Brigit Stewart looked impossibly beautiful tonight. She wore a strapless red satin dress and had her long blonde hair blown out to perfection. Her pale skin had lost the orange tone of the boxed tanning she’d indulged in during her life and now radiated with a cool, milky glow.
Death suited her.
“Hey, Bri, I need to ask you a bit of a weird favor.”
“Sure.” She didn’t hesitate or ask for details.
“There’s been some talk around the city lately of something strong enough to take out a shifter, and I think it might be the monster I’m looking for. They won’t tell me much at the vampire bars. Can you keep an ear to the ground and just tell me if anything comes up you think might help me?”
“Uh-huh.” Brigit nodded and gave me a megawatt smile. I knew her mind was otherwise occupied, but I also knew I could rely on her to help me out if she could. At this point I needed to use every resource I had.
“Heeeey, baby.” A guy in a fancy—albeit wrinkled—suit slid onto the stool next to mine. I acknowledged him but didn’t smile. No sense in encouraging Slobbery McDrunkface into thinking he had a shot.
Who was I kidding? Drunk guys in suits always thought they had a shot.
He put his hand on my bare thigh an inch below the hem of my black shorts and eyeballed my yellow backless halter top like it was an invitation. My jaw strained under the pressure of my teeth grinding together, and my hands balled into fists.
Oblivious to my demeanor, he pressed on. “You and your sisssster should come paaaaarty.” He rubbed his nose and grinned.
“Ew,” Brigit groaned. “Are you retarded?”
The man’s hand spasmed on my thigh, sending a chill of repulsion through me. A film of confusion clouded his features, and I could smell his anger before I saw it surface on his face.
“Listen—” He didn’t get a chance to finish.
“No, you listen,” I whispered so only he would hear me. “I’ve been about as patient with you as I’m going to be. Get your hand off my leg, or forfeit it to me.”
“What?”
“Get it off, or I keep it. That goes for any other part of you that tries to touch me or my…sister.”
Brigit smiled, and from what I could see of her face without looking away from the man, she had a gleam in her eyes. Eyes that were no longer blue.
“Secret?”
I looked from Grabby Hands to Brigit and saw how dark her irises had gotten, as though the pupils were trying to overtake her whole eye. She leaned across me, bracing her hands on my right thigh, and locked her gaze on the douche in the suit.
“You want to have some fun?” Her voice was a throaty growl, full of sinful promise.
“This guy?”
Her stare never wavered, but she gave an imperceptible nod. I guess I didn’t have much say in this. After all, it wasn’t my hunt.
The music changed to something slower with an animalistic throbbing rhythm that shook my pulse and sent a thrill down my spine. Propping my elbows on the bar at my back, I let Brigit and the suit make eyes at each other while each of them held one of my thighs. It must have looked promisingly scandalous because a few people gave us lewd voyeuristic glances as they gathered their drinks.
“You want to leave with us,” Brigit told him.
A wheezy breath escaped his slack-jawed mouth, but apart from that he only nodded mutely.
Drunks were so easy to thrall it was almost funny. The human equivalent of an old, weak antelope, most vampires didn’t bother with them because there was no challenge in it. But Brigit had only been a vampire for nine months and was still learning how to enthrall humans, so a drunk was a safe place to start.
Now we needed to confirm she could feed from him without losing control.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Follow me. Don’t get lost,” she instructed her too-willing prey. It was amazing how much smoother Brigit’s speech ran when she was out for the feed. There were no halting nonsense words. No likes or ya knows. Every word was purposeful, like she couldn’t spare any extras and still enthrall someone.
Brigit got to her feet and took the man’s hand, which I was thrilled to have off my leg. I brushed the skin of my thigh with my bone-dry palm, trying to get the smell off me. It was no use. Desmond would know the second I got home.
My vampire protégée weaved gracefully across the dance floor with her midnight snack in tow. He was less capable of dodging the flailing dancers and kept getting jostled and elbowed in his attempt to follow Brigit.
Shadowing them, I managed to escape the dance floor unscathed, though one brave soul did grab my hand and try to force me to dance with him.
“Don’t,” I growled, bracing myself to put up a bit of a fight, but the guy raised his hands palms out in a gesture of surrender.
Smart man.
Outside I found my odd couple in the alley adjacent to the club. The music had been whittled down until only the bass notes remained, pounding in the night like a woodpecker on a mite-infested maple.
