Page 48 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Twenty-Four

Three weeks earlier

It was nighttime, and Peter was thirsty.

Life, he thought, would be much easier if he did not need to feed quite so often. The streets of this small California town were frequently empty at night, which made finding his meals an unending challenge.

As he wandered the town, trying to distract himself from his thirst, he heard unusual sounds coming from a dark alley. Whoever was making that racket sounded human, if the cursing he heard was any guide.

Peter walked quickly in the direction of the noises, thinking of the meal he was about to enjoy.

Soon he would be fangs-deep in whoever was making that racket and he could go back to his coffin at the bus station.

The accommodations left much to be desired, but at least tonight he wouldn’t return to his temporary home thirsty.

When he saw the woman struggling with a box larger than she was, though, he stopped dead in his tracks.

Something was…different about her. She was small, with curly reddish-brown hair she’d tied back in a simple ponytail.

Under different circumstances he would have loved to get his hands on her ample curves.

But it wasn’t her physical appearance—alluring as it was—that kept him rooted to the spot once she came into full view.

It was the raw power he could all but feel , which simmered, wild and hot, through her bloodstream.

This power was familiar to him somehow, just as she was, though he had no idea why.

He imagined sinking his teeth into her neck, suckling at the wounds as her blood spurted into his mouth, her unchecked power nourishing him, and he was instantly hard.

If he’d ever been any kind of gentleman, he would offer to help with the box she was struggling with.

But he wasn’t a gentleman—perhaps had never been one, even before he’d lost his memories—and so instead of offering to help, Peter simply watched her, spellbound, as the box tumbled out of her arms and onto the ground.

“Shit.” Her voice was as fierce as the power flowing through her veins, but it had nothing on the ferocity of her expression when she looked up and saw him standing beneath the streetlamp where he’d been cowering in plain sight, watching her.

In the end, he helped her, throwing her box into the dumpster.

Maybe in a past life he’d been a gentleman after all.

He pretended not to notice the way she eyed the tense and flex of his forearms as he moved and had to tamp down the thrill that went through him at the thought of her finding his body pleasing.

“Thanks, Mr.…” she prompted.

“Peter.”

“Mr.Peter?”

He barely suppressed a smile. She was so irrepressibly charming, this stranger he’d just met. He wanted to tell her that, and almost did. In the end, though, he listened to the instinct that told him this would be a terrible idea and held his tongue.

“Just Peter,” he said instead. She watched his mouth as he formed the words, eyes flicking to his scar. A frisson of heat went through him. This time, he allowed a small smile to slip free. “And you are?”

“Zelda,” she replied.

A powerful wave of something like déjà vu washed over him. Her name rang in his head, as familiar as a sunrise, though he could not have said why.

Before leaving her again under cover of darkness, Peter found himself agreeing to think about taking one of her yoga classes. Of all the ludicrous things. But then, he suspected he would have agreed to anything this remarkable woman—Zelda—had asked of him.

Peter sat forward in the hotel room’s lone chair, elbows resting on his knees and hands clasped in front of him.

“I don’t know where to start,” he admitted. “I rehearsed a whole speech on the drive over, but now that I’m here, none of it seems adequate.”

I took a sip of the herbal tea I’d just made for myself, focusing on the pleasant warmth of the mug in my hands to keep from losing my shit. “I’d say start at the beginning, but you only have twenty minutes.”

He swallowed. “Right.” His eyes drifted to the floor, and I could all but see the wheels in his mind spinning as he thought through what to say.

“I guess I’ll start with…I haven’t always worked for people like The Collective.

I certainly didn’t while I was human, and even after I became a vampire, I did… other things for a while.”

I snorted. This part, I could guess. “At first, you just ran around killing and fucking indiscriminately. Right?”

His eyes snapped to mine. “You say that like it’s not a big deal.”

“You’re not the first vampire I’ve known,” I explained. “I know it’s a crazy-wild rush. Your first taste of blood, your first kills, blah, blah, blah.” I shrugged. “All vampires go through it.”

His eyes drifted away again, clearly embarrassed. “Right,” he said very slowly.

