The Secret Ingredient Is Love. No, Really Read online

  “Yeah. People eat it for nutrition and pleasure.” She took out a slice and held it up, letting the cheese drip. “And steak sauce. From my sister’s restaurant, The Pit? Goes real good with the crust.”

  “Thanks. Thank you,” he said a little faintly, shutting the holy water back in its drawer. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “Did you eat today?”

  “Huh?” He looked up, mouth full. His stomach made a soft anticipatory growl as he realized he didn’t know the answer to that question.

  Eva just chewed while his brain hurried to catch up with his taste buds.

  “Oh.” Jude swallowed and cleared his throat. “I knew I forgot to do something.”

  “Thought so.” She headed over to the sofa and sank down, letting out a soft sigh that told Jude she was every bit as exhausted as he was.

  “Not your job to take care of me, Eva,” he said, grabbing a slice and shaking out some of the spicy-smelling red sauce onto his plate.

  “There are a lot of things I could say here,” she returned quietly, giving him a steady stare. “But we’re off the clock. So I’m just going to say I’m sorry for how we left things earlier. I don’t like being the bitch, Jude. Believe it or not, I want us all to have the best lives as we can. If Jasper ever graduated from low-key shady shit to actual trouble? You’d better believe I’d shake some sense into him too.”

  “You’re not a bitch, you’re the chief.” Jude had been busying himself with his food, but now he met her eyes. “And you were right. I’ve been letting… personal issues get in the way of my job. I’ll do better.”

  “Well, okay.” Eva blinked, looking pleasantly surprised. “Glad to hear it. You know I’m gonna hold you to that. Sucks, but I have to.”

  “Didn’t always suck,” Jude smiled just a little as he headed over to join her on the couch Not all memories were traumatic. Some of them were still fresh and warm after all this time, and those would live forever. “I just liked it better when you were telling me it was time to jump.”

  “It was exciting, that’s for sure. We did good work.” She paused, eyes drifting off into the same kind of faraway haze he found himself caught in more and more. “Still, I wouldn’t look back. Not for a second. There’s nothing back there for any of us.”

  “I hear you.” He took another bite of pizza, his head slowly clearing and exhaustion fading. “Anyway, I meant what I said, about doing better. No more running around in dark alleys. Not anymore. That’s not the life I want.”

  Yesterday this would have been a lie. An hour ago this would have been a lie. But after tonight, after the parking lot, it wasn’t. Jude had spent years chasing shadows. But actually catching up to them, looking into coldly alien faces, unable to move under their stares…

  Eva hesitated, looking like she was thinking several more things she was too polite to say. “Is that why you answered the door with that implement of destruction?”

  Jude glanced back at the drawer where his holy water awaited the next nocturnal invasion. He couldn’t bring himself to be embarrassed by its presence, only reassured. “You can never be too careful.”

  “Well, in this case I’d say that’s about right,” she said, eyeing the several locks and deadbolts. “The freaks sure do come out at night. And people do disappear. Like that kid from a couple floors up? The one with the punk haircut, loud music all night?”

  Jude swallowed his bite of pizza, frowning, but not at the memory. That particular upstairs neighbor, directly above Jude’s apartment and below Eva’s, had been a bass-thumping, wall-vibrating thorn in his side for months. But at her words, just-as-loud alarm bells went off in Jude’s head now. “He’s gone?”

  Eva’s smile faded as she looked at what had to be his increasingly-disturbed expression. “Yeah. About a month ago. Just never came back one night. Guess they’re finally cleaning out his stuff, saw it on the way down.”

  “Huh.” Jude was quiet for a few seconds, trying to mask his growing unease with a neutral, unreadable pokerface. “I thought it was quiet around here.”

  “Yeah. Wonder if that’s how somebody noticed he was missing.” Eva might have been half-joking, but she just looked troubled.

  “Nobody knows what happened?” Jude leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, interest piqued despite himself. He had no desire to start another round, but if he ignored warning signs like this, he’d only have himself to blame when… “Any signs of…?”

