Bring On the Night (5 page)

“Let me guess: Jeremy’s solution is for you to become a vampire.”

“Pretty much.” We shared a smirk at the expense of our morbid friend, the sole human DJ at WVMP. “That’s his solution for everything, including static cling.”

“But he might have a point. Not about you becoming a vampire but about your commitment phobia.”

“He might.” I sipped the Irish coffee, hoping its warmth would soothe my apprehension. “I never want to break up with Shane. But I couldn’t stand losing him for normal reasons—because of something I did or because I wasn’t good enough. So I know that eventually I’ll start making a bigger deal about how different we are, until one day it’s true, and we’ll have proven that a vampire and a human can’t go the distance together.”

“If any human and vampire could, it would be you and
Shane. If you ask me, it’s better to have a few years or decades with someone who rocks your world than a whole lifetime with someone who makes you yawn.” She studied my face. “What if he headed you off at the pass?”

“By breaking up with me?” Just uttering the thought made my voice squeak.

“By proposing.”

I closed my eyes and imagined the moment. He’d come up with something clever and charming and sexy, like the hero of a romantic comedy movie. He’d be almost impossible to resist.

“I’d say no,” I told her.

Maybe he’d ask again and again, and I’d say no again and again, and eventually he would give up.

And then the end would begin. He’d leave home earlier in the evening, start sleeping at the station. I’d be relieved to wake up alone.

Then, one night, he would leave for good. It would hurt him too much to know I couldn’t give him forever.

Just imagining it made my lungs ache. But the alternative—marrying him, growing old, and finally dying while he stayed young—stopped my breath altogether.

In the battle over my state of consciousness, the whiskey kicked the coffee’s ass, and I was asleep by eleven o’clock. I barely had the presence of mind to take off my clothes before crawling under the covers.

I didn’t know Shane was there until he slipped his arms around my waist and buried his face in the back of my neck. The soft scrape of his cotton shirt against my skin said he couldn’t wait to hold me, not even long enough to undress.

I twined my fingers with his and kept my voice sleepy, as if my words were a reflex, which they never were. “I love you.”

He sighed, deep and soft. I tightened my grip on his hand and tried not to picture him as he was fifteen years ago this moment, lying dead in his maker Regina’s arms.

His next breath was nothing but my name. I turned to face him. In the dim glow of the nightlight, I could see the mix of joy and agony in his pale blue eyes. They were dry but crinkled and a little swollen around the edges, as if he had a head cold.

Though I longed to do much, much, much more, I simply kissed him softly on the tip of his perfect nose, then on his lips. I stroked the sharp angles of his cheek and jaw with the tips of my fingers, then slid my hand into the light brown hair that grazed his neck.

“Welcome home,” I said.

He kissed me then, as gently as I had kissed him, but with lips parted, his tongue beckoning. The sudden wet contact shot a bolt of desire down my spine, pooling liquid heat in my core.

Despite our month-long separation, we didn’t crash together in a desperate, grabby lustfest. We touched like we were sculpting glass in our bare hands, as if pieces of us would break off if we grasped too hard.

When his clothes were gone, he guided my leg over his hip and entered me. We lay side by side, facing each other, kissing deeper, saying nothing. I crested slowly, building higher and higher over what seemed like hours. Then suddenly I was clutching Shane’s shoulder, my nails sinking deep into his skin to hold myself together.

He groaned against my neck and pressed his mouth hard
to my flesh. Through his lips I felt his fangs and knew that part of him wanted to pierce me, taste my blood at its sweetest, at the height of my ecstasy.

But that would have made me something more and less than his beloved. We wanted to dwell in the fragile,
human
bliss we’d created.

So he just held my body tight to his as he came. Pulsing deep inside me, breathing warm against my skin, he had as much life as I’d ever need.

Destination Unknown

In a sure sign of the universe’s cruelty, I had to go to work later that morning. I hated leaving Shane alone on his death-iversary, but at least Dexter would be there to cheer him up with random acts of laziness.

I dragged myself up the rickety stairs of the tiny station building and knocked on the front door. It unlocked and opened only from the inside, to prevent vampire flameouts.

