by Cat Devon
“So you’re the caped crusader bent on saving humankind? You’ve seen too many superhero movies.”
“That’s not it. I know I can’t find every killer in this city. I can’t save everyone who is attacked. But I save those I can,” Alex said.
“You do realize that vampires traditionally aren’t into saving humans unless it’s for their next meal.”
“Yeah, I’m aware.”
“And is this Keira the latest human you intend to save?”
“Yes, she is.”
“What if saving her hurts Vamptown?”
“That won’t happen.”
“If it does?” Damon persisted. “Your loyalties better lie with us, Alex.”
“They do.”
“You took an oath. Yes, you took an oath as a cop as well. But a human oath is nothing compared with a vampire oath and that’s what you swore to us. Do not forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“Good. Because you know the punishment for breaking a vampire oath, correct?”
Alex nodded. “The punishment is death.”
“So don’t go losing your head over this Keira or you could end up literally losing your head by decapitation.”
Alex’s jaw clenched. He was sick of Damon treating him like some kind of disobedient schoolboy. “Have I ever let this clan down in the ten years I’ve lived here?”
“No.”
“I’m not about to start now, so back off.”
Damon held out his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “I’m just trying to do what’s best for Vamptown.”
“So am I,” Alex said. “So stop breaking my balls and let me get back to work.”
Chapter Eight
Half an hour after arriving, Sierra jumped up from the couch and headed for her tote bag. “I almost forgot. I brought more cupcakes. A dozen this time.” She flipped open the container’s lid and displayed the contents. “And a bigger selection. We’ve got cookies and cream. Pink lemonade. Blueberry with red, white, and blue frosting and sprinkles in honor of the Fourth of July tomorrow.”
Sierra’s words took Keira back to the luncheon she’d attended a few hours ago for the city’s Taste of Chicago, scheduled to take place after the Fourth of July. Her life had still been relatively normal then. Yes, she’d read her grandfather’s journal and was aware of the probability that vampires were real. But she still had her freedom and her apartment.
A thousand cupcakes couldn’t make this situation better.
But they couldn’t hurt, so she took the pink lemonade cupcake. She dipped her finger in the icing for a preview taste before contemplating what Sierra had told her so far. “I still don’t get how you can be okay living with vampires.”
“I’m actually only living with one. The others are neighbors.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You think vampires are evil.”
“I don’t think they are choirboys,” she retorted.
“No, definitely not choirboys,” Sierra agreed.
“Alex claims there are good and bad vampires like there are good and bad people.”
“He’s right.”
“I don’t understand. How can a vampire be good?”
“By fighting evil. They are better equipped than humans to fight the darkness that is out there.”
“You write mysteries. You’re good at figuring out clues. Who do you think is behind these blood thefts? Is that the kind of darkness you’re talking about?”
“It’s not anyone from here. I’m sure of that.”
“How can you be sure? You said yourself that you haven’t been here very long. What about the blood? Where does it come from for the vampires here?”
“That information is on a need-to-know basis. And I don’t need to know.”
“So you have no idea where the vampire you love gets his blood?”
“Let’s get back to the blood thefts,” Sierra said firmly. “The most likely suspect is the rival vampire clan.”
“Do you know someone named Lawrence Lynch?” Keira asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because he came to the police department when I was there. He came to speak to Alex. I’m assuming he was a vampire since he made a comment about me being lunch.”
“You need to ask Alex about that. I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to tell you,” Sierra admitted.
“Alex doesn’t tell me much.”
“That makes sense. He doesn’t know if you can be trusted.”
Keira took a bite of her cupcake. “These are good.” She looked at the box. “Heavenly Cupcakes. I did a story about them a few months back. Are they nearby?”
“Yes, they’re … No you don’t.” Sierra caught herself. “Nice try but I’m not going to get into trouble for revealing something I shouldn’t.”
“It’s just a cupcake shop,” Keira said. “Or is it?”
“It’s definitely just a cupcake shop with outstandingly delicious cupcakes and a wonderful owner.”
“She’s a friend of yours?”
Sierra eyed her cautiously.
“What?” Keira said. “What harm could come from you saying you’re friends with … her name is Daniella, right? Daniella Delaney.”
“That is her name.”
Keira abruptly changed the subject. “What about you? What are you working on now? Would you be interested in my doing a story about you?”
“About me living with a vampire? No thanks. Not that you could write that anyway.”
“Why couldn’t I?”
“When I first found out about the vampires surrounding me, Ronan dared me to include that fact in an email to my publicist, Katie. She’s an awesome publicist, by the way. The best in the business. Anyway, nothing I typed about it came through. Nothing I texted. It didn’t work. Now, of course, I’d never try something like that.”
“But I might. And I might be more successful.” Keira reached for her laptop, which she’d been charging and had plugged in now.
“Go ahead,” Sierra said, looking unconcerned. “Give it your best shot.”
