by Sylvia Frost
“Sweet Jesus.” She pushed her palms against my chest and looked up at me with wide-eyes, but her body had stopped shaking. “Isn’t that stalking?”
“I don’t know.” Another March wind lanced through the thin fabric of the covered entryway. Carefully, I placed my hands over hers on my chest to keep them from getting cold. “What do you think?”
“I think it is a little bit.” Her swallow was audible as she stared at our hands, together for a moment. “But I think I like you anyway.”
Releasing her hands, I stroked the side of her face, enjoying the shiver that coursed through her at my claiming touch. “Good.”
Her gaze slid over my shoulder, to the plastic-windowed door behind me leading back to the restaurant. “And I think my date was kind of a creep, to be honest. So thank you for rescuing me .”
The thought of Lonan, that morally bankrupt asshole so much as breathing the same air as my mate made my whole face hot. And him as a creep was a best-case scenario. There was the possibility he was only interested in Rose because of his job.
“Creep is an understatement.” I gritted my teeth battling down the rage, and pressed a hand to the back of my neck over my matemark to soothe me. I would tell her everything after I calmed down.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. “There are just some important things I have to tell you.”
“Oh yeah?” She said and shivered from the cold.
I wanted to rub my hands up and down her arms, then remembered that I could now. Soon we’d have no secrets at all between us. I reached out, but she ducked away, biting her lip, smiling at me shyly. “How about we go somewhere warmer first. Do you want to get dinner at my apartment?”
Chapter 9
DANIEL
I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel and stared at the bumper of the taxi in front of me. Pedestrians jostled past us on the grate-covered sidewalk which vibrated from the subway rumbling through the labyrinth of tunnels below. Both modes of transportation were faster than my car, but I didn’t buy a Mercedes for speed.
My Mercedes was my cocoon of black leather and muted chrome. It shielded me from the worst of the smells, voices, and glances of the city. Also its stability controls, according to the advertisements, were enough to ward off a moose attack. My inner lion, with its habitual hatred for all gazelle-like animals, appreciated that. But the biggest plus of all was a minor detail not at all unique to my vehicle. Seat belts.
A black strap crossed over my mate’s chest and buckled her in tight. Her hands were absentmindedly running over the soft leather of the dashboard.
“I forgot how comfortable these seats are,” she whispered. “It’s like sitting on a waterbed full of butter.”
My inner lion tossed its mane in satisfaction at the thought of making our mate comfortable. Safe.
I smiled to myself and flicked on my turn signal. “I’m glad you like it.”
“Oh, you heard that.” Rose looked down at the floor mats and scratched her wrist. “Yeah, my mother drives a Mercedes too.”
I massaged the steering wheel with my palms. Now would’ve been a great time to tell her, but I couldn’t risk her doing something drastic while I was driving.
I cleared my throat and gave a little too much to gas as the light turned green. Then I merged onto a side street. I often took roundabout routes. That way if someone was following me, I’d know, but now I wasn’t looking behind me.
My gaze slid over Rose’s body. Her scent of lilacs and morning dew hit me afresh in the confines of the car, and the red and yellow shades of her dress enhanced the undertones of her fawn-colored skin and drew my eyes to her chest. I remembered her nipples brushing against my pecs, and just like that my cock was hard.
I opened my mouth, needing some topic of conversation, and grunted, “Your necklace is gone.”
“What?” Rose touched her chest to check and looked down. “Oh, yeah.” She fluffed out her hair, bringing her braids over her shoulders to hide her face from me, but I could read her moods through her smell. Embarrassment.
“I thought it was a little silly to wear on a date,” she confessed.
I darted forward between lanes and through a yellow light. “Why?”
Rose gripped the armrest, like this was a roller-coaster. “I, uh. It’s based on this book series I like.”
“Which is?”
“Matesofdarkness,” she mumbled all in one word.
I raised an eyebrow, smiling.
She tried to disappear into the leather seat.
I kept smiling and she relaxed just a little.
“It’s a YA series about werebeasts,” she explained, her eyes brighter and bigger than I’d ever seen them before. “There’s this character named Naomi and she’s this kind of sword-wielding badass.” Her hands danced in a cross between a sword fight and shaking maracas.
“And this necklace of yours is like her sword?”
Rose nodded vigorously. “Hers is made of meteorite and sets itself on fire every time she’s near the evil alpha werebeast dude. So some genius decided to make one out of magnesium so that if you go camping or something you can use the little sheath that comes with it to start a fire.”
“And you wear this around your neck?” I tried to keep my voice from sounding too concerned, but I kept picturing Rose walking around with a stick of something that I knew could issue sparks up to 3000 degrees Celsius. First a car accident, what next, an explosion? “It sounds dangerous.”
“Well,” Rose drawled. She smirked, but all too quickly her shyness gobbled back up her smile.
“What?” I coaxed.
“Maybe if I had worn it on my date, I could’ve set Lonan on fire when he tried to kiss me.”
I froze. An unfamiliar feeling bubbled up in my lungs. My hands loosened around the steering wheel. Rose regarded at me warily. Then I burst out laughing. The image of my danger-prone mate trying to set her date on fire was the most horrifyingly hilarious thing I had ever pictured. My chest shook.
