Jackie could tell by Laurel’s expression that there was no disagreement. Lovely. The whole far-fucking-fetched story was true. “This Drake guy show you how?”
She shook her head. “Showed Nick. Nick showed me.”
“Wait. What?” Jackie stared incredulously at the metallic bottle being offered to her by Shelby. “Nick turned you into a vampire? What’s this?”
“Yes, he did. And that,” she said, “is the worst-tasting shit you will ever drink.”
“What is it?”
“Synthetic blood.”
Jackie nearly dropped the bottle. “Blood? This is what you drink?”
She nodded. “Yep. Developed by Nick and his brainiacs over at Bloodwork Industries.”
Jackie handed the bottle off to Laurel, who looked far more intrigued by it than she was. The notion of bottled blood creeped her out. “I see.”
“Why did Nick turn-or, um, show-you how to be a vampire?” Laurel asked, turning the bottle over in her hands.
At that, Shelby gave a sardonic little laugh. “Because he couldn’t let me die.”
“Care to explain?” Jackie said.
“Drake had shot me,” she replied. “This was back in 1934. My guts were practically on the floor, and I was going to die. Nick couldn’t bear to let Drake win, so he did what he thought was his only option.”
Jackie tried to consider if she would want to stay alive if the option were to consume blood to keep living. No. Not a chance in hell. “Why would he do that to you?”
She smiled at Jackie, wistful and knowing. “Love can make you do strange things.”
“That it can,” Laurel whispered.
Jackie gave Laurel a sidelong glance, who turned her gaze quickly away and then held up her teacup. “Can I have a bit more, please?”
Shelby flowed around the couch with the smooth grace of a dancer. “Certainly.”
A knot formed in Jackie’s gut. What was up with Laurel? She was being no use at all with this. “All insanity aside, why not come forward with this? No laws have been broken. Law enforcement is far different now than in 1970.”
“I promised Nick a long time ago that I would never expose him or what was going on. The decision was his to make.”
“It’s getting people killed is what it’s doing,” Jackie stated. “You’ve obviously had no luck stopping him to this point.”
“Agent Rutledge… Laurel.” Shelby turned and gave a sweet little smile to Laurel. “You need our help. We need yours. Nick has a lot of blood on his hands and would rather this played itself out without any additional casualties.”
“Chivalrous of him,” Jackie said. “It’s obstruction, too. I should have him arrested.”
The smile on Shelby’s face vanished. “You can’t arrest him. At least, not yet.”
“I didn’t say I was, but I-”
“No.” Shelby shook her head. “Drake will come after him no matter where he is. You won’t be able to stop him.”
Jackie avoided rolling her eyes. Cocky bitch. But her earnestness gave Jackie pause. “Why is this guy so dangerous that even the FBI can’t handle him?”
Shelby’s smile was more of a wince. “He can do things we don’t quite understand. He has power that goes beyond just drinking some blood. Trust me, I know.”
No. Jackie was pretty sure she didn’t want to know about that, but what choice did she have? They needed information. “Give me an example.”
“He can travel in ways that make him untrackable. We’ll sense him someplace, and then, just like that, he’ll be gone. That’s just an annoyance, though, compared to the real power we have, which is this kind of hypnotic control over people.”
“Hypnosis?” Not a trick Jackie had ever had any faith in, but she knew of its possible effects. “So all that movie crap is true?”
She laughed, a bubbling, lively sound that filled the room. “God, no. I love garlic. Crucifixes don’t burn my flesh, and I don’t sleep in a coffin. The sun, however, does bother me.”
“So the whole bright-eyes thing? That’s an effect of being a vampire?” Under other circumstances, Jackie would have laughed at this line of questioning. Even working with Laurel, who had spoken to a ghost or two in her lifetime, would not have taken her into the realm of vampires.
“Oh, these,” Shelby said, her fingers touching the skin beside her eyes. “They’re contacts.”
“I knew it!” Jackie had pegged something right about them at least.
“You don’t want to see the real thing.”
“Perhaps I do,” Jackie said with a defiant tilt of her head.
“Then maybe you’d like to spend the rest of the afternoon polishing my mahogany bedposts?”
“What?”
“It’s what I could have you doing if I caught you in my gaze long enough.”
“Seriously.” Jackie didn’t believe it. A look at Laurel, though, said otherwise. She half expected her to get up and go polishing. Was Shelby working some kind of vampire voodoo on her now?
“Yep.” Shelby nodded. “Unless it’s something that might get you killed. I can bend your will only so far.”
“I see.” Okay, she didn’t really. Jackie was half tempted to take Shelby up on that bet but thought better of it. “And Drake does this to his victims?”
“Yes. Only, there is no resisting him. You can’t say no.”
“I find that hard to believe,” she said. “You telling me this guy could make me just walk off a cliff to my death or pull out my gun and shoot myself in the head?”
“Basically, yes. Maybe not directly, but his power is such that he would give you a compelling reason to believe that walking off that cliff or shooting yourself in the head was the most appealing option available to you.”
All right, then. That notion set Jackie’s nerves on edge. “This why Nick is trying to keep everyone else out?”
“Yes. He knows that if you encounter him, the result will likely mean your death.”
Laurel sat up straight now. “Then how does he plan to stop him?”
“That’s the infuriating thing about Nick Anderson,” she said, her voice showing the first real signs of anger Jackie had heard. “I don’t think he’s planning on stopping him at all.”
“Wait.” Jackie held up her hand. “Hold on. He’s trying to keep us away from a murderer he isn’t trying to stop?”
“Oh, he’ll try,” she said. “Nick is alive today because he promised to try to stop him, but he’s sure he can’t. He’s just playing this game out until its inevitable conclusion, which with three more deaths will come to its horrible, mindless end.”
“What end is that?”
“Drake is going to kill Nick.”
“Ah.” Things were falling into place now. The history was making some twisted sort of sense. Jackie walked over and sat down next to Laurel. “Maybe you should give us your whole story, from the beginning.”
She laughed again. “You have a few hours?”
Jackie leaned back and folded her hands over her stomach. “Yeah. Yeah, we do.”
Chapter 23
Only an hour later, Jackie leaned back in the safety and privacy of her Durango and ran her fingers through her hair. She closed her eyes, waiting, hoping for things to settle, come together, and get off the tabloid pages.
“You okay?” Laurel said and then laughed nervously. “I couldn’t tell if you were going to laugh her out of the room or slap her upside the head.”
Jackie dropped her hands to her lap. “I wanted to smack you a couple times. What the hell was going on in there? It was like watching a supernatural episode of The Dating Game.”
She looked at Jackie for only a second and then looked outside, at her hands, and at anywhere but near Jackie’s face. “Sorry. It… I was just… um…” Her face scrunched up, trying to unscramble whatever jumble of words were running through her head.
The pink flush of embarrassment brought a smirk to Jackie’s mouth. She had never seen Laurel in this state before. It had always been the other way around. “It wasn’t very subtle, you know. She touched you every chance she got.”
Laurel sighed. “Pretty obvious, huh?”
“I should arrest her just on principle, flirting with an FBI agent in the middle of an interview.”