CHAPTER ONE

I stood in the early morning sunshine outside Sacramento City Hospital where I work my second job as a night filing clerk every Sunday through Thursday night of the whole blessed year (including holidays because I get paid double for those). I stretched my arms, breathed in deep through my nose and then nearly coughed my lungs out my mouth as the fumes from the ambulance bay mixed with the scent of freshly poured blacktop and damn near choked me.

“Gotta watch that breathing thing,” a voice said behind me. “It’ll kill you.”

If only it were that easy. I turned. His voice hadn’t surprised me. I’d known he was there within a few seconds of walking out of the hospital and onto the sidewalk. I can’t quite describe what it’s like. It’s not like a smell or a sound. It’s more like a vibration, like a buzzing that I feel in my flesh, a lifting of the hair on the back of my neck. A bit of a tingle.

To be fair, that wasn’t the only thing that tingled and buzzed when he was around. Knowing he was there had a way of sending electric shocks up my nerve endings and down to places that a lady doesn’t mention in public.

I wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted to risk being out here after dawn had broken on the horizon, but that was most decidedly his business and not mine. As long as I stayed in the sun’s path, it was bound to stay that way, too. I inched a little farther from the shadows.

The he in question was Dr. Alexander Bledsoe. Dr. Bledsoe was six foot two inches of broad shoulders and thick chest and long legs. He had thick black hair with a touch of gray here and there that he wore swept back from his face and a little tousled. I’d never gotten close enough to touch it and see if he had product in it or if it was just naturally hella sexy. I certainly didn’t plan to get that close now. Getting close to Alex could be dangerous, even for me.

His eyes were the rich brown of the dark chocolate roux my grandmother uses as the base for her jambalaya, and he invariably had a touch of stubble no matter what the time of day. Basically, every time he walked through the corridors of the hospital, he left groups of nurses, techs, support staff and a few patients swooning behind him, female and male. Not me, though. I’m not the swooning type. Plus, as I mentioned, I keep my distance from the not-so-good doctor. That doesn’t meant I didn’t notice, however. Dr. Bledsoe was very hard not to notice.

He was also a vampire.

On the face of things, being a vampire and an emergency room doctor might seem incompatible. Not so. Dr. Bledsoe had easy access to blood pretty much whenever he wanted it with no questions asked. No one even had to die. People showed up at his doorstep and spurted blood all over him. If you were an accountant, that wouldn’t happen. At least, not literally. Generally, it didn’t happen in lawyers’ offices either. Not in schools or most offices. Dentists may get a little blood but not in nearly the quantity that it sprays around even the tamest emergency room, and how many dentists do you know who only work nights? Nobody at Sacramento City questioned Alex’s strange hours, weird sleeping habits, pale skin or generally antisocial behavior. He was an attending, after all. Honestly, given the perks, I don’t understand why all vampires don’t become emergency room doctors.

Oh, yeah, there’s that pesky caring-about-people thing. Most vampires fall pretty short in that category in my personal experience. Of all the things that go bump in the night that I have to consort with in my “day” job, vampires are among my least favorite. They give me the heebie-jeebies, even Dr. Hottie McHottster with the ever so chilly skin standing over in the shadows right now. I’ll take a troll over a vampire any day, and you have no idea how bad the average troll’s breath is. They are totally not into good oral hygiene.

Granted, my experience isn’t terribly vast at this point. I’m twenty- six. I wasn’t sure how old Dr. Bledsoe was. It’s really hard to tell with vampires. I’d guess in the three- to five-hundred-year range. Practically a baby, when it comes to bloodsuckers.

He dropped a manila envelope to the ground and kicked it toward me. It slid out of the shadows where he stood and into the sunlight a few feet from me. It looked innocuous enough. I’ve learned over my short but eventful years, however, that looks can be deceiving.

“What is it?” I asked, without making a move to pick it up. “And where is it supposed to go?”

“It’s nothing. Just something that came through the ER that I thought Aldo should see.” He looked from the envelope to me with one eyebrow raised, but he didn’t move from where he leaned against the textured concrete wall. His sliver of shadow had narrowed a bit, but if he noticed, he wasn’t showing it. Then again, what did I expect? It wasn’t like a vampire was going to sweat.

“Aldo?” I kicked the envelope back to him and felt a minute tingle in my foot. Aldo de la Tarantarina was the nominal head of the loose association that governed the local vampires. He was not my favorite person. He wasn’t even my favorite vampire. He’s officious, slimy and a little bit poncey to boot. Vampires give me the heebie-jeebies. Aldo gives my heebie-jeebies goose bumps. Besides, I don’t usually do vampire-to-vampire hand-offs. No one needs me to do them. One of the main reasons anybody needs a Messenger is to take things between different groups that don’t get along.

