InsistentHunger

by Lyn Gala

  Sure enough, the butler looked uncomfortable now. “They aren’t available,” he said again, closing the door in her face. Paige sighed and wondered how long this game was going to go on. She propped herself up on the railing of the porch and put one boot against the siding of the house. She could wait for a good long time. However, she didn’t think she would have to. Unless she missed her guess, mister butler-man was telling either Brady or Gavril that they had a crazy woman standing on the front porch.

  It took about ten or fifteen minutes, long enough for Paige to get really bored, and then the door opened again. The butler appeared with an even more sour expression on his face. For the second time, Paige wondered exactly why a human being would work for a vampire. It didn’t seem like there’d be a lot of opportunities for advancement.

  “Follow me.”

  Paige snorted as she thought about Lurch from the Addams family. She might share the joke except the butler didn’t look like the kind to have a sense of humor, which also made him somewhat like Lurch. He turned and gestured toward the house. She followed him into a surprisingly modern house. The furniture had clean angles and dark wood and there was iron artwork in an abstract pattern on the wall. Gavril stepped out from behind a sleek black desk.

  “Ms. Silver, I am surprised.” From his expression, he wasn’t talking the happy sort of surprise.

  “Why? I thought it was pretty obvious that I wanted answers as much as Brady.” Paige stepped into the room and tried to ignore the discomfort that had curled around her spine. This man would kill her if she posed a real threat—she believed that. People didn’t live as long as him without being willing to defend themselves. Her best hope was to make it clear she didn’t want to hurt him or his. “You do seem to be the man who has the answers.”

  Gavril turned to the butler. “Michael, we’re fine.”

  “Define fine.” The older man, Michael, crossed his arms and gave Gavril a sharp look. Paige was startled. Clearly this wasn’t some silent and obedient servant.

  Gavril waved a hand in her direction. “This is Brady’s young strigoi.”

  “I haven’t been called young in a while,” Paige added. If this Michael was some sort of demon that didn’t have the same eye fading problem Brady had, who knows how old he might be. He looked to be in his fifties, but that might not mean anything.

  Gavril gave her a cold look. “Compared to me, you’re a babe.”

  Surprisingly, it was Michael who answered. “Compared to you, all of us are children. After all, you’re really old. Ancient. Fossilized, even.”

  “Yes, thank you, Michael. Should I need any more awkward conversation, I will be sure to call you.” Despite the words, Gavril gave the man an almost indulgent look.

  Michael turned to her. “Don’t let Grandfather freak you out. He’s only a total bastard on Fridays and every other Wednesday.” With that, he left the room. Paige couldn’t gather her thoughts well enough to even answer. Grandfather. Gavril was his grandfather. Which meant Gavril had stayed with a woman long enough for her to have a child and then stayed in contact with that woman long enough to know and live with a grown grandchild. Again, not really something she expected from a demon.

  Paige’s mouth was hanging open. She knew it. She also couldn’t get herself to close it. She finally turned away from the doorway where Michael had disappeared and looked at Gavril. “Grandfather?”

  He looked at her for a long time and Paige got the idea he was judging her. After some time, he shrugged. “Strigoi are rather more common than you seem to believe. His grandmother was a beautiful and talented woman.” From the irritated look Gavril gave her, Paige guessed that he found her lacking in both qualities. She didn’t care.

  “Where’s Brady?”

  Gavril looked bored. “Perhaps reading, perhaps watching television, perhaps out at some club. I do not keep track of him unless his behavior infringes upon my life. He’s learned to avoid that.” His smirk turned nasty. Now that look came closer to what Paige expected in a demon. A shiver traveled the entire length of her spine.

  Paige wanted to ask what that meant. However, she doubted that Gavril liked her well enough to give her honest answers and she wouldn’t believe him no matter what he said. “Huh. And here I thought you were supposed to be some great teacher.” She worked to keep her voice even.

