‘I had hoped…’ his voice cracked slightly and he swallowed, his tone becoming more business-like. ‘We’d heard rumours. I hoped… they were lying.’
‘So you haven’t found him?’
‘No one but Riko and I have been looking. It’s an ostrich nest here. Of course, everyone’s heard murmuring, but nobody wants to stick their head above the parapet to see if the rumours are true. No one wants to think about what it might mean for London, or the clan.’
‘But surely there are older vampires in your… family. Can’t you ask for their help?’
‘You just said yourself, Cass, Laclos took out three vampires older than he is. That makes them way older than anyone we have here. And as far as most people are concerned, it was Laclos who took out the Counsel last year – one of the oldest and strongest vampires in the world – for disobeying him. Whatever Laclos is doing, I can’t see anyone here rushing to oppose him, especially if they might potentially reap the benefits. Vampires are pretty mercenary. If Laclos emerges from this as king of London, I can’t see most of them caring how he got there. They’ll just want to secure their own place in the new court.’
He had a point, I suppose, though it didn’t make me feel any better. I thanked him and we hung up with mutual promises to keep one another informed, and I fidgeted for a moment, trying to think of something I could usefully do. ‘Wait and see’ isn’t really my style, and clearly keeping my head down and hoping for the best wasn’t panning out. I thought about calling Medea – as my colleague and, more importantly, my friend, she should know if new threats were popping up in the office – but I couldn’t face disturbing her. A huge part of the recent crisis had been because the Weres and the witches disapproved of Medea’s betrothal to her shifter girlfriend Katie and had sought to fatally deter both from the marriage, and unsurprisingly it had taken a lot out of the pair of them. I wanted to give them as much recovery time as I possibly could, so saw no point in disturbing them until we had a concrete plan of action. It was obvious there was only one person who had any chance of stopping Laclos – even if, at the moment, it seemed impossible that he could do so. So, recorking the bottle and locking up the office, I headed home to my broken angel, to see if he had any suggestions on how to save the life of the man who had nearly destroyed him.
***
So now I lay, dozing, in his arms, my mind rattling like a caged animal. Cain had offered little comfort as he listened to me over dinner, his only reaction being to say that he would come with me to the office from now on. I wondered if this was a good sign – that he was recovering – or a bad one. Cain’s first line of defence whenever bad stuff hits London is usually to try to convince me to quit work and go into hiding, but, conversely, he’s also never been shy about leaving me to fend for myself while he goes off and does whatever he thinks needs to be done. I wasn’t sure what this new tactic said about him, or me.
We’d gone to bed early and had sex for the first time since our showdown with Sebastian. It was cautious, gentle sex, so different from our usual frantic grappling. While Cain and I were more than capable of tenderness together, I’d never had to be careful with him before, and such restraint felt alien. Even his body felt different, now. Cain was an angel – as an atheist, I struggled with the religious connotations of that, but had realised I just had to accept it as shorthand for ‘mysterious immortal super-powered being’ – and he had a healing ability that made Wolverine look like a lightweight. But though his power was enormous (he had been the one to kill the Counsel, and had physically shaken the foundations of the very city in doing so) it was not infinite, and I knew he was scared that, in an immortal life, it would one day run out. Certainly, I’d seen that overexertion could weaken him, sometimes to a dangerous extent. So he was generally sparing with it: he kept his face, hands and neck free of scars that might draw attention, but the rest of his body had borne the marks of a long life hard lived, the bounty of a thousand battlefields. But the combination of nearly being disembowelled by a werewolf and Laclos’ over-enthusiastic feeding had been too much for his system, so his healing factor had been cranked up to 11. The result was that all of his scars were gone, expect for the two that never faded: the long, parallel lines that scored his back from shoulder to waist, and which now seemed more vivid and angry than ever, for reasons I was too scared to contemplate. So while being in his arms brought the same comfort it always did, the heat and solidity of his body against my back feeling like home to me, the strange smoothness of his skin disconcerted me, and though his breath was steady beside me, my Sense refused to be soothed. I shifted, in that semi-sleep where the world seems almost more hallucination than dream, which is why it took me a moment to realise that I had opened my eyes, and I wasn’t actually imagining things. Because there, stretched out casually beside me, was Laclos, and he was smiling.
