by Mary Hughes
I was about to pull him somewhere secluded, like the cruiser’s backseat—some part of me knew Jonesy wasn’t due to wake for at least another five minutes—when an explosion rocked us both.
Chapter Three
I was instantly behind Blackthorne, shoved gently there by those same big hot hands. His ribs were pumping and his head swiveled, his eyes sharp as onyx swords as he scanned the street.
The explosion had sounded from the west. I peered out from behind him. Light near the library sparkled. A whitish glitter fractured the air under the streetlamp.
I flattened palms against his muscled back. “What the hell is that?”
“You have a trashy mouth for such a small mouse.” He glanced at me then followed my stare. “But in answer, I don’t know. I’ll check. Stay here.” He glided off.
“Wait. An explosion means explosives.” I grabbed his wrist and yanked him back. Well, I yanked. He kept going. The net effect was me getting dragged. I tried to dig in my heels and started skiing. “I’m the cop. I’ll investigate.”
“Mouse.” He cast an amused glance at me. “This isn’t a case of stolen cheese.”
“Why, you overbearing, insulting—”
“Sorry.” He sounded surprisingly sincere. “You are a cop…so don’t you have to call for backup?”
“Already did, when we first stopped.” Which made me wonder where it was. With three third-shift squad cars patrolling Redfox Village, it was unusual for one to be more than ten minutes out.
“Shouldn’t you put on some clothes then? You look cold.”
I glanced down at my lace-covered breasts. I’d forgotten how close he’d been to lighting my fire with nothing more than two sticks and a good rub. My nipples poked up and the skin of my cleavage was rumpled with goose bumps. I glared at him. “Whose fault is that?”
“Sorry again.” He gave me an amused glance ending with an appreciative stare at my chest. “Mostly sorry. But you do look cold.” He stopped—and peeled out of his sleeveless tee.
The lift of his heavily muscled arms revealed the most edible abs in the world, extending as the shirt went higher. I stopped breathing. As his chest was revealed my tongue lolled out like a carpet runner. Muscles bunched intriguingly as he pulled the shirt over his head.
I managed to stuff my tongue back before he saw me panting after him like an estrogen-crazed idiot. What the hell had gotten into me? I’d never jumped a guy or kissed him like that, so hot, so fast… He offered me his shirt, all those licking-good muscles sliding easily under his silky smooth skin, and I forgot everything, even my name. “W-what’s this for?”
“You.” He stepped in close, winching the material in his hands, and looped it over my head. A brisk flick covered me from shoulder to mid-thigh. “You really are a squirt, aren’t you?”
“I’m a cop.” I backed up, stung. “And there are plenty of people shorter than me. Lots. At least two.”
“I like it.” He was grinning openly at me now, his stunningly handsome face sparkling with boyish charm. The sight was a hot, swelling bullet straight to my sex. I gasped a little.
His grin subsided to a smirk—still insanely attractive. I yearned to see that smirk rising between my thighs.
Self-preservation kicked in. I didn’t think, just got rid of that smirk as fast as I could—by smacking his smug face.
Which wasn’t there. My palm swished air. He’d already turned and started again for the library.
My own face flamed. I protected people, not assaulted them. Mostly. At least I had for the last fifteen years…he was getting away. I scooted after, my feet clomping double-time.
Thirty feet from the library, he stopped. I nearly plowed into his back but managed to turn it into a stuttering halt next to him. He was staring at the library with a frown.
Nothing was damaged, not the concrete sidewalk nor the steps nor the nearby bus stop shelter. What kind of bomb was so ineffective?
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Blackthorne said. “You stay here.”
“Because that echo voice works so well.”
His head jerked toward me, his surprise almost instantly masked. “Sunny, please stay back.”
“I’m a cop, Blackthorne. Not a mouse.” I braced myself for another shrimp comment.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I was teasing you before.”
My mouth paused on open.
“But the injured need you to call an ambulance.”
I was a fumb duck, too busy spelunking shadow men to do my job. “Point. I’ll go radio. But don’t leave until I have a chance to interview you.”
