Page 81 of Road Trip with a Vampire
“Yes.”
Gods, I wanted this. Him.
In the end, I was the one who led him out of the alley by the hand. But not before he obliged me by standing up on that barstool.
I supposed we both won.
Eighteen
Five weeks earlier
Out of pure boredom andfrustration, Peter went online and researched the person whose safe he’d spent the better part of two weeks trying unsuccessfully to crack.
He rarely researched his marks if he wasn’t being paid for a hit job. But this was an unusual situation. The internet frequently baffled him, but it was unparalleled when it came to providing leads.
After only thirty minutes of online sleuthing Peter had learned two critical things. First, the safe’s owner went by a different name than what Peter’s employers had given him. Second, she hadn’t lived in Chicago in a decade.
He’d suspected his employers were incompetent, but this was next level.
Peter didn’t know why a woman who ran a yoga studio in Northern California would have a safe in Chicago. He stopped caring, though, after he saw her picture on the studio’s website.
She was an exceptionally striking woman, with thick, curlyhair that fell to just below her shoulders and the sort of knowing hazel eyes that could see straight through you. In a different lifetime, he might have gone to great lengths to get the attention of a woman like this.
Under different circumstances, she might have been exactly his type.
Now, though…
Now he was only researching both her given name and her pseudonym, as well as the town where she lived, in case it yielded clues.
It had nothing whatsoever to do with how soft this woman’s hair looked or how beautifully kissable her lips were.
When he was on a job, Peter was above such things.
And should his employers ever find his search history, that was the story he’d be sticking to.
The house we pulled upto was a well-maintained mid-century one-story home, with neatly trimmed hedges in front and planter boxes beneath all the windows. Nothing grew in them—but then, it was autumn in Michigan, one of the coldest places in the country. Despite it still being several weeks before winter officially began, the temperature was well below freezing.
It was easy enough to imagine this yard and those planter boxes the way they likely looked in the summertime. They’d be filled with bright multicolored annuals striving for the sun. I’d grown flowers like those once. But that had been many years and several human lifetimes ago.
As I pondered the house’s neat, freshly painted black shutters,Peter made his way from the car to where I stood, about ten feet away from the front door. His hands were stuffed deep in the pockets of his coat, his face giving away none of what he was thinking.
We’d driven well into the night to get to South Harbor. I’d proposed stopping along the way, but Peter had been far too excited to finally see something he remembered to take a real break. He’d insisted he could drive if I needed rest, and he’d made good on that.
As glad as I was to accommodate him, I needed to conduct another magical experiment soon. Driving through the night without stopping for longer than it took to refuel the car meant my blood was roiling in my veins and my hands were beginning to shake for reasons that had nothing to do with the below-freezing temperatures.
After we saw this house, I’d need to find a way to do a spell or risk more significant discomfort.
“What do you remember?” I asked Peter, threading my arm through his. It was past two in the morning, so I kept my voice low. There were two cars parked in the driveway; the last thing we wanted was to wake whoever now lived here and alert them to our lurking presence.
Peter closed his eyes and breathed deeply, as though by gathering the essence of this place into his lungs, he might regain something vital he had lost.
“My name,” he said. He indicated the mailbox at the end of the driveway. “Peter Elliottwas written on that mailbox in white stenciled letters.”
He slowly approached the house, tucking me closer to his side as he walked.Grizelda Watson, protective talisman, I thought.That was a new one for me. A kitschyWelcomemat depicting autumn vegetables lay on the ground in front of the door. Though I suspected Peter and I would be anything but welcome here.
“I built this,” Peter said, voice reverent. He ran a hand along the house’s limestone base the way one might caress something precious and long thought lost. “Or rather, I designed it. I can remember the plans for this house spread out over a large wooden table. I remember working on them every night.”
As he said the words, I could almost picture it. Peter, dressed in clothes from the era in which this house was built, poring over designs with the same fastidiousness he brought to everything he did. His large hand clasped around a pencil, drawing neat, careful lines on the page. He wouldn’t tolerate any mistakes, would not be satisfied until everything was drawn exactly as he wanted it to be.