***
‘Finally!’ he exclaimed, with theatrical exasperation. ‘I have no idea why this whole ‘watching people sleep’ routine has become so popular with vampires. It really is unbelievably tedious.’
He flashed me a smile, fangs already bared, which wasn’t a good sign. And though he looked the same as ever, heat burned off him like mist off the sea, and his eyes were fever bright.
‘Good evening, Cassandra. It really is an absolute delight to see you. I’ve been…’
But I didn’t get to hear what he had been doing, because a split second later, everything went to hell.
***
Lots of things happened very quickly. I was grabbed roughly from behind and half shoved, half thrown out of the way, careering off the side of the bed and landing in an undignified heap on the floor with a yelp as Cain, suddenly wide awake, dived onto Laclos as soon as I was clear. There was a brief struggle that I heard rather than saw, and by the time I’d got my breath back and scrabbled to my knees, rather uselessly clutching a sheet to myself, it seemed to be over. Laclos was lying flat out on the floor, Cain on all fours crouched above him, straddling his hips, Laclos’ arms stretched above his head, pinned at the wrist in Cain’s fierce grip. Despite their relative positions, though, Laclos looked a lot happier about this arrangement than Cain, who looked slightly stunned by this development. He’d reacted with speed but not strategy, and it was obvious they were both aware that Cain couldn’t actually move without freeing Laclos’ arms, so leaving himself vulnerable. Plus, of the two of them, I was pretty sure Laclos had a lot more experience of being pinned to the floor by a naked guy. Certainly, he looked relaxed enough, a smile dancing over that generous mouth, though beneath his surface calm my Sense caught a broiling heat and a madness that terrified me. But when he spoke, he sounded so much like his old self that I could almost convince myself I was wrong.
‘I must say, hunter, on all the occasions I pictured you naked on top of me, this wasn’t quite the scenario I envisioned,’ he smiled, sounding almost conversational, then allowed his gaze a long, lascivious trawl of Cain’s body. ‘Though in all the crucial ways, you more than exceed my expectations.’
Cain looked about as impressed with this comment as you’d imagine.
‘How about you promise to behave, so I can let you up and we can talk like grown-ups?’
‘I feel no pressing need to stand.' Laclos made a movement that might have been a shrug, had he not been so constrained. ‘Besides,’ he turned his head, looking mildly at where Cain held his right arm flat: making it clear, lest we doubted, that he had indeed picked up on the flaw in this arrangement. ‘What do you plan to do?’ Another smile, another glance down the length of Cain’s body. ‘Unless you plan to stake me with that?’
Because, yes, when someone who is already mad at you has you pinned to the floor, it’s a great idea to make jokes about his penis. I almost spoke up, warning Cain not to be goaded, but then realised how ridiculous I was being. I’d hung around with Others for long enough now – well, I say ‘hung around’, that obviously includes ‘being hunted and attacked by’ – that I had come to realise n
udity is almost exclusively a human hang up. Something supernatural wants to kill you, it won’t bother to stop and put on some pants. So while I, with instinctive modesty, was clutching a sheet to my breasts to cover myself in front of two men who were both intimately familiar with my body, Cain was utterly unfazed either by his own nakedness or by Laclos’ references to it. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t angry. I saw his knuckles whiten slightly as he tightened his grip on Laclos’ wrists, and the vampire winced slightly at this evidence that Cain wasn’t quite as weakened as he might appear to be.
‘Nobody wants to hurt you, vampire.’
Laclos looked up at him, still smiling.
‘Oh, that’s not quite true, is it? Part of you would like very much to hurt me. You just would not like her to see it.’ He turned to me as he spoke, and canted his hips, as if to buck Cain off him, and smiled as Cain tensed, pushing back on Laclos’ arms as if to prove he was still in control here, and Laclos would only be getting up with his say-so. I wondered, though, if that were true, and how long Cain could maintain any show of strength before his bluff was called.
