A Bite to Remember

by Lynsay Sands

  Jackie blinked at his words, then started to blush and Vincent grinned.

  She cleared her throat, then said, “I’m sorry about waking you up. I asked the drugstore to send the delivery at 2:30. He arrived early. I wasn’t sure what to do when he got here, then decided it would be better for you to feed while he was here. You could always go back to sleep afterward.”

  “Oh no, no sleeping. I’m up now and wide awake. I’ve had enough sleep,” he assured her, eliciting something of a snort from his aunt. Fortunately, Jackie didn’t appear to hear it.

  Smiling and in a much better mood than she’d been in after grappling with the delivery guy in his room, she nodded. “Good.”

  “So what are we doing now?” Vincent asked, standing as he spotted the muffins on the kitchen counter. Tiny had made blueberry muffins. God, he loved the big guy. Such a good cook and he always made the tastiest stuff. Moving to the counter, Vincent fetched a muffin then glanced back toward the table to ask, “Anyone else want one while I’m up?”

  He waited until everyone had said, “No, thank you,” then moved back to the table.

  “That kid wasn’t high or something, was he?” Jackie asked as Vincent sat down and began to take the paper baking cup off the bottom.

  Vincent blinked in surprise. “No. Why would you think that?”

  “You seem rather…er…cheerful,” she said finally.

  Vincent opened his mouth to say that yes, he was, then recalled that he really shouldn’t be. He’d had to close plays. People were dying. Stephano, a good friend and excellent vice president, had been attacked. The fact that he liked Jackie and thought she might like him back shouldn’t nullify all that, he lectured himself. And it didn’t, he realized. Thinking about Stephano and the poor dead girl he’d fed on managed to dampen some of his good cheer.

  Frowning, he glanced toward the door and commented, “I should go check on Stephano. Is Neil still here?”

  “Yes. He’s working from Stephano’s room. He had his portable brought over and moved the fax machine and printer up from your office,” Jackie announced. “Stephano hasn’t woken up yet.”

  Vincent frowned at this news, but wasn’t really surprised. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since the start of the turning, and Stephano had been badly injured.

  “You go check on Stephano and talk with Neil,” Jackie suggested. “I want to grab a notepad and pen. I had an idea while we were waiting for you to come down.”

  Vincent considered asking what the idea was, but decided he’d find out soon enough, and simply stood to leave the room.

  It was a short visit. Stephano wasn’t awake yet and Neil wasn’t in a mood for chat. His voice was brusque as he announced that he hadn’t been able to contact his mother in Europe, and Vincent knew he was worried that she would hear the news that her son was dead before he could contact her and explain the true situation. However, Neil didn’t want to leave such news on an answering machine, so had simply left a message for her to call him back at Vincent’s home.

  Neil then took him by surprise, by asking if he should be arranging a funeral. When Vincent simply stared at him nonplussed, he pointed out that if Stephano were really dead they would be having a funeral for him, and as they wanted the saboteur to think he was dead, shouldn’t they be arranging a fake one? Neil had nearly lost his brother once, and wasn’t willing to risk him again. He would do whatever it took to keep the saboteur from hunting Stephano down and finishing the job.

  Vincent had agreed that this would probably be a good idea, but said he’d talk to Jackie about it first. If she agreed, they’d start making phone calls to arrange it. Vincent would, of course, cover the costs. He then frowned, and added that he’d talk to Jackie about Neil at least seeming to interview replacements for Stephano as the daytime vice president as well. This, too, would be something they’d have done if he was dead.

  It was as he was about to leave to return downstairs that Neil had suddenly blurted, “Thank you, Vincent.”

  Surprised, he paused by the door he’d been about to open and glanced back. “For what?”

  “For saving Stephano.” His expression was solemn. “I realize what you gave up by turning him.”

  Vincent stilled as Neil’s words sank in. I realize what you gave up by turning him. It was only at that moment that Vincent realized just what he’d done. It had been instinct. Stephano had been dying, attacked by a saboteur who was trying to hurt Vincent. It was his fault. He’d done what he had to do to save him…without considering for a moment the ramifications.

