Wolf at the Door

  “With a satin underlay!”

  James Earl Jones deep and scary. “Okay.”

  “And a cushioned footbed!”

  “O-kay!” He ignored Rachael’s renewed gestures of impending death. “My point was, they’re fine. In fact, we’re bringing them right over, so just chillax.”

  “Oh, Edward.” Like magic—it was, probably!—the queen’s voice was back to the pleasant contralto of earlier. “Nobody says chillax anymore.”

  “Hey, when I need to update my trends and pop culture refs, I’m not gonna check with a vampire. For all I know, you think zoot suits are trendy and you like to relax by doing the Charleston.”

  “Voh-doh-dee-oh-doh, baby.” She laughed. “We’re cranking up the blender at four. See ya.”

  He clicked off the call and looked at Rachael. “She’s either super-evil or super-cool.”

  “Can’t she be both?” Rachael rolled her eyes. “You realize after that surreal chat, I have to take you. I’m sure she’ll have all kinds of questions. Dammit!”

  “Aw, c’mon. It’ll be fun.”

  Rachael had slipped on the blue Beverly Feldman Bonvivant flats and now gave him a look. “Fun? This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons, Edward. You could get hurt. You could get dead.”

  “What about you?”

  “They most likely wouldn’t dare. They know my cousin sent me out here to keep an eye on things. And they know who my cousin is.”

  “Yeah, well, they also know who my friend Boo is, so I’m just as well protected—or poorly protected—as you are.”

  “Careful, Edward. That was almost clever.”

  “Hey, I’m almost clever lots of times. And now with my hot werewolf gal pal looking out for me? Evil doesn’t stand a chance. Besides, if they kill us in horrible grisly protracted ways, Boo will avenge us.” He snapped his fingers. “She could be here any hour. If she got a flight out this morning, she could be here any minute. That’s the other reason I had to come with. I want to give Boo all the intel I can.”

  “And you want to give me all the stomach ulcers you can. Come on.” She sighed and jerked her head toward the door. “Do you want to walk to our horrible grisly protracted deaths, or drive?”

  “Walk. Let’s try to keep our deaths as green as we can. Even in death, I try to watch out for planet Earth.”

  He could tell she didn’t want to laugh but couldn’t help it. In fact, Rachael laughed so hard she almost fell down on the porch. Which got him started. What with one thing and another, their giggles didn’t dry up until they were climbing the steps to the vampire’s lair.

  If we end up mutilated and murdered, at least we could say we had fun on the way over. It was weird that stuff like that was important to him, right?

  Forty-four

  “You’re going to have to answer some questions,” the cop who lived with the vampire queen told them.

  Whoa. Edward was still reeling from the intros, never mind the murders. Not that he thought murders should go on anybody’s back burner. But a lot of shit had been going down lately. Murders just made it grittier.

  He was so proud of Rachael . . . she was aces at everything, absolutely everything she did, and playing diplomat with the undead was the least of it.

  She’d knocked on the door, cool as you please, and when the zombie answered, she was all, “Hey, how are ya?” and “Have you met my friend Edward?” and “Do you think we could talk to the lady of the house?” All relaxed and polite! Like this was an everyday thing for her!

  Which it might be. He had no idea what her life in Massachusetts had been like, but he planned to find out. Because apparently, Cape Cod was infested with werewolves! And really, it explained so much . . . all that numb shit people usually put on tourists was probably numb werewolf shit.

  Then . . . then! Off they go, and Edward wasn’t sure what he was expecting—nothing like a throne room, natch, but something special, like a big fancy living room with thrones instead of sectional couches . . . at the very least, something like that. He was not expecting an industrial-sized kitchen with fruit scattered everywhere and three—three!—blenders cranking out fruit smoothies every ten seconds.

  So that’s how he ended up drinking a strawberry-banana smoothie with the queen of the vampires and her ilk at five o’clock in the afternoon.

  Right, he’d almost forgotten . . . it was only afternoon, but all the vampires were up! None of them knew they were supposed to lie in their coffins and do impersonations of dead people until full dark. They must not be reading the right legends.

