Charming (16 page)

“So how hard are people looking for her?” I asked.

“Fairly hard, actually,” Cahill said with a small smile. “Ever since her last foster family was found in pieces all over their home six months ago.”

I absorbed that information thoughtfully while noticing that Anne Marie’s IQ was listed on the second page. It was genius-level.

“Our smart vampire,” I said.

“Probably,” Cahill agreed.

If she was turned when she was small and physically weak, it would explain why she might have a hard time controlling a bunch of macho morons, too.

“VIAGRA!” yelled the group at the round table, and they all applauded and drank.

I refolded the papers and shoved them into my jeans pocket. “By the way, do you think you could get some more police types to come by this place?”

“Not a chance,” Cahill informed me matter-of-factly. “There’s a bar up the street owned by an ex-cop.”

Sorry, Dave. Cahill didn’t say anything else for a while, just sat there with both elbows propped up on the edge of the bar and periodically drank his beer. In the background some country singer tried to convince a woman that she just needed a little whiskey to get a little frisky.

“That chick with big breasts wants you,” Cahill said suddenly, staring at Tracy. “She keeps looking at you and giving me the stink-eye.”

“She’s got a hole in her life,” I said. “And she’s decided it’s penis-shaped.”

“So?” Cahill said, returning his attention to me. “You saving yourself for somebody else?”

I shot him a look. Now we were getting to it. “Just say whatever you have to say about Sig and get it over with,” I advised.

“All right,” Cahill replied. “I want you to take Sig away from Dvornik.”

I stared at him.

“I watched you two this morning,” he said. “And I think you’ve got a shot. She likes you, and it’s obvious you like her. Plus, you got all that stuff in common.”

I kept staring.

“Like, you’re both freaks who still think you’re human,” Cahill amplified. “And you won’t grow old on each other.”

Staring was working out really well for me.

“AUSTRALIA!” roared the round table happily.

“Come on, are you telling me you haven’t thought about it?” Cahill prodded.

“Are you serious?” I finally asked cautiously.

“NO, I’M NOT SERIOUS YOU FUCKING MORON!” Cahill yelled, slamming his empty beer glass down on the bar for emphasis before lowering his voice again. “Sure, you’re all lean and muscly and square-jawed and shit, and you’re funny under all that attitude. But Sig’s not the kind of woman who’s going to have a fling with a drifter.”

“Ah…” I began.

“No, you’re worse than a drifter, you’re some kind of fugitive!” Cahill went on. “What do you want to do, ask her to go on the run with you? Even if she said yes, which is doubtful, what kind of life would that be for her? And how would you keep a low profile with a six-foot-tall blonde timber truck running loose in china shops everywhere you went?”

“Uhm,” I said, nodding at Dave to let him know it was OK.

“And even if that weren’t true,” Cahill went on, “how would you two get away from Dvornik? The guy’s a psychic, you jack wagon!”

When I finally started to say something, Cahill held his
right palm up to cut me off. “Yeah, I know, you’re some kind of tough guy. You can kill vampires when you have to. So what? Dvornik isn’t a killer, he’s a murderer. I’ve been around a lot of sociopaths and trust me, any conscience that guy had burned out a long time ago. Sig and this geas thing you guys keep talking about are the only things keeping that asshole halfway human. And don’t give me any bullshit about how that’s ironic either. I don’t care.”

Cahill looked at me then.

“The…” I started to say.

“Yeah, I know,” he interrupted tiredly. “She and Dvornik aren’t going to last much longer, anybody can see that, but Sig hasn’t admitted it yet. She’s stubborn and loyal and she’s invested a lot of time in that piece of shit.”

“But if he…” I began.

“She can’t see it,” Cahill declared promptly. “She’s tried so hard and spent so much time making excuses for him that she can’t see what he really is anymore. Trust me, when their relationship finally falls apart, he is not going to take it well, and a guy in your situation is not going to want to be around for him to blame.”

“Maybe…” I said.

Cahill cut me off. “What, you’re going to kill him? If you did that, Sig would never forgive you, and you’d have a bunch of psychic vampire hunters with scary accents and long last names with no vowels coming after your ass… and that’s in addition to all those knight guys.”

