Vampire for Hire (2 page)

 
      
 
“Yeah, well, I told them it was an emergency,” said Fang easily.

 
      
 
He moved away from his car and stepped over the crumbling concrete parking curb with its exposed, rusted re-bars.

 
      
 
“And this is an emergency?” I asked.

 
      
 
His face lit up. “Of the highest order, Moon Dance.”

 
      
 
Now he was coming toward me, moving across the empty parking lot. On his chest, the two great shark teeth swung and bounced from the leather strap. Only I was beginning to think they
weren’t
shark teeth.

 
      
 
Fang. His name is Fang for a reason.

 
      
 
More deep breaths. I was tempted to step away from my van, but I couldn’t make my legs work. In fact, they suddenly felt gelatinous and heavy and not really my own.

 
      
 
I put my hand on the van’s warm hood, stabilizing myself.

 
      
 
Fang was a tall man, and his long strides quickly ate up the asphalt between us. When he was just a few arms lengths away, he stopped, chest heaving.

 
      
 
“I don’t know your name,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. His eyes rapidly roamed over me, taking me in. But I was used to him looking at me, wasn’t I? After all, I had often caught him looking at me.

 
      
 
“You never asked for my name,” he said.

 
      
 
“Married women don’t ask bartenders for their names,” I said.

 
      
 
“You’re not married now.”

 
      
 
“Technically I’m separated. The divorce paperwork is being drawn up now by my attorney.”

 
      
 
“You’re doing an awful lot of talking,” said the Heroes’ bartender, smiling at me again. His white teeth shone brightly, and so did the monstrously long teeth dangling from his neck. “And not enough asking.”

 
      
 
“Fine,” I said, feeling my heart calming down. This was Fang, after all, my best friend, my confidant, the man I had opened my life up to...all my secrets, all my fears. Everything. “What’s your name?”

 
      
 
“You can call me Eli Roberts,” he said. “But my given name is,” he paused. “Aaron Parker.”

 
      
 
I blinked, and might have gasped, too.

 
      
 
Aaron Parker.
I knew the name, of course. Anyone in law enforcement would know the name. I looked at the man in front of me again...looked at the fangs hanging from the leather strap. Indeed, those
weren’t
shark teeth.

 
      
 
“You’re the American Vampire,” I said.

 
      
 
He smiled and laughed lightly. “Could you say that a little louder, Moon Dance?”

 
      
 
Chapter Two

 
      
 
The Downtown Bar & Grill was a new restaurant in a very old building. The walls were brick and the black lacquer bar counter was epic. It stretched from nearly end to end and I could only imagine how many drinks had been served from its polished, scarred surface.

 
      
 
Aaron Parker, aka Fang, found us a table in the darkest corner of the deepest part of the lounge. Music thumped from nearby speakers. There wouldn’t be a soul on earth who could overhear us. A waitress materialized out of the darkness like a ghost and took our orders. Aaron ordered for us. White wine for me. Jack and Coke for him.

 
      
 
“You remembered what I drink,” I said. I found myself feeling wary and highly exposed and vulnerable. I also found myself fighting a very strong desire to run. But to run was to leave a lot of questions unanswered.

 
      
 
To run was to screw everything up, and I didn’t want to screw everything up.

 
      
 
Aaron sat forward and studied me intently. I don’t like to be studied intently. He knew that, didn’t he? Interestingly, his look was the same look he’d given me many times at Heroes, a bar I frequented with my sister. Silly me, I had thought his probing glance had been an interest of a different sort. Now I knew differently. He had been stalking me. He had known who I was all along.

 
      
 
I instinctively looked away, feeling a bit like a freak at a carnival:
“Come one, come all—see the real-life bloodsucker!”

