A Bite of Blueberry

by Melissa Monroe

  “This guy was a nightmare,” Jack Riggs muttered. Jack was a big man, and a close acquaintance of Priscilla’s. She wasn’t sure they classified themselves as friends yet, but he didn’t seem to mind sitting next to her at the break table.

  He ran a hand through his dark hair and his thick brows furrowed. “I don’t know how he’s still practicing. He botched an operation and left this one guy, Kyle Mills, with weakness and pain in his left arm. He had to quit construction. The case settled out of court. This lady, Jada Burke, nearly went into septic shock and died after he left a clamp inside of her. Again, it settled out of court. This other woman, Jeana Lupton, did die of septic shock, but the family couldn’t prove it wasn’t another member of staff. So he got off again.”

  “It sounds like Dr. Montgomery has gotten lazy in his old age,” Priscilla remarked dryly, leaning her head on the stack of papers in front of her. She was getting tired of reading about the exploits of Colten Montgomery, the corrupt head of their family business. He’d gotten off on a technicality, and then sued the courts for emotional distress. He’d won, the vile man. She was starting to wonder how Benjamin was the least objectionable member of the family.

  Jack gave her a playful pout. “Old age? You wound me, Priscilla. I’m nearly as old as the good doctor, and Bert here is a lot older.”

  Bert Holder, a cop who should, by all rights, be retired at 67, barely looked up from his pile of paperwork. His snowy white hair was getting overlong and brushed the page he was staring at.

  “Got something, Bert?” she asked.

  He frowned. “I’m not sure. This man looks promising. He flew out from the Midwest to see Dr. Montgomery for a consultation. It ended in a fight. Didn’t you say this DeLoreto guy was from Chicago?”

  “That’s what Martino Romano told us, anyway,” Priscilla said with a shrug. “Why’d they fight? What happened?”

  Bert shrugged. “This document doesn’t go into specifics. But apparently Dr. Montgomery’s arm was broken and he couldn’t practice for a while. He sued and took this James Butler guy for every penny he had. He’s living in low-income housing in Chicago right now.”

  “I can call him, if you want,” Priscilla offered. “I know you boys have been here a while, and I still have a few hours until dawn.”

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Arthur grunted, emerging from his office looking like he’d lost a fight with a buffalo. He seized the paper from Bert’s hand before he could offer it to her. “I thought I told you to get out of here hours ago. Anna’s been minding the shop since we got home, and you need to set that nose properly.”

  Priscilla wanted to object. The bones would set soon. She’d fed recently, though it would take fresh human blood to give her the nearly instantaneous healing that people expected vampires to have.

  Arthur handed her a dusty first-aid kit. “Take it and go home.”

  She smiled. “You do know I have one of those at home, don’t you? Cuts happen in bakeries.”

  “Yours is almost empty,” Arthur said with a scowl. “I checked. All you have are a couple of Band-Aids and a few aspirin. That’s good for what? One stubbed toe?”

  She sighed. “Fine, I’ll take your first-aid kit. But I’m buying you a new one tomorrow night. Will you call me if you get a lead?”

  “Assuming we’re not off chasing it,” he said with a nod. “Go get some sleep, Priscilla. You’ve earned it. Tell Anna that I’ll be by in a few hours to take her home.”

  “What about us?” Jamie griped. “We’ve been here just as long as Priscilla.”

  “You signed up for this job, rookie, so get used to long hours. Priscilla loses time and business every time something like this happens. Get back to work. And call James Butler. I have a good feeling about that one.”

  “Good night, boys,” Priscilla said, waving with her free hand.

  “Night,” Jamie said, waving enthusiastically until she was out of sight. He was a sweet boy, she reflected. She could understand why Anna liked him.

  Because they’d driven to the game in Arthur’s police cruiser, she didn’t actually have a ride home. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him or any of the other officers, and she wasn’t going to alert them to the inconvenient truth. She wasn’t going to pull a single man off the case. The wind had died down, and it wasn’t the coldest January she’d lived through in her long life.

