by Мишель Роуэн
He blinked. “And now you know.”
“Um, she seems very nice.”
“Didn’t you say you were leaving?”
This time I counted to fifteen. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had said nothing to piss him off. I’d even thought about what I was going to say before I let the words leave my mouth. That rarely happened. There was no reason for him to be acting like a jerk to me, especially after… well… after everything that had been happening between us.
“There’s no reason to get snippy with me. I guess I’m just trying to understand.”
“Understand what?” He stood up and pressed his palms against the desktop.
“It’s just that I thought… well, about what happened in Abottsville. I just figured—”
“I guess you figured wrong,” he said cutting me off. “I don’t mean to be rude, Sarah, but perhaps you read more into the situation than you should have. I have agreed to help you adjust to the life that has been thrust upon you, yes. But please, do not mistake a potential fling for something more meaningful.”
“A potential fling?” I sputtered. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, you’re right. To call it a fling would be exaggerating. It was only a few kisses, after all.”
His words felt like a slap in my face. For the last twenty minutes I’d wondered who I wanted to see die more, myself or Veronique. I’d just revised that list to include Thierry. And he was officially at the top of it.
I took a deep breath and concentrated on erasing the stunned look from my face. “You know what? I think you might be right. It was just a few kisses.” I forced a smile at him and didn’t try to make it look friendly. “And now you can kiss my ass good-bye.”
“Ah, yes.” The corner of his mouth raised into a half smile. “The refined wit of Sarah Dearly. It has been so refreshing this past week.”
Turning the doorknob, I looked back over my shoulder. “Oh, and by the way, if you happen to get the urge to throw yourself off another bridge anytime soon, don’t bother waiting for me to help you out. Just go for it.”
My reward was seeing a frown spread over his features before I slammed the door behind me. I saw the club through a foggy daze. I absolutely had no idea where that fight had materialized from. The only thing that echoed in my mind were the words “potential fling.” Was that really all he thought of me? And why did the idea of that cut me deeper than finding out he had a wife? I knew why. Because I’d been a silly dope and sort of fallen for him. But I wasn’t completely stupid. You didn’t have to hit me over the head, over and over, for me to see the truth. Not when it was sitting at the bar with its long, lean legs crossed, seductively sipping a martini.
Veronique waved good-bye to me. “Lunch. Soon.”
I walked around to the other side of the bar toward George. “Bye, George. Get well soon.”
“Sarah,” he said, his voice was still weak, but not as weak as it was earlier. He was healing up very nicely; another asset to life as a vampire.
“Yeah?” I leaned over.
“If it’s any consolation…”
“What?”
“You’re way cuter.”
I bent over to kiss his forehead. “You are now officially my favorite person in the entire world.”
I stopped at Holt Renfrew on my way home and bought a new pair of shoes. Hot pink, expensive stiletto pumps I’d seen a couple of weeks ago in Vogue—same pair Charlize Theron wore to a recent movie premiere. Did I mention expensive? The fact that I had no money except for twenty bucks left over from the tips I made the other night did occur to me. But I needed to buy something in the worst way—retail therapy. When I took the shoes out of the box at home, I realized I didn’t even like them. I cried over those pink shoes for a whole half hour. I was crying over the shoes. Really. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t talk to anyone. I’d decided to officially become a hermit.
My hermitivity lasted exactly three hours. I did some laundry, took a shower, and paced around my small apartment. Finally I was so bored I was climbing the walls, and I decided to go out for a walk. Danger be damned. I walked past a small park about two blocks from my apartment complex. In it, there was a girl arguing with a young guy. I squinted at her familiar black hair, black clothes, and pale face. She looked over and saw me studying her and then I recognized her. It was Melanie. The Goth chick I’d clocked the other night at the club. The human girlfriend of Timothy, the vampire. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized me, too. She poked the shoulder of the guy she was with—not Timothy—and pointed at me. Then she started to march right toward me, and she didn’t look friendly. The guy followed dutifully behind her.
