“Look, I didn’t mean to overhear.”
Tai nodded. In fairness, it was a vampire hazard whenever groups of them were in public. You could be habituallynot listeningand then someone happened to utter your name, and after that, tuning back out was like deciding not to think about a pink elephant because someone offered you twenty bucks not to think about pink elephants for thirty seconds. On the plus side, not a living soul knew Tai found the woman who called him her “nemesis” distractingly attractive. Not even Ryker.
“It’s not too late to tell her,” Ryker said.
“No, it’s not.”Too latedidn’t factor into his decision at all, and Ryker ought to know that.
Apparently, his friend did know. Ryker rolled his eyes, gently boxed Tai’s shoulder, and then nodded to the exhibit from which Tai still hadn’t moved on. “Hey, this stuff was made for you.”
“Yeah.”
“Look at all the violins. You ought to buy one from her. It would look cool in your den at the penthouse.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. Tai smiled. He could picture several of these finding a place in his home—the butterfly-pouring hollowespecially. Fleeting, delicate beauty. He felt it in his chest, the constant longing to capture what he saw and felt, the way his music so oftenalmostheld onto something while a piece of that thing remained free and fluttering just out of his grasp.
As if sensing Tai was feeling too much for words, Ryker didn’t expect any, instead nudged his shoulder again. “Can I bring Leslie over here? She’ll go nuts for these. Sculpture is her baby.”
“Of course,” Tai said.
When Leslie joined them, she spent several minutesooh-and-ahhing, but then she and Tai talked—about art and music, the work of creation, the lifelong pursuit of beauty. As a diorama artist who specialized in realistic landscapes, she tried to capture nature, its seasons and moods. Hers was a more concrete vision than the musical tapestry that lived inside Tai, but nonetheless he loved talking to Leslie about art. Artists were all alike in some ways.
By the time the wedding party left the gallery and headed to dinner, Tai felt overfull of the creativity and beauty he’d observed today. At the restaurant, he sat on one end of their long table, and Claire sat on the other, and it was for the best.
It had to be.
Four
The club music seemed to pulse against Claire’s invisible earplugs, specially made for vampires. Without them, she’d be on the floor, probably unconscious from the unbearable volume. With them, she was uncomfortable but functional. She hopped onto a barstool and ordered a virgin margarita that looked just like the traditional kind. Over the next hour, she loosened her movements and increased the volume of her voice by calculated degrees. She listened to every conversation in the building, in the lot outside, in the cars outside. She waited to be noticed, approached. She looked like an easy target. The men in the bar had three choices. Ignore her, treat her like a person, or try to harm her.
Saturday nights were for justice.
Specifically, the second and fourth Saturdays of the month. Maybe it wasn’t enough, but she’d had to draw a few lines for herself, around herself, back when she’d first devised this mission. Without them, things had gotten blurry; tonight they were perfectly clear. Solid lines between herself and her persona, as solid as her dramatically thick black eyeliner.
She’d been there, soaked in sensory stimulation and chatting with a few random guys who moved on shortly, for about three hours when she wondered if this was going to be a neutral night. Maybe when she left, she’d be alone. But statistics so far hinted she might get a hit tonight. It tended to happen every fourth or fifth mission, and the last four had yielded neutral results.
Sure enough, when she headed to the restroom—looking tipsy but careful not to over-exaggerate—one of the men seated along the bar slid off his stool to follow her at what he must think was an unnoticeable distance. He smelled like sweat and beer, and Claire moved just slowly enough not to lose him in the press of dancing bodies.
She went into the restroom and waited just a minute. He didn’t come in. She checked her reflection out of a long habit that helped her remain in character when she was about to dangle herself as bait on a hook. Her long blonde wig remained perfectly in place, and her brown contacts hid her identity better than anything else could. She tugged at the hot-pink fringe dress that helped make her conspicuous. Stared another moment at the makeup that made her nearly unrecognizable to herself—cat eyes and lime green eyeshadow, lipstick to match her dress.
This wasn’t Claire Elisabeth Vanderlaan. This was Verena the Vigilant.
And yeah, maybe naming her persona something that sounded like she belonged in the latest superhero blockbuster was laughable. But it worked. It reminded her the powerlessness she had to put on was absolutely false.
She double-checked the silver daisy pin at the neck of her dress. It looked vaguely out of place with this ensemble, but only vaguely. She nodded to the brown-eyed blonde, and Verena nodded back from the mirror.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
She lowered her shoulders, hunched her head slightly forward, lowered her eyelids just a bit, let her purse fall down her arm, and stepped out of the restroom. The man had waited for her, of course, leaning against the wall between restroom doors with typical overconfidence. He was noticeably bigger than she was, around six feet tall and built like a guy who had a gym membership and showed up for more than half his scheduled days. His brown hair was buzzed short, and his eyes were brown too. He filled out his jeans and beige V-neck tee in ways that might have been interesting to another woman.
A woman who didn’t get distracted almost daily by images of a lean vampire with metallic eyes arcing his body in a clean dive off a boulder.
“Hey, baby,” the guy said as he pushed off the wall.
Claire didn’t allow herself to roll her eyes. Instead she cheesed a huge grin at him, and he had just enough beer in his system to think she meant it.
“Do you know you’re the best-looking woman in here?”
“Am I?” She bounced the tresses of the wig with a shimmy of her shoulders.
