Once Bitten, No Longer Shy by Julie Steimle (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

with clenched teeth. And then he would hunt down that vampire and kill him.  

Officer Johnson heaved another breath, nodding with more comfort. To him it was clear Troy had not killed Nicole Collins. As someone who knew JJ could see and hear ghosts, Troy would have something to fear if he were the killer, as Nicole would tell him who killed her.

“It’s my fault, though,” Troy murmured through his clenched vampire teeth. And it weighed more heavily on him. He broke into sobs again. “I should have walked her into her apartment and made sure she got in and it was locked and she was safe. Or back to my place where I could have kept her safe. I was jumped by a vampire last night on my way home. I should have remembered. I should have gone back after her. I should have remembered the vampire who had attacked Brandon was still out there—that she was in danger. It’s all my fault.”

This got a huff from one of the cops in the room. Troy shuddered, disturbed most especially at the doubt he could hear in the rhythm of their heart beats. They all thought he had done it. They all believed that he had killed Nicole—all except for Officer Johnson. Officer Johnson had a more rhythmic, thinking beat. He would not jump to conclusions. He would find the truth.

“Alright, Troy,” Officer Johnson said, rising. “I’ll try to keep you updated. But I need to let you know, they have no lead and no suspects except for you. We’ve been keeping an eye on every member of your evening vampire group, and I have to tell you, not even that kook Steve Windmiller is being suspected. All of them have squeaky clean alibis. We’ve been watching them, and unfortunately you are the only one with erratic, unpredictable movement with numerous moments and times that people don’t know where you are. You take shortcuts. You’re impulsive. Yesterday, they completely lost track of you.”

Lost track? Troy bristled. “I’ve been spied on all this time?”

Shrugging, Officer Johnson said, “Once you became a vampire, and once it became a matter of public record, yes. You’re being tracked, not just by NYPD, but the SRA. And I am sure you know the Holy Seven are keeping tabs on you.”

His keychain fob. It was a tracker.

“Did Rick Deacon arranged this?” Heat seemed to swell over Troy. He wanted something deserving a bite.

“No,” Officer Johnson said, surprised really. “Actually, Rick Deacon made it so you were more difficult to track. That cell phone you have—it scrambles tech and acts as a shield against surveillance. The SRA, by the way, have confiscated it. I don’t know if you’ll get it back.”

Woah. Rick did that for him? That phone was from the Holy Seven. Semour Dawson had made it. It was experimental. Troy lifted up a bit. And as he thought on it, he was sure if Rick could not get that phone back, he would find some way to destroy it as it was secret tech. Or Semour would. Troy was liking this Holy Seven a little bit more now.

“Troy?” Officer Johnson’s voice seemed to come from far off. “Now is the time you tell me anything that might help us defend you in this case. We’re going to have to let you be taken into the prison, probably to solitary confinement, considering that you are a vampire—and what you did to these walls.”

Troy nodded absentmindedly, his mind racing. Rick had protected him, yes. But it had backfired. He was now the prime suspect in a murder he did not commit. And they had proof the perpetrator wasn’t one of the other vampires in the group, which was such a relief. Troy had not wanted to suspect them. He liked them, even Steve who really gave him a lot of insight onto the vampire mind. And he most certainly did not want to suspect the worst of Mr. Lenox or Cameron. They were, as far as he could tell, good men. So who was left except the Order of Blood, who clearly had it out for him? And how could they possibly know to target Nicole at all? Yes, he had walked Nicole home at night, but the Order still did not seem to know where he lived. It would make sense for them to target him, right? So they had to have had an informant. But who could have possibly informed them that she was important to him, that he might even have reason to be angry with her? It obviously wasn’t someone watching him that evening. It would have made more sense for them to target Marcus than Nicole. In his darkest thoughts he wanted to kill Marcus. He wanted to punish him, even now, for what he had done to Nicole.

“You must understand, when a Gulinger kid ends up accused of a crime, this becomes more than just an issue of justice,” Officer Johnson’s voice seemed to come from afar, as he moved to lead Troy out of the interrogation room. “You’ve stepped into the war.”

“War?” Troy came back to the present, finding he was on his feet again, near the door. “Excuse me? What? I’m a target of the Order of Blood. If anybody is guilty here, it would be them.”

“But there is nothing linking Nicole Collins to the Order of Blood, Troy.” Officer Johnson looked stricken. “Nothing but you. And you are the quintessential expert on vampires. Which to these men here means that you know all the loopholes. They think you are trying to get away with murder.”

“Loopholes?” Troy stared at him. “Being a vampire is not a contract. I didn’t sign up for this. And I most certainly didn’t think I would survive the sunlight after I was forced to become one. Do they actually think there is such a thing as a daytime vampire?”

