by Karen Chance
“You’re not risking anything!”
“That is correct. I am not. Not this time.”
“Damn it, Mircea!” I hung on to the phone, mad as hell but not able to give this up. I needed this job. And not just for the money, although a steady income was something I thought I could get used to. I needed it because of what I was.
I couldn’t just not hunt. It didn’t work that way. Even with Claire here it didn’t. Her presence made it easier to postpone episodes, to maintain some level of control. But I was what I was. A life lacking in violence might be the norm for most people, but for me it was a one-way ticket to the crazy house, and not just for a brief visit. The creature that lived inside my veins demanded blood; the only thing I’d ever been able to decide was whose.
And now he was taking that away.
“That Duergar mix of yours,” Mircea said after a moment. “You are fond of him, are you not?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“How would you like to see him walking headlong into a danger you cannot even name?”
“That’s not…” I gripped the phone tightly so I wouldn’t shove it through the wall. “That’s different. He’s a child.”
“And when he is not?” Mircea asked softly. “When he is an adult, when he has developed whatever abilities fate has decided for him, do you think you will feel one whit differently than you do today? Do you think you will suddenly not mind if someone takes him from you, if they threaten him, if they hurt him?”
“You never…” I swallowed, because he was doing it to me again. Just like every fucking…Goddamn it. “You never cared before.”
“I have always cared.”
“Then let me hunt.”
“No.”
“Mircea. I can find the ones who did this. I can—”
“What you can do is obey me,” the voice said, going cold again. “For once in your life, you will do as I say!” And the phone went dead.
Chapter Eleven
“That went well,” Ray said, sipping beer.
Claire came up behind me, saying nothing but sliding a slim white hand onto my shoulder. And reminding me that her usual passive abilities were nothing compared to what she could really do. Like when she abruptly pulled the rage off me, as fast as someone whipping off a cloak.
“Stop it,” I choked out. I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted to break something. But instead, I saw myself slowly replacing the receiver, and my hand didn’t even shake.
“It’s better than having you burst a blood vessel,” she said drily, her own hand sliding away. Her cheeks were a little pink, but otherwise she looked perfectly normal. I tried to work up some annoyance about that, but it fizzled out, too. When she was making an effort, Claire was like a dozen Prozac in a shot of whiskey. If I’d been wearing a mood ring, it would have just flipped to mellow, stoner blue.
“Damn it, Claire,” I said, trying for heat and getting only warm fuzzies.
“He’s right,” she said simply. “You know he is.”
“I don’t know anything of the kind.”
“You can hunt other things.”
“I don’t want to hunt other things.”
“You’ll get used to it,” she told me, with zero sympathy. Claire wasn’t big on sympathy. Claire was big on getting your shit together and getting on with it, as demonstrated when she took a stack of plates off the counter and pushed them into my stomach. “Can you set the tables?”
I glared at her, black eyes into green, and she narrowed hers back. She didn’t budge. But the plates poked me in the stomach again, a little harder this time. I bit my lip on a smile, amused and pissed off at the same time because I shouldn’t be feeling amused.
“You’re gonna need more plates than that,” Ray piped up.
Claire glanced at him. “Why?”
“You got company.”
I took the damned plates to the window, and spotted a parade coming at us from across the road. “What company?” Claire asked. She was blind as a bat without her glasses, which as usual she’d misplaced.
“It’s just the guys from next door.”
There was a similar Victorian monstrosity wilting across the road, only it was even larger than ours, a relic from when people around here could afford servants’ quarters. That made it a hard sell these days, with too much to air-condition and too much to heat—not that the house appeared to have either. But the artists who had taken it over didn’t seem to care, and the many little rooms were perfect for communal living.
“Just the guys?” Claire asked sharply.
“No, some of the girls are with them.” A couple blondes, a redhead and two brunettes were bearing casseroles and covered plates that looked like they might contain cookies—or, if I was lucky, some medicinal brownies.
But Claire didn’t seem so enthused. “Crap!” she said, searching around in her clothes for the missing glasses.
“What’s the problem? Throw another bag of rice in the pot, maybe a few more peas—”
“It’s not the food I’m worried about, Dory!”
“What then?”
“They’re…women of questionable morals.”
I laughed out loud at that one. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Claire. You do realize what century it is, don’t you?”
“And you do realize what we have in the backyard, don’t you?” she snapped back.
“What? You mean your bodyguards?” The fey had pitched tents back there rather than stay in the house, because there wasn’t enough room inside for everyone and it was some kind of no-no in their culture to not treat people of the same rank equally. Luckily, they seemed to enjoy outdoor living. No reason not to. Retrieving my underwear had been the most work they’d done in two weeks.
“No,” she said, finally locating the glasses in a pocket of her apron. “I mean a bunch of young male fey who are currently without supervision.”
“Where’s Heidar?” I asked, talking about Claire’s fiancé, who was supposed to be in charge of the motley crew.
