Page 47 of Starved Until Sunset

“A year.”

The coffee suddenly tasted worse.

“That’s great,” Demmy said, conveniently out of Cody’s smacking zone. “It’ll be nice to have you in town, and not just for any unusual situations that come up. It’s always good to see you.”

Apparently there was a conversation that needed to be had when he and Demmy were alone.

Lucia and Deputy Walsh walked in the front doors of the hospital, both in uniform. Cody was glad to see Deputy Walsh up and moving around, her injury from the night before apparently minor. As they approached, Walsh’s smile widened when she caught sight of them. To his dismay, he realized her reaction had been at the sight of Clarabell. What the hell was it about her? Maybe it was Clarabell’s voice. What if that foghorn-wannabe, paint-peeling voice was like the nix’s singing, allowing her to hypnotize people into liking her, and only Cody himself was immune?

“Clarabell!” Walsh bent over to give the woman a hug. “It’s so good to see you.”

“You, too,” Clarabell rasped.

Walsh stepped back and looked her up and down. “Your outfit is on point, girl.”

“Kill me now,” Cody muttered.

“Get in line,” Lucia muttered back.

After Clarabell distributed the remaining coffees—all perfectly prepared, of course—Lucia checked her phone. “Zenona said she’d meet us in the lobby. Anyone see her?”

They all looked around, but Zenona wasn’t in sight.

“What time is it?” Clarabell asked. “Has the sun gone down yet?”

A nervous chill went through Cody, tightening his stomach around the coffee and making it gurgle unpleasantly. “I don’t know.”

Clarabell looked at her phone. “We have another couple of minutes before sunset.”

Cody exchanged a look with Lucia and was glad to see his own intense dislike the turn the situation was taking reflected in her expression.

“Why, I’m going to regret asking, do we have to wait until after sunset?” Lucia said.

Clarabell looked at each of them in turn, her surprise clear. “You don’t know?”

“We don’t,” Walsh and Demmy said together.

“Babies, you’ve got a vampire infestation in your town,” Clarabell said.

Cody lost track of the conversation once Clarabell had said the ‘v’ word. It ignited a high-pitched buzzing in his brain that pretty much drowned out all other sounds. His head felt light and only loosely attached to his body, and the lights in the hospital lobby suddenly seemed much too bright. The sensation that his mind floated slightly above their group wasn’t really bad, but he also knew it wasn’t a good thing.

Demmy stepped in close and took his hand. At that simple and familiar touch, Cody’s mind thumped back down into his body with what had to have been an audible plopping sound. He looked at Demmy, tried to return his reassuring smile, but feared it may have come out as a grimace.

It wasn’t a total surprise, of course. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Cody had reasoned that everything had been adding up to a vampire. But still, to hear it called out so casually, as if this kind of thing happened every other day, was a tough adjustment.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Lucia said in a harsh whisper.

Apparently, not everyone had followed the clues to the vampire treasure chest.

Lucia threw a cautious look around the lobby, then jerked her head off to the side. They all followed as she led them the rest of the way to the grouping of chairs and benches where they all sat. Fixing Clarabell with a fierce glare—which, Cody was impressed to see, did not seem to phase her—Lucia continued in a lowered voice. “How in the hell do you know there are…” She looked around again and lowered her voice even more. “Vampires here in town before the sheriff’s department or these two?” She waved toward him and Demmy.

“I think I can explain.”

Cody turned with the rest of them to find Zenona standing a few feet away. She had her hands in the pockets of her white doctor’s coat, and her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

“Zee,” Lucia said. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you come to me? To us?”

Zenona took a breath and let it out. She looked down at the floor, slowly shaking her head. “It’s very complicated.”