Once Bitten, Twice Shy

by Jennifer Rardin

  “Cole, I have a problem I hoped you could help me with.” I kept my voice businesslike since Vayl sat three feet away, and I honestly didn’t want to lead Cole any further astray.

  “Sure,” Cole said.

  “Um, don’t you want to hear what it is first?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You saved my hide yesterday. Plus my lips are still tingling. At this point, I’m prepared to do just about anything you suggest.”

  Yipes! What have I unleashed? I wanted to say, “Cole, despite my actions last night I am not looking for a relationship with you. I can’t maintain a relationship with you due to the fact that I don’t want to. Also, I travel almost constantly and my boss is a vampire who I find disturbingly fascinating. These life choices don’t make me a good candidate for pet owner, much less girlfriend.” But I needed Cole to help me get information, which meant I needed him interested for just a while longer. Damn, damn, damn.

  “Can my partner and I meet you somewhere in about an hour?”

  “Your . . . partner?”

  “It’s kind of impossible to explain over the phone.”

  “Okay. How about Umberto’s? It’s semiprivate and the food’s great.”

  “Fine.” Cole gave me directions and we hung up. I looked at Vayl. “It’s set.”

  “Good. And?”

  “And what?”

  “You want to say something else, I can tell.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes this job sucks.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  When this whole mission ended, I suspected that if I survived, Pete would demote my ride to a used moped. Not great motivation to push the self-preservation button. But at the moment, I didn’t care. My local Mercedes dealer had brought me a dark blue C230 Sport Sedan that made even New Year’s traffic bearable. The car hummed like a Broadway star. I joined right in, and the two of us sang a duet Stephen Sondheim would’ve tapped his foot to while we motored down the sparkling streets of Miami.

  “I would ask you how you feel,” said Vayl, “but it is so obvious.”

  “It’s amazing,” I told him. “I just want to hug everyone I know. I want to buy the guy who engineered this car a bottle of champagne. I want to fly. Hey!” I turned to Vayl. “After this meeting let’s go hang gliding!”

  “In the dark?”

  “It’s a full moon.” I stopped at the light, flying forgotten as a burgundy minivan pulled up beside me. “I have never seen that shade of red before. Can you see all those flecks of gold and black in it?”

  “Yes,” Vayl answered, his smile more full and natural than I’d ever seen it. “I take it you are enjoying this part of the change.”

  “Oh, is that what it is?” The minivan activated its blinker and began to inch into my lane. “Looks like he’s a little lost,” I commented as I waved for him to slip in ahead of us.

  “You know, yesterday you would have cursed that man for ten solid minutes for delaying us,” Vayl observed.

  “Yeah, yesterday . . . I feel different than I did then.”

  Slight raise of the eyebrow, signaling imminent sarcasm. “No. Really?”

  “Will this last?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I followed the minivan for several blocks, then took a right onto the street that led to Umberto’s.

  “So tell me what you did today other than work activities,” Vayl suggested. “How did you spend your free time?” I had to think a minute, dig out my mental binoculars to see past the blackout and the moments before it. Why was it so hard to recognize the woman who’d spent most of her daylight hours clicking through encrypted files, looking for dirt on politicians like some commie-hunting throwback?

  Stardust in your eyes, sister. Only now it’s time to blink.

  So I began talking, starting with the family phone calls. But they required a back story, and that took a while, especially since I kept pausing to point out a fab new color I’d discovered. Eventually I worked my way back around to the research I’d done, specifically the background stuff I’d gathered on our oversight committee.

  “Did you come to any conclusions?” he asked after I finally finished talking. I shrugged.

  “All the senators are suspect because they all seem way too innocent. Doris Fellen gives away tons of scholarship money every year. Dirk Tredd is a true-blue war hero. And Tom Bozcowski was an extremely popular quarterback in the NFL before he shattered his knee.” I didn’t tell him I’d stared at their publicity photos for hours on end, trying to see behind the facade. It didn’t bother me so much that one of them had tried to eliminate us. We knew the risks when we signed on. But to put the lives of the citizens of your own country into the hands of monsters and terrorists—to be honest, the more I thought about it, the readier I was to nail said senator to the wall. With a telephone pole.