Northern California is a melting pot. Or a tossed salad. Or whatever they’re calling it these days. Everybody on earth came here, especially in the 1800s with that whole Gold Rush thing. With them, they brought their own gods and their own demons and everything in between. The place started to get crowded. Then, when you put a lot of prey in one place, the predators—like vampires and werewolves—come along, too. A lot of these groups don’t get along. That’s where I come in, generally. If a werewolf, who typically won’t be able to stand the smell of a vampire, needs a message sent to a vampire, I’m the go-between. With the emphasis on between. Since that’s where I seem to exist: between everything but not really fully in anything. “But he’s another vampire.”

Alex made a hissing sound. “Take an ad out, why don’t you?”

Oops. That was, at best, indiscreet. At worst, slips of the lip like that could wind up with Alex sporting the latest in stakes in his heart or me possibly locked up in a padded room, most likely the latter. Nobody really believes in vampires anymore, not even the idiots who pretend to be vampires on the Internet. It was a stupid mistake. “Sorry,” I said.

He kicked the envelope back toward me with a sigh. “Take the envelope and zip it, okay?”

Fine. I deserved that. Still, I was curious. “Why can’t you take it yourself?”

Alex sighed. “We’ve had . . . a bit of a falling out, Aldo and I. I think that he would prefer not to see me face-to-face for a while.”

I turned back into the sunshine, in part because I was cold. The hospital is way over air-conditioned and the air outside still held an early morning chill. The sun felt good. I also turned so Alex couldn’t see me smile. His frequent fallings-out with Aldo and the others of his kind were some of the things I liked best about Alex. I’m a sucker for bad boys. Just ask my mother. Trust me, you’ll get an earful on the topic. Plus, Alex is not quite like the other vampires. For one thing, he washes his hair a lot more. He has a much more human idea of appropriate personal hygiene than most of his fellow bloodsuckers. Maybe it goes with the medical training. “What was this little tiff about?”

“Nothing you need worry your pretty little head about, Melina. All you need to do is do your job and deliver the package to Aldo.”

It sounded like Dr. Bledsoe was getting a bit irritated. I glanced back over my shoulder. No wonder. His protective shadow was getting narrower by the second. In a matter of minutes, he’d be cut off from the entrance to the hospital by a rather large swath of sunshine. I sighed. He was right. He was just asking me to do my job. It wasn’t his fault that it wasn’t one I’d chosen myself and had a lot more pitfalls to it than my night job. When I file, I run only the risk of a nasty paper cut. Nobody is generally supposed to mess with me during my day job either, but not all the things I deal with have great reasoning capacities nor are they the best rule-followers on the planet. Case in point: vampires. They’re as bad as those creeps that try to cut around traffic jams by driving down the shoulder.

“Can it be a daytime drop?” I asked. Aldo’s place was creepy enough in the daytime. I much preferred to avoid it completely at night.

“It can be straight up noon and you can deliver it in your teeth while you walk on your hands, for all I care.” He looked down at the envelope and up at me again. Then he smiled. “Although I might pay to see that.”

Damn his already eternally damned soul, he’d broken out the big artillery, that damn grin of his. It transformed his whole nearly wolfish face with a boyish charm so potent there should be an amulet to ward it off. I took a step toward him in the shadows, my heart beating like Travis Barker on speed, and only managed to pull myself back with a giant dose of willpower. I wondered what quotient of my daily willpower allotment I’d used up with that move. I’d probably end up eating three hot fudge sundaes tonight. Damn him anyway.

“Come on, Melina, do it for me. I’m not that bad, am I?” His voice was low and rough and sweet, like a piece of aural sandpaper that scratched in all the right places.

It was true. He wasn’t bad. He was, however, evil, but it’s not like it was his fault. Vampires are just built that way. I didn’t hold it against him. I knew all about not getting to choose how you were built.

I reached down with my foot, carefully keeping it in sunlight, and slid the envelope toward myself. “Fine, then. I’ll take it.” I picked it up. The vibration I felt in my foot when I’d come in contact with the envelope was stronger now. Whatever was inside the plain manila wrapping had some kind of mojo on it. I wanted it in my hands as little as possible. That stuff can be like cooties, infectious and hard to wash off.

Alex was already slipping his way along the wall back toward the hospital entrance. I didn’t blame him. I’d seen what even a few seconds of sunlight could do to vampire flesh. I’d want to make sure I was back into the artificially lighted, windowless hospital interior before the sun exposed the rest of that wall, too, if I were he. “That’s my girl,” he said as the automatic doors slid open and he darted through them.

Good thing he’d saved that one until I’d already agreed to take his stupid envelope. I started to snarl, but he was already gone, which left me with nothing better to do than fume as I went to my car. I may well be his Messenger, but I damn sure wasn’t his girl.