Bad Blood: A VamPR Nightmare (Pisces Paranormal PR Agency Book 1)

by Bee Murray

  Good enough for me.

  Cleaning the dried blood off his battered body felt more intimate than anything else we had done in the years we’d been together. I would swear under oath that I was only doing my due diligence for a client, but caring for Vinnie, even in the aftermath of one of the scariest moments of my life, was unique and special.

  God, I needed therapy.

  I gently wiped the blood off Vinnie’s face and neck, carefully taped his broken nose, and put cream on the blisters the crucifix had left on his cheek.

  It was easy to fall into a rhythm. Wipe off the blood, bandage, repeat. By the time I was done with him he looked largely the same as he had before, with the giant exception of a two pronged antler sticking out of his chest.

  Truth be told, I was terrified of ripping it out of him. He was unconscious now, and that meant I didn’t have to worry about Vinnie or whatever he called his monster coming out and wrecking things. If the pain from removing the antler woke him, I’d be at his mercy again, and I never wanted to be in that position again.

  You did it before, it’s exactly the same.

  Just get a good grip, pull, and it’s over! Easy.

  Except the last time I’d pulled a stake from Vinnie’s body, I had distracted him with my blood and he was with it enough to know when to stop. I had no such guarantee this time around.

  I glanced at the blood on the floor once more and contemplated the teacup idea again. Short of going out into the woods and, I don’t know, hunting down a deer with my bare hands or finding some conveniently located roadkill, I was shit out of options.

  “Vinnie,” I used my sternest voice and pressed my hands to his cheeks. “Vincent Quaker if you’re in there and you can hear me, listen up. I’m going to hurt you when I yank this antler out and you are going to let me. You will not move a fucking muscle, you hear me? Do not move! And for the love of God, don’t attack me or I will toss you out into the yard to work on your tan!”

  His face remained expressionless, but I felt confident that somewhere in his subconscious he had heard me.

  The antler was slick with blood, and it was jammed so far into Vinnie’s chest that I wondered if he had slammed it into his ribs. I braced my palm on his chest and my foot on the floor as I leaned against the antler. I pulled as hard as I could and even punctuated my efforts with an unladylike grunt that usually worked on heavy bookcases.

  The antler didn’t move a single inch, and my broken wrist throbbed and burned.

  Ring.

  Riiiiiing.

  My phone was currently 0/3 for appropriate times for a phone call. I wiped my hands on the coveralls and reached for it.

  Adrienne Georgatou Requests FaceTime.

  Oh no.

  My head fell forward, and I rested my forehead on my arm. I had two choices: answer and talk to my very nosy best friend, or hit ignore again and risk her calling my boss for a status update.

  Adrienne was my ride or die, and that translated into a complete lack of acceptable boundaries, personal or professional. Normally, I found her behavior endearing, but showing her the shitshow I was currently in the middle of wasn’t exactly an option.

  Swiping the request, I quickly turned my video off and turned the phone face down on the table.

  “Hey! What’s up?”

  “Why is it so dark?” Adrienne asked, amused at my antics.

  “Listen, is this an emergency? Kind of in the middle of something here.” I tugged on the antler again, but it didn’t move.

  Maybe I needed a different angle.

  Adrienne sighed dramatically. “If by emergency, you mean ‘do I miss my best friend and am trying to catch up with her?’ Then, yes, Tuesday Matson, it is an emergency. A friendship emergency. I’m worried about you. You work too much, don’t do enough self-care, and let’s not even talk about your lack of orgasms.” Adrienne was on a roll and her Southern drawl was coming out with each word.

  I wonder what she would think of my current attempt at self-care. I had tried to have a no-strings attached orgasmfest with my ex who was now a vampire, and now I’m straddling his blood-soaked body trying to remove a fucking antler from his chest. Yay self-care.

  “Kinda busy right now, Renny. Can we catch up later? Maybe over the weekend?”

