Liz Jasper - Underdead 02

by Underdead in Denial

  Gavin. He hated vampires, went after them with a singular drive. All too soon, that would include me, if it didn’t already. Why had he kissed me? He couldn’t blame it on my purported vampire allure because my eyes had been closed when he’d pulled me into his arms. Unwanted heat surged through me as I remembered the feel of his lips on mine. I felt again the barely restrained passion as the kiss gentled and he’d pulled me even closer. Brushed his soft, firm lips across mine. He hadn’t been lured by anything vampire. He’d kissed me.

  And it was me he’d pushed away. I’d been rejected. Simple as that.

  I concentrated on my dinner. The steak came with sautéed vegetables and mashed potatoes, which I made myself eat. See? I’m perfectly normal. Lots of people like their steak really rare. Lots of people don’t care for vegetables. My only problem being that I lived in California where everybody had a weird fascination with roots and berries.

  I was about halfway through the meal, which I was eating with military precision—steak, potato, veggie, steak, potato—when my cell phone rang. I checked the screen. Gavin.

  Calling why? To apologize? I turned the phone off and pushed it away.

  My appetite left me. I scraped the remains back into the Styrofoam box and shoved it in the fridge for tomorrow.

  What I needed was a good book, some chocolate and a purring cat on my lap. That’s what rejected single women were supposed to do, right? I went into my bedroom and dragged out my shitty-day drawer. I selected a promising romance and a mystery I’d been hoarding and went back into the living room to flop on the couch.

  I called to the cat and patted the couch cushion next to me, but Fluffy remained holed up in her kitty condo. Clearly, I was so repulsive that even the cat refused my company. “Fine. I don’t like you either,” I told her fuzzy back.

  After a page and a half, I tossed the romance and picked up the mystery. I lasted three pages. I couldn’t focus on the words. Every time I tried, they swam into a black-and-white pattern of thoughts that I was trying to avoid. I got up and paced. Exercise would help. Blow off steam, get some endorphins going.

  After five minutes of pacing, all I’d managed was to work myself up to a good, old-fashioned pique of righteous anger. I was ready to call Gavin and give him a piece of my mind when a sharp knock sounded on my door. Hah! Gavin was back, no doubt to drive a stake through my heart. Or throw me in jail. He could do his worst, but first I was going to have the satisfaction of having my say.

  I stomped over to the door and yanked it open. It wasn’t Gavin standing there. It was Will.

  He took a half step back.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He regarded me thoughtfully in silence. “Why don’t we go out somewhere? You can tell me all about it.”

  My initial thought was nice try. But then I wondered, why not? So he was a vampire. So was I. Near enough, anyway.

  “Give me a minute to change. Uh…”

  I didn’t want to invite him in. I had a feeling once I did, it would be for good. Besides, my mother and my aunts and my grandmothers on both sides had drilled it into me that one didn’t invite someone like Will inside without a chaperone. Several chaperones.

  A knowing glint of humor lit his blue eyes. “I’ll wait here, shall I?”

  I hurried back to my bedroom and swapped my black hot pants for black straight-legged slacks. I unhitched my bustier, selected a soft black turtleneck sweater from my closet and went into to the bathroom. When I held up the sweater for a quick “outfit check” in the mirror, my face reflected so clearly it was nearly opaque.

  I perked up until I realized I was still wearing my Hollywood-vampire-slut makeup. I washed it off and turned back into a ghost. Sure I was a more opaque ghost than earlier in the week, thanks to the holy water. But I was hardly back to normal.

  What’s normal? I thought defiantly, tugging the turtleneck sweater over my head. As I stood in front of the mirror, I realized I’d automatically dressed as if I were going to a work function. How long had it been since I’d done anything else?

  I yanked off the sweater and replaced it with a deep green v-neck silk blouse. I pulled my hair out of its usual twist and brushed the heavy mass until it shone a coppery-gold. I dabbed on a little shadow that my mother insisted turned my hazel eyes green, brushed a coat of mascara on my lashes, did the blush thing and finished with a little translucent powder.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t really tell if it looked okay. But it was Will’s fault if my eyeliner was drawn on crooked, and he would have to deal.

