Samantha Moon: First Eight Novels, Plus One Novella (32 page)

And later that day, as I nervously hid my healed wound from Danny—and alternately wondered why I was feeling a very strong need to stay away from direct sunlight—I also had my first craving for the red stuff.

What the hell was happening to me?

Chapter Twenty

From the sky, Jerry Blum’s estate was easily one of the biggest for miles around. And in Newport Beach, that’s saying something.

His estate was, in fact, an island all to itself, an island that was accessible via bridge from Balboa Island.

An island within an island. Cool beans.

Balboa Island wasn’t a real island, though. It was just a long peninsula filled with inordinately large homes and hip bars and restaurants. I suppose calling it
Balboa Long Peninsula
just didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Still, those living on
Balboa Island
were living a lie.

Just sayin’.

Not so with Jerry Blum. He really did live on an island—an island all to himself, complete with a private bridge that arched from near the southern point of Balboa Island.

A handful of small planes buzzed around me, some beneath and some above. I doubted I was being picked up on any radar. A creature who didn’t have a reflection, probably didn’t return radar signals, either. And if a giant bat-like blip did show up on their radars, then that would certainly give the air traffic controllers something to chew on.

That, and nightmares.

I swept lower, tucking my arms in a little, angling down toward Jerry Blum’s private island. Wind blasted me as I raced through the sky. A thin, protective film covered my eyes. Vampiric goggles.

Whoever had created this thing that I sometimes turn into had done a bang-up job. Someone, somewhere had put some serious thought into this thing.

Who that person was, I didn’t know. Why I was created, I didn’t know. From where this dark flying creature came from, I didn’t know.

But I knew I wanted answers.

Someday,
I thought.

For now, it was time to go to work.

Hey, even giant vampire bats have to make a living.

*  *  *

I found a large tree on the grounds and settled upon a thickish branch. From here, I had a good view of the rear and east side of the house.

Sometimes I wondered if I had really died that night six years ago. Maybe this was death. Maybe death was living out a nightmarish fantasy that couldn’t possibly be real. Maybe death was full of wonder and fantasy.

The thick branch creaked under my considerable weight. How considerable? I didn’t know, but if I had to guess, I would say that I weighed over five hundred pounds.

Big girl.

The massive estate was quiet, although men in shorts and Hawaiian shirts routinely walked the grounds. A high wall encircled the property, and barbed wire ran along the top of the wall. There were security cameras everywhere, but I didn’t worry about security cameras. Two big Lincolns sat to either side of the main gate. No doubt men with guns sat in those cars. Beyond the backyard fence was the bay, and beyond that was Newport Beach itself. Wooden stairs led down from the backyard to a boat house and private pier. A sixty-foot yacht was anchored next to the boat house. The yacht looked empty, although there were a few lights on inside it here and there.

I sat unmovingly on the branch for a few more hours. My great, muscular legs never once went to sleep or needed adjusting. I suspected I could have sat perched like that all night. Or until the sun came up or until the branch snapped off. Whichever came first.

But Jerry Blum’s house was quiet tonight. No doubt he was off somewhere honing his racketeering and murder skills. Perfecting the fine art of gangstering.

I’ll be back,
I thought, and leaped off the branch and shot into the air.

Chapter Twenty-one

I swooped around my minivan once, twice, waiting for a security guard to move on. When he finally did, I landed softly atop the rocky cliff nearby, tucking in my wings. As usual, my wings’ thick, leathery membranes hung limply, this time in the dirt. And if I wasn’t careful, I could step on my wings, which I had done before and it wasn’t the most graceful thing to witness. A vampire stumbling on her own wings didn’t exactly grace the covers of supernatural romance novels the world over.

With the salt-infused wind hammering me atop the cliff, the flame in my mind’s eye appeared again. But this time a horrific creature wasn’t standing in the flame. (Unless, of course, you asked my ex-husband.) No, instead, a naked woman was standing in the flame.

A cute little curvy woman with long black hair.

It was one of the few times I actually got to see myself without heavy make-up on. Granted, it was a smallish image of myself, and perhaps only an avatar of myself, but it was me and I always loved looking at it.

And I didn’t look half bad. Personally, I think Danny is crazy. Think about it, he could have had a young-looking wife for the rest of his life, a wife who never aged. Granted every decade or so we would probably have to move and make completely new friends, and he would have to put up with my cold flesh, and the fact that I drink blood, but still....

Okay, maybe I wasn’t such a great prize, but I still think it’s his loss.

The asshole.

And as I gazed on that image of myself, as I stood on the edge of the cliff like a living gargoyle from hell, something occurred to me, something that had been bothering me for the past month or so.

Amazingly, I still cared for Danny.

Yes, the man had made my life an absolute living nightmare. Remember, until recently we had been trying to make things work. And if he hadn’t cheated on me, I would still be with him. I had planned to be with Danny for the rest of my life.

Well, the rest of
his
life.

But he had turned into his own kind of monster, which is more than ironic, and even though he began to openly cheat on me, and even though he hurt me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, I still had feelings for the bastard.

Yes, I understood why he did what he did. I get it. I’m a freak. He wanted out. But did he have to be such an asshole about things? Couldn’t he have treated me with compassion and love? Did he have to act like such a douchebag all the time? Did I want to hurt him often?

The answer, of course, was yes to everything.

