Authors: Liz Jasper
“Is that what you want? To be my boyfriend?”
He smiled. “Are you offering?”
A rusty Toyota idling at the gate pulled out onto the street and I realized with a start that the teacher’s parking lot was deserted. So did Will. The air crackled with the awareness between us. He shifted closer. Only a fraction of an inch separated his hard, lithe body and mine.
He said, “‘You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.’ Carl Jung.”
“Better than sitting and doing nothing. Jo Gartner.”
He pulled me hard against him and kissed me. I had forgotten how achingly good it felt to be in his arms. I forgot to be scared. Forgot to be discreet.
Chattering voices pealed like warning bells from the path around the side of the administration building. I pulled myself together enough to push Will away.
By the time the group (To this day I have no idea who was in it.) rounded the corner into the parking lot, Will was leaning casually against the SUV parked next to me, gorgeously unruffled, appearing every inch the chivalrous male. He wasn’t looking at the group. His midnight gaze was fixed on me. He watched and waited as I somehow fit my key in the lock, got in, started up my car and drove out of the parking lot.
When I looked back, he was gone. Another black shadow in the night.
The fear I had kept at bay came back with a vengeance, shimming down deep into my gut like a filet knife. I reached up a hand to touch my neck. I didn’t really think he could have bitten me without my knowledge, but then Will was capable of a lot of things I didn’t understand.
The skin was smooth and dry. No new marks.
I pulled up to a stop sign and rested my forehead against the cool vinyl of the steering wheel. “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”
Someone behind me leaned on the horn. I jolted upright and drove forward. I realized I was cold. Freezing. I started to shiver. My hands shook so bad, I had a hard time keeping them on the wheel.
At the next stop sign, I pulled to the curb to let a couple of impatient tailgaters pass and dug for my cell phone. As soon as my fingers closed around it, the shaking subsided a little and I started driving again. Maybe I should have waited until I was calmer, but I didn’t. Movement made me feel less like a sitting duck. But only a little.
I desperately needed someone to talk to and there was only one person—one human—who knew my secret. I hadn’t spoken to him in months, but I thought this was a good time to renew our acquaintance. I fumbled with the buttons on my cell phone.
The number rang and rang and finally switched over to a robotic recording saying the number was no longer in service. I jabbed the “end call” button and cursed technology for depriving me of the satisfaction of banging a receiver back on its cradle.
At the next stop sign, I called the main switchboard at the local police station and asked to be transferred to Detective Raines. He answered on the first ring.
“Dammit, Gavin, what the hell do you think you’re doing, changing your cell phone number?”
There was a slight pause. “Jo?”
“How the hell am I supposed to reach you?”
“By calling the police station, as you just did.”
I hung there in stunned silence. It’d taken me weeks of knowing him last spring to get his personal cell phone number, and I had thought it meant I could rely on him. Apparently I’d misunderstood his willingness to help me. “Why did I think you could help? Goodbye, Detective Raines.”
I ended the call and cursed him until I pulled into a parking space right in front of my apartment. Go figure. The night all hell broke loose, I got the number one parking spot. There’s the universe in balance for you.
Stifling a noise that was half sob, half slightly hysterical laughter, I grabbed my book bag from the passenger seat and bolted for my apartment. I took the stairs at a run, as if a dozen hungry vampires were after me. Which, for all I knew, they were.
When I got inside, I jittered around, turning on every single light and ended up in the kitchen. I had the freezer open for a full five minutes before I accepted there wasn’t any ice cream inside. I slammed it shut, pulled butter and eggs out of the fridge and got to work on comfort food. After a few minutes of alternating nuking and stirring two sticks of butter into a soft fluffy paste, I started to calm down. My hands were almost steady as I measured out white and brown sugar and cracked an egg into the mixing bowl.
I had the first tray of triple chocolate chip cookies in the oven and was almost humming with denial when someone knocked on my door. I glanced at the oven clock. It was after eleven. I wiped batter off my hands on a yellow daisy kitchen towel and went through the small living room to stand in front of the door.
“Who is it?”
“Gavin.”
I flicked on the outside light and opened the tiny peephole door that local builders had favored back in the twenties. It was Gavin all right. I relatched the peephole, and after a short internal debate, let him in.
The last time I’d seen him, long hours and the strain of a murder investigation had aged him so he looked closer to forty than his actual age of thirty. A new man stood before me. He was as trim and fit as ever, but a summer of biathlons had given him what my mother would have called a “healthy glow”. He was…relaxed, down to the golden stubble wreathing his jaw.
My summer had been spent cowering indoors, hiding from sunlight. I felt like a pasty, redheaded mushroom and resented every sun-bleached hair on his head.
