From Dead to Worse Read Online Free PDF Page B

young woman who works for Eric, his child Pam, mentioned it,” he said.
    Liar, liar, pants on fire, I thought. I hadn’t talked to Pam in a couple of weeks, and our last conversation hadn’t been girlish chatter about my social and work schedule. She’d been recovering from the wounds she’d sustained in Rhodes. Her recovery, and Eric’s, and the queen’s, had been the sole topic of our conversation.
    “Of course,” I said. “Well, good evening. I need to be leaving.” I unlocked the door and carefully slid inside, trying to keep my eyes fixed on Jonathan so I’d be ready for a sudden move. He stood as still as a statue, inclining his head to me after I started the car and pulled off. At the next stop sign, I buckled my seat belt. I hadn’t wanted to pin myself down while he was so close. I locked the car doors, and I looked all around me. No vampires in sight. I thought, That was really, really weird. In fact, I should probably call Eric and relate the incident to him.
    You know what the weirdest part was? The withered man with the long blond hair had been standing in the shadows behind the vampire the whole time. Our eyes had even met once. His beautiful face had been quite unreadable. But I’d known he didn’t want me to acknowledge his presence. I hadn’t read his mind—I couldn’t—but I’d known this nonetheless.
    And weirdest of all, Jonathan hadn’t known he was there. Given the acute sense of smell that all vampires possessed, Jonathan’s ignorance was simply extraordinary.
    I was still mulling over the strange little episode when I turned off Hummingbird Road and onto the long driveway through the woods that led back to my old house. The core of the house had been built more than a hundred and sixty years before, but of course very little of the original structure remained. It had been added to, remodeled, and reroofed a score of times over the course of the decades. A two-room farmhouse to begin with, it was now much larger, but it remained a very ordinary home.
    Tonight the house looked peaceful in the glow of the outside security light that Amelia Broadway, my housemate, had left on for me. Amelia’s car was parked in back, and I pulled alongside it. I kept my keys out in case she’d gone upstairs for the night. She’d left the screen door unlatched, and I latched it behind me. I unlocked the back door and relocked it. We were hell on security, Amelia and I, especially at night.
    A little to my surprise, Amelia was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me. We’d developed a routine after weeks of living together, and generally Amelia would have retired upstairs by this time. She had her own TV, her cell phone, and her laptop up there, and she’d gotten a library card, so she had plenty to read. Plus, she had her spell work, which I didn’t ask questions about. Ever. Amelia is a witch.
    “How’d it go?” she asked, stirring her tea as if she had to create a tiny whirlpool.
    “Well, they got married. No one pulled a Jane Eyre. Glen’s vampire customers behaved themselves, and Miss Caroline was gracious all over the place. But I had to stand in for one of the bridesmaids.”
    “Oh, wow! Tell me.”
    So I did, and we shared a few laughs. I thought of telling Amelia about the beautiful man, but I didn’t. What could I say? “He looked at me”? I did tell her about Jonathan from Nevada.
    “What do you think he really wanted?” Amelia said.
    “I can’t imagine.” I shrugged.
    “You need to find out. Especially since you’d never heard of the guy whose guest he said he was.”
    “I’m going to call Eric—if not tonight, then tomorrow night.”
    “Too bad you didn’t buy a copy of that database Bill is peddling. I saw an ad for it on the Internet yesterday, on a vampire site.” This might seem like a sudden change of subject, but Bill’s database contained pictures and/or biographies of all the vampires he’d been able to locate all over the world, and a few he’d