  She stepped out into the still air. The snow had also stopped sometime during the past few hours, leaving a powdery white blanket on the streets of Bellmare. She took a deep breath, inhaling the clean, crisp scent of a world covered in ice and snow. The snow wasn’t likely to stop until May. She could only hope that they wouldn’t be snowed in. It didn’t happen often, but Bellmare was a mountain town, and small enough that help didn’t always arrive as often as it should.

  Bellmare looked even spookier at night. On her way home, Priscilla passed several ghost tours, admiring of some of the town’s more infamous buildings. Markinswell Manor was briefly off the list until the murders were solved, but there was still Robshaw Inn, Riverty Sanitarium, the Bellmare Bridge, the Findlay house, the prison, and the mass grave that was located very near it. The tourists would probably conclude the night by snapping pictures of the stocks and gallows in the square, and then retire to Branigan’s Tavern for a drink. Each tour cost about $50 apiece, so the dedicated tourist could spend up to $500 to see every single one of Bellmare’s reputedly haunted places. Priscilla thought it was a waste of money, but it really didn’t matter. It wasn’t her vacation, after all.

  A man was sitting on the park bench across from her shop, smoking a cigarette a little ways away from another tour, oohing and ahhing over the gallows. A guide happily informed the crowd exactly how many people had been hanged, according to courthouse records. Priscilla steered clear of them. She disliked smokers and, while she was not as unfriendly as Tobias was, she still didn’t like talking to tourists. They wanted to hear her life’s story, and who had time for that?

  By the time she reached her front door, she was exactly the temperature of the surrounding air. The thermometer outside her shop door told her that was 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Priscilla smiled to herself. Perhaps she’d sneak up on Anna and press her hands to the back of the girl’s neck. It was immature, but she was dying for a laugh after all the tension she’d experienced in the last few hours. It would be nice to return to normalcy.

  The bell above her door tinkled as she entered. She waited for Anna to call her name, or at least the standard greeting for a customer. Instead, she was met with silence.

  “Anna?” she called. Perhaps she’d stepped into the back to retrieve something? Or maybe, because the store appeared pretty much dead for the time being, she’d stepped into the other room to greet Olivia?

  No, that couldn’t be right. Olivia had said she was closing early. Maddison had won a writing contest and was receiving her award at a ceremony tonight. The Big Bowl was closed. So that only left three places for her to be. In the back room, downstairs retrieving ingredients, or upstairs, using the bathroom. She doubted it was the latter. Joseph Reed, intentionally or not, had scared the life out of the girl twice. She wouldn’t walk into a froggy habitat if she could help it.

  Priscilla closed the door quietly behind her. Something was wrong, though she couldn’t seem to put her finger on what. The place still smelled of cinnamon, as it nearly always did. None of the chairs appeared to be out of place. The floors had been swept recently, and the cash register drawer was closed.

  Then it struck her. She’d left instructions with Anna to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies while she waited. Without fail, Priscilla had a wave of college dropouts cycling through her store by midnight. They wiped out her stock, every time. She’d had so little time for her day-to-day baking that she’d nearly forgotten about them, until she had seen one of their number at the basketball game. If Anna had prepared them, Priscilla’s body should have been adjusting to match the ambient temperature of the room.


  But she was just as chilled as ever. The room was only about ten degrees warmer than the air outside. Her industrial-sized oven heated the place effectively in winter, so she only kept the heat on inside the bakery proper when there was a danger of the pipes freezing. Otherwise, it felt like being in a broiler, according to Anna.

  Priscilla reached into her back pocket and withdrew her phone with shaking fingers. Her fingers were poised above the keys when a man’s voice spoke from the depths of the shop.

  “Call anyone, and I shoot the girl.”

  Priscilla froze, going as still as only the dead could. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t even blink. None of it was necessary, now that she was dead, and she was too frightened by the sudden development to do anything but comply. After all, Arthur had told her that guns were faster than vampires, hadn’t he?