He clasped hands behind his back and nodded. I bet his fingers were crossed.
Still, that 911 wouldn’t call itself. I stalked to the patrol car and radioed for emergency medical services.
Then I noticed the Dawn van had an unusually large parking space. I checked tall, dark and deadly—still crouched on the sidewalk—and trotted up the street.
Sure enough, the van was in a tow-away zone.
Gotcha. I scribbled a ticket and slapped it on the windshield. Not that I was looking for an excuse to see him again, only to ensure he came to the station to give his statement.
I trotted back to the library. “Hey, Blackthorne. You’re illegally parked…”
He wasn’t there.
I did a quick four-point check, south, west, north, east—the truck was vibrating like its engine was on. “Damn.”
I dashed up the street as fast as my thick-soled shoes would let me. Before I made it, the truck pulled out and roared away.
The fucker had disappeared.
Aiden Blackthorne, fiercest of fighters, preternatural tracker and deadliest of assassins, was uneasy.
He didn’t understand why. He was here to meet his childhood friend Eloise—one of only two friends he had. Talking with her for the first time in decades ought to be something he anticipated with pleasure. Maybe they’d even find a solution to the sword hanging over all their heads.
But the lightest foreboding ruffled his nape. He’d learned the hard way never to discount his bad feelings. He was dangerous—and constant training kept him razor-edge sharp—but luck did not favor the rash or sloppy.
Maybe that was part of the problem. Eloise had set the time and place of the meet through text messaging. He hadn’t actually spoken to her or seen her.
But he had no choice. Meeting Eloise was the first step to keeping his best friend Ric safe.
It was vital no one suspect why Aiden was in Illinois, so he set up a cover as a trucker for Dawn, laying down birth certificate and school records and credit rating and driving logs, rechecking it all until his identity was flawless.
That evening he went over the pup truck thoroughly for tracking and listening devices before leaving the barn. He drove a circuitous route, sharp eye out for tails. He circled the library three times before he settled on a parking spot over a block away, early enough to scout the meeting site before Eloise arrived.
He filtered silently out of the truck, eased the door shut and stood absolutely still, listening. Watching. Part of his unease was because the Chicago Loop was only a few miles away. Couldn’t be too careful at the edge of Nosferatu’s turf.
Nosferatu was a nasty piece of work; more, as head of a mafia-like organization, he ran a gang of vampire muscle known as the Lestats. Always out for easy blood, Lestats could be anywhere, even this well-ordered suburb—and the Windy City vampires didn’t play well with others.
Complicated by the fact that Eloise was Nosferatu’s daughter.
Aiden breathed in, testing the night air. Winter’s salt and dirt lay heavy in it, yet the damp, crystalline promise of spring quivered beneath, on the cusp of breaking through. It eased his tension.
Until his ears picked out the lub-dub of human heartbeats, accelerating in excitement—and fear.
A gun clacked. Threats rasped. A mugging, from the sound of things.
He checked the impulse to interfere. He’d gone to a lot of trouble not to call attention to himself. Eloise might get spooked if he got involved. He’d step in if the mugging escalated to physical assault. In the meantime, he had a meeting place to examine. He glided silently from the truck.
A police cruiser growled around the corner in the next block.
He slid into the shadows of the truck. The patrol car thrummed closer. Cursing, he pressed against the truck’s cool metal side. While he fully appreciated the need for cops to keep the social order, he made it a policy to stay well out of their way. He wasn’t against law and order, he just ran outside it.
The cruiser stopped a block short of where he hid. Two police officers emerged separately, headed for the mugging. Aiden nodded to himself. One thing off his plate.
He glided silently into the shadows of the winter-bare trees lining the street, merging effortlessly with each, listening closely to the cops’ heartbeats as he slid past the causeway, his ears attuned to the bum-bum of the larger cop, the fast lub-dub of the smaller…
He was almost to the library when he scented vampire and spun.
