Unraveled Read online

  Digging around in my purse, I came up with a travel pack of Kleenex. Liam took the offered tissue, dragged it across his mouth and spit.

  Vasili had vanished.

  “Not much food in that,” I said of the puddle before him. It was impossible to tell from the small, amorphous chunks what Liam might have eaten that had offended Vasili so.

  Liam struggled to his feet. “Food isn’t always easy to find.”

  To find.

  “What the hell has happened to you? You’re sleeping in your car, scavenging for food…”

  “You didn’t like that I was a hit man. So I stopped killing for money. Are you proud?”

  Proud was far too simple for the complex tangle of emotions unraveling in my head and heart.

  “You need help, Liam.”

  “Do I?” From one of the many pockets in his duster, Liam withdrew a small metallic flask and took a healthy swig. “And who’s going to give it to me, exactly? You know a job coach I can talk to about career transitions from contract killing? A therapist who will understand what it’s like to have the woman you love stolen from you?”

  Anger was a welcome change from the soup of pity and regret still bubbling in my gut.

  “First of all, we spent one night together. One. I have a hard time believing you fell in love with me from that brief encounter. Second, Crixus didn’t steal me. He saved me. If it weren’t for him, I might have died in that accident.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” Liam tipped the flask back once again. “If it hadn’t been for Crixus, we never would have been in an accident in the first place.”

  “Have you forgotten how you were pointing your gun out the window. How I had to grab your arm before—”

  “Who do you think I was pointing at?” Liam gave this a minute to sink in.

  “Crixus? But why? Why would you have done that? You’d never even met him.”

  “Gut feeling. Some fuckers just need to die, and he looked like one of them.” Whatever was left in the flask went sluicing down Liam’s throat. He shook like a wet dog and exhaled cloud of 80-proof vapor into my face. “Turns out I would have been doing us both a favor.”

  “I’m done with this conversation.” I turned my back on him and dug around in my bag for my keys.

  “Wait.” Liam grabbed me by the elbow.

  “This parking lot is crawling with police officers, Liam. You don’t want me to scream.”

  “Just do one thing for me.” The note of sincere pleading caught me and turned me to face him. “That’s all I ask.”

  “What?”

  “Ask that skeevy fuckball—”

  “Crixus. His name is Crixus.”

  “Fine. Ask Crixus about the vampire. Look into his eyes when he answers you.”

  “All right.” I had intended to do this anyway, so it cost me nothing to agree.

  “Promise me.” This was the sharpest he’d looked all evening.

  “I promise.”

  “Good.” Liam released my arm and walked away, heading west toward the setting sun.

  “Liam?” I called after him.

  He stopped and turned the unscarred side of his face to me over his shoulder.

  “Where will you go?”

  “Don’t worry.” He was walking again, pressing toward the shadows of which he already seemed a part. “I’ll be around.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Crixus and I had come up with a system long ago for those times when I needed to reach him urgently. As a supernatural bounty hunter, it wasn’t uncommon for him to be on the far side of the planet, up to his elbows in whatever his most recent bounty decided to throw at him. The options therein were varied and unpleasant.

  We called it the Batphone and I had never been especially clear on the particulars of how it worked. It looked just like an ordinary cellphone, but the network it connected to wasn’t detectible by any means known to humankind. It never lost reception, didn’t require a data plan, and it may or may not have been powered by leftover souls.

  My cellphone was far more pedestrian by comparison. And yet I’d been staring at it for the better part of an hour, pulling up “Batphone” in my contacts only to glare at it until the screen timed out. The contact displayed no corresponding phone number as I had pointed out to Crixus the day he’d programmed it. He’d assured me not to worry. That if I ever needed it, it would work.

  One gentle push with my finger. That’s all it would take. I had been attempting to psych myself up with this mantra, but showed no signs of carrying through on my own suggestion. All I had managed so far was to wear a small path in the foyer’s wood floor. The old Victorian home we had moved into after our wedding amplified the sound of my pacing and heavy sighs.

  I’d become one of the house’s many ghosts.

  “There’s probably a very reasonable explanation for all of this.”

  The ornately carved wooden lions on the fireplace mantel made no sign of agreeing with me. Theirs were the only faces beside mine in the room.

  “What possible reason would my husband have for hiring a vampire to attack me?”

  To my dismay, my mind had answers for that question.

  To scare you into quitting your day job so you can be accessible all the time.

  How often had he tried to persuade me to travel the world at his side? On any given morning, he might be called to Italy, Greece, Switzerland, or any of a number of exotic locales. How often he’d bemoaned my inability to come with him for an impromptu dinner in Tuscany or breakfast in Belgium. But he wouldn’t risk real physical harm to me…

  Would he?

  The phone, sweaty in my palm, startled me when it buzzed.

  A text from a number I didn’t recognize. I opened it up and read.

  Vasili is wanting to apologize for disappearing from parking lot. And for licking without permission. He hopes pretty doctor will forgive.

  Fantastic. The neophyte undead mosquito had my private number.