  He could turn only one.

  He’d turned Stephano.

  “Vincent?” Frowning, Neil moved to his side and grabbed his arm as if he thought he might need steadying. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he said weakly, but wasn’t at all sure it was true. Vincent didn’t regret what he’d done and would do it again in a heartbeat, but it was still heart wrenchingly painful to accept what his actions meant for him…and for his future. Whether he could read Jackie or not, whether she was his life mate or not, he could never turn her. He may have finally found the woman he was meant to live out his life with and she was now forever beyond his reach. Or, at least, she would be there for only a heartbeat of time in the many centuries that his life was likely to last.

  Vincent turned to the door and pulled it open.

  “I…er…I have to go,” he muttered and hurried from the room, desperate to be on his own.

  Neil didn’t try to stop him and Vincent stumbled out of the room, then along the hall to the top of the stairs where he paused and closed his eyes. His mind was whirling. A great, huge ball had lodged itself painfully in his throat, his chest was aching, and he felt nauseous.

  All Vincent had ever wanted his whole life was a life mate of his own and now he could never really have one.

  “Vincent?”

  Blinking his eyes open, he stared down at the foot of the stairs. Jackie had apparently returned from retrieving her notepad and pen from the office and spotted him at the top of the stairs. She was now staring up at him with concern.

  “Are you all right?”

  Vincent forced a smile and started downstairs. “Yes. I was just thinking.”

  “They must have been pretty grim thoughts. You looked upset,” she commented as he reached her side. “Is Stephano all right?”

  “Yes,” he answered and felt a little of his distress ease. Stephano was alive. He was alive. Jackie was alive. And where there was life, there was hope.

  His smile becoming a little less forced, he took her arm to lead her to the kitchen where Tiny and Marguerite waited. Vincent quickly told them about Neil’s suggestion about the funeral and putting out feelers for a vice president to replace the supposedly dead Stephano and as he did, the pain in his throat began to ease. The one in his chest didn’t, however. He suspected it never would.

  “He’s right,” Jackie said slowly when he finished. “Neil should at least seem to be arranging a funeral until Stephano wakes up and we know if he recalls who attacked him. And you’re right about his putting out the word that a new daytime vice president will be needed. Both of those are things that would be done if Stephano were really dead.”

  She tapped her pen on the notepad she’d fetched while he was upstairs, then nodded. “We’ll have to at least start the arrangements of the funeral. If Stephano can’t name his attacker, it may even be a good idea to carry it out. The attacker will surely be one of the people who attend.”

  “Why are you so sure he would attend?” Marguerite asked curiously.

  “Because of the letters. He seems to be enjoying taunting Vincent with what he’s doing. I think he’ll want to see how much he’s upset him by killing Stephano.”

  Vincent frowned, once again searching his mind for someone, anyone, he might have hurt in any way, even unintentionally. But there was no one he could think of who could possibly want to harm him this way. Pushing these frustrating thoughts aside, he glanc
ed at the notepad lying on the table. “What are we doing now?”

  Jackie drew the notepad closer and said, “I called the computer whiz I usually use in New York about retrieving the files the saboteur erased. Unfortunately, he can’t fly out until the day after tomorrow. But, I was thinking, while we can’t access the computer files, we can still get started on the list another way.”

  “The list of employees on the Dracula play?” Vincent asked.

  “Yes.”

  Marguerite frowned. “But we won’t need the list if Stephano can tell us who his attacker was.”

  “If he can,” Jackie agreed. “But there is no guarantee that he’ll be able to, and I’d rather not waste time just sitting around waiting for him to wake up, then find out that he can’t.”

  Vincent nodded in understanding. He had no desire to sit around waiting either. Having something to do would make the time pass more quickly. “How can we work on the list?”

  “You name off all the people you remember being in the play and then we go to them and see who they remember and so on. We might actually have the list made up before my computer whiz gets here.”

