Chapter One
The night was cool.
The waning moon hovered just above the old downtown buildings, its silver light suffusing with the yellow of the parking lot lights. Both sets of lights served to illuminate the tall man standing in front of me. Not that I needed much light to see him in the dark, thanks to the phosphorescent streaks of incandescence that seemed only visible to me. And perhaps others like me.
A small wind rattled a tree next to me. The tree had thick, waxy leaves that reflected the surrounding light. The tree didn't seem native to Southern California. Trees in Southern California tended to be stunted and pathetic-looking. A plastic grocery bag scuttled halfheartedly across the parking lot, passing between Fang and me. We both ignored it.
"Aren't you going to say something?" he asked, grinning easily. There was humor in his deep voice, but there was also something else. Doubt. Just a shred of it. But it was there, underlying his humor. And I knew the reason for his doubt, for I shared it, too. Fang wasn't at all certain this meeting was a good idea, either. And I suspected why.
He has a secret, too. A big secret.
How I knew this, I wasn't sure. A psychic hit, perhaps. But I was suddenly certain that Fang stood to lose much by this meeting; after all, his past - whatever it was - would not remain hidden, not with me in the picture.
We all have our secrets.
I finally moved my hands away from my mouth and took in a lot of air. I don't generally need a lot of air; in fact, I'm fairly certain I don't need any air at all. But breathing deep helped calm my nerves, and since my lungs still worked, I figured I might as well use them every now and again.
I also found myself scanning the parking lot, wondering if I had somehow walked into an elaborate prank...or something far worse. A trap perhaps. But I sensed no danger here and I sensed no malice from Fang. Granted, my sixth sense wasn't foolproof, but in situations like this, well, it certainly would have been triggered. Especially since my extrasensory perception seemed to be getting stronger and stronger of late.
"Don't look so concerned, Moon Dance," Fang said. He eased himself off the fender of his car and faced me. "We're alone."
I still hadn't spoken. Music pumped from the bar nearby and I might have heard the sharp crack of a pool ball striking another pool ball. Either that, or someone had just broken a kneecap. There was a slight hint of beer on the wind...and vomit. The two often went hand in hand, especially at this late hour and especially in a back alley parking lot.
I stopped scanning the surrounding area and focused on the man before me. Now with my shock abating, the investigator in me was surfacing. The man, I was certain, had stalked me. In fact, I was sure of it. That raised all sorts of alarm bells within me, although I should have known it would happen sooner or later. Fang was, admittedly, a vampire aficionado. I should have known he would have used all the clues I had laid out before him over the years to eventually find me.
Perhaps you wanted to be found, Sam.
Perhaps.
Granted, a part of me had hoped Fang would be Kingsley, but Kingsley was a very different kind of creature of the night. In the end, I knew that Fang could not have been Kingsley.
But I never expected the man standing before me now.
Finally, I spoke. "They let you off work early." Now I, too, stepped away from my van.
"Yeah, well, I told them it was an emergency," said Fang easily.
He moved away from his car and stepped over the crumbling concrete parking curb with its exposed, rusted re-bars.
"And this is an emergency?" I asked.
His face lit up. "Of the highest order, Moon Dance."
Now he was coming toward me, moving across the empty parking lot. On his chest, the two great shark teeth swung and bounced from the leather strap. Only I was beginning to think they weren't shark teeth.
Fang. His name is Fang for a reason.
More deep breaths. I was tempted to step away from my van, but I couldn't make my legs work. In fact, they suddenly felt gelatinous and heavy and not really my own.
I put my hand on the van's warm hood, stabilizing myself.
Fang was a tall man, and his long strides quickly ate up the asphalt between us. When he was just a few arms lengths away, he stopped, chest heaving.
"I don't know your name," I said, suddenly self-conscious. His eyes rapidly roamed over me, taking me in. But I was used to him looking at me, wasn't I? After all, I had often caught him looking at me.
"You never asked for my name," he said.
"Married women don't ask bartenders for their names," I said.
"You're not married now."
"Technically I'm separated. The divorce paperwork is being drawn up now by my attorney."
"You're doing an awful lot of talking," said the Heroes' bartender, smiling at me again. His white teeth shone brightly, and so did the monstrously long teeth dangling from his neck. "And not enough asking."
"Fine," I said, feeling my heart calming down. This was Fang, after all, my best friend, my confidant, the man I had opened my life up to...all my secrets, all my fears. Everything. "What's your name?"
"You can call me Eli Roberts," he said. "But my given name is," he paused. "Aaron Parker."