  “I assure you I made no such promise. I said that I would show him what he was,” Gavril said. “And I have. There are not so many blajini in this world that we can afford to ignore each other.”

  “Not many? Is that why you use human hunters to take out enemies?” Paige asked, pouncing on the opportunity to get at least one question answered. Honestly, she had more questions than answers at this point.

  Gavril gave her a hard look. “I would have him as an ally, nothing more. Look for him upstairs if you will. I have other concerns far more pressing.” Gavril sat down behind his desk again. Immediately, he focused on a laptop computer.

  Taking Gavril at his word, Paige eyed the staircase and wondered if she should just start searching his house. A little part of her that used to be a cop was uncomfortable doing that without a search warrant. But then she was a private citizen now. Even better, she was a private citizen with permission. Decision made, she headed for the stairs.

  The hallway split at the top of the stairs and Paige couldn’t get over how normal it looked. Other than a few extra shadows and a lack of open windows, it could belong to some average family, as long as the family really liked cleaning. Paige’s house never got quite so clean. A half-open bathroom door let her see color-coordinated towels neatly hung. Paige’s towels usually ended up on the ground.

  “Brady?” Paige called. There were too many rooms for her to randomly start poking her head in them, especially when she wasn’t sure what she’d find inside. “Brady?” Paige dismissed the fear that something would jump out at her from behind one of the closed doors. Besides, she’d mentioned to at least a dozen people at the hotel and over at Louisville PD that she was coming here. Someone would notice if she went missing. Hopefully. She had herself about halfway convinced to retreat when a face appeared on the stairs leading up to the third floor.

  “Paige?” Brady looked shocked, but other than that, he still looked like Brady. Something cold and unyielding unwound itself from her heart.

  “Brady.” She didn’t even realize she had reached for him until he crossed the distance between them and took her hands in his. “You look good.” He did too. The haggard look he’d had in his face the last time she’d seen him at the old Carter place was gone. Other than the unusual light brown of his eyes, she couldn’t tell him apart from the flirtatious recruit who’d first showed up at the station.

  “You look great. What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to check on you.” Paige cringed at how clingy that made her sound. She really had relationship issues. However, Brady grinned like a loon.

  “You did, huh? Do you want to see my room?”

  “Um. Sure.” This was turning out more awkward than Paige expected. Maybe Brady felt it too. He slipped his hand around her shoulders to urge her toward the stairs up to the third floor and then his hand slid down to the small of her back. It hovered there until Paige started up the steps and then it moved back up to her shoulders.

  “Michael’s a surprise,” Paige said, anxious to get the conversation onto some topic that didn’t feel strange.

  “How’s that?”

  “A strigoi? Gavril’s grandson is a strigoi? He didn’t strike me as the sort to go cavorting with humans.” She looked over her shoulder at Brady and he gave her a half-shrug.

  “I have no idea. Michael’s grandmother might have been strigoi too. But Michael’s a nice guy. He paints. Personally, I think his stuff looks like someone wiping off their paintbrushes on a random bit of cloth, but apparently they bring in some good money. Not my thing though.”

  Paige knew the kind of art he meant. “I prefer pictures I can figure out
,” she agreed.

  He nodded. “Yep. My room’s over here.” He waved her down the hall with a gesture that was equal parts grand and uncomfortable. She offered him a smile and headed toward the open door. Unlike the rest of the house, Brady’s room looked lived in. Newspapers sat in a rumpled pile on the chair by the window and a blue quilt had fallen to the floor at the foot of his double bed.

  “What, the maid didn’t get up here?” Paige teased as she plucked a pair of jeans off the desk chair and tossed them toward the bed before sitting down.

  “She only does the first two floors,” Brady answered in a perfectly deadpan voice. He saw something in Paige’s expression, though, because he frowned. “And you were joking. Right.” He settled on the end of the bed and crossed his legs so that his left ankle rested on his right knee where he could fiddle with the sock.

  “Kinda,” Paige said. A maid. She’d never known anyone who had a maid come in. To be honest, she thought it was a big waste of money.

