Peace, Blood, and Understanding Read online

  As much as I hated to break away from his mouth, I wanted to taste his skin to see if it felt as good. I nibbled my way down the line of his jaw, gently pinching the edge of it between my blunt teeth.

  I was right. It felt just as good.

  He gasped as I licked and kissed down his neck and guided his fingers over the curve of my breast, gliding under my bra and teasing the nipple until it was tight and aching. I threaded my fingers through his hair, and he leaned into the touch like a cat, purring and turning his head to drag his lips across my wrist.

  He pushed the skirt above my knees, caressing the sensitive skin over the patella. I giggled against his throat, and his fingers slipped between my thighs, tugging down the panties printed with little strawberries.

  He grinned and slid those clever fingers higher, touching me where I was wet and wanting him. I edged forward until I was sitting across his lap. I could feel him growing hard against my ass, and took pleasure in grinding back against him.

  I slid my tongue tentatively across his neck, tracing his jugular, but was unwilling to bite. I didn’t want to take any of the blood he’d just gotten back. It was enough just to nuzzle and lick at his skin and drink in his scent. The combination of that lovely, all-encompassing smell and the quick rhythm of his fingers had me hurtling toward one of the better orgasms of my lifetime—and that was saying something.

  I forgot about the fright of the last hour and the very real emergency we could be facing outside of this elevator shaft, and just gave myself over to him. His thumb knew all the right patterns to play against my flesh. I slid the zipper of his dark dress pants down with my free hand and turned in his lap, hiking my skirt up to my hips. I wanted him inside me in a way I hadn’t wanted anything in a long time. I aligned us with shaking hands and sank down on him without a second thought.

  He groaned into my neck as he filled me. I clutched at his shoulders, slowly canting my hips as he thrust up into me. I was already so close to coming that it took no time at all for me to begin quivering around him. He hissed and pressed his forehead against my shoulder. His own hips stuttered, and I fell over that shining coil to release. I pulsed hard, and he howled, gripping at my ass and pumping wildly.

  Just as I felt him spilling, cool and surging as seawater, the elevator jerked up and the lights flickered on. Our eyes went the size of dinner plates, like something out of a cartoon. I scrambled out of his lap. We both pushed to our feet, though I had to admit my knees were more than a little wobbly. I sincerely hoped the smell of peppermint tea and blood was enough to cover the smell of sex.

  Weston buckled his pants at lightning speed and I managed to pull my panties over my bare ass just before the car slowed to a stop at a subterranean level I’d never seen before. The door slid open, and Dick and Jane were standing there, wringing their hands. There were bullet holes in the wall behind them and an outline of something very large and… multilimbed… burned into the carpet.

  Don’t think about sex, I told myself, giving Jane an uncertain smile. Don’t think about sex!

  “Are you two OK?” Dick asked, his eyebrow lifting.

  “Fine!” I chirped in a tone far too upbeat for someone who had just been trapped in an elevator. “We’re just fine. I mean, it was scary, but we’re fine.”

  Jane frowned at me. “So you’re… fine.”

  “Fine,” I said, nodding. Something bad had very clearly happened here, and it was going to cause more problems for Jane and Dick. And I didn’t want to think about how Weston would respond to that. All I could think about was getting out of this situation before either of them guessed what I’d just done with Weston in the elevator.

  “What happened with the security system?” Weston demanded, clearly taking a very different, more authoritative approach to avoiding suspicion. “Why did the elevator stop working? And what the hell were you shooting at?”

  “We had a small problem on one of the secure subfloors,” Jane said carefully.

  “What do you keep on the secure subfloors?”

  Jane’s lips pinched together. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “You’re required to tell me that,” Weston snapped.

  It appeared that we were back into the work-mode, “doesn’t know how to interact with others” version of Weston. Greeeeeat.

  “I’m not going to talk about it out here in the common area like it’s watercooler gossip,” Jane said.

  “Then let’s go into your office,” Weston said. “I assume that, at least, is secure.”

  “I should go down to the archive… via the stairs,” I said, backing away.

  Jane shook her head. “Nope, you might as well come, too. I’m going to need to debrief you and get your statement anyway.”

  A hysterical giggle bubbled up in my throat, and I coughed over it. I didn’t think it would be appropriate to tell Jane that I’d already been “debriefed.”

  9

  Resist the urge to engage in shame spirals. They will not do you any good, and you’ll only end up making decisions you’ll regret more than the original spiral trigger. Ask yourself, Is this worth the potential fines and jail time?

  —Peace, Blood, and Understanding: A Living Guide for Vampires Embracing Pacifism

  Dick and Jane led us up… so many stairs… to Jane’s office. I kept my eyes trained on her back, barely blinking, to keep loud, sexy thoughts at bay. I did not want Jane to overhear them, because they were potentially shriek-y enough to be heard over her mental shields. I was not ashamed of what I’d done with Weston. It felt good, and I needed the comfort of physical contact. I just didn’t want those images in Jane’s head.

