“Not going to question Shaw, huh?” Brock said before Sam could answer. “She’s still only missing, but I’m guessing you can tell us what happened.”
“We had nothing to do with that,” Sam said.
“That,” Celia repeated with a clip of the consonant. “Which means you do know what happened.”
“And Simons looks like he knows exactly who we are.” Brock eyed Ed. “So either he’s psychic, or you’ve been playing triple agent.”
Quadruple in some ways.
“Listen—” Sam tried.
“Don’t pretend you’re not in this together,” Celia spat, thrusting her gun forward. “We just want to know who to point these at.”
“Midnight.”
“Like you’re not working with him too.”
“I’m not. I just made him think I was, because like you, he was threatening me and my friends,” Sam growled.
“As well as pretty rich boy there,” Brock said.
“Yes, Ed knows everything I know, but Midnight is the real threat. He just left.”
“Those were cops,” Celia said with a roll of her eyes.
“Yeah, and he was one of them.”
That got the Cramers to drop their guards, glancing warily at each other.
“He pretends to be Detective Harold Cheroneau,” Sam went on, “but his real name is Black. I know exactly who Midnight is, and his accomplice. Lara from Lucifer’s Rest.”
“The waitress?” Brock snapped back to him.
“Where Alverez was killed,” Celia added with a sneer.
“Yes. We don’t have to be on opposite sides. We can take on Black together,” Sam said, because honestly, it was the perfect shift in the plan. If something went wrong, he had more options to place the blame. “Trust me, he won’t see that coming.”
They still had their guns raised, and while Celia looked contemplative, Brock was less trusting.
He shifted his eyes to Ed. “You’re awfully quiet, Mr. Simons.”
“You’re pointing a gun at me in my home,” Ed said evenly. His expression was that cold stillness that always made Sam pause, surprised that someone so sweet could also be ominous.
“Black wants us to kill you,” Sam broke in to keep the attention on him, “and to message him when it’s done so we can meet. But if we work together, we can set a trap, make it easier for all of us to take him down.”
Celia’s arm had started to lower, eyes on her husband, who stared at Sam as he considered the offer, and then finally tilted his head.
“So, Midnight, Black, is waiting for you to message him that we’re dead—” He indicated Sam’s cell in his hand that he’d nearly forgotten. “—and then he’ll say where to meet him?”
Sam noticed the grins spreading across their faces too late.
“Wait—!”
The guns went off in rapid succession, and Sam’s instinct was to shut his eyes, bracing for the pain of Brock’s bullets striking his chest, while Celia fired at Ed—only to feel nothing after a breathless beat and open his eyes to see that Ed had moved to cover him.
Arms enveloping Sam like a shield, Ed faced Sam, eyes glowing with a furious vengeance. He pushed Sam backward as he spun and sprang forward, tackling Celia in a blur. Her gun went flying as he tore into her throat, not using any of the care or restraint he’d shown with Sam.
Sam could see the bullet holes in the back of Ed’s shirt.
Then he remembered Brock, who was so stunned, he hadn’t moved, arm lowered with his gun aimed at the floor as he stared in horror at what Ed was doing to his wife.
Sam dove forward before Brock could recover, grabbing his wrist and twisting it to get him to drop the gun. That was enough for Brock’s fight instincts to kick in, and he whipped around, but before he could do more than clumsily grab at Sam’s arms, Sam used the momentum of his body against him to launch Brock toward one of the radios. Aiming to pierce Brock’s temple with the corner of the table, he slammed him down as hard as he could.
Brock crumpled and lay still, blood quickly pooling beneath his head.
The adrenaline coursing through Sam reminded him of how weak he was, how dizzy, but he fought past the spinning of the room. Ed was watching while he fed from Celia, vigilant to a single perilous moment when Sam might need his aid.
Sam had to roll Brock over to make sure he was taken care of, and when he did, Brock’s jacket fell open to reveal a second gun and a knife in his coat.
“You f-fucking… freaks…,” Brock gasped.