  The man shuffled into sight, one arm around Anna’s throat in a tight headlock. It wasn’t enough to choke the life from her assistant, but it had effectively silenced her. Anna’s eyes were too wide, like a spooked horse. Her skin was beginning to bloom with bruises in places, and a sudden fury swept through Priscilla. How dare he harm her?

  The muzzle of a very strange-looking gun was pressed to her temple. The pipe that he’d stolen from the bathroom in the community center bathroom so many days before shone dully in the low, cozy light of the bakery. The mechanism attached to it was drawn back, and DeLoreto’s finger rested lightly on the trigger. This must be the zip gun that Arthur had been talking about.

  “Drop the phone,” he directed.

  Priscilla dropped the phone at once. It hit the ground with an ugly cracking sound, and she knew she’d probably just broken the only quick and reliable means to call for help. The only other thing she had in the bakery was an old rotary phone, which would take too long to dial with a gunman in her shop.

  “Good,” the man directed. “Get down on the floor.”

  She did as she was told. Unfortunately, the man had caught her while she was in front of the front door, which was entirely opaque. If she’d been standing in front of the windows, perhaps someone across the street would have spied the tableau and called the police.

  Anna whimpered. The man tightened his grip on her until the sound cut off with a gurgling rasp.

  “Stop that,” Priscilla snapped. “No one can hear us.”

  “You’re in no position to be making demands of me, vampire,” the man sneered. Priscilla couldn’t put her finger on exactly why he looked familiar, but she knew who this must be.

  “Let her go, DeLoreto. She has nothing to do with this.”

  He let out a dark chuckle. “I should have known that Sicilian scum was going to squeal to the cops. You just can’t trust a con man, can you?”

  Priscilla hoped that Martino had gotten out of town following their conversation. He might have been despicable, but he didn’t deserve to die.

  “Let her go,” Priscilla said, trying to make direct eye contact with DeLoreto and layering her voice with compulsion.

  She hadn’t used compulsion in a dog’s age, and she’d never been as good at it as her sire. Technically, under U.S. law, compelling someone with vampire wiles was punishable with up to ten years in jail. But she had to do something, or Anna was as good as dead. DeLoreto had already shown he had no compunctions hurting young people.

  He just laughed at her. “You think your powers will work at that distance, stronza?”

  She glared at him. “Where’s Butler, huh? Where’s that coward hiding?”

  DeLoreto laughed again. “James Butler? Oh no. That coward could never pluck up the stones to hire someone like me, no matter how much he hated that doctor and his repugnant little wife.”

  Priscilla’s head swam in confusion. It hadn’t been James Butler? But he was the most recent victim of Montgomery’s to leave the court system. His motive had seemed solid.

  “If not Butler, who hired you?”

  The door behind Priscilla opened, and the bells above her door tinkled merrily. The man behind it opened it with such force that the edge caught her in the back and sent her sprawling across the ground. She got one good look at the man who’d entered before his boot came crashing down on her head.

  It was the smoking man from across the road. Up close, she could see that he was a man of average height, not unlike DeLoreto. She caught a flash of red hair and freckles before the boot descended on the back of her head, knocking her face into the ground.

  Her nose broke, again, and her teeth rattled. Her vision swam. She could still get up, if she was fast enough. She could—

  The boot came down again, harder, and at an angle. She slid across the floor until her head encountered the wall. Then, the blackness slid over her eyes like a veil, and she knew no more.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Priscilla’s shin was throbbing. It was not the only ache that was demanding her attention, but it was the sharpest. She frowned, still muddled from the blow. Why was her shin throbbing? Hadn’t the unknown man kicked her in the head?

  Another sharp kick to her shin gave her the answer. She groaned and swiveled her neck as far as she could, to see Anna beside her. They were in her room. When had they gotten there? Priscilla frowned. There was a blurry edge to her vision that she hadn’t had since she’d been human, and a very sick one at that. Her mouth tasted like sawdust. Surely the human who’d kicked her couldn’t have actually damaged her permanently? She’d fed within the last few days, so the damage should have been healing.