  “Maybe you should call and cancel having him come out here then,” Tiny suggested. “He can be pretty pricey.”

  Jackie shook her head. “No. I want to be sure we have everyone listed. Besides, Vincent will need the files for work anyway, so he has to have them pulled up.”

  “You’re right,” Vincent agreed. “We will need those files back, but this list is a good idea.”

  Jackie smiled slightly, then picked up her pen and began to make columns on the page. “So, let’s see. I guess we can start by listing the departments. Security, production, actors…” She stopped writing and glanced up at him. “Shall we start with security?”

  Vincent nodded. “Max Kunstler headed security.”

  “Max Kunstler? The security chief at V.A Productions?” Jackie asked with surprise. She’d met the man the day before while going from department to department with Vincent in search of files the saboteur might have missed.

  Vincent nodded again. “Uh-huh. Unless there’s a problem, there isn’t really much to do around the production company most of the time. Max schedules the security guys, and so on, but other than that…” He shrugged. “Max doesn’t like to just sit around twiddling his thumbs, so he often oversees the setup of security for the plays. He goes to the theatre, decides what needs doing and how many men should be on site, hangs around for a couple weeks to be sure everything’s running smoothly, then returns to the company to take up the reigns there again.”

  “Oh.” Jackie wrote his name down, then glanced at Vincent and said, “So he knew about the sabotage attempts before we spoke to him?”

  “He knew, but he didn’t believe they were sabotage.”

  Jackie’s eyebrows rose. “Why?”

  “The same reasons I didn’t. The male actor who broke his leg was a drunk, the actress injured when the set fell on her just seemed bad luck at the time, the fires seemed accidental…” He shrugged.

  “And when the ‘contagious anemia’ cropped up?” Jackie asked, arching one eyebrow. “He didn’t wonder then if it might be more than an accident?”

  “Oh yes,” Vincent said dryly. “He knew that wasn’t an accident. He thought that was me.”

  “Well, surely you explained to him that it wasn’t you, that you hadn’t been biting them,” she asked with a frown.

  “Yes, of course I did,” he assured her. He added, “That doesn’t mean he believed me.”

  Jackie began to rub her fingers over her forehead, then shook her head. “I didn’t like Max much. Until you got firm with him, he seemed…”

  “Arrogant? Patronizing? Disrespectful?” Marguerite suggested.

  “That about covers it,” Jackie’s voice sounded dry. “Met him before, have you?”

  “No. I’ve never met Max or anyone else who works for Vincent.” Marguerite glanced toward her nephew briefly and when he didn’t protest explained, “However, I’ve seen that attitude in others. I fear Vincent’s condition makes some of our kind feel superior to him.”

  “Superior?” Jackie asked slowly.

  Marguerite nodded. “Immortals like to think of themselves as perfect. Perfect health, peak strength, peak intellectual abilities…” She shrugged. “And some mistakenly believe that the genetic anomaly that prevents Vincent’s feeding off bagged blood—like the rest of us—suggests he isn’t quite perfect.”

  Jackie was silent for a minute, then shook her head. “But this anomaly wouldn’t have shown itself until about fifty years ago or so when everyone switched to bagged blood.”

  “Yes,” Marguerite agreed.

  “So, up to that point, everyone accepted him as fine, immortal, equal?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then, when you all switched to bagged blood and he and his father found they couldn’t feed that way, some of the others…”

  “Began to look down on them and consider them inferior,” Marguerite finished.

  Vincent heard the anger in his aunt’s voice, but he was used to it. It bothered her more than it did him. Vincent had enough confidence in himself he didn’t much care how others thought of him.

  Except Jackie, he acknowledged to himself now. Vincent was very interested in her reaction. Had she turned a pitying look his way, he would have been upset. Instead, she looked merely bewildered as she turned to him to ask, “Why would you keep someone like that working for you then?”

  Vincent felt himself relax. Smiling faintly, he shrugged, “If I refused to hire anyone with that attitude, I wouldn’t have any immortals working for me. It’s pretty common. Besides, Max is good at his job, and he never pushes too hard with me.”