  I opened the door and Will was leaning comfortably against one of the banister posts as if he had all the time in the world. I guessed he did. The look of male appreciation on his face when he saw me said that he did have all the time in the world, as long as I was the result.

  With a rush of power and defiance, I stepped outside and locked the door behind me.

  “What’s next? Do we turn into bats and fly somewhere?”

  “That’s a bit of a misunderstanding.” He leaned in and brushed a slow kiss across my lips that made every nerve ending jump up and take note. “You look lovely.” With a simple chivalrous movement of his hand, he directed me to precede him down the stairs. “I thought, tonight, we could drive.”

  When we got to street level, Will beeped open the gleaming black car at the curb. An Aston Martin. I knew what it was because that’s what they had James Bond drive in the movies when they wanted him to look cool. It was out of place on my street.

  The car smelled wonderful. Leather and a trace of that scent Will always wore. Probably pure pheromone.

  A rustle of clothing against leather and Will was in the driver’s seat. We pulled away from the curb with an elegant roar of the engine.

  He touched a button on the dash and a full orchestra, tucked somewhere in the back, played Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. At the end of the block, the achingly beautiful music gave way to a polite plea for contributions to a public radio station’s pledge drive.

  I realized I didn’t understand Will at all. I didn’t understand any of this.

  “I have duct tape on my phone,” I said.

  We passed under a streetlight and Will turned to look at me with raised brows.

  “My car is sixteen years old and secondhand. But even if I could afford a better car, I like the one I have because it’s just the right shade of gray, so you can’t tell when I don’t wash it, and I almost never do. The most expensive things in my closet, aside from the hideous yellow bridesmaid dress I wore in my friend Sarah’s wedding two summers ago, and my long wool pea coat from college, are my running shoes. I teach earth science to twelve-year-olds, who most days manage to make me feel completely inadequate to the task.”

  I had turned in my seat, the better to impress my words on him.

  “What could you possibly want with me?” I demanded. I wasn’t speaking to the obvious income gap between us but something more intrinsic. We were just so different. He was Godiva and champagne, I was a s’more, eaten on the beach next to a crackling campfire. I wasn’t being coy or fishing for compliments. I really wanted to know. Why me?

  He was silent. I swept my gaze from the instrument panel that could have run a jet to his beautifully soft, black button-down shirt that probably cost more than I made in a week, and settled on the lean planes of his face. But I couldn’t find answers there. If anything, it made me more confused. Will had a vampire allure that could pull a girl in like a tractor beam. I’d experienced it. But he didn’t need it. He was the sort of man women dreamed about but only saw in movies.

  “You could have anyone.”

  “I could,” he agreed. There was an off note in his voice that I couldn’t place.

  I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t.

  I shifted in my seat so I faced forward again. We had turned off Ocean Boulevard, which—no surprise—runs along the ocean in Long Beach, and were heading inland.

  �
�Where are we going?” I asked.

  “That’s up to you.”

  The anger that had propelled me out the door was cooling by the minute and that statement put ice blocks around my feet. Was he speaking metaphorically? Asking if I wanted to complete the transformation? What had I been thinking, getting into a car with him?

  “Perhaps you’d like to dine? There’s a restaurant I think you’ll like a few blocks from here.”

  I was so relieved I nearly laughed aloud. I had a feeling that if I started, I would never stop. I wasn’t remotely hungry, but I latched onto the idea of a nice crowded restaurant like a lifeline. “Sounds great.”

  Will pulled up to a restaurant I’d seen before but never been in and parked right in front. A uniformed man rushed over to open my door. Will led me inside with a hand on the small of my back. We didn’t have to do anything so plebeian as stop at the hostess stand and ask about a table or a reservation. We went straight to a quiet, private table in the back.

  My chair was pulled out for me and pushed smoothly back into position as I sat. Menus appeared before us and we were left alone.

  “I always wondered what it would be like to be queen,” I muttered.

