Something's coming, I suddenly thought. What that I was, I didn't know.
I turned back to Fang. "So how did you find me?" I asked, although I had already intuited the answer. Obviously, I had given the man enough clues about my life - in particular, the cases I had worked on - for him to find me. Quite simply, he had put two and two together. Even if two and two had come over the course of years.
He confirmed my hunch, and explained. To his credit, he looked a bit sheepish. Anyway, it had been one of my bigger cases four months ago that had gotten some national attention, a case that involved a runaway girl and a murderous dad. Despite my best efforts to remain anonymous, my name had appeared once or twice in the newspaper. I had, of course, mentioned to Fang that I was working on an important missing person case. By this point, I had already inadvertently dropped enough clues over the years to direct him to the general region where I lived. And once he knew the general region, well, it had just been a matter of scanning the local headlines for any news about a runaway.
I said, "So everything I ever told you...."
"I made notes," he said. "I saved our messages. I poured over them later, searching for hidden clues about you. About how to find you. In the beginning, you gave me very little to work with. But you loosened up over the years."
I wasn't sure how I felt about that. There was a creep factor here that was hard to ignore. But I also understood human nature. Or, at least, tried my damned best to. Yes, of course he had been curious about me. Who wouldn't have been? I was a woman who was professing to be much more than a woman. And, admittedly, I had certainly been curious to find him, too, but I had never acted on it. I was a married woman at the time, working hard to keep things happy and seemingly normal.
Too hard.
A marriage shouldn't have to be so much work. Love shouldn't crush your soul. A relationship should add to your life, not take away from it. Something I'm only now beginning to understand.
But it was hard to remain mad at Fang...or Aaron. There was a gentleness to him that I never saw coming. His instant messages to me had exuded confidence. But I wasn't seeing the confidence here. No, I was seeing a man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, who had anything but confidence. I was missing something here, and I wasn't sure what it was.
I looked again at the teeth dangling from his neck. They were long and thick - but not quite as thick as shark teeth. They looked like dog canines. Big dog canines. I looked again at his twitching mouth, and saw him curl his upper lip down as if to....
As if to cover two massively prominent canines. Two unnaturally long canines.
"Those teeth," I said, motioning to his chest. "Are yours."
"Why, Moon Dance," he said, and I sensed his old charm. "You are quite the detective."
Chapter Three
I knew the story of the American Vampire, of course.
In essence, a young man with two extraordinarily long canine teeth had sucked his girlfriend dry. His trial had been as sensational as they get, and who could forget the images of the young man opening his mouth and exposing those two insanely long canines for all the world to see.
And here he was. In the flesh. Sitting across from me. A young man who had been tried and convicted of murder. A young man who had been deemed criminally insane. And there were very few who would argue that point.
And he's Fang, I thought. This is crazy.
If I looked hard enough I could see the similarities, but the truth was, he looked nothing like the tormented young man whose image had been broadcast across the airwaves and newsrooms and the early Internet. Now his thick beard would make him nearly impossible to place, and I was almost certain he had had some nose work done. And as I looked again, I could see he was wearing brown contact lenses. Almost certainly his eyes had been blue originally. But the biggest difference was his great height. He had not been quite this tall when he was eighteen years old. Then again, it was hard to know for sure, since he had often sat petulantly next to his attorneys. Still, I would guess he had grown another five inches...perhaps enough to completely throw authorities off his trail.
He was, after all, an escaped convict - and allegedly responsible for two more deaths. A guard at the criminally insane prison and the owner of a creepy museum in Hollywood who had purchased Aaron's teeth for a morally questionable display.
A sick display. There had been an outrage, of course.
But the outrage turned moot when the owner had been found dead some months later, and the teeth had been stolen.
The same teeth that now dangled from Fang's neck.
The same fangs.
"You are a killer," I said.
"As are you, Samantha," he said, sitting back and sipping casually on a drink that smelled strong enough to preserve a warthog. "We are both victims of circumstance. Never forget that."
His faux brown eyes continued scanning my face. I could see the wonder in them; I could sense his awe. His thoughts were alive to me, nearly registering in my mind as my own. After all, I had a deep connection to Fang, deeper than I had ever thought possible with another human being, and although the man in front of me was largely a stranger, now that we've met in the flesh, our connection seemed only to intensify.
He closed his eyes and took in some air. "I can feel you, Moon Dance."
I blinked. "Feel me how?"
"In my head. You're there. In my thoughts. Just off to the side. Listening. Picking up words here and there."
He cocked his head slightly to one side, like a dog listening to something on the wind. Now it was my turn to study his face. The man was gorgeous. Of that, there was no doubt. After all, there was a reason why my sister turned into a gibbering idiot every time he served us a drink. His brown hair was jauntily disheveled, or perhaps messily windblown. Mostly, it was his lips that commanded my attention. So full, especially the lower one. There was a spot of liquid on the bottom one and all I could think of doing was tasting that spot. Just that one, sexy spot.
His eyelids quivered, where I saw a brief flash of white, and realized his eyes had rolled up into his head. "Yes, there you are, Moon Dance."
I said nothing. Music continued pumping through the bar. A very old drunk man got up from his stool and started slow dancing with himself. He spun himself once, twice, and I thought he might even dip himself, but luckily he bumped into the bar and grabbed hold of it. No one seemed to notice him but me.
And seemingly inside my skull, I heard a very faint, yet very distinct whisper: Hello, Moon Dance.
Fang opened his eyes and smiled at me.