"I'm glad you hit me over the head with that right away," he retorted. "I wouldn't want you to wait."
"I'm just saying." If she could have blushed, she would have. That had sounded much worse out loud than she had meant. She was just...surprised. She hadn't a clue he had such deep feelings for her. All this time, and he never told her.
"You never told me."
"Well, I was waiting for exactly the right time."
"A vampire serial killer throwing us together? That was the right time?"
"Well, yeah."
"And there's a lot more to it than love, you know." She said this with triumph, as if she were thinking of reasons to make him be wrong about loving her.
"Sophie, what the hell are you talking about?"
"There's the issue of how I need blood to survive."
"Yeah, I know."
"Liam: I drink blood from living donors in order to function. I have to do it a lot."
"So? I have to eat regular food to survive."
"It's not the same thing."
"But it doesn't make you a bad person, right?
"No," she said slowly. "Feeding...biting and taking blood...it's like any weapon, I think. You've got a shotgun at home, yes? Well, is it a good shotgun or a bad shotgun?"
"Guess that depends," he replied. "If I use it to blow the head off a serial vampire scumbag killer, it's a good one. If I used it to, I dunno, hurt a kid or whatever, it's a bad one."
"Well, I think feeding is much the same. I could have hurt you. I could have killed you."
"I think you did kill me," he said cheerfully.
She didn't smile. "I'm being serious, Liam."
"Yeah, I can tell by the way you're sucking all the enjoyment out of this moment."
"And I'll outlive you," she continued doggedly, "unless we take steps."
"I know."
"I don't think you do."
"There it is again."
"What?"
"That I'm a vampire and a lot older, and so I'm smarter and just in general better than you."
"That's ridiculous!" she cried, freshly stung.
"Ha!"
"Ha yourself."
They didn't say another word until they got to the town where the last girl, Shawna, had lived and died. Then Liam said, "I'd prefer to ride with Betsy."
"You took the words right out of my head," she snapped, her idioms suffering, as always, when she was angry. She swung her door open and jumped out of the truck. "I'll send her over."
"Good."
"Good!" She stomped over to the king and queen, who looked to be in the middle of their own lover's spat.
"You don't suck like ordinary people suck, by the way. You suck like Academy Award-sucking. If there was an Oscar handed out for Most Sucking, you'd have it locked."
"You've got to come up with something new. Anything new."
"Excuse me, Majesties," she interrupted, her nervousness in their presence evaporating. She could be angry or she could be nervous, but apparently she couldn't be both. "Liam would like the queen to ride with him."
"Ride with...oh, right. The B and B thing." Shawna's mother had told them the killer was staying at a local bed-and-breakfast. There were two in town; they didn't know which one she had meant. So they had decided to split up. Originally each couple would make a team. Not any longer. "That's fine with me. Later, Sinclair." She walked over to Liam, who had gotten out and was standing beside the truck. "Hey, can I drive?"
He wordlessly handed her the keys, then walked around to the passenger's side. Sophie waited for a moment. For an apology? Whose?
"Dr. Trudeau, we need to be going," Sinclair told her.
"Sir," she replied miserably, and fell into step behind him.
11
"WHAT'S the matter?" Betsy asked him. She was so tall, she didn't have to adjust the seat, just the rearview mirror. "Did you guys have a big wicked fight, or what?"
"Something like that."
"I know what that's like."
"Mmm," he replied, secretly doubting she had the tiniest clue. Nice enough gal, and super-pretty, but a regular guy like him didn't have much in common with the queen of the vampires. "Okay."
"Dude, seriously. I'm supposed to be the consort of a guy who's totally arrogant and sneaky and has, like, eighty hidden agendas."
"You're supposed to be?"
"Don't even get me started. It's a whole long story, and I come off really bad in it. But so does Sinclair! Anyway--"
"You've got something..." He pointed to her neck, where three mosquitoes were currently having a party. He guessed...did mosquitoes bother vampires?
"What?" She brushed in the wrong spot, as people always did when told they had something on them. "What? Did I get it?"
