Kitabı oku: «Vampaholic», sayfa 2
Chapter 2
Thank God I was wearing Manolos. Swiftly I slipped off my left shoe and grabbed it up. By the inadequate illumination of the few parking lot lights, the vampire looked to be a teenager. He was moving so fast he almost ran into the spiked heel and staked himself, but he skidded to a halt just in time. He looked at me, astonishment on his acned face.
“Are you fucking kidding? That’s not gonna work.”
“I don’t see why it fucking wouldn’t, sweetie,” I told him. I heard the slight fuzziness in my voice and made a mental note not to drive home if I got out of this alive, but at least the cocktails I’d downed over the course of the afternoon lent me a certain Dutch courage, I realized. The hand that was holding the Manolo against his AC/DC T-shirt was rock-steady. “And you’re not so sure it won’t, either,” I continued. “If you were, you would have rushed me by now.”
He stared at me in frustration, and then the red glow in his eyes faded a little. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Guess I’ll just have to use my glamyr on you.”
The air between us seemed to shimmer. For a moment his adolescent chest took on definition under the dirty tee, his greasy brown hair looked glossy and beautiful and a wave of dark sexuality began lapping around me, drawing me to him. Even his acne-ridden skin cleared up before my very eyes.
Except for the angry red pimple on his chin. I shook my head and took a breath. “Zit-check at six o’clock,” I said, feeling the glamyr dispel abruptly. “Sorry, sweetie, but it ruins everything.”
“Shit!” he swore, his hand going self-consciously to his chin. “For a couple of weeks before I turned, my skin actually looked pretty good,” he said defensively. “I was going out with this girl who worked in Hazlitt’s Drugstore and she gave me these medicated pad things, you know? Then Bitsy and me broke up and I stopped using the pads. Just my crap luck to become undead when I was back in pizza-face mode.”
Megan’s MINI was still parked next to mine. Obviously she and Tash had been delayed in leaving the club. My plan was to keep the vamp talking until they showed up, but something he’d said puzzled me enough that I didn’t have to fake interest “Hazlitt’s?” I frowned, taking care not to relax my grip on my impromptu stake. “I can remember Grammie Crosse taking me there for ice cream when I was about five or six, but they must have gone out of business at least ten years ago. When did you become a—”
Maybe he’d been trying to keep me talking, too, in the hopes I’d become distracted enough that he could risk a lunge at me. But as it had done with me, something in our conversation triggered a real response from him.
“Crosse? You’re one of the Crosse sisters?” His face had been pale before, another indication that he needed to feed, but now it went so white his acne stood out like beacons. He took a step backward. “Oh, fuck, you’re not Kat, are you?”
“Megan,” I lied immediately. “If you’ve heard of my sister, you’ve heard of me, too, so you know you don’t stand a chance against—”
“Nuh-uh.” He took another step back, his eyes beginning to glow red again. “I can smell a Daughter of Lilith a mile away, and you’re not the vamp killer. You were trying to fuck me up! You were trying to get me to bite you, you bitch!”
“I was trying to make you bite me?” I leaned in, astonishment momentarily overriding my fear. “Is this the undead variation of ‘you know you want it, honey?’ Because I don’t appreciate it when human males try to pull that merde on me, and I’m certainly not about to let an underage, undead vampire—”
“Stay away from me!”
His words came out in a high-pitched snarl. As I stood there, my Manolo clutched in my nerveless hand and fear freezing me to the spot, he backpedalled away from me so fast that his feet got tangled up with each other and he tripped. He scrambled up again, his horror-filled red eyes still locked on mine. Then he turned to run.
I think I saw the stake before he did, but I’d swear he had time to dodge out of the way and save himself. Instead, he seemed to run deliberately into its path.
It came speeding through the near-dark parking lot with unerring accuracy, the deadly tip sinking deep into the left side of his chest, right through the DC part of the gothic AC/DC lettering on his tee. His hands flew to the shaft of wood sticking from him, as if he intended to pull it out.
His glowing eyes met mine again, but instead of the terror that had been in them a second ago, I saw an emotion so out of place that I knew I had to be mistaken. His hands fell away from the stake, his lips drew back from his razor-sharp canines in a death-rictus, the red glow in his eyes dimmed.
Then he turned to ash.
