by Finley Aaron
Constantine stops before he reaches me, crouching near the ground. I can’t see what he’s doing—the streetlights here are too widely spaced, the evergreens and tall buildings casting shadows that make it too dark to allow me to see clearly.
When he stands again, he’s holding something in his hands, studying it.
I’ve nearly reached him when he holds the item out to me. “Is this yours?”
“It’s my wallet.” I grab it and look through the contents. Everything appears to be there. “How did you—”
“It was lying on the ground. How did it get over here?”
“I’m not sure,” I answer truthfully. One of two things could have happened. Maybe it fell out of my bag as I was trying to grab it while fighting my assailant in the air.
Or maybe—and I study Constantine’s eyes for any sign of guilt, but his eyes are as dark as the night and just as mysterious—Constantine may have been my attacker.
I don’t know what my assailant looked like because he was wearing a ski mask, but his build fits Constantine’s. The jeans and parka, though ubiquitous this time of year, are fundamentally the same, and it was too dark for me to see any details that might differentiate between them. Constantine may have disappeared with my backpack (just as he disappeared last night) and then reappeared and pretended to find my wallet on the ground.
The cold air invades my lungs and slows the ramming of my heart with a dread akin to terror.
Did Constantine attack me?
Or did my wallet fall out of my bag before the real attacker fled with everything else?
I’m not sure which theory is more plausible, but until I know the truth, I really can’t trust this man, can I?
“Ready to go eat?” Constantine seems to shake off his question about my wallet’s strange location, without pressing for any clear answer.
Is that strange? Should it make me suspicious?
I shake my head once, slowly, then wince. “Sorry. I slipped on the ice back there and fell.” I point behind me to the place where my fire created a safety hazard. “I think I may have hit my head.” On a vampire’s hard noggin, but I don’t want to let on about that last part. Not if Constantine’s head may have been the noggin in question.
Constantine looks more closely at the glove I’m using to point. “What happened to your glove? You know, you look…roughed up.”
“I—I,” I place my hand on my forehead and think quickly. In another moment, he’s going to be asking me about the blackjack books, which are long gone. How much do I dare tell him?
I don’t like keeping secrets. I certainly don’t like secrets being kept from me.
But there are a lot of things Constantine has yet to tell me. Why should I be an open book when he keeps his book to himself?
He can’t know I’m a dragon. Not unless I know I can trust him, and we’re far, far from that. So I can’t let on anything about what I just did or what I’m capable of, but I can tell him why the books are gone.
“I think I may have been attacked. Jumped from behind. My backpack is gone.” I snap my fingers through the slashes in my gloves. “That would explain why you found my wallet down the sidewalk.”
Constantine’s face hardens. I’m not going to lie, this is a scary look he’s sporting right now. He may be charming when he smiles, but he’s terrifying when he’s angry. His nostrils flare as he breathes out a furious breath that forms a cloud in the cold air between us, veiling his face. “Your backpack?” Another cloudy breath. “What was in it?”
“Your blackjack books, mostly, and my textbook and notes from the political science class I came from before I hit the library.” Thankfully, the poly sci text should still be available in the campus bookstore, and I can get the notes from the class online forum, so none of that is irreplaceable. And even more thankfully, because of the sheer volume of blackjack books I was carrying, I left all my Dracula materials at home.
For once.
“Do you have any idea who may have attacked you?” Constantine meets my eyes.
I study his face for any sign of guilt. He looks livid. He’s also significantly taller than I am, even though I’m pretty tall and these boots add a couple inches to that. From this vantage point, his nostrils are flaring like a bull about to charge.
I set my jaw and meet his gaze as well as I can from below. “Do you?”
He flinches slightly, glances at the sky for just an instant, then stares back at me again, blowing a white cloud from both his nose and mouth this time. “Are you okay? I can walk you home.” That breath must have been his anger deflating. He’s suddenly being nice to me?
This is strange.
“I’m more hungry than hurt,” I tell him honestly. “Let’s get those steaks, then you can walk me home.”
We head for the restaurant, moving slowly. I don’t know how wise it is to hang out with Constantine, but at least this way I can keep an eye on him, and we’ll be in a public place. That’s sort of safe, isn’t it?
Since it’s a Tuesday evening, the restaurant isn’t terribly busy. Constantine gets us a small table near the back. He’s all business while the waiter is taking our orders. I go ahead and order the 24-oz. T-bone, the biggest steak they have. Normally I’d hold back on a first date, but after all I’ve been through, I just want to eat a big, juicy steak.
He’s lucky I didn’t order two, especially since he already said it was his treat.
Once the waiter is gone, however, Constantine leans close and speaks in a low but intense tone. “Do you have any enemies?”
“Do you?”
A tiny twitch of a smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth, and he leans back in his chair, eying me. “Rilla Melikov.”
Did he just learn my full name earlier when he looked inside my wallet?
It’s possible. I certainly never revealed it to him.