“Detective,” I said, crossing my arms and fighting the urge to drop kick his toned butt back out the door.
“Hello, Jo. Long time no see.” He looked at me closely, but as usual his inscrutable light gray eyes gave nothing of his thoughts away.
He sniffed the air and headed, uninvited, for the kitchen. “You’re baking cookies.”
He pulled out a chair from the small table in the breakfast nook. “I don’t suppose that’s why you called me?” He turned the chair so he could face me and sat down, stretching his long legs into the kitchen.
“No.”
The timer went off. I pulled the first batch of cookies out of the oven, transferred half onto an inverted brown paper grocery bag to cool and the other half to a plate. I handed Gavin a napkin and the plate before I realized what I was doing.
I stood frozen at the second horror of the evening. My mother had rubbed off on me.
Gavin picked up a cookie and took a large bite. The chips were still molten and he had to breathe quickly through his open mouth to cool it.
“I was watching the high school drama club’s fall production tonight. Will stopped in to say hello.”
Gavin swallowed his mouthful of cookie. “I see. Had you invited him?”
I snatched the plate of cookies off the table and plucked the half-eaten one from his hand. “I don’t know why I bother with you.”
Gavin look mournfully at the cookie plate in my hand. “Really, Jo. You didn’t used be this sensitive.”
“Oh? And what makes you an authority on my character?”
His face took on a shuttered look. “Nothing.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his broad, well-muscled chest, suddenly businesslike. “What did Will want?”
I felt myself blush.
“Right. Anything else?”
I gave him
a look
, and I didn’t care if it had enough uncontrolled vampire venom in it to reduce him to a pile of ashes. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, why don’t you leave?”
He held up his hands in surrender. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
When he spoke again, he sounded more like the old, worrywart Gavin. “I assume this is the first time you’ve seen him in a while.”
My head dipped in a tight nod. “Since last spring.”
He took a small wire-bound notebook out of his jacket pocket and sighed. “Why don’t you tell me everything Will said.” Fishing out the ballpoint pen that was tucked inside the spiral, he flipped to a blank page.
He’d asked nicely and I was scared enough that the old maxim, “a burden shared is a burden halved” sounded pretty good to me.
Who was I kidding? I would have made him listen if I’d had to tie him up to get his attention.
“Let’s see…” As I forced myself to think back over the whole evening without skipping over the more troubling bits, I nibbled on a cookie to calm myself. Gavin was watching me with a funny look on his face and I realized it was the one I’d stolen out of his hand. I put the cookie down, gave him back his plate and, closing my eyes, told him everything I could remember.
“Not much to go on, is it?” he said when I stopped talking.
“No.”
Gavin stood, put his empty plate in the sink and looked longingly at the few cookies left cooling on the counter before leaving the kitchen. He did his usual circuit around my tiny apartment, checking all the windows to make sure they were shut and locked. I followed him, trying not to show how nervous I was at the prospect of being alone that night.
“I think it would be a good idea if you got home before sundown, at least for a while. I’ll talk to the chief and see if I can’t get a couple of uniforms to drive by your place at night.”
Officially, Gavin was “visiting” from a small community up north to “learn” investigation techniques from the Long Beach Police Department detectives. Only the Chief of Police, and maybe one or two other necessary people affiliated with the department, such as the coroner, knew Gavin was there to quietly rid Long Beach of vampires, and they all wanted to keep it that way. Whenever a suspicious case came down the pike, the chief made sure it ended up on Gavin’s desk.
My apartment, for as much of my meager paycheck that it ate up each month, is absurdly small and in no time at all we’d circled back to the front door. Gavin dug into his back pocket and handed me a card. “My new number’s on that. Call anytime.”
He fixed his silvery-grey gaze on me for a long, silent moment before he turned to leave.
All at once, my nerves seemed to catch up with me. I caught his arm before he went through the door. He stopped and turned slowly back to face me.
“Do you think I should be worried?” I asked.
The hard grooves of last fall returned to Gavin’s face as he dropped the pretense of trying to make me feel better. “Yes.”
To be continued …
UNDERDEAD IN DENIAL
Available now in print and eBook.
Liz Jasper’s first novel,
Underdead
, won the 2008 EPPIE Award for Best Mystery. The sequel,
Underdead In Denial,
was published the following year to critical acclaim. Liz also writes young adult novels and is hard at work on the next book in the Underdead series.
Liz’s first job was teaching middle school science. Apparently jealous of her students’ place in the classroom, she eventually went back to school to earn a couple of master’s degrees and now works as a financial advisor. With this career path, writing paranormal novels was not only natural—it was necessary.
Liz lives in California near hiking trails and good public libraries, in a house where chocolate is welcome and the resident cat gets fatter and lazier every year.
Find more about Liz at: