Sunset Strip: A Tale From The Tome Of Bill Read Free Page B

she started. Immediately, my attention waned. “His sister actually.” The twit had a sister? Now it was even less interesting to me.
    “I assume this gets better.”
    “She’s run off.”
    “So what? Is she, like, six?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Okay, well this has been fun,” I said, standing up. “We’ll have to do this again when there’s an actual world-ending...”
    “Wait, you don’t understand.”
    “Understand what? That she had a temper tantrum because her parents didn’t buy her a car or something?”
    “It’s vampires.”
    That caught my attention slightly. Normally I could give a shit about such things. I mean, I’m usually the cause of people’s disappearances, not the other way around. Two things stopped me, though. Bill wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to help his friend, and he’d certainly give me shit when he got back if I refused to do the same. Listening to him whine in my ear for all of eternity did not bode well for my continued sanity. Secondly, though I wouldn’t have admitted it under torture by the Draculas, his fucking gimp of a roommate had helped us out on more than one occasion. I probably owed him just enough to hear Christy out.
    I checked my watch. Oh fuck it, five more minutes wouldn’t kill me. I sat back down. “Vampires?”
    “Yes.”
    “Any of mine?”
    “No. They’re not from around here.”
    “Okay, start talking, but be warned I’m ordering an appetizer too.”
    * * *
    The waitress brought our drinks while Christy explained. She wasn’t sure if it was coincidence or if some vamps had figured out two plus two and were purposely targeting Tom’s family because of his association with Bill. Either way, his little sister had acquired a new boyfriend in weeks’ past. He’d been stirring up trouble at home, driving a wedge between the girl and her parents...a not entirely difficult thing to do with a teenaged girl.
    Tom, still preoccupied with freaking out at the concept of becoming a dad, hadn’t paid it much heed. Couldn’t say I blamed him. The prospect of siring a new generation of dumbass of his caliber could be off-putting to anyone.
    Christy had likewise been busy, trying to keep him from turning into more of a dumb fuck than he already was, as well as apparently attempting to build a new mage coven. Hopefully it turned out to be more successful than her last one.
    “So how do vampires play into this?”
    “I’m getting to that,” she said in between sips of a decaf cappuccino. Ugh, the very thought made me gag. Talk about a sin against mankind. “Two weeks ago, Tom and I went down to visit with his folks. His sister mostly kept to herself, but I happened to see her new boyfriend once when he picked her up. Something about him set off warning signals.”
    “Something familiar?”
    “Sorta.” She broke eye contact. Before Bill’s doofy charisma had won her over, she’d been firmly in the kill all vampires camp. “I didn’t trust myself, though. Things are better than they were when I first found out I was pregnant, but my powers have still been going a little haywire every now and then. I’ve been self-binding myself just in case. It tends to mute everything.”
    “Self-binding? If we’re gonna start talking kinks here, then I’m gonna need something stronger. Don’t get me wrong, I like being tied up as much as...”
    “No! My powers. I’ve been using a ritual to keep them in check.”
    “Oh, well that’s a bit less weird...sorta.”
    “Anyway, as I said, everything’s been muffled for me. All I got was a little feeling, like the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. The thing is, it kept nagging at me. So when I got back home, I decided to undo the binding and cast a scrying spell.”
    “In other words, you spied on them?”
    “More or less.”
    “We’re back to kinky again.”
    She ignored me. “I didn’t get much at first.”
    “I take it you kept at it for a while?” I asked, bemused.
    “Well yeah, she’s