  “And then there is Martha,” said Vayl.

  I shook my head. “Man, I hope it’s not her.”

  Vayl put his hand on my arm. “You must accept that someone in your inner circle could betray you.”

  “Oh, I accept it. I just know, of all our suspects, if Martha’s the rotten link there’s no doubt we’ll be coming out of this bruised and bloody.”

  “You mean you prefer the senators?”

  “Absolutely. They can’t be nearly as mean, conniving, vicious, and underhanded as Martha.”

  “She is an excellent secretary, isn’t she?”

  “The best.”

  Umberto’s is an Italian restaurant located in a miniature pink castle. Only it wasn’t exactly pink. It shimmered with shades of silver and rose too.

  “I’m beginning to like that color,” I murmured as I pulled into the lot, picking a spot where we could exit quickly. I swallowed hard on a spurt of nerve-induced nausea. This whole meet could go south in a heartbeat if Vayl and Cole got to feeling competitive. And it would be my fault for not controlling my hormones better. Damn chemicals. Why couldn’t our bodies run on something simpler—like coal?

  An image rose in my mind of Vayl and me walking around belching black smoke rings. I laughed inwardly. Wouldn’t that change the world though? Everybody would have automatic dental coverage just to keep their teeth from looking like the inside of a chimney. And we’d be recycling our solid waste because sludge makes such nifty ashtrays.

  “Would you care to share?” asked Vayl as we headed for the restaurant entrance, his cane hitting the asphalt every other step with a reassuring clink.

  “Huh?”

  “You are smiling.”

  “Oh.” So I told him what I’d been thinking and we were both chuckling when we came through the door and met Cole, who stood waiting for us there.

  He covered well, but I could tell he wasn’t pleased to see Vayl and me sharing a laugh. Dammit. I know in other places kisses don’t mean much. Shoot, in Hollywood they do inconsequential smooching all the time. But to Cole, and most other people in the real world, kisses are significant gestures, not something you play with as I had. I bit my lip, forgot it was still healing from the last bite, and nearly made myself cry. So much for my postdonation high. The express elevator Vayl had taken me on came to an abrupt halt. The jolt left me with a roaring in my ears and a major craving for chocolate-chip cookies followed by a good hour of card shuffling.

  “Uh, Cole, this is my partner, Jeremy Bhane. Jeremy, this is Cole Bemont.”

  Vayl held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” said Cole. They shook. I waited for Cole to wince, but Vayl reined in his bone-crushing strength. I sighed with relief.

  The hostess showed us to a booth in a corner lit by a couple of candles and a low-wattage, recessed bulb. The decor diverted me enough to make me stop kicking myself and enjoy it. The carpet sparkled with every hue of green imaginable. It contrasted nicely with the white tablecloths and folded napkins. The menu covers felt like real leather. So did the cushioned seats.

  Vayl and I sat across from Cole. We ordered drinks—Diet Coke for me, beer on tap for the gu
ys—and the hostess left. “Lucille tells me you are a private investigator,” said Vayl.

  I expected Cole to squirm under Vayl’s icy-blue gaze. He didn’t, and I liked him better for it. Crap.

  “That’s right,” he said, “although it’s not turning out to be what I expected.”

  “No?”

  Cole shrugged. “It’s pretty mundane. And I’m not always sure I’m helping the good guys.”

  I spoke up. “Well, let me assure you that we are the good guys.”

  “Yeah?”

  I looked at Vayl and he nodded. So I took out my ID and slid it across the table. Cole opened it, studied it for quite some time.

  “I had a feeling you weren’t just another rich snob,” he told me. Despite the fact that he wore white Nikes with black dress pants, his hair looked like he’d just stepped out of a hurricane, and he smelled of citrus gum, Cole suddenly looked all grown-up as he slid my badge back to me. I slipped it back into my jacket.

