“I don’t have to. All I need to do is think it. I was born with my abilities so they come naturally. Do you want to go first or should I?”
Grumbling under his breath, he moved past her and headed for the front doors. Despite her claim to have cast a protection spell on them, he was still wary upon entry. Pushing the door open, he entered, keeping his eyes peeled for anyone or anything that might jump out at him.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s here.”
“We’ve only stepped inside. We haven’t checked the upper floor. Wait here.”
“If anyone is here they can’t hurt us. Stop trying to protect me, Mr. Not-So-Evil.” She gave his face a squeeze as she passed by him to head up the stairs.
Sending her a nasty look, which he knew she couldn’t see but made him feel better anyway, Danny let her have the upper floor while he examined the main level. “What do you think, Killer? Will this place do?”
Killer made his usual squeak in response that Danny took as a yes.
“We’ll need to get you a new litter box and some litter and food. Might as well do it all in one trip while I’m out getting blood. Right?”
The cat acknowledged his comment by clawing up his chest and coming to a rest on his shoulders.
“Not a soul upstairs,” Starla announced upon entering the kitchen where Danny and Killer had ended up. “And it doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for a while. Smells like it too.” She scrunched up her nose.
He’d smelled it too and opening the refrigerator saw what the cause of the rancid smell was. Rotten food.
“Oh yuck!” Starla pinched her nose shut and backed away from the fridge.
“Oh, get over it! It’s just rotten food. Could be worse.” And it seemed that Killer wasn’t too fond of the smell either. He jumped from Danny’s arms and rushed from the room.
“How could it be worse?”
He closed the fridge door and went to the cupboards. “We could have found a dead body.”
“Ew!”
“Hey, it happened to me in the first house I decided to live in. Ooh, potato chips.” Grabbing the bag of salt and vinegar chips, he headed for the living room to relax and found Killer taking a nap on the sofa. “Looks like you’re at home.” He plunked down beside him and dug into the bag of chips.
“How can you eat with that stench?” Starla mumbled through her plugged nose.
“Like I said, I’ve smelled worse. Want some? They’re not even stale.”
She shook her head. “Not with that smell in the air. We should clean it up.”
“Feel free.” Lifting his feet onto the coffee table, Danny relaxed while he munched on his chips.
“You’re not going to help?”
Sensing the food that was being consumed, Killer woke from his slumber to saunter over to Danny in hopes of receiving a few scraps. “In the past four months since I’ve been on my own I’ve cleaned up enough crap to last me a lifetime. But if you want some advice I can tell you that you’d be better off just tossing the fridge out the door rather than attempt to clean it.”
“Advice taken and rejected.” Twirling around, Starla headed back for the kitchen.
Looking at his watch, Danny figured he’d give her five minutes before she started vomiting. He broke off tiny pieces of the chips he was eating and fed them to Killer. He heard Starla muttering to herself, heard what sounded like the garbage can being dragged across the floor, and continued to eat his chips.
“Not bad, huh, Killer? But you shouldn’t eat too many or you’ll end up with a tummy ache. I don’t need to be cleaning up puke. Remember when you got into my bag of Cheez` It’s?” Still, he broke up a few more pieces and fed them to the cat.
“Oh sweet Goddess!”
Danny checked his watch, saw that it was only approaching a minute and wondered if his calculation of five minutes was a bit generous. Better make it three.
“Oh yuck, there are maggots.”
Maybe two minutes was more accurate.
Then he heard her gagging. She wasn’t even going to make the two minute mark. Poor girl. He continued munching on his potato chips, feeding bits and pieces to the cat.
“Breathe through your mouth,” he supplied, then stuffed his face with chips. He could use a beer to wash them down. Add stopping off at the liquor store to the list of places he needed to go.
“Thanks!” she barked back, gagging.
Checking his watch, Danny saw she’d gone past the two minute mark. She might make five after all.
She flew through the room and up the stairs like a flash of lightening.
Or…maybe not.
Setting the bag on the sofa, he stood up, gave the cat’s head a rub then headed upstairs. He found her face down over the toilet, her hair falling forward to cover her face. Casually, he moved toward her and scooped her hair out of the way. When she lifted her head, he handed her the towel that was hanging beside the sink.
“Thanks.” She took it and wiped her mouth.
“Wanna toss the bitch outside now?”
“I think the smell is stained inside my nose.” She plopped down on her butt and looked up at him. “Toss it.”
“If you’d have taken my advice in the first place you wouldn’t have blown chucks into the toilet.”
“I hate you,” she said with absolute calmness.
“Aw, now is that a nice thing to say to the guy who held your hair while you puked?” He gave her a tsk tsk before leaving her in the washroom, scowling at him.
“Stay out of the bag,” he warned Killer as he came down the stairs, spotting the cat pawing at it. Entering the kitchen, he gagged a little himself at the sight and the smell but pushed it aside to do what had to be done. First, he took the garbage can and tossed it out the back door. There was a nice wooden deck attached to the house and he imagined at one time the owners had stood outside in front of a roaring barbeque, grilling burgers.