  I moved, so I was standing straddling his chest and wrapped both hands around the nub as best I could. With my entire body weight, I pulled and the antler finally moved and with a gross sucking noise, it slid free from the wound.

  “Augghhh! Take that! You owe me so big, asshole!!” I shouted in victory as I waved the bloody antler over my head.

  Worryingly, Vinnie didn’t so much as twitch a toe when the antler was removed. He looked even paler than usual.

  He needed blood.

  Thinking fast, I held the teacup to the trickle and collected it. If given the choice of floor blood or fresh, I would always choose fresh. I’m sure Vinnie would agree.

  “Uh, take what?” Adrienne’s prim and proper voice made me laugh, and I stepped over Vinnie’s prone body to pick the phone up off the table.

  “Just work stuff. Listen. Do me a favor? Can you please let yourself into my condo and pack a warm-weather bag? I’m going to have a quick turnaround on this one and will need to jump on a plane right away.”

  “You owe me some explanations, Tuesday. Something is going on and my inner eye is giving me all kinds of terrible visions every time I think about you! Be. Careful.”

  Adrienne was a worrywart, but her ‘inner eye’ bullshit was accurate—most of the time. I took her warning seriously. It was nice to know that someone worried about me.

  “I promise, Renny. I’ll see you soon. We’ll catch up. I swear!”

  When Adrienne hung up, a heaviness settled on me. Sunlight shone through the window and I brushed the loose strands of hair out of my eyes. For the first time since I started work with Carlyn and Pisces PR Agency, I wondered if I was really on the right side of things.

  Sure, we cleaned up messes, and we solved problems, and we also made an ungodly amount of money while we did it, but was it worth… all this?

  I sighed and walked back to the kitchen to scrounge up some caffeine. There was a zero percent chance I could survive this day without coffee.

  The curtains on the small kitchen window hung crookedly on their rail, and I reached out to fix them and then froze in place.

  At first, I thought it was just a shadow or a trick of the light, but when I looked again, the image was still there.

  There was a grey wolf in the yard and it was sitting next to the van, staring intently at the door. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I ducked out of view.

  Maybe it smelled the blood?

  Could this day get any worse? Probably. I wasn’t about to dare anything else to happen.

  When vampires went public a few years ago, there were rumors that other paranormal creatures existed as well, but no one had told me anything about werewolves. I made a note to check in with Elena at my first opportunity. I crept to the door and flipped the deadbolt into the lock position.

  One killer supernatural creature is plenty, thanks.

  Plus, wet dog smell. No, thank you.

  With a cup of coffee in hand and a laptop beside me, I sat down across from Vinnie and waited for him to wake up.

  “You would make this virtually impossible to fix, wouldn’t you?” I frowned at Vinnie sourly, “Wake up and face the music, fang-head... Please.”

  When this was all over, I was going to need a very long, very alcoholic, vacation. Surely there’s some sort of sunny vampire and wolf-free beach somewhere.

  19

  VINNIE

  Tap.

  Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

  The sound invaded the darkness, and I tried to turn away, but it just drove farther into my brain.

  Everything hurt. Every inch of my skin, the bones in my feet, tendons in my arms. All of it.

  Am I dead? Again. This version of dead suck
s hairy balls.

  One eye opened slowly, cautiously, as I struggled to remember what had happened when my monster had taken the reins. When Tuesday had left me sitting on the bed with her blood singing through my veins, a red fog had dropped over my eyes and I couldn’t hold him back anymore. That bastard had almost killed Tuesday. He felt justified, but I just felt sick.

  I tried to roll over, but all I could do was groan as pain rocketed through me.

  Warm hands put pressure on my shoulder.

  Tuesday.

  “Slow down,” she whispered gently.

  “I—”

  “Hush,” she commanded. “You don’t have to do anything but just lie there.” She eased me down onto the floor and I grimaced as another shooting pain lanced through my torso.

