Vampaholic

I started to bring my stake up into position—wrist rigid, the power coming from the shoulder, if anyone’s interested—and then I froze.

The man facing me was the carpenter who’d played havoc with my hangover today. On one of the few days when I’d pulled myself together early enough to show up at the club before the cocktail hour I’d seen him taking a break outside with some of the others in the crew as I’d hurried into the building, swathed in a silk scarf and wearing oversized Christian Dior sunglasses to keep the brilliance of the day from racheting up my pounding headache.

Which meant he wasn’t a vamp. That fact wasn’t as comforting as it might have been, because he was still trying to kill me.

“You’re the one who’s going to be dust in a second,” he grunted, using both hands to steady the nail gun. “When you get to hell, tell your pals down there that Jack Rawls sends his regards.”

As he finished speaking he depressed the trigger on the cordless nailer. I barely had time to leap out of the way before a deadly barrage of nails began flying at me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled as I turned my leap into a dive and slid across the hood of my MINI, losing my Manolos in the process. I fell rather than landed on the other side of my car and crouched there. A metallic pinging like hail on a tin roof told me Rawls was still firing.

“Gunning for a vamp,” he said calmly over the pinging. His flat Midwest accent made his words seem matter-of-fact. “The nails are tipped with silver, and the gun’s been modified to shoot up to twenty feet, so make it easy on yourself and stop trying to run.”

My heart turned over. What did he mean, gunning for a vamp? There was no way he could know my most secret fear—no one did. How had he learned of it, and why was he so sure it wasn’t just a fear, but the truth?

I could hear him walking around the front of the car. Still keeping low, I sprinted to the back of the MINI, ungratefully wishing Popsie had sprung for Hummers instead when he’d bought our birthday presents. “I’m not a vampire,” I said tightly. “You were working only feet away from me most of the day, so there’s no way you don’t know who I am.”

“No way at all,” he agreed, his tone still unruffled. “You’re Kat Crosse, and one of your sisters is the local Daughter of Lilith. I knew who you were before I hit town.” I heard him exhale, and something in the raggedness of his breath made me realize his calmness was eroding. “I can’t fault your sister for not being able to put you down, but I’m not going to lose any sleep tonight after I dust you, lady.”

He stepped around the back of the MINI as he spoke and aimed the nail gun at where I’d been crouching. His head jerked up when he saw I wasn’t there, but his reaction came too late.

I jumped off the car’s roof and crashed into him, falling with him to the ground. Grandfather Darkheart’s weeks of training might not have turned me into a vamp fighter like Megan, I thought grimly as I rammed the point of my stake to Jack Rawls’s throat and glared down at him from my sitting position on his chest, but it definitely gave me an edge in a parking lot brawl like this.

His body went rigid. He stared up at me, and even in the poor light I could see implacable hatred in his eyes as blood traced a thin line from the point of my stake to his collar. “Do it,” he said, his voice hoarsened by the pressure on his throat. “Go ahead and plunge it in. If you don’t I’ll do it myself.”

He moved so fast I almost didn’t have time to react. His head jerked sideways toward the stake, and even as I pulled back my weapon in shock I saw the trickle of blood deepen. I felt him brace himself to repeat the maneuver and I did the only thing I could think of to prevent him.

“Stop that!” The stake was instantaneously reversed in my hand—another move that Grandfather Darkheart’s training had drilled into me—and as I shouted the command at Rawls I smashed the blunt end of the wood into his cheekbone. His head rocked sideways with the strength of my blow, and I sensed him gathering himself to break free of me. I hit him again, ignoring the blazing pain in my wounded hand, and then slammed the solid yew-wood stake against his temple a third time with all the strength I could muster. He went limp, the tension I’d felt in his body extinguished as instantly as a lightbulb being turned off.

“You’ve killed him,” I told myself through numb lips. “That’s what comes of going all altruistic and trying to save a man from himself, instead of sticking with what you know and being a ball-breaking bitch.” I wiped my bloody hand on my hiked-up dress—the fact that I only felt the tiniest pang as I did so was proof of how distracted I was—and pressed my thumb to the side of his neck.