 
      
 
Now that he was sitting across from me and not endlessly serving customers, I had a chance to really study him. I had always found him attractive. I’m sure he knew that. And my sister had an unhealthy crush on him that her husband really should probably be concerned about. Aaron Parker was tall. Perhaps one of the tallest men I had ever seen. I suspected he was an athlete and I resisted the urge to ask him if he played basketball. Aaron had full lips. The kind most women drool over. He had sad puppy dog eyes, as brown and bright as polished cherry wood. But it was his mouth that I found the most curious. He didn’t seem to know what to do with those beautiful lips of his. Sometimes he pulled them as if snarling. And sometimes they seemed to drape over his lower lip. Often they moved and shifted and I kept having the impression he was about to say something, but words rarely followed the movement. It was the oddest twitch I had ever seen.

 
      
 
Finally, his moving lips formed words. When he spoke, he did so softly. If not for my better-than-average hearing, I might have missed what he said: “I remember everything you tell me, Samantha.”

 
      
 
“Except I never told you my name.”

 
      
 
Now he looked away, suddenly embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. Her had stalked the shit out of me. “Yes, I’ve known your name for some time.”

 
      
 
“It’s not nice to stalk people,” I said. “Especially someone who can kill you and deposit your body somewhere over shark-infested waters where it will never be seen again.”

 
      
 
Aaron’s eyes flashed briefly with amusement. “It was a chance I had to take.”

 
      
 
Our drinks came. It was late Sunday night and the bar crowd was thinning. No doubt only the hardcore drinkers were left...and a creature or two of the night. As we sat in the bar, toasting to good health and long life (which put a smile on my face), I was suddenly certain Aaron and I were being watched. I glanced over his shoulder, searching for the source, but there was only an empty stairway leading up to God knew what. Still, the electrified field that only I seemed to see, a field that consisted of glowing streaks of light that helped me see into the darkest of nights, seemed to be buzzing with more than usual activity. Light streaks zipped about as if energized by something unseen.

 
      
 
Something’s coming,
I suddenly thought. What that I was, I didn’t know.

 
      
 
I turned back to Fang. “So how did you find me?” I asked, although I had already intuited the answer. Obviously, I had given the man enough clues about my life—in particular, the cases I had worked on—for him to find me. Quite simply, he had put two and two together. Even if
two and two
had come over the course of years.

 
      
 
He confirmed my hunch, and explained. To his credit, he looked a bit sheepish. Anyway, it had been one of my bigger cases four months ago that had gotten some national attention, a case that involved a runaway girl and a murderous dad. Despite my best efforts to remain anonymous, my name had appeared once or twice in the newspaper. I had, of course, mentioned to Fang that I was working on an important missing person case. By this point, I had already inadvertently dropped enough clues over the years to direct him to the general region where I lived. And once he knew the general region, well, it had just been a matter of scanning the local headlines for any news about a runaway.

 
      
 
I said, “So everything I ever told you....”

 
      
 
“I made notes,” he said. “I saved our messages. I poured over them later, searching for hidden clues about you. About how to find you. In the beginning, you gave me very little to work with. But you loosened up over the years.”

 
      
 
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. There was a creep factor here that was hard to ignore. But I also understood human nature. Or, at least, tried my damned best to. Yes, of course he had been curious about me. Who wouldn’t have been? I was a woman who was professing to be much more than a woman. And, admittedly, I had certainly been curious to find him, too, but I had never acted on it. I was a married woman at the time, working hard to keep things happy and seemingly normal.

 
      
 
Too hard.

 
      
 
A marriage shouldn’t have to be so much work. Love shouldn’t crush your soul. A relationship should add to your life, not take away from it. Something I’m only now beginning to understand.

 
      
 
But it was hard to remain mad at Fang...or Aaron. There was a gentleness to him that I never saw coming. His instant messages to me had exuded confidence. But I wasn’t seeing the confidence here. No, I was seeing a man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, who had anything but confidence. I was missing something here, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

 
      
 
I looked again at the teeth dangling from his neck. They were long and thick—but not quite as thick as shark teeth. They looked like dog canines. Big dog canines. I looked again at his twitching mouth, and saw him curl his upper lip down as if to....

 
      
 
As if to cover two massively prominent canines. Two unnaturally long canines.

 
      
 
“Those teeth,” I said, motioning to his chest. “Are yours.”

 
      
 
“Why, Moon Dance,” he said, and I sensed his old charm. “You are quite the detective.”