My boots announced my arrival with a sharp clicking on the concrete. Breath hung around my head, as it did around the man Brigit was pressed against. Only she remained breathless. She’d caged him between her arms and was leaning her full weight into the front of his body to make sure he stayed put.
Judging by his glassy-eyed lack of focus, I was pretty sure running was the last thing on his mind.
“Okay, Bri, are you ready for this?”
Instead of verbalizing her reply she licked his neck, eliciting a low moan from him, then she fixed her jet-black gaze on me. It was a little too erotic for my taste, but that’s vampires for you.
I tucked my hands in the back pockets of my shorts and nodded to her quarry. “No time like the present.”
Her fangs were already out, and she was close to diving for his throat when I coughed to regain her attention. It was a testament to her control she was able to stop herself.
“What?”
“Not the neck. Too risky.” I held up my arm and waved at her, pointing to my wrist.
She groaned and I think she rolled her eyes, but it was hard to say without any visible white.
When she grabbed his hand and tore open the vein with fierce precision, it was clear she wouldn’t let me interrupt again. All I could think was, I wonder if I looked like that when I fed from Lucas.
Brigit’s victim let out a yip of pain, but soon after, his eyes rolled backwards and his noises took on a more euphoric quality.
No fair. Whenever I got bitten by a vampire it hurt like a sonofabitch. I had to give Brigit credit, though. She’d enthralled him properly and as long as she stopped feeding after an appropriate withdrawal had been made, I’d be willing to say she was ready to hunt alone.
A human could only lose so much blood before a feeding became a murder, and as a good rule of thumb there was a one-minute time frame between the opening of a vein and the end of the meal. I was counting off the seconds in my head.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine…
Brigit gasped and drew her head back, her lips and chin smeared with blood. She looked grisly, but she’d done it. Licking his wound clean, she resisted the urge to take another sip, and her saliva started to work its creepy vampire magic.
On humans, at least living ones, saliva or blood from the undead worked to heal wounds made by the undead. Once a human had been killed, those wounds could no longer be fixed, so it was often possible to see a sire’s bite mark on a baby vamp after it had risen.
The jelly-kneed man was slumped against the building, panting like he’d had the greatest orgasm of his life. Brigit, his blood still on her face, grabbed his chin and smiled at him. He didn’t fight or seem at all alarmed.
“You got a quickie behind the bar,” she purred. “It was good, wasn’t it?”
“Y-yes.”
“When you get home you won’t remember my face or my friend. And you’ll stop being a douche to girls at the bar, ’kay?”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and you’ll never wear that cologne again. It’s gross.”
I suppressed a laugh. Leave it to Brigit to give her vic a lesson on hygiene. She bounded over to me, skipping on her heels, then stood in front of me like an eager schoolgirl. I handed her the wet nap I’d brought from home and kept in my back pocket with this purpose in mind. I’d seen Brigit eat before, and she sometimes got a little carried away. She tore open the square packet to clean her face.
“You did great,” I reported.
She squealed and clapped her hands together.
“Now can we stop at your place? I need to find something to wear tomorrow.”
“What’s tomorrow?” she asked.
“I meet the scariest being ever. My boyfriend’s mom.”
Chapter Eleven
Christmas Eve didn’t feel right without snow. I’m not much of a traditionalist, but I did grow up in Canada, and Christmas without snow was just plain wrong.
I was sitting on the loveseat in my living room, tugging nervously at the sweater I’d borrowed from Brigit. It was a pretty white angora knit with short cap sleeves and a purple-and-green Fair Isles pattern across the chest. It was a bit more cocoa-at-the-ski-lodge than Christmas-with-the-parents, but it beat anything I had in my closet.
My pants selection was an even mix of denim and leather, and jeans didn’t seem appropriate, so leather it was.
After trying a half-dozen different styles, I’d given up and pulled my hair into a ponytail with the loose curls draping down my back.
Pine needles were drizzled over the low pile carpet, and the whole apartment smelled of deep woods and the faint, clinging tendrils of Desmond’s baking. These were the smells that tugged at memory and rooted you to a place in time. While my knees might be jostling in a nervous beat, I couldn’t help but be warmed by the rightness of the apartment and how it felt like a home.
Desmond emerged from the bedroom wearing a hunter-green sweater vest over a crisp white shirt. The green deepened the gray hue of his eyes, almost blotting out the violet wash I loved so much. He was playing with the tie in his hands, smirking at a private thought, and when he looked up at me my heart stopped.