Don’t Bite the Messenger

by Regan Summers

  Chapter Three

  I flew down the highway, having called Rogers to have him tell McHenry I was out on an El Mufferd, doctored slang for “last minute from a fucking regular, dumbass.” I&O wasn’t what you’d call urbane before McHenry came along.

  I completed my last two drops in record time and headed north out of Anchorage at 3:00 a.m. under the warm, pink glow of artificial streetlight filtered through hazy snow.

  I’d memorized the directions and planned to be at this Mr. Kelly’s place by three thirty. That wasn’t a problem. The problem was that I hadn’t given notice to McHenry, and Lucille knew I was moving. Maybe she kept tabs on me—down to the minute—since we interacted a lot. Regular contact with humans was a risk that probably had to be monitored, since humans are easy to corrupt. Greed, blackmail, misguided affections. You name it and we fall for it. I’m notoriously keen on money, so maybe they thought I’d turn on them. But for me greed is a means to survival and, while I’ve seen some scary shit, I haven’t yet seen anything that makes me want to roll over on the toughest guy in town. Anyway, Luc had whispered, which meant she hadn’t told Bronson. I hoped.

  I didn’t bother with evasive driving. If Skinny had set a tail on me, I would have noticed it while evading my stalkers in the sedan or, in the event it had picked me up after, it would have seen me stop at Bronson’s. Lucille allowed me to back into a closed garage, so anyone watching would think that I had delivered the package.

  I crept down a long, L-shaped driveway with my parking lights on. I hoped this Kelly fellow was decent. Most of Bronson’s people politely ignored me, and that was how I preferred it.

  The house was tragic pea-soup green, around three thousand square feet thrown together in the seventies, nothing special. I got out of the car slowly, my messenger bag and I&O laminate visible, and my hands limp at my sides. Snow crunched under my feet and a few lazy flakes drifted around me. I didn’t hear or see a vampire, but the sensation that ran up my spine like the scrape of a cold nail told me he was behind me.

  “I have a delivery for you.” Adrenaline spiked my tongue copper. This was the second strange location I’d been to in one night, and we were miles from where anyone could hear me.

  “Good of you to bring it so far off the beaten path,” he said. My hair stirred against the back of my head and I really hoped it was the wind, not his breath.

  “I’m going to reach into my bag.” My fingers twitched in the cold.

  “I scent Lucille,” he said, giving me a second to hear that correctly. His voice was familiar, and irritation swiftly followed recognition. “What’s the message?”

  “I don’t…I didn’t read it,” I snapped, my mind whirring as it tried to make sense of what I was hearing—whom I was hearing. Something brushed my elbow and an instant later I heard the rustle of paper. Shifty bastard had lifted the message from me.

  He made a sound as he read and my cheeks heated. Yeah, I recognized that voice. It belonged to a dark-haired asshole with a penchant for richly colored, deliciously fitted sweaters. I really should have asked for his full name. Now all I wanted to know was how he had hidden the fact that he was a sucker, and why.

  “Will you show it to me?” he asked. I started. He was farther away, back by the trunk of the car. I moved stiffly, half-afraid now that I knew what he was, half-pissed that I’d let him get so close to me, and somewhere in between a little bit disappointed.

  I had to rub my finger over the print scanner for a few seconds before it heated enough to register me. Any other vamp, all I’d have been worried about would have been my neck. With him, I was also a little concerned with protecting my backside from groping.

  “Why have you been following me?” I asked, opening the trunk and working the lock on the box.

  “Your employer asked me to.”

  “McHenry?” He surprised me into looking at him. I couldn’t see much more than his dim outline beyond the red arc of the taillights, but it was definitely him. Malcolm Kelly. The corners of his mouth were turned down. Maybe he wasn’t happy seeing me in this context either.

  “Bronson.” Typical paranoid vampire. Malcolm stepped forward to peer into the trunk. “What is that?”

  “Felt-lined lead.” My voice trailed off as my throat tightened up. He looked even better than before, his skin smoother, his lips a little darker, fuller. Hell, he might have even been taller. He hadn’t merely been hiding his energy. He’d been passing as a human. “The package is inside, wrapped in plastic.”

