Lotus and Aaron exchanged looks that were, to give them credit, only slightly weirded out. Aaron said to Lotus, “My dad’s dead. How about yours?”
She shrugged. “He’s kind of a jerk. But he’s the only one I have. Had.” She frowned at Vayl. “Until now.” She raised her eyebrows at Aaron, who nodded for her to continue. “As long as you promise not to bite us or try to turn us, we’re cool with you coming to visit. But you have to call first.”
“And plan on staying at a hotel,” Aaron put in.
Lotus added, “Also? Don’t be killing anybody in the towns where we live. We don’t want to have to move every time you decide to stop by for a chat.” She turned to Aaron. “Do you have anything else?”
He nodded. “Yeah.” He pointed at me. “She’s kinda scary. So she has to learn how to bake cookies. I was thinking anybody who knows how to bake cookies should be okay.”
He wiped a band of sweat off his forehead and resolutely avoided my glare as he turned to Lotus, who said, “Actually, that makes a lot of sense. What do you think, Vayl?”
I leaned over and whispered in Vayl’s ear. “How did they know I don’t know how to bake cookies?”
Minute shrug. “Perhaps they can see it in your eyes?” He waited.
I humphed. “Okay. But they have to be chocolate chip.”
“I do not think they care which kind you make, as long as you promise to learn.”
I sat back in my chair, willing Vayl not to chuckle as he leaned forward and shook hands with his children, saying, “We have a deal,” so formally he might’ve been sitting across from a couple of big-time CEOs.
Soon afterward Lotus and Aaron found rooms for themselves, leaving us alone with our pets, our grubby clothes, and our wildly divergent thoughts.
“It has been quite an adventure, my pretera,” Vayl said.
“Yeah.” I’d sent my inner girls on a mission to knock on all the doors of my mind. If anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there answered, I just might have a nervous breakdown. But so far… no demons anywhere. I was beginning to accept the fact that Brude was gone forever.
“I found my children.”
“And they are unique.”
“Helena is a wonder as well.”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “About her.”
He took my hand and led me to the bathroom, where he slowly began to peel off my torn and bloody clothes. Whenever he found a scratch or bruise he paused to lay a kiss on it as he explained, “Yes. She is your ancestress. And yes, I have looked after your line ever since I adopted her. For the most part I have kept a respectful distance, so that the good fortune that has befallen your family members has seemed to be just that. And it seemed that the same would be true of you. I had never even seen you until after Matt died. But your circumstances demanded that I come closer. I felt you needed protection from something, though I could not pinpoint what that was.”
“Because it was myself,” I whispered, as I began to unbutton his tattered shirt.
He nodded. “The moment I saw you, everything changed for me.” He wrapped his hands around mine and I looked up into his eyes. “I had never felt for a woman the way I did for you then. I loved you instantly.” He raised my hands to his lips, his ring glinting in the soft glow of the single light we’d left on as he brushed them softly against each knuckle until I could feel the tingle of his touch down the backs of my thighs and into my feet. “You are part of my soul.”
I waited until he had thoroughly kissed each finger, then I freed my hand so I could part the front of his shirt and slowly pull it down his arms so I could enjoy each new bit of skin and muscle it revealed. His chest, as broad and curl-covered as it had been the day he was turned, rippled under my fingers as I swept them across it and down to his flat, hard stomach. I looked up into his emerald eyes as I began to undo his belt. “I never wanted to be this close to you. But you’re irresistible, you know.” As I freed the leather band and dropped it to the floor, I wrapped my arm around his waist and pulled him so close I could feel already that I’d excited him in the extreme. “You’re like air to me now. Without you, I couldn’t breathe. I wouldn’t want to.”
I raised my lips. Instead of dropping his head he lifted me in his arms, holding me effortlessly while I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his hips, pressing my breasts into his chest.
“I love you, Vayl,” I said between multiple kisses along his jaw and neck.
