The Vampire Next Door (16 page)

Were there other vampires out there like Reeve? Vamps who still retained some of their humanity? I traced my fingers over the scrawled letters, wishing that there was some way of contacting my dad. He would understand my dilemma, and he’d know what to do.

“What’re you reading?” Eddie said, stepping out onto the patio.

I hastily folded up the letter and shoved it back in my pocket, feeling the photo of the girls in my pocket alongside it. “I made a list of stuff I need to take with me,” I lied, and picked up my can of sausages again.

Eddie was eating a bowl of rice, and he plopped down on the bench next to me. “Don’t worry about that, Kennedy,” he said. “I know what we need to take. I’ve got it all under control.”

CHAPTER 12

I spent most of the day reflecting on my life over the past eight months. I was heartsick over the fact that I’d had to say
goodbye to Reeve so soon, and a little miffed that I’d so easily fallen back into the same old routine of letting Eddie walk all over me.

Eddie didn’t seem to notice my frustration. The interaction between us was the same, but I felt somehow very different, and I knew it was because I’d come to appreciate Reeve’s quiet acceptance of my decisions. A week on my own, surviving against all odds, had changed me and my expectations of the people around me. Eddie was nothing like Reeve. He was more like Cole, questioning my logic when I spoke up and making his own choices about what we would do, regardless of what I wanted or how much I protested.

I’d become so accustomed to being told what to do, to taking orders from the men in my life and letting them walk all over me. Over the last week, I’d found an independence that I hadn’t known was missing. In just a few short days, Reeve had shown me that not all men had to be in charge. He’d given me the option of walking out of his house, that first night, and he’d trusted me to make the right choice. He hadn’t questioned my decision to leave town, though I knew he hadn’t wanted me to. He’d even agreed to help me find a car and hadn’t attempted to talk me out of my plan to look for one myself.

Eddie, on the other hand, had immediately shot down my suggestion that we stay a little longer so that my knee could heal. He wanted to leave right away. I knew that it was best to get out of town as soon as possible. There was probably any number of survivors out there who would try to steal our car over the next several days, even though we’d moved it into the garage, but I didn’t like being shoved into the background of my own life again. I’d made a poor decision or two in the last week, but I’d also made one very smart decision- befriending Reeve. I knew I was capable on my own.

That night, Kellie showed up again, and her brief foray into sanity seemed to have disappeared right alongside my independence. She was angry, screaming about all the grotesque methods of torture that were in store for me.

I vividly remembered the night that Eddie had first found out about Kellie. I’d been so grateful for his presence that I’d been afraid to tell him about her. I can just picture how that conversation would have gone.

“Well, just so you know, I do have a vampire whose entire goal in her un-life is to murder me. She shows up every night and she makes a bunch of noise and tries to kill me. But now that you’re here, we can seal off those skylights and it’ll all be okay!”

Crickets.

The way it had actually gone down had been fast and messy. Eddie had been pounding the final nail into the boards that served as the last line of defense for the bathroom skylight. Suddenly a horrendous, shrieking wail interrupted his hammering and had me clinging desperately to the towel rod on the wall, resisting the urge to run in circles.

The wail was followed by a string of profanity, all delivered in Kellie’s usual sickly-sweet voice. She’d mastered that tone over the last several years. I’d grown accustomed to her condescension while she was alive, even tolerated it, but now the sound of her voice infuriated me. Once I’d recovered enough to let go of the towel rod, I pried my hands free and tried not to think about how much I wanted to gouge her eyes out. She’d certainly made a dramatic entrance tonight.

“Who is that?” Eddie had asked, and his expression was incredulous as he looked down at me from where he was standing on top of the bathroom counter.

“Bitch should have stayed dead,” I’d snapped, and flounced off to sulk in the basement.

Eddie found me there a few minutes later, after he’d locked the basement door and sealed us in for the night. “You want to tell me the whole story?” he asked.

I’d grudgingly relayed the sad tale to him, and he’d responded by laughing his ass off. I was only moderately insulted by his reaction, because I’d been worried that he might leave on account of Kellie. As it turned out, Eddie hadn’t cared much about Kellie at all. He was just happy to have found a fellow survivor in the vampire apocalypse, and the fact that I came with my own personal vampiric stalker wasn’t about to deter him.

The only thing that had bugged me was that Eddie cracked a joke about how similar our names sounded. It had been a point of irritation for me when Kellie had been alive, too. Lazy people frequently read off my name pronounced “Kelly,” too bored with their lives to bother noticing that there were a few extra letters in my name that served to differentiate me from the ex.

Every time a client walked into my office and said, “Hi, Kelly,” I smiled through gritted teeth and corrected them. But as the years went by, the name mix-up had shown no signs of stopping, because people would always be too lazy to actually read my name instead of just glancing at the first and last letters and filling in the in-between on their own.

Now, of course, Eddie was all too aware now that I didn’t appreciate jokes about the similarities between my name and Kellie’s.

The night after Eddie returned from his trip to Phoenix, and the night after I kissed Reeve, was very different from that first night, when I’d told Eddie the entire story and he’d found it amusing. In fact, Eddie seemed more on edge after his brief trip out of town. I could tell that Kellie’s spiel was getting on his nerves.

Finally he looked up from his dog-eared copy of
The Dragon Reborn
and said to me, “I forgot how annoying she can get.”

“You were only gone for a little over a week,” I muttered, flipping to the next page in my latest Barbara Cartland romance novel,
A Ghost in Monte Carlo.

“And it was a blissful week, free of psychotic ex-wives.” He cast an exasperated look up at the ceiling vent.

