The Bite Before Christmas

by Heidi Betts

  Ian greeted her with a mumbled, “Hey” as he pulled back onto the street.

  “Hey,” she replied. “How are the wife and kids?”

  She regretted the snarky question the second it passed her lips. Especially since she didn’t really want to know. Nor did she want him to know she was bothered by his marital status, not if she’d been having an affair with him for…who knew how long without voicing her annoyance.

  He turned a fraction in her direction, his expression clearly stating she was treading into “nagging bitch” territory.

  “You’re going to start this again?” he asked.

  His tone was short, as though they’d had this argument more than once before. And they very well may have. Wasn’t like she’d remember one way or the other, right?

  She pinched her lips to hold back any kind of response, since she wasn’t sure what kind of response she should give. Should she fly off the handle and jump into a fight they’d obviously repeated ad nauseum, or should she keep her mouth shut? She honestly didn’t know how Human Angelina would react, and she didn’t want to do or say anything that would arouse Human Ian’s suspicions.

  She did know what Vampire Angelina would do if she found out her lover was secretly married, though, and took at least a modicum of comfort in running through the gory scenario in her head. She rarely flashed fang in anger, but for something like that, she’d go postal as only a super-strong, undead creature of the night could.

  “Look,” Ian continued, unaware of the bloody and painful demise his alter ego was currently suffering in her mind. “We’ve been through this before. You’re the one who took off after graduation. I was ready to marry you and settle down straight out of high school, but you wanted to experience freedom for a while. Find yourself.” He sing-songed the words with obvious scorn. “So fine. Good for you. But I’m no monk, Ang, as you well know. So in the meantime, I hooked up with Ellen. She got pregnant, and I did the right thing. Doesn’t mean I love her the way a man should love his wife. Doesn’t mean I didn’t still care about you. That’s just the hand life dealt me.”

  She wondered if that was true, that they’d been involved once before—in love, even?—and she’d walked away. Innocently enough, of course, but if she’d loved Ian so much, maybe she should have stuck around and married him herself while she first had the chance.

  She certainly wouldn’t be in the mess she was in now, if she had. But then, hindsight was always twenty-twenty, wasn’t it?

  The slick polyester of her overstuffed coat rustled as she crossed her arms over her chest and scrunched lower in the seat. “It doesn’t make what we’re doing right,” she muttered.

  “No,” he agreed, and she was mollified to hear the slightest hint of guilt in his tone. “But I couldn’t leave Ellen now if I wanted to. It would hurt the kids too much, and you know damn well her father would have my ass. Mayor McCheese already thinks he owns the police force and everyone on it, starting with me.”

  She didn’t know that; didn’t even know who his wife’s father was—although from his derisive nickname for the man, she assumed he was a high-up political figure in the Boston area, possibly even the actual mayor.

  But the kid part she understood. It sounded as though, even if Ian wasn’t the greatest husband in the world, he was a dad who loved his children. That was something, wasn’t it?

  The problem was, she didn’t want to think about his having kids…not with anyone but her, at least. She’d gotten over the fact that, as vampires were unable to procreate, she and Ian were never going to have children of their own. So to come here and find that he did have kids, but with another woman…She pushed the knowledge aside, buried it deep and pretended her heart wasn’t aching painfully in her chest.

  “And you’re the one who came back here,” he added. “Came back, started hanging around, joined the force to be closer to me. You started this. If you’re tired of it or starting to feel guilty, then you need to be the one to leave, but don’t foist it all on my plate and make me the Number One Bad Guy.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. As usual, she was discovering that there were a lot of gray areas to this story. When it came to her current existence and her relationship with Ian, she apparently wasn’t a hundred percent innocent, and he wasn’t a hundred percent evil.

  Not that knowing that made her feel a heck of a lot better.

  They drove in silence for a while longer, going deeper and deeper into what looked to be a very bad part of town. Run-down houses and broken-down cars lined the streets, most of them tagged with names or symbols or gang signs.

  Street lamps were burned out, casting everything in dark shadows, but she could still make out the occasional human form. Hookers in short skirts, despite the frigid weather, and fake fur coats pounded the pavement looking for dates. Drug dealers sat on porches or stood in doorways waiting for customers. Junkies and the homeless littered the ground, passed out after shooting up or emptying a bottle.

  The whole thing gave Angelina the creeps, and she wanted nothing more than to go home to her pathetic little apartment and lock herself safely inside. It might not be in the best neighborhood, but it was a far cry from this.

  Unfortunately, she was supposed to be a cop. She was supposed to not only be used to these kinds of conditions, but willing to charge in and maintain law and order when the disorder and unlawful stuff got out of hand. Too bad she felt about as well-trained to be an inner city cop as a fish on a unicycle.

  Steering one-handed, Ian crept down a couple of side streets, then pulled into a long, rutted dirt alley between two houses that looked to be abandoned. All the windows were either broken out or boarded up. There were no lights burning inside either, and the yards were about six summers past well tended.