  “Foul play?” Eva raised her eyebrows, then shrugged. “Nah. Not that I heard, anyway. Guy just disappeared. Like how people disappear every day. I j—” She started to say something else, then shut her mouth and just looked at Jude with a wan expression he was starting to know too well.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” he said in what he hoped was a comforting tone, but probably not nearly as convincing as he’d have liked.

  “Yeah, but I’m gonna.” She set down her empty plate and folded her arms, shifting in the deep sofa cushions to look at him straight-on. “Until you give me a reason not to.”

  He tried to smile. It wasn’t easy. He was out of practice. “There’s no—”

  “Jude.”

  “I admit,” he said slowly, abandoning the attempted smile with some relief. “I might be feeling a small, minor bit of… strain.”

  “Minor strain?” She stared at him, looking so incredulous it crossed over into amusement.

  “It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he asserted. She didn’t look convinced, and he couldn’t blame her—but he gave a decisive nod anyway. “I’m handling it.”

  Eva took a deep breath in which he could feel her tension rebuilding. “Jude, I got you this job because I knew you’d be good at it. I wanted someone around I could trust. And before that…” She hesitated one more time. Jude remembered the way his breath used to catch the moment before a dive, stepping through a plane or helicopter’s doors and falling toward flames. She was going through the same thing now, the lead-up and the plunge. He’d always recognize the process, and respect it, even if it hurt to watch. Even if some things hurt to hear. “I kept my mouth shut when you said it was monsters that ripped our crew to shreds that night.”

  “One. There was only one monster,” he said very quietly. He shuddered under a wave of vertigo, fighting to keep his equilibrium.

  “We fought fires,” she said, steadily meeting his gaze until he sighed and leaned back, staring up at his white plaster ceiling. “Not vampires. Not even people. But it was just as dangerous, and I was a hundred feet in the air half the time. We could’ve died a million different ways, but fangs wasn’t one of them.”

  “I know what I saw,” he said, just as quietly and just as definitively. In the parking lot a half-hour ago, and five years before, he knew. He’d been saying it to himself for five years—1,825 days, 43,800 hours, 2,628,000 minutes and counting. Jude might not know much anymore: why it happened, why they were left to pick up the pieces, what other nightmares lurked just out of sight, or how to fight them. But he knew this.

  “It was a disaster,” Eva conceded with a tired shake of her head. “That night? It was the biggest, baddest structure fire I’ve ever seen, I could tell that from the air. The kind of thing that you don’t get out of alive without a miracle. And everybody’s luck runs out sometime.” She smiled, but it looked more like a pained grimace. “We lost a good man—a good friend. Jasper lost a fiance. But Felix went in with his eyes open, he knew the risks and so did Jasper. We all did. It was a known hazard. Not some demon.”

  “You weren’t there, Eva!” He raised his voice without thinking about it, not a shout, more a plea. He couldn’t sit still another second. He got to his feet and started to pace, pizza and plates forgotten. “You were a mile away in a helicopter. You didn’t see it! How fast this thing moved, how sharp those teeth were, the claws, the way it just ripped right through—”

  “I saw enough,” she said resolutely, clearly refusing to rise to his desperate level. “The explo
sion. What was left, the charred... none of that came from a monster. But there were no claw marks, no bites.”

  “Because the burns covered everything up!” Jude tried to control his rising panic and mostly succeeded. His heart started to pound, but he’d cut and run once tonight already. Not again. “And you had to have heard it over the radio. We were all screaming loud enough.”

  “Are we really doing this, Jude?” Slowly, Eva rose to her feet too but didn’t take a step, instead fixing him with a steady stare and holding her ground. “You really want to go back there?”

  “Pretty sure we’re already there,” he said, forcing himself to stop moving and face her across the sofa back, which he gripped with both hands. Jude tried to keep the years of loss, terror, and frustration out of his voice, but his eyes narrowed and a hot flush spread across his pale cheeks. Some things you could only keep inside so long before they bubbled over, or burst out like a monster’s full-moon howl. “Been there for five years.”

