Page 9 of Hot for Slayer (Scared Sexy Collection #1)

T he following morning I realize that, to my utmost shock, Lazlo will need to be fed once more. And in five hours—perhaps even fewer, considering his size—we’ll be here all over again. Because his kind needs food multiple times a day.

Absurd.

About half an hour before sunrise, I disentangle myself from him and sneak out to the corner bodega.

I buy eggs, bacon, vegetables, pasta, fruit, and something called Pop-Tarts that must have been invented while I was blinking.

I stroll back home, baffled that human society has managed to evolve past the hunter-gatherer stage, given the farcical amount of time they dedicate to eating.

Meanwhile, I think with a self-satisfied pat on my own back, I last drank two weeks ago—a guy who worked as a fixer for the Nestlé executive board—and barring unforeseen circumstances, I won’t need to be topped off for three or four more.

Although, something within me asks, wouldn’t a sip of Lazlo be good? Delectable. Thick and rich and unlike anything you’ve ever tasted. It would sit heavy in your belly, power your nerve endings, and you’d finally feel so warm that—

I mentally slap the idiotic voice inside my head, grateful for the distraction when someone asks, “Trick or treat?”

I glance down, and down , to find an adorable little girl staring up at me.

She’s wearing a black cape and plastic fangs, pearl white against her dark skin.

Someone drew a shiny, remarkably realistic trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.

Next to her, a blond boy holds something that closely resembles a wooden stake.

“I’m so sorry,” one of the adult women standing behind them says. “Hey, you two. We’re on our way to school. And trick-or-treating is not for the middle of a busy street—”

“I don’t mind,” I say with a smile, crouching down to the children’s height. “I like your costumes,” I tell them.

“Thank you,” the girl says solemnly. “I’m going to be a vampire when I grow up.”

“And I’m going to be a vampire hunter,” says the boy. “And we’re going to get married.”

I try not to choke on my tongue. “Good luck with that,” I mutter, because they’re definitely going to need it.

I dig the box of Frosted S’mores Pop-Tarts out of my “Save the Bees” reusable shopping bag and split the contents evenly between their satchels.

Judging from the hug they exchange, the pastries must be a hit.

Sorry, Lazlo. But they never pledged to maul me and eradicate my people, so they deserved the tarts that pop more than you do.

Back upstairs, I find him awake, standing in the small kitchen. “You went out early,” he says, like it’s totally normal for him to wait for me shirtless and freshly showered. “You’re a morning person.”

Ha. “Yeah. Sure.”

“You are well rested.”

“Right.” I’m starting to find it more amusing than irritating, the way he states things about me instead of asking questions, and that worries me a bit.

Only slightly less than the fact that he has already drawn and latched together all the blackout curtains, despite sunrise being five minutes away.

“How did you know—”

“You are allergic to the sun,” he simply says, like it’s an explanation, and then gets up to take the bag from me and begins putting away the groceries.

He’s been here for twelve hours, and we somehow have a routine.

I need to get him out of here stat.

“You hungry?” I ask as he lines boxes of pasta in the empty cupboard.

“Very.”

“I’ll make some eggs, then. It might, um, take me a while. Maybe you can have this in the meantime?” I throw an apple in his direction—which turns out to be a mistake when, in the blink of an eye, Lazlo grabs a knife from the wooden block and uses it to slash the fruit into four pieces.

While it’s still in the air .

The chunks hit the ground with dull thuds, and we stare at them for a long stretch of silence.

Then I clear my throat. “I didn’t know that an apple murdered your family.”

“I ... did not mean to do that.” He scratches the back of his neck.

“Right. No, I know. You cut the apple into four identical pieces by accident.”

“It was a reflex.” He twirls the knife in his fingers with a dexterity that would leave me less unsettled if I didn’t know he developed it to kill me , specifically. “But.”

“But?”

He sheathes the blade inside the wooden block. “If I asked you why I’m so good with a knife, would you tell me that it’s because of my pest control background?”

I force myself to swallow. There is something painfully heavy about lying to someone who knows that he’s not being told the truth, but ... what alternative do I have? “I can’t imagine any other reason.”

This time, his sigh is barely perceptible, but his lips are thin. “Then I won’t ask, Ethel.”

He crouches to pick up the apple, and I get to work on his eggs, wondering when I got so bad at gaslighting people.

“I didn’t know those eggs murdered your family,” he tells me after I smash the third shell against the edge of a bowl.

The last time I made an omelet, I didn’t have vampiric strength, and adjusting is taking a minute, but— “I’ve got it now, I’ve got it,” I protest, but before I can redeem my kitchen skills, Lazlo is standing behind me, gently prying the eggs from my fingers, taking over.

His arms bracket me on each side, and his chin brushes the crown of my head as he works with a cursory, expert grace that I find equally pleasing and irritating.

I should stiffen and push him away, but my body has already gotten used to being surrounded by his.

The strength. The warmth. The sensation of being part of something.

I pretend not to notice the way his lips press against the back of my head before he moves to the stove to scramble a number of eggs that could feed a family of five for two weeks.

“I had a dream,” he tells me once we’re sitting at the table. For this meal, my cover story is: Not a breakfast person . Lazlo didn’t bother reacting, as though he knows that every single thing coming out of my mouth is likely a lie.

