Page 5 of Angels Don’t Date

“Here ya go,” I said, sliding over the plate and giving her my best fanged smile. “Mitt took the entire day off. I’ll be sure to tell him how pretty you looked.”

She glowered at me, took the plate and stomped off to her usual corner, as far from the garden as she could get. The café was all windows on the one side looking out on the laboratory’s main hall, but on the opposite wall and towards the end, there was an indoor garden with hundreds of full-spectrum bulbs, so we could grow our own micro greens and also flowers. Mitt was also always stealing the poison lab’s frogs and sticking them in there, because dissection was cruel. But any time an ogre came in, those frogs would disappear, because they were food.

I started cleaning, humming my favorite princess cleaning song when a silver bullet came towards me. If I didn’t catch it the bullet would hit the glass blood dispenser behind me, and that would explode glass and blood in a mess that would take forever to clean up. But if I caught it with my right hand, I wouldn’t be able to use it well for a week. Bullets burned your fingers terribly.

My thoughts blurred along with my body as I turned, caught the bullet with my left hand and then threw it back at the intruder, a man in a long dark coat, with an unkempt goatee. The bullet went through his eye, lodged in his brain, and then he fell back, hitting the floor with an ominous thud.

I stared at the fallen body while my heart beat too fast and black spots filled my vision. I needed more blood before I passed out. I tended towards anemia if I didn’t keep up my blood drinking, and I honestly hated it. It was disgusting and the opposite of cute.

I filled a pretty martini glass from the silver spigot at the bottom of the blood dispenser, then added some mint-flavored silver sprinkles to the top. I sipped while Mini went over to the body, crouching over it and sniffing.

“Is he dead?” I asked, although what did dead even mean in the Scholar’s Laboratory? Maybe he could use him for parts.

“You should call the Scholar,” she said, frowning at him. “He’ll need to stick him on the wall when he comes to.”

“He’ll regenerate?”

She sniffed a few times and then looked up at me with a nod. “I think so. Unless you want to chop off his head, but that’ll make a mess, and maybe multiple heads will grow back.”

I pulled out my phone and texted the Scholar. I didn’t want to deal with trying to keep something dead if it was so determined to live. Determination was a wonderful thing!

The Scholar was there in three blinks, just in time to grab the man’s throat as the silver ball plinked to the ground, pushed out by his healing power. The Scholar stood, looking like death, holding the man by the throat, my guardian much taller than he usually looked, surrounded by an evocative mist that smelled like orange blossoms.

He frowned at the man, but spoke to me. “Are you injured, Katriana?”

I looked at my left hand. The burn on my thumb and first finger was blackened, maybe because it had been a silver ball. “Not particularly.”

“Silver poisoning is very serious,” he said, tightening his hand on the man’s throat. “You’ll have to go to the Healery and have Anna look at it.”

I tried not to sigh, but sometimes he acted like I was still a baby. “After my shift. Mitt’s gone to his grandmother’s for her two hundredth birthday.”

He gave me a sharp look before returning his focus on the man. He released his throat, but had a firm grasp on his mind, so the man just stood there, a slight red glaze over his still-healing goopy left eye.

“You shot this person. Why?” he demanded of the goateed assassin

The man twitched and then said, “For the bounty. The price for the Vampire Princess’s head is too high to wait for someone else to hit first.”

“A bounty on the Vampire Princess’s head?” The Scholar raised a dark brow and glowered. “Who placed the bounty?” There was a dangerously silky growl that meant his dragon was stirring. Maybe he’d eat him instead of putting him on the wall.

The guy’s voice was a raspy monotone. “Unknown. But the offer’s been placed on every respectable assassin’s board, so it must be legit.”

Ha. Like there was a respectable assassin. Other than Libby, but she was an ex assassin, so…

“Katriana, have you told someone that you were a vampire princess?” the Scholar asked, not looking away from the man, probably rifling through his brain for any clues as to who put out a call for my death.

I tried not to look guilty. I’d told him that I was staying with Sultry when I took a train to Apple City two days before. There had been a lot of phones pointed at me when the harpy and Herald confronted me. “Ah…”

He turned and put the full weight of his gaze on me, and it weighed me down like a truck full of wet cement. “Who did you tell?”

“Well, I was saying that I was the pastel princess, you know, on my social media account, but then this harpy was mad at me for the kittens and the noisy taffeta, and Herald stepped in.” I smiled brightly, but I definitely didn’t feel it.

“Herald? The Vampire King’s herald?”

I shrugged. “But I meant pastel princess, not vampire princess. I was wearing pink taffeta. I did not look like a vampire princess. You know, they’re always gothic. And I’m blonde. Blonde vampires always look a little sallow undead.”

He put a hand to his forehead, like he was starting to get a headache. “You could always spell your hair dark again like you used to. Where, precisely did you run into a harpy and the Vampire King’s herald?”

I hesitated before the words tumbled out. “At the opera. I went to Apple City on the train.”