Mercy's Destiny: Montgomery's Vampires Trilogy (Book #3) (Montgomery's Vampires Series) (8 page)

Joseph was a pretty fun date. He danced in a cool, self-deprecating way and didn’t even mind too much when a gaggle of drunken human women tried to lift up his kilt to see what was underneath. When it came time to catch the bouquet, I didn’t bother getting up. Joseph tried to nudge me out of the chair, but the steely look I shot him put an end to that
real
quick. He laughed:
Okay.

It was hard to believe that Joseph was affiliated with the most powerful (and lethal) vampire organization in the world, and that I’d been in front of him only a short time ago, pleading for my life.

After the wedding, Joseph and I had an awkward moment at the door. Had it been an actual date, a kiss would have been appropriate and welcomed. The boxes were all ticked: Mutual attraction.
Tick.
Fun evening.
Tick.
Sky illuminated by the moon.
Tick.

Unfortunately, there were a few boxes
not
on the perfect evening list that were also ticked. Questions, really. Did the evening conclude at my maybe-boyfriend’s house? Was my ‘date’ a major player in a mafia-type vampire organization? Did I have a contractual blood obligation to my companion?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

When the quietness got to be too awkward, I invited, “Would you like to come inside?”

For a horrifying moment I thought Joseph was going to accept . . . But then I was feeling as equally horrified when it seemed that he was going to decline.

I’d never been so conflicted. And then something occurred to me: I hadn’t checked my cellphone once the entire evening to see if Robert had called. I didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

“You aren’t tired?” he asked.

Actually, I was pretty exhilarated. I’d had a great time and I wanted to continue having fun.

But, on the other hand, I didn’t know what Joseph was getting at. Though I’d gone out on occasional dates in the past, the only ‘real’ relationship practice I’d had was with Mathew and Robert. I didn’t understand dating rules and protocols the way most twenty-something singletons did. Was Joseph asking about my tiredness code for “Are you energized enough for sex?” I began to worry that I’d inadvertently used a code for “Do you want to sleep with me?” by inviting Joseph inside. It wasn’t that I didn’t
want
to get romantic with Joseph—because, who wouldn’t?—but under the current circumstance, it would be hideously inappropriate to do so. But, oh boy, if I were single . . .

Well, too late now. I couldn’t take back my invitation so rashly without appearing discourteous. Or insane. And I figured that Joseph was versed enough with the ladies to know what I meant. Not only had we already outlined that what we were on was, in fact,
not
a date, but there had been zero romantic contact during the date: no handholding, no kissing, and no accidentally-on-purpose thigh brushes. We’d even kept a respectable amount of distance between us on the dance floor. The drunken kilt-lifting women had copped more of a feel in their thirty seconds of harassment than I had the entire night.

“Sure, I can come in for a nip,” Joseph smiled.

Oh God-oh God-oh God! He was coming in!

“Great,” I smiled right back.

I directed Joseph toward the living room and then went into the kitchen and fixed our drinks, blood and wine. When I returned, Joseph was sitting almost dead center of the sofa. So, no matter where I sat, I’d be right next to him. I regarded the armchair, which was clear on the other side of the room—no, it would be weird and insulting if I sat
there
.

I took a seat on the sofa and handed Joseph his blood.

“You didn’t decorate this place, did you?” he asked, looking around.

I chuckled. “Is it that obvious? No, that was all Robert.”

Joseph gestured toward the rug I loathed so much—the amoeba rug. “If you don’t mind my saying, that throw is atrocious.”

I threw back my head and cackled. “Right! I hate it, too! I get dizzy just looking at it!”

He took a sip of his drink. “Speaking of looking at things, what was up with the kid staring at you all night?”

Joseph used
a lot
more slang than Robert, who would never use a colloquialism like “What was up with . . . ?” It sounded quaint coming from someone so ancient, though I doubted anyone not chummy with Joseph would point this out. Correcting the grammar of a VGO leader seemed like a good way to get killed.

I frowned. “What kid? A kid at the wedding?” What would a vampire as old as Joseph deem a kid?
I
was a kid to him, if you wanted to split hairs, though he and I appeared similar in age physically.

