27. Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
T he week had been strange, passing both fast and slowly. Ryker now had two trials in his future: as an expert against Frederick Angstrom, and as the victim of Billy Ellis and his fellow henchmen. Angstrom was denying he even knew their names, much less that he’d sent them to get rid of an inconvenient vampire accountant. In the second trial, Leslie would testify too. She had expected this to happen within a few weeks, and Ryker was reminded that not everyone was familiar with the slow grind of the court system.
Now another weekend had come. In three hours, he could start driving toward the airport. He was departing at two a.m., and Leslie was picking him up at the airport at three thanks to the hour he gained when visiting. The red-eye was a vampire’s favorite flight—less likely to be booked, and the humans he did have to share a plane with tended to sleep or keep their voices down, which in turn kept everyone’s nerves down, which in turn kept odors down as well as noise.
Killing three hours felt like a monumental task. All he wanted was to see his girlfriend, kiss her, talk to her face to face, enjoy her presence, taste some new foods with her. Ryker bounced off his apartment walls for half an hour before texting his faithful friend, who would surely help him out.
Let’s hit the gym.
Tai: LOL
You can make fun of me all you want if you’ll spar with me so I don’t accidentally kick holes in my ceiling.
Tai: See you in ten minutes.
Tai refrained from teasing him. Much. Instead they sparred as if a real reward were at stake rather than simple bragging rights. Maybe Tai had something egging him on too. Ryker couldn’t catch hold of the guy for what felt like a year. When he finally did, Tai did his usual twisting-like-a-landed-fish thing to get away and nearly threw Ryker off him.
Then, as always, he went still and said, “Okay.”
“Good match.”
“Good match.”
Ryker extended a hand to his friend, and immediately Tai was gone, across the gym to the vending machines. Ryker had hardly seen him grab his wallet from the pile of their shoes, wallets, phones, and keys. He grabbed his own wallet, then darted barefoot after Tai. When he reached the corridor, Tai was staring at the unopened blood pack in his hand.
“Tai?”
“Shh.” Tai held up one finger. He stood statue-still for another five seconds. Then he nodded to himself, tore the bag open, and drained the whole thing without a pause. When it was empty, he pitched it into the trash and walked back across the gym without a word.
Ryker knew not to take it personally. And now that Tai had reminded him, his throat began to ache. That match had been a lot of work. He fed his credit card to the vending machine and gulped a blood bag of his own. Slaked and energized, he darted back to the sparring area. Tai was performing what would be an Olympian-level floor routine if he were human. He tumbled and sprang, leaped and twisted, made his way all around the mat with multiple forward and backward flips, changing direction in midair. At last he stopped and walked over to Ryker.
“Thanks,” he said.
Ryker shrugged. “For what?”
“You never make it weird.”
“You never make me feel like a coward when I think the world’s going to fall out from under me, so… We’re even. And you know that.”
“Yeah. It’s easy to forget though, when…when it hits me like that.”
“Tai, I couldn’t even tell. You talk like you go slavering mad, but to the rest of us, you look like any other slaking vampire.”
Tai nodded, half-convinced. At last he said, “That was a good match, man. You made me work for that.”
“Same.” Ryker decided a question would be okay. “Before you broke the seal, were you actually counting in your head?”
“It’s a habit, counting to ten before I let myself open the bag. When I’m extra thirsty, I count to twenty.”
“Of course you do.”
Tai slanted him a warning look, and Ryker raised his hands in surrender.
“You have time to go again?” Tai said.
“Hmm.” Ryker glanced to the oversized clock on the wall behind the service counter. Past midnight. “I’d better get going.”
They walked out together, and they froze simultaneously at the sight of a certain brunette leaning against Ryker’s car, her gaze already pinned on both of them.
“I should’ve anticipated this,” Tai said.
“Nah. Go on, man. It’s fine.”
When Tai hesitated, Jacqueline’s teeth flashed. She didn’t move toward them, of course. She waited for Ryker to come to her.
“I mean it,” Ryker said.
He didn’t want to say more in her hearing, but he didn’t have to. Tai’s iron grip landed on his shoulder and stayed there until he made eye contact. Then Tai studied him for a long moment that Jacqueline was watching too. He nodded at last. “Take care, man.”
“We’ll talk soon.”
“Yeah,” Tai said. He gave Jacqueline a short nod, to which she rolled her eyes. Then he walked away.
For a moment Ryker wondered how this would go. He waited for the old shame, the self-doubt, the confusion and hurt. But now he was only curious. Was she here to try to suck him back into her world again, had she given up on that, did she plan to take any sort of responsibility for sending people to murder him? He approached his car, stopped a few feet away, and crossed his arms loosely over his chest.
“Well?” he said.
She blinked. “Well, what?”
“No. This meeting was your idea. You have five minutes to say whatever you came to say.”
