Moonlight Virgin

by Kat Cotton

  “I should ask you that. What have you been doing? There’s strange things afoot, and I’ve heard you’re behind them.”

  “I’ve done nothing.”

  She could turn her voice down a little. It was too early for that loudness. What time was it, anyway? Ten? Was that a.m. or p.m.?

  “You’ve done something. My team has been sending me alerts for the past week, and I’ve been trying to find you. Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere.”

  And I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Portia what had happened in Tokyo.

  She’d put together a team of dodgy investigators, academics and weirdos. I wasn’t sure what they had on me. They couldn’t know much, because they were crusty old fools.

  “You’re done something bad, Clem, and you need to fix it.”

  Oh, it might be the whole Vampire King energy thing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into that. Even if she offered me an insane amount of money.

  Money? Where was my money? I felt under the cushion. Still there.

  “Look, Portia, I don’t have time to deal with this now. I need to sleep more.”

  She sighed. “You need to deal with it, and fast, Clem. With all the bad shit going down in this city lately, you don’t need to add to the problem. I used to think you were just a harmless weirdo, but now I’m rethinking the harmless bit of that.”

  Whoa, that was way too much insult to deal with on a fuzzy brain.

  What was Portia getting into this for, anyway? She’d started her dodgy team to find out who’d killed her sister. Now, that was all wrapped up. She could go back to whatever it was she normally did. Work in her family’s real estate company? I thought that was it.

  “I’m going now,” she said. “But you need to get on top of this, Clem. Property values are plummeting in the city. People are selling up and getting out. Also, I think you really should have a shower and maybe brush your hair. Your image is so far from professional, it’s laughable.”

  That was okay for her to say. She had a home with indoor plumbing and fancy shit.

  After she left, I got up. I checked the time. It was most definitely a.m. I’d slept for over 12 hours. That sofa was more comfortable than I’d thought, but, oh, boy, my back ached now.

  I needed to get coffee. But had Portia been serious about that shower thing? I sniffed my pits. I couldn’t take a real shower, but I went to the bathroom to wash and change my clothes. When I got back to my office, someone else had wandered in. What was going on?

  I recognized that guy. Jeb. The tall one.

  “We need your help,” he said. “We’re having an intervention for Nic.”

  Those words both thrilled me and terrified me. But, hell, an intervention for Nic? There was no way I’d miss that. I could say all kinds of stuff and get away with it.

  “Okay, but I need coffee first.”

  “Kisho said he’d have coffee and cake waiting.”

  This intervention sounded like the most fun I’d had in forever. And cake provided? That was just... the icing on the cake, really.

  “Let’s intervene! You can fill me in on the way.”

  Chapter 41 Nic: Intervention

  I’d ended up returning to the warehouse and spending the night with Vlad. He needed me with him.

  Sleeping on the warehouse floor wasn’t the best way to spend the night, even if Vlad had given me one of the blankets from his nest. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined rats chewing at my toes, so, in the end, I just got up and watched Vlad sleep.

  I got home to find the pack gathered in my living room. Not just the pack, but the pack and Clem Starr.

  There was cake, but I didn’t even feel like eating it.

  “You guys party all you like,” I told them. “I’m going to bed.”

  Kisho put his arm around me. “You can sleep in a little while. First, we need to talk.”

  I looked around the room. The way they stared scared me a little. This wouldn’t be good. They should be grateful to me, the whole ragtag bunch of them.

  I sat down in the chair near the bay window and curled my legs up. Kisho handed me a coffee and a slice of cake. It was carrot cake, far from my favorite.

  “Things aren’t right, Nic,” Andre said. “We all need to get this out in the open.”

  Why was Clem Starr here? If this was pack business, it didn’t concern her.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” I said. “Nothing at all. Well, I think we’re all a bit tired and emotional after Oscar’s death, and that’s understandable. But it takes time to get over these things. Maybe we need to have a memorial. Then we go into hiding.”