His pulse was slow but steady. Relief swept through me. I peered closer at his neck and saw that the small puncture mark from my stake was closer to his jawline than his jugular, and that the bleeding had already slowed.

“You’re not dead,” I told his unconscious form. “I like that in a man, but what I’d like even more is not having to worry about you trying to kill one or both of us. I guess I could keep knocking you out every time you show signs of coming round, except that would mean I couldn’t ask you questions.” I stood up and looked down at him. “And I’ve got questions, sweetie. Lots of them, starting with how you knew the one thing about me that I haven’t dared tell anybody.”

Stepping over him, I walked to the front of the MINI and reached inside to the console. I popped the trunk and hastened back again, flicking a wary glance at Rawls’s prone body as I passed him. Ask me how long two coats of OPI polish plus a base and topcoat take to dry and I can tell you to the second, but predicting how long a man who’s gone down for the count will remain down isn’t my area of expertise.

However, I did have some handy gadgets relating to one of my areas of expertise in the small overnight case I always carried with me. Minutes later, having used them and a few other things on him, I surveyed the results of my handiwork with satisfaction.

“There’s something about a man in handcuffs that always gets my motor revving a little,” I murmured. “But just because a girl’s got a wicked side doesn’t mean she’s a vamp, Jack—or at least, it doesn’t mean she’s turned into a vamp yet. If you’d known that much about me, we might have ended up using these handcuffs in a completely different scenario tonight.” I’d straddled him as I’d cuffed him to the MINI’s bumper and tied each of his legs with lengths of tough nylon rope to his own vehicle, which I’d moved up behind the MINI. Now I sat back on his chest and narrowed my gaze at him.

When I’d seen him earlier I’d been distracted, first by Terry and then by the confrontation with my sisters, and I certainly hadn’t taken note of his physical attributes while he’d been trying to shoot nails in me. Jack Rawls wasn’t a bad-looking man, I realized belatedly. He was in his late twenties, although by the leaned-down look of his jaw and the sun-squint lines interrupting the tan at the corners of his eyes, they hadn’t been twenty-eight or twenty-nine indulged years. His black hair was growing out from a close trim and I got the definite impression it would be ruthlessly cropped back again the minute it started to get in his way. Not drop-dead gorgeous like Jean-Paul, or all moody and wolfishly sexy like Megan’s Mikhail, I decided, but definitely handcuffs-to-the-bedposts material. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he was the type to go for that, even if we’d met under more conducive circumstances.

“Kansas farmer stock?” I hazarded as I waited for him to come to. “Idaho? From your accent, I’m guessing you’re from one of those flat states where people do Norman Rockwell things like going to potluck suppers and having chores. It’s not only the accent, it’s the whole grim determination thing you’ve got going on, as if staking me is a duty you can’t shirk. Such a shame, sweetie. As I say, these handcuffs could have been put to much better use.”

“I don’t sleep with vampires.” As if he’d been conscious for some seconds and had simply been waiting for the right moment to startle me, Jack Rawls opened his eyes and stared emotionlessly at me. “I meant what I said. Kill me. I’m not interested in eternal life, vamp.”

Without warning he jerked his arms powerfully toward his body and tried to do the same with his legs, like a mustang lunging desperately against restraints. I grabbed two handfuls of his T-shirt and tightened the grip of my bare thighs against his rib cage to avoid being bucked off as he tried to break free, expecting him to continue his fight for a few moments before realizing it was doing him no good. But he surprised me again. Just as suddenly as he’d exploded into movement he stopped—as if, I thought with sharp interest, he’d been in similar situations in the past and recognized when it was of more benefit to conserve his energy than to continue resisting uselessly.

I made a note to add his familiarity with restraints to the list of subjects to explore with the mysterious Mr. Rawls, but my first question was a deliberately distracting one.

“Police issue cuffs, courtesy of a detective on the Maplesburg P.D. who liked playing good cop/bad girl with me,” I told Rawls. “Or was it bad cop/bad girl? Anyway, they’re not toys, Jack, and I got the rope I tied around your ankles from the trunk of your car, so you’re not going anywhere until I say you can. I also ran over your damn nail gun, so don’t bother trying to think of some way you can reach it and use it. Speaking of your car, I’ve got to ask—what’s an upstanding, vampire-hating carpenter like you doing riding around in a vampmobile?”

