I started the engine and rolled down the windows. It was a beautiful night. Fall was here. I let the playful wind blow across my face all the way back to the apartment in Mansion Flats.
I did the standard drive around the block for ten minutes, looking for a parking place, but finally got one within what I considered a reasonable non-grocery-carrying distance.
I pulled the collar of my jacket up and walked down the sidewalk, whistling a little to myself as I went. I made sure to glance up and down the street, checking into all the dark shadows between the parked cars and the darkened houses. There was nothing on the streets in my neighborhood that was going to jump me that I couldn’t take tonight. Anything that could kick my ass would have set off my internal alarm system by now. My fingertips would be tingling. The hair on the back of my neck would be standing up ever so slightly. I was getting nothing. Still, it didn’t do to not look concerned. If I wanted people to treat me like a regular girl, I had to act like a regular girl.
It was an interesting lesson to have learned after all these years. I’d learned it from an interesting source, too. Alexander Bledsoe, M.D., my coworker at the hospital, my cohort in my fight against supernatural crime, my favorite vampire and . . . my friend? I didn’t know quite what to call Alex. He wasn’t my lover. Things hadn’t gone that far between us, although only because of a bizarre show of forbearance on his part during a moment of weakness on mine.
It had pissed me off at the time. I’d been looking for comfort and solace and had felt like he’d been denying me for no good reason. When I realized he’d been doing it for my own good, it pissed me off even more. One of the countless issues between Alex and me is the age difference. He’ll never give me an exact count of how old he is, but he did mention having seen Benjamin Franklin once, which meant that he had to be at least three hundred and fifty years old.
I’m going to be twenty-seven this year. It’s kind of a big gap. Yet they say that age is just a number.
Alex’s forbearance, on the other hand, had made it so that I could look Ted in the eye and say nothing physical had ever happened between Alex and me and be 100 percent honest. And, honestly, probably still at least 25 percent curious. I’ve heard a lot of rumors about vampire sex. I’m not sure why physical congress with something cold-blooded is supposed to be so damn hot, but that’s what all the kids say.
I let myself into our apartment building. It’s an old Victorian that’s been split up into flats. Norah and I are on the third floor. Ben and his mother, Valerie, are on the first. The rosemary and sage that Valerie had planted last summer were still green and going strong in the planters on the porch. It still amazed me to think about what they’d survived. Then again, I was a little amazed that any of us had survived last summer and still a little in shock about the one person in my life who hadn’t.
I stamped my way up the stairs to the apartment, turned the key in the lock and opened the door as far as the chain would allow. “Norah,” I called through the crack. “It’s me. Let me in.”
“Coming.”
The chain was a new thing. Norah had installed it after our little adventure last summer. I’m not sure what she thought it was going to keep her safe from. I’m pretty sure even the pudgiest Seventh-day Adventist lady could kick the door right off that chain.
She let me in.
“You know that chain won’t keep him out if he wants to come in,” I said as I brushed past her.
She crossed her matchstick arms across her chest. She’d lost weight in the last few months and Norah had never been exactly hefty to start with. “I know.”
“It does, however, present an issue for me.” I got it that she was afraid. She should never have seen what she saw that night at the Bok Kai Temple in Old Sacramento. I’d tried to keep her from going, but she’d insisted. In fact, I’d spent years trying to protect Norah from knowing who I was, what I was and what kinds of things I dealt with.
Turns out I’m not so good at keeping secrets from her. I’m pretty sure she wished I had been better at it now.
“I’m sorry.” She marched back to the couch and flung herself into it.
I sighed. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic, but I’d been being sympathetic for months now. Apparently, I have a finite amount of sympathy and Norah was dangerously close to having used more than her share. Perhaps for the decade.
“As vampires go, he’s really not bad.” I sat down next to her. She was watching
So You Think You Can Dance
. I grabbed the remote and turned it off.
She held her hand out like a cop stopping traffic. “He drinks blood. Human blood.”
