Biting Oz: Biting Love, Book 5 (36 page)

So we didn’t talk about it. Just as well. I still had my duty and rainbow dreams, and Glynn still had to leave at the end of the show.

Nothing had changed, just because everything had.

I loved him. I’d thought that before, but this was the kind of love that would throw away duty, forget dreams, simply to stay with him a few moments longer.

Feelings that big should move mountains. It’s absolutely incredible to me that they don’t even ruffle the real world unless action is taken.

Since most emotions don’t last and most actions do, it pays to be very careful to know for sure what’s real. The saying “think before you act” is just good business sense, and I was nothing if not all business. Well, except for the music part.

But my emotions were so overwhelming, thinking was almost impossible. Right now my saying was more, “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout”. Cap that with city businesses plunging toward financial ruin and Elias’s Armageddon marching one day closer, and maybe panic was a sensible reaction.

I needed simple again. I needed to reduce my life to problems I could solve.

Okay, good. Glynn first. Leaving at the end of the show, traveling to the home he loved. I’d already decided to let him go. Loving him even more didn’t change that.

Vampires? I might be able to make a difference there, as part of Nixie and Elena’s group. I tucked that away for later.

CIC Mutual? Too big for me to knock down.

Camille and her club?

There, as another business owner, I could prove useful. I’d see things the others might miss: ways to get her out of Meiers Corners, means to pull her well-manicured claws out of our citizenry.

Once I could think again, that was.

Thursday morning I discovered the city’s financial crisis was closer than anyone thought.

Before I even unlocked for the day, Rocky Hrbek was knocking frantically on the door. When I opened up, she ran in, breathing fast, locked the door behind her and drew me away from it as if we could be heard. In a low voice, she said, “They did it. I never thought they would. It’s
personal
, Junior. Almost evil.”

“Calm down. Another stolen garden gnome?”

She gaped at me from behind her huge glasses. “Are you serious? No, this is important. A friend at work called me. They posted yesterday. You’ll get yours today.”

“They’re mailing out stolen garden gnomes?”

“No!” Rocky rarely lost her temper, but that did it. “CIC is demanding full premium payment.”

“Your supervisor is demanding payment?”

“Would you listen?” She glared at me like I was the slowest tricycle on the planet. “The directive came from the president of the company himself. All premiums are due immediately.”

That finally got through. “W…what? But they can’t.”

“They think they can, and they have some nasty, ruthless lawyers who agree.” She lowered her voice even more. “I know Julian’s good, but they’ve got a whole cadre of sharks ready to stab us with lawsuits. Even if we’re in the right, we’d bleed out before we win. And dead is dead.”

An imperious knock at the door spun her. “Crap, it’s Mrs. Blau. You’d better let her in. She’s gotten crabby lately.”

“Everyone’s gotten crabby lately,” I muttered. Camille’s doing. I went to the door, Rocky following.

“Maybe it’s catching,” she said as I unlocked the door. “That would explain why Mr. Nosferatu went all Snidely Whiplash on us.”

“Nosferatu?” Unless there was more than one, that was the vampire who stood against the Iowa Alliance. “How do you know him?”

“He’s president of CIC.”

If she’d whapped me in the face with a bassoon, I couldn’t have been more stunned. Yet it made obvious sense. Nosferatu, the vampire attacking Meiers Corners, was behind CIC, the insurance company attacking Meiers Corners. Nosferatu was the high mucky-muck at CIC Camille was involved with. Why hadn’t I put it together before this?

I had a lot of time to think about it that day. We had customers, but they perused the sausage in stony silence. When they spoke, it was to criticize. Our receipts were way down, and I knew we weren’t the only ones.

Worse, we got our dunning notice in that morning’s mail. The letter carrier looked almost sick delivering it. It wasn’t the first he’d seen either.

The envelope rattled in my shaking hand. This was intolerable. I had to do something. We needed money, but even business guru Kai Elias’s cash was tied up helping the truly penniless. And besides, no self-respecting MC businessperson would accept a handout.

So what we really needed were tourists.
 

But Camille had grabbed those tourists somehow. She’d hooked them as surely as she’d grabbed our own people. And I had no idea how.

I opened the envelope. It was as Rocky said, twelve thousand dollars due by the end of the month. We could find other insurance, but it’d be hard to bind a new policy in time to stay open. Yet to pay this, we’d have to sacrifice the cooler fund, our savings and my instruments.

I felt cornered and out of options. Business Truth #7 said I should just wait, that the solution would become obvious. An obvious solution to citywide meltdown, and two ruthless vampires?

I didn’t have a lot of hope.
 

The theater that night was nearly empty. A dozen people sat in the audience, mostly parents.

Takashi’s beats were listless. Director Dumbass’s sparkling swish was gone. Even Mishela’s voice wavered as she wished upon that star.

What’s more shattered than heartbroken?

We didn’t bother playing the bows. I trudged back to the prop room, sluggishly disassembled and swabbed instruments.

Glynn appeared in the doorway. “Walk you home?”

“I’m not good company.”

“I thought perhaps…” He stared at his feet. “Maybe you could come to my room. I have a real bed.” He raised his eyes. Deepest blue, they were filled with such longing that it stole my breath.

“Bed?” The bower had been awesome, but the thought of Glynn’s huge mattress…a door to muffle anything louder than gasps and moans… My hormones revved directly into desperation. I stuffed instruments in cases, grabbed his arm and hustled us out the door.

Our hands found each other’s skin on the way, sliding under clothes and exploring so fast we were practically undressed by the time we hit Glynn’s door. He turned the knob with a hand borrowed from my breast, immediately diving back under while he kicked open the door. He scooped me off my feet and twirled me across the threshold—and ground to a stop.

