Time for a subject change. "CiCi, what happened to Tin Man last night?"
CiCi grimaced. "Apparently the bats have more appeal to him than I do. I hope he flies to Devil's Hole and straight down to hell." She clinked her glass against Flo's. "I say we give up men. Derek is teaching me to use the Internet. I've discovered a Web site devoted to a woman's pleasure and with the most amazing… toys. BigOdotcom."
"Glory, get out your laptop." Flo looked at Diana who'd snorted. "Come on, admit it, Di. You can please yourself better than ninety percent of male lovers can please you."
"Not arguing." Diana drained her glass again. "This stuff is good. While you've got the laptop out, Glory, let's order some more."
"In a minute." I put down my glass and walked to the kitchen. Valdez lay stretched across the threshold and I stepped over him to open the snack cabinet. I headed back out to the living room with a bag of Cheetos in my hand and a bowl.
"Now you're talking, Blondie. Let's celebrate. Westwood's gone to ground and I'm surrounded by beautiful powerful women." The dog sidled up to Flo and was rewarded with an ear rub.
"Some day, doggy, you and I are going to have a long talk. About who and what you really are, no?" She leaned down to rub her chin against his head.
"No, I mean, yes. I mean, who's going to eat those Cheetos anyway?" Valdez licked his chops.
"I am." I poured a sample into the bowl and picked up one fluffy piece. I smelled it and, idiot that I am, my fangs ran out, the vampire version of an erection.
"You're going to actually eat? What a concept. You can't imagine how hard it is to run a coffee bar where we bake muffins all day." Diana jumped up. "Any chocolate in the kitchen?"
"I think Lacy left a candy bar here last week when she decided to go on a diet. We're supposed to be holding it in case she weakens. Check the top of the fridge."
"Eating. What I wouldn't give for just a taste of something sweet." CiCi had a wistful look. "I vaguely remember the mousse chocolat my father's chef made for us. So rich and delicious. It was centuries ago."
"Found it." Diana came in waving a Hershey bar.
"Break it in half." CiCi looked at Flo. "Are you going to try to eat too?"
Flo shook her head. "No, thanks. Been there, done that." She picked up a Cheeto and dropped it into Valdez's mouth. "But you girls go ahead. If you need healing, I'm your woman."
"Healing?" Diana sniffed her half of the candy bar. "Is this stuff going to hurt us?"
"No pain, no gain." CiCi licked the chocolate and sighed. "I'm going for it. Flo, you're on standby."
"I'm going for it too." I leaned back and was about to drop the Cheeto into my mouth, when someone buzzed from downstairs.
I jumped up and hit the button for the intercom. "Who is it?"
Could Jerry have decided to stop by? I glanced back at the girls. CiCi and Diana each took a bite of chocolate and moaned with ecstacy.
"Delivery for Ms. Gloriana St. Clair. I can just leave it here by the door, ma'am."
"Fine. Do that." I threw open the apartment door, Valdez at my heels as we ran downstairs. I saw a delivery van pull away from the curb when I looked through the window beside the front door. A package. I opened the door and nudged it with my toe. Could Westwood have sent a bomb? A last act of revenge? But the large padded envelope wasn't ticking when I nudged it again. I leaned down and saw who'd sent it. Hmm.
"Okay, Glory. What's that?" Flo stood at the top of the stairs. "Bring it up. The chocolate's gone and Diana and CiCi have survived."
"Good." I hugged the package to my chest. A present from Jerry.
I dropped down on the couch and ripped open the large envelope. A Kevlar vest. I unfolded it. Oh, wow. Not just any old vest. Painted on the front was a familiar yellow shield.
"Wonder Woman." Diana laughed. "Who sent you that?" She made a grab for the note that had slid out with the vest, but I got it first. I read it out loud.
"Gloriana, you are brave and amazing. But wear this the next time you take on the bad guys. Blade."
Flo, Diana and CiCi sighed.
"Now that's romantic." Diana swiped at her brimming eyes.
"You think?" I stared down at the vest, then at the note. Yeah, for Blade the gesture was downright sappy. I grinned and picked up the Cheetos bag again.
"I don't know why I'm afraid to eat a Cheeto. I'm Wonder Woman. Right, girls?"
"Careful, Glory," Flo warned as I dropped the first bite into my mouth.