“He went back this morning. Something his father wanted—I don’t know. But that leaves us—damn it!” She’d gone to the kitchen door in time to see the group being greeted warmly by what looked like the Norwegian male swim team. A dozen tall, well-built guys with long blond hair were hanging over the back fence, grinning like Christmas had come early.
The artists were grinning back. “We keep hearing this crazy music,” Jacob said, holding up a guitar. He was the tall one with the Jewfro and the Grizzly Adams beard. “Do you guys play?”
“Yes. We will play with you,” one of the fey told him, his eyes on the pretty Hispanic girl at Jacob’s side.
“Oh, I love your accent,” one of the other girls told the nearest noble of the Royal House Blarestri of the High Court of the Fey. “Are you Swedish?”
“Yes,” he assured her solemnly. “I am of the Swedish.”
“Oh, cool.”
Claire rolled her eyes.
“They’re not children,” I reminded her, grinning.
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a—”
“Why do you think there are all those legends about the fey kidnapping human women?” she demanded, whirling on me. “What do you think they did with them?”
“I know, but—”
“Fertile females are like gold in Faerie, Dory—rarer even. And the fey can smell them coming. It’s like…bees to honey. You haven’t seen it—I have.”
“Well, so what? They’re all adults. If they want to—”
“Fertile females.”
“Oh. Oh,” I said, finally getting it. “Is that what you’re—”
“Yes! I know what it’s like to be caught between worlds. I wouldn’t wish that on…well, certainly not a bunch of helpless children!”
“But even if…I mean, the fey are notoriously infertile, right?”
&n
bsp; “With their own women, yes. These are not their own women!”
“Okay, Claire, okay. Calm down,” I told her, feeling a little strange because that was her line. “You’re their commander’s fiancée. Just order them—”
She was already shaking her head. “On something else—anything else—yes. I could. But not on this. Why do you think I’ve kept them so closely confined? Why Heidar has? They’ll just sneak out tonight when I’m asleep. It’s like babysitting twelve randy teenagers, and I can’t watch them all the—”
“So why not get ’em some condoms?” Ray piped up.
Claire stopped. And then turned to look at him. “I…don’t think they know what those are,” she said doubtfully. “They don’t have them in Faerie. The birth rate is low enough as it is; there’s no reason to develop something to lower it even further.”
“Well, it ain’t rocket science,” he pointed out. “They could learn, right?”
Claire was nodding, obviously liking this new idea. “Yes. Yes, they can.” She looked at me. “How many condoms do you have?”
“What?”
“Condoms, condoms! You must have some!”
“Why must I?” I didn’t think sex once a decade warranted it. And anyway, the only guy I was into at the moment wasn’t the type to need them. Not that we would have anyway, considering that I’d spent much of the last two weeks recuperating. And that probably wasn’t going to change, since it would only make it harder when—
“Dory!”
“I’m fresh out,” I told her.
“Well, go to the store,” Claire said, grabbing her purse and shoving it at me. “I—I’ll take the food out. They’ll have to eat first. And by the time they’re finished, you’ll be back.”
“With the condoms.”
“Right.”
“For the giant orgy you’re convinced we’re about to have in the backyard.”
“Dory! Just go!”
“I’ll go with,” Ray said, getting up. “I need a snack.”
Which was how I ended up condom shopping with a vampire.
“She always that tense?” Ray asked, as we pulled away from the house in my old Firebird.
“No. She’s just…under a lot of pressure right now.”
“What pressure? Her kid’s okay, right?”
I nodded. Actually, I had no idea what Claire’s problem was. Maybe it was just residual. In about a year, she’d gone from underpaid auction-house employee to fey princess to new mother to woman on the run with her endangered child, who also happened to be the heir to the Blarestri throne. It was enough to put anyone on edge.
But Aiden really was okay, with the conspiracy that had threatened his life over and the instigator dead. And he was now in possession of a talisman that pretty much ensured that he’d stay that way, even if someone managed to get past the wards, the phalanx in the garden, and the tense, half-dragon mother. Frankly, I didn’t fancy anyone’s chances.
“She’ll calm down eventually,” I told Ray. “So what are you doing here again?”
“Living,” he said, which I’d have taken for a smart remark, except he sounded pretty emphatic. But I didn’t have time to follow up on it. The nearest store was only a couple blocks away, and we’d already arrived.
Sanjay, brother to Bawa of the world’s deadliest curry, ran it, but he went home at six and some new girl was on duty. We skirted the aisles of Ramen, cards of press-on nails and towers of hairspray that constituted daily essentials in Brooklyn, and finally located the condom aisle. It also housed the diapers and the baby food. I wasn’t sure if that was random product placement or brilliant advertising, but either way, there was a good selection.
“So what kind are we talking about here?” Ray asked, surveying a neatly stacked display.
“I don’t know. Just pick one.”
“Well, there’s a lot of choice. I mean, you got your flavored, your ridged, your pre-lubed, your thin, your super-ultra-thin, your super-ultra-thin-pre-lubed, your…Huh.”
“Huh what?”
“Would you look at this?” he asked, examining a small box. “It says it glows in the dark.”
“So?”
“So what use is that to anybody? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write her name in the air with it?”
