“They never did care about each other’s lives,” Kamila pointed out. “That wasn’t ever their style, but you’re right. Anything the vampires want to protect badly enough to work together to achieve is probably something we should find and disrupt.”
“Ugh. It makes sense, and I know it makes sense, but I still hate it.” Tess put the pillow back. “I know I’m being a whiny bitch. And I’ll be my usual gung-ho self after I get a little bit of shut eye.”
I laughed and leaned over Kamila and Zarya to kiss Tess on her forehead. “It’s okay. I totally get it. I’d prefer a quick solution so we can stop running and just enjoy the sunshine. Throw the ball for Daisy a few times.” I licked my lips. “Cold beer. Sex. Fried things. Not necessarily in that order,” I finished with my best leer.
“Right?” She smiled and rested her head on Zarya’s back, and we pulled the blanket up to our shoulders.
I had to hope that day would come eventually, our mystical day in the sun. A day when the danger was past, and we could all rest secure in the knowledge that we could live without looking over our shoulder constantly. I didn’t know when it would come, but I had to cling to that hope. Otherwise, what else was there?
14
I put my best effort into sleeping, keeping my body still even as my thoughts whirled between hope and concern. Thanks to those emotions playing tennis in my mind, sleep eluded me, and I deiced to listen to my partners instead.
Kamila drifted off first. She usually fell asleep quickly after sex, and Kamila wasn’t the kind of person to let things take up space rent-free in her brain anyway. She was passionate, but she let her thoughts and feelings out right away, and then she moved on. Nothing troubled her conscience because she didn’t let it.
Tess fell asleep next. I hadn’t thought anyone could snore in a delicate way, but Tess managed it. I always found myself struck by the way Tess was such an incredibly dominant, ass-kicking person in her waking life, but became so delicate and downright dainty when she didn’t have to be tough. She was easy to love when she so chose during her unguarded moments. Like now.
An hour after I lay down, I quietly extracted myself from the pile of people in the bed. Kamila, who’d been cuddled into me, didn’t wake up. She moved over a little, giving everyone a bit more room. Tess didn’t seem to notice either, but Zarya slipped out of bed right away. She padded over to the corner of the room where we’d left our packs and pulled out our bathing suits, mine from the cruise ship and hers from Mexico.
Apparently, we were going downstairs to the pool. I guessed I wouldn’t mind.
We headed down and got big beach towels from the pool attendant. There wasn’t any shortage. At this time of day, the pool was deserted, so we had the area to ourselves. It was a gorgeous, luxurious space, a little surprising for this area. The pool itself was deep and beautifully designed, with an elaborate mosaic at the bottom and corresponding tile around the rim. Potted plants abounded all around the perimeter, ensuring privacy and filling the pool area with a heady floral scent. A waterslide led into one part of the pool. There was even a kiddie pool separate from the one we chose, so adults didn’t have to deal with the unpleasant side of sharing a pool with small children who approached swimming as a contact sport.
I jumped in and went for a quick swim, moving my body to shake away any lingering tension. It felt good to push my body through the resistance the water offered, even though the whole point of holing up here was to give my body a rest. This was different. This was by choice, and of course, it involved water.
The fact that the water magnified and reflected sunlight didn’t hurt, either. We swam in a glorious, azure killing zone for vampires, and it was perfect.
I got out of the pool after a short time. All I’d been doing was looking to use the exercise to reset my brain, not get a real workout in. When I’d accomplished that, I dried myself off and sat beside Zarya on one of the lovely teak lounge chairs. I considered bringing over one of the shade umbrellas, but decided against it. The sun felt too good, too safe.
I noticed Zarya had made the same choice. Her pale skin was getting pinker by the second. “Aren’t you worried about sunburn?”
She smiled mysteriously and gave me a little laugh. “Witch, remember? I can cure my sunburns anytime I want. And after being locked up in the dark all those months, I find I’m craving sunlight more than I ever did before.”
“I guess I can understand that. Not firsthand, but you know what I mean.” I settled into my chair, smiling at her beautiful form. “So you couldn’t sleep either?”
She sat back and closed her eyes. “When I got here, I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that bed and sleep for a week. Once we started talking about musty vampire fortresses, I was done.”
“Work hazards. Ours are a bit different from the rest of the world. I’m sorry you’re not getting that rest.”
“Don’t be. We have to talk about these things. We can’t tiptoe around them because I went through something. And to be honest, I’m not that fragile. I want to take the fight to them. I want to get revenge for what was done to me. Sometimes, it’s going to have a negative impact on me, and that’s just the way things are. I’m working through it, and it will be okay.”
I believed her when she said it would be okay. Her character shone through like a beacon, even in the sun. “Knowing you’re strong doesn’t mean I’d rather not put you in situations that force you to be strong, if that makes any sense.”
She smiled over at me, her expression posed between interest and desire. She looked out over the fence. The town of Uruará stretched below the hotel from here. “It’s interesting how Brazil works. We’re up here on this hill, in a luxury hotel enjoying the sunshine and five-star amenities. And there is a lot of money here, a decent-sized middle class. It’s possible to live a very normal Western life in Brazil.”
