Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires (77 page)

Swiftly and without a sound, Shane moves to stand between me and the small-town gangsta-ettes.

I scramble off the bench. “I can defend myself.”

“Against nine of them?”

“What could they possibly—holy crap!”

Jolene wields a serrated knife, which I recognize as the one Lori uses to slice bar fruit. Chocolate still stains her wet tank top.

I turn to Shane. “Let me do the talking instead of your testosterone. I don't want to start anything that'll involve blood and prison bars.”

He crosses his arms and stands with feet apart. “I'm here if you need me.”

They stop in front of us. The bridesmaids copy Shane's defensive stance. I wonder if they're also packing bar-accessory weapons, like ice tongs or double jiggers. I wouldn't want to get whapped with a cocktail strainer.

Jolene gestures with the knife. “You ruined my bach-elorette party. You're going to pay, all of you.”

“I said I was sorry. What do you want from me?”

“I want your shirt.”

My favorite red top? Fuck that. “It won't fit,” I tell her.

She advances on me. “What do you mean, it won't fit?”

“It won't fit you because I'm too—” Dissimilar to a heifer. “—flat-chested.”

Jolene examines my figure, doubt tingeing her eyes. “Give it to me anyway!” She brandishes the knife again, with less conviction.

“Give me yours. We'll trade.”

She clutches the hem of her tank top. “But my best friend made this for me.”

“I'll mail it back to you tomorrow.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You know where I work.” I hope Shane isn't blowing my cover with a questioning look. “Besides, why would I want to keep a Bride 2B shirt? I'm not engaged. It'd be like a Red Sox fan stealing a Yankees cap.”

My argument makes just enough sense for drunk logic. Jolene nods slowly, her eyes vulnerable. “Promise you'll mail it?”

“Yeah, express. Can we get out of the street now? Someone might want to use it for driving.”

We move into the library's little park. I point to two groups of shrubbery, one on either side of the path. “We can change behind those. Shane's the go-between.”

Jolene brightens at the idea of him seeing her half-naked. She hustles behind the bush on the right. I collect the beer and popcorn from the bench and retreat behind the other hedge to wait. The bride-goons keep watch.

A few minutes later, Shane appears with the white shirt.

“What took so long?” I ask him.

“There were conditions.” He turns toward the street as a car approaches. “Cops.”

Sure enough, a bright light sweeps over the library's brick facade, then halts. A car door creaks open.

I snatch the bags and dash around the library toward the parking lot. Though I can't hear his footsteps over the pulse in my ears, I know Shane is right behind me. His shadow keeps pace with my steps.

The pebbly sidewalk curves downhill around the building. I almost topple over a waist-high barrier that keeps skateboarders from speeding out in front of departing cars. Shane leaps the barrier with an Olympic hurdler's ease.

“Which way?” he asks.

I guess he's going home with me. I'm about to wave him to follow when I notice what he's still holding.

From the other side of the building, Jolene shrieks my name in a parade of profanities, culminating in, “Cheap-ass, double-crossing, shirt-stealing bitch!”

“We should let these beers rest.” I stuff the six-pack in my fridge. “They got shaken up when we ran from the police.”

Shane hands me Jolene's shirt, glancing around my apartment with the caution of a trespasser. I plug the kitchen sink and turn on the cold faucet.

“I hope she didn't already try warm water. That'll set the stain.” I soak the shirt and gently rub the brown blotches. “This top's big for me, but I could sleep in it.”

“You said you'd mail it back to her.”

“I never got her address. Hey, what do you think she meant when she said, ‘You'll pay, all of you'?”

Shane emits the vocal equivalent of a shrug.

I smooth my hair back off my neck, then let it drop behind my shoulders. “Sorry it's so hot in here. Only the bedroom's air-conditioned.” I wonder if he thinks that's a come-on. I wonder if it
is
a come-on.

He doesn't seem to hear me as he scours my walls with a nervous gaze.

“I live alone, if that's what you're worried about.”

Shane offers a sheepish half smile. “I was, uh, never mind.”

