Maybe I could fake going to sleep? Sure, it was 2:34 A.M., the vampire equivalent of midday. But a sexual effort like that deserved a catnap, right? Plus, I’d lost a lot of blood earlier in the evening—
“If you don’t get up off the glass, your skin’s going to heal over it. It will itch for decades.”
That was…not what I expected.
He shifted to his feet, shaking debris out of his hair. His skin was ruddier, suffused with my blood. He looked almost tan.
That must have been what he looked like in life, minus the splinters of table sticking out of his back.
Gabriel made a hesitant grab for his pants and slid them on. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t go all prom date on me, Gabriel,” I said, my voice harder than I intended. I got up, leaving a wake of glass tinkling to the floor. I grabbed my robe and yanked it over my back. “My father isn’t going to show up on your doorstep with a shotgun and a preacher.”
He touched my arm and made me turn to face him. “In light of what’s happened, I think you should come stay with me for a while.”
“I don’t think moving in together is the answer to our problems.”
“We don’t have problems,” Gabriel insisted.
“You killed someone!”
“I killed someone for you!”
“Well, pardon me if I don’t think that’s going to make it into the next collection of Hallmark cards!” I cried. “And don’t think that this changes anything,” I growled, fangs creaking to full length. I closed my eyes, tamping my temper down. “We are not back to normal, whatever normal is for us. I’m still—I just don’t want to be around you right now. I think you’d better go.”
Well, if punching him in the face didn ’t hurt him, that certainly did. His lips parted, but he pressed them back together, reconsidering saying something that would probably piss me off even more.
“Jane, please, we can talk about this,” he said, stepping toward me. When he saw the anguish on my face, he stopped. “I’ll call you.”
“Please don’t.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
“Well, at least that wasn’t weird.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and surveyed the damage to my living room: chipped bric-a-brac, a shattered table, and a scrambled brain. And I didn’t know where my underwear was.
19
Remember, you’re much more flammable now than you were in life. So live every day as if you’re soaked in gasoline.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
Sometime between my sustaining multiple gunshot wounds and losing my panties, Dick had called my cell phone to leave me a cryptic voice-mail message.
“Hey, Jane, it’s Dick,” he said, his voice unusually quiet and subdued. “Do you think you could stop by my place sometime tonight? I need to talk to you.”
It was almost four by the time I heard the voice mail. And Dick wasn’t answering his phone, so I risked some early-morning exposure to drive to his trailer. Because if I was at home, I would be cleaning up broken glass and thinking about what I had decided to call “the incident.”
My phone rang as I jogged up the steps to Dick’s trailer. The caller ID said it was Gabriel. I debated picking it up but finally hit the ignore button. I knocked on the door and—
WHHHOOOOOMMMMMMPPFFF
Red and gold stars exploded at the base of my skull as I was blown off Dick ’s porch and onto the hood of my car. My frustration at being thrown through yet another windshield was superseded by the fact that my sleeves were on fire. It seemed to be a more pressing concern. I slapped them out just before a secondary explosion knocked me back again. The blast threw me off the car, thwacking the back of my head against the cement blocks supporting a nearby El Camino. The flames burned orange behind my eyelids. I slipped into a soft black place where the burns on my arms didn’t leave me screaming.
I was still able to be knocked unconscious. That was comforting. What was not comfortable was the cot I was currently chained to. I was lying in a dimly lit room that smelled of bleach and cement dust. Someone had taken the time to remove my smoldering clothes and put me in blue hospital scrubs. I jerked at the handcuffs binding my wrists and shrieked. Though healing, the burns on my arms were the color and texture of barely cooked hamburger.
“Agh, I am fortune’s bitch,” I moaned. Not exactly Shakespeare, I’m aware, but I was operating with a concussion. I sniffed at the chains. Under the tang of steel, I smelled something stronger.
“They’re reinforced with titanium,” a smooth, young female voice informed me from the darkness.
“Fortune’s bitch,” I said again.
Ophelia was sitting in a folding chair in the corner. Her fangs glinted as she offered a thin smile. “You do have a way with words.”
“What is going on?” I asked, trying to sit up. My very sensitive equilibrium told me this was a bad idea. “Who let the mariachi band loose in my head?”