I scratched my nose. It was a difficult point to argue. That’s pretty much what vampires did. “Only what people come in and spray at him, for the most part.” And a bit from willing partners, met anonymously and left mainly intact. They might end up with the tiniest of puncture wounds on a neck or a wrist or some other highly vascular body part, but he’d never drink enough to harm them and never ever enough to turn them. Of that, I was reasonably certain. It was one of the ways that Alex was different than most of the other vampires I’d met and was one of the reasons I could stand to be around him.
She glared at me, grabbed the remote and turned the TV on again. “He’s more like them than like us.”
Unspoken between us was the fact that Norah was the one who had invited him into our apartment. As much as I like Alex, and there are times when I like him a confusing amount, inviting him into the apartment was not a mistake I was likely to make. Despite hours on the Internet and watching old
Buffy
DVDs, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to uninvite a vampire from a home. Therefore, Alex could pretty much come and go in our place as he pleased.
The irony was that Alex had not taken advantage of the situation. Not once. He had not fluttered through the windows, slid like smoke under the door or simply busted his way in. He hadn’t even shown up and knocked. The even bigger irony was that until Norah had seen the
kiang shi
in action, she’d thought Alex was pretty cool.
Which he is. What with the being undead thing, his temperature stays way below us 98.6-ers. But Nora hadn’t thought it literally. She’d thought it flirtatiously, but flirting with a vampire is flirting with danger to a very high degree. She had no idea how lucky she was.
Alex hadn’t done anything that night to put her off. In fact, he’d done pretty much nothing. It wasn’t his fault. Everything went down in a temple and it’s a little tricky for vampires to set foot on sacred ground. In fact, they can’t. Somehow, watching Alex do nothing and watching Ted Goodnight save the day had shaken my little New Age-y, tofu-eating, yoga-posing BFF right down to her rainbow-loving core.
“Couldn’t we just stock up on garlic and crosses and leave the chain off the door until I come home?” I pleaded.
She gave me a hard stare. “Once you’re home, I don’t need the chain on anymore.”
There was that. Nora had also seen me in full action for the first time, too, and now knew what I was capable of. There wasn’t much that could come through our door that I didn’t have a good chance of taking.
The doorknob to the front door started to turn. Norah’s hard stare turned into a look of horror and she damn near jumped into my lap. I pushed Norah behind me and stood. The doorknob jiggled again. Something was definitely trying to come in and it didn’t seem to feel a need to be too stealthy about it.
I rolled my shoulders, making sure they were loose and easy. I closed my eyes, reaching out with my senses to whatever was trying to get into the apartment. My skin didn’t prickle. My hair didn’t stand up like I was too close to a lightning strike. Nothing buzzed in my brain or my flesh.
On the other hand, I was pretty sure I smelled pizza.
“Ted?” I called.
“Hey,” he answered from the other side of the door. “Could you let me in? My hands are full and I can’t find my key.”
WE POLISHED OFF MOST THE PIZZA IN RIDICULOUSLY SHORT order. Well, Ted and I did. Norah picked at olives and peppers and took some tiny bites of cheese and crust.
“Thanks.” I leaned back on the futon couch and contemplated undoing the top button of my jeans. I decided against it. It seemed unladylike. I may not be well-versed in the ways of girlfriending, but I’m pretty sure popping open the top button of your 501s has to wait until after the first anniversary.
“I figured you’d be tired and hungry.” He leaned back and smiled at me.
He’d been right about that. I’d been both of those things and my night wasn’t over. I needed more information, the kind that most definitely would not be available on the Internet. I needed underworld gossip and I knew where to get it. The question was, how was I supposed to get it without alerting Ted?
If I could just maneuver him into deciding to take me where I wanted to go, I’d be golden. People call boxing the sweet science. I think it’s manipulation. It’s way harder to do.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked, picking desultorily at a mushroom and not looking him in the eye.
“Plan for what?”
Norah made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “It’s Saturday. It’s date night. Dinner was good, but now what are you going to do?”
Ted looked from one of us to the other. “We could go to a movie or something.”
