Page 41 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Twenty

Three weeks earlier

Peter stood in front of the safe that had stymied him for weeks, frowning at the slip of paper in his hands.

He didn’t think someone as clever as Zelda would ward her safe with something that could be cracked with the absurd solution his employers had given him.

Not that he knew Zelda, of course. All he knew about her he’d learned from visits to her studio’s website, the minutes from last February’s Redwoodsville, California, chamber of commerce meeting where she’d spoken passionately about a proposed bus route, and his failed attempts at cracking her safe.

He thought he was likely right in his assessment of her intelligence, though.

He’d built a career out of his educated guesses usually being correct.

Her sharp, shrewd eyes seemed like they saw everything.

(Her eyes were lovely as well, bright hazel and flecked with green, though he told himself that had nothing to do with it.) Besides—anyone who could successfully keep him out of something he wanted to bust into had to be uncommonly bright.

When he’d asked his employers where they’d gotten this spell, they’d said something about a Redditor called smokedup_69420 who’d insisted this counterspell could counterspell anything.

And when Peter had voiced his doubts over whether smokedup_69420 had the faintest fucking idea how to counterspell magic that was this strong, John and his egregious red plaid suit had both glared at him and demanded he try it anyway.

Given that Peter was no closer to cracking the safe than he’d been weeks ago, he’d had no ready reply to that.

If this worked—though Peter seriously doubted it would—then he could finally go home. One thing to look forward to, anyway.

Peter read the scrap of paper again before clearing his throat. Here went nothing.

“Lalalala kalalalalala,” he said in the most serious voice he could muster, cringing at himself.

For long moments, nothing happened.

Just as he was about to call his employer to let him know they were back at square one again, an explosion from the still-sealed safe sent him flying across the room.

A bright burst of pain exploded behind his eyelids when his head cracked against the cold tile floor.

And then…

Darkness.

I had a moment of disorientation when I opened my eyes and didn’t recognize my surroundings.

I lay in a comfortable but unfamiliar bed. It was dark as pitch outside the too-high windows.

Then I heard the unmistakable sound of Reggie’s laughter coming from the other side of the closed bedroom door and remembered where I was.

This was Reggie’s guestroom.

The last thing I remembered was lying down with Peter for a quick nap before Reg and Amelia got back home. Peter wasn’t beside me now, though.

I thought it had been around seven when I’d lain down to rest. A quick check of my phone showed me it was almost nine.

The past few nights of minimal sleep must have caught up with me.

A woman’s voice—Amelia’s?—said something that made Reggie laugh again. I opened the door and wandered down the hallway towards my friends.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Reggie said cheerfully.

He sat at the kitchen table with Peter and a blonde woman in a charcoal-gray pantsuit who had to be Amelia.

He was sipping something from a mug that said Kiss the Cook in bright red letters.

I had a feeling I knew what was in it. “You slept half the day away.”

“She slept for two hours,” Peter said, sounding oddly surly. The mug he cradled in his hands matched Reggie’s perfectly—except this one said I’m the Cook.

Unbelievable. Not only did Reggie live in an upscale condo with a normal human girlfriend, they owned cutesy matching mugs.

When Peter caught my eyes darting back and forth between his mug and Reggie’s, he held up a hand. “Before you ask, Reggie gave me the mug. I didn’t read it before I started drinking.”

“And I didn’t read it before pouring our dinner.” Reggie turned to Amelia and said sheepishly, “Sorry, dear. I know how much you love that mug.”

“Why don’t you take it with you?” Amelia suggested to Peter. “I won’t want to drink from it anymore.”

“Because it has blood in it?” Reggie asked, wincing.

“No, hon,” she said. “Because it’s stupid.

” At Reggie’s look of mock horror, she grinned, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“I have a meeting at seven tomorrow morning. I should go to bed.” To the rest of us she said apologetically, “I’m sorry I won’t get to chat more with you before you leave. ”

I was sorry, too. “Hopefully next time we’ll be able to get to know each other properly.”

“I’d like that.” Amelia grabbed a black leather briefcase next to her chair and stood up. “Good night, everyone.”

Once Amelia had left, Peter picked up his mug as if to sip from it again before setting it back down and closing his eyes.

Something was wrong.

