Dead End Dating (3 page)

“How do you know he doesn’t have an eternity mate waiting in the car?”

“Duh, he’s not wearing a commitment charm.” The charm was a small crystal vial that all committed vamps wore suspended on a chain around their neck. It held a drop of their significant other’s blood. While it looked like a hip piece of jewelry to the average human, it symbolized the sacred union between born vamps.

Not that my brother had noticed. Men. Sheesh.

I continued my prospective client search. A man stood near the computer terminals available for rent. “Alone,” I said again. A woman picked up a roll of packaging tape to go with the box she’d just retrieved. “Alone.” My gaze lit on the customer Max had just rung up. The man had paused in the Hi-Lighter aisle. “Painfully alone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he already spent twenty minutes trying to decide between the neon green and the fuschia pink, and now he’s second-guessing his final choice.” I eyed my brother. “If he had a significant other, do you think he would be wasting time
here
?”

Max (FYI—chocolate cake drenched in caramel sauce) shrugged. “So maybe you’re on to something.”

“I am.” I plucked a flyer from the top of the stack and turned to follow Mr. Hi-Lighter, who’d finally given up the debate and headed for the door. “Later, bro.”

“H
ey,” I called out when I reached the door. Obviously, Mr. Hi-Lighter wasn’t used to having majorly hot babes call after him. He didn’t so much as miss a step as he walked down Fourth Street toward the subway station.

I usually avoided the subway the way most people avoided Porta Pottis (a girl just didn’t know what she’d find crawling around in there during the middle of the night). But my instincts were prodding me on. I had a feeling about this guy.

He looked so sad.

So lonely.

So geeky.

He needed me.

I started after him. I’d made it all of three steps before a strange sensation washed over me. My ears perked up and the hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I had the strangest sensation that I was the one being followed. I glanced around and saw…nothing. Just the empty sidewalk and the neon green
MIDNIGHT MOE’S
sign glowing in the distance.

Shrugging off the feeling, I turned my attention back to Mr. Hi-Lighter, who’d managed to get a pretty good lead on me. I picked up my pace, which should have been enough to run this guy down in no time (just one of my many vamp talents). I gained on him as he neared the subway station and descended the steps, but I couldn’t seem to close the distance between us. He was moving too fast.

Faster than me?

That could only mean…Nah. He couldn’t be. I would have made him right away. That was the thing about vamps. We had heightened senses. We could see things that other people couldn’t. Hear sounds that weren’t audible to the average ear. Smell scents sharper and more intense than the average nose—another reason I avoided the subway.

I followed as he pushed through the entry gate. My nostrils flared and I drank in a deep breath of…graham crackers? Way too bland for a born vamp. As for a made vampire…the few I’d actually met had smelled like old mothballs and greed.

Obviously the past five hundred years were finally catching up to me. I just wasn’t as fast as I used to be. That, or Nike had finally hit pay dirt with their running shoes.

Pushing through the gate, I bypassed a group of college girls, backpacks slung over their shoulders, and a gay couple walking hand in hand. I started down the platform just as Mr. Hi-Lighter came to a stop at the far end near a group of young guys.

They wore classic gangbanger with slouchy jeans that barely clung to their hips, muscle shirts, and enough gold jewelry to reduce the national deficit by a good quarter.

“What do you think you’re doing?” one of the guys asked Mr. Hi-Lighter.

“Waiting for my train.”

“It ain’t your train, dumbass.” The guy—tall with buzzed dark hair, an olive complexion, and a tattoo on his bicep that read
BORN TO DIE
—walked up until he was nose to nose. “It’s
our
train.”

“That’s right,” another one said. He had deep red hair, freckles, and a Stone Cold Steve Austin attitude. “And this is our platform.”

“So get lost,” Born to Die said before giving the geek a quick shove.

Mr. Hi-Lighter stumbled back a few steps, right into another one of the guys who’d come up behind him.

“I guess this asshole’s hard of hearing.” The guy behind shoved the geek back toward his friend. “Otherwise, he’d be gone by now.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Then you shouldn’t have stopped on our platform uninvited.” Born to Die pulled out a knife. “It’s gonna cost you.”

I picked up my steps, but I was still too far away to stop what happened next. The knife pressed against Mr. Hi-Lighter’s throat. His breath caught, his nostrils flared, and his eyes turned a telltale midnight black.

I stopped in my tracks and waited for the transformation that would come next. A wolf or a jackal or something equally vicious. Something that would rip these clowns to pieces.

The air shimmered and blurred, and a split second later, an old woman’s voice crackled across the distance.

“Antonio Dante Moreno! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

The guy with the knife stumbled backward, his eyes wide as he stared at the tiny old woman. Tight, meticulous snow white curls covered her head. She wore a flower-print dress, orthopedic shoes, and a spaghetti-stained apron. One twisted, arthritic hand gripped a large stainless steel ladle. The smell of Dippity-do and garlic clung to her.

“Grandma Maria?”

She shook a gnarled finger at the gangbanger. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Antonio. Why, your papa, bless him”—she crossed herself with her free hand—“would turn over in his grave if he could see you now.”

“I…” He swallowed, his gaze stunned and frightened at the same time. “Y-you can’t be here. You’re d-dead.”

