He felt her worry like a cloud filling the car. “I should have what?” she said tartly. “Should have killed her earlier? Should have remarked on how hungry she was? I figured you, as a vampire, should already know. Should have told you what a treacherous bitch she was?”

Lemuel managed to nod.

“Like you would have listened.” Olivia said nothing else, which was a blessing.

“You left the shop closed,” Lemuel scolded weakly, when she parked his car behind the store.

“Sue me.” She ran around to his side of the car to help him out.

“I can walk,” he said, and began moving carefully in a straight course for the side door. He walked slowly, but steadily.

Olivia ran ahead of him to unlock the door, and they paused for a moment on the landing while she relocked. Then they went down the steps as quietly as they could, hoping they wouldn’t wake Bobo on the top floor. Lemuel’s apartment was open, as he’d left it, and he felt his way inside without turning on a light. He knew Olivia was hovering in the doorway of the bedroom.

“Come in here, if you please,” Lemuel said. He’d taken off his clothes, which were probably ruined, and now he lay down on his bed. The worst of his wounds were healed, but he was exhausted. He wanted her closeness.

“Let me feed you,” Olivia whispered.

Lemuel felt her hand patting to determine where he was. Then she was on the bed beside him, her warm neck pressed to his cold mouth.

Lemuel bit, and felt her shiver, and then his mouth was filled with the most divine taste. Her flavor was bold and brave and bright, like Olivia. He was always mindful of the need for self-control with her, and he stopped just before he would have had to chide himself. He healed the ragged marks in her neck, and she shuddered again.

“Olivia,” he whispered. Everywhere his body touched hers, he could feel the heat of her. “I admire you just as you are. But if you are ever weary of this life, I would gladly make you like me.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she whispered back. “Let me think on it, Lemuel. Would we be able to stay together?”

“I am not like most vampires, as you know. We’d be able to, as long as it suited us. I know there are disadvantages to being both energy and blood fueled. But there are some good things about it, too.”

“Disadvantages?”

Olivia already sounded sleepy. He put his arm around her. Possibly he could get her closer. “I can’t hide what I am,” he said. “Everyone who looks at me knows I am not human. And I’m not beautiful, like so many of the blood vampires.”

“You were changed by someone who loved you,” she murmured. “That has to make a difference.”

Lemuel had never thought of that. He did now, lying with Olivia in his arms, both of them on the verge of sleep.

“What happened to your wife?” Olivia said, suddenly sounding a bit more alert. It was not only Lemuel who was thinking of something for the first time.

“The man who’d changed her. He came to woo her a few years later, and by that time we were strapped. Two energy suckers in an area with thin population, and very little transient traffic . . . it just wouldn’t work in those days. I was trying to live as I had when I was alive, plowing the fields at night, moving the cattle around then, too. That wasn’t working, either. I had never been anything but poor, and a cowboy. I had always planted just enough for my wife and me. We’d never had any but stillborn children, thank God, because with our days and nights reversed, what would have happened to them?”

“So this man came back? And he took your wife away with him?”

“He did. By that time, we were broke with each other. She’d changed me to save my life, but the life we had together wasn’t worth it. Yet we didn’t have much of any idea of how to change it.”

“Tell me the rest later?”

“Surely.”

“Night-night.”

He smiled over her head in the darkness, and then they were both asleep.

No customers came to Midnight Pawn in the hours before the sun was up, but three skunks, a fox, and seven opossums died under the traffic light that night.

The creature underneath raised a finger. It had not moved in almost two hundred fifty years.

22

Bobo rose early in the morning and went to the front window to check for dead people. The Rev was heading away from the intersection with a wheelbarrow full of dead animals. Diederik was trailing after the old minister, so Bobo didn’t run down to offer his own help. He turned away, shaking his head. It was obvious this wasn’t going to be an ordinary day, and Bobo wondered if there would ever be an ordinary day again.

Bobo dressed with some haste, and he took his bowl of oatmeal down to the shop with him. There was a new note beside the cash register, which he read with some bewilderment.

Arthur Smith walked through the door within the hour. Since he was the sheriff, he didn’t have to wear a uniform, though he usually preferred to. Today, Smith was very well turned out in a navy blazer, sharply pressed khakis, and a starched white shirt. His tie was a cheerfully subdued plaid of blue and green and a hint of red.

“Looking good,” Bobo said by way of greeting.

“Thanks,” Arthur said uncomfortably. “Ah, I have a thing later.”

“Okay. What can I do for you before you have your thing?” Bobo added together Arthur’s discomfort, the fact that he’d been seeing Magdalena Orta Powell very steadily, and Arthur’s romantic history. Bobo suspected that Arthur was about to get married again.

“I can’t rouse your tenants.”

Of course, Bobo had heard Arthur try the side door, so this was no news to him. He had wondered if he should intervene, but he’d correctly figured Arthur would come into the shop through the front door. “The side door stays locked until one of us goes out that way, Arthur. Of course you can’t see Lemuel, it’s daytime. I can’t believe you tried. Olivia worked the counter in here last night, too. Is this about her car?” (The note had said, “Bobo, my car was stolen last night, so people may show up asking for me. Olivia.”)

“Yes, mostly,” Arthur said. He still looked grim. “Lemuel is all right?”

“As far as I know. I can go check, if you want.”

“That would be a relief to me.”