Page 46 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Twenty-Three

My Dear Miss Watson,

It pains me to have to part with my transporting powder. However, I cannot deny that you won our bet fair and square. How was I to know that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was such a bleeder? Remind me to never again place wagers on the lives and times of Central European royalty when you are present!

May you use this powder for good fun and hijinks, just as I have over the many years it has been in my possession.

Yours very sincerely,

—F

The hotel I vanished to had to have been the fanciest place in all of south-central Indiana, but I hardly noticed the chandeliers in the lobby or the beautiful local artwork on the walls when I checked in.

I was a tangled mess of emotion, too wrapped up in my anger and confusion to focus on anything but collapsing into the first bed I could find.

Peter had tricked me into feeling something for him while he’d been lying to me for weeks.

My fury was boundless. But my anger wasn’t only with him.

I was just as angry with myself for being gullible enough to believe his lies in the first place—to say nothing of how livid I was with my past self for having been so reckless in everything I did.

If I’d been a normal immortal witch and played by the rules, none of this would have happened.

What exactly had happened in that warehouse, though?

Peter had lied to me, yes. But he’d also staked John Richardson with no hesitation, then stayed behind to deal with the fallout while I ran away like a coward.

If Peter was truly in cahoots with The Collective—if everything he’d told me was a lie and he had no feelings for me at all—would he have done any of that?

And was he okay now? Had he been able to handle all those vamps by himself? On top of everything else, I still worried about his safety.

Gods, I was such an idiot.

When I got to my room on the fifth floor, I flung myself face down on the bed, overwhelmed and exhausted.

I still needed to Uber back to the warehouse to get my car, which I’d abandoned there in my haste to get away.

I also needed to decide what to do about The Collective.

They’d gone after Reginald in the past with far less to go on than they had on me.

Even if Peter had managed to dispatch everyone in that warehouse, the chucklefucks who’d sent him after me in the first place wouldn’t let their centuries-long grudge go just because I’d gotten away.

Later, though.

All of it would have to wait until the world stopped spinning and my thoughts and feelings made sense again.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with whoever might be trying to reach me. Especially if it was Peter. Taking a bath in the room’s gorgeous bathroom seemed like a better call. If I’d ever deserved some pampering, it was then.

I stripped, then stumbled to the tub, dumping half the little bottle of soap by the sink into the swirling water. I watched in a stupor as hot water and bubbles filled the porcelain basin before climbing in and submerging myself.

By the time I got out forty-five minutes later, my fingers had pruned up and I had calmed down enough that the idea of looking at my phone felt doable.

I’d missed texts from Peter and Reggie.

Peter: I am so sorry.

Peter: Can you call me? I can explain everything.

Peter: But I also understand if you never want to see me again.

I didn’t ever want to see him again. Or at least I was pretty sure I didn’t. My relief over Peter surviving whatever I’d abandoned him to in that warehouse was probably just days’ worth of inadequate sleep catching up to me.

Reggie’s text was less fraught.

Reg: How did it go?

I decided to reply to him first.

Zelda: You sent a real creep my way Reg

Zelda: Do a better job of vetting strays you meet at scrapbooking conventions going forward

He called me less than a minute after I hit send .

“Okay, what happened?” Reggie said, all business.

“You were right. It was The Collective sending Peter the notes all this time. Not only that, it turns out Peter was paid by The Collective to take me out. Because they finally figured out it was me who’d started that fire at Count Countesque’s party.

” I flopped onto the bed and flung an arm above my head.

“The vampire you shipped to me is a fang for hire.”

I stared at the painting that hung over the bureau without really seeing it as I waited for Reggie to respond. And then: “I’m sorry, but… what ?”

“I didn’t want to believe it,” I said. “But it’s true.

John Richardson was in the warehouse, waiting for us, and Peter miraculously got all his memories back the second he saw him.

” I rubbed at my face, refusing to let the tears pricking the backs of my eyes fall.

“Peter admitted John’s been paying him all this time to get to me. ”

“Those assholes .”

After what John Richardson and The Collective had put Reggie through, his reaction didn’t surprise me. “Richardson’s dead now, at least. Peter staked him.”