His nostrils were flared, his fangs full length and his eyes burned bright red and not in the good lusty way. I followed his stare to see—

The small table was bare.

Glynn rushed to it and frantically patted it like a blind man, like maybe his tchotchkes were still there, just invisible. He hadn’t put me down, had simply baled me into one arm like a sack of groceries. I wasn’t insulted at being treated like cat litter; I was amazed. He’d held on to me.

In the midst of a nightmare, he’d only clutched me tighter.

“Oh,
Duw
, where are they?” He whispered it like a prayer, as though he were actually asking God. He dropped to his knees, twitched aside the heavy brocade tablecloth, but I knew he wouldn’t find his tchotchkes there. If they were anywhere in the room, his preternatural nose would have at least detected the pipe, the unglazed ceramic holding its cavendish essence.

He rose and circled the room in search anyway. Round and round, checking the same places two or three times. His directionless search screamed his loss.

“Glynn.” I caressed his hair. “Glynn, stop. Sit down. We need to think.”

It took five minutes of petting and gentle words before he finally collapsed on the foot of the bed.

“Why?” His voice broke. My heart broke with it. “Why would someone do this? Who would do it?”

He was incredibly vulnerable right now. Of course, his very vulnerability made him deadly dangerous. Not to me, but I didn’t want to touch off that powder and have it explode on someone else. So I spoke slowly, carefully. “Who knew what those items meant?”

“Nobody. I never talk about them.” He took a deep breath, making a visible attempt to calm himself. “You know. Elias knows, I suppose. Nobody else.”

“Not what they symbolized. Who knows how important they are to you?”

His eyes focused, for the first time since seeing the empty table, on me. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Many people. Emersons, Mishela, some of the Alliance vampires. And—” His eyes abruptly unfocused, like he’d been shot. “Oh, bollocks. I can’t believe…it can’t be.”

“Can’t be what?” Or rather,
who
?

The pain contorting his face confirmed a “who”, someone close. Betrayal by a friend.

But there was anger in his face too. A friend, but not a heart’s friend. I was incredibly relieved—until he said her name.

“Camille.”

I shuddered.

He shook his head. “How could it be her? Wouldn’t I smell her?”

Camille knew about the tchotchkes, knew how important they were to Glynn. She had, at one time, been close enough for him to feel hurt and betrayed now. Close enough that he remembered her scent.

Close, to guys, usually meant sex.

Damn.

Yes, Glynn wasn’t mine. And yes, I knew he was eight hundred years on this earth and had to have had sex before me.

But it hurt. Not because Glynn had belonged to someone else first. But because he might
still belong to her
. The male I loved so much that he’d become a part of me, might still be part of someone else. Wouldn’t he have forgotten her scent otherwise?

I wanted Glynn to belong to
me
.

Well, mostly I wanted him to be happy. And maybe he wouldn’t get that belonging to me—but he sure wasn’t going to get it with
her
.

Damn it, I just wanted him to be happy.

Oh God. I loved him. The real deal—not just first-blush euphoria or giddy sex, but the nitty-gritty, daily grind, your-happiness-matters love. I’d run away from it, then deluded myself that it was a business decision. I’d lost both those battles. Having never felt quite this way about anyone, I thought maybe I’d lost the war as well.

And there went my rainbow dreams.

I was singularly less impressed with losing them than I’d expected. Maybe shock. Maybe because Glynn was still here, at least for a few more days. Or the sense of inevitability. Mom had fallen, so would I. How many children actually ended up completely different from their parents? How many molecules escaped the liquid as gas?
All of them
whispered my brain, but I hadn’t done that well in chemistry and couldn’t trust the answer I wanted in the face of the answer I had.

“I’d smell her,” Glynn said again, sounding lost.

I put my feelings to one side. I could deal with them later. Glynn was suffering now.

I stroked his hair. “You just need to do a more thorough search.”

His eyes focused on me like I’d thrown him a lifeline.

“Start in this room. Go over every inch again, using all your senses. Search the entire basement, both townhouses, and the yard.”

“Why?” He made a half-gesture at the table. His eyes dulled. “They’re gone.”

“You’ll find traces. Clues to what happened.” I took his beloved face in both hands. “Get Julian to help you, and Nikos and Rebecca. Even if you’re distracted, they’re good. They’re sure to find something.” I put more certainty in my voice than I felt. If the thief were human, I’d have had no doubt. But I had no idea what a vampire could hide.

He nodded and I could practically see his intellect come online. “I’ll ask Mishela too. Both her acting and Elias have trained her to observe.”

“Great.” Now came the tricky part.

Glynn and I might have no future, but my love demanded I do at least this much for him. I needed to at least try to get Glynn’s pieces of home back. But I knew what would happen if I told him I was going to visit Fangs To You. He’d try to stop me. I couldn’t let that happen.

Safer for me if I asked him along. But he still remembered Camille’s scent, was still lost and hurt at just the thought that she might be the thief. He was so vulnerable my heart broke.

Besides, I didn’t think I’d be in any real danger. Hey, I wasn’t intending to announce myself. A little luck and she’d never know I was there.

I released his face. “Look, since you’re using vampire senses, I’ll just slow you down. I’ll head home.” He frowned again, so I added, “If you come up with anything, give me a call.”

“Well…you must be tired. You work too hard, Junior.” He managed a small smile. “Thank you. You’re good for me.”

I covered my embarrassment by pressing a kiss to his gorgeous lips.

Enough of Glynn’s protector self was left to insist on driving me home. I managed to not give myself away on the drive home, but his sad face made it hard. With a quick kiss I jumped out and ran inside. I ran to the front store window and watched the limo purr away. Then I wrote a note explaining where I’d gone and slipped it onto my dad’s desk. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but I was going into the lair of a she-bitch vampire.