Chapter 4

Thursday morning came early, only to find me alone and in my own bed. Wednesdays were my night on my own, when Jakob went into work early and stayed late leaving me to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. My early nights on Wednesday meant my Thursday mornings went a lot better, which was important since I spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings running with E.

I’d started running again last October after a squad room bet left me exhausted at the end of my first 5K in more than a decade. I’d loved running in high school, the feeling of my body moving as fast as it could, eating up the ground beneath me, the power that came from knowing no matter where I was I could run home. And finally, best of all, the authority, the pride I got from doing what made other people cringe.

On the track I could run a mile in minutes, the laps falling away as I found a perfect Zen state. I didn’t bring home medals, didn’t win awards, but I was a strong finisher, and more importantly, I enjoyed it.

Sadly, high school was a long time ago. While I still love running my days of having enough time to run long with the team then practice repeats at three-thirty were over. Now if I wanted to run it meant getting up before work, before the sun most days, at the god-awful hour of five-thirty. The only thing that made it bearable was E.

I don’t know when she started running. We talked about a lot of things out on the roads but it never came up. Maybe it was back during the war, when E was part of a guerilla group of witches killing their way through a cadre of traffickers, pimps, and the other people who made the Morality Wars happen.

E left when the soldiers, the real army, started to arrive. Something told me her time there had been particularly gruesome. Gruesome and hard enough that when she banged on my door to run at five-thirty-five, I opened it.

“’Morning.” She looked like the day had already done something to offend her.

“Yeah,” I replied.

Neither of us were talkative until the end of the first mile, but there’s an intimacy that comes with sweating next to someone over the miles. We’d been running together since November, and while she wasn’t one of my girls, we’d gotten closer. We were a good match; E’s boyish frame had no trouble meeting my casual ten-minute mile pace. I’d been a lot faster in school, and I’d run the 5K in under thirty minutes but my goals had changed since last October. I ran to change my mood, to find a place where my body and mind operated smoothly together.

Now I was chasing a running high, not trying to beat the clock. Some days I caught it early, other days it never showed up and I struggled next to E trying to keep the pace. Today sat in between: my legs moving but my head never quite catching up. We hit the first water fountain at about a mile; while she drank I talked.

“Jakob asked me to move in with him.”

“Congrats.” The word was an exhalation, she had to stop breathing to drink and her body needed the air.

“Yeah, except…” I ducked in for my own drink. “He’s a vampire, you know? Moving in with a vampire?”

There it was. Did I love Jakob? Completely, without a doubt. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. But even though he hated talking about it, he was a vampire. He didn’t tell me the details of that part of his life, so I was pretty much in the dark. With no real facts to go on I was left wondering, doubting, scared of what it meant.

E watched me drink. “So?” she asked pointedly. Elsebeth Miller (E was a nickname) was one of Jakob’s last living descendants. He found her family after one of Ronnie’s genealogy projects and helped them move to Baton Rouge. E had been four then, and Jakob filled the role of favorite indulgent uncle in her life ever since. If I was hoping for a neutral third party to assuage my fears she wasn’t it.

“So…how does that work? I mean he drinks blood, and I’m a woman…I mean…he’s great but…” I hesitated. I couldn’t help but think of the dirty coffee mug on my desk. Was I signing up for a lifetime of bloody mugs? “Mechanically, the day-to-day stuff, how does that all work out?”

“Get a moon cup, you’ll be fine, better for the environment anyway.” She started running.

“A what?” I asked completely confused.

“A…” She glanced over at me. “Never mind, I misunderstood the question. What’s your problem with moving in, again?”

“There’s stuff I don’t know. What do I do if another vampire shows up? What’s the etiquette? Is he finally going to eat in front of me? Why doesn’t he keep blood in the house? Should I pick some up when I’m grocery shopping? When does he eat anyway? He doesn’t need to every night but he’s got to at least once a week, right? Twice a week? And then there’s the little stuff, I mean what’s going to happen when—?”

“Stop! Stop right there. You don’t know. I don’t know. No woman knows what’s going to happen when she moves in with a guy. He might turn out to be a freak or have some bizarre mommy complex and expect you to clean up after him. That’s why you move in, to find all that stuff out and see if it will work.”

“I get that but aren’t there more unknowns here than usual?” We passed out of the park and into the stoplight-filled downtown area. I was glad, there were more chances to talk out here.

“Maybe a few, but I’ve lived with a vampire. A vampire, every kind of witch there is, and the occasional lycanthrope all crammed together in one small space. Somehow we all made do. If you and Jakob love each other you’ll make do the same way.”

“But…”

“But?”

“But…shouldn’t I talk to someone? Can’t I prepare?”