“I’d rather not think of you doing anything with it,” I said honestly.
“Besides, the fey already glow, so you gotta think it’s a waste of—”
“Ray!” I glanced around, but there was nobody within earshot.
“Well, excuse me if I’m not used to buying condoms for aliens,” he said more softly.
“They’re not aliens.”
“Well, they’re not human. I mean, they could have anything under those tunics, you know?”
“Like what?”
“Like…I don’t know. It could be barbed or something.”
“Barbed?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He slanted me a glance. “Do you?”
I just looked at him.
“No, of course not. You’re too uptight.”
“I am not uptight.”
“You’re the definition of uptight. I bet you and Mr. Muscle Bound haven’t even done it yet.”
“Okay, enough with the personal—”
“Nailed it.” He nodded. “You wouldn’t have freaked out on him this afternoon otherwise. ‘Oh, no, somebody’s in my head for five seconds, even if it did save my life—’”
I scowled. “You don’t get it. He’s not supposed to be able to do that.”
“He’s a senior master. They got skills.” Ray shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. As soon as a baby vamp wakes up, he’s got all kinds of people in his head.”
“I’m not a vampire,” I said, but Ray wasn’t listening.
“There’s his master, poking around, telling him what’s what and that he better toe the line. There’s the senior vamps in the family, checking out the new talent, just in case they want to recruit him for one of their cliques later on. There’s the slightly older babies, trying to dig up some dirt to make sure he stays on the bottom of the heap, and so on. And they never shut up. Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. It drove me crazy for years.”
“Is that what happened?”
“But I got used to it. So will you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get used to it,” I muttered, examining a box that promised to vibrate. I thought that was my job. I put it back.
“Oh, you want it, all right,” Ray said. “The two of you practically melt the walls every time you get within three feet of—”
“That’s not the same thing,” I told him irritably. It wasn’t the sex that worried me. I’d had sex; I’d never had a relationship with a vampire unless you counted Mircea, and look how well that had turned out. If I couldn’t even manage the usual father-daughter stuff, how was I supposed to handle something much more complex with someone I didn’t know half as well?
Relationships weren’t my best thing. They never had been. Even the easy ones. And nothing about Louis-Cesare was easy.
“It is when you’re dating a master. You gotta take the whole package, you know?” Ray said. And then he stopped, and turned to look at me. “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“You never dated a master before.”
“I’ve been with vampires.”
“Yeah, sure. Any regular old vamp—I can see that. I mean, you’re stronger than him; you’re the one calling the shots; you’re the one who says when you’ve had enough and it’s time to head out.”
“Shut up and pick something.”
“But it’s not the same with a senior master, is it? Somebody who might be stronger than you. Somebody who might want to take the lead sometimes, too. Somebody you can’t just dump whenever you—”
I tipped the whole display into the basket he’d picked up by the door. He blinked. “Well, that oughta do it.”
I grabbed the basket o’ co
ndoms and went to wait in line, ignoring the looks from a couple people ahead of me, who were apparently not used to seeing someone buying twenty boxes at once. Ray went to lean on the counter, supposedly enthralled by an awesome display of toenail clippers, but in fact snacking on the salesclerk.
And, predictably, my stomach curled into a knot.
It was one of the things—one of the very, very many things—about dating a master that wasn’t going to work. Ray made it sound so easy, like this was just some kind of tug-of-war, some weird power play, that I needed to get past and I’d be fine. Like all the other humans who eagerly lined up to attach themselves to the great houses. Mircea probably turned away fifty a month, and those were just the ones arrogant enough to try. Louis-Cesare, as the longtime darling of the European Senate, could hardly have attracted any fewer.
Ray probably thought I should feel honored to have caught his eye. That I should feel grateful. That I should feel…whatever those other humans felt.
He forgot one thing.
I wasn’t human.
There had always been a love/hate—okay, mostly hate—thing going on with me and the vampire community. I’d tried to stay away; I’d spent years trying. Like Claire said, there were other things to hunt and most of them were much less likely to hunt me back. But there was nothing that made my blood sing, my senses reel, my heart pound quite like chasing my natural prey.
Except maybe fucking it.
It was crude, but it was the truth. Vampires weren’t just prey to me; they never had been. There was this weird kind of yearning underneath it all, and resentment and jealousy and a bone-deep ache that I didn’t understand. Not completely. I just knew that, every once in a while, the craving got too deep and it was either fight or fuck, and mostly it was the former but sometimes…sometimes it had been the latter. Just long enough to get it out of my system, to keep myself from going crazier than I already was.
And then, yeah, I moved on. Why the hell wouldn’t I? If I stayed around, it always ended the same way, and crazy or not, I didn’t particularly like the idea of staking a former lover. No matter how much a few of them had deserved it.
But this wasn’t a one-night stand. This was…well, I didn’t really know what this was, since I’d been avoiding discussing it. Talking about it meant facing the fact that this weird little interlude or experiment or whatever the hell I thought I’d been doing had run its course. Because how could you care about someone when his very means of existence made your stomach hurt?