Author: Molly Harper

“That’s no way to talk to me, Walter,” Rich said, grabbing Walter by the scruff of his neck as the broken limb dangled. “You’ve been warned about robbing the Cellar. Norm’s been given permission to dust your hide with silver shot. He just doesn’t have the heart to do it, ’cause you don’t have the sense to duck.”

I protested that all this bone-breaking wasn’t necessary. I was fine, no harm done. And thanks to Walter, I was more than alert enough to drive home safely. Walter called me some very creative names and repeated his anatomically impossible instructions to Rich. Rich paused and watched Walter’s arm set itself, then he wrenched it again.

“Oh, come on, man,” Walter whined.

“I can keep breaking it,” Rich told him. “Now, do you have something to say to this lady?”

Even I was disturbed at the display of testosterone. “Really, this is just—oh, come on. What’s next? Screaming ‘Mercy is for the weak’?”

Rich actually shushed me, saying, “There’s a principle here.”

Walter mumbled something close to “I’m sorry.”

“What was that?” Rich combined the pain of a crooked arm with the indignity of a flicked ear. I could only hope the situation didn’t escalate to the dreaded purple nurple.

Walter shrieked, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

Rich smiled brightly at me. “Happy?”

“No!” I shook my head. “This is just wrong.”

Rich gave me a look telling me he knew that some small, petty part of me was enjoying this. He released a whining Walter, who rubbed his arm gingerly. “Walter, I want you to go home to your mama’s. Have a drink. And whatever you were planning to do with Norm’s money, don’t do it.”

Walter sneered at me, told Rich he hoped an important appendage rotted off, waited a beat, then took off running. Rich nodded to Walter’s retreating form. “That was Walter.”

Walter had problems, Rich told me. He was a living example that being a vampire made you stronger and faster but not necessarily smarter. Turned behind a bowling alley five years before, he still slept in his mom’s basement and made a living selling pirated Knight Rider DVDs. It wasn’t much of a living, because he robbed the Cellar at least once every few months. Norm didn’t even bother locking the safe anymore.

I dusted the parking-lot remnants off my jeans, glaring up at him. “So, I’m supposed to feel sorry for the guy who treats Norm like a human piñata and tried to pulverize my skull?”

He shrugged again. “No, but he’s not very bright, so you can’t hold it against him.”

I winced as several parts of my head fused back together. “And yet I think I will, anyway.”

“I like you.” Rich grinned and bowed over my hand in a courtly manner. “Richard Cheney.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand under his nose, making it much more difficult for him to kiss. “Wait, Richard Cheney, as in Dick Cheney? You’re a vampire named Dick Cheney? Somehow, that makes you seem more evil.”

“I was Dick Cheney first. I was Dick Cheney before he came along, and I’ll be Dick Cheney after he’s dead.”

“Sore subject?” I asked.

He nodded. I glanced back at the abandoned bar, its neon sign spattering forlornly against the gathering humidity. “What about the bar?”

Dick made a gesture somewhere between a nod and a slouch. “I’ll close it up. Norm gave me a key for nights like this.”

“How often are you here?”

He laughed. “You’d better get home now, Stretch. Sun’s coming up soon.”

“Not a hot date for years, and suddenly I’m man bait,” I muttered as I opened the car door. Andrea was still napping. I poked her rubbery, inanimate cheek and amused myself by giving her funny faces. “Entrée into the vampire world, my foot.”

As dawn pecked at my windows, I tucked a lightly snoring Andrea in on my couch and asked Jettie to wake her in time to change for work. I knew I would wake up bright and early if invisible hands were yanking the pillow out from under my head.

I took a long, hot shower. It was more than a little nauseating when the gravel was forced out of my healing knee wounds and plinked into the enameled metal tub. I also washed a half-pound of grit from my hair and pulled a seven-inch sliver of windshield glass out of my shoulder.

“That can’t be good,” I muttered, tossing it into the wicker wastebasket. Apathetic about my nudity and the complications it could pose if I were confronted by a ragtag team of stake-wielding teenagers, I hung a thick quilt over the window and collapsed into bed. My last coherent thought was that I’d never retrieved my purse from the Cellar.

According to Jettie, Andrea left for work the next morning wearing an old church outfit of mine, which probably added up to the worst-dressed workday of her life. When I called her cell phone, she was driving two counties over to a client’s house. Amused by my tales of parking-lot fisticuffs, she gave me the background on Dick.

Richard Allan Cheney lived in an old Airstream trailer out on Bend Road. Sort of blew those romantic castle-and-cape fantasies out of the water, didn’t it? Andrea said the mobile life suited Dick’s restless spirit, to know that he could pick up and move any time he wanted. His only fear was a tornado coming along during the day and ripping the house off him.

Dick was an old friend of Gabriel’s, and when I say old, I mean 140-plus years. He was the last in a long line of dissolute men who were good with women and bad with fiscal responsibility. Dick’s parents died when he was eighteen, leaving him with a perfectly respectable house, a pitiful income, and the one servant the family hadn’t had to fire.