“What?” she crossed her arms.
I wiped away a tear from the corner of my eye, surprised at myself. “Just…you, sitting at that table. Trying to ignite Lonan with your nail-clipper sized magnesium sword.” We hit a stoplight, and I mimed her trying to start a fire with her little sword furiously. I broke again, guffawing for the first time I could remember.
She hit me with the palm of her hand. “Watch it, maybe I’ll use you as kindling.”
I snorted incredulously. We both knew that all I’d have to do was kiss her hard and she’d melt. At the thought of kissing her, my pants got tighter still, and I was glad the steering wheel hid my crotch.
Her gaze intensified to mock-stern. “Hey,” she waggled her finger in a gesture that reminded me oddly of her mother. “You don’t know me.” My desire went cold.
I didn’t know her. I had no idea how she would react when she found out the truth. If she admired some kind of fictional character who went around slaying werewolves with a burning sword, who knew what she might do to me. My stomach felt like a fist closed around an ice-cube.
“You’re right,” I said,” I don’t.”
Her face fell.
We drove in silence for a few more minutes.
Eventually the cobblestones and cramped array of Tribeca’s trendy shops, bars and restaurants gave way to the austere limestone faces of Wall Street. Not too far from here was the former headquarters of the FBSI, the organization that had once hunted and killed my kind, although was long since defunct. I often wondered if they were somehow affiliated with the scientists who had held me in captivity. But hunters didn’t study werebeasts, they murdered them.
Now their headquarters had long since been turned over to office spaces, but I made a sharp left toward the baseball stadium to avoid it anyway.
Rose coughed, and her hand closed around the seat belt. I tensed at the idea of her taking it off.
“S-so,” she started, “big We
rehawks fan?”
I glanced at the stadium now on our right, then remembered my T-shirt. “Not particularly. How about you?”
“No.” She shook her head and her braids undulated with the motion.
Another beat of silence.
“I just figured with your shirt, and taking this round-about route just to look at Stromwell stadium…” she trailed off.
I flinched at the name. The Stromwells had once been the biggest werebeast hunters in the world, and had earned a pretty penny for their supposed extermination of the wolves and bears. That money had funded the stadium to my right, built around the turn of the century in a classical style, as if to mock the werebeast emperors of Rome who had once pitted rebellious humans against werewolf warriors in gladiatorial games. To be fair, records show that any human who could actually defeat a werewolf in single combat without the use of silver could join the wolves in the ruling warrior class. But only a couple ever had. Most died.
Now I pictured the Astroturf of the base-ball stadium, neat and even. Sans the pitcher’s mound and the bases, I imagined it didn’t look all that different from a cemetery. There were no official memorials for the death of my kind. Monsters didn’t get marked graves.
“No,” I said. “The T-shirt was just on sale, and I like this route as it tends to avoid traffic.”
“Oh,” she said, and didn’t comment on the bumper-to-bumper jam we found ourselves in at the moment. Through the curtain of her braids, her golden matemark shimmered on the back of her neck, the hairs long as freshly cut summer grass. “Well, what do you love?”
I opened my mouth, ready with the stock answers of “saving lives” or “old movies.” Both of those were true, but I liked them. I didn’t love them.
“I’m not sure I know,” I admitted. “I spend a lot of time working, and I enjoy that, but…”
“But you don’t love it,” she finished. “I get you. My job isn’t exactly my favorite thing either. To be honest, I moved here to get into publishing, but no one hired me, and I didn’t want to take any money from my mamma so I got a job as a secretary to make rent.” She laughed at herself. “Huh, I guess that’s a problem of mine. Going for what’s available instead of what I really want.”
“You love stories,” I prompted, checking my rearview mirror. Behind us a puzzles of cars shifted, and I swore I caught a glimpse of a Humvee, one of a similar model that I’d noticed when I pulled up to the restaurant. There was a non-zero possibility Lonan was following us. When I looked over my shoulder, it had taken a right turn. I made a note of the license plate, “GARCIA.”
“Yeah,” she added. “It’s not like I’ve had a bad life, but I love reading about other places and people. I love to escape. Sometimes I feel the freest curled up in a corner surrounded by books.”
“Well, let’s get you lots of books then,” I said.
She giggled. “I like the sound of that. Although I hear it’s kind of forward, buying a girl books on the first date.”
I liked the sound of her. I wanted to make sure that she kept making that little giggle. Exhaling through my nose, I found an answer. “I don’t love my job. But I need to do it. Helping other people calms me.”
“So you want to save the world?” Her hand crept toward the divider between the passenger seat and mine.
It took all my willpower not to snatch her by the wrist and zoom right out of this city. “That’s what I say when most people ask.”
“But the truth is?”
“The truth is I want to save myself.” The emotion cracking at the corners of my words startled me. “I didn’t have an easy adolescence. I…”
Broken bones. Broken bars. Scars screaming. Needles in my arms. Silver in my veins.
“We have a problem! He’s breaking out.”
