Merchandise! I bristled.
“I’m no one’s property.” My ankle hurt on the stairs because of the speed I moved, but I gritted my teeth as I stepped down off the staircase.
A darkness flickered through the gray and then it was gone before Karson could see it. I darted my eyes between the others. The woman was dark-skinned, her hair cropped short. She too was dressed in all black, in leather pants not unlike mine and a fitted black tunic under a long jacket. Her jaw and cheekbones carved the outline of her face. A swirled black tattoo marked her neck. Vampires who dated humans in an era long gone used to mark their partners like a piece of property with a scar in the shape of a fang beneath the lobe of their ear, or on their neck. Sometimes it was disguised in a tattoo. It was a signal to other vampires that they were taken and not to be touched. It kept them safe. Was she marked before she was turned and the scar remained? I couldn’t tell if that was what hers was. She looked at me like I was a bug she wanted to place her heel on, press and twist.
The dark-skinned male beside her had an expression of stone. He was tall, built like he was carved from a mountain. The other was around twenty, I guessed, when he was turned. He had shoulder-length wavy blond hair and sun-tanned skin. He didn’tlook annoyed—he looked hungry. I preferred the look of stone. I swallowed and looked away.
“This is Amelia,” Karson answered, then his eyes shot to Josh and his tone was sharp. “Mary would like your help, if you’re capable of using a feather duster?”
“I think I can manage as long as the feathers aren’t sharp.” He laughed awkwardly. His joke fell short. Karson’s lips thinned. Josh’s cheeks burned pink. “Sure, I will just get going, then,” he said as he scurried across the room.
“Rodney, Kenneth, Janice,” Michael said as he entered through the front door. “How lovely of you to call in.”
“Michael,” Janice responded. “I see old defense habits have not changed.”
Michael smiled. “We weren’t sure who was calling in unexpectedly. Had I known it was you, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
Kenneth shook Michael’s hand. He wore two large silver rings on his left hand and had a silver chain around his neck. He cleared his throat. “Monique,” he said quietly. “It’s good to see you.”
She ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken.
My eyes drifted back to Janice’s tattoo. She caught me staring and placed a hand on her hip, shifting her long black jacket slightly, and I caught a glimpse of blade handles tucked against her belt. A vampire didn’t need blades to fight, but some still preferred them. Unlike a witch, they couldn’t conceal her weapons with a glamor spell. I had that up on her, at least. Well, I would if I carried them …
Get your weapons, fool, I imagined Dahlia snapping.
Every instinct told me to step away, and my stomach knotted as I resisted the urge to step behind Karson. I stopped beside him.
Rodney’s nostrils flared. He was sniffing me.Bastard.My back stiffened. Karson’s did too, but it was subtle, and from where he stood Rodney wouldn’t notice. Was I going to let him get away with that? Hell no.
“The perfume is from Victoria’s Secret, in case you’re curious.”
He blinked. But then he recovered and practically purred, “There are only a few scents a vampire is interested in, and one has nothing to do with the perfume you wear.”
“There are only a few polite ways to greet someone, and they don’t include sniffing them.”
Rodney’s lips moved up, but you wouldn’t call it a smile. It was the grin of a piranha. “How rude of me, I apologize.”
He reached out to shake my hand. The thought of touching him made my skin crawl. It would be rude not to; I’d just given him a lesson on etiquette, after all. And he was Karson’s friend. My manners outweighed the chills this guy gave me. I began to raise my hand.
Karson flattened his fingers against my arm and pushed it back down.
Rodney darted his gaze between us, a cunning in his eyes. He dropped his hand down. “I see,” was all he said, and yet it was pointed. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Amelia.” He bowed his head as if I was a queen. Weird—a vampire thing, I assumed. I didn’t bow back. If it was vampire etiquette, too bad.
Only my mother, Michael, and Karson called me Amelia. It irked me coming from him. I forced a smile. “Call me Amy.”
“I had heard you were sheltering a witch, Karson, and I didn’t believe it. But here she is.” He spread his hands out dramatically. “Standing in the house of the man who slaughters witches for afternoon tea.”
A muscle ticked on Karson’s jaw, but he asked smoothly, “And who is it that spread rumors all the way to Paris?”
Paris, where Sarah supposedly was.
“You know how far rumors fly. Kenneth was at a bar and overheard a vampire saying how you were working with a witch.”
“Does the vampire have a name?” he asked, his tone coated in oil on the cusp of being lit.
“I don’t know who he was,” Kenneth answered, stepping beside Rodney, his voice as deep as his sprawling chest. “I was pretending not to listen and didn’t want to look at him. He was from Portland, and he said he had witnessed you tearing the head off a vampire who had threatened two witches.”
That was at The Bite months ago. It seemed far too big a coincidence they were only just hearing about it now.
