And there it was: that sense of rightness about her, the sense that she was for him and he was for her. Even though only one of them knew it.
That was all right. He was a patient man.
She mistook his silence for something else and glanced down at herself, the first time he had seen her self-conscious: “Ugh, look at me. I must stink as bad as I look.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Ugh, stop it right now.”
“But you are,” he said, puzzled.
Her brown eyes narrowed as she studied him. “Boy Scout, get those thoughts out of your head right this minute.”
“Thoughts that you’re beautiful?”
“Uh-huh. I’m not beautiful; it’s the vampire mystique. It’s like…like a hormone I give off. Makes it easier for me to bite you. Any vampire can do it.”
“You don’t smell like anything; how can you be giving off a hormone?”
“Because, trust me, I’m not beautiful. I’ve got a big nose and big feet and tiny tits and my hair never grows so I always look like a shorn sheep.”
He was dizzy with the wrongness of her self-perception. “Huh?”
“This will never work out. Not in a thousand years.”
“Huh?”
“Look at us.”
He smiled.
“No, really look.”
“I don’t care that you’re a vampire.”
“You don’t even know what a vampire is, or does.”
“So? You’ll show me.”
“And the age difference?”
He shrugged.
“Boy Scout, I’ve got at least fifty years on you! I was thirty when I died!”
“So call a nursing home.”
“And…”
“And?”
“You’re white.”
He waited for the rest of the explanation, and she had to resist the urge to put her fist through his television set. “I’m black, you’re white. Are you listening?”
“You mean— You’re a bigot?”
“I’m not! Everybody else is! And don’t even tell me how trendy it is to be black or to have a black girlfriend because trends are cyclical, they are, and one day you’ll wake up and I won’t be trendy and then where will we be?”
“Miss,” he said patiently, “do you want that shower or not?”
“Boy Scout, you’re not hearing a thing I’m saying, are you?”
“You have eyes like chocolate,” he said dreamily.
“You don’t even know my name.”
“Oh. Well. Mine’s Burke Wolftaur.”
“Of course it is. Great disguise, by the way, werewolf. Running around on the beach right before a full moon, got the word wolf in your damned last name, real bright.”
He shrugged. “I was on my way back to my house; I would have made it in plenty of time if I hadn’t run into you.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault you’re a dumbass?”
“Yes. And all the packs’ names go back to the same roots. There are hundreds of Wolfs, Wolftons, Wolfbauers, Wolfertons, right here on the Cape.”
“I repeat: great disguise, dumbass. I’m Serena Crull, by the way.”
“Cruel?” he asked.
“C-R-U-L-L.”
“Oh.”
“Well, at least my name isn’t Serena Vampireton, ya big putz.”
“The bathroom is down the hall and on your left. I’ll find some clean clothes for you.”
“Had lots of lady friends stay over, hum?”
“No, you’ll have to make do with my clothes.”
“Ah, let the fashion show begin!”
“You’ll be lovely,” he said flatly, as if stating a fact: It will rain tonight. It was too cloudy to stargaze. You will be lovely.
“Boy Scout, you are one weird white boy, anybody tell you?”
“Never to my face,” he replied, and went to find her something to wear.
Chapter 7
Burke shut the fridge and turned around, then nearly dropped the gallon of milk on his foot. Serena was standing right there and he hadn’t heard a thing.
“That’s disconcerting.”
“Thanks, Boy Scout. If that’s for me, don’t bother. I don’t drink…milk.”
“It’s for me, actually. I can still taste the sand from last night.” He poured himself a large glass and drank it all off in a single draught, like it was beer. He could use a beer, but there wasn’t a drop in the house. He scowled at the gallon container, then poured himself more.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.” She grabbed a napkin from the small pile on the kitchen table, stepped forward, and wiped his upper lip. “I can’t hardly see where I bit you anymore.”
“Fast healer. Fast metabolism.”
“Honey, tell me.” She stepped back—almost too quickly, he thought, as if she was afraid. Not that he could exactly tell—it was maddening not to be able to smell her emotions. And tantalizing. But mostly maddening. “So?” She whirled in a small circle. “How do I look? Ready to call Vogue?”
“You look fine,” he said, which was a gross underestimation. She was wearing one of his white strappy T-shirts, which only emphasized her small, firm breasts and the sweet dark smoothness of her skin. Frankly, the shirt emphasized that her breasts were all nipple, which made him want to pull it off to see, which made him want to—
“Fine,” he repeated, wrenching his mind back on track. Trying, anyway. “You look fine.”
“Well, the sweatpants were never gonna work, so I found a pair of your shorts.” As it was, they came down to her knees and made her look irresistibly cute; she wiggled her bare toes and he smiled. She was still damp from the shower; water glistened in her tight cap of black curls.
He hurriedly drank more milk. Pity that wasn’t what he was thirsty for.
“Well, I appreciate the clothes and the shower and the late-night snack—” She tapped her throat by explanation and he nodded. “But I’d better hit the trail, as they said in the old Westerns right before they killed all the Indians. Excuse me: Native Americans.”
“Hold on. I want to help you.”
