A Taste for Justice

What a wonderful thing humanity is: passionate, intelligent, inquisitive, generous, full of hope and joy, noble of spirit, and above all, delicious.

Delilah paused in the doorway of the forest estate, her shadow stretching across the marble foyer long before the rest of her caught up to it. Behind her, six figures peeled themselves out of the dark: some in costume, a few not bothering with the pretense at all. Two vampires. Three humans who had simply run out of patience for their own species. One very large, very unnecessary crow that had followed them from the tree line and seemed to be enjoying itself immensely. Thunder cracked overhead right on cue, which Delilah found a bit on the nose, but she’d never once turned down good weather.

The Halloween party fell silent. Somewhere near the caviar, a champagne flute met imported tile and did not survive the introduction.

“Please,” Delilah said, stepping past a fog machine still dutifully pumping atmosphere nobody needed anymore, “don’t let us interrupt your charming little soiree. We’re only here for the refreshments.” She smiled, and a nearby jack-o’-lantern threw just enough candlelight to catch on her fangs. “Well. Refreshments, and perhaps a few valuables. We’re flexible people.”

The two hosts, tech founders dressed as werewolves who had made an obscene amount of money actually employing werewolves in their warehouses and pixies in customer service, stood frozen beside the caviar station. One had been mid-pitch about Q4 projections. His fake fur suddenly looked very, very cheap.

“The thing about hosting a party this deep in the woods, on Mischief Night of all nights,” Delilah mused, trailing one pale finger along a Grecian column strung with plastic cobweb, “is that no one can hear you scream. Statistically speaking. We haven’t run the experiment yet tonight, but I have a good feeling about the acoustics.”

What was supposed to be a simple job (grab some jewelry, drain a billionaire or two, leave a scathing Yelp review) went sideways fast. One of Delilah’s crew, a bitter, accountant-postured human dressed as a sad little vampire, the irony lost on absolutely no one, had spent the better part of a month quietly auditing Marcus Delacroix’s books before the job ever started. Tonight he got overenthusiastic with a hedge fund manager and tore straight through a curtain. The curtain caught a candle. The candle set off the sprinklers. The sprinklers ruined a very expensive wall of framed NFT certificates and melted half the decorations, which enraged a guest dressed as a headless horseman, who threw a punch that tall-and-brooding (a Victorian vampire costume, because why not lean into it) caught midair and returned with considerably more force.

Then it was chaos. Dignified chaos, but chaos. Orange and black streamers hung ruined and dripping from the sprinkler heads. A plastic skeleton toppled off its hook and landed, spread-eagled, directly in the caviar.

Delilah waded through the wreckage with the boredom of someone who had personally watched the guillotine come down on more heads than this party had guests, and who found modern Halloween disappointingly toothless by comparison. That was when she saw her.

A woman stood near the back terrace, rattled but holding her ground while chaos rearranged the room around her. Dark hair swept into an elegant twist. A white dress with an asymmetrical hem and orange accessories, a sexy Wilma Flintstone costume that somehow managed to be both ridiculous and devastating at the same time. Cheekbones sharp enough to make Delilah’s fangs ache on principle. And under the cheap party-store fog and everyone else’s drugstore perfume, she smelled like lavender and gunpowder, an intoxicating combination Delilah had absolutely no intention of ignoring.

Detective Elara Beaumont had been having a bad night before the vampires showed up. Four months in Shadowbrook, transferred from a quiet upstate precinct where the most supernatural thing she’d ever handled was a fortune teller with an unnervingly good hit rate. Here, vampires had union dues. Werewolves had a shop steward. She’d spent three of those four months undercover trying to nail Marcus Delacroix for gutting a pension fund, finally landed an invite to his tech-bro friends’ Halloween party to get close to his money people, and now there were actual, literal vampires robbing the place on Mischief Night.

Four months of groundwork, torched, on the one night she couldn’t afford it.

Nothing in the academy had covered this.

She was reaching for the gun strapped to her thigh when a cold hand closed around her wrist.

“I don’t think so, darling,” Delilah purred. “You’re far too lovely to waste on a sad accountant’s snack tray. You’re coming with me.”

“Excuse me. What? No. Absolutely not.” Elara tried to yank her hand free. The grip didn’t move an inch. “I have people expecting me. Important people. People who will notice I’m gone.”

