Free Deliver Me from Darkness: A Novel of the Paladin Warriors by Tes Hilaire Page B

had gone down last night was too fucking weirded-out to be real. Sure, there had been a coed and a back alley. And before that there had been some liquor and some powder. But no way in hell had there been a fucking vampire. That shit wasn’t real.
    And if it wasn’t real, then why the hell was he in here cowering rather than out doing what he normally did? Was he such a friggin’ pansy ass that he was going to let some impure X put him off his game? And that’s what it had been. Bad X. He should find the dealer who sold it to him and off the branded fucker. Better yet, spread the word that Tattoo Guy was selling inferior products and let someone else off him. Fewer repercussions that way. He needed to put the nightmare behind him, find a new dealer, and get on with his shit. Life was waiting, after all, and at thirty-nine he wasn’t getting any younger.
    The sense of eyes boring into the side of his head had him looking down the bar to the right. The barkeep was staring at him uneasily, his hands drying and re-drying the same glass over and over again. WTF? What was the asshole staring at? He was a goddamn paying patron, after all. Tom’s anger bubbled, his hand clenching the shot glass. Some of the precious top-shelf splashed over the rim. The waste of the expensive shit pissed him off further.
    Shit. The shot was half-empty but not because he’d drunk any. A quick review of the last couple minutes told him he’d probably been nodding and gesturing to himself like a fucking crazy person. And now Greg thought him the next candidate for the loony bin.
    Well, he wasn’t. He wasn’t crazy. Crazy was seeing things that weren’t there. Crazy was thinking the fucked up dreams that came after an evening of binging were real. Crazy was letting said dreams fuck you over the next night too. Well, that wasn’t happening here. Nope. Tom was going to finish his shot, grab up his money—no tip for busybody Greg—get into his GT500, and do what a real man would do, which was do what he always did. He had at least another decade before his looks went to total shit, and his money couldn’t lure out the pretty coeds. He was a former all-star college athlete, a successful banker with a good crib and a better car. Yeah, he was still a player to be reckoned with. Red eyes or not, nothing was going to keep him from living life to the fullest.
    With the decision made, Tom tossed back the shot—there was a reason they called it liquid courage—slammed down the glass, and pushed up off his barstool. Then, with a jaunty swagger, he made his way out the door into the parking lot where he stopped and took a deep breath of night air.
    A smile cracked on his face, his body thrumming with purpose as he began to whistle on the way to his Mustang. The night was young yet and all his. Carpe diem and all that crap.
    ***
     
    Roland examined the peeling linoleum floor, the pads of his fingers brushing over the dark brown stains that were layered over what must have been decades of other stains. Karissa’s home. Her sanctuary. The place where she should have felt safe, yet murder had occurred here. Recently. The blood was old enough to oxygenate but not so old as to leave no clues.
    Killer. The accusation, and the fear that he might let loose his frustration and rage on his best friend when Calhoun returned for his shift, had driven Roland into the night. He’d been able to trace the faint taint of death that still clung to her back to her Brooklyn home.
    Karissa was right. He was a killer. And for this he would be again. Whoever had taken the life of the man who had fallen here would pay in kind. An eye for an eye. Death for death. So it would be.
    Whoever the man was, he was a relation to Karissa. He could pick up enough lingering scent to know that. Someone had removed the body. Not the police either, for there was no blatant yellow tape, despite the obvious crime scene. Whoever this man was to Karissa—father, brother, uncle—his absence