Before I ran away .

“No loss there,” he muttered. “But hold on. If Richardson had been paying Peter, why did he stake him?”

I bit my lip. “There’s more. Peter also told me to run while he took care of whoever was left.”

Silence from Reg’s end of the phone as he processed what I’d told him. “I’m sorry,” he eventually said. “I thought my bullshit detector was spot-on, but clearly I’m slipping. I never doubted his story for a second.”

I closed my eyes. “Neither did I.”

“Did you ever suspect anything was off with him?”

“I should have,” I admitted. “I mean, I did. Some people we met on the road freaked out when they saw him, so I assumed he did some not-great things before losing his memories. I just thought that whatever he’d done, it didn’t have to impact who he was now.

And that he could change his ways if he didn’t like what he discovered when he got his memories back.

Given my history, I thought I’d be a hypocrite to judge him for any of it.

” I’d been such a damn fool. “I never thought he was only with me because he wanted to crack my safe.”

“Crack your safe?” Reggie chuckled. “Please tell me that’s not a sexual metaphor?”

If Reggie were there, I’d have slugged him.

Affectionately, of course. But still. “It’s not a sexual metaphor, you weirdo,” I said, fighting a smile despite everything.

“Richardson kept talking about needing to get into this safe I allegedly have. They were so desperate, they paid Peter to do it for them.” I shook my head. “No idea what he was talking about.”

A beat. And then Reggie burst out laughing. “Do you seriously not remember the safe ?”

I frowned. “Should I?”

“Oh yes,” Reggie said mock earnestly. “But you’re under a lot of stress, so I’ll give you a hint.” He paused for dramatic effect, then said: “Funniest. Prank. Ever.”

“ Funniest prank ever? ” I repeated, bewildered. “What’s that supposed to me—”

All at once it hit me.

Oh my gods .

Of course.

“The safe!” I shrieked, feeling slightly delirious. “Oh my gods, how is that nonsense still circulating?”

“No idea,” Reggie said, laughing again. “But I guess it is. The funniest prank you and I ever played together, coming back to bite you in the keister after all these years.”

It had been a magnificent prank. How could I have forgotten? “How did we even come up with the idea in the first place?”

“It was at that party in 1981,” he replied. “Remember? You’d had one too many sloe gin fizzes, and some random vampire we never saw again dared you to get a safe. We never figured out why.” I could almost hear him smiling. “The rest we came up with ourselves.”

It was coming back to me now, the absurdity of this entire situation breaking through the cloud of anxious dread that had gripped me since finding out the truth about Peter. Laughter bubbled up inside me, hysterical and bright.

Back then I’d never been able to say no to a dare, no matter how peculiar it was.

So when this vampire had dared me to do it, I’d gotten a safe at a downtown Chicago bank the next day.

Reggie and I had placed a whoopee cushion inside it.

Then, I’d warded it to within an inch of its life so whoever tried to open it would get the bazooks zapped out of them.

And then the two of us worked together to create a legend surrounding it.

At first we’d told people—after swearing them to secrecy, of course—that the box contained a tiny bottle of the elixir of life.

Whatever that was. Later, in a winking homage to the now late, great Douglas Adams, we’d told people the safe contained the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

The vampires we’d run with back then weren’t much into reading, so no one had realized we’d lifted that directly from a series of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.

My notoriety at the time had been such that the rumors took on wings and flew far and wide, evolving over time without much effort on my part.

What stayed consistent in all versions of the legends that got back to us, though, was that the safe’s contents would be life-changing to whoever managed to get inside.

Of course, Reggie and I had had a lot of irons in a lot of fires back then. After about eighteen months, we’d grown bored of the stories that filtered back to us of people getting zapped by my wards. After another few years, the vampiric community also seemed to have moved on.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in decades until now.

“Unreal,” I said, still laughing. My sides would be in serious pain later, but gods, I needed this release. “In the end, I guess the last joke was on me.”

“Fitting,” Reggie said, still chuckling. Then he said in a more subdued tone, “What are you going to do now?”

That sobered me. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I mean, I should figure out a way to take down those idiots for good.”

“Need help with that?”