  He smiled, or smirked, his handsome profile and perfect hair making me self-conscious of my hat head and clownish makeup. Why, I had no idea. He’d already seen me like this.

  “Is that courier standard?”

  “I’ve learned to be cautious in my old age.” I put my hands on my hips and then wished I hadn’t. His eyes ran over me in a way that made me feel like I was wearing a lot less than long johns, jeans, a puffy down coat and a scarf. I cleared my throat. “I was thinking of getting a vacuum sealer, but they’re loud, take too long.”

  “Interesting.” Presumably, he meant the containment system, though his eyes remained on me. “Proceed.”

  I ground my teeth as I opened the case and extracted the package. I held it out toward him. He didn’t take it.

  “Could you please unwrap it?”

  It took serious effort not to roll my eyes, and I concentrated on working the tie with stiff fingers.

  “M. Pike,” he said, reading my ID. I nodded slowly. “Mary. You have been delivering to Bronson for how long?”

  “Almost six years,” I ground out. It was odd that he did not refer to Bronson as “my master” or “the Master.” Lucille never failed to sound faintly awed when she spoke to or about Bronson. Malcolm barely sounded respectful.

  “And why do you think Bronson always uses you as his runner?”

  “Look,” I said, giving in to frustration and ripping the plastic open, “I’m not a vamp tramp, so don’t get any ideas. I…” He moved on me and I jumped back, smacking the back of my head against the open trunk. He snatched the tube from my hand and threw it. I blinked—that was all I had time for—and then he grabbed me around the waist and started running, our knees banging together, my teeth chattering.

  “What the fu—” Over the horizon of his shoulder, the night lit up in a searing blast of flame. An explosion? The concussion lifted and tossed us toward the stark birch forest. I screamed, until we landed in a bone-crunching heap.

  Malcolm twisted at the last second, landing first, and I crashed down on top of him. The snow-covered ground might have been softer. My head snapped forward, and my ears filled in a high squealing sound. I couldn’t breathe.

  Darkness intruded over the bright orange sky, and I realized that Malcolm had rolled me over and was leaning down over me. His mouth moved, but his voice came to me in stuttered waves. I clutched at his arms. Pinpoints danced in my vision as I fought for more air.

  “…hurt…feed you…ud…”

  I felt my head shaking vigorously in response before my stunned brain translated his offer to feed me blood. Vampire blood: the elixir of life, the medical miracle. If only the side effects didn’t hit one out of ten lappers. Blood-bonding, an artful phrasing of dependency on your donor. If you didn’t drink regularly, you’d suffer permanent loss of reason. Cardiac arrest. And I had no idea what it might do to me.

  “You’re hurt,” he shouted. I shook my head again, then stopped abruptly as I recovered from having the wind knocked out of me. I gasped, and with the cold air came jagged scraping along my ribs and a halo of pain around my skull.

  “Hell, no,” I ground out. I was hurt, and this was the perfect opportunity for him to use my pain—my weakness—to ruin me. I’d never met a vampire that could pass up a chance to manipulate a human. Even Lucille, I realized, with that money, was probably working me in some way. My chest tightened and tears leaked from my eyes. “Please don’t force me.”

  Malcolm raised a hand, ignoring the
way I flinched, and stroked my cheek. I felt more than heard myself make a small, pitiful sound.

  “Stubborn. Sleep.” Cool mist covered my eyes, drifted into my mind. My head crunched once in a spike of agony, and then I slept.

  ***

  I woke to a terrible taste in a dry mouth, a splitting headache and ringing ears and the feel of McHenry stroking my hand. The last was the most disturbing.

  “Let go.” I groaned, pulling my hand back and hissing as the IV line tangled in the bedding and the needle squirmed under my skin. I looked around, blinking until my eyes focused. “Did I win?”