In the past couple of months I’ve seen so many vamps die that you’d think I’d be used to it. My sisters are. Megan stands over her kills grimly, as if she wants their last sight on earth to be the Daughter of Lilith who sent them to hell. Tash is the opposite; she all but does a victory dance around the ashes, and once I saw her kick them. Grandfather Darkheart caught that little performance, too, and in his heavy Carpathian accent gave her a stern lecture that I could tell Tashya tuned out before the second sentence.
I feel agonizing pain. The first time I experienced it, I was sure the vamp had somehow turned my stake against me before he’d died and I’d looked down at myself, expecting to see a yew-wood shaft protruding from my body and dark gouts of blood pouring from the wound.
I felt like that now, but I didn’t bother looking for a wound I knew wasn’t there. Instead, I turned to watch Megan sprinting across the parking lot toward me, Tash right behind her. I took a breath and put on my best bored manner.
“Yay, team. Chalk up another one for the good guys, and all that.” Languidly I pumped the hand holding the Manolo into the air before bending to slip my shoe back onto my foot. “Impressive stake-hurling, sis. Ever think of giving up this vampire-killing gig and trying out for the Olympic javelin toss?”
Megan retrieved her stake and shoved it into the strap holster on her left bicep. “You’ve got a right to be pissed,” she said evenly. “I shouldn’t have interfered with your kill. Sorry, Kat.”
“We saw you standing there like a dummy and we thought you were caught up in his glamyr,” Tashya explained. “Either that, or so scared you were about to wee-wee your panties. Which one was it, Kat?”
I raised my eyebrows and hoped my drawl covered the last remnants of my shakiness. “Gawd, sweeties—scared? Whatever gave you that idea? I simply hoped I wouldn’t have to ruin a perfectly darling pair of Manolos by using one of them as a vamp sticker…and as it turned out, I wouldn’t have had to.” I gave an elaborate shrug. “Your reputation’s spread, Meg. I told the little pisher I was you, and he tripped over his own feet trying to get away.”
“I wondered why he was running,” Megan answered. “And like Tash, I also wondered what you were playing at, standing there and talking to him instead of sending him to hell. You sure he wasn’t using a little glamyr on you without you knowing?”
There it was in her voice again, that repressive tone that she’d seemingly inherited with her life mission of vamp killing, but now it was accentuated with a marked coolness. Not surprising, given our recent contretemps in the club, I supposed. I extracted my car keys from my purse.
“Believe it or not, sister dear, the rest of us aren’t totally incapacitated when we’re facing the undead. In fact, I’ve always suspected I’m a little less susceptible to vamp wiles than you are, but to answer your question, no, his glamyr didn’t work on me.” I turned to unlock my car, adding casually, “He seemed so inept all round it’s a wonder he wasn’t staked a decade or so ago. Since he was a local boy, it positively dented my civic pride.”
I began to get into my MINI, but Megan’s hand shot out and clamped around my arm. I stiffened. She removed it but didn’t apologize. “A local vamp who’s been around for decades? Not possible,” she said flatly. “Maplesburg wasn’t infected until Zena arrived here.”
“So we believed,” I answered. “Apparently we were wrong.”
“You’re wrong,” Tash snapped. “That would mean Maplesburg had already turned when—”
She stopped and I finished her sentence for her. “When Daddy lived here, sweetie? Yes, that’s exactly what it would mean.” I looked away from her frozen face and met Megan’s hard gaze. “If you don’t want to take my word for it, use the resources of Darkheart & Crosse to locate a woman named Bitsy. As a teenager she worked at Hazlitt’s Drugstore before it went out of business, so she’d be in her thirties now, at least. Ask her about a boyfriend she had who was into AC/DC and Clearasil.”
“I will,” Megan said coldly. “And if I find out you’re yanking our chain over this, Kat, you’ll be sorry.” She strode to her car and got in. Tash was already sitting in the front passenger seat. Megan started the ignition and then rolled down the window. “Take this,” she called to me, her tone expressionless. “I always keep a couple of spares in the car. You really shouldn’t be out after dark without one.”
I caught the stake she tossed my way. Even as my fingers closed around it, she was revving her MINI out of the parking lot. I saw the car’s taillights flare red as she came to the stop before the road, and then my sisters were gone.
Ten minutes ago I hadn’t trusted myself to drive. Now I was stone-cold sober. I began again to get into my MINI, and for the second time in as many minutes didn’t complete the action.
