Present Tense: Pleasure Times Four (Out of the Fire Book 3)

by Candace Blevins

  “Nothing is wrong,” Etta told him. “But there are some things you need to be apprised of. I can see you’re worried so I’ll jump in while you prepare your plate.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Eunice and James double-teamed Kelsey. Tell me what you feel from her.”

  He looked at her and stretched out feelers, sensing her energy. “She’s stronger. Could be from feeding from lust, but it feels different.”

  “Excellent. In a nutshell, during orgasm, it became apparent that her animal is mongoose.”

  Multiple thoughts came to Fabio at once. First, surprise that Eunice hadn’t killed her at the very idea she might somehow be able to take him over even easier than she could anyone else. Second, happiness because Eunice didn’t seem completely freaked, and he hoped beyond hope this meant their friend might finally allow himself to get close to someone besides his closest friends at Drake Security.

  And finally, hope that this meant the four of them could become a poly group for real.

  He and Collosa had tried it with a nice submissive deer once, but Eunice refused to have any part of it. A threesome with him living in the house but not a part of it was awkward. It wasn’t going to work long-term anyway — no matter how strong the little deer was — living with a grizzly, a leopard, and a mongoose was too much for her unless she was in bondage. Constant bondage was fun for a few weeks, but in the end, it meant she was higher maintenance than they were prepared for.

  With her gone, they’d never attempted it again.

  But Eunice liked Kelsey. If he’d fucked her and things hadn’t gone to shit, maybe it could work.

  Maybe.

  “Usually,” Etta said, “the vampire has more control over shifters he or she resonates with, not less. It’s why most of the powerful Strigorii form a guard unit primarily of their animal, because they can bind them tightly enough to be assured of their loyalty during the daytime, while the vampire is most vulnerable.”

  Etta took a drink of wine and set the glass down. “In this case, Marco and I set Eunice in place as Kelsey’s Dominant. She was bound to him as a submissive. He was over her in the hierarchy when the connection between them formed. There’s a blood bond, but Eunice controls it, rather than Kelsey.”

  Which completely explained why Eunice wasn’t freaked the fuck out.

  “It’s why I knew when she rose, when she was weak, when she was telepathing with ya’ll,” Eunice said.

  Fabio keyed into her again. “She hasn’t had much blood?”

  “I let her drink some from me when we finished with her, but she primarily fed lust from me.” Collosa’s smiled from ear to ear. “Damn, dude. Wait till you feel it. Thought my toenails were gonna come out of my dick. Bigger rush than her feeding from blood, when she sucks at your lust while you’re fucking coming in her.”

  Fabio looked at Eunice, who shrugged. “She doesn’t have permission to feed from me.”

  Dude was seriously missing out, but this way, Fabio only had to take turns with Collosa, so it wasn’t like he was going to try to convince the asshole to feed her.

  Kelsey walked into the geek unit of Drake Security and smiled at the friends she’d made. A few were still wary of a vampire working with them, but most had accepted her.

  She’d only seen Chance a few times, since he preferred working days. His outfit made her eyes want to bleed — a shirt made up of swirls of day-glow green, florescent lavender, and a brilliant orange. Pants in the same luminous lavender, orange sneakers, and a radiant green belt she thought might actually be radioactive.

  “Fuck, I forgot my sunglasses,” she said, squinting at his outfit. Crows were supposed to like shiny things, but he seemed to like colorful as well as shiny.

  “Hey, if I gotta be here at night, I’ll bring my own color. Got a job that’s going to take both of us, and since you have that annoying sunlight allergy, I’m here at night.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “One we aren’t working on in here.” He stood and walked out of the room, motioning for her to follow.

  Three doors down, he put his palm to the reader, said his name, and the door opened. “It’s keyed for us, Aaron, Nathan, and the Fabulosa trio, for now. If you and I can’t figure this out, they’ll probably add some helpers. Once we start planning for the mission, we’ll add Panda and Mira. Probably a few others.”