  “Jeez, Syd. What happened? You’ve been so careful, so good this year. We thought we’d lost you. Your GPS went offline, out in gosh darn Chugiak.” My name sounded strange spoken aloud. McHenry always remembered to call me Mary. He was reliable like that. I blinked, trying to pull my memories together through the army of hammers pounding away in my head. Not winning, then. The boss’s soft, pale face was so roughened by worry that he almost looked like an adult instead of a forty-year-old child.

  “The Price delivery was an explosive,” I said, mentally backtracking through the night’s events. “Where’s my car?”

  McHenry looked around as though he expected someone had parked it in the hospital room with me.

  “We called emergency services when your signal went out. They found your car blown to bits, and you twenty yards away in the damn woods.”

  “Language,” I muttered. A flash of memory, strong arms around me, the breathless sensation as we flew, propelled by the blast.

  “You’ve got about a million stitches in your head and your left arm. They said it’s going to hurt to breathe for a couple days, ’cause your ribs are all banged up.”

  Pain registered in each body part as if being mentioned turned it on, and the light around the edges of the vertical blinds seared my eyes. The light. Sunlight. Shit.

  “I gotta go,” I mumbled, examining the IV. “Sign me out, will you?” I unwrapped the tape from my arm and gritted my teeth as I extracted the needle. McHenry paled and dropped his head between his knees.

  “There, there, tough guy.” My own nausea took its sweet time twisting my stomach before it allowed me to stand. I found my bag and pulled it over my shoulder with shaky hands. I aimed for the door. After a few steps, walking got easier. McHenry’s chair scraped over the linoleum as he stood, bounding forward and blocking my way. “I need to borrow your car.”

  “You’re in no condition to be going anywhere. You need to rest, Syd. And if you think…”

  “I didn’t finish Bronson’s last delivery,” I said. The idea of failing his biggest client shut him up instantly. His pale blue eyes ran over my face, skittered up to where I could feel the stiches pulling at my scalp. He dropped his keys into my hand.

  ***

  I parked McHenry’s old blue Suburban at the edge of the scorched, black wreck that had been my car, and permitted myself one sad little whine. The Audi had been a beauty, but it was merely a possession. Hopefully Eugenie hadn’t called in my favor at the auto dealer, since it looked like I’d need it. Beyond the remains, Malcolm’s house was torn open. Icicles hung like teeth in the fractured opening. Now I knew what happened when the fire department hosed a house down on a frozen night. I’d hoped that Malcolm had made it back inside, maybe down to the safety of some secret lair, but the splintered bones of the foundation were exposed. No such luck.

  I turned, my sore neck and wavering vision protesting, and looked toward the woods, to where he had run with me. I felt better than I should, according to the chart I’d snatched from the holder outside my door, but it still seemed like a long walk. I put my head down against the cold and trudged forward.

  The tramped-down trail made by emergency services ended in an oblong circle at the foot of a big, dead cottonwood tree. The snow was spotted with blood and a couple of pieces of green bandage. It was amazing they’d been able to see me in the dark. Or maybe the house had been burning brightly enough to cast light that far. I twisted the space blanket I carried in my fists. McHenry would have mentioned if I’d been found in the company of a vampire.

  I looked around, through the white-skinned birch trees and the dark, hunched spruce. Had Malcolm kept going after setting me down? Had he willed me to sleep and abandoned me, left me to freeze to death? And what was I thinking, trying to save a vampire from the sun in the middle of the day? Maybe I had suffered serious neurological damage.

  “All right,” I called out, “if you’re here, let me know. Because it would be awesome to find out I didn’t drive out here to talk to myself.” Two ravens lit off from a tree branch at the sound of my voice, startling me and dropping a soft line of snow to the ground.

  “Tempting as it is to let you think you’re talking to yourself,” Malcolm responded from somewhere to my left, making me jump again, “I’m curious to hear what you think you’re doing.” I waded through knee-deep snow toward the sound of his voice. There were no footprints other than the floundering trail I was making.

  I finally spotted him through the low branches of a large spruce tree, his knees drawn up toward his chest, surrounded on all sides by walls of snow. Protected from the sun but essentially trapped. He must have been freezing.

  “I came to rescue you, but I can see you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “Below-zero temperatures are quite refreshing.”

