Page 50 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Twenty-Five

Chicago, Illinois

Present day

Peter looked across the café table at the two men he’d come to meet.

On other, very different projects, Peter had worked with better. Much better. But these people had experience he did not have. They were also willing to help even though he wasn’t certain he deserved it. That more than made up for their obvious shortcomings.

To be blunt: He didn’t know where else to turn. And he needed help, objectively. He’d taken care of John Richardson in that warehouse, and one of the other vamps who’d been there as well. That had been easy. This, though…

This had him terrified.

“Nice to see you again, Petey,” Reginald said.

Peter still didn’t know whether the man called him Petey because he liked the nickname or if he did it simply to antagonize him.

Reginald gestured to the man seated to his left.

“This is my friend Frederick. When I told him I needed to counsel someone even more pathetic than we were in matters of the heart, he insisted he come.”

“Only because you are an imbecile, Reginald,” Frederick said. He inclined his head towards Peter in greeting and offered him a warm smile. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. I heard you previously suffered from amnesia.”

Peter bristled. Thinking of those weeks when he’d had no memories made him feel inadequate. He hated feeling inadequate in any way.

“Yes,” he confirmed more tersely than he’d intended. “I did.”

Frederick made a humming noise that Peter assumed was sympathetic. He touched his right temple. “I was in a coma for a century, myself.”

Peter had no response to that.

Reginald awkwardly cleared his throat, obviously wanting to move on from the subject of mental maladies. That gave them one thing in common, at least.

“I admit I wasn’t inclined to help you when you first reached out,” Reginald said. “You understand, I’m sure.”

Peter did. “Yes.”

“But the three-page, single-spaced letter complete with bullet points you sent more than proves your remorse,” Reggie continued. “And your devotion. So. Let’s hear your plan.”

Plan? Peter had no plan. All he knew was that it had only been a week since he’d last seen Zelda, but he already missed her so much he couldn’t think straight.

“I was hoping you might have ideas,” he said, like the fool he was.

Reginald nodded at Frederick, then turned back to Peter, a cheeky grin on his face.

“If there’s anything I have,” Reginald said, “it’s ideas.”

“Before we move on to the next item on the agenda,” Becky began. “Zelda. What’s wrong?”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. We were in the middle of our first all-partners meeting since I’d returned from Indiana, but I hadn’t been able to focus on anything either of my partners had been saying. Was it that obvious?

“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied. “Why?”

“You’ve been a million miles away all afternoon,” Becky said.

“Not just this afternoon,” Lindsay interjected. “You’ve been mentally in outer space ever since getting home two weeks ago.”

Lindsay wasn’t wrong. But I couldn’t face discussing the reasons for it with my friends. “That’s not true,” I said.

Lindsay fixed me with her patented stop bullshitting me stare. “Okay then. Fine. What have we been talking about the past half an hour?”

I looked down at my notepad. I normally took a lot of notes during these weekly team meetings, mostly because my memory wasn’t as great as it had been a few hundred years ago.

Today, though, my notepad was completely blank, save for some doodles that looked distressingly like the inside of that Blossomtown warehouse.

Damnit .

“We’ve been talking about…” I floundered for something to say. “The…goat yoga event?” Seemed like as good an answer as any and reasonably likely to be true.

Becky rolled her eyes. “I knew you weren’t paying attention.”

Crap. “We weren’t talking about the goat yoga event?” I asked weakly.

“The final details for the event have already been sorted,” Becky said. “Which you would know if you’d been checking your email.”

Double crap . Chastened, I set my pen down. “You got me,” I admitted. “My attention must have wandered for a few minutes. Help me out—what have we been talking about?”

Becky and Lindsay exchanged a look. “We’ve been discussing replacing our roof,” Lindsay said.

“Oh,” I said, brightening. “That’s great.” Our building’s current roof had been installed several years before we’d moved in. At a minimum, it was badly in need of patching. If we replaced it, we wouldn’t have to worry about it leaking anymore.

The way it had leaked the night before I’d met Peter, when I’d been trying to get rid of all those ruined leotards.

Peter .

I shook my head, trying to clear it. And I’d been doing so well, too, going a solid five minutes without thinking about what had happened.

“Do we have a roofer in mind?” I asked, forcing myself back into the present.

