the subject’s come up, exactly how does that work? Who pays the bounty when you hunt down a vamp?”
“The families of victims.” He didn’t open his eyes. “They pay me what they can. Sometimes that’s just gas money to make it to the next town.”
“How deliciously Sir Lancelot of you, sweetie,” I said, a trifle acerbically, “but I hope you got more than your mileage for this job. Forget the fact that I came close to being a vamp snack, since you’re convinced I’m going to end up as a big pile of dust anyway, but if that slash over your eye had been any longer or the one on your bicep any deeper, Claudia and her posse would have ended your career tonight.”
I wasn’t totally convinced of what I’d just said. Being attacked by three vengeful vampires would put any other man down for the count, but except for a hiss of indrawn breath as he’d splashed holy water over his wounds from a plastic soda bottle he’d retrieved from his car, Rawls’s demeanor had remained grimly stoic. His dark T-shirt was soaked even darker in places with his own blood, one knee of his jeans was ripped to show pavementtorn skin beneath, and there was a growing lump on the cheekbone under his left eye. True, I had a collection of assorted scrapes and bruises, too, the worst being my hand, although by now the pain had subsided into a dull throbbing. I hadn’t rated holy water, but Rawls had supplied me with peroxide and some gauze to bind it with. The thing was, I had the feeling this was how Jack Rawls usually looked—like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him in a back-alley fight but had left the other guy looking worse.
He really was a junkyard dog—snarling, tough and way too dangerous to pat. A cautious woman would have heeded the conventional wisdom of letting sleeping canines lie, I suppose, but I’ve always found caution and conventionality très overrated qualities.
More important, I needed to keep talking. Talking meant I didn’t have to think about the glimpse of Claudia’s crimson world she’d shared with me just before she turned to ash.
“If the divine Dr. M was their cosmetic surgeon, I can understand why he inspired such fanatical devotion in his patients. Honestly, darling, staking a man with that kind of talent is like staking Mozart. Couldn’t you have made an exception in his case and just put him under house arrest or—”
“Dr. M?” Rawls’s eyes snapped open. “Dr. Middleton?”
I’d finally caught his attention. It was a trifle ego-shattering that my exposed curves hadn’t been able to accomplish that feat, but at least I’d come up with something he found more interesting than sleep. “Linda simply called him the ‘divine Dr. M.’ Apparently, he was one of your past kills, which is why the three of them swore to hunt you down and take their revenge. As I say, I hope the good doctor was one bounty-hunting job that involved more than gas money—”
“Middleton wasn’t a job, he was a link in a chain I was following. That chain started in Nebraska with a girl named Mary Lou Gilly,” Rawls said, something smoldering behind the ice of his gaze. “The same chain led me straight here to you.”
I reacted badly to his statement, I admit. Oh, pooh—I’d been reacting badly all day, whether it had been to Terry’s dreary accusations or to Megan and Tash when they’d tried to pull their high-minded intervention in my social activities. But I was getting tired of being everyone’s favorite whipping girl, especially when I was more than a little stressed out with my own private worries.
Not that I expected to spontaneously combust when the first streaks of dawn showed in the sky. As Rawls had noted, lately I’d been finding it harder to function in the daytime, but that was only to be expected with my party-till-the-wee-hours schedule. I’d yet to have the urge to sink my teeth into a handy neck and I’d felt no revulsion when I’d seen him splashing holy water on his wounds.
So maybe Tashy a was right, and the Crosse triplet Zena had marked had gotten a Get-Out-Of-Vamphood-Free card when Megan had killed her. I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t, and neither could I believe there was a chance Tash had been marked instead of me. Even if I persuaded myself that my inability to stake vampires was due to paralyzing fear, I was still left with two inarguable points.
One was that I knew I was changing.
I’d first known it a few weeks ago, although I’d told myself I was imagining things. I’d also told myself that my decision to move out of the Crosse mansion and take an apartment on my own was totally unrelated to my fears. But during the past week, the feeling had become an almost daily occurrence—a strange sense of dislocation with my own psyche, my own thought patterns, that came and went instantly but left me feeling oddly invaded. I’d tried to chalk the feeling up to my higher-than-normal cocktail consumption, but when Claudia’s crimson-soaked world had called to me tonight and something in me had wanted to answer its call, my fears became bleak certainty. Zena’s twenty-one-year-old legacy was bearing its poisonous fruit. I was turning into what she’d been.
But I had absolutely no intention of thinking about that particular subject until I had a brimming glass of something numbingly alcoholic in my hand.
Thanks to Mr. Tall, Dark and Pissy, however, I wasn’t going to be within hailing distance of a jigger of vodka for a while. To add insult to injury, he was apparently under the impression that I was linked to the late Linda’s divine Dr. M, whose staking apparently had been a labor of love and not one of Rawls’s bounty-hunting commissions; and to some Cornhusker State female with a name that sounded like it had been plucked straight out of a country and western hurtin’ song.
I take back my mea culpa. Under the circumstances, I think I reacted with admirable control to Rawls’s hostile declaration.
“That chain you followed must have had a broken link, Jack,” I said in my most languid drawl. “All I know about Dr. M is what Linda told me before you dusted her, and as for a Mary Lou…Gilly, did you say?” I gave an exaggerated shudder. “Aside from the fact that I’ve never been within a hundred miles of Nebraska, she doesn’t sound like someone I’d have a lot in common with, sweetie. I mean, the name simply screams big hair, a softer-side-of-Sears outfit and shoes with court heels, no?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Rawls got to his feet and looked down at me, his expression unreadable. “When I first knew her, she wore rolled-up jeans and Keds. When I ran into her years later, she’d graduated to crotch-high minis and see-through blouses. The last time I saw her she was naked and dead and covered in her own blood.”
His tone was so uninflected that for a second the impact of his words didn’t hit me. Then it did, and I drew in a quick breath. “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately. “For talking like such a shallow bitch, as well as for what happened to her. How did she die?”
“Badly.” His gaze on me was unwavering. “The vamp who killed her liked torturing the hookers he picked up before he finally finished them off, and as a former surgeon, his preferred method was a scalpel. He was a real Mozart with it.”
I closed my eyes. “No wonder you made it your business to track down Middleton and stake him. You…you say he targeted hookers. Is that how—”
“I wasn’t one of her johns, I was her half brother,” Rawls said tightly. “When I was sixteen and big enough to stand up to the bastard who was my stepfather, I beat the crap out of him and walked out. The next time I saw Lou she wasn’t a seven-year-old who hero-worshipped her big brother anymore. She was a fifteen-year-old who’d been selling herself on street corners for a year. She told me to go to hell and got into a Mercedes that pulled up to the curb. After searching all night for her and her john in one fleabag joint after another, the next morning I stood in a blood-spattered motel