  That got met with awkward silence. If they planned to keep me out of bed, I wanted more than awkward silence. The only sound in the room was Clem Starr chomping on her cake.

  Luis and Shelly exchanged glances. They wouldn’t tell me what was going on. Neither would Kisho.

  “Andre?”

  He looked at his hands. It must be hard if he couldn’t say anything.

  “It’s like this, Nic,” Jeb started.

  I didn’t want to talk to Jeb, though.

  “You’re getting too obsessed with the Demon Child,” Clem Starr said. “You bonded with him, and that was meant to control him, but it’s gone the other way. To put it simply, you’re his bitch.”

  My mouth hung open. I had no words. They’d all been sitting around talking about this behind my back? And they’d got things so wrong. I was no one’s bitch. I just had to be careful about how I treated Vlad at the moment. If they knew anything about my training methods, they’d know that. He’d been sick. I bet none of them had watched their child wasting away.

  “You all think that way?” I looked around. No one denied it. “I’m not even going to discuss this. You haven’t been here. You’ve had no idea what’s going on.”

  I tried to stand up, but Andre pushed me back into the chair.

  “We don’t have any idea because you isolated us. You sent us away so you could be alone with this unicorn/vampire. And you put him before the welfare of the pack.”

  “You’re not working out as leader,” Jeb said.

  “We’re not saying that at all, Jeb,” Luis said. “We need to solve this problem, not have some stupid leadership battle. Nic is our leader, and it’s staying that way.”

  Well, that was something.

  “But,” he continued, “we need to be strong. All the signs point to war, and we need to be strong enough to fight. We can’t do that without you at full strength, Nic.”

  “I’m at full strength.” Well, except for this conversation making my head ache. “And we are not getting involved in this stupid war. We’re going to Lisbon.”

  “You couldn’t even take down Lucio, and he’s not exactly an ancient,” Jeb said. “My grandmother could take out Lucio if she wanted, and she’s been dead nearly 200 years.”

  There’d been extenuating circumstances. They didn’t understand. This was an attack on me, no matter what Luis said. I perched on the edge of my chair. I wanted to flee, but I worried they’d stop me.

  Kisho. He’d support me. He always did.

  But he said, “They’re right, Nic.”

  What? Kisho had betrayed me. I felt just like Julius Caesar. Knifed in the back.

  “If you’re right, which you aren’t, how do you suggest that we deal with this problem?”

  “You need to break the bond,” Kisho said. “It’s the only way.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It’s totally possible.”

  “Can I just interrupt for a second?” Clem Starr said. “I know this is important and all, but, Nic, if you’re not planning on eating that cake, can I have it?”

  “NO!”

  That might’ve been an overreaction, but with them ganging up on me, I needed to keep my cake close by. Cake was my only ally in this.

  My fingers curled around the edge of the chair, digging into the fabric.

  “There’s one way the bond c
an be broken,” Kisho said. “The whole basis of the bond is that you’re a virgin, right?”

  I knew what he implied but I couldn’t accept it.

  “No. No way.”

  “If you had sex with Clem, that would do it,” Kisho said.

  He grinned way too much when he said that.

  I jumped up. “That is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in my life, and I’ve been alive for a long, long time. Clem Starr? No. Just, no.”

  “It doesn’t have to be her. She’s just convenient,” Andre said. “It could be the mayor.”

  Then Clem jumped up, hands on her hips.

  “What? No one told me about this sex plan. I’m not ‘just convenient’. You can forget it.”

  “We’d pay you,” Andre said.

  Clem pulled a knife out of her waistband. “One more word and I’ll cut you and feed you to the dog. I don’t sleep with the undead for money. I kill them for money. I sleep with them for kicks.”

  To prove her point, she kicked him. Typical Clem.

  Kisho pulled her back down. “No one is going to force you to sleep with Nic.”

  “Good, because I’d kill the lot of you first.”

  What was she getting so offended for? I had to say something.

