Free Gifts of the Blood by Vicki Keire Page B

strongly scented air of my job. I looked at the clock. It was going to be a long six-hour shift.
     

 
    Chapter Six:
    The Lighter Spectrum
     
    I watched as Amelie took her third sip of my cinnamon-dusted, whipped cream topped coffee confection. Her silvered eyelids pulsed against the urge to fly open, but she repressed it; that would be cheating. Her perfect mouth twisted slightly in her pale face, amused, even as her nostrils flared over her steaming cup. Amelie was so pale, with snow-blond hair and ice-gray eyes, that she could only wear pale or sheer shades of make-up. But her features were frozen perfection, and she knew it, and used it to her advantage. Her skin glowed with some kind of outrageously expensive cream imported from her native France. If I looked closely enough, I could see tiny sparkles as she moved in the light. Her eyes and mouth were the only features she could highlight without looking like a circus clown. Today she’d chosen a deep red lipstick, the color of pomegranates, that left generous circles on the white coffee cup as she played her part of our nightly game.
    “Vanilla and brown sugar?” she guessed, a flash of pink tongue lapping at her top lip as she waited.
    “Oh, come on,” I huffed, a little insulted. “You are so off. Those are summer flavors, Amelie, and you know it. Give me some credit.”
    When she smiled in triumph, her deep red lips an almost cruel, curling beauty in her snow queen face, I bit my lip in annoyance. Damn her. “Why, thank you, Caspia, for that vital clue. So it’s seasonal, hmm?” I didn’t answer. “How many guesses do I have left?”
    “Just one,” I ground out, crossing my fingers and wishing hard. "You just used your second." We played this game whenever we closed together. The loser had to wash the dishes. Since Mr. Markov never invested in a dishwasher, someone had to wash everything by hand. It was the least popular chore. The dishwasher was almost always the last one out and the closer by default. Tonight I really hoped to go early; I'd tried to devise an unusual drink, hoping to stump Amelie and win my early freedom.
    For some reason, I was the one who almost always invented the new coffee drinks. Mr. Markov, the owner and our boss who happened to be dozing beside his chessboard in front of the fire, claimed he had no talent for such things. If we left things up to him, Whitfield’s only coffee shop would serve nothing but plain black coffee. Maybe, if he felt adventurous, he might add decaf, too. I sighed.
    “Mmm.” Amelie sipped again, her pink tongue licking up whipped cream. “I’ll have to go with…” I held my breath. I so did not want to be the last one out and then have to go to the bank too. Plus there was the tiny little matter of Ethan, and his slightly puzzling comment about keeping me company, my even more puzzling anticipation that he might actually show, and the extremely high creepiness factor that he knew things he shouldn’t and appeared to be stalking me…
    Amelie snapped her perfectly manicured fingers in my face. “Hello? Pretending to be in a coma won’t save you. It has to be pumpkin.” She gave me a wintry smile that matched the growing unease in the pit of my stomach and cradled her drink. “Admit it, Caspia, so I can finish up and go home.”
    “Pumpkin spice, actually,” I told her, slumping back against a bare expanse of green marble countertop in defeat. “But close enough.”
    She finished off what was left in her cup in one quick, unladylike gulp. “It really is quite good. What are you going to call it?”
    “Pumpkin spice?” I said dully, feeling about as imaginative as Mr. Markov. My entire body went limp as the weight of my day pressed down on me. I looked out the storefront windows, every one of them lit up with tea lights across the sill, at the darkness lurking just beyond and tried to imagine what waited for me out there. Take the deposit to the bank in the dark, possibly accompanied by a