The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires (23 page)

“Ugh, why can’t you just be the cool parent figure who wants to be my friend?”

I shrugged apologetically as “Flight of the Bumblebee” rang from my phone. “I bring home vampires. How can you get cooler than that?”

Gigi turned on the blow-dryer, covering the crude response that I could barely make out in the bathroom mirror. I smiled sweetly and blew her a kiss as I answered my phone and took an order for three kinds of bath salts from three different boutiques for Ms. Wexler.

Then I trotted downstairs and ran smack into Cal as he walked out of the kitchen. I rammed headfirst into his chest, bouncing off him like a pinball and colliding with the countertop.

“Mother of fudge!” I yelped, cradling a hand over my aching hip. Cal grabbed my arms to stop my mad ricocheting about the kitchen. My hair flopped into my face like a dense, unmanageable veil.

“Are you all right?” he asked, pulling my hips parallel with his so he could check for bruising.

“Fine,” I ground out, pushing his hands away and shoving my hair out of my face. I turned away from him,
rummaging through the spice drawer for the package of Laffy Taffy that I kept there.

Cal frowned at my bizarre choice of candy storage. “Why do you have candy there—” I lifted an eyebrow. He stepped back. “Never mind.”

Ripping into the package, I stared at the artfully faded collar of his denim work shirt, the same shirt he’d worn the night of the “incident.” Its presence wasn’t helping with my frame of mind. Somehow seeing it made me really angry for reasons that my rational mind couldn’t seem to pin down.

“Is there anything I can do to make the last day of your stay more comfortable?” I asked, my tone flinty. His sable eyebrows rose as I glared up at him. “Leave your bags by the door? Pack up your leftover blood in a doggie bag? Launch you off the front porch with a catapult timed for sunset?”

“Can we go outside for this discussion?” he asked, looking pointedly upstairs, where Gigi was singing some obnoxious bubble-gum pop song with the word “boy” in every other phrase. I nodded and followed him to the backyard. I stopped near the back door, but he continued out into the garden, between flanking beds of fragrant white and purple irises, their delicate, waxy petals fluttering slightly in the breeze.

I let him walk ahead. He would not touch me. I was out of his reach. At least, that’s what I told myself. “I understand why you’re so upset. Reading what I wrote, it … When I wrote those things about you, I hadn’t met you,” he said softly. “You were just another nameless, faceless
human, so small and apparently harmless that I barely deemed it necessary to look into your background.”

I snorted. “Oh, yes, it’s so much better to make hasty, hurtful judgments about someone you don’t know.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t think about you beyond what you could do for me or to me. I’m used to thinking of humans as a means to an end. It’s not an excuse, it’s just the way it is. And I didn’t know you would turn out to be …”

His heavy silence started to grate on my nerves, so I threw up my hands. “What?”

He scrubbed a hand through his dark hair, leaving it wild and tousled. His eyes were eerily black in the dim light, no pupils. “There aren’t words to do you justice.”

“Find some.”

“You shame me, Iris.”

I frowned at him. “Find some different words.”

“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to thank you for going out and risking yourself to protect me, to take care of me? Despite the blustering to the contrary, you are generous and gentle. You have devoted your life to taking care of other people, even when it means giving up what you want. Even when it could mean putting yourself at risk. You shame me. And I haven’t felt shame in a millennium.

“The hardest part is that a year ago, a month ago—hell, last week—I wouldn’t have cared. If some little human had volunteered to help me, leaving me free to finish an assignment faster, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. If she put herself in danger, well, that would be unfortunate,
but I would make sure that she knew the risks involved and then let her go on her merry way. I’m objective, logical, focused. That’s how you manage to survive walking this earth for a few thousand years.” He paced over the grass, brushing past flowers, leaving trails of silvery dew on his jeans. “But you, you just creep in and—a few days in your basement and a blissful encounter against your living-room wall, and I become
emotionally involved
.” He spat the words as if they tasted foul. “You make me weak, Iris. You keep me from being able to do what’s best for me.”

“I’m having a hard time understanding why you’re blaming me for something that isn’t a problem.”

