We bolted up the road and around a corner. The suspect was fast, his spindly arms and legs pumping like a runner in a race, his black coat flying out behind him, looking a little like black wings. But for every step he took, Brodie was taking two or three and he was gaining fast.
The vamp skidded left into a side road. Four seconds later, Brodie’s sleek wolf form disappeared after him. I was six seconds behind them both, sliding around the corner in a jingle of bells, only to have to suddenly leap over the still-wolf form that was Brodie.
“Where is he?” I said, standing beside him and frowning into the dark and silent side street.
He shifted shape, then said, “I lost him.” He held up the stranger’s black coat. “This is what I smelled. He was using it to cover his own scent. There’s obviously some poor wino out there now freezing his nuts off.”
“If he hasn’t been drained.” My gaze met his. The green eyes were flat and annoyed. “How could you lose him?”
“Because werewolves can’t fly.”
My gaze went skyward. All I saw was darkness and wet white stuff. “Vampires can’t, either.”
“Well, apparently no one told this murdering son of a bitch that. I should have stayed in human form and shot the bastard.” He grabbed his clothes and started dressing.
“Shooting vamps doesn’t kill them.”
And this vamp had an execution order on him. While most non-humans had rights to courts, lawyers, and justice, vamps were the exception. When they killed, an execution order was placed on their heads. No ifs, buts, or maybes. It was our job to serve it—which was the one huge difference between our squad and the rest of the FBI.
“It would have stopped him enough for me to catch the bastard.”
“Trouble is, we only have my instincts saying he’s connected to our vamp. He isn’t our killer, because his canines were smashed and our victims had neat bite wounds.”
“If you say he’s connected, that’s good enough for me.” Brodie caught my arm and swung me around, his fingers so warm they just about branded my arm. “But let’s get this coat back to the labs so they can double-check. Then once we make our report, we can go get that coffee we were discussing.”
“It’s going to take more than coffee to make me talk pleasantly to you,” I said as we walked—or in my case, jingled—back to his car.
He raised an eyebrow, a smile breaking through the annoyance and tugging at his luscious lips. “What if I add the sweetener of cake?”
I’m an idiot for even considering this. “Depends on the cake.”
“Carrot?”
I snorted. “Get real. It has to at least be triple chocolate. With fresh cream.”
“Done.” He opened the car and ushered me inside, then he bagged the coat while I radioed headquarters, asking them to research flying vamps and where they might have come from. The boss wasn’t too happy about us losing our quarry, but hey, when vamps decide to grow wings and fly, there wasn’t a whole lot a werewolf and a human could do about it.
Brodie started the car and turned the heater on to full. Cold air blasted down onto my toes, making them feel icier than ever.
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, shifting my feet out of the way.
“It’ll warm up in a minute,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said, and wondered even as I said it just how true it was. I mean, he hadn’t even gotten serious about trying to seduce me, and here I was about to go for coffee with him. If he went too much further, just how quickly would the ice in my soul melt?
Too damn quickly. The specter of Christmas past, it seemed, wasn’t the shield I was hoping it might be, despite all my defiant words earlier.
“How are we going to catch a vampire who can fly? And how can a vamp even manage to do that?” I added, hoping work talk would distract my thoughts from the man sitting far too close.
“It’s likely he has shifter in his background. Not all vamps come from human stock, though it is the most common source. And we catch him by spotting him earlier, and chasing him harder.” He glanced at me as he ran an amber light. “You got a change of clothes back at headquarters?”
“No.” Stupidly, I’d gone straight from home to the stakeout site. “Hopefully, we can get the reports done quickly so I can get home and get warm.”
He glanced at me, and the twinkle in his eyes was all too familiar. Plans were being made, plans that undoubtedly involved me and nakedness. But all he said was, “How come you didn’t sense what he was when he first appeared?”
“Because it doesn’t always work like that.” I reached around and grabbed my coat from the backseat, wrapping it around my legs blanket-style but feeling no warmer. “I sometimes sense the evil in people very quickly, but it often takes something like eye contact to actually feel what they are.” I glanced at him. “But you know all that.”
“Last case we worked together, you were getting squat about a guy who’d killed nine people. I thought maybe that was a sign that your psychic gifts were burning out.”
Burnout was a problem in the squad—though it was often a case of the people burning out more than the actual gifts. So far it had not been a problem for me, but then, simply feeling the evil in someone’s soul was a whole lot different from actually sharing their darkest dreams and desires—as some in the squad could.
“It’s hard to find the evil in someone’s soul when they haven’t got a soul,” I said. “Just like it’s hard to find someone’s heart when they haven’t got one.”
“I have a heart,” he said, keeping his gaze on the road. “I just didn’t use it very wisely.”
Ouch, I thought silently, and looked out the window. We drove the rest of the way in silence. Once back at headquarters, Brodie carted the evidence down to forensics, and I quickly typed up a report. There wasn’t much to tell, so it didn’t take long. We were in and out inside an hour.
“Now, let’s get that coffee,” Brodie said, as he opened the car door for me.
“I’d really rather go home,” I said, shivering a little despite the thermal thickness of my coat. The building may have been heated, but it hadn’t done a lot to chase the chill away from my skin. “Besides, I’m wet and I’m dressed as an elf. Not the sort of outfit any respectable person would wear to a nice café.”
“Nonsense. You look lovely in it.” He slammed the door shut and climbed in the other side of the car. “And I promised you cake. I intend to keep that promise.”
“Yeah, it would be this one,” I muttered.
He ignored me and drove out of the parking lot. I watched the world go by, half of me wanting to play it safe and go home, but the other half—the foolish half—wanting his company, however dangerous that might be to my emotional health. Unfortunately, the foolish half was winning the war.
“Hey, we just passed a perfectly respectable-looking café.”
“Is mere respectable going to gain me a smile?”
“Not even triple chocolate cake with fresh cream is going to gain you that, my friend.”
“My friend?” He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “That’s better than rat. Or what was it you called me the other day? During that brief moment you deigned to speak to me?”
“I called you a stinking love rat,” I muttered. “And let’s not make this about what I’ve done. You’re the one who left me, not the other way around.”
“And I do believe I have apologized profusely for that.” He slowed down for a red light, then added, “And, technically speaking, the term love rat does not apply, because I have never loved anyone else.”
Again my heart did that treacherous little lurch. Calm down, stupid. He didn’t mean it that way. He left you, remember? That doesn’t infer love in any way, shape, or form.
“That’s not what the office talk is.”