I lean back and imitate his posture and gaze. “Constantine, I forget what you said your last name was. Something with an F?”
“Funar.”
“Funar?”
“It means rope maker.” He shrugs. “I bought it, you know.”
I lean forward again. “Who else have you been?”
He shakes his head slowly, his eyes never once leaving mine. “It is less dangerous for you if you do not know.”
I can feel my eyes narrow as frustration and even anger squeeze my face. “I was attacked this evening. Robbed. Somebody—something—is after me, or after something I have or something they think I have, I don’t know what. But I think you know more than you’re willing to say, and until you tell me—” I swallow back my words as our waiter appears with our water glasses.
I whisper “thank-you,” and sip from the straw until the waiter is out of earshot. Then I tell Constantine, “I cannot help you until I know who and what you are.”
“I already told you.”
“Names. I want names.”
“I bought them all. None of them were me.”
“The first one. Who were you originally?” I’m staring him down, but he looks away, stirring the ice in his water with the straw.
When he looks back up at me, he says, “Constantine.”
“You were Constantine the first time?”
He nods. “Last names weren’t necessary then. One name was all I needed.”
“And what are you?” I whisper, leaning close, even though the people at the nearest table are young co-eds laughing loudly, completely oblivious to our existence.
“I told you what I am.”
I raise an eyebrow. My brows might not be as imposing as his, but they get the point across.
He swallows. “Vampire.”
“I want to see.”
“No.” He leans back in his chair. “Too dangerous. Far, far too dangerous.”
“Where are your fangs?”
He rolls his eyes. Then he plucks the dessert menu from where the waiter left it to tempt us. Constantine uses the big laminated thing to shield his face from anyone else�
��s view (it’s a wall on our other side, being in the back, as we are) and opens his mouth.
As I watch, slightly horrified, his canines grow to sharp points, which seem to glint menacingly before retreating back to their normal size and shape.
Then he pinches his lips shut, lowers the menu, and gives me a half shake of his head along with a look that says he can’t believe he let me bully him into doing that.
For all his discomfort, though, I’m sitting here with my blood chilled cold as ice in my veins. I pull my coat tighter around me (I can’t very well take the thing off, not with the back of my shirt ripped by my wings).
He really is a vampire, then.
I mean, he couldn’t have faked that. It was pronounced and distinct and clearly vampirish.
“So, the bats…” I begin slowly once I find my voice.
“I already told you.”
“Yes, but I didn’t quite believe you then.”
“Perhaps you should start believing. I don’t have time to repeat everything. We have work to do, and the others are closing in far faster than I expected.”
“See—that.” I point at him as though to point at the words he just spoke. “Right there? That’s why I have trust issues. There is clearly a lot more going on, which you haven’t begun to tell me. I got attacked this evening—”
“You keep bringing that up.” Constantine’s no longer whispering.
“My head still hurts!” I’m definitely not whispering.
The co-eds glance our way. One of them gives us an annoyed look before they go back to their loud giggling.
Yeah, we’re the annoying ones.
I exhale impatiently and pinch the bridge of my nose, which is still throbbing from the cranial impact earlier. “Who is after what and why? Why do they think I have whatever it is they’re looking for, and what’s up with the appearing and disappearing out of nowhere?”
“Vampires can teleport. I believe that is consistent with most of our mythologies, even if the more rudimentary traditions don’t use the same terminology.”
I try not to be too impressed with his vocabulary, though I’ve long had a soft spot for big words. And he’s multi-lingual.
I could swoon.
But no, no, I can’t.
It’s a good thing Constantine is a dangerous and probably evil beast who’s almost certainly been lying to me, because I simply can not form a crush on him. I mean, he’s cute and cosmopolitan and smart and studly and everything, but he’s a vampire, which is definitely, completely, totally, and in all other ways, not a dragon.
It’s also not a human, which is handy, because as long as he thinks I’m human, I don’t have to worry about him thinking there might be something between us. I mean, he already mentioned about Melita Thorne liking him, and how he deliberately never let anything develop between them because of the species difference.
So the boundaries have already been established.
I’m safe—romantically at least.
But in all other ways, I fear I’m in terrible danger. The mugging earlier proves that, even if you don’t count all the mysterious activity that’s led up to it.
“So, these are vampires who have been bothering me?”
Constantine nods.
“Enemy vampires?”
Constantine shrugs. “Are your classmates your enemies?”
“No.”
“When you play sports, are the other competitors your enemies?”
“No.”
“These vampires, they are after something, just as I am after something. We are not enemies, just peers on a journey that leads to the same places, and sometimes we get in each other’s way.”
“What is it you’re after?”
“Knowledge.”
“Knowledge?”
He glances down at the dessert menu. “A recipe, of sorts.”
“Who has this recipe?” Now we’re both whispering in words so silent we’re practically reading lips.
