by L M Adams
“Don’t touch me.” He orders and my arms drop immediately.
“Please, Jack,” comes my strangled plea.
“What, Jaevia? What do you want?” His voice is low and dangerous. I can stop this any time; something tells me he’ll stop if I say the word. I know he will. Why won’t my mouth say the word?
“You, I’m sorry about the things that have happened to you. If you need to hurt me, it’s ok, Jack. I can handle it.” My eyes close, a tear slips from my lashes. He’s so twisted inside. Had he reacted like this because I had treated him with kindness?
“I do not want your pity! I knew you didn’t love me. I know you see me as some poor little creature that needs fixing because you saw those pictures. I like who and what I am. I do not need to be saved!” he shouts, standing up and releasing me. My body aches with the loss of his touch.
“One minute you tell me you want to throw me out your life, to set me free, sending me to be with another woman. Then next you’re telling me I make you feel calm and that you want me.” He turns his back on me, hanging his head.
“I want you to want to be here, Jack. Not as my slave as a man who wants to be with a woman.” I say simply.
Ah, the same thing Lucien wants, perhaps?
We have an agreement, I think sternly, reminding her of her promise.
Yes, yes.
I feel my succubus pull away, settling inside of me.
He turns back to me his eyes have gone completely blue, the room plunges into an ice cold.
“Do you think I’d be here if I did not want it so? Are you so young you do not realize when a man offers his heart to you?” He laughs a cruel laugh. “I’d never thought I’d understand Lucien but by all that is holy I do right now. We both have offered our hearts to you on a silver fucking platter.” I jerk at ‘fucking.’
I open my mouth to say something, but close it quickly as he rages on.
“You reject him and you treat me like a child that knows not what they want. I am a man! I am a prince of the royal blood. I am a hundred and fifty years old, yet you think I do not know my own mind.”
His voice drops to a low octave, his eyes bore into me ruthlessly.
“Well I promise you this: if you mention setting me free again, you better mean it because I will leave you.”
He moves to walk out the room. The hell with that!
My own voice is iced over, “Don’t you dare move another inch.”
I don’t know if it’s what I say, or the conviction in my voice, but he doesn’t move. I stand and walk to the middle of the room.
“Sit on the bed.” He moves to the bed and sits down. His face is blank.
I turn my back and close my eyes. I don’t want him to go, not if he doesn’t want to.
“I’m not always going to do or say the right things, Jack!” I turn to him saying, “I keep seeing you as a victim. Maybe because of what I’ve been through. I want you to be happy, so if this is what makes you happy then so be it. I swear I will respect your choice from here on out, even if I don’t understand it, on two conditions. One, should you ever want to be free of me, you will tell me; and two, you try to be selfish a little.”
He looks at me then, eyes gone back to their deep metallic dark blue. He nods his head once; I guess that’s him agreeing.
Now the hard part, me being honest. “I’m scared I’ll hurt you, Jack. There are dark things inside me.” I say, looking away from his clear gaze.
“There’s also love. I see it; I know it, even if you do not believe it,” he says in a whisper.
“To have my love, you’d live with the dark things?” I ask.
“I’d love the dark things. I’d love the parts of you that you hate.” He says in a clear voice, “Now come let me finish your hair. It’s a mess.”
Back to my normal Jack.
Disaster adverted. I sit on the floor between his legs and let him finish braiding my hair.
Women are more emotional. Ha! Make a note to self: daemons, wolves, and pure blood vamps all have their pride.
“What should I do about Madame tomorrow night?” I ask after I feel him relax, concentrating on his task.
“You need to assert your dominance early on. You becoming Grigori will be our basis. Madame hasn’t been taken and dominated in probably decades. I think we should show up in force. Which – let me say this – none of you have the proper clothing for. We need to fit in a shopping trip somewhere tomorrow.”
“How do you know what I have to wear?” I ask incredulously.
