Crossed Read Free Page B

thinking about Father Ike. I still didn’t understand how Eric had convinced a human priest to perform a marriage ceremony for vampires. When I asked Father Ike about it, the little old priest had laughed and cleared his throat. “I’ve been trying to save that wily old sinner since we served together in Korea. If he’s still walking and talking, then I believe there is hope. If I can get him into a church for any reason, so much the better.” Maybe if I’d met someone like Father Ike, back before I got sick, went to hell, came back . . . maybe it would have been different. Everybody ought to know a Father Ike.
    “Rachel, please don’t screw this up for me.”
    “Fine.” I held the paper towels under the now-warm water just enough to get it damp and wiped Eric’s scent off me. He was so paranoid. Tabitha’s senses were dulled when she playedhuman, and playing human was the only way she could stay awake during daylight hours. She was still as hard to kill as a vampire, but her other attributes became utterly mundane. He should have just let it go. Now I had to make him sorry. “Look, you’re right,” I said, smiling. “This is your special day.”
    “A little special for you, too,” Tabitha said. She handed my dress back to me. “Who did you meet?”
    “Some guy,” I answered vaguely as I watched her reaction in the mirror, somehow disturbed by her ability. It takes insane levels of magic to fool a mirror. They reflect truth. “You don’t know him.”
    That was true, too. She’d never really know Eric. You have to see terrible things, feel real pain and despair, and get angry enough to crawl out of your grave before you can see things the way he does. “You know what Mom would be worried about, don’t you?”
    “The fight?”
    “Something old.” I patted myself down with several more paper towels.
    “Something new,” Tabitha interjected. I let her help zip up the back of my dress.
    “Something borrowed. Something blue,” we finished together.
    “I forgot all about that,” Tabitha fretted. Thunder cracked and lightning struck out in the street. Lord Phillip was having some fun.
    “Don’t worry, Tab.”
Slut!
“I can take care of everything.”
Bitch!
I picked up my thong and waggled it at her. “Something borrowed and something blue all in one package.” It was a pleasure to watch her recoil.
    “But you wore those; they smell like sex,” she whined, disgusted.
    “It’ll spice up the honeymoon too, the smell of me and you all mixed up together . . .”
    Uncertainty was pushed gradually aside by her desire to please Master. I wondered if she even knew that she thought about him in two different ways, the vampire part of her recognizing him as Master while the human part still conjured images of Eric, her one true love, her knight in shining goddamn armor.
    “Maybe.”
    Idiot. How he ever brought himself to turn you, much less propose to you I’ll never know,
I thought.
You can’t be that great a lay.
“Or you and I could give him a three-way in the marriage bed. I guarantee you he’ll never forget it.”
    She snatched the panties away with a sigh.
    “No.” She sounded exasperated. “You promised me that you wouldn’t sleep with him.”
    “And I’ve kept that promise.” Also true; we weren’t sleeping. “But it doesn’t hurt to offer. You know it’s what he wants. Of course he might settle for permission to fuck me every once in a while.”
    “Shut up! Shut your filthy mouth!” The slap caught me by surprise, sharp and painful against my jaw. Anger had brought out a little of Tabitha’s vampire strength, spinning me around so that I bounced off the sink and then to the floor, pink taffeta bunched up around my feet. That was the line she shouldn’t have crossed. Eric could slap me if he wanted. As long as he got off on it I wouldn’t care, because my magic would make it feel as good to me as it felt to him, but Tabitha? No fucking way did she get to bat me around. I