  “Michael hired her. Apparently Gavril used to have some of those mid-level vamps around to clean and guard the place, and when Dorothy took off, he staked the last two. It turns out those vamps aren’t nearly as loyal as you might think.”

  “Imagine that. The mentally questionable undead don’t make good guards. I never would have guessed.”

  Brady grinned at her sarcasm and Paige could feel herself smile back.

  “Most blajini keep them around until they’re old enough to feel when other demons come into their territory. Gavril can feel when anything supernatural goes bump in northern Kentucky or half of Indiana. I don’t notice unless I have a vamp trying to chew on my neck.”

  “So you are learning.” The fact Gavril had honored his promise to teach Brady about himself and this new world made her feel a little more comfortable. Brady had been her responsibility. She’d gotten him through so much, and watching him walk away with some demon who showed up out of nowhere had felt so damn wrong. She would have made a bigger fuss only she really hated losing a fight and she knew she’d lose that one. Brady’s decision to leave made sense logically, even if she’d hated it.

  “A lot,” Brady agreed. “There are a lot of things that go bump in the night—some good and some bad and some indifferent.” He sighed. “Okay, to be honest, it’s more like mostly indifferent with a big chunk of bad and this little, tiny sliver of good.” Brady held up his finger and thumb to show how big the “bad” chunk was and how small the “good”.

  “That might explain why humans call them demons,” Paige pointed out. She wondered which pile Brady put Gavril in.

  “Actually, that comes from the Greek word daemon, which was a minor god or the ghost of a dead hero, although I suspect it was the sort of ghost that eats chickens. It turns out most cultures had some sort of stories of beings from the other side crossing over to this world.” Brady sound almost excited to share that information and Paige smiled at how happy he looked.

  “Any epiphanies about the other side?”

  A frown flickered across Brady’s face. “Not as much. Gavril says we don’t want to remember. Actually, he’s surprised I remember as much as I do about how bright and uncomfortable and crowded it all was.” The joy drained from his face, but after a second, Brady shook his head as though trying to shake free of the memory. “But if biology class was right, we can’t be that different from humans. Demons and humans have been having kids forever.”

  “Strigoi,” Paige said. She still couldn’t wrap her head around the idea she had a demon somewhere up her family tree.

  “That’s one kind of hybrid. When the lower-level vamps have kids, it’s a lot rarer.”

  “They do seem the kind more to eat a human than fall in love.” Paige wrinkled her nose at the thought of vamps having sex. As far as those really low-level Cody-vamp ones went, she didn’t know if they could figure out how to have sex.

  “Yeah, seems like,” Brady agreed. “But when they do have kids, the children get some nice upgrades. They have the power to recognize demons on sight and they live longer and have better health than most humans, but they can’t have kids of their own.”

  “Like a mule.” Paige thought about that. A mule had parents from different species, and that’s why it came out sterile. “So, vamps and humans have hybrid children? But Gavril made it sound like strigoi could have kids.”

  “They can,” Brady agreed. “Strigoi, like you, don’t get the superpowers. Or you only get one—you don’t die from having a demon feed on you…not unless a whole lot of demons try to do it at once.”

  Paige thought about the Cody-vamp who had reached for her. “So I’d be safe around those zombie-like vamps?”

  Immediately, Brady shook his head. “They hunt in packs, Paige. They’d overwhelm you. You’d last longer than a human and have a better chance to either fight back or get away. But you have to stay away from them.” He stared at her, red starting to color the edges of his eyes. He was worried.

  Paige smiled at the evidence that he still felt so strongly. “Trust me, I’m not interested in any more demon hunting. I’m leaving that to Jim Hunter. So, I don’t get to, I don’t know, levitate a spaceship out of a swamp?” she teased.

  “You…what?” Brady seemed caught off guard. He was cute when he had trouble following the conversation.

