American Vampire (15 page)

His breath was strangely warm as it stirred her hair. “Yeah, well, don’t tell any of my friends. If this gets out, I’ll lose a lot of vampire street cred.”

She laughed again, and he continued. “I’m serious. It would be like someone finding out you console ice cream cones.”

“I’m an ice cream cone?” she asked, sniffling. “That’s not very flattering.”

“I could have said ‘side of beef,’ but I’m a gentleman.” He leaned back and hooked a finger under her chin, tilting her face up to his. “Fine. A strawberry sundae.”

“That’s not much better,” she began. “What about a coo—”

His lips gently brushed hers, and the rest of her sentence was lost to a sharp, startled breath. As suddenly as the kiss had happened, it was over.

“Sorry.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Your ankle, right.”

She sat, silent, as he fumbled with the first-aid kit. He pulled out an Ace bandage and began unwinding it. With surprising quickness, he bound up her sprained ankle and immobilized it, then got a washcloth and wiped the blood from her face with efficiency that lacked the tender concern he’d shown before.

It wasn’t a difficult change to adapt to. Derek had been a master of expressing, then immediately withdrawing, affection.

The fact that she’d compared Graf to Derek bothered her more than it should have.

“We need to think about what’s going to happen
when Derek tells everybody in town that you’re a vampire,” she said, taking up Graf’s cues to stay detached.

“It’s all going to depend on whether or not they believe it.” Graf tossed the washcloth over the side of the pedestal sink. “Or whether Derek is stupid enough to tell them how he found out.”

“He won’t be. He’ll make up some story.” But Graf had a point about them not believing. “Maybe they’ll think he’s drunk. Or stupid. But we still have that binder.”

“They already know he’s stupid… But you’re right. We might have a fight on our hands, eventually. What’s in that binder that he’s going to be so hot on keeping under wraps?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s Sarah’s.” She cleared her throat. “Sarah Boniface’s, that girl I told you about. Everyone thought she was a witch, and with the way things in town are…”

“Right, angry mob. Hue and cry. Gotcha.” He rubbed a hand over his chin. “Okay, so what do you think we should do? Hide someplace else?”

The thought of leaving her house sent flutters of panic careering through her body. “No! No, we’re safer if we stay here.”

“Why?”

That was a good question, one Jessa wasn’t prepared to answer. If she wasn’t safe here, where would she be safe? “We have the gun. And supplies.”

“Yeah, and we could take that stuff with us,” he countered. “There has to be a bomb shelter or a cave or someplace we can hide where no one would look for us.”

“Until when? Until they just give up? Anyplace we go, they’ll find us. We have limited options, and they have unlimited time to search us out.” She hadn’t realized the sense to that before she said it. She just wanted to stay here, where she felt safe, where it seemed nothing bad could get to her.

Graf considered a moment, then agreed. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I’m not use to thinking with the ‘trapped rat’ mind-set you all have. I don’t think I like it.”

“None of us do. All we can really do is wait and see what happens.” She hated waiting. She hated the entire situation. “If we start barricading ourselves in here, or we run, we’re going to look like we have a reason to be guilty. It’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to deny that you’re a vampire if we don’t do anything out of the ordinary.”

“I can’t say I’ve convinced tougher audiences.” Graf paced the length of the bathroom, his index finger tapping his lips. “Usually, people don’t realize I’m a vampire until I’m eating them.”

Her stomach went sour at that. “I might never eat ice cream again.”

He looked up and said, “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be.” She struggled to stand, unable to stay in one place any longer.

She expected him to put out an arm to steady her, but instead he scooped her up in his arms again. “Let’s get you somewhere you can elevate your ankle. If we do have a fight coming to us, it’ll be easier if we have four working legs between us.”

He carried her to the door of her bedroom, then, seeing the sunlight streaming in, turned around and headed for her parents’ room. She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off before he could even begin. “I know, you have issues. That’s terrible, and I feel really bad for you. But not bad enough that I’m going to get burned twice in one day. You can stay in here while I sleep, so if you need anything, or any thing happens, I’ll be able to get to you.”

“If the angry villagers storm in with pitchforks and torches?” She bit back a noise of pain as he lowered her to the mattress.

A smile quirked the corner of his mouth. “Don’t joke about that. It actually happens.”

Their eyes met, just for a second, and she raised her head, tried to make their mouths connect, but he turned away.