  Will barked out a laugh, catching my meaning at once. “I always felt sorry for the servant who didn’t procure a chair in time to seat the royal bottom.”

  “Was there one? Someone who didn’t push the chair back in time?”

  “There must have been, once. Can’t be sure about twice.”

  “Probably how the Tower of London got its start.”

  My nerves stopped jangling and shooting warnings at me. As I relaxed and settled into my chair, I realized it was actually quite comfortable.

  “Do you want something to eat?” Will asked.

  “Honestly? I’m not really hungry. Mostly I wanted to know if you ate real food.”

  Will’s quick grin broadened, completing the transformation from scary lord of the night to nice guy.

  “We’ll just have drinks then. Maybe dessert? They do an excellent chocolate soufflé. I’ll take that look on your face as a yes.”

  The waiter reappeared as if by magic. I ordered the soufflé and coffee.

  “Decaf?” the waiter asked smoothly.

  “Sure.” Not decaf, cautioned a thin voice inside me. Keep your wits about you. “No, regular!”

  Will’s mouth twitched slightly, as if he knew what prompted the change. He ordered a brandy.

  “Tell me…” Will said, as the waiter disappeared. He reached a hand across the table to cover mine. His touch was warm and unexpectedly soothing. “What was it that had you so upset earlier?”

  Gavin’s kiss flashed into my consciousness, but I locked it back away.

  “Just something to do with Tom’s murder…um, that was the guy—”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  In the beat of silence, any number of terrible reasons why he might know that crowded into my head.

  “His name was in the newspaper,” Will said.

  “You did that on purpose.”

  “I couldn’t resist. Your every emotion plays across your face.” He watched me a moment and said, “You were saying…about Tom?”

  “He died after eating cookies I made. Someone put cyanide on them.”

  Will absorbed that. “Did you know Tom well?”

  “Not really. We had dinner together once, as tagalongs on a double date between two of our friends.” I decided not to mention Becky’s name. In my experience, once you put a name to a face, it moved from the random jumble at the back your mind to the front. I wanted Becky to remain as far to the back of Will’s radar as possible.

  “You liked this man?”

  I hesitated, torn between two maxims I’d grown up with—“only say good of the dead” and “begin as you mean to go on”—and decided to go with the latter. If Will found me uncouth, he was welcome to drop me at home and forget about me.

  “No. He talked at me the entire evening. I don’t think there’s a single corner of his entire existence that he didn’t share with me.”

  Our drinks came.

  “He told you his secrets?” Face inscrutable, Will leaned forward slightly as he waited for my response.

  “Hardly. He regaled me with his life story. Every boring minute of it. Then he bragged about his thievery. Apparently he ‘found’ some papers mixed in with a box of useless desk supplies at the garage sale of a grieving son. Tom basically stole what he insisted was the final unpublished work of the guy’s grandfather, a local playwright who was popular back in the Twenties. Soler? Solera?”

  The intent, searching expression on Will’s face mellowed suddenly into something thoughtful. He sat back in his chair and tented his fingers against his lips. “Sydney Solaire.”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I knew him.” Will’s eyes got a faraway look. “Shortly before his death, he was working on an intriguing play on the nature of man.” His attention came back to fix on me. “You say this…Tom…found the manuscript? No wonder he was murdered.”

  He said the last so matter-of-factly that I wondered if I’d imagined the intellectually curious dreamer I’d seen sitting across from me seconds before.

  “I don’t know about that. There is a good chance Tom’s death was an accident, that the poison was meant for someone else.”

  Will shook his head. His brandy remained untouched. “No. The play would have been a masterpiece.” His face seemed lit by an internal fire. “Solaire’s treatment of destiny and our roles choosing our own fate was brilliant, a work of philosophy rivaling any of the greats. An unpublished play of that caliber, its author dead, his progeny unaware of its existence… For such things, men kill.”

  Kill. The word lingered in the air, buoyed by a sweet, musky perfume that choked the response in my throat. I turned to find Natasha approaching our table. Her curves were barely contained by a slinky dress in a shade of come-hither red that I was embarrassed to use on my toenails. I could practically see the air currents formed by the swiveling of her hips. Boom-shiska-boom-shiska-boom.

