Free Companions by Susan Sizemore

protection and laws of vampire society, but that didn't mean the local Enforcer wasn't aware of most strig activity in his town. Any good cop would know potential troublemakers.
    "Possibly."
    "Any nest have a safe house off Oak Street?"
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    She didn't blame him when he didn't answer. He reached past her and closed the body bag, his long white fingers elegantly graceful against the shiny black plastic. He took the body out of the car trunk as if it weighed nothing and put it over his shoulder, then turned a very frightening, stern glance on her. "This is my case from now on, Detective. Thank you for your help." Then he disappeared, leaving a momentary white blur in the corner of her eye as he moved with the swiftness of his kind.
    It was not, she noticed after a moment's reflection, anywhere near as fast as her boy Steve could move.
    She wondered why that was and pulled out of the quiet neighborhood to drive through heavy traffic on the way home to Evanston. She knew Enforcers were different than regular vampires, almost a breed apart, and that Istvan was different even than regular Enforcers. What she didn't know, and he'd certainly never bothered telling her, was why and how. It had become habit to try not to think about anything to do with the monster in her life. Cop's instincts told her that might not be wise right now, not when she'd just risked her own career to clean up a mess that had spilled over from the world she pretended didn't exist.
    "It's not pretense, it's a survival tool," she muttered as a driver using a cell phone cut her off. She hated using her own car, and she hated people who used those things while they drove! "Idiots. Where was I?"
    Oh, yeah, telling herself she didn't pretend vampires didn't exist. It was only Istvan, her boy Steve, she tried to pretend didn't exist. Tried and failed utterly.
    She hated admitting that, not because she loathed personal failure but because she dealt with people who lied to themselves all the time, and they were stupid. Murderers were especially good at mental gymnastics that convinced them that they had a right to take life, that it was the victim's fault they'd been killed. And sex offenders: God, sex offenders were the worst at finding anyone to blame but themselves for the sick lives they led. And what was a vampire but an immortal rapist-murderer?
    And she was one of them.
    "Now there's a chilling little admission." Selena glanced in the rearview mirror to look herself in the eye.
    Somehow that ritual helped reassure her of her current humanity. At least she could see herself in the mirror. She remembered how she used to check her teeth to see if they were getting pointy and brushed and flossed five or six times a day after she was first bitten. She supposed she'd nursed some crazy hope that good dental hygiene would save her from the fate that awaited her.
    A largely unknown fate, she admitted, after two years of lurking around the outside edge of strigoi life.
    She didn't know what it was like to be a vampire, and she had only a warped and fragmented notion of what it was like to be a companion — from fellow dissatisfied companions, at that. She sometimes suspected that her aunt knew more about vampires than she did. And Steve — Istvan, the Meanest Mother in the Valley — what did she really know about him?
    Did it matter for a murder investigation she'd just turned over to the vampire police department? Her instincts told her it did. Her instincts, she pointed out to herself, were screwed up by hormones, or pheromones, or blood loss from last night's little romp with Fangboy the Magnificent. And was he really hung like a stallion, or was it some sort of vampire hypnotism that made her think he was? And did it matter, considering the force and frequency of the orgasms the illusion — or possibly reality — induced in her?
    "Yes, damn it!"
    Reality mattered. Controlling her