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“I hoped it would just go away. I thought maybe it was some weirdo antivamp crazy who wanted to make me uncomfortable. But now, this combined with Walter’s being set on fire, I think the guy who shot me the first time, Bud McElray, is trying to scare me or finish the job or something. I don’t know what to do. Can I complain to the human authorities? Do I go to Ophelia and tell on him—” I saw Gabriel’s face grow tense at the mention of Bud’s name. “What?”
Gabriel grimaced. “You haven’t read your paper lately, have you?”
“Besides want ads? Not really,” I admitted. “Why?”
He went into my kitchen and shuffled through the old Half-Moon Herald s in my recycling bin until he found what he wanted.
He handed the news section to me.
“Half-Moon Resident Killed in Hunting Mishap,” I read aloud from a front page dated two weeks before. “Half-Moon Hollow native Bud McElray died Tuesday when the deer stand he was climbing collapsed, bringing a thirty -two-foot oak tree down on top of him. Coroner Don Purdue described the cause of death as multiple blunt-trauma injuries, including a broken spine, fractured skull, and massive internal bleeding. Purdue added that several empty beer bottles were found around the fallen tree. He said it would take several weeks for toxicology tests to determine whether there were drugs or alcohol present in McElray ’s system.”
Let’s see, the man who mortally wounded me with a hunting rifle while drunk was killed in a freak accident on a deer stand that he was too drunk to climb. That wasn’t suspicious.
“Jane, Bud McElray can’t be the person who shot you, and he’s not the one who’s been harassing you. He’s been dead for weeks.”
“I swear I didn’t do it,” I said, dropping the paper. “It wasn’t me.”
“Of course, it wasn’t you. Trees fall. Mr. McElray had the bad luck of standing under it at the time.”
“And that doesn’t strike you as…convenient?” I asked.
“No.” He snorted. “It was a terrible inconvenience to push a very heavy tree on top of Mr. McElray.”
I gaped at him, the salty-sweet gorge of faux blood rising in my throat. “You killed him,” I whispered.
He sat there, still as stone, as he stared at me. Looking back, this may have been Gabriel’s way of saying, “Duh!”
“Say something!” I yelled. “You can’t just tell me how inconvenient it was to shove a tree on top of a living human being and then not say anything. Please tell me—just say something.”
“He hurt you,” Gabriel said, his eyes flashing silver even in the dim light. “He left you to die like some animal and just went on living his life.”
“He thought I was an animal! How could you do that? You weren’t trying to feed or to defend yourself.” I whimpered, shrinking away. “You murdered him.”
“And you would have let him live?” He followed me into the living room, clearly irked that I didn ’t appreciate what was probably considered a romantic gesture in the vampire world. “You would have let him go unpunished for what he did? Let him hurt other innocent people?”
“I will not pretend that I’m sad to see Bud McElray dead,” I admitted. “A part of me hates him for what he did to me. I’m glad that he will never be able to hurt anyone else. But I wouldn’t have had any human die that way. It’s cruel and vicious, and it’s beneath you, Gabriel, with all your noble-creature-of-the-night bullshit. Don’t you dare think you did this for me. Plus, I’m already suspected of setting other vampires on fire. I don’t need a human murder charge on my head. Did you even think about that?”
“No one will connect it to you, because no one knows McElray was responsible for shooting you, ” he said. “There was never any report, any evidence.”
Damned if he didn’t have a point there. So, instead of following logic, I demanded, “Why wait until now?”
“I gave him time to forget what had happened, if he even remembered it in the first place. I watched him. I let him settle back into his drunken useless wasted life and when he least expected anything, I extinguished it.”
His voice, the absence of passion or any sort of feeling about the fact that he had snuffed out a human life, chilled me to my marrow. My hands began to shake. I bunched them into fists, flexing the fingers to try to pump warmth into the joints. “What about me makes you think I would be OK with that? What makes you think I would find that acceptable? What happened to not taking the things humans do personally, taking the good with the bad?”
“This is different.”
“How is it different?” I demanded.
“He hurt you!” Gabriel shouted, stepping closer to me. I backed away, but he pursued me, backing me up against the edge of my writing desk. “He left you to die. What about me makes you think I would find that acceptable?”
“Back off.” I shoved him away. Well, I tried. He was pretty much unmovable. “He didn’t know he’d shot me, Gabriel. He wasn’t an evil man, just a stupid drunk who didn’t know any better. No matter what kind of person he was, he was still human.
And you’ve made me responsible for his death. You said you didn’t want to give me experiences to regret, but this is a big fricking regret.”
“I know you’re upset. But I hope that someday you will understand why I did this. You will understand what you mean to me. I will do anything to keep you safe, anything.”
He reached for me. For the first time since I ’d known him, he looked unsure, unsteady—probably because I slapped his hands away. “Don’t touch me. Just get away from me.”
