LITMIR.BIZ

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cream and a maraschino cherry,” I elaborated. “If the cherry stem’s tied into a knot when you set down the empty glass, you get your next drink free. A talented girl can keep the cocktails flowing all night with that trick, as I know from personal experience.”

      Jack stood and turned away from me, bringing the gun into firing position and holding down the trigger. I clapped my free hand against my left ear, but even after he quit firing my right ear was still ringing. My earlier fury flared up again.

      “Why do you have to be such a junkyard dog, Rawls?” I snapped. “I could have left you to those bitches, but instead I turned back to help you. Next thing I know, you’re telling me we’re going to wait here until dawn to see if I flash fry when the sun comes up because you still think I could be one of them. Aside from nearly getting my throat ripped open by Claudia, what more proof did you want that I was on your side?” I didn’t expect an answer, but he surprised me.

      “Seeing you stake one of them. And if you’d never met them, how do you know the blonde’s name?”

      I raised my eyebrows. “Merde, sweetie, don’t tell me you didn’t realize who they’d made themselves into, thanks to some expert nipping and tucking.” At his scowl I sighed again, my anger dissipating into resignation. “Naturally you didn’t. You’re a hetero male, and from the Corn Belt to boot, I’m guessing. The only way you might have recognized who Claudia, Naomi and Linda were impersonating would be if they put supermodels on feed-store calendars. And if you never met them, how did they know your name?”

      “A lot of vamps know the name of Jack Rawls,” he answered briefly, lowering himself to the ground and extending his jeans-clad legs in front of him. He leaned back against the MINI, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest.

      I ignored his none-too-subtle hint. “Vamps know of you because you’re a bounty hunter, you mean?” I persisted. “Since the subject’s come up, exactly how does that work? Who pays the bounty when you hunt down a vamp?”

      “The families of victims.” He didn’t open his eyes. “They pay me what they can. Sometimes that’s just gas money to make it to the next town.”

      “How deliciously Sir Lancelot of you, sweetie,” I said, a trifle acerbically, “but I hope you got more than your mileage for this job. Forget the fact that I came close to being a vamp snack, since you’re convinced I’m going to end up as a big pile of dust anyway, but if that slash over your eye had been any longer or the one on your bicep any deeper, Claudia and her posse would have ended your career tonight.”

      I wasn’t totally convinced of what I’d just said. Being attacked by three vengeful vampires would put any other man down for the count, but except for a hiss of indrawn breath as he’d splashed holy water over his wounds from a plastic soda bottle he’d retrieved from his car, Rawls’s demeanor had remained grimly stoic. His dark T-shirt was soaked even darker in places with his own blood, one knee of his jeans was ripped to show pavementtorn skin beneath, and there was a growing lump on the cheekbone under his left eye. True, I had a collection of assorted scrapes and bruises, too, the worst being my hand, although by now the pain had subsided into a dull throbbing. I hadn’t rated holy water, but Rawls had supplied me with peroxide and some gauze to bind it with. The thing was, I had the feeling this was how Jack Rawls usually looked—like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him in a back-alley fight but had left the other guy looking worse.

      He really was a junkyard dog—snarling, tough and way too dangerous to pat. A cautious woman would have heeded the conventional wisdom of letting sleeping canines lie, I suppose, but I’ve always found caution and conventionality très overrated qualities.

      More important, I needed to keep talking. Talking meant I didn’t have to think about the glimpse of Claudia’s crimson world she’d shared with me just before she turned to ash.

      “If the divine Dr. M was their cosmetic surgeon, I can understand why he inspired such fanatical devotion in his patients. Honestly, darling, staking a man with that kind of talent is like staking Mozart. Couldn’t you have made an exception in his case and just put him under house arrest or—”

      “Dr. M?” Rawls’s eyes snapped open. “Dr. Middleton?”

      I’d finally caught his attention. It was a trifle ego-shattering that my exposed curves hadn’t been able to accomplish that feat, but at least I’d come up with something he found more interesting than sleep. “Linda simply called him the ‘divine Dr. M.’ Apparently, he was one of your past kills, which is why the three of them swore to hunt you down and take their revenge. As I say, I hope the good doctor was one bounty-hunting job that involved more than gas money—”

      “Middleton wasn’t a job, he was a link in a chain I was following. That chain started in Nebraska with a girl named Mary Lou Gilly,” Rawls said, something smoldering behind the ice of his gaze. “The same chain led me straight here to you.”

      I reacted badly to his statement, I admit. Oh, pooh—I’d been reacting badly all day, whether it had been to Terry’s dreary accusations or to Megan and Tash when they’d tried to pull their high-minded intervention in my social activities. But I was getting tired of being everyone’s favorite whipping girl, especially when I was more than a little stressed out with my own private worries.

      Not that I expected to spontaneously combust when the first streaks of dawn showed in the sky. As Rawls had noted, lately I’d been finding it harder to function in the daytime, but that was only to be expected with my party-till-the-wee-hours schedule. I’d yet to have the urge to sink my teeth into a handy neck and I’d felt no revulsion when I’d seen him splashing holy water on his wounds.

      So maybe Tashy a was right, and the Crosse triplet Zena had marked had gotten a Get-Out-Of-Vamphood-Free card when Megan had killed her. I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t, and neither could I believe there was a chance Tash had been marked instead of me. Even if I persuaded myself that my inability to stake vampires was due to paralyzing fear, I was still left with two inarguable points.

      One was that I knew I was changing.

      I’d first known it a few weeks ago, although I’d told myself I was imagining things. I’d also told myself that my decision to move out of the Crosse mansion and take an apartment on my own was totally unrelated to my fears. But during the past week, the feeling had become an almost daily occurrence—a strange sense of dislocation with my own psyche, my own thought patterns, that came and went instantly but left me feeling oddly invaded. I’d tried to chalk the feeling up to my higher-than-normal cocktail consumption, but when Claudia’s crimson-soaked world had called to me tonight and something in me had wanted to answer its call, my fears became bleak certainty. Zena’s twenty-one-year-old legacy was bearing its poisonous fruit. I was turning into what she’d been.

      But I had absolutely no intention of thinking about that particular subject until I had a brimming glass of something numbingly alcoholic in my hand.

      Thanks to Mr. Tall, Dark and Pissy, however, I wasn’t going to be within hailing distance of a jigger of vodka for a while. To add insult to injury, he was apparently under the impression that I was linked to the late Linda’s divine Dr. M, whose staking apparently had been a labor of love and not one of Rawls’s bounty-hunting commissions; and to some Cornhusker State female with a name that sounded like it had been plucked straight out of a country and western hurtin’ song.

      I take back my mea culpa. Under the circumstances, I think I reacted with admirable control to Rawls’s hostile declaration.

      “That chain you followed must have had a broken link, Jack,” I said in my most languid drawl. “All I know about Dr. M is what Linda told me before you dusted her, and as for a Mary Lou…Gilly, did you say?” I gave an exaggerated shudder. “Aside from the fact that I’ve never been within a hundred miles of Nebraska, she doesn’t sound like someone I’d have a lot in common with, sweetie. I mean, the name simply screams big hair, a softer-side-of-Sears outfit and shoes with court heels, no?”

      “I wouldn’t know about that.”

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