“He was a teenager. You didn’t see him?”

I shook my head. “No, not at all. What was he doing?”

“He was watching you. All night long.”

“Like in creepy way—checking me out? Or like he knew me?”

Joseph thought a moment. “I wouldn’t say it was creepy, no. He was sort of . . . observing you. Like he was curious.”

“Hmm, that’s weird.” Could Robert have sent a spy to see how well I was getting along without him? Now I was just being paranoid.

“You can’t really fault him, can you?” Joseph purred. “You’re a very striking woman, Mercy. I couldn’t take my eyes off you all night, either.”

I leaned forward to set my glass on the coffee table, just to have something to do, because I didn’t know what to say. At that precise moment, Joseph did the same thing, and our heads nearly butted.

As I sat back, Joseph reached out and curled his cool fingers around my wrist, pulling me into him. I stiffened, frozen with indecision.

Joseph’s face bore a mixture of wanting, displeasure, and surprise. No woman had ever spurned his advances, I presumed. His grip slackened and he sat back. Joseph began to speak, probably to apologize.

But I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say.

Instead, I sealed his lips closed with a kiss.

8

The passion didn’t last long.

It was the shortest kiss of my entire life. I guessed it was the same for Joseph. We didn’t even need to come up for air—it was
that
short.

I wiped a hand across my mouth. He did the same.

I said, “Well, that was . . .”

He finished for me: “Weird.”

I nodded. “Yah.”

“Do you, err, want to try again?” he asked.

“Sure. Okay.”

The kiss lasted longer this time, but the outcome was the same. When we finished, Joseph and I sat back and regarded each other. It started to pour outside, and the raindrops made pelting sounds against the windows.

“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way,” I began. “But that was . . .”

“Bloody awful.”

Suddenly, we were cracking up, as if nothing had ever been so hilarious. We were laughing so hard that tears were springing from our eyes like a dam had burst under our lids. I snorted like a little piggy as I wheezed for breath, making us laugh harder.

Joseph slapped a hand down on his thigh and then my knee. “I’ve had more passionate kisses with goats!”

“What?” I cackled, swiping a tear from under my eye with a knuckle. My mascara was probably all over my face. I didn’t care.

“I was a herder back in the day,” he explained.

“Oh.”

And then we were off again.

“I don’t know why this is so funny!”

“I don’t either!”

Our merriment eventually died down to the point where we were making those soft
uh-uh-uhh
noises people do after they’ve had a good giggle. Joseph picked up my wine glass and handed it to me and then picked up his own tumbler of blood.

He held his glass up and made a toast. “Here’s to us never, ever,
ever
kissing again.”

I chinked his glass against mine. “Agreed.”

We sipped on our drinks and then I said, “I mean, what in the hell
was
that?”

Joseph grimaced. “I have no idea. It was like kissing . . .”

“Like . . . a family member . . . or a random associate, like the mailman.”

“Totally!” he exclaimed. “I don’t get it. You’re hot, I’m hot—” he laughed again. “Yikes. That kiss was just so appalling.”

“So, where does that leave us?” I smiled.

He asked, “Where do you want it to leave us?”

“This is weird, because I don’t really know you, but I like you. Like as a friend?”

“I completely agree,” Joseph said, nodding. “I feel close to you. But, uh, not sexually.” Apparently. “And I suspect we’re in agreement.”

“So, maybe we can be friends, Joseph. If it’s allowed?”

His brow crinkled. “Why wouldn’t it be allowed?”

“Err . . . Because of the whole VGO thing.”

“Oh. You aren’t planning on skipping town, are you?” he said. “Reneging on our bargain?”

“No, not at all,” I said with absolute seriousness, so there was no room for interpretation on his part. “I made a deal, and I’m a woman of my word.” Though I didn’t like it. “I just didn’t know if you’d get into trouble for being all buddy-buddy with me.”

“It’s quite decent of you to be so thoughtful about my welfare after everything the VGO have put you through. I know our treatment of you has been harsh.” He could say that again. “But in case you didn’t notice, Mercy, I’m fairly high-up in the organization.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“You don’t think that the VGO
sent
me here, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

He asked, “Didn’t you find it odd that we didn’t send a lab tech to extract your blood?”

