Vampaholic

Chapter 5

“Ever had a wet dream, sweetie?” From my uncomfortable sitting position on the asphalt by the car I looked at Rawls, ten feet away and hunkered over his disassembled nail gun. Giving no sign he’d heard my question, he picked up one of the metal components and began wiping it with an oily rag. I briefly debated with myself whether to make some pertinent comment about phallic symbols and weapons, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

This was turning out to be the longest night I’d ever spent with a man, and not in a good way. When I’d first found myself cuffed to the car, I’d indulged in an impressive but ultimately futile display of outrage. After an hour I’d subsided into cold silence. When I’d realized my silence wasn’t getting through to Rawls, I’d tried reasonable discourse, then shifted tactics and resorted to threats; later still, I’d descended to insults. For the past three hours I’d been mentally maxing out my credit cards at Bloomies, Saks and Neiman’s, but now my fantasy shopping spree had come to an end.

I tried again. “How about a screaming orgasm?” I let the tip of my tongue trace my top lip. “Mmmm…I love those. Then again, I also adore a long, slow screw up against a cold, hard wall, but as a male, you’re probably more partial to a blow job, n’est ce pas?”

Rawls set down the rag and began reassembling the nail gun. I sighed.

“A Long, Slow Screw being made with sloe gin, Galliano and Southern Comfort, of course; and a Blow Job being Kahlúa, Baileys and vodka in a shot glass topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry,” I elaborated. “If the cherry stem’s tied into a knot when you set down the empty glass, you get your next drink free. A talented girl can keep the cocktails flowing all night with that trick, as I know from personal experience.”

Jack stood and turned away from me, bringing the gun into firing position and holding down the trigger. I clapped my free hand against my left ear, but even after he quit firing my right ear was still ringing. My earlier fury flared up again.

“Why do you have to be such a junkyard dog, Rawls?” I snapped. “I could have left you to those bitches, but instead I turned back to help you. Next thing I know, you’re telling me we’re going to wait here until dawn to see if I flash fry when the sun comes up because you still think I could be one of them. Aside from nearly getting my throat ripped open by Claudia, what more proof did you want that I was on your side?” I didn’t expect an answer, but he surprised me.

“Seeing you stake one of them. And if you’d never met them, how do you know the blonde’s name?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Merde, sweetie, don’t tell me you didn’t realize who they’d made themselves into, thanks to some expert nipping and tucking.” At his scowl I sighed again, my anger dissipating into resignation. “Naturally you didn’t. You’re a hetero male, and from the Corn Belt to boot, I’m guessing. The only way you might have recognized who Claudia, Naomi and Linda were impersonating would be if they put supermodels on feed-store calendars. And if you never met them, how did they know your name?”

“A lot of vamps know the name of Jack Rawls,” he answered briefly, lowering himself to the ground and extending his jeans-clad legs in front of him. He leaned back against the MINI, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest.

I ignored his none-too-subtle hint. “Vamps know of you because you’re a bounty hunter, you mean?” I persisted. “Since the subject’s come up, exactly how does that work? Who pays the bounty when you hunt down a vamp?”

“The families of victims.” He didn’t open his eyes. “They pay me what they can. Sometimes that’s just gas money to make it to the next town.”

“How deliciously Sir Lancelot of you, sweetie,” I said, a trifle acerbically, “but I hope you got more than your mileage for this job. Forget the fact that I came close to being a vamp snack, since you’re convinced I’m going to end up as a big pile of dust anyway, but if that slash over your eye had been any longer or the one on your bicep any deeper, Claudia and her posse would have ended your career tonight.”