Aiden was never rash. Before flying to the rescue, he sampled the air, identifying scents. The humans’ smell was stung with fear. The vampires’ hungered, mixed with bright leather and stale blood, a stink that said Lestat.
Aiden fisted claws. Figured. After all the trouble he’d taken to avoid the Windy City vampires, here they were feeding.
He ghosted toward the causeway, thumbing a text as he went to the area vampire/human expediter. “Lestats here—stop humans.” Elena Strongwell would keep more humans from wandering into the area plus bat cleanup. Elena was police too, but he’d first met her as a vacationing expectant mother. For a cop, she was okay.
The slurping started. Aiden grimaced. While the Lestats probably wouldn’t kill the humans—there was an unspoken agreement in place—the vamps didn’t have the best track record.
He was already resigned to revealing himself to rescue a bunch of humans, probably blowing his meet with Eloise, when gunshots made him pause. Then a vamp snarled, “You’re dead, bitch.”
Aiden flickered into the causeway and yanked Mace off the small cop. All three Lestats were easy enough to overcome. Nosferatu had gotten lax with his training. Aiden threw a quick hypnosis on the humans so they wouldn’t remember vampires and freak. Humans tended to be a little fussy and fragile that way.
Then the clompy cop with the ridiculous bob haircut and the sweet oval face and lush, beckoning coral lips surprised him by throwing off his suggestion and coming after him.
He didn’t trust cops, and she was obviously suspicious of him by the way she pursued him. Even with all that, somehow he ended up kissing her. She tasted like wild honey and sunshine. Aiden was a two hundred-year-old vampire with the burning libido of his kind, but in all his years he’d never fired an inferno of lust like that. He’d kissed her and would have done a helluva lot more than that if that bomb hadn’t gone off.
Protecting humans was automatic; protecting her was instinct. He’d reacted before he even knew what he was doing, covering her. To keep her safe while he went to investigate, he commanded her to stay back and was exceedingly annoyed when the mouse insisted that she was the protector here.
So he appealed to her sense of responsibility, suggesting she protect the injured. Once he got her safely out of the way, he crossed the thirty feet to the blast site.
He almost misted there—mist was the fastest way for vampires to travel—but mist was also flammable. There might be another explosion and he mistrusted that metallic dust, so instead he used the gliding run of his kind. He was still there in an instant.
The library steps glittered with pale dust. Ash from the explosion? He knelt and grazed it with a finger—and recoiled like he’d touched a hot stove.
His fingertip was red and raw. He blew on it. Even that brush burned like he’d touched acid, confirming his suspicions.
The dust was pure silver.
He shuddered. Good thing he hadn’t misted. Silver dust combined with vampire mist? Like blown grain and matches. He’d have been nothing but soot. Even solid, the bomb would have made him sick and helpless.
Then it hit him. A silver bomb had exploded—in the exact spot where he was scheduled to meet Eloise.
I dragged home after shift, a little appalled with myself. Not only had I lost track of an important witness, I’d proceeded to lose custody of the vampire assailants when an unmarked black van squealed up and two blond hunks in SWAT suits and a Black Widow in a cat suit leaped out, cuffed the vamps, plopped their heads on—producing that unnatural click of skull snapping onto spine and zip-bag sealing of skin—barked an alternate reality at me and dragged the big bad vamps into the van as easily if they were recalcitrant children.
Nobody but me remembered the vampires. I showed Jonesy my shift report and he said, “Are you trying to get fired? I’ll write yours this time. Get out of here and get your head on straight.”
Good advice. But the instant I shut the front door of my house, my mother greeted me.
“Hello, Sunny, how was your first day of police work? Or not day I guess, since you are third shift, but your first night? Was it good? Would you like an after-work snack of milk and cookies, or would you rather have breakfast? I have eggs in the fridge and it would only take me a moment. Sausage too, some of that lovely blutwurst from the Stiegs’ sausage store. Or not just the Stiegs now since that nice young cheese couple went into business with them.”
Amid the river of words, I hugged the woman who’d taken me in as a baby, the mother of my heart if not my genes. I loved her and she loved me and that meant we were family.
Daisy Ruffles was in her late forties but had the energy of a twenty-year-old, probably from the Meiers Corners diet of all-bratwurst-and-beer. My nickname is Sunny, but my mother could be Nova.
“Hello, Sunny,” a second, similar voice greeted me, not lower so much as muddier, raspy like a blender set on grind. My brother Dirk’s words were punctuated by the clomp of his big feet coming down the stairs. He’s a half-foot taller than me—the same height as Elena—but looks like a scarecrow with plates for feet, a potbelly and a feather mustache. “How was your first night? My night was good. I dusted my desk and filed my reports in triplicate and then had a yummy but healthy snack of raw potatoes dipped in ranch dressing—no pepper, you know how that makes me sneeze, so I used paprika instead—and then I watched reruns of Oprah until Detective Strongwell sent me out on a soda case, that is to pick up a case of soda pop from the Allrighty-Allnighty convenience store…”
I love Dirk too, but I’ve learned there’s only one way to keep from being carried away in a gully-washer of words. I shout. While I don’t approve of debate by volume, sometimes it’s the only thing that works.
“GOOD MORNING, DIRK.” In the second’s silence that produced, I told Mom, “Breakfast would be good.”
“Eggs?” She started for the kitchen. “Or a nice English muffin with cheese ball spread and a slice of the lovely sausage I got from the Stiegs’ Wurst Und Käse store?” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a long brown curved-balloon of a sausage. It was the exact size and shape of a horse’s filly-maker.
I’ve learned from experience to only eat food I can positively identify. Which, parenthetically, might be another reason I’m a cop. Investigation into the truth is not just an interesting job in the Ruffles household, it’s a matter of gastric life or death.
“Eggs is fine.” I fumbled brass buttons as she put the suspicious sausage back and took out the eggs. Too bad I didn’t have Blackthorne’s magic fingers to help me… I squelched the thought.
“Oh, look at that.” Mom tsked and set down the carton. “You have blouse buttons missing. Was your p
olice work that rough? Take if off and I’ll sew on new buttons. I’m not known as the Kamikaze Needle Champion of the Lutheran Ladies Auxiliary Mothers Association for nothing, you know.” As she chattered, she took my jacket and started pulling at my blouse.
The idea of my mother armed with sharp things was appalling enough that I let her undress me.
“What a nice new black undershirt,” she said brightly.
That woke me up. I said, “Oh, well, you see I had an extra in my locker—”
“What’s that logo?” Dirk said. “Dawn Truck Lines?”
“I mean, I borrowed it from the lost and found—”
“Sun-Hee Ruffles.” Mom used her stern voice. “Don’t lie to me.”
I sighed. Mom pretends a certain naïveté, but she doesn’t let me get away with jack cheese. “I had a clothing mishap while apprehending muggers. One of the—” I passed a hand over my mouth and made a sound like plzoffcr, “—loaned me his shirt.”
“What?” Dirk said. “I didn’t recognize the word between ‘the’ and ‘loaned’.”
Any other brother would have been deliberately causing trouble. My brother was just a walking natural catastrophe.
“Know what? I’m tired.” I grabbed my shirt and jacket from Mom. “I think I’ll get some sleep.”
I managed to get ready for bed with only the usual antics—putting my flannel nightshirt on backwards and tangling the sleeves as I tried to switch, then, since Dirk and I share a bathroom with two sinks, nearly poking my eye out when Dirk bumped me as I shoved the toothbrush in the general direction of my face. Every generation of Ruffles loses at least one eye. Grandpa Ruffles took his out with a cap gun and Uncle Rufie Ruffles lost his in an unfortunate knitting accident. For our generation, it’s only a matter of time.
But tonight I avoided losing my stereo vision and after sliding Blackthorne’s T-shirt into my undies drawer—only burying my face in it for a second or two—I tucked myself into my twin bed.
I’d barely closed my eyes when my cell phone rang.