“And I love you, Jasmine.” Long pause while we shared a kiss so phenomenal that when it was finished I had to think for a minute before I could remember where in the world we were standing.
“Are you still cool with me spending more downtime with family? Because, you know, that would mean you’d have to hang out with them too.”
He took another moment to kiss my forehead. “I relish the thought. Perhaps, one day, you would like to join Evie and Cassandra in motherhood?”
I regarded him seriously. “I don’t know. Do you think we could pull that off?”
“Perhaps. We are becoming so… different. Also, I hear I am a wonderful father.”
I threw my arms around him. “You are. Which is a good thing, because it’s entirely possible I’d suck as a mother.”
“I doubt it.”
“You know,” I whispered in his ear, “it’s also entirely possible we may never find out.”
“I do not care,” he said earnestly. “We will be together. And think of the fun we will have trying!”
I snorted. Then I stopped. Because I was entertaining a couple of ideas, and it was suddenly taking all my concentration to stand upright. Then I got a whiff of myself. I said, “I hate to ruin the moment. But I stink. Plus, I think I might have gorgon blood on my bra.”
Vayl chuckled. “That is more than blood.”
“Eeeeewww!”
“The last one in the shower has to unwrap the hotel soap.”
“Get outta my way!”
extras
meet the author
Cindy Pringle
JENNIFER RARDIN began writing at the age of twelve. She penned eight Jaz Parks novels in her life. She passed away in September 2010.
introducing
If you enjoyed
THE DEADLIEST BITE,
look out for
TEMPEST RISING
Book 1 of the Jane True series
by Nicole Peeler
Living in small town Rockabill, Maine, Jane True always knew she didn’t quite fit in with so-called normal society. During her nightly, clandestine swim in the freezing winter ocean, a grisly find leads Jane to startling revelations about her heritage: she is only half-human.
Now Jane must enter a world filled with supernatural creatures that are terrifying, beautiful, and deadly—all of which perfectly describe her new “friend,” Ryu, a gorgeous and powerful vampire.
It is a world where nothing can be taken for granted: a dog can heal with a lick; spirits bag your groceries; and whatever you do, never—ever—rub the genie’s lamp.
I eyeballed the freezer, trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night. Such a decision was no mean feat, since a visiting stranger might assume that Martha Stewart not only lived with us but was preparing for the apocalypse. Frozen lasagnas, casseroles, pot pies, and the like filled our icebox nearly to the brim. Finally deciding on fish chowder, I took out some haddock and mussels. After a brief, internal struggle, I grabbed some salmon to make extra soup to—you guessed it—freeze. Yeah, the stockpiling was more than a little OCD, but it made me feel better. It also meant that when I actually had something to do for the entire evening, I could leave my dad by himself without feeling too guilty about it.
My dad wasn’t an invalid—not exactly. But he had a bad heart and needed help taking care of things, especially with my mother gone. So I took up the slack, which I was happy to do. It’s not like I had much else on my plate, what with being the village pariah and all.
It’s amazing how being a pariah gi
ves you ample amounts of free time.
After putting in the laundry and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, I went upstairs to take a shower. I would have loved to walk around all day with the sea salt on my skin, but not even in Rockabill was Eau de Brine an acceptable perfume. Like many twentysomethings, I’d woken up early that day to go exercise. Unlike most twenty-somethings, however, my morning exercise took the form of an hour or so long swim in the freezing ocean. And in one of America’s deadliest whirlpools. Which is why I am so careful to keep the swimming on the DL. It might be a great cardio workout, but it probably would get me burned at the stake. This is New England, after all.
As I got dressed in my work clothes—khaki chinos and a longsleeved pink polo-style shirt with Read It and Weep embroidered in navy blue over the breast pocket—I heard my father emerge from his bedroom and clomp down the stairs. His job in the morning was to make the coffee, so I took a moment to apply a little mascara, blush, and some lip gloss, before brushing out my damp black hair. I kept it cut in a much longer—and admittedly more unkempt—version of Cleopatra’s style because I liked to hide my dark eyes under my long bangs. Most recently, my nemesis, Stuart Gray, had referred to them as “demon eyes.” They’re not as Marilyn Manson as that, thank you very much, but even I had to admit to difficulty determining where my pupil ended and my iris began.