Ophelia, who I could now see was wearing an obscenely short plaid skirt and a schoolgirl blouse, crossed to the foot of my bed. “I told you to behave yourself. I told you to stay under the radar.”
“I did,” I protested, the slightest hint of a whine creeping into my voice.
“Then how do you explain your being found unconscious outside a burning trailer belonging to one of the oldest vampires in the region?”
Not that again. “Look, for the last time, I didn’t do anything. I walked up to the door, and the trailer exploded. Wait! Was Dick inside? Is he dead?”
There were the shark eyes again, which were even scarier when they were flashing at me from the dark. “Considering the hour, we’re assuming he was inside. Of course, we wouldn’t find him if he was inside. The fire would reduce him to dust. The question is why you were stupid enough to knock yourself out before you were able to leave the scene of the crime.”
The terror was giving way to anger, which I assumed was a good sign. I demanded, “Why would I set Dick on fire?”
“Why would you set Walter on fire?” she asked.
“I didn’t set Walter on fire!” I shouted.
“Give me an explanation, Jane. Give me something to take back to the other council members, to the vampires who will demand justice. Give me some plausible reason for two men you are rumored to be involved with—whether that involvement is real or imagined, it won’t matter to the community—having both been set on fire. Explain why you were found outside Dick’s burning trailer after you were recently seen having a lovers’quarrel with him at a party.”
“That wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel! That was a friendly conversation!”
“You were seen hitting him repeatedly.”
“It was a friendly conversation that involved me hitting him repeatedly.”
Ophelia did not look convinced.
I sighed. “What’s going to happen to me? Is a vampire detective going to come in here and question me with a phone book and a rubber hose?”
I could see the amusement reach her eyes, but she refused to smile. “A tribunal has been called to discuss your case.
Depending on the outcome of that discussion, you may have a trial tomorrow.”
“A trial,” I repeated before realization dawned. “The trial? Wait, don’t I get a lawyer or a phone call or something?”
“No,” she said, uncuffing me. I sat up slowly. She was across the room and out of my reach in a glimmer of movement.
Where was the trust? “You’re accused of immolating two of your own kind. The Bill of Rights no longer applies to you.”
She turned toward the door, then whirled back on me. She stood by the cot, peering down at me with those glowing black eyes.
“I regret this. You seem to be an interesting vampire.”
“Then don’t do this!” I yelled. “Stop making an example of me for other young vampires. I’m a terrible example. More weird stuff happens to me in a week than is foisted upon the average person in an entire lifetime.”
“I regret this,” she repeated. “But I also regret the loss of Dick Cheney. Once upon a time, we were…close acquaintances.”
“Am I the only person in the Hollow who hasn’t slept with Dick Cheney?”
“Possibly,” she admitted.
“Sorry,” I said. Shrugging my shoulders was a painful gesture that let me know there were bits of glass embedded somewhere near my shoulder blade. Gabriel was right, it itched.
Gabriel.
“My sire, Gabriel Nightengale, does he know I’m here?” I asked as she opened my cell door.
She nodded. “You’re not allowed visitors,” she said, shutting the very solid door behind her.
And for the first time since being shot and left for dead, I was truly frightened.
Whenever those horrible “women in prison” movies were played on Lifetime, I thought, what’s the big deal about prison? I could handle solitary. Even if I couldn’t read, I could daydream. I could write. I would take naps.
Well, like many of my predeath preconceived notions, that one was destroyed. There was no window, so I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. There was no clock, so I never knew what time it was. I couldn’t sleep, because the healing burns on my arms itched like crazy. And my daydreams were interrupted by pesky questions such as, “Where is Gabriel?” “Why does this keep happening to me?” “Am I going to die for real this time?”
I spent half my time trying to figure out where the hell I was. When I pressed my ear against the wall, I could hear traffic. I heard voices at least twenty feet above my head, but I couldn’t make out any actual words. And there was a rat somewhere in the plumbing.
The only good thing I could say about the clink was that the blood (served in a paper cup shoved through a slot in my door) was fresh and tasty. It was also of an indeterminate origin, but I decided not to ask questions.
I was halfway to drawing “LOVE” and “HATE” on my knuckles, when Ophelia returned. She was wearing black silk pants and a top that may, at one point, have been a handkerchief. I stood up, grateful for any sort of interaction, even if it could mean I was facing a spookily titled punishment.
