Day 2 - wordcount: 2,244; total: 5,010

Part 1: Of retrospection, vampire hair care and why the IRS does not suck

I woke up in an empty bed, though by the way the sheets were arranged I could tell Kirill had not had a sudden attack of chivalry and done something silly like sleep in the guest room. Good; after last night I felt much better knowing that while I'd slept, any tresspassers would have been faced with six foot plus of angry vampire.

It would have been better had he been here when I woke, but a quick glance at the bedside table told me that it was four in the afternoon and I had slept for eleven hours straight. For a moment I wished that the folk tales were true and vampires slept until sunset. Granted, most of them don't go out until the sun disappears and they regain their powers, but my dear employer has more than a few conventional magical tricks up his sleeve. He had been a mage before he was turned, and three and a half centuries to practice the Art will make just about anyone good at it.

Pleasant as it was to think of Kirill's adventurous past, or just him, pride and chivalry and wisdom all wrapped up in lean muscle and dark hair that was perfect for my fingers to clutch while he kissed me or fed from me, such thoughts had their time and place. And lately, led to unsettling meditations on why exactly I had to use the words "employer" or "boss" as an elegant variation. "Friend" didn't cut it, and I've seen Kirill in love, with all the destructive power each of those affairs brought with them, so it wasn't that either. And I'm old-fashioned enough to consider "friend with benefits" to be something only a certain kind of women have. While I... damned if I know where Kirill and I place on that scale.

Then again, there were upsides to whatever our relationship was. Like the fact that he might have been gone, but there was a glass of my favorite juice on the bedside table. With a bendy straw at that, and as far as I was concerned, that earned him my particular gratitude. I grabbed at it and managed to drink most of the glass without spilling anything. I remembered the time when I hated the combination of grapefruit and pineapple, but now it tasted great, and a slight change to the flavor told me that Kirill had put an iron supplement in it to help me replenish the lost blood. He can be really sweet when he doesn't think about it too hard.

Back to business then, or at least to my physical state. I was groggy, but no vertigo even once I sat up. The ribs hurt, ouch. Some muscle twinges in my abdomen that I could live with. And nothing got worse when I distangled myself from the sheets and stood up.

Kirill's bedroom has a full length mirror with a carved gold-leaf frame, the kind my grandmother used to call a tremo, so I could take full stock of my current state. There was a lovely collection of mottled bruises on my abdomen that meant I wouldn't be wearing a cropped top for the next few weeks, but then I owned a grand total of two – one with purple sequins that was a gag Valentine's gift from Anton and a skimpy bit of black leather I bought the time that Eudokia chose "fetish" as the theme of her New Year's party. Apart from that I had an imprint of Captain Redneck's paw on my left breast and an abrasion on my cheek; my face didn't look half as bad as I'd feared, so whatever potion Kirill had given me must have been some good alchemist shit.

The rest of me looked the same as always. Average height, average figure, average face. Straight brown hair that refused to behave unless threatened by a truckload of hair care products, preferably in the hands of someone more skilled at it than I was. I never tanned well, but the afternoon October sunlight accentuated the fact that whatever golden sheen my skin acquired in the Bahamas last month was gone the way of the dodo. Some of it might have been blood loss, but a visit to the tanning salon seemed to be in order to assure no-one took the impression that Kirill had talked me over to his side of the fence. Apart from that, just your average thirty-year-old. The same I've looked since my thirtieth birthday, back in 1954.

After freshening up in the ensuite bathroom and borrowing one of Kirill's hair ties to keep my mane out of my eyes, I rifled through the walk-in closet. For some reason every vampire I've known, even the sewer-dwellers in New York, had enough clothes to wear a completely different outfit in each day of the month. Though to be fair, the amount of clothes I kept here somehow expanded to fill three shelves. Probably because Kirill's housekeeper does laundry much better than the laundromat in my basement.

I found my favorite jeans, but all my tops at hand were lightweight summer wear; the weather had only turned colder recently, and I hadn't had the chance to bring over my warmer clothes. Even now it wasn't that cold, but I guessed that my jacket hadn't been cleaned of Olson's brains yet, so I would be venturing out coat-less. Finally I swiped a charcoal-grey pullover of Kirill's and hoped that if I rolled up the sleeves, they would hold and not end up as a straitjacket.

Outfit completed and looking mostly decent, I ventured out to forage for food. The moment I poked my head into the corridor, I smelled something decidedly not appetizing: hair dye. It looked like Anton was updating his image again.

I followed my nose to the second upstairs bathroom and found Anton bent over the tub, washing the last of the dye out of his hair. The suds obscured the new color, but I was sure I'd find out what it was soon enough.

He mumbled something that was lost in the sound of running water, but was probably meant to be ‘good morning'.

"Morning, Anton Kirillovich." I perched on the counter-top that held the twin sinks. "I thought you'd decided to stick with black?"

He flicked some water at me as he shut off the shower head. "I can stand only so many laypeople telling me I look like a vampire in one night."

"Doesn't seem to stop Kirill."

"My father stops those comments with a look. I, alas, have not inherited that ability."

