I Want You To Want Me. Kathy Love

nodded. “What happened to her?”

      Sherri gave him a surprised look, as if she couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard. After all, Vittorio had once spent plenty of time with Amanda.

      “She was found dead in her apartment. God, that must have been at least three years ago now. I think they labeled it heart failure. You know, she had a cocaine problem for years. Well, of course you know that.”

      Vittorio nodded. Amanda struggled with drugs for years. When he’d first met her, she hadn’t just restricted herself to coke. She mixed; whatever she could get. But he also knew she was doing a great job staying clean the last time he’d seen her.

      But relapses were common. And maybe she had. Maybe she had just gotten careless. Fallen off the wagon, hard.

      “But you know,” Sherri added as she absently wiped down the worn bar top, “I recall hearing that they didn’t find any drugs in her system.”

      Vittorio’s muscles tensed. “Really?”

      “Probably the damage was already done. Her heart just gave out or something.”

      Vittorio nodded again, even though he wasn’t sure he agreed. She’d been killed. Possibly like Angela, Jessalynn. God, the list went on and on.

      Nausea swelled over him like a warm, salty wave, threatening to drown him. Amanda made number twenty. Twenty women in as many years. Women he’d known. Women he’d helped—or thought he’d helped. They’d all trusted him. And now they were all dead.

      Anyone looking at all these deaths, however, wouldn’t necessarily find them unusual—after all, they were all drug users, some were prostitutes, others just living hard and fast lives. Prime candidates for early deaths. But even for a vampire who’d been alive for over two hundred years, the rate of unusual and premature deaths around him was high.

      He glanced at his acquaintance on the other side of the bar. Sherri didn’t realize just how lucky she was that they had only remained acquaintances. Friends didn’t fare well around him. Maybe it was the natural course of things, or maybe it was something more.

      He was leaning toward something more these days.

      “And you remember Julianne, that little short girl from where The Impalers play?” Sherri asked, dragging him out of his thoughts. “I think she started there while you were still playing with the band.”

      “Yes,” he said slowly, already dreading what Sherri would say about the sweet girl who’d moved here from backwoods Alabama. A girl he’d lent a sympathetic ear to on a number of occasions when he’d worked with the band. He’d even seen her some months ago while visiting Ren.

      “Last April, she was found dead. Jumped out the window of her apartment on Decatur. You didn’t hear about that?”

      Vittorio shook his head, feeling numb. That’s when he’d seen her. April. He’d been here for Ren and Maggie’s wedding. He’d sat at the bar, after hours, and chatted with her. Something about her always called to him. She looked a little—lost.

      “It was weird too,” Sherri continued. “She was in here the night before she died. With her boyfriend, and they seemed quite happy. All sweet smiles like she always was. She certainly didn’t strike me as someone who was going to hurl herself out a window the following night.”

      “What night was that?” He could feel nausea rising, making it hard to swallow.

      “Early April, I think.”

      Vittorio nodded. She’d killed herself right around the time he’d seen her. Or she’d been killed.

      Maksim waited. And waited. Frankly, demons were not known for their patience. But his frustration was compounded by the fact that he couldn’t simply enter this vampire’s mind, take the information he wanted, and be done with him. His mind-connect couldn’t work with other preternatural creatures.

      So he had to find out the answers he wanted, the old-fashioned way. Eavesdropping. Tedious—especially when he wasn’t in the position to do so.

      He leaned back on his barstool, trying to peer through the doorway that led to the back room. Vittorio still sat at the bar, his profile to him, nursing a drink and occasionally chatting with the female bartender back there.

      The vampire looked decidedly ill. Although the lighting in this joint was hardly flattering. And the undead often did look a little peaked. But still Maksim got the feeling that it wasn’t the unflattering lighting and lack of a pulse that made this one look unwell. Given Vittorio’s rapid pace and intent look as he walked here, he had come to find out something. And that something apparently wasn’t sitting well.

      There was no way for Maksim to move closer without garnering notice, so he was stuck here trying to decipher any vibes he could pick up, which were diluted by the others in the bar.

      Maksim sighed, pushing his lukewarm beer away. Well, if this vampire had any dastardly deeds planned for the evening, he wasn’t rushing off to act on them. Frankly, he didn’t look in any shape to do anything terribly dastardly anyway.

      There was nothing to be learned here tonight. Maksim was better off going back to Orabella and trying to gather any information he could from her. And she would ask him to continue following this Vittorio. So there would be other times to figure out the deal with this vampire and his relationship to Orabella.

      He fished around in the pockets of his jeans for a few dollars. He tossed the crumpled bills on the bar and strolled out of the narrow, squalid little hole-in-the-wall.

      Vittorio sat in the bar for how long, he didn’t know. Then he wandered back to Ren’s house, taking the long way, the darker, dangerous streets away from the relative safety and lights of Bourbon Street.

      Several shady-looking characters approached him, one asking for a cigarette, another asking for money, the third drunk, and itching for a fight. None of them worried Vittorio. This is where he’d spent much of his time when he’d lived here. Trying to help these people. And trying to save himself.

      But all his efforts hadn’t done an ounce of good. How hadn’t he realized what was going on?

      He unlocked the large barnlike doors that led into Ren’s house. The courtyard was dimly lit and silent. The air was heavy and still, humidity hanging in the air like an entity unto itself.

      Even as he told himself not to look, his eyes moved right to the windows of the lower apartment. Erika’s apartment was dark. Hardly a surprise, it had to be after 3 a.m. She’d said she kept odd hours too, but he doubted they were as late as his. Most mortals’ weren’t.

      Despite the horrible things he’d discovered tonight, he still found himself longing to see Erika. Was he mad? He couldn’t risk being a part of her life. Or rather making her a part of his. What he’d learned tonight was enough to ram home that fact.

      Julianne. She of all the women was proof he had to be careful. He hadn’t been anything more to her than a sympathetic listener—someone to listen to her, period. She’d been a good girl, not part of the darkness he usually surrounded himself with. She was out of her element in the Big Easy. Shy, quiet and not suited to the wild bawdiness of Bourbon Street. But she’d come here and was determined to stay because of her love for a musician who worked at one of the many bars on Bourbon.

      She hadn’t been happy here. But her boyfriend hadn’t struck Vittorio as the type to settle down into a mundane, domestic life. So to have him, she had to stay in his world.

      Maybe she had really killed herself. Although she hadn’t struck Vittorio as that type either. But he really didn’t know. And somehow, awful as it was, her taking her own life was a better alternative to the one he’d come up with.

      That women were being killed just because they knew him.

      He dropped down on one of the wrought iron benches nestled among the overgrown magnolias and ferns and other lush greenery. Maybe he was wrong about