Let us kill him! My vampire side raged within me.
Shut up, you!
I should have hit him harder, damn it. Ugh, and it was a lesson I’d already learned—knowing when to err on the side of caution with non-humans.
Lawson regained his feet with difficulty, managing to kick me just under the ribs. Somehow I didn’t think it was a lucky shot.
“Charles Holmwood sends a woman to take me down?” he demanded. His voice was deep and almost genderless, as though it had been dragged over too much gravel to survive intact. He made several chuffing sounds. It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing. At me.
What a wanker!
“Where’s the respect?” he continued. “The professional courtesy? He ought to have at least sent a Helsing if it had to be a female.”
I wanted to ask how he didn’t know I wasn’t a Helsing. But... I knew how. The Helsing line had produced a total of two women since I’d been turned, both born in the 1940s. Neither would be as spry as the twenty-something I appeared to be. They were still dangerous as hell, but no longer in the field.
Harvey Lawson knelt over me and I let him, even though most of the strength had returned to my limbs. My back and ankle were going to be sore tomorrow, but I’d heal eventually. This wasn’t even close to the worst I’d experienced on the job.
He made a fist and then cocked it back, as though he was going to drive it into my face. Flames licked along his fingers, curling between them like he’d donned an incendiary pair of brass knuckles.
“And what name shall I tell Charles Holmwood to carve into the headstone, little girl?”
I grinned at him then, gave him one of the rare, toothy smiles I usually reserved for Sherlock and Watson.
Some of the confidence faded around the edges when he spotted my fangs. And the confidence faded entirely when I held up the extinguisher and doused his fist in foam. Then he wasn’t so confident at all because I nailed him right in the face—so quickly he never saw the blow coming. And much, much harder this time.
Swing batter, batter.
***
Transporting Lawson took two trips.
One trip with him bound with the extension cord I’d found in his supplies and a second trip to deliver the crate of phoenix eggs he’d been smuggling. I left both Lawson and the eggs in the cavernous front lobby of the Holmwood Association. It was late, even for hunters, so the doorman and a glassy-eyed receptionist were the only witnesses to the drop-off.
I plucked a tube of my signature blood-red lipstick from my back pocket, twisted the lid off, and scrawled a note on Lawson’s forehead.
$10,000. Lucy.
The note was meant for Charles and it would, undoubtedly, piss him off. But, I didn’t care.
I kicked Lawson a little further inside and limped back out the way I’d come, feeling the coming dawn like a prickle of dread at the base of my spine.
Chapter Three
Someone had magicked gum into my hair. I wasn’t sure who, but when I found the little a-holes, they were going to pay.
Okay, ‘little a-holes’ was an exaggeration. These were college kids. So they were big a-holes. With bad attitudes.
Trying to keep the homicidal impulses out of my eyes, I turned slowly away from the blackboard,. I really had pushed my luck a little far. My eyes had been turning faintly crimson by the time I returned home and dug Lissa’s Elixir out of my nightstand.
It was Elixir drinking night and I hadn’t wasted any time in taking it. The mint and black licorice taste still coated the inside of my mouth. I knew from long experience neither toothpaste nor Tic-Tacs could scrape the taste off my tongue. It was stuck there for at least the next twenty-four hours. Some sort of karmic punishment for having the audacity to be bled dry by one of the most notorious vampires around.
Between the gum and the taste, I was pissed and ready to lay into someone. Question was, who was the culprit?
I scanned the room, squinting at each face in turn. Almost all of them showed traces of amusement. A prank had just been pulled, after all, and it looked like it was going to cost Professor Westenra almost four inches of hair. Four inches of beautiful, thick and platinum blonde hair, I might add. Hair that was my pride and joy. Hair that almost reached my waist.
The only kids who weren’t biting their knuckles to contain snorts of laughter were Cynthia Whitfield and her small social circle. Four girls, all pretty, and all fairly well-off. Since the start of the term, they’d been coming to class with the shakes, unable to meet my eyes. Cynthia could answer questions just fine, sure. That wasn’t a surprise though because the drug she was taking increased cognition. That was because it was a performance enhancer, at least I was pretty sure that’s what it was.
I’d corner Cynthia after class, if I got the chance. I knew she wasn’t the gum culprit. Her hands weren’t steady enough to perform magic at the moment. No, I was interested in her for different reasons…
I gave the class of twenty a smile. The false one I’d perfected over the course of a century, carefully showing only my front two teeth, hiding the canines from view. No matter how human the elixir made the rest of me appear and act, the fangs never went away. If I ground them down, they were back within days. If I plucked them out, they stayed gone... oh... a week maybe? Not worth the hassle.
Separating the long pale lock of hair with the gum stuck in it, I twirled it around my finger to bring attention to it. Some were looking a little less confident now that I’d failed to scream at them. Hazing-the-new-professor wasn’t supposed to go like this.
“Well, I suppose someone’s decided we need a practical demonstration in alchemy, hmm?” I said, unable to keep the acid from my tone. They were about to see just what happened when Lucy Westenra got pissed.
A few of the kids exchanged glances. One face, in particular, was beginning to crease into an unhappy frown. Tobias O’Keefe. No proof yet, but his motives were solid…
The position I’d been filling for the last three weeks had belonged to his mother. Professor Devina O’Keefe had been fired after having an affair with Lissa Ravenwood’s husband. Now both families were in shambles, and Lissa had called in a favor from me. I agreed (if that’s what you wanted to call it) to teach the little monsters until someone else could replace me.
Apparently Tobias had found some way to blame me for the loss of his happy home life. Or maybe he’d just been hoping I’d dismiss class early so he could go home, play Halo, and forget about how crappy things were. I sympathized with him. I really did. It wasn’t his fault his mum was so scandalous. But I also wasn’t about to let some punk bully me out of this position. I was at least six times this kid’s age.
Time for a little object lesson.
There was a half-full bottle of water resting on the edge of my desk. I couldn’t wash the elixir taste out of my mouth, but some futile part of me hoped this go-round would allow Aquafina to be useful, for once. I tilted the water down, letting a generous measure pour toward my palm. The stream came to a quivering halt just before it could touch my (woefully short) lifeline.
Any human could learn the basics of magic. Most magic was just memorization and calling on higher powers. But to really harness the energy, you had to have magical empathy or drops of inhuman blood flowing through your veins. That was why magic had fallen out of favor among regular folk for so long—we’d forgotten we were capable of it at all.