"Here, I--" He brushed at her neck, and was startled when something snagged his finger. Well, he was pretty bad at this stuff. "Aw, shit, now I'm caught on something..." He pulled back, surprised to find a gold chain entwined on the end of his finger, and even more surprised to find a cross dangling from the end of the chain.
"Oh, crap! The chain broke!"
"I can fix it," he told her, since she seemed pretty upset about it.
"It's just, Sinclair gave it to me. I wouldn't want anything...it's nice, right?"
"Right." He stared at it in wonder...she was a vampire, correct? "Let me hold on to it for you, and I'll fix it when we're done tonight."
"Thanks. It used to belong to his sister, I guess it's a family heirloom thing. I wouldn't want anything to happen to it, is all. Anyway, where was I?"
"I'm sorry," Liam said. "But I've just gotta know. You're a vampire, right? The queen of them? What are you doing carrying around a cross? And if Sinclair gave it to you...I guess it's just an old wives' tale, huh?"
"Oh no, no," she assured him, stomping on the clutch and shifting into third. "Sorry, didn't mean to go all Bela Lugosi mysterious-ee on you. I haven't been a vampire very long...just a few months."
"That's why crosses don't work on you?"
"No, no. Nothing works on me. Crosses normally burn the crap out of a regular vampire, but I guess I'm special." She said it glumly, as if it wasn't a good thing at all. "Crosses don't burn me, and holy water makes me sneeze, and stakes through the chest don't work, but they sure wreck my clothes."
"That's too bad," he said, because he had to say something. "About your clothes, I mean."
"Tell me. My dry cleaner totally freaks out when I come near him these days. Anyway, crosses would burn Sinclair, except he got that one way back when his sister died, before he was a vampire."
"Oh."
"Okay? Everything cleared up?"
"Uh, sure," he said, pretending he heard this sort of thing all the time. Of course, very little had been cleared up. Why was this woman so special? Why had Eric Sinclair, whom she professed to dislike, given her a family heirloom, a religious symbol, no less? Could she be killed? Should she be killed?
He guessed he'd never know, and wasn't sure if that was good news, or bad.
"Now where was I? Oh, right, the jerkiness of Eric Sinclair."
"And the whole consort thing," he prompted her, pocketing the necklace.
"So, I'm supposed to just throw all my doubts aside and be his wife for, like, a thousand years or whatever. And nobody can understand why I'm not getting with the program." She laughed, sounding a little bitter. "Just forget everything I've ever learned and trust some guy who's as scary as he is good-looking."
Hmm. Wasn't that what he expected Sophie to do? Toss aside all she had learned, all she was, because he was mortal and he demanded it? Maybe her thing was more his problem than hers.
"Hellooooooo?" Betsy was saying, waving a hand in front of her face and steadying the steering wheel with the other. "My lips are moving; it's polite to pretend to listen."
"I heard every word," he assured her.
"IT seems your evening has been almost as stressful as mine."
"Sir, you have no idea." She glance
d over at him and was surprised to see a compassionate expression on his face. "I've had a lot thrown at me in the last few hours, that's all. I'm certainly not going to bore you with it."
"I'm interested," was all he said, so she found herself telling him the entire story...her loneliness since her friend had died; how wonderful Liam was; how she didn't know he had loved her in secret all those years; how wonderful Liam was (when he wasn't being a tiresome pig-head); how he seemingly accepted her vampire nature; how wonderful Liam was...all of it.
"It sounds like a wonderful problem to have."
"Sir, it's not that simple."
"No?"
"Sometimes it's...easier to stay by yourself."
"Keep the status quo, you mean."
"Yes."
"It's certainly safer."
"Yes." She saw where he was going and gave voice to her biggest fear. "He's a child with a crush."
"He looked full-grown to me. He also looks like a man who knows what he wants."
"Hmph."
They had finished searching the bed-and-breakfast, which was free of guests except for a couple on their honeymoon, currently enjoying themselves behind a closed bedroom door. No serial killers in that room.