“I can’t even remember what that was like,” I said. Coincidentally, the book I was reading involved a sister of an ex-wife seeking revenge on the ex-husband. It seemed morbidly appropriate.

Eddie put his book down- an indication that he wanted to talk. I wasn’t really in the mood, though, and kept my nose buried in my own story. Oblivious as usual, Eddie said, “One of the guys I talked to in Phoenix said that’s pretty typical. Vamps latch onto something from their human life, and that’s all they can think about.”

“Mmm.” I flipped to the next page. Kellie could latch onto whatever she wanted. I was leaving town tomorrow, and with any luck, I’d never have to hear her nails-on-chalkboard voice again.

“He has a theory that most bloodsuckers experience memory loss after turning,” Eddie continued. “They don’t know what to do or where to go, so they cling to the few memories they’ve retained. This guy said that when his wife turned, she wouldn’t leave South Mountain because that’s where they’d gotten married. She didn’t know why she remembered the place, and she didn’t even remember him. She just knew she wanted to stay.”

Though I hadn’t intended to actually participate in this conversation, Eddie’s little speech did catch my attention. I looked up from my book. “You think maybe that’s why Kellie is here? I’m the only thing that she can remember from her life before she was turned?” But no, that wouldn’t be accurate either, I realized, because Kellie had specifically made mention of Cole and the girls.

Eddie shrugged. “There’s no way to know for sure. But what mother in the world would spend every night terrorizing her ex’s new wife when she has no idea whether or not her kids are safe?”

I nodded in agreement. I’d wondered about that from the first night Kellie had shown up on my doorstep. “She’s talked about Cole and the kids before, though,” I said, tapping my fingers against the spine of my book as I ran through the possibilities in my head. “Maybe…well, this is kind of silly, I guess, but maybe she only remembers the custody battle. Her fear at losing the girls, her heartbreak at losing Cole, and of course the way she blamed me for everything.”

Eddie was following my line of thought. “You think she doesn’t remember how much she loved the girls?”

“Yeah. I mean, it would make sense.” I closed my book and set it down on the couch beside me, intrigued at this new theory. “Like you said, what kind of mother would be here instead of out looking for her kids?”

“A crappy one.”

I laughed, despite myself. “I always thought she was a crappy mom anyway, because she proved on more than one occasion that she hated Cole more than she loved Pearl and Priscilla. In her head, she’d made him into this horrible diabolical villain, but he was really just a man who loved his kids, even though he didn’t love her anymore.”

As I spoke, a chill ran through my heart. Some of what I was saying could have applied to me as well. I’d made Kellie into such a horrendous, menacing figure in my own mind. She loved Pearl and Priscilla, or she had, before she was turned. But all I’d been able to see was the way she had tried to keep Cole from his children.

She’d been a mother first, but all I’d seen- all I’d chosen to see- was the villain.

The thought was an uncomfortable one for me, so I steered my thoughts towards Reeve. He was even more of an enigma than Kellie. He had just appeared in my neighbor’s house, with no recollection of where he was from or how he’d gotten there. The only memory he’d really latched onto was me. But I knew we’d never met before, so that didn’t make sense, either.

“Kennedy, come out and play!” Kellie screeched, shaking the wrought iron bars of the breezeway.

“It’s time for a reckoning, you vamp-loving bitch!” someone else shouted, and the new, female voice echoed through the basement.

I jumped in surprise, startled out of my thoughts, and looked at Eddie, who had heard it, too. “Who is that?” he asked, brows knitting.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t recognize the voice. I grabbed my crossbow off the table and cocked it before reaching for my bolt quiver. Even if Kellie had somehow found an ally, it was doubtful they’d be able to get in, but I’d be prepared regardless.

The new voice spoke again. “You thought you’d get away with this, but you were wrong! You’ll pay for what you did! You and your vamp boyfriend!”

The puzzle pieces fell into place. It was the woman I’d saved- the woman who had tried to attack me in Reeve’s house. The same woman whose friend had been murdered by Reeve.

Eddie’s expression was incredulous as he looked at me. “She thinks I’m a vampire?” he said, and I realized that I’d have to tell him what had happened.

A third voice joined in on the taunting. “Come out and play, Kennedy, or the boyfriend gets it!”

Now that scream I recognized. It was the same voice from one of the most terrifying moments of my life. It was the teenager who had attacked me in the alley behind Reeve’s house. All three of them together? How was that possible? And was the woman Reeve had released still human? I didn’t find that plausible at all. Kellie would have attacked the tiny blonde woman the moment she’d smelled human blood.

I ticked off the days in my head since the redheaded man had forced his way into Reeve’s house. Yes, there had been plenty of time for the blonde woman to be bitten and turned. She was probably the driving force behind this sudden and unexpected alliance. She’d sworn that she would get revenge on Reeve when he released her.

And now all three vampires were threatening to go after Reeve. He was strong, and more than capable of taking on any single vampire, but three? Even he might not be able to handle that.

“Kennedy, what’s going on?”

I looked at Eddie, completely at a loss as to how to explain. I decided to try to put it mildly. He wasn’t going to be happy, either way. “Some…stuff happened while you were gone. I met our next-door neighbor.”

There was a crash from above, and Eddie reached for his shotgun, keeping his eyes on me.

Good grief, how was I going to summarize this story? “He’s a vampire, but he’s good,” I blurted out in a rush. “He saved my life from- from the third vampire that’s outside right now. But he also killed a man who tried to rob me. The second woman outside, she’s the dead man’s friend. The vampire next door let her go because I didn’t want him to kill any more humans, but…but…maybe that was a mistake.”

No, that had definitely been a mistake. I’d made a lot more enemies than I’d intended with my act of mercy. I should have just let Reeve kill her.