  “‘Use the force, Luke’,” she intoned as she quoted Star Wars. She had trouble not laughing at the unvarnished horror on Brady’s face. “No big magical powers of levitation or mind control or something?”

  “Luke did not use magic. That was the force.” He poked his finger in her direction.

  “How is it different from magic?”

  Brady looked flummoxed for a second. His mouth came open, he closed it, and then it came open again before he found an answer. “I don’t know, but it is. The force is the force. That is not magic. Do not make fun of the force.” He wagged his finger.

  “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” Paige laughed, repeating one of her grandmother’s favorite phrases.

  Brady snorted. “Well, Luke Skywalker you are not. Being a strigoi means you have a little more luck, you might live a few years longer. That’s it.”

  Taking a second to study Brady—the long line of his leg, the curve of his shoulder and his strong chest—she pointed something else out. “And I can stay near you. As superpowers go, that isn’t half bad,” she pointed out. Brady slowly turned a pale shade of pink. “But seriously…nothing about picking winning lottery numbers or dreaming the Kentucky Derby winner?”

  Brady cleared his throat. “No. In fact, you know all those stories about how horrible witch hunters were because they’d accuse a woman of being a witch because she could cross a muddy street by picking her way across the dry spots?”

  Paige nodded, she remembered something about that from history. The woman had been hanged for having a clean dress. Paige had been eleven or twelve when she’d heard the story and she’d tried convincing her teacher that she wouldn’t wear clean clothes because of that story. In reality, her father’s alcoholism had gotten bad enough that he didn’t do much housework and she didn’t want to wash clothes. She’d been a pretty average kid and that meant avoiding housework when possible.

  “It turns out that’s about the only way you can spot a strigoi. Their magic comes down to being a tiny bit luckier than most. Nothing more.” He flinched. “Well, mostly.”

  “Mostly?” Paige’s cop instincts twanged at her. Whatever he was hiding, it was big.

  “They’re…you’re bright. Not bright like smart…” He stopped, his blush growing deeper. “Obviously you are smart-bright,” he hurried to add, “but I mean your life force is bright. When you die, if there’s an open portal near you or even if I’m near you, the ones on the other side will be able to find you. They’ll be drawn to you as soon as soul ‘you’ moves out of body ‘you’.”

  Paige blew out a breath. She felt like someone had kicked her in the stomach as she thought about that. “So there’s a be
tter than average chance I’m going to turn into a demon?”

  Brady looked down at his white sock and the cuff of his jeans as he nodded. “Part of you,” Brady agreed.

  Paige wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Yes, she liked demon Brady. He had an ethical core to him that just did not match the word “demon”. However, talking about her own death was hitting pretty high on the creepy scale. “Can we skip this conversation?” Maybe she could handle this later, but right now she had as much as she could handle on her psychological plate.

  Brady looked as uncomfortable as she was. “Deal. I just didn’t want you to think I hid that from you.”

  “I wouldn’t think that. In case you haven’t noticed, I happen to think you’re a good man.”

  His gaze came back up to her face. “I won my bet with Gavril because of that,” he said shyly.

  “What?”

  “Gavril.” Brady gave a sly smile. “He bet me that as soon as you had time to stop and think that you were going to freak out and run like hell. He figured you’d make it all the way to Timbuktu before you stopped.” From the way his grin grew, he’d enjoyed rubbing it in Gavril’s face that Paige had continued to call and had finally decided to track Brady down.

  “He did, huh?” Paige narrowed her eyes. She was having some very unfriendly thoughts about Gavril.

  “Paige,” Brady warned. “He’s old and powerful, so don’t go poking the demon.”

  “I never said I was going to poke him.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re thinking it loud enough.”

  She crossed her arms. “He thought I was some sort of coward.”

  “No, he thought you were going to avoid me. Not the same thing. Besides, you can’t tell me that you didn’t consider avoidance,” Brady said firmly. “Some mornings I wish I could run away from all this shit and go back to being human, so I know you considered it.”