Sophie was embarrassed; for a while she'd completely forgotten that there was quite a bit more at stake than her love life. But she and the king were almost half-hearted about the search; their enhanced senses had already told them the B and B was virtually deserted, but it was always best to make sure.
"Thank you for listening," she said, following him back out the front door. "I appreciate your advice and will think hard about what you've said."
"I didn't say much," he replied mildly. "Compared to my queen, I'm not much of a talker."
"Is that some kind of slam, pal? Because if you wanna go, we'll go." Betsy was walking through the front yard, Liam on her heels. "No luck at the other place. They've got a full house, and none of them are our guy. It's all couples."
"Couples like the killer with his new girlfriend?" Sophie asked.
"Naw," Liam said. "Couples like retired people on vacation. You guys didn't have any luck?"
"How could you search an entire house, then drive across town and be here just as we finished?" Sinclair asked.
"Dude: have you seen this town? It's, like, a mile long. Is it our fault we're way more efficient at looking for killers than you two are? I'm telling you, our guy's not there."
"Well, he isn't here either," Sophie said. "Damn it all. We'll have to go back and talk to Shawna's mother some more, poor thing. I was hoping we could leave her out of it."
Liam was looking at the wooden sign over the front door. "This is the Rose Manor. But The Garden Bed-and-Breakfast is the one we're looking for. We just assumed this was The Garden, because it's the other B and B you can see from the road. But..."
"There's another one," Sinclair said immediately. "Probably called The Iris or something tiresome like that. But since the same people own and run them both, they're considered one business. We checked the one across town, and we checked this one, because those are the two businesses."
A quick trip inside to speak with the owner confirmed their suspicions; there was indeed one other B and B called The Garden.
"Stupid," Liam said disgustedly. "We should have checked. Never assume, that's what my mom always said."
"I don't understand," Sophie said. "We checked the two in town. What are you talking about?"
"There's three in town, and they're all under the business name The Garden, because they're all owned by the same family. We checked two of them...you and Sinclair checked The Rose, Betsy and I checked The Tulip." At her mystified expression, he continued. "Those are the names of the individual houses, though they're all under the same business name. But there's one more, like the guy said inside. And it'll have another flower name, like Sinclair said."
"I guess it makes sense for the bad guy to make it hard for us to track him down," Betsy said. "I know I'm totally confused. But if there's another one, there's another one. Let's go check it out."
Five minutes later, they were standing at the end of a long driveway outside a third Victorian with yet another flower motif.
"The Sweetheart Rose," Sinclair said. "I was close."
"We're assuming he's even still there," Betsy said. "If it was me, I'd be long gone."
"He's not going anywhere," Sophie said as Sinclair nodded agreement. "With the funeral, and the reporters, and all the mourners...there's too much here for him still."
"Prick," Betsy commented, and this time, everyone nodded.
12
THE villain met them on the front steps.
This was startling, to say the least.
"Hello," he said cheerfully. "I was just leaving to go break another girl's heart, so I only have a minute."
Sophie felt like hitting him. With luck, she would soon be doing exactly that. "You what?"
"Dude, you are so busted," Betsy told him. Then, to Sinclair, "This kind of takes of fun out of it. No big showdown scene. Unless this is it."
"You killed all those girls," Sophie said, beginning to recover. She had a horrible feeling she knew why the youngish-looking man seemed so unconcerned. "It's the same as if you had..." She groped for the words. "Shot them or used a knife on them."
"Yes, I know." She could see why he passed for a premed student; he didn't look a day over twenty-five. He was short, only a few inches taller than she was, with hair that was exactly between blond and brown. He had pleasant features and looked rather like anyone else on the street, in his denim jacket and khaki slacks. His eyes were wide-set and brown. They were the only feature that gave him away. They glittered like a snake's. "I've been meaning to get down to Minneapolis and..." He cut himself off and laughed. "Okay, that's a lie. I've been up here having some fun, for a change."
Sophie was staring at him. They were all, she realized, staring at him. Betsy was right. This was a very odd way to go about catching a killer. "For a change?" she finally asked, when no one else said anything.