“I got a deal,” he said tonelessly. “Its last owner died in it.”

When I’d moved his vehicle, I’d turned off the bright headlights, leaving on only its parking lights. My back was toward them but they shone full in Rawls’s face, so I could see every flicker of expression that crossed his features, if there’d been one. But there wasn’t. The only indication of his state of mind came from the cold hatred in his eyes as he stared up at me.

Now, cold hatred isn’t the usual expression men have when they look at me. Unbridled lust, hopeless infatuation, puppy-dog pleading—those are some of the ways men look at me. Even when I’d dumped Terry this afternoon, I’d seen in his eyes that if I’d crooked my little finger as he’d stormed out, he would have turned right around and come back for the chance to spend another night with me. Rawls, on the other hand, had me sitting on his chest with the black lace of my pink panties peeking out under my hiked-up hem and, thanks to the ripped neckline of my ruined slip dress, my breasts practically spilling out of my push-up bra into his face—and still he was treating me as if I was something he’d scraped off his shoe.

I decided that Jack Rawls was beginning to piss me off just the teensiest bit.

“Its last owner being a vampire like you think I am, I suppose,” I said, my patience at an end. “How can I put this so you understand? I’m not undead, I’m a real live female.” A thought occurred to me. “You’ve seen me in the daytime,” I reminded him, clinching the ridiculous argument. “What does the fact that I didn’t burst into flames tell you, sweetie?”

“Fuck all.” If anything, the hatred in his gaze intensified. “I’ve never seen you exposed to the sunlight. Far as I can tell, no one has in a while. Yeah, you’ve shown up here a couple of times in the late afternoon, looking as sick as a dog and wrapped up in scarves and wearing dark glasses. I’ve known a vamp or two in my time who can rise before dusk if they had to and if they take the kind of precautions you do. That hasn’t stopped me from killing them.”

“Then we’d better hope you never run into Tara Reid,” I shot back, pissed by his “sick as a dog” observation, which didn’t take much effort to translate into “skanky wreck.” “News flash, Jack—when a girl’s partied a little too enthusiastically the night before, sometimes she finds jumping out of bed at the crack of dawn and singing ‘Oh, What a Wonderful Morning’ a tad beyond her. She might even reach for the Ray-Bans and be a smidge tardy getting into work. Admittedly, most hangover cures I’ve choked down could better be classified as hangover punishments, but a stake through the heart is going too far, no?”

He didn’t respond. I leaned closer to him, my arms braced on either side of his shoulders. “Okay. If I’m a vamp why haven’t I bitten you by now? For that matter, why did I defend myself with a stake?”

Just as I decided he wasn’t going to answer this time either, he spoke, his jaw clenched. “I don’t pretend to know why you creatures do any of the things you do. My best guess is that you’ll bite me when you’re good and ready, but right now you’re getting a charge out of this.”

“A charge out of what?” I demanded. “Getting nailed to my car?”

His words ground past his teeth. “Out of sitting practically on my face and leaving nothing to the imagination while you’re doing it. Out of seeing if you can make me hot for you by using your glamyr.” He exhaled tightly. “Out of knowing it’s beginning to work.”

I’d had enough. He’d used a nail gun on me. He’d shot my car, destroyed my dress and ruined my whole evening…but all of those were nothing compared to the fact that he’d somehow discovered my greatest fear and dragged it into the light. I still wanted answers from him, but what I wanted more right now was to do to him what he’d done to me.

It was obvious what his greatest fear was. It would be pure pleasure making him face it.

In one smooth movement I pulled my dress over my head and let it drop to the ground. I shook my hair out, looked at Rawls through my lashes and moistened my lips.

“Is it hot out here or is it just me, sweetie?” I purred. Arching my back and squirming my hips against him, I tipped my neck back and began to trail the fingers of my left hand down my body, giving loving attention to the curve of my breasts in my barely there bra. I let my fingers wander slowly toward the lace of my panties. “’Cause all of a sudden I just feel so—”

My throat closed and my words dried up. I pushed a sex-kitten strand of hair out of my eyes and looked across the parking lot at what had caught my attention.

