“There was nothing in the rules that implied quality,” Dwayne stated calmly, secure in his victory.
“What happened to the living room?” I asked as I began to right the furniture.
“Well, we had a little debate,” Granny said, eyeing the pile of crap they’d created.
“It turns out Granny has sharper fangs and a slightly better right hook and I’m faster and have a far superior sense of smell,” Dwayne informed me.
“That ain’t nothing to brag about, Vein Eater,” she sniffed indignantly. “Fangs trump smell any day of the week.”
“She has a point,” I added.
Dwayne laughed and wrapped a pink scarf around his neck. “I can smell species.”
This shocked and silenced both me and Granny. I was totally unaware that Vamps could identify species by scent. That was huge. I could scent a shifter and I knew if it was a wolf, but it took more than just smell to correctly identify what kind of shifter.
“I call bullshit,” Granny said and wound a baby blue scarf around her neck.
“That was a rabbit that delivered the pizza,” Dwayne said and handed me a shiny silver scarf. “You’ll need this to cover the welt on your neck.”
Ignoring the comment and the ugly, holey neckwear, I zeroed in on Grandma. “You ordered pizza? From Juju?”
Juju was a rabbit shifter and made the best pizza known to man. It was so damn good that every wolf in the surrounding area had voluntarily given up eating rabbit in their animal form. No one would take the risk of accidentally eating Juju. No one.
“Yes, I did and apparently Bat Boy isn’t joking. You knew he was a rabbit?” she demanded.
“Of course,” Dwayne answered smugly. “And he’s boffing a weasel.”
“Juju and Sara Mary Munchouse are doing the nasty?” I gasped and dropped down on an upended plaid ottoman. That was too much to stomach. Juju was five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds sopping wet and Sara Mary was six feet tall and came in at a conservative three hundred. The physical mechanics were mind-boggling. Shoving the images into the far recesses of my brain in the “never pull those up again” section, I got back to the more important issue.
“There’s Juju pizza in this house and you didn’t tell me?”
“I was a little busy kicking your dead friend’s ass,” Granny said. “Go help yourself.”
“I will,” I muttered and hauled tail to the kitchen. It had been a full year since I’d eaten Juju’s pizza and my mouth watered at the prospect.
“Junior came by and left you a stack of files,” Granny said as she snagged a slice. “He gave your buddy the evil eye till Dwayne asked him if he’d had butt implants and wanted to touch them to make sure they were real.”
I choked on my pizza and asked myself yet again why I’d let Dwayne come with me.
“I really wish I’d known he was Hank’s older brother. I would have mentioned impaling you on a regular basis,” Dwayne said earnestly.
Again, I choked.
“Looks like Hank the Hickey Maker struck again,” Granny stated gleefully with a mouthful of double pepperoni.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. Juju’s pizza suddenly tasted like cardboard in my mouth as the reality hit. I had thought they were joking. “Did that hairy dork leave a mark?”
“A big one,” Dwayne gushed. “You so banged him.”
“I did not bang him. I racked him.”
“Whoa,” he said, bending at the waist in sympathy. “You’re really mean.”
“You know what?” I shouted. “I’m not mean. He’s mean. Mean and stupid and full of himself and wanky and fat and ugly and mean and dumb and…”
“And you want to bang him?” Dwayne added unhelpfully.
I dropped to the floor in defeat. Pizza wasn’t going to help. The only thing that would help at this point was running again, but that was out of the question. I had a job. Maybe I got it under false pretenses, but I was a good agent and I knew it. I would find out what was happening here, end it and then I was gone. I had to leave or I would fall back into a trap that would tear my heart to shreds from the inside out. “Yes. Yes, I want to bang him, but I won’t. I have a small amount of self-respect left and I plan to hang onto it for dear life.”
“Honey child, what happened?” Granny asked as she slid down the wall and plopped down on the floor next to me. “What could have been so awful?”
Dwayne got comfortable on the other side of me. Usually being sandwiched by people made me itch, but these people loved me…warts and all.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I mumbled.
“Sometimes talking about painful things helps, Essie,” Dwayne said gently. “I’ll go first. About two hundred and fifty years ago during a great famine there wasn’t enough food for the humans and they got really skinny and tasted like burnt peas and rancid hummus—it was harder than hell for a Vampyre to eat. I accidentally killed a lovely fellow from my glee club and I just felt awful about it, so I started drinking pig’s blood and let me tell you—that was gross. Pigs are cute—well, piglets are and all I could find were damn piglets. They would stare at me with those little piglet eyes…I love Charlotte’s Web. The book is waaay better than the movie. Don’t you think? Anyhoo, I got so upset, I moved on to sheep. Several Vamps I knew were even…wait, what were we talking about?” Dwayne asked.