  He pulled to a stop a couple of yards from the end of the alley and cut the engine, plunging them into silence and almost total darkness. Other than their breathing, the only sounds in the dead, squalid night was the occasional bark of a dog or the faraway squeal of brake pads.

  She wanted to ask what they were doing there, why they’d just…stopped, but worried it would make her sound stupid and make him think she’d flown even farther from the cuckoo’s nest than he already did, since she was supposed to be up on their case load and already aware of their plans for the night. So she sat there. Silent, bored, and growing colder and more antsy as the seconds slowly ticked by.

  How did Ian do this all the time? Even in their other life, he was an undercover detective, working stings and stake-outs one after another. She’d never thought about it before, but she wondered if he ever got as bored with it as she was now.

  Shifting in her seat, she waited, fidgeting both for something to do and in an attempt to keep warm. She knew they were supposed to be watching for something, but she wasn’t sure what, so she didn’t know where to focus her attention.

  Then Ian sat up, going on full alert. “Here they come.”

  Angelina straightened, straining to see what Ian did. A second later, a group of people came into view strutting down the sidewalk on the other side of the street several yards away.

  A handful of men dressed like extras in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video—brightly colored, out-of-style leather and chains, not rotting flesh. Each had an arm slung around the shoulders of a young woman. The men looked cocky and arrogant, to say the least.

  The women…she couldn’t put her finger on it, but the women looked odd. Drunk, maybe? Or high? They weren’t stumbling, exactly, but they were moving stiffly, almost robotically, their expressions glazed and blank.

  They climbed the steps of a run-down house directly across from where she and Ian were parked. The guy in the lead opened the front door, holding it while the others passed. As they did, each of the other men lifted a hand and high-fived him.

  She couldn’t see their faces, but she could see the leader’s. He was grinning like an idiot playing with a light switch. And when he did, when his
lips parted and the whites of his teeth appeared…he flashed fang.

  SIP FOUR

  Pulse pounding, Angelina sat up even straighter, focusing every ounce of her attention on the house across the way and its new inhabitants.

  This was who they were staking out? This was the group Ian thought was running a meth lab?

  Oh, they weren’t drug dealers. Far from it. But what they were was much, much more dangerous.

  Before, she would have smelled them a mile away. More than that, she would have sensed them. A buzz under the skin or a tickle in her brain like the beginnings of an ice cream headache that warned her another vampire was in the vicinity.

  But because she was now a damn, useless homo sap, she had none of the essential, life-saving spidey senses that came with being a vampire.

  Whipping her head around, she glanced at Ian, who was staring dead ahead at the supposed meth house. He had a small pair of binoculars out now, and was peering through them, watching for…she didn’t know what.

  What she did know was that the people in that house weren’t cooking up illegal drugs, but they were doing something just as wrong. The women who had gone inside weren’t drunk or high or anything like that. They were human females who had been mesmerized by the male vamps, and were probably even now being sucked dry of their bodily fluids.

  With luck, the vamps wouldn’t kill them, but would merely drink enough to satisfy their thirsts, then send the girls on their way. Dazed, confused, dehydrated, and memories of being human Slurpies wiped.

  But this was a nest. A group of rogue vampires living on the fringes of society—mortal and immortal alike—and well outside of the law.

  It had taken centuries, but vampires had finally managed to integrate themselves with the human race. Were they completely and readily accepted? Of course not. There were still people who lived in fear of the “bloodsucking monsters” walking amongst them. There were even some who lobbied for their extermination (legally) and hunted them (illegally). For the most part, however, they’d done a pretty good job of blending in.

  Even this group would be all right, flying under the radar, if they hadn’t somehow called attention to themselves. She hoped they weren’t killing people in their attempts to feed. Bad part of town or not, that just wasn’t a smart move. But having the police on their tails, thinking they were mixing up drugs in the basement and selling them on the street wasn’t much better.

  Angelina wasn’t worried about the nest, though. There was a good chance none of them were boy scouts, and it was more than likely that some or all of them were flat-out bad asses.

  No, the thought that had her heart racing and her blood running cold was that this nest could very well be a huge danger to the cops. To Ian.

  Ian thought he was staking out a bunch of drug dealers. Big deal. Run-of-the-mill street thugs with juice in their veins and maybe some heavy firepower. He had no clue that the men he was watching could leap small buildings in a single bound…lift a Buick and toss it to the other side of town…squeeze the life out of a person twice their size one-handed.

  If they carried guns, it was just for show and convenience. To really kill—and if they were cornered, she had no doubt that’s exactly what they would do—they would simply tear out their opponents’ throats. And while a human could sometimes survive a bullet wound, there was no coming back from a ravaged jugular or worse.

  “I can’t tell what they’re doing in there, can you?”

  Ian’s voice broke her train of thought and made her jump. He lowered the binoculars and she quickly swiveled her head back around to face forward, as though she’d been paying as much attention to the house across the street as he was.