He missed barbeques.
Heading back to the fridge, he closed the door then unplugged it. Grabbing hold of the front and back, he began to swivel it through the room. When it suddenly slid forward on its own, he nearly did a face plant on the floor. Baffled, he looked to his right and saw Starla standing by the doorway. “You do that?”
She nodded. “I thought you could use some help.”
“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”
“Because I didn’t think cleaning it would be so bad.”
“Lesson learned. I’ll get the door and you woo hoo it outside.”
Laughing, she waved her hand and the refrigerator slid toward the open doorway.
Danny gave it its final shove, then closed the door. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Only, now what do we do for a cooler?”
“We steal a portable one.”
“What?” she gasped.
“We steal a portable one. What’s the big deal?”
“It’s called stealing.”
“And?” Her jaw dropped. “Well, it’s not like anyone’s here to stop me.”
“I’m stopping you.”
“Do you have any idea how many things I’ve stolen from shops or other houses since the darkness began?”
“Well, you’re not doing it now. Not anymore. We’ll purchase one.”
Now his jaw dropped. “Okay, who do you plan to purchase it from? All the shop owners are gone.”
Her lips pursed in thought. “It’s not right to just take it. We can leave some cash behind.”
“Oh sure, so the next person who goes in there to steal something will also get a nice chunk of change. Good idea.” He rolled his eyes.
“I can’t just take something without paying for it.”
“That’s fine. I can. But first, I need
a car.” He headed for the front door, preferring to avoid going out the back way if at all possible.
Chapter 13
What was he doing? Instead of trying to steal a cooler of some sort, he should be getting his butt out of Jacob’s Cove like he’d planned. Maybe once he’d helped Starla get settled he’d head out. Then again…he couldn’t really leave her here to fend for herself in a city filled with monsters.
Okay, so the motivation to stay was purely selfish. Danny was hoping to get laid. Since Starla had given him a full frontal view of those scrumptious tits of hers and he’d felt the slick juices of a woman aroused, he was determined to have more.
“You think maybe after we get the cooler we could have sex?”
“What?” She stopped abruptly in her stride.
Danny stopped a few seconds after her which put him directly in front of her. Facing her now, he could see the shock etched on her face at his question. Maybe he should have put it a little smoother. “I’m just wondering because, well…I’m still a little keyed up from your sex show.”
“It wasn’t a sex show.”
“Sorry. Your attempt to seduce answers out of me. What’s your answer?”
“Way to romance a girl, Danny. Very smooth.” She marched ahead of him in quick clomps of her feet.
“Hey, you weren’t exactly thinking romance when you were stripping for me earlier,” he reminded her as he hurried to catch up.
“You still don’t just blurt something like that out to a girl.”
Why not? He had before and had gotten what he wanted. “Okay.” Apparently she preferred something more. “Is there a possibility you and I could get horizontal sometime soon?”
She threw her hands in the air and huffed.
“What? I’m horny.”
“Instead of blurting that out to me, you could show me how you feel.”
He could do that, no problem. Grabbing her arm, he pulled her into his arms and sunk into her mouth with as much hunger as if he were starved for a year. With his free hand, he shoved into her shorts only to have her stop him with her hand. She gave him a good solid shove back.
“What?” He was completely baffled. “You said you wanted me to show you how I felt. I want your body and I’m horny so I showed you what I wanted.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
She was trying his patience. “For Christ’s sake, will you just tell me what you mean already? I’m getting a headache.”
“Romance me. Seduce me. Hold my hand, caress my skin, kiss me softly. That sort of thing.”
“You want intimacy. I want to be satisfied.” Two completely different things.
“What’s wrong with combining the two?”
“Hey, Danny.”
Their conversation was momentarily halted when his brother, Dante interrupted them. “Hey, bro.”
“Bro?” Starla inquired, looking from Danny to Dante.
“This is my twin brother, Dante.” Danny introduced with very little enthusiasm. He was still on the fence about his feelings towards his brother. On one hand, they’d had some decent conversations in the past few months. Still…his brother had locked him up and had left him locked up when the house he was in went up in flames.
“This is your twin? Interesting. Then you’re not a vampire?” she asked Dante.
“He’s all human.”
“So this is what you should look like. Not bad.” She smiled charmingly at Dante and had Danny’s nerves prickling.
“Keep your eyes to yourself. He’s seeing someone,” Danny informed her, suddenly feeling very possessive of her. “Dante, this is Starla. She’s new to Jacob’s Cove.”
“I’m here researching the spell that’s surrounding Jacob’s Cove in darkness.” She held her hand out to him. “Pleased to meet you, Dante.”
Dante took it, gave it a short shake. “Pleasure’s mine. It’s pretty risky for you here.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“She’s a witch,” Danny supplied, shoving his hands in his jean pockets.
