Ilona Andrews - Hex Appeal

We walked in silence for several moments, until Connie finally said, “He’s not an angry person. He’s usually so calm. But when something finally gets to him…”

“It’s hard for him,” I said. “He’s huge and he’s very strong and he knows it. If he loses control of himself, someone could get hurt. He doesn’t like the thought of that. So when he starts feeling angry, it makes him tense. Afraid. He’s more upset about the fact that he feels so angry than about anything I said or did.”

Connie looked up at me pensively for a long moment. Then she said, “Most people wouldn’t realize that.”

I shrugged.

“What don’t I know?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’m not sure it’s my place to tell you.”

“But it’s about me.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled faintly. “Then shouldn’t I be the one who gets to decide?”

I thought about that one for a moment. “Connie … you’re mostly right. But … some things, once said, can’t be unsaid. Let me think about it.”

She didn’t answer.

The silence made me uncomfortable. I tried to chat my way clear of it. “How’d you meet Irwin?”

The question, or maybe the subject matter, seemed to relax her a little. “In a closet at a party. Someone spiked the punch. Neither of us had ever been drunk before, and…” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “And he’s just so damned sexy.”

“Lot of people wouldn’t think so,” I noted.

She waved a hand. “He’s not pretty. I know that. It’s not about that. There’s … this energy in him. It’s chemical. Assurance. Power. Not just muscles—it’s who he is.” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, I guess. But once the hangover cleared up, that happened, too.”

“So you love him?” I asked.

Her smile widened, and her eyes shone the way a young woman’s eyes ought to shine. She spoke with calm, simple certainty. “He’s the one.”

About twenty things to say leapt to my mind. I was going to say something about how she was too young to make that kind of decision. I thought about how she hadn’t been out on her own for very long, and how she had no idea where her relationship with Irwin was going to lead. I was going to tell her that only time could tell her if she and Irwin were good for one another and ready to be together, to make that kind of decision. I could have said something about how she needed to stop and think, not make blanket statements about her emotions and the future.

That was when I realized that everything I would have said was something I would have said to a young woman in love—not to a vampire. Not only that, but I heard something in her voice or saw something in her face that told me that my aged wisdom was, at least in this case, dead wrong. My instincts were telling me something that my rational brain had missed.

The kids had something real. I mean, maybe it hadn’t gotten off on the most pure and virtuous foot, but that wasn’t anything lethal in a relationship. The way they related to one another now? There was a connection there. You could imagine saying their names as a unit, and it fit : ConnieandIrwin. Maybe they had some growing to do, but what they had was real.

Not that it mattered. Being in love didn’t change the facts. First, that Connie was a vampire. Second, that vampires had to feed. Third, they fed upon their lovers.

“Hold on,” Dean said. “You missed something.”

“Eh?”

“Girl’s a vampire, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So,” Dean said. “She met the kid in a closet at a party. They already got it on. She done had her first time.”

I frowned. “Yeah.”

“So how come Kid Bigfoot wasn’t dead?”

I nodded. “Exactly. It bothered me, too.”

The girl was in love with Irwin, and it meant she was dangerous to him. Hell, she was dangerous to almost everyone. She wasn’t even entirely human. How could I possibly spring something that big on her?

At the same time, how could I not ?

“I should have taken the gold,” I muttered to myself.

“What?” she asked.

That was when the Town Car pulled up to the curb a few feet ahead of us. Two men got out of the front seat. They wore expensive suits and had thick necks. One of them hadn’t had his suit fitted properly—I could see the slight bulge of a sidearm in a shoulder holster. That one stood on the sidewalk and stared at me, his hands clasped in front of him. The driver went around to the rear passenger door and opened it.

“Oh,” Connie said. “Marvelous. This is all I need.”

“Who is that?” I asked.

“My father.”

The man who got out of the back of the limo wore a pearl gray suit that made his thugs’ outfits look like secondhand clothing. He was slim, a bit over six feet tall, and his haircut probably cost him more than I made in a week. His hair was dark, with a single swath of silver at each temple, and his skin was weathered and deeply tanned. He wore rings on most of his manicured fingers, all of them sporting large stones.

“Hi, Daddy,” Connie said, smiling. She sounded pleasant enough, but she’d turned herself very slightly away from the man as she spoke. A rule of thumb for reading body language is that almost no one can totally hide physical reflections of their state of mind. They can only minimize the signs of it in their posture and movements. If you mentally exaggerate and magnify their body language, it tells you something about what they’re thinking.

Connie clearly didn’t want to talk to this man. She was ready to flee from her own father should it become necessary. It told me something about the guy. I was almost sure I wasn’t going to like him.

He approached the girl, smiling, and after a microhesitation, they exchanged a brief hug. It didn’t look like something they’d practiced much.

“Connie,” the man said, smiling. He had the same mild drawl his daughter did. He tilted his head to one side and regarded her thoughtfully. “You went blond. It’s … charming.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Connie said. She was smiling, too. Neither one of them looked sincere to me. “I didn’t know you were in town. If you’d called, we could have made an evening of it.”

“Spur-of-the-moment thing,” he said easily. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not.”

Both of them were lying. Parental issues indeed.

“How’s that boy you’d taken up with? Irving.”

“Irwin,” Connie said in a poisonously pleasant tone. “He’s great. Maybe even better than that.”

He frowned at that, and said, “I see. But he’s not here?”

“He had homework tonight,” Connie lied.

That drew a small, sly smile out of the man. “I see. Who’s your friend?” he asked pleasantly, without actually looking at me.

“Oh,” Connie said. “Harry, this is my father, Charles Barrowill. Daddy, this is Harry Dresden.”

“Hi,” I said brightly.

Barrowill’s eyes narrowed to sudden slits, and he took a short, hard breath as he looked at me. He then flicked his eyes left and right around him, as if looking for a good place to dive or maybe a hostage to seize.

“What a pleasure, Mr. Dresden,” he said, his voice suddenly tight. “What brings you out to Oklahoma?”

“I heard it was a nice place for perambulating,” I said. Behind Barrowill, his guards had picked up on the tension. Both of them had become very still. Barrowill was quiet for a moment, as if trying to parse some kind of meaning from my words. Heavy seconds ticked by, like the quiet before a shootout in an old Western.

A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I’m not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma.