Thin Ice Read online

  Sam! I remembered suddenly and pulled out my phone, but stopped just short of dialing them. What would I say if they picked up? Hey, Sam, sorry to interrupt your threesome, but I just froze a vampire, then some weirdo shot him. Wanted you to watch out, you know, just in case.

  I sighed and lowered the phone. Sam was open-minded when it came to just about everything, but vampires, assassins, and magic—or whatever I’d done in the parking garage—were out of their wheelhouse. They wouldn’t know what to do with that information. Sam was a great friend, but there were things even they couldn’t deal with. I was on my own.

  Not knowing what else to do, I took a shower, standing under the faucet until the water ran cold. I spent the whole time stuck in the moment again, going back over it and analyzing every detail. There had to be a rational explanation for what’d happened. It was one thing for there to be vampires in the world. Hell, maybe there were werewolves and little Tinkerbell fairies too. But magic? You’d think I’d know if I had magic powers.

  I wrapped a towel around myself and stood in front of the cloudy mirror for a moment before wiping my wrist across it. The face staring back at me didn’t look like it belonged to the sort of girl who got caught up in those things. My life was boring. Average grades in school, average family, normal job. The only thing that had ever been different about me was how normal I was.

  Okay, if I did it once, I could do it again. I turned on the faucet and focused on the water running down the drain. In my mind, I tried to recreate the panicked feeling from the parking garage, but I couldn’t call it back up. I was unsettled as hell after what’d happened, but the fear had fled. All I felt now was frustration. Why was all of this happening to me? Why had I asked to be transferred to the night shift at Kloud9? Had I really been so desperate for one more dollar an hour? And why the fuck couldn’t I freeze the water running down the drain?

  I shut the water off with a sigh. This was crazy. What was I getting involved with? At least I didn’t have to worry about money for a while.

  I dressed in my favorite pair of pajamas and checked the locks again. Sam had texted me a picture of them in a dark movie theater, sitting beside one of the guys they’d left the club with. The caption promised Sam would be back in time for class in the morning, but I wasn’t holding my breath. When they were like this, they usually skipped class a few days in a row until they got it out of their system.

  Rather than go to sleep, I sat in my bed, scrolling through social media feeds. Everyone I knew was posting photos of mundane things. It was hard to believe none of them knew what I knew—that there were vampires lurking in the city, and maybe worse things.

  One of the big exposed pipes in the ceiling rattled, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Dammit, calm down. That was just the heat kicking on. Just the same, I got up to close and lock my bedroom door, only to stop once I’d grabbed the doorknob. I’d feel a lot safer with a weapon.

  I knew it was silly, but security was mostly an illusion anyway. Locked doors and windows might make people feel safe, but a determined thief could get past them easily. A vampire could do it without breaking a sweat.

  I stalked into the kitchen, determined to find something—anything—that would help me defend myself against a vampire if one broke into my room. The gun EEG had issued had to be left at work, and I’d turned it in when they’d suspended me. I hoped Ronan would issue me a new one. Until then, a steak knife would have to do.

  This is dull as fuck, I thought, lifting the knife into the light. It couldn’t stab a tater tot, let alone a vampire. Guess I should fix that. For the next fifteen minutes, I sat at the kitchen table, sharpening all our knives. Just in case.

  The entire time, I held the image of that Bloody Mary vampire in my mind. He was gone, but his friends were still out there, and if they came through my door, or after me and mine, they were going to be in a world of hurt.

  Knives sharpened, I selected the biggest one, went back to my room, and locked the door. With the knife tucked under my pillow and my blanket pulled up to my chin, I fell asleep, dreaming of a world without vampires.

  Chapter Nine

  To make up for being late the day before, I showed up for work early. When I arrived, Ronan was in his music room again, only this time he was playing the violin. I’ve never been one for music, but if I had to choose between the piano and the violin, I’d say he was much better at the violin. Maybe not at playing; I didn’t know enough about either instrument to tell anyone what was technically good or not. There was just something different about his face when I walked in and found him playing that day as opposed to the day before, the sort of passionate expression people only reveal when they truly care about their art.

