Author: Molly Harper

I’d been shot in the shoulder, near my right kidney, and a few inches left of the base of my spine. It stung considerably, especially when the healing tissue forced the small-caliber bullets out of my wounds. But at least I knew I didn’t have Bud McElray’s rifle shot floating around in my gut.

I’d given Bud quite a bit of thought during the drive home from Missy’s. Now, as I sat in lukewarm pink water, draining another blood bottle of its contents, I kicked myself for not at least checking on Bud’s whereabouts since the first shooting. I’d been far too passive through the whole ordeal, waiting for it to just go away, hoping it would stop if I ignored it. As the only person who’d ever shot at me, he was now the prime suspect in every weird incident over the last couple of months. And now I wanted to give him the whuppin’ he thoroughly deserved. I wasn’t entirely sure if (a) I could find him, and (b) I could get away with it.

I changed the water in the tub twice and still didn’t feel clean. I could still smell blood on every inch of my skin, sending the synthetic stuff in my stomach roiling. At the sound of a fist pounding on my front door, I ran to my room without bothering to towel off and threw on a bra and underwear. If Bud McElray was going to take another shot at me, I wasn’t going to be naked when he did it.

“Jane?” Gabriel called from my porch. “Are you home?”

Relieved, I threw on my robe and padded down the stairs. I was about to throw my arms around him and tell him the whole sorry tale when he barged through the door. “Why am I hearing rumors that you and Dick have had an intimate knowledge of each other in the dressing rooms at Wal-Mart?”

I groaned, pulling at the soaked robe as it clung clammily to my skin. “So, we’re at the Wal-Mart now?”

Gabriel blanched. “What?”

“Don’t worry about it. None of it’s true.”

“No, I do believe I—” He sniffed the air. “Why do I smell blood? Your blood?”

Given the way Gabriel’s fists were clenching and unclenching, I wasn’t sure I should tell him. Sensing my hesitation, Gabriel took my chin in his palm and made me meet his gaze.

I sighed, turned my back, and dropped the robe. “Someone shot at me as I was leaving a party earlier.”

“Why would someone shoot at you?” he demanded, roughly pulling me closer to inspect my healing skin. “Normal bullets wouldn’t be enough to kill you.”

“No, but it annoyed the bejesus out of me,” I grumbled, yanking my robe back together. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you about some things that have happened around here lately. Someone’s been hanging around outside my house at night. Someone used deer blood to paint insults on my car. They tried to poison Fitz with antifreeze. And then, obviously, tonight someone shot me. Again.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice dangerously soft. “Jane, if anything happened to you…”

“I hoped it would just go away. I thought maybe it was some weirdo antivamp crazy who wanted to make me uncomfortable. But now, this combined with Walter’s being set on fire, I think the guy who shot me the first time, Bud McElray, is trying to scare me or finish the job or something. I don’t know what to do. Can I complain to the human authorities? Do I go to Ophelia and tell on him—” I saw Gabriel’s face grow tense at the mention of Bud’s name. “What?”

Gabriel grimaced. “You haven’t read your paper lately, have you?”

“Besides want ads? Not really,” I admitted. “Why?”

He went into my kitchen and shuffled through the old Half-Moon Heralds in my recycling bin until he found what he wanted. He handed the news section to me.

“Half-Moon Resident Killed in Hunting Mishap,” I read aloud from a front page dated two weeks before. “Half-Moon Hollow native Bud McElray died Tuesday when the deer stand he was climbing collapsed, bringing a thirty-two-foot oak tree down on top of him. Coroner Don Purdue described the cause of death as multiple blunt-trauma injuries, including a broken spine, fractured skull, and massive internal bleeding. Purdue added that several empty beer bottles were found around the fallen tree. He said it would take several weeks for toxicology tests to determine whether there were drugs or alcohol present in McElray’s system.”

Let’s see, the man who mortally wounded me with a hunting rifle while drunk was killed in a freak accident on a deer stand that he was too drunk to climb. That wasn’t suspicious.

“Jane, Bud McElray can’t be the person who shot you, and he’s not the one who’s been harassing you. He’s been dead for weeks.”

“I swear I didn’t do it,” I said, dropping the paper. “It wasn’t me.”

“Of course, it wasn’t you. Trees fall. Mr. McElray had the bad luck of standing under it at the time.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as…convenient?” I asked.

“No.” He snorted. “It was a terrible inconvenience to push a very heavy tree on top of Mr. McElray.”

I gaped at him, the salty-sweet gorge of faux blood rising in my throat. “You killed him,” I whispered.

He sat there, still as stone, as he stared at me. Looking back, this may have been Gabriel’s way of saying, “Duh!”

“Say something!” I yelled. “You can’t just tell me how inconvenient it was to shove a tree on top of a living human being and then not say anything. Please tell me—just say something.”

“He hurt you,” Gabriel said, his eyes flashing silver even in the dim light. “He left you to die like some animal and just went on living his life.”

“He thought I was an animal! How could you do that? You weren’t trying to feed or to defend yourself.” I whimpered, shrinking away. “You murdered him.”

