Sex and the Single Vampire (5 page)

I laid out the necessary tools in front of me, and after sprinkling a bit of ginseng over the cat, started reciting the words of Release.

I had to stop midway through to pinch the bridge of my nose. The powdered ginseng was tickling my nose, making it scrunch up and my eyes water with the urge to sneeze. I waited until the urge passed, completed the Release chant, made the protection symbols, and unguarded my mind to envision Releasing the spirit to another plane of existence.

The cat twitched an ear at me and started licking its shoulder.

“Uh-oh.” I gnawed on my lower lip and considered the cat. Maybe I didn’t use enough ginseng? Or maybe my stopping in the middle of speaking the words threw it off. I’d try it again, this time taking care not to breathe in the ginseng.

As the last word of the Release left my lips, the cat moved on to licking its sole back leg.

“Poop. Something’s not right here. I wonder if the ginseng wasn’t fresh enough?”

I spent the next hour and a half trying variations on the Release, adding and subtracting amounts of ginseng, even adding a dollop of dead man’s ash in case that was the secret ingredient to a successful Release.

Nothing worked.

I was starting to get a bit worried. I knew by the rules of Summoning that if I didn’t Release the cat, it would be bound to me for all my days, and while it had managed to escape being seen by the maid, I couldn’t count on it achieving that feat every day.

Not to mention how I was supposed to get it home to
my apartment in northern California. I hated to think what I was going to have to write on the customs form:
One translucent feline, dead fifty-some-odd years. Vaccinations up-to-date.

The alarm on my watch started pinging, signaling something I was supposed to do.

“Oh, that stupid book signing. Drat. It would have to be now, when I’m busy with something important.”

I thought of brushing it off, but Corrine had begged and pleaded with me before I left for London to attend this book signing.

“Honestly, Cory and her vampire romances,” I scoffed as I started repacking the bag. “So some hotshot author has a book signing. Big deal. I have a job to do! But no, I have to go stand in line and wait for a smug author to sign a copy of a book she could get back home. I have to suck up and make nice just so he’ll write something pleasant that she’ll forget five minutes after she reads it. I have to spend my evening standing on my bad leg in a line that’s sure to go for miles because Mr. I’m So Important Dante can’t be bothered to do more than one book signing a year. Well, fine, just fine. Make me give up trying to Release my ghost cat. Boy, she’s going to owe me for this!”

I finished tidying the bag, popped on my evening sunglasses, told the cat to behave itself, and headed out to find a taxi to Covent Garden. On the way there I ran over the mental list of who in the area I could consult about why the Release wasn’t successful.

“Let’s see … there’s Carlos at SIP, but he’s not a Summoner. There is that witch who Ras mentioned supposedly Summoned the ghost of Karl Marx, but I don’t have her address, and besides, I’m not sure I want to hang out with someone who actually wanted to spend time with a dead Marx who wasn’t Groucho. Um …” I tapped my lip, watching as the dark, damp streets of London passed by
the rain-splattered window. “Oh! That hermit that the woman at the SIP office mentioned. That might be a possibility.”

“SIP as in Society for the Investigation of the Paranormal?” the taxi driver asked me.

Rats.
I was talking to myself out loud again. It’s a habit that I can’t seem to break myself of. I smiled at the driver and nodded, hoping he wasn’t one of the religious fanatics who seemed to delight in lecturing me as to the sinful nature of my job. “Do you … um … know about them?”

“My wife and me go ghost hunting with them a couple of times a year. Just last August we spent the night in the Tower.”

The Tower of London was said to be the most haunted spot in all of England. It was a paranormalist’s version of Disneyland.

“Did you? See anything interesting?”

He shrugged. “Couple of orbs, a hand coming from the wall, and we felt one or two cold spots, but nothing we caught on film. You a Summoner?”

Normally I don’t admit to my job to laypeople, but the driver seemed to be copacetic with the whole idea of ghosts and ghoulies, so I nodded again.

“Thought you might be. What’s with the dark specs?”