"Sure. I mean, working for Nostro, talk about all work and no play making me a dull boy. I actually missed the big fight, when this guy here"--he nodded at Sinclair--"took control of the whole shebang. I was out getting Nostro some more girls."
"You brought him victims."
"Sure."
"And when he wasn't holding your leash any longer," Sinclair went on with terrifying pleasantness, "you decided to come and...how did you put it? Have some fun?"
"Sure." The killer looked puzzled. "Look, I know I should have come down and paid my respects, but you haven't been in power that long, and I figured I had time--"
"We're not here about that," Betsy said, exasperated. "Jeez. Like we care if you come down to the cities and kiss our asses, or pretend to kiss our asses, which is way worse. We're here to stop you from killing anybody else."
The killer's brow wrinkled as he struggled with the alien concept. "But...why? Do you need my help with something? I'll be glad to go back to Minneapolis--"
"Dude...We. Don't. Want. You. To. Kill. Anybody. Else."
"Because. It's. Wrong," Sophie added.
"Do you mean, it's wrong because I'm not letting you have a crack at the girls? I could--"
"Stop talking now," Sinclair said.
"Do you believe this guy?" Betsy cried, turning to the group. "He's not getting this at all. He--" Her eyes narrowed as she took in the expression on Sophie's face, and the identical one on Sinclair's. "You guys totally expected this!"
"Well..." Sophie began, but had no idea where to go from there.
"This is a regular thing for vampires?" Liam asked, his displeasure evident.
"No," Sophie said. "Er...all right, sometimes. Not the making the girls fall in love with him part. But the, ah, other part."
"See? See? This is why I'm not getting on board with the whole consort thing," Betsy told him triumphantly. "And why being a vampire makes my skin crawl. Just when I
think it might not be a totally insane idea, something like this happens. And you're all, 'Ho hum, another vampire who's a total psycho killer, oh well.'"
"You guys have lost me," the killer interrupted. "You're mad because of the girls? What, you had your eye on one of them? Because if I crossed territory, I really apologize."
"I guess they aren't people to you," Liam said. "They're...what? Sheep?"
The killer laughed. "Not hardly! You're supposed to cherish and protect your sheep. The girls are more like...hors d'oeuvres."
Betsy carefully pushed the sleeve of her sweater up, almost to her elbow, then socked the killer in the face.
"Ow!" he cried, clapping a hand to his nose. "What was that for?"
"Where to begin?" Sophie replied.
"That was a good start," Sinclair said, "but start in the groin area next time. And use knives instead of your hands."
Betsy shuddered. "Ick. Though if anybody deserves it, it's this punk. So, what? Do we arrest him? Can we do that?"
"Can this wait until after Theresa kills herself?" the killer asked nasally. "I was leaving to go watch, but--"
"You mean you're doing it again? Right now? But Shawna's barely a week in her grave!"
"Yeah, well, I thought it'd be fun to do a two-fer, you know, play them off each other, but Shawna was a little more fragile than I thought, she kind of jumped the gun on me--" Then he stopped, because Sinclair had picked him up by the throat.
"Where does Theresa live?" Silence, followed by Sinclair adding, "Oh, good, I can beat it out of you. Several times."
"Sinclair, he can't talk, you're squishing his vocal cords," Betsy pointed out. "Not that we want you to stop or anything."
Sinclair let go, and the killer fell to the lawn and gurgled a street address. "We'll tend to the girl," the king said, grabbing Betsy's hand and pulling her toward the car. She yelped, but let herself be dragged away. "You two take care of him. Frankly, if I have to look at him for another ten seconds.... you two deal with it."
"What's that mean?" Liam asked as Sinclair tore out of the small driveway.
"Drown him, stab him, choke him, slice him, squeeze him, starve him, burn him," Sophie suggested.
"What is everybody's problem tonight?" the killer bitched, standing and trying to brush grass stains off his pants. "You'd think this was about something important."
"Oh, boy," Sophie said. "You're a disgrace to all of us, you wretched horrible thing, and it will be the greatest pleasure of my life to kill you."