by Debra Dunbar
Figuring I would feel safer with a table between me and Jones, I snagged a menu and sat. He followed suit, dialing back the dimples so I could focus on the offerings.
“What looks good to you?” He skimmed the listing.
“The special.” Fresh lobster with lemon-herb butter served with corn on the cob, Johnny cakes and a baked potato. “Not bad for twenty bucks.” A worrisome thought occurred to me, and I jumped in front of it. “That reminds me. This date is Dutch.”
“I expected no less.” He sounded pleased. “Can I buy you a drink at least?”
“A Corona.” I could bend that much. “Why are you smiling? Must you torment me?”
I was only half kidding. Until meeting him, I’d had no idea dimple fetishes were a thing.
“You called this a date.” He sat up taller in his chair. “Let me enjoy the moment.”
Sighing in his general direction, I waved over a local teen with dark skin and darker eyes dressed in cut-off shorts that consisted of pockets strung from a waistband and a pink bikini. Long ropes of hair cascaded over her shoulders, and matching pink beads capped the ends. They click-clacked when she moved, and the sound brightened the night.
“Two specials,” I ordered for us since he had yet to settle on a choice.
“Two Coronas,” he countered, unfazed by a woman ordering on his behalf.
Our effortless rapport relaxed some part of me held tense until this moment. My last partner was as nice as he could be to my face while preaching “women belong in the kitchen” rhetoric behind my back. If I’d ordered for Dawes, he would have keeled over on the spot. It seemed Jones had passed a test I hadn’t realized I was administrating.
“So,” he began.
“So,” I echoed. “Is this the part where we reminisce about my old cases?”
“Nah. I don’t want to be predictable.” He flicked away a mosquito. “I was hoping we could talk more about you. Likes, dislikes. That kind of thing.”
I hesitated too long to be polite, but he didn’t seem to mind. “What do you want to know?”
“Favorite color.”
“Pink.”
“Favorite song.”
“Currently ‘All Time Low’ by Jon Bellion.”
“Favorite pet when you were a kid.”
“No pets allowed. Mom has allergies. Though my dream is to one day own a corgi.”
“There’s a meme about those, right? Corgi butt or loaf of bread?”
A smidgen of doubt had me wondering if he had researched my dog preference too, but I was pretty sure no one outside my family and a few friends had any idea I wanted to be a puppy momma one day when work quieted down and my life stabilized.
“Yes, there is.” The pause in his interrogation was welcome, whatever his purpose, and turnabout was fair play. “What about you?”
“Pink is also my favorite color. No, it’s true. One night I fell asleep on the couch while my sister was hosting a slumber party. She was ten. I was sixteen. She painted my nails pink and, much to her horror, I wore the polish until it chipped and flaked off. I adopted pink as my favorite color that day, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.”
“You have siblings?” I was an only child. Dhampirs were a rare breed given vampire-reproductive issues.
“Just the sister. She’s nosey as all get out, and she’ll probably paint your nails if you fall asleep on her couch. Just sayin’. Fair warning and all.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I kept my expression serious. “Should I ever end up unconscious on your sister’s couch.”
The food arrived then, and we fell into a companionable silence. The food was mouth-wateringly good, the view spectacular, and the company… I had no complaints there either. Except maybe that it was difficult for him to both dimple and chew at the same time.
We finished up, tipped the waitress and left our compliments with the chef, then walked on the beach. The moon hung heavy above us, and the crashing waves soothed parts of me that still felt raw all these months later. Maybe the higher-ups had known what they were doing after all. Maybe a change of scenery was just what the doctor ordered. I breathed easier here, away from the familiar, the things that triggered dark memories.
“Can you surf?”
“No.” I studied him. “Can you?”
“Yep. I can teach you, once this is over.” He studied the glittering sea, a different sort of longing in his expression. “There’s nothing like it.”
“Are you about to tell me surfing is better than sex?” I heard the doubt heavy in my voice.
“Hell no.” He walked until the surf nursed his bare toes. “There’s only one thing better than sex.”
Wary of his answer, I still asked, “What might that be?”
“Sleep.”
A chuckle bubbled up my throat.
“After a sixteen-hour shift, there is nothing I want more than my bed. I’m sorry. It’s the truth.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “I hope that doesn’t cost me my street cred with you. I mean, if you were in my bed when I got there, I would at least be conflicted about it.”
Laughing again for the dozenth time that night, I joined him in the foamy water and rested my head against his shoulder. Today had started out ugly, and tomorrow promised more of the same. One thing marshals learned early was to take happiness where and when we found it, because you never knew when you’d get your next dose of reality.
Chapter 5
A frantic shriek pierced the night, and reality came crashing down on us. A woman of Hispanic descent, her cruise line T-shirt labeling her as a tourist, arrowed toward us and grabbed me by the arm. I wasn’t surprised when she homed in on us. Cops were easy to spot once you knew what to look for, and clearly this woman had made us.
