Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3) Read online

  “Maybe I should call back,” she suggested. “You sound like you’re in a hurry.”

  “That’s because I have a dead body in my trunk.” I glanced at the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see flashing red and blue given the way this day was already unfolding.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “I’ve got to go, mom.”

  “I’ll call you later,” she promised. “I love you.”

  “Love you too, Mom.” Most days, that was true.

  Chapter 6

  “That’s Rudy Valentino,” Joseph Abernathy said, rolling the head to face us. A thin, dark dribble of blood worked its way down the gray flesh of a strong chin. Two pearly white points protruded between his waxy, bloodless lips.

  Rudy Valentino was a vampire. There was a decapitated vampire in my trunk.

  “What is Rudy Valentino doing in my trunk?”

  “Not much,” Mark said, leaning in past his father to get a better look.

  We stood staring down into the Mustang’s trunk in the alleyway behind the gallery. A relatively secluded spot away from the eyes of tourist foot traffic of historic downtown Georgetown.

  “Let me rephrase,” I said. “Why is Rudy Valentino in my trunk?”

  “Because someone put him there,” answered Joseph.

  Ugh. If there was anything worse than werewolf dad humor, it was double werewolf dad humor.

  “You know,” I said, “you two are exceptionally helpful. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your input.”

  Joseph scratched at the silvery stubble dusting his jawline. “Second decapitated vampire in one day. This is not a promising trend.”

  “Odd how it coincides with your arrival.” Mark let the comment float like a fetid balloon on the air between them.

  “You can’t think I did this.” Joseph glanced from me to his son, as if requesting my confirmation of his innocence.

  “The timing seems suspect.” Mark failed to look his father in the eye after this accusation, a sure sign it was designed to annoy rather than discern.

  “The timing is incredibly suspect, which is precisely why you should be questioning it.” Joseph’s good natured voice had taken on a steely edge.

  Abernathys tensed on both sides of my peripheral vision.

  Round two.

  “Who was in your trunk?” I asked in a pathetic bid to redirect the confirmation.

  “I’m sorry?” Joseph answered.

  “Your trunk. Rudy Valentino is in mine, who was in yours?”

  “Ahh.” A small, strange smile stretched across Joseph’s face. “It seems someone has a sense of humor. Charlie Chaplin.”

  “Good hell. Vampire actors? This is a thing? In the same way artists tend to be werewolves?”

  “Think about it,” Joseph said. “The obsession with remaining eternally young and beautiful, the desire to live forever through books, or movies...”

  “You have a point,” I admitted. The weight of all I had yet to learn about the non-human world bore down on my shoulders. Would there be no end to feeling hopelessly lost and tossed? “I’m assuming this has something to do with the whole werewolves vs. vampires thing then?”

  “Very likely,” Joseph agreed.

  “But why a decapitated vampire in the trunk? Why not a werewolf? Wouldn’t that be a more effective way at getting back at me? Or at Mark?”

  “It would,” Joseph pointed out, “if simple revenge were the motive.”

  “As opposed to?” I didn’t like where this was going. Not one bit.

  “Complete and utter domination and destruction of your soul,” Joseph said.

  “It’s kind of a vampire specialty,” Mark added.

  A chill worked its way from my scalp to my sneakers.

  The face seemed so peaceful—a pale white mask slumbering in the gloom. Words bandied back and forth between the two Abernathys but filtered to my ears through cotton batting. I leaned into the trunk until I could feel the pale, smooth flesh of Valentino’s cheek against my hand.

  It wasn’t skin.

  Skin had pores.

  This was something else. Something perfect. And dead.

  My thumb traced the cool, pale gray of his lip, meeting a hard bud of resistance where the painfully precise point of one pearlescent fang protruded from his silent mouth.

  “BWAHHH!” the head bellowed.

  I managed to crack my head against the trunk lid as a leapt back, shrieking in a key that could deafen dogs, connecting flailing elbows with both Mark and Joseph in my pure, blind, panic.

  Mark caught me before I went ass-first down to the concrete. Next on the list was scrambling up a wall like Wylie Coyote.

  It was a noise that stopped me.

  Laughter. Mark’s, specifically. Doled out with a miser’s generosity, it was enough to give me pause.

  When it was joined by the harmonic booming of Joseph’s guffaw, realization finally arrived.

  The head hadn’t screamed. Mark had.

  “You bastard!” Knowing full well I was hurting my knuckles more than his marble-hard bicep, I went after his arm like the kid in every training scene in every boxing movie ever.

  “He’s not.” Joseph gripped his stomach, tears of mirth watering his cheeks. “I can attest.”

  “You should have seen,” Mark cackled, fighting for both words and air, “the look on your face!”

  So, I did the only reasonable thing available to an adult woman my age.

  I kicked him in the shin. Hard.

  “Hey!” he yelped.

  “Serves you right!”

  “That really hurt.” The surprise on his face gave me a little thrill of satisfaction.

  “How long has she been working for you?” Joseph asked, seriousness darkening his tone.

  “Two months, two weeks and four days,” I answered. Not that I had been counting.

