Confessions of a Vampire's Girlfriend (8 page)

Sometimes I'd like to kick myself. Other times I just want to step out of my skin, point to my body, and say, “I'm not with her.” This was one of the times when I wanted to do both.

“Sorry,” Ben said, and without giving me anything more than a quick glance, he turned around and walked off.

Crap, crap, and double crap!
Could I be any more stupid? The cutest guy in the whole universe—okay, he's a bloodsucker, but no one's perfect—and I have to snap at him until he goes off to talk to smaller, shorter, prettier girls, girls he doesn't have to pretend to like just because they can save his soul.

“My life totally sucks,” I told Tesla. He twitched his tail aside and pooped. “Thank you. I so needed that.”

I scooped the horse poop out of the way, made sure Tesla was okay for a while, then figured, as long as I was miserable and unhappy and depressed, I might as well be
really
miserable and unhappy and depressed.

Fran Ghetti, the Nancy Drew of the twenty-first century.

“
M
iranda says you have agreed to find the thief who steals our money. She vill not tell me how it is you are to do this. I am naturally curious. You vill tell me now.” Absinthe set her overnight bag down next to her trailer, and turned to bark something in German to Karl, who had picked her up from the train station. Imogen says that Karl is Absinthe's boy toy, but I have a hard time believing that. It isn't that Absinthe is ugly, but her spiky pink hair doesn't quite go with the hard jaw and mean little eyes.

Her German accent was a lot heavier than Peter's and Soren's, but even so, when she turned her washed-out pale-blue eyes on you, you got her meaning. She was also a mind reader, a fact that made me really nervous around her. Much as I disliked Ben marching in and rifling through my mind, at least I trusted him. To a certain extent. Absinthe I didn't trust farther than I could spit. “Um . . . actually, I don't think I will tell you. Mom didn't say that was part of the bargain.”

“Bargain?” Absinthe spun around and narrowed her eyes at me. It was late morning, and she'd just returned from her trip to Germany to find a replacement band. Most of the Faire people were just waking up, but I figured I'd get a start on my new role as detective, and fire up the investigation . . . such as it was. “Vat bargain is this?”

“The bargain that says I get to keep my horse if I help you. I figured the first thing I need to do is talk to you about the thefts, and maybe see the safe and stuff like that.”

She gave me another narrow-eyed look, then turned and entered the trailer. I assumed I was supposed to follow, and climbed up after her. I figured the inside of the trailer would look like the outside (pink and green, remember?)—in other words, garish—but it was surprisingly uncluttered. There was an awful lot of that shade of tan called taupe, but the little couch, two chairs, and tiny table that made up the main part of the trailer were actually pretty tasteful. Absinthe set her overnight bag down on the table and waved at the curved bank of the couch.

“This is the safe. As you can see, it is a good safe, very reliable,
ja
? In the morning ven I come awake, I open the safe to take out the money for food, but there was no money, only newspaper. It was that Josef, in the band, you know?
Verdammter Schweinehund!
He is trying to ruin us!”

I squatted down in front of the safe. It was big, about two feet high, made of white-painted metal, with the usual spin dial thingy on the front, a metal handle to open it, and not a lot else. I prodded it with my toe. It probably weighed a couple of hundred pounds.

“Who has the combination to the safe?”

“Peter and I do.” She shook out her linen jacket and hung it up in a tiny closet.

“No one else?”

“Of course not; do you take us for the fools?”

I tried to think of what I would do if I wanted to break into the safe. “Um . . . when do you normally open it?”

She grabbed her bag and brushed past me, opening the door behind me to her bedroom. “In the morning, to pay out such money as ve need to Elvis and Kurt for purchasing food and anything ve need for the shows.”

Kurt was Karl's brother. Another boy toy, or so Imogen said.

“And you put money into it at night?”

“I do it,
ja
. I put it in a bag like this, you see?” She held up an empty black money bag, the kind with a zipper and a lock on the end. “The money goes in once ven I count up the ticket sales, and also after the fair closes, ven all the money comes from the employees.”

The Faire contract called for all the performers to split their takes with Peter and Absinthe. In return they had their travel expenses paid, and were guaranteed a minimum amount each month.

“Ven I look in the morning, fffft! The money is gone, and the bag is filled vith newspaper.”

I chewed on my lip as I watched Absinthe unzip her travel bag. I didn't want her to see me touching the safe—if she knew about my little curse, she'd demand I be put to work as the resident Teen Freak. With my back to her, I peeled off the gloves from my right hand and reached for the safe handle. With Absinthe liable to finish putting away her stuff any second, I didn't have time to brace myself for the onslaught of images. I just grabbed the handle and hoped for the best.

It was awful. Worse than I thought. At least seven different people had touched the safe in the last few weeks: Absinthe and Peter were the strongest, but I could also feel Karl, Elvis, Soren, even Imogen and my mom had touched the safe at some time or another. Inanimate objects can't hold on to memories the way people do, but if someone was feeling a very strong emotion when he or she touched it, sometimes that was imprinted onto the object.

Indecision and frustration were there on the safe handle, but the overwhelming feeling, the emotion that swamped my mind was a cold, quiet desperation, the kind of desperation that makes your palms prick with sweat. One of the people who'd touched the safe was emotionally in a state so bad that touching the memory of it now left me slightly sick to my stomach.

I pulled my hand away, but didn't have time to get the glove back on before Absinthe popped into the room. “I am not seeing how you can help us if you vill not tell me how you work. Do you read the minds, eh? Can you see someone's guilt in their aura? Are you a human . . . what do you call it . . . lie detector?”

