Caught in Darkness (23 page)

Cliff and Carol left a minute later
with Carol calling back a quiet, “I’ll talk to you later, sweetheart.” That
twinge of guilt flared again, but it was still too soon for her to dwell on it.
She would talk to her mother later, and when she did she’d explain her
non-existent relationship with Cliff. In the meantime, she just needed to find
a way to explain it without hurting her mother’s feelings.

Since Nikki was still in the drink
station Veronica took up a position behind the register, drawing in a deep
breath before finally turning her attention to the customer. All she’d noticed
about him as she’d walked past was that he was tall and male. “What can
I
—?” The question died in her throat when she realized she
was looking up, into
Jasen’s
faintly-amused eyes.

“That was interesting,”
Jasen
declared. “Who’s the guy?”

Jackass.
Smile
falling away, Veronica replied, “Someone my mother mistakenly thinks I’m
interested in. Do you know what you want?” Oh, it was a good thing her boss
wasn’t there. She would definitely hear it from him if he heard her talking to
a customer that way.

“I get the feeling he has that same
impression. Large mint mocha, extra hot, and one of those butter croissants,”
he said smoothly.

She was actually slightly surprised
that he was ordering something so vastly different than Seth’s usual, but she
typed it in anyway. “That’s because he’s an idiot who can’t take a hint.” She
quoted him the price as she moved to the display case to grab the croissant
before asking, “Heated?”

“Please,”
Jasen
said as he slid the exact change onto the counter. When she returned to the
counter to take his money he added, “And maybe you need to upgrade your hints.”
He turned without another word or waiting for a response and moved to the pickup
shelf.

Veronica glared at his back for a
full three seconds before she realized what she was doing and yanked her
attention back to her job. She was so glad her shift was almost over.

Chapter Thirteen

The end of the workday didn’t
provide Veronica with any relief. She was fantasizing about taking a nice, long
nap in her two-nights-cold bed as she let herself into her house with Tuesday’s
and Wednesday’s mail tucked under one arm. But she was barely in the entry, the
door swinging shut behind her, when her eyes landed on the man sitting on her
couch. And, even as her body tensed in preparation for some sort of
confrontation, she couldn’t help but think that this was the worst Thursday in
existence. That was the only possible explanation for why Dennis Claypool was
sitting uninvited in her house.

Dennis sat up, letting the
newspaper he’d been reading drop into his lap, and called, “I wasn’t sure when
you got off work, so I thought I’d make myself comfortable. Hope you don’t
mind.”

Veronica stared at him in
dumbfounded silence for a long beat. There were so many reactions she had to
this situation that it took her a minute to settle on one. “You hope I don’t
mind? What, are you crazy? Of course I mind! You broke into my house to, what,
chit-chat? But you know I don’t want to have anything to do with you!”

Dennis frowned. “I know we haven’t
had the best start, and what I told you before was a lot to take in. But it’s
been a couple of days and I thought it was time we really talked about everything.”

Her anger quickly mounting,
Veronica stomped forward in order to slam her mail down onto her old coffee
table so that she could properly plant her fists on her hips as she snapped, “I
don’t have anything to say to you!” She took a deep breath, fists tightening,
and added pointedly, “I would greatly appreciate it if you got up and let
yourself out.
Now.”

“That sort of seems unreasonable to
me,” Dennis argued, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “All I
want to do is talk. Don’t you want to know about your heritage?”

Veronica opened her mouth to say
something scathing, but her voice failed her as her eyes landed on his
gesturing hand. The last time she’d seen him that wrist had been encased in a
very solid cast—a cast she knew was recent, because Seth had admitted to
breaking his wrist. Now, however, the cast was gone. There wasn’t even a splint
or an ace-bandage. That’s impossible. According to Seth’s timeline it had only
been about two weeks—give or take a day—since his first altercation with
Dennis. Broken bones didn’t heal in just two weeks.