“I’m certain they will.” Delilah hoisted her over one shoulder with the sort of ease that made the whole idea of gyms feel like a scam.

“PUT ME DOWN. This is kidnapping. That’s a FELONY!”

“Technically it’s a rescue,” Delilah called back, already bounding for the French doors. “You’re welcome.”

Behind them, someone sobbed about a ruined wine collection. The sad accountant was apologizing to a werewolf while readjusting his plastic fangs. A black cat, real or costume nobody could say, watched the whole thing from the piano with total indifference. Delilah really should learn her crew’s names one of these days.

The world dissolved into wind and dark and the distinctly improbable sensation of covering a great deal of ground without her feet once touching pavement. Elara had approximately four coherent thoughts on the way there, and not one of them survived contact with whatever Delilah was actually doing to move that fast without breaking a sweat.

---

Delilah’s townhouse turned out to be surprisingly tasteful. Dark wood, leather-bound books, none of the gothic cliché Elara had braced for. Though she did clock the total absence of a single jack-o’-lantern or cobweb, a strange omission for a woman who’d apparently timed a heist around the holiday. She found herself deposited on a velvet sofa while Delilah poured two glasses of wine, unbothered, like this was a normal Tuesday and not a felony in progress.

“I don’t drink with kidnappers,” Elara said, already on her feet, scanning for exits. Two windows, one door, the door she’d come through. The windows had bars. Decorative bars. Who installs decorative bars?

“Don’t be tedious. I didn’t kidnap you, I rescued you from a dull party about to involve sirens.” Delilah handed her the glass anyway. “Though you’d have been fine, Detective Beaumont.”

Elara’s stomach dropped. “How do you know that? Did you go through my purse?”

“Your badge fell out during transport. That, and you smell like department-issue leather and righteous indignation. Very distinctive combination.” Delilah settled into the chair across from her, crossing her legs with predatory grace. “Marcus Delacroix. Skimming from a pension fund that happens to cover three werewolf crews who work his warehouses. Word travels fast in certain circles when a man steals from the wrong kind of immortal, which is how he ended up on my radar in the first place. Warren, my accountant, the one currently apologizing to a werewolf about the curtain, has spent the better part of a month picking through Marcus’s books getting ready for tonight. Your name turned up in places it had no business being, asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. He flagged you to me before we ever walked through that door.”

Elara went very still. “You’re telling me your crew was investigating my case before I even knew any of you existed.”

“I’m telling you our interests overlapped, and once Warren found you, I made a point of learning the rest myself.” Delilah’s smile didn’t waver. “You should be flattered. I don’t research just anyone.”

“I’ve been on this for four months!” Elara was pacing now, the wine forgotten on the side table. “I learned actual cryptocurrency for this. I still don’t understand it. And you just plucked me out of the room like a garnish!”

“Better than letting you blow your cover arresting my crew in front of every camera in that house.”

“Your crew committed armed robbery!”

“Unarmed, actually. The tall one forgot his tire iron.”

“THAT ISN’T THE COMFORT YOU THINK IT IS.”

“Are you going to kill me?” The question came out sharper and higher than Elara intended.

“Don’t be dramatic. I’m going to finish my wine.” Delilah studied her over the rim of the glass, unhurried. “Though I will say, I’m terribly hungry, and you smell extraordinary. Killing someone the night before Halloween would be dreadfully cliché, though. I have standards.”

“Absolutely not. No. Not happening.” Elara backed into a bookshelf. “I have a medical thing. My blood is bad. Toxic, even.”

“What medical thing.”

“A blood thing!”

“You are a terrible liar for a detective.”

“I’m an excellent liar, I convinced a hedge fund manager I understood blockchain.” Elara grabbed the nearest book and held it up like a weapon. “Stay back, I know how to use this.”

“That’s a first edition Hemingway.”

“I’ll throw it.”

“Please don’t.”

“Then tell me what you actually want.” Elara’s voice cracked despite her best effort to keep it level. “Because I have been trained for hostage situations. I know the techniques. I will not break.”

“I don’t want information, darling.” Delilah rose slowly, setting her glass aside. “I want to bite you. Just a little.”

“NO.”

“Not even a nibble?”

“How is that different from a bite?”

“Less blood.”

“STILL NO.”

“You’re very stubborn for a woman holding a book hostage.”