“Sure, I did. I almost passed out when I opened the door and saw you standing there,” I admitted.

Joseph smirked at that. “I made the
choice
to come here. I wanted to see you. I fancied you when we first met.”

I smiled.
Duh.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out better.”

With a shake of the head, he told me, “I’m not. I have very few female friends—genuine friends that I have zero sexual interest in—that I can talk to. And certainly no human ones. Vampires are very sexual beings, if you didn’t know.” Oh, yah, I knew. I’d spent enough time with Robert to know
that
.

Joseph sat back on the sofa. “I’m glad I came. I had fun with you tonight.”

“I had fun as well,” I seconded.

“As far as the VGO, there are very few members that I take orders from.”

Before I could stop myself, I sneered, “You mean you don’t take orders from Serena?”

He snorted. “Uh, no. No way.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Oh, not a fan?” I said with sarcasm. “But she was
such
a lovely woman when I met her.” For a complete bitch face.

He chuckled. “You didn’t hear it from me, but Serena’s on her way out.”

I couldn’t believe Joseph would divulge such clandestine information to me, a lowly human. Then again, it didn’t sound as if he had too many vamps to answer to, so he could pretty much say whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted, couldn’t he?

With my heart thudding, I asked, “What do you mean, on her way out?” Could her departure have something to do with Robert?

“I mean that Serena’s going to be invited to leave us.” He said ‘invited’ acerbically, and in a way that implied
She’ll leave or the VGO will
make
her ass leave.

“Why?” I figured that if Joseph didn’t want to tell me, he wouldn’t.

He shrugged. “Vampire stuff—politics. But, really, it’s more like she’s pissed off all the wrong members.”

“She did seem kind of . . . prickly.”

“Most vampires are prickly, Mercy,” Joseph joked. “But Serena has no respect for her position. VGO are comprised of greatness, and our members are held in high esteem. Serena has dishonored our organization one too many times.” Now he was venting. Perhaps it was easier for him to vent to an impartial human who had absolutely no political influence. Maybe his adverse opinion of Serena was a dangerous one to have, despite his seniority. With enough backing, even a peon immortal had the potential to overthrow a single leader.

“So, when are you going to tell her that she’s out?” Man, how I’d love to be there to see that. Bitch stole my man, after all.

“That’s the problem we’re having, Mercy,” Joseph said. “Nobody knows where she is.”

I sat up straight. “What do you mean? Like,
right now
you don’t know where she is? At this moment?”

“No,” Joseph said slowly. “We haven’t seen Serena in about a week. She vanished, leaving us . . . What? What is it?”

I had to stop myself from shouting. “Joseph,” I said in a vaguely calm manner. “I think I have some information you need to know.”

Joseph rushed out after I finished outlining all that had happened. He was markedly pissed, not at me for telling him everything—for that, he was grateful—but because he suspected that Serena was up to no good. He promised that he’d help me find Robert. I wondered if Joseph would have been so keen to do that had our kiss not been so dispassionate.

Unable to sleep, I paced through the house, feeling guilty. (I would have felt a hell of a lot worse had I slept with Joseph, so at least I had that going for me.) Could Liz’s cockamamie theory about Robert’s kidnapping be right? If so, she owed me the
I told you so
of the century.
Had
Serena murdered Mathew for Robert’s fangs and then used them for kidnapping? It just seemed so farfetched. And what would motivate Serena to do that?

If Serena
was
guilty of all sorts of bad things, and Robert
was
being held against his will, where had that million dollars in my bank account come from? (Joseph assured me that it most definitely had not come from the VGO.) I doubted Leopold would have done it, and Liz didn’t have that kind of money.

So . . . where?

I didn’t have to wait long to find out the answer.

The next morning, I woke up sicker than ever. It surprised me, because I hadn’t really had that much to drink at the wedding. I’d been too worried about letting my guard down around lusty Joseph and then doing something I’d end up regretting in the morning. Including the small glass of wine I’d sipped during the trainwreck make-out session with Joseph, I’d only had three glasses of wine total, which I’d spread throughout the entire evening. All the stress must have finally started to take a toll on my body. After a few crackers and some 7Up, I was right as rain.

