona rose of heat unfurls inside me, igniting in all the places where his fingers and mouth had touched me. It’s mortifying how wet I get in so very short a time.
Motionless apart from the flaring of his nostrils as he breathes, he says, “Not now, darling.”
Oh my God, he can’t possibly have smelled that, could he?
He pats my head. “Stay here.”
I stare after him as he leaves me standing at the mouth of the stairs, eyebrows slowly crashing down over my glaring eyes.
Asshole.
I march after him because, first, I’m not a dog, and second, nobody that I have to live with in this building needs to see me doing the walk of shame in a rich man’s shirt when I’m supposed to be grieving. I already feel guilty as hell. I don’t know what possessed me to go to Club Toxic in the first place. It’s like I’ve got giant holes in my head where explanations for all of last night’s actions ought to be, but I can’t remember how those holes should be filled. Perhaps I went there hoping to feel close to Jez in a place I know she used to love. I don’t know. I can’t explain it to myself, the last thing I want to do is to feel backed into a situation where I have to justify it to others.
Like Ms. Menendez—otherwise known as Saguaro Canyon’s very own town crier—who lives across the hall from me. Please, dear God, don’t let her come shuffling out to talk to me tonight.
Just the sight of my door, the last apartment next to the emergency exit at the end of the hall and the giant window that overlooks the parking lot, reignites my need to hurry. And yet, not only is Aleron blocking the hall so I can’t squeak past him, but he’s heading right to my door. I never told him my apartment number.
“How do you know where I live?” I ask, but his hand snaps up, both halting and silencing me.
He ventures closer, his upraised hand becoming a single, staying finger. His movements are as silent and as graceful as they seem suddenly quite deadly. That’s when I notice my door stands cracked open. More than that, it’s not just cracked, it’s been kicked in. I can just make out the splintered wood where the deadbolt used to latch.
My shocked step forward is as involuntary as, I think, Aleron’s response. He catches me, his open hand coming to rest on my stomach, stopping me mid-step. He doesn’t look at me, not even when he raises a silencing finger to his lips. His head turns. He’s listening, tracking movements so soft that I can’t make out so much as a whisper.
“You may as well come in,” a man calls out from inside my apartment. “I heard you coming up the stairs, and I could smell her all the way from the lobby.”
Aleron’s face has no discernable expression, apart from a tic of muscle as his jaw clenches. I look down when his finger taps my stomach, but I don’t think Aleron knows he’s doing it. He’s thinking, but only for a moment before saying to me, “Stay right behind me. Do not speak, and do not move more than a step from my side. Is that clear?”
I nod, the flesh of my neck crawling as I take my place behind his muscular frame. Slowly, he pushes my broken door open, but I’m looking down the hallway, back the direction in which we’ve come. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I’ve lived in this building for two years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the place so still or so quiet, even at nine o’clock at night.
I glance behind me. Ms. Menendez’s door has been kicked in too, but pulled closed just like mine was. A tiny smudge of reddish brown no bigger than a thumbprint marks the doorknob. I stare at that, completely unprepared to make that next logical leap. Ms. Menendez is always home. She never leaves, not even to get groceries, and she would never tolerate so much as a smudge on any part of her door. She’s in the hall almost every day, scrubbing it and grumbling about the kids from two doors down who use this hall as their personal playground.
Oh Jesus, has every door on this floor been kicked in. Why is it so quiet?
That spot between my shoulder blades itches unbearably. I feel sick, rooted here in the hallway as Aleron eases no more than a step across the threshold, already looking right, toward my tiny enclosed kitchen.
“I believe you are in the wrong apartment,” he says to whomever he finds inside.
“No, this is the right apartment.” The soft thump of my purse hitting the floor at Aleron’s feet sounds obscenely loud in the unnatural quiet of this place. “I’m absolutely in the right place. It’s you I’m concerned about, my friend. Wrong place, wrong time, definitely the wrong girl. Company makes the man, and all that. Sometimes it can even get him killed. Walk away.”
“Not a chance.” Aleron turns his body toward the kitchen, blocking the doorway, but otherwise he doesn’t move.
I do, though. Pulled by the most dreadful, icy feeling, I creep the few steps that separate my door from my neighbor’s. My fingers tremble as I reach out. It only takes the softest touch of my fingertip and the door swings slowly in.
