The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires by Molly Harper Read Free Book Online

offend her if I sent you away. To be honest, I thought your contract was a cover for her monitoring my activities.”
    “By that logic, wouldn’t it make sense that I might be the person who tampered with your blood?” I asked. His eyes narrowed at me. “I really have to learn to shut up.”
    “I know it wasn’t you,” he said grimly. “The blood was delivered as part of a welcome gift basket from theCouncil yesterday. You haven’t used the access code for my door before today.”
    “My friend Jane says you shouldn’t trust gift baskets around here,” I told him.
    “That would have been helpful to know a few days ago,” he mumbled.
    “So you’re sort of a vampire PI?” I asked. “Without the office in a semidisreputable part of town or the cheesy mustache?”
    The aforementioned unmustachioed lips quirked in response. “In a manner of speaking. You might say my gift is problem solving. If I stay fixed on a problem or a question long enough, I will eventually find a solution. It started in my early days as a human. I’d always been clever with puzzles, games of strategy, battle plans. And now I’m used in investigations into financial indiscretions between vampires and the human business world, finding vampires who have disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances, tracking the human descendants of vampires interested in getting reacquainted with their human families since the Great Coming Out, that sort of thing.”
    He was sprawled back on the couch now, exhausted and drained by my questions. I helped him to his feet and walked him to the cellar door. “So if you’re the problem solver, why can’t you figure out who’s poisoning the vampires?”
    He frowned at me, as if I was touching a tender subject. “It’s not an instant-gratification sort of talent. It’s more of an instinct that leads me in the right direction.This time, the problem has a few more twists and turns than I’m used to,” he said, his voice worn and as thin as paper as I helped him downstairs and into the tent. He barely glanced at his “room.” If he was less than thrilled with my less-than-four-star accommodations, he didn’t say anything. I suspected that he found conversation with me to be circuitous and pointless.
    Mainly because he told me that he found conversation with me to be circuitous and pointless. To my face.

3

    Your family will not understand your decision to take in a vampire. To avoid awkward conversations, think of excuses to avoid their visiting beforehand. Solid suggestions include: Your house is being fumigated. You have a contagious rash. You are trying to read the North and South trilogy from beginning to end.
    — The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
    I stayed up a good portion of the night, sitting on the couch, clutching my mother’s heirloom silver pie server. Much like with sunlight, vampires are allergic to silver. For them, it’s like touching every caustic, irritating substance in the world all at once, combined with the annoyance of listening to actress-slash-models talk about their “craft.” It can actually burn the flesh from their bones if they’re exposed to enough of it, which is why the vampire pepper spray I carried was mostly very pure colloidal silver.
    For all I knew, Cal’s impotent-kitten routine could have been an act. And I wasn’t exactly pinning my hopes for personal safety on my houseguest’s inability to climb the cellar stairs unassisted.
    I used my insomnia time wisely. I finished a historical romance I’d started-and-stopped so many times I’d forgotten the names of the main characters. I reported the loss of my darling BlackBerry to my cell provider’s online insurance site and was slightly mollified by the promise that a replacement phone would be shipped to my house overnight. My business landline rang several times. There were calls from clients asking for various deliveries, pickups, and errands … And asking why I wasn’t picking up my cell