From the far end of the parking lot came the growl of a car engine starting up. It caught and became a full-throated roar. I heard the solidsounding thunk of a transmission dropping into first gear, heard the roar immediately ease into a deep rumble and then saw a pair of headlights flare to sudden life. Dazzling tunnels of light cut through the darkness and early evening ground mist as the car began slowly heading my way.
It passed under one of the lot’s two feeble lights, and my heart sank. The vehicle’s windows were black—not merely tinted, but blotchy black, as if someone had applied the contents of a can of matte paint to the interior of the windows. That could only mean one thing.
“Shit.” I was too tired to bother translating my comment into French. “Vamp transport.”
It had to be. The car had moved out of the pool of light and was now rolling through the dark again, a hulking, dated silhouette. A certain type of vamp seemed to go for vintage vehicles; probably, as Megan’s Mikhail had once informed my sisters and me, because the trunks of older cars were roomy enough to make a comfortable daytime resting place if necessary. “Also,” he’d added with a significant glance at the matching MINIs that had been Popsie Crosse’s most recent birthday gifts to us, “because those old Detroit tanks can ram most newer vehicles off the road. At that point, sitting in a ditch in your car, you’re the equivalent of a can of Dinty Moore beef stew to a hungry vamp.”
“Which means that making a run for it in the MINI might be a teensy bit rash,” I told myself out loud as the car rumbled closer. “I’ll never make the three miles to town before he catches up with me, so what other options do I have?” I forced a casualness to my solitary conversation, hoping to keep my growing terror at bay. “The obvious one is to stake him. On the plus side, I was Grandfather Darkheart’s star pupil when he was training Megan and Tash and me in the finer points of vamp sticking. On the negative side, when it came down to doing it for real during the battle at the Hot Box with Zena and her followers, I—”
I didn’t finish my sentence, but I couldn’t shut off my thoughts. I had been Anton’s star pupil, so much so that I’d been secretly sure I was the Crosse triplet who’d inherited my mother’s vamp-killing legacy and would be the next Daughter of Lilith. My first kill had ripped that fantasy from me forever.
When Zena had loosed her pack of undead on us that night, I’d taken up a fighting stance like a vampire-killing Joan of Arc, knowing I was fulfilling the destiny that had been written for me long before my birth. The first vamp that had rushed me hadn’t stood a chance. I’d been so confident of my powers that I’d let him come close enough to grab me, but as he’d leaned in to slash at my throat I’d thrust my stake into his heart. In triumph I’d looked into his eyes, wanting to see him die.
Instead, I saw him being born.
It had been like watching a movie, except I wasn’t watching it, I was living it. And although only a split second could have elapsed between the time I staked him and the moment he fell away into dust, I experienced his whole life. I stood in the delivery room as he came into the world. I was on the sidewalk watching him take a tumble from his trike, inside the pet shop as he pointed out the puppy he wanted, with him on his first day at school when he wet his pants and tried to hide it.
I saw him fall in love.
I saw him graduate.
I saw him being attacked in an alleyway one night by the vampire who turned him.
I saw his first kill, his final kill…and then I saw myself standing over him, my hand still on the stake lodged in his body. Terror and agony ripped through me, both overwhelmed by an agonizing sense of loss. In the moment that he turned to dust I knew the truth. His death was mine. Part of me would follow him down to hell.
I forced myself to take on the second vamp who came at me, a female, and went through the whole process all over again, but during my third kill something broke in me and Zena made her move against me. Since her move consisted of sending me to hell, I don’t think it’s too surprising that for the most part I’ve blanked out that unpleasant interlude. I don’t have any trouble remembering what happened when I finally came back to full consciousness, however: the battle was over, Zena had been vanquished and Megan had proved herself to be a true Daughter of Lilith.
I’d received proof, too. I’d walked into the Hot Box wanting only to kill vampires. When I left hours later I finally understood a favorite quote of Popsie’s, one he’d told me he’d read in an old cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
I’d seen the enemy. I’d felt the blood tie between me and them—a blood tie forged years ago when a queen vampyr had marked a Daughter of Lilith’s baby. I hadn’t turned yet, but if Grandfather Darkheart was correct and the kiss of the vampire bore fruit in her victim’s twenty-first year, I would soon.
