I blinked at him. “What kind of a message requires a shotgun blast through the chest?”
He shook his head, impatient. “It’s not important. What’s more important is what you’re doing walking around in broad daylight with blood like that running through your veins.”
I paused to try and parse that statement, without success. “I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about,” I told him truthfully.
“Really? None at all?” His gaze sharpened again, and it felt like he could see straight through my skull to what lay beneath. I didn’t like the feeling. When he spoke again, his tone was thoughtful. “You actually mean that, don’t you?”
I threw my hands up, frustration overflowing. “No, I’m lying to you. Vampires tear my shed door off its hinges and drink my neck like a Capri-Sun on a near daily basis. I thought that was a normal part of life. So, do you maybe want to... I don’t know... explain some of this?”
He seemed to consider my words as he studied me closely. For a moment, he looked like he wanted to eat me alive—and not necessarily in the bad way. A frisson raced up my spine, but before I could decide whether to run for the hills or call him out on it, his expression smoothed into something like regret.
“Best not,” he said, not unkindly. “You were supposed to forget what happened yesterday. If you’re smart, you’ll try your best to do exactly that. Go home, and stop asking questions that might draw the wrong kind of attention.”
I bristled. “Oh, yeah? Questions like, ‘Who’s going to pay for the repairs to my shed?’”
He laughed, then—a low, pleasant sound that did things to my overactive libido despite my best efforts to maintain my armor of outrage. With a crooked smile, he reached out, brushing my cheek with the backs of his knuckles—a fleeting caress that left my skin warm and tingling where he’d touched it.
“What did you think the hundred-dollar tip was for, Zorah Bright?” he asked.
And then he was gone. I sat frozen for a moment, my hand rising stupidly to cover the echo of his touch on my cheek. By the time I came back to myself and hurried after him with Vonnie’s worried check-in text buzzing at my hip, he had already disappeared into the city.
FIVE
HE KNEW MY NAME. I lay awake, staring at the early-morning darkness above me and trying not to freak out. Okay, yes, I was a waitress. I’d been wearing a nametag when he and his friend had come in to AJ’s. A nametag with my first name. Not my last.
I’d slept poorly. What a shock, right? But the practical upshot was, I still felt weak and achy and generally like shit, two days after being drained by a vampire. How much had he taken from me? Should I be worried?
I spent an unproductive hour of my quality time with insomnia, trying to mentally tweak my budget this month to accommodate a trip to my doctor. No way in hell. Now that I was no longer on my father’s health plan, I was uninsured—bringing in too much money to qualify for assistance with the premiums, but not enough to make the cheapest qualifying plan work. At least, not if I also wanted to eat and pay the utilities.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t exactly tell the doctor that I was suffering from blood loss when I didn’t have a wound to explain it. He would just start harping on about chronic fatigue syndrome again. Still, it was worrying. I’d managed to reach a balance between what I was physically capable of doing in a day, and what was necessary for my job.
Sure, it required taking more pain medication than I would have liked, but I’d been getting by. Right now, though, I felt like I’d been run over by a bus... and I was due at MMHA bright and early this morning, followed by an eleven to three shift at AJ’s.
I sincerely doubted that the neglected lawn was going to see any attention today.
Since sleep was clearly a distant dream at this point, I slipped out of bed, drank a bunch of water, and ran through a gentle yoga routine while I waited for the sun to rise. Every joint ached, every muscle burned with fatigue after hours of doing nothing more strenuous than lying awake in bed. As it always did, the yoga helped a little, and a hot shower helped a little more.
This morning, I succumbed to the lure of the massaging showerhead. I still felt like a damned nympho freak, but I craved the brief flush of endorphin-fed physical and mental relief that would follow. By the time I’d eaten a solid breakfast and popped a few more ibuprofen, the prospect of heading out and working until three no longer made me want to hide under the covers and burst into girly tears.
At eight-thirty sharp, I strolled out of the spitting rain and into the bustling offices of the Missouri Mental Health Alliance; ready to add my paltry support to a cause I cared about. Before a sharp downturn in my unpredictable health had derailed my college career, I’d managed most of a two-year degree in accounting. That was what I did at MMHA—keep the books.
The unfinished associate’s degree had originally been intended as a stepping-stone toward becoming a CPA like my father. Looking back, it had been a young woman’s attempt to make an emotionally distant father love her, and a fairly sad attempt, at that. I didn’t have any particular interest in a career in accounting, and at this point in my life it would have been difficult to pursue it further in any case. But it did mean I could offer a valuable service to MMHA.
That, I did care about.
In the absence of any grand explanation for my mother’s assassination when I was little, I was left with a very troubled man who’d done a very bad thing in a moment of