“I want to kiss you,” he said, before his rejection could sting her any deeper. “I want to do a lot more than kiss you. But I don’t want it to be because Derek hurt you.”

“It’s not—” she began, but he shook his head, cutting her off.

“It’s a big thing for me to admit, about a human. Don’t make it harder to turn you down.” He kissed her forehead, then grabbed a pillow and propped her foot up on it. Then he pulled the bedspread off the bed and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked, a little desperately.

“I’ll be out in the hall, if you need anything.”

The door closed behind him, and Jessa flopped back on the pillow, staring up at the popcorn ceiling, and listened to him settle down just on the other side of the door.

G
raf couldn’t sleep, and it wasn’t just because every seam and join in the hardwood floor had some personal vendetta against his spine.

What the hell had happened? He pored over every second of the last few days, scrutinizing every one. Jessa sure hadn’t gone out of her way to welcome him when he’d first gotten into town. And she hadn’t been pleasant…ever. Maybe he didn’t like pleasant. He sure liked Jessa.

Maybe it was some kind of cabin fever. Maybe it was inevitable, if you were stuck with someone for long enough, you’d start to like them. You’d have to, or go crazy.

All he knew was that when he’d seen Derek putting his hands on her, he’d wanted to kill. And the night before, with Chad.

That was it. He was feeling bad for her because two people had tried to kill her since he’d arrived.

No, he couldn’t convince himself of that, either. Normally, he hated helplessness. If he hadn’t depended on her so much, he would have killed her the first night he’d been here. And she wasn’t right in the head. She was too attached to this damned house, and to the past. And she was human.

So, why did he want to go into that bedroom and hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right? Nothing else—he’d meant it when he’d said he didn’t want to be consolation for Derek. That was just more to worry about. Why not go in for the kill, figuratively? She was rejected and hurting and willing. Totally easy lay. But he couldn’t do it.

He dozed off for a while, and woke to a dark hallway. His internal clock told him it wasn’t sundown yet. A soft roll of thunder prompted him to get to his feet, and stretching the kinks out of his back, he went to the window in Jessa’s room. Outside, fat drops of rain pelted the house, and an electric gray coated the underside of the clouds. On top of the vanity with too many coats of rubbery white paint sat framed photos. Jessa and Derek, in their caps and gowns, and Becky at Jessa’s side, beaming. Jessa and Derek at prom. Jessa and her parents. He picked up the graduation picture and tapped the frame against his palm.

He carried it with him to the next room, where Jessa lay asleep, a tattered paperback open over her
face. An unwilling smile twitched Graf’s mouth, and he lifted the book off her, wondering how she hadn’t suffocated. The motion was enough to stir her, and her eyelids fluttered open. “I fell asleep.”

“I noticed.” He set the book on the bedside table, facedown to keep her place.

“What time is it?” She sat up, yawning.

He checked the alarm clock. “If that’s right, it’s five o’clock.”

“It’s right.” She frowned at the picture he still held. “Snooping in my room?”

“I was checking the weather, accidentally snooping.” He sat beside her. “Nice picture.”

He’d expected Jessa to look sad, maybe shed a few more tears for Derek the dickhead. But she actually smiled as she studied the picture. “Ah, the good old days.”

“So, what happened between then and now?” He took the frame from her hands and placed it on the nightstand.

“The usual stuff,” she said with a shrug.

“I don’t think it’s very usual for a best friend to steal someone’s boyfriend.” Then again, he wasn’t familiar with the female concept of friendship. It seemed like a lot of backstabbing and bitching, from what he’d seen of Sophia’s relationships with other women.

“She didn’t steal him. I threw him away.” The sadness in her voice was different now when she talked
about him. Like someone talking about a person who’d done them wrong a long time ago, not just this morning. “After my parents died, he tried. He wanted to be there for me, but we were so young. And we were stuck here… It was a lot for anyone to take.”

“You lost your parents,” Graf said, surprised to find himself arguing on her side. “He couldn’t have expected you to—”

“No, I know. That’s what everyone said. But if I couldn’t be a good girlfriend for him, how could I have expected him to be a good boyfriend? I isolated myself for months. I didn’t want to leave the house or have anyone come into it.” She paused. “That hasn’t changed much. If we had stayed together, I would probably have kept shutting him out. And the college thing—I came back here when the accident happened.” An audible wobble hit her voice when she mentioned it. “And the morning I was supposed to go back, we got trapped.”