The crunch, the taste. I was in Cheeto heaven. I chewed, then braced myself and swallowed. Would it go down? Yes! I popped another one into my mouth. Then another. My stomach clenched, but I kept chewing. I've always liked to live on the edge, you know? And now I had the vest to prove it.
Read on for a special preview of
Gerry Bartlett's next novel
Real Vampires
Live Large
Available in July 2007 from Berkley Books!
Whump, whump, whump, whump.
"Please remain calm. The fire is out. The fire is out. Firemen are on their way and are clearing the smoke out of the building."
I was wet, cold and lying on concrete. My baby dolls were tangled around my hips and Valdez was barking into my ear.
"Fire?" I took a breath. Smoke. Oh, shit.
"Yeah, fire. I dragged you up here." Valdez bumped me with his cold nose. "But you're okay now, Blondie. Right?"
"Fire!" I swallowed and sat up. A helicopter sporting the logo of a local TV station hovered overhead. Nice. My chubby thighs would be on the evening news.
"You dragged me up here? Flo! Diana!" I jumped up and looked around. I may sleep like the dead, but once the sun goes down, I'm operating on all cylinders. I saw the other resident vamps—Flo, Diana and a guy I knew lived on the third floor—laid out on the roof. They were all wet and all in various stages of stirring. The sun had obviously just slipped below the horizon.
"Yep. I'd say our old buddy Brent Westwood decided to take a parting shot." Valdez growled and leaned against my leg. "Somebody threw a firebomb into your shop and the fire spread from there. Whoever did it had a hell of a nerve pulling that in broad daylight. Of course it's Monday and the shop was closed. Mugs and Muffins was probably open though. I wonder—"
"Shut up, Valdez. I… My God!" My legs folded and I sat hard on the concrete again. Just about anything, from a wooden skewer to a chopstick, could take a vamp out while she's sleeping. And a fire… No amount of healing sleep could bring a vamp back from being a crispy critter. I rubbed my dog's ears. He'd saved me.
"How do you know this was Westwood?" We'd been fighting off the big game hunter who thought vamps were the biggest game of all ever since I'd arrived in Austin. After a recent showdown, we all figured he'd move on to easier prey. Parting shot.
"Who else? People love your shop. Only an asshole like Westwood—"
Whump. Whump. Whump. Whump. "Medical assistance is on its way. Please wave if you're all right."
"Yeah, right. Smile for the camera, you mean." I picked up my sodden sheet and threw it over my head.
"How are the others?" I pushed to my feet again and wobbled over to Flo like Casper the not-so-friendly ghost, Valdez at my heels. Of course my roommate would sleep in the raw. Valdez had draped a wet sheet over her but the rotors were blowing everything on the roof all to hell. Flo sat up, giving the camera a nice shot of her boobs.
"We're on camera, Flo. You might want to wrap your sheet a little tighter."
"What's happened?" She pushed back her dark hair and looked around, then up. "They'd better not be taking my picture. I need my hair dryer, my makeup."
Hopefully, they didn't have audio. I could hear the lead-in now. "Fire victim runs for blow dryer as rescuers battle blaze."
I looked at Valdez. "My shop?" My voice cracked. I'd built Vintage Vamp's Emporium from nothing into a thriving business that actually supported me.
"I figure it's probably gutted." Valdez sat down and scratched his ear. "Of course I w
as pretty busy. When the smoke alarms went off, I had to clear you guys out. And the stairwell was solid smoke." He coughed, sneezed, then looked at me for sympathy.
"My hero!" I dropped to my knees and threw my arms around his neck. I sniffed wet fur, a mix of dog and smoke. Valdez coughed again and I looked at him, really looked at him. "Seriously. Are you all right?"
"Yeah, I'm okay." Cough, cough.
Okay, now he was faking it. I sat back. Maybe he deserved a little slack. "How did you manage to get all of us out?"
"It wasn't easy. It was still daylight, so I had to pile you guys up inside the stairwell with the door open for ventilation until the sun went down. I had a hell of a time keeping all of you from frying."
"Frying. Oh my God."
"We are alive, no?" Flo sat down and put her arm around me. Her Italian accent comes out when she's stressed. "And once again our puppy has saved the day." She patted the dog's head. "We are dead without you, signor."