“It’s literally in the manual.” Despite herself, a hysterical laugh climbed up Elara’s throat. This was insane. She was arguing about nibbling with an actual, historical vampire. “This isn’t how this is supposed to go. They told me supernaturals here were integrated. Law-abiding. I believed that, apparently, like an idiot.”

“How refreshingly naive of you.” Delilah tilted her head, amused rather than cruel about it.

“I am NOT naive. I’m from upstate. Our biggest supernatural event was a psychic predicting rain, which is not impressive when your town has weather.”

“You’re panicking.”

“I’m processing.” Elara lowered the book an inch. “How does this usually go? You drink, I die, you leave me in a dumpster somewhere?”

“Good lord, no. A dumpster. I have standards, Detective.” Delilah closed the distance between them, unhurried, giving her every chance to run. “A bite doesn’t kill. It takes a little. Most people find it rather pleasant, if they’re honest.”

“That’s the venom talking.”

“There’s no venom. Only endorphins. Biology is romantic that way.”

“Nothing about this is romantic. You kidnapped me.”

“I rescued you from blowing your cover at a supernatural crime scene. You’re welcome, again.” Delilah reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Elara’s ear, and the gesture was so unexpectedly gentle that Elara’s protest died somewhere in her throat. “I’ve been alive a long time, Detective. I’ve watched your species at its absolute worst and, occasionally, at its best. And right now, standing this close to you, I am finding it strangely difficult to remember why I bother keeping my distance from any of you.”

“Oh my god. Are you trying to seduce me?”

“Is it working?”

“No. You’re a criminal, I’m law enforcement, and this is…” Her grip on the book had gone slack without her noticing. “This is my first big case and you have completely wrecked it.”

Delilah’s expression softened, just slightly. “Your first.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t look at me like that.” Elara’s voice wavered. “I worked so hard to get out here. To prove I could handle a city with fangs and claws in it. And now I have to explain to my captain how I got kidnapped from my own crime scene.”

“Tell him I glamoured you.”

“Can you actually do that?”

“Yes. I simply haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

That surprised a real laugh out of Elara, small and involuntary. “That is somehow not the worst advice I’ve gotten tonight.”

“I’m occasionally useful.” Delilah was close enough now that Elara could feel the cool air coming off her skin, smell the wine and something older underneath, cedar and rain and centuries. “Tell me to stop, and I will. Right now. I mean it.”

“Stop what?”

“Getting closer.”

Elara looked down at the book still clutched in her hands, then back up at eyes that had watched empires rise and fall like weather patterns. She should have said stop. She should have gone for the gun. Instead what came out was, “I don’t understand what’s happening to me right now.”

“Neither do I,” Delilah admitted, quiet for the first time all night. “It’s been a very long time since anything made me feel uncertain. I find I don’t hate it.”

“This is wildly inappropriate.”

“Yes.”

“I should be arresting you.”

“You should.”

“I’m still holding a first edition Hemingway.”

“I noticed.”

Elara set the book down.

Delilah’s fingers traced along her jaw, tilting her face up with a tenderness that felt almost unfair given the circumstances. “Always gentle. I promise.”

She leaned in slow enough that Elara could have stepped back at any point, and didn’t. At the last second Delilah shifted, mouth grazing her jaw instead of her lips, trailing down the line of her throat until she found the pulse hammering there. One hand slid into Elara’s hair, fingers curling against her scalp, while the other settled at the small of her back and pulled her flush against two centuries of very solid muscle.

“Just breathe,” Delilah murmured against her skin. “I’ve got you.”

The bite, when it came, was nothing like Elara had braced for. A sharp point of pressure, and then heat spilled outward from it, down her spine and low into her stomach, a slow drag of warmth that had absolutely nothing to do with blood loss and everything to do with the way Delilah’s hand tightened in her hair like she was trying to hold onto something. Elara’s fingers dug into the vampire’s shoulders, unsure whether she meant to push her away or pull her closer, and her body decided that question for her. A sound came out of her that she was going to deny under oath for the rest of her natural life.

Delilah made a low noise against her throat in answer, and it was that, more than the bite itself, that made Elara’s knees actually give out.

She pulled back before Elara wanted her to, pupils blown wide, a bead of blood caught on her lower lip that she licked away without breaking eye contact. The fire popped behind them. Neither of them moved for a long moment, foreheads nearly touching, both of them breathing like they’d run somewhere instead of standing perfectly still.