  Oh, and can we tell the studio audience that the vampire queen’s lair is also a COMPLETE BABE FACTORY? Because it is!

  First he got a look at the one Rachael had referred to as Jailbait. And yep, she was. Looked it, anyway; God (and maybe the vampire queen) only knew how old she really was. Long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail that ended in the middle of her back. A sleek black headband keeping her bangs out of her eyes. A dark red pleated skirt, spotless white blouse (a good trick in a kitchen that had fruit everywhere), red cardigan, spotless white tights, little tiny black flats. And that face! Zow. Pale, perfect, with luminous dark eyes that were almost as pretty as Rachael’s.

  Yeah. And that was one vampire. One.

  He’d seen the pregnant woman before, of course, and found out her name was Jessica. It turned out she was one of the only two “normal” ones in the bunch. (Three, if you counted the baby, but who knew what was going to come rocketing out of her?) Except Jessica wasn’t just Betsy’s friend, she was sort of like Bruce Wayne . . . Edward had gotten the impression that she funded at least some of their operation with her own money.

  Oh, and Betsy. Yeah, Betsy. That was the name of the queen of the vampires. Yet another illusion, shattered.

  “I am pleased to meet Your Dark Majesty,” he’d said, all formal and everything (he’d practiced), and the dark majesty started laughing so hard she choked on her smoothie, and Jessica had to bang her on the back four or five times.

  When she could talk, she’d greeted him with, “What’s it like, being one of the biggest geeks in the world?”

  And he’d come back with, “Back off, you harpy. Why don’t you go pound some strawberries straight up your nose?”

  And she’d liked that. She laughed! And her underlings had laughed, too.

  The other normal person turned out to be the father of Jessica’s baby . . . and a cop! Edward was filled with admiration. The queen’s minions came from all walks of life (and death). Her info pipeline must be as wide as it was deep. Plus, her husband was Dark Dude! And if Dark Dude made less than ten million bucks last year, Edward would eat all the candles on the guy’s next birthday cake.

  So: rich friends in high and low places, friends with and without pulses, plus her very own zombie army of one (so far).

  And that was only what he’d been able to find out in five minutes. He hadn’t even tried to find any of that out. He felt lucky to have retained even that info; he was having a very hard time keeping from geeking out.

  Every time he realized, every time the simple home truth tried to emerge that he was hanging out with vampires (and their queen!) and a werewolf (who he’d had sex with a lot!) and a zombie (who was just the nicest guy you could ever meet) and a homicide detective (who not only had knocked up his girlfriend but was fine with his baby growing up in this environment) and someone born during the Civil War (the fucking Civil War!), every time those truths started to emerge, he had to fight the impulse to utterly geek out.

  Don’t you dare. It’ll embarrass Rachael. And yourself! And Rachael.

  So many questions. So little time. Must . . . squash . . . inner . . . nerd.

  So in an attempt to get ahold of himself, to act like an adult, or at least someone so cool they weren’t tempted to nerd up during Smoothie Time, in an attempt to somehow bring all that to heel, he’d blurted, “Too bad about all those murders, huh?”

  And from there, it had stopped being silly and starte
d being scary.

  Forty-five

  “This is awkward,” Detective Nicholas Berry said, “but you’re not a serial killer, are you? Or know any?”

  “Not since the operation,” Rachael replied. She had liked the homicide detective (Interest. Curiosity. Lust.) at once. She didn’t hold the frisson of sexual attraction against him. Whether you were Pack or human or undead (or not), you couldn’t help it if you were attracted to someone. She never blamed people for that . . . only for how they acted on it.

  “What is that, your punch line?” Betsy asked. “You trotted that one out the other day, too. Also not funny, I hesitate to point out, and yet must for the sake of our continued good time.”

  “Which part wasn’t funny, the line, or the fact that she might be a serial killer?”