  Jackie nodded a slow acknowledgment to that. She’d noticed that while Max had shown a hint of arrogance, and seemed a touch patronizing and just that bit disrespectful, he hadn’t been foolish enough to make any of these attitudes terribly obvious. On the other hand, she’d also noticed that some of Vincent’s natural good humor and easygoing attitude had been missing at the office, replaced with a cool steel she hadn’t seen in him before.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “So, Max was there. Who else was in security?”

  “There was a Bob, a Tony, a John, and a Francis.”

  Jackie bit her lip as she wrote the names down and then asked, “I don’t suppose you caught their last names?”

  “No, sorry.” He grimaced. “I didn’t need to know their last names.”

  Jackie waved his apology aside. “We can get a list of the other security people from Max. Let’s move on to production. I imagine you took Lily, she—”

  “No.” Vincent shook his head.

  “No?” she asked with surprise. “But she’s your production assistant.”

  “Yes, but she was on vacation at the time,” he explained, “So I took Sharon instead.”

  Jackie blinked. “But Sharon’s a secretary, why would you take her as a production assistant?”

  “I didn’t really need a production assistant. I was the lead actor, so we had a different producer on the play. What I really needed was more of a personal assistant and Sharon could handle that easily enough.”

  “I see,” she murmured, crossing out Lily’s name and putting Sharon’s in place instead. Jackie then raised her head and said, “Why don’t you just start listing off everyone you can think of and I’ll write them down. Then we’ll pick the brains of those people to see who they recall.”

  Eleven

  The nightclub was loud, hot, dark, and crowded.

  Jackie fiddled absently with the straw sticking out of her Diet Coke, her gaze moving slowly over the people sitting, milling, and dancing around them. Jackie was having that hinky feeling again. She was sure the saboteur was somewhere in the crowd; watching them…and awaiting an opportunity to make his next move. Now that the saboteur had stepped up the game, moving it to murder, whatever was coming couldn’t be good.


  “Relax, Jackie. He’s not going to strike in the middle of a dance club.” Vincent spoke close to her ear, and still he had to shout to be heard over the cacophony of sounds around them.

  Forcing a smile, she gave up her survey of their surroundings and glanced around the table, noting that while Tiny looked as tense and alert as she, both Vincent and Marguerite appeared relaxed. It just went to prove that Marguerite was as talented an actor as Vincent, because Jackie knew the two immortals weren’t as relaxed as they appeared. Or, at least, she didn’t think they could be.

  It was two days since Jackie had awakened Vincent with his drugstore Darryl breakfast. They’d spent the time since then collecting their list of names of employees on the play Dracula, the Musical. First, they’d put down everyone Vincent recalled, then they’d gone to interview Max and Sharon—the only people in the company that were on the list—to see who they recalled.

  Max had been busy, questioning everyone in V. A. Productions about what they’d seen or heard at the time of Stephano’s attack—or murder, as they were all led to believe it was. However, he’d taken time out to aid them in the list and been very helpful, recalling even more names than Vincent.

  Sharon, on the other hand, hadn’t been very helpful at all. The secretary hadn’t been openly difficult, she’d merely claimed to have a bad memory, at least when it came to mortals. While she’d been able to name the immortals working on the play easily enough, when it came to mortals, Sharon recalled them only as some “little blond mortal” or “some rude little mortal.”

  Jackie had been interviewing the woman alone and suspected that if Vincent had been with her, the woman would have been more helpful. However, there had been at least a dozen people at the company in a panic to talk to him after the events of the day before, and she’d suggested he deal with them while she spoke to Sharon.

  Some of the people on the list they’d managed to compile had worked for the company before, or were working for them now in some capacity or other and so were on file. Jackie had pulled those, and made copies of everything before they’d headed back to Vincent’s home. Leaving Tiny to begin investigating the people so far on the list, she and Vincent had then continued compiling it, going to each person listed to see if any more names could be added.