Her gaze narrowed and drilled into the young man. “You’ll be the one dead when I tell your uncle Gino that you were out getting into trouble when you should have been home studying for your algebra test. You’re this close to failing.
Failing,
” she wailed. “Why, no one in our family has ever flunked out of school.”

“I—I didn’t mean…” He shook his head. “I—I’m sorry.”

“This is too weird, man,” one of the other guys said. “Too fuckin’ weird.”

“Watch your language, young man.” She bopped him with her ladle before turning to smack each one of the group soundly on the head. “All.”
Bop.
“Of.”
Bop.
“You.”
Bop-bop.

“I—I’m getting the hell out of here,” one of the guys blurted.

“Me too.”

“Wait for me.”

The young men scrambled for the steps. A few moments later, the old woman’s figure blurred and shimmered. Just like that, the pudgy man from Moe’s stood on the platform in her place.

I blinked and tried to come to grips with what I’d just witnessed.

It wasn’t the transformation itself that had me so freaked out. I’d seen more than my share. Heck, I’d done my fair share. My particular favorite was a white Alaskan husky with vibrant blue eyes and a vicious bark.

But I’d never morphed into an Italian grandmother, for Pete’s sake.

No wonder this guy was alone.

Being a geek was bad enough. But a geeky
vampire
? Talk about a sucky existence—and I don’t mean that in a good way.

This guy needed my help, all right.

And I needed his.

I tightened my grip on the flyer and stepped forward.

“I
don’t need a date.” The geeky vampire stared at the flyer I’d just handed him and shook his head.

“Not a date. A
mate.
” Did I have to spell out
everything
? “An eternity mate.”

“I’m afraid I don’t really understand.”

“My name is Lil Marchette, and I’ve just opened up an exclusive service that helps unattached vamps, like yourself, find that special someone. For a small fee, of course.”

He stared at me as if I’d just confessed to being a vamp hunter. One with really good taste in accessories, of course. His voice vibrated with shock. “You’re a
vampire
?”

“Duh.”

His gaze roamed from my expensive honey-colored hair with platinum highlights to the tips of my favorite Anne Klein slides, and back up again. “You don’t look like a vampire.”

“Neither do you. Especially wearing the apron and the Dippity-do.”

“I haven’t nailed the whole metamorphosis thing yet. Most vampires just pick something ruthless and go for it, but my special talent is mind linking. Whenever I’m stressed, I get my wires crossed. Instead of digging into my own mind for something frightening, I end up pulling something out of whoever’s in front of me.”

“Frightening, as in a little old grandma?”

“A little old Italian grandma.”

Okay, he had a point.

“Thanks,” he went on, “but I, um, really don’t think this is for me.” He handed back the flyer.

His hand brushed mine and he actually blushed, and I started to think that maybe I was trying to bite off more than I could chew.

Hel
-lo
?

Vamps mesmerized and intrigued and intimidated and, in my case, looked really hot and happening carrying the latest beaded Donna Karan handbag in cream mocha. They did not
blush.

My gaze swept the length of Grandma Fang, from his battered brown penny loafers (can we say
over
?), up the length of his blah-blah beige khakis, his yellow button-down shirt with the white undershirt peeking over the top button, to his round face and pale, watery blue eyes.

He’d obviously been in his mid-to-late thirties when he’d lost his virginity and stopped aging. Judging from the way he avoided my gaze and kept blushing, that couldn’t have been more than a few years ago.

“How old are you?”

“One thousand thirty-six.”

“I know most young vampires aren’t really thinking about the future and continuing the bloodline, but—what did you just say?”

“I’m one thousand thirty-six.”

“Years?”

He nodded and I just stood there dumbfounded for a few moments. The subway roared by us and groaned to a stop. The doors slid open, and a few people filed out onto the platform. An older woman, arms overflowing with grocery bags, clicked by me. The smell of cheap hairspray slid into my nostrils like a heavy-duty dose of smelling salts.

The shock beating at my temples subsided and gave way to a totally fantabulous idea. (Did I mention that I do my best thinking when I’m totally stressed? There’s just something about the added pressure of impending disaster, be it war, famine, or pinning on the Moe’s name tag, that makes my creativity positively hum.)

I was definitely hitting a ten on the in-over-my-head-o-meter. At the same time, I couldn’t shake the excitement zipping up and down my spine.

This was
it.

The mother lode.

The oldest, most clueless, most dweebish vamp in existence (make that the
only
dweebish vamp in existence because the very nature of our species contradicted the whole geekoid persona).

If ever anyone needed to get an afterlife and find a mate, it was this guy.

And I was just the girl to help him.

I’m a sucker for happy endings, after all. An advocate for l-o-v-e. A firm believer in relationships, even though I haven’t actually had a decent one in the past one hundred years.

As a die-hard, card-carrying romantic, I
had
to help him.

The fact that he would be good PR for my business and prove to the entire bloodsucking community that I knew my stuff when it came to matchmaking was just a great big cherry floating in my already delish green apple martini.

I smiled. “One thousand years old, huh?”

“And thirty-six.”

“Well, then.” My smile widened. “It’s your lucky day. We’re running a half-price special for anyone over one thousand thirty-five.”

The brown wooly mammoths that doubled for his eyebrows climbed a notch. “Really?”