Page 12 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

I set aside the two actual sandwiches and fries, but went through and made a whole pile of chicken. Frankly, it looked like too much food for me for a whole day.

“Stop the lights,” Davin muttered as she started into her third one. Before I could ask him what the heck that meant, he turned to me, black eyes wide. “What kind of cat is that?”

I shrugged. “Not sure yet.” I wasn’t too worried about him freaking out.

Vampire, after all. He of all people knew there was more in the world than most people were aware of.

Instead of worrying about it, I set the sandwich marked “special” aside, and handed him the other, and a container of fries. “I thought...you might want food?”

He accepted them and immediately started munching on fries. And he thought Twist was weird. At least normal cats ate, if not usually quite so much.

For a while, we all sat in companionable silence and ate our food.

I was trying not to think about how much of my dwindling bank account the food had cost me, because it wasn’t like any of us could choose not to eat.

Well, at least not me or Twist. I had no clue about Davin, and was mostly trying not to stare at a vampire eating food, because it was freaking weird.

“Your mam called to check in,” Davin finally said after taking the last bite of his sandwich, breaking the silence with the weirdest sentence ever.

My mother hadn’t “checked in” when I was two, let alone now that I was over thirty. Also, she’d called him to check in? Was he her kid? Okay, that was weird. Also, I had to stop checking him out and thinking about how cool black eyes were if he was, like, my brother.

Right?

It wasn’t like we were going to have kids together, even if?—

“She called the office line,” he added, like maybe he’d read my mind. Or maybe like my face always said exactly what I was thinking, and he’d noticed. “She’s worried about...the situation with Charles, she said. And she wants us to come to dinner.”

For a moment, all I could do was sit there staring at him. “My mother wants you to come to dinner tonight.”

“Mostly you,” he said, tone odd, like he was worried about something. “I’m sure she wants to see you more than me.”

I scoffed at the placation, rolling my eyes at him. “She wants to know if I’ve figured out who killed Charles Mailloux, that’s all.”

He frowned at me, and for a second, I thought he was going to defend her. But then he said the obvious thing for a brand-new vamp in town. “Who’s Charles Mailloux?”

“Elder vamp, ran against Mother for the senate position fifteen years ago. Brand-new maid discovered him dead in his study this morning, and called the cops.”

Davin almost choked on his next fry. “The cops? Like the Gardaí? Vamps never bring in the actual authorities.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “New maid, human. Didn’t know the truth, and probably wouldn’t have lasted long even if Charles had lived. Also told the cops that he had late night meetings, and I quote, like a drug kingpin.”

Now that I wasn’t in front of the cops, I let myself react to that—with a laugh. So did he, and a moment later, we were both laughing uproariously.

“So your mam wants you investigating,” he managed, once he stopped laughing and...caught his breath? How did a vampire become breathless? “But now you’re going to have to dodge the humans at the same time.”

“I am. And then there’s the mess of what happens to the killer when we find them. Chances are they’re a vampire, because let me tell you, I’ve never met a human who could do that kind of damage. Maybe a bodybuilder?”

He winced. “And rare’s the human who can take down a vamp in any fight, even an unfair one.”

“Exactly.” I leaned back onto the sofa and let my head loll backward. “Charles might have looked like an old man, but he was as fast and strong as any vampire. A human getting the better of him was pretty unlikely, and the killing blow was...”

The scene swam up before me, and I shoved my food away. No surprise to anyone, Twist immediately pounced on it. She took a giant bite from the bun on my sandwich, then looked up at me and asked, food still in her mouth, “I can have this, right?”

“Yeah, Twist, all yours.”

For a moment, we just sat there, Davin staring at Twist like she was the shocking one, even as he ate another french fry.

“It wasn’t a human,” I reiterated to him, barely even able to look at Twist eating the remains of my food.

“But that leaves us with a whole lot of suspects. Over three hundred vampires live in the greater Los Angeles area, and it’s always possible someone else has come into town that we don’t know about. ”

For a moment, he stared at me. Then his eyes went round. “You truly mean to investigate a murder? Yourself?”

I couldn’t hold back an eye roll at that, because, “Who the heck else is going to do it? You think the human cops are going to catch a vampire?”

“You’re human too,” he pointed out, which...well, it was certainly possible. I wasn’t as strong or as fast as a vampire, which was his point. I couldn’t take on Charles’s killer by myself.

So I shrugged, picking up Twist and setting her on my chest, where she first bathed herself, then curled up in a ball and started purring.

Finally, I looked back up at him and gave him the only answer I thought he’d accept without question.

“My mother said she wants me investigating. What else would I do?”

He didn’t have any rebuttal for that.