I wasn’t totally convinced of what I’d just said. Being attacked by three vengeful vampires would put any other man down for the count, but except for a hiss of indrawn breath as he’d splashed holy water over his wounds from a plastic soda bottle he’d retrieved from his car, Rawls’s demeanor had remained grimly stoic. His dark T-shirt was soaked even darker in places with his own blood, one knee of his jeans was ripped to show pavementtorn skin beneath, and there was a growing lump on the cheekbone under his left eye. True, I had a collection of assorted scrapes and bruises, too, the worst being my hand, although by now the pain had subsided into a dull throbbing. I hadn’t rated holy water, but Rawls had supplied me with peroxide and some gauze to bind it with. The thing was, I had the feeling this was how Jack Rawls usually looked—like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him in a back-alley fight but had left the other guy looking worse.

He really was a junkyard dog—snarling, tough and way too dangerous to pat. A cautious woman would have heeded the conventional wisdom of letting sleeping canines lie, I suppose, but I’ve always found caution and conventionality très overrated qualities.

More important, I needed to keep talking. Talking meant I didn’t have to think about the glimpse of Claudia’s crimson world she’d shared with me just before she turned to ash.

“If the divine Dr. M was their cosmetic surgeon, I can understand why he inspired such fanatical devotion in his patients. Honestly, darling, staking a man with that kind of talent is like staking Mozart. Couldn’t you have made an exception in his case and just put him under house arrest or—”

“Dr. M?” Rawls’s eyes snapped open. “Dr. Middleton?”

I’d finally caught his attention. It was a trifle ego-shattering that my exposed curves hadn’t been able to accomplish that feat, but at least I’d come up with something he found more interesting than sleep. “Linda simply called him the ‘divine Dr. M.’ Apparently, he was one of your past kills, which is why the three of them swore to hunt you down and take their revenge. As I say, I hope the good doctor was one bounty-hunting job that involved more than gas money—”

“Middleton wasn’t a job, he was a link in a chain I was following. That chain started in Nebraska with a girl named Mary Lou Gilly,” Rawls said, something smoldering behind the ice of his gaze. “The same chain led me straight here to you.”

I reacted badly to his statement, I admit. Oh, pooh—I’d been reacting badly all day, whether it had been to Terry’s dreary accusations or to Megan and Tash when they’d tried to pull their high-minded intervention in my social activities. But I was getting tired of being everyone’s favorite whipping girl, especially when I was more than a little stressed out with my own private worries.

Not that I expected to spontaneously combust when the first streaks of dawn showed in the sky. As Rawls had noted, lately I’d been finding it harder to function in the daytime, but that was only to be expected with my party-till-the-wee-hours schedule. I’d yet to have the urge to sink my teeth into a handy neck and I’d felt no revulsion when I’d seen him splashing holy water on his wounds.

So maybe Tashy a was right, and the Crosse triplet Zena had marked had gotten a Get-Out-Of-Vamphood-Free card when Megan had killed her. I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t, and neither could I believe there was a chance Tash had been marked instead of me. Even if I persuaded myself that my inability to stake vampires was due to paralyzing fear, I was still left with two inarguable points.

One was that I knew I was changing.

I’d first known it a few weeks ago, although I’d told myself I was imagining things. I’d also told myself that my decision to move out of the Crosse mansion and take an apartment on my own was totally unrelated to my fears. But during the past week, the feeling had become an almost daily occurrence—a strange sense of dislocation with my own psyche, my own thought patterns, that came and went instantly but left me feeling oddly invaded. I’d tried to chalk the feeling up to my higher-than-normal cocktail consumption, but when Claudia’s crimson-soaked world had called to me tonight and something in me had wanted to answer its call, my fears became bleak certainty. Zena’s twenty-one-year-old legacy was bearing its poisonous fruit. I was turning into what she’d been.

But I had absolutely no intention of thinking about that particular subject until I had a brimming glass of something numbingly alcoholic in my hand.

Thanks to Mr. Tall, Dark and Pissy, however, I wasn’t going to be within hailing distance of a jigger of vodka for a while. To add insult to injury, he was apparently under the impression that I was linked to the late Linda’s divine Dr. M, whose staking apparently had been a labor of love and not one of Rawls’s bounty-hunting commissions; and to some Cornhusker State female with a name that sounded like it had been plucked straight out of a country and western hurtin’ song.