“What were you looking for?”

He scratches his shadow of light brown stubble. “Crosses?”

I laugh. “Don't worry,” I say in a stage whisper. “No crosses here.”

He spots my bulging photo album on the coffee table. “Can I look?” he asks with a little kid's eagerness.

“Sure.” No guy's ever wanted to see my photos before. I turn on a lamp and join him on the couch. He whips open the album as if it contains the secrets of life.

“Whose dogs are these?”

“Not mine. I volunteer with a mutt rescue group. I've sponsored these dogs, paid for them to stay at a local kennel. Gets them out of the pound where they might be put to sleep.” I point to a photo of a giant white blur. “That's Banjo. Last week he went to his forever home.”

Shane's eyes widened. “He died?”

“No, he got adopted. On Saturdays I'd go to the kennel and try to teach him manners so he'd be more appealing. These days it's not enough just to be cute.”

He flashes me a look of amusement, and I wonder who he thinks I was referring to. “That's really noble.”

“No.” I let go of the album. “I only do it to convince myself I'm a good person.”

“Bullshit. By the look of this place, you can barely feed yourself, much less a bunch of dogs.”

“I always get what I need to survive.”

This time his gaze is steady. “Working for a hotshot PR firm in D.C.”

His X-ray eyes propel me off the couch and toward the fridge. “Those beers have probably settled.”

I hear him flip through several pages of dogs while I pop the tops of two bottles. One of them fizzes over, but I catch most of it with my mouth. “You want a glass?”

No answer. I glance over the counter to see Shane lingering on a page of photos.

“Are these sunrises or sunsets?” he asks.

“Some of both.” I move back to the couch and put the beers on the table, using two unopened pieces of mail as coasters. “My bedroom faces north, so in the summer I see the sun rise over campus.”

“So you're a morning person.”

“I'm a morning person and a night person. So I have to be a nap person, or else I'm a tired person.” Great, now I'm rambling. That's the second time I've mentioned my bedroom with no reaction from Shane.

He doesn't pick up his beer, just stares at the sunrises. I take the opportunity to study his profile, at least the parts I can see beneath his hair. His jaw is sharp and defined, and his nose is like a ski jump—perfectly sloped with a little curve up at the end. If my nose were a ski jump, the skiers would all plunge to a tragic death.

I clear my throat. “If you stay here late enough, you can see it yourself.”

He looks at me then, brows drawn together. “I can't stay until sunrise.”

His show, of course. “You go to work at three, right?”

“Right. Work.” He scans the living room. “Where's your music?”

This time I say it with all the casualness I can muster. “In my bedroom.”

“Oh.” He focuses on the photo album again, but his fingers are twitching, and as he turns the pages, he doesn't react to the pictures.

Here goes.

“Do you want to see what I have?”

He looks up.

“Music-wise,” I add.

He studies my face for a long moment, as if he's not sure what he'll find. Something about me bothers him, but maybe in a good way.

His hand brushes mine, and a tingling spreads through me. I let out a breath that sounds half-cough, half-hiccup. Very attractive.

I stand and head for the hall. “This way,” I say, as businesslike as a tour guide.

I move through the dark bedroom to turn on a soft bedside lamp, rather than expose my squalor to the harsh overhead light.

“No crosses in here either,” I say with a nervous laugh.

He sits on the floor in front of my CD shelves and contemplates their contents. “Your collection's pretty kickin'.”

I wince at the outdated slang, then step out of my shoes and stretch prone across the foot of the bed, my head near the spot where Shane sits.

“They're out of order.” He grabs a wide handful of CDs.

“What are you doing?”

“Fixing it.” He starts sorting them into stacks on the floor. “Alphabetical okay?”

“Really, you don't have to—”

“I'll start with alphabetical. Maybe later we can subgroup by genres.”

Shane must have read the section of the
Truth about Vampires
pamphlet that said they're obsessive-compulsive. He's putting on a show for me, which would explain his use of the word “kickin'.”

Suddenly he stops and holds up a CD. Foo Fighters.