  Thomas left me in the doorway, where I stood waiting for him to finish. He had his back to me, which meant he didn’t notice me for a while. After a few minutes, I got bored with standing there and went to pick a book up from where it rested on the arm of a chair. It was the copy of Great Expectations he’d been leafing through the day before. I tried to flip it over without losing his spot, but the book slipped out of my hands and fell to the floor with a bang.

  Ronan’s bow screeched and he spun around.

  I cringed. “Sorry.”

  His face lit up with a boyish smile. He placed his violin carefully back on the stand. “Callie! Thomas should’ve told me you were here. Let me guess—he just shoved you into the room and shut the door behind you? Sounds like him. You didn’t have to stand there. Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “It seemed rude to interrupt. You were pretty into it.”

  “I must’ve been if I didn’t hear you come in. Sorry. I promise I don’t spend all my time in here. It’s just that playing keeps my mind too busy to think about anything else. Otherwise, I’d be a mess.”

  It was hard to imagine someone so put together being a mess. He probably had a whole team of people who picked out his clothes, did his hair, and maybe even polished his shoes. Based on the salary he’d promised me and the house, Ronan had to be obscenely rich.

  He walked up to me, beaming from ear to ear. “You’ve got new shoes.”

  I looked down at my feet. Everything I had on was new, but he’d noticed the shoes? “Uh, yeah.”

  “You can tell a lot about a person by the shoes they choose to wear.” Ronan grabbed both doors and threw them open, gesturing for me to follow. “It’s one of those details people often overlook, but it’s the details that make the person, Callie.”

  He led me down a different hallway with pictures on the wall, all modern art pieces that Sam would’ve loved. I didn’t get them. The walls, however, were pristine white, the baseboards free of dust.

  The hallway spilled into a dining area with a long table. Three brass light fixtures with swirling designs hung over it, but they were off. The only light came from the gray morning outside, filtering in through three large picture windows. The pool in the backyard had been covered for the year, but the cover on it was clean enough to eat on.

  “This way,” Ronan called.

  I turned away from admiring the backyard and found him waving to me from another doorway. “I’m going to get lost in this place.”

  “There’s a map in your orientation paperwork. You’ll have plenty of time to go over that on the plane.”

  “Plane?” I stepped through a stone arch into a kitchen a five-star chef would’ve killed for. There were two islands: one for the sink, and the other an L-shaped bar complete with bar stools. The countertops must’ve been real marble. Someone like Ronan wouldn’t bother with knock-offs. Everything was made of dark wood, stainless steel, or patterned glass.

  Ronan went straight to the fridge. “Did you have breakfast? There’s fruit in the basket there, or I can call Jeanie in to make you something. I’m not much of a cook, but she’s amazing.” He pulled out a plastic container full of thick green liquid and gulped some of it down.

  I cringed and lost what little appetite I had at the sight of it. “I can
tell. What is that?”

  He lowered the container and studied it as he wasn’t sure. “Something with kale probably. I’m on a strict diet until all these stupid underwear shoots are done. After this, I’m NPO for six hours. I’ll be practically dehydrated by the time we get to the shoot.”

  “NPO?”

  “Nothing passed orally. No food. No drink.” He shook his head. “I don’t recommend it, but there’s a price for making your living by looking like this.” Ronan took another sip from the bottle and lowered it. “Dammit, that came out wrong. I promise I’m only about fifty percent stuck-up male model. One second.” He pulled out his phone, took a selfie, and turned all his attention to posting it somewhere online.

  I folded my arms. More hashtag than heartthrob was right. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “This is part of my job. I can’t get gigs if I’m not constantly posting, Callie. Oh, that reminds me!” He darted to the other side of the kitchen to retrieve a white plastic bag from the counter that he held out to me. “This is for you. Part one of your welcome package.”