The knob turned and the door popped open, sticking to the frame due to the foggy day’s humidity. At that moment, I happened to be in the middle of a wide, uncovered yawn.

“Oh, that’s attractive.” Franklin, the sales director, waved me into the office. “Come inside before flies lay eggs under your tongue.”

“Welcome home to you, too,” I told him as I pushed past.

“I never left,” he snapped.

“Maybe you should consider it.”

“Love to, but then I’d miss all the free pie.”

“What free—” I stopped as I approached my desk in the small, open main office area. On the surface
sat a pie with a crumb topping and what looked like a homemade crust.

I looked back at Franklin. “Did you—”

“Don’t get excited.” He opened the credenza next to the bricked-up fireplace and pulled out a stack of paper plates and napkins with some plastic utensils. “Aaron hates rhubarb, so I used you as an excuse to make an extra pie for Easter.”

I poked my finger through the crust. Apples, too. My all-time favorite. “Is that a candied walnut topping?”

“I used whatever was lying around the house.” He slapped the plates, napkins, and utensils on my desk. “Candied walnuts, the crumbs at the bottom of the dog biscuit box…”

I grabbed a plastic knife and sliced the pie. “You are the worst coworker ever.”

“You’re the worst coworker in two or three evers,” he said as he took the first piece.

It was as close as we’d ever come to saying “I missed you.”

David’s raised voice came from behind his office door, which was shut but so thin it might as well have been open.

“Mom, we’re not really eloping. I would never do that to you.” A pause. “No, I promise I’ll talk Lori out of it.”

I decided to save his butt, though after that fib, I was more interested in kicking it. I dialed an interior extension so his phone would ring.

“Mom, I gotta take this call,” he said. “Love you. Bye.” He picked up the other line. “Agent Griffin, I presume.”

“Got a minute for Control talk? Or an hour or a day?”

“Yep. Bring pie.”

I was cutting David a slice when he opened his office door. He stopped at the threshold, where his sharp green eyes
examined my frame. “Did you get taller?”

I hid a smile, secretly proud of my unprecedented level of physical fitness. “They stretched me on the rack until I told them where I hid Dracula’s bones.” I hooked my pinky through the loop of my thermos and carried our pie slices into his office.

David shut the door behind us and moved quickly out of my personal space to the other side of his desk. The minuscule general manager’s office was lined with shelves of music books and filing cabinets of supernatural facts. As a result, it contained approximately five square feet of floor space.

He sat in his chair and straightened his sport coat. “How was Indoc?”

“It’s all against my nature.” I passed him his slice of pie. “Taking orders, working on a team—not to mention learning how to kill vampires.” I poured myself a pre-sugared cup of coffee from my thermos. “But Lanham said I either did what they wanted or Shane would spend the rest of his unlife north of the Arctic Circle.”

David let out a heavy sigh and picked up his fork. “They drive a hard bargain. But remember, the colonel’s done a lot for you. A lot for
us
. He looked the other way while you were pretending to be Elizabeth so we could keep the station.”

“I know,” I said, in a junior-high sullen voice. After the station owner, Elizabeth, had died for good, I’d “borrowed” her identity to keep the station from being liquidated. Lanham and the Control had looked the other way.

“So where did they assign you?”

I hesitated. David knew about my “anti-holy” power, so my future work wouldn’t be a secret to him. And he’d been close to the Control—when he wasn’t actually
in
it—all his life. Maybe
he could teach me how to keep my commanders happy without compromising my few moral principles.

“Something called the Immanence Corps.”

His fork halted on the way to his mouth. The morsel of pie tumbled back to the plate.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

I blinked. Unlike the rest of us, David rarely used profanity. It was sort of adorable. It also let us know when he was really upset.

“Why would I kid about that?”

“I was afraid this would—” He slammed down his fork, flipping a shower of candied walnuts against his shirt. “What are they thinking?”

“I don’t know. What are
you
thinking? What’s wrong with the Immanence Corps, besides being a band of freaks?”

“They killed my father.”

