American Vampire (14 page)

He gritted his teeth. “I was just trying to be considerate.”

“And get me hanged for murder, that’s real considerate.” She turned to the sink and ran the water, splashing it around the basin with her hands.

“Fine. You do puke cleanup and I’ll do body cleanup. That’s fair.” He went to the living room and checked out the window before opening the door. The last thing he needed was to walk out with a corpse slung over his shoulder just to run into some smiling townsperson.

Oh, who was he kidding? There was nothing to smile about in this town.

He gave Jessa one last look before he left. She still
stood at the kitchen sink, with the water running. Didn’t surprise him. There was a lot to process after an attempted murder.

Disposing of the body took longer than Graf had anticipated. Finding the spot to dump the guy wasn’t difficult, but Jessa had spooked him with her talk of CSI: Walton Mountain, so he did a little extra work. He bashed up the trees, and shredded Chad’s clothes a little. After crushing Chad’s torso to a pulp and obscuring the bite wound on this throat by decapitating him entirely, Graf felt pretty confident with his work and returned to the house.

Jessa wasn’t downstairs. Her bedroom door was closed. Graf went into his room and stripped off his bloody clothes, leaving them in a pile on the hardwood floor. In the morning, he would take them out and burn them. In the meantime, though he’d promised Jessa he wouldn’t mess with her parents’ stuff, he needed something to wear. He rifled through the drawers in the bureau and prayed her father had been approximately the same size as him. He’d just found a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that looked like they would fit when he heard a quiet, persistent noise like the sound of a television on in another part of the house. The springs of Jessa’s bed squeaked, momentarily covering the sound, and he realized what it was. She was crying, alone in her room.

He sat at the foot of the bed and listened. He
should go in and ask her if she was okay. No, that didn’t seem right. Since when “should” he do anything? He was a vampire. Did a human ask a bowl of soup if it was okay before he ate it?

With a shock, he realized that he didn’t intend to eat Jessa. He didn’t know exactly when he’d crossed her off the menu, but she’d somehow moved into the strictly “do not kill” section of his brain. The thought of eating her was ridiculous; the thought of listening to her cry herself to sleep nauseated him.

He pulled on the clothes and walked to her room, tapping on the closed door softly. She didn’t answer. Was she intentionally ignoring him, waiting for him to go away, or did she just not hear? He knocked again, then pushed the door open.

Jessa lay on her bed, curled into a ball with her arms crushing a pillow to her face as she sobbed. She hadn’t wanted him to hear, still didn’t know he was in the room. He could back out and leave her there, and claim that the strain of the evening and the pot Chad had smoked before he’d consumed him were to blame for the momentary lapse in sanity that had caused him to think of her as something other than a possible victim.

But he’d already moved toward the bed, and any further argument would be futile. He sat beside Jessa and put one hand on her shoulder.

She startled and pulled the pillow away from her face. “What are you doing?”

The genuine fear in her face shot straight to Graf’s heart like a wooden stake. He couldn’t find the words to explain himself. “I’m…sorry?”

“What are you doing in here?” she repeated, sit ting up and drawing her knees to her chest.

“I wanted to check on you.” Why did caring about someone have to sound so lame out loud? “I heard you crying. Are you okay?”

“My ex-boyfriend sent his buddy over to kill me,” she reminded him.

“I know.” He leaned away from her, but his hands seemed determined to touch her, as though he could reassure her. “Do you know why?”

“Now that his wife is gone? No. Unless he’s gone completely crazy and managed to take Chad with him, I don’t know why he would ask Chad to do something like that. Or why Chad would agree.” Her face crumpled, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks.

“Hey, hey,” Graf said softly, the words painful as they left his throat. “I’m not going to let anybody hurt you.”

Confusion momentarily broke through her grief. “You threatened to kill me before.”

“Yeah,” he said helplessly. “That was before. It seems like there’s competition for the job now, and I’m not one to follow a trend.”

She laughed through her tears, then fell quiet, playing with the hem of her skirt. “So, are we friends now?”

Friends. He couldn’t remember a time when he described anyone that way. Not even when he was human and therefore supposedly normal. “Are you going to stop being mean to me?”

“I have to, don’t I? You saved my life. You could have let him kill me.”

He didn’t point out the obvious, that which they had already discussed—that he couldn’t have her showing up dead if he wanted to evade suspicion. He wished they had never had that conversation. He motioned to the head of the bed. “Do you mind?”

