Page 30 of Kissed the Mark
“Can you try it on?” she asked.
I pulled the sweatshirt over my head andslid the jacket over my tank top. It was incredibly comfortable.The weight of the denim settled on my shoulders like a comfortblanket. Unable to stop myself, I sighed. I felt likemeagain.
“Wow. You look great,” Leandra said.
“Leandra, what do we do about Patricia?” Irepeated.
She pursed her lips. “We’ll figure somethingout.”
Chapter Sixteen
The Vampire and theFairy
TO GET A NEW SET of eyes on her research, Leandrahad me read over Viktor Lehmann’s first diary. I was so exhaustedthat it took me five minutes to realize I wasn’t comprehending thetext because it was in German. The words blurred before my eyes ina big Germanic soup. When I told Leandra I didn’t speak thelanguage, she disappointedly took the diary from me and read italoud, translating as she went with some difficulty.
I tried my best to pay attention, but mymind wandered. It worried me that she wasn’t as concerned aboutPatricia; I was the one with my ass on the line, not her. The giftsstill confused me—what I’d done was nice enough, I guessed, if shehad been observing and only saw that I was caring for the fakeversion of her, but did it warrant a whole new smartphone and apersonalized jacket? I was wary of jumping to conclusions about herkindness. She surely had another agenda in mind and it was onlytime before I got swept into it.
I was tired enough too that I only nowrealized Ihadalready been swept into the agenda after shefinished describing Lehmann time traveling to murder his youngerself.Thiswas the thing she wanted help with. This wasactually the thing she’d wanted help with the whole time—we werejust doing away with pretenses now. I watched her lips move as sheread the text aloud, forehead scrunching when she got to a phraseshe struggled to translate into English. She had me transcribingeverything she said into a word processor but I knew I was missingsome of it. Her voice was the kind they would have used inaudiobooks, the kind you’d listen to before bed to have sweetdreams.
“Thanks,” she said.
“What?”
“You just complimented me.”
I hadn’t known I’d spoken aloud. “Leandra,”I said, “I’m sorry for being rude, but I don’t think I’m doing avery good job transcribing.”
“I’m recording it too,” she said, gesturingto a microphone that would be the envy of many a Twitch streamer.“So it’s okay if you don’t get everything. I’ll go over itall.”
“Um.” She had been so polite to me that itwas hard to let her know I didn’t want to do it.
“Maybe we should take a break?” she offered.“You look exhausted.”
“I am,” I said.
There was a moment of awkward silence.Leandra had shown me the plush king-sized bed in her bedroom whenshe went to get a specific picture she’d stolen from ViktorLehmann’s Austrian villa. We’d been acting like friends, or maybecolleagues who owed each other something, but neither of those weretrue. I saw my thought process reflected in her expression.
“You can go home if you like,” Leandra saidfinally. “But if you want to rest here, I can order you food inexchange for helping me?”
Her bed did look nicer than mine. I hated tobe beholden to anyone, though. “What are we doing?” I asked.
“What do you mean? I told you what I wantedto do. You don’t have to help if you don’t want to, but I have someextra funds if this is cutting into your bounty hunting—”
“No, I mean…what arewedoing?”
Another awkward silence. “Please be moreexplicit,” she said quietly. To me that signified that she alreadyknew what I meant.
“Are we friends?” I asked. “Why are we doingthis together?”
Leandra swallowed. “I’m sorry for pushingyou so far. You can go home if you want. Do you need me to orderyou a ride? The sun’s coming up soon, or I’d walk you.”
“You avoid my questions a lot.”
“You ask a lot of questions I don’t want toanswer,” she shot back.
“I’ll stay and help you if you can give me agood reason. And also for a chance to sleep in the soft bed and getfree food,” I added as an afterthought. Might as well milk it.
“I get sick of vampire politics,” Leandrasaid after a moment. “I get tired of answering to Patricia’s everywhim, I get sick of covering up other people’s mistakes that exposeus to humankind, and I get sick of all the stuck-up vamps out therewho all wish they could be as high up on the food chain as I am.”She closed the diary and set it aside. “It’s nice to have aconnection that isn’t a vampire. Someone fun to talk to who I knowisn’t motivated by her own dark agenda.”
