Outtakes From the Grave

  “What do you think you’re smiling at?” a pretty, petite blond vampire demanded as she rose from her chair.

  Then Jade grabbed me from behind. I made no effort to struggle. Instead, I let out a laugh.

  “What’s so funny, lovely?” Jade murmured as her lips grazed my ear.

  “You are,” I retorted. “Thought you were bringing home takeout, didn’t you?”

  “What?” In her arrogance, she let me go and faced me. She’d shed her human disguise, and her eyes glowed with pure emerald light while her fangs extended like daggers.

  “You have entered the realm of death,” Jade declared. “Now look into my eyes.”

  That made me laugh harder. She was downright cliché. “No, but how about you look into mine?” And I unleashed the emerald light in my own gaze. She gasped in disbelief.

  “You!”

  Oh, so she’d heard about me. It was nice to have fans.

  In the split second that she froze with shock, I pounced, twisting her head off before she could flinch. Then I torpedoed it at first vampire who lunged at me. That bought me another second, and I yanked my knives from my boots. Several blades sank home, and two more vamps went down for good. Another one leapt at me, and instead of moving out the way, I caught her. She was unprepared for my strength, and with a brutal snap, I broke her back over my knee. Her spine shattered and she collapsed. Before she had time to heal, I drove a blade into her heart and twisted. She began to shrivel at once.

  Instead of attacking, the other four tried to run. This is where my team would come in handy. I gave chase, grabbing the nearest vamp and plugging his heart with a silver knife before flinging him out the window.

  That was the signal they’d been waiting for. Moments later, the van crashed through the metal gates, and I heard the guys yelling as they approached the house.

  “Get the human!” I barked to whoever was close enough to hear me as I spied the naked girl trying to escape out the side door. To ensure that she didn’t get far, I flung one of my knives and skewered her in the hamstring. She went down with a scream, but she was lucky that she hadn’t been trying to go for a gun or I would have aimed to kill. My human body count had gone up along with my vampire one.

  The remaining three vampires raced up the stairs. I followed in hot pursuit, my adrenaline flowing. It was a sad reality that the only time I felt truly alive was when I was in a fight to the death.

  Noise behind the door to my right made me drop low and kick it open. I rolled through the entrance, avoiding the arms that struck empty air instead of me since I was near the ground. Then I buried my dagger into the nearest body part, which turned out to be my attacker’s groin. Hair-raising shrieks filled the room, and I yanked the knife out and thrust it through the vampire’s heart next, jerking it brutally.

  Two more to go.

  On the third floor, I heard sobbing and movement. I ascended the stairs as quickly as I could and kicked through the only door at the top of the landing. One look revealed that it was a prison. My two vampires were in there, but so were two naked, weeping girls, and the vampires had them by the throats. Bite marks and bruises covered the humans’ bodies, confirming that they’d been the vampires’ version of an in-house snack. Even though I’d seen this sort of thing before, it still filled me with a blistering rage.

  “You want to see them die?” the pretty blond-haired vampire hissed at me. She didn’t look afraid, but the other vampire, a brown-haired man, stared at me with frightened fascination. “Come closer, and they will,” she went on. “Leave, and they’ll live.”

  “I have another proposition.” As I spoke, I could hear one of my guys come up the stairs, so I kept talking to mask the sound of his footsteps. “The first one of you that lets a human go lives. The one that doesn’t dies. Well? Who feels like living to bite another day?”

  “I’ve heard of you,” the male vampire said with a moan. “You’re the Red Reaper. We told Jade not to bring home any redheads, but she thought you were a myth.”

  “Shut up, Taylor!” the blonde snarled.

  “I’m not a myth, Taylor,” I said. More footsteps started on the staircase. I talked louder, faster. “You know how many of your kind I’ve killed? Hundreds.” Now that was a gross exaggeration, but it had the desired effect. Taylor visibly quailed.