I wrinkled my nose. “There’s nothing I really want to see.”
He drummed his fingers on his knee for a second while he thought. “How about a drink? We could go out for a drink.”
This was almost too easy. I felt a pang of guilt. “That might be fun. Where would you want to go?”
“How about McClannigan’s? We could stop by and say hi to Paul.” Ted gave me a sweet smile.
“Great idea!” I said. “I’ll go change.”
That had been some low-hanging fruit I’d just picked. Still, I mentally patted myself on the back for an excellent job of covert boyfriend manipulation as I headed down the hall to my room.
NORAH WOULDN’T GO WITH US. I COULDN’T REMEMBER THE last time she’d gone out.
“She doesn’t look right to me, Melina. Don’t get me wrong. I’m pleased as punch that she doesn’t hiss and spit every time she sees me anymore, but she’s not herself.” Ted looped his arm around my shoulder as we walked to his truck.
I tensed for a nanosecond. I was still adjusting to casual public displays of affection. My usual reflex to an arm across my shoulder was to grab it, whirl beneath it and give it a strong chop at the elbow. I have it on the best authority that that is not the route to getting more dates, although it is damned effective at shattering a bone. I forced myself to relax. This was nice, right? Cozy, even. “Tell me about it. I mean, what the hell is she doing home on a Saturday night? I think I can count on one hand the Saturday nights she’s stayed home since high school. Since the
kiang shi
, I’m not sure she’s been out on one and I don’t think she’s been down in Old Sacramento at all. She used to love it there.”
He unlocked the truck door and held it open for me, yet another alien experience that I was adjusting to. “She has some bad memories associated with that place. She might never want to go back there.” He kissed me as I slid into the truck. “Are you okay going back there?”
I nodded. He shut the door and went around to his side. I am well aware that I am not wired like other girls. It’s not like I had pleasant memories about last summer’s adventures in Old Sacramento. If anything, mine might be worse than Norah’s. She might not have ever seen anything like the
kiang shi
before, but I related to them more than a little bit.
What had they been really but unthinking tools in someone else’s cruel and vicious game? And what was I? What had happened to them? Well, I’d destroyed them. Maybe someone or something would come along and decide I was too dangerous to have around and destroy me. It wasn’t completely out of the question.
Most of the time, I didn’t know what I was delivering or to whom or why. I was a tool that got used and, I imagine when the time came, would be discarded when I was no longer useful.
It had pained me to destroy the
kiang shi
. Their making had not been their fault, nor had their demise. Still, they had had to be destroyed, as surely as a dog trained to kill had to be put down.
I had been trained, within an inch of my own life, to act and react without thinking. I had to fight my reflexes to get along in an everyday life and not snap my boyfriend’s arm when he pulled me close as we walked down a street on a chilly night. Was I any better than they were?
I sighed. I didn’t see any way out of it for the time being, so I smiled at Ted when he got in the truck and settled back for the short ride to Old Sacramento. It still felt odd and alien to lean back and let someone else drive the situation, both literally and figuratively. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was okay letting Ted take that role. I certainly didn’t let many other people. I bristled at people telling me what to do, even if it was something I’d wanted to do in the first place. I once rode all the way from San Jose to Sacramento with my knees practically around my ears because my mother told me to move the seat back.
I peeked over at him as he drove. I’d learned a lot about him in the last few months. I realize you’re supposed to do that before you jump into bed with the guy, but our courtship was anything but normal, what with the Chinese vampires and the triad from San Francisco after us. It had seemed prudent to gather our rosebuds, so to speak, and he had gathered mine in ways that no one else had ever even bothered to try.
He’d gone into the army right after high school and had ended up as an MP. He’d gone some places that he preferred not to talk about, although whatever had happened OCONUS, or Outside the Continental United States, as they say, occasionally leaked out in his dreams. I hadn’t brought it up, but then again, he hadn’t brought up my occasional thrashing in the arms of Morpheus either. We all have our baggage, it seems.