She was the one who was in need here, and that her friends wanted to make nice with the fucktard who’d done this to her was utterly ludicrous.
Wanda turned the key in the ignition and began backing out of Gregori’s long driveway. “Nina.”
“Don’t you Nina me, Wanda Schwartz. You guys were all up in that jack-off’s face like he wasn’t the enemy. He turned me into a vampire. He fed me blood. Blood, Wanda. What about that doesn’t sound crazier than a one-eyed whore in a monastery?”
“You are the most difficult woman alive, Nina Blackman!”
Was that Wanda screeching at her? Well, well, well. Look who was all assertive these days.
“You listen to me, Nina. You crashed. Like just dropped. We reacted. What would have happened if we had called 911? You have no heartbeat. What kind of explanation could we have possibly provided for that?”
Nina’s silence was stony.
“Exactly,” Wanda said, shaking her index finger at Nina. “Greg knew exactly what to do, while we babbled like two blithering idiots. He said you needed to feed, because newly turned vampires need replenishing often. Until your body adjusts anyway. That you made it as far into the next day as you did is a real testament to your bitchiness, according to him. I won’t be sorry we let him do what he had to do to help you. Would you have rather we just let you kick it?”
Point. “Fine, so you did what you had to do. Thanks oodles. But did you have to make friends with the freak? Marty was all batting her eyelashes and cooing, and you—you may as well have just thrown yourself at him.”
“I threw myself nowhere, and, well, he is pretty dreamy. Even you, in your hissy fit, had to have seen that.”
“Yeahhhh,” Marty said on a windy breath. “He’s beyond cute. A little pale and definitely not as hot as my Keegan, but cuuuute.”
Yes, indeedy. He was hot. There was no denying it. She wouldn’t even try to kid herself otherwise. He was smokin’-licious. And a vampire. “Could the two of you stop admiring the enemy’s wares?”
Wanda’s eyes rolled. “Oh, stop. He’s not the enemy, Nina. He seemed perfectly nice to me and more than willing to help. He was very cordial. And unfortunately, you’re all in this vampire thing. If what he says is really true, he can’t do anything about it.”
Nina focused on the sky as they drove, her eyes drawn to the purple, frosty clouds moving overhead. “We’re awfully quick to assume there’s nothing he can do, aren’t we, Miss Infatuated? I think he’s lying. Don’t vampires want everyone to be like them? Don’t they take some kind of sick pleasure in making other people vampires? I’m just another notch on his bat wings.”
“He doesn’t have wings,” Marty chided. “Look, one way or the other you’re going to have to talk to him, because you’ll need to feed again.”
“Would you stop fucking talking about me like I’m some animal in a petting zoo? Feed…Enough already.”
The rustle of paper sounded like the roar of an incoming tide in Nina’s ears. Marty stuck a piece of paper under her nose. She grabbed at it and shoved it into her coat pocket. “There’s your schedule. Your next feeding is at two a.m. I wrote it all down for you, so you’d know. I also wrote Greg’s number down. After all, he is your local blood dealer.”
“Oh, and he doesn’t kill people for blood, Nina.” Wanda said it as if he was doing something as magnanimous as curing cancer because he didn’t kill people.
What a guy—a real rule follower.
“He buys the blood on the black market.”
Sweet.
Blood, fangs, vampires, black markets, oh my. She was officially on overload. “Just take me home. I just want to go home.”
“We won’t let you bury your head in the sand, Nina.” Marty’s conviction clearly laced her statement. “You have to feed. It’s imperative.”
Nina grunted, slipping down against the comfort of the passenger seat. “Yeah, that’s a big word there, Marty. Imperative. Know what’s imperative right now? Me going home.”
“Don’t be sullen. It’s unattractive and not at all like the Nina of last night, who wasn’t going to behave like Marty and cry about her new lot in life.”
Marty’s gasp of astonishment was prickly. “Did you say that about me, Nina? I can’t even believe you. Well, now I guess you know just how it feels when the entire landscape of your life changes, don’t you?”
Yeah, she knew how it felt.
Kooky.
That’s how it felt.