Sam grabbed the knife, hands trembling, but only for a moment.
Brock tried to grab his wrist to stop him, but Sam batted him away. He wasn’t letting anyone take what he’d found with Ed.
Not Black.
Not Lara.
And not the Cramers.
“Just die,” he snarled and rammed the blade into Brock’s chest.
Coughing and sputtering at first, Brock soon stilled—this time for good.
He was dead. Sam had killed him.
Sam had killed someone and had the blood pouring over his hands….
“Sam.” Ed’s voice startled him, half a growl since he still had Celia on the ground, who wasn’t fully gone yet but dazed and immobile in his arms.
“I’m okay,” Sam said, thinking maybe he shouldn’t be—okay; how could he be okay?—but it all kept getting easier.
Ed continued to drink from Celia until her eyes went glassy.
Sam left the knife in Brock’s chest, standing and wiping his hands on his pants. They’d have to burn these clothes too. They were going to need another shopping trip.
That morbid thought almost made him smile.
As Ed wiped his mouth, messier than that first night when he killed the man on his patio, Sam didn’t know how to ask if he could feed from someone who was already dead, and whether he could store up if he fed from multiple people in short order.
“Do you want… umm… I mean, can you…?” He gestured meekly at Brock.
“I’ll drink what I’m able. I heal quickly,” he said, leaving Celia and showing off the holes in his shirt, but while there had been blood, it wasn’t flowing anymore and there didn’t appear to be wounds, “but I need more to replenish the energy it takes. Better to feed as much as I can.”
“Waste not, want not,” Sam said with a grimace. “Sorry.”
“Are you okay?” Ed pressed.
“Yeah. Really. More than I thought I’d be. Because you saved me,” Sam said with a smile, dead bodies at their feet be damned. “Again.”
“You didn’t do so bad yourself.” Ed smiled in kind.
There was an energy between them, like the wrong sides of connecting magnets; they wanted to touch, to kiss, to hold each other and comfort each other, but the blood staining them kept them at a distance. Even standing apart, though, there was a warmth in that energy too.
Sam didn’t want to watch Ed feed again, since he began doing so much slower with Brock, being in the safety of his own home with no additional threats, but there was no point in cleaning up when they still needed to get rid of the bodies and follow the trail of the Cramers to make sure no one had seen them arrive. Everything was a mess all over again, and Sam wasn’t sure how to fix it.
“What… the hell?”
Sam’s head snapped to the living room entrance—where Mim and Gerry now stood.
They must have seen the patio doors open and decided to come in from there instead of the front. Because Sam had called them, told them to come here, and too much time had passed while they dealt with the Cramers.
Who were dead. And Ed was lapping the blood from Brock’s chest.
A growl rumbled up from him, eyes flashing, as Mim and Gerry, terrified-looking and choosing flight over fight, backed up into the living room and turned to run. They bolted back to where they’d come from, and Sam hurried after to stop them.
“Wait!”
Ed reached the doors first, just suddenly there to block their escape, like a movie mons
ter come to life.
Gerry screamed and grabbed on to Mim, who clutched right back at him, both backpedaling and running into Sam.
“It’s okay!”
They spun and honestly looked like they wanted to get away from him as much as Ed.
“He won’t hurt you,” Sam tried, hands outstretched and placating.
But when they looked over their shoulders at Ed, he hadn’t dropped his vampire face.
Why hadn’t he dropped that face?
“Eddie,” Sam said in concern.
But Ed kept looking at them.
“They’re not a threat!” He hurried around Mim and Gerry to get in front of them. “They’re my friends. They’ll listen to me.”
Ed’s stance remained taut like a springboard ready to snap—
“You promised.”
The light flickered from his eyes, fading to green again, and his fangs vanished. “I… I’m sorry. You’re right. I promised to protect you all, and I will.”
Sam breathed relief. It had just been a stressful, unprecedented morning. He knew Ed hadn’t meant it.
“The fuck?” Mim cried, less quick to be understanding. “What the fuck, Sam?”
