Collin had come to stand by her, a beer in each hand. Looking up at him, she noted his face had taken on a grey cast and his eyes glittered.
Cadence turned to face him. She’d begun to put some of what she hoped were crazy thoughts together in her head and she needed to rein them in until she had answers. “So, got some thoughts on what you’ve been doing all this time, Collin Grayson, ace reporter? Cuz your public would like to know.”
“We need to talk, Cadence” was his answer. Solemn and with a hint of what she was certain was remorse.
“We need to talk about what, Collin? That show says you’ve been out of circulation for five years in the big bad world of reporting the news. So where ya been and if you’re such a big shot, what happened to all of your money? This apartment sure as hell doesn’t reflect greenback, Collin.” Her voice was rising with each question she asked and her instincts told her this was going to be something she wasn’t ready to hear.
Collin’s voice was stiff when he spoke. “I have been out of circulation for five years. I’ve been writing articles under pen names and working for a shitty supermarket rag. That’s what I’ve been doing for five years, Cadence.” His words reflected a whole lotta bitter and it seemed to be aimed at her right now.
“I’m thinking I’m supposed to be sorry to hear that and I guess I would be if my radar wasn’t telling me the supermarket rag has something to do with our meeting.”
“I’m not going to excuse what I do to make ends meet. It’s shit,” he spat, running his hands over his hair. “Look, Cadence, I lost my job five years ago because a source fucked me over on a big drug ring I’d been investigating. My source was my friend and he led me around by the nose, thinking I was going to have the scoop of the decade because the guy who was heading this drug ring was a United States Congressman. He’d given me plenty of falsified documents, tons of pictures. All sorts of stuff that said this guy was into some crap that shouldn’t leave him sitting in his nice brownstone in Georgetown. My friend failed to mention the Congressman he had me chasing around was the wrong Congressman. Naturally, he had the right one all along. In essence, he scooped me, the bastard, and then, because of the aftereffects of my report, I found out just how influential a nice Congressman with lots of connections can be. I lost my job, my house, my money, my wife.”
Er, wife? Like the kind with a ring on her finger and his last name? “Whoa, there. A wife? You had a wife and you didn’t tell me?” Holy shit. Collin had mentioned girlfriends, but never a wife.
A wife. That was pretty fucking important information in their getting to know each other process.
Sighing with exasperation, Collin paced the small space between them. “Yes, I had a wife. A wife who liked the prestige my job offered and the money it gave her to have fat injected into her lips. When there was no more money and she had to cancel her collagen injections, she split.”
Cadence’s head spun. A wife. “Do you still love her?” It was agony to ask, but she needed to know what else he might have kept from her.
“Love her? Um, no, Cadence. I don’t know that I ever loved her, but I sure the fuck knew I didn’t love her when I found her naked in my kitchen with my golf buddy.”
Ooooh, that was sooo bad.
Tramp. Whore. Infidel. Jesus!
She felt a moment’s pity for Collin before she sat down, trying to catch her breath. “Okay, so tell me, was this wife a werewolf too? You said your family wasn’t into inter-shifter romances, so she must have been.”
He was silent, looking down at her with that stoic, unreadable expression he seemed to be so damned good at. “My family is dead, Cadence. I don’t have a family.”
Well, color her confused.
Disoriented.
Knocked for a loop.
And then, it hit her almost at once and connecting the dots to this picture in her head was drawing a clear portrait of exactly what was going on here.
Let’s see… reporter plus bad reputation equals needing a really big scoop to seek retribution for said soiled reputation, equals hitting the fucking story jackpot on a dating site for paranormal beings.
After all, the Boogey Man, not to mention Count Dracula and An American Werewolf in London, really did exist.
Collin Grayson was no werewolf.
And because she’d spent so much time wallowing in her own guilt over lying, she hadn’t been paying attention to the signs he’d given her all along or now, where the blame should really lie.
With Collin.
The non-paranormal Collin.