But until I did I had to assume I was as vulnerable to being killed by a vamp as any normal human would be.
“Which brings me back to my original problem, no?” I muttered now as I steadied myself against my MINI and thrust all future problems aside to deal with my current one. “If it’s a question of my survival, am I capable of staking the son of a bitch?”
I was about to find out the answer to that question. The vehicle came to a stop about twenty feet away from me, its engine idling with a heavy rumble I could feel through the spike heels of my shoes, its chrome grille glittering ominously. I waited for my gentleman caller—a car like that simply had to belong to a male vamp, I thought—to get out, saunter over to me and flash fangs.
The black-painted driver’s window rolled down. Something projected from it and I shifted position slightly to see what it was.
Thunk-whap!
The metallic sound exploded right next to me and adrenaline kicked through me like a double shot of one-hundred-proof vodka. I’d been set up, I thought hollowly, appalled at my own carelessness. A second vamp had apparently landed on my MINI while I’d been watching the approach of the one in the car. Stake in hand, I whirled to face my attacker.
There was no one on the MINI. A nerveracking possibility flashed into my mind and I dropped to my knees, stake at the ready, my gaze scanning the pavement under the car.
Thunk-whap!
Pain blazed through my right hand, and my stake clattered to the ground. Instinctively I tried to cradle my hand to my body to ease the agony, but trying to move it sent a sickening wave of fresh pain through me. In confusion I looked at my hand.
At first I didn’t understand what I was staring at. My fingers were outstretched on the driver’s door of my car, every tendon on the back of my right hand standing out in sharp relief. Blood ran down my wrist onto the glossy white paintwork of the MINI, and between my index and middle fingers something gleamed silver in the half light.
I suddenly recognized the silver gleam for what it was, and shock slammed the breath from my lungs. I’d wanted a drink earlier. Now I needed one, if only to numb the horror of what I was seeing.
The object spiked through the web of skin between the fingers on my hand into the car’s door…was a nail.
Chapter 3
“Damn.” The low-voiced oath came from the direction of the idling car. I heard the sound of the vehicle’s door being opened and the scrape of shoes on the pavement. After my first sickened glance at the nail through my hand I’d turned away, but now I made myself look at it again.
There’s something about seeing yourself as a carpentry project that makes a girl want to throw up. I forced back the bile that rose in my throat and tried to pull the nail out with my free hand.
It wouldn’t budge. I pulled harder, my grip slick with my own blood, but the nail was firmly lodged into the MINI’s door panel. From the sound of his unhurried tread, the vamp wasn’t in any ravenous rush but even so, I had only seconds to free myself.
I’d lived through Brazilian waxes. What I had to do next couldn’t be more excruciating, could it? I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth and ripped my hand free of the nail.
I’d been right, the pain didn’t beat out Brazilian waxes—not by much, anyway. But in my experience, the agony of a wax is always replaced by a delightfully sleek and sexy feeling after it’s over. Seeing the torn and bloody web of skin between my fingers just made me feel like a rat that had gnawed off its own foot to escape a trap.
Not delightful. Not sexy. And definitely not as conflicted as I’d been a few minutes ago about staking the sadistic undead who’d done this to me. My Badgley slip dress looked like a rag that had been used to mop an abbatoir floor, and my hair was hanging around my face in damp hanks. As I scrabbled under the car for the fallen stake and my knees scraped painfully against the oil-stained pavement, a primal rage surged through me.
He wasn’t playing fair. Vampires had the whole fang and super strength and flying thing going on, and all we humans had were wood and garlic and maybe a splash of holy water if we were lucky. For a vamp to add a nail gun to his arsenal was overkill—and where had he gotten it from, anyway?
Nausea rose up in me a second time. Of course. The son of a bitch had killed one of my carpenters and taken the tool from his dead body. I thought of the crew that had been working all day and into overtime this evening to get the club’s stage rebuilt on schedule for me, and my anger grew. Nailing me through the hand had made it personal, but this made it war.
My fingers closed bloodily around the stake as the footsteps behind me came closer. I jumped to my feet and let my rage out in a scream as I raced toward the approaching vamp.
“Get ready to kiss your ass goodbye, you bastard! When I’m finished with you there won’t be anything left but dust!”
I started to bring my stake up into position—wrist rigid, the power coming from the shoulder, if anyone’s interested—and then I froze.
