The Vampire Next Door (18 page)

Reeve stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. I looked up at Eddie, knowing that he was right. Reeve had survived, and he didn’t need my help. No one would ever accept our friendship in the real world, outside of the bubble of our tiny town. It would be one nightmare after another, with vampires attacking Reeve for his perceived betrayal, and humans shunning me for my friendship with a bloodsucker. There was no future for us.

I pulled my arm from Eddie’s grasp and began hobbling towards Reeve.

To his credit, Eddie said nothing else, and when Reeve held out his arms, I walked straight into them, resting my head against his chest and mentally thanking every deity I could think of that he was still alive, that he’d managed to survive.

“You shouldn’t have come out,” Reeve murmured against my forehead, and he pulled away, framing my face with his hands. “That’s exactly what they wanted.”

It was the first time he’d ever criticized a decision I’d made, and I hoped he wasn’t planning on making it a habit. “They wanted to kill us both,” I corrected him. “And they knew I wasn’t going to let you die alone.”

His dark eyes searched mine for a long moment. “I guess Kellie knew you better than I did,” he said, and dropped his hands from my face, lacing his fingers through mine.

I heard the grinding of the garage door opener, and looked over my shoulder. I wasn’t at all surprised to see Eddie backing the Camry out of the garage. He backed up until he was even with us, the car idling mere yards away from me in the paved circle of the cul-de-sac, right beside Kellie’s prone body. He rolled down the passenger’s side window.

“Last chance, Kennedy,” he said. “Come with me now.”

I shook my head. “Just go, Eddie.”

He looked angry, but didn’t argue with me. The tires spun on the pavement, sending up smoke, and he screeched to the end of the street, turning left and careening out of sight without even bothering to pause at the stop sign.

“We have to get inside,” I said to Reeve. “Somebody had to have heard that fight.”

Reeve nodded, but didn’t follow when I moved towards my house. I looked back at him questioningly.

“You go ahead,” he said. “I need to take care of something.” His eyes flicked for the briefest moment to Kellie’s body, and I felt at once grateful and horribly grieved. Kellie was dead. Though I hadn’t been the one to drive the stake into her heart, I still felt awful about it.

“Come straight to my house afterwards,” I said to him. “I’m not leaving you alone tonight.”

Reeve responded by leaning down and brushing his lips against my forehead. I leaned into him for a few seconds, drawing strength from his solidity. When he released me and turned away, I did the same, walking to the breezeway and locking myself inside to wait.

I sank wearily to the tiled floor inside the protection of the wrought iron bars, burying my face in my hands as I struggled to absorb what had just happened.

Eddie was gone.

Kellie was dead.

I was more upset about Kellie, because with all my revelations over the past several days, I’d genuinely believed there might be a chance at getting through to her. If I’d wanted her dead, I would have killed her in the first week rather than suffer through all these months of her taunting and ridicule.

I still believed, in my heart, that vamp amnesia had affected Kellie differently than it had affected Reeve. While Reeve had remembered very little about his life prior to vampirism, Kellie had seemed to remember only the parts involving Cole and the divorce- and me. The rings in my pocket added weight to my theory. In Kellie’s mind, I had stolen her husband and her kids.

It was the most rational explanation I’d been able to come up with so far, and my gut told me it was the right one. But regardless of why Kellie had been so determined to kill me, the fact remained that I had failed miserably in my attempted intervention, and now she was dead.

What would I say to the girls? I knew I’d be able to tell Cole the truth, but Pearl and Priscilla wouldn’t understand.

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that when Reeve knocked on the gate, I jumped. When I saw that it was him, I climbed to my feet.

“How are your legs?” he asked when I let him inside.

“They hurt like hell,” I muttered as I locked the gate again and limped towards the front door. “Do all vampires have claws, or just the women?” I knew the answer to my question, of course- Reeve’s fingernails appeared no different from any other man’s fingernails, at least the ones that I’d seen.

“I think our nails are stronger than humans’,” Reeve said. He took my arm and helped me step into the entryway. “If we grow them out, they’re as strong as any knife.”

“Got that right.” I locked the storm door and the front door, and leaned heavily on Reeve as I walked towards the basement. “You’ve never been in my house before, have you?”

“I haven’t.”

“I usually stay in the basement.” I pointed at the basement door and limped over to it, leaving Reeve to trail behind me.

“A basement in Arizona?”

“I know they’re pretty rare here. It was one of my favorite things about the house when we bought it.” When I opened the basement door, Holloway was waiting for me, his entire hind end wagging.

I motioned for Reeve to head down the stairs and stayed behind to deadbolt the door, putting the bar back in its place when I was finished. The last time I’d been standing on this landing, I had been pointing a gun at Eddie, demanding that he let me out so that I could help Reeve.

In the end, it had been Eddie who had saved me from Kellie, and nothing grieved me more than to know that he’d risked his life to save mine, and I’d rejected him. After all our months together, Eddie deserved a proper goodbye. Instead, he thought I’d betrayed him for a bloodsucker.

Eddie would never understand that Reeve was more than just a vampire to me.

