Page 40 of Love Her Ruin
The woman doesn't flinch.
Her three men don't flinch either, but their eyes do something. All four sets, at the same instant, flash red, a quick, bright, arterial red, there and gone. The blond man pushes his glasses up his nose. The muscular one rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. The bronze one crosses his enormous arms and settles in like he's getting comfortable for a long conversation.
Vampires.
My brain offers the word up, immediately dismisses it, then slowly reels it back in. If shadow daddies exist, why not vampires too?
Daddy growls.
The whole gas station vibrates. The chip bags rustle on their racks, the Slim Jims tremble in their plastic, and the coffee in the pot ripples like something dropped a stone in it. The growl rolls out through the walls and into the parking lot and down the street, and somewhere in the distance a dog starts barking, and another, and another, a chain reaction of animals noticing that something has made itself known. From next door, a police car siren pierces the air.
Eddie is working a case somewhere across town, and James is currently selling his van for a better, less pedo-looking vehicle at my request.
It’s just me and Daddy, but I’m not too worried.
One word, pressed through the bones of the building, erupts from Daddy: "STAYING."
The woman regards him coolly. She tips her head, assessing, mildly interested but unimpressed.
"Well," she says, "I'll pass that along, Azhrael. But I can't make any promises, and you should’ve just answered the door when I rang the doorbell at your house. It would have saved us both some time. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from me soon.”
He knows her. Or she knows him. She used his name, his real name, like she's said it before, or said the names of a thousand things like him, and none of them scared her.
"He'smine." The words are out of me before I decide to say them.
The woman's already half turned toward the door. She stops and turns back, one eyebrow quirked.
"He helped me make this city safer," I hear myself say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like the voice I used in the basement when I killed Red Hands and Vincent. "And I won't let him go."
The shadows respond and tug at the edges of my ribs, the cold that lives in my own marrow since the pact, since I let him into me and he decided to stay. Tendrils peel off Daddy's column and whip around me, tentacles of black that curl around my wrists, my waist, my throat like phantom jewelry. The cold eats up into my eyes, and I can feel them go all black.
The woman regards me, indifferent, but her men close ranks around her.
"Safer, huh?" she says.
Daddy wraps himself around me, the whole column of him folding down and in, cold pouring over my shoulders like a cloak.
"MINE," he says through the walls.
"I'm Daddy's," I say, my voice both his and mine.
"Well," she says breezily, "maybe Downstairs Daddy doesn't need to know."
Behind her, the blond man makes a sound like a cat choking on a hairball. The muscular one looks at the frosted ceiling like he's begging it for strength. The giant bronze one puts a massive hand over his face.
"Jesus, Belle," the blond mutters.
"That's a phrase," the muscular one says. "That's a phrase you actually said."
"Out loud," the giant rumbles in a velvet voice that could tame snakes. "In public."
"What?" the woman says. "Downstairs Daddy might as well be his title. He'd love it. He'd put it on a plaque and make everyone call him that."
The muscular one pinches the bridge of his nose. "He absolutely would."
"For the love of all that is unholy, you can’t tell him about this," the giant warns her.
"I'm going to need a minute when we get back in the car," the blond says, pushing up his glasses. “You know, so I can scrub out my ears.”