“Okay.” I hadn’t given much thought to the economic situation of Brazil before. I knew parts of New England had a lot of Brazilian immigrants, but Maine was not one of them. That was the extent of my knowledge. That and something about soccer. Football, I corrected myself.
“At the same time, there are these pockets of deep, deep poverty. The poor neighborhoods, called favelas, would make your hair turn white. But here we sit, in the middle of someplace as beautiful as this.” She sighed and pushed her long hair behind her. “It reminds me of when I was young. That juxtaposition, that stark inequality, makes me think of the old days.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say. We had some pretty deep pockets of poverty back in the States, too. I’d been in places in Maine that still used outhouses and kerosene because running water and electricity weren’t things. In other places, like Appalachia, it could be worse. But that didn’t change the poverty rate here.
She smiled at me and put a hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. I’m just being maudlin. Would you believe for a period of time in my youth, I was a Poor Clare?”
My eyes almost popped out of my head. “I thought you were a witch.”
“I said for a period of time.” She laughed. “I didn’t say I stuck around. There weren’t a lot of options for women who wanted to help the poor back in my time.” She relaxed again.
A little spout of water, almost like a miniature whale might make, blew out of the pool.
I knew that spray hadn’t been natural. I could feel it. I also knew I hadn’t done it. “Zarya!” I hissed the words, just in case of prying eyes. “Someone could see!”
“There’s no one around.” Her gentle smile turned mischievous. “And besides, one of the things you need to learn as a water-using Ferin is how to manipulate the water without being obvious about it. It’s fun to do the big, flashy things. That thing you did where you put a typhoon all around my island? It was brilliant. But sometimes, the work calls for more subtlety than that. You try.”
I gave her a look because I was enjoying the sun—and view—too much to concentrate on using my powers. In other words, I was struck lazy
by the fragrant air and cloudless sky. “We’re supposed to be hiding from the vampires, not hanging a massive sign out our front window saying, come on, here’s good eating.”
An arm made completely of water reached up from the pool to tickle my bare feet. It was incredibly detailed.
“Fine, gorgeous. Just be discreet. If you’re capable.” She responded by sticking her tongue out at me and laughing. In that moment, she was utterly filled with life, and far away from the hunted being we’d become.
I made little ripples in the water, all in a line as though someone were dropping pebbles into it. Zarya laughed with delight and one-upped me with a display that looked like rocks skipping over the surface. I distorted the water as it would be if someone were swimming underneath it, and Zarya stilled it behind me.
I made the water run up the waterslide instead of down, spilling away in a rainbow curtain. It was—fun. We were relaxed, and as close to living as we’d felt in some time.
We played in the water for a while, and then I got an idea. I jumped back into the blue depths. Zarya followed me, presumably curious as to what I had in mind. I dove deep down to the bottom. I knew I couldn’t drown, but I still had a moment of panic as I stayed at the bottom for a full minute, then three.
Zarya joined me there, eyebrows drawn together. Had she just not realized I hadn’t tried this before?
I exhaled, creating a bubble. Then I spoke into the bubble. “How long do you think we can stay down here before hotel staff comes looking for us and thinks we’ve drowned?” I pushed the bubble over to her ear, where she popped it to get her message.
She threw her head back and laughed, dark hair floating around like Medusa’s snakes. Then she climbed on top of me and kissed me.
Kissing down here wasn’t like kissing on the surface. For one thing, I didn’t need to come up for air. I supposed that meant I didn’t need to come up for air on the surface, either, but it still felt natural up there. Down here, I could kiss Zarya for hours without having to break contact. Her nipples hardened against me, and she rocked her hips to get some traction.
I met her eyes and slid my finger along the hem of her bikini bottoms. Getting consent down here was tricky because every sound was distorted. I didn’t know exactly what Zarya had been through with the vampires, but I wanted to make extra certain she was fully on board with anything we did so soon after everything she’d endured.
She met my eyes and nodded. Her pupils were wide with lust, and it was hard for me to doubt her desire. As if she wanted to make extra certain I knew what she wanted, she moved the fabric aside to slip my finger underneath.
In one motion, my fingers slipped into her silken heat, thumbing at the core of her nerves with a delicate, staccato beat. She held on to my shoulders, bucking her hips wildly as she took her pleasure. When she came, she clenched around those fingers hard enough that I wondered if she could break them. It was immortal Kegel power made real. I smiled. There really were benefits to being a Ferin.
She didn’t drift off into a haze but took me in hand herself. She had long fingers, wrapped softly around my length as she began a rhythm that built slowly. Then she sped up, but only for a moment, slowing down when she sensed me begin to tense. I leaned back against the wall of the pool and let her do her work, losing myself in the rhythm of the strokes and the pure sensation of pleasure.
This time, my orgasm did punch out of me, hard and furious and without warning. She tucked me back into my bathing suit and pulled me up to the surface, and not a moment too soon. Two hotel employees were running out from the bar, bellowing in English about an explosion in the pool.
I blushed, and Zarya covered her mouth, choking back a laugh.
