Page 18 of Silver Claw

I smiled as I watched him go, realizing for the first time that the boogeyman no longer saw me as a monster he would someday need to kill.

Chapter Seven

No one was surprised to see us walking into the office looking disheveled and bloody, but everyone was a little shocked to see us walking in very nearly on time.

I laughed when some of the waiting clients began applauding and a weak cheer went up. Max hurried from behind his desk to check Joe’s nonexistent injuries, and it gratified me to see that at least Max wasn’t concerned that my lack of magic might make me weaker. He was more concerned that avampiremight have gotten hurt.

Joe hadn’t said, but I knew he would have been terribly disappointed if he’d missed out on coming into the office. Funnily enough, he really loved his office time, and he loved going with me to clean houses just as much. I wasn’t taking that from him.

It was because of me that he was a vampire.

Max tended the front desk with a quirky assistant named Gracie Dawn Lockhart. He’d recently hired her after interviewing a dozen applicants, none of whom he believed would “appropriately appreciate the job” as much as Gracie Dawn.

She was a self-described country girl who’d moved to the city five years earlier when she’d begun to “pine for something different.” She talked a lot, was quite often unintentionally funny, and most of the time acted like she was seventy-two instead of twenty-two. She worshipped Max and said he was the smartest boy she’d ever met—and her adoration may or may not have had something to do with him giving her the job.

She wasn’t the most competent person I’d ever met, but she gave it a damn good try, and she was like a white light in our dark world. She was also human, but then, so was Max.

A supernatural needed human allies in her world, no matter how often she told stories about a country life that were possibly—surely—exaggerated, or how often she began a sentence with, “mama says,” “my papaw always said,” or the oft repeated, “my dear sweet mamaw.”

I thought Huntersburg was country, but no. Gracie Dawn’s Yellow Wade Hills, which she referred to simply as “the Hills,” had Huntersburg beat all to hell. Apparently, the town had been named after a man named Wade Hurst, who’d either been a hero or a coward, or maybe a coward who became a hero. I never could quite figure that out from her stories. Over the years, it had grown to a population of around forty-five hundred “dear, sweet souls.”

Gracie Dawn was the one who called me when one of the walk-ins had an emergency that couldn’t wait. And she seemed to believe that everyone who walked through the door was an emergency, so she called me often.

Max took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did you bring donuts?”

“You can see my hands are empty of donuts,” I pointed out.

“Hon,” Gracie Dawn said, opening a drawer in her mini desk that sat next to Max’s, “I can go get you some donuts. You want anything else?”

“Send in my first client, Max,” I said, striding to my office, “as soon as you’ve made Joe’s boo-boo all better.”

“I don’t have aboo-boo,” Joe growled, and followed me into my office. I hurried to grab a clean shirt from a bag I kept in the office. Two minutes later, I was ensconced behind my desk, ready for my first client of the night. Joe stood against the wallwith his machete, bald and fierce, just the way the customers liked him.

They were both intimidated and comforted by him. “Not even a ghost,” one of the clients had told me once, “would dare mess with our Joe.”

And that was before he’d become a vampire—which the clients didn’t know about, of course. But there was no denying that Joe was fierce.

Sometimes he was a marshmallow, but mostly, he was fierce.

I’d seen a dozen clients and made appointments to visit their homes to get rid of ghosts that may or may not have been haunting them when Sam walked in.

“So,” he said, dropping into the chair in front of my desk and giving Joe a wave, “what’s been happening while I’ve been away?”

My heart dropped into my stomach. Sam was in town, and in the Pocket, there was a blood-filled room and two murdered human women.

Rick was going to come for him, and it didn’t matter if the women had abused their sons. He wouldn’t give Sam a pass.

I’d talk to Sam about it, but not now. Not yet.

Shapeshifters were rare, and Sam had been overcome with joy like he’d never felt when my own shapeshifter had made itself known. He was going to be devastated when I told him my shapeshifter had been killed by a siphoner. Once again, he would feel alone.

And I really, really didn’t want to do that to him—murderous bastard though he was.

I stood. “I have some housecleaning to do. We can talk about it on the way.”

He saw in my face that he wasn’t going to like what was coming. He hesitated before he got up and walked with me to the door.

Joe followed, quiet.