“Please stop sniffing me for evidence of other people,” I groaned, cutting off my contrived, indignant response. Instead, I quietly said, “I had to feed from him.”
“Why are you making that face?” he asked, tucking his thumb under my chin. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t feed from Zeb.”
“I sort of vowed not to feed from humans, remember?” I said. “I was doing great, six months clean and passive … and then Zeb tried to kiss me, and it all just went to hell from there.”
“I’m sorry.” Gabriel shook his head, laughing. “For a minute, I thought you just said that Zeb tried to kiss you.” I gave him a look that was part wince but mostly cringe. “Oh.”
“I know,” I groaned. “I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like the whole world’s just gone cockeyed. And while I was feeding, I had all these weird thoughts. And they were … dark and hungry and sly. And they kept telling me to drink more, take more, turn him, keep him with me. Does that mean this is my fault? Did I accidentally put some of my subconscious thoughts in his head because I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to our relationship when he and Jolene get married? Is that why he tried to kiss me? Did I do this with my evil vampire temptress powers?”
Gabriel leveled me with his serious, paternal gaze. “Jane, do you want to have sex with Zeb?”
My eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. “Lord, no.”
“So, this couldn’t be your fault. The voice in your head? That’s just a blood thought.”
Gabriel laughed and cupped my face between his palms. “It’s the vampire brain’s response to live fresh blood, a physiological attempt to keep the vampire as well fed as possible for as long as possible. We never know when our next meal will be. So the receptors in your brain that interpret pleasure all start firing at once. You get overloaded with endorphins, and you start having thoughts … well, thoughts I’d rather you didn’t describe to me. But it’s perfectly natural, particularly for those who rarely feed on live blood. Your brain was just overcompensating for time lost.”
“So I don’t really have dark, hungry feelings for Zeb?”
“In a universe that is decent and good, no.” He shook his head.
“Thank you,” I breathed, leaning against him. “I thought I was having some sort of bizarre psychic reaction to the wedding. Or maybe an aneurysm. I was hoping for aneurysm.”
Gabriel’s voice tightened. “That does, however, mean that I must have a talk with Zeb about appropriate behavior for engaged men, particularly engaged men who expect to continue to spend time with you and retain the use of their limbs.”
I snorted. “And if that doesn’t work, what’s next? A paid chaperone?”
“If necessary. I’m sure Dick could use some extra cash,” Gabriel muttered, tensing when I shot him a warning look. “I am very fond of Zeb. He’s a fine young man, and I enjoy spending time with him. But if he thinks he can make advances toward you because of a misguided case of cold feet, he is sorely mistaken.”
“I’m pretty sure I got that point across when I made his nose bleed,” I told him.
“You hit him?” he asked, grinning. “That’s my girl.”
“I don’t think he even realized he was doing it. He had this odd, glazed-over look in his eyes, and he just leaned in. We were both pretty mortified once we got his nose mopped up. Is it possible his brain was just overreacting to being bitten? I mean, Andrea’s reaction when I fed from her was sort of … happy. But she didn’t try to make out with me.”
“It’s possible,” he conceded. When he saw the relief flood my face, he groaned. “This is one of those issues you’re going to insist on handling yourself, isn’t it?” I nodded. “If he does it again—”
“If he does it again, you have my permission to break his legs and arms and make him believe he’s a rodeo clown from Walla Walla,” I promised. “We can make him call himself Slappy the Wonder Clown.”
“Fine. On to less disturbing subjects; can I see what you’ve found so far?”
I turned my laptop to show Gabriel the sad little “No records found” screen. “I can’t find him registered in the state’s database of the undead. According to this, he died almost fifteen years ago, so why wouldn’t he register? He’s an old vampire, hardly threatening.
What’s he afraid of?”
“Maybe he’s not a vampire,” Gabriel said.
“But what else could he be?”
“I honestly don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well, you’re no help,” I grumbled. “I’ve tried reading his thoughts, but he must be one of those people I can’t get through to. Because I got nothing.”
“You can’t just go around thumbing through people’s brains when it suits you, Jane.”
“Oh, you’ve wiped my parents’ memories like Windex, and now suddenly there’s a boundary?”
Gabriel gently pried the laptop out of my hands and put it on the coffee table. “I can only guess that Wilbur is a lonely being, either natural or supernatural, and he genuinely enjoys your grandmother’s company.”
“No, that can’t be it,” I muttered, grabbing the laptop and clicking into another search engine. I typed in Wilbur’s name. “Does this seem like a lot of results in the wedding license section?”
I scanned the folder. The name Wilbur, Will, Bernie, or Gus Goosen showed up six times over the last fifteen years. “Each wife died within a year of their marriage.”
“Can you tell what they died of?” he asked, intrigued.
“I’m going to do something slightly illegal, so you might want to turn your head,” I told him. Gabriel, unfazed, merely smirked. I gave an exaggerated sigh. “You have been warned.”
I clicked on an online database that was supposed to be limited to licensed medical examiners. It said so right at the top of the screen, in big red letters. I entered a valid user name and password, prompting Gabriel’s jaw to drop. I explained, “Jolene has a cousin working in the county coroner’s office. He can be bought with summer sausage.”
Gabriel sighed. “Well, of course she does.”
“OK, first up, first wife, Dulcie, had a stroke in 1991, age seventy, nothing suspicious,” I said, poring over the digitized paperwork. “Here’s a death certificate for Wilbur, dated 1993. Cause of death listed as natural.”
“Natural what?” Gabriel asked.
I clicked and scanned. “Just ‘natural.’ There was no autopsy. The coroner wrote that the death was unremarkable and likely connected to the deceased’s chronic heart condition.”
Gabriel scrunched his nose. “So, the cause of death was ‘he was old’?”
“According to this, his body was released to Aaronson’s Funeral Home a day later. Next of kin listed as Jerry Goosen, Wilbur’s son, a resident of Ashton, Oklahoma. I can only hope that Jerry chose the cheapest funeral home in the state because he picked the first one he saw in the yellow pages. Is it normal for vampires to get a death certificate?”
Gabriel, fully vested in my little Nancy Drew investigation now, nodded. “It can happen if a just-turned fledgling is found by humans before he or she can rise. Since autopsies and embalming involve removing organs and most of the blood from the body, vampires don’t tend to fare well. They turn out wrong somehow, weaker, diluted. When was his next marriage certificate dated?”
I chewed my lip, switching back to the vital-statistics database. “In 1994, a Bernie Goosen married Ms. Ethel Brown. She died a year later as the result of anaphylactic shock from multiple bee stings. She’d been gardening. Coroner ruled it accidental. Then in 1996, a Will Goosen to Mrs. DeeDee Wilkins-Reed. Her death certificate is dated six months later.
Cause of death: blunt trauma to the head. A leg of the shower stool she was sitting on collapsed, and she was thrown to the floor, hitting her head on the tile. Coroner ruled it accidental. In 1998, Gus Goosen married Mrs. Judy Wooten. She choked on a piece of peanut brittle. Coroner ruled it, all together now—”
“Accidental.”
I sifted through the online files. “I’ll grant you that the first one was natural, and maybe even the second one was an accident, but after that, I think Wilbur figured out how much fun marriage for profit could be. What are the odds that Wilbur isn’t bumping his wives off Bluebeard style?”
“It could just be a coincidence, you know.” I stared at him. He jerked his shoulders. “It’s not likely, but it could be a coincidence.”
“I think my grandma may have finally met her match,” I marveled.
“You are very good at this,” he said, adding, “Stay away from my tax records.”