She’d lied too, no doubt, but she didn’t lie in order to eventually hurt anyone else. No one but quite possibly herself.
If Cadence had organs, she’d suppose by now they’d have all stopped working.
Collin was going to get the proof he needed to write a story that was sure to sell to every newspaper and television station across the land and he was going to use her to do it, making her a freak. A spectacle. Hurting her family, forcing them to hide because they were very different.
Cocksucker.
Cadence rose again, her legs shaking in tempo with her voice. “You lying son of a bitch! You’re no werewolf, are you? You’re a human who spun the wheel and hit shifter-lucky, aren’t you?”
Collin’s face was tight and his jaw twitched, but he remained in front of her, standing his ground. “Listen to me, Cadence --”
“The fuck I will, you shit!” she interrupted with a shout. “You’ve been lying to me the entire time we’ve dated. You were fucking me to get a story, Collin. A big, fat, juicy story to gain back the recognition you’d once enjoyed!”
“No, Cadence! I mean, yes. Yes, I lied, but no, I am not, and was not fucking you for a story.” He put a hand on her arm, but Cadence pulled away with a sharp yank.
Oh, bullshit that’s not what he’d been doing. “You’re a liar, Collin Grayson. You joined that site so you could get a scoop. I don’t know how you found out about it, but you did and you were going to expose me and anyone else you could to get back your prestige. Do the real reporters -- reporters who are notable and respected -- sleep with their exposés, Dan Rather? You fucking story whore! Is that what you’re about, Collin? Ruining people’s lives so you can reap the kudos for a job well done? For a little fame, maybe?” Her rage had boiled and every last bit of her shook with it as she stood in front of him with her fists clenched to keep from clocking his ass.
His face was pale and his calm approach was tweaking her. “Look, we need to talk about this rationally. I just want you to hear me out, Cadence. All I’m asking is that you listen to me. I don’t care about any of it now. Not my job, or the money, or regaining my reputation, but I do care about you.”
Her face twisted into a mask of infuriation. “Do you, Collin? I don’t think so. I think you care about getting a story. I think I’m your story. Ain’t you feelin’ like you won the story lottery? All your talk about full moons and your pack. How did you intend to pull that off, Collin? You had to tell me sometime. Tomorrow is the full moon. So then what? What would you have done?” Vaguely, she remembered she’d intended to do the same thing, but she shrugged that off in favor of her fury. She was a shifter. She might not be the hairy, meat loving kind, but she was one. Collin was a human. An interloper out to expose her family and Cadence just wouldn’t allow that.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he said through clenched teeth, “That was why I wanted to talk to you tonight, Cadence. I don’t know what I was going to do, but I wasn’t going to let it go on.”
“Well, that’s mighty fine of you, Collin. You were going to tell me all about the lies you’ve been feeding me since day one. How very altruistic of you, reporter.” Cadence stood on her toes and hissed in his face. “I won’t let you hurt my family, Collin! They’ve worked long and hard as vampires…”
Oops. My bad.
Collin’s eyes narrowed. “As what?”
Oh, fuck. Double fuck even.
Collin’s gaze grew hard
and cold. “As what, Cadence?”
Suddenly, the idea that they were both liars was both ironic and infuriating. Fuck Collin Grayson. She was a shifter. She might not be a dog, but he was still a threat to her family and for that, she couldn’t forgive him.
“You heard me, Mr. AKC. I’m a fucking vampire! Yeah, I lied too, just not with the obvious intent you had. Got that, Peter Jennings? A vampire. A bat. A night dweller. I’m surprised with your reporter nose you didn’t put that together. I mean, I do a radio show, Collin, called CC and the Nocturnal Journals. It’s sort of hiding in plain sight.”
“A vampire.” His reiteration was cold, distant, but Cadence no longer cared.