“See,” Delilah said, voice rougher than before. “Still alive.”

“Barely.” Elara’s hand found the front of Delilah’s shirt, fisted in the fabric, and instead of pushing her away she used it to pull her closer. “Do that again.”

“Which part.”

“Any of it. All of it.” Elara heard herself say it and could not, for the life of her, dredge up the appropriate amount of professional shame. “I have never once wanted to arrest someone this badly and want them to touch me at the same time.”

“That’s the most romantic thing anyone has said to me in more centuries than I’d like to admit,” Delilah said, and kissed her.

It was different from the bite, slower and somehow more dangerous, deliberate in a way that made Elara’s pulse do something complicated. Delilah backed her into the wall beside the fireplace without breaking the kiss, one hand braced flat against the plaster by Elara’s head, the other working the top button of her ruined Wilma Flintstone dress like she had all the time in the world and fully intended to use every second of it.

“You’re very slow for someone who threw me over her shoulder two hours ago,” Elara managed, when Delilah’s mouth finally left hers to trail along her jaw.

“Slow is not the same as reluctant, darling.” Another button gave way. Delilah’s lips found the curve of her ear, voice dropping low enough that Elara felt it more than heard it. “I have survived two centuries by knowing the difference between wanting something badly and rushing it. Guess which lesson I intend to apply to you.”

Elara’s hands found their own project, fumbling at the buttons of Delilah’s shirt with considerably less patience, and Delilah laughed against her throat, low and delighted, without slowing down at all. By the time the dress hit the floor, Elara had abandoned all pretense of technique in favor of getting that shirt off by any means necessary, and Delilah, for someone who claimed to value patience, did not seem inclined to stop her.

They made it as far as the arm of the sofa before gravity took an interest, Delilah catching her before she actually fell and using the momentum to pull her down into her lap instead. Firelight caught the line of her throat, her collarbone, the pale stretch of skin Elara had spent the last hour thinking about far more than any woman with an active undercover assignment had any business doing. Elara kissed her way down that stretch of skin methodically, savoring how Delilah’s breath caught, proof that two hundred years hadn’t made her entirely unshakeable after all.

“For a detective,” Delilah said, voice rougher now, fingers tangled in Elara’s hair, “you are remarkably thorough.”

“I like to be complete in my investigations.”

“Is that what we’re calling this.”

“I haven’t decided yet. Ask me again in an hour.”

Delilah pulled her back up for another kiss, deeper this time, one hand splayed warm against the small of Elara’s back and the other sliding beneath the hem of what remained of her slip, and whatever answer Elara had been building toward dissolved into a sound she was absolutely not going to be proud of later. When Delilah finally stood, lifting her easily off the sofa in a move that had no business being as attractive as it was, Elara wrapped her legs around her waist without waiting to be asked and let herself be carried down the hallway, still kissing her the entire way like stopping might break whatever spell they were currently operating under.

They ended up in a bedroom Elara only half registered, high ceilings and heavy curtains and a bed that had definitely cost more than her yearly salary, and if the details blurred at the edges after that into warmth and low laughter and Delilah’s voice murmuring something in a language Elara didn’t recognize against her collarbone, that was between the two of them and nobody else, least of all a captain who did not need to know a single thing about it.

Afterward, Elara lay tangled in expensive sheets that smelled like cedar smoke, staring at the ceiling, feeling more thoroughly undone than any four months of undercover work had left her.

“I have to still do my job,” she said eventually, mostly to the ceiling.

“Do you, though.” Delilah’s fingers traced idle patterns along her collarbone, right over the fading bite mark. “From where I’m lying, it looks a great deal like a crisis of conscience.”

“That’s not… I’m not…” Elara caught the wandering hand and laced their fingers together instead of pushing it away. “You’re a terrible influence.”

“The worst,” Delilah agreed, entirely too pleased with herself. “And yet here you are.”

“Don’t tempt me. Or, don’t stop tempting me. I genuinely don’t know which one I mean.”

“I’ve been tempting you since I threw you over my shoulder, darling. Little late to start minding it now.”

Elara’s dress hadn’t survived the evening, so Delilah handed her a pair of black jeans and an oversized sweater that smelled like cedar smoke, and made no effort to hide that she enjoyed watching her put them on. Somewhere in the house a clock insisted it was well past midnight, an hour that used to mean something to Elara, back when she still kept a bedtime.