“We were . . . playing around. Splashing,” I said.
“Ten feet of water? Please . . . no more. Too much fun,” the man said, his face sour for having to deal with tourists and their disrespectful ways.
“You have my word, sir. No more jets of water,” I told him in a grave tone.
“Can you guarantee that?” Zarya asked me, her voice low.
“I can. The next time, you won’t see me coming.”
15
When we got back up to our room, I was ready, at last, for sleep. I didn’t know if it was because of the exercise I’d gotten or because of the fun we’d had playing with the water. It could have been down to the second orgasm I’d had in only a few short hours. My money was on the laughter, but my libido was betting on the orgasm. I might be Ferin, but I was still male.
I slept longer than any of the others, but Zarya’s bleary eyes told me we could have used even more.
Kamila had gone for more food, delicious local treats from downstairs, while I was still out. “I wanted to wait and see what you wanted, but I didn’t think it would be safe for very long.”
I looked out of our huge windows. The sun had indeed gone down.
I winced. “We shouldn’t be sending anyone out alone right now anyway.”
She waved a hand. “It’s all good. We all needed the sleep, and I had Daisy with me.”
We decided we wouldn’t be leaving the room after dark. While the room might wind up feeling claustrophobic by the end of the night, it was a hell of a lot safer than exposing ourselves to the vampires right now. We flipped on the television and commenced some serious relaxation, which allowed us all to calm our nerves and further heal.
I couldn’t quite shake something Zarya had mentioned, though, and after we’d been watching people act out a drama in a language only one of us could understand, I finally spoke up. “So Zarya, you brought up something while we were out by the pool.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “I brought up a few things.”
The other girls snickered at her double entendre.
I blushed, but I pressed on. “You were talking about the favelas.”
Tess frowned. “Isn’t that a kind of bean?”
Zarya laughed. “No. A favela is kind of a cross between a neighborhood and a shantytown. They’re pockets of severe poverty, the kind most of us would have nightmares about. The government destroyed a bunch of them to make room for the World Cup a few years ago, and there were huge protests about it.” She looked at each of us. “You do know what the World Cup is, right?”
“Peripherally,” I admitted. “I know there’s soccer involved. I try to avoid any sports that might make people think I’m European.”
“Ugh.” Zarya looked up at the ceiling. “Anyway, the favelas in Rio are the best known, but they’re all over the place. They sometimes start out as regular slums, neglected neighborhoods. Sometimes, they just evolve in empty spaces. They’re populated by the poor, people who don’t have any place else to go. They build shelters from salvaged or stolen materials. They don’t follow any kind of building codes. They get no services like trash collection. They’re sometimes built into cliffs. Sometimes they’ll have multi-story buildings or even apartment buildings that were abandoned and reclaimed.”
“It sounds sad.” Kamila, who had been a country girl for a long time, wrinkled her nose.
“Apparently, the ones closer to big cities attract tourists.” Zarya shook her head. “I can’t imagine wanting to go and stare at a bunch of unfortunate people stuck living like that, but who knows why people do the things they do? Disaster tourists are ghouls, in my mind, but they exist.”
I leaned forward. The idea had sparked in the back of my mind when I first heard about these places, but now it seemed like an even more certain option. “I’m guessing they’re not the safest places,” I said, to probe at my theory a little further. “I mean for one thing, packing people in so tightly with no building codes is a recipe for disaster in and of itself.”
“Right? A stray spark can kill hundreds.” Tess cringed. “All three of us remember times like that in our own lives, you know? And people would do their best to be careful, but things still happened.” She rubbed at her arm, a stray memory peeking through to which we weren’t privy.
&
nbsp; “They’ve got their own risks outside of fire. Poverty engenders violence. People who are poor aren’t necessarily bad people, but when you have to fight for every scrap of food and even walking down the street becomes an opportunity for someone to hurt you, it can change the way you think. When every resource is scarce, you’re more willing to hurt someone to get it.”
“And to see every person as a potential resource.” Kamila’s mouth tightened a little. “It’s not exactly rocket science. You do what you have to do to survive.”
“Right.” Zarya nodded. “And the government doesn’t care about those people. The police don’t care about them either. They won’t set foot in there. As long as the people who live in them don’t step out of line—meaning try to leave—everything’s good. But if, say, a tourist tries go in . . .”
“The police will go in and keep them safe?” Tess widened her eyes, clearly joking.
“Cute. No. People show up and never come out.” Zarya slumped back against her seat.
Something hovered right on the edge of my consciousness. “You know what that sounds like to me?”
“It sounds like the perfect place for vampires to feed on the living.” Kamila tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Are you kidding me? It’s a whole population that no one else cares about. They can have their way with them and no one will care. No one will report them, no one will do anything about them, and no one will even collect the bodies. They’re—they’re disposable people.”
I drummed my fingers on the table, thinking. “Maybe that’s why the vampires view this place as a kind of homeland. Plenty of countries have violent slums. Plenty of countries have poverty. No place, at least no place that I’ve heard of, has anyplace as institutionalized as the favelas.”
Forever Young - Book 3 Page 8