“This is a real problem!” he shouted. “I don’t make commitments. I don’t form attachments. I do not court locals. I do my job, collect my fee, and then move on to the next assignment, wherever it may be. That’s my life, and I love it. When this is done, I will be leaving. Nothing will change that. Not even this bizarre hold you seem to have on me.”

“Well, who asked you for a commitment?” I shot back. “Have I asked you for a promise ring? I didn’t have a commitment to the last man I was with. I ‘courted’ his brains out for years. If you feel any sense of obligation to me because we happened to see each other naked, don’t bother.” I turned on my heel to leave, only to swing back and jab my finger into his chest. “And by the way, I’m sure it’s awfully fulfilling, being able to pack your whole life into a cardboard box and move from one sterile condo to the next. So, once you’re done here, feel
free to traipse around the globe doing whatever strikes your fancy, living in the moment like some spontaneous world-traveling sex pirate!”

Now it was his turn to put his finger in my face, which was probably a safer option, since I was not, in fact, an angry vampire. “Don’t even try to compare me with the Pygmy. What the two of you were doing was not ‘courting.’ If it was, and he had a single firing brain cell in his head, he would be here right now, not me. You are not the kind of woman a man loves once and then walks away from.” He stopped suddenly, staring at me, his eyes narrowed. “Did you just call me a ‘sex pirate’?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” I sighed, rubbing my hands over my eyes. “I don’t even know what that meant.”

A good, honest laugh burst from him. He straightened, gripped my upper arms, and dragged me toward him. He held me, pressing my face against his chest, where I inhaled the comforting scent of leather and sandalwood.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, pulling back from him. I stepped away, warding him off with raised hands to prevent further contact. “I’m sorry if I interfere with your ability to be a detached, rational vampire. I’m not going to change. If that makes you uncomfortable, maybe you should leave.”

“You know I can’t,” he said.

“Oh, that’s right. You have no other options,” I grumbled.

“Indeed.” He cleared his throat, and all mirth was
leached from his voice. The bluish moonlight gave his face a more skeletal, otherworldly shape. I was reminded of Hades, god of the Underworld, lurking in the shadows … I needed to knock off the Greek mythology books before bedtime. “The situation is becoming more serious, Iris. I saw on the news today that there was a fire in a college dorm near Seattle. Four people are dead.”

“And what does that have to do with you?”

“I looked up the story online,” he said. “The school boasts a state-of-the-art sprinkler and alarm system. All of the other residents managed to evacuate, but somehow four people in a single room died of ‘smoke inhalation’ and were burned beyond recognition. This is the Council’s work. They’re covering up another attack. The question is: how were the vampires in this case poisoned if all of the tainted blood was recalled?”

I shuddered, forcing the images from my mind by cataloguing the various chores I needed to complete around the garden. Mulching, weeding, pruning, training. I toyed with the idea of putting a vegetable garden in the far corner of the yard, a particularly important project if Gigi persisted with her threat to become a vegetarian. I could see the rows of zucchini and squash. And, like most of my neighbors, I would never be happy with my tomato plants—

“Iris?” Cal nudged me. “Iris, focus, please. I need more time here. I need to stay off the Council’s radar, and the best way to do that is to stay still, to stay somewhere they’ve already looked for me. Will you let me stay? Until I decide it’s best for me to leave?”

I nodded slowly, rubbing my hands over my arms, warming them, despite the balmy spring evening. “How many more times do you think they’ll get away with covering up attacks before the human government starts to notice?”

“Not many. And if that happens … it could be worse than it was just after the Coming Out. The delicate peace that we’ve reached with the humans will be shattered. The human press will demonize us. There will be protests and convenient fires that somehow claim entire houses full of vampires. Iris, if that happens, I’m going to have to disappear. No good-bye. No exchange of e-mail addresses. It will be like you never met me,” he promised. “Most of the older vampires will do the same. Hell, some of them haven’t come out of hiding since the last time the humans turned on us. It would be better for you that way. None of your neighbors would know that you had a vampire living with you. You wouldn’t be snubbed by your community.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, glaring at him through hair that had flopped into my eyes. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense … with the exception of the part where I will be broke and jobless because all of my vampire clients went underground. Not to put any pressure on you, but are you making any progress?”