  The blonde turned to him in fury, and I took advantage. Three of my blades shot across the room and pinned her hand to the wall, away from the helpless girl’s neck. Tate burst into the room at the same time and fired, striking Taylor several times. Tate was a crack shot and his gun was filled with silver bullets, so Taylor slumped to the floor. By the time the blonde yanked her hand free, I already had her gripped in my arms, and my final knife was in her chest.

  “Don’t even think of moving, Sunshine, or this silver will shred your heart,” I warned.

  Cornflower-blue eyes glared into mine. “What are you?”

  “Homeland Security,” I replied and left it at that.

  Juan and Peter entered the room while sirens started to wail in the distance. The gunshots had no doubt disturbed the peace of this opulent neighborhood, not that I was worried. The other members of the team would hold the regular police at bay until the scene was contained.

  “We’ve got a chopper coming to take these girls to a hospital,” Peter informed me as he broke the chains around their wrists. Not surprisingly, both women were hysterical. He looked around the room for something to cover them with, but there was nothing.

  “Bedsheets, lower floor,” I said.

  Juan went to fetch them. Then Arnold and John popped into the room. “Capsule’s ready.”

  “Okay, Tate, cover me. I’ll bring her downstairs, and you shoot if she even looks like she’s thinking of making a break for it.”

  The blond vampire continued to glare her hatred at me, but she didn’t try anything as we slowly made our way down the stairs and then out the front door. A tractor-trailer had been backed up as close as it could get to the house, and when my men saw me, they slid up the door.

  The capsule was open, and the interior resembled an escape pod from hell. Four long, strategically placed silver pikes protruded from the capsule door, facing inward. Five sets of reinforced titanium clamps were awaiting the vampire’s waist, wrists, legs, ankles, and neck. The capsule was soundproof, airtight, and blastproof, so once she was inside, she’d be truly helpless. She must have realized that because when she got a good look at it, the vampire began to scream.

  Then she tried mind control, which didn’t work on me, and my men had been trained never to look a vampire in the eye. Still, as a precaution, they snapped the opaque visors down from their helmets so their eyes were covered. Now they couldn’t see, but we had run through this drill so many times they didn’t need to. They knew this part by heart.

  I shoved the blond vampire inside the capsule and began fastening the clamps. In less than a minute, I slammed the door shut, cutting off her wail when the silver spikes thrust into her torso. Too much struggling on her part, and they’d rip through her heart. That’s how we made sure the vampire we brought back didn’t wreck our transport on our way to the compound.

  Once the capsule was safely loaded into the tractor trailer, Tate took off his helmet. “Don will be doing cartwheels about having a female vampire. We’ve only brought home males before.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be any difference in her blood,” I muttered.

  Juan gave me a wicked grin as he pulled his gloves off and flexed his fingers. “Cat, tonight was the best job we’ve ever pulled. Seeing you play tonsil-hockey with that gorgeous bloodsucker made my year. I’m going to burn new calluses into my hand just remembering it. Hey, do you think you could loan me that dress—?”

  A punch to the jaw stopped him from saying anything else, and he rubbed his face. Dave coughed to cover his laughter, but I heard it anyway. Even Tate, usually more circumspect, had a curl to his lips, but then he sobered.

  “That vamp sa
id they weren’t supposed to take home any redheads because of your reputation. Do you think it’s going to become a problem?”

  My forehead wrinkled for a moment, then I shrugged. “I think it means I’m going to the salon.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Cat and Noah: Her Greatest Mistake?

  Author’s Note: When combined with grief from the loss of a friend and the additional years apart from Bones, Cat’s inherent recklessness caused her to make a colossal mistake. This never made it into One Foot in the Grave because my editor flatly told me that I could not write such a plotline into a romance novel. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I had been a long-time reader of romance, but I didn’t realize the genre had certain rules. After my first book came out, it didn’t take me long to learn those rules, and in hindsight, I am endlessly glad that I edited out Cat’s “greatest mistake.” You’ll get to see a watered-down version of it in these deleted scenes, however, and I am bracing for the hate mail.