Officer Johnson shrugged, but he looked even more relieved. He grasped the door knob. “Why not? We’ve got benevolent werewolves roaming our city and ‘they’ can’t handle that either.”

Troy laughed, painfully. Yes. The Deacons. What a conundrum. Non-savage, wealthy, benevolent werewolves and a daytime vampire. For an SRA agent, that would be earth-shattering. What was the world coming to? They couldn’t play the game of hunter vs. monster anymore.

But that was the end of Officer Johnson’s ‘audience’ with him. The police of that precinct cuffed Troy again before the kind policeman opened the door, and they ‘dragged’ Troy to the holding cells. Troy found it ridiculous, actually… as he realized he was stronger than the lot of them—something he could tell Officer Johnson knew and yet nodded to Troy for him to play along. So Troy did. He imagined all the times when Tom Brown was dragged to jail, snickering under his breath as the guy could walk through walls easily—and he, could probably break out of his cell with his newly acquired vampire strength.

Thing was, the message about the ‘war’ was clear. To keep from being branded a monster by the SRA, he had to allow himself to be a civil captive while his Gulinger friends worked to clear him. That meant he had to wait.

“Don’t think we trust you, vampire man,” one cop said when locking the door. “We know your type.”

Troy smirked, finding the only seat in the small cell. It was a bench. Getting comfortable, he said, “Don’t worry. I don’t trust you either.”

*

When Officer Johnson had told Troy they had taken Marcus to a safe place, he did not tell him that it was a jail cell. The second Matthew found out from Tom that Troy had sent him to trash the porn stash Marcus had made of Nicole—Matthew found out how much the man really had. It wasn’t a little. And it wasn’t just of Nicole. Marcus Williams practically ran a small porn industry as a side business.

Piranha, who had the pleasure of flooding Marcus’s house and collecting the evidence in the first place, found every nasty picture and film of all the women that scummy man had slept with—including the vampire woman who had bitten him. Though Marcus could have helped Matthew and the Holy Seven track down the vampire hooker who was feasting on her clients, Marcus clearly didn’t want to expose his little industry and therefore had not turned over the footage. The fact that he had not turned in that particular video footage when Matthew had asked for all traces of their vampire attackers made it just cause to prosecute Marcus for obstruction of justice… never mind the rest of the garbage the man had done.

Unfortunately, in that porn stash, there was no evidence of who had killed Nicole. It still looked like it could have been Troy in a fit of rage. Marcus’s previous victims of his secret porn industry were as varied as the hookers on the street, and it was doubtful Nicole was killed by the she-vampire who had bit Marcus—though they intended to find her and question her that evening.

So Matthew went over all the other evidence they had. So much of it pointed to Troy. It was awful, but it was evident that Troy was the only one with means, opportunity and motive that they knew. And yet Matthew knew deep in his gut Troy would never kill anyone. Not that creep Brandon, and most certainly not Nicole.  He had been in that interrogation room when Troy had smashed that table. He had heard his thoughts when he had screamed at the SRA connected cop. Troy was hiding nothing. Everything he had said was the truth.

Troy had fallen hard for Nicole—Matthew could see it. And though Troy was emotional and sometimes blind to things, he was not ignorant about the kind of person Nicole was. If anything, Troy had been dismayed about her cheating, not angry. He was more angry about her lying to him about being with Marcus… and deathly furious over what Marcus had done to her. Besides, Troy’s personality was not a premeditated sort. If he had killed Nicole, it would have been in the heat of the moment—just like the destroyed table and walls of the interrogation room.

But what about jealousy? The motive.

Was Troy jealous?

Matthew shook his head. Though Troy did get jealous, it sort of fizzled rather than brewed. Like with Silvia. Troy was not scared that she was a witch. He was, however, jealous that she had won Randon’s affections where he had not. Rather, Troy accepted when he lost. Besides, he was too easily distracted.

Fact was, after Brandon was killed, when Brandon’s friends and acquaintances suggested that Troy had murdered Brandon out of jealousy, Matthew got the impression that some of them were lying, though their thoughts and words matched up. It was unsettling, especially in that it was like they believed in the lie—if only for that moment. And the more Matthew had talked with them, the more he realized that they were in fact jealous of Troy because of Nicole. They had wanted Nicole, and Troy had got her. That was a motive he could not ignore.

Matthew also realized that most of those male bite victims had deserved to get bitten. Rick use to say that a person had to be a special kind of stupid to get bitten by a werewolf. After all this, Matthew decided now that it also applied to people bit by vampires—Troy being the exception. He was the only one who didn’t deserve it.

Setting aside the women who had their own problems which drew a vampire to them and got them bitten, the men were almost all the same kind: players who loved to party, had a thing for loose women, and just wanted to get laid but didn’t care with whom. To be frank, Matthew had a low tolerance for those young fools who thought a hedonistic lifestyle was a good thing. It was how people caught herpes, AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and all those