I went back downstairs to join my dad in the kitchen, and I felt that pang in my heart that I get sometimes when I’m struck by how he’s changed. He’d been a fisherman, but he’d had to retire about ten years ago, on disability, when his heart condition worsened. Once a handsome, confident, and brawny man whose presence filled any space he entered, his long illness and my mother’s disappearance had diminished him in every possible way. He looked so small and gray in his faded old bathrobe, his hands trembling from the antiarrhythmics he takes for his screwed-up heart, that it took every ounce of self-control I had not to make him sit down and rest. Even if his body didn’t agree, he still felt himself to be the man he had been, and I knew I already walked a thin line between caring for him and treading on his dignity. So I put on my widest smile and bustled into the kitchen, as if we were a father and daughter in some sitcom set in the 1950s.
“Good morning, Daddy!” I beamed. “Morning, honey. Want some coffee?” He asked me that question every morning, even though the answer had been yes since I was fifteen.
“Sure, thanks. Did you sleep all right?”
“Oh, yes. And you? How was your morning?” My dad never asked me directly about the swimming. It’s a question that lay under the auspices of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that ruled our household. For example, he didn’t ask me about my swimming, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me about Jason, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me whether or not I was happy in Rockabill, I didn’t ask him about my mother…
“Oh, I slept fine, Dad. Thanks.” Of course I hadn’t, really, as I only needed about four hours of sleep a night. But that’s another thing we never talked about.
He asked me about my plans for the day, while I made us a breakfast of scrambled eggs on whole wheat toast. I told him that I’d be working till six, then I’d go to the grocery store on the way home. So, as usual for a Monday, I’d take the car to work. We performed pretty much the exact same routine every week, but it was nice of him to act like it was possible I might have new and exciting plans. On Mondays, I didn’t have to worry about him eating lunch, as Trevor McKinley picked him up to go play a few hours of cheeky lunchtime poker with George Varga, Louis Finch, and Joe Covelli. They’re all natives of Rockabill and friends since childhood, except for Joe, who moved here to Maine about twenty years ago to open up our local garage. That’s how things were around Rockabill. For the winter, when the tourists were mostly absent, the town was populated by natives who grew up together and were more intimately acquainted with each other’s dirty laundry than their own hampers. Some people enjoyed that intimacy. But when you were more usually the object of the whispers than the subject, intimacy had a tendency to feel like persecution.
We ate while we shared our local paper, The Light House News. But because the paper mostly functioned as a vehicle for advertising things to tourists, and the tourists were gone for the season, the pickings were scarce. Yet we went through the motions anyway. For all of our sins, no one could say that the True family wasn’t good at going through the motions. After breakfast, I doled out my father’s copious pills and set them next to his orange juice. He flashed me his charming smile, which was the only thing left unchanged after the ravages to his health and his heart.
“Thank you, Jane,” he said. And I knew he meant it, despite the fact that I’d set his pills down next to his orange juice every single morning for the past twelve years.
I gulped down a knot in my throat, since I knew that no small share of his worry and grief was due to me, and kissed him on the cheek. Then I bustled around clearing away breakfast, and bustled around getting my stuff together, and bustled out the door to get to work. In my experience, bustling is always a great way to keep from crying.
Tracy Gregory, the owner of Read It and Weep, was already hard at work when I walked in the front door. The Gregorys were an old fishing family from Rockabill, and Tracy was their prodigal daughter. She had left to work in Los Angeles, where she had apparently been a successful movie stylist. I say apparently because she never told us the names of any of the movies she’d worked on. She’d only moved back to Rockabill about five years ago to open Read It and Weep, which was our local bookstore, café, and all-around tourist trap. Since tourism replaced fishing as our major industry, Rockabill can just about support an all-year-round enterprise like Read It and Weep. But other things, like the nicer restaurant—rather unfortunately named The Pig Out Bar and Grill—close for the winter.