“You wear jeans and T-shirts every day. I looked through your closet earlier. There’s nothing there suitable. I’m sure none of the guys have anything that will suit either. You have to make an impression or rather remake your image. So you’ll have to be drastic in your actions, in your appearance.” Jack says.
“Well what should we wear?” I ask.
“Leave it to me; I’ll do your hair and makeup as well. So we need a couple hours to get ready.” He leans down and kisses the side of my neck.
“You’re such a beautiful woman, Jae.”
“Thank you, Capaneus,” I say, smiling a little. “What a horrid name.”
“If you care for me at all, you will not tell the guys that’s my real name.”
He swings his leg over my head, getting up. He stands in front of me holding out his hand to me. I grab hold of it and he pulls me to my feet and into a kiss.
One of those toe-curling kisses that say all the things your heart wants to say but your mind won’t admit.
I kiss him back with all my heart asking for his forgiveness. How has a man I’ve known only for a day come to mean so much to me?
I hear Peter yelling, “Food!” and my stomach growls in response.
I turn from Jack and quickly change into a black tank top and a pair of purple yoga pants. He slips off his boots and places them neatly in the corner near our unpacked bags. I pad downstairs barefoot, feeling more relaxed than I have all day.
Chapter Twenty-two
Yes - let the joyous news be spread! The Wicked Old Witch at last is dead! -The Wizard of Oz
We all converge on the kitchen while Peter carries the food in. I really need to do something about the lack of food in the house. Search for missing almost wolves, go shopping, try to dominate a vampire that could have me for an afternoon snack, and oh yeah, go to the market.
I hand out paper plates as Peter unpacks the box of food. It’s enough to feed an army but I doubt there will be any leftovers. We have a lot to discuss, a lot to do, but I feel the need to do something fun, or at least normal.
“We have time before we can go search the houses of the missing Bâtardi. I’m watching The Wizard of Oz; you’re all welcome to join me if you want. Then we’ll go over what Peter has found and what we need to do tomorrow with the Madame. But I need something normal for a little while today.” I grab the plate Jack hands me filled with my rice noodles, an egg roll and a couple duck sauce packets.
I go back into the living room and curl up on the sofa tucking my legs under me. I pick up the TV tablet and flip to the movies application.
I’ve bought a nice stock pile of movies, all genres, all years. Next to eating Chinese food, watching old movies is my second favorite thing to do in the human world.
I’d bought the tablet especially for the TV. Actually, that and the TV were the only things I’d bought for the house, using some of the funds I’d gotten after selling one of my precious gems.
I’d fallen in love with The Wizard of Oz the first time I’d seen it, filled with innocence and the absurd. I mean really. I wish I could go around throwing buckets of water on my enemies to make them melt. My life would be awesome then.
Jack comes in after me and sits on the floor in front of me leaning back on the sofa. Tabari comes in and moves the seat from the corner of the living room so he can see the TV that’s hung on the wall above a low bookshelf.
Lucien takes the seat beside me. Peter sits beside him af
ter I yell for him to turn off the lights. I’m glad it’s a large sofa. Minx, back in her cat form, jumps onto Peter’s lap and curls up.
The movie is watched in complete silence except for me. I laugh at everything, especially when the munchkins representing the lollipop guild start to sing. It’s one of my favorite parts. When The Scarecrow, The Cowardly Lion, The Tin Man, Dorothy, and Toto find out the truth about the Wizard of Oz, Tabari gasps, horrified, and yells, “Charlatan!” Which makes both me and Peter laugh nonstop for minutes on end.
By the time Dorothy is saying goodbye, I sniff. It always makes me sad. I’d stretched out at some point letting my legs dangle between Lucien’s thighs. He’d grunted after his first bite of the spicy rice noodles; he finishes both orders I’d gotten for him too. I barely keep my laughter in watching Tabari open a packet of duck sauce and dribble a little on his tongue. He stares down at the packet with the most curious look on his face.
Jack’s head is leaning back against my thigh and I casually run my hand through his hair. The occasional sound of pleasure coming from him lets me know he enjoys the softer sides of a relationship, too.
