“Oh, I know,” I said, lightly pushing the gas.
While I was flopping over the couch and narrating an M. Night Shyamalan film, Nina had been in her bedroom finishing off a Zumba DVD.
For a vampire who could eat all the fat guys she wanted and never gain an ounce, I had to admire her pluck.
“So what are you going to do?”
I shook my head, gnawing on my bottom lip. “I don’t know. But I can’t just let him go on running. What kind of life is that? Always looking over your shoulder, never getting close to anyone.” A little prick of pride poked at me. “I’m going to help him, Neens. After all he’s done for me? I owe him that. I can totally help him.”
Nina didn’t even bother to hide her skepticism. “You’re going to help him not be a werewolf?”
“I’ll figure something out.”
My sudden bravado was stemming from the new leaf I had been considering turning over. In my life, I did a lot of crying. And sniveling. And falling down. For a girl whose CONTACTS list was loaded with the undead, the overpowering, and the often stinky, I didn’t have a heck of a whole lot going for myself other than my near infallible ability to screw things up.
That stopped now.
“Yeah,” I muttered to the windshield, my superhero grin widening. “I’m going to save Sampson.”
Nina eyed me, then squirmed in her seat. She folded her shoulders in and put on a pair of sunglasses that covered up the majority of her flawless pale face. “Sure.”
“What are you doing?”
“It’s hot.” She rolled down the window and tucked one of the many pieces of discarded clothing-slash-garbage that I kept in my car just for situations such as these—or just because I’m lazy—in the window. “Didn’t anyone tell the sun that this is summer in San Francisco? You’re off for the season!” she yelled out the window.
While summer in San Francisco usually consisted of hoodies and hot chocolate, this year the temperatures were unseasonably warm. I loved the opportunity to bare skin that spent the majority of time cuddled in fleece; Nina hated it. I suppose I would, too, if every ray of sunshine made me sizzle and smoke.
Vampires have sun-free immortality; we breathers have flip-flops, tank tops, and skin cancer.
When the morning DJs rattled off a string of hotter-than-usual temperatures for the rest of the week, Nina’s lip curled and her nostrils flared.
“God, I hate global warming.”
As we inched closer to the police station, my heartbeat started to speed up. Once we pulled into the lot, I was fairly certain my spasming heart would bolt right out of my throat. I swallowed hard and tried my most ordinary grin on Nina.
“Did you put your jeans in the dryer again?” She cocked a quizzical eyebrow then hovered one perfectly manicured fingernail in front of my perma-grin. “You’re looking a little pinched in the face area.”
I dialed down the grin and killed the engine.
Though the Underworld Detection Agency is firmly hidden beneath thirty-five floors of earth and concrete, the very idea of it—and of me, walking through a place that catered to a magical, mind-reading clientele with a secret the size of the Titanic—made my heart pound and my palms sweat.
Some days I wished I had stuck with my childhood dream of becoming an Avon lady or a pony.
I closed my eyes and chanted to myself: I’m good at keeping secrets, I’m good at keeping secrets....
And I am.
I’ve kept the lid on the entire existence of the demon Underworld, the fact that my roommate is a vampire, and once, when I was on a plane from New York, the winner of American Idol. But walking through an office staffed with the undead, the unearthly, and the unable to keep their noses out of my 100-percent-normal, breather mind, is a different story entirely.
I felt the surge of pain before I heard her voice. “Jesus crap, Nina, what the hell did you do that for?” I rubbed at the rapid bruise I was sure was forming on my rib cage where Nina had zinged me with her index finger.
“You were doing your weird, freight-train breathing again. Are you okay?”
“It’s called relaxation breathing, and I’m just trying to center myself.” My eyes darted to the police station’s double doors. “I need to act calm and normal or people are going to suspect something’s up.”
Nina leaned over and pulled the biggest hat I’ve ever seen out of her shoulder bag, then worked to arrange it on her head. Finally she turned to me and smiled. “Soph, if you walk into the Underworld Detection Agency acting either calm or normal, everyone is going to know something is up.”
Touché.