The rest of the drive was endured in silence, oppressive and thick.
When Wanda finally pulled up to her building, Nina scrambled out with a deftness both women commented on. “You’re like lightening fast.”
“A total blur.” Marty backed Wanda up, swishing her hands in a Karate Kid-like circle.
Nina rested an arm on the passenger door and gave Marty a dirty look. “Remember that the next time you wanna let someone feed me blood, ’cause I’ll klunk you over the head lightening fast. Now you guys go home. I’m beat, and I just want some peace.” She paused, remembering they were her friends and even if they annoyed the living snot out of her, they had helped. “Um, thank you for coming all the way out here. I know I’ve been a bitch, and I’m sorry.” Sort of anyway. She appreciated her friends, kinda got their distorted view on helping her, but she just wanted to be left alone.
Wanda’s face changed under the dim car light, sending her a concerned look. “I’m setting my alarm on my watch, Nina. If you don’t call Greg by one-thirty this morning, I’m going to do something drastic. Like raid a blood bank or something. Promise me you’ll call him. I’m tired, and I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours. That means I’m fragile and I could crack at any second. Who knows the trouble I could get into on so little sleep. Maybe I’ll go digging up some fairies and join this club you and Marty have going on.”
Nina almost smiled. Almost. “You’re very funny these days, Wanda. Very funny, indeed. I’ll do what I have to do.” It was a vague promise to carry out her wishes, but not quite a lie. No goddamned way was she calling a vampire.
“Promise?” Marty asked once more.
“Yeah. Girl Scout’s honor. Now go home to your dog. You’ve missed the he-man’s kibble hour.”
Nina threw the borrowed sunglasses in the backseat and slammed the door before Marty had the chance to croak her tired statement that she wasn’t a dog.
She literally flew up the steps of her worn, gray apartment building, jamming a hand into the pocket of her coat for her key, and pushed the door open gratefully.
Blood.
She’d consumed blood.
Shitpissfuck.
Throwing her keys on the cracked tile of her kitchen counter, Nina headed straight for the freezer. She didn’t need no stinkin’ blood. What she needed was some hot wings and bleu cheese dressing. She ripped open the carton and plunked them with a satisfying thump into the microwave, setting the timer for five minutes.
Larry. She needed to feed Larry.
The click of his little feet in his plastic wheel set her into motion, heading for her bedroom. Larry’s multicolored, plastic-enclosed penthouse sat on the scarred dresser she’d found at a tag sale.
Nina bent down and smiled, clicking the plastic with a fingernail. “Dude, what up? Ya hungry?” Flipping open the top of the cage, she scooped Larry’s little russet and white body up and held her hand near her face.
Larry’s look was pensive.
“Not you, too,” she chided with disgust.
He sat up on his hind legs and scratched his jowls. God, he felt wonderfully warm against the palm of her hand. Alive. She could hear the blood course through his veins, his tiny heart beat in quick rhythm.
Nina’s lips grew instantly dry. Running a tongue over them, she tried to speak the cutesy words people normally spoke when they were talking to their beloved pets, but her throat clogged. The roar of his blood swishing its way to his heart enticed her, called to her. The mesmerizing throb of life screamed
for her to expunge it.
Holy. Shit.
She wanted to eat Larry.
Her stomach growled with an ugly rumble.
Mary, mother of God. Who wanted to eat their pet? It was sacrilege. Preposterous. Insanity at its finest.
In one fell swoop Larry was back in his cage safe and sound. She dumped a handful of pellets after him and flew back to the kitchen just in time to hear the timer ding on her microwave.
Nina grabbed for the door handle and clung to it, resting her forehead on her arm before swinging it open and diving for the carton of chicken wings. She grabbed some napkins and dropped them on the table after getting the bleu cheese dressing from the fridge.
Her fingers were frantic in their attempt to gather as many of the wings as she could in her fingers and shovel them into her mouth.
She drank the bleu cheese dressing straight from the bottle, with a gulp to wash them down.
AN hour later, and after much kneeling before the greatness of the Porcelain God, Nina sat at the edge of her bed, pressing a cold cloth to her forehead. Christ, had that chicken wing spree ever been a mistake.