  Joseph’s eyebrows raised as the last of the levity vanished from his face. “Two cycles?”

  “What do you mean two cycles?” I quizzed. “Are we talking lady bits?”

  Joseph turned to Mark, his face an expression of the confusion I felt. “You haven’t told her about that either?”

  Until this moment, I hadn’t been aware sheepish was an expression my boss was capable of.

  “What?” I asked. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  Joseph’s glanced at Mark, not so much asking permission as declaring intention. Mark didn’t argue.

  “If an untransformed recessive is exposed to an alpha for extended periods of time, certain symptoms of transformation can be...triggered.”

  Oh, I’d been exposed, all right.

  “What?” This wasn’t so much a question as the unintentional sound of a tea kettle. “How is that possible?”

  “Have you ever had female roommates?” Joseph asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “In college.”

  “Forgive me for being indelicate,” he continued. “But did you cycle with them? That is to say, did your menstr—”

  “Yes,” I said, cutting him off. “I always regulated with whichever roommate I was closest to at the time.”

  “That’s how it’s possible.” Joseph’s eyes were kind as they met mine, making sure I’d taken his point. “Your body senses the alpha, and it begins to respond, mated or not.”

  I turned to Mark, my hand finding their now-familiar notch on my hips. “Is this true?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” A solid vein of crazy lent my voice that oh-so-charming teakettle-like shrill. “How could you not mention this? What was all that stuff about refusing to take my choice from me?”

  “Because I had no idea it would take you forever and a fucking day to decide!” His voice amplified down the alley, bouncing off the centuries old brick walls and startling a flock of pigeons skyward.

  “Excuse me all to hell for being the tiniest bit hesitant about whether I want to sprout a tail and tear-ass around town on all fours every time
there’s a full moon!” I jammed my pointed finger skyward, where the barest ghost of the mottled orb already hung on the carpet of darkening blue.

  “Now we’re throwing around stereotypes, Miss I have three cats and no boyfriend?”

  My face stung as if slapped. Abernathy’s aim was as accurate as ever, hitting bone with effortless ease.

  “You’re hardly one to talk,” Joseph argued on my behalf. “Mr. I haven’t been laid in a hundred and twenty-four years.”

  Cue mental record scratch.

  “A hundred and twenty-four years?” I blinked at him, incredulous. I had asked him this question one sweaty, naked morning and he’d dodged it with the skill of a Cirque d’Soleil acrobat. In the few months I had known him, there had been no shortage of beautiful female satellites in his orbit. I had mistakenly assumed he’d been screwing them all six ways from Sunday. But I’d been disabused of this notion as one by one, their platonic positions in his universe had been revealed.

  Worse, the only service he’d been providing them was protection.

  Mark’s breathing was slow and deep, lending his words the dangerous patience of a stalking predator. “Following my cock around the globe isn’t a luxury I have, Joseph.”

  “Psst!” I held hands up to silence them both. “If you’re going to fight like this, it’s going to be in front of Dr. Phil, not a headless vampire.”

  “She’s right,” Joseph agreed. “This conversation is getting us nowhere.”

  “Thank you,” I said. These words were rare and precious in my world.

  Mark’s face crumpled in irritation. “What did you do with the last body?” he asked.

  “I took care of it,” Joseph answered. “Just as I will with Rudy.”

  “Two bodies in one day?” Mark asked mockingly. “Are you sure you’re up to the strain?”

  “I have twice your years and twice your stamina,” Joseph answered.

  “Good enough for me.” I dug in my purse and handed over my keys.

  Joseph snapped his hand closed around them and pushed by Mark, bumping shoulders with him as he passed.

  I felt a pang of jealousy as he gunned the Mustang down the alleyway and shot around the curb, handling my car with an expert intuition of machines that far outstripped my own.

  I told myself the Mustang still liked me more. And he’d better, after all those summer waxings in naught but a bikini and cut-offs.

  Mark was halfway down the alley toward the gallery’s back door and I jogged to catch up with him.

  “Hey,” I said. “We need to talk about this.”

  “About what?”

  “About this whole syncing cycles thing.”

  “It’s very simple,” he said, opening the door and crossing into the main gallery space. “You can’t work for me anymore.”

  This phrase and the casual way Mark said it stole the breath from my lungs.

  “What?”

  “You can’t work for me anymore.” He continued up the stairs to his office without looking back.

  “I mean, do we really need to be so drastic? Isn’t there some kind of pheromone blocker or something like that? Nose plugs! What about nose plugs?”

  Abernathy didn’t answer until he was planted in his familiar chair with an expanse of desk between us.

  “The longer you’re around me, the longer you’re around the pack, the more you’ll transform. Obviously you don’t want that to happen.”

  I plopped down on the leather couch, crossing my legs beneath me. “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  Previously, I thought I had gotten pretty adept at reading Abernathy’s face. The subtle downward twist of his mouth or tick of an eyebrow that could signal the difference between boredom and irritation.

  Now, Abernathy’s face was completely and utterly inscrutable. Deadly flat and calm.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to be a werewolf—”

  “Then what?”

