Page 44 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Twenty-Two

Blossomtown, Indiana

Present day

As he stood at Zelda’s side, that small slip of fabric between his fingers, the pieces of the puzzle that had eluded Peter for weeks took shape, crystallized, and finally slotted perfectly into place.

No.

No, no, no .

It all come rushing back like a river in flood.

He remembered everything .

The red plaid pocket square fluttered from Peter’s fingertips, landing on top of one of the dead humans.

“ No ,” Peter said, sounding horrified. Terrified. What little color he normally had in his face had entirely drained away. “Oh gods. No .”

“Your memories,” I said, staring up at him. “They’ve come back. Haven’t they?”

“We should leave,” he said instead of answering me. It didn’t matter; his urgent tone, the look of panic in his eyes, were answer enough. Seeing him unravel did more to unnerve me than anything else that had happened so far. “We should leave now .”

“I’m not leaving,” I insisted. Whatever was happening, I wasn’t going anywhere. “We’ve come all this way.”

He clutched my shoulders, fingers digging in almost hard enough to hurt. “I remember everything. Okay? Being in this space, that fucking pocket square —it’s brought it all back. Please believe me when I say we have to go.”

A throat cleared behind me. Ice flooded my veins.

“But you’ve only just arrived at our headquarters, Mr.Elliott,” said a deep male voice.

I whipped around so I could see who it was. Before I could get a good look at his face, the warehouse floodlights came to life, illuminating everything. Blinding me.

“And you brought Ms.Watson, too,” the voice continued. Its owner stood in front of me now, less than a foot away. He let out a low, dark chuckle. “Your quarry. How marvelous.”

Peter’s quarry ?

It took another moment for the spots dancing in front of my eyes to resolve enough for me to see clearly again. When I did, Peter was standing stock-still beside me, as white as a sheet, glaring at the man I had to assume had been sending him those notes.

In the flesh, the man didn’t look terrifying.

He appeared to be about sixty, though with vampires that didn’t mean much.

The clothes he wore—a garish red plaid suit, which perfectly matched the pocket square we’d just found; a black top hat; and shiny black patent leather shoes—were straight out of Anachronistic Vampires: Twenty-First-Century Edition .

A book that didn’t technically exist but might as well have.

He smiled at Peter the way a parent might smile indulgently at a favorite child.

I inclined my head to whisper in Peter’s ear. “Do you know who this is?” Although, from the look of revulsion on Peter’s face and the familiar way the other man was regarding him, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt Peter knew exactly who he was.

“I know him,” Peter confirmed, his jaw tightly clenched.

The man’s eyes were on me now, hungry and assessing. “Mr.Elliott, this is exactly why I insisted from the beginning that we hire you, you, and only you for this job. Your reputation for thoroughness, for leaving no stone unturned until the job is complete, is obviously well earned.”

“Mr.Richardson,” Peter warned. “Don’t.”

The vampire called Mr.Richardson laughed. “I’ve told you. Call me John.”

My stomach plunged.

This guy was John Richardson ?

As in John Richardson, the ringleader of those douchebag vampires in The Collective?

I’d been so worried that Peter might have done something to land him on The Collective’s shitlist. Had he been working with them all this time?

John Richardson laughed again, the sound like nails on a chalkboard. “I take it from her stunned expression that you didn’t tell her why you brought her!” He clapped in delight, even as my heart was breaking into a thousand brittle pieces. “Bravo! Inspired work, even for you.”

“I didn’t tell her,” Peter said through gritted teeth, his dark eyes full of fury, “because I’d forgotten all about this arrangement until moments ago.”

“Oh, come now, my boy.” John waved a dismissive hand. “You can drop the poor little amnesiac vampire routine now. Your ruse worked.”

“It wasn’t a ruse,” Peter insisted.

I wanted so badly to believe him, but if this was in fact John Richardson from The Collective…and with the proprietary way Richardson was looking at Peter right now…

The older vampire’s eyes flicked to mine again. Seething hatred burned within them. The feeling was entirely mutual. “Amnesia or no, Grizelda the Terrible is here. Now we don’t need to worry about cracking her safe! We can simply ask her how to unward it. Won’t that be nice?”

“You’ve been trying to crack my safe ?” I spluttered, outraged.

Actually…

Wait a minute.

Did I even have a safe?

I scoured my memories for some hint as to what he was talking about. If I did have a safe somewhere, I’d gotten it so long ago that its existence, and whatever was in it, had totally slipped my mind. Things like that happened sometimes when you were over four hundred years old.

“Yes, your safe,” John Richardson confirmed, oblivious to my confusion. Then he nodded at Peter, who flinched visibly. “We’d been trying to crack it for six months with no luck. So we hired Peter, the best in the business, to help.”

I stumbled back a step as the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Richardson said the words as matter-of-factly as if we’d been discussing the weather, but a punch in the face would have hurt far less.

Betrayal, hot and painful, sliced through me.

Peter had lied to me. From the beginning. He wasn’t some poor amnesiac sob story who’d needed someone to help him regain his memories.

He was a fang for hire. And he’d been hired by some of the worst vampires I’d ever known to fuck with me .

I looked to Peter for some kind of confirmation. Either that what Richardson was saying was true, or that it was all a lie. My eyes began stinging, and I scrubbed the unshed tears away with the back of my hand.

Agony flickered in his eyes. “Zelda.” His voice was broken. Beseeching.

It wasn’t a denial. Just the opposite.

It was all the confirmation I needed that he’d been lying to me all this time.

I thought of how adeptly Peter had fixed my wobbly table and my car.

The attention to detail he brought to even mundane tasks like cleaning my studio.

He was obsessively observant and missed nothing—not even offhand comments I’d made about caffeine affecting my sleep.

All skills that would come in extremely handy if what you did to pay the bills was evil people’s bidding.

Why hadn’t I taken to heart the way those employees at the chicken restaurant and the bowling alley reacted to him? The incident at that convenience store, when he’d wanted to rip that poor kid’s head off over nothing at all, should have clued me in that something about this man was very off.

I should have trusted my instincts and my brains. Not my heart.

And here I thought I’d left poor decision-making behind when I’d become Zelda .

John Richardson was watching me expectantly, as if waiting for me to say something.

Possibly about this safe I was almost certain I didn’t have.

Telling him I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about wasn’t the right play, though.

If I’d learned anything from my own adventures and from old episodes of Scooby Doo , it was that keeping the bad guy talking was almost always how the good guys won the day.

“My safe. Oh yes. How I do so love my safe,” I babbled, drawing myself up to my full height for an extra spike of confidence. Of course, my full height of five foot two wasn’t too impressive, but I was working with what I had. “Why do you want to crack it?”

“You can drop the act, Ms.Watson.” John Richardson’s tone dripped ice. “We know what’s in that safe, and we’re prepared to get it by any means necessary.”

If you know what’s in that safe, that makes one of us , I thought.

Peter took a step closer to the older vampire. The older vampire who I was definitely staking the second I figured out what the hell was going on. “So help me gods, John, if you lay a finger on her—”

John cut Peter off with another dismissive wave of his hand.

“Thank you for your service, Peter. Couldn’t have done this without you.

Much obliged. The rest of your payment is waiting for you in my office, so why don’t you run along now and collect it like a good little hired hand.

Then you can be on your way.” He paused, then rubbed at his chin.

When he spoke again, it was in a more thoughtful tone.

“On second thought, why don’t you stick around for a little while.

If she refuses to tell us how to get into the safe, even when we ask her nicely, we may need your help to convince her to give us the information we need. ”

“Fuck off, ” Peter spat.

“Of course,” John Richardson continued, as if Peter hadn’t said anything, “should those extra services become necessary, we will provide you with extra compensation per the original terms of our agreement.”

The original terms of our agreement.

It was true, then.

I never enter an arrangement without knowing all the terms . Isn’t that what he’d said when I proposed our bet at the bowling alley?

Gods, I’d been so stupid.

“No,” Peter said. “I’m breaking our contract. I’ll return all the money you’ve paid me. Just…leave her be.”

Peter turned to me, his eyes pleading. But I was done letting him play with my emotions.

I was also done hiding who I was. But what was my plan? Charging John Richardson straight-on would be foolish. I had magic, but he was a lot bigger and probably a lot stronger than I was. All those cars out front suggested he had cronies in here with him, too, hiding somewhere.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to come up with a good plan. I spent another few seconds frantically weighing options, and—

“Mr.Richardson,” I said, invoking my old Grizelda the Terrible swagger. “Actually, we’re old friends, right? Can I call you John?”