Page 46 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
“The smell of him,” Davin said, curling his nose at the mere memory of it. “Like cat piss, rotten eggs, and heavy duty window cleaner.”
Meth, I thought absently. Interesting.
Still, I could never ask someone to put up with a stink like that all the time, especially not with a vampire’s sensitive nose.
“On the other hand,” he said, getting a calculated look on his face. “C’mere.”
Without hesitation, I followed him out of the back room and into the front, right to the giant plate glass window...a window which was now emblazoned with our names. Or rather, my name and his sort-of-designation? It read “Knight & Daywalker” in huge white letters, along with a cute little purple and white logo of the sun and moon in a little circle.
Or, well, it would have read like that if I’d been outside. It was backward from my viewpoint inside the building.
I turned to Davin, because part of me wanted to ask him what my fucking life was turning into, and when my mother had sent yet more stuff and a window sign—or a person who put letters on windows, whatever.
Instead, I asked, “If you don’t want to talk about eating, why do you call yourself daywalker?”
That made him pause, and he looked at me a moment. Instead of giving me an answer, though, he asked, “How the feck does your brain work?”
It was a fair question, all things considered. I shrugged. “Messy?”
He shook his head, bemused or disgusted, as most people ended up with me, and gave a little tap to the glass where it said Daywalker. “It pisses them off, yeah? They all hate me, but I have something they don’t. I can go out in the daylight. They call me killer, and abomination, and other rude shite, and I call myself something that makes them seethe even more.”
And that? That somehow made Davin a dozen times hotter than he’d been before. He was literally calling himself Daywalkerjust to piss off other vampires because they’d been assholes to him.
I fucking loved a petty king.
“And besides,” he added. “Knight and Byrne sounds silly.” Before I could open my mouth to say I’d thought exactly the same thing, or offer up something even sillier, he motioned back to the window. “Ignore the guy, and look over there.”
I looked where Davin was pointing, and—okay, thatwasodd.
We were in Southern California, and it was a nice spring morning. The two people sitting on the bench across the walkway from the shop, though, were dressed for the dead of winter. Or maybe if they’d been anywhere other than SoCal, they were dressed appropriately for the season.
The woman, with an elaborate hair up-do of braids wrapped around her head that fell into long golden curls like a fairy tale princess, wore a long-sleeved, full length dress in a pale blush pink that matched the color of her cheeks. Her lips were pursed, and she was looking up at her companion, not speaking, but clearly from her expression, disagreeing with him.
The guy, well...he was a straight up hottie. Okay, maybe not as hot as Grady behind them on the beach, wearing nothing but trunks, his locs pulled up in a loose tail atop his head, looking like the personification of the beach he loved. But this guy was somehow also hot, while being Grady’s opposite.
He was strictly button-up, wearing what looked like half a suit, with long navy pants and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck only, a blue patterned tie hanging untied around his neck. His hair was the same burnished gold as his companion, glinting in the sun, and I could tell from this distance that both their eyes were the same sky-blue.
Frankly, they were both beautiful.
“Swear to god, everyone in this damned country is ridiculously attractive,” Davin muttered next to me, like he’dread my mind. Then he turned to give me a sharp look. “Is there something in the water? Or maybe they’re filming a movie?”
“Usually,” I agreed with the latter comment about filming, since it was true. “But for the water, I think it’s mostly just water with a little fluoride. Which I suppose helps with attractiveness, since it’s why most of us still have our teeth. So I guess there is something in the water. Huh. Weird.”
I fully expected Davin to be rolling his eyes at me, but instead, he was watching me with the same expression as before. Like I was a fascinating lab rat, maybe. “That is actually how you function. Every time.”
“No idea what you’re talking about. So why am I looking at the hot gold twins?”
That got his attention back to the subject at hand, and boy was that a weird feeling. I was never the guy who got the conversation back on track. “They are gold, aren’t they? And definitely related.”
“For sure,” I agreed. “Unless it’s like that whole thing where people look like their dogs, only with humans instead. Or maybe it’s like?—”
“They’ve been there almost since you left,” Davin interrupted my random associations to drag the conversation back on track. There we were. Someone else doing that part of the conversation, and all was right in the world again. “They almost came in for a moment, and she definitely wants to. But every time she tries, he puts a hand on her shoulder and stops her. I noticed them because when that skeevy man came in, the smell of their argument wafted in, and it’s a lot. Emotions high, even if I don’t know exactly what they are at first sniff.”
Interesting. So much information. Again, confirmed, Davin couldn’t easily parse feelings by scent. He had an excellent sense of smell, though, and knew the scent existed, even if he didn’t know what it meant.
But back on the subject he wanted me to care about, the hotties. They were siblings, I was suddenly sure. They were bent too close together, clearly in deep conversation, too emotional with each other, to be much else. And coming into the shop or not was somehow important to them.
“Should we wait?” Davin asked.
