Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland

savings that it would sting like hell.
    “If this isn’t what it seems,” I asked, “then what is it?”
    He opened his mouth, shut it again, looked away, then quickly looked back, his gaze flicking to the knife, then to me as if gauging how serious I was about sticking him. He should know me better than that.
    “I’m not sure where to start,” he murmured.
    “How about when you turned into one of the things you’re supposed to kill?”
    The words caused an involuntary flinch. I might have wished him dead a hundred and one ways, considered doing him in myself on many a long, lonely night—a girl had to have some fun—but I didn’t really want him dead. I didn’t really want to be the one to kill him. Too bad what I wanted had never once been something I could have.
    “I didn’t turn,” he said, “and I’m not one of them.”
    “Then why did Ruthie say you were a dhampir?”
    “Because I am!” he shouted.
    The fury in his voice startled me, and the knife I’d let drop to my side came back up.
    He slumped against the door, as if needing the support rather than blocking my way. His gaze lifted from the weapon to my face. “You’ve never heard of a dhampir?”
    “How would I? You think bizzaro legends from the land of crazy are something I keep up on?”
    “You will.” He took a breath, then another before beginning. “I was born of a human and a vampire.”
    “I didn’t think you knew who your parents were any more than I did.”
    “I don’t. All I know is human plus vampire equals dhampir.”
    “How can a vampire procreate? They’re dead.”
    “Myth. Vampires are as alive as you and me. They were born of a Grigori and a woman. When a vampire mates with a human, a dhampir is born.”
    His face was bleak, and I had to resist the urge to reach out to him once more. As he’d said, when we touched, bad things happened. I didn’t want to see again that flash of fang; I didn’t want to catch a whiff of blood.
    “How could I not have known this when we were kids?”
    “I didn’t know it. I came into my powers… later in life. Until then, I was like everyone else.”
    I gave him a long look. Jimmy had never, by any stretch of the imagination, been like anyone else.
    “You tell me you’re one of the good guys, but—” I broke off, uncertain. If what Jimmy was telling me was true, and after what I’d seen and heard from Ruthie, I knew it was, but how far could I trust him? By his own admission, he was tainted.
    “But what?” he asked.
    “How can you be trusted to help humans when you—”
    “Aren’t human?” he finished.
    “Well, yeah, but also, you kill them.”
    “Do not.”
    The retort came so quickly, with such a childish inflection—do not! Do too!—I was struck again with the urge to laugh. I suppose the human mind, when confronted with something so vast and unexpected, had to have a stress outlet, and laughter was mine. Jimmy’s was probably sex.
    I contemplated him in the now dusky light of the tack room. Black hair tumbled over his forehead, shirt unbuttoned, a sheen of sweat across his collarbone, dark eyes burning in a beautiful but tense face.
    “I know I’m not up on the legendary lore,” I said, “but vampires still kill people, don’t they?”
    “I don’t.”
    I shook my head. “I saw—”
    He was across the floor faster than my eyes could register, suddenly standing so close I caught the familiar scent of soap and cinnamon with the sharp tang of something else just beneath. My gaze caught on a droplet of sweat gliding down his neck, then pooling in the hollow of his throat. I had a nearly irresistible urge to sweep it away with my tongue.
    “What did you see?”
    “Fangs.”
    Just then a stray beam of the setting sun turned the glistening moisture the shade of—
    “Blood.”
    “Fangs and blood.” His mouth quirked. “That leads you to ‘murdering demon?’ “
    “One and one is two, Jimmy.”
    “Not always. Not anymore.”
    The scent of him was