  “Shut up, Clem Starr. You dream of sex with me. Don’t deny it. The one opposed to this plan is me. Not you. I’m the one with everything to lose.”

  “Well, really, the only thing you have to lose is your virginity,” she said.

  “My dignity. My pride. My clean bill of health.”

  “Hey, shut up.”

  “I’m not having sex with Clem Starr or anyone else,” I said. This conversation made me cross. I wondered if I could say I was going to the bathroom and sneak out the window.

  “Come on, the mayor is a good option. He’s a swell guy and very good-looking,” Luis said. “Don’t rule out the mayor.”

  “I’d pick Clem,” Andre said.

  He didn’t have to follow that with a leering look at her.

  “I’d go Clem too,” said Jeb.

  They exchanged smiles. I didn’t like the idea of a Clem/Jeb alliance one bit.

  “No offense, Clem, but I’m on the mayor’s side,” said Shelley.

  “No offense taken,” she said. “I’m on the mayor’s side too. Nic and the mayor—they’ve proved themselves a worthy partnership so far. Also, why am I even weighing into this stupid discussion? It’s the mayor or nothing.”

  Even with her mouthiness, Clem Kisho carefully. She wanted so badly for him to say he’d pick her. You could see the desperation in her eyes.

  Kisho ran his hand through his hair, not saying a word.

  “Kisho?” I said. “You need to pick.”

  “Huh? Oh. Clem, of course.”

  Clem smiled at him, and he smiled back. Then she frowned.

  “But it’s a moot point,” I said. “I never believed the day would come when Clem Starr and I agreed on something, but this is the day. This whole discussion makes no sense. I’m not breaking the bond. I’m not having sex. That’s final.”

  I couldn’t believe I had such a stupid pack. I should just cut myself off from them, leave them to their own devices. Being alone would have to be an improvement on this drivel.

  “You have to admit, Nic, that your actions have put us in danger,” Luis said.

  “Maybe my deal with the mayor wasn’t well thought out, but you didn’t see how sick that kid was. I needed to get him a reliable food source.”

  “The mayor is evil,” Clem Starr said. “He stole my car.”

  “Shut up about your car.”

  Hell, she’d grabbed Kisho’s hand. I’d have to put up with the two of them being all kissy-kissy now. Maybe I should sleep with her just to prevent that.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Prove it,” Jeb said.

  “Huh?”

  “If you aren’t obsessed with that kid, and you won’t sleep with Clem, then stay away from him for a week. Let the rest of us look after him. You keep right away and look after pack business. If you can’t do it, then we go back to Plan A.”

  “No problem. So long as you look after him. He’s very delicate.”

  Chapter 42 Clem: Kitchen

  “Did you know they were going to suggest that?” I asked Kisho.

  I actually had him holed up in the kitchen so we could talk alone. I didn’t trust the rest of the pack.

  “I didn’t know that’s why they wanted you here. They talked about breaking the bond. But they can’t force you to have sex with him. Although it might be to your benefit too.”

  “They’re thinking about it in their heads. Imagining Nic and me doing it. That’s enough. That’s more than enough. Yuck.”

  I opened the kitchen drawers just so I could bang them shut. Damn vampires. Damn Nic saying I dreamed of having sex with him. As if. Well, I had, but only a few times. And that wasn’t my own doing. It was my weird sleeping brain. I had no control over that.

  “Really, Clem, calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down.” I held a weapon toward him, but it was just a spatula I’d picked up from the counter. “This is a disaster. Do you really think Nic is the kid’s bitch? There’s something creepy about that kid. He hates me. That’s not natural.”

  “You did try to stake him.”

  “Yeah, but that was just in the line of work. It wasn’t personal. All that unicorn blood thing. You’d think that’d make someone all sugar and rainbows, but nope. He’s nothing like that.”

  “Well, he is a vampire. More vampire than unicorn. But unicorns aren’t exactly that sweet, either. That’s just popular culture. The real story is much different.”

