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“Am I the only person in the Hollow who hasn’t slept with Dick Cheney?”
“Possibly,” she admitted.
“Sorry,” I said. Shrugging my shoulders was a painful gesture that let me know there were bits of glass embedded somewhere near my shoulder blade. Gabriel was right, it itched.
Gabriel.
“My sire, Gabriel Nightengale, does he know I’m here?” I asked as she opened my cell door.
She nodded. “You’re not allowed visitors,” she said, shutting the very solid door behind her.
And for the first time since being shot and left for dead, I was truly frightened.
Whenever those horrible “women in prison” movies were played on Lifetime, I thought, what’s the big deal about prison? I could handle solitary. Even if I couldn’t read, I could daydream. I could write. I would take naps.
Well, like many of my predeath preconceived notions, that one was destroyed. There was no window, so I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. There was no clock, so I never knew what time it was. I couldn’t sleep, because the healing burns on my arms itched like crazy. And my daydreams were interrupted by pesky questions such as, “Where is Gabriel?” “Why does this keep happening to me?” “Am I going to die for real this time?”
I spent half my time trying to figure out where the hell I was. When I pressed my ear against the wall, I could hear traffic. I heard voices at least twenty feet above my head, but I couldn’t make out any actual words. And there was a rat somewhere in the plumbing.
The only good thing I could say about the clink was that the blood (served in a paper cup shoved through a slot in my door) was fresh and tasty. It was also of an indeterminate origin, but I decided not to ask questions.
I was halfway to drawing “LOVE” and “HATE” on my knuckles, when Ophelia returned. She was wearing black silk pants and a top that may, at one point, have been a handkerchief. I stood up, grateful for any sort of interaction, even if it could mean I was facing a spookily titled punishment.>Maybe I could fake going to sleep? Sure, it was 2:34 A.M., the vampire equivalent of midday. But a sexual effort like that deserved a catnap, right? Plus, I’d lost a lot of blood earlier in the evening—
“If you don’t get up off the glass, your skin’s going to heal over it. It will itch for decades.”
That was…not what I expected.
He shifted to his feet, shaking debris out of his hair. His skin was ruddier, suffused with my blood. He looked almost tan.
That must have been what he looked like in life, minus the splinters of table sticking out of his back.
Gabriel made a hesitant grab for his pants and slid them on. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t go all prom date on me, Gabriel,” I said, my voice harder than I intended. I got up, leaving a wake of glass tinkling to the floor. I grabbed my robe and yanked it over my back. “My father isn’t going to show up on your doorstep with a shotgun and a preacher.”
He touched my arm and made me turn to face him. “In light of what’s happened, I think you should come stay with me for a while.”
“I don’t think moving in together is the answer to our problems.”
“We don’t have problems,” Gabriel insisted.
“You killed someone!”
“I killed someone for you!”
“Well, pardon me if I don’t think that’s going to make it into the next collection of Hallmark cards!” I cried. “And don’t think that this changes anything,” I growled, fangs creaking to full length. I closed my eyes, tamping my temper down. “We are not back to normal, whatever normal is for us. I’m still—I just don’t want to be around you right now. I think you’d better go.”
Well, if punching him in the face didn ’t hurt him, that certainly did. His lips parted, but he pressed them back together, reconsidering saying something that would probably piss me off even more.
“Jane, please, we can talk about this,” he said, stepping toward me. When he saw the anguish on my face, he stopped. “I’ll call you.”
“Please don’t.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
“Well, at least that wasn’t weird.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and surveyed the damage to my living room: chipped bric-a-brac, a shattered table, and a scrambled brain. And I didn’t know where my underwear was.
19
