Under the Gun (14 page)

“It’s one of the only ways to truly kill a vampire. Wooden stake through the heart.”
Vlad counted off on his fingers. “Fully engulfed in flames, or . . .” He swallowed,
his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Beheading. Do they know who did it?”

I shook my head.

Alex wiped his hands on a napkin and rested his elbows on the table. “Not to be insensitive,
but isn’t it pretty difficult to do? I mean, you’ve got extra strength, right?”

Vlad’s tongue snaked over one of his fangs. “Yeah. It wouldn’t be easy.”

“Could a human do it?”

“It’s unlikely.”

Alex glanced at me. “Do you think this killing could have anything to do with the
Sutro Point homicide?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, that was—you know, breathers, and this was—”

“A werewolf could kill a vampire,” Nina said quietly.

“What was that?”

“A werewolf. Super strength. Chip on its shoulder. A werewolf could kill a vampire.”

“And probably a Kishi demon, too,” I added. “A Kishi demon could kill a vampire. Or
a Wendigo, maybe.”

Alex swung toward Nina. “Why would a werewolf kill a vampire?”

“They’re unstable,” Vlad said simply.

“Actually,” Nina said, “it’s pretty unlikely that a werewolf would go after a vampire—or
vice versa.”

“Despite what popular media would like you to believe.” Vlad had to put in the VERM’s
two cents.

“So the whole vampires-hate-werewolves thing is made up.”

“Not exactly,” Nina said, blinking at Alex.

“It’s just blown out of proportion. The majority of us have no problems with them.
They’re fine. They retrieve, roll over, fetch slippers. . . .” Vlad grinned and poked
a fang into a second blood bag.

“What else did Dixon say about the murders?” Alex asked, dipping the stubby end of
an egg roll into a dish of hot mustard.

I fidgeted, then stuffed my mouth with a mammoth bite of chow mein. “Um, not much,”
I said finally, trying my best to get my food down my rapidly closing throat.

“‘Not much’ like he doesn’t know about it, or ‘not much’ like he had nothing to say
about it?”

“Dixon has something to say about everything,” Nina groaned.

Vlad’s eyes flashed at his aunt. “Dixon Andrade is a very well-respected man.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” Nina answered. “Well-respected men can be total windbags,
too.” She shot Vlad a sweet-as-pie grin—or at least it would have been sweet as pie
if her fangs weren’t tinged fresh-blood red.

I pushed the food around on my plate, my internal dialogue arm-wrestling over what
I should and should not tell Alex. “Dixon thinks that the person responsible for the
vampire death may have been a werewolf, too.” The words came out in a solid chain
before I had the chance to stop them. My admittance felt like a betrayal, a silver
bullet in Sampson’s heart, and silence blanketed the table.

“So, who’s filling Octavia’s position?” Nina asked slowly.

I looked up curiously. “I don’t know. Blakely Grimshaw, I think.”

It may have been the fresh pint of blood coursing through her frozen veins, but Nina’s
face seemed to go from everyday pale to fire engine red. Her nostrils flared and she
fisted her hands, squeezing the remains of the blood bag mercilessly until blood bubbled
around the straw she had shoved into it. “That’s just like a man. Blakely is, what?
A hundred? A hundred and five? And she always wears those stupid little tank tops
so she can show off those fake melons of hers.”

Alex leaned down and lowered his voice. “Vampires can have fake boobs?”

I shrugged and wound a noodle into my mouth, relieved that the subject had been changed.
“News to me.”

“Ugh! I can’t believe the nerve of that man! What even qualifies that little twit
to take over for Octavia? Octavia was brilliant.”

“I thought you hated her,” Vlad mumbled.

“Did you want Octavia’s position?” I asked Nina.

She rolled her glazed eyes. “No.” She drew out the word. “Of course not. I wouldn’t
be caught dead again doing that.” She flicked her hand distastefully.

“So?”

