by J. F. Lewis
“Did he explain anything?”
“Does Winter ever explain anything?”
“What exactly are you supposed to do?”
“It’s a good thang you don’t show up on film,” JPC shouted next to me. Several motorists had cell phones out, trying to take pictures or video of me.
“Keep him here a week,” Rachel said.
“And to do that you decided to kidnap him and make him cheat on me.”
“Oh, please.” Rachel flipped me the bird. “Do you know a better way to keep Eric occupied than with liberally applied pussy? Consider it his bachelor party come late and forget about it. It’s not like he’s going to be faithful anyway. Not unless your name is Marilyn—and neither of us are her.”
“Damn it, Rachel!” I poured on the speed, leaving my ghost escort so far behind that he blew away in a puff of smoke and re-formed next to me.
“Don’t go doin . . .” He fell behind. Vanished. Re-formed.
“. . . that, missy. It ain’t . . .” He lost the pace, vanished, and re-formed a third time. “. . . fun a t’all.”
“Sorry,” I mouthed. “You go wait in the In-between or something, but keep track of me.” I slowed up to keep from pulling past his range limit. “And, John Paul.”
“Yes?”
“If I fall asleep tonight and I don’t have Eric . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’ll need you to shoot me with El Alma Perdida. Can you do that?”
“Well, a certain number of times and in the raht circumstances, but it’ll set you on fahr.”
“Only if the bullet lodges in me,” I said. “You have to make sure the bullet goes clean through, enough to wake me up, but not set me ablaze.”
“Maybe you ain’t noticed, missy, but Perdy’s bullets don’t like ta go straight through.”
“Then pull the bullet out, but fast. Promise me?”
“Why do you want me ta shoot you in the first place?”
“To wake me up, so I can keep looking. We’re on a timetable here.”
“Ah promise.” He didn’t sound happy. “But it’ll count as one of yore times.”
“What times?”
“Times I kin fahr Perdy on yore behalf.”
“How many do I get?”
“I cain’t tell you.”
“Fine then. Done.”
Courtney’s body lost cohesion, drifting apart in a roiling cloud of smoke scattered on the breeze, and I sped back up, the repetitive slap of my boots on the pavement jarring my knees and rubbing raw against my skin the longer I kept it up.
“I’m sorry, Rae,” I said when we were in full contact again through her thrall-master bypass. “Winter’s going to have to lose this bet.”
“I thought you might feel that way.” She waggled her eyebrows impishly. “Say hello to my little friend.”
Irene appeared before me at the same time I sensed her. She was at least twenty years older than me, vampirically. Pink hair and a slight figure masked a core of strength. She was a Vlad, too. That I hadn’t sensed her before, I chalked up to Rachel’s mystic shenanigans. She wore capri pants and an open ruffled blouse without a bra. My eyes went to the wedding rings on her finger. I’d only seen them once before, but I recognized them.
Greta had brought them back when she finally got around to cleaning out Marilyn’s apartment. They were Marilyn’s wedding rings—an engagement ring with a large square radiant-cut diamond flanked by two tapered baguettes, and a matching wedding band of channel-set radiant-cut stones. There was an engraving on the inside, but I couldn’t remember what it said. “He’s going to kill you.”
“Nah,” she said, jogging backward as fast or faster than I ran forward. “He’s got a soft spot for me.” She smirked. “And a hard-on.”
“Irene . . .”
“Oh, what’s the harm?” She darted from side to side, hard to follow with my eyes, so fast—even for a vampire, unbelievably fast. “It’s a few tumbles. You’ll get him back in a few days and the sex you guys have will be great. Makeup sex is the best.”
“Didn’t he try to kill you?”
“Oh please.” Irene shook her head. “That was forever ago. A tiff. It’s hard to stay mad at Eric. It would be like staying mad at Disney World because Pirates of the Caribbean broke down once. The other rides are still fun.”
“Irene . . .”
