Page 4 of Clay White
“I give a fuck about fucking.” I pushed my groin—still clothed—against his naked one.
“Is that why you came to the club tonight? For sex?”
I remembered my original mission then and, ashamed, disentangled myself from him. I stood and backed away several steps, but he remained sprawled on the floor, his pale cock hard against his belly.How the hell do vampires get hard-ons?I dragged my focus back to more important matters.
“I came looking for you,” I said.
“Me?”
“I know about the murders.”
His expression went blank. Moving gracefully, he rose to his feet. He pulled up his jeans but let them hang unfastened and low on his hips. “You know better than that, Agent White. I didn’t kill them.”
I ignored theAgentand shook my head. “Five young men, dead. Every one of them drained dry.”
“So you assume a vampire did it.”
“Seems a safe assumption.” Uneasy about where the conversation was going, I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes. As I said, I don’t like to think—and questioning my actions leads nowhere good.
Marek gave me a look that a schoolteacher might bestow on a dim student. “You’ve seen what my kind does to people. Have you ever seen corpses like these?”
“I haven’t seen these victims at all. The Bureau isn’t exactly in a sharing mood.” I’d heard rumors and read between the lines of the news reports, but I hadn’t viewed the bodies. Hadn’t even gotten my hands on any photos.
Marek prowled closer. There was something disturbingly near to pity in his gaze. It clashed with my blood on his skin. “They were dried-out husks,” he said. “Not just their blood gone, buteverythingliquid. Nothing left but bones and hair, and skin like old leather. Mummies.”
“How would you know that if you didn’t kill them?”
“They were left for me to find.”
None of this made any sense—least of all that I simply stood there, still hard from his touch, my gun far out of reach. But the orderly house I’d made of my life had begun to crumble months earlier, and perhaps all semblance of logic had crumbled with it. “Left by who?” I asked. “And why?”
He searched my eyes. “Will you believe me if I tell you?”
I shrugged.
After a long pause, he nodded. “Let’s go somewhere else for this conversation. Coffee?”
I may not be an intellectual man, but I have some share of curiosity. So I agreed.
Chapter Two
Before we left, Marek washed the blood from his face and buttoned his jeans. He dampened a scrap of his now-ruined shirt and, grinning, cleaned my face too. Then he reached into a plastic bag and pulled out a plain black T-shirt. I wondered if he’d deliberately acquired one that was a size too small—it showed off every line of his lean torso and exposed a strip of pale skin below the hem. If you didn’t pay too much attention to his eyes, he could have been mistaken for a human boy interested in nothing more than sharing his body. But I knew better.
He didn’t say anything while I retrieved my gun, put on the safety, and tucked it into my boot holster. He even turned his back to me as he led the way out of the restaurant. Maybe I could have shot him before he turned around. I didn’t try.
The temperature had cooled while we were inside but not enough to make me wish for a jacket. The fog hadn’t settled into this part of town, probably due to the light breeze that sent bits of paper skittering along the sidewalk. Although the air reeked of piss, the wind brought a hint of salt from the Bay, that damp, piscine odor that I imagined the whole world had smelled like, once upon a time.
Marek walked quickly and I had to hurry to keep up. But we didn’t go far. Three blocks from his restaurant, we came to a donut shop with brightly lit windows. Inside, the scent of coffee was thickly overlaid by the aromas of frying dough and sugar. I ordered for us at the counter—two coffees and a glazed old-fashioned—then joined Marek at a booth in the corner. The table was scarred and sticky, the vinyl upholstery cracked. But the coffee was decent and the donut freshly made.
Since Marek seemed disinclined to speak right away, I looked around. Working for the Bureau meant I’d spent a lot of time in places like this one, trying to stay awake through the night hours when those I hunted tended to appear. Because this was San Francisco, the late-night crowd was a little different from those in other cities. Fewer truck drivers and more drag queens.
In the harsh fluorescent light, Marek’s skin was nearly translucent and his eyes glowed as if lit from within. I stared at him shamelessly, wondering whether he’d been as beautiful when he was alive, wondering what he’d witnessed over the decades.
“Monsters come in many guises,” Marek said quietly. His hands were wrapped around his mug as if for warmth.
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Some of them are human.”