I gave her a feeble smile and shoved my bare hand behind my back, slowly backing down the narrow aisle of the trailer so she wouldn't see it. “None of that, sorry. Mom just thinks I can help. I read a lot of Agatha Christies.”

Absinthe crossed her arms and glared at me. “I don't think that is at all the amusing. How vill you help us now?”

I reached for the door with my gloved hand, still keeping my back away from her. “I'll probably talk to everyone and see if anyone has noticed anything.”

“Bah!” She threw her hands in the air in a gesture of annoyance. “Useless, that is useless. I have questioned everyone and no one sees anything—no one notices anything wrong. This is a vaste of my time.”

I let one shoulder twitch in a half a shrug. “Yeah, well, I made a bargain with my mother, and I'll stick to it.”
No matter how much it destroys me
, I added silently. “I'll let you know if I find out anything.”

Absinthe thinned her lips at me, her eyes glittering brightly. I stood with one foot on the step, one in the trailer, suddenly unable to move, locked into place by that look. My scalp tingled as I realized what she was doing. I could feel her nudging against my consciousness, trying to find a way into my mind. I wanted to yell at her to stay out of my head, but I felt as if I were caught in a big vat of molasses, as if everything going on around me had been switched into slow motion. Panic, dark and cold, gripped me as I could feel her sliding around me, surrounding me, suffocating me. She was going to get in, and then she'd know everything about me! I couldn't breathe; my lungs couldn't get any air in them. I felt squashed flat by her power, by her ability to just push aside my feeble resistance and march into my head. Everything started to go gray as I was swept up in wave of dizziness.

No!
my brain shrieked.

Warmth filled me, eased the stranglehold Absinthe held on me, allowed my lungs to expand and suck in much-needed air. I clutched at the warmth.
Ben?

Is something wrong?
He sounded sleepy, a warm, comfortable sleepy, as if he were snuggled down in a warm bed on a cold winter morning. The touch of his mind on mine was reassuring, pushing away the gray dizziness, blanketing me in security.

I took a deep breath, my eyes still on Absinthe's as she made a big push at my mind. My knees almost buckled under the attack.
Ben!

Think of the sealed room, Fran
. His voice was so soothing, so filled with confidence, it helped push some of the black panic away. I pictured a room made of stainless steel, all rounded corners, the seams of which were welded together. There wasn't a crack, wasn't a space anywhere that anything could get in or out. It was absolutely airtight, sealed, and I stood in the middle of it.

Absinthe's hold on me snapped just as if I severed a taut rope. She snarled in German, but I didn't wait around to see what else she had to say. I babbled something about seeing her later, and ran for my life.

He didn't answer. I couldn't feel him, either. I couldn't feel anything, not one single thing. There was just me in my brain.
Ben, are you angry because I woke you up? I'm sorry if you are, but I wanted to let you know that your idea worked. Absinthe didn't get into my head. Everything's okay now. Um. Unless you're mad at me, and then I guess everything is not okay.

Nothing.
Nada
. Not one blessed thing. He didn't even think angry at me, the way he could think a smile.

I sighed and looked around. There're not a lot of places to hide when you're living in a big, open, grassy meadow with a bunch of tents and a cluster of trailers. I had no idea where I was going, but weaved through the trailers until I arrived at one with Norse symbols painted in gold and black. I knocked on the door as I turned the handle and slid through the door, glancing over my shoulder to make sure that no one saw me going into Imogen's trailer. “Imogen? You up? I really need to talk to you.”

The shades were up, sunlight slanting into the trailer, highlighting the remains of a bagel on the tiny little table, so I gathered Imogen was up and about.

“You getting dressed?” I headed for the closed door to her bedroom. “Listen, I have a question for you—Ohmigosh!”

It wasn't Imogen in the bedroom; it was Ben. With a bare chest. Sitting up in Imogen's bed with a sleepy, surprised look on his face. Until I moved and a tendril of sunlight snaked past me into the room, falling on his bare arm. He yelped and jerked the blanket up, squinting at me.

“I'm so sorry!” I tried to move to block the sunlight, but more came in around the other side of me. “Geez, I'm sorry. I can't . . . stupid sun . . .”

“Get in and close the door,” he snapped. I jumped into the room and slammed the door shut behind me.

That was when I realized that I was standing in a tiny little dimly lit bedroom with a naked vampire who looked really, really mad.

He clicked the bedside light on, pushing the blanket down to look at his arm. At the sight of the blisters that streaked up his arm I forgot all about being embarrassed that he was naked. “Did I do that? Oh, Ben, I'm so sorry. What should I . . . Ice, that's what you put on a burn.”

“Don't open that door again!” he yelled just as I was about to go hunt for ice. “I don't need anything; it will be all right.”

“Don't be stupid; those are like third . . . degree . . . wow.” Ben stroked his burned arm. With each pass of his hand, the blisters lessened until all that remained were faintly red angry marks on his nummy tan skin. “That's amazing! You're a healer!”

“Not really.” He slumped back against the wall. “I have limited regenerative powers. The weaker I am, the less I am able to heal.”

“Weak?” I reached out to touch his arm, realized I had my gloves on, and yanked them off. The second my fingers touched his skin I was filled with hunger, gnawing at me, biting me with sharp, painful stabs, a need building within me to take what I needed, to subdue that animal that growled within. I jerked my fingers back and stared at Ben. “You're hungry. Is that what you meant by weak?”