"True." He glanced at me. "It took me a moment to recognize you. Your look and smell was different enough that I glanced past you several times before I realized who you were. I like your regular look better, by the way."
"Then I'd better keep this one," I said dryly. "You planning to be there tomorrow night?"
"Of course." Telepathically, he added, Now that I know she has an accomplice, it is my duty to track her down and hill them both.
And if he did, I would arrest him. No matter how horrified my crazy hormones might be. "If I spot you tomorrow night, I'll treat you a lap dance."
"I wouldn't."
I raised an eyebrow again. "Why not? We both know you'd enjoy it."
"That is the problem." I am not here to enjoy myself.
Of course he wasn't. He was here to track down and kill. Just like me. A shiver rolled across my skin and I rubbed my arms. If he noted the movement, he didn't do the gentlemanly thing, like offer me his coat. Quinn would have.
As we neared Flinders Lane, Hanna suddenly swung in our direction, looking left and right before running across. She didn't even look our way as she ran past us, moving up the street with a quick glance at her watch.
"Must have an appointment," Kye murmured, his arms brushing mine as the pavement suddenly narrowed.
Up ahead, a figure waited. A slender woman who was all of sixteen or seventeen.
Fuck.
I stopped, and just as I did, Hanna looked around. Kye reacted before I could, his speed almost that of a vampire as he crushed me against the wall and began kissing me.
And oh, what a kiss.
It was urgent and hungry and filled with everything he hadn't been showing, and I reacted as fiercely as I would have had the full moon been nearing completion.
For several seconds, there was nothing else in my world but this kiss and the fierce heat of his body against mine. Then sanity returned, and along with it sound, and I became aware of voices talking.
I broke away, then said, Listen.
I am. He kissed my neck, my ear, then wrapped his arms around my waist and drew me into a hug that was as close as two people could get without being naked.
"But what does the job entail?" the younger woman asked.
"Nothing more than sleeping with a vampire for one night." Hanna's voice sounded a lot tinnier than it had before. Maybe she was wearing some sort of cheap modulator.
I shifted my head slightly on Kye's shoulder so I could get a better look at Hanna's target. Like the other women who'd been found dead, this one was slender in build. Unlike the others, she had large breasts and a wine-colored birthmark covering part of her cheek and running down her neck.
The younger woman raised an eyebrow. "Ten grand for sleeping with one bloodsucker for one night? That seems like an awfully good deal. What's the fucking catch?"
"The catch is you have to come to Meinhardt's to meet him."
"Isn't that a strip joint?"
"A men's club is the term we prefer," Hanna said, voice holding an edge, "and you won't be expected to strip for anyone except my client. He has a fetish for unusual body markings and I think you would be to his tastes."
"So I have to do him there?"
"No. You accept an invitation to go home with him."
"And then what?" There was still doubt evident in her tones, but even I could see the glint of anticipation in her eyes. Though not, I suspected, for the sex, but rather for the cash. "I just leave in the morning?"
"With ten grand in your hand, yes. And that's more than enough money to take that course you were talking to the employment office about."
I had no idea what course Hanna might have been talking about, but I knew for sure the young woman would never live to do it.