Her apartment is every bit as clean as her door. Spotless, brightly decorated in ceramics and a veritable jungle of living plants that bush from every corner, on every available surface. The patio drapes are wide open. A single light is
on, a bright reading lamp on the table by the recliner where Ms. Menendez is. At first glance, one might think her sleeping. But she isn’t, and I know it even as I try to convince myself otherwise.
Her eyes are open, her head tipped so far back and cocked at a broken angle. Her legs are sprawled apart. So are her arms, each draped over an opposite arm of the recliner, with wrists turned up, making the fang marks on them easy to find. Her neck looks gnawed, the flesh torn and mauled.
She is not alone.
An older, masculine figure sits on the loveseat reserved for company. Another steps slowly out of hiding to stand in the archway of her tidy kitchen.
The itch at the back of my neck has grown terribly. I look right, back down the hallway in which we’ve come just as another figure steps soundlessly out of another apartment. And then another one. And another. Four more men, one from each of the four other apartments that crowd this floor.
“Welcome home, Jez,” the man on the couch calls to me, and my eyes snap back to him. He’s mostly bald, with little more than a wreath of sparse gray that wraps his skull from ear to ear. When he stands, he’s not particularly tall and almost seems frail until he moves a step toward me, then stops. I hear the breath he takes as he lifts his nose, scenting the air. Like a dog, I think.
Or a vampire.
Seven vampires—two in this apartment, one in mine, four moving in like assassins down the hall—Aleron makes eight. I feel him behind me, his cool hand light upon the back of my neck.
And then there’s me, just standing here, staring dumbly with no place to run—as if any human could ever hope to move faster than a vampire—except out the fire escape, and what’s the chance of there being one or more vampires out there, just waiting for us to attempt it.
“You aren’t Jez,” the man says, mildly surprised. He laughs, a soft, breathy sound. “I am such an idiot. You’re Jez’s sister. Her twin?”
“Yes,” I whisper with a nod.
The shadows in Ms. Menendez’s living room have carved hard angles in the lines of his narrow face, and yet when he smiles they seem almost to soften. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know, but I should have. How very unfortunate for you.”
He looks friendly. Sympathetic. He looks like someone’s kindly old grandfather, even as he tells the dark-skinned vampire filling up the kitchen archway, “You may kill her now.”
Everything up to that point seems so slow moving. So still. The incredibly deadly calm that one only fully appreciates right before the storm suddenly explodes all around them. This storm hits harder and faster than my eyes can follow or my mind can register, because the next thing I know I’m on the floor, flung there by Aleron’s shoving grip on the back of my neck. I still feel the warning flex of his fingers closing over my nape, that phantom grip has my nerves stubbornly insisting his hand is still there when the window overlooking the parking lot shatters. I flinch, barely glimpsing the blur of the vampire from Ms. Menendez’s kitchen flying backwards out through it.
I suck air, but the blur of the vampires coming up the hall became nothing more than bowling pins falling all over one another as the vampire from my apartment slams into them.
“Sh—” is what I have time to shout before the blur of Aleron’s arm locks around my waist, lifting me clean off the floor. He cradles me like an infant, his other hand pressing my head to his shoulder, and it’s probably for the best that I can’t see what he’s doing until he leaps and suddenly we’re flying out the window. “—it!” I finish in a high warbling scream.
Did I say flying?
We fall. Like rocks. Two carefully entwined rocks—one of which was scrambling desperately to grab a tighter hold on the other right before he executed the most ludicrous superhero landing on the hood of someone’s pickup truck.
Startled shouts yelp out from those gathered on balconies all around the apartment complex.
Mine is among them.
So is, “Pendejo! My car, man!”
Leaping from the hood, Aleron runs to his car. My back and butt hit the passenger seat before I knew he had the door open.
“Buckle up,” he says calmly, his blurring race around to the driver’s side making it seem as if he just materialized like magic behind the steering wheel.
The vampire from Ms. Menendez’s kitchen lies on the sidewalk, floundering weakly, his now crooked back obviously broken.