By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, Reeve had already unearthed the first aid kit from the storage closet and was bandaging the shredded flesh of his forearm. The blonde woman had done some serious damage, even slicing through to muscle at a few points, but Reeve was stone-faced as he cleaned his wounds.

I sat down on the couch next to him. “Can I help?”

He held out his arm wordlessly, and I picked up the iodine, ignoring the churning in my stomach at the severity of his injuries.

“Eddie’s gone,” I said, stating the obvious. “He took his car with him, so now I’m back at square one.”

“You’re going to look for another car so you can drive to Phoenix?” Reeve asked, and winced as I encountered a particularly deep gash.

“I guess I have to. Why? Do you have something else in mind?” I hated the smell of iodine. It stung my nose, it stained my hands, and I knew it was hurting Reeve, too.

“I think so.” Reeve lowered his arm and reached his other hand to tip my chin up so that my gaze met his.

My breathing grew shallow as he looked at me, the sadness and desire in his eyes lending a tragic beauty to his already handsome features.

“Stay.” The word spilled from his perfect lips. “Forget Phoenix. Stay with me.”

I was taken aback by his suggestion, and at first I wasn’t sure that I’d heard him right. “Stay?” I repeated numbly, and he nodded.

I was so shocked that I sat there, very still, for a handful of heartbeats after he spoke, unsure of what to think or how to respond.

A week ago, I’d had no intention of leaving this tiny town. I was overloading on preservatives, squirreled away in my basement, living day to day with no hope of anything different, except for Cole’s eventual return. My entire existence had revolved around taking orders from Eddie and waiting for Cole.

But it had been eight months. Eight months! Although those two words had swirled around in my head constantly over the past week, the reality hadn’t hit me full-on until right then. It didn’t take eight months to get from Florida to Arizona. Cole was either dead, or he needed my help, but at this point it was a virtual guarantee that he wasn’t going to make it here.

Something had changed over the last week, and I knew it had everything to do with Reeve. He was filling a void in my life that I hadn’t even known had existed. He was there to support me, to protect me, but not to control me or belittle me. It was the first time in so long that a man had sought to shore me up instead of dismissing me as unimportant. Staying with Reeve would give me the opportunity to maintain that independence.

But Phoenix offered more hope, especially since Eddie had said the humans had set up a base of operations there. They were looking to wipe out all the vampires, but as I looked at Reeve, I wondered how many other vampires out there were simply trying to survive. He couldn’t be the only vamp in the world who was willing to risk his life to save a human.

Was the extermination of all vampires really the answer?

Two weeks ago, I would have said yes. But now I was no longer certain. Perhaps there were other humans like me out there, too, who had befriended vampires and were reluctant to engage in the genocide of an entire race. Eddie may have been unreasonable about it, but there were other humans who weren’t. My dad, for example. If he was still alive, I knew he would listen to what I had to say.

One thing I was sure of was that I would be sticking close to Reeve from now on. He was my friend…maybe more…and I didn’t want to lose him again.

My hand found Reeve’s, and held it tight, our fingers interlocking.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Come with me.”

Surprise registered in his dark eyes, and before he could respond, I spoke again.

“I know it sounds crazy, but we have to find a way to fix this. You can’t be the only vampire in the world who wants to live in peace with humans. There have to be others, but somebody has to be the first to step up. That could be you. That could be us.”

“We could be dead,” he said, and pulled his hand from mine. He reached for a bottle of ointment. “Most humans aren’t like you. Most vampires aren’t like me. We’re not going to start a revolution just because we happen to be different.”

I watched as he began applying antibiotic ointment to the cuts in his arm. “So you’d rather just stay here? Hide out and hope that vampire hunters never come for you?”

“There are no hunters,” he muttered. “That’s just a myth.”

Frustrated, I leaned over and framed his face with my hands, turning his gaze back towards me. “We can’t stay here. We’re not meant to die here, in this tiny town. We have a bigger purpose.”

He reached up and gently took hold of my wrists, pushing my hands away before he reached for the roll of gauze. “This isn’t
Star Wars,
Kennedy. We’re not the chosen ones, fighting for the fate of the galaxy. You and I are just two people trying to survive in the middle of a whole lot of killing.”

I frowned, and as he started bandaging his arm, I remembered that my legs were still bleeding from Kellie’s nails. It was a welcome distraction. I propped one foot up on the coffee table and started rolling up my pant leg.

She had sliced long grooves into my flesh, but fortunately the cuts seemed fairly superficial. My jeans were ruined, but it appeared they had protected me from grave injury.

Reeve and I worked in silence, and when he had finished patching up his arm, he helped me clean the wounds on my legs and tape cotton pads over the worst ones. I went to the storage room when we were done to look for a pair of shorts.

I was disappointed at Reeve’s reaction, and my feelings were hurt as well. This was the first time he’d openly disagreed with one of my suggestions, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. I wasn’t used to standing up for myself.

I found an old pair of corduroy shorts and put them on carefully, trying not to touch any of the cuts on my calves. I was surprised that my knee seemed to be all right after the night’s events. I still wasn’t back to one hundred percent, but there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage, and that was a relief.