The Lady is a Killer

Part V - Pillow Talk

            “Mr. Mathisen,” she said as I popped the car forward with a lurch. “Might I trouble you for a cigarette?” I nipped the case from my breast pocket and handed it to her, watching her sideways as she fumbled with the clasp. She finally succeeded in extracting a butt and offered the case to me. I took one.

            Hell, what else was I going to do after seeing something like that? I’d just sat there while one woman got bled halfway to death, then watched a wisp of another as she extracted quick, bloody vengeance.

            What was most shocking was that it hadn’t looked like that was the first time she’d done that.

            “You want to tell me what I just saw? Because I’m not sure I trust my own eyes tonight."

     “You probably don’t think too much of me after that, Mr. Mathisen,” she said. I swung the car too fast around a bend, skidded on the loose shoulder. She didn’t object and the speed felt real, vital. Something I could fight and control. “But I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

            “It thought she was a pro.” It was more a question than an accusation.

            “She is, one of the best. But…what they did to her. What they’ll do to all of us if they thought they could get away with it.”

            “Unnatural,” I said, a cold shiver working its way up my spine. I bit down on the cigarette, got a mouth full of tobacco.

            “Every creature has to feed, but to take pleasure in pain. To have been human, to grow stronger and still to do that to another. That-” She ground the word between her teeth and my fists tightened around the wheel. I understood what she meant. I understood exactly.

            She lit my cigarette then her own, dropping the match in the little brass dish where it worked hard on smoking up the car. Vera looked out the window or, more precisely, at it, and my hand twitched with the uncomfortable desire to reach up and stroke those gold curls. Under the drops and smears of blood, she looked like a summer morning.

            “What must you think of me,” she said, that breathlessness back and stealing a little of my air as well. What did I think of her? I thought the kind of thoughts that would get me singed next time I walked into a church.

            “I’m not sure what to think of you. I can’t tell if you’re reckless or very brave.”

            I didn’t think she’d even heard me, but she tilted her head away from the window. My face heated under her scrutiny, but each small glance gave me a piece of her. The shadow beneath the bone of her cheek. The flush the cold had left across her nose and cheeks. The pillow of her upper lip.

            “Can I trust you, Jake Mathisen?” she asked. My heart pounded away at its cage of ribs. She smiled. “Oh yes, I know who you are. Jake Mathisen. Toliver Cain’s driver recently relocated from Chicago.”

            She didn’t sound angry, merely thoughtful, and for a second I thought maybe she was just talking, that her mind was running and there wasn't any meaning behind those words. That feeling lasted only a second.

            “The funny thing about having a lot of enemies the way my father did, was that when he went, why they were falling all over themselves to prove they hadn’t been the ones to kill him. I say ‘enemies’, but they were more like…aggressive competitors. Their battles, even when heated, were respectful.”

            The words I knew wouldn’t fit together to form a proper response, an acceptable response. I wanted to apologize and plead my innocence but, while I was sorry, I wasn’t sure I was innocent. She knew, oh, she knew. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, expecting a stake to the throat or a knife to the belly. But she simply smoked, staring at the fogged window. As if she hadn’t just killed two vampires. As if I hadn’t let her father be murdered. How differently would things have gone had she been home that night?