  I took the bag and peeked inside, frowning. “A phone?”

  “I’m sure you have one already. Everyone has a cell phone. But since you’re running my security now, you need to have a top-of-the-line model. You’ll be monitoring online threats as well as those to my person, which means you need to have a fully capable phone. Not only that, but this one will integrate with the house security like mine does. You’ll be able to control everything from the thermostat to the gate remotely. Whether we’re in Berlin or you’re sitting at home, you can shut everything down at a moment’s notice.”

  “Cool.” I took the phone out of the bag and turned the box over. He wasn’t kidding when he said it was a top-of-the-line model. Was this one available publicly yet? How did he get it?

  “Right. Let’s get you everything else you need. Oh, and I should show you the panic room.”

  Panic room? I raised an eyebrow, but that was all I had time to do because Ronan was already scurrying to the next room. I practically had to jog to catch up. “You said something about a plane earlier?”

  He nodded as we reached a narrow stairway hidden in a little alcove. “I have a photoshoot in New York this afternoon, so I won’t be able to give you the full tour of the house. We’ll be back late. I hope that’s not a problem? I did tell you about the hours?”

  “You did,” I huffed. I was in good shape, but Ronan was taking the stairs two at a time at a crazy pace. Damn Sam for insisting I wear even these low heels instead of flats, on the premise that my employer was a model and I couldn’t look frumpy. “It’s not a problem.”

  At the top of the stairs, Ronan made a sharp right and darted into a room the size of a small bedroom. It had been transformed into a security station, with monitors on one wall. They boasted a good-quality color image, not the fuzzy black and white of the factory cameras. Next to the monitors was a sleek desktop computer, and next to that, a huge gun safe.

  Ronan grabbed a yellow sticky note from beside the computer and typed in the code to open the safe. “I know you know your way around firearms. Walter wasn’t bad with them. He liked big guns, though, and I kept telling him we didn’t need that sort of protection.”

  The gun safe was full of…well, guns—more guns than I’d seen since I left the service. There were enough there to equip a private army, although the hiring materials Ronan had given me stated I only had a security staff of two other part-timers.

  “Maybe you should’ve listened to Walter.” I picked out a Remington 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and looked down the barrel. “Good model. Nice sights. Some of the best stopping power available to civilians.”

  “Civilians.” Ronan chuckled. “I like it.”

  “Good for close-range encounters if you’ve got only one intruder.” I put the shotgun back and picked up an AR-15. “Now, this almost feels familiar.”

  “I imagine you carried something similar in the military?”

  I checked the rifle over. “Sort of. The civvy version has a longer barrel, but the trigger assembly is the same, and they handle similarly. Iron sights, huh?” I frowned and pushed open the safe door a little more. There were some optics there, but none of them were compatible with the AR-15. It wasn’t useless without a decent scope, but the three-round burst fire was much more effective when you could see what you were aiming at.

  “Something wrong?” Ronan leaned over the gun safe’s door.

  “Not wrong. It would be better with more accessories.”

  “Everything’s better with accessories,” Ronan agreed. “Make a list of what you want, and I’ll make sure you get it.”

  I’d already put the rifle back and turned to the other door to examine the handguns. “This is my favorite,” I said, pulling out a Colt .45 M1911. “Lightweight. Reliable. Easy to conceal. Lots of customization options.” I lowered the gun. “What about body armor?”

  Ronan gestured for me to follow him to a metal locker on the other side of the room. He unlocked that one with a key that he tossed to me afterward. Inside were three ballistic vests, thin enough in profile to fit under an overshirt. I pushed them aside and eyed an over-the-clothes version with tactical pockets. “Was Walter wearing one of these when…when it happened?”

  “Unfortunately, short of riot gear, I’m not sure there is any type of body armor that can stop vampire fangs.”

  “They make Kevlar sleeves for your neck,” I said, pushing them all aside. “These are great, but they’re all designed to fit a male frame. They’ll be long on me and fit wrong in the arms. We’ll have to upgrade that.”