“Bad timing.”

“You’re telling me.” She laughed bitterly. “But even going to college was the real beginning of the end for Derek and me. He thought he was going to get some big football scholarship, but it never materialized. So, he started working on Becky’s parents’ farm. And from there…”

“He started working on Becky.”

She nodded and grimaced. “It’s amazing how
clear it all is when you look back on it. At the time, I thought it was the ideal situation. He was going to be making enough money that he could move to Columbus to be with me, eventually. But I guess he’d always had a little crush on Becky, and vice versa.”

A louder crack of thunder preceded a knock on the door downstairs, and they both jumped.

“I’ll get it.” He got to his feet. “Stay here, unless I tell you otherwise.” He would be damned if whoever it was would hurt her. Not after he’d kept her alive through two attempted murders. Three, if monsters can be said to “murder” people.

He realized halfway down that he still wore the stained T-shirt, so he whipped it over his head and tossed it behind him, hoping it landed bloody-side down.

The visitor knocked again while he made his way down the stairs, and again as he paused to kick the black binder under the couch. One more knock brought him impatiently to the door. He opened it in the middle of the next knock. “What do you want?” he snarled, before realizing who stood before him.

June’s features were lost in the recesses of a hooded sweatshirt and a rain poncho. “Good to see you again, too.” She gestured to the three figures behind her. “Mind if we come in? They need to talk to Jessa.”

“Jessa’s in bed,” he said, knowing what they would
think from his shirtless appearance. “Can you come back later?”

“Well, we don’t mean to interrupt you,” June said with a grin.

“This is serious business, son.” Tom Stoke, the sheriff, stepped through the door, crowding June out of the way. It chafed Graf’s nerves to be called “son,” even though the man couldn’t have known that Graf was older than him.

Graf blocked the rest of them with his body. “What’s going on?”

“We’re really more interested in talking to Jessa,” one of the other men said, and June shrugged.

“I’ll go on up and get her,” Graf said eventually, opening the door and ushering the rest of them inside, where Sheriff Stoke wandered the living room, examining it as though it were a crime scene. “Make yourselves at home for a minute. She’s gonna need help. She had a bad fall.”

He hoped she’d heard him up there. He had no doubt she’d been listening. When he got to the top of the stairs, she stood in the doorway already. “Who’s down there?” she asked, a little louder than normal. To show she wasn’t hiding anything, he assumed.

He picked up the shirt he definitely needed to hide and pushed it under the bed before returning to her side to help her limp downstairs. “Some dudes, and June.” He noticed her shudder as he lifted her and cradled her against his bare chest. He hoped it was a
shiver of restrained sexual desire and not fear at the mention of the council, but he figured it was, sadly, the latter.

When they reached the living room, June, who’d remained standing by the door, gasped. “Honey, what happened to you?”

“Bad fall,” Jessa said with an unconcerned laugh. “I was going after an egg up in the hayloft and lost my balance.”

“Fell straight down,” Graf supplied. “I thought I was gonna get to her and she would be dead.”

The same man who had spoken before cleared his throat. “Well, I’m sorry to hear about that, but we really need to get down to business. None of us want to be out past nightfall, not with what’s been happening lately.”

“Why, what happened?” Jessa asked as Graf set her in the armchair. Lies rolled off her tongue smooth and convincing. It amazed him and scared him, just a little. He’d never met a better liar than Sophia, and Jessa wasn’t far off.

Before the man could answer, Jessa laughed, startling everyone in the room. “I’m sorry, I just realized that my friend here doesn’t know most of y’all. This is Graf.”

“We’ve met,” Stoke said, smoothing a hand over his yellowed beard. “This here’s Dan Beech and Wade Cook.”

“Nice to meet you. I hope it’s under good
circumstances,” Graf added quickly. “But I’m guessing not.”

“No, son. We’re here because there’s been another disappearance.” Tom fixed his beady gaze on Jessa. “Chad Shelby.”

Jessa didn’t miss a beat. “
What?
Oh my God! Well, where did he go?”

“We don’t think he went anywhere,” the one named Wade said, scratching at the short stubble that covered his head. “We think something happened to him.”

“Well, how long has he been gone? Did anybody tell his mom?” Jessa asked, looking each man straight in the eye.

“She knows,” Tom said. When he spoke, only his mustache moved.

“Well, how’s she doing?” Jessa continued, as if blithely unaware that they had come here to interrogate her about the murder.

