AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Look under the sink,” he said, nodding toward the cabinet in question. Where most people stored their garbage bags and empty grocery sacks, Mr. Calix had stored a canvas duffel bag and a carrying case for the laptop in the living room. I unzipped the duffel to find an emergency stash of clothes and toiletries. Oddly, this level of preparation warmed my heart. I did not want to top this strange day off by searching around in a vampire’s underwear drawer. Nothing good could come of that.
By the time I turned around, Mr. Calix was standing on his own two feet, albeit leaning against a counter. Even weakened, at his full height he cut an imposing figure. He loomed a good foot taller than me, his frame solidly built. And I didn’t think he got those muscles from painting or baking during his human years. Mr. Calix was someone who charged and fought until his last remaining enemy was destroyed … like my poor phone.
I had a sudden sense of foreboding. How smart was it to take an unstable, phone-crushing vampire home with me? I didn’t know anything about this guy beyond his last name, address, and credit history. Sure, he was referred to me by Ophelia, but she was the type who would probably find trapping a human in an enclosed space with a vampiric sex offender rather droll.
I should just call Ophelia, I told myself. I should tell her about her poisoned consultant, go the hell home, and pillage the bag of York Peppermint Patties hidden in my freezer.
Just as I was flipping through Mr. Calix’s contacts to do exactly that, he pulled open what most people would have used as their utensil drawer and began carefully counting out cash into small, banded stacks. I could see a wealth of green still in the drawer as he snapped it shut.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he said, nudging the neatly stacked bills toward me. “Consider it a good-faith down payment. If I survive the week, you’ll get the full amount.”
My hands shook a little as my fingertips brushed the precious green paper. I had never seen so much cash in one place before. This couldn’t be real. This amount of cash shouldn’t just fall into my hands so easily. This couldn’t be a good idea. But the money ended up in my hand somehow and was safely zipped into my purse. And that seemed like the point of no return, in terms of negotiating.
“You keep that kind of cash in your knife drawer?” I asked. “I think I know why someone poisoned you.”
“The person who poisoned me didn’t have use for my money,” he said dryly. “Just so you know, I’ll be changing the security code on the way out. I would hate for you to be tempted to come back and clean me out while I’m sleeping.”
“I ask you, where’s the trust?”
“Tucked safely into your purse,” he retorted.
I took a moving blanket from a heap in the living room and tossed it over his head. He slipped into some shoes, and we carefully exited the house. He used his vampire speed to reset the code so that even if I’d been tempted, I couldn’t follow it, and we moved swiftly toward my car. Just dusk, there was no one outside in the neighborhood yet, so I was able to load him calmly into the back of the van without so much as a wisp of smoke rising off his skin.
With my client snugly situated under a blanket, I stopped on the way home to pop into a local blood bank where the staff knew me and told them that I was filling an order from Mr. Rychek. Knowing the way he stress-fed when Diandra came into town, they didn’t question the extra units of O positive and fresh plasma that I withdrew.
The sun was just setting as I turned into my own driveway. I was relieved to see my house, even if I was technically bringing a monster into it. My place was nothing special, a rambling old farmhouse that my parents had purchased just after they married. The original owners had added rooms here and there over the generations. The effect was like several cracker boxes stacked against one another and then covered with cream-colored aluminum siding. But the trim was covered with a fresh coat of robin’s-egg blue, and the gutters were new.
I didn’t have as much time to maintain my flower beds as I’d like, so I tried to give them a low-maintenance, wild fairy-cottage look, with fluffy white spikes of crepe myrtle and low-lying purple and golden clouds of shrub verbena. Creeping carpets of periwinkle phlox spilled over the stone circles that contained the beds. I liked the way their color contrasted against the lush basketball-sized purple-blue clusters of the hydrangea bushes.
I knew every plant, every bloom, because I tended them with my own hands. I could mentally catalogue them by genus and phylum, but I chose not to. This was one area where my botany professors and I didn’t agree. I didn’t like calling plants by their Latin names. Yes, it was more appropriate in an academic setting, but it was so impersonal. Plants had personalities. Referring to happy, open sunflowers as “helianthus” was like calling them by the ugly middle names they only listed on their tax forms. If plants paid taxes, that is.
Despite the use of a wide-brimmed straw hat, my skin was brown and slightly freckled from the hours I spent weeding, watering, and warding off pests. My hands were callused, and my nails were nonexistent. Some days, all I wanted to do was collapse on the couch after work rather than break out the aphid spray, but I could no more neglect my plants than I could leave Gigi “Appliance Killer” Scanlon to cook for herself. Like Gigi, they’d been left to me, and I took care of them.
I caught Mr. Calix looking at the house over my shoulder as I helped him out of the van. The expression on his handsome face screamed “not impressed.” He cleared his throat and managed, “It’s …”
I gave him an arch look. “Yes?”
“Quaint. Very homey.”
“Because it is a home, my family’s home,” I reminded him. “Which I am bringing you into.”
“I understand,” he said, gritting his teeth a bit as we negotiated the front steps. I wasn’t sure why he seemed so pained. I was pretty sure that I was bearing more of his weight than he was. And negotiating a locked front door while attempting to prop up a slumping vampire is quite the feat of concentration.
Contrary to those talented storytellers’ theories, vampires can, in fact, enter your home without an invitation. In general, they don’t, because they consider it rude. There were a lot of little myths that the humans had to let go of once vampires came out of the coffin—crosses, holy water, guys with cute English accents who wandered around in long black coats being all adorably evil.
Sigh. Oh, Spike.
Believe it or not, this whole public vampirism thing was started by an out-of-control undead accountant. In 1999, a newly turned Milwaukee tax consultant named Arnie Frink requested evening hours so he could continue his job at the firm of Jacobi, Meyers, and Leptz. But the human-resources rep, as ignorant as the rest of the world about the existence of the undead at the time, insisted that Arnie keep banker’s hours because of security concerns. Because God forbid anyone should be able to use unsupervised night hours to make unlimited copies.
Arnie countered with a diagnosis of porphyria, a painful allergy to sunlight, but the evil HR rep could not be moved. So Arnie responded just like any typical wronged American.
He sued the absolute hell out of them.
When the allergy-discrimination argument failed to impress a judge, a sunblock-slathered Arnie lost his composure in court and declared that he was a vampire, with a medical condition that rendered him unable to work during the day, thereby making him subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
After several lengthy appeals, Arnie won his lawsuit and got a settlement, evening hours, and an interview with Barbara Walters. While initially furious that some schmuck accountant from Milwaukee had destroyed millenniums’ worth of undead mystique, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open, anyway. Blood was easier to get when you could just ask someone for it.
An elected contingent of ancient vampires officially notified the United Nations of their presence and asked the world’s governments to recognize them as legitimate beings. They also asked for special leniency in certain medical, legal, and tax issues that were sure to come up. Apparently, organized financial records are beneath vampires’ notice.
