I was halfway to LAX, fighting traffic on the 105 Freeway, when a text message came through.
Oprah had a point about not texting and driving. Oprah, as far as I knew, wasn't a vampire with cat-like reflexes and an inner alarm system that alerted me to danger.
I glanced down at my iPhone, and was not very surprised to see that it was Kingsley. Secretly - or perhaps not so secretly - I had hoped it was Fang.
Jesus, Fang...where are you?
Still, seeing the text from Kingsley warmed my heart a little. The guy was trying soooo hard to be nice. He knew he'd screwed up and screwed up royally.
He also knew there was probably a very good chance I would never even see him again.
Still, he kept at it. Kept being sweet.
And the big oaf was worming his way back into my life. One sweet text at a time.
Full moon tonight, his text read.
Franklin and I are gonna get our freak on.
I shook my head and texted back: I don't even want to begin to know what that means, goofball.
Hey, I'll take goofball, he wrote back a few minutes later. Better than what you've called me in the past.
You're still a jerk.
I know. And soon I will be a hairy jerk.
Just try not to rob any graves tonight, I wrote, texting rapidly. Supernaturally fast, I might add. That's really, really gross, by the way.
Kingsley, as a werewolf, had a taste for corpses. That is, when and if he ever escaped the safe-room his butler Franklin locked him into each full night. A butler who was, of course, so much more than a butler.
I know, wrote Kingsley. What's the deal with that anyway?
In fact, I knew exactly what the deal with that was. Kingsley and I, although two very different creatures of the night, were not so different after all. Each of us harbored what I'd come to understand was a highly evolved dark master, an entity banned from this world, but returning through a loophole, so to speak.
And we're the loopholes.
These dark entities gave us our lives - our eternal lives, that is - and existed within us side by side, or, if not side by side, somewhere deep within us.
I shuddered again at the thought.
And so, it was the thing within Kingsley that hungered for the flesh of the dead. And it was the thing within me that hungered for blood.
After a moment, I texted back: I think we both know what the deal is, Wolfman.
Just be a good boy tonight.
Will do. :) I took in a lot of air, held it in my dead lungs, and released it back into my minivan. I gripped my steering wheel and thought of Kingsley and Russell and Fang...and shook my head.
And kept on shaking it nearly all the way to LAX.