I made good on my decision to support Swindled 5. I went online to their website, listened to a few clips of their songs, and then ordered a CD. They sounded exactly as I’d predicted, with an edgy ‘garage band on the verge of making it big’ sort of style. I ordered a scoop neck t-shirt while I was at it because I liked its design: shattered prisms with tiny ribbons of light shining through. If nothing else, I’d wear it jogging. It was nice having enough money that ordering items as simple as a t-shirt and CD wouldn’t destroy my budget for the whole month.

I tried doing small chores that would keep my mind off Robert’s assumed kidnapping. Now that I’d involved Joseph, who had far more resources and connections than I did, the situation was pretty much out of my hands. And if I kept stressing, I’d have all my organs vomited out by noon.

Since jogging was already on my mind, I contemplated going for a run. But after I pulled everything from the closet, the idea of jogging made me want to, well, vomit again. Instead I went to get coffee. It was just like jogging, I reasoned, since it elevated the heart rate. (Oh if only that were true.)

I bit the bullet and went to Lakeside Plaza. I’d have to face going there eventually, as it was on the main road leading out of the neighborhood. Driving miles out of the way for the sake of avoiding the Scene of Decapitation was not a practical long-term option.

I was horrified to see that they’d reopened Lakeside’s fountain for public use. A mom and her two young children were perched on its ledge, eating ice cream cones in the hazy sunshine. The weather in San Francisco never rivaled that of Los Angeles or San Diego, but Bay Area residents liked to pretend that it did. If the sky hinted at brightness, residents bustled out like it was July in the Hamptons, even if the temperature was barely in the mid-fifties.

Next to the mom sat a congregation of boisterous teenaged girls. They were sipping on the adolescent version of ice cream, frozen whipped coffee drinks, and snapping duck-faced selfies on their cellphones, which they then insisted on taking ten more times because they didn’t like the way their foreheads shined or their noses looked big. I envied their one-dimensional troubles. The chattiest girl in the group, a pretty blond thing, had her shopping bags resting on the ground between her feet. It was the exact spot where Mathew had been lying rigid in a pool of his own blood. I did not feel obliged to tell her this.

It was business as usual at the fountain: caution tape removed, stains scrubbed from the concrete, new chlorinated water replaced the old bloody pink stuff—sterile, sterile, sterile. It made me wonder if something similar had ever happened to me or, for that matter, the rest of the world. Just how much was society as a whole oblivious to the crime and violence that had once occurred around them? How many times a day did people sit down and eat their sandwiches on the same park bench some poor sod was stabbed for the last measly twenty dollars he had in his wallet? How many times in my life had I crossed a street where a pedestrian had been struck dead by a hit-and-run, or boarded a train where an old woman had gone into cardiac arrest after being mugged?

Man, I was in a grim mood.

I felt better after I had a few sips of iced coffee, which I was loath to admit to myself. I didn’t like knowing that I had to rely upon stimulants to get through the day, but evidently that was the case. And I could live with that. Being addicted to caffeine wasn’t like being addicted to heroin, though I supposed there were more than a few people out there who would argue otherwise.

A strange car was parked in the driveway when I got home. It was strange in the sense that I’d never seen it before, and because it was sitting in my parking space. My pulse went into overdrive at the sight of it, my thoughts immediately going to the VGO’s search for Robert and Serena. Then it dawned on me that it was daylight, so no vamps would be out during that time.

Still, I approached with caution, because you never know. With Mathew’s death, and all the other sinister events that had been happening, I needed to keep up my defenses.

The car was of the luxury variety, which I only knew because Marlena drove a similar model. An old woman sat behind the wheel and an even older man was in the passenger seat. I could tell that they were hoity-toity by looking at them, and not just because they were sitting in a car that cost nearly two hundred grand. Their faces had that pinched old money look, like they’d drop dead of disgust if they were forced to interact with a stinking lower-class commoner.