“This is why I couldn’t tell you everything.” He turned back to them. “I didn’t want to ever tell you if I didn’t have to, but we didn’t know the Cramers were going to ambush us.”
“He’s a vampire….” Gerry remained wide-eyed, staring at Ed, still clutching Mim’s arm. “He’s a fucking vampire!”
Sam knew things were bad if Gerry was cursing. “He’s on our side. He’s was just being defensive, mostly because of me. He’d never hurt me. Or you.”
Mim kept her hold on Gerry to comfort him, but when her gaze landed on the side of Sam’s neck, she reached out furiously to rip the bandage from his bite marks. Gerry’s eyes went wider as he saw them too.
“You stay away from us!” Mim roared, pushing Gerry into Sam’s arms so fast, he hardly registered her storming around him and whipping the bandage at Ed’s face. “And you stay away from Sam!”
Letting the bandage strike him and fall, Ed flinched and backed away.
“I don’t care if you can do to us what you did to them, to Alverez and who knows who else! I won’t have you using Sam like a fucking juice box!”
“Mim!” Sam called. “That’s not what this is!”
“Like hell it isn’t!”
“He’s tried pushing me away. He’s just as afraid of using me or hurting me, but that is not what this is.” Sam left Gerry and stalked forward, not to Mim, but right to Ed, who stood in front of the patio doors that were still open with too much sun coming in. “I love you, Eddie. Tell me you don’t love me.”
“Sam….” Ed flinched again, refusing to look at him, so Sam reached for his face and made him turn his head, not caring that Ed’s cheek was smeared with blood.
“I love you,” he said again.
Ed’s eyes looked so soft as he pressed into Sam’s touch. “I love you too, but she’s right. I’m just a danger to you.”
“I don’t care,” Sam said stubbornly, clinging to the flutters in his chest at hearing Ed say the words finally, but if they were going to argue about this again, he didn’t want to do it in front of Mim and Gerry. “You’re worth it, worth all of this, and I won’t let you think otherwise. Now,” he said as he pulled away to stare down his friends, “we’re going to clean up this mess and figure out our next move.”
THEIR NEXT move….
The next move should be for Ed to run and make up for all the heartache he’d caused Sam, but he couldn’t let Sam sort through this alone.
Ed didn’t know what to say, finally meeting Mim and Gerry under the worst of circumstances and having acted so deplorably, so he offered to handle the bodies.
“Don’t dispose of them,” Sam said. “Just put them in the basement and wrap them up in a way that you can easily transport later.”
Ed didn’t ask why, just nodded and did as he was told. It should have been a strange phenomenon, at least where it came to getting rid of bodies, but not when the orders came from Sam.
Sam said he’d take care of most of the cleaning if Mim and Gerry went out to look for the Cramers’ vehicle and figure out how they’d gotten there without the cops noticing. Sam trusted them to leave and come back.
By the time Ed had finished in the basement, having cleaned himself, changed, and put his dirtied clothes in the incinerator, Mim and Gerry had indeed returned and were arguing heatedly with Sam in the foyer.
“Sammy—”
“I don’t want to hear it. All that matters is that the Cramers’ vehicle isn’t visible.”
“Yeah,” Mim huffed, while Ed stayed hidden on the second-floor landing to listen. “Totally out of sight in a little off-road spot in the woods. I only knew where to look because I saw Celia’s heel prints outside the fence. No one else would ever notice.”
“Good. We’ll take care of that later.”
“Sam—” she tried again.
“Not now.”
“He’s a monster,” Gerry hissed. “You’re covering up murder for a monster!”
Ed shrank inward, understanding their concerns, because they were warranted.
“He only feeds from bad people,” Sam defended. “Is it really that different from what we’ve always done?”
“We never killed anyone,” Mim said.
“I’m the one who killed Brock. I caused the head wound and stabbed him before Ed ever touched him. Am I a monster too?”
“That’s different,” she bit out quietly.
“Why?”
“It was self-defense!”
“And it’s survival for Ed! What’s the difference if it’s bad people?”