  “Both,” the queen admitted. She turned to the detective, a handsome blond man with swimmer’s shoulders and a tan jacket from Armani. They must pay cops way more in St. Paul than they do in Boston. They were clearly good friends, judging by the ease in their body language and how they spoke to each other. “What’s on your so-called mind, Beriberi?”

  “Another nickname, Betsy? Wouldn’t it just be easier to get everyone’s actual name right? ‘Hello, my name is Detective Berry, nice to meet you.’ Like that? How hard is that?”

  “You do not command me, mortal law enforcer,” Betsy had replied with dead-on arrogance, done well enough to make them all snicker. “Go search yourself, Beriberi.” Then, to Rachael: “I shouldn’t be teasing. Those poor people! And not even killed for something they did. They’re just . . . decoration. Killed only because their killer needs something noticed, something that has nothing to do with them or the lives they led.”

  In that moment, Rachael liked the vampire queen more than she could have imagined. She had assumed a vampire queen would have the standard arsenal of charisma and charm. She hadn’t expected that respect would follow so quickly on the heels of liking.

  “What are you talking about?” Edward was looking at both of them. “Did you find something out?”

  “You could say that,” Detective Berry said. “DNA.”

  “No shit! Then you’ve got him, right?”

  The detective smiled at Edward, but it was a nice smile, and there wasn’t a trace of condescension in his voice when he replied, “It’s not quite as simple as Law and Order makes it out to be.”

  “Those bastards lied to us again?” Jessica yelped. “Oh, Detectives Stabler and Benson, say it ain’t so.”

  “Oh, God, don’t start on those two,” Edward groaned. “My roommate—one of my roommates—lives for that show. He’s got a huge crush on Mariska Hargitay. He went to see an episode of The Martha Stewart Show because she was the guest star and Martha taught her how to make doilies, or something.”

  Rachael had noticed the other vampire—not the queen—had flinched at oh, God. That was good to know. That was very good to know.

  “Well, anyway, the murders aren’t in our jurisdiction, but Betsy’s boss man, there, made a few phone calls.”

  “Eric Sinclair is not my boss man,” the queen said, every word a knife.

  “Easy, whoa there, big fella,” Jessica said. “Take it easy, Betsy. Your pills?”

  “Well, he’s not.”

  “The DNA didn’t hit.”

  “So it wasn’t any good?” Rachael asked. She was privately wondering if there was any way she or Mrs. Cain could get to a crime scene and give it a sniff.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t any good. I said it didn’t hit. Lucky for you, huh, Rachael?”

  She blinked. They were all looking at her, even Edward. “What?” Concern. Fear. Worry. Concern. Resignation. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s your DNA, Rachael.”

  Forty-six

  “Whoa!”

  “Edward—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” Edward had more than jumped out of his seat. He had rocketed out of the damned thing. Adrenaline was a wonderful thing.

  He’d jumped up and run over and stood in front of Rachael. “She didn’t do it!”

  “We know.”

  “So just pack up your arresting paperwork and back off, Beriberi!”

  “Oh, don’t tell me that stupid nickname’s gonna stick now.”

  “Focus, please! Someone’s out to make Rachael look bad. Like they even could, I mean, look at the woman. They don’t come much hotter than this, right?” He gestured to her. She hadn’t moved from her seat, just shifted her weight so she could tip her head back and look straight at him. “That’s what all this has been about, making vampires look bad to Pack, and Pack look bad to vamps.”

  “That was our theory as well.”

  “There’s no way she went to any of those crime scenes and committed any of those murders to make those crime scenes. No way!”

  “Edward—”

  “Shut up, Rache,” he muttered. Then, louder, “You guys don’t even know, okay? She’s as smart as she is hot, but even better, she’s as nice as she is smart. Do you know how rare it is to find a chick this smokin’ who isn’t also a huge bitch? Huh? Because it’s pretty fucking rare!”

  “Awwww,” the queen said. Then: “He’s right. We are rare.”