“Officer,” she panted. “Please. There’s a man—” She flung her arm out behind her, and tears sprang into her eyes. “I was on a walk. Ay dios mio! I thought he was drunk and had fallen asleep, but I checked on him.” The panicked animal sound she made caused the predator in me to sit up and pay attention. “He was so cold. His neck. It was bloody. I think I—”
She whirled to the side and emptied her stomach while I rubbed a hand up and down her back.
“I’ll check it out.” I switched places with Jones then jogged toward a grouping of fancy loungers set out by one of the upscale restaurants on their private beach. I spotted a man reclining, legs crossed and gaze fixed on the ocean, shades covering eyes that would be clouded by now. The breeze caught his scent, and I smelled pungent halitosis on him long before I got close enough to check for his absent pulse. I called in the murder and circled the scene, snapping reference photos with my phone. “You just threw a monkey wrench in the works, mister.”
The only common thread between our victims had been gender. This one, being male, broke that trend.
I stayed with him until backup arrived then left the techs to start processing the scene and hunted down Jones. He had taken the woman, Hazel Vasquez, to the table where we had eaten dinner. She sat hunched over a small glass of clear liquid that might have been water or something stiffer while Jones scribbled notes in his ever-present notebook. I walked up behind her but didn’t interfere with the rapport he had established.
“Did you see anyone else near the victim?” he was asking.
“A shadow,” she murmured. “It was this hunched, blackened thing. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.”
“That’s why you decided to check on the man?”
“Yes.” She rubbed her hands up her arms. “It looked…wrong.”
“Did you see where it came from?” He was careful to ignore me, allowing me to act as an impartial observer. “Where it went?”
“It ran toward the villa.” Her voice faltered. “It was more of a limp, really. I thought it would fall before it reached the patio.”
“It? Do you think the person you saw fleeing was male or female?”
“That thing wasn’t human.” Her hand flew to her throat. �
��There were puncture marks here.” A nervous laugh bubbled up her throat. “Madre would say it was el chupacabra, but that’s a silly superstition.”
Jones graced her with a tight smile. Superstitions were rooted in reality, and our reality was far different from hers or her mom’s.
“Wait here, ma’am, and an officer will drive you back to your hotel.” He stood and gestured over a marshal who had taken up a position similar to mine, content to watch Jones work, and he let her handle getting Ms. Vasquez back to her room. After the witness left, he crossed to me. “You sure know how to show a guy a good time.”
Humor was the antidote to working one too many crime scenes, so I played along to dull the edge of horror that another life had been lost. “I aim to please.”
His grin was a dimpleless flicker. “What did you find?”
“Male victim. Marks on his neck mirror those found on the women. The scent I picked up on the first victim was present on him as well. He hasn’t been dead long. If I had to guess, I’d say our killer was dining around the same time as us.”
Awareness a crime had been perpetrated while we sat less than a half mile down the beach caused the food that had been so delicious going down to roil in my gut. We couldn’t work twenty-four hours a day. We had to stop and eat sometime. But the fact I had let the case go, let myself enjoy Jones’s company, made it a bitter pill to swallow.
“Don’t,” he said, reading me as though I were an open book. Perhaps for him I was. “This was not your fault. This didn’t happen because you let your hair down for a few hours.”
“I know.” But knowing and accepting were two different things. “All the same, I think we should cool this, whatever this is, until we close the case.”
“Is this a brush-off?” His shoulders tensed as though preparing for me to land a physical blow.
Aware we were being watched by other marshals, and unwilling to provide more gossip fodder, I refrained from grabbing his hand. “No.” I pushed out a dramatic sigh. “There’s something about you, Jones. You’re too young and too pretty for me, but you’re also smart and—”
“I have dimples,” he added sagely.
I mashed my lips into a flat line.
“I won’t hesitate to use them,” he warned. “I’ll give you until the case ends, but the second we get this nutjob locked up, I’m asking you out on a second date.”
I almost protested the label, but I had been the one who slipped up and called dinner the D word. “Fine.”
“One last question before we put this on hold.”
“Hit me.”
“Would you have let me kiss you good night?”
I snorted and spun on my heel. “Guess you’ll never know, Dimples.”
Chapter 6
We searched the villa and the patio, which reminded me of a tropical garden spiked with enormous, trumpetlike umbrellas to protect guests from the sun portion of the sand and sun equation. We came up with nothing. No blood. No obvious tracks—there were simply too many footprints in the sand to distinguish one set from another. No convenient witnesses to point us thataway.
“We’re missing something.” I leaned on the railing overlooking the beach and strived for perspective. “What was the killer doing on this end of the island? The other bodies were found within a half mile of each other. This one is two parishes away.”
“You think it followed us.” He didn’t make it a question.
“Is that so crazy?” I glanced at Jones, who had adopted the same pose as me. “Maybe it scented us at the scene and trailed us.”
“Chupacabras are too animalistic to comprehend the idea of a car or travel,” he mused. “Looks like we’ve cleared our first suspect. The killer must possess higher reasoning skills, and speed, to track us this far. The average speed limit was forty-five miles per hour.”