I found my voice. “About running over your nail gun,” I croaked, not taking my gaze from the pool of illumination shed by the farthest parkinglot light. “That might have been a teensy bit rash of me, Jack.”

I heard the tremor in my tone, and all of a sudden I couldn’t keep up the act anymore. I looked down at him. “We’re fucked,” I said flatly. “Three vamps just flew in and landed beside the club. They’re heading our way, Rawls.”

Chapter 4

“I should have known this was a setup,” Jack muttered. “Your undead friends sent you out as bait to catch me off guard, and now the fun begins.” I saw a muscle move at the side of his jaw. “Before the four of you start killing me inch by inch, tell me something, vamp—how long have your kind been tracking me? From the start, or was my trail picked up in Pennsylvania when that son of a bitch insurance salesman got away from me?”

I adore single-mindedness in a man at the appropriate time, but I consider the appropriate time for male single-mindedness to be when he’s doing something exquisitely tantalizing and I can feel waves of shuddery ecstasy rising to a crescendo in me. Since the only thing rising in me right now was pure terror, Rawls’s inability to move on struck me as a major drawback—one that I realized would take drastic action on my part to overcome.

All this went through my mind as I got off him and turned to his car. “I don’t have the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about, sweetie,” I said tensely, not caring that I was giving him a Dita Von Teese-like view of my bottom as I bent over the front seat of his vampmobile. My fingers closed around the handcuff key I’d tossed there after securing him. “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning for doing this, but two against three is better odds than one against three. Besides, if this doesn’t convince you we’re on the same side, I don’t know what—” I turned to face him as I spoke, expecting to see him lying where I’d left him and found myself staring at the business end of the stake I’d dropped earlier.

“We’ll never be on the same side, vamp,” Rawls said with another of those cold smiles that looked like the grimace a Doberman would wear just before it lunged. “I told you, I’m not interested in playing for Team Dead. Maybe I won’t be able to fight off all your pals, but I’m taking out as many as I can, starting with you.”

He thrust the stake toward me with the speed of a striking snake, and I reacted with equal speed. My sideways leap wasn’t as fast as a vamp’s, but it took me out of the path of the pointy piece of wood aiming for me. I didn’t have the opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief, however, since a split second later it was coming toward me again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the trio of vampires walking across the parking lot, and I realized that doing the life and death tango with Rawls was using up time we didn’t have.

I squeezed my eyes shut against the sight of the stake plunging toward me and held the handcuff key in front of my face, fully expecting to feel yew wood entering me before my heart could take another beat.

“I don’t get it.”

At Rawls’s growled statement I cracked open one eyelid and peered cautiously through my lashes. He was staring grimly past the key to me, the tip of his stake frozen a hairsbreadth away from the skimpy pink satin cupping my left breast. Three thoughts occurred to me almost simultaneously. One: if I’d been a D cup instead of a nicely proportioned C, there wouldn’t have been even a hairsbreadth of space between me and my confiscated stake. Two: the vamps—they were all female, I could see now—were only about thirty feet away from us. And three: Jack Rawls might be a total prick, but he had the sexiest eyes I’d ever seen.

Pure green, pure bedroom and fringed with thick, spiky lashes a covergirl would kill for. Not that any of that was relevant right at this moment.

“You don’t have to get it,” I told him. “You just have to decide whether you want to try fighting those bitches off all by yourself or whether you want my help. The fact that I was about to unlock your cuffs before I knew you didn’t need a key to get free should win me some brownie points with you, no?” Approaching vamps or not, I was unable to hold back my next words. “Just how did you release yourself?”

He stared at me a moment longer and then lowered the stake with a quick, smooth movement, as if he’d come to a decision he wasn’t thrilled about. “This fell out of your hair while you were giving me a free lap dance.” I recognized the small object he tossed aside as one of the bobby pins that had held my now ruined chignon. “And this fell out of the heel of my workboot,” he added without cracking a smile. One-handedly, he closed the gleaming steel of a switchblade and shoved it into his jeans’ pocket. “I used it to cut the ropes around my ankles. Catch.”

