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I took a deep breath, looking deep into Gabriel’s eyes. If anyone had proven his devotion to me, it was Gabriel. Even if that devotion was destructive, it had a single focus, and that was me. I held his interest even when I was just my “annoying” human self. He didn’t consider my brain or personality something to overcome. He’d saved me. He’d killed for me. He’d loved me. And for all of that, I owed him a little bit of trust.
“I love you, too,” I said, cupping his face in my hands. I locked eyes with him, leveling him with my gaze. “So I’ll wait. I want you to tell me what’s causing you so much stress. Maybe I can help. But I want you to do it in your own time. However, you should know that if that time doesn’t come soon—”
He nodded. “You will threaten any number of my orifices. I understand.”
“Is it orifices or orifici?” I asked.
“I’m rather shocked that you don’t know,” he admitted.
The countdown to the wedding was two weeks. It was a slow night in the shop, and I had just given up on sorting through any old boxes after a traumatic incident in which Dick had to kill a rather large spider for me. I swear that thing chased me onto that chair.
When Dick returned, I had put the spider’s box in the alley and opened up my file of notes for what Zeb had termed “Operation Undead Gigolo.”
“What are you doing?” Dick asked, peering over my shoulder. “Oh, honey, this is worse than I thought. Normal, well-adjusted girls do not spend Friday nights looking through autopsy reports.”
“When have you ever known me to be well adjusted or normal?” I asked.
“I concede.”
“I’m looking into the guy my grandma is marrying. He seems sketchy. He drinks pig’s blood. According to this, he’s dead.” I showed him the death certificate. “And he’s been married several times to women who don’t quite make it past their first anniversary. He’s not registered on any of the official undead databases, but according to the chapel that handled his burial, he went to his grave intact, so it’s possible he’s a vampire.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to ask him whether he’s one of us?” Dick asked, looking over Wilbur’s coroner’s report.
“I would, but my grandma Ruthie seems to be actively avoiding me. She doesn’t come to Mama’s house if she knows I’m going to be there. She screens my calls. She won’t let me near Wilbur, but I don’t know if it’s because he’s trying to hide something or she’s afraid of me embarrassing her. There’s no legitimate address listed for this guy, and the last three homes he shared with the corpse brides have been sold. I went to his grave to see if there was anything abnormal about it. It seemed fine. I wasn’t about to try to dig him up and see if the coffin was empty, because that’s how horror movies start. Dick, are you even listening to me?”
“Huh,” Dick said, looking over Wilbur’s death report. “Sorry, no. This is weird.”
“Weird ha-ha? Or weird our territory weird?”
Dick turned the paperwork to get a better look. “Well, the nurse who did the CPR on him, Jay Lemuels, I know him. He’s one of us.”
“Where can we find Jay?” I asked.
Dick checked the grandfather clock on the wall. “This time of night, probably Club Rainn. It’s a vampire bar. Good blood, bad sound system.”
Dick jangled the keys out of his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re going,” he told me. “The night is young, and we’re immortal, and there are unanswered questions afoot. If that doesn’t make a case for a couple of beers and a ridiculously high cover charge, Stretch, I don’t know what does.”
“The last time I went out on the town with you, I ended up a suspect in Walter’s murder.”
“I’ll be there to keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t know if that will keep me out of trouble or just get me into it more efficiently.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s Karaoke Night.”
“OK, but you have to sing one Kenny Rogers song in a falsetto,” I said, poking him in the chest.
“I will sing,” he said, tossing me my jacket. “But only because my version of ‘The Gambler’ is both inspirational and erotic.”
“Gross.”
* * *
We climbed into Dick’s beat-up transportation, which smelled suspiciously of burnt rope. There were dozens of empty blood bottles on the floor and what might have been counterfeit Gap jeans. I turned back to him. “If we get pulled over, am I going to have to tell the nice policeman that I’ve never met you before and I have no idea how those stolen car stereos got into the trunk?”>Without a word, he turned on his heel and stormed toward the door. I used my superhuman speed to step around him and throw myself across the doorway. “No, no. No. Just leave it alone. Trust that I took care of it. Take a leap of faith that I managed to handle a situation on my own without completely screwing it up. Besides, if anyone should be asking the pointed questions around here, it’s me. You’re the one disappearing every time I turn around, not answering your phone, not staying where you say you’re going to be.”