Becky arched an eyebrow “That’s what we’ve been talking about for the past fifteen minutes.”

“To recap,” Lindsay said, smirking at me. “No one’s quoted us a price we can swing yet, so we need to keep looking. But we have to find someone fast. The rainy season starts in earnest soon.”

“Seriously, Zelda,” Becky said. “What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself at all since coming home.”

How did I handle this? My friends were clearly too observant to believe my lies that nothing was wrong.

But I couldn’t tell them the truth. Immortals lived among humans, true—but it was a precarious hiding-in-plain-sight situation for all of us.

I couldn’t tell them I was a witch. I couldn’t tell them that Peter, the hot guy I’d left to go traveling with, was a vampire with amnesia who had only been out here in the first place because he had been hired by a vigilante group to come and neutralize the threat they thought I was.

I also couldn’t tell them I had developed feelings for him despite my better judgment. That part, though, was mostly because I wouldn’t be able to bear my friends’ sympathy.

“The trip…kind of sucked,” I said. True enough. “It wasn’t as fun or as restful as I’d hoped it would be. I guess I’m still recuperating.” Also true.

“Did anything specific happen that you want to talk about?” Becky asked gently. When I didn’t reply, she pressed. “Maybe something to do with Peter?”

“Why would you think that?” I asked too loudly and way too defensively.

Calm down , I reminded myself. They’re only trying to help.

“You’ve never been this out of sorts since we’ve known you,” she said. “You’ve also never traveled alone with a man since we’ve known you. Just putting two and two together here.”

“It’s just deductive reasoning,” Lindsay agreed.

Was I really that transparent?

“My current mental state…might be partly due to Peter,” I conceded. “Things got weird between us on the trip. I’m still trying to shake it off. “

“Do you need help burying a body?” Lindsay asked, dead serious. “We can get the Early Crew to help. There’s nothing they like better than telling a shitty man where to stick it.”

“What? No,” I said. I tried to laugh, to make light of the situation. It came out as more of an anxious wheeze. “It’s not like that. Peter didn’t do anything wrong.” That wasn’t entirely true, but the man still didn’t deserve to have my early-morning Gen X brigade go after him.

“If you change your mind—” Lindsay began.

“I won’t,” I insisted. I grabbed my pen again just for something to do with my hands. “I’m not going to see him again, so…yeah. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe we should have a girls’ night,” Becky suggested. “No better way to get over a lousy man than watching bad television with your girlfriends and doing each other’s hair.”

I opened my mouth to object—then closed it again when I realized I had no objections. This was actually a great idea. It had been too long since I’d spent time with my friends outside work. And it would get my mind off Peter, even if just for an evening.

“Sounds like fun,” I said honestly. “When were you thinking?”

“Scott isn’t at the hospital tonight,” Becky said. “He’ll be home with the kids. How about tonight?”

Lindsay was already checking the calendar on her phone.

“The only thing I have tonight is a call with my mom.” She put her phone back in her bag.

“I can let her lecture me about how I’m wasting my potential tomorrow.

This would be way more fun. And much less likely to make me want to throw my phone against a wall. ”

“I also have nothing going on tonight,” I said. Unless you counted moping around my apartment and being sad, of course. But I did that every night these days.

“Wonderful,” Lindsay said.

“Can you host, Zelda?” Becky asked. “We don’t want to do this at my house. There are nerf gun fights there twenty-four seven.”

“And my studio’s a disaster,” Lindsay added.

“You want to have it at my place?” I did a quick mental run-through of my apartment’s condition.

It had definitely seen better days—I hadn’t unpacked from my trip so much as dumped everything out on my love seat when I’d gotten home—but it wouldn’t take long to make my main room presentable enough. “How about seven?”

“That works for me,” Lindsay said.

“It’s a date.” Becky was grinning at me. “This is going to be exactly what you need.”

If only that were true.

Two episodes into Rejected Proposal , the latest Netflix rom-com sensation, I had to admit my friends had been right.

This was exactly what I needed.

“That guy doesn’t deserve her,” Lindsay said from her spot on the floor, pointing at the television. She was three glasses into the wine she’d brought over for tonight’s festivities and was starting to slur her words, but she wasn’t wrong.

“He’s a tool,” Becky agreed from the couch. “They better not be endgame.”