“Yep,” Cadence said as she strode to his one, lone window streaked with dirt, and turned to take a last look at what a fool she’d been. “A vampire. Pay attention now, you piece of shit, because I’m going to set your little reporter’s pen to twitching and I swear to you, Collin, by all that’s dear to me. I’ll jack you up if you hurt my family!”
Cadence spun around, unable to look at Collin anymore, warring with her anger and the tendrils of sadness that clawed at her.
She concentrated with fierce determination, letting her fury take over and allowing her shift to take control.
In the blink of an eye, Cadence transformed before Collin.
The rapid-fire flutter of her wings echoed throughout his apartment. She flew over and around his head in a wide arc before zeroing in on his window and flitting out into the night.
Cadence left without looking back.
She couldn’t bear to look back because it was tangible proof that she was, indeed, a fool for love.
Chapter Eight
“I can’t let you go, Collin, and you know that, don’t you?” Pam’s words were firm, eerily calm and undoubtedly said with the deadliest of intentions while she let her slender hand rest on his forearm.
Collin’s bleary eyes assessed Cadence’s friend. If he was three sheets to the wind a moment ago, he was now, officially, done with his laundry. He’d been drowning his sorrows in booze when she’d presented herself to him with “Collin? Pam. I’m Cady’s best friend and your friendly guide to all things vampire. You are officially toast.” She’d then gone on to explain her purpose in this dive.
Sitting up straight on his barstool, he wanted to posture, but found he had little energy left to do much but question the obvious. “So what you’re telling me is that in order for me not to die, I have to become one of you. Which essentially means -- I’m going to die.”
“Yep, because I’ll see you dead -- like the real kind of dead, before I’ll let you expose Cadence or her family and you won’t be exposing anything if you’re one of us, now will ya? You’d be icing your own ass.” Her menacing statement was crystal clear. She’d kill him before she’d let him expose her friend.
It was nothing less than he deserved. He was a scumbag for ever thinking he could go through with it to begin with. His writing had never been about wanting to hurt someone else. It was about justice and fair reporting until he’d been fucked over by an unreliable source and blackballed at every major newspaper, television station and magazine worth its weight in font.
All Collin Grayson wanted to do was reenter the world of reporting with a story strong enough to erase the past and give him back his credibility. To have stumbled on what he did in a seedy bar had seemed like just the manna Heaven had denied him so far.
He’d been juiced on the story of the century. Hell, it was the story of the fucking millennium and when that drunk had approached him in the bar that night a few months ago with talk of an online dating site for vampires and werewolves, Collin had thought the guy was about as soused as you could get, but he’d taken that card from him and gone online to research it anyway because the business card looked damned legitimate and the idea of a site like this was too funny not to at least poke around in.
He’d honestly believed that some bunch of nuts had started an online dating site geared toward a paranormal theme. Like the idiots who dressed up like vampires and pretended they were night dwellers. He sure as fuck hadn’t thought they were anything but groupies, kind of like alien watchers. People convinced aliens were coming to take them away on a particular day and while life moved on around them, they spent all of their days preparing for “unification.”
But he’d been wrong, very, very wrong and even now he couldn’t believe it.
What he’d found had rendered him speechless. Once he’d gathered his wits, his reporter’s instincts had set in and there was no stopping him. It hadn’t been easy to fill out the forms to subscribe to Paranormal Mates, but he’d figured it all out.
He wasn’t thinking about anything but making some cash, clearing his name in the industry and getting the fuck away from the job at the rag mag he’d hated so much. He never would have sold a story like that to Ronald Atkins at Tell All, a cheesy supermarket piece of crap. Collin had artfully strung his smarmy ass along so he could keep collecting a paycheck, with the idea he was going to get the story of the century for Ronald, and good ole Ron had fallen for it.
But he couldn’t deny he’d planned to sell it to a reputable source. That was until he’d met Cadence… Everything had changed after that and selling a story hadn’t become as important anymore.
But the paranormal really did exist.
Cadence just wasn’t a werewolf, she was a vampire. Either way, shifters did exist.
