Page 25 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

W hen I got back to the office, There was a sleazy guy hanging around right outside the front of the shop, and I didn’t like that at all.

Normally I didn’t like to judge people based on appearances, but he seemed like he was about to open his trench coat and offer to sell me a “real” Rolex.

He was also stopping every other person who walked by, and they had to brush him off, one by one, all looking highly displeased.

Suzy was eyeing him up like maybe she was gonna do something about him in a moment. Here I’d been starting to worry that she was falling down on the job.

I didn’t especially want the guy’s attention, or to have to brush him off myself, so I slipped around behind the building and let myself in the back door. Sure, I was willing to have a confrontation if it mattered, but if I could avoid it, then why not do that?

As I opened the door into the back office area, a robotic female voice announced, “Back door open.”

That was new and weird.

Davin glanced up at me from where he was.

..he was rearranging sets of shelves that had definitely not been there when I’d left, in a side area of the back that I’d never messed with much.

I’d mostly used the furniture setup of couch and chairs, a few tables, and the wet bar that served as a half-assed kitchen.

This spot was an alcove that slotted like a puzzle piece against the bathroom and closet, like a short hallway inside the back office.

Apparently, it was now a storage alcove, because it was lined on both sides with wire shelves, and they were covered with...stuff. Little white boxes and coiled cords and other multicolored boxes and little black things that looked like cameras to my untrained eyes. Or maybe they were cameras.

“Saw your man out front did you?”

“ My man?”

“The fella who looked like he was here to sell us something,” he clarified.

I wasn’t sure why the hell that made the guy my man, but I nodded. “Yeah, he seemed skeevy as fuck, and he was harassing random passersby. Is that why you’re back here?”

Davin stopped and cocked his head. “Skeevy?”

“Um, sketchy? Seems like the kind of guy you wouldn’t trust to watch your wallet?”

He scoffed at that, then nodded. “Skeevy. I like that. Yeah. Skeevy arsehole was your next appointment. I told him the place was already rented, but he keeps hanging around out there. I think he thinks I’m an employee and he’ll eventually find the real owner and get a different answer.”

For some reason, my first instinct wasn’t to berate him for sending someone away without talking to me first. Nope. I was grateful I hadn’t had to make that call myself. “Should I ask what he did to inspire that reaction?”

“The smell of him,” Davin said, curling his nose at the mere memory of it. “Like cat piss, rotten eggs, and heavy duty window cleaner.”

Meth, I thought absently. Interesting.

Still, I could never ask someone to put up with a stink like that all the time, especially not with a vampire’s sensitive nose.

“On the other hand,” he said, getting a calculated look on his face. “C’mere.”

Without hesitation, I followed him out of the back room and into the front, right to the giant plate glass window.

..a window which was now emblazoned with our names.

Or rather, my name and his sort-of-designation?

It read “Knight & Daywalker” in huge white letters, along with a cute little purple and white logo of the sun and moon in a little circle.

Or, well, it would have read like that if I’d been outside. It was backward from my viewpoint inside the building.

I turned to Davin, because part of me wanted to ask him what my fucking life was turning into, and when my mother had sent yet more stuff and a window sign—or a person who put letters on windows, whatever.

Instead, I asked, “If you don’t want to talk about eating, why do you call yourself daywalker?”

That made him pause, and he looked at me a moment. Instead of giving me an answer, though, he asked, “How the feck does your brain work?”

It was a fair question, all things considered. I shrugged. “Messy?”

He shook his head, bemused or disgusted, as most people ended up with me, and gave a little tap to the glass where it said Daywalker.

“It pisses them off, yeah? They all hate me, but I have something they don’t.

I can go out in the daylight. They call me killer, and abomination, and other rude shite, and I call myself something that makes them seethe even more. ”

And that? That somehow made Davin a dozen times hotter than he’d been before. He was literally calling himself Daywalker just to piss off other vampires because they’d been assholes to him.

I fucking loved a petty king.

“And besides,” he added. “Knight and Byrne sounds silly.” Before I could open my mouth to say I’d thought exactly the same thing, or offer up something even sillier, he motioned back to the window. “Ignore the guy, and look over there.”

I looked where Davin was pointing, and—okay, that was odd.

We were in Southern California, and it was a nice spring morning. The two people sitting on the bench across the walkway from the shop, though, were dressed for the dead of winter. Or maybe if they’d been anywhere other than SoCal, they were dressed appropriately for the season.

The woman, with an elaborate hair up-do of braids wrapped around her head that fell into long golden curls like a fairy tale princess, wore a long-sleeved, full length dress in a pale blush pink that matched the color of her cheeks.

Her lips were pursed, and she was looking up at her companion, not speaking, but clearly from her expression, disagreeing with him.

The guy, well...he was a straight up hottie.

Okay, maybe not as hot as Grady behind them on the beach, wearing nothing but trunks, his locs pulled up in a loose tail atop his head, looking like the personification of the beach he loved.

But this guy was somehow also hot, while being Grady’s opposite.

He was strictly button-up, wearing what looked like half a suit, with long navy pants and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck only, a blue patterned tie hanging untied around his neck.

His hair was the same burnished gold as his companion, glinting in the sun, and I could tell from this distance that both their eyes were the same sky-blue.

Frankly, they were both beautiful.

“Swear to god, everyone in this damned country is ridiculously attractive,” Davin muttered next to me, like he’d read my mind. Then he turned to give me a sharp look. “Is there something in the water? Or maybe they’re filming a movie?”

“Usually,” I agreed with the latter comment about filming, since it was true.

“But for the water, I think it’s mostly just water with a little fluoride.