  I ignored the guilt that rose at that statement. He had probably tried to wait out the fire department, and gotten trapped by daylight. I shook out the space blanket, and the crinkled foil surface reflected light all around. He scrambled back, shaking the tree trunk. Pine needles fell around me.

  “Jesus Christ! I wasn’t burned before. What kind of a rescue is this?”

  “Feel free to stay there for the rest of the day then,” I yelled back. “I thought—stupidly, I guess—that you might have been injured last night and require feeding.”

  “Are you offering?”

  “I already gave at the office.” I paused to think about that. “The hospital, actually. But I’ve got a couple pints of pig blood in the car.” He made a disgusted noise, similar to the sound I’d made when I’d reached into the cooler at the Asian market for said blood.

  “Fine.” He sounded as if he was making a huge concession. “Hand me your reflecting device.” I turned around to shield him as I folded it up, then very carefully lowered myself to one knee, and handed him the blanket. His fingers, cold as the snow he sat on, brushed the back of my hand.

  “Jesus, you look terrible.”

  “I was afraid you’d look worse.” The relief in my voice was a surprise. Well, he had saved my life.

  “Mary.” His quiet concern drew my gaze to him, and his use of my alias made me, oddly, want to come clean. “Are you all right?”

  A herd of small cuts had taken up residence on one side of my face and a square patch of pink skin marred with fat, black stitches stood out above it. I scanned him for damage, but Malcolm looked the same as always, impeccable, though blue veins showed through the thin skin under his eyes and he was squinting, even in the dim light under the tree.

  “I couldn’t just leave you here.” I pushed myself up. “Though I’d appreciate it if you could move your ass. I’m not a morning person.” An instant later he was at my side, looking almost goofy under the reflective blanket.

  “Is it cozy in there?” I asked, holding back laughter.

  “As a crackling, metallic womb,” came the muffled response. I hooked my hands around the lump that was his arm, intending to guide him, but by the end of the walk to the Suburban he was pretty much holding me up. Once inside, I added a red and green checkered blanket to his protection, cranked the heat and started for home.

  My eyelids were drooping by the time we hit 5th Avenue. Before the vampires resurrected our economy, the main funnel into downtown Anchorage had featured abandoned storefronts and slow-moving auto dealerships. Now it gleamed, all swank, with steel and
glass blood lounges, discreet clubs thumping away behind privacy fences and an airport full of private luxury planes. No wonder the Chamber of Commerce celebrated suckers twice a year. They oozed money.

  I turned down the heater and struggled out of my coat, hoping that cooling off would allow me to stay awake. I turned onto the narrow side street that led to my apartment building.

  “You shouldn’t have come back for me.”

  “I didn’t think your master would take kindly to me leaving you there.” I scrubbed a hand over my face then pulled into my parking space, driving halfway onto the curb before bouncing to a stop.

  “I meant you should have been resting. I’m surprised the hospital discharged you.”

  “Not as surprised as they were,” I muttered, all but falling out of the truck.

  “You ran away from the hospital?”

  “I woke up and it was light out, and I had no idea where you were, okay?” God, I’d never known an undead to fixate on something so trivial. I slammed my door and jerked open the back door. “Now, are you ready to get out? It’s about twenty feet to the building, and then you can take this thing off.”

  The man-shaped mound of blankets sat up and slid off the seat, somehow managing not to uncover a single inch of himself or upend the two empty plastic containers stacked neatly on the floor. I was so tired that I couldn’t even bring myself to freak out about him silently drinking blood in my backseat. Malcolm closed the door with his elbow and walked beside me, looking like a patchwork ghost.

  “Where are we?” he asked, and I had to lean in to hear him.

  “My place.” I frowned. All I had been thinking about was crawling into bed. It hadn’t occurred to me to take him to a lounge or one of Bronson’s homes. I could pretend that it was because I was too tired to care, but that wasn’t the real reason. Things had changed last night and I kind of, sort of trusted him. That feeling was so rare and fragile that I wanted to hold on to it, if only for the day.