Wanton With a Vampire (23 page)

“Can I ask you a question about the girl you
talked to here a few days ago?” Trish asked.

“The dead one?” Willow asked.

Trish wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to the
way Willow casually said things like that. It made sense, since
Willow had been seeing things like this her entire life, but Trish
still wasn’t used to the weird stuff. “Yeah, that one.”

Willow shrugged. “As long as we can go into
the kitchen and play with the espresso machine.”

“Did you just come over here so you could
play with the espresso machine?” Trish asked suspiciously.

“No, but it makes me want to visit you more
while you’re staying here,” Willow said with a wink, which looked
crazy behind her huge glasses. “Do you think anyone would notice if
I stole it?”

They’d just walked into the kitchen, so Trish
eyed the enormous contraption. “I’m not sure you can move it, so I
don’t see how you’d steal it.”

“I can move it if you help me,” Willow said,
which made Trish laugh.

“You want me to help you steal the coffee
maker? Why not just ask Tempest to move it out of here with her
mind?” Trish had seen Tempest move stuff with a thought but still
found it hard to believe.

“I already asked her,” Willow admitted as she
selected her coffee.

“I take it she refused to help with your
larcenous endeavors?” Trish asked.

Willow looked over her shoulder. “Yes! Can
you believe she won’t even help her own cousin get some good
coffee?”

“In her defense, you are asking her to steal
from her other family members,” Trish said reasonably.

“They barely use it,” Willow said with a
dismissive wave of her hand. “Isaiah said he’s the only one using
it most of the time, and he doesn’t even live here. I guess I could
always buy my own,” she said. “This one is just so pretty, and I
can’t find one like it anywhere.”

“Speaking of Isaiah, that’s why I wanted to
talk to you about the girl you talked to,” Trish said in an attempt
to get the conversation back on track.

“What about her?”

Isaiah’s softly spoken question nearly made
Trish jump out of her skin. With a hand over her heart, she spun to
face him. “Jeez, Isaiah! Didn’t we just talk about you sneaking up
on people?”

“Sorry,” he said, but this time he looked
less embarrassed and more amused. “I was walking by and overheard
your conversation.”

“Which part?” Willow asked, looking a little
guilty.

Isaiah’s lips twitched. “I’ll load the
espresso machine into your car before you leave,” he assured
her.

Surprisingly, Willow looked disappointed.

“What’s wrong now?” Trish asked. “I thought
you wanted the coffee maker.”

“I do,” Willow said. “The idea of stealing it
just sounded kind of fun.”

“I won’t tell anyone else you have it,”
Isaiah assured her. “Justin may not use it, but he’ll notice it’s
missing as soon as he walks in here, and it’ll drive him
crazy.”

Willow smiled. “Thank you!”

“It’s the least I can do,” Isaiah said before
turning his attention to Trish. “So, what do you want to know about
the girl?”

“Did you go visit her father?” Trish asked,
figuring there was no reason to beat around the bush.

“Yes,” Isaiah said without hesitation.
“Before you ask, I kept my promise and didn’t cause him any
physical harm. I never even touched the man.”

“Are you the reason he confessed to killing
her mother?” Trish asked.

“Yes,” Isaiah said. “I’m not crazy about
using mind control, because I hate taking away people’s free will,
but in this case, I made an exception.”

“What if he takes back his confession?” Trish
asked.

“Won’t matter,” Isaiah said. “The murder
weapon was still in the attic of his mother’s home, which he
inherited while he was in prison. The police have the weapon now,
and I’m sure they’ll get all the evidence they need to send him
back to prison for a very long time.”

Willow surprised them all by walking over and
hugging Isaiah. “You aren’t as bad as the other vampires,” she
said.

Isaiah chuckled. “That’s high praise coming
from you.”

Willow grinned at him. “Fine, I kind of like
you. Now, help me steal this espresso machine.”

Trish got to play lookout while Isaiah
carried the bulky machine out to Willow’s car. She couldn’t help
but wonder if all Willow’s visits would be this bizarre.