  I shrugged. This kitchen was small enough that our bodies kept touching, and that meant my sexy thoughts weren’t focused on Nic.

  “Why can’t one of the pack sleep with Nic? He’s their leader, not mine.”

  Kisho took a deep breath and pried the spatula out of my hand. “For starters, they aren’t human.”

  “Is there anything that says he has to sleep with a human? I’ve never seen anything about that. I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing about that. Sex is sex. With a vampire or with a human, it’s the same thing.”

  “The other thing is that you’re the one Nic wants to sleep with, not any of the pack.”

  “Phhht. Nic’s not even straight.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  The way Kisho glared at me made me question everything I’d assumed about Nic. Just because he was girlie and pretty and way too vain didn’t mean he was gay. The first time I’d met him, he’d said that gender lines blurred when you’d been alive long enough. I wasn’t sure what he’d meant by that.

  “He so does not. He hates me.”

  Kisho grabbed my shoulders. He shook his head as though he didn’t believe what I’d said. “And people say I’m oblivious.”

  “He does not want to sleep with me. Tell me that’s not true.”

  “I’ve known Nic a long time, and he’s pretty much asexual. Sure, he plays around with me and the rest of the pack, but that’s not for his own satisfaction. He’s the leader. It’s complicated...”

  “So, he gives you what you want so he can control you.”

  “Not to control us.”

  “Aha.”

  I’d seen Nic play with Kisho. But what about the others? Did they have kinks and fetishes that Nic catered to? What kinks? I needed to know. I bet that big guy, Andre, was into some weird stuff. Stuff like pony play.

  “If he gives you what you want, what about Jeb? He wants to be leader. Nic won’t give him that.”

  Kisho dropped his hands, but his body stayed close to mine, our stomachs almost touching.

  “Are you sure that’s what he wants?” he asked. “Does he really want to be pack leader? That might be the thing he thinks he wants, but it goes much deeper.”

  Wow, thinking about what went deeper in people was not my forte. I liked surfac
es. But that made sense. Maybe Jeb wanted to be a whiny victim more than he wanted to be leader.

  “He doesn’t give me what I want, either,” I said. “He snarks at me all the time, tells me I look like shit and my makeup is outdated, that kind of thing.”

  “Because that’s what you really want.”

  “Is not. That is so the opposite of what I want.”

  But then he’d sent me off to Japan with Kisho. Maybe Nic did understand what I wanted. That made the thought of sex with him so much worse. Kisho made me all warm and gooey inside. Nic didn’t make me warm and gooey. Nic made me all spiky and prickly and filled with rage. Why couldn’t Kisho be the virgin?

  And, frankly, why was Kisho so for this Nic sex thing? He should be all jealous and territorial. Like, “You can’t have Clem, she’s mine.” Well, maybe not that bad, but he could be just a little bit against the idea.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to have sex with him?” Kisho asked.

  “Of course not. I want to have sex—” I left the “with you” hanging in the air.

  Vampires. Why did they always make things difficult?

  Chapter 43 Nic: Sulking

  After that shambles, I took my cake and went to my room. What was wrong with me? I wanted to eat that cake, I really did, but I couldn’t stomach it. I couldn’t sleep, either.

  Instead, I got out my journal. I needed to write down my thoughts.

  My thoughts were mostly a revenge list. Damn pack with their intervention. I could last a week without seeing Vlad, but it’d be hard for him. He had come to rely on me. I wasn’t sure that the others could be trusted.

  I turned the page and began writing instructions for dealing with him. They had to know about feeding him and training.

  Something scratched at my door, then howled.

  Hellhound.

  Jeez, you’d think that Clem Starr would’ve asked about her dog. She forgot so quickly. Okay, he’d only been her dog for a few days until I rescued him, but still. She was way too irresponsible for dog ownership.

  I opened the door and let him in. At least I had one friend I could count on. I gave him a scratch behind the ears, then turned back to my list.