“Go ahead,” she said uncertainly, and he swung his legs onto the bed, lying beside her. He pulled her down, and she lay easily at his side, her head propped on his shoulder.

“Are you wearing my father’s jammies?” she asked with a hitch of quiet laughter in her voice.

“Sorry. My clothes are destroyed. We’ll have to burn them tomorrow.” He looped his arm around her and stroked her hair. “Think of a good excuse to have a fire.”

She yawned and lay silent. He thought she was sleeping, until she said, “Why would Derek want to kill me? He doesn’t hate me. Becky does, but Derek…no matter what he says, he doesn’t hate me.”

Graf believed her. Derek had married Becky, but he had history with Jessa. A fucked-up history, from what he understood, but there was something between them that wouldn’t break. It made Graf strangely sorry for her, and sorry for himself. He’d never had that kind of connection with anyone. He’d thought it made him free. Maybe it just made him kind of pathetic.

J
essa didn’t know what time Graf had left her room, but since she hadn’t woken to a pile of ashes in her bed, she’d figured he’d made it out before sunup. She had woken with a lot of unanswered questions in her head, though, and those needed taking care of before she could do anything else.

She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her forearm, but she didn’t stop walking. The day was beyond hot; it was downright hellish. Damn Becky for taking Graf’s car. There would have at least been air-conditioning in it. This was a mission Graf couldn’t be involved in, though, so she had to do it during the daylight hours.

Derek lived in a small house at the back of his in-laws’ farm. Once upon a time, it had housed Becky’s elderly grandfather, but when he passed, Derek and Becky moved their brood into it. A lot of families
had done that in the last few years. Pulled together geographically to form their own little compounds. It made them feel safer, she guessed.

Jessa had never been inside Derek and Becky’s house. It had been easier for Derek to come to her, and there had been less risk of getting caught, in those early days when they’d still thought no one was onto them. From the outside, the house looked bleak. Derek was too busy running around with his buddies to keep the place up probably. The siding was dented and splashed with a long streak of roofing tar beneath where a sloppy patch job covered a hole in the roof. The screen over the storm door hung in a limp curl, and Jessa didn’t bother with the rust-stained doorbell. She opened the storm door and hissed as it first stuck, then released violently, bashing her shins with the sharp bottom edge. She hoped that thing about tetanus shots lasting sixty-five years was true.

“Derek?” she called, knocking on the rusted inside door. “Derek, you home?”

At her house, Derek always just barged in, and expected her to be okay with it, but she wasn’t sure if she should do the same at his place. For one, Becky lived there. She was missing now, but there was something just plain not right about “the other woman” walking into the family home. Another knock and a couple minutes of waiting made up her mind, and she tried the knob.

No one in Penance used to lock their doors.
Nowadays, with the monster and the isolation and the mistrust that had grown between neighbors, people didn’t just lock up their houses, they fortified them. When the knob turned and the door swung inward, Jessa thanked God that Derek had never lost his teenager’s sense of immortality.

The inside of the house was dark. Sheets pressed into service as curtains kept most of the light out, a smart choice on such a hot day. Still, the dark and heat of the interior suffocated Jessa, and the stench of unwashed dishes and untended trash made her gag. This wasn’t a mess Derek had made before Becky had left. It was evidence that she’d checked out a long time before leaving.

Picking a path through strewn toys and unwashed cloth diapers, Jessa checked the living room and the bathroom. The children’s bedroom, with its dirty walls and dingy, bare mattresses on the floor, was likewise empty. The door to the master bedroom was closed, and Jessa knocked on it before she opened it to find it empty.

She’d told herself that she had come to interrogate Derek, to find out if he truly had sent Chad to kill her. But that would have been a bad plan, revealing that she had seen Chad, that there had been violence. When they found him, all fingers would have pointed her way, and who would have believed her?

Staring down at the rumpled sheets of the bed he’d shared with his wife, she realized she’d come here to
prove to herself that he still cared for her, and that he would never have wanted to hurt her. But if that had been true, why would he have chosen this life, with Becky, and not her?

She brushed tears from her eyes and cursed her stupidity. Derek had so casually hurt her in the past, when she’d needed him to stay true to all the promises they had made each other. While she’d tried to put back together the pieces of her broken life, he’d grown tired of waiting. When she’d welcomed him back, he’d been unwilling to come to her—at least, not fully. He’d wanted her, but he’d wanted Becky more, and Jessa had let herself believe a lie.

