2
Garreth's key let him in through the back door of the police department's end of City Hall. Chief Danzig and Lieutenant Kaufman had both been gone since four o'clock, when Nat Toews—pronounced "Taves"—the Evening officer, came on duty, but as usual Danzig had left a written briefing. Sue Ann Pfeifer, the evening dispatcher and clerk/typist, looked up from the communications desk dividing the office and reached across it to hand Garreth the notes . . . warrants issued by the sheriff's office down in Bellamy and in surrounding counties, requests on activity to be watching for, a bulletin on a nationwide manhunt for two men who had robbed a bank in California then killed a highway patrol trooper in Nevada, a synopsis of the day's activity . . . items the shift sergeant in a larger department would have covered verbally at rollcall.
"Nat's rattling doors downtown. Maggie radioed that she's on her way in," Sue Ann said. "Have a cookie."
Garreth grimaced. "I'm allergic to chocolate, remember?"
"I wish I was." She sighed, patting a generous hip.
The smell of her blood curled around Garreth, warm and tantalizingly salty-metallic, pulsating with the beat of the dispatcher's heart. Thirst flared in him.
Pretending to become engrossed in the briefing notes, he unzipped his fur-collared winter uniform jacket and strolled away from her back to a desk by the locker room, where the other odors permeating the office drowned the blood smell: sweat and gun oil, coffee, the eternal plate of donuts and chocolate chip cookies by the coffee urn, scents of urine and disinfectant in the four cells upstairs.
Item Ten brought a groan of dismay. The bloodmobile visited Bellamy in two weeks. Not that again? "Does Danzig really want every one of us to drive down and donate?"
On the other side of the communications desk, Sue Ann smiled. "He says it's good public relations."
Vampire blood dripping into the veins of someone with a weakened immune system would not be good for the public, Garreth thought.
Lane had believed in a vampire virus carried in the blood and saliva. According to her, a healthy person's immune system easily destroyed small inoculations of the virus. The virus triumphed, however, in a severely weakened body, invading every cell and altering the host's DNA. Anyone transfused with Garreth Doyle Mikaelian's blood would certainly live, but at what a price. Worse, some nurse or doctor might discover what the patient had become, might realize that far from being just myth, vampires actually existed.
He had to find some way out of donating.
A key clicked in the lock on the back door. Moments later Baumen's bestlooking officer strolled up the short hallway between the locker room and Danzig's office. Grinning at Garreth, Maggie Lebekov tossed her cap onto a desk and combed the fingers of both hands through her curly cap of dark hair. "You'll have fun out there tonight."
He pushed aside the problem of the bloodmobile. "Rough shift?"
Her blue eyes crinkled. "Mine wasn't, but . . . it's the first Friday after Easter and all those virtuous abstentions for Lent are over with. Business is booming at the bars and private clubs. By midnight, you'll have your hands full of DUI's. Oh, and take your slicker; there's rain headed our way."
"Damn." Kansas spring storms could be exhilarating with their roiling purple clouds sweeping in from the west in a spectacular play of lightning and thunder, but on a night like this shift promised to be, rain meant only headaches.
Maggie followed him to the locker room. As he took his equipment belt and clipboard out of his locker, she wrapped her arms around him. The speedloader cases on her belt pressed into his back below his jacket. "What say I set my alarm for 0400 and come over to your place in time to soothe your aching body after the shift?"
The scent of her blood enveloped him, beating at him. Pretending he needed the room to buckle on his equipment belt, he moved out of her arms.
He ought to tell her not to come, he knew. It would be in her best interest to break off the relationship entirely. Over the year and a half that they had been seeing each other her nearness and the blood running warm and salty beneath her skin increasingly brought the hunger boiling up in him with such a fierceness that the effort of denying it left him shaking. And yet . . . he could not face the thought of always coming home alone.
Hating himself for his weakness, he said, "I'll look forward to seeing you," and dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. Maybe her presence would chase off the nightmares.