The Vampire Who Loved Me by Teresa Medeiros

scrambled to his feet.
    “Where are you going?” Cuthbert demanded, his side-whiskers quivering with alarm. “You’re not going to leave me here all alone, are you?”
    Julian seized his friend by the shoulders and hauled him effortlessly to his feet. “I need yourhelp, Cubby. I wouldn’t have asked you to accompany me tonight if I could have done this alone. But I was afraid we were walking into some sort of trap. I need you to do what you do best—watch my back.”
    He dragged Cuthbert to the edge of the loft and pointed to a pair of sandbags dangling from a nearby beam. They hung right over the splintery wooden doors that stood guard over the main entrance of the warehouse. Earlier in the day, Julian had looped the ropes holding them aloft over a nearby peg. “If anyone besides me tries to come through those doors, I want you to loosen the ropes and drop those sandbags on them. Do you understand?”
    Cuthbert nodded mutely, his throat too swollen by panic for speech.
    “Good man.” Julian clapped him on the shoulder, sparing him a brief but fierce smile.
    Then he was gone, moving so swiftly that Cuthbert would have sworn his feet never once touched the rungs of the ladder they’d climbed to reach the loft. Before Cuthbert could puzzle over what he’d seen, a faint shriek, quickly muffled, came from the street. He started back toward the window but a man’s shout and thethunder of running footsteps drew him up short.
    Remembering the charge with which Julian had entrusted him, he stumbled over to the peg where the rope was looped. He cocked his head to the side, frowning. The footsteps were coming from the wrong direction. They weren’t coming from the street but from the ground floor of the warehouse. An icy band tightened around his chest as he realized they had been sharing their hiding place with someone else all along. Someone who was even now racing toward the very door Julian had ordered him to guard.
    He reached for the rope, but hesitated, torn by indecision. Hadn’t Julian told him to drop the sandbags on anyone who tried to come through that door? He hadn’t specified in which direction. The footsteps were drawing nearer. In just a few more seconds, they would be at the door.
    Before he could lose his nerve, Cuthbert gave the rope a decisive tug, loosing it from the peg and sending the sandbags plummeting to the floor below.
    There were two loud thumps, muffled groans, and then dead silence.
    Wincing in belated empathy, Cuthbert peered over the edge of the loft. In the dim light, he could barely make out two shadowy figures sprawled on the dirt floor below. Although he doubted the impact could have killed them, he was confident that they weren’t going to be troubling Julian—or anyone else—any time soon. He smiled and dusted off his hands, rather pleased that he had managed to fell two such giants without Julian’s help.
     
    Portia deserved to be eaten.
    She’d allowed herself to become totally consumed with the notion that Julian was both a murderer and a monster and now she was about to be consumed by some bloodsucking witch she should have recognized as a vampire at twenty paces. As she hung helpless in the creature’s deadly grasp like a rag doll caught in the jaws of a snarling mastiff, she found it odd that in these, the last moments of her life, she would be feeling not terror but acute embarrassment at her own ineptitude and bittersweet relief that she had misjudged Julian so thoroughly.
    The toes of her slippers scrambled for purchase on the damp cobblestones. The womanwrapped a handful of her curls around one ruthless fist and gave them a harsh yank, jerking her head to the side.
    As she hooked one of her scarlet-tipped fingernails beneath Portia’s choker and prepared to rip it away so she could better reach the soft, vulnerable flesh of her throat, Portia squeezed her eyes shut. She could not help but wonder if Julian would miss her “bright eyes” when they were forever