Before I could ask him what it was, he stood abruptly from his chair. “I need a walk,” he mumbled.

“Can I go with you?” I asked.

He left the apartment without answering me, without even a backwards glance in my direction.

What the hell was going on?

“Peter had a dream memory while you were both sleeping,” Reggie explained very quietly once Peter was gone. “He was completely panicking before you joined us.”

“Panicking?” The only time I’d seen Peter even come close to panicking was when he’d thought I’d been seriously injured in that convenience store. If I was concerned before, now I was officially alarmed. “What happened?”

“ Panicking is probably an exaggeration,” Reggie admitted. “But he was worried enough that he told me, someone who is basically a complete stranger, about it.”

With how closely Peter held things to the chest, this did nothing to calm me down. Neither did the fact that for some reason, he told Reggie about his dream but chose to leave the apartment rather than tell me what had happened.

I tried to tamp down the hurt that rose up at that realization. We didn’t know each other that well, I reminded myself. Not really. Who Peter chose to tell things to was his business.

“What did he remember?” I prompted.

Reggie shook his head. “He only said it concerned the Indiana warehouse. That’s all.

Then you showed up, and he took off.” If Peter had remembered something about the warehouse, or who sent those notes, that might explain why the dream had upset him.

Before I could fully process this, though, Reggie asked, “Sorry to change the subject abruptly and all that, but are you going to tell me the real reason you’re on this trip? ”

Reggie’s eyes were curious but lacked any sort of judgment. “Right,” I said, sitting back in my chair. “I guess I did promise you an explanation.”

“Mm,” Reggie agreed. “Is it because you’re in love with him?”

I jumped up from the table so fast I nearly knocked over my chair. “ What? ”

Reggie picked up his mug from earlier and took a delicate sip, eyes never leaving my face. “You heard me.”

This asshole. “You think I’m in love with him?” I began pacing the kitchen so vigorously the downstairs neighbors must have thought a herd of elephants had moved in. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Reg gave a one-shouldered shrug that was so clearly a pantomime of Peter’s mannerisms I nearly grabbed his Kiss the Cook mug and threw it at him.

“Great,” I muttered. “Now you’re copying his shrugging just to troll me.”

He had the audacity to burst out laughing. “That wasn’t what I was doing, I swear.” He put up his hands in a placating gesture. “Why did you assume that? Does Peter shrug a lot or something?”

I opened my mouth to tell him off, then snapped it closed again when I realized he entirely had my number. “Maybe,” I conceded.

“Listen,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s beyond obvious that our Petey has feelings for you, and I cannot imagine why you’d go on this mad trip if they weren’t reciprocated.

” He smirked, then added, “Besides, you two napped together while Amelia and I were out. In the same bed! Here, in my good Christian home.”

Now he was definitely trolling me. I barely registered it.

It’s beyond obvious that our Petey has feelings for you .

Was it true? The idea of never seeing Peter again once he got his memories back filled me with a kind of hopeless dread that I had no name for. But did that mean I was in love with him?

I didn’t have the space to examine it. Not right there in Reggie’s kitchen the night before we were headed off for whatever was waiting for Peter in Indiana.

Later. Hopefully there would be time to sift through all these confusing feelings later.

“I didn’t go on this trip because I was in love with him,” I said truthfully, sidestepping the real question Reggie was asking like the land mine it was.

“I went because I’d been repressing my magic for too long, and it was negatively impacting my life.

I needed to get out of town for a while to see how much magic I could safely use again without endangering people I care about in the process. ”

Reggie’s forehead creased in concern. “You’ve been hiding your magic?”

“Yeah.”

“Your entries in the Vampyric Annals said you’d been living a new, secret life,” he said. That dumb vampire encyclopedia had Grizelda entries? That was news to me. “I didn’t realize you’re completely hiding everything that makes you you.”

“I am,” I said. “Or rather—I was. I can’t anymore.”

“Because you came to your senses?” Reggie asked, acting so much like a mother hen with his lecturing tone that I couldn’t help but smile.

“Because I set my bedroom curtains on fire.”

His eyes widened. “Like that time in Paris when you and I set all those curtains on fire on a dare?”

That got a smile out of me. “Not like that,” I clarified. “That was a lot of fun—”

“It sure as hell was.”