Lover's Bite. Maggie Shayne
and the mighty Pacific. The scene was so breathtaking that she paused for just a moment to take it in.
Then practicality intervened, and she glanced upward. Bamboo blinds, and window shades beneath them. Thank God, she thought. Those windows would let in way too much sunlight by day.
Okay. She sank onto the soft sofa—into it, to be more accurate—and laid the sheets out on the glass-topped bamboo coffee table. And then she began to read.
Jack parked the Carrera in front of a meter on a suburban street about a mile from where he planned to spend the night. He locked up the car, hoping no one would bother it, and put the maximum amount of change into the meter. It would get him through most of the day. And if he got a ticket toward sundown, so be it. It wasn’t like he would ever pay the thing.
He took his bedroll from the passenger seat and, slinging it over his shoulder, began the walk to his temporary abode. It wasn’t much, a family crypt in a cemetery beyond the suburbs, surrounded by rolling fields and with no one around to observe anything amiss. The crypt belonged to the family Carlisle, and it was roomy and spacious, and any corpses inside had long since turned to dust. They didn’t keep it locked. Hell, who did these days?
There was utterly no reason why a vampire should sleep in a crypt. He liked the poetic cliché of it, though. It spoke to his whimsical nature. Besides, no one would bother him there—and if they did, he could scare the bejesus out of them without much effort, which would be good for a laugh, if nothing else. The crypt was completely impervious to sunlight, the main necessity.
Besides, it was the closest safe place to where Topaz would be sleeping today. And he didn’t want to get far from her. Nor did he want to sit around analyzing just why that was, thank you very much. Suffice it to say, he was pretty sure she was about to tread on some dangerous ground, maybe ruffle a few feathers, stir up some long dormant evil and put herself at risk. That should be reason enough to want to stay close.
It wasn’t. But it should be.
Of course, he had his other reason. She would be checking in with Reaper periodically, which he couldn’t very well do himself. Not without raising suspicion, at least. He was too new to the white-hats, not really one of them yet. Any concern he showed would be suspect.
She could do it, though. And he could keep tabs on the big guy through her. That, too, should be reason enough to stay close to her.
And it, too, wasn’t.
He sighed, set his backpack on the big stone bier and closed the heavy slab of rock that passed for a door, plunging himself into utter darkness. That didn’t bother him. He could see just fine in the dark. Still, a little touch here and there to make the place homey wouldn’t hurt.
Jack liked his creature comforts. And he’d done some shopping along the way to be sure he would have all he needed.
He hadn’t spent a nickel of Topaz’s money, though. He told himself he needed it, in case he had to return it to her. He paid no attention to the unfamiliar guilt that made him feel slightly ill whenever he thought of spending it.
He unzipped the backpack and took out a bat-tery-powered lamp made to look like a gas-pow-ered one. It was clever. He’d taken a liking to it right away. It provided the rustic ambiance of camping without the fuss. Then he took out his portable DVD player and flipped it open. He’d rigged it with a timer, and the lamp had its own. Both would shut off within a few minutes of sunrise.
No point wasting the juice while he was dead to the world.
He undid his bedroll, yanked on the cord and watched his air mattress inflate itself atop the bier. Quickly he made his bed with blankets and a pillow. All the comforts of home. Everything but a teddy bear.
He pulled out a pint of O-negative, sealed in a plastic bag. He would have preferred it warm, but this would do as a bedtime snack.
Finally he lay down in his bed and turned on a movie. Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Leslie Nielsen really bore no resemblance to Vlad. Jack had met the infamous vampire once, face-to-face. Moody bastard, and none too friendly. And while Nielsen looked nothing like him, neither did most of the actors who’d portrayed Dracula over the years. Bottom line? Nielsen made him laugh, so Jack was perfectly willing to overlook such minor issues.
3
Topaz pored over the dossiers on the three men who the police had considered “persons of interest” in her mother’s murder. None of them had ever been charged, so she knew going in that she wouldn’t find much evidence. But she also thought she would just know. If she saw the face, or read the details of the life of the man who had murdered her mother, she was sure she would know who he was.
And yet, the photos she saw—the politician, the actor and the businessman who’d raised her—said nothing to her. None of them whispered “guilty.”
She couldn’t even get an inkling for which one of them might have fathered her.
She ran out of time long before she’d had her fill of reading up on the men and their connections to her mother. Dawn was coming, and she was forced to turn in, to save the rest of her reading for nightfall.
She gathered up the pages into a folder and carried them with her up the stairs, where she checked out each bedroom before choosing one that faced west to the ocean and the sunset. It was perfectly dark in there, with the sun getting ready to rise on the opposite side of the house. There were perfect vertical blinds in the windows, and thick drapes as well. She drew them all nice and tight. Then, relishing her vampiric strength, she shoved the bed easily into a corner of the room where there was no chance of any light that might filter through, touching her.
She tucked the files underneath her pillow, then made a final round downstairs to be sure the entire villa was locked up tight, before finally curling up beneath the covers. She felt the sun rise. As it lifted, her eyelids sank.
Dead to the world, she thought. It’s more than just an expression.
Briar sat on the carpeted floor of the vacant, unfinished home in Virginia. She and Reaper had headed north from Savannah, driving all night, until they came to this place. She didn’t know who owned it. She didn’t know if Reaper knew them and had permission to be there, or whether it had just seemed a likely place to rest for the day. She didn’t know if they would be discovered and murdered while they slept, and she didn’t particularly care.
“You’ve barely said a word all night,” Reaper said as he tossed her a bag of blood, taken from a cooler in the car he’d rented. She didn’t know where he’d gotten the blood or how long he’d had it or how much remained. She didn’t care about those things, either.
“I have nothing to say.”
“I could think of a pile of things.” He chugged his own liquid meal, tossed the plastic bag and sank down onto the floor beside her. “You could thank me for saving you from Gregor. You could tell me I was right about him all along. You could explain how he managed to break your spirit in such a short period of time.”
“I don’t need to thank you for saving me, since I would have saved myself, sooner or later. I never had any doubt as to what Gregor was. I only thought he would show more loyalty to me, being that I’m just like him.”
“You’re nothing like him.”
“You don’t know me.”
He drew a breath, seeming to consider those words, then finally nodded, conceding the point.
“And as for the condition of my spirit—assuming vampires even have such a thing—that’s my business.”
“I suppose that’s true. I just thought it would take more than a day or two of torture to turn you into…this.” He waved a hand her way.
“Into what?”
He shrugged. “A docile, quiet, brooding woman. A victim. Yes, that’s it—you’re acting like a victim.”
“I