Vampire for Hire (4 page)

 
      
 
The squiggly lights in the bar flashed and zigzagged like thousands upon thousands of electrified fireflies. I watched as they whipped crazily around a nearby stairway, a stairway that led up into the black depths. The flashing lights began gathering together, collecting other squiggly lights. I had seen such things before but had dismissed them. They were just strange lights, right? Nothing more.

 
      
 
“Creatures of the night seem to attract each other, Samantha, whether they know it or not...or whether they want it or not. It is not a coincidence that the werewolf came into your life. Soon, I expect others like yourself to make appearances.”

 
      
 
“Like myself?”

 
      
 
“Vampires, Moon Dance. You cannot be an island for long. Not in this world of fantastical creatures.”

 
      
 
I continued studying the glowing object at the foot of the stairway. More light gathered around it. Now, if I looked hard enough, I could see shoulders, hips, and a head forming. Even what appeared to be longish hair. And then, amazingly, the light creature turned toward me. I couldn’t see its features, but I sensed its great pain. And then, buried deep in my mind’s eye, I saw a flash of a knife’s blade, heard a strangled cry, then weeping, and then...nothing.

 
      
 
“I see a ghost,” I said. “There by the stairway.”

 
      
 
I saw Aaron turn out of the corner of my eye. “I don’t see anything, Moon Dance. But I’m not surprised. This is supposedly one of the most haunted buildings in Fullerton.”

 
      
 
And just like that the vaguely humanoid column of light dispersed, scattering into a thousand glowing, fluorescent shards of energy.

 
      
 
Son of a biscuit,
I thought, reciting my son’s favorite expression.

 
      
 
After a moment, Aaron Parker looked back at me. “So does it feel strange finally meeting me, Moon Dance?”

 
      
 
“Yes and no. A part of me wants to run back to my computer and continue this conversation there. I felt safe there. I felt open. I felt free to be me.”

 
      
 
“You don’t feel free now?”

 
      
 
“I don’t know how I feel, to be honest.”

 
      
 
“Do I feel a bit like a stranger?” he asked.

 
      
 
I nodded and I felt the tears come to my eyes. “Yes.”

 
      
 
“A stranger who knows your deepest and darkest secrets.”

 
      
 
I nodded, suddenly finding it hard to speak.

 
      
 
He said, “Do you regret meeting me, Moon Dance?”

 
      
 
I sat motionless for a long time before I reached out and took his warm hands in my mine. As I did so, he curled his long fingers around mine. “I don’t know,” I whispered, and it was perhaps the hardest three words I have ever spoken.

 
      
 
He continued holding my hands. Now he rubbed his thumb along my knuckles. His thumb was rough, calloused. He was a grease monkey, no doubt. Tending bar at night, fixing up his classic muscle car during the day.

 
      
 
Fang tilted his head slightly. “
Grease monkey
is not a politically correct term, Moon Dance. We prefer to be called lubed primates.”

 
      
 
I snorted. “Sounds like a bad porno.”

 
      
 
“There are no bad pornos, Moon Dance.”

 
      
 
“
Eww
, and you just read my thoughts.”

 
      
 
“Yes,” he said. “I heard a few snatches here and there.”

 
      
 
“So how is it that
you
can read
my
thoughts?”

 
      
 
“I don’t have all the answers, Moon Dance.”

 
      
 
“Well, give it your best shot, big guy.”

 
      
 
He stared at me long and hard. As he did so, his tongue slid along his lower lip and seemed to be searching for something that was not there. I sensed his great sadness for what was lost. I suspected I knew the source of his sadness.

 
      
 
Finally, he said, “We are connected, Moon Dance. Or, more accurately, you have allowed me access into your mind.”

 
      
 
“So I can turn it off?” I asked.

 
      
 
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “And you’re right, Sam, I do miss them every day. More than you know.”

 
      
 
His teeth, of course.

 
      
 
Chapter Five

 
      
 
Instead of going home, I went to a place I was familiar with: The Embassy Suites in Brea. My home over the past month.

 
      
 
I parked the minivan in my old spot, and shortly said hello to Justin who was working the front desk. He smiled and nodded and seemed to have forgotten that I had checked out a week earlier. Of course, just last week, when I had busted my husband for running an illegal strip club in Colton, I had dressed the part of a stripper. I might be little, but I’m a curvy thing, and Justin the night clerk hasn’t looked at me the same since.

 
      
 
I felt his eyes on me all the way to the bank of elevators. At the ninth floor, I found a locked service door I had seen many times in the past. A service door I had taken note of. Why? Because the plaque on it read:
Roof Access. Maintenance Personnel Only.

 
      
 
I glanced up and down the hall, took hold of the locked doorknob, and turned steadily until the inner mechanisms shattered in my hand. The knob broke off.

 
      
 
God, I’m a freak.

 
      
 
I pushed the door open, and, after wiping the knob with the hem of my shirt, tossed it in the corner of the stairwell. Next I stepped over a low gate and quickly headed up a metal flight of stairs, taking them two at a time and noticing how strong my legs felt. The door at the top of the landing was locked as well. But not for long.

 
      
 
As pieces of the broken door knob fell away at my feet, I stepped out onto the roof.

 
      
 
Immediately, wind buffeted me. The waning moon was higher now and shone through a thin layer of pathetic-looking stratus clouds. Mostly, though, the sky was clear, and I could even see a star or two.

 
      
 
At the service door, I quickly removed my clothing and naked as the day I was born, moved across the dusty roof, avoiding, of all things, a broken beer bottle.

 
      
 
Hell of a party up here.

 
      
 
Now standing at the roof’s edge, I stared down at the city of Brea, which shone before me like a brilliant constellation, providing me a view that the heavens could not. At least, not the heavens here in Southern California.
Thousand
of lights winked and sparkled. Some were brighter than others—street lamps, perhaps. Others were barely discernible—bathroom nightlights and perhaps the glows of Kindles and Nooks.

 
      
 
Whatever those were.

 
      
 
The wind was at the edge of the building. It rocked my naked body. But I had no fear of falling. My hair whipped around my head like so many serpents. Medusa would have been proud. Or envious. I breathed slowly, deeply, each intake spiced with exhaust and tar and the sage from the nearby foothills.

 
      
 
The world lay at my feet. The normal world. Where people prayed to God and Jesus, where people worried about their kids’ health and Charlie Sheen’s career, where life went on steadily and predictably.

 
      
 
Life hadn’t gone so predictably for me. Life had hung a hard right turn at “predictable” and detoured through a forbidden forest where the Headless Horseman was real, where werewolves existed, where a mother of two could be changed forever into something nightmarish.

 
      
 
I took in more air and lifted my face toward the heavens. The day’s latent heat rose up from the roof’s surface, warming my eternally cold buns. I heard honking and tires squealing. The crash of a fender-bender.

 
      
 
Oops.

 
      
 
I heard a baby crying from the hotel below and the steady hum of a hundred or so air conditioners powering through the warm night. The building beneath me seemed alive, vibrating and swaying slightly. Or perhaps that was just my imagination.

 
      
 
I stood there for a heartbeat longer.

 
      
 
And then spread my arms wide and jumped.

 
      
 
Chapter Six

 
      
 
The drop down from this hotel was always a little dicey, although jumping from the roof gave me some extra wiggle room. But not much.