“That”—Melanie pointed at me—“that’s one.”
“What?” I asked. “Somebody who’s kicked your ass?”
Melanie scowled at me. Her friend just blinked a couple of times. Maybe he had even less of a clue what she was talking about than I did.
“No, bitch,” she snapped. “A vampire.”
I sighed. “Wow, alert the media. You know, Timothy should really invest in a leash and muzzle for you.”
“Timothy and me are through,” she spat and grabbed the arm of the timid-looking boy.
“This is my new boyfriend.”
He blinked at me again.
“My condolences,” I said and turned away.
“Where do you think you’re going, bitch?”
I raised my eyebrows and turned around. “You have a lot of hostility, Melanie. But at least your glowing personality makes up for it.”
“Vampire,” her friend finally spoke. His voice was small and nervous. He struck me as the kind of guy who’d be better off wearing a polka-dot bow tie, sitting in a small office, adding lists of numbers together, than out on the town with “Miss Congeniality.”
Melanie nodded. “That’s right, Eugene. A vampire. And what do we do with vampires?”
His forehead creased in concentration. “Uh.”
Melanie rolled her eyes. “We kill them. Come on, get your stake out and kill her.”
“He’s a vampire hunter?” I asked, my voice devoid of any panic. I mean, come on.
“That’s right,” Melanie said proudly as Eugene searched his pockets. “I’m training him, based on my knowledge of your kind.”
Eugene finally found what he was looking for. He held a stake tightly in his trembling right hand, but it slipped away from him and clattered to the sidewalk.
I bent over to pick it up and handed it back to him. “I should let you know that I’m in a very bad mood right now. It’s been one of those days.”
“Kill her,” Melanie prompted, her black-rimmed eyes shiny with the prospect of violence.
Eugene raised the stake. I kicked him in the shin. He dropped the stake again, blinked painfully up at me as he rubbed his leg, and then ran away in the opposite direction.
I shook my head as I watched him flee. “Honestly, Melanie, I think your taste in men may be even worse than mine.”
I turned to glance at her just in time to see her lunge at me, the stake now in her hand. Instinctively, I grabbed her wrists to prevent her from plunging it into my chest. Her momentum knocked me backward and we fell in a heap on the ground, my dark sunglasses knocked off my face. She was stronger than she looked, plus she’d taken me by surprise. Not a good combination.
“This’ll teach him for dumping me,” she shrieked. “He thinks I’m not good enough for him, huh? We’ll see about that.”
It never would have occurred to me, after facing off against legitimately deadly vampire hunters, that I had anything to be afraid of with Melanie. But as I wrestled with her—her jilted-girlfriend rage tripling her normal strength; her seeing me as the reason for all of her problems—my life flashed before my eyes. And it wasn’t pretty. I hadn’t lived a very interesting life.
I felt the sharp tip of the stake nick my chest. The pain brought me out of my mental slide show and back to reality. With my hands busy fending off her attack
and my legs trapped under her, I knew I’d have to use my head if I wanted to get out of this one. Literally use my head.
I smacked my forehead against the bridge of her nose. She screamed but didn’t budge.
“Let go of me,” I yelled.
“No way. You’re dead meat!”
“What about Eugene?” I managed. “Don’t you want to make sure he’s okay?”
“Screw Eugene!” she yelled.
“No thanks!”
We rolled around on the ground. The girl sure had spunk, I’d give her that. When she set her mind to something, she didn’t give up. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that killing me was a very good thing for her to set her sights on. Then I saw somebody out of the corner of my eye. Thank God. Somebody was going to rescue me. The somebody wasn’t moving. While I held Melanie’s hands away from me, I glanced over.
Quinn looked down at us wrestling on the ground. He wore dark sunglasses.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hello,” I replied.
“How’s it going?”
