By the time Hopkins had grilled us all and the crime scene and cop brigade had left the building, my body was humming. I could still smell Pike in my apartment, his coconut scent just hanging in the air. But there was something else, too—and having spent enough time with it I couldn’t deny it: the stench of death was heavy in the air.
I leaned against my window, watching the taxicabs honking and tourists walking on the street below, watching people going about their everyday lives in the twilight. They moved in sort of an organized chaos, completely unaware that just a few hundred feet away a life had ended and another had changed completely.
I remembered the last breath of life as it seeped out of me. My body fought to hold tight to it and I felt like my insides were burning. But the handsome stranger—his arms—were tight around me and somehow I still felt safe, willing the life to drip out of me as I licked the droplets of blood on his neck. I needed them. The thirst was overwhelming. I was changing; I was becoming someone—something—else, and all around me life went on. My parents sat in the parlor; my siblings, fast asleep in their beds. And I was outside, dying, living, changing, becoming.
An immense sadness washed over me.
I flopped onto my couch and pressed my fingertips to my temples. I didn’t have a headache—it’s physiologically impossible for a vampire to have a headache—but I could almost swear it was on its way.
That’s why I jumped a foot and a half when the goddamn black bird that had taken up residence outside my front window started squawking like the disease-infested winged rodent that it was. I rolled last week’s copy of US Weekly into a narrow tube, flattened myself against the wall, then slammed the magazine against the glass, willing the stupid bird to exit once and for all. I didn’t have the nerve to look.
It’s not that I’m afraid of birds. Hello? I’m a vampire. I’m afraid of nothing! Except maybe sunlight, shoulder pads, and the very real idea that neon and side ponytails are coming back into fashion. But birds? No. They just disgust me. With their beady eyes and their mean, pointy beaks, and those wings. Disease is carried on those wings, I just know it. So the fact that this, this—monster—had the gall to pace my windowsill on a very regular basis, squawking and clawing and generally just making a nuisance of itself, bothered me to no end.
Seriously, I was considering renting a cat.
When a good minute—a silent, non–wing-beating or squawking minute—passed, I took a two-inch step forward and peered around the window molding, an indescribable relief washing over me when all I saw beyond the clear window glass were a few cabs inching along the street and a woman berating a parking meter.
My relieved sigh curdled into a scream as that stupid bird launched itself into my line of sight, squawking and flapping like a murderous maniac, the tips of its wings tapping the glass.
I was reeling backward, vaulting toward the couch when an insistent knock at my door terrified me five times more and I felt every muscle in my body instinctively stiffen. Though my fangs are always exposed, in times of true vampdom—i.e., when an artery needs ravaging or a bartender spills something on my Manolo Blahniks—the fangs extend an extra half-inch causing that frightening scowl you see plastered all over TV. My hackles were up and adrenaline pulsed through me; even my hair seemed to stand on electrified end. My every thought was savagery and a hiss of air sliced through my teeth as I snatched open the door.
I was met with pursed lips.
And a cocked eyebrow.
And an expression completely devoid of terror or shock.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“What? A guy can’t fly across country to see his favorite aunt?” My nephew was standing in the hallway, framed by chintzy yellow hallway light, grinning like I had just won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. His fangs were small but pronounced, pinching against the edges of his upturned lips.
“I’m not your favorite aunt, I’m your only aunt.” I addressed him suspiciously and the smile fell from his face.
“So can I come in or not?”
In the Hollywood sea of vampires with horrible accents, satchels full of graveyard dirt, and the ability to turn into bats—there was one thing they had gotten right: a vampire can’t enter private premises without first being invited. Even if those premises were home to another vampire. I stood aside and opened my arms. “Vlad, you are welcome to come into my apartment.”
Vlad stepped over the threshold, arms crossed in front of his chest. Looming at just over six feet, he looked down at me with one of those noncommittal teenage expressions. A hint of mischief flickered in his dark eyes and I was instantly seized with joy and sadness. Vlad looked so much like his mother—my sister—that it warmed me. But the feeling almost immediately fled because I knew Sonia was dead, would never know that her son was thriving—though undead—or that his Aunt Nina was taking good care of him. She also would never know that Vlad headed up the West Coast division of VERM—the Vampire Empowerment and Restoration Movement—or dressed like a fashionably suicidal cross between Bela Lugosi and Count Chocula.
Maybe it was better that she stayed in the grave.
I jumped forward anyway, enveloping Vlad in a crisp hug. “I’m sorry. I am really happy to see you! But, really, what are you doing here?”
He stepped back in true teenage fashion as though someone would catch wind of the fact that he had shown a modicum of emotion. Vlad may be one hundred and twelve, but he was forever caught in the moody, brooding, obnoxious sentience of a sixteen year old.
And he never picked up his socks.
He threw an Army duffel onto my couch and grinned again. I could tell he just fed by the deep, ruddy pink of his lips.
“I came to visit you!”
Now I crossed my arms in front of my chest and cocked a brow. “What’d you do?”
A sweet innocence flooded over Vlad’s face. “What do you mean?”
I pulled my cell phone from my jeans pocket and poised a finger over the trackpad. “You know I have Sophie on speed dial.” In addition to being my roommate in San Francisco, Sophie is Vlad’s partial guardian by proxy, and my very best friend.
Vlad held up a silencing hand. “Okay, okay. So, there’s some talk that I may have had a tiny indiscretion with a fairy.”
“Fairies are awful!” Though Walt Disney painted them with big, kind eyes and pursed pink lips, anyone who’s met one will tell you that fairies—and pixies, too—are awful little buggers. Mean, sassy, stuck-up.