‘Laclos…’ I began, not sure what I would say, but clearly we couldn’t keep this up. But even as Laclos turned his head again and his gaze met mine, I had to stop myself from flinching, because I could Sense the buzz of his hunger, darker and deeper than anything I’d felt from him before, stoked by Cain’s proximity. But none of this was visible – he smiled at me, pleasantly, as if all of our conversations took place while he was trapped under my pissed-off naked boyfriend.
‘Cassandra, forgive me. I’m being rude.’
He gave another sharp buck of his hips, and again, instinctively, Cain pushed back, but when he did so Laclos tilted his whole body and rolled, easily freeing himself from Cain’s hold. There was a rough, clumsy, vampire-speed scramble and when they stopped moving – so fast that to my human eyes they blurred – their positions were reversed. Now Cain was pinned down, though Laclos, triumphant, had learned from the angel’s mistakes: one of Cain’s hands was trying, fruitlessly, to loosen Laclos’ fingers from around his throat, his other was down at his side, his wrist painfully pinioned under one of Laclos’ knees.
For one terrible moment, I thought Laclos was going to break Cain’s neck, tear out his throat. I felt something ugly spike inside him, some atavistic instinct telling him that now his prey was down, subdued, he should take it, deliver the killing blow and feast without mercy or hesitation. Cain saw it, too, because their eyes met and something very like fear flickered in his gaze. But Laclos seemed to pull himself together, though it took an almost visible effort. He sat back on his heels – straddling Cain as he was, this kept the angel pinned at the hips beneath him – but he released the hold on his throat and brought his hand to rest lightly, almost fondly, on Cain’s chest. Cain’s suddenly free arm flailed for a moment and he slumped back, depleted even from this exertion. I saw the skin under Laclos’ fingers start to whiten, though, and realised the pressure on Cain’s chest wasn’t gentle at all, even though the vampire seemed to be making no effort to hold him down. In fact, had it not been for the clear frisson of the pleasure I could Sense at Cain’s discomfort, I’d have thought Laclos wasn’t even aware of what he was doing. Perhaps, in truth, he wasn’t: hunger pulsed off him, filling the room like a noise. In the face of such need, I was invisible, but that was fine with me: I clutched the sheet tighter and edged away from them both.
‘Do you know how I feel, hunter?’ Laclos leaned forward, again, his voice ragged. His face was over Cain’s, his long hair falling over him, close enough that he could feel the heat of Cain’s breath, his dark eyes blazing, inhuman. ‘Do you know what you have done to me? I can taste you in the back of my throat. I can feel you pulsing through my veins.’ His dipped his head lower, so he was almost dripping his words into Cain’s mouth. ‘Can you imagine how it feels to be sated beyond imagining, yet at the same time to be hollowed out with hunger? To have a vampire’s senses, a vampire’s cravings, multiplied beyond measure? Can you comprehend how terrifying it is – and how it feels to have all of that and then know it is slipping away from you?’
Cain flinched at his words, clenching his eyes shut, like a child trying to convince himself that if he couldn’t see the monster, the monster couldn’t see him. I’d never seen him look so shaken, and it scared me more than Laclos’ madness.
‘I know what you are now, angel,’ Laclos hissed, and Cain’s eyes flew open, and now he looked properly afraid. His body, taut beneath Laclos, ready for a fight, sagged suddenly, and he turned his face away, as if he could not bear the dark scrutiny of Laclos’ gaze. That this was a mistake was immediately evident. I felt Laclos’ hunger surge at the sight of Cain’s exposed throat: realising his error, Cain turned back to him, quickly, trying to look calm.
‘I admit it never occurred to me,’ Laclos went on, his voice almost dreamy, distant. ‘Of all the things that exist in the world… but it explains a lot. The legend of the Burner. The healing ability. The tedious anti-Other zealotry. Tell me, Cassandra, did you know?’
I almost jumped as his gaze turned to me, though much of his face was hidden by the unruly curtain of his dark hair.
‘I knew. I wasn’t sure I believed.’
‘Oh, you should. Our Cain here is the real deal.’
Um, OK, ‘our’ Cain?
Laclos sat up abruptly, his tone brisk.
‘Well. Since we are apparently all very keen not to hurt one another, I suggest you do not fight me and I’ll make this as painless as I can.’