“What kind of dream?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was a memory. You were there, though.”

My stomach sinks. “Were you chopping me into four pieces with a kitchen knife?”

“We were dancing.”

I slump, relieved. “Dancing ... in a club?”

He shoots me a dirty look like he knows what a club is and wouldn’t be caught dead inside one. “More formal than that.” He chews some more. “I liked your dress.” A smile starts. Turns into a private thing—between Lazlo and his own thoughts. “A lot.”

“We’ve never danced together, so I don’t think it was a memory,” I say, unsure whether to be embarrassed or relieved or flattered. “Anyway, I assume you are eager to return to your own home, so—”

“No,” he says, final, happy. At ease.

By all means, Lazlo, do overstay your welcome, I think. There’s no real heat in it, though. Which is stupid. The more he sticks around, the better he’ll know me, and the easier it’ll be to track me down once he regains his memories.

I grit my teeth and plop myself down on the couch, snatching the first sudoku magazine I come across. This is not harmless . Once he remembers who he is, I’m going to have to move, and—

The cushion dips as Lazlo makes himself comfortable next to me, still half undressed.

The mask tattoo under his heart shifts with every little movement, daring me to remember where I’ve seen it before.

Then he grabs one of my puzzle magazines and a pencil, and begins filling in a sudoku grid with impressive speed.

I blink. Then ask, pathetically excited: “You like sudoku?”

“What?”

“The square thing you’re doing.” I lean closer. “I didn’t think you—” I snap my mouth shut. Reopen it. “Did you just write down random numbers?”

“And I do not see what you enjoy about it.”

“About what?”

“Coming up with rows of numbers. It’s poor entertainment.”

“No. No, there is an actual ... No. ” I spend the next two hours teaching a vampire slayer who was created to wipe out my bloodline how to correctly fill in a sudoku grid. He’s not at all bad at it, and I hate to acknowledge it.

“So, this is what we do during the day,” he says after a while.

“ We? ” I frown. “ We don’t usually spend our days together.”

He smiles like I didn’t even speak.

“I’m serious. We rarely ...” I drift off, because he’s taking a strand of my hair between his fingers and rubbing it gently, watching the flow of light orange across his own pale skin. His mouth murmurs a few words in another language—one that I speak, but I pretend not to, because this is not—

It shouldn’t—

What is even—

It’s casual, the way he tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. His touch is at once new and familiar, scorching and gentle. “Strawberry blond,” he says to himself. Then asks me, “We rarely what?”

Vampires don’t blush. We simply don’t have enough blood for it. I thank whoever cursed us for that small grace, glance away, and mumble, “Nothing.”

The rest of the day is ...

I wish I could say that it’s terrible. That I consider walking into the sun just to escape Lazlo’s suffocating presence. But that’s not the way it goes.

He is surprisingly restful to be around, even when he teases me for holding a spoon like it’s an object of alien provenance, even when I sneak back up from the basement with my dried laundry, and he watches me fold my lingerie with a smile that says: I know who you wear it for.

In the afternoon, he collects all his weapons and begins to clean them.

“Have you—”

“No, I have not remembered,” he says. “But I feel an itch.”

“An itch,” I repeat. But I watch him polish and oil, trying not to jolt at every sound of clanking metal.

My understanding is that the H?llsing Guild doesn’t micromanage, and that every slayer is allowed their weapon of choice.

Or five. Given that silver, wooden stakes through the heart, or particularly garlicky Olive Garden dishes have no effect on us, and that only the sun can truly kill us, intelligent slayers (to my constant despair, Lazlo is one of them) tend to prioritize tools that will incapacitate us.

Steel bolas trip and bind us, while blades can cut off limbs and make it difficult to run away.

Since Lazlo has done both things to me, multiple times , I cannot help but startle when he asks, mid-sharpen:

“What do I do, Ethel?”

I blink. Force myself to calm down. “I told you, you—”

“Ethel.” He holds my gaze, still whetting his dagger with expert strokes. “What do I really do?”

I bite my lower lip. I’m going to have to lie to him again. When, exactly, did that begin to feel so abominable? “You’re right. I wasn’t truthful. The reason we know each other is ...”

He stares, patient.

“You’re a CPA, Lazlo. You do my taxes.”

He sighs. Shakes his head, but his mouth twitches. “I remember why we were in that building now.”

“You do?”

“Hm. To go over your itemized deductions.”

“Precisely.”

He looks at me, amused. I look at him in pretty much the same way. And when I can no longer stand the tension of it, I ask him, “Do you, um, maybe wanna play cards?”

He immediately puts the blade away, like sharing an activity with me is the only thing he has ever desired, and it’s ...

Nice, kind of. Shared. Pleasant. Not really what I usually do during the day, which is ... maybe not lonely, but definitely on my own.

This is different. Playing cards with Lazlo. Watching him realize that “Clearly we are both very competitive people.” Laughing.

I can make my own meaning. I can find my own joy. But there is a different kind of happiness in this companionship. A sense of something coming. Like the breeze picking up before a storm.

It’s possible that I am, like the abbess said, just a fanciful, too-distractible girl. But for the first time in nearly one and a half millennia, I forget to keep track of time, and I don’t feel the need to run outside the exact moment the sun has set.