Despite herself, Veronica’s arms
fell back to her sides and she asked, “What happened to your cast?”

Dennis blinked up at her, looked
down at his wrist, and finally smiled as he looked back up. “It healed. One of
the perks of having Slayer blood—we heal faster than regular people. Haven’t
you ever hurt yourself and noticed that it doesn’t take too long to get
better?”

That was a good question. Growing
up she had certainly had her share of spills and scraped knees, but she’d only
ever broken one bone—a finger, during P.E. in junior high. Her father had
wrapped it up, bracing it with the finger beside it, and told her that the pain
would go away soon enough. “Before you know it,” she corrected herself
silently. He said it would go away before I knew it. And when her mother had
come home later that day he’d only told her it was a sprain. At the time she’d
just thought he was trying to keep her from overreacting—or maybe to keep
Veronica from overreacting—but now she wasn’t so sure.

“I take it that’s a yes,” Dennis
said, pulling her out of her memories as he leaned back into the couch. “And
I’m guessing Ron never explained that to you. Don’t worry, though. Unless you
end up with a Slayer you won’t have to explain it to your kids. The
blood’ll
be too diluted to affect ‘
em
.”

Veronica stepped back from her
coffee table, pressing the heel of her palm to her forehead as she groaned,
“This is too much.”

“Maybe you should sit down,” Dennis
offered, patting the open area of the couch.

“No,” Veronica replied, arm falling
back to her side. She would take some pills for the headache later. Narrowing
her eyes at him, she said, “You waltz into my life and tell me things about my
father that don’t add up to the man I knew and you act like we can all hug and
forget that you tried to kill me or that you want to kill someone I care about,
and that’s not happening. I want nothing to do with you, do you understand
that? So you might as well pack up and go find a new city to terrorize.”

Sometime during her rant Dennis’
eyes had hardened, his lips forming a thin line. This expression matched the
crossbow-wielding man who’d first tried to kill her. “You’re telling me you
care about that fang?” Something about the cold stare in his eyes and the
dangerous tone of his voice sent chills down her spine.

She had the irrational urge to get
in his face and loudly declare that, as a matter of fact, she loved ‘that
fang,’ but she knew better. In the space of a heartbeat he’d transformed from
annoying, kind of
creepy,
and pushy to intense,
terrifying, and dangerous. This was not the man to argue with—this was the man
to get as far away from as possible as quickly as possible. So she swallowed,
managed not to take a step back, and said, “Yes. It might go back to that ‘you
tried to kill me’ and, oh, by the way, ‘he saved me’ thing.”

“I already apologized for trying to
shoot you,” Dennis said, pushing to his feet. “But if you’re really going to
insist on siding with that vampire over me then you’re not leaving me a lot of
choices.”

She did take a step backwards this
time. She really did not like the way he’d said that. “What’s that supposed to
mean, exactly?”

He was definitely in predator-mode
now, she could see it in his eyes right before he said,
“
You
had a point. That fang took a stake for you. So if I want to kill him all I’ll
really need is bait.”

Veronica’s mouth went dry at his
words. Some part of her suspected she’d known he was going to say something
like that, but hearing it aloud was infinitely worse. I guess it’s either
‘let’s be a family’ or ‘let me use you to kill someone you love’ with him.
Some family.
And in the space of an instant her fear took a
back seat to her anger.

Fists clenching at her sides she
took a deep breath and snapped, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Do you
even realize how moody you are? And, for the record, if that ‘we’re family’
crap meant anything to you, you wouldn’t even be considering that! Dad would never
let you get away with this if he were here.”

Something snapped in his eyes and
before she could react he had rounded the table, closing the gap between them. His
arm swung out, the back of his hand connecting with the side of her face and
sending her head snapping to the side as he snarled, “Shut up! The man you
remember was a sham, and trying to change himself for you and your idiot mother
got him killed!”