I looked at Anton toweling off his hair and had to concur. Between the fact Anton's his last surviving direct descendant and the fact that after Anton's father exile to Siberia and subsequent death for his part in the 1863 mess in Poland, Kirill picked up the parental slack – from what I've heard, Anton's mother wasn't the most reasonable of women – they might call each other father and son, but somewhere in the intervening four generations of Rossovs the genes for imposing height and breadth of shoulders seemed to have taken a runner. Anton's not small, medium height, but he's got a dancer's build and a face that speaks of mischief rather than serious threat.

Which shows you what a crock physiognomy is, because while Kirill might be willing to listen first and shoot second, Anton's approach to serious danger is to tear it to shreds. Anton's becoming a vampire is a long tale I've only heard second-hand, but Kirill once told me of how he arrived to the rescue only to find the whole infamous Butor vampire clan neatly drowned in their own blood. Looking at the vampire in front of me, making faces as he brushed out his shoulder-length hair, no-one would ever guess.

Especially with the new blond streaks.

"I thought you'd given up on bleach." I handed Anton his shirt.

He shot me a wounded look as he buttoned it. "If you're about to start on the Spike jokes, don't. I don't even like the blighter."

I snorted. While Buffy was still running, we had a standing row – I rooted for Spike to win Buffy over, and Anton was of the Buffy-Angel-together-forever school of thought, with Angel-and-Lindsey as his second choice. With Skyler and Chuck rooting for Xander and Alyssa ready to rip out the throat of anyone who bad-mouthed Cordelia, post-Buffy nights at work were usually a war zone. I wouldn't put it past the North America supernatural lobby to have pressured Warner into canceling Angel just to curb the rampant fanaticism – a few years ago you couldn't move but for people talking over the last episode and what they thought would happen next.

"Relax. It's not Billy Idol – kind of early Gavin Rossdale, if anything." I tugged on one of his new blond strands. "Kind of late nineties, but it suits you."

"Says the lady with the broom haircut. Did you even brush that thing?"

I bristled, and I'm sure my hair did the same. "My hair looks fine."

"Not according to the fashion police." He threw me a green bulb that sported a lot of impressive marketing drivel.

I grumbled under my breath, but obediently put some of the oily liquid on my hair. Surprisingly it started to behave, falling smoothly down and looking obedient enough that I risked leaving off the hair tie.

Anton beamed at me, showing off his fangs.

"If that's supposed to scare me, it's not working," I snorted. "Is there any hope of breakfast?"

"Tea," he corrected me as he led the way downstairs to the kitchen.

Despite his claim, ‘tea' for me consisted of cereal, toast and pineapple slices. Call it what you like, breakfast is breakfast. Anton decided to join me in defying the time of day with half a box of pop tarts. Or maybe it was just the sugar – vampires don't eat much normal human food, but they tend to go for the strong tastes. One of the greatest jokes of vampire folklore is the fact that while some vampires will pass up the blood of a habitual garlic overdoser, just about all will happily munch on anything from general Italian to raw cloves of garlic.

"So what happened last night?" Anton asked between bites, pointing to my bruised cheekbone.

I shrugged and poured myself more pineapple-grapefruit juice. "Search me. I needed a Hand of Fatima to set up those wards downtown – it's a human-origin artifact, so not exactly legal, which meant I had to put out feelers in the right circles. Olson caught the bait."

"Who's Olson?"

"Nobody. Fifth-rate mage, no talent, no brains, just a lot of seedy connections. And that's was, not is – when those guys jumped us, they blew his head off with a Gatling without so much as a hello."

"That was where?"

"An alley off Laurence – wrong end of the warehouse district. There were five of them, big guys all, three giving off a redneck vibe and two dressed up in full East Coast rapper drag. They hit me, I hit back, then made my way here because I was pretty sure Kirill wouldn't kick me out."

Anton eyed me suspiciously. "That's all?"

"That's all. Nothing to bother yourself about."

"I beg to differ." He gave me another of those mischievous devil-in-disguise smiles. "Especially since I'm under strict orders not to let you out of my sight."

I almost choked on my toast. "From whom?!"

"Father, of course. He had a meeting, but he's worried about you."

Damn it. Kirill and his over-chivalrous ways. "I can take care of myself."

"Against five guys?"

"Three now." I showed my own teeth. They might not be as impressive as vampire fangs, but the meaning is universal.

Anton switched gears. "Please? The IRS audit's supposed to start tonight, and I need some fun company before tackling that."

Someday, I'm going to catch him practicing those puppy eyes in the mirror. "I thought you'd wriggle out of it?"

"No such luck." He gave me a double dose of puppy eyes from under almost-dry blond-streaked hair. "I didn't even wrangle an auditor who's in the know, so we'll have to be in full stealth mode at work."

"Poor Antosha." I covered my smirk by finishing off the juice. Anton keeps the books for Kirill's varied businesses, and evading the IRS is his favorite hobby. The fact that this time not only did he not escape an audit, but also would have to keep a layman auditor from finding, say, the boxes of Egyptian relics in the trading-house, had to be a blow to his ego.

He sniffled experimentally, and I kicked his ankle. "Don't push it. And maybe I'll grant you the honor of accompanying me home to feed the cat and then to the palace of excitement known as the municipal library."

"You say that like it's a bad thing, Mother."

Only vampiric speed saved him from the curse I threw his way. It dissipated into the wall, leaving behind a charcoal skull with snails coming out of the eyeholes that took me five minutes to wash off. By the end of it, he showed up again with a sheepish smile and my boots, cleaned from the grime and body parts, so I decided to forgive him. This time.