A call at one in the morning was never a good
thing. There’d been a time when it might have been a good thing,
but it had been about five years since that had happened, and Drew
suspected this caller wasn’t going to tell him anything he wanted
to hear. The number came up as
unknown
.

“Hello,” he answered groggily. He hadn’t been
sleeping, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk and hoped the caller
got the hint.

“Hello, Andrew,” his mom said in a
deceptively sweet voice. While she might sound sweet, he knew she
was angry because that’s the only time she ever called him
Andrew.

“Alek is still looking for you,” was all he
said. A normal person might have asked how she was or been worried
that Alek planned to kill her. That’s what a normal person would
do, but he wasn’t normal. She wasn’t normal. Nothing in his
twenty-two years of life was normal.

“Can you meet me now?” she asked calmly.

Drew was tempted to hang up and pretend he’d
never heard from her. That would make things so much easier for
him, but he knew that tone in her voice all too well, and people
would suffer more if he didn’t show up. She’d take her anger at him
out on others. There were many days, like today, when he hated
himself for still caring if others got hurt.

His mother loved him in her own twisted way.
She’d never laid a finger on him. In fact, to the observer, she’d
been a doting mother. What they didn’t see is that her anger at him
could easily be taken out on others. She liked making others
suffer, and he’d given her many excuses to do that. Some days, he
cared less about the pain of others. Just his luck, today was a day
he gave a fuck about someone other than himself.

“Andrew? Are you still there?” His mother
sounded impatient, and he knew he had to give her an answer
soon.

It was the muffled sobs of a child in the
background that caught his attention.

“Please don’t make me hurt her,” the child
pleaded.

“Where are you?” Drew asked.

“That’s better,” his mother said happily.
“I’ll send the address to your phone now.”

Not waiting for a reply, she hung up on him.
A moment later, his phone buzzed.

Drew dressed and slipped out of the house
without his grandmother hearing him.

The drive was short but stressful as he
wondered when his mother had started taking children. Then he had
to wonder why he was a little jealous of a child who would probably
be killed before he arrived. At least the kid wouldn’t have to live
it over and over again.

The address was in an industrial area with
several warehouses, so there was still a fair amount of activity.
Drew parked, noticing that this particular warehouse was far enough
from the others so that no employees loading or unloading trucks
would see what was going on.

Boxes and fully-loaded pallets were all
around the lower level. Either the warehouse was still in use, or
someone went to great lengths to make it look that way. His mother
had told him to go up the stairs and knock on the door at the far
end of the hallway.

When his mother opened the door, a beautiful
smile lit her face. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and petite
build, she looked harmless, but looks were usually deceiving. The
blood around the room and the dead woman strapped to the table were
proof of that.

“You can’t keep doing this,” he said in a
tired voice. “She’s not even your type.” It was true; his mother
rarely killed women, and even then, it was only because they got in
her way.

His mom hugged him, which was awkward because
he refused to bend down to her. “Why are you so moody tonight?” she
asked with a frown. “I brought you a surprise. Actually, I had two
for you, but the woman was getting really annoying, and I just
couldn’t handle her screams anymore. I’d wanted Hunter to make his
first kill with you by his side.”

“Hunter?” he asked. That’s when he saw
movement at the edge of the room. The young boy was cowering in the
corner. His dark brown hair was messy, and his eyes were closed
tightly as he wept softly. “Was that the boy’s mother?”

His mother laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.
This woman was just a stupid human I hired to help take care of the
boy. Don’t you recognize Hunter?”

After studying the boy for a moment, Drew
shook his head. “Why would I?” But there was something very
familiar about the kid.

“He’s your son,” she said with a bubbly
smile.

Drew’s entire world came to an abrupt halt,
and he suddenly felt like he was going to be violently sick.
“That’s not even possible. I prefer watching.” That wasn’t always
true, and the time when it wasn’t had been about five years
ago.

“How old is he?” Drew asked.

“A little over four,” his mother said. “The
whore dropped him off at the house and made me promise to tell you
how sorry she was. She claimed her family would destroy him.”

