Vampire for Hire Read Free Page A

teeth had sucked his girlfriend dry. His trial had been as sensational as they get, and who could forget the images of the young man opening his mouth and exposing those two insanely long canines for all the world to see.
     
               And here he was. In the flesh. Sitting across from me. A young man who had been tried and convicted of murder. A young man who had been deemed criminally insane. And there were very few who would argue that point.
     
               And he’s Fang, I thought. This is crazy.
     
               If I looked hard enough I could see the similarities, but the truth was, he looked nothing like the tormented young man whose image had been broadcast across the airwaves and newsrooms and the early Internet. Now his thick beard would make him nearly impossible to place, and I was almost certain he had had some nose work done. And as I looked again, I could see he was wearing brown contact lenses. Almost certainly his eyes had been blue originally. But the biggest difference was his great height. He had not been quite this tall when he was eighteen years old. Then again, it was hard to know for sure, since he had often sat petulantly next to his attorneys. Still, I would guess he had grown another five inches...perhaps enough to completely throw authorities off his trail.
     
               He was, after all, an escaped convict—and allegedly responsible for two more deaths. A guard at the criminally insane prison and the owner of a creepy museum in Hollywood who had purchased Aaron’s teeth for a morally questionable display.
     
               A sick display. There had been an outrage, of course.
     
               But the outrage turned moot when the owner had been found dead some months later, and the teeth had been stolen.
     
               The same teeth that now dangled from Fang’s neck.
     
               The same fangs.
     
               “You are a killer,” I said.
     
               “As are you, Samantha,” he said, sitting back and sipping casually on a drink that smelled strong enough to preserve a warthog. “We are both victims of circumstance. Never forget that.”
     
               His faux brown eyes continued scanning my face. I could see the wonder in them; I could sense his awe. His thoughts were alive to me, nearly registering in my mind as my own. After all, I had a deep connection to Fang, deeper than I had ever thought possible with another human being, and although the man in front of me was largely a stranger, now that we’ve met in the flesh, our connection seemed only to intensify.
     
               He closed his eyes and took in some air. “I can feel you, Moon Dance.”
     
               I blinked. “Feel me how?”
     
               “In my head. You’re there. In my thoughts. Just off to the side. Listening. Picking up words here and there.”
     
               He cocked his head slightly to one side, like a dog listening to something on the wind. Now it was my turn to study his face. The man was gorgeous. Of that, there was no doubt. After all, there was a reason why my sister turned into a gibbering idiot every time he served us a drink. His brown hair was jauntily disheveled, or perhaps messily windblown. Mostly, it was his lips that commanded my attention. So full, especially the lower one. There was a spot of liquid on the bottom one and all I could think of doing was tasting that spot. Just that one, sexy spot.
     
               His eyelids quivered, where I saw a brief flash of white, and realized his eyes had rolled up into his head. “Yes, there you are, Moon Dance.”
     
               I said nothing. Music continued pumping through the bar. A very old drunk man got up from his stool and started slow dancing with himself. He spun himself once, twice, and I thought he might even dip himself, but luckily he bumped into the bar and grabbed hold of it. No