But, hey, rational thinking had been left back at the mall parking lot.
Maybe Penny was discovering the famous vampire libido along with the bloodlust. I hated to rain on that parade, but she just wasn't ready for it. Not sex with a mortal anyway. If I could hook her up with a paranormal, she could have at it. I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw the exit for Penny's street and crossed two lanes of traffic to take it. In minutes I'd found her address and followed my sense of smell to the right apartment in the vintage building. I should have known Penny would be on the ground floor. That height aversion.
She'd put on music and I heard her laughter behind the door. I knocked and she stopped laughing. I waited, tapping my foot in time to the tune, a top-forty hit. I knocked again, hard enough to rattle the doorframe. The music clicked off.
"Open up, Penny, or I'll knock it down." The door jerked open and Penny stood there, her fangs gleaming in the light from a dozen candles.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Penny growled.
"Thought you'd given me the slip? As if." I shoved past her to see Josh sitting on the couch, the telltale look on his face that meant she'd whammied him. Yep, my little fledgling had put the guy into a trance. I didn't see fang marks yet. I turned and reached behind her to slam the door shut.
"First, you tell me. Why the whammy, Penny? What's Josh going to do while you have him under your little spell?" I stared hard at her.
"What do you think? That I'm so desperate I've got to put a guy in a trance before he'll have sex with me?" She flounced over to the couch and sat close to him, even put her hand on his thigh. "I'll have you know he was all over me before I did this to him."
"Yeah, I'm sure he got the message that you were good to go when you agreed to leave the movie before it was over." I sat across from her in a sagging leather chair. A fat orange cat stared at me from under a table across the room. I ignored it.
"I'd seen it before. Jenny dragged me to it the first week it was out. I wasn't into vampires then and this time I could see how fake it was." She rubbed Josh's leg. "Isn't he cute? He offered to take me to the vamp movie because he'd heard girls like it. You did such a great job of making me look good, he couldn't keep his hands off me."
"You do look good." I shook my head. "But then you had to screw things up, didn't you?"
Penny frowned. "What do you mean? You're the one who burst in here, checking up on me."
"Come on. Admit it. Josh is sitting there looking zoned out for only one reason." I leaned forward and gave Penny a hard look. "Despite my warning, you were about to test drive your fangs on this mortal, weren't you? You think I can't see them?"
Penny swallowed and looked everywhere but at me. Finally she turned, chin up. "Yeah, so what? I can control myself. I'm not your ordinary fledgling, Glory. I can do this. Watch me." She put her hand on his jugular.
"Stop right there." I gripped her wrist. "This isn't some intellectual exercise, damn it. This is bloodlust. Your eyes are dilated. Your fangs are down and I can see you're about to lose it."
"So?" Penny snarled. "Feel him. He's so incredibly warm and that's his heart pounding under my hand. Then there's the smell." She inhaled and a look of near ecstasy came over her face. "God, but he's, he's driving me crazy. He's alive!"
I kept my grip on her, though she was trying to pull away. "Forget it, Penny. You can't do it. Let him go. Plant the idea in his mind that he liked you, but he can't call you again because you dumped him. You just can't forgive him for leaving you on that hilltop. It's the right thing to do."
"No. I want to see him again. He - he makes me feel alive." She leaned against him, gasping when he fell over to land on the couch. "Geez, this is ridiculous." She grabbed him and straightened him back to a sitting position.
"That's because he's basically unconscious with his eyes open." I sat on his