  The door closed, and he pointed to a board. “A counter insurgency in Moldova captured someone under our protection. They have a team of Russian hackers on their side, and fuck if I can figure out how to get past their firewall. Hardened to hell and back. I can’t even figure out who’s on the team. The coding is in Russian, so I’m assuming Russian hackers.”

  “Not necessarily. Do you speak Russian, or are you using a translator?”

  “I know the coding in Russian, but I don’t speak it.”

  “I mostly only know the coding as well, other than some phrases here and there. We’re going to need someone who knows more.”

  “Aaron is fluent.”

  “He isn’t going to want to spend the night in here with us.”

  “Probably not. Why do you think we’ll need a native speaker?”

  “I hacked into the—” She stopped herself from saying she’d gone into the Vatican. She didn’t know Chance well enough to admit to that front and center. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it was in Italian, and I know about as much Italian as I do Russian. I brought in a native speaker to help me out. They’d used odd words here and there — instruction pages, notes, echoes — that would’ve thrown someone off using a translator. Things you’d only know if you’d grown up there. Stuff not even in the urban dictionary for Italy.”

  “Which means we need more than Aaron, probably.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. We’ll start with him. Meanwhile, I’m kicked into a server in Minsk. Looks like we’re hacking from there.”

  “What’s the goal?”

  “Eyes and ears would be good, but anything we can get our people would be helpful.”

  “Okay, while you see about getting us a native Russian speaker, let me poke around.”

  Two hours later, she was in, and she had data trickling onto a hard drive in Hong Kong that immediately saved to a second hard drive in India, where it was encrypted and sent to a cloud server in Taiwan. It was a piece of cake to hack in and take the data from there in a way no one would ever follow.

  Twenty minutes later, she had eyes and ears.

  Chance had handled little jobs for her as needed, and it’s possible she’d come off as a royal bitch while she worked. She blew out a breath and looked at him. “I was harsh a few times. I apologize.”

  “No need, I completely understand. If you stop to be nice you lose your train of thought. Been there, done that. I’m gonna bounce the video and audio feeds through UAE. We own a server there. Safer to bound a stream we want to see closer to real time.”

  “Do I need to apologize to Aaron?” She’d only needed him the first hour, until she got the hang of what they were doing.

  “I don’t believe so.”

  She watched traffic going and coming to the server in Moldova while Chance worked. She didn’t speak Romanian, but the machine translators had been enough once she was into their system. She looked up when Aaron stepped into the room.

  “Excellent work, Kelsey. When Chance is impressed, I’m even more so. Can you poke around in their network and look for information without being seen?”

  “Sure.”

  “If you think you’ve been spotted, or might be, stop. Top priority is getting our client back alive. It’s too late for unharmed. Once we get him back, if we can give him their future plans — battle plans, hijacking plans, whatever — he’ll be a lot less inclined to nuke them for torturing him. We need to take them down, but we haven’t been able to accurately forecast their moves ahead of time.”

  “No one sees me unless I mean for them to.”

  When Mira brought Kelse
y home, their girl was shaken. Eunice could feel it when the car was still five miles away, so he was waiting outside for her when the Drake SUV pulled up to the house.

  He opened her door and looked in. “What’s wrong?”

  Mira rattled it off as if she were reciting a grocery list, but Eunice knew the snake shifter had feelings in there somewhere, even if she rarely showed them.

  “She had to look through email correspondence while she found which accounts needed to be downloaded to our servers for further analysis. While doing so, she saw humans tortured, and read snippets of battle plans, including the torture of...”

  Kelsey buried her head in Eunice’s chest while she was still seated, and Mira stopped talking and started again.

  “Future plans are kept on a computer without network access. There’s one with access beside it, for research. She was able to pull off some of what’s been researched in the past four days — maps, historical information. She thinks they’re going to take over schools in order to further their agenda.”

  “Time frame?”

  “No data.” She looked at Kelsey in Eunice’s arms. Not in judgment, but curiosity.

  “You were never allowed emotion,” Eunice pointed out. “She was.”

  “She’s destined for power. Scary power. Hers already feels centuries old, and yet her age is that of a newborn. You can’t have so many emotions when you wield that kind of power.”

  “I disagree,” Eunice told her. “Aaron Drake loves his children. Nathan loves Panda.”

  “But both can turn it off for work.”

  “Not off,” Eunice said. “Down, certainly, but not off.”

  She didn’t look as if she believed him, so he tried again. “When they get pissed, they use their anger. Heat. Fire. It’s there, along with the pain, but they use it to strengthen their resolve.”

  “I am angry at the people who would use children’s lives to further their agenda — at the kind of evil who can do this without...” She looked at Kelsey again. “She isn’t weak. You must teach her not to appear so.”

  Eunice unfastened Kelsey’s seatbelt and urged her out of the vehicle. “I’ll get her settled in for the day and then I’ll be in. I’m assuming there are blueprints to go over?”

  “There are. Chance is still working on a way to get into the offline computer. Your girl there says it’ll either have to be carried out whole, or a hacker will need to go in and sit at the computer to extract the information.”

  “We can’t just take the hard drives?” He’d done that before to bring back data for the geeks.

  “There’ll be a failsafe on the drives,” Kelsey said, her face buried in his chest, “to make sure they’re booted in that machine. If they aren’t, they’ll self-destruct. With the encryption they use, there won’t be a way to get data off without booting them. Just reading through them on a different machine...” She took a breath and shook her head. “It could take years to break the encryption.”

  “Chance said decades,” Mira said.

  Eunice stroked Kelsey’s back. “Okay. So we take enough manpower in to pull a desktop unit out.”

  Mira shook her head, and Kelsey took a breath and moved a step back.

  “She’ll explain it,” Mira told him. “It’s complicated. I need to get back. See you in, what... an hour?”

  “Hour and a half, and you’ll have all three of us. Aaron will need to send a daytime guard.”

  Eunice figured seeing the live torture shots was probably enough to warrant this level of emotion from Kelsey, but it felt like more.

  He walked her to the front porch, turned her to face him, and cradled both her cheeks in his palms. “Give it to me in one sentence.”

  “You’re going to have to take a hacker in — someone who can put hands on that computer, get through the booby traps, and extract the data.”

  Eunice walked her inside, closed the front door behind them, locked the security system down, and listened to the confirming chirps. He went to the house speaker and pushed the button to broadcast upstairs. “Assholes, I locked our security system down. Need both of you downstairs. Don’t break any ankles, but get your asses out of bed and moving.”

  The latter part let them know they weren’t actively under attack, but that he’d just moved them to high security and he needed to let them know why.

  “Who can do that?” he asked on the way down the stairs with her.

  “Chance could, but it would take him longer than me. I can, but my contract says I don’t have to do anything physically dangerous.”

  She went vampire fast the rest of the way down the steps, and she was sitting on her sofa when he entered her room. “I was worried you’d be upset they’d let a girl drive me home.”

  “Mira is more than capable of keeping you safe on the drive from there to here. I’d trust her to have my back any day of the week.”

  “I think Australians are more afraid of snakes than Americans. I like her, but I don’t think I’d want her at my back.”

  “Are there King Cobras in Australia? I had the idea they were from India.”

  “Right, but we have plenty of others that can kill you dead.”

  “Mongooses are immune. Eunice isn’t as afraid of her as the rest of us,” Fabio said as he walked in. “My cat has a healthy respect for her. I do, too, but that’s because she’s a bad-ass, not because I’m afraid of her.”

  “But you are?”

  “Maybe a little, but I’d trust her with my back. She’s damned good.”