“For real?” Dante asked in a shocked tone.
Starla nodded. “You two sound the same. Well, your voice is a little deeper than Danny’s, but I suppose that’s because you’re older where he’s still maturing. It’s fascinating, really,” she stated, looking from one of them to the other in amusement.
“Yeah, thrilling. We were just heading—”
“For a stroll. Danny was showing me around,” Starla interrupted boldly. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the ritual?”
“I know enough,” Dante added with a curl of his brow. “Why do you want to know about the ritual?”
Danny let out a long breath and decided to lean up against the fence along the sidewalk that led to someone’s house. This could take a while.
“My mother and High Priestess Essema tried to break the ritual but were unsuccessful. They even tried contacting the Dark Mystics but were denied by them as well. I thought if I came to the actual place where the spell was cast I might be able to find out who did it and how it was done. Danny’s been kind enough to help me out.”
“Not by choice,” he muttered, examining his torn sneakers. Maybe while he was stealing a cooler he could lift a new pair of shoes too.
“So you want to end the darkness?” Dante inquired.
“Yes. There have been too many lost lives due to it already. It’s time to end it.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. As it so happens, we’re looking to break the darkness too.”
Starla cocked her head to the side, tucked her hair behind her ears. “We?”
“He belongs to Trinity and Basil’s little gang,” Danny supplied, still bored. He started chewing on his nails for a lack of anything else to do.
“Who is Trinity?”
“She’s the queen and ruler of all vampires,” Danny added nonchalantly.
Starla stepped back. “So you guys are evil?”
Dante’s brow furrowed and Danny burst out with laughter. “My bro here doesn’t have an evil bone in his body…well…unless you count locking me in a dungeon and leaving me to burn to death.”
“What?” Starla gapped, her head snapping from Danny to Dante.
“I thought we’d gotten past that,” Dante said.
Danny shrugged. “Still working on it on my end. Hey, it’s not an easy thing to get over.”
“You locked him in a dungeon and set it on fire?”
“No!”
“Lies,” Danny piped in.
“Well, okay. I locked him in Basil’s dungeon but I didn’t set it on fire,” Dante justified. “His old buddies did that by blowing up Basil’s house.”
Starla turned to Danny now, her eyes wide. “Your friends blew up a house?”
“Hey, I was locked up and had no part of it. Starla, why don’t you ask my bro there why he had me locked up in the first place?”
“I did it for your own good,” Dante snapped.
“For my own good? You were hoping to turn me to the good side.”
“I just wanted you away from Chaos,” Dante expressed vehemently.
“In hopes to turn me to your side.”
“And what was wrong with that?”
Danny shook his head as he pulled his hands from his pockets and took Starla’s hand in his. “You’re always trying to make me into something I’m not, bro. When are you going to accept me for who I am? Come on, Starla. We have things to do.” He walked off, taking Starla with him.
“Your brother can’t accept you being a vampire I take it?”
“He hates what I am.”
“You would think after all these years he would accept you for who you are.”
“Before the darkness he thought I was
dead.” She stopped abruptly causing him to stop. “What’s up?”
“He thought you were dead?”
“Yeah.”
“How horrible. Why would he think you were dead?”
With a heavy sigh, Danny decided just to give her a rundown of his life and get it over with. “I never felt like I belonged in my family. I always felt like I was meant for something else, so when Chaos approached me when I was thirteen and asked if I wanted something else, I said yes. Dante happened to witness Chaos turning me into a vampire. My family suspected I’d been killed and I let them believe it.”
She tugged her hand free of his grasp and backed up one step. “How cruel of you to let them believe such a thing for all these years!”
“Hey, Chaos made me believe my family didn’t want me.”
Her mouth gaped open. “He did? How cruel of him. Why on earth did you stay with him?”
“Well, I didn’t know better until recently. For twenty years I thought my family was glad I was gone.”
“What changed your mind?”
He slipped his hands in his pockets and glanced around the area they’d stopped in. He was surprised they hadn’t been approached by some night creature yet. “Dante locked me up and told me differently.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Locked you in that Basil guy’s dungeon?”
“Yeah.”
“So why are the two of you mad at each other then?”
“How would you like it if your brother locked you up and left you there when the house was on fire?”
“I don’t have a brother. But I can understand why you’d be upset by that.”
“Thank you. At least someone understands.”
“Still…” Starla began, “you two should work it out and put it behind you.”
“Yeah, easier said than done. Look, we need to keep moving. No telling when someone’s going to come out and want a snack or more.”
“More?”
He took her hand in his only because he’d liked the way it had felt in his earlier. “Rape. You’re a tasty number in more than one way, Starla. These animals have had the same blood and pussy for months. Having someone fresh on both accounts is mighty tempting. There’s a truck up ahead. Let’s give it a try.”
Shiela Stewart - [Darkness 04] Page 8