“And so far, neither have you.”
We stood there staring at each other, and I gradually realized that we were being stupid.
“Dinner at Delmonico’s? Tuesday night?” he asked.
I realized that my mouth was hanging open. I shut it.
“No,” I said. I took a couple of deep breaths, backing away from him. “Lieutenant Blair, I normally don’t date customers, and I don’t even know you.” Hell, I had never dated anyone unless I intended to kill them. I stared at him and couldn’t figure out what to say. Did I want to make things so final? “But that doesn’t mean that I’ll never say yes.”
A slight smile softened his face. “Fair enough. Good evening,” he said with a bow.
I watched him collect his coat and walk out into the night. He had left his change on the counter, which was a lot more than a normal tip.
What in the hell was I doing, I wondered? I had never had a real date in my life. I knew how to seduce men, but I didn’t know the first thing about relationships—at least about the emotional part. I understood all the mechanical parts. How to dress, what to say, when to make my moves to advance whatever agenda I was pursuing.
Was I supposed to be in love to go on a date? Did it automatically mean sex? What did you do in the morning when the man was still alive? You’d probably have to talk to him. What would you talk about?
I went home that night a complete mess, my mind as confused as I could ever remember. Freedom to be yourself and do whatever you wanted was a very chaotic way to live. No wonder the world was so screwed up. Who was I, and what in the hell did I want to do? So far, I had simply run away from my past, but what was I going to do with my future? I was used to a lot more structure. Day-to-day decisions weren’t something I had been trained to deal with.
And on the other hand, I was scared something fierce of anyone telling me what to do. Nine years of being a ‘good girl’ and following orders proved that my sense of who to trust couldn’t be trusted. Was I simply gullible? Naïve? Or maybe just dumb? I wanted to trust Sam, and I wanted to trust Blair, but how was I to know if that was the right thing to do? Every way I turned seemed to present some kind of danger. Sometimes I just wanted to give up, but I didn’t know how to do that, either.
When I arrived at work the following evening, I went into the kitchen. Steve and Donny gave me guarded looks.
“Hey,” I said. “I want to apologize for last night. I was way out of line.”
I saw them relax, then Donny said, “No, you weren’t. I was. I’m kinda clueless sometimes. Sorry.”
Steve chuckled. “Hell, you were gentle with us. When I went home and told my old lady, she reamed me out good. She’s still pissy about it this morning. Naw, we were the ones out of line. I know how hard it is dealing with drunk assholes, and it’s worse as a woman. I guess we just needed a little reminder.”
Trevor came in alone around six. He sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and asked for a menu.
“I apologize about last night,” he said when I sat his beer down.
“Oh. Was that you grabbing my ass? I thought it was Josh.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
I leaned over the bar. “Why do you constantly feel the need to apologize for him? I mean, if you’re worried that people will lump you together, you’re right. Apologizing for him won’t help that, Trevor. You hang around with a jerk, people are going to assume you’re a jerk, too.”
His face turned bright red. “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me? Use small words. I’m only a girl.”
I thought his face couldn’t get any redder, but it did. “I’ve known Josh since grade school. When kids used to pick on me, he defended me. And now we’re in business together.”
“Trevor, you don’t owe him. I know you think you do, but you don’t. And if you think your business is going to do well, I hope you’re the one dealing with customers.”
He handed me a card. Lost and Found.
“That’s the name of your business?”
Trevor nodded. “We find things.”
“Tell Josh to find a clue,” I said. “What do you want to eat?”
The rest of the evening went fairly smoothly. Trevor sat at the bar and we chatted for more than two hours. He told me some funny stories about things Lost and Found had been employed to find, and I enjoyed it. I found myself wishing that he’d come around without Josh more often. I was sort of dreading having to face Blair again, but he didn’t come in on my shift.
As I was packing up to go out to the bus stop, Lizzy came over. “Hey,” she said. “I have a group of friends who get together for brunch every Sunday. A lot of them are people I’ve known since high school. Would you like to come? Give you a chance to meet some people.”
I was sort of stunned. Making friends was as foreign a concept to me as dating. I had sort of a friend for a couple of years when I first went to live with the Illuminati, but she died in a training accident. Or so I was told. “Uh, sure. I guess. Where is it?”