He tossed Megan’s loaner stake to me as carelessly as he’d thrown down the bobby pin. I grabbed at it but missed, although that turned out to be a good thing because as I bent to retrieve it I saw one of my Manolos under the MINI. I slipped it on, spied the other lying on its side a few feet away, and speed-hobbled toward it.

I can hear some of you now—God, girl, why waste time over shoes, even if they are Manolos? All I can tell you is that as soon as my heels were elevated to their accustomed four inches above the ground I felt like Wonder Woman with her bulletproof bracelets on. I was even able to face the approaching vamps with something like resigned bravado.

My surface calm vanished as Rawls took his place at my side, cradling the nail gun like an M-16. Before I could ask him what the merde he thought he was doing, he aimed it at the ground.

Thunk-whap!

“It’s not broken,” I said unnecessarily.

“These things are built tough,” he said without looking at me. “I’ll take out the brunette and the blonde, you concentrate on the redhead.”

I hadn’t disabled his weapon. He’d managed to pick the lock of the cuffs I’d secured him with and access a wicked-looking switchblade I hadn’t even known about. Under the circumstances, the three vamps whose unexpected fly-in had interrupted Rawls’s and my personal tussle might be the nearest thing I had to Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers.

If Flora, Fauna and Merry weather had recently had an extreme makeover and now looked like Linda, Claudia and Naomi, that is.

All three were clad in leather. The redhead in the middle wore a bondage-tight pink leather catsuit with pink Christian Louboutin stilettos. The brunette had the whole decadent-schoolgirl thing going on, complete with teensy black leather kilt and thigh-high black stockings. But it was the blonde’s outfit I immediately coveted. Her white leather dress was deliciously do-me, plunging outrageously in front to show off her creamy cleavage, and diamond-encrusted spaghetti straps glittered over the milky skin of her shoulders.

I was suddenly all too aware that my own look was less do-me than been-done, consisting as it did of blood-flecked undies, rat’s-nest hair and a recently nailed right hand. With the I-don’t-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-$10,000-a-day arrogance of supermodels, the three of them came to a dead stop ten feet in front of Rawls and me just as Rawls aimed his nail gun at the blonde and pulled the trigger.

She shimmered sideways. That’s what it looked like, anyway—as if her image faded and then took form again a few inches to the left of where she’d been. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vampire move so fast that she seemed to blur, and I knew it was a bad sign. That ability only came with practice or by being turned by a powerful vampyr, and it meant Claudia and her girlfriends weren’t going to be easy to dust.

“You missed, Chack.” Her purr was thickly Teutonic. “You are losing your touch, nein?”

“Either that or we caught him at a bad time,” the stunning redhead beside her said, flaring perfect nostrils. “Who’s your Frederick’s of Hollywood hottie, Jack?”

“Who bloody cares?” The English-accented brunette curled her top lip, her canines dazzlingly white against flawless mocha skin. “Let’s fucking rip them apart and get this over—”

A stuttering stream of nails flew from Rawls’s weapon, cross-stitching its deadly way across the three vamps at chest height—or at what would have been chest height if they’d still been standing in front of us. But they’d levitated upward before the first silver missile could reach them, and as I jerked my gaze up I got a momentary glimpse of their faces, no longer supermodel-perfect, but ugly with fury.

Although Rawls hadn’t seemed to recognize them, from their expressions they obviously knew and hated him. I felt justified in taking that as a second bad sign.

They swooped down at the exact moment that the stuttering of the nail gun coughed and died. I saw Rawls trying to clear the jammed weapon before he was hidden from my view by three leather-clad bodies, and I stood there for a split second, paralysed with horror. Then I turned to run.

The memory of my turning from Rawls and the vamps swarming him has robbed me of more nights than I care to admit. All I can say in my own defence is that I only took two steps before I forced myself to turn back.

I saw leather and flying hair and yanked hard on a long black strand that whipped me across the face, pulling the Naomi clone off balance, but before I could shove my stake at her, the swatch of hair I was clutching parted from its owner. She glanced over her shoulder at me, her gaze a fiery red.

“Extensions, love,” she hissed malevolently. “When we’re finished with the fucking bounty hunter, I’ll strangle you with one of them.”