I waited until he was stopped at a light and lifted the glasses to my forehead for a moment.

His eyes widened as he whistled. “That natural?”

I laughed a harsh, bitter little laugh. “It’s nothing I want, believe you me.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I guess not. Must make for some odd looks, eh?”

And odder responses, responses like people screaming and dropping things, claims that I was doing it just to get attention, and worst of all, accusations that I was a freak.

The rest of the ride was conducted in silence. I looked
out at London at night and wondered if my optician wasn’t wrong—the last time I’d tried contacts, I’d managed to wear them almost a week before my eyes started ulcering. That had been over a year ago. Maybe now they could handle the contacts….

As I left the taxi, the driver pushed a card into my hand. “In case you ever need a chauffeur to take you outside of London. I do that as well.”

I thanked him and joined the throng of people streaming into the new bookstore.

“How many copies do you want?” a harried bookstore employee asked me a few minutes later as I shuffled forward in a line so long it was guaranteed to leave my leg aching.

“One of whichever is the latest book.”

“One?” She looked me up and down as if I were an insect that had donned human clothing. “Just one?
One?”

“Oh, you want more than one, dearie,” the woman in line behind me said as she tugged my arm. “They’re ever so good.”

“I’ve never read them. I’m just doing this for a friend.”

“Never read them!” The woman gasped as I accepted a hardback book from the store employee. “Never read them! Well, you just have to read them. Here, you, give this lady another copy. You’ll love it, you truly will.”

“No, thank you,” I said as I pushed the second copy back to the employee. “One’s fine. I’m sure they’re very nice, but I’m not into this sort of book.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean,
this sort of book?”
She shook the three copies she held at me. “These are beautiful books, wonderfully written and full of dark, brooding men and the women who save them!”

“And the sex is good, too,” a woman behind her added.

The woman behind me nodded emphatically. “Just lovely love scenes, very creative and hot enough to melt your
knickers. Here.” She shoved a book into my hands. “You take this. Read it. You’ll be a believer in no time. The way Dante writes … it’s positively
unearthly!”

I lifted my glasses just enough so she could get a good look at my eyes. “Trust me, I don’t need to read a book to know what unearthly feels like.”

She choked and hurriedly dropped her gaze from mine. I pushed my glasses back down and gently returned the book she’d shoved in my hands, turning around to face forward in the line. I hated calling attention to myself in that manner—my limp was enough to make people stare—but if there’s anything I dislike, it’s a rabid fan.

Those were my thoughts until the line slowly snaked its way down the rows of bookshelves, close enough for me to see the group of people gathered around a table situated in the middle of the store. Bodies shifted and moved in an intricate dance of color and pattern. I stood, bored, mentally drawing warding spells to protect me from overeager readers, until suddenly every hair on my arms stood up on end. The person directly at the front of the signing table shifted and moved far enough to the side that I could see the man who was sitting behind a stack of books, his head bent over a copy as he signed it.

Long, shoulder-length black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, but a strand had escaped and framed one side of a hard jaw, a jaw that led down to a familiar squared chin. The man looked up at the person he was signing for and smiled. I staggered back as if I’d been punched in the stomach, literally feeling as if all the air had been sucked from the room.

It was the man I’d seen first in my dream, then later in the inn, the crazy man who had cut himself all over his really nummy body and then disappeared … or had that been a fantasy, nothing but the deranged ramblings of an overtired mind? I rubbed my forehead, unsure of whether
that whole episode had been imagined, or if he was … My mind came up with a blank as to an explanation, if he really had been at the inn. No one could have cleaned up that room and gotten rid of the table in the ten minutes I was gone. No one human.

C. J. Dante, famed vampire author, the man who came to me in my dreams and begged me to help him. A tormented man, one whose anguish I could feel without even opening my mind up to him. A man who sliced himself up like a loaf of bread, then got testy when I tried to help him.

“Just who—or more to the point,
what
… is he?” I muttered to myself.

Unfortunately, I had no answer.

