by Molly Harper
“I am not evil, that I am aware of,” he said evenly, though he sounded as if he was about to laugh. “And I do not think I am hell-bent on your destruction, though my actions apparently lead you to believe otherwise.”
“Which, I suppose, is your way of saying that you don’t know why you’re going into anti-Gigi fugue states,” I muttered.
“I really have no idea. But for now, can we pretend that we are two normal people on a normal outing, in which we are exchanging the background information one would expect to learn when one of them is not blacking out large portions of his history?”
“You mean the kind of conversation that usually takes place before getting to second base with somebody?”
He leaned forward, trapping me against the trunk of a large oak tree by placing a hand on either side of my head. “I am not familiar with the base system, but I am fairly certain we did not get to any of the interesting ones. As a man, I insist that I would remember touching a body like yours. The sense memory alone would be enough to carry through to my conscious memory.”
He flashed that megawatt grin at me, and my lady bits did a little happy dance. It just wasn’t fair. The man should come with a warning label. “Caution: May Cause Panties to Spontaneously Combust.”
OK, Scanlon, you are a grown, modern woman, with plenty of practice controlling your hormones. This is no different from any date with any attractive man. You just have to set boundaries and keep the blood directed above your waist. You’ll be fine. Now, keep him at a distance, so you can concentrate on producing words of more than one syllable.
I reached up to toy with the collar of his shirt. “Well, I’m combining the lovely languid kisses with the aggressive biting attempts, which rounds up to second.”
Traitorous lady bits!
Clearly, the parts of my brain not controlled by pheromones had lost the fight. They were probably tied up and shoved into a storage space somewhere in my oculomotor section, the part of my brain that controlled eyelash fluttering and giving Nik the “come closer” looks. Stupid trampy brain parts.
Nik’s nose brushed against the curve of my forehead, running along my hairline. “What do you want to know?”
Nik knelt to the ground, silent in the dry, rain-
deprived grass. Fear flared through me like a warning bell. What if this was some weird sex thing I wasn’t ready for? What if he sank his fangs into my thigh? He slid off the rubber ballet flats I used as house shoes and dropped them to the ground. Yeah, that didn’t make me feel much better, in terms of potentially weird sexual things.
Even in the moonlight filtering through the overhead canopy of leaves, I could see the iridescent red polish on my toes, with little golden House Lannister lions painted on my big toes and R-O-A-R written on the others. His eyebrows rose in surprise.
“I noticed these before, in your bedroom. As much as I want to use my question on something profound, this begs explanation,” he said, waggling my foot.
“Jane and I paint our toes with the different house sigils while we watch Game of Thrones reruns,” I told him, slipping my foot back into my shoe. “Last week, we had House Tully trout swimming across our feet. Jane’s got a much steadier hand with the polish than I do. I’m more of a House Stark girl, but we don’t play favorites.”
He stood, pulling me gently as we went deeper into the woods. “You are an interesting group.”
“We find ways to enjoy our time together,” I said, as he threaded my fingers through his. He compared the size of our hands. The verdict? His were huge, even compared with my long, tapered fingers. The same flaring feeling thrilled through my belly, but it was less fear-based and more giddy nerve-giggles. “Iris can’t watch Game of Thrones anymore. Every time she starts to like a character, that character dies in some spectacularly horrible way. So she sticks with nice, safe network comedies that don’t feature regular beheadings. But Jane likes the show, so she comes over to watch it and get a little time away from the testosterone cesspool at her house.”
Nik took a lock of my dark hair and twirled it around his long, deft fingers. “I envy your closeness. It has been a long time since I have shared that sort of camaraderie with anyone, even Cal, whom I would consider a close friend. And I have not seen him in centuries.”
“Still, to come running when he asked you to harass my classmate on my behalf, that’s a pretty tight bond,” I said. “Also, before we really start the Q-and-A portion of this evening, I need to tell you something. Because I don’t want you to find out some other way and get upset. I may have gone into the office server last night to look for your employee file.”
He stopped to stare at me, golden eyebrows at full mast. “You did what?”
“I didn’t know if I would ever get to see you again, and I had all of these questions that Cal refused to answer. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to violate your privacy. I just wanted to know more about you. I thought I should tell you myself.”
“How did you find my employee file?”
I winced. “Technically, I didn’t. I found what was supposed to be your employee file, but it was empty.”
He laughed and pulled me against his side, tucked neatly under his arm. “The fact that you were able to find the empty file was impressive. My actual file fills most of a storage room at the Council archives in Prague.”
I would take time to be frightened by that later. “So you’re not mad?”
“Mad that the girl who has occupied most of my waking thoughts since the moment I remember meeting her is equally curious about me? No, I am not angry, quite the contrary. I am glad you want to know more about me. And I am intrigued that you have the skill and cunning to accomplish your goal. All wrapped up in that sweet, deceptively guileless package. You surprise me, Gigi.”
“Well, I’m glad you appreciate my sexy curiosity, because I have questions galore. What’s your origin story? And as a follow-up subquery, how do you know Cal?”