  Her eyes were hard as daggers as they slid over me, sending a familiar icy chill down my spine. Once again I had gotten so caught up talking to Will that I had forgotten he was a bomb ready to go off. I never made that mistake with Natasha. For the first time that evening, I was painfully aware how very, very stupid I had been to leave my apartment.

  Her attention didn’t linger on me and I drew in a shaky breath as her face softened with sweetness as cloying as her perfume. All for Will’s benefit.

  It was then that I noticed she wasn’t alone. One slim hand curled around the steely forearm of a blond demigod. He wore jeans slung low on lean hips, giving us a peek at abs so ripped they’d make a Calvin Klein underwear model hustle self-consciously to the gym. His gorgeously muscled, V-shaped torso was shown off by a thin cotton shirt that molded to his body like a second skin.

  My first thought was Wow. My second thought was that he seemed familiar. I figured I’d probably seen a model who looked like him pasted on the girls’ binders at school. But then he shifted his doglike attention from Natasha to look at me and I saw the same flicker of recognition in his eyes.

  I remembered where I’d seen him and choked. Will passed me a glass of water, which I took with shaking hands and pretended to drink to buy myself time to recover.

  The blond stud was the guy Natasha had disappeared with into the haunted house the night Tom died. My eyes moved automatically to his neck. Unlike mine, which still bore twin scars from Will’s incisors, his was unblemished. He noticed what I was doing and flashed me a self-satisfied smile. Natasha had already turned him, of course, and that curious power of regeneration had healed the wounds as if they’d never been.

  It was only the bodies left for dead that retained the teeth marks. The dead and me.

  Natasha presented the newcomer to Will as if she were showing off her new Porsche, and then begrudgingly,
and only because Will expected the courtesy, introduced him to me.

  Natasha’s vampire arm candy had a name. “This,” she said, “is Leonardo.” She drew out the name in an affected way, as if he were famous and we should immediately throw ourselves to the floor and start bowing and scraping.

  “Hi! You can call me Lenny,” he said brightly.

  I coughed. “Lenny?”

  Lenny’s face lit with pleasure at being mentioned, the way a puppy’s does. The sexy veneer disappeared, leaving a guy who would’ve been at home chewing straw and driving a tractor on a small farm in the Midwest.

  “Heya, Will.”

  Lenny’s accent was pure Minnesota. His mother was probably back home dreaming about ways to tweak her blue-ribbon jam recipe for the local fair.

  Will’s expression was unreadable.

  Lenny reached for my hand and pumped energetically. “Jo, it’s real nice to finally meet ya. I—”

  Natasha pinched Lenny’s biceps sharply. He shifted immediately back into cool mode, turning his head and tilting his jaw in a pose of calculated boredom.

  That’s when I noticed the fading bruise under his chin. As if in recognition, the back of my head throbbed from where it had collided with my attacker’s jaw a couple of hours ago.

  I’d been right. Natasha was behind the “accidents”. Only, she was using her new stooge to do the dirty work, in case Will asked any pesky questions. The way she kept Lenny pasted to her side explained why I had kept smelling her perfume.

  My teeth started to chatter. I clamped my them together to make it stop, and sneaked a glance at Will, to see if he noticed. He hadn’t. He was doing the small-talk thing with Lenny and Natasha. As if this were normal. Just two people out on a date, running into friends. I realized that’s what they were to him. Friends. Family, even.

  But Natasha and Lenny weren’t my friends—not even close—and nothing about this was normal. However gorgeous and charming, Will was a powerful and deadly vampire. Natasha was a psycho-vampette and Lenny, Natasha’s vampire arm candy, had been recruited like a piece of meat. Probably with less thought. He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and in a snap of Natasha’s pointed teeth, the sweet young man from the farm was gone forever. Now, Natasha said “kill” and Lenny said “when and how?” She probably had enough vampire allure to turn an army of men into murderous robots.