I blinked, and might have gasped, too.
Aaron Parker. I knew the name, of course. Anyone in law enforcement would know the name. I looked at the man in front of me again...looked at the fangs hanging from the leather strap. Indeed, those weren't shark teeth.
"You're the American Vampire," I said.
He smiled and laughed lightly. "Could you say that a little louder, Moon Dance?"
Chapter Two
The Downtown Bar & Grill was a new restaurant in a very old building. The walls were brick and the black lacquer bar counter was epic. It stretched from nearly end to end and I could only imagine how many drinks had been served from its polished, scarred surface.
Aaron Parker, aka Fang, found us a table in the darkest corner of the deepest part of the lounge. Music thumped from nearby speakers. There wouldn't be a soul on earth who could overhear us. A waitress materialized out of the darkness like a ghost and took our orders. Aaron ordered for us. White wine for me. Jack and Coke for him.
"You remembered what I drink," I said. I found myself feeling wary and highly exposed and vulnerable. I also found myself fighting a very strong desire to run. But to run was to leave a lot of questions unanswered.
To run was to screw everything up, and I didn't want to screw everything up.
Aaron sat forward and studied me intently. I don't like to be studied intently. He knew that, didn't he? Interestingly, his look was the same look he'd given me many times at Heroes, a bar I frequented with my sister. Silly me, I had thought his probing glance had been an interest of a different sort. Now I knew differently. He had been stalking me. He had known who I was all along.
I instinctively looked away, feeling a bit like a freak at a carnival: "Come one, come all - see the real-life bloodsucker!"
Now that he was sitting across from me and not endlessly serving customers, I had a chance to really study him. I had always found him attractive. I'm sure he knew that. And my sister had an unhealthy crush on him that her husband really should probably be concerned about. Aaron Parker was tall. Perhaps one of the tallest men I had ever seen. I suspected he was an athlete and I resisted the urge to ask him if he played basketball. Aaron had full lips. The kind most women drool over. He had sad puppy dog eyes, as brown and bright as polished cherry wood. But it was his mouth that I found the most curious. He didn't seem to know what to do with those beautiful lips of his. Sometimes he pulled them as if snarling. And sometimes they seemed to drape over his lower lip. Often they moved and shifted and I kept having the impression he was about to say something, but words rarely followed the movement. It was the oddest twitch I had ever seen.
Finally, his moving lips formed words. When he spoke, he did so softly. If not for my better-than-average hearing, I might have missed what he said: "I remember everything you tell me, Samantha."
"Except I never told you my name."
Now he looked away, suddenly embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. Her had stalked the shit out of me. "Yes, I've known your name for some time."
"It's not nice to stalk people," I said. "Especially someone who can kill you and deposit your body somewhere over shark-infested waters where it will never be seen again."
Aaron's eyes flashed briefly with amusement. "It was a chance I had to take."
Our drinks came. It was late Sunday night and the bar crowd was thinning. No doubt only the hardcore drinkers were left...and a creature or two of the night. As we sat in the bar, toasting to good health and long life (which put a smile on my face), I was suddenly certain Aaron and I were being watched. I glanced over his shoulder, searching for the source, but there was only an empty stairway leading up to God knew what. Still, the electrified field that only I seemed to see, a field that consisted of glowing streaks of light that helped me see into the darkest of nights, seemed to be buzzing with more than usual activity. Light streaks zipped about as if energized by something unseen.
Something's coming, I suddenly thought. What that I was, I didn't know.
I turned back to Fang. "So how did you find me?" I asked, although I had already intuited the answer. Obviously, I had given the man enough clues about my life - in particular, the cases I had worked on - for him to find me. Quite simply, he had put two and two together. Even if two and two had come over the course of years.
He confirmed my hunch, and explained. To his credit, he looked a bit sheepish. Anyway, it had been one of my bigger cases four months ago that had gotten some national attention, a case that involved a runaway girl and a murderous dad. Despite my best efforts to remain anonymous, my name had appeared once or twice in the newspaper. I had, of course, mentioned to Fang that I was working on an important missing person case. By this point, I had already inadvertently dropped enough clues over the years to direct him to the general region where I lived. And once he knew the general region, well, it had just been a matter of scanning the local headlines for any news about a runaway.
I said, "So everything I ever told you...."
"I made notes," he said. "I saved our messages. I poured over them later, searching for hidden clues about you. About how to find you. In the beginning, you gave me very little to work with. But you loosened up over the years."