  And where do you suppose he got it?

  Dr. Wolfe?

  But Doctor Wolfe called on your office line. Julie had to patch him in.

  Liam?

  Even if Liam remembered my phone number, would he have given it to Vasili?

  Unlikely.

  I toggled between Vasili’s message and the Batphone contact screen.

  “Oh just do it, you big giant pansy.” It was somewhat refreshing to use a phrase I thought at least a dozen times a day in my practice but wasn’t allowed to say.

  Before I could chicken out, I poked the call button and waited.

  The line didn’t ring, but suddenly Crixus’s voice was there.

  “What is it? What happened? Are you okay?” he yelled over booze-loose shouts in the background and the unmistakable clank of pool balls breaking.

  “Yes, I’m okay. Where are you?”

  “Prague.”

  “In a bar in Prague?”

  A beat of silence. “It’s a favorite haunt of the guy I’m chasing.”

  Impossible to know how he had meant the word haunt. It was conceivable that an actual ghost might be his quarry. Notoriously difficult to capture, non-corporeal beings. I waited through another crippling wave of déjà vu with the phone pressed to my cheek and my pulse pounding in my ears. “I see.”

  “What’s wrong? You sound strange.”

  My fingers ached from gripping one of the wooden lions by the snout for balance. “How soon can you be home?”

  “Why? Did something happen at the office today?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it over the phone.”

  “Give me five minutes. I just need to let my contact know I’m heading out.”

  “See you soon.” I disconnected and set my phone on the mantel, surrendering to a series of violent, involuntary shakes. Main
taining my cool had required more effort than I’d realized.

  Crixus arrived with the customary pop that announced the molecules in the room rearranging themselves to accommodate him. Prague to New York in five minutes. There was much to recommend travel via demigod.

  He rushed over to where I was stationed on the couch, hands in my hair, bent over the coffee table, my yellow note pad and its single word—Adelaide—lying before me.

  His big body depressed the cushion next to mine, tempting me to slide into him. To treat myself to the feel of his warm skin and solid muscle. Forget about my questions and their potentially problematic answers.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I saw Liam today.” I exhaled a long breath and propped my elbows on my knees.

  I felt him stiffen at my side. “Where?”

  “In the parking lot outside the Powerhouse Gym. After my session with the vampire, I decided I would go and take a look at the scene of the most recent Dude Bro murder.”

  “You what?”

  “Things didn’t go so well with the vampire, so I decided to find out more about the murders myself.”

  “With Vasili? Why?”

  My ears filled with a strange, high-pitched buzzing.

  “Crixus, how did you know his name was Vasili?”

  He looked at me, his blue eyes wide, his face a mask of cultivated innocence. “You must have said it while you were on the phone.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How can you be so sure? You were pretty distracted.” The innocence evaporated in favor of something darker. Something suggestive.

  I knew what he was doing. Attempting to move this conversation onto ground at the intersection of Playful and Seductive. The kingdom where he ruled.

  “I remember what I said, Crixus. Liam said he saw you talking to Vasili in the parking lot before you came up to surprise me.”

  “The guy only has one eye, and you’re going to trust what he says he saw? He’s a washed-out, used-up drunkard. We both know he’d say anything to get your attention.”

  “And how would you know that Liam only has one eye?”

  Crixus squirmed on the fishhook he’d bitten. Straight answers had never been his forte. He was a big fan of hand waving and distraction when it came to conversations. Especially important ones. “He’s been skulking around for a while. I’ve seen him in passing.”

  “You didn’t think to mention this to me?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you. I mean, he looks pretty hard up these days.”

  “Crixus, if you value our relationship at all, now is the time to tell me the truth. Did you talk to Vasili before our session today?”

  Though our faces were separated by less than a foot, seeing him now felt like looking across an unconquerable gulf. Not just of physical space but of time and circumstance. As they so often did when he had to say something he didn’t want to, Crixus’s eyes darkened to lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone used by pharaohs and kings since antiquity. The shade of every azure sky since the world’s beginning boiled down into his unflinching gaze.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I did.”

  My heart shrank with the initial blow, making room for my lungs to fill. “What did you talk about?”

  “Matilda, let’s not do this.” He kneaded the tense intersection of my neck and shoulder. “We’ll just end up having a big fight. You’ll yell, I’ll yell, we’ll both end up sorry. Why don’t we just skip all that and move straight to the make-up sex?” His hand wandered down to the swell of my breast.

  I swatted it away while I tried to maintain possession of sanity. “Tell me.”

  He reached out and lifted my hand from my knee, turning it over, palm up. With one finger, he traced my lifeline over the hill of muscle at the base of my thumb. It ended abruptly about an inch from the curve where my thumb and index finger joined.

  “Do you remember the night I asked you to marry me?”

  I scanned my memory banks for the event in question. The information was served up quickly and not in order. Our bodies naked in the moonlight. A cliff overlooking the ocean. Bathed by a breeze warmed by the sand below. Crixus holding my hand just as he held it now. Palm up. Tracing the same line not with his finger, but with his tongue. Then he’d kissed my palm and set it down on his bare chest. The ghost of a heartbeat beneath the place warmed by his lips.