I grab for the seatbelt as all four tires squeal against the pavement. Aleron leaves eight feet of blackened rubber in his flight from Saguaro Canyons. Looking back over my shoulder, the last I see of the place that has been my home for two years, is the shadow of that kindly old vampire standing at the broken window we just escaped through.
Chapter 9
Merris
“Who the hell was that?” I ask in a small, shaky voice.
“I don’t know,” Aleron replies. He’s stiff, his expression unreadable, and if he keeps driving like this, he’s probably going to kill us both.
Staring wide-eyed out the front windshield, I hang on to the dash with one hand and the oh-shit handle with the other. And yet, every time I get the urge to remind him that I’m still very mortal, I remember Ms. Menendez. That old woman was in everyone’s business. She was grumpy and gossipy, and she often acted like she was mother over the entire apartment complex, but she didn’t deserve to die like that.
Nobody does.
I’m responsible. Tears sting my eyes as I try to figure out what I’ve done that could possibly explain all of this. “They killed everybody on my floor.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Aleron switches lanes. “Far more likely, he killed everyone in your building.”
That did not make me feel better. “He was waiting for me.”
“Yes.”
“Why was he waiting for me? How did he know Jez?”
“I don’t know.” His hands flex on the steering wheel. “But I intend to find out.”
That’s when it strikes me just how odd it is for him to say such a thing. I look at him, scared and baffled. “Why? Why are you trying to involve yourself any deeper in this, with me? You could have been killed back there too.”
His scoff is little more than breath. “An infant may choose to wrestle a cougar, but which do you think will come out the winner?”
“Yeah, but who’s the cougar?”
He gives me a side-eyed glance. “I will pull this car over, darling Merris. Don’t test me.”
We’re doing at least double the speed limit and sometimes faster. We run stop signs and stop lights, and he must have the kind of luck that inspires lottery ticket purchases, because we don’t pass a single cop. Pedestrians get out of our way. So do the other drivers on the road, and those who don’t, he swerves around. Aleron must be doing something, I’m certain of it, but unlike when he crawls into my head, I can’t feel anything. Only the cold, sickly knots still tightening in my stomach and chest until it feels as if I can’t breathe at all.
“Calm yourself,” Aleron says.
I’m trying. I really am, but this is crazy. This isn’t normal at all, and I don’t just mean his driving. What the hell has happened to the world as I thought I knew it? A month ago, everything was fine. Now, my sister is gone and vampires don’t just exist, they want me dead.
I shake my head, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t make sense of it. “Why me? What have I done? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” says the vampire beside me. “Do you feel up to finding out?”
I don’t have a choice. “How?”
He doesn’t look at me, but weaves seamlessly into the gap that two slowing cars create beside us so he can take the onramp onto I-10. “We’re going to ask someone to undo a mistake I made.”
“Who?” I ask. “What mistake?”
Again, I get a side-eyed look.
“Do you remember last night at the club when I saved your life?”
It’s hard not to feel a sting at that. “You think helping me was a mistake?”
“No, what I did before that was.”
Now that we’re on the interstate, he’s not slowing down. The flattening effects of gravity meld me to the chair as he takes the car faster than I have ever been in a vehicle. Honestly, I’m not an adventurous soul and that isn’t saying much. But it’s definitely a shock to glance over and see 215 on the digital speedometer.
“Can we please slow down?”
“No.” Aleron moves into the fast lane. “We are far from safe and the more time that passes, the less safe we’re going to be.”
I am in so far over my head, I don’t know how to do anything more than put myself completely in this man’s hands. It’s at once the scariest and the most comforting thing I can think of. How can it not be? He’s saved my life twice now. Even if he does regret it.
“There are certain rules, my darling Merris, that simply cannot be broken.”
“What rules? What are you talking about?”
“You,” he says pointedly, giving me another look.
I’m lost. Rattled as I am, none of this is making sense.
“Vampires,” he all but snaps, exasperated. “We live among humans, and we can do so peacefully only for so long as the mortal half do not know about it.”
“You mean the edible half?”
“It is a harmless arrangement…”
“Harmless?” I bark incredulously. “Try telling that to all those people—” Those dead people… because of me. I could cry.
“That was an anomaly.”
“Anomaly my ass! They were people! People I knew!”
“I meant, most of us go through great effort to make sure it doesn’t happen like that. Not anymore.”