Chasing Daybreak Read online

  Back at the station, Chief Haynes stared at me over the rim of his well-used coffee mug. I was still wearing the scratchy, gray blanket the EMTs had nestled around my shoulders, as if the thin cloth would hold the hysteria of a five-foot three-inch woman at bay. Shane hadn’t been so lucky. After reluctantly allowing himself to be handcuffed, he was tossed in the back of a squad car and brought in for questioning. Only my vouching for him had kept him out of the dank basement cell they reserved for their plasma-challenged guests. As if metal bars would have held a vampire anyway, I thought dryly.

  “Vampire blood?” Chief Haynes repeated as if the words were completely alien to his mouth. I should have expected this. Vampires had only been out of the coffin for a few years, and most local authorities had no idea what to do with the information. They weren’t citizens yet, legally anyway, and they weren’t really people. That put them in a gray spectrum for those people whose job it was to rush in and risk their lives for them.

  I couldn’t really blame them. I’d been living with a vampire in my attic for almost a year, and sometimes, I wanted to stake him myself.

  Despite the residual quaking in my hands, I tried to stay professional. “As I explained earlier, the fire bug, Billy Young, was recently on staff at Victory General Hospital. We discovered he’d been stealing blood from the vampire blood unit. He was using it to destroy the homes he’d lived in as a foster child,” I explained.

  I’d called the station as soon as we had Young’s identity figured out and left a message for the chief. Shane and I had only gone to that particular house to try to confirm what Young was using as accelerant but, as my run of bad luck was holding this month, he’d still been in the house when we got there.

  I was eager to go home and take a hot bath, to wash off the ash, sweat, and fear that clung to my skin like dry glue. I was equally eager to see what they’d done with Shane. While I was on my way with the chief to give my statement at the station, the local cops had decided to ‘question’ Shane. If you asked me, he was extremely lucky some trigger-happy cop hadn’t put a few holes in him at the scene, just for good measure.

  Of course, regular bullets wouldn’t have really hurt him. They just would have pissed him off.

  Haynes nodded. “Yeah. The staties caught up with Young at the Battery. He was about to blow his own head off, dumb son of a…”

  I coughed, not because Haynes was about to injure my delicate female sensibilities with his language, but because I had probably just inhaled enough soot to make up for a lifetime of not smoking.

  “Your, err, partner, Shane, is waiting outside to drive you home.” He motioned to the door and stood. “Thanks for getting to the bottom of this. I never would have thought…”

  I shook his hand and practically bounded out the door. Shane was standing rigidly against the wall of chairs near the entrance. He saw me and motioned for me to take his arm. I considered refusing, but after the time he’d surely had with the police, I figured he could use a show of support, no matter how small.

  Maybe we didn’t always get along, but we always had each other’s backs.

  By the time we got home, it was nearly dawn. Shane said a quick good night and bolted up to his room. If anything untoward had happened back at the station, he didn’t say anything about it and I didn’t ask.

  I tossed my purse and keys into the worn, orange chair in the living room. It was one of the many throwbacks littering the place, remnants of my father, which I couldn’t bring myself to part with, no matter how hideous. The house was old before the turn of the century, nestled near the Charleston University campus. Dad’s shingle still hung beside the black iron mailbox affixed beside the front door. Stone Investigations. Once a respectable PI, he’d earned a reputation for being willing to take on any case, from following and filming elicit affairs, to helping the city’s vamps track down long-forgotten blood relatives.

  The attic had been converted into a dark room back when my father took over the detective agency from his father some thirty-odd years ago. Back before the age of digital photography, my father had carefully developed all his own photos in there. Now, the darkroom served as perfect sleeping quarters for my photosensitive buddy. When he moved in, we’d rearranged a few things, put in a small bed, and a phone. I’d offered to put in a small bathroom, but he curtly informed me that vampires didn’t need to pee. Ever.

  Which was way more than I needed to know.

  He did, however, make up for it by taking the longest showers in the history of ever in the downstairs bathroom, more often than not leaving me to wake up to an ice bath.

  When Dad passed away early last year, the business and the house fell to me. I was the oldest of four daughters—which was a continual disappointment to my father who, despite his affection for his girls, always dreamed of having a son to pass the business on to. When he had the first heart attack two summers ago, he called me home from college and gave me the rundown of our family’s legacy, and my responsibilities to keep it afloat.

  Of course, I never really thought he was going to die. I expected, however irrationally, that he would be around forever. So even as Dad was preparing me for the job, I still figured I’d get my teaching degree, settle down, get married, and have a life of my own.

  When he died the next year, I reluctantly left school permanently and came home to run the office.

  I’d be the first to admit I had no real desire to be a PI, but as it turned out, my natural curiosity and nosiness made me well suited for it.

  The office had originally been my great-grandparents’ home, but as the family grew, they needed more space, so they eventually moved into a larger house on the outskirts of the city. The business had remained in the old house. Now it was mine.

  The only full bath in the house was on the second floor, complete with a new Jacuzzi tub I’d forced Shane to help me install. Running the water as hot as I could stand it, I stepped in, allowing the rushing jets to massage out the kinks in my neck and back. There were ugly rope burns on my wrists, as well as cuts on both hands, and multiple red welts that would bruise by tomorrow. Great. I hated having to wear long sleeves in the heat of summer, but it was better than the alternative, which was looking like a leper.

  Tomorrow, I had to make my weekly visit to my mother’s bakery to give her a check from the office’s meager account for my younger sister Sarah’s tuition. Sarah was studying at UCLA, and the bakery barely paid for itself. I wasn’t bitter about it or anything. To my surprise, I enjoyed running the agency. After my personal life had fallen apart, it was a refuge, a haven for me, and later, for Shane, too. Days like today, however, made me wish I’d become something safer, like an astronaut or a ninja.

  I also had a meeting tomorrow—strike that, I thought weakly, tonight—with a prospective new client. From the initial conversation, it sounded like he wanted us to find his missing daughter. I relaxed deeper into the water, adding a splash of lavender oil for my dry skin. It stung my wounds for only a second before filling the room with a soft, sweet scent.

  It would be a nice change of pace to work on a human case for once, I thought weakly.

  It seemed like all we did anymore was supernatural crap. As soon as people got word I’d brought a vamp on as a partner, they started coming out of the woodwork with bizarre requests. One lady wanted us to prove her husband was turning into a werewolf once a month. Better that than admit he was probably having an affair, which he was. Unfortunately, we’d had several legitimate paranormal cases, too. There was a family whose teenage daughter was sneaking out at night to see her teenage-looking boyfriend. Luckily, the vamp was over three hundred years old, and we got to turn that one over to the DA as a case of statutory rape. His punishment had yet to be decided, but he was sure staying the hell away from sixteen-year-old girls. For now, anyway. The courts were arguing between sending the pedi-vamp to some sort of dark hole for a few months or just killing him. Of course, he’d been changed in his mid-thirties. I cou
ldn’t help but wonder if it might have been different if he’d been turned as a teenager himself. It’d be interesting to see what the courts had to say about that.

  At some point during my mental volley regarding vampire law, I dozed off in the tub.

  What woke me was the temperature drop. My teeth were chattering so hard I thought they might crack, my skin ridged like a basketball with all the goose bumps. Sloshing the now-cold water over the edge of the tub, I stepped out and wrapped myself in a large, white towel. As I headed to my room, I peeked down the stairs to see rays of morning sun streaming in the downstairs windows. Releasing a heartfelt sigh, I climbed into the warm blankets of my bed and fell back into blissful oblivion.