From the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of black lying on the bed. A book. Did Derek keep a journal? It seemed unlikely, but she crawled over the mattress, pulling a black plastic three-ring binder from the tangled sheets. She flipped it over, a lump of dread in her throat at the thought it might be their wedding album. Then, she saw what had to be a devil symbol drawn in silver ink on the front—the circle around an inverted star—just like she’d seen warnings about all through her youth group years. Silly superstition yanked her hand back, but she forced herself to open the book. The heavy-metal loser kids in high school had carved the same lines into the desks and the devil had never materialized in English class, even if it had felt like hell. She flipped open the cover and the fleeting feeling of relief fell into
the sinkhole of her stomach. There, with heart-dotted
i
and all, was Sarah Boniface’s name. It was on the bottom of every page.

It had been a mistake to come here. She turned away from the bedroom and started back down the hallway, the sound of footsteps in the living room jolting her into panic. She’d never been afraid of Derek before, but now as she stood clutching stolen property, she didn’t know how he would react. The footsteps came closer to the hallway. Those familiar footsteps, the sound of his breathing. She knew him so well, and not at all. Her heart hammered against her ribs. He didn’t know she was there. She could hide in the bathroom, and sneak out when he left. But if he found her there, how would she explain herself?

It was too late. He rounded the corner and looked at her with wide-eyed shock, and his gaze dropped to the book in her hands. Then she knew. And he knew, as well.

With all of her might, Jessa rushed him and threw her shoulder into his midsection, keeping low and exploding up the way he had taught her when he’d been on the football team. Only now he wasn’t wearing pads and bracing for the force in a practice drill, and he stumbled back with a loud grunt, leaving her free to run for the door. A row of plastic ducks on a cord wrapped around her ankle, and she fell painfully to one knee as a chorus of quacks went up around her.
The binder sprang from her hands and she grabbed for it, tucking it close to her chest with one arm. Derek grabbed at her shirt, and she twisted free, kicking the ducks away and lunging for the door. She opened it and slammed it hard into his face before sprinting through and into the overgrown lawn.

The hot air burned her lungs, and pain shot through her knee with every step, but Derek was strong, and she knew he would follow her, so she had to keep going. Heads of blackjacks thumped against her legs as she ran for the road. She crossed it, then cleared the ditch on the other side and plunged into the cornfield.

“Jessa,” Derek called behind her, his calm tone a put-on if she ever heard one. “Jessa, come on back, baby. I’m not gonna hurt you!”

Yes, you will,
she pounded into her brain, to keep running. And strangely, she thought of Graf’s promise the night before:
I’m not going to let anybody hurt you.
She trusted him more than she trusted the man chasing her, and she forced her aching body to keep moving forward. Trapped between two tightly planted rows, she had no other choice but to move forward, pushing glossy green leaves aside so they wouldn’t slap her in the face.

At the end of the rows the ground rose up, and she stumbled, clutching at the tall grass to grope her way up the bank with one hand as she struggled to hold the binder with the other. Her shoes slipped on
the soft dirt, and the plants she used as handholds lost their footing in the soil, so she clawed at the dirt, shoulders aching, until she reached the top. Just another few hundred feet, and she would be home safe. She raced across the blacktop for the dirt road—she wouldn’t go through the stand of trees and risk seeing Chad’s mutilated body, even if it was the difference between life and death. Her every instinct screamed to look over her shoulder, to see if Derek still followed, but that would be a mistake; she knew it in her heart. She would turn her head and see him, and that would be when she stumbled and he overtook her. She wouldn’t let that happen, not when she was this close to safety.

The lawn had never looked so welcoming as when her feet finally landed on the grass, and her whole body ached to drop down and rest now that she was beneath the sheltering arms of the oak in the front yard. But she pressed on, her breath wheezing from her lungs, the steps to the porch almost her undoing. She reached the door and pushed it open, summoning as much air as she could to scream, “Graf!” as Derek finally overtook her and carried her to the ground.

Derek’s hand twisted in her ponytail and he wrenched her head back, slamming her face forward into the floor. Then, he lifted off her, and in the mind-blowing pain that paralyzed her, all Jessa knew was that Graf had saved her, and now everything would be okay.

