Page 11 of Happily Undead in Dark River

“Whiskey-nips?”

“What?” Was he having a stroke?

“Do you have nipples that give whiskey? Is that your new vamp power?”

I scoffed and flipped him the bird. “Amazing personality, remember?” Luckily I was saved from his smartass comeback by the arrival of Beatrice.

“Hello, Lass,” she said, smiling softly. I loved Beatrice. “Ah, good to see you are still alive, you good-fer-nothin’ degenerate.”

What in the Furby-loving hell?

X just laughed so loudly, everyone in the diner turned to stare. “Ah, Beatrice, you saucy fucking wench. It was touch and go, but I’m hard to kill.”

Beatrice waggled a finger at him as she filled all our mugs with coffee. “So is a cockroach, Lad. So is a cockroach.” She grinned at me, and I thought that Beatrice might actually be fond of him. “What can I get for you? I’m going to tell Bert to spit in this one’s food, so I recommend not getting the same thing as him.”

X began giggling so hard, he could hardly breathe. Beatrice looked bemused. “Just pancakes, thanks, Beatrice.” I looked over at Judge and mouthed, “What the fuck is happening?”

Judge just shook his head in bemusement. “The usual please, Beatrice. If Bert needs a hand with the spitting though, you just let me know.”

She walked away, without asking X for his order, but I had a suspicion he would somehow get what he wanted anyway.

I wanted to ask what happened with the Council, but not with so many supernatural ears around. Which left a conversational void for a question I really wanted to know the answer to. “So, what was the go with you guys and Miranda? Were you a thruple?”

X screwed up his nose. “A what?”

“A committed menage,” Judge answered, surprising the shit out of me. It was a day for surprises apparently. He shrugged. “Tex talks about it. He says we are a Quiple or Quinple? He thinks you should start dating X so we can be a Sexuple.”

X just stared at him, then looked at me. “What the hell have you done to him, Love? It’s like he’s been body-snatched.” He took a long sip of coffee. “I loved the cold-hearted witch. She loved the pretty Southern boy. He only loved himself. And now you, it would seem. But it didn’t end well, as you can imagine. But we were the Council’s favorite clean up crew, so we were kind of stuck in that toxic cycle.” He stirred his coffee even though he was drinking it black. At that moment, without the perverted sense of humor, lost in a little heartache, I could see the Harley Street surgeon beneath the Jack the Ripper Killer. “I need to talk to the proprietress of this fine establishment about getting tea. This shit is like sludge. Excuse me.”

I watched him go, walking straight past Beatrice and out the front door. Guilt ate at my gut. I knew it was going to be a sore subject, but I poked at the wound anyway. I looked over at Judge, his eyes were characteristically blank. He reached out and covered my hand with his. “It’s okay, Rainey Day. He’ll calm down, and will be back being the smartass prick he normally is. Miranda and him, it was messy. He loved her so damn much, and I had no fucking idea. He’s not the easiest guy to read.”

I bit my lip. I was still going to have to apologize. “What happened?” Judge’s jaw tightened. “Hey, you don’t have to tell me. The past is the past, right?”

He pulled my stool closer, so our hips were touching. “He pursued her for years. Maybe a decade. She wanted nothing to do with him. You’ve met her. To her, he was too thuggish. Too flirty. Too interested. I… did not take to my new position as a killer for hire so well. I was moody, standoffish. I wasn’t interested in her flirtations, and that just made her more interested. More persistent. But I had no idea that he wanted her for anything more than a convenient fuck. I had no idea he loved her. Sometimes we’d scratch that itch that came up when you are on the road a lot with another person, but it was never when X was around. Not on purpose, but it just worked out like that. Now I know it was because Miranda knew of his feelings.” He sighed, and there was a world of regret riding on that breath.

“Anyway, we had a really bad run-in with an entire nest of rogue vampires, I was down, so was X, and we fucked. I mean Miranda and me,” he paused, looking at his mug. “Not X and me. I’ll never forget the look on his face, you know? He’d been slashed to pieces days before by rogues, but it wasn’t until that moment that he looked truly shredded. Anyway, the rest is history. We continued to work together until it was so tense we started making mistakes. Miranda is too valuable to the Witch Cabal, so they called her back, we disbanded and I got the fuck out of the Enforcers. I got back in touch when you got murdered. It didn’t add up for me and there is only one man I truly trusted to look into this stuff with me.”

I nodded. “Thank you for telling me.” I leaned forward and kissed him softly. It didn’t matter to me, not really, not anymore. But I was happy he trusted me with this little piece of his past when getting information from him was normally like extracting teeth from a crocodile. I lifted my hand and waved to Beatrice. “Can we get those meals to go, please?”

Beatrice nodded but moved off to take someone else’s orders. I stood up and reached over to kiss Judge’s cheek. His midnight blue eyes burned into mine, as if he was trying to tell if I was really okay with the whole sordid story. I was. It was a tale as old as time, and he was as old as dirt. If he hadn’t been caught in one love triangle in all that time, was he even really alive?

“Can you find X and bring him back to my house? I should apologize. But first…”

I dashed out the door. I had a stop to make, and I wanted to do it alone.

Chapter Six

Istill loved the stained glass windows out the front of the Immortal Cupcake, formerly the best bakery/bookshop in North America. But instead of being lit up from within, the images of horses and oceans etched in the window seems lifeless. Dead.

I still had a key to the back door, so I walked down the back alley to the rear entrance door. Up the stairs was my old apartment, still coated in Walker’s flaking blood. Shaking my head to chase away the memories, I let myself in. It felt wrong to be in the Immortal Cupcake without Angeline. Without the other people of Dark River bustling around, waiting patiently for some kind of baked confection.

I strolled through the darkened kitchen, and into the main cafe area. I wanted to cry. So many good memories tainted by one hour of badness. I’d started a new life in this very room. Refound happiness right here. Now I could never be comfortable here again.

“What are you doing here?”

“Holy Jesus fucking a frog,” I screeched, startling at the voice in the darkness. I spun around and saw Angeline standing in the library. Her hair was stringy and standing up on end, and she was in yoga pants and a misshapen sweater that hung to her knees. She looked like shit, and I felt like shit for even thinking it.

Her lips twitched. “That’s very blasphemous, Raine.” Her voice was flat, grief darkening the edges.

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