Fast and lethal with one heck of a parched throat. And then there was the smell to consider…
“The volume of blood consumed is what worries me most.” Outside the fact three people had died to supply the killer. “My gut says we’re dealing with one killer. But the math doesn’t work. There must be more than one.”
“Or it’s very, very thirsty.”
A hazy idea coalesced in a swirl of memory, there and gone before I grasped it. “I need to call home.”
He straightened, his brow furrowing. “Is everything all right?”
“I want to ask Dad a few questions, that’s all. My blood requirements are negligible compared to what a true vamp requires. Since there are no coveys on the islands, it would be quicker to pester him than locate another vamp on the payroll to ask.”
Jones indicated a table and chairs several yards away. “I’ll give you some privacy.”
Unsaid was he wasn’t leaving me alone out here with a killer on the loose.
I dialed home, and Dad answered on the first ring. “Lena?”
“Hey, Dad. I have a few questions to ask you. About feeding.”
“Are you having trouble?” The warmth in his voice dropped like a stone, and he zoomed into full papa-bear mode. Having a half-vamp kid involved a lot of trial and error, and Dad worried over my diet to the point of sending me bagged blood via courier with shot glasses hand-marked for my weekly allowance. That was after I turned away the men he paid to offer me their veins. Those had come with stopwatches to time my feedings. I figured it was the vampire equivalent of making plane noises while shoving a spoon in my mouth. “Are you still in Nevis? I can catch a flight if you—?”
“Daddy,” I said firmly. Well, as firmly as a grown woman falling back on childhood mannerisms got. “It’s for a case. I’m fine. I’m eating well. I’m drinking well. I’ve even gained back five pounds.”
Only fifteen more to go until I reached my pre-Edelweiss weight.
“Oh.” He brightened. “That is good news. I’m happy to help however you need. What’s on your mind?”
“How much blood does a full-blooded vamp require?” I left the timeframe open for his interpretation.
“The average human body contains around ten pints of blood. A vampire on a regular feeding schedule can make do with one pint taken every five to seven days.”
That was about what I expected him to say. “How bad off would a vamp have to get to drain a human?”
The line went quiet for a moment, and then Dad exhaled. “Some of the older vampires sleep for decades at a time. When they rise, they’re ravenous and not quite sane. They can drain three to five humans before getting too blood drunk to keep gorging. Generally, when they wake, they remain in a stupor for up to a year before slowly regaining awareness and requiring another feeding.”
“That’s regulated now, right?” Since vamp law didn’t apply to me or any other dhampir, our mixed heritage forcing us outside their hierarchy, I wasn’t up to date on the edicts of their ruling body. “There would be records of any ancients hitting the snooze button?”
He paused. “Yes.”
“I sense a but coming.”
“But,” he continued, “ancients who slumbered prior to implementation are not part of the public record.”
I did the math in my head. “That would mean any vamps not included in the census would be close to a century old. Can vamps sleep that long?”
“It’s possible. The older the vampire, the longer their rests when they retire from the world. What is the purpose of these questions? Do you believe you’ve stumbled across an ancient?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Tell him yes, and he would contact the vamps to handle the problem in-house. Tell him no, and I might be lying to him and complicating the case. I chose the middle road. “Locals think it’s a chupacabra.”
“I thought those were native to Latin America.” He sounded intrigued. “You do meet the most interesting people.”
A harsh breath burst from my lungs. Yeah. I did. And some of them tried to kill me. A few of them almost succeeded.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I only meant to tease.”<
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“I know.” I monitored my breathing, got everything back on track. “And before you ask, I’m fine. I’m dealing. It just hits me sometimes.”
“Understandable.”
“The techs are leaving,” Jones said from far too close. “We ought to get some sleep too. There’s a meeting in the morning, and we’re expected to be there. You in particular, since you were the first on scene.”
“Who’s that?” A growl entered Dad’s voice.
My gaze flicked to Jones. “He’s my partner.”
“What does he mean we ought to get some sleep?”
“Dad.” Heat rushed into my cheeks. “It’s not like that.”
Jones leveled a stare on me that called me on my bull.
“Okay, so maybe it will be like that, but it’s not right now. Love you. Gotta go. Bye!”
“Your dad didn’t seem thrilled with the idea of you dating,” Jones observed.
“I’m his baby. Of course, he doesn’t want me to date.”
The clouds shrouding the moon caught his attention. “So, it’s not because you told him what I am.”
“My folks are in a mixed marriage. I’m a half-blood. Do you really think they care if you are too?”
“Some parents do.”
Protocol be damned, I covered his hand with mine. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.” I leaned close. “I’m a grown woman. I make my own choices. If my dad threatened to greet the sun over me dating a half elf, I would send him packing with a bag of marshmallows.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” He rolled his thumb over my knuckles.
“Okay, so I would chain him to a chair in the basement, hose him with SPF 100 in case he escaped, and then call Mom. The point is, I can date whoever I want, and the rest of the world can deal.”
“I think I’m going to like being yours,” he murmured.
Heat swirled through my chest, and my pulse skipped. “You’re not mine.”
“But I will be.”
The way he said it sounded like a promise.