“That’s not fair, Ryker. I came here to apologize.”
“I heard the ADA elected not to charge you with conspiracy. I assume the detectives ignored my advice that a vampire should conduct your interview.”
“Not entirely. There were two detectives, partners. One vampire, one human.”
“Okay.” She was a better liar than he’d thought.
“I explained that the whole thing was a prank, and no one was ever supposed to get hurt. I was very credible. That’s how they both described me, you know. Very credible.”
“If they only knew.”
Her laugh was loud, but she broke it off when she realized he wasn’t reacting. She took a long moment to stare at him, and Ryker stared right back.
“Even the vampire liked me by the end of my interview,” she said. “He advised me to work on awareness of consequences. I promised I would. He found me very attractive, by the way.”
At the end of everything she’d ever done or tried to do to him, she was simply flat. No interest beyond herself, no concern beyond her image in the moment.
In the flash of an instant, Ryker thought about the things that motivated the people he knew and loved—about Claire working to create a place of community for vampires, Nova writing grants to help preserve the natural world she loved, Logan putting so much care and art into his dishes, Philippa turning her salon chair into a place of self-care and safety, Mackey coping with uncomfortable proximity to humans in order to save their lives. And then there was Tai, battling to make the humans around him safe from himself. There was Leslie, holding tight to the peace her soul loved, not so she could keep it all to herself but so she could offer it in handfuls to him, show him the great worth of simplicity and home and rest. There was Dad stepping into a place of power so he could listen well to the people who’d privileged him with that power, and there was Mama battling for victims of all kinds, forcing the bad guys to face their reckoning.
Yeah, sometimes Ryker got up in his head; sometimes he got lost in the drive to achieve, to prove he could come out on top. But ultimately he valued a lot of the same things. Things his friends and family had taught him, and things that were born into the core of who he was.
Now here she stood in front of him, the woman who had made him doubt himself and, at one time or another, all of them. And she looked empty.
“Why did you do it?” he said.
“I was bored.”
“With what, your hair?”
She flipped her shiny brown locks over one shoulder just as she’d flipped them on the conspiring video a week ago, when they were dyed a shoddy imitation of Leslie’s gorgeous silver. “I hated that look. I made it look decent, but on average women it’s awful.”
“Did you want to complicate my life? Was that all?”
“I told you, I was bored. I wanted to see what would happen to her.”
“To…her?”
Jacqueline rolled her eyes. “If your life was threatened because of your job. What would Toymaker do? Would she record an embarrassing hysterical reel for her socials? Would she break up with you for being too much trouble?”
Too much trouble. How those words used to bite into him, but now they’d been defanged. Because he was steel? Maybe not. Maybe he’d never been steel at all. When he thought of the woman he loved, waiting in her snug mountain bungalow for him to land in Nashville, waiting to kiss him and touch him as no one else ever had… The roaring anticipation that spread from his core all the way to his fingertips wouldn’t be possible in a man made of steel.
And now, when he wasn’t trying to solve the puzzle, the puzzle solved itself.
“You were here,” he said. “The day Tai congratulated me about Angstrom. You were here, deliberately listening to everything we said.”
“Are you just now figuring that out?”
He made a show of taking out his phone and checking the time, then shoving it back into the pocket of his gym pants. “It’s been six minutes, so you got an extra one. Get off my car.”
In the space of a human heartbeat, Jacqueline was in his face. “You will never be over me, Ryker. Not ever.”
He lifted her under the elbows, ignored her glare, and set her down a full arm’s length away from him. When he let her go and said nothing else, she stared disbelieving, maybe panicked. He turned toward his car, his back to her, and that seemed to break something inside her.
“You’re pathetic,” she yelled. “A coward. You play dead like a little vampire baby who wants its mama.”
“I sure do.” He got into his car and shut the door. As he turned the key, she kept shouting.
“I told every man I was with while we were together—you know what I told them? That you were boring and pathetic. That you play dead like a needy baby!”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t three men, Ryker. It was so many more than three.”
“Okay.”
He put the car in drive and allowed it to creep toward her, crossing his fingers that she wouldn’t leap on the car and kick his windows in with sheer strength and high heels. Maybe she didn’t want to mess up her wardrobe, or maybe she was too stunned. When his bumper was a foot from her shins, she stepped aside. He held in the sigh of relief that she would be able to hear.
“Don’t you want to know how many more it was?”
In the flash of his headlights in her eyes, the last unknown piece of Jacqueline lay bare and flat. This was the way to beat her. This had always been the way. All he’d ever had to do was stop caring what she thought of him—a true full stop. Without that, she had no hold on him; and finally, after two years, she wasn’t the only one who knew it.
“Bye, Jacqueline. Have a nice life.”
He drove away, and she didn’t shout after him, because she could have said anything, anything and he’d have kept driving.
Finally they both knew it.