The man facing me was the carpenter who’d played havoc with my hangover today. On one of the few days when I’d pulled myself together early enough to show up at the club before the cocktail hour I’d seen him taking a break outside with some of the others in the crew as I’d hurried into the building, swathed in a silk scarf and wearing oversized Christian Dior sunglasses to keep the brilliance of the day from racheting up my pounding headache.
Which meant he wasn’t a vamp. That fact wasn’t as comforting as it might have been, because he was still trying to kill me.
“You’re the one who’s going to be dust in a second,” he grunted, using both hands to steady the nail gun. “When you get to hell, tell your pals down there that Jack Rawls sends his regards.”
As he finished speaking he depressed the trigger on the cordless nailer. I barely had time to leap out of the way before a deadly barrage of nails began flying at me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled as I turned my leap into a dive and slid across the hood of my MINI, losing my Manolos in the process. I fell rather than landed on the other side of my car and crouched there. A metallic pinging like hail on a tin roof told me Rawls was still firing.
“Gunning for a vamp,” he said calmly over the pinging. His flat Midwest accent made his words seem matter-of-fact. “The nails are tipped with silver, and the gun’s been modified to shoot up to twenty feet, so make it easy on yourself and stop trying to run.”
My heart turned over. What did he mean, gunning for a vamp? There was no way he could know my most secret fear—no one did. How had he learned of it, and why was he so sure it wasn’t just a fear, but the truth?
I could hear him walking around the front of the car. Still keeping low, I sprinted to the back of the MINI, ungratefully wishing Popsie had sprung for Hummers instead when he’d bought our birthday presents. “I’m not a vampire,” I said tightly. “You were working only feet away from me most of the day, so there’s no way you don’t know who I am.”
“No way at all,” he agreed, his tone still unruffled. “You’re Kat Crosse, and one of your sisters is the local Daughter of Lilith. I knew who you were before I hit town.” I heard him exhale, and something in the raggedness of his breath made me realize his calmness was eroding. “I can’t fault your sister for not being able to put you down, but I’m not going to lose any sleep tonight after I dust you, lady.”
He stepped around the back of the MINI as he spoke and aimed the nail gun at where I’d been crouching. His head jerked up when he saw I wasn’t there, but his reaction came too late.
I jumped off the car’s roof and crashed into him, falling with him to the ground. Grandfather Darkheart’s weeks of training might not have turned me into a vamp fighter like Megan, I thought grimly as I rammed the point of my stake to Jack Rawls’s throat and glared down at him from my sitting position on his chest, but it definitely gave me an edge in a parking lot brawl like this.
His body went rigid. He stared up at me, and even in the poor light I could see implacable hatred in his eyes as blood traced a thin line from the point of my stake to his collar. “Do it,” he said, his voice hoarsened by the pressure on his throat. “Go ahead and plunge it in. If you don’t I’ll do it myself.”
He moved so fast I almost didn’t have time to react. His head jerked sideways toward the stake, and even as I pulled back my weapon in shock I saw the trickle of blood deepen. I felt him brace himself to repeat the maneuver and I did the only thing I could think of to prevent him.
“Stop that!” The stake was instantaneously reversed in my hand—another move that Grandfather Darkheart’s training had drilled into me—and as I shouted the command at Rawls I smashed the blunt end of the wood into his cheekbone. His head rocked sideways with the strength of my blow, and I sensed him gathering himself to break free of me. I hit him again, ignoring the blazing pain in my wounded hand, and then slammed the solid yew-wood stake against his temple a third time with all the strength I could muster. He went limp, the tension I’d felt in his body extinguished as instantly as a lightbulb being turned off.
“You’ve killed him,” I told myself through numb lips. “That’s what comes of going all altruistic and trying to save a man from himself, instead of sticking with what you know and being a ball-breaking bitch.” I wiped my bloody hand on my hiked-up dress—the fact that I only felt the tiniest pang as I did so was proof of how distracted I was—and pressed my thumb to the side of his neck.
His pulse was slow but steady. Relief swept through me. I peered closer at his neck and saw that the small puncture mark from my stake was closer to his jawline than his jugular, and that the bleeding had already slowed.
“You’re not dead,” I told his unconscious form. “I like that in a man, but what I’d like even more is not having to worry about you trying to kill one or both of us. I guess I could keep knocking you out every time you show signs of coming round, except that would mean I couldn’t ask you questions.” I stood up and looked down at him. “And I’ve got questions, sweetie. Lots of them, starting with how you knew the one thing about me that I haven’t dared tell anybody.”
