Wicked Love - Michelle Dare Page 0,55

to have this information to me by tonight. I need it.” I raked my fingers through my hair as I paced my apartment.

After sleeping a little, I woke to Daniela gone, a little note on my kitchen notepad about her needing to sleep in her own sunlight-proof bedroom for the day, and that she’d call me when she woke. It was currently 10:00 a.m. and this P.I., Kirk, was giving me the runaround.

“I don’t know, man. I’m hella swamped and have another deadline.”

Sighing in frustration, I said, “Look, why don’t you just start with the ones ruled as animal attacks. That should be quicker to run down, right?”

He was quiet for a minute and I looked at my phone to see if we were still connected. “Kirk, you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll run those down through the Denver PD database. It’ll still take me a couple hours, but I’ll get them to you by this afternoon.”

I sighed in relief. “Thanks, man. I mean it.”

“You’re welcome, and Judson?”

“Yeah?”

“It really is gonna cost you double,” he replied with a laugh before hanging up.

Relieved he was helping me, I poured myself another cup of coffee and drank it black while I opened my laptop. In the search bar, I typed in Animal attacks, Denver and was greeted with thousands of hits. The first few were actual animal attacks in some of the state parks, like idiots trying to take selfies with bears, and then a few vicious dog bite stories. But then a headline caught my eye:

WOMAN ATTACKED IN ALLEY NEAR LO-DO

I read on to read that a woman’s body was found in an alley in lower downtown, her throat ripped open, and animal-like teeth seemed to have made the tears the coroner had reported. Grabbing my notepad, I ripped off Dani’s note, set it aside, and wrote down the victim’s name, Marci Vanhoose. I then did a Google search of her name and found her Facebook page. Reading that, I could see she was a college student at Denver U and had only been 19. She had been walking home from the bars in Lo-Do when she never reported back home. Her family placed some sad messages on her page with a lot of feedback and condolences. I read them all, but they seemed to be pretty generic. I then began to scroll through her photos and stopped when a picture caught my eye: A tall, young man had his arm slung around her shoulders in what looked like a dark club or possibly a house party. They were both smiling but the man’s eyes had that silver tint to them. Realizing it could have been the flash, I told myself it probably was and continued to scroll. But something about the guy was familiar to me, so I scrolled back to the photo and looked at it again. Yes, I’d seen that guy at Bash before. There was no caption or tag to tell me the guy’s name, but I’d know if I saw him again.

After falling down the rabbit hole of searches and social media, I only had one solid “animal attack” that seemed like it was most likely a vampire murder, and it was this girl, Marci. I looked at the clock on the microwave and saw it was almost noon. I didn’t have much planned for the day except a haircut and few mundane errands. As I searched the fridge for bread and lunchmeat, I thought about what Dani had told me last night and it began to really bother me that she was a bounty hunter. That she was paid to kill people. Was it just humans she killed? We hadn’t gotten that far in the conversation before our lust had taken over. What if we were to be together? Would it even work? Do humans and vampires have relationships that last? I knew they couldn’t go in the sun. How would that affect everything? Would she stop bounty-hunting if I asked her to? She’d mentioned wanting to stop, at least. So many questions with zero answers. But we would be addressing them eventually—that was a fact. But first, I had to try and save my own life.

12

Daniela

I glanced at Angie sitting on the couch watching TV and reached for the doorknob, glad the sun had sunk below the mountains so I could leave the damn townhouse. “I’m off to work, have a good night, girl!”

I closed and locked the door behind me, knowing creatures like me