She plopped out her lower lip. “I would have liked to have been asked.”

“You’re impossible,” I groaned.

“It’s what makes me lovable.” She grinned.

“Okay,” Alex said, eyes raking from Nina to me. “What makes Dixon think that it was
a werewolf who murdered this victim?”

“The brutality,” I said, my voice suddenly a hoarse whisper.

“Like the Sutro Point murders.”

“That bad?” Nina asked, apparently no longer pissed.

I nodded while the images of those women crept back into my mind. I shifted in my
seat, feeling suddenly sick, suddenly bargaining with God, Buddha, or whoever else
was listening to help me keep my kung pao down—and keep Sampson out of the picture.

“Well, if there was a great deal of brutality, the only other race with the power
to remove the head of a vampire is the werewolf.” Vlad cocked his head, a slight appreciative
grin playing on his bloody lips. “Although Buffy the Vampire Slayer got in a few lucky
chops.”

“I can’t believe you, of all people, watch that,” Nina said.

One of Vlad’s ink-black eyebrows quirked and all the humor drained from his face.
“It’s official Vampire Empowerment and Restoration Movement research.”

Nina rolled her eyes. “And I volunteer at the Red Cross for the cookies and juice.”

“They do have good cookies,” I mumbled to my plate.

“So, other than—” Alex began.

“Kill theory,” Vlad supplied.

“Other than kill theory, there is no other evidence that this woman was killed by
a werewolf?” Alex said.

“I really don’t see what else it could have been,” Vlad said, crumbling his empty
blood bag.

I knew Nina was staring at me; I could feel her eyes burning a hole through my temple.
“That’s not entirely true,” I said to my chow mein.

“What’s that?” Alex asked.

I glanced up. “Well, there are other demons that are powerful. And, it wouldn’t really
make sense for a werewolf to go after a vampire. Werewolves kill to feed, so they
go after meat and blood. They hunt by smell. Vampires don’t have a smell.”

“You’re welcome,” Nina said with pride.

“But humans have a smell?” Alex asked with raised eyebrows.

“A powerful one.” Vlad’s eyes were hooded and dark, and his lips snaked up into a
sly grin.

“You just ate,” I warned him.

“So, basically, there’s a good chance that the murders we’re looking at—human and
vampire—aren’t connected.”

“Right,” I said, completely uncertain of what I was proving.

“No,” Vlad said at the same time. “They’re definitely connected.”

“So, we’re exactly nowhere closer to where we were pre-dinner,” Alex said, raking
a hand through his hair. “Hey, Lawson, can you come up after work tomorrow, and maybe
we can get an angle on this thing?”

I nodded, not really hearing what Alex was saying due to the loud, uncomfortable buzzing
in my head.

We all jumped when the Christmas wreath that was circling my sword finally flopped
to the ground, the top cut cleanly by the blade.

Alex had just left and I was scrubbing errant grains of rice off the kitchen table
when Nina came up beside me.

“Here,” she said, handing me a package.

“What’s this?”

“A ShamWow. Like a chamois, only . . . wowier. Whisks water away like nobody’s business.
I ordered it—”

“From QVC?”

“You’ll thank me. It’s a total life-saver. And the price was right.”

“We really need to get you out of this apartment. Why don’t you go down to Poe’s or
something?”

Nina slumped at the table. “No one’s around. With heat like this, most of us took
off or headed underground. I’m so insidiously bored. But try the ShamWow.”

I unwrapped the thing and eyed her. “What did you do when this happened before?”

She shrugged. “I had a nest. There was a bunch of us. We’d just migrate somewhere
gloomier. But I can’t do that now.”

“You can’t?”

Nina used her fingernail to pick at a grain that my ShamWow missed. “Nope. This is
home. This is where I have roots.”

I couldn’t help but feel a tender warmth growing in my belly. “That’s sweet, Neens.”

She narrowed her eyes, but her lips were quirked in a tight smile. “Don’t get used
to it.”

