like that. I like delicious men. I like having a cocktail or two. Is that simple enough for you, sweetie?”
Tash’s gaze hardened. “Go to hell, Kat.”
“Been there, done that, courtesy of Zena, remember?” I said with a sweet smile. “Or is my little sojourn in the hot place on the night we battled her and her vamp army just another one of those things we’re supposed to forget about?”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Tash said tightly. “Because the woman who came back from there wasn’t my sister anymore.”
She spun on her heel, leaving me alone in the room. That’s when I walked out of the club and practically into the fangs of a vampire, the perfect finishing touch to a day that had turned completely to merde.
Chapter 2
Thank God I was wearing Manolos. Swiftly I slipped off my left shoe and grabbed it up. By the inadequate illumination of the few parking lot lights, the vampire looked to be a teenager. He was moving so fast he almost ran into the spiked heel and staked himself, but he skidded to a halt just in time. He looked at me, astonishment on his acned face.
“Are you fucking kidding? That’s not gonna work.”
“I don’t see why it fucking wouldn’t, sweetie,” I told him. I heard the slight fuzziness in my voice and made a mental note not to drive home if I got out of this alive, but at least the cocktails I’d downed over the course of the afternoon lent me a certain Dutch courage, I realized. The hand that was holding the Manolo against his AC/DC T-shirt was rock-steady. “And you’re not so sure it won’t, either,” I continued. “If you were, you would have rushed me by now.”
He stared at me in frustration, and then the red glow in his eyes faded a little. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Guess I’ll just have to use my glamyr on you.”
The air between us seemed to shimmer. For a moment his adolescent chest took on definition under the dirty tee, his greasy brown hair looked glossy and beautiful and a wave of dark sexuality began lapping around me, drawing me to him. Even his acne-ridden skin cleared up before my very eyes.
Except for the angry red pimple on his chin. I shook my head and took a breath. “Zit-check at six o’clock,” I said, feeling the glamyr dispel abruptly. “Sorry, sweetie, but it ruins everything.”
“Shit!” he swore, his hand going self-consciously to his chin. “For a couple of weeks before I turned, my skin actually looked pretty good,” he said defensively. “I was going out with this girl who worked in Hazlitt’s Drugstore and she gave me these medicated pad things, you know? Then Bitsy and me broke up and I stopped using the pads. Just my crap luck to become undead when I was back in pizza-face mode.”
Megan’s MINI was still parked next to mine. Obviously she and Tash had been delayed in leaving the club. My plan was to keep the vamp talking until they showed up, but something he’d said puzzled me enough that I didn’t have to fake interest “Hazlitt’s?” I frowned, taking care not to relax my grip on my impromptu stake. “I can remember Grammie Crosse taking me there for ice cream when I was about five or six, but they must have gone out of business at least ten years ago. When did you become a—”
Maybe he’d been trying to keep me talking, too, in the hopes I’d become distracted enough that he could risk a lunge at me. But as it had done with me, something in our conversation triggered a real response from him.
“Crosse? You’re one of the Crosse sisters?” His face had been pale before, another indication that he needed to feed, but now it went so white his acne stood out like beacons. He took a step backward. “Oh, fuck, you’re not Kat, are you?”
“Megan,” I lied immediately. “If you’ve heard of my sister, you’ve heard of me, too, so you know you don’t stand a chance against—”
“Nuh-uh.” He took another step back, his eyes beginning to glow red again. “I can smell a Daughter of Lilith a mile away, and you’re not the vamp killer. You were trying to fuck me up! You were trying to get me to bite you, you bitch!”
“I was trying to make you bite me?” I leaned in, astonishment momentarily overriding my fear. “Is this the undead variation of ‘you know you want it, honey?’ Because I don’t appreciate it when human males try to pull that merde on me, and I’m certainly not about to let an underage, undead vampire—”
“Stay away from me!”
His words came out in a high-pitched snarl. As I stood there, my Manolo clutched in my nerveless hand and fear freezing me to the spot, he backpedalled away from me so fast that his feet got tangled up with each other and he tripped. He scrambled up again, his horror-filled red eyes still locked on mine. Then he turned to run.
I think I saw the stake before he did, but I’d swear he had time to dodge out of the way and save himself. Instead, he seemed to run deliberately into its path.
It came speeding through the near-dark parking lot with unerring accuracy, the deadly tip sinking deep into the left side of his chest, right through the DC part of the gothic AC/DC lettering on his tee. His hands flew to the shaft of wood sticking from him, as if he intended to pull it out.
His glowing eyes met mine again, but instead of the terror that had been in them a second ago, I saw an emotion so out of place that I knew I had to be mistaken. His hands fell away from the stake, his lips drew back from his razor-sharp canines in a death-rictus, the red glow in his eyes dimmed.
Then he turned to ash.
In the past couple of months I’ve seen so many vamps die that you’d think I’d be used to it. My sisters are. Megan stands over her kills grimly, as if she wants their last sight on earth to be the Daughter of Lilith who sent them to hell. Tash is the opposite; she all but does a victory dance around the ashes, and once I saw her kick them. Grandfather Darkheart caught that little performance, too, and in his heavy Carpathian accent gave her a stern lecture that I could tell Tashya tuned out before the second sentence.
I feel agonizing pain. The first time I experienced it, I was sure the vamp had somehow turned my stake against me before he’d died and I’d looked down at myself, expecting to see a yew-wood shaft protruding from my body and dark gouts of blood pouring from the wound.
I felt like that now, but I didn’t bother looking for a wound I knew wasn’t there. Instead, I turned to watch Megan sprinting across the parking lot toward me, Tash right behind her. I took a breath and put on my best bored manner.
“Yay, team. Chalk up another one for the good guys, and all that.” Languidly I pumped the hand holding the Manolo into the air before bending to slip my shoe back onto my foot. “Impressive stake-hurling, sis. Ever think of giving up this vampire-killing gig and trying out for the Olympic javelin toss?”
Megan retrieved her stake and shoved it into the strap holster on her left bicep. “You’ve got a right to be pissed,” she said evenly. “I shouldn’t have interfered with your kill. Sorry, Kat.”
“We saw you standing there like a dummy and we thought you were caught up in his glamyr,” Tashya explained. “Either that, or so scared you were about to wee-wee your panties. Which one was it, Kat?”
I raised my eyebrows and hoped my drawl covered the last remnants
