Mercy's Debt (Montgomery's Vampires Series Book One) by Sloan Archer Page B

entured. “To borrow your terminology, Michael, I intend no offense by what I’m about to ask. The thing is, though, I’m a little concerned about my safety. Have your vampire clients every, umm, bitten any of your chaperones?”
    Michael, Marlena, and Stephano snickered in unison. The back of my neck prickled in embarrassment. I thought that it was a valid question.
    “Oh, heavens no!” Michael chuckled. “No, we vampires sorted out our feeding problems long ago. We buy our plasma at blood banks just as humans go to the grocery store to buy milk. It has not always been that way, but throughout the centuries vampires have needed to evolve in order to keep up with the times. We cannot just go around killing people; there would be repercussions. It is the same for humans. That is not to say that some vampires do not slipup from time to time, just like humans do. But none of our clients ever have. Not once in the ninety-seven years that we have been in business.”
    I still had my doubts. It sounded a little too packaged and perfect. “So, nobody has even been hurt, then?”
    Stephano opened his mouth to answer, but Marlena delivered him a brutal assault of dagger eyes, silencing him promptly. Michael and Marlena exchanged a quick nonverbal dialogue that only husband and wife seem to be capable of having.
    Michael l ooked deflated. “I guess there is no point in hiding this,” he said. “If you do end up working for us, you are going to hear it from one of the other chaperones anyway. I rather you hear it from me, so at the very least your opinion of vampires will not be tainted by their speculations. Some of the chaperones have quite vivid imaginations.”
    This did not sound good. I k new there had to be a catch (well, in addition to the whole vampire part).
    “Umm, okay,” I said.
    “Throughout the years,” Michael continued unhappily, “a few girls have disappeared. Before you ask, no , none of them have ever disappeared while chaperoning our clients.”
    “What happened to them?” My voice was almost a whisper.
    Michael shrugged. “I honestly do not know. One day they were here, working for us regularly as a chaperone. The next- poof - they were gone. Honestly, Mercy, it breaks my heart because I do not know what became of any of them. There have been four girls who have vanished throughout the years: one in 1924, one in 1963, one in 1985, and then the last one.”
    I shuttered. “When did the last one disappear, Michael?” I asked.
    “She- Penelope- vanished just last month. ”
    Last month!
    “I am telling you, Mercy, it was like she literally disappeared from the face of the earth. Everything she owned was left inside her apartment: clothes, furniture, wallet, and even an envelope filled with five thousand dollars in cash.”
    He dabbed at his eye s self-consciously. “Sorry,” he muttered. “She worked for us for a little over three years. I thought of her like a daughter.”
    After he composed himself , I softly asked, “What makes you think that vampires had nothing to do with the disappearance? It seems like too much of a coincidence.”
    “W e are talking about only four girls vanishing in a time span of almost ninety years, Mercy,” Marlena said dismissively. “I’m sure even human businesses have had a few employees go missing during the same amount of time.”
    “I guess so,” I said, not convinced. I’m sure she wouldn’t think of it as “only” if she’d been the one to disappear.
    “There is what Marlena said,” Michael piped in, “plus the fact that vampires have no reason to hurt our employees. Our chaperones unequivocally know that they are going to be associating with vampires, and the vampires know just as equally that they will be associating with humans. So, it is not as if the chaperones will be exposed to some detail that they did not already know that would then make a vampire want to harm them. When a person is a chaperone for Dignitary, and when a client hires