  “Un-be-liev-able,” Eva said with a completely mirthless laugh, shaking her head at him and staring as if she’d never seen him before in her life. “You honestly think you’re the only one who—God, Jude, we all went through hell! Put yourself in Jasper’s place, for five minutes. Or mine! Trying to hold all of us together so we can have some kind of functional life.”

  “I know,” he said, trying desperately to regain some equilibrium, but with every second his grip on the situation faltered, and he felt their connection slipping through his fingers. He gripped the sofa back more tightly, suddenly feeling like he might fall if he let go. “But I can’t just bury it. I wish I could. But I can’t ignore what happened—”

  “It didn’t just happen to you!” she burst out, shocking him into silence. “It happened to all of us! So how the hell do we move on after that? I don’t know! But I’m still trying! Because if we don’t, it’ll eat us alive.”

  “Maybe you can move on, but I can’t,” he said, words blunt and voice hard. Too tired to soften a single one. Too tired to be anything but honest. “We lost Felix. I lost my leg. And my heart stopped. Everything stopped. Time stopped. It hasn’t really started up again ever since.”

  “I know,” Eva said, the fire in her voice dying down until she sounded as exhausted as he was, just as unable to escape the bone-deep fatigue and inescapable weight, the anchor that pulled them inexorably back to one devastating night under a full moon.

  “I was gone for sixty seconds,” he said, and now it was his turn to let out a laugh with no humor in it at all. “I come back and everything’s different. Everything’s gone. Felix is gone, and so are we. Who we used to be, our whole life. I’m here now, but I’m still gone. And now I can’t stop seeing fangs.”

  Eva didn’t answer. For a while, neither of them said a word.

  “I know how it sounds,” Jude said at last, and now the plea came through loud and clear. To be believed, to be supported, to have someone tell him to take a break, they’d handle it, it wasn’t his problem. Say he didn’t have to face every night alone ever again. “But I never told anything but the truth.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t back you up,” she returned softly, and truly sounded like it. “But I was telling the truth too.”

  “There are monsters out there. There really are.”

  “I know there are.” She looked into his haunted eyes and, in hers, he saw five years’ worth of fatigue and resolve, sleepless nights and isolated days. It felt like looking in a mirror. “But why do you have to be the one to fight them? Why do you have to carry the world on your shoulders?”

  “I…” Jude couldn’t continue. He could barely breathe.

  The parking lot. Two terrifying creatures baring their teeth, eyes that blazed into his soul like high-beam headlights. He shivered, muscles twitching in an echo of the way he’d frozen, paralyzed as they laughed, then whispered, then flew away. Why did he have to be the one to face them? He couldn’t remember the answer.

  “We don’t need to lose anything else,” Eva said, and her voice was gentle now. Not an imperative, not a pragmatic declaration. Almost a plea of her own. “Or anyone. I don’t want you to end up like…”

  “Like Felix,” he whispered, heart sinking. He leaned heavily against the sofa back. His knees felt weak. Both of them. His left leg burned in a phantom-limb fire.

  “Like Jasper.” Eva was more hugging herself than folding her arms now. She wasn’t looking at Jude anymore and he could barely make out her words.

  “I’d say he’s doing better than me,” Jude offered with a shrug, though the casualness was deceptive. He’d heard the truth in her voice, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it. “Jasper doesn’t go looking for monsters in the dead of night. Or reach for the holy water when someone knocks on his door.”

  “No, he…” Eva stopped, and gave a sad shake of her head, shoulders sagging. “He doesn’t. In a way, I almost wish he did. At least then I’d know how to reach him.”

  “They’re out there,” Jude said, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. A last, fragile defense that he didn’t know was worth maintaining anymore. “I don’t know how to explain it to you, but they are.”

  “I know there are monsters out there, Jude.” The shake in Eva’s voice couldn’t just be his imagination. “But they’re human. I’m not saying forget everything, I’m not saying don’t feel it, I’m just…God, we’ve earned a break. You’ve earned a night safe at home watching TV, eating pizza. I’ve earned a life that makes sense. We deserve that.”

  “I know,” he murmured.

