Steal the Day (Thieves #2)(5)

I strode to the elevator and pushed the button for the floor that held four large apartments. As far as I knew, only three of the rooms were occupied. The entire undead population of Dallas was supposedly housed in those rooms.

There was Daniel, the youngest, but without question strongest of the three. Michael House looked to be an affable man in his twenties, but he’d died on the battlefields of World War One. And then there was Alexander. Of all the vampires I’d met, Alexander Sharpe was the creepiest. Daniel had reason to believe Alexander had been Jack the Ripper, so I kept my distance.

God, I wished I’d been able to find my shoes. Daniel and I had settled into a nice sort of friendship, and I didn’t want to wave a red cape in front of a bull. Though we had agreed to work on being friends, he still managed to make me feel like a cheating wife sometimes. It wasn’t so surprising. Up until seven months before, I would have done anything to be Daniel’s wife. We’d known each other most of our lives. We fell in love as teens and were engaged at twenty. Before we could get married, he’d died in a car accident. The upside? He’d turned out to be a vampire. The downside? The craptastic Council had taken him away from me for three years and sent him back as a distant stranger with more secrets than I could handle. We’d only gotten intimate again months before, and that was when I discovered all the things the love of my life had been hiding from me.

My blood calls to his, but then it does the same with any vampire. If I’m in a room with a vampire, you can bet his eyes are on me. He doesn’t have to know me to want me. It was only luck that I hadn’t met up with one before or I would have been taken off the street, flown to the catacombs of Paris, and sold to the vampire with the most money or clout. Daniel’s patron, Marcus Vorenus, had assured me he would have paid top dollar. Daniel, in his post-turn fumblings, had managed to protect me. When the Council had come for him, my blood had been in his body. It was enough to make a claim but not a marriage. That had come later.

I had discovered that the person I loved beyond life, beyond death, returned my love because I tasted good.

Dev might not love me, but I wasn’t actively pursued by every faery I met. He slept with me because it felt good, and he liked me. I was Daniel’s obsession, and that was a heavy burden to bear.

The elevator doors opened, and I stepped out into the quiet hallway. I used my key and opened the door to Daniel’s apartment. I was going to sneak into his bedroom and change clothes when I heard a burst of masculine laughter.

I peeked into the small dining room where five men sat around a table. At first I thought they were playing poker. Dev’s club had lively poker rooms going all hours of the night. Then the dice came out, and I knew I was wrong.

“Take that, dragon lord,” one of the men, and I use that term loosely, said.

I shook my head, looking at the table in front of me. “Seriously, you’re a vampire with unbelievable power, and you spend your nights playing Dungeons and Dragons?”

Daniel smiled up at me, his longish hair in desperate need of a trim and completely perfect for its shagginess. His blue eyes were lit with mirth as he looked over at me and I tried, I really tried, to not let my heart break a little bit. “I’m immortal, baby. Do you have any idea the kinds of campaigns I can run?”

I had to smile back. “Nerd.”

“Back at ya,” he replied. “Gentlemen, for those of you who haven’t met her, this is my lovely wife, Zoey. Don’t let her adult-like disapproval fool you. She’s thrown the dice in her time.”

Yes, I had. I’d played with Daniel. I looked at the men around the table. “He’s pulled you in, too, Michael?”

Since Daniel had come back, I’d had several nice conversations with the WWI veteran. He enjoyed talking about his time in the army, and though he didn’t remember much about the sixties because acid apparently works on vamps, too, he was a veritable fount of twentieth century history. He’d even managed to stop staring at me like I was a particularly juicy steak.

Michael shrugged. “It’s fun. It’s just nice to have some friends.”

I knew it was nice for Daniel, too. He’d spent an enormous part of the last several years keeping everyone at arm’s length. He sat there in his Spider-Man T-shirt, and there was nothing I wanted to do more than go over and sit in his lap and hold him close and show his friends that I was his girl. It was an impulse, and now I knew it had nothing to do with what I wanted and everything to do with blood and biology. So I forced myself to stand there.

Besides Daniel and Michael, there was a vamp I didn’t know and two other males of undetermined species. The vamp I recognized because of the glazed look of desperate longing that had hit his face the minute he got a whiff of me.

“Justin,” Daniel said evenly, reaching over to touch the other man’s arm.

Justin shook his head and forced his focus from me to Daniel. “Yeah?”

“She is mine.” The words were said with no real threat behind them, which was surprising. In the past, Daniel had threatened wretched death on any vamp who looked at me twice.

“Of course.” Justin sighed as though some pressure had been released. That answered one question I had. Justin wasn’t a newbie. Baby vamps struggled with control. It was why the Council ruthlessly handled their training. “I’m sorry.”

Daniel cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You didn’t know.”