  Our drinks came, we ordered supper, and the waitress left.

  “So, Cole—” I began.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your neck.” He nodded at the bandage. I’d completely forgotten about it. My hand flew up to it as if I could hide it from him. Vayl bumped his leg against mine.

  “Oh that.” I smiled, because Lucille would’ve. “I burned myself with my curling iron. Second degree.”

  Cole nodded, apparently satisfied. “You were saying?”

  “Um, okay, we’ve been investigating Assan for a while now, and we’re sure he’s a big hitter in a terrorist group called the Sons of Paradise. We know he’s performed surgery on fugitives. We know he has a powerful new partner and a plan of attack that could threaten the entire nation, maybe even the world. We think the documents we need to stop him and his partner are in his house.”

  Cole whistled in disbelief. “And you think I can get them for you?”

  Vayl sat forward. “Possibly. We hope you can at least provide us with information. You do, after all, have a connection on the inside.”

  Cole locked his hands together and played thumb wars with himself for a few seconds while he processed. “I don’t think Amanda knows anything about her husband’s shadow life. She sure wouldn’t have hired me if she did.”

  “We need access to her house, especially to her husband’s office,” I said, hating that I had to push. “But we don’t want to spook her. No telling which side she’d land on if she knew the truth. All we want is for you to convince her that, to help further your investigation, you and your partner need to take a look inside his desk, his computer, and his safe.”

  “My . . . partner?”

  I nodded. “That would be me.”

  Our food came. Cole started stabbing at his lasagna. Vayl and I traded looks.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You already have a partner.”

  Crap.

  Vayl nudged me. “If you will excuse me,” he said, “I think I will go wash my hands.” I let him out of the booth. Cole didn’t exactly glare at his back as he left, but I got the feeling he would’ve liked to.

  “Cole.” I sank back into the seat. “Last night, kissing you, was the closest I’ve been to a relationship in . . . a while.”

  “You make that sound like a bad thing.”

  Crap in a bucket! We had only traded spit, that’s all, and now he thought he deserved an explanation. Worse yet, so did I. I took a deep breath. His hands, exhausted from thumb wars, rested on the table. I put mine over them.

  “Cole—” I stopped. Had to. Memories exploded out of the suitcases I generally kept them locked in. Voices. Screaming. Blood—some of it mine. A surging black hatred that nearly swallowed me whole. No way could I put all that into words. No way would I take anyone else back into the hell I still visited in nightmares. So I gave Cole a sketch, knowing he could never imagine the full picture.

  “About fourteen months ago, I was a Helsinger. Are you familiar with that term?”

  Cole nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said, straightening in his seat as if I’d just called him to attention. “Helsingers are elite teams of vampire killers, named for Dracula’s nemesis, Dr. Van Helsing.”

  “Excellent,” I said. He responded to my praise like any good student would, with a smile and a satisfied little nod.

  “We didn’t start out as a tight-knit group,” I told him, “but we ended up that way. There were ten of us in all. I fell for a hard-charging former Navy SEAL named Matthew Stae. My brother, David, was on the team too. That’s how he met Jessie Diskov. And when he married her it seemed perfect, because we were already like sisters.”

  Cole turned his hands so they held mine and squeezed. It was a little depressing holding his hands, because he would soon come to understand why I was too dangerous to touch.

  “Some of what happened to my Helsingers on the night my life changed forever is classified. Some I just don’t remember. Here’s what I can tell you. We’d spent the day clearing out a nest in West Virginia. But we missed the Vultures. That’s what we called the leaders. They’d holed up so deep we couldn’t find their resting places before dark, and we didn’t dare stay longer without our own vamps there to back us up.”