  “You really did a number on yourself. Looks like I can’t trust you around furniture or antlers, either.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean,” I croaked.

  “You got lucky,” she said.

  I could hear the smile in her voice, but there was only a hint.

  Of all the mistakes I’d ever made, and all the pain I’d ever caused—the times I’d hurt Tuesday (purposefully or not) were the ones that hurt the most. But this… This was a thousand times worse than anything I’d ever done.

  “I—”

  “If you’re trying to apologize to me, you can save it,” she muttered. “Drink this.”

  The smell of blood filled my nostrils, and I opened my mouth obediently as she pressed something to my lips.

  “This is the last of our supply,” she breathed. “We need to think of something else to get you back to strength, but this will do for now.”

  The blood was cold and thick, but the moment it hit my tongue I felt some pain ebb away.

  Tuesday knelt behind me as I drank and propped me upright with her comforting warmth. This was all I’d ever wanted, and I’d ruined all of that. First the bloodlust, then the guilt — How could I have been so fucking stupid.

  The monster inside me was coiled and ready to strike at any moment. Even now, weakened but not defeated, he was there. Waiting. I couldn’t trust myself to keep any kind of control. Especially not around her.

  I drained the cup and fell back against Tuesday. Her fingers pushed through my hair and I tried to smile.

  “You are the dumbest vampire I have ever met,” she murmured.

  Was that a compliment?

  “Do you know many?”

  “I don’t. But after this, I don’t know if I want to.”

  I tried to chuckle, but it hurt so I just lay there instead.

  “Go back to sleep, you big dumbass. I have work to do. There’s a press conference happening in a few hours that I want you to be awake to see.”

  The blood had helped, I could feel things knitting together.

  “Did you break my nose?”

  “I did,” she replied with a hint of pride. “But you deserved it.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I deserved way worse.”

  Tuesday’s hands slid down to my shoulders, and she pressed her fingers gently into my tingling skin. “Well, lucky for me, you’re still a clumsy ass when you’re not on stage with a million people watching you.” She eased herself away from me and I laid back on the floor.

  Whatever I was lying on crinkled beneath my fingers. “What is this?”

  “A shower curtain,” she replied briskly. “Just in case I had to wrap you up and bury you in the woods.”

  “What?”

  “What? Sleep. You’ve got three hours to get your vampiric shit together, and then I’m going to need that back so I can take a shower.”

  I forced my eyes open and flinched at the brightness in the room. Tuesday had pulled me into the shadows of the living room so that it protected me from the worst of the sunshine. “One day of sunshine a year and it had to be today,” I grumbled.

  Tuesday walked across the room, grabbed her laptop and folded herself gracefully into a chair.

  “What are you wearing,” I croaked.

  Her hair was in a strange knot on top of her head, and the coveralls she wore were… heinously large. I could smell the oil on them, and the guy who had worn them. “Did you take those from my garage?”

  “It’s called fugitive fashion,” she snapped as she opened the laptop. “Look it up.”

  “Trust you to make something like that look good.”

  Tuesday pointed an accusatory finger at me. “Don’t get started with me, pal. You just… do your healing thing. I have work to do.”

  I had very little interest in doing what I was told. The vamp virus hadn’t changed that about me. In fact, it had probably made it worse. “Work? What kind of work?”

  “Sorting this out,” she muttered. “Pisces PR is going to handle the press conference. Y’know, the big one where they announce you were just a pile of ashes in the house? Very tragic, your fan club is already in pieces over the fact that you haven’t made an appearance yet.”

  I winced and pushed myself up on my elbow.

  “They are?”

  My fans were reliably insane and followed my every movement like rabid lemmings hurtling toward the edge of a cliff.

  I adored them almost as much as they obsessed over me. Every rockstar should be so lucky.

  Tuesday nodded. “There’s been a vigil outside what’s left of the gate at the end of your driveway since it happened.”

  “Do you have a photo of it?”