“Talk to him. He’s the one that matters. And you can’t prepare for life like that. It’s not a test.”

****

Life might not be a test but my work was. Four miles and a shower later, I was starting my day with the first test. Did I remember the forms to fill out for theft of a supernatural object? I took them out of my drawer, test passed. Why couldn’t relationships be that simple?

“The paperwork,” I said to Danny. “Fill it out, handle this officially.”

“No, it’s a family matter.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Family matter, whose family exactly? That coat didn’t belong to anyone you’re related to, right?”

“We’re not going there. We’re not discussing it. What else do we have for today?”

I shoved the form back into my drawer more than a little annoyed. What else did we have for today? More follow up on the murder case, more useless follow up if our visit to the great white hunter was an example, oh and paperwork, we had plenty of paperwork. So that was what we did, wasting time until our appointment with the next person in the murder case.

Christine Sweeny lived alone in a house worth more than twice my annual salary and furnished for half of it. I wasn’t jealous, just aware of the cost of things like the chic antiques and billowing white curtains. Walking inside felt like going to my favorite lingerie shop, another world of lace and silk, white and pastel colors, all female, all the time.

Even the kitchen was decorated in white and light pinks, with tiny pink and white pots of herbs lined up on the window sill. The other detectives didn’t have any notes to give us, the storm stopped their investigation before it stated, but the decor made me guess her boyfriend didn’t spend the night often.

He stood watching us go through his lover’s things when she’d been buried only yesterday. Yet he didn’t cry. He didn’t even seem sad.

“How long were you together?” I called to him, coming out of the master bathroom. There weren’t any pictures of him in the house.

“Two years, things started when she stopped doing field job. We worked together before but we didn’t start seeing each other until she left, otherwise it would have been…well you know, awkward.”

Two years was a long time to be with someone and not have your photo anywhere in the house. I casually checked out the bedroom and the closet. A small shop’s worth of designer label clothes hung from padded hangers in a rosewood closet. Suits hung together, dresses in the back, shoes nested together in cubby holes, but absolutely nothing for a man. I’d left Danny alone with the boyfriend hoping they’d bond over their shared gender. When I came out I saw I was wrong.

“So you were close?” I asked, deciding it was time to be blunt.

“We were sleeping together.” He was immediately defensive, which meant no, they weren’t.

“Any chance Christine had a safety deposit box or maybe a safe somewhere in the house?” There wasn’t a home office, only a computer on a shelf in the kitchen. Home offices usually gave us a wealth of information, receipts, bills, credit card statements. You could tell a lot about a person from the little slips of paper they left behind. Christine hadn’t left anything behind. The house was neat and tidy; even the trash can under the paper shredder was empty.

“Uh, I don’t know. I didn’t come here much, I mean, she liked my place.” He swallowed hard, looking at a photo on the wall. A naked woman curled up inside a papasan chair; the misty gray shades of the black and white photo softened the image but I still recognized Christine. “She liked the lab too, but that made sense, it was her lab once.”

“Her lab?”

“I took her old job. That’s when she first saw me really. I mean I saw her the day I started, fresh out of school, junior lab tech, and there she was stunning, distant. But then she left and I took over. I figured I’d never see her again but one night I was working late and she showed up in the lab…”

He stopped talking and blushed furiously. I could guess how that night had ended. “I didn’t even see this place the first six months we were together. She’d show up at the lab and we’d…I mean it was always so random, that was Christine.”

“Random?” I looked around at the very orderly kitchen, through the entryway to the neat living room. The couch was piled under cushions that were all different but the exact same shade of cream. The same cream the doilies on top of the TV, the back of the couch, and the coffee table shared.

On top of one of those crocheted doilies was a vase of dried roses in the same pink as the couch and the mats in the framed prints on the wall. Nothing about her house seemed random. Why did he think she was?

“Christine would just appear. I never knew when or why, she was just there.” He shrugged, still looking at her photo. “If I didn’t drop everything for her it might be weeks or months until I saw her again. She didn’t return calls, wouldn’t give me her cell number, then I’d be in the lab late some night and there was Christine, smiling, laughing, sending me to the bathroom to wash my hands.”

“Wash your hands?” Danny looked up sharply. Maybe he was listening.

“She had a thing about the lab and the chemicals. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We wear gloves all the time but she would still insist. And I couldn’t use the lab sink, oh no, I had to use the one in the bathroom.” He looked away from the photo finally. “Do you really need me to be here?”

“Not really,” Danny admitted.

“Good. I mean, I miss her, God, I really do but looking back, I think maybe I shouldn’t be here now…it wasn’t the healthiest relationship,” he finished. “Call me if…well if there’s any way I can help.”

I watched him walk out, positive there wasn’t going to be.