LITMIR.BIZ

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the agony of a wax is always replaced by a delightfully sleek and sexy feeling after it’s over. Seeing the torn and bloody web of skin between my fingers just made me feel like a rat that had gnawed off its own foot to escape a trap.

      Not delightful. Not sexy. And definitely not as conflicted as I’d been a few minutes ago about staking the sadistic undead who’d done this to me. My Badgley slip dress looked like a rag that had been used to mop an abbatoir floor, and my hair was hanging around my face in damp hanks. As I scrabbled under the car for the fallen stake and my knees scraped painfully against the oil-stained pavement, a primal rage surged through me.

      He wasn’t playing fair. Vampires had the whole fang and super strength and flying thing going on, and all we humans had were wood and garlic and maybe a splash of holy water if we were lucky. For a vamp to add a nail gun to his arsenal was overkill—and where had he gotten it from, anyway?

      Nausea rose up in me a second time. Of course. The son of a bitch had killed one of my carpenters and taken the tool from his dead body. I thought of the crew that had been working all day and into overtime this evening to get the club’s stage rebuilt on schedule for me, and my anger grew. Nailing me through the hand had made it personal, but this made it war.

      My fingers closed bloodily around the stake as the footsteps behind me came closer. I jumped to my feet and let my rage out in a scream as I raced toward the approaching vamp.

      “Get ready to kiss your ass goodbye, you bastard! When I’m finished with you there won’t be anything left but dust!”

      I started to bring my stake up into position—wrist rigid, the power coming from the shoulder, if anyone’s interested—and then I froze.

      The man facing me was the carpenter who’d played havoc with my hangover today. On one of the few days when I’d pulled myself together early enough to show up at the club before the cocktail hour I’d seen him taking a break outside with some of the others in the crew as I’d hurried into the building, swathed in a silk scarf and wearing oversized Christian Dior sunglasses to keep the brilliance of the day from racheting up my pounding headache.

      Which meant he wasn’t a vamp. That fact wasn’t as comforting as it might have been, because he was still trying to kill me.

      “You’re the one who’s going to be dust in a second,” he grunted, using both hands to steady the nail gun. “When you get to hell, tell your pals down there that Jack Rawls sends his regards.”

      As he finished speaking he depressed the trigger on the cordless nailer. I barely had time to leap out of the way before a deadly barrage of nails began flying at me.

      “What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled as I turned my leap into a dive and slid across the hood of my MINI, losing my Manolos in the process. I fell rather than landed on the other side of my car and crouched there. A metallic pinging like hail on a tin roof told me Rawls was still firing.

      “Gunning for a vamp,” he said calmly over the pinging. His flat Midwest accent made his words seem matter-of-fact. “The nails are tipped with silver, and the gun’s been modified to shoot up to twenty feet, so make it easy on yourself and stop trying to run.”

      My heart turned over. What did he mean, gunning for a vamp? There was no way he could know my most secret fear—no one did. How had he learned of it, and why was he so sure it wasn’t just a fear, but the truth?

      I could hear him walking around the front of the car. Still keeping low, I sprinted to the back of the MINI, ungratefully wishing Popsie had sprung for Hummers instead when he’d bought our birthday presents. “I’m not a vampire,” I said tightly. “You were working only feet away from me most of the day, so there’s no way you don’t know who I am.”

      “No way at all,” he agreed, his tone still unruffled. “You’re Kat Crosse, and one of your sisters is the local Daughter of Lilith. I knew who you were before I hit town.” I heard him exhale, and something in the raggedness of his breath made me realize his calmness was eroding. “I can’t fault your sister for not being able to put you down, but I’m not going to lose any sleep tonight after I dust you, lady.”

      He stepped around the back of the MINI as he spoke and aimed the nail gun at where I’d been crouching. His head jerked up when he saw I wasn’t there, but his reaction came too late.

      I jumped off the car’s roof and crashed into him, falling with him to the ground. Grandfather Darkheart’s weeks of training might not have turned me into a vamp fighter like Megan, I thought grimly as I rammed the point of my stake to Jack Rawls’s throat and glared down at him from my sitting position on his chest, but it definitely gave me an edge in a parking lot brawl like this.

      His body went rigid. He stared up at me, and even in the poor light I could see implacable hatred in his eyes as blood traced a thin line from the point of my stake to his collar. “Do it,” he said, his voice hoarsened by the pressure on his throat. “Go ahead and plunge it in. If you don’t I’ll do it myself.”

      He moved so fast I almost didn’t have time to react. His head jerked sideways toward the stake, and even as I pulled back my weapon in shock I saw the trickle of blood deepen. I felt him brace himself to repeat the maneuver and I did the only thing I could think of to prevent him.

      “Stop that!” The stake was instantaneously reversed in my hand—another move that Grandfather Darkheart’s training had drilled into me—and as I shouted the command at Rawls I smashed the blunt end of the wood into his cheekbone. His head rocked sideways with the strength of my blow, and I sensed him gathering himself to break free of me. I hit him again, ignoring the blazing pain in my wounded hand, and then slammed the solid yew-wood stake against his temple a third time with all the strength I could muster. He went limp, the tension I’d felt in his body extinguished as instantly as a lightbulb being turned off.

      “You’ve killed him,” I told myself through numb lips. “That’s what comes of going all altruistic and trying to save a man from himself, instead of sticking with what you know and being a ball-breaking bitch.” I wiped my bloody hand on my hiked-up dress—the fact that I only felt the tiniest pang as I did so was proof of how distracted I was—and pressed my thumb to the side of his neck.

      His pulse was slow but steady. Relief swept through me. I peered closer at his neck and saw that the small puncture mark from my stake was closer to his jawline than his jugular, and that the bleeding had already slowed.

      “You’re not dead,” I told his unconscious form. “I like that in a man, but what I’d like even more is not having to worry about you trying to kill one or both of us. I guess I could keep knocking you out every time you show signs of coming round, except that would mean I couldn’t ask you questions.” I stood up and looked down at him. “And I’ve got questions, sweetie. Lots of them, starting with how you knew the one thing about me that I haven’t dared tell anybody.”

      Stepping over him, I walked to the front of the MINI and reached inside to the console. I popped the trunk and hastened back again, flicking a wary glance at Rawls’s prone body as I passed him. Ask me how long two coats of OPI polish plus a base and topcoat take to dry and I can tell you to the second, but predicting how long a man who’s gone down for the count will remain down isn’t my area of expertise.

      However, I did have some handy gadgets relating to one of my areas of expertise in the small overnight case I always carried with me. Minutes later, having used them and a few other things on him, I surveyed the results of my handiwork with satisfaction.

      “There’s something about a man in handcuffs that always gets my motor revving a little,” I murmured. “But just because a girl’s got a wicked side doesn’t mean she’s a vamp, Jack—or at least, it doesn’t mean she’s turned into a vamp yet. If you’d known that much about me, we might have ended up using these handcuffs in a completely different scenario tonight.” I’d straddled him as I’d cuffed him to the MINI’s bumper and tied each of his legs with lengths of tough nylon rope to his own vehicle, which I’d moved up behind the MINI. Now I sat back on his chest and narrowed my gaze

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