“Not so good.” I bashed Melanie in the upper lip this time, giving me the opportunity to maneuver myself on top of her. I was going to need some Tylenol after this was over.
Either that or a mortician.
“Who’s your friend?” Quinn still wasn’t making a single move to help me out.
“Oh, this is Melanie,” I said, after I narrowly avoided the stake hitting my jugular.
“Melanie, Quinn.”
Melanie wasn’t in the mood to meet new people at the moment. It was quite obvious that Quinn was trying to keep from smiling at my predicament. If I weren’t fighting for my life, I would have been extremely annoyed.
“Need some help?” he finally asked.
“Oh, no. I’ve got it all under control.”
Melanie rolled over, so she was on top again, and let out a Xena-like war cry.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you later, then.”
“Quinn!” I yelled after he turned his back. In this position the bright afternoon sun was blinding me. “Welcome to the land of sarcasm. Help would be nice.”
He grinned and, with one hand, snatched Melanie by the back of her black sweatshirt and hauled her off me. She clawed at him, the air, and everything in between. I slowly got to my feet and brushed off my jacket. There was a patch of red over my heart, where she’d grazed me with the stake. I rubbed it tenderly and pouted. She’d ruined one of my favorite T-shirts. Quinn gently shook Melanie until she dropped the stake. She didn’t seem scared; she just looked pissed off that we’d been interrupted. Quinn held her arms firmly against her sides so she couldn’t budge. I grabbed my sunglasses off the ground and put them back on. Then I walked over to Melanie and slowly looked her up and down. “Now is the time when I’m supposed to say that I’m sorry about how things went down with you and Timothy. And that vampires aren’t all bad. Also, that in time you’ll be okay; you just need to give your feelings a while to heal.”
She blinked at me, and I could see the rage slowly fading from her eyes.
“Let her go,” I told Quinn. He released her and she turned to walk away without saying another word.
“Oh, just one more thing, Melanie,” I said.
She turned around and I punched her in her already-injured nose.
I smiled at her. “Come near me again, and I’ll bite you.”
Her lower lip quivered and she turned and ran away.
I rubbed my throbbing hand. “Ow, that hurt.”
Quinn just shook his head at me.
I frowned at him. “What?”
“You just made me remember one of the first things you ever said to me.”
“What’s that?”
“That you’re not a nice girl.”
“Oh, right! That was after your pickup line from hell.” I smiled, and then stopped myself from looking too friendly. “What are you doing around here, anyhow?”
“Looking for you.”
“Is that right?” I was immediately on my guard.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Besides, after what I just witnessed, I don’t think I’d be able to hurt you. You’re pretty tough.”
I crossed my arms. “Then what do you want?”
He began to say something and then stopped. He opened his mouth again and met my eyes. “I wanted to apologize.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Apologize. For what?”
“For everything. Mostly the nearly-killing-you part. Yeah, I wanted to apologize for that, and then thank you for saving my life.”
“You know, Quinn, even though I haven’t known you that long, I hope you’re not insulted if I doubt your sincerity.”
He shrugged. “I know. I guess it’s been one of those ‘walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’ things for me. I’ve been raised to believe that va—that vampi—” He stopped and frowned deeply.
“Bloodsucking, murderous monsters,” I finished for him. Again with the sarcasm. It was a gift.
He sighed. “It’s hard. I’ve always been raised to believe that they’re evil. Now I’m one of them, and I don’t feel any different than I ever did. It makes me wonder if I’ve been in the wrong all of this time.”
“You think?” I rolled my eyes. “Let’s just leave it with your apology and my saying no big deal. I hope you have a good life, Quinn, I really do.”
When I turned to walk away, he grabbed my shoulder. “It’s not just that, Sarah. Ever since I met you, I… I don’t know. I just can’t think about anything else.”
I looked up into his blue eyes. “Come again? Can’t think of anything else but what?”
He turned away, rubbed his forehead hard, then turned back to me. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Me?”