The second he thought it, Graf realized he must have looked guilty from the start. And damn it, June had seen. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and pushed her hood down.

“Not so good, Jessa. That’s why we’re here.” Tom looked to the other two men as if seeking support. “We know he was headed out to see you last night, after the search party came in. And we know that he never came back.”

“Is he here now, Jessa?” June asked quietly.

“No, he’s not here,” she said, still giving those honest, bewildered glances. “He didn’t come by last night, either. I waited up for a while, but he never showed. The last time I saw him was yesterday morning, when he brought over the stuff from the auction.”

The men exchanged glances. There was some thing they weren’t telling her. They were trying to let her hang herself. Graf would have been worried, if he didn’t have total faith in Jessa’s deceptive little mind.

Tom clicked his tongue and rested his hands on his knees. “The thing is, Derek says he walked over with Chad. Says he saw him come into your house.”

“Well, if Derek said, it must be true,” Jessa said, dropping all pretensions of friendliness.

Dan broke in. “We’re not saying we believe his word over yours, Jessa. Hell, I’m wondering what he was doing skylarking around while his wife and babies have gone missing. But we had to check it out.”

“I know you did. And I know you gentlemen like to keep a real tight ship around here. But I gotta say, it’s pretty insulting to have you come in here and in sinuate that I did something to Chad.” She paused. “That’s what you came to check out, isn’t it? Or were you hoping you’d find him here, so you could run back to town and spread the gossip around?”

“Now, you know we ain’t that type of people—” Tom began.

Jessa interrupted him. “Yeah, well, you’re the type of people who would believe Derek when he hasn’t told anything more than a half-truth in the past five years. I didn’t see either Derek or Chad last night. I guess that was a good thing, because my new friend here is pretty possessive. We hit it off right away, and he doesn’t really care for other guys coming around.”

Graf wondered where she was going with this lie—okay, maybe it wasn’t a lie, because he hadn’t liked the two guys who had come around so far—when it all became clear.

She smirked. “If you all saw Derek today, you saw what Graf here did to him for sniffing around me this morning.”

“He said It did that to him,” Wade said with a grin. “I guess he didn’t want to admit he got his ass kicked.”

Tom didn’t look like he was enjoying the exchange as much as the councilman was. “If you don’t want trouble, you’ll all stay away from each other from now on, you hear?”

“It’s a small town, sheriff,” Jessa said, meeting his cold glare. “Believe me, I haven’t been trying to run into him.”

Tom stood and held out his hand to Graf. “I told
you to keep your nose clean, and we wouldn’t have any problems.”

“Clean as a whistle, sheriff,” Graf said, but he couldn’t manage to make it sound sarcastic. It came out mostly nervous.

The council filed out after Tom, but June hung back. “You just made yourself some enemies,” she warned Graf. “And there’s blood on your carpet.”

Then she closed the door and left.

“We’re so fucked,” Jessa whispered, staring in horror at the door. “We’re so fucked.”

Graf held a finger to his lips and went to the window to make sure they were all out of earshot. All four figures were walking across the lawn, Tom gesturing broadly with his short arms, the rest nodding in agreement. June had pulled up her hood and rain poncho, and walked with her hands in her pockets.

Graf turned back to Jessa. “You did so good. I almost believed you when you said you hadn’t seen Chad.”

“They could tell,” she said, trembling. “I lie all the time. They know better than to believe me. And June saw the blood on the carpet.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t say anything in front of the other guys.” Why she hadn’t was anybody’s guess, but Graf wasn’t going to complain. “She knows some thing isn’t right about me, that’s for sure. I can tell by the way she looks at me. But she’s not ready to tell
them about it. Which makes me think she’s not too keen on her town council buddies.”

“They’re not too keen on her, either,” Jessa agreed. “Tom thinks she pokes her nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“She does, and that’s why she’s valuable to have on our side.”
If she is on our side,
Graf thought, but he didn’t need to say anything like that to Jessa and get her all paranoid.

“And Derek didn’t say anything about you biting him.” Jessa paled. “Oh, God, he had that bite. And he said It did it, which would have covered for us. But I told them.”

“It’s okay, they seemed pretty satisfied to believe Derek got smacked down.” If anyone asked, Graf would be happy to admit to taking a chunk out of Derek. It wouldn’t make him seem like the sanest person in town, but it would at least keep people from messing with them.