I look over to Lucien, who is watching the movie with rapt attention. He casually rubs my calf under the yoga pants. I know he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. The stiffness eases from him as the movie goes on. I’m glad Lucien decided to join us, although something tells me he’s only here so he can join in the more important topics. He’s always stayed separate from everyone, never tried to make friends growing up, always seeming so lonely. He’d stay on the fringes of everything unless you manipulated him to do otherwise. He probably would have taken the seat away from me if Tabari hadn’t gotten to it first.
After the movie ends, Jack gets up turning on the lights, “I’ll put on a pot of coffee.”
“I’ll go up and get the laptop. I think I can link it to the TV so everyone can see the charts I’ve made,” Peter says getting up.
Charts? The man has made charts? Well what did I expect from a ranking CNAE officer? New werewolf or not.
“I liked the movie, Jae. That was just what everyone needed,” Tabari says getting up and going to the bathroom.
“Really? Flying monkeys with little hats?” Lucien says with a smile.
I smile back, “What? It’s funny.”
“I’m glad to see you smile, Jae,” Lucien says.
I feel awkward again. How can you know someone for years, have made love to in every way under the sun and then feel so awkward around him? I feel easy with Jack when we’re not arguing about me not wanting, wanting, not wanting, wanting to beat him.
Lucien leans in and holds my gaze, asking me with his eyes if it’s ok. He’s really trying. I nod my head and look down a little, feeling shy again. Then his lips are on mine, soft and warm. I open my mouth a little and his tongue slips into my mouth, gently probing. I reach an arm up to wrap around his neck, my hand brushes his soft locks. It’s not a kiss filled with fiery heat, but more a kiss of old lovers, seeing each other again. It’s the kind of kiss we should have greeted each other with. If I wasn’t Jae and he wasn’t Lucien and this was a perfect world.
He pulls back and looks down at me. “You’re such a beautiful woman, Jae.”
I smile shyly. “Thank you, Luey.” He rolls his eyes; he hates when I call him that. Lucien is fine, Beast is fine, but Luey he hates. Which means I just have to tease him with it.
“Wench,” he smiles a half smile, gets up and goes up the stairs. He doesn’t push for more, no declarations of love or devotion. He accepted the small moment for what it was. I can’t say it wasn’t nice.
I sit back on the sofa and close my eyes for a while, enjoying the taste of warm honey Lucien left on my lips with his kiss.
Jack comes back in with the pot of coffee and a platter filled with pastries.
“Where did you get these?” I ask, taking one from the platter; goodness he even warmed them up.
“I stopped at the market for a few things when I went out earlier. I only got enough food for breakfast. I don’t know how to cook much else.” He sets the coffee pot down on the coffee table and goes back into the kitchen. I really have to find a way to thank him without him taking it the wrong way.
He comes back in with mugs, cream and sugar. He pours me and Lucien a cup, he fixes mine perfectly again and sets Lucien’s to the side. I close my eyes in pleasure.
Tabari grabs a pastry. Jack pours him a cup of coffee as well. He pours one more, saying it’s for Peter and goes back in the kitchen to make another pot. He always puts himself last. I’ve noticed that. Even if he’s not a slave to a person, he takes care of their needs first, every time. ‘If I serve I feel like a good person.’
“I haven’t found any pattern as far as where the Bâtardi live. Except that they all live in the fringe,” Peter says coming down the stairs.
“Have you found anything to link them at all?” I ask, taking another bite from my pastry.
“Nothing concrete; everything seems circumstantial at best.” He turns on the TV and links the laptop to it. He pulls up a map that has red dots placed over a map of Baltimore.
He’s right, they’re scattered. No pattern that I can see. He then pulls up pictures with each person’s vital information beside it. All different races, both male and female, age, looks. Nothing is the same between any of them except they’re some sort of lycanthrope carriers.
