The heavy storm shutter is rolled down over the outer storm door, but the button for the doorbell is located on the wall just outside it. That means looking out the viewfinder won’t do me any good. The intercom is inside the storm shutter, though, protected from the weather, and not accessible by someone outside the shutter.
I draw my gun and, standing to the side, I unlock the heavy front door and ease it open a hair. “What do you want?” I yell. “You’re trespassing. This is private property. You arenotwelcomed here.”
The man’s growly response nearly makes me drop my gun. “Then how the bloodyhellam I supposed to give you a well-deserved spanking for disappearing the way you did, love?”
31
Dexter
Make no mistake—thereabsolutelywill be a spanking in her immediate future.
Earlier, when Mark returned and confirmed he thought it was Eilidh, it took everything I had not to race out into the sun.
FuckingAlaska. My girl justhadto end up someplace where summer days are longer than anywhere else, and the nights are barely five hours long right now.
That’s hardly long enough to fit in one of the spankings my girl’s earned herself.
Then, when Noah, one of Garrett’s cousins from Seattle, reported back that he’d nearly gotten himself shot by a woman who obviously knew he was a wolf, and who definitely smelled like the scent he’d been given to look for from Eilidh’s wig I had, Iknewwe’d found her. Although he reported her hair is blonde, not black.
What other human would be brave—or feckless—enough toknowinglyand so brazenly face down a potential werewolf threat the way she did?
Only my Eilidh.
Holy fates, am I proud of her, too. She’s all mine.
IfI can catch and keep her long enough to get her to stop running and allow me to help her solve the problem of her mysterious spectral canine stalker.
And now here I stand, with nothing but a storm shutter and a glass storm door separating me from my love. I can smell the strange vampire and my Eilidh.
I’ll kill him if he’s so much as laid a finger on her, much less if he’s blooded her.
The wooden door slowly swings open, and Eilidh’s scent fills my lungs.There’smy girl, and for the first time in over seven weeks, relief and peace fill me.
“Dexter? Wh-what thehellare you doing here?”
I stand in the doorway, in front of the storm shutter, and peer through the cracks at her. I brace my hands on either side of the doorway, much as I did in her apartment doorway that first night she took me there. “What do youthinkI’m doing here, love? I’m here to claim what’smine, dammit.” I see the vampire standing behind her and force myself to remain still. “Letme in, Eilidh.”
“That ismydecision, I do believe,” the vampire replies. “Since she works for me, and this ismyhouse.” He’s got a slight accent I can’t quite place. I want to stake him, revive him, and stake him again for being so goddamned good-looking and continental European-ish as he stands next tomygirl.
“Back up, Dexter,” she warns.
Reluctantly, I do. I hear her flick a switch and the storm shutter slowly rolls up.
NowI can see my girl. Yes, her hair’s changed color to golden blonde, like in the picture I saw of her and her mother. I believe I like it better than I did the black. My gaze doesn’t leave her as the vampire steps forward, a crossbow leveled at me from the other side of the storm door.
“Dexter Van Sussex, I presume?” He sounds amused, so that’s something, I guess.
“You presume correctly, and that’smygirl in there.”
He studies me for a moment and then tips his head toward Eilidh. “You’re right. He does look like Ianto Jones.”
She nods. “I know,right?”
He smirks. “Funny, I somehow pictured you older.”
“I’m over two thousand years old. How much older do you think I should look?”
He snorts. “Okay, Boomer.”