Valdez puffed out his chest and looked up. "You think I'll be on the evening news? You know they're going to want an interview."
"Sure. Right. Talking dog saves sleeping vampires. Sorry, but you'll have to settle for a bag of Cheetos."
"Now you're talking."
I gave him a final ear rub, then walked over to check on Diana. She ran the coffee shop downstairs. If my shop was toast, so was hers.
"Di, are you okay?"
She coughed and sat up. "What happened?" She wore cute red plaid flannel jammies and her sheet, wet of course, coordinated in navy blue.
"Fire. Someone firebombed my shop, probably yours too if Westwood did it." I reached out and pulled her to her feet.
"What?" She glanced up, then shot the finger at the helicopter. "Buzz off, vultures." She headed for the door to the stairs. "I've got to check on the shop." Mugs and Muffins. Like me, Diana has to support herself. If her shop had been hit too… Well, this was really, really bad. For both of us.
I grabbed her before she could open the door. "Wait. The firemen are working their way up here. The building's full of smoke."
"My shoes!" Flo was on her feet, her sheet wrapped into a strapless sheath.
"I don't think the fire got that far. The building's security system went off as soon as I heard something crash through Blondie's shop window. The fire trucks got here pretty quick after that." Valdez spent my sleeping hours on hyper alert. Thank God.
"I say, how did we get wet?" The third floor vampire had joined us. He was a sight in an old fashioned nightshirt, but good looking in a college professor kind of way. His British accent was cute. We'd met him at some vamp meetings. Dennis, David, something like that.
"Sprinkler system in the halls. You got wet when I dragged you out of bed and up the stairs to the roof."
"But my door was locked. Double deadbolts." The prof stared at Valdez.
"So I did a little damage. I couldn't just let you guys fry."
Fry. I swallowed a lump the size of Valdez's food bowl.
"Brilliant! You don't even know me." The male vamp had obviously just found his new best friend.
"I saved all the vamps in the building." Valdez was visibly preening, and why not? "It's my thing. You'd think some of those shifters would have been around, but no such luck. So I handled it."
Shifters. Shape-shifters, that is, live in a couple of the apartments. A were-cat, my friend and employee, lives right across the hall. I took a shaky breath and felt sick again. This time I couldn't blame it on Cheetos or an evil mind meld. If Valdez hadn't been who or what he was…
The stair door slammed open and three firemen dressed in full bright-yellow gear ran onto the roof. The first one threw off his helmet and ran his hand through his short brown hair.
"Anybody hurt? You folks okay?"
We stayed huddled together, looking appropriately shocked and disoriented.
"The fire. It didn't spread to the apartments, did it?" If I had lost everything I owned… I've had to start over before, but it's hard, really hard.
"No, ma'am. Sprinkler and alarm systems saved the day." The fireman sounded pure Texan. "You got good response time too. The fire itself didn't have a chance to spread upstairs. Just the smoke."
"The sprinklers didn't go off in the apartments, did they?" Flo was suddenly right beside the fireman and grabbed his arm. "I have a most valuable collection that will be ruined if it gets wet."
Flo's collection of Ferragamos, Prada, Manolos, et al. The fireman looked down at her, obviously liked the way Flo's sheet was slipping and patted her hand.
"No, ma'am. Only the hallways have sprinklers. Fire's out now. Smoke's just about cleared. Do any of you folks need the paramedics?" The fireman whipped out his walkie talkie when Diana coughed.
"No! Really! I'm fine. Just the night air and wet clothes." Diana managed a smile. "Can we go in now? I'm freezing."
Actually we were lucky. For mid-November in Austin, it was fairly cool, but not even close to freezing. Maybe I was being too literal. A vamp doesn't feel heat and cold like a mortal does. So I faked a shiver.
"Yeah, let's move inside if that's all right."
"One minute." The fireman spoke into a walkie-talkie. "Let me get the all clear." Another fireman showed up in the doorway with a stack of blankets. We each took one gratefully.
Whump. Whump. Whump. Whump. Channel whatever was getting this all on tape. Flo decided to take advantage and planted a big wet one of thanks on the cute fireman's lips after he announced we were good to go. Then we all hustled into the stairwell and out of camera view.
"What started the fire?" I looked at Valdez.
"Arson." The fireman had a grim look as he stopped at the top of the stairs. "Someone broke the windows in the stores downstairs and tossed in incendiary devices." The fireman couldn't take his eyes off Flo. She was busy rearranging her sheet again, flashing the entire crew. Probably unintentional. She was really anxious to check out that shoe collection.
The fireman's walkie-talkie squawked again. "How'd you folks get up here? The smoke alarm wake you?"
"Sure. Who could sleep through that?" Professor Vamp patted Valdez. "This fellow barked too, though. Just to be sure we knew to take it seriously."
"No kidding." The fireman, Flo attached to his side, gave Valdez an admiring glance. "But why are the doors knocked down? And who the hell could do that? I mean, three apartments look like they were hit with a battering ram…" Flo looked up into the fireman's eyes and he was under the whammy.
As damage control, it was a Band-aid. We'd have to whammy every fireman who'd seen the doors Valdez had obviously knocked down. I looked at Di and the professor and they went to work on the other firemen coming down the stairs behind us. Before we got to the bottom, the guys had no memory of anything other than knocking the doors down themselves because they were looking for victims.
We stepped outside and I got my first look at what used to be a pretty cute vintage clothing shop. Thank God for sprinkler systems. The windows were shattered, the area right in front of them totaled. It didn't look like the fire had penetrated the closed door into the back room, though. I felt wobbly as I picked my way around broken glass. Diana cried out and I saw that Mugs and Muffins had received the same treatment. If Westwood had done this…
"Folks, you've got to let the paramedics look you over. It's our policy." Cute Fireman led Flo over to an ambulance. You can bet she wasn't letting anyone put a stethoscope to her barely beating heart. And, sure enough, the men around her smiled and nodded and let her walk back to us without a checkup. The whammy at work again.
"They won't bother us now. Let's go upstairs." She sniffed. "The whole building smells like smoke. My shoes had better not be ruined."
Diana looked at her with red eyes. "Your shoes? Your shoes'? Excuse me? Do you see my shop? Glory's shop? We're out of business!"
I grabbed Diana's arm. "We'll be fine. Damian's bound to have insurance." Hope. Pray. Damian Sabatini was Flo's brother, and he owned the building. "Upsta
irs. Get a shower and some dry clothes."
"Electricity will be off for a while, people." Another fireman, a captain according to his helmet. "Here are some flashlights. But please just gather what you need for the night and make plans to sleep elsewhere. Until the building inspector gives the go ahead to occupy the residences."
I realized we were lucky no one had asked why we all were ready for bed at what must be seven in the evening. We were a pretty strange looking group.
We heard a shout and I saw Diana grabbed by two of her employees. I caught some snatches. Slow time of day. No customers so both workers had been in the back area making up a batch of the muffins the place was famous for. At least neither of them had been hurt.
A car pulled up behind the fire engine and a man jumped out. Damian aka Casanova. He's a sexy vampire, but I'm now immune. He'd played some dirty tricks on me while trying to add another notch to his bedpost.
Did I mention he's our landlord? I was actually glad to see him and his look of concern. Please let him have insurance. I sure didn't. I know. I know. But the premiums! I looked back at the shop. Maybe I'd rethink my priorities if my business survived this.
"Florence, Gloriana, are you all right?" He grabbed Flo and looked her over. "Diana?"
"We're all fine, Damian." Flo hugged him before we all turned to head upstairs.
"Wait!" Someone grabbed my arm.
"Donna Mitchell, Channel Six News. The fireman said this is your shop?" A female reporter dressed in a blazer and running shoes thrust a microphone near my mouth. I started to brush her off, then glanced at the front of my shop again.
"Yes. This is… was my place. Vintage Vamp's Emporium, offering fine clothing and accessories from the past at bargain prices." Okay, so I had to plug it, even if I had no idea if I even had a shop any more. Tears filled my eyes and the camera zoomed in. Nothing like a tragedy to boost ratings.
"Any idea what happened, Ms… ?"
"Gloriana St. Clair." I hitched my slipping blanket up on my shoulders. My wet hair dripped into my eyes. I was damn mad and looking pitiful worked for me right now. Valdez pressed himself against my legs and looked up at me soulfully. "We all work night shifts, so my dog here helped wake us up." I patted him on the head and he showed his teeth in a doggy grin. "Someone did this on purpose."
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