The pie’s crumb topping turned to sawdust in my mouth. “He was assassinated?”

“Not directly.” David set his elbows on the desk and rubbed his eyes, which had grown tight with tension. “More like driven to his death.”

“I thought he was an enforcement agent like you were.”

“He started out that way.” David sank back into his squeaky office chair and rolled his palms over the curves of its arms. “When I was really young, I didn’t know what he did for a living. But I knew he was happy.” His expression softened as his gaze turned distant. “Sometimes he would dance with my mom even when there was no music playing.”

I stabbed another bite of pie. “So what happened?”

“He got promoted into management. His command experience snagged him a high-level directorship.”

“Of the Immanence Corps?”

“No. Internal Affairs.”

I frowned around my fork. “Rat Patrol? That sounds like punishment, not promotion.”

David lifted an eyebrow in assent. “So we settled down here. I started high school, and he started—” He drew a heavy hand through his dark brown hair. “The only word that fits is ‘fading.’ Like old vampires when the modern world becomes too much for them? My dad withdrew from us. He smoked and drank more than ever. Over the next seven years, Mom and I watched that job kill him.”

Though my brain burned with a million questions, I forced myself to slow down and empathize. “I’m sorry. That must’ve been really rough.”

He nodded, then seemed to go far away. I sensed he wasn’t going to say more without prompting.

“But what’s that got to do with the Immanence Corps?”

“He was investigating them when he began his…” David searched for the right word. “Descent.”

“How do you know? Aren’t those cases classified?”

“He made notes. I found them after he died.”

His glance shot to the lowest drawer in his filing cabinet—the one that was always locked. I interpreted this as a hint that the notes were in there for the stealing. If I asked to see them, he’d say no, since that would be against Control rules. Then I’d be officially disobeying him by reading them. This way, we could both pretend he had scruples.

“I’ll keep your warning in mind,” I told David, “but I don’t have a choice. And maybe things have changed. Maybe new management trends have made the IC more soul friendly. That was what, thirty years ago?”

His eyes narrowed. “Fifteen. I’m only thirty-five.”

Ah, a chance to change the subject. “That’s a long time
for your poor mother to wait for her only child’s marriage. The least you can do is give her a real wedding to cry at.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. “Lori told you I wanted to elope?”

“She tells me everything. It’s a best friend rule.”

“I thought
I
was her best friend.”

“Girls can have more than one. That’s another rule.”

“Wait—she tells you
everything
?”

“As much as I can stomach.” I stood, balancing the pie plate on top of my thermos lid. “I have a month’s worth of trivial e-mail to read, so I really should—”

“Go. Yes.” David shuffled random papers over his desk, avoiding my eyes. “I have, uh, things. To do.”

I shut the door on my way out, satisfied. His mind had traveled far away from the Immanence Corps.

I wish I could’ve said the same for mine.

Before class that night, I went to the history department to meet my professor, who also happened to be Franklin’s long-term boyfriend. In any normal universe, the younger and infinitely cuter Aaron Green would be way out of my coworker’s league. But a normal universe wouldn’t contain vampire DJs.

When I knocked on Aaron’s open door, he looked up from his notes, holding the rim of an empty Styrofoam cup in his mouth. “Hey, Ciara,” came his muffled voice. He lowered the cup and gave me a distracted smile. “Welcome home.”

“It’s good to be back in the real world. Thanks for hating rhubarb so Franklin could bring me pie.”

“I don’t hate rhubarb.” Aaron picked up our latest textbook and placed it in his open briefcase. “He made that pie because he missed you.”

“Then I should go away more often, and Franklin would probably be the first person to agree with that.”

A corner of Aaron’s mouth twitched in response. His gaze traveled around the perimeter of his desk. “What was I…” He scratched the back of his head, tugging the soft waves of sable hair. “I needed something else for tonight’s class.”

He didn’t normally fit the absentminded professor stereotype. “You okay?” I asked him. “Still jet-lagged?”

“No, it’s been a week since I got back from Debrecen.” Aaron’s fingers trickled over the surface of his desk before reaching a stack of papers held together with an alligator clip. “Ah. Here.”