Page 20 of Cuddling Sucks in Coffins
Oh shit. This couldn’t be happening.
Detective Appelt left, and another officer strolled in, a pair of handcuffs dangling from his finger.
I needed a lawyer. I also needed to let my three vampires know what had happened.
The officer led me out in cuffs, his hand squeezing my elbow and helping to keep me upright. I felt positively sick at not being able to do my slayer duty. The police station swam in front of me, a wall of offices on my left and rows of cubicles stretching to my right. As the officer led me toward an elevator, I pushed past the extreme cramping, fiery feet, and the pain in my bladder and focused on the individual bites all over my body until they tingled.
“Help,” I whispered.
Hopefully they heard me, tracked me, and then figured out what had happened.
The officer stared straight ahead, even as another female one came toward us. She skipped her gaze right over me and then stuck it to the man at my side. Curiosity sparked across her face, and then she frowned.
Goose bumps rolled up from my cuffed wrists behind my back. I side-eyed him, but all looked normal, or as normal as this situation warranted. But it didn’tfeelnormal, and I wasn’t just talking about being torn from my slayer duties. I had to get out of here. And fast. But it wasn’t as if I could just start running. The place was swarming with badges.
The officer stopped in front of an elevator with dull, dented doors and pushed the down button.
The cold metal handcuffs bit into my skin and bones painfully. I pulled and wriggled so they wouldn’t cut off my circulation and then happened to glance left. Right into the eyes of Paul.
He stared back from a black and white photo of him pinned to a bulletin board with the word Missing over it. My heartbeat stalled. Scraggly blond hair, watery blue eyes. That was him, all right, or at least the body he’d stolen. I hated to imagine what he might look like without wearing a human. Like a nightmare, probably. Likemynightmare.
My eyelids drooped as I stared at him, and I jerked as if I really had been dreaming. I blinked hard at his picture. Had I just fallen asleep?
A voice echoed behind us, calling again and again, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It sounded as though I had permanent wads of cotton in my ears, but...that couldn’t be right.
“Can you...” I swallowed, my tongue feeling like it had swollen three sizes. “Can you loosen these...?” What were they called again? Handholders. Handfucks. What? A giggle bubbled out from my mouth.
The elevator door opened in slow motion, and the officer dragged me inside. I slumped to the back wall, trying to keep my eyes open. The officer produced a black key with a skull at the top and plugged it into a slot at the bottom of the rows of buttons, his movements mechanical and detached.
Beyond him, the woman officer we’d passed had shot back toward us and was almost inside the elevator with us. “Who are you? What is your badge number?”
The male officer blocked her in the elevator doorway, reared back his fist, and punched her square in the jaw.
That was highly irregular. Another giggle burst out of me while deep, deep down I was screaming. I folded myself into a corner, as far away from this stranger as I could get while the elevator doors sealed us in. But there was nothing I could do other than laugh about it. I was trapped inside my own body, only a witness to what was happening around me.
A side effect of not slaying when I should be, maybe. Or something much, much worse.
Once the elevator stopped its descent, the officer led me out, guided me down a row of barred cells, and stopped in front of one on the end. He released my hand thingies, then shoved me roughly into the cell. The loud click of the lock penetrated my mind fog, as did a beautiful sight within the cell.
“Oh, look. A toilet,” I muttered.
And then I slumped to the floor, out cold.