She stopped, going from high speed to stationary in an instant, arm outstretched, and it clotheslined me. My head and body flew in divergent directions and the traffic went nuts, cars crashing into each other as my blood spurted everywhere—not as much as a decapitated human might have, but impressive nonetheless.
I lay in the dark, unable to move, when John Paul Courtney appeared next to my head.
He let loose an appreciative whistle. “That one’s feisty.”
“Head back on,” I mouthed.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “I cain’t touch you, but I kin touch Perdy and she kin touch ya. Got you under the car at the hotel, didn’t I?”
The indignity of having one’s head rolled across the highway to be reattached to one’s body cannot be underestimated. Particularly when the ghost of an ignorant hick who’s doing the job misjudges a car trying to drive past the accident and gets you hit again in the middle of the road. Yes, JPC had rolled my cat-body up under a nearby car just before dawn on the same day, but it hadn’t been nearly so far, and I hadn’t been awake for it.
In mid-roll, our surroundings shifted and I found myself in a Vale of Scrythax a few feet from my body with no JPC to roll me the rest of the way.
“You are a very determined vampire,” a German-accented voice said. Aarika stepped into view, armored up and ready for a fight. “And an even more determined wife. I’ve convinced the Council that if I don’t provide you my assistance, our furry itinerant dinosaur will hold it as a breach of trust.”
She rolled my head back to my neck and when the flesh touched, my body reawakened and the healing process screeched to life.
“Do you have a car?” I asked.
She helped me stand.
“I do.”
“I can track Eric, but only as a cat. It’s hard to explain.” My outfit was ruined. “Can you understand Cat?”
“I can link us temporarily.” She touched my forehead, and a telepathic link opened between us.
“Say something.”
“This feels different, more . . . organized than when I talked with James.”
“Of course,” she said with pride. “I am German. Now transform.”
I did, reassured by the familiar feel of my feline form, a welcome change from sore ankles, wrecked clothes, and dirt.
“Can you still understand me?” I thought.
“Of course.”
We walked to where she said we’d be out of the road and we left the Vale, appearing in the real world next to a silver sports car with futuristic lines and a front grill reminiscent of a guitar pick. The doors rotated up like the wings of some stylish insect.
“Wow.”
“You like it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s a Wiesmann GT MF5. A good German car. Don’t claw up the seats or I will be forced to kill you.”
I climbed into the seat.
“Shedding is to be kept to a minimum.”
She pressed the silver Start button and the car roared to life. As we pulled onto the road, JPC appeared in the passenger’s seat, overlapping me.
“I like this un,” he said. “I put Perdy in the trunk.”
“Thanks, John Paul,” I meowed.
“Think it,” Aarika corrected. “Don’t speak it. I can understand your thoughts, not your words.”
She pulled back into traffic, ignoring the emergency vehicles behind us.
“Did anyone get hurt?” I asked.
“Of course,” she snapped. “Vampires played among humans.”
“Keep going straight,” I thought at her. “I may not have a whole lot of noti
ce on turns.” I switched to meows for talking to John Paul. “John Paul, you go ride with Eric. Come back and tell me when they turn.”
47
ERIC:
BLIGNORANCE IS HISS
Two hours later, I finished watching Casablanca and started on Singin’ in the Rain. Gene Kelly had just escaped his fans and was jumping off the roof of a streetcar and into the passenger’s seat of Debbie Reynolds’s car when I hit Pause.
“Debbie Reynolds was Carrie Fisher’s mom, wasn’t she?”
“What the hell are you talking about, babe?” Rachel asked. She was driving too fast, had been the whole trip, not that I mind fast cars, but I’d noticed.
“She married Eddie Fisher and he dumped her for Elizabeth Taylor when Mike Todd died in that plane crash,” Irene said.
“Oh, yeah.” I remembered. “The Lucky Liz. Lucky for Liz she wasn’t on that plane, I guess. Not too lucky for folks on board.”
Irene elbowed me. “Be nice.”
“I am nice.”
