Page 59 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
He watched the shifts in Vincent’s expression, the confusion and suspicion, but beneath that was something a little bit hungry.
Wes felt like shit to prey on it. He had always been the predator in their relationship. At least now he was being open about it. “The mortgage is entirely paid off, so you’d just have to deal with the property tax and the insurance. If you get a roommate or two, you shouldn’t even need much of a job. And I’ll even sign it over to you right now, in my own blood if I have to, so if we get to Vitalis-Barron and you want to back out, it’s still yours.”
“But you…” Vincent looked back through the woods like he could see the house from there. “Where would you go?”
Of course that would be Vincent’s first thought—not of himself, but of how his gain might hurt someone else. Wesley didn’t know if his heart could handle much more of this feeling: the painful mix of how very much he loved this overly compassionate vampire and how much he regretted taking advantage of that compassion. He tried not to let that all show as he shrugged. “I’m an adult with a college degree. I can get a job like everyone else and rent an apartment or something. I’m not a vampire.”
Vincent grimaced. He rubbed at his wrists, his tight brow casting odd shadows in the beam of the flashlight. Facedown in the dirt, Babcock’s phone lit up. Natalie had to be coming back any minute now. Wesley shifted between the soles of his feet, glancing toward the cemetery.
“Please, Vinny. I really need this. I don’t have any other options.”
With such ragged caution that it hurt Wes to watch, Vincent drew to his feet. He wrapped his arms over his chest, squinting at Wesley. “I risk my life for one night, we fuck Vitalis-Barron over, and I get the house?”
“One night, Vitalis-Barron gets fucked, and you get the house. Unless it looks too risky, then I pull you out immediately and you still get the house.” Vincent would just have to trust that Wes would follow through.
The vampire ran his fingers over the welts along his throat, and his gaze went to Babcock’s cooling body. He swallowed. “Deal.”
“Deal.” Wesley offered up his hand.
They shook.
22
VINCENT
Getting away from Babcock’s horriblesilver stick had revived Vincent’s speed and agility, and he’d even stopped trembling about ten minutes after they left the woods, but his anxiety—that had to be what it was, since the sun-pain never returned—was wearing off into an ugly nausea that felt only a tiny bit better. At least his brain seemed to function at almost normal capacity, so long as he didn’t think too hard about Wesley Smith Garcia: betrayer, manipulator, and violent protector.
“And that vampire you’ve hurt? That’s someone I love.”
He kept replaying Wes’s words like they might change.
They could have been another manipulation, a lie in a long string of half-truths and avoidances. But Wes had fought Babcock for Vincent when he could have offered to shake the man’s hand instead and slide into the research lab on his coattails. The only thing that had stood between Wesley and the goal he’d been working so hard for was Vincent’s suffering. Wes hadn’t been willing to permit that. It wasn’t enough, at least not yet. But it was something.
The offer of the house was something, too.
Vincent stood in the front hall space, picking out each little piece of the room that had come from Wesley’s mother: the family photos of a smiling Mexican woman with a beaming boy half covered in mud, the pin fornurse of the monthon the minivan’s lanyard that dangled from the garage doorknob, the little cherub-like action figures of her favorite animated characters lining the mantel beside Wesley’s video game collectibles, the old rosary she’d saved from a religion that must have been important to her once. He found her, too, in the wear on the wood flooring, in a chip in the banister, and in a loose, feminine handwriting that marked the adventure map on the back of the couch. She had turned this place into a home for her and her son. And now Wesley was giving it away.
To Vincent. To the vampire he’d nearly handed over to a company he knew was running deadly experiments on them. But then he hadn’t. And that also meant something.
If only for the first time since they’d met, Wesley stayed true to word, pulling his own house key off its chain and offering it to Vincent. There were no signatures involved, much less ones with blood. Vincent was grateful for that. If he had to smell Wesley’s blood while still feeling his current range of conflicting emotions towards the man, he thought he might vomit. While simply possessing a key wouldn’t hold up in any court, particularly when it was a vampire trying to argue for ownership, the sentiment still counted.
They climbed into the minivan in a silence broken only by the snap of their seatbelts, then the rumble of the engine. As they sat at a turn, the blinker’s ritual click-click boring into Vincent’s skull, something finally occurred to him that he should have asked back when they were still in the woods frantically covering Babcock’s body with a tangle of dead brush.
“You have a plan, right?” He felt a little sicker with each word. “You know where Vitalis-Barron is keeping this information? And you have some kind of exit strategy, for both of us?”
“Si—yes! Kind of.” Wesley’s hands went tighter around the wheel. “I know where the front entrance is, and the back exit, and that the parking lot is really empty at night so there can’t be that many staff at this hour. And I have Babcock’s gun now.”
“Oh my god.” Vincent pressed his palms to his cheeks, focusing on the cold of them. “We’re going to die. I’m going to die, and you’re going to prison.”
“You’re not going to die.” There was an edge to Wesley’s voice that hadn’t been there a moment before. It cracked as he continued. “But I might be going to prison anyway, since I kind of killed Matthew Babcock. Though technically, I think it was whatever he fell on, not me. It looked like there was some blood on the dirt under his head.”
“A lot of blood,” Vincent said, then cringed. “I could smell it.”
“Right. So not entirely my fault. I’m a man-slaughterer, not a murderer.”
“Which is why you tossed the murder weapon into the creek?”
“Man-slaughterer weapon.”