  This alternate version also contains a small chunk of what did make it into One Foot in the Grave because the context is essential for understanding Cat’s mindset at the time.

  My mother sat at the table, and she vibrated with excitement. I was less enthused. Noah and I had been dating for two months now, and the poor schmuck said he wanted to meet her. She’d been over the moon to find out I had a boyfriend who was both alive and not in the military. Her brown hair was swept up and she even wore an outfit that wasn’t dowdy. For her to take care with her appearance spoke volumes to me. Though she was only forty-four, she often dressed like she was eighty-four. It was a waste because she was an attractive woman. To my knowledge, she had never been on a date since the night she was raped. Too bad she had as tough of a time letting go of the past as I did.

  “Catherine, I’m so happy for you!” she said for the fifth time.

  “Cristine,” I corrected her. She was forever reverting back to my original name, probably because she gave it to me.

  She waved a hand in apology. “Oh, right. Gosh, I hope I don’t slip in front of Noah. He might think something strange was going on.”

  That made my lip curl. No, mustn’t let Noah be confused by the fact that there were always strange things going on.

  He’d made it amazingly difficult for me to come up with an excuse to stop seeing him in the past couple of months. Whenever my pager went off and I had to rush out in the middle of dinner, he would simply have the waiter bag my food to go and tell me not to forget to eat. If I had to cancel at the last minute, he didn’t complain about being stood up. When Tate and the guys waited at my house one night after my cell died and a vampire was spotted three counties away, Noah shook their hands and told them how glad he was to meet my coworkers. The fact that I’d climbed into a van filled with five athletic, muscular men didn’t seem to faze him. If the shoe were on the other foot, I’d have demanded to see their identification.

  No, Noah was the perfect gentleman. Even Don, who ran a full background check on him without my knowledge, was happy with him. To give him credit, Noah did take the edge off my loneliness. He was a great guy and I liked him tremendously.

  But… I still cried at night when I thought of Bones. All the warm, friendly feelings in the world couldn’t hold a candle to fact that my heart still belonged only to him. Perhaps I would continue feeling like I’d had a hole blown through the center of me for the rest of my life. At least I could say I tried.

  A car pulled up in the drive and my mother shot out of her chair. “He’s here!”

  “Calm down. Here, check the roast. I’ll get the door.” I wiped my hands on a towel and opened the door to let Noah in.

  He gave me a quick kiss before extending his hand to my mother. “Mrs. Russell, what a pleasure to meet you. Cristine has told me so much about you, I feel as if I already know you.”

  I’d told him lies, of course. There wasn’t a shred of truth I could share with Noah. He thought my father had died when I was a baby and that my parents’ marriage hadn’t been a happy one. In my pretend life, I wasn’t illegitimate. Then again, I wasn’t half-vampire, either. He also thought that I was Irish. Hell, for all I knew, I could be. With all the resources of the United States government at my disposal, I still hadn’t been able to find out my real father’s identity.

  “Call me Jussie,” my mother said.

  She’d taken less liberty with her name than I had and simply abbreviated it. She also had no idea that Russell was Bones’s surname. If she had, my mother would have flatly refused to use it for her alias.

  “Jussie, then. Can I help you with anything?”

  “Not at all, Noah,” she assured him. “Ca— Er, Cristine and I have it under control. Have a seat and tell me about yourself.”

  My cat picked that moment to jump onto the counter and leisurely eye the mashed potatoes. I handed Noah and my mother a drink while I swatted him away. He sat on the floor, watching everything with bright green eyes that were almost identical to my own when my other nature flared. My mother frowned at the kitty. She rarely visited me at home anymore because of him, which could be why I’d grown to love the cat so much.

  “Cristine, can’t you lock that… critter in your room?” she said with a sniff in my cat’s direction. “It’s unseemly.”

  I gave a short laugh. “Mom, Noah’s a vet, so the only person my cat is offending is you. Get over it. He stays.”