  Tuesday glared at me. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

  I struggled to sit up and grabbed for the styrofoam cup that held the last of the pigs’ blood. If we were truly on the last of our supply, things could start to get dicey, real fast. But Tuesday always had a plan, I could count on that. And after my little... display… I didn’t think she’d want to chance that it could happen again.

  “Do you have a photo or not?”

  Tuesday groaned loudly and rubbed a hand over her face. “Yes, I have photos,” she grumbled from behind her hand.

  “Show me.”

  I rolled over and grabbed the edge of the table to pull myself up to my feet, but the table gave way under my weight and crashed to the floor as I stood up.

  “Shit.”

  “Nice one. You’ve single-handedly assured that Pisces will have to buy this cabin. The damage deposit won’t cover the actual damage you’ve done to it.”

  “Shit. I can buy it—”

  “I know you can, but that’s not the point.”

  “Then what was the p—” I stopped mid-sentence as my eyes finally focused. Strange shadows streaked through the room from the crooked curtains that hung on the windows and I wished immediately for the massive blackout curtains that had filled my home.

  But they were all gone too.

  “Holy shit.”

  Smears of blood covered the floor, as though a classroom full of toddlers had spilled fingerpaint everywhere and gone nuts with it.

  The table was broken beyond repair, and shards of a smashed mirror littered the threadbare carpet.

  “Did I do—”

  “Did you break the table in half? Yes, yes, you did,” Tuesday said calmly. She pointed to the remnants of the kitchen door that hung crazily on their broken hinges.

  “And that.”

  A coffee table that had been constructed of antler horns, a tacky monstrosity that only a bona fide hunter could love, had been shattered over the floor. It was covered in blood, too and I resisted the urge to press my fingers against the steadily healing wound in my chest.

  “Was that—”

  “Yessir, that was the culprit. Honestly, it’s my hero. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been clumsier.”

  She was trying to keep her voice light, but there was something else beneath it.

  She was afraid of me.

  That hurt worse than any other wounds I’d sustained. To know that Tuesday feared me—

  “All right you egomaniac, come and see your
legion of adoringly desperate fans,” she said dryly. She turned the laptop toward me and I staggered through the smeared, drying blood toward her.

  “Children of the Night,” I blurted. “That’s what I’m going to call them after this.”

  “What?”

  “My fans. Every good rockstar has a name for their fan base.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” Tuesday snorted. “Can’t you think of something a little less… obvious?”

  “Tuesday, I’m a vampire. I can afford to be a little obvious.”

  “Well, if that little escapade was any sign, clearly you can’t.”

  “Fans dig gimmicks.”

  Tuesday stared at me incredulously. “You’re a vampire, Vinnie. That’s not a gimmick!”

  “Sure, it is. It makes me different. Dangerous. Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but it worked for him, didn’t it?”

  “You did not—”

  It wasn’t worth it to argue with her. This was a great idea, and I knew my record label would agree. But I didn’t actually care what they thought, either. I focused on the screen instead of Tuesday’s angry glare. “Was that it?”

  The photo gallery that Tuesday had found was from a gossip site. They always seemed to have photos of my house, and I wasn’t convinced that they’d actually followed the restraining order I’d put on them a few years ago. There’s always some motherfucker with a drone —

  My fans were very… dedicated. I could only imagine what they’d be saying online. The rumors would fly thick and fast. Not even Tuesday could have seen this firestorm coming.

  They had brought flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, candles—it was touching, really.

  As I clicked through the gallery, it was hard not to smile. These people actually cared about me. They didn’t want my money, they just wanted me.

  Wasn’t that all anyone craved? To be wanted?

  “Children of the Night,” I whispered.

  “Don’t call them that,” Tuesday snapped.

  I made a face at her and clicked another photo. This one was a closeup. Women and men clung to the twisted metal gate. Tears. Mourning. They already thought I was dead. This press conference was going to be epic.