And he was about to become one of them. If he had known how to find someone that would have turned him sooner, he’d have done it. But he’d already involved enough of the innocent. To go back to the site and seek someone out to change him was playing with a hand grenade and taking the chance he’d end up dead, rather than a bat. He’d spent the past few days trying to figure out just how he was going to achieve vampire status to prove to Cadence he’d never hurt her or her family.
In his mind, becoming one of them was the only way.
“How did you find me?”
Pam’s laugh was sharp, punctuated by a short intake of breath. “I smelled you, you asshole. Cadence mentioned you hung out here and I’ve seen your picture. So I knew what you looked like. That was all I needed. She’s pretty screwed up over you. She felt so much guilt over lying to you and it looks like you were both lying to each other. The games people play, huh?”
“She’s upset over me?”
“Of course she is, even if you are a jerk. Sometimes, you can’t help who you love.”
“Why did she lie about being a werewolf anyway? I don’t get her motivation.”
“Like you deserve an explanation?”
“I need to know.”
Pam seemed to think about that for a moment and then said, “You said you would only entertain the idea of hooking up with other werewolves, according to her. She kinda fell in super lust with your picture and she wanted to meet you in person. Sometimes, Cady can be a smidge impulsive and then she worries about the consequences after it’s too late. You are case in point. Cady didn’t have any idea you and she would end up liking each other the way you did. None of the dates she’d been on meant anything to her. Yours obviously did.”
So she did want him. What a freakin’ mess. “Do ya suppose this will work in my favor?”
“I can’t make any predictions about a future with her, Collin. Your lie supersedes hers, if you ask me. Yours would have hurt a lot of people and made her and her family social pariahs. It could have seen her dead. You know, humans kinda freak and break out the garlic recipes if they think a vampire is their neighbor. Cady’s lie just meant she might be hurting herself.”
What Pam said was without a doubt all true. One problem at a time, he thought. First up, the Count Dracula thing.
“So, how shall we do this? You want a quick rundown before I turn you? Vampire one-oh-one?”
“Nope. I’ve had a couple of days to research it on the Internet. I think I know what happens next and I wouldn’t let you do it if it weren’
t for Cadence.”
Pam cocked her head at him. “What are you talking about? You were going to write a tell-all story on Cadence. What were you doing for her but looking to ruin her damned life and the rest of ours with it? Besides, you couldn’t stop me, Collin. I’m far stronger than I look. If you researched us, then you know I have some serious superhuman strength. You’d be wasting your time fighting me. Just be glad I offered you the chance to live. I could have just killed you. I should just kill you…”
She was remarkably calm, which led Collin to believe that she’d done this before. “Do you do this often?”
“What?”
“Kill people? Ya know, drain them or whatever?”
Pam shoved at his shoulder. “No, you idiot. I’ve never drained anyone dry. None of us have. Well, wait, maybe Cady’s great-uncle Jackson, but that was centuries ago. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t kill people. At least the breed of vamp we are doesn’t or won’t. We get our blood elsewhere. We just want to live peacefully with humans. Another reason I can’t let you expose us. But don’t think that doesn’t mean I can’t start killing people now, especially if it means saving Cady.”
Collin stood, towering over Pam, and got his coat. “Okay, let’s do it.”
She looked up at him, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. “You’re not going to put up a fight?”
Collin stared back down at her. “Nope.”
“Are you serious? What kind of nut are you?”
“The nut that loves Cady.”
“Ohhhh, be still my non-beating heart,” Pam mocked.
Collin remained silent and waited to go wherever it was that vampires went when they sucked the life out of people.
She looked confused. “You’re fricken’ serious, aren’t you?”
“Deadly so” was his answer.
“Oh, my God! You love her… You really do.”
“Yep.”
“Why’d ya have to go and make this so easy on me?”
“Because I deserve nothing less and I love Cady,” he said again with more conviction.
Paranormal Mates Society: Chunkybuttfunky Page 7