“I found one thing, out of complete desperation. I looked at their last recorded visits to the City Proper.” He pulls up another screen which has each of their names and a date and time beside it.
“They’ve all been to the City Proper in the last two months. But that’s not unheard of,” I respond.
“True until you look at what for. All of them made those visits for their mandatory physical. Most of them have no other trips recorded except for the same thing last year. After this last visit, they go missing within a week’s time,” Peter says quietly.
The ramifications of that knock the wind out of me. “The humans know,” I say, barely above a whisper. “It’s the only way. They’ve found what genetic markers to look for; the ones that show supernatural genealogy.” I get up and start to pace.
I know they keep logs of everyone’s DNA for crime fighting, disease control, VRB chips. The use of DNA really took off at the end of twentieth century.
But why would they start analyzing it further after the fall? Wouldn’t they need permission first?
Now Jae, this is the government. They don’t ask for permission.
“Does the Kindred know?” I ask, looking towards Tabari.
“Not as far as I know. We’ve known something would have to be done with these VRB chips because it’s going to start looking suspicious when Big Mike shows up and scans his wrist. It says he should be eighty or a hundred but he looks forty-five,” Tabari answers. Shit, Big Mike is probably the better part of two hundred now.
“If they have any plans, they haven’t let it be known to the Reapers.” Lucien adds coming down the stairs.
Jack hands him his cup of coffee. He’s going out of his way to be accommodating to Lucien, which seems to put the large man at ease. Maybe they won’t kill each other after all.
Peter clears his throat. “There’s one other thing.” He pulls up another screen. It’s a timeline with miniature pictures of all of the missing people and the generation away from their lycanthropy origin.
“At first it was fourth generations and then third generations. But the last two – the ones Big Mike called the Kindred about – they are the only second generation.”
“They are progressing,” Jack says.
“Yes,” Peter answers. “They may try to take a first generation next and then a full blood.”
“Perhaps not.” Lucien says. “Not if they find whatever they’re looking for. If they wanted a wolf, they’d take a wolf. There has to be a full blood that would have gone in for their medical in the last month or so. No full bloods have gone mi
ssing? It is odd.”
“Well, what in the world do you want to do with people who can’t turn into anything?” I ask to no one in particular.
“Experiment on them,” Tabari says. “Say for argument’s sake, they have a pure blood sample already. They know what those genes do but they want to know how to turn them on or off. It would probably be easier to work with dormant genes.”
“But that’s not for humans to meddle with,” I say out loud.
Lucien scoffs “Wouldn’t be the first time humans meddled with things that they ought not to.”
“The Collapse,” I say softly. Tabari and Lucien nod their heads.
“It was a resistant strain of influenza, fast acting and deadly, nothing could have been done. That’s not human kind’s fault.” Peter says, sticking up for his not so long ago brethren.
I sigh. “Peter, the humans created the influenza.”
“What? No they didn’t! Why would they do that?”
“Fear makes mistakes,” I say looking into Peter’s eyes. “Humans had been tinkering with genes and splicing and cloning for so long, they thought they were gods. Then another flu mutated, remember? But people barely ever go and get those flu shots. Not taking it serious. They just ignore them. The flu spread badly. The CDC couldn’t rely on people doing the right thing any longer. So they bonded the next vaccine to a supposedly harmless but aggressive strain of a common cold. It was supposed to race through the population. A few would catch a bad cold maybe, but the vaccine would bond to the cells and protect against the next strain of flu.
“Except it mutated, and became the strongest, most aggressive flu since the Spanish Influenza. That one killed maybe twenty to fifty percent of the population. This one killed eighty percent of you.”
Basic human history, we’re all taught it back home. The collapse of man has an entire book. Maybe the humans would’ve been able to do a better job of fighting back against the aggressive flu strain they’d created. But just then the economy collapsed; it was the perfect shit storm. A country already limping along came to a screeching halt. With the fall of America; France, Great Brittan, Canada, Japan, and China tumbled soon after. Third world countries actually faired the best; they already knew how to be poor.