Free Hex Appeal by P. N. Elrod Page A

gets to decide?”
    I thought about that one for a moment. “Connie … you’re mostly right. But … some things, once said, can’t be unsaid. Let me think about it.”
    She didn’t answer.
    The silence made me uncomfortable. I tried to chat my way clear of it. “How’d you meet Irwin?”
    The question, or maybe the subject matter, seemed to relax her a little. “In a closet at a party. Someone spiked the punch. Neither of us had ever been drunk before, and…” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “And he’s just so damned sexy.”
    “Lot of people wouldn’t think so,” I noted.
    She waved a hand. “He’s not pretty. I know that. It’s not about that. There’s … this energy in him. It’s chemical. Assurance. Power. Not just muscles—it’s who he is.” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, I guess. But once the hangover cleared up, that happened, too.”
    “So you love him?” I asked.
    Her smile widened, and her eyes shone the way a young woman’s eyes ought to shine. She spoke with calm, simple certainty. “He’s the one.”
    About twenty things to say leapt to my mind. I was going to say something about how she was too young to make that kind of decision. I thought about how she hadn’t been out on her own for very long, and how she had no idea where her relationship with Irwin was going to lead. I was going to tell her that only time could tell her if she and Irwin were good for one another and ready to be together, to make that kind of decision. I could have said something about how she needed to stop and think, not make blanket statements about her emotions and the future.
    That was when I realized that everything I would have said was something I would have said to a young woman in love—not to a vampire. Not only that, but I heard something in her voice or saw something in her face that told me that my aged wisdom was, at least in this case, dead wrong. My instincts were telling me something that my rational brain had missed.
    The kids had something real. I mean, maybe it hadn’t gotten off on the most pure and virtuous foot, but that wasn’t anything lethal in a relationship. The way they related to one another now? There was a connection there. You could imagine saying their names as a unit, and it fit : ConnieandIrwin. Maybe they had some growing to do, but what they had was real.
    Not that it mattered. Being in love didn’t change the facts. First, that Connie was a vampire. Second, that vampires had to feed. Third, they fed upon their lovers.
    *   *   *
    “Hold on,” Dean said. “You missed something.”
    “Eh?”
    “Girl’s a vampire, right?”
    “Yeah.
    “So,” Dean said. “She met the kid in a closet at a party. They already got it on. She done had her first time.”
    I frowned. “Yeah.”
    “So how come Kid Bigfoot wasn’t dead?”
    I nodded. “Exactly. It bothered me, too.”
    *   *   *
    The girl was in love with Irwin, and it meant she was dangerous to him. Hell, she was dangerous to almost everyone. She wasn’t even entirely human. How could I possibly spring something that big on her?
    At the same time, how could I not ?
    “I should have taken the gold,” I muttered to myself.
    “What?” she asked.
    That was when the Town Car pulled up to the curb a few feet ahead of us. Two men got out of the front seat. They wore expensive suits and had thick necks. One of them hadn’t had his suit fitted properly—I could see the slight bulge of a sidearm in a shoulder holster. That one stood on the sidewalk and stared at me, his hands clasped in front of him. The driver went around to the rear passenger door and opened it.
    “Oh,” Connie said. “Marvelous. This is all I need.”
    “Who is that?” I asked.
    “My father.”
    The man who got out of the back of the limo wore a pearl gray suit that made his thugs’ outfits look like secondhand clothing. He was slim, a bit over six feet tall, and his haircut