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

  “And what did you say when I asked you?”

  “That there’s no way it would work. Because you’re immortal, and I’m not.”

  “Right,” he said. “And what did I say?”

  “That it didn’t matter. That you’d love me for as long as I lived, and when I died, you’d love the place I’d left behind.” Tears bloomed in the corners of my eyes, blurring my vision.

  “I meant it. But if there was a way for us to share the same lifetime, wouldn’t you want that?”

  “But there’s no way for an immortal to become a mortal,” I protested. It was one of the absolute truths I’d managed to pick up in my years of working with paranormal patients.

  “Exactly.”

  Our eyes met as the implications of what he was saying sank in slowly. If he couldn’t become mortal, then that left only one option. My becoming immortal.

  “Wait just a minute. Are you saying you paid Vasili to…to bite me?” I snatched my hand from his and stood, wanting to put myself out of reach of the supernatural pheromones Crixus churned out by the metric ton.

  When he nodded, he looked more irritated than contrite. A remnant of his human side, this substituting anger for guilt.

  “But, that would mean I would become a vampire.”

  “I know. It was stupid and thoughtless and wrong and I’m sorry.” He rose from the couch and walked over to the fireplace, thumbing the polished wooden fang of the lion closest to him. “Let’s just put this behind us and move on, okay?” To his credit, the regret darkening his eyes to sapphires appeared genuine.

  But I wasn’t ready to let it drop. Not by a long shot.

  “You’re saying that you, all by yourself, decided that A: I needed to become an immortal, and B: Turning me into a blood-sucking, undead creature of darkness was an acceptable way to accomplish this?” The quiet, even tone in which I asked this question had Crixus eyeing windows, then the door. Identifying potential exits, perhaps, against the flying testicle kick my livid anger might just demand.

  “It was that or have an Egyptian priest of my acquaintance turn you into a mummy, and call me crazy, but I didn’t think you’d be all that excited about carrying around your vitals in a canopic jar.”

  My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

  Talking required air. Air required breathing. Breathing required a sympathetic nervous system, and as far as I could tell, someone had stolen mine and wired me into an electrical socket instead. Eye twitching, palms sweating, hands clenching and unclenching.

  When shock loosed its stranglehold on my throat, the words came out in an unfiltered torrent.

  “You. You are the most presumptuous, most egotistical, most reprehensibly deluded creature I have ever met!”

  “You forgot charming as fuck.” He abandoned the fireplace mantel and took up the slouchy, sexy strut that so often marked imminent panty-droppage.

  So I did the only thing available to me as a mental health professional and fully actualized adult.

  I threw a paperweight at his head.

  My aim has never been anything to brag about and this instance proved to be no exception. The miniature globe arced wide, shattering the window behind Crixus’s head. A masculine shriek of surprise from the yard below cut through the tinkling sound of breaking glass.

  “Did you hear that?” I searched the darkness beyond the window but saw nothing.

&nb
sp; “Hear what?”

  “It sounded like a man’s scream.”

  Crixus shrugged, turning to peer out of the window as well. “Probably just the breaking glass.”

  “Now?” came a muffled whisper.

  “Vasili is out there, isn’t he?”

  “What?” Crixus laughed, a little overloud, I thought. “No. Of course not.”

  “Crixus.” I loaded his name with every ounce of stern displeasure I could summon.

  “I swear, I called it off. Scout’s honor.” He held up his fingers in a configuration that looked like a mangled rabbit shadow puppet.

  “Nice try. Vasili?” I called.

  We both turned to see Vasili’s pale face framed by shards in the window. He dusted debris from his dark hair and shoulders.

  “Now is time for bite?” the vampire asked, looking from Crixus to me.

  The rounded tips of Crixus’s oddly small ears turned the color of a vine-ripened tomato. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  “But you tell Vasili to wait outside until signal.”

  “No, I didn’t.” The scarlet hue bled from Crixus’s ears down his neck.

  My teeth made a sound like crunching ice inside my head. If I crossed my arms any tighter, I might just pull them out of their sockets.

  “Crickets is say this,” Vasili insisted, looking at me through eyes as guileless as a child’s. “Window is break, and Vasili thinks maybe this is signal?”

  “It’s not a signal,” Crixus said through gritted teeth.

  “You want Vasili to go away now?”

  “Yes,” Crixus and I answered in unison.

  “Okay. If this is how you feel, Vasili will go.” Vasili had propped his folded arms on the windowsill and was now resting his chin on them, a strange, undead replica of one of Raphael’s famously moony cherubs. “Is this how you feel?”

  “Yes,” we both said.

  “All right. Vasili will go into cold, dark night. All alone.” He sighed, slowly sinking below the windowsill until only his eyes and forehead were visible. I’d heard of vampires having all manner of super-human powers, but last time I checked, guilt-inducing kicked-puppy eyes wasn’t one of them.