  “I’m guessing we aren’t down here because Mira freaked our tiny vampire the fuck out.” Collosa closed the door behind him, put his hand to the touchpad, and looked over the diagram of the house when it came up on the screen.

  “Everything locked, no breaches.” He turned to Eunice. “What’s going on?”

  “Moldova. Our girl got into their system. Real time torture, historical video of torture, and she had to go through emails to figure out which accounts to download from their servers for our analysts to comb through.”

  Kelsey shook her head. “That’s not why I’m upset. I mean, sure, I had to work hard to keep from crying in front of everyone when the torture videos came up, but...” She crossed her arms and felt cold, which meant she needed to pull herself together. Vampires don’t feel the cold. When she did, it was a trigger to tell her something wasn’t right. Usually, something emotional.

  “Their plans, their plots, campaigns, whatever you want to call them — the bastards are smart. They have them on a computer without network access. No hardware on it that can be used to network out. A single USB outlet, boobytrapped so if you don’t know the codes, the unit will self-destruct if you try to take data off it.”

  “Self-destruct?” James rubbed his jaw. “You mean fry its own motherboard, or do you mean there’s a bomb?”

  Eunice hadn’t understood, but James did. “Explosives. Bomb. It’s set to send an EMP pulse, which will kill electronics, and the bomb is set to go when it doesn’t have the electrical impulse from the computer.”

  “So if we kill their electricity, they all die?” Fabio asked.

  She shook her head again. “They have a solar system set up, a large battery bank, plus several huge tanks of diesel on the property. No outside electricity comes in. There’s nothing to cut.”

  “There’s always something to cut,” Eunice told her. “The question is whether that’s the best choice, and how close we need to be to do it. If we can get the data, we should do so. If we can’t, we put our own ordnance in and blow the place to kingdom come after we’ve rescued the client.”

  Fabio said something that sounded like key-all-g-set, and she frowned at him.

  “It’s the pronunciation of an anacronym that stands for kill-em-all-and-let-god-sort-em-out,” James explained. “We’ll leave you, so you can do whatever it is you do before you go into your hidey-hole.”

  They all gave her a hug and a chaste kiss, and left. She took a hot shower, fixed her hair,
spent time getting her makeup right, put a sheer robe on over sexy panties and bra, and climbed into her hole. Dying at night meant she’d stay exactly as she was — no moving around meant her hair and face would look the same when the sun went down as it did when the sun came up.

  28

  Eunice looked across the Drake Security jet at Kelsey, sitting in Collosa’s lap, playing couple’s chess with Panda and Mira. It seemed to be keeping Kelsey’s mind off what was to come, so he was grateful it was working.

  Logic said he should be jealous — that he should want Kelsey with him. That he should be jealous of the grizzly’s size, and the fact she looked so fucking comfortable in his lap.

  But they should return in plenty of time for them to make Sunday night’s D&D game with his friends — people who were destined to become their friends. It’d be something he and Kelsey had that his housemates didn’t. And four hours ago, he and Kelsey had talked about the mission they were heading towards in terms of walking into Mordor and destroying the one ring, except they weren’t carrying the ring in with them.

  Fabio was in the back room, sleeping, which was probably what Eunice should be doing. James could handle Kelsey if she had another meltdown, but he didn’t think she was going to.

  She’d volunteered, but only to keep Chance from having to go. She knew she could do it faster than him, and could survive more damage than him — assuming they got her out before sunrise. She was terrified, and had come to Drake Security with the understanding she wouldn’t have to do anything dangerous, and her first trip out was one of the most dangerous ops Eunice had done in at least eighteen months. Well, except for the big battle, and some of the things leading up to it, but still, this wasn’t going to be a piece of cake.

  But other than the one meltdown, the second time they’d run through the hologram of the interior, she’d performed brilliantly. To her credit, she’d held on during the run-through and hadn’t completely lost it until it was finished. Yes, she was an emotional female, but she’d done her best to remain professional.