  Only it wasn’t. Her nose throbbed dully, as did her cheek and jaw. Her wrist felt raw and her senses finally registered a soft dripping sound somewhere in her vicinity.

  “Did you have to turn the heat on?” DeLoreto grumbled. “It’s like a hundred degrees in here, Lupton.”

  That name rang a bell, vaguely, but Priscilla’s muddled mind couldn’t place where she’d heard it. The red-haired man paced in front of where she sat, tied to a chair. Anna was in a similar position, about a foot away. She had an impressive bruise on her jaw.

  “I told you, this is necessary. You do want to get out of this crummy town alive, don’t you? They’ve already pegged you, and it’s only a matter of time before they peg me too. I know I’m somewhere in that odious man’s files.”

  “But why did you turn the heat up?” DeLoreto griped.

  The man—Mark, presumably—let out a gusty sigh. “You failed your biology classes, didn’t you?”

  DeLoreto slouched in a corner, scowling. “So?”

  “When our bodies are cold, it restricts blood flow. If we want to make this little distraction work, we have to get the vampire’s body temperature up. She’s not going to bleed if she’s cold.”

  Priscilla frowned. Was she bleeding? She sniffed the air very delicately. Sure enough, the scent perfumed the air, very near her. Her stomach clenched hungrily. That, too, was troubling. She had fed recently. It shouldn’t feel like she’d been going without for a month. What was wrong with her?

  Mark Lupton bent in front of her, examining her face. “Ah, so you’re awake. You look confused.”

  “My wrist ... hurts,” she said thickly. Every new thought that entered into her head was a challenge to process. It felt like wading through molasses to get to the root of anything right now.

  He grinned tightly. “Yes, I suppose it would. I had my friend here coat his knife in silver. I knew you’d heal quickly, otherwise.”

  Ah, so that was why the wound felt raw. Come to think of it, that was probably why she scented blood and had been hearing the steady drip-drip. She glanced at her side. One of her wrists had been loosely tied to let the wound drip blood into a glass pitcher. It was half full already. She swallowed convulsively. That was why her throat was parched. That was a gallon pitcher, and if it was half full, she’d lost too much blood already.

  “Why?” she rasped. “Why are you doing this?”

  His smile became even grimmer, if that was possible. His green eyes glittered with dark humor.
“Which part? This little frame-up, or the murders?”

  “Either. Both.”

  Mark cocked his head to one side. “I don’t know how much you know, really. Where to start?”

  A thought finally filtered to the surface of her brain, and she blurted it out without thinking.

  “You’re one of the lawsuits. Mark Lupton. Your wife, Jeana, she …” she trailed off, having trouble remembering just what Jack Riggs had said. “Your wife died of sepsis.”

  Mark’s smile disappeared, and he grew even paler under his freckles. His eyes narrowed. “Yes, she did. What else do you know?”

  Priscilla strained to recall the details that Jack had given her on the case. There hadn’t been many. “I know that he didn’t have to pay you, because you couldn’t prove he was liable.”

  Mark’s mouth twisted. “Did the file tell you that she was twelve weeks pregnant when that lazy son of a—” he cut off, apparently deciding that the curse word wasn’t strong enough. “That that monster killed her? Did it tell you that the procedure wasn’t even medically necessary? The biopsies said the tumor was benign. It could have waited until after she’d given birth. I bet that file also didn’t tell you that the operation shouldn’t have been performed by a doctor who wasn’t experienced at treating pregnant women. The twins died, and then she died. I lost my whole family at once.”

  Priscilla could only stare at him in mute horror. No, Jack hadn’t mentioned that part. And suddenly a few things made sense. The order in which the children had been targeted, for one. And why he hadn’t gone straight for Dr. Montgomery and gotten it over with. Few things in the world were as painful as losing a child.

  He laughed at her dumbstruck expression. “No, I didn’t think that they would. That man’s attorney had the facts stricken from the record. Too prejudicial, I think he said. There was no proof that his client had caused the deaths. After all, pregnant women develop sepsis all the time.”

  “I’m sorry,” Priscilla said.