  “Noted.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Actually, it might be easier if you got a catalog or something and just put the order in. I’ll pay for whatever upgrades are needed, of course. Maybe if Walter’d had the sort of experience you do, we could’ve been better prepared.”

  I turned away from the armor. “I’m sorry. Were you close?”

  He shrugged. “It’s hard not to be when you’re with someone day in and day out. Walter, though? He was always…distant. Very professional. Very good at his job. Just the sort of person Mother would hire.” He sighed and pushed off the safe to slap a panel in the wall. It rolled aside to reveal a big red button. “You, though? She’d hate everything about you.”

  I put the gun back, closed the safe, and gestured to the button. “What’s that?”

  “Panic button.” He patted the clear plastic covering over it. “Hit this baby, and it’ll drop ballistic shutters around the core section of the house. That includes this room, my master suite, and the guest room. An alert will automatically be sent to both our phones, the police and fire departments, and to my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Her idea. Anyway…” He pointed up. “If it gets hit a second time, there’s an escape hatch in the ceiling in here. Ladder drops down, and you can get into the attic crawl space. There are enough supplies up there at any given time to keep two people alive for three days. There’s a company that comes in and replenishes all that for me once a month overnight. I’ll give you their schedule. You’ll have to stay in the house when they’re here. I don’t like outside guests to be left unsupervised.”

  I frowned at the panel. If he hadn’t pointed it out, I would’ve missed it. “No offense, Ronan, but don’t you think all this is a little much? I mean, you’re just a model.”

  “And you’re just a security guard.” He crossed his arms. “Except you’re not. No one is just whatever their job is.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  His face broke into a smile. “I’m messing with you. Don’t worry about it. I promise you’re not the first person to assume I am just a rich pretty boy. You won’t be the last. Sometimes, though, it’s better to let people believe that story. You’d be surprised by how far that gets me half the time.” He clapped his hands. “Now, you’d better pick out your gun. I want you armed whenever you’re with me.”
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br />   I grabbed the Colt from the gun safe, along with a belt holster and a couple of magazines, and followed Ronan through the rest of the upstairs as he pointed out different rooms. In addition to the bedrooms, security room, kitchen, dining room, and music room, the house had a library that spanned both floors tucked into one of the far corners. The library was the first room we came to where not everything was spotless. Books lay in random piles near chairs or sat dog-eared on the window seat. It wasn’t the largest private library, but he easily had more books than I’d read in my entire life.

  “I don’t come in here as much as I used to,” he said, gripping the edge of one of the ornate bookshelves.

  “You just read Great Expectations over and over, then?” I scanned the shelves and found them full of classics like Austen, Twain, Hemmingway, and Tolstoy. Then on the next shelf, he had collectors’ editions of several famous fantasy novels.

  Ronan shrugged. “Not really. I’m bored with most of these books. If I’m honest, even my music felt stale until this morning. I’m not sure what changed. I just woke up and felt…better. But you don’t want to hear about all that.” He waved a hand, dismissing the conversation. “We’ve got a plane to catch in a few hours, and you have things to read.”

  Ronan collected a whole box of spiral-bound books from the library table and held them out to me.

  I reached to pick up the first book in the box, only to find it was all one big book. “The Art of Security by Walter Wyman? This thing must weigh fifty pounds!”

  “What can I say? Walter was thorough. He wanted to make sure his replacement was well-prepared.” He hefted the box into my arms and checked his watch. “You’ll have plenty of time to read it on the plane. The driver should be here any minute, and I haven’t finished my smoothie. I’ll call for you when he gets here?”

  “Yeah, sure.” With a grunt, I lowered the box to the ground and scowled at it. Being Ronan’s bodyguard wasn’t supposed to have homework. The flight from Columbus to New York wasn’t going to be near long enough for me to make it through that entire book. “And here I thought Dickens would make for dry reading,” I grumbled and opened the book.