“No,” Drew said.

“Yes,” his mother assured him. “I kept him
with nannies until I had to leave. Your father would have sent him
to live with someone else, and I couldn’t allow that to happen.
When I fled, I took him with me. As you can see, his most recent
nanny became a problem,” she said, gesturing to the dead woman with
a look that said how little the woman’s life had mattered to her.
Turning to Drew, her face lit up and her eyes took on a dreamy
quality. “Now, we can all be together. Can you imagine how
wonderful it will be? I’ll teach him all the things I taught
you.”

The child looked up at him with the same icy
blue eyes all the Draksel males had. They stared at each other for
a long moment before Drew broke eye contact and returned his
attention to his mother.

“We’ll need to dispose of the body,” Drew
said in a cold voice. He’d learned long ago how to lock his
emotions away when he had to. “Come out to the car with me to get
the supplies.”

His mother gave him a happy smile and patted
his cheek. “I knew I could count on my sweet boy!”

Drew motioned for her to go out the door
first, like the gentleman he’d never be. He waited until they were
far enough from the room so the boy wouldn’t see before pulling the
knife from his jacket pocket. Reaching out, he grabbed his mother’s
hair and pulled her head back. Giving her no time to react, he slit
her throat. Shock registered briefly on her face before the life
faded from her eyes. Maybe he was just seeing what he wanted, but
for a moment, he almost believed he saw gratitude. Eventually, his
uncle would have killed her, and he’d like to believe she would be
happier knowing her death had come at his hands.

With an efficiency he’d learned from his
mother, he loaded the bodies into the trunk and gathered up the
frightened boy.

“I don’t have one of those things kids ride
in, so you’ll have use a seatbelt,” he told the boy.

The way the child clung to him melted
something in Drew’s heart. Before he dealt with the bodies, he had
to make sure Hunter was safe.

Alek groaned when his phone rang at nearly
three in the morning. “What the fuck?” he asked, staring at the
phone as if that might make the noise stop. He was further annoyed
to see the caller was Drew, and he decided to ignore the call.
After it went to voicemail, the phone started ringing again. Drew
certainly was a determined little psycho.

“What do you want?” he snapped.

“I’m about to walk up to the front door of
Nathaniel’s house,” Drew said quietly. “Come let me in. I don’t
have my keys.”

“Come back in the morning,” Alek said.

“This is important,” Drew pleaded, and Alek
heard the urgency in his nephew’s voice.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” he said.

Trish mumbled something incoherent.

“I’ll be right back,” he said before kissing
her on the forehead and slipping on boxers and a pair of jeans.

By the time he got to the bottom of the
stairs, he was fully prepared to kick Drew’s ass. With a scowl, he
opened the front door to let Drew in.

“I need help,” Drew said.

“Talk to me about it later in the morning,”
Alek grumbled. “If there’s no body, I don’t care enough to deal
with it tonight.”

“Got two in the trunk,” Drew said
quietly.

Drew looked dazed. Honestly, Alek almost felt
sorry for him. He had a coat clutched to his chest, and it looked
like he had something under it.

“Where are the bodies?” Alek demanded.

“In the trunk, like I said,” Drew snapped.
“Keep it down. I don’t want you to upset the kid. He’s been through
enough tonight.”

“Please tell me you didn’t kill his parents,”
Alek said.

“I’m only responsible for one of the bodies,”
Drew said. “Neither of them were the kid’s parents.”

“Well, now, that just makes it okay then?”
Alek hissed. “We have enough trouble trying to keep your mother
from killing people.”

Drew let out a humorless laugh. “You won’t
have to worry about that anymore. Her body’s the one I’m
responsible for.”

Alek released a weary breath, feeling like an
ass. “Come on in,” he said, gesturing for Drew to follow him into
the large sitting room just off the foyer.

Drew silently followed with the child in his
arms. Trish was standing at the bottom of the stairs, close enough
to have heard the entire conversation.

“You’re sure the other body isn’t one of the
kid’s parents?” Alek asked.