When it came time to go, I showered and then jolted my nerves with a tall cup of Costa Rican dark roast spiced with goat’s blood. The lump was almost gone and if I fluffed my hair over it, no one could tell that my head had been used for batting practice. And if someone asked, I’d tell him that I’d accidentally let the lid of a coffin slam on me. Clumsy me.

The party was in an east Denver home, a gabled Tudor. Techno music boomed from inside. A chubby woman answered the doorbell, wearing an obscenely tight latex cat suit that pinched a wedge of fat cleavage out the front. Her thick legs teetered on stiletto heels. No mistress of the dark, she looked more like a matron of the refrigerator. Her eyes had a vampire’s gleam from costume contacts. “Welcome to our crypt, fellow vampire,” she lisped through plastic, glow-in-the-dark fangs.

What a sad poser. No self-respecting vampire would dress like her, not unless there was serious money involved. I excused myself and squeezed past.

Most of the guests wore black, some gaudy latex, others trashy Goth getups with chains and leather, and a few were dressed in dark clothing that looked ordered from Lands’ End. Everyone’s eyes shone bright, the same as the greeter’s from the front door.

I surreptitiously removed my contacts. Instantly, the color of the auras let me know who was vampire and who was human. Makes for an interesting switch when we vampires have to remove our contacts to fit in.

As soon as I got something to eat, I’d start to mingle. I forgot about this being a mixed crowd-vampires and humans-so there weren’t many real blood treats on the buffet table in the den, mostly human food. A chocolate cake in the shape of a casket lay in the center of the table. Tamales wrapped in black cornhusks were piled in a chafing dish. Black candles dripped wax on bone-shaped candelabras. A steaming fondue pot held what looked like blood, but it was only marinara sauce-sans garlic, of course. A pyramid of blood-pudding canapés sat on a silver platter. No scabby corpse, thankfully. The cake looked especially rich, so I grabbed a serving knife.

Someone tapped my shoulder. “Cut me a piece of that.”

I turned around.

A woman grinned at me. A bright-green aura radiated from her body as if she were plugged into a xenon lamp. With an aura that color, she was not human, and she definitely was no vampire.

“Felix Gomez,” she said, “welcome to Denver.”

CHAPTER 10

MY KUNDALINI NOIR jumped so hard I thought it would leap through my belly button.

After last night’s attack, my defenses went to maximum alert. This woman made no threatening gestures, so I strained to keep my fangs and talons from springing out and revealing myself to the human guests.

She stood about five feet tall and was narrow-shouldered with broad hips. Wavy brunette hair fell alongside a pixieish face. Her green eyes looked a size too big for her face, her mouth a size too small. She seemed to have been put together from God’s spare parts bin, though somehow it worked. She was cute.

So far, this investigation into the nymphomania at Rocky Flats had introduced me to the paranoia and intrigue within DOE. Soon after that a nympho put a gun to my head, later somebody knocked me unconscious and ransacked my apartment, and now I meet this woman with her mysterious green aura. Perhaps she was a super-nympho.

I fixed a vampire glare on her, strong enough to make the toughest biker whimper in fear. “How did you know my name?”

“Bob Carcano told me,” she answered, oblivious of my attempt at zapping her.

What was with this woman? She was no vampire and deflected my powers like no human could. Her green aura became like the pleasant glow from a string of Christmas lights.

She set her hands on her hips and gave me the once-over. “Felix, if you get this excited when I have my clothes on, what would you have done if I’d been naked?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your aura,” she replied. “If your erection throbs like that, I’m one lucky girl.”

She read my aura? How? Her eyes didn’t have tapetum lucidum.

I said, “You’re no vampire.”

“I”-she mugged nonchalantly as if it were obvious to all but the densest of morons-“am a dryad. Forest sprite to you nontechnical types.”

“A forest sprite? That some kind of fairy? Like Tinkerbell?”

“I never cared for her sense of fashion.” She wore a wooly red sweater and loose jeans with the cuffs bunched over suede clogs. “Too frou frou for me. I don’t have the hips for it.”

“What’s a dryad doing here among vampires?”

“You got something against me? None of the other vampires do.” Her smile eased, then disappeared. “Let me simplify it for you. I could leave and pretend we never met. Would that work?”

The idea that we’d never met disturbed me. I wanted to see her smile again. I barely knew this woman-forest sprite, fairy, whatever the hell she was-and frankly, I didn’t want her to go. Her spunkiness excited me. And since my aura was flashing my emotions like a billboard, she had to know that, too. But I couldn’t make it too easy for her.

“I notice you’re still here.”

“Maybe I like dumb challenges.” She pointed a finger at me. “You know what I mean?”

“Much too well.” I offered my hand. “Miss Dryad, you have a name?”

“A rather nice one, I think.” Her pearly grin returned. “Wendy Teagarden.”

We shook hands. Her touch was firm and warm.

“Wendy? So you are like Tinkerbell. Who’s your old boyfriend? Peter Pan?”

That pearly grin flattened a tight line. “Keep that up and you’ll go home the same way you got here…alone.”

I raised my hands to signal surrender. “My bad. Forgive me.”

Wendy shook her head and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Considering what I have to work with, okay, you’re forgiven.”

“How do you know Bob?”

“Friends of friends.”

Wasn’t much of an answer. “What do you want from me?” I asked.

“Since my offer for sexual favors went right over your head,” she waved a hand over her hair and made a whoosh sound, “I’ll have to settle for chocolate cake.”

“What offer?”

“Jeeze, talk about your dumb challenges.” She rolled her eyes. “The cake. Please, while I’m still in the mood for that.”

I plunged the serving knife into the cake and flipped a piece onto a paper plate.

Wendy looked at the plate and twitched her nose in disapproval. “Kinda small.”

“I thought size didn’t matter.”

“We’re talking about chocolate cake.”

I cut a thicker portion. “Is this okay? What else would you like me to do?”

Wendy lifted the plate and started away from the buffet table. “Cork that opened bottle of merlot and bring it. And a couple of glasses.”

“Where’re we going?”

She motioned to the other guests. “To get some privacy.”

How much privacy would we need?

We went out a side door, into a night barely lit by the dim street lamps. We walked around the corner of the house into a shadow between two elm trees.

Wendy approached the wall. She planted one foot on the siding and began walking up, vampire fashion, while keeping the paper plate level with the ground so that the chocolate cake wouldn’t slide off. Stepping over the eaves, she disappeared onto the roof.

I lifted my leg and set my shoe against the siding, then stepped upward with my other foot. The climb was a simple, sixteen-foot vertical walk. But my movements became sluggish, and the higher I climbed, the harder I breathed. The wine bottle and glasses clinked together and almost slipped from my hands.

I hoisted one leg over the eaves and then the other. My feet planted themselves on the steep, shale-shingle roof. I felt like a fat man who had sprinted up three flights of stairs. Thoughts about my weakening vampire prowess led me to brood about my refusal to drink human blood, and that, in turn, resurrected my guilt over shooting the Iraqi civilians.