“I know it’s stupid. I know that you and Thierry… well, whatever. That guy wants to kill me as it is. I don’t know what this is between us. But it’s something.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. He couldn’t stop thinking about me? My brain temporarily stopped working. Finally I found my voice.
“Are you nuts?”
“What?”
“You have a hell of a lot of nerve, you know that?”
Quinn stared at me blankly.
I shook my head. “I’m just supposed to forget everything that happened before, now that you suddenly realize I’m not as evil as you thought I was? If it hadn’t been for your father at the bar, I’d be dead right now. If it hadn’t been for Dan and his friend in the PATH, I would be dead again. No way, buster. I’m not about to give you a third kick at the can. I helped you out because I felt guilty about what happened to you. That’s it. That’s all. So, why don’t you find some other girl to stalk?”
He rubbed his forehead again. His face was a little red, either from all the rubbing or from embarrassment, I wasn’t sure. “You’re right. All of it. You’re absolutely right. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I’ve done nothing to prove myself to you. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
He shook his head hard, as if that might erase everything he’d just said to me, and turned to walk away. After my little outburst I’d be surprised if he ever came near me again. And that was a good thing, right? I don’t care if he’d seemed like a nice guy when I first met him, that we hit it off really well. He’d been nothing but a problem since that moment. But still… I was in a little bit of shock. Mr. Vampire-Hunter-turned-Vampire had just basically admitted that he had a crush on me? The last damn thing I needed was another complication in my life. I chewed my bottom lip. Not that that had ever stopped me before.
I swallowed hard. “Quinn!”
He stopped and turned back around. “Yeah?”
“How do the words ‘double date’ sound to you?”
Chapter 16
Amy was thrilled when I phoned her at work. She immediately put me on hold so she could call to make reservations. She got right back to me.
“Tonight. Top of the CN To
wer,” she said. I could tell she was grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of our mutual date. “In the 360 Restaurant.”
“Isn’t that expensive?” The CN Tower was Toronto’s landmark tourist attraction, a huge tower that rose high above all the other downtown skyscrapers and had a world-class rotating restaurant on the top floor. Fancy schmancy.
“So?”
“Yeah, I’m unemployed, remember? I was thinking more along the lines of McDonald’s.”
“Don’t worry about money. This is a special occasion. You are so going to love Peter.”
I was already regretting agreeing to this. Why did something sound like a great idea one moment and a horrible mistake the next?
But it was just dinner. It didn’t mean anything. It would give me something other than my vampire problems to focus on for a while. I returned my overdue monster movies and begrudgingly paid the late fee. Then I returned the designer shoes and went shopping for a dress to wear to dinner. After seriously shopping for two hours I finally found it. Short, tight, and a gorgeous shade of violet. Plus, it was on sale. Buying it triggered my happy shopping endorphins. Maybe the day was turning out better than I thought. I went back to the apartment to get ready. I’d decided I was going to have a good time and forget all about Thierry and his magical mystery spouse.
It was working until I had to put on some makeup. As soon as I pulled the shard out of my purse, I got a little misty-eyed. I had the overwhelming urge to throw it against the wall and watch it shatter into a thousand pieces. But I wasn’t that crazy. Not yet, anyhow. Quinn had given me his cell phone number and I called to tell him when to show up. At seven-thirty I pushed open the glass door to my apartment building and strode out into the chilly night air on my three-inch heels. He was waiting for me. When he smiled, I could see his brand-new fangs. Guess we were in the same boat when it came to developing early, thanks to Thierry’s full-strength blood. He looked good, too. Some men clean up well, and Michael Quinn was one of them. He wore a dark blue suit with a crisp white shirt underneath, open at the collar. The color of the suit brought out his gorgeous blue eyes. His sandy blond hair was combed back off his face, and as I got closer, I noticed he was wearing my favorite Calvin Klein men’s cologne.