I sat quietly on the cliff edge, surveying the beach below. There was no one behind me, or anywhere around me for that matter. My hearing in this form was phenomenal.

Danny was the father of my children. As much as it pained me to admit it, I knew he was doing the best he could given the circumstances. How many fathers would have taken their kids from something like me? Probably many of them. How many husbands would have sought a warm body elsewhere? Probably many of them.

Yes, it would have taken an extraordinary man to get through this with me.

Danny wasn’t him.

In my mind’s eye, I studied the woman in the flame. She stood there passively, naked as the day she was born, watching me in return. I loved that woman. I loved her with all my heart. Life had dealt her a shitty hand, but she, too, was doing the best she could.

A moment later, I was moving toward the woman in the flame. She grew rapidly bigger, taking on much more detail. And then she was rushing at me, too, and a moment later I found myself standing on the edge of the cliff, naked, cold and crying, and staring down into the churning dark depths below, where the surf pounded rocks into sand.

Chapter Twenty-two

“I think I’m in love with her,” said Chad.

It was nearly four in the morning, and we were standing just inside my hotel doorway. It had been a hell of a long night for Chad. Apparently, though, he had loved every minute of it.

“Thanks, Chad. I owe you.”

“
I’m not joking,” he said. Chad was a tall guy, easily six-foot-three. Maybe taller. When you barely scrape five-foot-three, just about anyone looks tall as hell. Except for Tom Cruise, of course. Chad added, “There’s something about her.”

“
She’s vulnerable and cute,” I said. “And you’re a man. It’s a simple equation.”

We were whispering since Monica was asleep on my bed. We were also whispering because it was four in the morning and we were in a hotel and we weren’t assholes.

He glanced over at her sleeping form. I glanced too. Mostly under the comforter, she looked tiny and child-like. Just a little bump in a big bed. Say that five times in a row.

He said, “Sure, but there’s something else.” He stopped talking. Chad, I knew, wasn’t used to expressing his emotions; he needed prodding, like most men. Well, those men not named Fang.

So I prodded. “You feel an overwhelming need to protect her, to help her, to save her.”

Chad looked at me funny. “That’s pretty much it, yeah. How did you know?”

“Because I had the same reaction,” I said.

He nodded and looked back at her sleeping form. “How could anyone do that to her?”

“There are bastards out there,” I said.

Chad didn’t say anything at first. When Chad and I were partners we didn’t talk much, but we always had a comfortable silence. When he spoke, his words weren’t empty. They were full of a lot of forethought.

“I would kill him,” he said. “If he ever came within a mile of her.”

“
That sounds like love to me,” I said. “And just think, I was only gone for six hours.

“
And we talked nearly the whole time.”

“
You mean she talked and you listened.”

Chad grinned, but kept looking at her sleeping form. “Something like that.”

“Get out of here and get some sleep, you love-struck puppy dog,” I said. “Before you propose to her in her sleep.”

“
I guess I am being a little ridiculous, huh?”

I shrugged.

“This has never happened to me before,” he said.

“
Welcome to love-at-first-sight,” I said. “Now go on.”

He nodded and told me to call him anytime I needed help. I said I would and practically shooed him out of my hotel room. As I locked the door behind him, I resisted the urge to look out the peephole to see if my ex-partner was hugging and kissing the door.

With Monica sleeping nearby, I did some more work on my laptop. In particular, I got the visiting hours to Chino State Prison. On a whim, mostly because the bastard was on my mind, I headed over to my ex-husband’s law firm’s website. Danny was your typical ambulance chaser. He screwed insurance companies...and anyone else, for that matter.

I broadened my search on Danny Moon, chaser of ambulances extraordinaire. His name was all over the net, usually in association with some case or another, usually a case that actually went to court. You see, Danny
didn’t
like to go to court. Danny was a lazy SOB, and his firm did all they could to keep cases
out
of court. But sometimes the negotiations went bad and cases actually did go to court. When they did, Danny and his firm actually had to do real legal work. Which generally made him grumpy as hell to be around.

Poor baby.

I next went to his Facebook page. I generally don’t go on Facebook. It’s not like I have a lot of new pictures to post, right? Anyway, I do keep an account because my daughter has one and I like to see what she’s doing. Besides, Farmville is a hoot.

No, Danny and I are not friends on Facebook; apparently, divorcing someone is also grounds for dropping them as Facebook buddies. So I guess you could say I’ve been defaced.

Anyway, Danny kept his pictures public. Maybe he didn’t know the intricacies of Facebook privacy, or maybe he didn’t care.

He should have cared.

Although his pictures were very professional, everything a respectable attorney’s pictures should be, there was one very
un
professional picture. Apparently Danny had been tagged at a party. And not just any party. A party at a strip joint in Riverside. And not just any party at a stripjoint, but a
Grand Opening
party.

Now, what was a respectable attorney doing at the grand opening of a cheesy strip club in Riverside?

I didn’t know, but I was going to find out.

Chapter Twenty-three

It was almost sunrise and I was feeling my energy fading.

I had already warned Monica of my “condition”. That is, she thought I had a rare skin disease that kept me out of the sun, which, of course, necessitated me keeping odd hours. She promised she would let me sleep during the days, and that she would not leave the hotel room on her own. I told her to wake me if she needed anything, but that I didn’t awaken easily; she would have to give me one hell of a good shove, or two. I told her she could do just about anything she wanted, other than leave the suite, open the curtains, or answer the door.