I take back my mea culpa. Under the circumstances, I think I reacted with admirable control to Rawls’s hostile declaration.

“That chain you followed must have had a broken link, Jack,” I said in my most languid drawl. “All I know about Dr. M is what Linda told me before you dusted her, and as for a Mary Lou…Gilly, did you say?” I gave an exaggerated shudder. “Aside from the fact that I’ve never been within a hundred miles of Nebraska, she doesn’t sound like someone I’d have a lot in common with, sweetie. I mean, the name simply screams big hair, a softer-side-of-Sears outfit and shoes with court heels, no?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” Rawls got to his feet and looked down at me, his expression unreadable. “When I first knew her, she wore rolled-up jeans and Keds. When I ran into her years later, she’d graduated to crotch-high minis and see-through blouses. The last time I saw her she was naked and dead and covered in her own blood.”

His tone was so uninflected that for a second the impact of his words didn’t hit me. Then it did, and I drew in a quick breath. “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately. “For talking like such a shallow bitch, as well as for what happened to her. How did she die?”

“Badly.” His gaze on me was unwavering. “The vamp who killed her liked torturing the hookers he picked up before he finally finished them off, and as a former surgeon, his preferred method was a scalpel. He was a real Mozart with it.”

I closed my eyes. “No wonder you made it your business to track down Middleton and stake him. You…you say he targeted hookers. Is that how—”

“I wasn’t one of her johns, I was her half brother,” Rawls said tightly. “When I was sixteen and big enough to stand up to the bastard who was my stepfather, I beat the crap out of him and walked out. The next time I saw Lou she wasn’t a seven-year-old who hero-worshipped her big brother anymore. She was a fifteen-year-old who’d been selling herself on street corners for a year. She told me to go to hell and got into a Mercedes that pulled up to the curb. After searching all night for her and her john in one fleabag joint after another, the next morning I stood in a blood-spattered motel room and vowed to track down the bastard in the Mercedes who’d hacked her to pieces.” His teeth flashed briefly white in one of his nongrins. “When I made that vow, I didn’t know vampires existed, but since then I’ve become an expert on them. The most important thing I learned was that all trails lead back to an original infector.”

“I can’t imagine how you must have felt in that motel room,” I said, still dwelling on the first part of his account. “If anything ever happened to one of my sisters—” I belatedly took in what he’d just said. “Original infector? Are you talking about me?” My laugh didn’t sound as amused as I’d meant it to. “Sweetie, that’s utterly ridiculous! If anyone around here was vamp zero, it was a bitch named Zena, and you arrived in Maplesburg about six weeks too late to—”

“I know,” he cut in, “word travels. Your sister took care of her. I also know you aren’t vamp zero.”

“Such a relief, darling,” I said with a carelessness I didn’t quite feel. He was still cradling his damned nail gun, I noticed, and his finger was only inches from the trigger. “It must be a huge disappointment for you, finding out that Megan beat you to the punch. I’m sure if she’d known Zena was the vamp you’d been tracking for so long she would have let you do the honors,” I commiserated.

“Zena wasn’t the end of the chain, either,” Rawls said flatly.