  Damn this human form, she cursed herself. With vamp eyesight, she could have seen through the windows even in pitch black and known what they were up to. With vamp hearing, she could have rolled the car window down and heard them as clearly as though they were sitting in the back seat. And if necessary, with vamp speed and strength, she could have zipped across the street, broken down the door, and taken out at least half of them before they’d even know she was there.

  But in this weak, vulnerable, useless, mortal body, she could do none of those things. And she couldn’t even tell Ian what she knew because…

  Because in this reality, she wasn’t sure whether or not people knew vampires existed. If they’d merged into society or not.

  Because she didn’t know how Ian would react to such a revelation. Would he take it in stride?…Be horrified?…Think she was crazy and report her to their captain or request a new partner?

  No. This situation was too dangerous, too important. She couldn’t take the chance that one of the latter would happen, and then that something bad would happen to Ian—something she might possibly prevent.

  At the moment, she didn’t know how she would manage that, given—yoo-hoo, no Super Vamp superpowers. (She’d truly never appreciated the damn things until they went bye-bye.) But at least with her knowledge of what was going on and what the gang members in that house really were, if she stuck around, she might be able to circumvent certain events.

  She may not be able to stop a bullet or keep Ian from continuing to surveil the nest, but maybe she could convince him that the group wasn’t doing what he thought they were doing and that they were a lost cause. Or maybe she could somehow make contact with the nest’s leader and convince him to move on to…bloodier pastures.

  Again, her lack of immortality would make that difficult. No way was a big, bad vampire leader going to listen to or be intimidated by a little human female. Even if she did carry a gun—one she didn’t know how to use.

  But maybe there was a small chance that her knowledge of their existence and what they were doing in that abandoned house would be enough to make them nervous and get them to pull up stakes.

  Ha! Poor choice of words; she’d be sure to phrase things differently if she ever found herself face to face with Thriller Boy.

  Dropping her head to her hands, she clamped her eyes closed and let out a low groan. What a mess. Or as Ian—her Ian, Vampire Ian—would say, this situation was definitely fubar.

  “What?” Human Ian sat up in his seat and grabbed the binoculars, once again staring straight ahead at the supposed meth house. “Did you see something?”

  “No, nothing.” She shook her head, raising it at the same time.

  He was so intent on catching those guys doing something drug related. But he could sit there until the sky turned green and he still wouldn’t get what he wanted. She had to find some way to get his focus away from the nest and onto something else.

  “You know,” she began slowly, racking her brain for something, anything logical that might convince him the Thriller gang was a lost cause. “Maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

  He lowered the binocs and fixed her with a narrow, knit-browed gaze. “What do you mean?”

  “How long have we been sitting on this group of miscreants?” she asked, trying to make the question sound offhand and rhetorical, even though she really did want to know the answer.

  And did people use the term “miscreants” anymore? She’d have to be careful of her vocabulary or it might set off more bells and whistles than her little fear-of-the-sun dance had earlier that afternoon.

  “Six months,” he supplied.

  Six months? Geez, Louise. Talk about a waste of police presence. They’d have been better off staking out the local Krispy Kreme for sugar junkies looking for their next high.

  “Right,” she said instead, as though she’d known it the whole time. “Six months. And we’ve caught them doing exactly nothing we can book them on. No cooking, no dealing, not so much as jaywalking or littering.”

  Oooh, look at her, sounding like a real live Police Woman. Living with a cop for the past eighty years had apparently paid off. Just call her Cagney. Or Lacey. Or…whatever.

  Of course, she was grasping at straws and could only hope she really did sound like
she knew what she was talking about without saying anything that wasn’t true or accurate.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So maybe we can’t catch them at anything because they’re not doing anything.”

  If possible, his brows and the sides of his mouth dipped even lower. Now he wasn’t just confused, he was heading into pissed. Ian never had handled being told he was wrong very well.

  “Come on, Ian. If that were a drug house, we’d have seen traffic pouring in and out of there all night. Strung-out junkies looking for their next fix, dealers hitting the streets with pockets full of product. I hate to say it, but I think this is a big, fat waste of time. Those guys are nothing more than wannabe hoods out for a good time with a couple of working girls. Still illegal, granted, but not quite Mr. Wizard setting up the meth lab you were hoping for.”

  She could tell she’d hit at least a couple of nails on the head because Ian’s scowl was lessening and he was rubbing the spot between his eyes.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  “What?” she asked, her own eyes widening slightly as she worried she might have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way in her impassioned speech.

  “You’re right,” he said, and she breathed a huge but silent sigh of relief. “If they were cooking up meth in the basement, we’d have seen signs of it by now. But something’s going on with those guys, I know it. I can feel it in my gut.”

  Angelina licked her lips, her own stomach going tight. She’d rarely known Ian’s gut to be wrong, and it wasn’t off base this time, either. He sensed something wrong about the bad eighties throwbacks because there was something wrong with them. Just not anything he could fathom or handle on his own as a mortal.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she told him, hoping that if she could get him away from this place, she could also distract him enough to give up on his odd obsession with the group of vampires. For good measure, she rubbed her hands together and blew on them, letting him know how cold and uncomfortable she was.