Cahill sadly looked down at his beer, which had become empty at some point during his… what? Rant? Lecture?

“I’m really glad we had this conversation,” I said dryly, taking the glass away and refilling it.

“THE G-SPOT!” yelled the peanut gallery at the round table. That was my signal to get involved. Dave shot me a
questioning glance, so I nodded and told Cahill I’d be back and circled around the bar.

“It’s about time,” Tracy said as I walked toward her. “Might as well sit down and have a drink while you’re on this side.” She patted the stool next to hers invitingly.

I stopped for a moment. “You’re hot,” I told her. “But I’m hung up on somebody else at the moment. Sorry.”

I didn’t look back to see her reaction, but I could hear her swearing under her breath all the way over to the round table.

“I have a party game for you,” I told the big kid with the goatee and the football jersey. I say
kid
, but he was as old as I looked. I had him and his friends pegged for people who had graduated from Stillwaters University but were still hanging around Clayburg, holding down whatever marginal jobs they’d gotten to see them through college. They probably had a sense that they should be getting on with their lives but were ignoring it for as long as they could. The leader’s eyes were fogged over with drink, but they held a shrewd glint. He seemed like the sort of person who didn’t mean any real harm but preferred chaos to boredom or introspection. He would push limits just to see if he could, further than he should be able to most of the time because he was smart and charismatic and ballsy, and every now and then he would push things too far and blame someone else when the shit hit the fan.

I could tell that I’d picked the right one to talk to because the entire table quieted down to listen.

The alpha male failed to see any sign of fear or nervousness or hesitation or bullshit on me or in me, and he didn’t know what that meant, but he knew that he didn’t trust it. That’s one of the qualities of a natural leader: good threat-awareness. He held up his palms placatingly. “It’s all right, man. We’re not causing trouble.”

“Neither am I,” I said. “I want you all to have a good time
and keep spending money. That’s why I want to play a game. It’s called ‘Identify the Off-Duty Cop.’ ”

That made him pause. He actually looked around the bar, stopped when he saw Cahill, and stared at him for a long moment. “The guy you’ve been talking to,” he said.

“That’s the owner’s brother,” I lied. “It’s just something to keep in mind.”

He raised his glass. “TO THE POLICE!” he toasted.

His table laughed and raised their glasses and shouted, “TO THE POLICE!”

I winked at him and walked back across the bar. The leader had saved face, but he was smart enough to keep his table from crossing the line now.

Tracy didn’t say anything as I went by.

“Sorry about that,” I told Cahill.

“You outed me,” he noted.

“I did,” I agreed.

Cahill glanced over at Tracy and caught her sneering at us before she looked away.

“How much you want to bet that I can swoop in and tap that in another drink or two now that you’ve broken her poor drunk heart?” he asked.

“That is a wedding ring you’re wearing, right?” I asked him. “You didn’t just put it on because you wanted to wear something pretty?”

“My wife and I have a misunderstanding,” he said.

It was a mildly amusing line, and I liked him less for it.

Cahill drained his glass and pushed it toward me. I obligingly drew him another draft and set it in front of him. “That’s your last one,” I told him. “You were hanging around Sig this morning, so you might be a target.”

“I know the drill,” he said testily. “That’s why I’m here.”

I looked at him. “I thought you were here to talk about Sig.”

He waggled his hand back and forth. “You can talk about smart vampires all you want; there’s a chance some of those things will come after you again tonight, and Sig won’t be here to back you up this time. I wanted to check on you.”

“OK,” I said.

“Because, you know, Sig’s busy,” Cahill added.

“OK,” I said.

Cahill spelled it out. “Having makeup sex with Dvornik.”

I didn’t say that was OK. I also didn’t ask him if he’d ever seen a real vampire before, or make any pointed comments about what he expected to do if any heat seekers did show up. I contented myself with an observation. “If any do show up, I’ll have a lot more than a bottle of holy water and a knife this time.” It was the truth. I’d spent two hours driving up and back to a storage unit a few towns over just so I could drop some stuff from my house off and pick my custom-made guitar case up; in fact, the guitar case was only ten feet away from me, leaning against the west wall. It had a guitar in it and everything. If it had a false bottom and weighed about fifty pounds more than it should, that was my business.

