judgment. Although he might have a point about finding someone to replace him on the job,” I admitted, my airiness fading.
“You should have thought about that before you did the floor and table and shower thing with him.” Tashya joined us. In contrast to Megan’s basic black, she was wearing a ribbon-belted Zac Posen bias-cut skirt topped with a cashmere shell in pale lemon that played up the strawberry-blond glints in her curls. In my bitchier moments I compare her to Shirley Temple, but most of the time I have to admit she looks like a Botticelli angel. She’d obviously entered the club with Megan but, being made of less stern stuff than a Daughter of Lilith, she’d been distracted by Ramon’s conga line of hotties. She cast a last, longing look at them. “Not that I’m complaining, but why do they have to drop their laundry to get a job here?”
“Because the staff uniform’s almost as revealing,” I told her. “Think Chippendale dancers. I want to be sure every male working at the new Hot Box is absolutely to-die-for from head to toe. Did I tell you about my idea to—”
“Kat, we didn’t come here to talk about your club,” Megan cut in. She frowned. “Although just as an aside, you’re surely not going to keep the name Hot Box, are you?”
Even a Daughter of Lilith could be distracted, it seemed, but distractability wasn’t a positive when it came in the repressive tone of voice Megan was using. I studied her, trying and failing to see the sister I’d grown up with—the one who’d rolled her eyes with me over Tash’s irritating whininess, giggled with me over how dumb but fascinating boys were and later snickered with me over how dumb but fascinating men were—who’d known all my secrets and told me all hers.
Sometime in the past two months, that sister had left me. She’d been replaced by the seriousfaced woman in front of me—a woman who’d sworn she wouldn’t let anything stand in the way of her hereditary mission to kill vampires.
I suddenly wished I’d made my cocktail a double. I looked at the pink froth rimming my empty glass and said the first thing that came into my head. “God, no.” I gave her a tiny smile. “I’ve decided to call the club The Vampire’s Kiss. Appropriate, yes?”
Megan’s gaze went flat. “Appropriate, no,” she said tersely. “Not to mention tasteless. In case you’ve forgotten, our mother gave her life in the fight against vampires.”
“And either Tash or I received the kiss of the same queen vamp who vanquished her,” I drawled. “Ever notice how we don’t talk about that much anymore, sis? Not since we learned you weren’t the one who got vamp-marked, anyway. I guess it’s a pretty delicate subject, though, with you feeling so honor-bound as a Daughter of Lilith to hunt down and stake any sister of yours who might suddenly turn undead on you.”
I expected a reaction from Megan, but I wasn’t prepared when Tash clamped a hand around my arm and pulled me a few feet away from the group of carpenters. She thrust her face into mine, her voice a furious whisper—furious but unnecessary, since Mr. Nail Gun was loudly at work again. “We don’t talk about it because it doesn’t matter anymore!” she hissed. “Megan killed the queen vamp, and when a vamp that’s bitten you dies before you make your own first kill as a vampire, you’re saved! You know that as well as we do, so either your memory loss is from all the alcohol you’ve been tossing back lately, or there really is something to the phrase ‘screwing your brains—’”
“Congratulations, Tash,” Megan ground out through gritted teeth. “We agreed before we came here that we weren’t going to handle this intervention like a confrontation, and that’s exactly what you’ve turned it into.”
“Intervention?” I stared from one to the other of them. Tash looked ashamed, as she always does when she knows she’s crossed the line. Megan looked upset, and just for a moment I saw my sister, not a Daughter of Lilith, behind her worried gaze. Then she nodded slowly.
“Someone has to make you see what you’re doing to yourself, Kat. As usual, Tash shot her mouth off without thinking, but she’s right. In the past few weeks you’ve gone from indulging in the occasional cocktail to downing them like water, and that scene we walked in on when we arrived just bears out the other part of what she said.”
“That I screw my brains out?” I asked with icy politeness. “Because at least I do it with men, sweetie. Tell me, have you bought a dog license for Mikhail yet?”
Megan paled. I waited for her to scream at me, to insult me back, to give me an angry shove, but what she did was worse than any of those things.
She turned and walked away from me.
“On the bitch-o-meter, that one rang the bell,” Tash said hotly, planting her hands on her hips and tossing back a red gold curl from her glaring blue eyes. “Mikhail might be able to shapeshift into a wolf, but that doesn’t make him one. And for your information, it’s not the number of men you’ve been seeing that has Meg worried, it’s the way you treat them.”
As if by some mysterious signal, the hammering that had been going on all day by the stage suddenly stopped. Then I realized that the signal hadn’t been mysterious at all; the clock behind the bar showed eight o’clock, which meant the crew had put in their agreed-to overtime. On the other side of the room, both Ramon and his conga line had gone, too.
I felt like a drink. I started to push past Tash, but she stepped in front of me.
“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it, I’m going to say it anyway. You’ve always loved ’em and left ’em, sis, but now it’s different. Your carpenter boy-toy was right—you’ve turned into a ball breaker. You never spend more than one or two nights with the same man, and if they can’t be as casual as you are about it, you make sure you dump them as publicly and humiliatingly as possible. Megan says she can’t figure it out. It’s like you’ve got a hate on for all men. I agree. Only difference is, I have figured it out.”
“What an exciting new experience for you, sweetie,” I said acidly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I really must run.”
“This won’t take long.” Tash took a deep breath. “I know what’s been eating away at you since Megan killed Zena, and why you’ve been acting all ‘Girls Gone Wild’ lately and treating men like Kleenex. It’s because of what that queen bitch said about Dad just as Meg staked her—that he’d been one of her vamp servants and he’d betrayed Mom.” She bit her lip. “If that were true it would mean he betrayed us, too, in a way. We grew up on Grammie and Popsie’s stories about what a great son he was and how much he loved Mom and adored his darling baby daughters. When Zena realized she was going to hell, she saw how she could use our love for him as one final weapon against us, and that’s exactly what she did. But it wasn’t just a lie, it was a stupid lie, because Grandfather Darkheart saw our father’s dead body that night twenty years ago when Zena came for Mom and us. If Dad had been a vampyr, he’d have been dusted, not dead.”
Her words had tumbled out of her like a torrent. Now they abruptly dried up and her gaze burned into me.
I could have said a lot of things. I could have said that even if the son Grammie and Popsie remembered had once been as loving as they said, becoming a vamp would have changed him completely. I could have said that Grandfather Darkheart might well have lied about what he saw the night my mother died, to spare us pain. I could have said that it would be easy enough for a vampire to feign death to fool a desperate old man, and then to disappear into the night, never to be seen again.
I could have said any or all of these things, but seeing the shadowy fear lurking behind Tash’s china-doll blue gaze, I didn’t. I gave
