A Girls Guide to Vampires(91)

She stared at me, her mouth slightly ajar.

I nodded. "Raphael found her, and I found him. He's gone to tell Dominic, I guess. I've already spoken to the police, but the worst thing is"—I looked around again to make sure no one was near enough to hear—"her neck was torn out."

"Tom out? Like an animal attacked her?"

"No," I said, watching her steadily. "Like a vampire killed her. There was no blood, Roxy, nothing. Somebody ripped into her throat and drained the blood from her body."

She put her hand over her mouth as if to keep from screaming. I know I certainly felt like it. "Oh my God, you don't think—Christian?"

"I don't know of any other vampires around here, do you? Oh, Lord, it's all my fault, too. I had no idea he would lose control so easily. I figured if he had lasted nine hundred years, he could last a little longer until we found him his Beloved, but I guess he finally realized that I wasn't she, and he went berserk."

"Oh my God," Roxy said again, her eyes huge. "Christian—who would have thought? He's been so nice to us."

"I have to find him. I have to find him and calm him down, and make him see reason. I have to make sure he doesn't do anything like this again."

"How are you going to do that?"

"I don't know," I wailed, heading back around the toilets toward the mass of humanity. "But I'd better do something pretty damn quick before anyone else figures out what happened, or the famed reclusive author C. J. Dante is going to find himself on the business end of a sharp stake."

Roxy and I searched the fair but did not find Christian. We saw Raphael and Dominic in grim consultation, a silent Milos standing with them. Arielle's tarot-card booth was dark and empty, so I assumed she'd been told of her sister's death. Roxy offered to go sit with her after I borrowed a nice couple's mobile phone and had no luck getting hold of Christian at his home.

"I talked to Demeter," Roxy told me after a quick confab with the aura photography woman. "She says Paal took Arielle to her trailer, and Renee is sitting with her. All the fair employees know about what happened to Tanya."

"It was bound to come out," I said, tapping my lip. I wondered aloud where Christian had gone, and how I was to find him.

"Easy. Call him," Roxy suggested.

"I just tried. His housekeeper, who I think I woke up, said he was gone for the evening and she had no idea when would be back, and could I please not call again this late because she had to be up early to get ready for the festival."

"Not that kind of call. Use your Vulcan mind-meld, or whatever you said you can do with Christian."

A cold chill raced down my arms at the thought of such intimacy with a man who could savagely kill another person. "No, thank you."

Roxy turned to look at me. "Why? What are you afraid of? He swore never to hurt you."

I rubbed my arms. "I'm just afraid, OK?"

She gave me a weak smile. "Do you remember when we were seven and I got my head stuck between the school gym wall and the drainpipe, and I wouldn't go near the gym for months? You went all philosophical on me and told me that it was all right to be afraid of something as long as you didn't let the fear control you."

"I remember," I glared at her. "My mother used to say that to me. Damn, I hate it when you're right. All right, I'll try to see if he's got his receiver on, but it'll be on your head if he swoops down and carries me off because of it."

She held one arm, watching me.

"What?" I asked.

"Are you doing it now?"

"No!"

"Oh." She sounded disappointed. "So are you doing it now?"

"Roxy, it's not a circus act. I'm not going to do it with you watching me."

"Why not?"

"Because, it's something… intimate. I can't do it with people watching me. I have to be somewhere private to do it, where I know I'm not being stared at."

She looked around the fair. People were elbow to elbow in the long aisle leading up to the main tent where the second band was setting up for their session. The tarot-card booth and the palm-reading booth, both empty, offered no privacy. She turned back to me with a faint grin. "I guess there's only one place for you to use."

I nodded. "Raphael's trailer."

She shook her head. "Do you really want to take the chance of having Christian swoop down on you where a bed is handy for that all-important fifth step of the Joining?"

"Oy. You have a point. So what great idea do you have?"

She pointed at the lines before the portable toilets. "Voilà! Instant privacy."

I didn't like it, and spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find an alternative, but in the end I waited in line for an eon to use a toilet, Roxy at my side to keep me from being bored, or so she said. I think she was really just hoping to see me "do it."