Dead on Delivery Read Online Free PDF

I’d spent years trying to protect Norah from knowing who I was, what I was and what kinds of things I dealt with.
    Turns out I’m not so good at keeping secrets from her. I’m pretty sure she wished I had been better at it now.
    “I’m sorry.” She marched back to the couch and flung herself into it.
    I sighed. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic, but I’d been being sympathetic for months now. Apparently, I have a finite amount of sympathy and Norah was dangerously close to having used more than her share. Perhaps for the decade.
    “As vampires go, he’s really not bad.” I sat down next to her. She was watching So You Think You Can Dance . I grabbed the remote and turned it off.
    She held her hand out like a cop stopping traffic. “He drinks blood. Human blood.”
    I scratched my nose. It was a difficult point to argue. That’s pretty much what vampires did. “Only what people come in and spray at him, for the most part.” And a bit from willing partners, met anonymously and left mainly intact. They might end up with the tiniest of puncture wounds on a neck or a wrist or some other highly vascular body part, but he’d never drink enough to harm them and never ever enough to turn them. Of that, I was reasonably certain. It was one of the ways that Alex was different than most of the other vampires I’d met and was one of the reasons I could stand to be around him.
    She glared at me, grabbed the remote and turned the TV on again. “He’s more like them than like us.”
    Unspoken between us was the fact that Norah was the one who had invited him into our apartment. As much as I like Alex, and there are times when I like him a confusing amount, inviting him into the apartment was not a mistake I was likely to make. Despite hours on the Internet and watching old Buffy DVDs, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to uninvite a vampire from a home. Therefore, Alex could pretty much come and go in our place as he pleased.
    The irony was that Alex had not taken advantage of the situation. Not once. He had not fluttered through the windows, slid like smoke under the door or simply busted his way in. He hadn’t even shown up and knocked. The even bigger irony was that until Norah had seen the kiang shi in action, she’d thought Alex was pretty cool.
    Which he is. What with the being undead thing, his temperature stays way below us 98.6-ers. But Nora hadn’t thought it literally. She’d thought it flirtatiously, but flirting with a vampire is flirting with danger to a very high degree. She had no idea how lucky she was.
    Alex hadn’t done anything that night to put her off. In fact, he’d done pretty much nothing. It wasn’t his fault. Everything went down in a temple and it’s a little tricky for vampires to set foot on sacred ground. In fact, they can’t. Somehow, watching Alex do nothing and watching Ted Goodnight save the day had shaken my little New Age-y, tofu-eating, yoga-posing BFF right down to her rainbow-loving core.
    “Couldn’t we just stock up on garlic and crosses and leave the chain off the door until I come home?” I pleaded.
    She gave me a hard stare. “Once you’re home, I don’t need the chain on anymore.”
    There was that. Nora had also seen me in full action for the first time, too, and now knew what I was capable of. There wasn’t much that could come through our door that I didn’t have a good chance of taking.
    The doorknob to the front door started to turn. Norah’s hard stare turned into a look of horror and she damn near jumped into my lap. I pushed Norah behind me and stood. The doorknob jiggled again. Something was definitely trying to come in and it didn’t seem to feel a need to be too stealthy about it.
    I rolled my shoulders, making sure they were loose and easy. I closed my eyes, reaching out with my senses to whatever was trying to get into the apartment. My skin didn’t prickle. My hair didn’t stand up like I was too close to a lightning strike.