I try to be helpful. “That goes under F.”

“Dave Grohl's new band,” he whispers.

“Not really new.” Shouldn't he know that? “At all.”

“He was the drummer for Nirvana.”

“I know. I was alive in the nineties.”

“So was I,” he says with a touch of bitterness.

“Do you want to listen to that now?”

“No.” He sets it aside like it might poison him.

“Put something else in, then. Something soothing.” What I mean is, something seductive. Despite his idiosyncrasies, I can't stop watching him, wondering what he looks like from certain other angles.

He puts in Nirvana's
Unplugged
concert. After a moment of applause, the opening acoustic chords of “About a Girl” pulse through my bedroom. Shane listens for a moment, then reduces the volume.

“You think I'm crazy,” he says quietly, not looking at me.

“No, I think you're funny. But honestly, the joke is getting a little old.”

“I don't blame you for not believing I'm a vampire.” The last word comes out stilted, the way someone might pronounce a foreign phrase. “It sounds insane.”

“Hey, I know: I'll tie you to my bedpost until sunrise. If you burst into flames, it'll prove you're not kidding.”

He jerks his head toward me, and I swear for a moment I see genuine fear. Then he blinks and turns back to the CDs. “Give me a hand here?”

I sigh and slide off the bed. “Sure, what better way to spend a Friday night?”

“There's four stacks.” He taps each one in turn. “A through G, H through N, O through T, and the rest.”

“Is that a statistical thing based on the probability of band names, so that the piles end up exactly even?”

He looks at me with awe. “No, but that's a great idea.”

I take a handful and start sorting. “So what system is it? It can't be the same number of letters, because four doesn't go evenly into twenty-six.”

He hesitates. “It's stupid.”

“Tell me.”

“No, you'll laugh.”

“I promise I won't.”

He straightens out the CDs I just tossed onto the H-N pile so that their edges line up. “When I was a kid I had a magnetic play desk, Fisher-Price or some shit like that. The letters were in four rows, in different colors. I still see the alphabet in my head that way.” He looks at me. “In case you had any doubt I was a freak.”

Actually, it makes him seem more human. I hold up a CD. “What color was M?”

“Red.” He nods at my choice. “Mudhoney. Nice.”

Basking in the approval of a rock snob, I hide my smile and lean across him to put the CD in pile number two.

As I pull back, my arm brushes his knee—accidentally, of course. His sorting slows for a moment, then resumes.

Sitting together, our heights are closer, which means
he's mostly legs. Long as they are, he crosses them easily beneath him. I like a man with flexibility.

I also gather from the way he handles the CDs that he's left-handed. Probably right-brained, then, maybe a creative type. But odd that he'd fixate on letters, which is a left-brained thing. Makes me more suspicious.

“It's weird,” he says. “I'm a big fan of the other DJs' music, but they don't get mine. It's like they can't hear it.”

I attempt a light laugh. “Must be lonely, living among dinosaurs.”

He doesn't smile. “I'm turning into one, too. Every time I flip on the radio—not our station, but one of the regular ones—I feel lost in the present.” He frowns at my Limp Bizkit CD. “It doesn't even sound like music.”

I take The White Stripes' latest release off the U-Z pile. “Let me play you something good. Then you can see—”

I catch myself. I'm playing right into his game, acting like his reality is the truth.

“Wait a second,” I tell him. “If you're stuck in the past, how do you know it's the past? Isn't it like crazy people don't know they're crazy, and if they do, they're not really crazy?”

He leans back against the side of the bed and contemplates. “You know, you're right.”

I grin. “See, I told you—”

“As long as it bothers me, I can't be too far gone.” His voice is still serious. “The rest of them are so lost, they don't even know it anymore.”

I sigh. “That wasn't what I meant.” I lean past him for more CDs. This time I brush against him on purpose, and not just my arm. I risk a glance at his face.

Shane looks at me, then at the CDs, then at me again, and so on. Something's stuck. I keep watching him. The rhythm of his breath turns uneven.