Neither of them said much on the way down to the garage. Delilah held out a hand at the top of the stairs anyway, and Elara took it, and neither of them mentioned that this was entirely unnecessary for a grown woman perfectly capable of managing her own staircase.

---

The motorcycle was a gorgeous vintage Triumph pulled from a garage Elara hadn’t noticed on the way in. Delilah handed her a helmet and swung a leg over the seat with the same unbothered ease she did everything else.

“You have a motorcycle,” Elara said, still working through several other things she now knew about this woman that she had not known three hours ago.

“I have a few.” Delilah patted the seat behind her. “Unless you’d rather walk, Detective.”

Elara climbed on and wrapped her arms around Delilah’s waist, and told herself it was purely for safety.

The ride back was shorter than she wanted it to be. Fog machines had given way to the real thing, drifting low over lawns strung with real cobweb and real bats circling the streetlights. It was well past the hour for trick-or-treaters, but Mischief Night was living up to its name regardless: someone’s oak tree had gone ghostly with toilet paper, a fresh egg dripped down a mailbox they passed, and more than one jack-o’-lantern grinned from a porch nobody had bothered to leave a light on for. An animatronic witch, apparently on a timer nobody remembered to set, cackled at them from an otherwise dark yard. The whole city smelled like woodsmoke and pumpkin and something colder underneath it, autumn finally deciding to commit.

Elara pressed closer than the road strictly required and did not examine that decision too closely either.

Too soon, they pulled up outside her building. Delilah killed the engine, and the sudden quiet felt loaded with everything neither of them had said yet.

Elara climbed off, pulling the helmet free. “I watched a robbery, got kidnapped, bitten, and somehow ended up in your bed. That is not a night. That is an incident report.”

“A remarkably thorough one, I’d say.” Delilah stayed seated, watching her with an expression Elara couldn’t quite read, which was new. She’d gotten fairly good at reading people. Necessary skill, in her line of work.

“I should still arrest you.”

“You probably should.”

“I’m not going to. Not tonight.”

“Smart woman.” Delilah’s smile turned wicked. “You know where to find me, if you change your mind.”

“Wait.” Elara caught her arm before she could restart the bike. “You flew tonight. When you grabbed me at the party. There is no version of events where you ran that fast carrying a grown woman over your shoulder.”

“I have no idea what you mean. I’m simply very athletic.”

“Vampires can fly.”

“Can we?” Delilah tilted her head, all false innocence. “Seems excessive, honestly. We’re already immortal and devastatingly attractive. Flight feels like showing off.”

Elara narrowed her eyes, already turning the question over the way she turned over every piece of evidence she couldn’t yet place.

“Go inside, Detective,” Delilah said, reaching up to cup her jaw, “before I decide to kidnap you again tonight, and neither of us gets any sleep.”

“That’s not…” The rest of the sentence died against Delilah’s mouth. This kiss was slower than the ones before it, unhurried in a way that made Elara’s toes curl inside her ruined heels, two centuries of patience packed into a single, devastating goodnight. When Delilah finally pulled back, she was smirking like she knew exactly what she’d done.

“Goodnight, Detective. Happy Halloween.”

“It isn’t Halloween until tomorrow.”

“Close enough.” Delilah winked and kicked the engine back to life before Elara could get another word out. “Tomorrow night I intend to be absolutely insufferable about all the humans dressed as vampires. The cultural appropriation of it, honestly.”

She peeled off into the dark with a roar that was almost certainly a noise ordinance violation, taillight shrinking down the block until it vanished around the corner.

Elara stood in her doorway, fingers drifting to her throat where the mark had already faded to almost nothing. A plastic skeleton swayed on her neighbor’s balcony in the cold breeze. Her case was in ruins. She’d slept with a criminal she was actively investigating. She still didn’t have the woman’s last name. Tomorrow she’d figure out what to tell her captain. Tomorrow she’d try to salvage the investigation, or what was left of it.

She laughed out loud, alone on her own stoop, feeling more alive than she had in four months of careful, exhausting pretending.

Tomorrow was Halloween. Somehow, that felt exactly right.

Vampires could fly. She was certain of it.

And she was absolutely going to prove it.