An unwilling glance at the clock told her it was just midnight. She needed to get her shit together if she was getting up at six for work. If she still had a job after the Belinda-nator tattled on her like the sorry sissy she was. Another quick glance told her she had no messages on her machine—so, so far, Dr. Berkenstein hadn’t called to fire her. This was a good thing.
So sleep. She needed to sleep. Yet she couldn’t seem to slow her body down. Everything around her was a stimulant. The colors of her frayed coverlet danced like sun streaming through stained glass.
And it was pitch black in her bedroom.
The incessant rat-a-tat-tat of Larry’s plastic exercise wheel clacked in a cacophony of sound.
She’d never sleep like this.
Her iPod. Music always soothed her. She rose, pulling her jeans off along the way and dug around her dresser drawer, locating her MP3 player. With shaky hands, she jammed the earphones into her ears and clicked on her playlist.
Barry. Barry would get her through this. Hopefully, it would help with her sensory overload tonight.
Nina sprawled out on the bed, closing her eyes and singing along with her most favorite crooner of all time. “At the Copa-Copa Cabanna. Music and passion were always the fashion at the Cooooooopppaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—”
“Somehow I never would have taken you for a Fanilow, Nina. You just don’t strike me as a ‘Can’t Smile Without You’ kind of girl. Not with your mouth anyway. Barry Manilow’s a pretty sensitive guy. Some might even say sentimental. I had you pegged for Alice in Chains or Mettalica. Or maybe speed metal.”
Nina sat bolt upright, pulling the coverlet over her half-naked body in surprise. A shiver of the unknown skittered up her spine. It was the vampire. Fabulous.
When she found her voice, it had a tone that had a “none too happy to see him” ring to it. “What the hell are you doing in my apartment? How did you get in here?”
Greg’s smile, the one she wanted to knock off his face with a good right hook, lit his eerily pale face in her darkened room. “We’re crafty, us vampires. Don’t get excited. I come bearing gifts.” He held up a Starbucks coffee cup. “Call it my peace offering.”
Her stomach howled at the very idea of coffee. She covered her mouth to keep from yarking whatever might be left in her bleu cheese dressing-coated stomach.
God, how could it be that the beverage she would most opt to have fed to her intravenously made her want to hurl? The injustice…“I don’t want any coffee, and I don’t want you here in my apartment. I don’t give a shit if Marty and Wanda like you—I don’t. So take your weirdness elsewhere.” She waggled a finger in the direction of her bedroom door as a signal for him to hit the bricks, hoping he wouldn’t read the flicker of fear in her eyes. Yet for a brief, crazi-fied moment, she stopped to agree with Wanda and Marty.
Dude was hot.
How dare he break into her apartment and be so off the chain hot while he did it?
The fucking nerve.
Setting the coffee cup on her dresser, he shot her a cocky smile filled with a compelling charm, and she just couldn’t grasp why it was sucking her in.
Greg cleared his throat, eyeing her with a hint of amusement. “Now, Nina. Is that any way to talk to one of your own?” His tone crooned. “And this isn’t coffee. I just put it in a Starbucks cup because your friends said you liked their coffee, and I thought it might comfort you to have something familiar when you feed.”
Nina curled her lips into a sneer, yanking her earphones off and tossing them on the bed, scooting to let her back press against the headboard. “How considerate of you. Very sensitive. Very in touch with your warm, fuzzy side. Now get the frig out of my house. I’m not drinking any more blood, or sucking on someone’s neck so I can live to have longer fangs. I’m not doing any of that crazy shit I read on the Internet. Now get—the—hell—out!”
He plopped down on the edge of her bed casually, leaning back on his arms and allowing her a real gander at his form in all its vampire-ness. He shook his dark head. “They really ought to ban Wikipedia. Most of the crap on there is only loosely based on my lifestyle—yours now, too, by the way, and the information is provided by online users who I bet aren’t even vampires. Now, stop all this crazy talk and chugalug. C’mon, you know you like it.” He pointed a finger at the cup and winked a green eye framed with sooty lashes at her.
