Vampaholic. Harper Allen

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       Chapter 3

      “Damn.” The low-voiced oath came from the direction of the idling car. I heard the sound of the vehicle’s door being opened and the scrape of shoes on the pavement. After my first sickened glance at the nail through my hand I’d turned away, but now I made myself look at it again.

      There’s something about seeing yourself as a carpentry project that makes a girl want to throw up. I forced back the bile that rose in my throat and tried to pull the nail out with my free hand.

      It wouldn’t budge. I pulled harder, my grip slick with my own blood, but the nail was firmly lodged into the MINI’s door panel. From the sound of his unhurried tread, the vamp wasn’t in any ravenous rush but even so, I had only seconds to free myself.

      I’d lived through Brazilian waxes. What I had to do next couldn’t be more excruciating, could it? I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth and ripped my hand free of the nail.

      I’d been right, the pain didn’t beat out Brazilian waxes—not by much, anyway. But in my experience, the agony of a wax is always replaced by a delightfully sleek and sexy feeling after it’s over. Seeing the torn and bloody web of skin between my fingers just made me feel like a rat that had gnawed off its own foot to escape a trap.

      Not delightful. Not sexy. And definitely not as conflicted as I’d been a few minutes ago about staking the sadistic undead who’d done this to me. My Badgley slip dress looked like a rag that had been used to mop an abbatoir floor, and my hair was hanging around my face in damp hanks. As I scrabbled under the car for the fallen stake and my knees scraped painfully against the oil-stained pavement, a primal rage surged through me.

      He wasn’t playing fair. Vampires had the whole fang and super strength and flying thing going on, and all we humans had were wood and garlic and maybe a splash of holy water if we were lucky. For a vamp to add a nail gun to his arsenal was overkill—and where had he gotten it from, anyway?

      Nausea rose up in me a second time. Of course. The son of a bitch had killed one of my carpenters and taken the tool from his dead body. I thought of the crew that had been working all day and into overtime this evening to get the club’s stage rebuilt on schedule for me, and my anger grew. Nailing me through the hand had made it personal, but this made it war.

      My fingers closed bloodily around the stake as the footsteps behind me came closer. I jumped to my feet and let my rage out in a scream as I raced toward the approaching vamp.

      “Get ready to kiss your ass goodbye, you bastard! When I’m finished with you there won’t be anything left but dust!”

      I started to bring my stake up into position—wrist rigid, the power coming from the shoulder, if anyone’s interested—and then I froze.

      The man facing me was the carpenter who’d played havoc with my hangover today. On one of the few days when I’d pulled myself together early enough to show up at the club before the cocktail hour I’d seen him taking a break outside with some of the others in the crew as I’d hurried into the building, swathed in a silk scarf and wearing oversized Christian Dior sunglasses to keep the brilliance of the day from racheting up my pounding headache.

      Which meant he wasn’t a vamp. That fact wasn’t as comforting as it might have been, because he was still trying to kill me.

      “You’re the one who’s going to be dust in a second,” he grunted, using both hands to steady the nail gun. “When you get to hell, tell your pals down there that Jack Rawls sends his regards.”

      As he finished speaking he depressed the trigger on the cordless nailer. I barely had time to leap out of the way before a deadly barrage of nails began flying at me.

      “What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled as I turned my leap into a dive and slid across the hood of my MINI, losing my Manolos in the process. I fell rather than landed on the other side of my car and crouched there. A metallic pinging like hail on a tin roof told me Rawls was still firing.

      “Gunning for a vamp,” he said calmly over the pinging. His flat Midwest accent made his words seem matter-of-fact. “The nails are tipped with silver, and the gun’s been modified to shoot up to twenty feet, so make it easy on yourself and stop trying to run.”

      My heart turned over. What did he mean, gunning for a vamp? There was no way he could know my most secret fear—no one did. How had he learned of it, and why was he so sure it wasn’t just a fear, but the truth?

      I could hear him walking around the front of the car. Still keeping low, I sprinted to the back of the MINI, ungratefully wishing Popsie had sprung for Hummers instead when he’d bought our birthday presents. “I’m not a vampire,” I said tightly. “You were working only feet away from me most of the day, so there’s no way you don’t know who I am.”

      “No СКАЧАТЬ