  She huffed at that but gave up. She must still be trying to make a good impression on Noah, or she would have fought me for at least another few minutes.

  “Why haven’t you put his collar on him, Cristine?” Noah asked me, petting my cat. He purred before leaving with a flick of the tail. The feline was fickle in his affections.

  “I keep forgetting,” I lied. “He never goes outside, so it’s not like he’ll get lost.”

  In truth, I couldn’t because Noah still thought that my cat’s name was Bones. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d totally misunderstood why he’d overheard me saying that name to myself, and I hadn’t come up with a different name for the kitty yet.

  “What collar?” my mother asked.

  I flashed her a look that said to drop it. She ignored me, as usual.

  “I gave Cristine a collar for her cat on our first date, but she never remembers to put it on,” Noah said with a forgiving smile at me. He was impossible to piss off.

  My mother wasn’t. “Cristine, that is so rude! When someone gives you a gift, you don’t let it languish. What a thoughtful gesture, Noah. Where is the collar? I’ll put it on the mangy feline myself.”

  Oh, now she was going to get it. “Right-hand drawer, next to the oven.”

  I watched with dark satisfaction as she fetched the collar and approached my cat. He watched her balefully, his tail swishing back and forth.

  “Let’s see now,” she mused to herself. “Here is the buckle and here is the strap. Oh look, it’s got his name on it. Cristine, I didn’t know you named him. What—?”

  The name finally registered, and my mother pitched forward in mid-crouch. My cat scored her hand with his claws before leaping away with a hiss. Noah blinked at the foul word she shouted as she sprawled on the floor. I shook my head without sympathy. She’d asked for it.

  “Let me help you up, Jussie!” Noah said, recovering from his surprise. “Are you all right?”

  My mother let him help her to her feet and then gave me a withering look. “What a perfect name for that animal, Cristine. It fits the horrid beast.”

  “Huh?” Noah didn’t get it.

  I did, and steam nearly poured from my ears. “See, something bad always happens when you mess with Bones. Did that scratch hurt? I hope it doesn’t leave a mark like the one I got the last time I petted Bones. He practically kept me up all that night licking it.”

  Noah glanced back and forth between us, feeling the tension but not knowing the reason. My mother’s face flamed in furious embarrassment, but I didn’t care. One low remark d
eserved another.

  Noah coughed, trying to defuse the situation. “Let me check on the oven. Something sure smells good in there.”

  ***

  The rest of the dinner passed without further incident. Occasionally I would look up and see my mother give me a scathing glance, but she dropped the entire matter of the cat’s namesake. Noah was charming, as usual. You were just weird if you didn’t like him. Soon he had her warmed up to where she was laughing again. By dessert, she quit with the underhanded dirty looks and instead was obviously pleased with my choice of a boyfriend. So pleased, in fact, that she faked several yawns even though it was only eight o’clock and was out the door in record time. I usually had to force her to leave when she visited.

  “I don’t know why you hesitated about having me meet her, Cristine,” he remarked. “Your mom is terrific. She really doesn’t like the cat, but then no one is perfect.”

  I gave him a level look. “She was behaving, Noah. Believe me, she can be a real bitch, but she loved you. I’m shocked she didn’t grab your ass on the way out.”

  He laughed. “That would’ve been different, but then things are always unpredictable around you. It’s what I like most.”

  He put his arms around me and kissed me. I responded, but it was surface level only. We hadn’t slept together, but it was definitely to the stage where it was inevitable unless I broke it off. Kissing Noah was enjoyable, but it hardly inflamed me with passion.

  He was worked up about it, judging from his accelerated breathing and the hardening of his body. I continued to kiss him while a cold list of pros and cons ran through my mind. I liked Noah, but I wasn’t turned on by him. The truth was, I hadn’t been turned on by any man in over six years. Finally, my choice boiled down to a single question: did I want to go to bed tonight with my loneliness or with Noah? He wasn’t the man I loved. Not even close, but there was someone pressed against me instead of no one, and at the moment, it was better than being alone.