“I will. No Internet connection?” She looked at her screen with a frown. “What happened to vamp Wi-Fi?”
“It’s reserved for vampires,” Alex said as he strolled into the room. “Are you ladies having fun?”
“Buckets of fun,” Keira retorted sarcastically. “Too bad you missed it.”
Alex dramatically placed both hands over his heart. “I am so incredibly saddened to hear I missed out.”
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Sierra said. “I’ve got another five pages to write yet today. Oh, Keira wants to know who Lawrence Lynch is. You should tell her. Bye for now.”
“So you want to know about Lynch, huh?” Alex said. “Wasn’t he in that journal of your grandfather’s?”
“Not as far as I know, no.”
“What do you mean not as far as you know? I thought you read the whole thing.”
“Most of it.”
“And Lynch was never mentioned?”
“I already told you.”
“You haven’t told me much.”
“Right back atcha,” she said. She licked pink lemonade frosting off her fingertips before saying, “So you’re holding me near Heavenly Cupcakes, huh?”
“What gave you that idea?”
“Sierra.”
“She told you that Heavenly Cupcakes was nearby?”
Keira nodded.
“Liar.” He rubbed his thumb across her bottom lip. “Shame on you.”
Her entire body lit up with desire. Even so, she refused to let her wild attraction to him get in the way of information. Taking a step back, she irritably said. “Stop trying to seduce me into behaving.”
“You’re angry because you want me.”
“I’m angry because I’ve been abducted by vampires and had my apartment trashed and then torched. It’s been a hell of a day and not in a good way.”
“Same here.”
“An
d Sierra did tell me that the cupcake shop was nearby. Granted, she did so accidentally, but I wasn’t lying. I’ve been honest with you, which is more than I can say about you.”
“You haven’t been honest about your grandfather’s journal. You said you’d show me where it is right before you kneed me.” He pointed to his crotch with both index fingers, which of course directed her attention to that area of his body.
She noted the bulge beneath the zipper of his black pants. She’d felt how hard his erection was. She’d felt him against her body. She still wanted him even though she shouldn’t. But then she’d been doing plenty of things all day that she shouldn’t. But not this. She was not having sex with a vampire, no matter how much her body wanted to. She returned her attention to his police badge attached to his belt.
“I did that because you were manhandling me and threatening me. It was self-defense,” she said.
“Maybe,” he allowed.
“Definitely.”
“At least you didn’t get a black eye from hitting the invisible defensive wall when you tried to escape.” He tenderly brushed his fingers over her face.
“No thanks to you.”
“Hey.” He gently tapped his finger against her chin. “I didn’t want you hurt. I gave you an ice bag for it.”
Damn. He was hot enough when he was being bossy; when he showed a slight tenderness, he was nearly irresistible. A mere tap to her chin, over in an instant yet still registering in her sensual memory bank.
She had to stay focused here. Not focused on seeing Alex naked. Not focused on peeling his shirt from his chest and kissing her way to his navel. No, none of that was allowed. No thinking about it. No fantasizing about it.
She needed to be practical. “If you’re forcing me to stay here overnight then we need to discuss the sleeping arrangements,” she said.
“Go right ahead.”
“I’m sleeping on my couch.”
“Fine by me.”
She eyed the huge bed in the far corner of the loft. “Where do you sleep?”
“Hanging upside down like a bat,” he drawled.
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“No, not really. Didn’t your grandfather’s journal detail the sleeping habits of vampires?”
“Not your sleeping habits, no.”
“Yet I was next on his hit list. Didn’t he do his research?”
“There wasn’t much info on you at all.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“There may have been some information about umm, you being a marine in World War Two.”
“I was a medic fatally injured on Iwo Jima in the Pacific.”
“He didn’t go into details.”
“Neither do I,” Alex said curtly.
“You don’t like talking about how you became a vampire. I get that.”
“That doesn’t stop you from being curious about it, though,” he said.
“True,” she admitted.
“How about this, I tell you something about that time and you tell me something about your grandfather?”
She thought a moment before agreeing. “Okay. You go first.”
“They told us that we could take Iwo in three days. Instead it took thirty days and thousands of marines were killed.”
“Including you.”
“Including me for a brief moment.”
“What happened?”
He shook his head. “I told you something. Now it’s your turn to tell me.”
“My grandfather had a streak of white across his hair.”
“That’s not information,” he said.
“It’s more personal than your factual statement was.”
“You want facts? I’ll give you facts.” His voice was harsh. “Like the fact that nothing could prepare you for the horror on that godforsaken island. Constant shelling and sniper fire. Limbs being blown off. Skulls exploding. The enemy was booby-trapping their injured and dead with explosives so that we’d be blown to smithereens if we tried to move them.”
“It must have been horrible,” she whispered.
“It was beyond horrible.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, so am I.”
