When they said goodnight and walked separately to their cars, Tai’s body began to buzz from the inside out, adrenaline colliding with stunned confusion. Four months together. So much of himself revealed to her…so much pain. So much trust. More than he’d ever opened up to another person. And all the time, she’d kept this to herself. The imbalance of it left Tai utterly lost, pausing at the driver’s door with a hand on the car frame to steady himself as even his physical balance fell away from him.
He drove home on autopilot, still feeling fractured. He called her on the way. Once. Twice. The second time her phone went to voicemail, he couldn’t keep himself from leaving a message.
“Claire, it’s me. We need to talk. Please, tonight, any time you get this, I’ll be home, and we need to talk.”
Twenty-Five
Justice and protection were hard work.
The thought burrowed in and stayed with her while Claire sat at yet another bar in yet another overstimulating human club. The music was especially loud, bass pulsing against her earplugs. All her senses demanded that she get out of here, away from the warm humans who often broke a sweat as they danced. Twice tonight, someone had bumped into her. But she couldn’t leave.
She’d already caught the wrong man’s eye.
He’d introduced himself as Eric. He’d bought her a drink after she’d declined his offer, so she hadn’t touched it, partly to see what he’d do. Eric had laughed it off, but the laughter didn’t reach his eyes.
When he said,“No worries, I’m a nice guy,”the slight tension around his mouth gave away his lie, but human eyesight wouldn’t have caught it.
Claire agreed when he suggested going for a drive. His eyes held an uncommon sharpness, rapt on her every move, so shetempered her tipsiness act with more care than usual as they walked to his car.
“It’s nicer out here,” she said. “Kind of loud in there.”
“Exactly,” Eric said.
She slid into the passenger seat and set her purse on the floor. By the time he got in behind the wheel, he was telegraphing his intentions with the direction of a glance, the unconscious twitch of his hand toward his feet. Not to mention Claire’s hearing could pick up the low hum of the object he’d hidden on the floor beside the pedals.
Human civilians often assumed a stun gun was the best way to subdue a vampire or wolf. Most of them didn’t know a vampire would require half a dozen simultaneous shocks to go down. A wolf, at least double that. But this guy wasn’t intending to subdue a vampire.
The comfort of rage took over her whole body, but she couldn’t let it out, not yet. First she had to let Eric shock her. Had to capture it on the body cam. It would hurt, but she’d be fine. Unlike the human woman he thought she was.
“Could we go to the park?” she said. “It’s only five minutes from here, and it’s so nice at night.”
“I’ve got a better idea. Let me show you.” He reached down to the floor and came back up with the gun leveled straight at her.
“No,” she said for the camera, though consent would hardly be an issue with this case, and then, before she could form another thought, he pulled the trigger, and the dart sank into her skin just below her neck, lodging against her left collarbone.
Heat and pain. Burning her skin. Turning her brain into a fireball.
He hadn’t released the trigger.
Claire grabbed the barb, yanked it out of her, and threw it back at him. It bounced off his shirt onto the floor, attached by wire to the gun. Mouth falling open, he dropped the gun, and Clairepicked it up. She crushed it in her hand, showed him the pieces, then let them fall.
“I said no, Eric.”
“What…? Who…? How…?”
“If you give it some thought, I bet you can answer all those questions for yourself.” She retrieved zip-ties from her purse, bound him to the steering wheel, and tossed his keys out the door, into the overgrowth at the edge of the parking lot.
“I didn’t know you were a vampire,” he said, as if offending her were the worst thing he’d done tonight.
“Of course not. You only assault human women.”
“You’d better let me go. This is false imprisonment.”
She gave him the most exaggerated, bored eye roll she could muster while her collarbone continued to burn and sting. “You must be a real novice at this if you think defending myself is going to get me in trouble.”
“I’m not a novice!” he snapped.
She stared at him, only partly acting. She’d never recorded such a clear admission before. In another instant he realized what he said, and his mouth curved in the smile that didn’t find his eyes, that flattened them instead. Claire could only hope the camera captured this too.