The man wasn’t just a junkyard dog, he was a junkyard dog with a bone he wouldn’t let go of, I thought in exasperation. “Of course she was. She was a queen and although she was superbly wellpreserved for her age, she was definitely ancient. Whoever the vampyr was who turned her centuries ago, he’s lost in the mists of time.” I slanted my gaze up at him through my lashes. “Now that I’ve cleared up that little misunderstanding for you, would you mind terribly clearing up something for me?” I said carefully. “You said word travels. What exactly is the word on me in the vamp community?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “That you received the kiss of a vampyr when you were in the cradle. That as the daughter of a Daughter, when you come into your full strength you’ll make Zena’s powers look sick. Even if there hadn’t been a connection between you and the vamp I was hunting, I would have taken the time to search you out and put an end to you. The only reason you’re not dust already is because—”

He stopped abruptly and I narrowed my eyes at him in the same way he’d done to me. “Because I could have killed you when I had the chance. I could have left you to be ripped apart by Claudia and crew. I didn’t do either, and now you’re not so convinced that your information was correct.” But his information was correct, I thought. Or at least, the part about me being marked by Zena was. And if the vamp underground knew that much about me, who was to say they weren’t also right about the rest of it? As the daughter of a Daughter, when you come into your full strength you’ll make Zena’s powers look sick… I wouldn’t think about it until I had that drink I’d promised myself in my hand, I told myself numbly. And instead of a single, it was going to be a double. Make that a triple.

But right now I had Rawls on the ropes, and I had to convince him he’d been wrong about me. The last thing I needed was a vamp hunter hanging around Maplesburg while I continued to go increasingly fang girl.

“Vamps lie like we breathe, Jack. Whoever your informant was, he fed you a line of merde about me and you know it. If you thought otherwise you’d have used that nailer on me by now, so why don’t you give up this wait-until-dawn farce?”

“Because the waiting’s over,” he replied matter-of-factly, looking past me and over the top of his car. “The sun’s coming up over the horizon right now.”

I stared at him in disconcertion. Then I wrenched my gaze away and glanced around, seeing dark gray where a moment ago all had been black. For no good reason my heart seemed to squeeze in my chest, and I scrambled unsteadily to my feet, barely feeling the metal bite around my wrist as I pulled too far from the cuff holding me. As soon as I looked over the roof of Rawls’s vampmobile, I saw he was right.

I’d been sitting in the shadow of the car. Beyond it, the parking lot’s few lights had begun to look sickly and washed-out and beyond that, the dark horizon was rimmed with a pale line. Looking at it, I was suddenly filled with dread.

In a moment that pale line would brim over and spill forth. In a moment it would become the day’s first ray of sunlight, shooting from the edge of the world straight toward me. And judging from my response to Claudia before Jack had staked her, wasn’t there a chance I’d progressed far enough along the path to full vamphood tonight that I might just flash fry as soon as that first ray of sun hit me?

My initial reaction was to duck back down behind the car in panic. I forced myself not to give in to it and went with my second reaction, which was to toss back my hair, moisten my lips and stand up straight. If I was going to die in the next few seconds, I damn well wasn’t going to die cringing in the shadows like a vamp, I decided, I was going to die like the fabulous Kat Crosse.

I just hoped I could pull it off.

“Goodness, I feel all butterflies inside, Rawls.” My hands were shaking, the left one so badly that the gauze I’d wound around it had unravelled and the right one clattering its cuff in a catchy bongo beat against the car door. I gripped the vampmobile’s handle to muffle the noise. “I mean, sweetie, could it be more Romeo and Juliet? Here we are, just you and me and the dawn. Is this what they call sparking out in Nebras—”

“Just you and me and that maniac in the pickup with the smoked windows driving hell-for-leather into the parking lot,” Rawls said, bringing the nail gun into firing position and aiming it at me. “You almost had me fooled the past few minutes, but I might have guessed there was a reason why you weren’t too worried about sunrise. Too bad for you the vamp rescue squad left it so late, though.”

“Vamp rescue squad?” With an effort I shifted my gaze from the sight of the glowing line on the horizon and saw twin headlights cutting through the rapidly dissipating predawn gloom. The red pickup jounced over a bump in the parking lot as it sped toward us and a dark shape flew from the bed of the truck. The shape rolled once when it hit the ground, but instead of continuing to roll it seemed to gather itself and then race alongside the pickup that had just ejected it. As I watched I saw the shape begin to outstrip the vehicle.