She took another look out of the rear window and tried to hide it. A human might not have noticed it, but I did. “Why do you keep looking out the back window?” I looked out into the night. Maybe you could see the Alps in the distance, maybe not. By day it would have looked special, but not at night, not to me. It was a long drive to Montpellier . . . I hadn’t thought France was so big.
“It’s pretty,” she answered. “Just watch your movies. Don’t you have Casablanca on that thing? You love that movie.”
“I just watched it.” I settled back in. “You’d have noticed if you weren’t so busy looking out the window for bad guys.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Hey.” I warded off the explanation with upraised palms. “I’m a no-questions-asked kind of guy. I don’t need to know and generally I don’t want to. You know that, but if there’s a problem and you need help, well, we’re married and I probably take that a little more seriously than you.”
A combative response lingered on Irene’s tongue and teetered on her lips before sliding back down her throat in an uncomfortable swallow. “You do, don’t you?”
“Yep.” I looked out the back. Vamp vision made things look clearer than I let on. Beautiful countryside at night, speckled with quaint, crowded, beautiful towns and cities, the modern meeting the historic and, even an hour away, I fancied that I could smell the sea. “On the other hand, if you’re trying to keep secrets from me, then do a better job.”
“Why, what did you hear?”
“Well . . .”
If you want an insight into the way my head works, here it is: I could have told my new bride I’d heard her telling a gorgeous little Vlad that she could have me back in a few days, describe the telltale sound of neck muscles giving way, and stop pretending I’d been so wound up in the movie that I hadn’t noticed the accidents behind us or the sirens . . . or the blast of wind when Irene had opened the door and jumped out of the moving car, the second blast when she’d come back in, the blood under her fingernails and down the back of her capris. . . . I could demand to know what the hell was going on.
Or . . . I could paint my brain with Liquid Paper and enjoy the ride while it lasted, have one or two more three-ways while I didn’t know what they were costing me and I could still enjoy the sex without focusing on the bill.
Guess which one I chose.
“Well, I heard a whole lot of sirens . . . and then you said something about my hard-on. I only heard that much because when you went walkabout, I had to scramble to keep my headphones in.
“But what’s annoying me is all the backward glances.” I touched her chin and drew her into a soft kiss. “You can either tell me what’s up and let me help or keep me in the dark. But if you choose option two, then, like I said, you need to do better, because I can only ignore so much. Okay?”
“What if I’m trying to kill you?” Irene started undoing my belt buckle, nipping my lower lip with her fangs as she kissed me.
“Then you’ll die disappointed and a failure.”
Irene’s gaze flickered to Rachel and back . . . and I smelled cinnamon.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I pushed Irene away less gently than I should have and she slapped against the door. “We’re nowhere near a pâtisserie and there isn’t a Cindy’s Cinnamon Rolls in this whole damn country . . . so don’t start doing whatever magic you ladies are doing, and—”
“I was just trying to calm you down,” Rachel said. “You’re right, it was me, and it was magic, but only because I’m not supposed to let you get too angry. You remember? I’m supposed to keep you calm?” She flicked on the emergency lights and slowed down. “Remember?”
Nice save, I thought. It might even be true. Partially.
Rachel stopped the car, got out, and opened Irene’s door. “You drive,” she said. “He needs me and you know the way.”
Irene’s look shot daggers at Rachel, “I want what I want” so close to being said that my ears were picking up on the initial inhalation of air. “Fine.”
Rachel and I partied in the back while Irene drove (partition up and radio blaring). Live women are more fun anyway, and Rachel’s affections were desperate, her lovemaking urgent, as if she knew it couldn’t last.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and get it over with?” I whispered in her ear.
“You don’t want to know,” she said, and it was the truth.
“That bad?”
Her tongue traced the lobe of my ear, the heat as intoxicating as her breath, coming in shorter gasps against the side of my face. “Uh-huh.”
Our clothes came off and we moved together. No foreplay this time. She didn’t want it.
“Wherever you’d kiss me,” she hissed as she thrust against me, “I want you to bite.”
