Dead on Delivery Read Online Free PDF Page A

windows. It was a beautiful night. Fall was here. I let the playful wind blow across my face all the way back to the apartment in Mansion Flats.
    I did the standard drive around the block for ten minutes, looking for a parking place, but finally got one within what I considered a reasonable non-grocery-carrying distance.
    I pulled the collar of my jacket up and walked down the sidewalk, whistling a little to myself as I went. I made sure to glance up and down the street, checking into all the dark shadows between the parked cars and the darkened houses. There was nothing on the streets in my neighborhood that was going to jump me that I couldn’t take tonight. Anything that could kick my ass would have set off my internal alarm system by now. My fingertips would be tingling. The hair on the back of my neck would be standing up ever so slightly. I was getting nothing. Still, it didn’t do to not look concerned. If I wanted people to treat me like a regular girl, I had to act like a regular girl.
    It was an interesting lesson to have learned after all these years. I’d learned it from an interesting source, too. Alexander Bledsoe, M.D., my coworker at the hospital, my cohort in my fight against supernatural crime, my favorite vampire and . . . my friend? I didn’t know quite what to call Alex. He wasn’t my lover. Things hadn’t gone that far between us, although only because of a bizarre show of forbearance on his part during a moment of weakness on mine.
    It had pissed me off at the time. I’d been looking for comfort and solace and had felt like he’d been denying me for no good reason. When I realized he’d been doing it for my own good, it pissed me off even more. One of the countless issues between Alex and me is the age difference. He’ll never give me an exact count of how old he is, but he did mention having seen Benjamin Franklin once, which meant that he had to be at least three hundred and fifty years old.
    I’m going to be twenty-seven this year. It’s kind of a big gap. Yet they say that age is just a number.
    Alex’s forbearance, on the other hand, had made it so that I could look Ted in the eye and say nothing physical had ever happened between Alex and me and be 100 percent honest. And, honestly, probably still at least 25 percent curious. I’ve heard a lot of rumors about vampire sex. I’m not sure why physical congress with something cold-blooded is supposed to be so damn hot, but that’s what all the kids say.
    I let myself into our apartment building. It’s an old Victorian that’s been split up into flats. Norah and I are on the third floor. Ben and his mother, Valerie, are on the first. The rosemary and sage that Valerie had planted last summer were still green and going strong in the planters on the porch. It still amazed me to think about what they’d survived. Then again, I was a little amazed that any of us had survived last summer and still a little in shock about the one person in my life who hadn’t.
    I stamped my way up the stairs to the apartment, turned the key in the lock and opened the door as far as the chain would allow. “Norah,” I called through the crack. “It’s me. Let me in.”
    “Coming.”
    The chain was a new thing. Norah had installed it after our little adventure last summer. I’m not sure what she thought it was going to keep her safe from. I’m pretty sure even the pudgiest Seventh-day Adventist lady could kick the door right off that chain.
    She let me in.
    “You know that chain won’t keep him out if he wants to come in,” I said as I brushed past her.
    She crossed her matchstick arms across her chest. She’d lost weight in the last few months and Norah had never been exactly hefty to start with. “I know.”
    “It does, however, present an issue for me.” I got it that she was afraid. She should never have seen what she saw that night at the Bok Kai Temple in Old Sacramento. I’d tried to keep her from going, but she’d insisted. In fact,