“I’m finding lots of interesting little pieces to the puzzle, but so far, none of them fits,” he admitted. “I’ve made lists of possible suspects, of vampires who would be bold enough to break into my home and attack someone connected to me. But the list keeps expanding, and I keep
going around in circles. The good news is that the files for Vee Balm have proven to be very useful. Vee Balm appears to be some sort of combination preventive vaccine and cure for the poisoning. The national Council has just completed safety testing and deemed it safe for use. Council offices all over the country will be ordering it in massive quantities, to protect the vampire population from this ‘previously unknown vulnerability.’ The whole endeavor has involved some significant financial approvals from the international office.”

“What’s in it?”

“I have been studying this report for two days, and I have to say … I really don’t know. It identifies multiple botanical compounds. I’ve been trying to track them by chemical trace, but that’s very time-consuming. And it’s only helped me narrow down a list of suspects, so to speak. If only I knew someone with a background in botanical studies.”

I snorted. “Why didn’t you just ask me for help?”

“You made it clear that your door was closed to me.”

“And you’ve never heard of knocking?”

“Vampires aren’t used to … knocking.” He tensed at my side, cocking his head as if listening for some noise in the distance.

I frowned at him. “Are we still talking about knocking, or does ‘knocking’ mean something else?” When he was unable to answer, I sighed. “Can we talk about this later? I have a teenager to scar psychologically.” I heard a car pull up in front of the house. I nudged him with my elbow. “Relax. It’s just Gigi’s date, Ben.”

Cal’s face went blank and then drew into a fierce scowl. “Date?”

—

Cal apparently forgot the part where he wasn’t supposed to be seen at our house. He followed me into the living room and stood at my heels while I let Ben in through the front door. Ben stood awkwardly in the foyer, its sunny yellow paint reflecting none of its intended warmth as Cal stood, arms crossed, staring him down.

“Hi, Miss Iris,” Ben said, his apple cheeks blushing red.

Ben was tall for his age, but he still only came up to Cal’s shoulder. Cal took full advantage of this, glaring at him with the hardened stare that had probably made ancient soldiers piss their leather skirts. Fortunately, Ben played a lot of violent video games, so he was immune to that sort of thing.

I rolled my eyes. Honestly, why didn’t Cal just break out a shotgun and clean it in the living room?

“Um, hi,” Ben said, squeaking slightly but stretching his hand out for a manly shake. “I’m Ben.”

Cal arched a brow, glancing down at the outstretched (sweaty) palm as if Ben was trying to hand him a pair of sweaty gym socks. I none-too-subtly nudged his ribs with my elbows. Cal cleared his throat and finally deigned to shake hands. “Cal.”

“Are you a friend of Miss Iris?” Ben asked carefully.

Cal smiled, his teeth white and sharp and not exactly friendly. “A very close friend of the family.”

“Oh, well, that’s nice,” Ben said, relaxing but shifting his body away slightly.

“Tell me, Ben, what are your plans for the evening?” Cal asked, smoothly leading Ben over to the living room and pushing him into the Report Card Chair. Cal stood over him like a mob enforcer in a Scorsese movie. Ben cleared his throat and wiped his hands on his jeans. I stood behind Cal and tried to make calming gestures.

“Um, Gigi made the plans,” he said. “I think we’re supposed to go to the movies and then get some ice cream at the Dairy Freeze.”

“And when you drive Gigi to and from your destination, you will, of course, obey all traffic laws, both written regulations and common sense,” Cal said. Ben nodded dutifully. “And you will drive directly to and from your destination, without even pausing along the way?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir … which answer means I won’t be stopping to take Gigi to Half-Moon Point?” he asked, flushing even redder.

“I didn’t mean to fluster you, Ben,” Cal said, clapping a hand over Ben’s shoulder. “But Gigi’s health and safety are very important to me. Should she come home in any condition other than the one in which she leaves the house, even if that condition is mildly disappointed, I can only say that I would feel very sorry for the young man who let her down.”

He bent low and murmured something into Ben’s ear. I couldn’t hear all of it, but I made out “back roads” and “shovel.” The redness drained out of Ben’s cheeks, leaving him a sick chalky color.