Moonlight's Ambassador (Aileen Travers Book 3)
T.A. White
CHAPTER ONE
SLIME. OR SO close to it that the description fit. It was everywhere. In my hair. Covering my body. Oozing from my shoes with every step. I grimaced as my skin pulled and a patch started to itch. The only thing worse than slime was slime as it hardened.
I held my bike at arm’s length, with as few fingers as possible, to prevent the slime from adhering to it. Bad enough that it was going to take me hours to get this stuff off me. At least I could stand in a shower to loosen it up. No way was I subjecting my bike to the same treatment. Bikes were expensive. Good bikes even more so. Mine may not have been top of the line, but I had no intention of letting a hundred-dollar job destroy it. If it meant I had to walk four miles home rather than risk getting this stuff all over my bike seat, then so be it.
This was the last time I accepted a run for a kappa. I didn't turn down paying work often, but I think I had finally found my line in the sand. The damn thing had thought it was funny when its pet covered me in this sticky gunk after I startled it.
A creature straight out of Japanese folklore, the kappa was about the size of a child and had made the sewers under the city its home. It wasn't on my normal route, so I'd never dealt with one before—much less known how easy it would be to freak out its pet, which was the size of a small truck and had teeth as long as my arm. Evidently, that over-sized worm had a thing about phones, the sight of which sent it into a sliming, vomiting tizzy.
Normally, Tom, a gnome and my arch nemesis at Hermes Courier Service, was the one responsible for running messages for the kappa and others in the Fey community, but since his involvement in trying to fix the vampire selection, he had been MIA. That left the rest of the Hermes couriers to pick up his slack.
No more. Jerry could find someone else to deal with the kappas. I was done. Those aquatic pranksters could go pick on someone else from now on. I didn't need the headache.
I turned the corner onto my street and frowned. Something was different.
It took me a moment before I realized what it was. The lights. Someone had gotten all the street lamps working, making the small stretch almost seem like a legitimate neighborhood for once. It was a nice change, since the lights had been out since I moved in several years ago. The city got around to replacing them every once in a while, but they were always broken again before the night was through, leaving the street in shadows until the next time the city's budget accommodated new bulbs or someone’s parents complained.
It was almost more surprising that they were still working. It might be the wee hours of the morning, but college kids never slept—at least in my experience. Most nights someone would have knocked them out by now.
A street without light didn’t really bother me. As a vampire, my night vision was better than anything technology could create. Even on a moonless, cloudy night, I could see as clearly as I had during the day when I’d been human.
The only sound in the night was the whirring of my bicycle wheels as I headed for my apartment building. An old duplex just outside of campus, it had seen better days. The new lights cast sharp shadows on my home, giving it an almost sinister look and highlighting the fact that it was one step above a slum. It looked like it had been built around the turn of the nineteenth century, but not in a cute, 'look at how historical this is' way. It was more of a 'please don't fall down on my head' style.
The stoops tilted at odd angles and drooped forward like a drunken sailor on shore leave. All the windows were slightly off kilter, a side effect of settling that had never been mitigated.
My place was a second floor walk-up. I was ninety percent sure the wooden stairs on the outside of the building leading up to my apartment weren't up to code. They always shook and trembled like they were in the midst of an earthquake when anything bigger than a cat stepped onto them. One of these days they were going to collapse. Knowing my luck, I'd be standing on them at the time.
The postage stamp parking lot was looking a little rougher than usual. The weeds that had grown through the numerous cracks were gone. The pavement itself looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to it and huge chunks were now missing or had been pulverized into a million pieces. The only untouched spot surrounded the black Escalade sitting on the far side. Maybe someone had finally decided to demolish the old lot.
The urge to stop and make sure the vehicle remained unmarked was brief. I waved it away almost as soon as it occurred. Though I was technically the owner, I had not decided whether to accept it. There were strings attached to anything vampire related, and since it was a gift from my sire, the man who turned me into what I am today and then subsequently abandoned me, I was pretty determined to steer clear of those strings. It didn't matter if he didn't remember changing me because of some curse. His problems had destroyed the life I'd planned. A fifty-thousand-dollar SUV wasn't going to make up for that.
I continued past the Escalade toward the stairs that would take me to my apartment and the wonderfully hot shower waiting for me there.
Stepping onto the rickety stairs, I froze as a figure moved at the top of the landing.
"Caroline."
Her jaw had a pugnacious tilt to it that practically dared me to give her grief. At odds with the defiance in her expression was the uncertainty and hint of fear hiding in her eyes. It was that uncertainty and fear that kept my first reaction locked inside. It had been months since I'd last seen her. Months, since her life had been upended when she was kidnapped by a demon and bitten by a werewolf. She’d cut me out of her life after that. Turns out lying, even by omission, pretty much kills a relationship—especially when the part of your life you tried to keep secret tears hers apart. We hadn't been on good turns before the unveiling of my new condition, and that had worsened when Caroline found herself donning a coat of fur every month.
Besides the lack of the black rimmed glasses she'd worn since we were kids, Caroline looked normal. Maybe with more of a glow than usual, but anyone looking at her would never guess she was werewolf. She was the typical girl next door. Pretty, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes.
After a moment of hesitation, I continued up the steps.
Her expression turned uncertain before her mask slid into place, and she watched me with a cool sense of poise.
"Aileen, I've been waiting for hours."
I paused my ascent as I processed that statement. "I'm sorry. I had a job to finish before I could quit for the night. Had I known you were waiting, I would have perhaps expedited things."
Her expression flickered. She seemed to just take note of the state of me, her nose crinkling. “What happened to you?”