Chapter 2

"Belle Harrison." The one on the right said it with an undertone of a purr that trembled up my thighs. He wore a simple black T-shirt and jeans that hugged every curve of his impressive form. His eyes glinted in the moonlight and were outlined by lashes as dark as his short hair.

The one on the left wore black-rimmed glasses with a button-up white shirt, its sleeves rolled to the elbows. His blond hair spiked in all directions as if he'd just speared his fingers through it. When he caught me looking, he prowled away a short distance and then back again, a wild animal caught in a cage.

"Please." I held up a hand to ward off the combined power of their hotness. "If I ever hear my full name again...well, I suppose it will be from that demon when he comes back on Halloween."

"Vampires and demons don't mix, but...we could sense him," Black T-shirt purred.

"What do you mean you don't mix?" I asked.

The wild animal vamp stopped his pacing, gazing at me sideways through his tumble of blond hair. "They've erected demonic magic so we can't go anywhere near them, because we're beneath demons on the supernatural totem pole."

"Ah." I was learning all kinds of things tonight.

"If you don't mind my asking, what did he want?" Black T-shirt asked.

It wasn't his business, but since I still needed to sort it out in my head, I figured there wasn't any harm telling them. "Apparently the devil needs a bride, and I've been summoned for the job." Honestly, I was getting tired of never being able to choose my own career path.

"It's not your night, is it?" A grin broke out on Black T-shirt's face, effortless, so beautiful that I dropped my stakes.

Nope. Never mind. I hadn't been carrying one to begin with. My remaining ones were all tucked inside my clothes. Because this was how I usually faced off with vampires - defenseless. Geez, tonight really couldn't get any better. And what was I doing engaging in conversation with them when I should've been stabbing them? It couldn't be that they were hot personified. Couldn't be.

"You're thinking about slicing and dicing us, aren't you?" Black T-shirt gave me another one of those disarming grins that tightened and lit my body up all at once.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could feel the vamp hidden in the fog watching me, anticipating my eventual lunge for the stake in my boot.

"That depends," I said. "Were you thinking about biting me?"

"Yes," the vamp with the glasses growled, and he licked his lips as if for emphasis, eyeing me like a cheeseburger.

If there was ever a time I wouldn't mind being a piece of meat, it was right then, because the hunger in his orange-yellow gaze pooled a delicious heat between my thighs. Maybe, if I let him eat me, that would be where he'd start. In one of the very few books I'd found on the topic of vampires, it had said that some liked to bite during sex.

Black T-shirt glared at Glasses. "What did I tell you, Eddie? Keep it to yourself."

"Fucking smell her, Jacek," Glasses - Eddie - said.

I was wrong. This night could get weirder. My stake was definitely coming out if they tried to sniff me.

Jacek, the vamp in black, turned to me again. "Before you slay us, maybe we can help with your demon problem. We have a pretty extensive occult library back at the nest. Eddie here can show you around it."

I crossed my arms and quirked my eyebrows. "You want me to go to your nest with you." Had I accidentally stamped my forehead with "idiot" instead of "go away"?

"That's what I'm saying, yes." The way Jacek's mouth tipped up at the end hinted at more than just library research on his mind.

Yep. Idiot. Because God help me, I wanted to see what else was on his mind. What the hell was wrong with me? Had it really been that long since I'd gotten laid? Carry the one, minus the zero, and yes, it had been that long. The last time had been with my downstairs neighbor, and he'd been so clumsy that I couldn't be sure we'd actually had sex. There had been a lot of sweat and panting, and it was all over way too soon. Scratch that. It was over before it had begun. Plus, he'd left me with terrible hickeys that no amount of makeup could cover and had marked me with a tramp stamp until they'd faded.

Still, I knew zilch about demons, and the public library here didn't even have Harry Potter because of some overzealous breeders who had a problem with good versus bad stories.

"If I go with you, will there be minimal sniffing?" I asked.

Jacek laughed, a pleasant sound that tripped up my heartbeat.

"No way I can guarantee that," Eddie growled and flicked the tip of his tongue to his upper lip.

A heated flush crept over my chest, tightening my nipples into hard buds I could tell without looking were poking through my T-shirt.

A low rumble sounded from one of the vamps. The one near the gate shifted ever so slightly in the fog.

"If I go with you," I said, "then I'll flay you if you even breathe on me wrong."

Jacek shrugged, all smiles. "We're dead so...there's not a whole lot of breathing happening."

I sighed. "I'm going to pretend I meant that as an expression. I would appreciate if you pretended I meant that too."

He chuckled. "Sure. No problem. No breathing. No expressive breathing. Just a library. You can even take some of the books home with you to read through."

"Why would you want to help a slayer?" I asked, narrowing my eyes. "What's in it for you?"

Jacek exchanged glances with Eddie. "Maybe you can repay us a favor at some point in time. Quid pro quo."

"Right. Quid pro quo." It was crazy that I was even considering going to their nest with them, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued. I was armed with stakes. I could leave right after a little library research, and then go write my five-page economics paper I was so excited about. So excited I'd waited until the last possible minute to get started. One of Mom's wishes was for me to graduate college, and even though she wasn't here, I refused to let her down. Still, my sophomore year mostly online course load on top of my job at the coffee shop and slaying and training was killer. "How far do you live?"

"We're vampires," Jacek said. "We live almost right next door to the cemetery."

"Of course you do." I waved toward the gate. "Lead the way."