I wasn't sure how I felt about that. There was a creep factor here that was hard to ignore. But I also understood human nature. Or, at least, tried my damned best to. Yes, of course he had been curious about me. Who wouldn't have been? I was a woman who was professing to be much more than a woman. And, admittedly, I had certainly been curious to find him, too, but I had never acted on it. I was a married woman at the time, working hard to keep things happy and seemingly normal.
Too hard.
A marriage shouldn't have to be so much work. Love shouldn't crush your soul. A relationship should add to your life, not take away from it. Something I'm only now beginning to understand.
But it was hard to remain mad at Fang...or Aaron. There was a gentleness to him that I never saw coming. His instant messages to me had exuded confidence. But I wasn't seeing the confidence here. No, I was seeing a man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, who had anything but confidence. I was missing something here, and I wasn't sure what it was.
I looked again at the teeth dangling from his neck. They were long and thick - but not quite as thick as shark teeth. They looked like dog canines. Big dog canines. I looked again at his twitching mouth, and saw him curl his upper lip down as if to....
As if to cover two massively prominent canines. Two unnaturally long canines.
"Those teeth," I said, motioning to his chest. "Are yours."
"Why, Moon Dance," he said, and I sensed his old charm. "You are quite the detective."
Chapter Three
I knew the story of the American Vampire, of course.
In essence, a young man with two extraordinarily long canine teeth had sucked his girlfriend dry. His trial had been as sensational as they get, and who could forget the images of the young man opening his mouth and exposing those two insanely long canines for all the world to see.
And here he was. In the flesh. Sitting across from me. A young man who had been tried and convicted of murder. A young man who had been deemed criminally insane. And there were very few who would argue that point.
And he's Fang, I thought. This is crazy.
If I looked hard enough I could see the similarities, but the truth was, he looked nothing like the tormented young man whose image had been broadcast across the airwaves and newsrooms and the early Internet. Now his thick beard would make him nearly impossible to place, and I was almost certain he had had some nose work done. And as I looked again, I could see he was wearing brown contact lenses. Almost certainly his eyes had been blue originally. But the biggest difference was his great height. He had not been quite this tall when he was eighteen years old. Then again, it was hard to know for sure, since he had often sat petulantly next to his attorneys. Still, I would guess he had grown another five inches...perhaps enough to completely throw authorities off his trail.
He was, after all, an escaped convict - and allegedly responsible for two more deaths. A guard at the criminally insane prison and the owner of a creepy museum in Hollywood who had purchased Aaron's teeth for a morally questionable display.
A sick display. There had been an outrage, of course.
But the outrage turned moot when the owner had been found dead some months later, and the teeth had been stolen.
The same teeth that now dangled from Fang's neck.
The same fangs.
"You are a killer," I said.
"As are you, Samantha," he said, sitting back and sipping casually on a drink that smelled strong enough to preserve a warthog. "We are both victims of circumstance. Never forget that."
His faux brown eyes continued scanning my face. I could see the wonder in them; I could sense his awe. His thoughts were alive to me, nearly registering in my mind as my own. After all, I had a deep connection to Fang, deeper than I had ever thought possible with another human being, and although the man in front of me was largely a stranger, now that we've met in the flesh, our connection seemed only to intensify.
He closed his eyes and took in some air. "I can feel you, Moon Dance."
I blinked. "Feel me how?"
"In my head. You're there. In my thoughts. Just off to the side. Listening. Picking up words here and there."
He cocked his head slightly to one side, like a dog listening to something on the wind. Now it was my turn to study his face. The man was gorgeous. Of that, there was no doubt. After all, there was a reason why my sister turned into a gibbering idiot every time he served us a drink. His brown hair was jauntily disheveled, or perhaps messily windblown. Mostly, it was his lips that commanded my attention. So full, especially the lower one. There was a spot of liquid on the bottom one and all I could think of doing was tasting that spot. Just that one, sexy spot.
His eyelids quivered, where I saw a brief flash of white, and realized his eyes had rolled up into his head. "Yes, there you are, Moon Dance."
I said nothing. Music continued pumping through the bar. A very old drunk man got up from his stool and started slow dancing with himself. He spun himself once, twice, and I thought he might even dip himself, but luckily he bumped into the bar and grabbed hold of it. No one seemed to notice him but me.
And seemingly inside my skull, I heard a very faint, yet very distinct whisper: Hello, Moon Dance.
Fang opened his eyes and smiled at me.
"Okay," I said. "That's never happened before."