  Tangents, ah, I love ’em. They keep you at a safe distance from painful subjects. But this was one train I needed to keep on track. “Anyway, they came back for us that night, before we had time to regroup. By the next morning the only crew members left breathing were me and my twin. And David only survived because he wasn’t there. He was in the hospital, sidelined with two broken ribs from a previous mission.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Oh, you can bet I stopped talking to him that night. I lost my team, my fiancé, my sister-in-law. And my brother blamed me for all of it. It was my crew after all, my responsibility to see they got home safe after every mission.” Like a tired, old dam, my throat began to ache from holding back the torrent of tears that threatened to drown me if I released them. I finished as fast as I could. “So you can see why I can’t have a relationship with anyone, especially a nice, normal guy like you. A guy stays with me long enough, he will die.”

  “Unless he’s a vampire,” said Cole.

  Cole stopped my fabricated reply with a raised hand. “I know Vayl’s a vamp, Lucille. I can smell it on him.”

  “You . . . you’re a Sensitive?”

  “Yep.”

  “But . . . how? I mean, were you born that way, or—” I stopped because he was shaking his head. His own bad memories were beginning to make his palms sweat. He squeezed my hands and faked a smile.

  “I was born in New York,” he told me, “just outside of Buffalo. Lived there till I was six, in an old white farmhouse with an actual barn and a pond out back. My brothers and I were skating on that pond one fine January afternoon when I fell through the ice. I was under the water for fifteen minutes before the firemen fished me out.”

  “So . . . you died?”

  “Yeah.” He was trying to act casual, in case I began to scoff at his life-altering experience. As if I could after what I’d survived.

  “Was it . . . awful?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember. The doctors said kids will do that when an event is too traumatic to bear. I guess it’s still too much for me. But afterward”—he leaned forward, eager now that he knew I’d listen—“it was like you hear about in church, Lucille. There was a light, and then my grandpa was there waiting for me, and he had my dog, Splinter, with him. It was”—his eyes shone, making me smile—“absolutely fabulous.”

  “And when you came back . . .”

  “I could sense vampires and other things that ran in the woods east of my house. Between that and the horror of almost losing me, my parents decided for a new, ice-free scene.” His gesture encompassed the whole state when he said, “So here I am.”

  I nodded, my neck creaking under the weight of this new information. I wanted to ask a dozen more
questions, because Cole was the first of my kind I’d ever gotten to talk to like this. But he beat me to it. “So why did you let him bite you?” he asked.

  My hand flew back to the bandage as if it was magnetized. “That’s none of your business.”

  He took the time to blow an orange bubble and pop it before he said, “No, but it’s the price I’m asking if you want me to help you out.”

  I stared at him, reframing this new picture of him so that it fit with what I’d already seen. “That’s very personal,” I said.

  “I know.” Cole dropped his eyes to our intertwined hands, feeling a little guilty, maybe, but not enough to back off. “Tell you what, you give me an honest answer and I’ll give you the real truth about why I’m working for Amanda Assan.”

  Suddenly I felt like it was my bet in a game of high-stakes poker. I looked closely at Cole, trying to interpret his intentions. But his face, usually so much more expressive than Vayl’s, gave nothing away. Did he have a straight flush or a pair of twos?

  “Okay, Cole,” I said, “I’m all in. But if I get my butt kicked on this deal, I’m sharing the pain.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, trying to hide his triumphant little smirk. “So why’d you do it?”

  Maybe I could’ve given him the party line and he’d have bought it. I might’ve convinced him with the argument that had swayed Vayl. But people rarely ask me for the truth, and when they do I feel compelled to give it to them.

  “Part of me just wanted to know what it was like,” I told him. “Part of me wanted to feel that vital, to know that without me, Vayl would have lost more than his life. He’d have lost that navigational beacon that lands him on our side of the wall. Because there’s nothing more demonic than a starving vamp. And part of me”—whoa, this is going to be embarrassing—“just wanted to be close, to be connected to somebody else. Like I said, it’s been a while.”

  Cole grinned and brought my hands up to his lips. “Then maybe I have a chance after all.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Do you ever stop?”

  He appeared to think about the question. “Not often.” His grin said, I’m wicked fun. “Women are my passion, my weakness, and my joy. And you”—he kissed my hands again—“are a paragon among them.”