Then he ducked his head to Cain’s throat. Cain let out a grunt of protest, legs thrashing as he struggled, but Laclos was too strong for him. Then, just as fangs punctured flesh, Laclos froze. I had put both the sheet and the fact he’d been ignoring me to good use, and had managed to shuffle to where Cain’s bag was shoved under the bed and snatch a weapon, so now Laclos had the muzzle of a gun pressed hard into his cheek.
‘I can’t let you do that, Laclos. For your sake as much as his.’
My voice was shaking but my hand was steady. Laclos closed his eyes for a second then slowly, carefully lifted his head from Cain’s throat, the gun moving with him. He looked at me with a slightly disappointed frown, though he couldn’t turn properly without getting a face full of gun muzzle. I had no idea if the gun was loaded with silver or lead – the first could be fatal to a vampire, the second anywhere from annoying to excruciating – but much as I didn’t want to kill Laclos, I was worried Cain might not survive another feed, nor might the tattered remains of Laclos’ sanity. I tried not to show any hesitation in my expression, or my fear that, amped up as Laclos was, even silver might not stop him: even now I could feel his power, crouched like a giant animal in the room, eating up the air, a suffocating presence. And I saw, in his eyes, recognition of the certainty that I would shoot if I had to. But then it didn’t matter. He moved impossibly fast, backhanding the gun out of my hand so hard that I fell backwards with a cry, my whole body jarred. Not for the first time was I grateful for a bit of extra natural padding, because even with my own bounteous arse I knew I’d be feeling that bruise on my tailbone for days.
‘My darling girl,’ he smiled at me through gritted teeth. ‘You have no idea how close to the edge of my self-control I am currently standing, nor how compelling my desire to have your blood mix with his inside me. So I suggest you maintain your distance until we are done, or I am afraid I cannot guarantee your safety.’
Then, annoyance making him petulant, he lowered his head again, but Cain put his free hand out to stop him. Clearly he had no hope of that, but it did make the vampire pause.
‘Please,’ Cain said, and his voice sounded smaller than I had ever heard it, which made me sick with fear. ‘You’ll kill me.’
For a fraction of a second, something shifted in Laclos’ face: empathy, or pain, something of himself peering over the edge of madness and horrified at what he saw. But then it was gone, replaced with a glacial smile.<
br />
‘I’m afraid I really don’t care.’
‘Wait!’ Cain cried, and there was something, some supplication, that made Laclos stop, and lift his head, curiously. ‘Maybe we can do… a deal.’
Laclos sat back, coolly amused.
‘I’m not sure what you can offer me that I cannot simply take. Tell me, what do you think would match the pleasure of draining you dry then continuing my jolly rampage through a city which has, frankly, begun to weary me?’
Cain looked suddenly calmer, and to my surprise, he smiled at Laclos, almost sly.
‘We both know blood isn’t the only thing you want from me, vampire.’
OK, this really couldn’t be good. Laclos smiled, a cat watching a mouse that has started to do something entertaining, but his calm demeanour belied a white-hot spike of lust that burned through him like a lightning strike.
‘What’s to stop me taking that as well?’ he asked, almost mildly.
Cain’s voice was soft, almost sad.
‘We both know that’s not who you are.’
Fury flared, sharp and vicious, in Laclos’ voice.
‘How do you know that is not what I am, angel? How do you know that isn’t what you made me?’
Cain gave a half shrug, and smiled again.
‘Bet my ass?’
Because, really – was I the only one who didn’t think we should be joking about this stuff right now? Laclos sat back further, and from my vantage, sprawled inelegantly on the floor several feet to the side of him, I could only see him in profile, but I could Sense his mind whirring. Of course this was a trap – of course it was. But the part of Laclos that was capable of reasoning this, and of seeing that, even if it wasn’t a trap, it was wrong for a whole load of other reasons, was wrestling with the howling of pure animal need inside of him, the predatory cunning that was telling him that even if Cain was trying to trick him, it didn’t matter. He could take what he wanted – everything he wanted – without a fight. Cain clearly also picked up on this, but whatever his own endgame, his reaction wasn’t what I expected. He sighed, suddenly impatient.
Angel Falls (Cassandra Bick Chronicles Book 3) Page 2