Stefan gave in and laughed. “It won’t be me,” he told me. “So what do we do next, Haunt Huntress?”
“That’s a pretty lame superhero name,” I told him.
“Scooby-Doo is already taken,” he said with dignity. “Anything else sounds lame in comparison.”
“Seriously,” I said, “I think we’d better go find his parents.” Who hopefully were sleeping peacefully despite Chad’s cry and doors banging into walls, not to mention all the talking we’d been doing. Now that I thought of it, it was a bad sign they weren’t out here fussing.
“We? You want me to come, too?” Stefan raised an eyebrow.
I wasn’t going to tell Chad to lie to his parents. And if something had happened to Amber and her husband, I wanted Stefan with me. Their room was on the opposite side of the house from Chad’s and mine, their door was thick—and they didn’t have nifty hearing like Stefan and I did. Maybe they were sleeping. I clutched my walking stick.
“Yeah. Come with us, Stefan. But, Chad?” I made sure he could see my face. “You don’t want to tell your folks Stefan is a vampire, okay? For the same reasons I told you before. Vampires don’t like people knowing about them.”
Chad stiffened and glanced at Stefan and away.
“Hey. No, not Stefan,” I said. “He doesn’t mind. But others will.” And his father probably wouldn’t believe him about that either—and maybe he’d tell Blackwood about it. Blackwood, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t be happy if Chad knew about vampires.
So we trekked to Amber’s room and opened the door. It was dark inside, and I could see two still figures in the bed. For a moment I froze, then realized I could hear them breathing. On the bedside table next to Corban was an empty glass that had held brandy—I could smell it now that I was through panicking. And on Amber’s side was a prescription bottle.
Chad slid past me and scrambled over their footboard and into bed beside them. With his parents here, he was no longer required to be brave. Cold feet did what all the noise had failed to do, and Corban sat up.
“Chad ...” He saw us. “Mercy? Who’s that with you, and what are you doing in my bedroom?”
“Corban?” Amber rolled over. She sounded a little dopey but woke up just fine when she noticed Chad and then us. “Mercy? What happened?”
I told them, leaving out Stefan’s vampire status. I didn’t, actually, mention him at all except as part of “we.” They didn’t care. Once they heard Chad hadn’t been breathing, they weren’t worried about Stefan at all.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I admitted to them both. “I’m out of my league. I think you need to get Chad out of here and into a hotel tonight.”
Corban had listened to everything with a poker face. He got out of bed and grabbed a robe in almost the same motion. I heard him walk down the hall, but he didn’t go into Chad’s room. Just stood outside it for a moment and returned. I knew what he saw—nothing but a ripped-up comforter—and was glad he’d been there for the little toy-car demonstration.
He stood in the doorway of his bedroom and looked at us. “First, we pack for a couple of days. Second, we find a hotel. Third, I talk to my cousin’s brother-in-law, who is a Jesuit priest.”
“I’m headed home,” I told him before he could tell me to go away and never come back. I needed to help them do something about Blackwood, who was snacking on Amber, but I didn’t know what. And from the sounds of it, no one had ever been able to do something about this vampire. “There’s nothing I can do for you, and I have a business to run.”
“Thank you for coming,” Amber said. She got out of bed and hugged me. And I knew what she was most grateful for was convincing her husband that Chad hadn’t been lying. I thought that was the least of her worries.
Over her shoulder, Corban stared at me as if he suspected I’d somehow caused everything. I wondered about that, too. Something had made their ghost much worse, and I was the obvious place to look for a reason.
I left them to their preparations, packed my own bags, and hugged Amber again before I left.
She still smelled like vampire—but then so did Stefan and I.
STEFAN WAITED UNTIL WE WERE MOSTLY OUT OF SPOKANE, driving past the airport, before he said anything. “Do you need me to drive?”
“Nope,” I answered. I might be tired, but I didn’t like anyone else to drive my Vanagon. As soon as Zee and I put the Rabbit back together, the van was going back in the garage. Besides ... “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping again anytime in the next millennium. How did he bite me twice without my knowing it?”
“Some vampires can do that,” Stefan said in the same sort of soothing voice a doctor uses to tell you that you have a terminal illness. “It’s not among my gifts—or any of our seethe except perhaps Wulfe.”
“He bit me twice. That’s worse than just once, right?” Silence followed my question.
Something wiggled in my front pocket. I twitched, then realized what had happened. I pulled my vibrating cell phone out without looking at the number. “Yes?” Maybe I sounded abrupt, but I was scared and Stefan hadn’t answered me.
There was a little silence, and Adam said, “What’s wrong? Your fear woke me up.”
I blinked really fast, wishing I was home already. Home with Adam instead of driving in the dark with a vampire.
“I’m sorry it bothered you.”
“A benefit of the pack bond,” Adam told me. Then, because he knew me, he said, “I’m Alpha, so I get things first. No one else in the pack felt it. What scared you?”
“The ghost,” I told him, then let out my breath in a gusty sigh. “And the vampire.”
He coaxed the whole story out of me. Then he sighed. “Only you could go to Spokane and get bitten by the one vampire in the whole city.” He didn’t fool me. For all the amusement in his voice, I could hear the anger, too.
But if he was pretending, I could pretend. “That’s pretty much what Stefan said. I don’t think it’s fair. How was I to know that Amber’s husband’s best client was the vampire?”
Adam gave me a rueful laugh. “The real question is why didn’t we suspect that’s what would happen. But you are safe now?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’ll wait until you get here.”
He hung up without saying good-bye.
“So,” I said, “tell me what Blackwood can do to me now that he’s fed off me twice.”
“I don’t know,” Stefan told me. Then he sighed. “If I have exchanged blood with someone twice, I can always find him, no matter where he goes. I could call him to me—and if he is near, I could force him to come to me. But that is with a true blood exchange—yours to me, mine to you. Eventually ... it is possible to force a master-slave relationship upon those you exchange blood with. A precaution, I suppose, because a newly turned vampire can get nasty. A simple feeding is less risky. But your reactions are not always the usual. There could be no ill effects to you at all.”
I thought of Amber, who had been feeding the vampire for who knows how long, and her husband, who could be in the same condition, and felt sick. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” I said. “Damn it.” Okay. Think positive. If I hadn’t gone to Spokane at all, the vampire would still have had Amber and her husband, only no one would have known. “If I was unconscious, could he have forced a blood exchange?”
He sighed and slumped in his seat. “You don’t remember him biting. That doesn’t mean you were unconscious.”
I wasn’t expecting it. I hadn’t had one since leaving the Tri-Cities. But I managed to pull over, hop out of the van, and make it to the barrow pit at the side of the road before throwing up. It wasn’t sickness ... it was sheer, stark terror. The panic attack to end all panic attacks. My heart hurt, my head hurt, and I couldn’t stop crying.