“Help me out of these shorts, maybe,” she joked, and he hurriedly looked away so she wouldn’t realize how close she was to the truth. “Naw, I think we’ve bugged each other enough for one night—well, two nights. Don’t you?”
“You can’t do it by yourself.”
“Do what?”
“Whatever it is you came here for. You’re not a native, and you’re not a tourist. Something brought you to the Cape. I want to help you with it.”
“Why?”
Because you’re beautiful. Because I was a coward. Because you know what I am and you’re not afraid. Because I know what you are and I’m not afraid. Because. Because.
“I feel bad,” he said carefully, “about last night.”
She waved his cowardice away with one nail-bitten hand. “That? Forget it.”
“Never.”
She raised her eyebrows at his tone. “I mean it. I made a fuss, but it was no big. It was sweet—yet dumb—of you to jump in at all. You couldn’t help your nature, any more than I can help biting people on the neck. And I quit apologizing for that about thirty years ago.”
“Still, you’re rogue.” Like me.
“Rogue?”
“Out here by yourself. Alone. You don’t have the pack to help you. But I’ll help you.”
“Boy Scout, I really don’t think you will.”
“On my word as a former member of the Wyndham Pack, I will.”
“Boy Scout, you don’t want any of this, trust me.”
“I left you once and it almost killed you.”
She snorted. “Not even close.”
“I can’t leave you again. At least—” He groped for a way to lighten the moment, make a joke. What would a real person say? “At least not until we get you some decent clothes.”
“You’re sweet, but you sh
ouldn’t offer to jump into something when you don’t know what it is.”
Patiently, he went over it again. “I don’t care what it is. I want to help you. Frankly, I don’t see you leaving this house without me right behind you. I’m an excellent tracker.” A bluff, with her lack of scent, she could probably lose him in half an hour.
She scowled, then shrugged. “Have it your way, Boy Scout. You rang the cherries: I’m not a tourist. I’m out here for a reason. In fact, I’m out here to find a vampire and kill him. How ’bout that?”
“Oh, murder? That’s fine with me.”
To his amusement, she was so shocked she sat down.
Chapter 8
“See, the thing is—”
“It’s fine, Serena.”
“But see, it’s like—”
“Do you want to leave now? Or do you need to, I don’t know, rest?”
“Listen to me. I…we…have to find the vampire who—”
“Who sired you?”
She made a face, her dark nose crinkling like she smelled something bad. Since he hadn’t taken the garbage out for a day or two, it was entirely possible. Perhaps they shouldn’t be having this meeting in the kitchen. Perhaps another room. Like the bedroom. Ah, the—
“Boy Scout, you’re not listening. Nobody says ‘sired’; a vampire makes you or he kills you. In fact, a lot of us say we were killed, even if we were made. Are you— Was that a yawn?”
“I haven’t been sleeping.”
“It was a yawn! What, I’m boring you?”
“I’m just not interested in the details.”
“The details like who we’re going to murder.”
“According to you,” he said coolly, “our victim is already dead.”
That gave her something to think about, he could see; she leaned back in her kitchen chair and stared up at the ceiling for a minute. Finally she brushed her ear—a charming monkey gesture—and said, “Well, okay. Technically, the guy we’re going to stake doesn’t breathe and doesn’t have a pulse, or not much of one, and he’s been running around dead for at least sixty years. But still. It’s a very serious thing.”
Burke managed to conceal another yawn.
“I can’t believe,” she said, shaking her head, “that you don’t at least want the details.”
“Oh, sure, I want them. Who, when, and how, I suppose. He’s probably going to be a hard kill.” He smiled and Serena shrank back in her chair. “You certainly were.”
“Okay, first of all, when you grin like that, you’ve got about a million teeth. Second of all, the who is the vampire who made me, yeah. The when is as soon as I track the mother down, and the how—we have to stake him in the heart or throw him into a tanning bed or something like that.”
“Crosses? Holy water?”
“Will hurt him but probably not kill him. And don’t be waving any of those things around me, Boy Scout.”
“Does the stake have to be made of—”
“Any kind of wood. And it has to be through the heart. Anywhere else, he’ll just get right back up and keep coming.” She added bitterly, “Don’t ask me how I know this.”
Burke ground his teeth. “Did he hurt you?”
“Huh? No. I mean…not physically.”
“But you want him dead for making you dead.”
“No. For making my friend dead. I want him dead for lying. He lied. He didn’t tell me the truth. I mean the whole truth. He let me believe that whoever he bit would be a vampire. He didn’t tell me…didn’t—” She covered her face with her hands and went silent.
After a minute, Burke said, “He bit you.”
“Yes.”
“And you came back.”
“Yes.”
“You were lonely.”
Serena’s hands came down; her eyes were big with wonder. “Yes. Once the hunger—the being new, the being crazy of a new vampire—once that wore off, I found my friend. My best and greatest friend, Maggie Dunn.”
“She missed you.”
“She was so happy that I was alive. Sort of alive. You know. And—”
“You talked to your friend. Or Maggie asked you. It doesn’t matter.”
“That’s right,” she choked. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You thought, or she thought, being a vampire would be a fine thing. Friends forever. And your sire—the one who made you—he obliged. He didn’t tell you—what? Did he not perform all the rituals? Did he do it wrong out of spite, or to keep his pack’s numbers down?”
“He didn’t tell me, and I only found out later, that being a vampire…it’s like the measles. It’s something you catch. Or don’t catch. You could get bit by the same vampire a hundred times, and ninety-nine of those times, nothing would happen. Or he’d drink too much and you’d die. But that one time, the hundredth time, you’d come back. I thought—I didn’t know it was a fargin’ virus. I didn’t know it was a damned head cold. And he didn’t tell me. Didn’t warn us.”
“Your friend didn’t come back.”
“My friend.” She took a shuddering breath and obviously wasn’t used to it, because she almost tilted off her chair and onto the floor. “My friend died screaming. And I let it happen.”
“And this was…”
“Nineteen sixty-five.” She smiled. It was a wobbly smile, but it was there. “Free love, you know.”
“Why…now?”
“I finally found him, that’s why now. There’s a new regime in place, and the king helped me track him down.”
He blinked, processing this. “The king.”
“King Sinclair. The king of the vampires. He made the Minneapolis librarian track Peter down for me.”
“Peter?”
“Innocuous name for such a scum-sucking son of a bitch, isn’t it? Anyway, the old boss didn’t give two shits for problems like mine. I knew better than to even ask—we all just kept out of his way. It was a bad time for most of us. But then—”
“Things changed.”
“I heard the new king and queen—”
“There was a coup for power? The old leader lost? Was killed?”
“Yeah. So I let things settle down a bit and then I went to St. Paul and— Never mind all that, point is, I got an address, I even got the name of the restaurant he runs.”
“Your leaders—they know what you’ll do when you find Peter?”
She nibbled on her lower lip. “The king does. He understands this kind of stuff. I got the feeling—I think he keeps the queen out of a lot of the bloodier stuff, you know? She’s kind of new to the game.”
“Ah.” He knew about new mates, having seen (from a distance) Jeannie’s struggles to fit in with the pack. He didn’t blame this Sinclair fellow at all for keeping his woman out of the boring bloody details.
“That’s it? ‘Ah’?”
“There is nothing else, right?”
“Yeah, but…that’s it? You got nothin’?”
“Do you know what my mother told me every night before I went to bed?”
“Uh…stop being such a chowderhead?”
“No. She repeated the family motto: Kill or be eaten.”
“Swell.”
“Isn’t that your situation, as a vampire?”
She shifted in her chair. “I-I don’t think of myself—I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever killed anyone. It’s a myth that vampires have to kill you to feed. Half a pint and we’re good for the night. Sure, we’re a little bit nuts in the beginning—a brand-new vampire is pretty much out of her mind for a few years. But you get ahold. It’s like anything—you deal.”
He touched his neck, which had entirely healed, and smiled at her. “Good to know.”
“But it sounds like being a werewolf is really, really stressful. No wonder you live away from it all.”
“That’s not why I live away from it all,” he said, and got up to put the milk away, and they both knew the discussion was over.
Chapter 9
Before she realized it, the night ha
d disappeared and the killing dawn was lurking around the corner. Serena could hardly believe it. They’d spent the entire night in the kitchen, plotting.
Born and bred on the Cape, Burke knew the local geography and tourist traps, and recognized the name of Pete’s restaurant, Eat Me Raw. He told her it was “up Cape” in “P-town,” whatever the hell that meant. Not for the first time, she thought it wasn’t so crazy, hooking up with the Boy Scout.
“We could drive there now,” he said, looking at her doubtfully, “but you’d have to ride in the trunk. And stay in the trunk until the sun goes down.”
“Tempting offer, but no thanks. Let’s just crash here and we’ll hit the road first thing tonight. You’ve got a whole day,” she teased, “to come to your senses.”
Without a word, he got up and escorted her to the basement of his small, pleasantly untidy house. It was a finished basement, cool and dark, partly used for storage. Part of the basement had been made into a bedroom, with one small south-facing window, which he efficiently taped a dark beach towel over.
“All rightey then,” she said, looking at the neatly made double bed. The room screamed “guest room”; there was no personality to it at all. In fact, Burke’s entire house (well, the parts she had seen) had very little personality, as if occupied by a ghost, or someone who didn’t care much one way or the other. “Good night.”
“Good night.” He stood very close to her for a moment and then (she thought—hoped?) reluctantly moved away. “Call me if you need anything.”
“Oh yeah. You betcha.” She cursed her Minnesotaisms, which surfaced in moments of stress.
The door shut. She was alone in the sterile guest room. Which was too bad, because she hadn’t been laid in about twenty years (the thirst tended to take over everything, including the sex drive and the need for manicures) and Burke would obviously be a—
But that was no way to think. That way was trouble, pure and simple. She had a mission to complete, and when Pete was dead, when his lying head had been cut off and she’d kicked it into the ocean, when Maggie had at long last been avenged, then…then…
Well. She didn’t know. But that was for later. For now, she climbed between clean sheets and, when the sun came up (she couldn’t see it, but she could sure feel it, feel it the way bats felt it, the way blind worms in the dirt felt it), she slept.