“Are you allowed a ‘subquery’?”
“Yes, I am,” I said airily. “Entertain me, Nikolai.”
“Oh, I could entertain you for hours,” he teased me, rubbing his thumb in tight circles around my palm. “But for now, I will tell you that I was born in the 1500s,” he said. “I was the youngest of three sons in a fairly well-off family, for the time. We did not have a title, but we had a very rough version of what could be considered a castle. It was mostly a fortress, deep in the Romincka Forest. My father tended faithfully to his tenants in the village. He made sure they had enough to eat, medicine when they were sick, firewood when they were cold. He was a good man, educated and kind, and so were my brothers. But as the youngest, there was little for me to do or look forward to unless one of my brothers died. And that wasn’t the way I wanted to make my way in the world.
“So one day, when a traveling Romani circus drove past the village, I jumped on the nearest wagon and joined the caravan.”
I hooted. “You ran away with the circus?”
“For a time,” he said, looking pleased that he’d made me laugh. “They were not pleased that I had stowed away on their wagons and made me work for every crust of bread they threw my way. It was a rude awakening for a boy used to servants and soft sheets. But I earned my place.”
“Were you ever a clown?” When my alarmed tone caught his attention, I added, “It’s a fair question.”
“No, I was more of an ‘advance man,’ ” he said. “I went into the towns before the caravan arrived and was sure to tell the locals of my woes down at the nearest tavern. My pretend farmhouse had burned down, my pretend cows had dried up, my pretend wife had left me for my brother, that sort of thing. Conversation would naturally lead to commiserating about similar mishaps in their village, and I would take what I learned back to Mama Katya to use in her palm readings.”
“And no one ever caught on to you?”
“I wore di
sguises,” he said. “I blackened my hair with boot polish, rubbed walnuts on my teeth to stain them. I learned about subterfuge and sleight of hand. The circus folk may have stolen and lied, but they were very open about it.”
“Once again, your vampire logic is not like my human logic.”
“I suppose it is not,” he said, sliding a cool hand over the delicate bone of my wrist. “I enjoyed myself with the circus. I learned who I was and what I was capable of, and I picked up many of the skills I still use today.” He held up his hand, which was currently dangling my stainless-steel cuff bracelet, inscribed with a swirling G.
“Hey!”
“You did not even feel me take it off,” he said smugly.
“You could have used your vampire speed to do that,” I said, snatching it out of his hand and hooking it around my wrist.
“But I did not,” he said, and somehow, he had managed to get the dang bracelet back and was dangling it from his fingertips again.
“Stop that!”
“When it stops being funny,” he said with what almost sounded like contrition. “I toddled along that way for years, until I sent a very superstitious fellow—who I didn’t know was a vampire—for a palm reading. Katya predicted a long and lonely life for him, and he lashed out, turning me to prove her wrong. He told her that he would keep me with him for all eternity.”
I was not able to suppress my shudder. All of the vampires I knew, with the exception of Andrea, had been turned by people they knew and trusted, or eventually came to know and trust. And Andrea’s horrible sire had been given the Trial, the triple whammy of vampire capital punishment, making way for her husband to take his place as a mentor. I couldn’t imagine being turned by someone who was basically an emotional albatross. “Did that work out for him?”
Nik shook his head. “No, I rose three days later, and the moment he turned his back, I staked him and ran.”
“Seems fair.”
“There are certain benefits to being turned by a vampire who is not particularly smart,” he said. “Or fast.”
“And then what happened?”
He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, as if all that history was boring. “Eh. Enough about me.”
“But your story is so much more interesting than mine,” I protested. “My life story is sadly lacking in circus folk.”
“To you, it is less interesting, maybe. But I have so many questions about a girl named Gladiola Grace and her strange vampire upbringing.”
“We’re coming back to your awkward vampire adolescence,” I told him, but when I pointed my finger at him, I realized my bracelet was missing again. “Damn it, Nik!” I snatched it back from him.
He asked, “So what was it like, growing up with one human parent and one vampire?”
“I didn’t grow up with Cal,” I said, closing my bracelet around my wrist. “He sort of swept in under the wire and filled that big-brother role right before I flung myself out of the nest for college.”
“You are going to have to learn to use fewer metaphors.”
I pulled his hands into mine, so I could study them, trace the outline of his scarred palms with my fingertips. How could hands that still seemed so young and strong have survived for so long? How many countries had these hands touched? How many lives? Trying to estimate made me a little dizzy. How could he stand to see so much, to know so much? How could he drum up enthusiasm for each new stage in history? And how could I seem at all interesting compared with any of that?