“So what do you think?” Cahill pushed. “About what I was saying about Sig.”

“About her having makeup sex with Dvornik?” I asked.

He made a waving-away gesture. “You know what I’m asking.”

“I think I’ve known Sig for twenty-four hours,” I said. “And it doesn’t take that long to know she’s something special, but it’s still just twenty-four hours. I also think I’m leaving this town about ten hot seconds after the last vampire is staked, for reasons you already know.”

Cahill sighed and took a deep pull on his last beer.

“And I think you’re the one in love with her,” I said.

Cahill laughed softly. It wasn’t a happy sound. “That’s why you should listen to me. I know what I’m talking about.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I thought she was just another nutjob the first time she showed up at my desk talking about being a psychic,” Cahill said reminiscently. “I probably would have blown her off if she wasn’t gorgeous, but I figured if she was crazy, I might have a chance of getting a blowjob. By the time I figured out she was for real and off-limits, it was too late to run away.”

“That’s kind of how our world works,” I said.

“The truth is,” Cahill said, not giving any indication of having heard me, “my wife is probably cheating on me, and I don’t blame her or care. I’m just waiting for her to leave me so I won’t have to pay as much alimony. I spend every day thinking about a beautiful woman who’s not even a woman, and if she was, she’d be way out of my league. And being Sig’s friend isn’t enough, but it’s something.”

I wondered how long he’d been waiting to tell this to someone. Cahill’s expression was unguarded for a moment, and his eyes were wistful. “She and Dvornik probably establish a connection with the local police force every time they move into a new town. With her looks and her whole I-can-see-dead-people thing, it’s probably always a male homicide detective too. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re still not getting another free drink,” I said.

He laughed again.

I poured him a cup of coffee and added, “You should be telling this stuff to your wife.”

“Fuck you,” he said with no discernible emotion.

“OK,” I acknowledged.

“This is good coffee,” Cahill said when I came around to check on him a little later. “Is it a special blend or something?”

“No,” I said. “You just have to clean your coffeemaker every once in a while and use trial and error. It’s not that hard to learn how much coffee from a particular brand goes right with the specific coffeemaker you’re using. For the one here, I have a big spoon that I use because I couldn’t get the proportions right with the small plastic scoop that came with the can.”

“You’re weird,” Cahill commented. “You know that?”

“Coffee is one of the few constants in my life,” I explained. “No matter where I go, no matter how crappy a day I’m having, no matter what kind of mood I’m in, coffee is always there to make me feel a little better.”

“You really are a lonely son of a bitch, aren’t you?” Cahill observed.

I grimaced. “I live like a Nazi war criminal or a serial killer… like I have something to be ashamed of.”

“Do you?” Cahill asked.

“I was raised to believe that werewolves are demon-infected, and I am one,” I said. “I know I don’t change into a wolf, but come on. I can smell that you had pork and corn and broccoli for dinner a couple of hours ago. If you shot me in the heart with a lead bullet, I’d live.”

I leaned forward and looked him in the eye and snarled. “This is the first time in almost twelve years that I’ve been able to be myself. And I have to leave and go back to hiding who I am and watching everything I say as soon as this vampire thing is over.”

Cahill tilted back slightly. “See, that’s what I’m talking about. One second you’re sounding like a metrosexual talking about coffee preparation, the next you look like you’re going to rip my heart out and eat it.”

I backed off. “You asked.”

He nodded. “You said this was the first time in twelve years. Who were you with twelve years ago?”

I thought about not telling him, but to hell with it. “I lived with a woman who knew everything.”

Cahill looked at me steadily. “How did it end?”

I had already told Sig. I didn’t feel like going into it again. “Badly,” I said tightly. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

He ignored this advice. “But you…”

“When I tell you to leave something alone this close to a full moon,” I growled, “you leave it alone.” The tips of my fingers itched, and they wanted to be on his throat. If I’d had sharp canines, they would have been showing.

Cahill held his palms up. “OK,” he said, meaning the opposite but willing to postpone the conversation.