  Jane’s office was a calm, sparsely decorated space. She’d hung beautifully framed pictures of her family on the walls nearest her desk. Jane and Gabriel kissing at their wedding. Jane and Dick and Andrea at the bookshop. Jane and an elderly man wearing a tweed jacket. One shot showed the whole extended family wearing ugly Christmas sweaters in front of a huge decorated tree. The furniture was comfortable and functional gray-upholstered midcentury pieces, arranged in a conversation grouping far from her desk.

  Jane handed me a clipboard with a form marked “Incident Report—Injury to Probationary Vampire” and motioned to the sofa. “I need you to fill that out.”

  “But it’s just a little bump on the head,” I protested. “Weston’s the one with the broken ribs.”

  “I have a different form for him,” Jane said, glancing at Weston. “But any time someone with your status is injured on Council property, it has to be properly documented.”

  “What joy is mine,” Weston muttered, taking his own clipboard. “Now, what the hell just happened?”

  Jane cleared her throat. “Hypothetically, we have the underground space to hold certain… entities that cannot be safely contained at other facilities. And somehow, one of those entities was released into the building.”

  “What sort of entity?” Weston asked.

  Dick said, “According to the shipping manifest, it was a ghul, which based on my limited knowledge of Middle Eastern folklore is what we would call a ‘ghoul,’ a graveyard-dwelling devourer of dead people parts. It was captured in Florida and sent here for safe storage.”

  I grimaced, picturing the awful burned outline on the carpet. I didn’t know much about ghouls beyond Scooby-Doo monsters, which seemed inaccurate. I inferred from the fact that Jane and Dick seemed extremely stressed about its escape that it posed a pretty significant threat to vampires… which made sense, considering ghouls ate dead people, and we were dead people. For a brief moment, I felt sort of sorry for it, being released from isolation into what it probably saw as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and then shoved right back into its prison cell. No, wait, it was probably dead. Was that better or worse, in the great cosmic picture?

  “According to the shipping manifest?” Weston asked.

  “The Council tells us very little about what it ships to me for containment,” Jane said. “The national office tells me it
’s above my pay grade to know what I’m housing. They send in special handlers to feed and maintain the assets. I just provide electricity and space. The only reason I allow the risk to my district is that nothing has ever escaped from our containment units before. And I divert the money the Council pays us for containment to school backpack lunch and literacy programs in this end of the state. Before I came here, it covered a travel slush fund for the head representatives. Waco Marchand—the guy who damn near killed Iris? He used it to fund an annual cruise to Alaska.”

  “How far did the ghoul get?” Weston asked.

  “One level up, to a slightly less secure subterranean level, but we thought a full lockdown was appropriate because we don’t know what a ghoul is capable of,” Dick said.

  “I would say that was good judgment,” Weston admitted. “Do you have any idea how the ghoul escaped its containment unit?”

  Suddenly, there was a frantic knocking at the door. Dick got up to answer it, and Chloe came rushing through the door. “Oh, my God, Meadow, are you OK? Somebody said you were trapped in the elevator! I’m so sorry!”

  “I’m fine,” I assured her. “We’re fine.”

  “I realize I’m interrupting, Jane, but I just wanted to give you all of the information I could get as soon as I got it,” Chloe said.

  “That’s helpful, Chloe. Thank you,” Weston said, making Jane give him super side-eye.

  “It seems like there was a short in the electrical system that powers the magnetic locks in the containment units,” Chloe said. “It was only down for a minute or two, but it was enough for that thing to get loose and do a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage. We’re just lucky no one was hurt.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make sense because those were inspected recently. I signed off on the order myself,” Dick said.

  “Mm-hmm,” Weston mumbled, pulling his little notebook from his shirt pocket and making a note.

  “I suppose you have a report to write,” Jane said wearily.

  “I do,” Weston said.

  “Well, you might as well go do it now, while the details are fresh,” Jane said, waving toward the door. Weston couldn’t have been more thoroughly dismissed if Jane had tossed something out in the hallway for him to fetch.

  Back ramrod straight, Weston rose. “Chloe, I’m going to need a written statement from you as soon as possible. I need the exact locations of the rooms where the electrical system failed.”

  Weston glanced at me as he walked out, but I looked away.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Jane asked me.

  I nodded. “I think all the adrenaline is starting to drain away.”

  “The one system we’ve got working is the glands,” Dick said, nodding sagely. I raised my eyebrows, wondering if there was a double to his entendre.

  “Chloe, why did the elevator shut down? I thought it had its own generator to keep it running in case of a fire or emergency.” I got up and walked out to the elevator shaft, where Chloe had pulled the elevator car up to our level through some miracle of engineering. The other three had little choice but to follow me. The doors were propped open with these big metal wedges, and there was caution tape stretched across the opening.

  Where was that caution tape an hour ago? my sarcastic inner voice muttered.

  Chloe walked into the elevator without hesitation, so I had to assume it was safe. Or that Chloe played pretty fast and loose with her personal safety.

  “Well, in the case of an emergency ‘escape’ shutdown like we had today, it wouldn’t operate on the sublevels to keep whatever is running around those levels from accessing the upper floors. But as long as the car was above the sublevels, it should have continued to work as normal,” Chloe said, pulling open the little metal door and showing us a rat’s nest of tangled, loose wires. “But I checked the control panel just now, and it looks like someone reached in there and just started pulling stuff out.”