Veronica stumbled with the force of
his hit, her face screaming in pain, and she wasn’t able to stop from crying
out. One hand came up, gingerly cupping the stinging side of her face, and she
fought back the tears of pain as her eyes met his again. She’d never been
struck before. And as angry as that made her, it was nothing compared to what
he’d said. “My father was a good, honest man who cared about people—even the
ones he didn’t know. Maybe he used to be more like you, but that was a long
time ago. The only lie is the man you remember.”

“Your father was half the man he
was before he left,” Dennis bit out, reaching forward again and wrapping one
large hand around her upper arm. “If he’d been on his game from the start that
fang would never have been able to kill him!”

Veronica’s heart stopped at his
words. The pain building in her arm and still throbbing in her cheek fell away
as she considered what her uncle was saying. Had a vampire killed her father? The
person—or people—responsible had never been caught; they’d never even been
identified. The murder weapon—a broken-off piece of a chair leg from his office—had
been found at the scene, but with no fingerprints or DNA other than her
father’s. But he was stabbed, not bitten.

“You didn’t know that, did you?”
Dennis sneered, tightening his fist over her arm. “All it took was a little
research to dig up the old case file. He was stabbed right through the heart
with a convenient weapon that just so happened to be shaped like a stake, in a
city filled to brimming with fangs. No one saw or heard anything, despite the
cubicle less than a dozen feet from the bathroom door.
And
the clincher?
Security footage shows a blurry figure in the hall twice—once
coming, once going. Idiot police just figured it meant the tape was tampered
with.”

Everything was swimming around her
now. She remembered overhearing the police explaining to her mother that their
best hope for catching a lead had ‘fallen through.’ They had even used the
phrase ‘tampered with’ at one point. Was that too big of a coincidence to
ignore? Could Dennis be right: had her father been killed by a vampire? She
wasn’t sure what to believe.

“It’s okay if you can’t process all
of that right now,” Dennis said, shifting and dragging her toward her kitchen. “You’ve
got time to think about it. All you need to do from this point forward is sit
still and look weak—do your best impression of a damsel.”

She could barely hear him through
the thoughts screaming through her head. If her father really had been killed
by a vampire…should she try to investigate it? She had always fervently wished
that the police had been able to catch the murderer, and she sometimes still
lost sleep knowing he was running around out there somewhere. Maybe she could
finally change that. Maybe her father’s killer would finally face justice. But
she
would need
help to do that, and she wasn’t so sure
she could talk Seth into hunting down his own people to solve a
now-sixteen-year-old murder. And she certainly couldn’t count on
Jasen’s
help.

She was yanked out of her thoughts
when she found herself being shoved into one of her wooden kitchen chairs, her
knee slamming painfully into the leg of the table. The pain only served to
remind her about everything else that hurt. She swallowed back her outcry and
managed, “What are you doing?”

Dennis glared at her, irritation
shining in his angry blue eyes. “I told you—baiting the fang you’re shacking up
with. Now make like bait and shut up.” He lifted his hand again, but instead of
striking her he just reached over and pinched a nerve at the back of her
throat. And then everything went black.

****

“You’re too attached to her, you
know,”
Jasen
declared casually as he and Seth sifted
through the final abandoned apartment.

Seth paused, a few loose papers in
his hand, and looked over at his colleague. He was more surprised that
Jasen
was starting a conversation—let alone that
conversation—than he was about what, specifically, he’d said. “I know,” Seth
replied at length. There was no point in arguing it when he himself had already
come to that conclusion.

Jasen
was
going through the cupboards in the kitchen when he said, “Are you going to do
something about it?”

“Like what?”

“You’ve only got two options,”
Jasen
stated, pulling open a drawer. “Either leave her now
or Turn her.” There was no inflection in his voice to give any indication of
which answer he thought was smarter.

Seth ground his teeth. “If I
Turn
her I’m taking away her life and she’ll lose everyone
she has left.”

“Then walk away.”