Free Raw Deal (Bite Back) by Mark Henwick Page B

lights were still on. I walked past and I just noticed them somehow, really noticed them. Like they’d called me, but they hadn’t.”
    If I could sense vampires, maybe some other people could, too. I stayed quiet, letting her tell it in her own way.
    “I sat down on the arm of the sofa, and talked to them. First off, it was just guy stuff.”
    “Like what?”
    “Oh, they had this joke going. One of them said I was pretty as a picture, he’d hang me on his wall. The next one said I should be in a gallery, and the third one, Rodrigo, told the other two off. But then he said he thought I must have good taste.”
    I winced.
    “I don’t think he was making a sick joke then,” she said. She finished her coffee. “I said something about feeling they’d called me over. Y’know, just flirting around. They seemed surprised. That’s when they started arguing in that language.”
    “Any idea what it was about?”
    “Something about me. Rodrigo wasn’t happy I was there. It gets a bit blurry. Next thing I know, I was leaning over Antonio, like we were cuddling. He bit me and there was this feeling. So hot, like I was almost ready to come. Weird or what?”
    “He bit you and it didn’t hurt at all?” Again, my experience had been different, but I’d been fighting to the death. Valerie’s comments about her sensations and the blurring of her memory fit in with a couple of the theories the colonel and I had discussed. If vampires could make humans want to be bitten, that would be dangerous enough, but if they could mess with memories and perceptions—that was a whole different kind of dangerous.
    “Yeah.” She balled up around the cushion, lowering her face to it. “None of them hurt me.” Her voice was muffled. “That time.”
    I reached out and touched her arm gently. Leo twisted around in a flash and latched onto me with his claws. We burst out laughing and had to fuss him until he let go.
    “That night was creepy, but I could live with it,” she resumed, when the cat had received enough worship to placate him. “I talked to Dominé. She didn’t like the sound of it and she said they wouldn’t get in again. But she was out yesterday. Someone let them in. I was on the door to the Sanctum, where you saw me tonight.”
    She reached behind the sofa, bringing out a huge art folder and putting it on the coffee table. Pinned to the front was a fresh painting. It was done in oils, and looked as if it was still sticky.
    Valerie’s mouth twisted, as if she felt sick to her stomach.
    “I can’t remember exactly what happened. But I can remember what it felt like to me,” she said, pushing the painting toward me. The intense colors had been spread with a knife, in sharp, straight lines. It was angry, wounded and violent. “I can remember suddenly realizing what they were and being scared shitless. That’s the point where things started to happen and it all just gets…” she gestured again at the painting and then pushed the folder away as if she didn’t want to be reminded of it. “Marcel was on the door with me. He said nothing happened. He couldn’t remember them coming up the stairs at all. They did something to him. Even Dominé didn’t believe me until she looked at the recording from the security camera.”
    Security footage? Hard evidence of vampire activity? I felt goose bumps down my arms. 
    I’d need that recording from Dominé and I had to get it to the colonel tonight.
    “And you, Amber. You’re one of them, but you’re different. How is that?”
    It felt like I’d been gut-punched. All the stuff from Dominé about being like them was so much talk, unsettling but nothing more. Here was a girl who could sense vampires, and she sensed I was one. I’d been sitting here with my Ops 4-10 head on, thinking about nailing vampires in America for the colonel. If I was one too, what did that mean for me?
    “What do you mean?” I stalled.
    “When you got in my face at the club, I felt the same