“Hey, girl,” she said gruffly, as I locked the door behind me. We didn’t open for another half hour.
“Hey, Tracy. Grizelda back?”
Grizelda was Tracy’s girlfriend, and they’d caused quite a stir when they first appeared in Rockabill together. Not only were they lesbians, but they were as fabulously lesbionic as the inhabitants of a tiny village in Maine could ever imagine. Tracy carried herself like a rugby player, and dressed like one, too. But she had an easygoing charisma that got her through the initial gender panic triggered by her reentry into Rockabill society.
And if Tracy made heads turn, Grizelda practically made them spin Exorcist style. Grizelda was not Grizelda’s real name. Nor was Dusty Nethers, the name she’d used when was a porn star. As Dusty Nethers, Grizelda had been fiery haired and as boobilicious as a Baywatch beauty. But in her current incarnation, as Grizelda Montague, she sported a sort of Gothic-hipster look—albeit one that was still very boobilicious. A few times a year Grizelda disappeared for weeks or a month, and upon her return home she and Tracy would complete some big project they’d been discussing, like redecorating the store or adding a sunroom onto their little house. Lord knows what she got up to on her profit-venture vacations. But whatever it was, it didn’t affect her relationship with Tracy. The pair were as close as any husband and wife in Rockabill, if not closer, and seeing how much they loved each other drove home to me my own loneliness.
“Yeah, Grizzie’s back. She’ll be here soon. She has something for you… something scandalous, knowing my lady love.”
I grinned. “Awesome. I love her gifts.”
Because of Grizzie, I had a drawer full of naughty underwear, sex toys, and dirty books. Grizzie gave such presents for every occasion; it didn’t matter if it was your high school graduation, your fiftieth wedding anniversary, or your baby’s baptism. This particular predilection meant she was a prominent figure on wedding shower guest lists from Rockabill to Eastport, but made her dangerous for children’s parties. Most parents didn’t appreciate an “every day of the week” pack of thongs for their eleven-year-old daughter. Once she’d given me a gift certificate fo
r a “Hollywood” bikini wax and I had to Google the term. What I discovered made me way too scared to use it, so it sat in my “dirty drawer,” as I called it, as a talking point. Not that anyone ever went into my dirty drawer with me, but I talked to myself a lot, and it certainly provided amusing fodder for my own conversations.
It was also rather handy—no pun intended—to have access to one’s own personal sex shop during long periods of enforced abstinence… such as the last eight years of my life.
“And,” Tracy responded with a rueful shake of her head, “her gifts love you. Often quite literally.”
“That’s all right, somebody has to,” I answered back, horrified at the bitter inflection that had crept into my voice.
But Tracy, bless her, just stroked a gentle hand over my hair that turned into a tiny one-armed hug, saying nothing.
“Hands off my woman!” crowed a hard-edged voice from the front door. Grizelda!
“Oh, sorry,” I apologized, backing away from Tracy.
“I meant for Tracy to get off you,” Grizzie said, swooping toward me to pick me up in a bodily hug, my own well-endowed chest clashing with her enormous fake bosoms. I hated being short at times like these. Even though I loved all five feet and eleven inches of Grizzie, and had more than my fair share of affection for her ta-ta-riddled hugs, I loathed being manhandled.
She set me down and grasped my hands in hers, backing away to look me over appreciatively while holding my fingers at arm’s length. “Mmm, mmm,” she said, shaking her head. “Girl, I could sop you up with a biscuit.”
I laughed, as Tracy rolled her eyes.
“Quit sexually harassing the staff, Grizzly Bear,” was her only comment.
“I’ll get back to sexually harassing you in a minute, passion flower, but right now I want to appreciate our Jane.” Grizelda winked at me with her florid violet eyes—she wore colored lenses—and I couldn’t help but giggle like a schoolgirl.
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