Mim and Gerry didn’t say anything at first, and Ed snuck closer to risk a glance over the banister. Sam was almost finished ridding the foyer of any traces of what had happened; tile was much easier to clean than carpeting, like on that first night when Ed made Sam clean the living room.
He’d been so angry and flustered and unsure of how to respond that night, half certain Sam would turn on him the second he had a chance.
Sam had had plenty of chances, but he hadn’t betrayed Ed yet.
“You want to be like him,” Mim said finally, quietly again, as if she hardly believed it. “We just found out vampires are real, and you want to become one?”
“The first night I saw Eddie change,” Sam said, “when I found out what he was, I was scared. I didn’t think I could handle all this. But I can. I have been. It doesn’t feel like a heavy price to pay when it means I get to be with him.”
“But he bit you,” Gerry said with a shudder.
“That was an accident.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” Mim snapped. “God, you sound like a textbook battered spouse case—”
“That isn’t what this is.” Sam raised his voice enough to echo up the high ceiling. “If I become like him, it won’t matter.”
“What about us?” Gerry asked.
“What about you? Nothing has to change.”
“If you become some creature of the night,” Mim said with a sneer, “I think a few things are going to change. Shit. Must be some pretty impressive sex.”
Sam snorted. “It is, but that’s not why I want this. I love being with him. We look at the stars and tell stories and balance each other out in ways no one else ever has for me. He thinks I’m too young and that this is too new for me to know what I’m asking. I disagree. Have you ever known me to be certain about something and change my mind?”
“Yeah,” Mim threw back. “This fucking job.”
That made Sam snicker again. “In the beginning, but now I’m glad, because this job led me to him.”
“Um…,” Gerry said suddenly, pointing warily upward—at Ed.
“S-sorry!” Ed shrank inward again, before realizing how pointless that was now and moving to descend the stairs. “Bad habits.”
“It’s okay
,” Sam said, smiling. “You didn’t hear anything I didn’t want you to.”
Ed felt that warmth fill him like nothing else ever had in all his years with cold skin and an empty heart. It had been easy to give in to Sam, and it would be just as easy again, but one of them had to be practical. “I can’t commit to an answer about what you want from me. I need time to think. I want us to be done with this burden I’ve put on you first.”
“Okay.” Sam nodded, however somber. “That’s fair. But it’s our burden, not just yours.”
“And I promise you—” Ed looked at the others. “—I will stop at nothing to protect Sam and you. I didn’t mean to scare you before. I just… don’t trust easily. Sam means a great deal to me. I do love him. Very much.”
Mim didn’t say anything.
Gerry still looked terrified but said, “C-cool. I-I mean… if you really wanted to kill us, I guess you could have done that by now, so… I’ll try to believe you. Sam doesn’t trust easily either.”
Stilted as that may have been, it meant so much hearing it from Sam’s friend.
“Whatever,” Mim said with less attempt at pleasantness. “But if I ever see any reason to think you’re more bad news for Sam than good, I don’t care how all-powerful or freaky you are. I will kick your ass and make you regret it.”
“Understood,” Ed said with a nod, thinking there was something in Mim’s fair form with her raging fierceness beneath the petite package that reminded him of Hypatia. “What now?” He returned to Sam.
“Now I change and clean up, and you make sure I didn’t miss any evidence. Then we tell Mim and Gerry everything.”
So they did. Gerry was clearly heartbroken to hear more about Lara’s exploits, but he didn’t raise his voice to deny it anymore.
“If she could lie to me that easily… then yeah, I’ll help. I’d already been researching Black after I got his name. Now I know better what to look for.”
Gerry had his laptop in a bag he’d been carrying over his shoulder, so much like an extra limb that Ed hadn’t noticed. He set it up on the coffee table to begin working, with Sam helping by recounting everything he knew.
They’d decided to wait to handle the Cramers’ car until after it was dark, so all Ed could do was stand around and wait, and Mim was much the same.
Their Dark Reflections Page 19