Lizzy gave me the address. “We meet up around eleven,” she said. “I’ll give you my phone in case you have trouble finding the place.”
She stood there with her phone in her hand looking expectant. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I grabbed a pencil.
“Okay.”
“It would be easier to just tell me your number. I’ll call you, and then we’ll have each other’s numbers.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
Her expression didn’t change at first, then she blinked, then said, “Oh, did you lose it? Wow, that’s a bummer.” She gave me her number, and I wrote it down. “Let me know when you get your new phone,” she said and smiled. “See you in the morning.”
As I watched her walk away, I realized how lonely I was. Lizzy reaching out to me, Eleanor’s and Sam’s and Jenny’s kindness were foreign. They knew nothing about me, about what a horrible person I was. I wondered how they would react if they did.
I walked out of the bar at two-thirty in the morning and found Jolene leaning against the wall across the alley. Without a word, she fell into step beside me.
“Hi,” I said.
“We need to talk.”
“Okay.”
We walked around the corner and down the street a ways before she spoke again.
“I don’t want to see Josh hurt.”
“Oh? Well, the easiest way to prevent that is for him to keep his hands to himself.”
Jolene shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. He’s falling for you and I don’t think—”
I stopped. I realized I was staring at her with my mouth open, so I shut it. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She was several steps down the street before she discovered I was no longer with her. She turned back to look at me.
“What is he, twelve years old?” I asked. “I like her, so I call her names and hit her? Dear gods. Between you and Trevor, he doesn’t have to take any responsibility at all, does he? Can he even wipe his own nose?”
She started to open her mouth, but I closed the distance between us. “Don’t worry about your little boy’s feelings. If the son of a bitch touches me again, I’m going to put him in a hospital. As for any kind of romantic attachment, I’d rather date a cockroach. I’ll sleep with a vampire before I sleep with him.”
Furious, I stalked away from her. Worried about poor little Josh’s feelings? She would be better served worrying about his breathing, and whether he would continue to do so.
Josh reminded me so much of a boy, young man, I knew when I was sixteen. Roger was a Hunter trainee a couple of years older than I was, and he took an interest in me. He was cocky and a bit of a bully. He made my life miserable, grabbing my ass or my breasts, trying to get me alone and force me to kiss him. I complained to my Masters about him, but they just told me he had a crush on me and ‘boys will be boys.’
On his first mission, Roger went to Mexico with three older Hunters to take down a rogue werewolf pack. The others returned, but Roger had disobeyed orders, gotten separated from his brethren, and the shifters killed him. I had always thought that if the Masters had slapped him down and held him accountable when he was younger, he might have learned enough discipline to save his life.
I arrived at the bus stop to discover the street light that hung over it was out. Not only that, but I saw the taillights of the bus fading into the distance. I was late, and it would be half an hour until the next bus. Then I heard a noise from the bushes ten feet away. I cautiously moved closer and saw a woman’s foot sticking out from the foliage, twitching and sort of kicking.
Rushing forward, I met my second vampire. He had a girl pinned on the ground with his hand over her mouth and his head lowered to her neck. Her eyes were round with fear, and when I came into her field of vision, she began struggling harder.
I kicked him in the side, and he turned his head toward me. I kicked him in the face and cast a spell that pinned him to the ground. Grabbing the girl by the arm, I pulled her away from him. There was a little blood on her neck, but I couldn’t tell how much he had drained her.
He probably hadn’t done much yet, because she was plenty animated and actively using her limbs to get away from him. The lassitude normally associated with the vampire’s saliva entering her bloodstream hadn’t kicked in yet.
“Scream,” I told her as she staggered away. “Call the cops.” Then I turned back to the vamp. I wasn’t sure what to do with him. Killing him with a witness present wasn’t a good idea. Actually, considering Detective Blair, killing him wasn’t a good idea at all.
The girl definitely wasn’t hurt too badly because her scream about deafened me.
I took the vampire by the ankles and dragged him close to a nearby tree. Taking a good grip on his ankles, I swung him around in a circle, lifting him off the ground, then stepped toward the tree. The jolt of his head against the trunk jarred him loose from my grip, and he fell to the ground. As far as I could tell, he was unconscious, so I dissolved the holding spell.