down onto the teak boards, boot heels clunking. The boat swayed imperceptibly with my weight, and head down, I rummaged for my keys as I stepped into the cool shade of the large overhang.
But I froze as I stood before the sliding-glass doors, frowning. The door was unlocked.
Ivy? I wondered, hesitating. And then the tantalizing, spicy scent of the long undead tripped down my spine, plucking every nerve ending on the way down to make me shiver.
“Hey, uh, Rache?” Jenks said in warning, but I was way ahead of him, and I took my splat pistol from my purse, backing up into the sun until my calves hit the back bench of the large canopied cockpit.
“Who the devil is on our boat?” I whispered as the shadow of a man approached the door.
I couldn’t tap a ley line while over water, but damn it, someone was on my boat! Even in the semidark of the boat’s interior, I could see he was in a suit coat and sported a professional haircut and a slim build. If he was a vamp, he was clearly still alive since the sun was up. If he didn’t have a good reason for being on my boat, I was going to turn him into a dead one.
Expression grim, Jenks hovered beside me and loosened his garden sword.
But when the man came closer—smiling and ducking his head, actually giving me a little wave as he reached for the latch—I wondered if he was a vampire.
Simply put, he was not beautiful. Oh, he might have been once, being tall and having a slim build. The dead bred what they liked over the eons, and the dead liked beauty above all.
This guy wasn’t it.
“Sorry for startling you,” he said as he slid the door open and came out, blinking in the shade of the overhang. “I was hoping to find you, actually. Ivy said you might be here. You’re Ms. Rachel Morgan, yes?” he added, eyes touching briefly on Jenks before returning to me.
His voice was average everything, and unsure, I nodded, reassessing my first impression. It wasn’t that he was unattractive, but his numerous scars got in the way. His nose was misshapen from being broken too many times. Lines from battle, not the bedroom, ran along his chin and one side of his face to his eye, which was a little droopy compared to the other. His irises were brown and his complexion tan—and kind of lumpy. Short, carefully styled dark hair showed that one of his ears had been ravaged. Early thirties maybe.
But it was the wave of vampire incense lifting from him that worried me. He was a living vampire, one holding a great deal of status by the amount of pheromones he was giving off. He’d been sipping on someone old for a very long time, and probably vice versa. “Yes,” I said, remembering what he’d asked me as I tried to reconcile him with everything I knew about vampires—and came up short.
Slowly his smile faded as my eyes traveled over him, clearly comparing him to what he “ought” to be. He pulled himself straighter, tugging his smartly tailored suit coat down over his linen slacks. There was no tie, but it would have looked wrong on him. More scars peeped from his wrists, appearing self-inflicted, not vampire bedroom play. By the age of them, he’d been working his way up from average Joe to someone’s scion for a long time, and my pulse quickened at both the threat and the promise that held. But it was his unshakable confidence that drew me—confidence that said he’d been sipping blood so old, it tasted like electric dust.
“How like a vampire, eh, Jenks?” I said, and the man’s faltering smile vanished. “No one home, so he assumed he can go in.” I put the splat gun in my bag, sure he could move fast enough to avoid it. The keys, I kept in my fist. “Get off my boat.”
“It’s not your boat,” he said, unable to hide his anger as his pupils grew and the brown rim around his pupils shrank. “It belongs to Kisten Felps’s estate, since given over to the city of Cincinnati. I have every right to be here to evaluate the assets available to the city’s master vampire. Which makes you a squatter.”
“Son of a green troll fart! Who do you think you are?” Jenks said, and I cocked my hip, staying right where I was in the sun.