“These aren’t toys,” I said needlessly. “It’ll hurt like hell. Mine heal fast, but—”
“I want it to hurt,” she said. “Everything’s fucked up. Unrecoverable. And I want to feel it as much as I can.”
“Just tell me what’s going on and then tell me you’re sorry—”
“I did that once.” She increased her rhythm as she spoke, breath shorter, our flesh meeting and separating in hard angry slaps. “You won’t be so forgiving next time.”
I sank my teeth into her wrist following a kiss, kissed my way up her arm and across her shoulder, leaving wounds in my wake, smeared with blood, mine and hers. Scraping the skin of her cheek with my fangs when I couldn’t bring myself to bite, I left red lines on her body, down her jaw, her throat, the underside of her breast, where I bit hard and she lurched, resisting the natural urge to pull away from the injury, leaning into it as I pressed my fangs deeper into her breast.
“Should I turn you?” I asked her. Her laugh caught me off guard.
“No, baby.” Rachel’s nails dug into my shoulders, her thrusts constant. “I’ve got a way out. I don’t want to take it, but I have one.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
My heart woke. My lungs drew air, and blood ran through my veins. I lost track of the time, one sexual act leading into the next, each climax spurring the next one on until the scent of her sex and her cinnamon magic ran together and I tasted not just the cinnamon or the spice of her blood, but the sweat on her skin and her skin itself.
“I want you to do everything and I want you everywhere,” she told me. “Parting gift. Okay?”
I responded wordlessly, ignoring the fact that I’d climaxed multiple times with no sign of an abatement of my ardor. At some point, we reached Irene’s villa and when the car stopped, I carried Rachel out and onto the hood, the engine-heated metal shy of scalding, but uncomfortably hot. She smiled into the metal as I pulled at her hair, fangs buried in the nape of her neck.
“Hit me,” she said, and I couldn’t.
“No.”
“Scratch me then. I want to feel your claws on my skin.”
I raked her back, not as hard as she wanted, because s
he wanted blood, her own, wanted it running down her back and dripping off my claws, but I couldn’t do that either.
“Now change.”
“What?”
“It’s the only way you can get deeper,” she said. “I’ll help.”
I smelled cinnamon and the skin on my arm blackened in the night and I grew. The skin on my back broke open and I looked sideways at the tenebrous wings that sprung forth. What the hell? Purple light from my eyes tinted her skin an alien tinge, her blood darker in that light, close to black, and Irene cursed. The weird part was, I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t remember changing before, but it felt natural.
“You’re doing the uber vamp?” Irene asked.
“The what?” I asked the question, but Irene didn’t answer.
Rachel hissed. “Eyes on me, Eric.”
We built toward a final climax, her cries filling the night, and when I pulled away from her, I was slick with sweat and the normal secretions of sex, not blood.
“What the hell?” My voice was deep, rumbling.
“Now that,” Rachel said with a leer, “is unsafe sex.”
“Can he get you pregnant like that?” Irene asked.
“Blood,” I gasped. My heart sped up instead of slowing down. “I . . .” Knees buckling, I collapsed onto the front of the car, grasping at my chest. “. . . need blood.”
With my throat drying, it became hard to speak. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach clenched. My intestines writhed like snakes.
“Cecile,” Irene bellowed, “bring blood wine!”
We were parked in the driveway of Irene’s villa. Lights sprang on and servants came running. When I saw them, Irene’s face masked theirs the instant I saw each of them.
Gunpowder odors wafted past my nostrils, and my skull ached, flashes of white hot searing it, seemingly from within.
“What did you do?” Irene asked.
“Get some blood in him,” Rachel shouted. Exhausted herself, trembling as she tried to rise. “I used up too much of my power and he’s fighting it.”
“Fighting what?” I murmured.
“Maybe if I tweak his hunger . . .”
I remembered El Segundo. Remembered Irene’s betrayal. And someone was calling my name. Someone important, but very far away.