I cleared my throat and shook off those crippling feelings of inadequacy, because I refused to be that girl in this strange undead love story. “Our parents died when I was around twelve. A drunk driver hit their car on the way home from a party. Iris was already in college and she tried to fold me into her life so she could finish up her degree. But that didn’t work. It was hard enough to try to get along, just the two of us, without adding the stress of living in a big city, no connections, no help. Iris gave up school so she could take care of me. We moved back to our parents’ house in the Hollow. For the longest time, it was just Iris and me. We were together, and we were as content as you could hope to be under the circumstances, but it was so hard on Iris, being the only adult in the house. And there was always this fear nagging at the back of our minds. We never talked about it, but I knew it was there, the fear that at any moment, we could lose it all. One bad accident, one slow month with Iris’s business, and we could teeter right into financial disaster. We could have lost the house. We could have ended up living in our car. And then Cal came along with his ‘grrr, I must protect all of the womenfolk’-ness and endless pots of money. And for the first time, we felt safe. So many of our worries seemed to just melt away. We could enjoy each other’s company in a way we hadn’t before. And then there was the added fun of freaking Cal out whenever we could. I mean, the man fought in the Trojan War, but seeing a bra hanging over a shower-curtain rod makes him stammer like a choirboy.”
Nik burst out laughing. “I will have to remember that.”
“Cal was the kind of big brother you always wanted, but he was kind of a nightmare at the same time. He loved us fiercely, but it was always just a little twisted. I mean, he decided he wanted to do an Easter egg hunt the first spring we were all together, and he filled all of the eggs with twenty-dollar bills. But then he buried them because he thought it was funny. He scared the hell out of Ben, even though he liked Ben, just because he could. There was a boy in one of my classes at UK who wouldn’t take no for an answer when I didn’t want to go out with him, and I didn’t know what happened, but I figured Cal threatened him with something, and then next thing I know, this kid runs across the campus when he sees me coming. And then he dropped out of school . . . which I suppose you already know about because you were there. Do you often do favors like that for Cal?”
“When I am not doing business for the Council, I occasionally offer my services to friends, yes.”
“Business like attending terrifying staff meetings where fangs are crushed with pliers?” I asked wryly.
“That was a special favor to Ophelia,” he said. “I am in the Hollow because Ophelia requested my assistance with a series of thefts from vampires in the area. My special talent is well known among vampires. My presence at the meeting gave her intimidating claims more credence. To be honest, I hoped that I would not have to demonstrate in front of the room. I do not particularly like performing in public, even after my circus years.”
I nodded. Almost all vampires had some sort of special talent, like Jane’s mind-reading or Dick’s gift of persuasion. Iris had yet to discover her special vampire gift, which Cal assured us was perfectly normal. It could take years to cultivate a special talent. And even then, it could be something completely off the wall like finding lost objects or talking to woodland creatures. Though, personally, I think the lost-object thing would be kind of cool.
“So far, we haven’t figured out what Iris’s is yet. I am really rooting for that ability to talk to squirrels thing, because that would be weird and awesome. Oh, wait, let me guess yours. Is it wearing clothes really, really well? Or sneaking up on people in locations where they park cars?”
He lowered his head until we were nose-to-nose and growled softly, reminding me once again that I had a bad habit of poking at predators. But then he grinned broadly, and I felt all off-balance again. He was really alarmingly good at that. “My vampiric gift is psychometry. I touch an object, and I get images of past events that occurred around the object.”
“So why don’t you use your gift to try to recover your memories of me?” I exclaimed, smacking his arm.
“I have tried!” he said, batting my swinging hands aside like harmless flies. “Have you not noticed how often I touch you? I am not getting any sort of read from you.”
“But how does it work?”
He thought about it for a long moment, as if tryi
ng to find an explanation I could handle. That made me nervous. “Every time you touch an object, you leave fingerprints behind, yes? You also leave an echo of your soul.”
I frowned. “Like a Horcrux in Harry Potter?”
I would never get tired of seeing him rub his hand over his face like that. “No,” he said. “You leave a little bit of the emotions you are feeling when you touch an object. If the emotions are strong, whether they are positive or negative, the echo is much stronger. When I pick up an object, that echo bounces into my head and shows up like a movie on a screen. Only the movies are always unpleasant.”
“Always?”
“Almost always. People seem more open to feeling strong negative emotions than positive ones.”
“Well, that’s depressing.” I stuck my bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout.
“I can see what they saw, feel what they felt, hear what they heard. If the echo is very strong, I can hear their thoughts in my head. It takes me away from myself, out of my own head.”
Suddenly, his not needing a laptop for his work made much more sense. He literally had to be “hands-on” while conducting his research for the Council. Not much use for Google there. I tilted my head at a curious angle. “Does it work with people?”
“People have too many emotions going on at once. It is almost impossible to get a clear reading. It is like white noise. If I opened my mind up to it, I would go insane.”
“Well, I’d hate for you to risk that,” I admitted.
He took my hands in his. “I hate the idea that I could not remember our first moments together. I hate that you might feel alone in this. I never want you to feel anything but—”
He stopped, jerking his head toward the house, as if he was hearing something I couldn’t. Which was likely.
“Cal and Iris are moving upstairs,” he said. “Dawn is coming, and I must rest for the day. I will walk you back to the house.”
“Wait, you were going to say something,” I said, as we moved out of the trees. “Something about feelings?”