The taste of warm blood in my mouth and soft flesh parting under my fangs and bright lights and walking naked in the highway and blood in my mouth and blood still in my mouth and blood I can taste right now. Right here. In my mouth.
“Daniel,” her voice brought me back.
I clenched my back molars together so hard my ears popped. “I fought.”
“I see.” Her voice was soft, enthralled, not judging me or pitying me. Just listening.
“Some people put me in a bad situation.” I went on. “To get out, I had to hurt them. It was the right thing to do, but I hated that look in their eyes. As if all the bad things they’d done to me were okay, because in the end I’d proved them right by fighting back. I’d proved, I was just a monster.”
“You’re not a monster.” Her fingers intertwined with mine, and I hated the rush of peace that washed over me at her touch. I was supposed to ease her fears, not the other way around.
“You don’t know that,” I said.
“You’re right. I don’t know it. But I feel it.” She squeezed my hand, and my gut twisted, the ice inside melting to something warm and embarrassingly mushy. My throat was too dry to speak.
She kept talking. “And I know what you mean about people looking for excuses. When I was ten, my daddy got hit by a drunk driver. Back then we still lived in Missouri, and it was funny…” She didn’t laugh. I heard her swallow.
“The guy who did it turned out to be the sheriff of the town,” she said. “So of course he wasn’t charged or anything. Mamma took him to trial in a civil suit and it got kind of nasty. In the end they said that Daddy was at fault because he wasn’t wearing a seat-belt and didn’t use his turn signal. The police department lost the records of the sheriff’s breathalyzer test.”
She shrugged off my condolences preemptively, but I kept silent as I turned onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Above us the circular lights twinkled and the silver cables gleamed, impersonal and bright. A whole world revolved around us, not caring about Rose. Not caring about me. But as I held her hand the world didn’t matter. Only we did.
“Middle school was tough enough for me as it was, you know.” She nodded down to her belly, her voice getting quieter and quieter. “But being the daughter of the woman who dared accuse the sheriff of manslaughter?”
I rubbed her hand.
Her shoulders bowed. “Well, I think no one ever liked me, but that was the excuse they needed to be really cruel. I remember every lunch I’d sit alone at the farthest table and at recess I’d have to walk around the playground, just so that I didn’t run into anyone else, because of the way they looked at me. The things they said.”
She squeezed my hand even harder, hard enough now that I could actually, for the first time, really feel it. The whites of her eyes were fissured with red and glistening with tears.
We reached the end of the bridge, and I flipped on my turn signal to pull over so I could hold her and rock her until she cried like she obviously needed to. But then I noticed something in my mirror. A black speck.
A Humvee. It was still there. Still following. No question now. Lonan. It had to be.
My inner lion, sedate from all the talking, perked up, eyes widening to take in the threat. There was no more time for analyzing emotions—-Rose’s physical safety had to be the first priority.
I ripped the wheel to the right, spinning into a turn up a one-way street. Rose gasped and viced my hand.
Checking over my shoulder, I ignored her, fully expecting the Humvee to be there, closer still, Lonan with a gun in the front seat, pointing right at her head.
But the car wasn’t there.
“Daniel!” Rose gasped. “This is a one-way street. Going the other way.”
Facing front, I took in the wall of cars advancing toward us. Horns blared and my vision strobed as the two nearest vehicles flipped their headlights off and on again. I shook my head, trying to see straight, and yanked the shift into reverse before backing up into a parking garage.
Rose let out another “oof” as she flew forward. The seatbelt cut into her shoulder. Her hand separated from mine.
Fuck.
I scanned traffic, hoping I’d find that Humvee, that I’d have s
ome explanation for my behavior. I didn’t. I exhaled, gripping the steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking.
She tells you her father died from a drunk driving accident, and then you decide it’s the perfect time to join the cast of The Fast and the Furious? My lion drawled.
“Shut up,” I hissed, not meaning to speak aloud.
“I-I didn’t say anything,” Rose mumbled. “A-are you okay, Daniel?”
Her lilting voice saying my name centered me and sharpened my focus. I hadn’t spoken to my inner lion aloud since I had first left the facility, barefoot, naked, wandering through the woods to the nearest road. I wouldn’t go backward.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought…” No, an explanation would just make it worse. “It doesn’t matter, I’m sorry.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes, this won’t happen again. Please forgive me.”
She gave me an odd look. “No, are you sure you’re okay?”
I forced myself to smile at her, ignoring how stiff and awkward it felt. I would tell her everything the moment we got to her house, but first I had to get her to safety.
“I just got a bit turned around, would you mind giving me directions, please?” I asked.
And I never realized how much I hated hiding behind politeness until I saw the downturn of her mouth as she mumbled, “Okay.”
Chapter 10
ROSE
“One second,” I stalled, twisting the key in the old lock. “This thing is particular, you have to turn it at just the right angle.”
Daniel loomed at my back, his broad shoulders blocking out the florescent light flickering from the naked lightbulb above me. Daniel had done a lot of looming since the whole car-chase thing, and his grim mood had only blackened as he walked me up the too-steep stairs of my apartment building and to my door.