  “She’s not out here by choice, she got sent here, like for a job. She was made to yank her entire life out by the roots and drag it halfway across the country, get it? And she’s such a good person she didn’t question any of it! So now here she is, and bodies are piling up, and that’s not her fault and it’s probably not even you guys’ fault, but here she is anyway, stuck in the middle of a mess she didn’t make. But she’s here, right? Getting shit done. She got sent to keep an eye on you guys . . . and you land her in this kind of trouble? When she could have said fuck you to all of us and stayed home?”

  He knelt beside her, took her hand in his—

  worry anger fear anger love love love love worry anger love love love

  —and said, “Rache, I know you’d never do anything like this. These guys aren’t touching you. Nobody’s laying a finger on you, got it? We’ll get you out of here and you’ll call your cousin and he’ll fix everything or you’ll engage your awesome brain and solve the crime.

  “But I’m not letting them put you in a cage for even one nanosecond. I know you guys—the Pack . . . well, I don’t know the Pack. I only know you. And you couldn’t stand being in a cage. Not even a dinky holding cell downtown for a couple of hours. And as long as I’m here—”

  “Encouraging you to add resisting arrest to your résumé,” Detective Berry said dryly.

  “—nobody’s gonna lock you away.”

  “Edward . . .”

  “I mean it, Rache.”

  “Edward, you’re a fool.”

  “Thanks, I lo—wait. You aren’t saying the lines I imagined you’d say,” he admitted, looking flustered.

  “You’re a fool and I love you.”

  “Oh. I imagined you saying something like that, even if you’re not saying it exactly the way I pictured.”

  “I’d like to take you for my mate. I’d like to bear your cubs.”

  He looked at her. He looked and his eyes got bigger and bigger and she was getting a little alarmed—would he pass out?—when he turned away from her and said to the room, “Y’see? She loves me! And I love her! (I’ve just realized.)” He turned to her. “You knew I loved you before I did. This is one of those cool werewolf things where you knew something about me I didn’t know!”

  “That isn’t true, Edward.” She kissed him, a long one full of what they both knew. “You knew before your body could give me the cues. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been anything for me to pick up on.”

  He quickly kissed her back. “I love you.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Are you really gonna be smug about this?”

  “Sure.”

  He laughed, and then remembered they wanted to arrest his lover—except was she now his fiancée, maybe?—for multiple murde
rs.

  Right. Back to work.

  Forty-seven

  “Right! Okay.” He took a few seconds to get his bearings. “So, in closing, don’t you dare even waste half a minute arresting mah woman—I always wanted to try pronouncing it like that—when she’s not guilty. Mah woman!”

  Edward was watching the others carefully; he was the only one standing. Not even the cop had stood. They were just sort of sprawled in their chairs around the table, sipping smoothies and watching him.

  Good. Maybe they were going to stay cool. That’d be unexpected and lovely. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Worse, nothing like this had ever been written about in a movie or graphic novel or book before, as far as he knew, so he had no idea where to go from there.

  “Rachael, Detective Beriberi said it himself, it’s not even his jurisdiction. So you and I are going to get up and walk out of here and then you’re gonna call your cousin and get the cavalry out here to find the real killer—”

  “We’re pretty sure we know who that is,” Detective Berry said, “so if you need a name or address, just let me know.”

  “—so you can clear your name.” Wait. What? “Wait. What?”

  “Well, let’s see. If you have a name, that means not only did you find my DNA,” Rachael guessed, “you found proof that it was planted DNA. Something I couldn’t have left behind by accident. And since I wouldn’t go to the trouble of planting my own DNA at a crime scene when I’m a good source of my own DNA, you knew someone was trying to frame me.”

  “Hey, that sounds pretty good . . . hmmm.” Okay. Well, he knew Rachael was as smart as she was hot. Good to have further verification on that. “Uh, what have you guys all figured out that I don’t know yet?” It was gonna sound vain, but he was sort of used to being the smartest person in the room, in most rooms . . .

  “I didn’t figure anything out,” the queen said, looking sympathetic. “Honest. They had to explain it to me, too.”

  It worked! He smiled at her and said, “Hey, thanks, that actually cheered me up. I’ve been standing here wondering how long I need to keep the dunce cap on.”