Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25)(44)

All at once, I realized he had been staring at me before.

With exactly this expression on his face.

I was just starting to hope when one of his hands found my waist, and he kissed me.



Another Thursday, another band practice.

This one was running particularly late, too. The band had a new set of songs Izzy wanted us to learn as soon as possible, and we couldn’t get Sayid and Emerson to agree on anything, from the tempo to the harmonies to the lyrics.

It didn’t matter too much to me if we went overtime, though. The girls were at a basketball game. I would’ve totally gone, but the thing is, I’d rather floss with barbed wire than watch a live sports match, so I declined with regrets. Besides, I’d had to skip the last band practice to play emergency babysitter when Aunt Linda developed a sudden pain in her side. It didn’t turn out to be anything major—thank God—but I couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, so I couldn’t afford to play hooky from practice on top of that.

We’d been practicing for about an hour when Sayid and Emerson called a time-out to argue over a line in the song—Sayid thought the original “you throw your arms around me, while all the lights surround me” was better, while Emerson was pushing for the obviously superior, “when darkness seeks to blind us, a fire ignites inside us.” Izzy, who thought lyrics were only there to complement an epic drum track, decided to mostly ignore them while she experimented with different beats, humming the chorus to herself. I wasn’t able to focus—I’d been a ditzy, gooey mess since Thanksgiving—so I perched myself on a stool and watched the others with a vague smile. So vague, even, I didn’t notice Izzy had stopped drumming. Until she threw a Skittle at my head.

“What are you all smiley about?” she asked. “You look like a Disney princess; stop it.”

I hunted for the Skittle on the carpet then popped it in my mouth.

“Ew, I touched that,” Izzy said. “My hands are all sweaty.”

“It was a red Skittle. A sweaty red Skittle is worth three green Skittles.”

“What kind of bodily fluid would bring a single red Skittle below the net worth of a green Skittle?”

“It’s less about the bodily fluid, and more about who the bodily fluid comes from.”

She cackled. “Touché.”

Emerson paused in his argument long enough to give us a withering glance. “You guys are really killing the mood.”

“Your lyrics killed the mood,” Sayid muttered. “You took it from a love song to a song about overthrowing the establishment.”

“Ooh, I think you just sold Emerson’s version to me,” Izzy said, stroking her chin like a supervillain. “I do love overthrowing establishments.”

Sayid held his hands up. “Seriously?”

“My vote’s with Emerson, too,” I said. “Sorry, man.”

Sayid scowled and went to pack up the keyboard. “You guys never side with me,” he said.

“They can’t help it if I’m a lyrical genius,” Emerson said.

“Oh yeah, we got a regular Lin-Manuel Miranda over here.”

I grabbed my phone just as a text came in from Juliette.

Hey, the game just finished. We’re heading to You Got Soft-Served over on Hamilton Street if you want to come grab a shake?

Wait, so I could go consume some sugar, see Will again, and support a local pun-appreciating business? It’s not like I could say no to that, now, was it?



Everyone was already there when I arrived. Five basketball guys formed a row of black-and-white varsity jackets, crowded around a booth against the wall. They all had damp hair from their post-game showers. Will’s hair was the longest out of all of them, and he kept sweeping it back off his forehead with an impatient hand. He paused when he noticed me coming, his hand midsweep, and then ducked his head with a shy grin.

Across from them, Lara, Niamh, and Juliette sat, already sipping on milkshakes. Juliette beckoned me to sit next to her on the light blue pleather. “The guys haven’t ordered yet,” she said. “We’ve been waiting here a while.”

“We had to get ready, didn’t we?” Matt asked. “Do you think looking this good happens by accident?”

Lara raised an eyebrow. “Oh, God, girls, I think this is what they look like when they’re trying. How tragic.” She looked down at her phone and smiled at something on the screen. I tried to catch a peek of it but she was too far away.

“So, uh, how did we do?” I asked in a small voice. I wasn’t used to talking in front of the basketball guys. Honestly, they intimidated me a bit. They always seemed so confident, and loud, and judgmental. Not really the best mix with people who weren’t also confident, and loud, and judgmental.

One of the guys I’d never spoken to before, Ethan, started thumping his hands on the table. The other guys joined him, in a four-by-four beat that got louder by the second. Except for Will. Will just folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, looking damned pleased with himself.

Darnell jumped out of his seat and grabbed Will’s shoulders. “This man right here, this man, won us the game.”

“We’re even footing the whole way,” Matt added, holding his arms up in front of him, “then in the last quarter we start dropping. We have, like, two minutes to go, Will’s one-on-one on the wing, he makes the shot, then he steals the inbound pass and hits another contested shot absolutely out of nowhere, and suddenly we’re in the lead.”