Which I suppose helps with attractiveness, since it’s why most of us still have our teeth.

So I guess there is something in the water. Huh. Weird.”

I fully expected Davin to be rolling his eyes at me, but instead, he was watching me with the same expression as before. Like I was a fascinating lab rat, maybe. “That is actually how you function. Every time.”

“No idea what you’re talking about. So why am I looking at the hot gold twins?”

That got his attention back to the subject at hand, and boy was that a weird feeling. I was never the guy who got the conversation back on track. “They are gold, aren’t they? And definitely related.”

“For sure,” I agreed. “Unless it’s like that whole thing where people look like their dogs, only with humans instead. Or maybe it’s like?—”

“They’ve been there almost since you left,” Davin interrupted my random associations to drag the conversation back on track.

There we were. Someone else doing that part of the conversation, and all was right in the world again.

“They almost came in for a moment, and she definitely wants to. But every time she tries, he puts a hand on her shoulder and stops her. I noticed them because when that skeevy man came in, the smell of their argument wafted in, and it’s a lot.

Emotions high, even if I don’t know exactly what they are at first sniff. ”

Interesting. So much information. Again, confirmed, Davin couldn’t easily parse feelings by scent. He had an excellent sense of smell, though, and knew the scent existed, even if he didn’t know what it meant.

But back on the subject he wanted me to care about, the hotties. They were siblings, I was suddenly sure. They were bent too close together, clearly in deep conversation, too emotional with each other, to be much else. And coming into the shop or not was somehow important to them.

“Should we wait?” Davin asked.

From my desk, Twist gave a little mewl. “Should I eat the furry thing?” I turned to look at her, because what furry thing? Had I accidentally brought a rat back with me from Broken Dreams? I hadn’t thought so, but?—

“She’s been distracted by the little rat dog, too,” Davin added. “Keeps watching it like maybe it’s dinner.” He looked over at Twist, unimpressed. “But I’ve seen you eat, and that tiny thing isn’t nearly enough for your dinner.”

Rat dog. Like a rat terrier? I looked around, and it took me a while to finally realize both Twist and Davin were indicating the man and woman on the bench. Because there, in a basket the woman had in her lap, was an adorable little Yorkie, complete with a red and green plaid bow on his collar.

“No eating the Yorkie,” I agreed with Davin. “Hardly any meat on a Yorkie, plus they’re super cute, and usually pretty smart. We don’t eat people we can have conversations with.”

I worked hard to ignore the fact that I had never met a chicken or a cow, but if I did, I could probably speak to them.

That didn’t give me nightmares at all, except, you know, all through my childhood.

After many sleepless nights when I finally confessed the problem to my mother, she’d gone drastic, getting livestock banned from her neighborhood and demanding my teacher remove all information about related subjects from my curriculum.

I wasn’t sure it had helped, but it had been nice that she cared.

“So what do you think they want?” Davin asked me, dragging me back to the conversation about the siblings on the bench outside.

I turned to look at him, then at the couple, and back again. “Let’s ask.”

“What? You can’t?—”

Before Davin could say another thing, I was slipping out the door, heading right over to the bench they were sitting at.

“—important, Amelia, but this matters to me. It’s—” the man was saying, sounding like every character in one of those classier-than-you BBC period shows.

He broke off from what sounded like an impassioned plea as I approached them.

I didn’t force my way in, just slid onto the bench next to them, and that was enough.

A second later he was turning toward me asking, “I’m sorry, can we help you? ”

“Oh, I hope so.” I waved at the shop, which—damn, that looked downright professional from this side. All I could do for a moment was stare at my office.

Fuck me, I was an adult.

That didn’t sound so great, honestly.

“Sir?” a soft voice asked in that same posh British accent. The woman.

“That’s me,” I said, pretending I hadn’t gotten entirely derailed by looking at the front of my office. “I’m the Knight. Flynn Knight. And you two clearly wanted to talk to me. Or my partner.”

“I want to talk to you,” a voice said, and I frowned at the two of them because neither had opened their mouths.

Before I could tell them their ventriloquy skills were impeccable, the voice continued, “I was here for an appointment about renting the shop next door, and some Irish guy turned me away. He?—”

“He’s my business partner,” I told the guy. “So whatever choices he makes are law here at Knight and Daywalker. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do with these two. Inside. Bye.”

He still didn’t catch a clue and leave, so I turned to the pair and their dog. “Inside?”

Looking stunned, he nodded, and stood to follow.

Her? She looked a little smug. The dog barked a few times, my internal translation giving me something that sounded positively obscene, but it seemed to scare off the skeevy guy, who did indeed stink of meth.

Who the heck was afraid of a Yorkie?

There were probably good reasons to smell like that, but in the moment, I couldn’t think of a single one, let alone one that I’d want to live with in a neighbor. Davin’s instincts had said no, so no it was. Plus stopping randos who were just trying to walk on the beach was weird.

“You want me to take him down?” Suzy asked me as I headed for the front door, and when I looked, her eyes were still trained on skeevy guy. Damn, I wasn’t even sure what he’d actually done, but everyone seemed to hate him.

I decided to err on the side of caution. “Only if he tries to come in without permission.”

She nodded and continued watching him.

I got the two people and dog inside, and motioned them toward a set of chairs up front. Waiting area? Did security offices have waiting areas? Did security companies even do what we did, combination tech and investigation? It seemed weird to me.

Whatever. “Hey, so, me Knight, him Daywalker.”

“Davin Byrne,” my partner corrected.

“What’s up?”

When the hotness twins looked at each other before speaking, my curiosity was doubled.

That was when I realized the dog was staring at me with shrewd, interested eyes.

Uh oh.