  “You talk about this like you’re so certain, but I have a very vivid memory of someone stopping short at the mention of marriage the last time we were naked.”

  Mark’s eyes sought the display of first edition tomes on his gleaming bookshelves. After discovering some of them had been inscribed by the likes of Charles Dickens, it had been all I could do not to set up an altar and dance naked in front of them, seeking favor.

  “I have no use for binding papers,” he said. “Nor do I care to appear in human government records.”

  “Let me make sure I’m understanding you correctly. You’re willing to make me a werewolf, thereby binding your soul to mine for the rest of your unnaturally long life, but you don’t want to be connected to me on paper?”

  “Yes.”

  This single word sailed a rock at the glass pane of my ridiculously squishy heart.

  “Bonds are only as good as the men who make them,” he said, as if this would somehow salve the wound.

  “That’s such an Abernathy thing to say.”

  “What did your marriage to Dave buy you, save more paper to undo it and a mountain of debt and regret?”

  “You’re just going to say his name like that? I’ve got a paper cut here.” I held out my hand. “Wanna rub some lemon juice in it? Maybe some salt? Battery acid?”

  “It’s a valid question given the circumstances.”

  I really hated it when he was right.

  “It didn’t buy me anything,” I said. “But that’s not the point. Marriage is an outward symbol of an inner commitment.”

  “Symbols?” Abernathy raised an eyebrow at me. “What about me says I’m a man who needs symbols? I do what I want, when I want. The show, the display, they’re for everyone else.”

  “What’s so wrong about wanting everyone else to know?” A familiar, sinking feeling spread in my belly. The sure and sudden knowledge that I was losing ground, sliding backward.

  “Why does everyone need to know?” Abernathy asked. “Who are you trying to convince?”

  “It’s not about convincing anyone.” My scalp prickled in that special way that only Abernathy-directed irritation could produce. “It’s about making it official.”

  “According to whom?” he asked.

  “According to...to everyone!” Even as I heard myself say it, it sounded lame and pathetic. Which, to be honest, was the way I almost always ended up feeling after a verbal tussle with Abernathy.

  “How did that work out with your ex-husband?” The corner of his mouth quirked up into his I am totally winning smirk. “Making it official?”

  “I really don’t like your face right now,” I said. “You know that?”

  “Your body...”

  “Fine,” I agreed. “Marriage aside, are you saying you’re ready to be bound to me for life?”

  “Yes,” he answered without hesitation.

  It’s possible my heart stopped. Or my soul left my body. “Really?”

  Abernathy’s eyes moved from my body up to my face like fire licking up a trail of gasoline. “Hanna, I have to be with you.”

  My heart thundered in my chest. “You do?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He hesitated, glancing down at his desk then back up at me. “It’s the only way to keep you safe.”

  The fluttering bird of my hope ran smack into a windowpane.

  “You, sir, can fuck all the way off,” I said.

  “Is that an offer?” His eyes flashed with dangerous hunger.

  “It’s a suggestion for self-improvement,” I said. “I’m not your project.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “You didn’t need to.” A total brat move, stealing his earlier statement, but I wasn’t exactly feeling at the height of my emotional maturity at that precise moment. “I have work to do,” I said, pushing myself up from the couch.

  No sooner had I settled at my desk than the sound of a gasp and a sob echoed through the gallery.

  Shayla.

  I erupted from my chair and tripped dow
n the stairs toward the oddities shop attached to the gallery through a door beyond the artists’ studios. I found her bent behind the counter clutching the plastic-lined wicker basket I’d designated as the trash bin on my first day as Abernathy’s assistant.

  Her back arched as a fresh wave seized the curving cage of her ribs and racked the contents of her stomach upward from her scooped waist.

  My hands found the damp strands of her cobalt blue hair and drew them back from her face and lifted them off her burning neck.

  The hair, like the brilliant green eyes set against the reddening flesh of her face, were natural.

  Which is completely normal if you’re a Nereid.

  She drew a deep breath and set the basket down, resting her forehead against the cool wood surface of the shop’s counter. The rainbowed tapestry of her tattooed arms curled around her head.

  “Honey,” I said, handing her a paper towel to wipe her mouth. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” She lifted her head just enough for me to see her watery green gaze. “I’m pregnant.”

  I blinked at her, disbelieving. “Say what?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she repeated.

  “Are you sure? Steve makes some pretty odd food combinations—”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “But, but…” I sputtered, searching for words. “You and Steve have only been dating for a month.”

  “Believe me, I know,” she said.

  “How did this even happen?”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with the process.” Fine red slits puffed at the sides of her neck. Poor Shayla was green around the gills.

  Literally.

  “What I meant was, didn’t you guys use protection?”

  “I was on birth control.” She pressed her eyes closed tighter and moaned. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “Is everything all right?” Joseph had materialized against the backdrop of shelves stuffed with the odd array of objects Mark had collected or purchased over his centuries on the planet. I wondered exactly how long he’d been lurking there. Stealthiness ran in the family, apparently.

  “Shayla,” I said, “this is Joseph Abernathy. Mark’s father.” I followed this statement with a meaningful glance of the we will totally dish about this later variety.