Stepping over him, I walked to the front of the MINI and reached inside to the console. I popped the trunk and hastened back again, flicking a wary glance at Rawls’s prone body as I passed him. Ask me how long two coats of OPI polish plus a base and topcoat take to dry and I can tell you to the second, but predicting how long a man who’s gone down for the count will remain down isn’t my area of expertise.
However, I did have some handy gadgets relating to one of my areas of expertise in the small overnight case I always carried with me. Minutes later, having used them and a few other things on him, I surveyed the results of my handiwork with satisfaction.
“There’s something about a man in handcuffs that always gets my motor revving a little,” I murmured. “But just because a girl’s got a wicked side doesn’t mean she’s a vamp, Jack—or at least, it doesn’t mean she’s turned into a vamp yet. If you’d known that much about me, we might have ended up using these handcuffs in a completely different scenario tonight.” I’d straddled him as I’d cuffed him to the MINI’s bumper and tied each of his legs with lengths of tough nylon rope to his own vehicle, which I’d moved up behind the MINI. Now I sat back on his chest and narrowed my gaze at him.
When I’d seen him earlier I’d been distracted, first by Terry and then by the confrontation with my sisters, and I certainly hadn’t taken note of his physical attributes while he’d been trying to shoot nails in me. Jack Rawls wasn’t a bad-looking man, I realized belatedly. He was in his late twenties, although by the leaned-down look of his jaw and the sun-squint lines interrupting the tan at the corners of his eyes, they hadn’t been twenty-eight or twenty-nine indulged years. His black hair was growing out from a close trim and I got the definite impression it would be ruthlessly cropped back again the minute it started to get in his way. Not drop-dead gorgeous like Jean-Paul, or all moody and wolfishly sexy like Megan’s Mikhail, I decided, but definitely handcuffs-to-the-bedposts material. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he was the type to go for that, even if we’d met under more conducive circumstances.
“Kansas farmer stock?” I hazarded as I waited for him to come to. “Idaho? From your accent, I’m guessing you’re from one of those flat states where people do Norman Rockwell things like going to potluck suppers and having chores. It’s not only the accent, it’s the whole grim determination thing you’ve got going on, as if staking me is a duty you can’t shirk. Such a shame, sweetie. As I say, these handcuffs could have been put to much better use.”
“I don’t sleep with vampires.” As if he’d been conscious for some seconds and had simply been waiting for the right moment to startle me, Jack Rawls opened his eyes and stared emotionlessly at me. “I meant what I said. Kill me. I’m not interested in eternal life, vamp.”
Without warning he jerked his arms powerfully toward his body and tried to do the same with his legs, like a mustang lunging desperately against restraints. I grabbed two handfuls of his T-shirt and tightened the grip of my bare thighs against his rib cage to avoid being bucked off as he tried to break free, expecting him to continue his fight for a few moments before realizing it was doing him no good. But he surprised me again. Just as suddenly as he’d exploded into movement he stopped—as if, I thought with sharp interest, he’d been in similar situations in the past and recognized when it was of more benefit to conserve his energy than to continue resisting uselessly.
I made a note to add his familiarity with restraints to the list of subjects to explore with the mysterious Mr. Rawls, but my first question was a deliberately distracting one.
“Police issue cuffs, courtesy of a detective on the Maplesburg P.D. who liked playing good cop/bad girl with me,” I told Rawls. “Or was it bad cop/bad girl? Anyway, they’re not toys, Jack, and I got the rope I tied around your ankles from the trunk of your car, so you’re not going anywhere until I say you can. I also ran over your damn nail gun, so don’t bother trying to think of some way you can reach it and use it. Speaking of your car, I’ve got to ask—what’s an upstanding, vampire-hating carpenter like you doing riding around in a vampmobile?”
“I got a deal,” he said tonelessly. “Its last owner died in it.”
When I’d moved his vehicle, I’d turned off the bright headlights, leaving on only its parking lights. My back was toward them but they shone full in Rawls’s face, so I could see every flicker of expression that crossed his features, if there’d been one. But there wasn’t. The only indication of his state of mind came from the cold hatred in his eyes as he stared up at me.