“So, what happened to the people you used to nest with?”

Another shrug. “Some moved on, one got killed, some . . .” She waved at the air.

I sat across from her, my eyes wide. “What?”

“There’s a huge suicide rate among vampires.”

“Really? I had no idea.”

“Eternity is a really, really long time.”

I frowned, considering, and Nina let out a long sigh. “Think about it. Every minute
you’re alive is one moment closer to your demise. Every single moment, you’re aging.
Your body is breaking down, cells don’t reproduce, everything is slowing down. Every
day is one day closer to your death. Not me. Not us. Every day is . . . just another
day. Every moment is just another moment. No closer to death, no closer to any kind
of finality. You should be happy with your wrinkles, with your gray hair.”

I felt my upper lip roll into a snarl. “What’s the homicide rate among vampires? Big?”

Nina rolled her eyes. “You’ve got romance. You’ve got ’til death do us part.’” There
was a distance in her eyes, a wistfulness that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.
“It’s romantic.”

“Do you ever—” I kneaded my palm, looked away. “Do you ever think about it? Death,
I mean? Suicide?”

Nina swallowed. “Eventually, we won’t be friends anymore. You’ll age and I’ll look
like this. Will will die, you’ll die and . . . I’ve thought about it. It scares me,
death. I don’t know where I’d go.”

“You mean like Heaven?”

Nina cracked a half smile that was mirthless.

“You’re a good person, Neens. Of course you’d go to Heaven. You’re the best person
I’ve ever known. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“I damned my nephew, Sophie.”

“But only because your sister begged you to! He would have died otherwise. He was
sick. You had to save him. That was a good thing to do.”

She stood up and headed toward her bedroom. “Was it? He’s alone, like me. We’re all
alone.”

My voice was small. “You’d go to Heaven. Your soul is good.”

Nina’s hand was on the doorknob, her back to me. “I don’t have a soul.”

She clicked the door shut behind her and I kneaded the ShamWow in my hands, good and
evil flip-flopping in my mind. Was it really that easy? Did the good become bad—even
if things were out of their control? Nina had been turned into a vampire—but she was
good. And Sampson—turned into a werewolf. A good man turned into a bloodthirsty animal.
If he did things—terrible, heinous things—while he was a werewolf, things that he
didn’t remember the morning after, in his human form, did that make him bad through
and through?

I swallowed hard and stood up, pressing the cloth to the fake veneer table and scrubbing
until my shoulder ached.

Because there was something else.

It nagged at the edge of my mind. A murmuring that I couldn’t stand to hear—but couldn’t
seem to shut out.

My father.

The devil.

I tried to push the thought—the image—away, but it was etched in my mind. If a girl
was born of evil, could she ever truly be good?

 

 

The next morning was hotter than the previous one and I dressed in gauzy layers. I
poured myself a travel mug of coffee while assuring Nina, who stared up at me with
the most pitiful puppy dog eyes in the underworld, that I would bring her a whole
cache of celebrity trash magazines and let her color my hair once I got home.

It was surprising how a play-by-play of Kim Kardashian’s postdivorce woes and a box
of Clairol Ravenous Red could bring a fanged smile to my roommate’s pale face.

“What about me?” Vlad said with a monotone glower.

“BloodLust Four?”

Vlad glanced down at his computer screen—currently flashing the blood-splashed graphics
of BloodLust 3—and grinned. “Cool.”

“Anything you want me to let Dixon know?” I asked Nina.

She pressed her lips together, then turned up her tiny ski-jump nose. “Not at all.”

I stepped into the hallway and paused in front of Will’s door. I took a few tentative
steps, then pressed my ear to the door.

“You know, it works better if you hold a glass to it.”

I whirled around, clutching my thundering heart while Mr. Sampson smiled at me from
the hallway.

“I’m sorry, I uh—knocked,” I lied, “but I didn’t hear anything. Wanted to make sure
you were okay.”