Page 76 of Flock This

“You think anyone will make you a tombstone?”

“Talk about kicking a girl when she’s down. Come on, help me at least a little. I don’t know who or what you are, no one even believes me that you’re real, but obviously you’re something powerful. So just this one, help me because I helped you.”

He let out a soft laugh, as though amused by my antics. “Okay. Call it a gift for entertaining me all these years. You were found over William’s body by someone walking in, right?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, thrown as ever that he knew that.

“The thing is, what were the odds that someone would walk in at that exact time?”

It brought up something that had nagged at me. Why had I been just that unlucky?

“So she was in on the setup?”

“Maybe,” the man said. “Maybe she was just a tool that someone else used. Either way, she is a piece that you have yet to look into.”

I pressed my lips together, trying to work out a full plan. Asking around would give me her name, then I could look in the book I’d gotten from the vampires to get more information. A little stalking might just tell me whatever else I needed to know.

The man chuckled, then flicked the stick to the candy still pressed between my lips. “You’ll do what you have to do, I’m sure. And if there was anyone who could get out of this…it’d be you.”

I wanted to respond, to thank him, but instead I found myself bolting upright in bed. Waking up from these little meetings always sucked, because I didn’t feel as though I slept.

“Are you okay?” Kelvin asked, causing me to twist to find myself in his bed, the sun just starting to rise outside, him seated in a chair near the window.

Right, I’d fallen asleep here. Or rather, I’d fallen asleep on the balcony and he must have brought me inside.

I nodded, breathing hard, wishing I’d had just a little more time to ask that man a few more questions. It was rare that he actually provided me useful information, and it made it hard for me to just let it go.

“What’s that?” He came closer and tapped his finger against something pressed between my lips. It took a moment for me to work out what it was.

A sucker.

The same one that man had given me.

Which meant that no matter how dream-like that interaction had seemed, it clearly was more than that.

Just what the hell had turned me into this? And was he really on my side at all?

Chapter Nineteen

As it turned out, Vampires lived far more boring lives than I would have figured.

I wasn’t sure why I’d expected different, but I really had. I’d thought that they spent their days in debauchery and luxuries unknown to us normal folks. I saw them getting fanned all day and fed grapes—or blood, whatever—by thralls and never lifting an actual finger. I pictured bloody orgies and kinks I never wanted to know about.

Which was why it was so fucking weird to watch this vampire at the post office.

Not even a good post office, like the private mailboxes for the rich and famous so they didn’t have to deal with us plebs. Instead, this woman went into the regular postal service at one in the morning, when the flickering fluorescent lights inside made everyone look ten years older and like they hadn’t slept in years.

This vampire looked like she had that day, when she’d walked in on me in William’s room. She dressed like most twenty-year-olds, even if I was sure she was quite a bit older than that.

Ursula Pauline. With a name like that, she had to be at least a century old. I couldn’t picture anyone naming their kid Ursula in the past hundred years.

I stayed outside the post office, since not enough people entered at this hour for me to hide. I wore a black hoodie, my hair covered, in a car I’d again borrowed from Kelvin, watching from the parking lot.

So far, Ursula had headed to a twenty-four-hour supermarket for pantyhose—another sign she wasn’t young—and wine, then to the post office to check for mail in a box. All in all, I found her far more boring than I’d hoped for.

However, all that mattered was following her until I found something. She’d arrived at that room at the exact wrong time. Sure, I had bad luck, but I didn’t think it was possible to be that bad. If she’d shown up two minutes sooner or two minutes later, everything would have gone down differently.

Sooner and I wouldn’t have gotten there yet—maybe William would have even been less dead—and later I’d have left already. Basically? The odds of her getting there exactly then screamed her being in on it.

---