He was not exactly what Grandma Ruthie would call a “reputable person.” If you needed it, Dick could find it. But you shouldn’t ask where he got it. I’m not talking about your typical illegal-fireworks transactions. A werewolf once tried to stake Dick instead of paying him for a pistol that shot silver bullets. It was rumored that the werewolf was now a fur rug in Dick’s badly decorated living room. It’s a moot point to ask why the werewolf didn’t shoot Dick with the silver-bullet gun. Werewolves are sort of the crazy cousins of the supernatural world, Andrea explained, not great at making decisions.

Eager for a quiet night in, I dutifully read the chapters on finding blood sources and emergency sun protection from The Guide for the Newly Undead. The descriptions of spontaneous vampire combustion were going to give me nightmares for weeks. But now I knew not to trust a T-shirt pulled over my head to keep me from bursting into flames. (Coats, heavy-duty trash bags, and high-quality aluminum foil would do in a pinch.)

I nuked a bottle of Faux Type O and pored over my personal library for something that would settle me. As usual, I came back to my dear Jane. Whenever I get restless or stressed, I revisit Mansfield Park. Because I know that no matter how rough my life gets, at least I don’t have to wear a corset and live with a stone-cold witch like Mrs. Norris.

I propped my feet on the arm of my porch swing and settled in. I’d barely begun a proper scratching of Fitz’s ears when a set of brass knuckles came flying at me. I caught it a few centimeters from my forehead.

“That’s so cool,” I marveled. I turned to see Dick Cheney—the vampire, not the former vice president—climbing up onto my front porch. Fitz lifted his head as Dick sauntered past but dropped back into the scratching position without so much as a bark.

“I figured you might want them the next time you get into a bar fight,” he said. “I didn’t want to say anything last night, but you hit like a girl, Stretch.”

I gave him my best “don’t underestimate me” look and muttered, “A vampire girl.”

He sauntered over to the swing and made himself comfy, despite my objections when he stretched my legs over his ancient jeans. Not bothering to adjust the “I Know Tricks” T-shirt that rode over some impressive abs, he took particular pleasure in examining my brand-new cotton-candy-pink pedicure. “I do admire a woman who pays attention to her toes. So, what do you have planned for the evening? And where is that tasty friend of yours?”

I tossed the brass knuckles into his lap, drawing a wince from him. “She’s not here, and she won’t date you.”

He grinned, splitting the rugged planes of his face with brilliant white fangs. “She might if she knew me.”

“She does know you, and that’s why she won’t date you.”

He gave me his best panty-dropping smile. “I guess I’ll have to settle for you, then.”

Unable to decide whether that was an insult, I ignored him.

“There’s something familiar about you,” he said. “I can’t quite place it. But you’re different.”

“It’s my shampoo,” I said, a smidge too loudly. “It smells like mangoes, very memorable.”

“No, that’s not it,” he said, then squinted at me and gave up. He poked my side, instinctively aiming at my most ticklish places. “How come we haven’t met before? How old are you? What do you do when you’re not losing fights and quipping me half to death?”

“I grew up around here,” I said, slapping his hand away. “I was just turned last week. I’m a librarian.”

He stilled, as if I’d just told him I was the inventor of the tube top. “I watched a movie about a librarian once. Well, she was a librarian by day, a call girl by—”

I stopped him with a quick lift of an eyebrow. “If you finish that sentence, we cannot be friends.”

“You don’t talk like a librarian,” he said.

“I know,” I admitted. “I’m proof that just enough education can be dangerous. In the right setting, I can argue Faulkner and James Joyce with the best of them. But I think it’s going to take a couple of centuries to polish the Hollow off me. My sire’s pretty urbane. Maybe he can send me to vampire charm school or something.”

“I kind of like it.” He smirked and turned his attentions to the gardens. “I knew your family, growing up. Came to a couple of parties here at River Oaks. I was, uh, friendly with your several-times-great-aunt Cessie.”

I glared at him. Dick glossed over the subject. “The gardens were never this pretty, though. My mother used to have a garden like this. She liked to leave it kind of wild, but you could see the thought she put into it. She loved her roses.”

“So did my aunt Jettie,” I said. “I’m barely keeping them alive. I’m better at reading about gardening than the actual gardening itself. But Jettie liked it when I would tell her what the roses meant. You know, white roses mean purity. Red roses mean passionate love. Oddly enough, blue roses signify mystery, the real mystery being that there is no such thing as a naturally blue rose. Roses can’t produce a chemical called delphinidin, which makes flowers blue. So florists have to dip them in chemicals to turn them blue.”

Even as I was talking, a voice inside my head was yelling, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Dick seemed impressed but a little frightened. “You must really like flowers.”

“I like finding symbolic meanings in everyday things,” I said. “You know, the meanings in some Victorian floral guides conflicted, so sometimes couples sent each other mixed messages. I like the idea of some proper English lady breaking her parasol over a suitor’s head because he sent her yellow carnations, thinking it meant affection, but in her book it meant rejection and disdain.”

Dick stared at me a long time before saying, “You’re—”

“Jane?”

My head snapped up. Gabriel closed the fifty yards to my front door in a few strides. He did not look happy. And he was carrying my purse. My feet dropped to the porch. Fitz lifted his head and let out a huff but didn’t move. Dick remained in his casual, cozy pose, a smug grin spreading like molasses.