Sunglasses at Night (Claws Clause 3)

Just because he was bitter at being turned, it didn’t make Adam a complete asshole. At her sharp intake of breath, he looked up from his application. “You alright?”

She was cradling her finger against her chest.

The partition was warded. The witches who worked for the government on contracts they claimed through Coventry had thrown enough magic at the glass to make it absolutely Para-proof.

Para strength, that was.

The scent still got through. It was rich, it was tangy, it was fresh.

It was blood.

Adam’s mouth pooled with saliva. His jaw ached as he adamantly refused to let his fangs lengthen in response to the temptation.

“It’s just a…” The clerk gulped, obviously reading the torment and struggle that Adam couldn’t quite hide. “A papercut.”

A papercut. A tiny slice in her finger, barely a drop welling up along the side.

“I didn’t mean to,” she squeaked out. “It was an accident.”

That was unlikely, since she wore the donor brand, but based on how frightened she was all of a sudden, she surely regretted it. And she should.

The thirst was sudden and terrible. He knew the glass separating them was warded. He knew there was no way he could get to her. Still, being slammed with the temptation of a taste hit him harder than he would’ve thought. At that very second, Adam wasn’t so confident that the partition would really stand up and protect the pretty clerk.

He stepped back, running into the next person in line in his haste to put some space between him and the window. The shifter huffed, building up to a roar as they collided. In the back of his mind, he thought bear, and the situation went from bad to worse when a big paw of a hand slammed into his back, throwing him off his equilibrium.

Adam wasn’t expecting that, and the vampire he’d been turned into reacted before the rest of him did. He immediately crouched. Baring his fangs, he flexed his fingers, priming his pointed, black claws, ready to swipe out at whoever got closest to him.

The intercom crackled overhead, a bored, flat voice chiming over the loudspeaker. “In accordance with Ordinance 7304, there is no unauthorized biting inside of the Department for Paranormal Regulation. I repeat, no unauthorized biting. Thank you and enjoy your evening.”

From the way everyone—from the human clerks to the Para clients—was watching him closely, Adam knew the message was meant for him. How the disembodied voice of the speaker knew what was what, he had no clue, but he pushed his curiosity aside as a different emotion overwhelmed him.

Unholy embarrassment, followed quickly on its heels by shame.

His head snapped back to the window, to the clerk who kept her finger folded tightly in her fist now, and the paperwork for the permanent P.I.D. he abandoned. Adam scowled at it, entirely too aware of the points of his fangs digging into his bottom lip, and stormed off of the line.

Know what?

Fuck the P.I.D. Fuck the Claws Clause. So what if there were laws and the humans still in charge would be itching for a reason to throw his ass in the Cage?

Oh, well.

It didn’t matter anyway.

He wasn’t planning on being around long enough for it to.

He was being stalked.

Adam couldn’t say when he first picked up on the tail. He

was still stewing over having to go over to the D.P.R. in the first place, and the tension over the clerk’s papercut kept him on edge. He needed to shake it off. Maybe stop at the nearest Bloodbucks for a synthetic blood beverage.

Something.

Anything.

The familiar pinch at the back of his throat was super annoying. The thirst was rearing its ugly head again and, no matter how he tried to keep ahead of it, sometimes it caught him off-guard. Between the thirst and how the trip to the D.P.R. messed with him, he was beginning to think one of those artificial smoothies wouldn’t cut it.

He had a last resort. Though it pissed him off to have to buy bags of blood instead of just sucking it up and opening an account at the blood bank, he refused to register at the Grayson location. And since the Claws Clause had a ridiculous law about that, too, he couldn’t even go out of town. It was his local branch or no branch; Adam chose no branch. Luckily, through his friendship with Shea Moonshadow, he got to know her ex-Donor brother, Hudson, who—to the surprise of everyone who knew him—actually managed to hold down a job at the blood bank.