Page 42 of Just the Pool Boy at Vampire Mansion

She had to be dead. She’d been in there too long. “Why didn’t you pull her out?” I panted, doubled over, hands on thighs.

He didn’t answer, just stared at her.

She was dead. So dead. Why had he wasted time calling me? He could have saved her. “Theo? Why didn’t you pull her out?” This was bad. So bad. Not just for him but for me too. “We have to call the cops. We have to.” Cops meant jail. I didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t go through that again. Tiny cell, mind-numbing routine, casual violence, day in, day out.

“She’s alive,” he said.

“What?” I looked at her pale face. “She can’t be.”

“I know a living body from a dead one, Owen,” he snapped, then frowned. “She’s breathing. Grab her ankles. Help me take her to the pool house.”

I grabbed her legs while Theo scooped her up, under her arms, and together we carried her to the pool-house couch.

Theo propped a cushion under her head. I grabbed a folded blanket from the chair in the corner and laid it over her.

We both stood back. Her chest rose and fell. She had some color in her cheeks. It was impossible. She’d been in that water for twenty minutes, at least.

“Do you know her?” I whispered.

“No, never seen her before,” he whispered back, chewing on a thumbnail.

“How’d she get in your pool?”

“I have no idea.”

“You don’t know how some random woman ended up face down in your pool?” Was she a girlfriend and he didn’t want to tell me? She had to be someone he knew. The grounds were fenced. The gate had been closed. People didn’t just wander off the streets into Witherborne Mansion.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Theo snapped. “I don’t know! I got back from a . . . thing, and she was there.”

“You’re alone?”

“Yeah.” He swept a hand through his hair and paced to the window then back again. “Why does this keep happening? Should we call the cops?”

“No!” I cleared my throat and dialed back on the panic. “I mean, probably not yet, right? She’s alive, so . . . she’s going to be fine. Probably.”

He didn’t argue. Just kept pacing and chewing on his nail.

“Maybe she’s a fan?” I suggested. “Maybe she broke in somehow, and fell in the pool?” It seemed unlikely, but weird stuff happened all the time. Especially around Theo.

“Another body turns up less than a week after Jay’s body is moved here? C’mon.”

But this body was alive. “You’ve never seen her before, so maybe Bentley knows her?”

“Bentley?” He stopped pacing. “Yeah, maybe. But he doesn’t bring women home . . . He uh . . . He goes out for snacks.”

That was something I was not getting into now. “He turned up at my place.”

“He what?” That cool fury flashed in Theo’s eyes now too. He strode toward me, coming in hot. “Did he hurt you? Did he touch you?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” I backed up a step and Theo slowed. “I didn’t say anything because . . . well . . . it doesn’t matter right now, but he’d do this, right? To mess with you?”

Theo planted his feet and glanced at the girl. “Yeah, probably. You’re right.” He sighed, and the tension melted off him. “She probably knows my brother.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it.”

“What did he say to you?” Theo asked, quickly coming back around to the whole Bentley had been at my place thing.

“He’s paranoid someone else is going to kill you. Like me.”