“And after your newborn bloodlust calmed down, you had the existential crisis over immortality that most decent vampires eventually have, and you needed to figure out what the hell you were going to do for the rest of eternity.” I took another sip of my tea. “How am I doing so far?”

“You’re reading me like a book.” A corner of his mouth lifted into a sad half smile. “It all felt very dire at the time. But now that I’m talking to you, I suppose it was all rather cliché.”

“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “But clichés are cliché for a reason. Immortality’s a lot to grapple with.” I would know. “Especially if it wasn’t something you expected to happen to you. I don’t judge you for any of that.”

He nodded, eyes full of an emotion I couldn’t name. “Well, as you just said, I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my existence. But I didn’t think I could go back to doing what I’d done before I turned.”

Despite everything, the wistfulness in his voice tugged on something inside me. “And what was that?”

Another sad half smile. “My human life is mostly just images and feelings, nothing concrete, even now that I have most of my memories back. But I believe I was an engineer with an interest in both machinery and architecture.”

“Really? You’re not built like an engineer,” I said before I realized how that must have sounded.

He blinked at me. “Oh? And…and how am I built?” His voice was a mix of curiosity and playfulness.

“You know how you’re built,” I muttered.

“The other night you said my body looked like it had been sculpted by the gods,” he murmured. “Do you still think so?”

It felt like I was blushing from the roots of my hair down to my toes. I’d told him that right after he’d given me the first of several mind-blowing orgasms. It had been true then and was still true now. But we were not doing this after everything that had happened.

“I’m not dignifying that with a response,” I said. “All I meant was that when I imagine an engineer, they aren’t usually built like…like…”

“Like their bodies have been sculpted by the gods?” he supplied, his smile growing, all traces of his maudlin mood gone.

“Shut up,” I muttered. But I was fighting a losing battle against a smile, too.

Fortunately, Peter dropped it. His mood sobered again. “To answer the question you haven’t asked, my few clear human memories include me spending my spare time doing heavy physical labor with my father on his farm.” He looked away. “Hay threshing does wonders for the upper body.”

That would explain his frankly bonkers physique. But I had too many other questions to allow myself to get sidetracked like this.

“How did you go from being a farmer-boy engineer to working for people like The Collective?” My question had the intended effect. He sobered further, shifting in his seat, all playful innuendo forgotten. “It’s quite a change.”

“In some ways, yes,” he admitted. “In other ways, no. Most of what I get paid to do uses the skills I honed as a human engineer. It’s just, now that I’m immortal, I can take on jobs that are more dangerous than anything I could have done as a human.

Becoming a vampire seems to have sharpened my abilities.

Made them stronger.” He paused, his eyes inscrutable. “I am seldom paid to kill anyone.”

I had to swallow around the lump in my throat. “But not never,” I said.

A long pause. “But not never,” he agreed very quietly.

I thought of the host at that chicken restaurant, of the guy at that bowling alley. What had Peter done to make them freak out so badly when they’d seen him? I still didn’t think I wanted to know.

“Murder is not a regular part of my work,” he reiterated as if he could read my thoughts.

“I’m much better with my hands and with solving mechanical problems than I am at killing.

Which is why my stock in trade has become solving unsolvable riddles, disabling alarm systems, fixing irreparably broken pocket watches…

” He looked away again. “And cracking uncrackable safes.”

I bristled at the reference to our current situation.

“Couldn’t you have just stayed being an engineer?

” It was a ridiculous question, and I knew that.

Vampires couldn’t hold down human jobs for myriad reasons.

But if I was going to forgive him, I needed to hear that he’d been driven to this life out of necessity rather than because he was drawn to it for other nefarious reasons.

He shook his head miserably. “I wanted to. At first, though, the newborn bloodlust made holding any job impossible. After that passed, I’d been out of work for several years and had blown through my meager inheritance from my parents.

No engineering firm would have hired me even if I’d applied.

If I’d had any skill with words, perhaps I could have done freelance writing under a nom du plum, but…

” He snorted. “Zelda, I tried it. My writing was atrocious . Just awful. Especially my poetry.”

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at the idea of Peter, the man who could fix a table and hotwire a car, writing a poem.

“Well, poems are difficult,” I said as diplomatically as I could.