“And you would have let him live?” He followed me into the living room, clearly irked that I didn’t appreciate what was probably considered a romantic gesture in the vampire world. “You would have let him go unpunished for what he did? Let him hurt other innocent people?”

“I will not pretend that I’m sad to see Bud McElray dead,” I admitted. “A part of me hates him for what he did to me. I’m glad that he will never be able to hurt anyone else. But I wouldn’t have had any human die that way. It’s cruel and vicious, and it’s beneath you, Gabriel, with all your noble-creature-of-the-night bullshit. Don’t you dare think you did this for me. Plus, I’m already suspected of setting other vampires on fire. I don’t need a human murder charge on my head. Did you even think about that?”

“No one will connect it to you, because no one knows McElray was responsible for shooting you,” he said. “There was never any report, any evidence.”

Damned if he didn’t have a point there. So, instead of following logic, I demanded, “Why wait until now?”

“I gave him time to forget what had happened, if he even remembered it in the first place. I watched him. I let him settle back into his drunken useless wasted life and when he least expected anything, I extinguished it.”

His voice, the absence of passion or any sort of feeling about the fact that he had snuffed out a human life, chilled me to my marrow. My hands began to shake. I bunched them into fists, flexing the fingers to try to pump warmth into the joints. “What about me makes you think I would be OK with that? What makes you think I would find that acceptable? What happened to not taking the things humans do personally, taking the good with the bad?”

“This is different.”

“How is it different?” I demanded.

“He hurt you!” Gabriel shouted, stepping closer to me. I backed away, but he pursued me, backing me up against the edge of my writing desk. “He left you to die. What about me makes you think I would find that acceptable?”

“Back off.” I shoved him away. Well, I tried. He was pretty much unmovable. “He didn’t know he’d shot me, Gabriel. He wasn’t an evil man, just a stupid drunk who didn’t know any better. No matter what kind of person he was, he was still human. And you’ve made me responsible for his death. You said you didn’t want to give me experiences to regret, but this is a big fricking regret.”

“I know you’re upset. But I hope that someday you will understand why I did this. You will understand what you mean to me. I will do anything to keep you safe, anything.”

He reached for me. For the first time since I’d known him, he looked unsure, unsteady—probably because I slapped his hands away. “Don’t touch me. Just get away from me.”

He seemed vaguely amused by this. “You haven’t minded me touching you in the past. In fact—”

Even as I punched him in the mouth, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. For one, the deep scrape of Gabriel’s fangs against my knuckles was excruciating. And two, I’d never really hit anyone before and meant it, besides the usual sibling brawls and the unfortunate Walter encounter.

Gabriel sprawled across the floor, sliding across the polished wood until he hit a wall. I was this close to helping him up and apologizing profusely when he snarled up at me. Which just made me hit him again. I think I had some anger issues I needed to work out.

My fangs extended, nicking my lip. The taste of my own blood only stoked my temper, tingeing the edges of my vision a hot, glossy crimson.

The shock of his spastic childe being coordinated enough to land a blow had plainly disoriented Gabriel. As he stumbled to his feet, I flew at him and knocked him back down. I kicked him again, but he swept an arm out and knocked my legs from under me. From my position on the floor, I kicked at him as he rose, pushing him against the wall. But as I tried to gain advantage, he used my momentum to slam me against the wall instead.

“Good. Good.” He hissed, pinning my wrists. “This is what we are, Jane. This isn’t some fairy story. It’s not one of your books. You could pretend you didn’t know this was in your nature, but you’d be lying to yourself and to me. You’ve known ever since the night you rose. You’ve sensed it under the surface. We’re predators, Jane. We hunt, and we feed, and we kill.”

I strained against his grip, but he was too strong, slapping my useless hands against the plaster. He smirked as he drew in for a kiss, then seemed to think better of it, unsure whether I would chew on him—in the bad way.

“You talk too much,” I grumbled, seizing his mouth.

There was a pleased purring sound in his chest as his fingers slipped up my wrists and intertwined with mine. He let me shove away from the wall, and we stumbled backward, tripping over my leaded-glass coffee table and sending shards of glass exploding over the floor as we fell.

Gabriel rolled, trapping me between the solid weight of his body and the unyielding floor. His stare pinned me as much as the knees pressed against my thighs. I wanted him without thinking. I didn’t care that I had crazy wet hair or that I was wearing underwear featuring cartoon ladybugs. I didn’t care if I was kissing him the right way. I didn’t care if the sex might be bad. I just wanted.

Still wrapped around him, I used all of the strength in my legs to roll over him, pin him to the floor. His eyes flashed as I strained to keep him held there. He was enjoying this, watching me struggle. My hair curled in wild, damp ropes over my face as I crouched over him, scraping my fingers along the edges of his bared torso.

His palm curled around my chin, forcing me to look him in the eyes. He grinned. He wanted me. He wanted me to touch him, finally to take control. He took my hand in his and pressed it against his chest. He was so smooth. Pale, hairless, and cool as marble, sculpted from years of whatever manual labor a nineteenth-century planter’s son performed. I ran my fingertips along the lines of his chest to his sides, giving in to the urge to kiss the skin just below his belly button. The muscles of his abdomen bunched. He was ticklish. That had possibilities.