“Sorry that you became a vampire?”
A tick in his jaw indicated that he was holding his emotions in check. “Enough about me,” he said curtly. “What about your grandfather?”
“He was there for the Chicago Fire, in 1871. He was alive then. And not a kid, either. Is that usual for vampire hunters? To have that kind of longevity?”
“If they’re good at their jobs, yes.”
“The hospital told me that he died of a sudden brain aneurysm. Is that true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you tell me if you did know?” she demanded.
“Maybe. We didn’t know The Executioner’s identity until today when you told us.”
“You said hunters lived as long as they were good at their job. Did a vampire kill my grandfather? Did they compel the ER doctor to tell my mom and me that it was an aneurysm?”
“I’d need to know more details about the time right before his death. Were you with him?”
“No.” Just hours ago she would have stopped there and revealed nothing more out of fear. But that fear was changing and morphing into a shared sense of … she wasn’t sure what to call it. Trust? She’d sensed the depth of Alex’s anguish when he’d talked about the battle. The more time she spent with him, the more she felt she knew him in ways that defied logic but were too true and too strong to ignore.
She nervously fingered her evil eye ring. Her grandfather used to tell her to trust her gut. She was doing that with Alex … up to a point. “The hospital called and said he’d collapsed on Michigan Avenue and had been brought into their emergency room. They said we should come as quickly as possible because his condition was critical and he wouldn’t last long. He was already dead when we got there.” She had to pause a moment to collect herself. Although her grandfather had died a year ago, the memory was still difficult to manage. It also reminded her of her mother’s much more recent passing.
Taking a deep breath, she continued. “What about his age? Wouldn’t the doctors have noticed something? As far as I knew he was seventy years old. But now I know he was much older than that. He looked to be thirty or forty in the photo with the smoldering debris from the Chicago Fire behind him, and like I said that was almost a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“He didn’t write about his early life?”
“He was rather mysterious about it. All he said was that he had no choice. That he had to become a hunter. That he had to make things right. After that point he merely wrote that he was fighting evil.”
“He killed vampires, period. He didn’t care if they were good or evil.”
“He considered them all to be evil.”
“Do you share that belief?”
She wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t believe Alex was evil, but she couldn’t find the words to express her emotions.
“Never mind,” he growled. “Your silence says it all.”
“No, it doesn’t. I don’t know about all vampires but I don’t think you’re evil,” she said softly.
“I’m glad you realize that,” he replied.
Keira also realized that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon so she might as well try to make the best of the situation. Once leaving the loft was removed from the visual equation, she noticed more about the details of her surroundings. A series of framed landscape paintings on the front brick wall were the first thing to grab her attention. She moved closer to get a better look. They were colorful watercolors.
“These are lovely,” she said. “Did you paint them?” After all, Alex did have artistic hands with long fingers. She’d admired that about him from the first moment she’d met him.
“No. They belong to a friend.”
His answer surprised her. Not that he wasn’t the artist but that the pa
intings weren’t his. That’s when she realized she didn’t know much about his romantic history. “A girlfriend?”
“No.”
Keira moved from one painting to the next before casually asking over her shoulder, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
His smile was sexy and potent. “No. How about you? Is there a boyfriend waiting in the wings?”
A few hours ago she might have lied and said yes, that the man in her life was a Special Forces dark-ops specialist who fiercely protected her. But she figured Alex had his ways of investigating her past so there was no point in fabricating anything. “I suspect you already know the answer to that question, but no. I’m not currently seeing anyone.”
Or kissing anyone. The thought flew through her mind as the memory of his lips on hers sent the blood rushing through her body. To distract herself from those romantic images, she continued her exploration of the loft, skipping past the large bed with the black satin sheets. But that was difficult to do considering how easily she could imagine Alex on that bed, on those sheets, with her in his arms.
One kiss shouldn’t get her thinking along those lines so quickly. But there was something about Alex that besieged her defenses and got to her.
Tearing her eyes away from the bed, she noted that the depressed leather couches and chairs had disappeared, replaced by her furniture. She hadn’t realized that her things had made his disappear. She wondered how he felt about that.
“Do you think I’m girling up your man cave?” she asked.
One dark eyebrow rose. “Girling up?”
“Replacing your leather couches and chairs.”
“They belonged to my friend.”
“Does anything here belong to you?”
You. You belong to me. It was almost as if she could hear his words in her mind. Her breath stopped. The feminist part of her didn’t want to belong to anyone, but there was a tiny part of her that responded to his silent claim, providing he’d belong to her in return.
She moved closer to the worktable where he’d dumped out the contents of her messenger bag earlier. She’d carefully returned her belongings to their rightful place while he was gone. For the first time she noticed the pile of books on one side.
“Yours?”
He nodded.
“Favorite author?” she asked him.
“Lee Child,” he instantly replied. “What about you?”