Her fury overrode her fear, forcing her off the bed in a stumble of tangled sheets and iPod wiring. Forgetting she only had panties on beneath her T-shirt, Nina confronted him with her best bad-ass ’tude. “Go to hell!” Grabbing her jeans, she jammed her legs into them, grunting.
His gaze narrowed, while he assessed her standing in front of him, hands firmly planted on her hips. “I think I’m losing my patience with you,” he had the audacity to say with the calm collectiveness of Gandhi.
“You’re losing patience with me? Are you cracked? You turned me into a vampire, you nut. Whose patience should be on its last leg here?” she spat. “Now I said, get out!”
His jaw clenched just before he spoke. His big arms flexed when he clenched and unclenched his fists. “That’s it.”
Wow. That sounded like really final. Like all fed up and shit.
With a speed that not only caught her off guard, but would have taken her breath away had she had any left, Greg scooped her up, hauling her over his hard shoulder with a hand firmly planted on her butt and headed for the bedroom door.
She bounced against his back with hard smacks, her eyes level with his ass.
Wow.
If not for the situation—and because of the fact that she was slapping against all his hardness like a helpless sheet in the wind—she’d spend more time admiring the sculpted genius of it.
’Cause he was ass-tastic.
“If you don’t put me down, I’ll bite you,” she yelped as she bounced. Not that that would be a bad thing, given his ass was so bitable…
He stopped at her living room window, shoving it open with one hand while getting a firmer grip around the bend in her knees. “Yeah? I dare you.” His tone was smug, a challenge.
Rearing up behind him, she tried to get a better view of what they could possibly be doing at her window when he stuck one of those muscled thighs out of the opening and onto her rusty balcony. He pulled them both out to the flat surface with nary a grunt.
“What the fuck are you dooooing?” She fought the roar of the wind as she yelled up at him, alarm and disbelief clinging to her words.
“If I were you, I’d shut my yap, though I know that’s not an easy task for you. Oh, and hold the hell on.” His suggestion was spoken with a tight voice while climbing over the railing and seating himself there.
Nina pummeled his back with little effect. “Let go of me, you crazy freak!”
He swatted at her hands impatiently. “Cut it out, Nina. For Christ�
��s sake, I have to concentrate in order to fly and you do not want to break my concentration—because this is anything but easy, and some nasty shit could go down if we drop like we’re hot.”
Fly? Did they have wings, too? Marty had said no wings…
Omigod. Did she have wings?
“Whoa there, Batman. Fly? Fly?”
“Yep. Fly,” he reiterated coolly, leaning forward and again tightening his grip around the backs of her knees.
“But that’s flippin’ crazy, you can’t flyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…”
Her words were lost in the soar of their swoosh off the balcony and the gust of air blowing around them, lifting them into the deep purple of the night sky.
Hookay, so, yeah, he could fly.
CHAPTER
4
“You crazy motherfucker! Are you out of your friggin’ miiind?” Nina bellowed when Greg dumped her without ceremony on the ground. Spitting what she could only assume with a cringe were bug guts from her mouth, she ran a hand over her fly-blown hair.
Fly, flew, flown.
To Long Island.
Omigod.
Her stance was the “looking for a fight” kind when she confronted him with a wave of her finger under his nose. “You could have dropped me, you paranormal flying Wolenda, and then what?” She paused for a moment, mentally reassessing this new affliction of hers, then answered her own question. “Wait, nothing would have happened, right? Because I’m now blessed with super immortality, I’d have bounced like some kind of beach ball, yes?”
Flown. They’d just flown from Hackensack to friggin’ Long Island.
To his castle. With the moat and the turret. Three turrets, if one were to split hairs.
Which would be kinda crazy-cool if it weren’t for the fact that in order to find out this undoubtedly sensitive, classified information one had to be a vampire.
Not so cool. Crazy, but sooo not cool.
Greg smirked, his green eyes glistening in the dark night, while opening the front door to his not-so-humble abode. “Something like that, yeah.” Holding out an arm, he motioned her inside, making his way to the kitchen without looking back.
Accidentally Dead Page 6