  “Jude.” Her voice was soft. He heard her take a step, then felt her hands on his shoulders. “It’s you, me and Jasper. We’re all that’s left. We’re all we have left, each other. That’s all. If something happens to you, how long do you think he’ll—”

  “I know,” he said as he looked up, voice a little stronger. Eva didn’t want to hear a lot of things. Jude didn’t want to hear however she was going to finish that last sentence. “I’m sorry.”

  “I just don’t want to be the last one.” He felt the pressure increase on his shoulders just a little. She wasn’t squeezing so much as leaning on him, like he’d done with the sofa. Like him, it felt like without the support, she might fall. “I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?”

  Jude thought about going one night without jumping at a shadow. He thought about sleep.

  “All right,” he said at last. “No more late nights. No more chasing monsters. No more…” He thought about the way his blood turned to ice in his veins, his heart clenched in his chest at the sight of fangs gleaming sharp and deadly in a streetlight, bright as the full moon. “No more vampires.”

  “Thank you,” she said, letting her breath out in a rush, and squeezing his shoulders. “That’s all I needed to hear. Now eat.”

  “I already had a slice,” he said, but it wasn’t an actual argument. Her faint smile told him they were back on safe, familiar ground.

  “Get another one. You can go back to forgetting food exists as soon as I leave, but as long as I’m here, you’re gonna eat.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” he said, grabbing a second slice and pouring some more red sauce. This time he didn’t keep it contained to a small pool in the corner. It was a lot better when it covered the entire cheesy triangle.

  “Write yourself a damn sticky note, set an alarm. Just take care of yourself.” She didn’t bother to hide her fondness as she watched him take another bite, eyes widening as the rich, mildly spicy sauce woke his neglected taste buds up after a long hibernation. “Oh, you like that? Good, I’ve got about a hundred bottles in my kitchen. You can have it all.”

  “What is it?” Jude asked, curious in spite of himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been interested in something that wasn’t undead and fanged. Sometimes it was nice to be reminded there was more to life.

  “Mags says it’s supposed to be like, fancy experimental gourmet stuff,” Eva said with a faint eye-roll tha
t jogged Jude’s memory. Magnolia was every bit as tough and outspoken as her big sister, but where Eva had dedicated her life to fighting fires, Magnolia and her husband Dorian kept their burns controlled and productive—in their restaurant’s open-flame kitchen. “One of Dorian’s old family recipes, all traditional from the Old Country. I’m supposed to be selling it, but I can’t give the stuff away.”

  “Why?” Jude frowned, taking another big bite. “It’s good.”

  “Oh I know! I love it too, especially this kind, I think that’s the—” Eva shut her mouth, eyes growing wide.

  “What?” Jude shot her a look, not missing her hesitation, or letting the moment of weirdness pass. She certainly never did when their positions were reversed. “It’s what?”

  “Nothing. Forget I said anything.” Eva said, looking down to nervously eye the remains of her own sauce. She was a terrible liar. So was Jude, but he liked to think he was at least a little smoother than her. Most people were.

  “What’s going on, Eva?” Jude frowned, picking up the bottle and giving it a suspicious once-over. “What’s in this stuff?”

  “Oh… nothing!” Her voice rose in pitch, and she let out a short laugh. “It’s just, you know, fancy-pants hipster bullshit, all pretentious, artisan, way too expensive—”

  “Eva.”

  “Blood.” She leaned heavily back against the counter, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. “They have a lot of different recipes, and I think that’s the blood one. Some creepy Transylvanian—no, actually, I think this one’s Italian—except instead of blood pudding or sausage or whatever, they decided ‘okay, we’ll make a steak sauce and sell it, everyone will barbecue with blood, not just on Halloween but every day, this is a great idea, Keep Portland Weird!’“ When she was done, she sounded a little out of breath.

  “Huh.” Jude hesitated, dipping his pinkie fingertip into the sauce and studying it. After a second he stuck it in his mouth, considering. Yes, it still tasted delicious, even knowing what was in it. Even knowing his history with things that drank blood. He should have found it repulsive, but instead, something about enjoying it himself seemed… triumphant. The corners of his mouth turned up into a smile, and he nodded as he held up the red bottle. “Still good. I’m keeping it.”