As I saw it, I had two choices. I could either assume that the past evening spent in the presence of a mentally disturbed individual who thought nothing of inflicting horrible tortures upon himself was not real, something my mind dredged up for some purpose or other, or I could rip that black sweater from Dante’s manly chest and look for healing cuts, calling loudly for the police and the nice guys in the white suits.

In the end I decided to take my cue from the man himself. If he recognized me, I’d know the episode was real. If he didn’t, I’d know that I had the most vivid and realistic vision I could ever possibly imagine, one that had left red fingerprints all over my notebook.

As the line slowly crept forward, I kept myself hidden by the chunky woman in front of me, just in case Dante spotted me and started making a scene. One of the store employees was escorting people to him, handing him the books to be signed, then making sure the fan was hustled off so the next one could take her spot. I looked behind me, then back to the front. Every single person in line was female.
Hmm.
I peeked around the shoulder of the woman in front of me and studied Dante. He was every bit as handsome as I remembered him, more so because he wasn’t dripping blood everywhere.

“Some men look really, really good in black,” I said without thinking. The woman in front of me turned and nodded her head emphatically. I gave her a cheesy smile in
return. I felt something behind me, a sort of rippling in the air, and turned to see a tall, very pregnant woman waddle past the line of people waiting. She was accompanied by a short woman with one of those pretty heart-shaped faces that I had always secretly coveted. Both of them grinned and circled around behind the table to greet Dante. He stopped signing long enough to kiss both their hands, and speak with them for a few minutes before apologizing to the person who was waiting for her book.

So he has groupies
, I told myself.
So what? You can’t expect a man to go around looking like he does without having great huge hordes of women falling all over him. Means nothing to you, unless of course the slice-and-dice scene last night was real; then you have to do something about him before he starts cutting up others.

I gnawed my lip and tried to decide what to do as the line snaked ever so surely forward, but in the end I just kept myself hidden behind the chunky woman until I was next in line. The bookstore woman grabbed my book from me.

“Just signed, or inscribed to someone?”

“Um … inscribed, please. To Corrine. Two Rs, one N.”

The woman nodded and turned back to look at Dante as the chunky woman giggled and told him he was no better than he should be. He smiled and the bookstore woman handed him Corrine’s book, leaning forward to give him the information. He bent over the book, writing with an elegant hand that reminded me of Victorian copperplate.

“I hope you enjoy the book,” he said as he signed his name with a flourish, his voice as beautiful as I remembered it. It slid over my skin like silk, raising the hairs on my arms with the pure, rich tone. He looked up and smiled as he handed me the book, then froze like a pointer spotting a pheasant.

“Christian?” The pregnant woman looked between the two of us standing still as statues.

I stopped breathing. Even through my dark glasses I could feel the pull of his eyes. It was as if I were being sucked into them, teetering on the edge of an abyss.

“Christian?” The woman touched his arm.

Without being aware of it, I unguarded my mind and felt myself plunge down into the depths of his eyes, down into a blackness that surrounded me, filling me with grief and anguish and hopelessness without end. I was overwhelmed with his pain, filled with it, unable to catch my breath under its suffocating presence.

“Christian, are you okay?”

Desperately I tried to reguard my mind, bringing down as many mental barriers as I could to keep him from filling me with his torment.

“Who are you?” I asked in a whisper that was all I could manage after the experience of looking into his mind.

His eyes darkened.

“More important, who are
you?”
the shorter woman with the pretty face asked. She looked at me curiously, eyeing me from toes to nose before turning to Dante and whapping him on the shoulder. “I
told
you this was a good idea! See? We got her after only a half hour! Good. Now I can go home.”

The bookstore woman nudged me, and when I didn’t do anything but stare at the man in front of me—who, it should be noted, was staring right back at me, his eyes dark with mingled surprise and pain and no little amount of speculation—she took the book from his hand and shoved it at me, giving me a little push to get me going. I stumbled forward, unable to tear my gaze away from Dante’s until the pregnant woman put a hand out and touched my shoulder.