“No one. It is lost knowledge. Forgotten methods—everyone who knew it is long, long dead. All we have left are pieces of the tradition handed down or hidden. It’s a recipe in parts, and the parts are all disguised, encoded, in minds and memories and books, in myths and tales too fantastic to be believed. And they are searching for the pieces of the recipe. I am searching for it. I have pieces I cannot let them see, because if they put it together before I do, they could use it to enslave us all.”
I hesitate to ask my next question, because I’m afraid of what the answer might be. “What is the recipe for?”
“How to make gold.”
Chapter Eight
As if an unseen hand has thrust me against the back of the chair, I lean back and stare at Constantine until the waiter delivers my steak, and then I eat with as much restraint as I can muster, which is just enough to avoid too many annoyed looks from the co-eds, and the whole time, what I’m really trying to digest is not the steak, but the information Constantine just shared with me, and its uncanny overlap with a bunch of other stuff that’s been happening to my family in recent years—battles we’ve fought and hints of a greater fight that’s been going on since before I or even my parents were born.
And all that’s happening in one sentence, just like that, because my head is really full right now.
See…gold.
Oh, where do I start?
My brother, Felix, made gold, but he doesn’t know how he did it.
And my sister-in-law, Nia (who’s married to my other brother), was enslaved by a dragon named Eudora, who’s technically no longer a dragon because my mother turned her into being only human, and we thought she had finally forgiven my mom for that because she agreed to help us last summer in our battle against that mad scientist guy Hans Wexler, only probably she was only lying and betraying us to get something else she wanted, which might have had something to do with the fact that she was once married to Hans Wexler, or it may have been totally unrelated. We still haven’t figured out what it was, or if it was, in fact, a number of things.
And did I mention why she enslaved Nia?
No?
Oh, that’s a very important part. Well, part of it was for one thing which we thought was the whole reason, but actually it probably had as much to do with trying to get information from Nia about how to make gold, which sounded absurd to Nia and everyone else at the time, because Nia had no idea how to make gold, but the more I learn, the more I think, wow.
Seriously, wow.
Mysteries and myths and tales too fantastic to be believed.
Indeed.
So, I happen to know it is possible to make gold, since my brother did it, even if it was on accident and he hasn’t been able to replicate the process since (though he’s tried).
But if the dude who attacked me earlier today wants information like that, well, I’m not going to let on to anybody one peep about anything I know.
Because these vampires are dangerous.
Enemies or peers, they clearly aren’t above attacking someone who might have the information they’re looking for.
If they knew for sure I had information?
I can only assume that would be even more dangerous.
And Constantine—charming, almost swoon-worthy Constantine—might be the vampire who attacked me (odds are pretty good, actually, when you put it all together—he knew where I was coming from and where I was headed and exactly when). So no way am I telling anything of what I know to Constantine.
We finish our meal, and the waiter asks if we want dessert, and while I’m tempted to order the black tie cheesecake, I order a burger for dessert, because burgers are basically meat cookies, which totally count as dessert, and I need dessert right now.
After the day I’ve had?
Yeah. The waiter’s walking away, but I call him back and order a second burger.
The co-eds look at me all questioning like, so I give them an annoyed look.
“You…must be hungry,” Constantine observes. He
ordered the cheesecake after I decided not to.
“Stress eating. I’ve never been mugged before.” I sip my water before I can say anything more.
“Completely understandable.” Constantine gives me the kind of sympathetic smile that makes me immediately wonder what he’s up to.
Seriously, I think it’s an established point of vampire lore that vampires don’t give that look to anybody, ever, unless they’re trying to manipulate them according to their evil will.
There’s a reason why he’s so charming, and it’s not a good reason, is it?
Gambling puns aside, I’m going to bet Constantine is evil. And if there’s anything on earth I dislike more than being lied to or misled, it’s being manipulated according to someone’s evil will.
Especially if said manipulation involves being lied to and misled.
Which right now I suspect is very much the case.
So I’m going to change the subject and steer this conversation back to what was supposed to be the reason for our meeting in the first place. “I got a chance to look through the blackjack books before they were stolen.”
“Ah, yes. What do you think? We can do it?”
I give him my crinkled-face expression that says I’m willing to humor him only a short while longer. “The card counting stuff doesn’t sound too difficult. I even think it might be possible, with practice, for me to get good enough to count cards while making a diversion of conversation with my tablemates, so no one knows I’m doing math in my head. But that doesn’t get us past the hardest trick to pull, the reason so many aspiring card-counters ultimately fail.”
Constantine leans back, grinning that way-too-charming grin. “The signal.”
I nod and keep talking and try not to let his smile work its magic on me. The man is not that good looking. It’s just that smile. “I can’t think of a single signal that hasn’t already been proven not to work. I’ve never been terrifically smooth or adept at being discreet. If anything, I’m kind of a bumbler. I’ve always been tallish and gawkish. And trying to pull off something complicated while I’m chatting innocently with everyone else and trying to keep the cards counted—that sounds like a recipe for disaster…”