“Oh, sweetie,” she said, looking pleased by the compliment. “Thank you. But not all vampires kill humans. I don’t. Why, I used to be a human once. But I gave it up. You know why?”
“No,” Alaric growled. “And I don’t care.”
“Love.” She raised her heavily made-up lashes to look at him. “I fell in love with a vampire. My husband, Emil. I’m not saying he’s perfect or anything. He’s not. No one is. But he loves me. He loves me so much that he was willing to give up killing humans just because I asked him to…and that was before the prince ever became the prince and issued his command that we all stop killing them. When Emil did that for me, I knew I’d found the love of my life. And I was willing to give up everything I loved-my family, pecan pie, sunshine, the chance to ever have babies-just to be with him.”
“That’s too bad,” Alaric said flatly. “If you’d just have contacted someone in my office instead, we could have helped you. It’s our job to keep women like you from falling prey to soul-sucking demons like him. But it’s too late now.”
“Well,” Mary Lou said, putting her fingers delicately on his sword blade to push it a few inches down and away from her neck, “it’s a good thing I didn’t. Because I’ve never regretted my decision. Emil’s my everything. If you think I’d rather have babies and pie than that, all I can say is I feel sorry for you. Because you have no idea what love is.”
Alaric considered her words carefully. Did he know what love was? His partner, Martin, had told him that he’d known he’d found his true love-the man with whom he shared the parenting of Simone-when the two of them discovered their mutual fondness for Belgian waffles and a certain German rock band from the nineties. Alaric had always found this a bit…odd.
It was true Alaric wasn’t that familiar with the sensation of loving or of being loved. Who had he ever had in his life to love or to be loved by?
But you couldn’t miss what you had never known, and so Alaric hadn’t been particularly bothered by this.
Until quite recently. He’d realized this when Meena Harper had insisted on following him through the rectory and then tied that ridiculous scarf of hers around his wrist.
It was then that he had found himself almost blurting out the truth. Not all of it, of course. But the part about his idea of how she should come and work for the Palatine.
What had he been thinking? He had almost revealed something that up until that moment he had been trying to play close to his chest.
He still had the scarf tied around his wrist, even though it wasn’t particularly comfortable. What man wore a scarf around his wrist? What had she even been thinking putting it there?
But she had said it was for luck. And then she had kissed him.
So he didn’t dare remove it.
He had a sinking feeling that he really was a fool, just as Holtzman had accused him of being.
He looked the vampire in the eye. She said he had no idea what love was?
“What you’re confusing for love,” he concluded aloud, “is the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in your brain, stimulated by the mammalian hormone oxytocin.”
“I think we should just agree to disagree,” Mary Lou Antonescu said. “Do you want the damned dog or not?”
Sighing, Alaric pulled the sword away and sheathed it. “I want the dog,” he said. “If this is a trick, I will kill you and your husband both. And I won’t make it quick.”
It wasn’t a trick. She had the dog locked up in a bathroom of her apartment, which was five times the size of Meena’s and had been neither vandalized nor ransacked by the Dracul. Alaric found himself approving of both the tasteful and expensive décor and the timidity of the husband, Emil Antonescu, who seemed to be expecting Alaric to strike him down at any moment.
“For heaven’s sake, Mary Lou,” he exclaimed when his wife opened the front door to let the two of them in. “Where have you been? Didn’t I warn you not to leave the-”
That’s when he saw Alaric and dropped the brandy snifter he’d been holding. It fell with a crash to the parquet, glass and brandy going everywhere. Emil went as pale as…well, a vampire.
“Is th-that,” the husband stammered, “th-the-”
“Oh, don’t worry, hon,” Mary Lou said. “The Dracul seem to have all gone. And this is just the Palatine guard, here to pick up Meena’s dog. He promised not to hurt us. Well, he didn’t promise, exactly. But I’m sure he won’t. He seems all right, for a Palatine guard. Oh, look at the mess you’ve made, Emil. Who do you expect to clean that up? You know it’s the maid’s day off. Do you want a drink?” This last was directed at Alaric. “I never did get your name. What is it?”
Alaric was looking at a painting of a pretty young girl they had hanging in their foyer. The signature at the bottom said Renoir.
“Alaric Wulf,” he said, studying the painting. “And I don’t drink. I’m just here for the dog. I like this painting very much.”
“Isn’t that nice?” Mary Lou said about the painting. “Emil picked that up for a song from the artist when he was just an unknown. Emil has quite an eye. Are you sure you don’t want anything? Not even a soda or something?”
“Nothing for me,” Alaric said. Like he was going to accept a drink from a vampire. What if they put poison in it? “Just the dog, please.”
“Of course. I’ll be right back.”
Mary Lou drifted away, leaving Alaric alone with the husband, who was standing on the far side of the spreading brandy stain on the highly polished wood floor, staring wide-eyed at him.
“I would kill you right now,” Alaric said casually to Emil Antonescu, “but I promised Meena Harper I would bring her dog back in a timely fashion.”
“I would kill you right now,” Emil Antonescu said, hatred causing his eyes to flare red, “but my prince forbade me from it.”
“Did he now?” Alaric heard this with interest. “I wonder why.”
Emil shrugged. “Your people,” Emil said, “have done nothing but harass my people for decades, causing us misery and heartache.”
“Well, I believe your people started it,” Alaric pointed out, “by dining on the blood of innocents.”
“We no longer drink to kill,” Emil said. “We’re forbidden from it. Now we dine only on willing donors or blood purchased from blood banks. Why can’t you leave us alone?”
Alaric’s sword hand itched. It was incredibly difficult for him to be standing this close to a vampire and not kill it. “Perhaps,” he said, “because there’s no such thing as a willing donor, only human beings who are too weak willed to stand up to your freakish mind games. And your people are the ones who keep attacking mine.”
“In self-defense,” Emil hissed. “In self-defense only.”
Alaric took a step toward him…and kept on stepping until they were standing only inches apart.
“It wasn’t self-defense when a pack of Dracul attacked my partner and me in a warehouse outside of Berlin and nearly killed him,” he snarled, glaring down at the smaller man.
“It’s a shame it was only nearly,” Emil snarled back, giving him a chest bump.
Alaric drew his sword. It came singing from its scabbard, the blade shining in the glow from the crystal chandelier hanging from the foyer’s high, arched ceiling…
“Here we are,” Mary Lou sang. She came back dragging a highly reluctant Jack Bauer behind her on a leash. The dog fought her every step of the way, growling and struggling against the leash, his claws skidding on the polished floor.
The men parted at once, going back to their separate squares of parquet.
When Jack Bauer saw Alaric, however, he stopped fighting and bounded over to him excitedly.
Alaric stooped down and lifted the dog, who appeared to be unharmed and in perfect health.
“He looks good,” he said, unable to keep the surprise from his tone.