Page 101 of Road Trip with a Vampire
“No idea,” Reggie said, laughing again. “But I guess it is. The funniest prank you and I ever played together, coming back to bite you in the keister after all these years.”
Ithadbeen a magnificent prank. How could I have forgotten? “How did we even come up with the idea in the first place?”
“It was at that party in 1981,” he replied. “Remember? You’d had one too many sloe gin fizzes, and some random vampire we never saw again dared you to get a safe. We never figured out why.” I could almost hear him smiling. “The rest we came up with ourselves.”
It was coming back to me now, the absurdity of this entire situation breaking through the cloud of anxious dread that had gripped me since finding out the truth about Peter. Laughter bubbled up inside me, hysterical and bright.
Back then I’d never been able to say no to a dare, no matter how peculiar it was. So when this vampire had dared me to do it, I’d gotten a safe at a downtown Chicago bank the next day. Reggie and I had placed a whoopee cushion inside it. Then, I’d warded it to within an inch of its life so whoever tried to open itwould get the bazooks zapped out of them. And then the two of us worked together to create a legend surrounding it.
At first we’d told people—after swearing them to secrecy, of course—that the box contained a tiny bottle of the elixir of life. Whatever that was. Later, in a winking homage to the now late, great Douglas Adams, we’d told people the safe contained the answers to life, the universe, and everything. The vampires we’d run with back then weren’t much into reading, so no one had realized we’d lifted that directly from a series of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
My notoriety at the time had been such that the rumors took on wings and flew far and wide, evolving over time without much effort on my part. What stayed consistent in all versions of the legends that got back to us, though, was that the safe’s contents would be life-changing to whoever managed to get inside.
Of course, Reggie and I had had a lot of irons in a lot of fires back then. After about eighteen months, we’d grown bored of the stories that filtered back to us of people getting zapped by my wards. After another few years, the vampiric community also seemed to have moved on.
I hadn’t thought about any of this in decades until now.
“Unreal,” I said, still laughing. My sides would be in serious pain later, but gods, I needed this release. “In the end, I guess the last joke was on me.”
“Fitting,” Reggie said, still chuckling. Then he said in a more subdued tone, “What are you going to do now?”
That sobered me. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I mean, I should figure out a way to take down those idiots for good.”
“Need help with that?”
“No,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.” Hopefully, with JohnRichardson out of the way, the rest of The Collective would scatter. If not, I’d come up with a plan to handle them on my own once I got my bearings. As grateful as I was for Reggie’s offer, all he could really do was tell jokes, drink blood, and fly. Those traits were a lot of fun at parties but rarely came in handy in a fight against other vampires. I wouldn’t put him in any additional danger.
“Just when you think you can trust somebody you meet at a scrapbooking convention,” Reggie said wistfully. “You know, itdidseem odd how insistent Petey was on visiting California. But I thought his amnesia story was legit. I honestly believed he needed help.” A long pause. “I still might, actually.”
My heart twisted at Reggie’s words. I’d believed Peter’s story, as well.
Maybe part of me still did.
“He was incredibly convincing,” I admitted.
“I’m just wondering,” Reggie continued. “If Petey’s goal was to off you, why bother dragging you across the country first?”
“He was only being paid to crack mylegendarysafe,” I said, making air quotes around the wordlegendary. “The Collective was too afraid of me to risk taking me on directly until they got me outnumbered in that warehouse.”
“Interesting,” Reggie mused. “Did Petey ever ask you any questions about your safe?”
That brought me up short. “No,” I said. “Never.” In fact, he hadn’t even brought it up once.
“Hmm,” Reggie said. “Listen, if it had been me, and I was traveling with someone I was only pretending to like,andweeks had gone by with no clues about her safe, I’d have skipped ahead to killing her after that singing-chicken restaurant and just been done with it.”
I snorted. “Why would you wait that long?” I asked. “It took us a full day to get there.”
“Because that place sounds awesome,” Reggie said. “I’d never heard of it before Peter mentioned it in Chicago, but I’m determined to see it at least once before I die.”
I laughed. I could always rely on Reg to defuse a stressful situation with his unique brand of ridiculousness.
“Itwasmemorable,” I conceded.
“I bet.” He sighed. “I wonder if can convince Amelia to go there on our honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “You’re getting married?”
“We’ve been talking about it,” he admitted. “I suppose I’m putting the cart before the horse, planning our honeymoon.”