She rolled to her back in time to see Graf open his mouth and rip the skin just beneath Derek’s ear. Smoke rose off Graf’s shoulders from the light streaming through the windows, but it didn’t deter him from sucking down Derek’s blood. Before Jessa could cry out a warning, Derek ripped the H
OME
, S
WEET
H
OME
placard off the wall beside the door and bashed Graf in the face with it. Stunned, Graf let go, just for an instant, and Derek elbowed him in the chest and took off through the door, leaping over the porch railing as Graf ran after him.

Jessa shot to her feet and caught Graf by the arm before he could reach the top of the porch steps. She tugged, hard, bringing both of them crashing to the floor just inside, and covered him with her body as she tried to kick it closed.

“What were you doing?” she screamed as he struggled from under her. She climbed to her feet almost as fast as he did and blocked the door with her body. “You’re going to get killed!”

“He knows what I am now! I’ve got to go after him!” Graf argued, but he didn’t make another at tempt to leave.

“You’ll never catch him now, not before you burn up.” She knew he already had given up for that reason, but it felt like it needed to be said out loud. They weren’t giving up. Their hands were tied.

“Look at you,” Graf said, reaching for her face. She
flinched, and the motion made the contact between his fingers and her flesh more painful.

“He’s going to tell everyone,” she said, ignoring Graf’s hand gently cupping her jaw. “We have to get out of here.”

“Where are we going to go? It’s full daylight out—I can’t leave. And we can’t get out of town.” He said this as though she were a child being told she couldn’t have a birthday party. Gentle, understanding, but firm. “Let’s get some ice on your nose.”

She marveled at Graf’s calmness as he got ice from the freezer and towels from the kitchen drawer.

“You got a first-aid kit?” he asked.

She nodded. “In the bathroom.”

“Let’s go up there, then,” he said, almost cheerfully reassuring. She’d expected him to say, “I told you so,” and possibly even do a jackass end-zone dance when he said it. His kindness really threw her for a loop.

Jessa showed him where the kit was, and watched with fascination as he removed alcohol swabs and bandages. She covered the single window with a towel, then looked in the mirror and saw a long scrape across her forehead, and blood clotting at both of her nostrils, two long tracks of blood across her lips and down her chin.

“Sit,” he ordered, lowering the toilet lid. She obeyed, and he tore open a swab and began to gently dab at her forehead.

“We should be boarding up the windows and preparing for siege,” she said, drawing in a breath at the stinging cold.

“Why do you say that?” He frowned as he wiped the blood and dirt from her wound.

Jessa thought of the binder downstairs, lying forgotten on the floor. If anyone walked in and saw that, she’d be in a world of hurt. She’d be right where Sarah was now. “I found something in Derek’s house. A notebook. He’s going to want it back, and he can definitely use the fact that I’ve got it in my possession against us.”

“Like what kind of a notebook?” Graf leaned close and blew a stream of cold breath over the liquid on her forehead. “That help?”

“My mom used to do that with peroxide,” she said lamely.

“I’m a nurturer. Wait, did you say, ‘in Derek’s house’?”

Jessa sucked in a breath, and waited until he looked up, into her guilty eyes.

“Oh, come on. You didn’t go over there.” His frown deepened into one of disappointment.

“I had to know. I don’t expect you to understand.” She looked down at her hands. They were torn up from fighting.

“Damn it, Jessa!” Graf threw something at the bathtub, and it ricocheted loudly around the porcelain interior.

“You don’t have to yell,” she said meekly. It was a ploy to keep him from being too mean, too loud. If he was, she wouldn’t be able to stay calm. She would respond in kind, and she didn’t know if she had enough energy for more fighting.

Thankfully, his anger seemed to diminish. “That was stupid,” he admonished, dropping to one knee and taking her foot in his hands. “And now your ankle is all fucked up.”

She winced and pulled her leg back. He was right, it did look bad: swollen and purple with bruises. He pulled her shoe off carefully, though it couldn’t have been done completely painlessly, and tossed it aside. His hand was cold against her calf.

She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

“Don’t, don’t,” Graf murmured, his arms closing around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder. Though his body was cold and his shirt was soaked with blood, he felt safe to her. Safer than she’d felt in years.

“There’s only so much of this a guy can take,” he whispered. “We’re not going to do this holding-and-crying thing every day, are we?”

Despite the sadness swelling under her ribs, she laughed through her tears. “This is ridiculous.”