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“I’ll let you do anything you want to me, baby,” I promised with coquettish willingness. It was all I could do to fight back my fangs and refrain from ripping his throat out in front of all his adoring fans then and there.
Too bad that wouldn’t have killed him.
No, I was going to need to decapitate him, burn him or destroy his heart. Don’t let the stake-through-the-chest myth fool you. Vampires aren’t that easy to kill. Sure, it would help slow one down, but if you miss a direct hit to the heart, all it’s going to do is piss the rogue off.
My weapon of choice was a 9mm handgun loaded with silver bullets I had specially ordered. Silver, while expensive, is a solid investment in my line of work. It’s as effective as poison on a vampire and has the added perk of being lethal to werewolves too. I had to have my clips preloaded for me because I was so allergic to the stuff I couldn’t touch it.
Silver bullets alone won’t kill a vampire, but if you use them to take out the head or heart, it’s a pretty effective method. Decapitation is messy and unpleasantly intimate. I prefer to blow their heads off from a clean distance and save myself the hassle.
The bonus is, so long as you can keep anyone from finding the body until sunup, the corpse will turn to ash in the morning light. No body, no crime.
Charlie ran his hand up and down my arm and bit my earlobe with a playful drag of his teeth. I shuddered, but since he couldn’t see the disgust on my face, he must have thought it was from pleasure.
“The Columbia Hotel,” he told me. “Meet me in an hour. ”
“Of course. ”
Back at McCarthy’s, I saw Tyler’s head peering over the line, his gaze sweeping the street. He spotted me and waved to get my attention. My timing was impeccable; he was second from the entrance. I made my way up to meet him, but with every step closer I felt my blood grow cold.
“Son of a…” I cursed under my breath. No wonder he’d been looking for me so diligently.
“Look who I found,” Tyler began, but I didn’t need him to continue. He hadn’t found anybody. Somebody had found us.
“Holden. ” I spat out his name, and it had never sounded more like a dirty word than it did in that moment. His faux cheeriness had returned, and he was brimming over with barely suppressed delight. He appeared to be taking great pleasure in the mess he was making out of my night.
“What are the chances?” Holden asked in his best it’s a small world voice.
“I was wondering that myself,” Tyler replied, his tone tight and the polite smile looking forced. I wasn’t doing a very good job of censoring myself either, because neither of them seemed too impressed by the expression on my face. “Did you guys need to talk or something?”
“Yes. ”
“No. ”
Tyler turned from Holden’s affirmative to my emphatic negative and deduced there was something he was missing. He was smart, otherwise he wouldn’t be a detective and Mercedes wouldn’t have set us up. Unfortunately, he jumped straight to the obvious assumption, not that I could blame him.
“So, clearly there’s something going on with you two, and I don’t want to get into the middle of some domestic entanglement. ” He moved to step out of the line, and Holden did nothing to stop or correct him.
“Tyler, wait,” I insisted. He obeyed, and I wondered, not for the first time, if I might have a little of the vampire thrall magic in me. “It’s not what you think. ”
He waited. Holden waited. My brain waited, which pretty much left me hanging in the wind.
“I need Secret for a business meeting,” Holden offered at last, and in spite of how pissed off I was, I could have hugged him.
“At eleven o’clock at night?”
“She probably told you about our new client,” Holden replied by way of explanation.
“Charlie Conaway?”
“You know those Hollywood types,” I chimed in. “Odd hours. ”
Holden shrugged a halfhearted apology. “What can you do?”
“You need her now?” Tyler asked, obviously miffed about waiting in line for forty minutes only to have me vanish again.
Holden was already leaving the line, angling me back towards Times Square, when I turned back to Tyler and said, “It won’t be long. We’re just going to the Columbia Hotel. ” Holden squeezed my elbow in warning, but I kept right on talking. “Meet me at the Billie Holiday Bar? One o’clock?”
I could tell he was going to protest, but I took advantage of his hesitation and went for broke. I shot him a variation of the look that landed Charlie’s attention earlier, only poutier.