  “Do you smell that?” I asked, leaning close to the panel door. The starflower smell was still there, as clear as daylight… or moonlight, in my case.

  “What?” Chloe said. “That weird peppermint-and-blood smell?”

  “No, that sweet smell,” I said, bending closer to the panel. “I noticed it right after the elevator dropped. It smells like really cheap hand lotion.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” Jane said, leaning close. “But you have the super-smeller, not me.”

  Chloe shrugged. “We’ll have the elevator up and running by tomorrow, Jane. I’ll run all the checks myself to make sure it’s safe.”

  “Thanks, Chloe,” Jane said.

  “I’m glad you’re OK, Meadow,” Chloe said as Jane and I returned to solid ground.

  “I think you should go home for the night,” Dick told me. “You’re holding up great now, but the crash is going to come, and you’re going to want to be near a soft surface when it does.”

  Dick was giving me his very rare “concerned dad” face, and he wasn’t making his usual wisecracks. Oh, hell. This was serious.

  “I appreciate that, Dick, but I just have one question,” I said. They looked at me expectantly, and I added, “It’s not a ‘common area’ question.”

  “Of course,” Jane said, ushering me and Dick back into her office. “I’m assuming this is related to the ghoul? Trust me, we put that thing down, Meadow. Once it becomes an issue of public safety, we have sole discretion about that sort of thing. You don’t have to worry about it.”

  “Actually, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a few days,” I said. “This is just the first time I’ve had time alone with you two.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry, hon. You can always come to me if something’s bothering you, work-related or otherwise,” Jane said.

  “I would offer the same, but Jane’s usually better with that sort of thing,” Dick said. “So what’s your question?”

  “Why did you ask me to pull Luke Corso’s file? And why is that file red?”

  Jane’s brow wrinkled, and she tilted her head as if that was the last thing she’d expected out of my mouth. “I’d really rather not say, Meadow.”

  “Is it reasonable to assume that the people whose files were pulled were listed together because they have some sort of known grudge against you and Dick?”

  She pursed her lips for a long moment. “That would be reasonable.”

  “Is it reasonable to think that I’m considered some sort of security threat because I’m involved with someone on that list?”

  “Meadow—”

  “I know I’m asking a lot more than one question. But I’m not asking you as my boss and Council representative and case supervisor, Jane. I’m asking you as my friend.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear that you’re overreacting, Meadow, but you’re overreacting,” Dick said.

  “No, overreacting would be screaming that Luke is innocent or staging some sort of sit-in to protest the existence of this list in the first place. I just want to know where I stand. As the person who had sex with a ‘suspect’ on your list just a few weeks ago, I would really like to know if he’s a supervillain. And if my connection to Luke endangers my job or my standing with the Council as an upstanding undead citizen, I think I should know.”

  Jane laughed, as if she needed the break from all this tension. “If your job were in danger, I would have let you know a long time ago. And no, your ‘standing’ with the Council isn’t at risk. You’re one of a handful of people I trust entirely here. Meadow, you sent me a tea sampler and a handwritten letter of apology when you accidentally stuck a pad of Post-its in your purse—after you returned the Post-its!”

  I nodded, but internally, I reminded myself that the Meadow who had made that over-the-top honest gesture was pre–“elevator sleeping with the enemy” Meadow. And I wasn’t tempted to breathe a word of the elevator sex. So I was clearly a less stellar person and employee than I had been all those months ago.

  “Do you think that Luke could
be the one sabotaging the Council office? First the virus and now this. It’s really messing things up for you during Weston’s inspection.”

  “Well, before today, I would have said it’s crazy to suspect that someone is systematically sabotaging the Council office. I would have said the virus was a one-off, and that we had considered a number of people as potential suspects. But obviously, it’s time to consider the possibility. I wouldn’t say Luke is the only person we suspect. Does that help?”

  “Is this because he wasn’t given the security director job two years ago?” I asked.

  Dick patted my shoulder. “Some of Luke’s online activity recently pinged Gigi’s radar. A while back, he posted some stuff on an Internet forum complaining that Jane and I didn’t know what the hell we were doing and we would eventually regret not hiring him.”

  “But you know Luke! You organized my birthday with him!”

  Jane shook her head. “No, he happened to come by the shop on the night we were getting ready for your birthday. And we invited him along since we know you see each other on occasion. He seemed fine that night, though—no weird awkwardness—so we’re probably wrong. But you can’t complain about us putting him on the list.”

  “I’m not complaining,” I assured her. “I just started wondering what was going on when his file got requested, and I started pulling away from him, and he noticed.”

  “You didn’t say anything to him about him being included on the suspect list, did you?” Jane asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “It was killing me not to say anything, which was part of the reason I pulled away. Which led to us fighting, which led to us probably not seeing each other for a while. I’m not exactly the Council’s biggest fan, but I’m not disloyal to you two.”

  She reached out and squeezed my arm gently. “I know that, Meadow. I’m sorry. It’s just been… a day. Did you know that ghouls explode into flame and guts when you shoot them with silver-coated bullets? Because I didn’t.”