by Karen Chance
“For what? For saving my life? For almost getting killed in the process? For not dying nobly? What?”
His brow tightened into a familiar frown. “You’re in a mood.”
“Yes. Yes, I am. I have had a day, and I am in a mood. So what are you apologizing for, exactly?”
“For . . . taking it that far. But I didn’t see an alternative. He’d put you under a strong compulsion, and that kind won’t break without—without completion.”
“Completion.” It took my tired brain a few moments to work through that one. And then another moment, because the only answer I was getting didn’t make sense. “Okay, let me get this straight. You’re apologizing for giving me a mind-shattering orgasm?”
Caleb slammed in the door. “I didn’t hear that.”
“Damn straight.”
He had clothes, plain gray sweats and sneakers for Pritkin, and an oversized navy T-shirt for me. “It’s mine,” he told me. “I figured it’d work as a dress on you.”
“Thanks.” At this point, anything was better than the scratchy blanket. “Is there a shower?”
“Yeah. Over by the gym.” He looked at Pritkin. “Gonna wash her back?”
And Pritkin growled—literally. Rabid pit bulls don’t make that kind of noise when going for the jugular, although that seemed to be the plan, since he was out of the seat and lunging for Caleb faster than I could blink. Only to stop when I kept a grip on that hand.
Good idea grabbing it, in hindsight.
“Not the time, Caleb,” I said briefly.
He nodded, looking a little freaked. I guess he hadn’t heard that particular tone before, either. I struggled to my feet.
I’d actually been asking about the shower for Pritkin, who looked like he could use some hot water downtime. But clearly, leaving the two of them together was a no-no. And I was sort of afraid that maybe the couch wasn’t the only thing stinking in the room.
Pritkin threw on the new sweats, which pretty much negated their status as clean, but which meant that I got to keep the whole blanket. I drew it around me until I was pretty sure I wouldn’t shock anybody, and grabbed Caleb’s tee. And then peered out the door.
Thankfully, the halls outside were as deserted as you’d expect at something o’clock in the morning. There wasn’t even a janitor pushing a mop around; just a shadow behind a frosted glass door and a guy doing laps in the gym. Not that it was a gym, per se. Just an area carved out of the huge complex by some plywood partitions, and fitted out with a track, some treadmills and a lot of iron in the form of weights lining the walls.
A Fey would go nuts in here, I thought vaguely, and felt slightly more cheerful.
We followed a line of lockers to the back, where two bathrooms were situated side by side. Pritkin got me a towel and a squeeze bottle of something out of his locker that had no discernable scent but that I assumed was soap. I said thanks and he said nothing at all, and we went our separate ways.
The shower part of the bathroom was, like the rest of the place, extremely utilitarian. I guessed it made sense—until a month ago, the Corps had been based at MAGIC, aka the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, aka the supernatural version of the UN. At least it had been, until the war left it a glass slick in the desert. That had forced the Corps to find a new home, and trust them to make it as Spartan as humanly possible.
There were no cubicles—privacy was so damn girly—just an even dozen showerheads and a sloping floor with a drain in the middle. The tile was white and the fixtures were shiny, but only because they were new. I doubted that the shoe warehouse had come equipped with bathrooms this big, so they’d probably been a recent add-on. And yet, despite the newness, the place managed to be really ugly in the tradition of institutional spaces everywhere.
I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed some more, and since the soapy stuff seemed to double pretty well as shampoo, that included tackling my hair. And damned if I didn’t manage to finally soak the green out. Should have asked Pritkin for something before, I thought blearily, resting my head on the water-slick wall.
I felt exhausted, clammy and vaguely nauseous—the same as when I fed Billy a little too much. I wasn’t completely drained; Pritkin had stopped short of that. In fact, Billy had left me feeling worse than this a time or two—with one exception. Feeding Billy had never left me with a burning little knot of guilt under my sternum.
And that’s exactly what this was, too: guilt. Not overwhelming or paralyzing or crushing, but guilt all the same. I’d experienced enough of it in the past to have no trouble identifying it. I just didn’t know what it was doing there.
This wasn’t the first time Pritkin and I had gotten close; it was the second. The first had been about a month ago during the final battle with Apollo. Pritkin had been seriously injured and his incubus abilities had saved him, with a little help from me. Very little, compared with today, but the basic idea had been the same: I’d provided the energy, he’d done the healing, the end.
And it really had been the end. Our relationship had gone back to the usual and I hadn’t even thought that much about it afterward. There had been so much other stuff going on that it had seemed, well, just one of those crazy things. Like almost drowning myself in a bathtub or being chased by a dragon through an office building. Crazy shit like that happened all the time lately, and that’s the folder it had gone into in my brain. If anything, I’d just been grateful it had worked and that we’d both come out of the battle with a whole skin.
So what was different now?
Was it because I’d enjoyed it? Because I had; there was no point in denying it. Not the first few minutes—those had been pretty damned horrifying. But later . . . yeah. I’d enjoyed it. Kind of a lot. Okay, a hell of a lot. But then, I’d enjoyed it the last time, too. And, seriously, Pritkin was the son of the prince of the incubi. What the hell did my brain expect? That I’d hate it? I mean, what were the odds?
And the fact was, I’d have helped him whether I’d gotten any pleasure out of it or not. The guy was dying. I wouldn’t have let that happen, regardless. And I sure as hell wasn’t sorry he was alive. So no, I didn’t think the pleasure thing was the problem.
Was it maybe because I was dating Mircea now, and I hadn’t been before? I mean, Mircea had claimed me a while ago, but master vamps had a habit of simply taking whatever they wanted, as I knew from long experience. It hadn’t surprised me, but I also hadn’t considered us married just because he said so. I hadn’t considered us as having any status romantically at all until we started dating, and that had been after the last little incident.
So was that it? Was I feeling like I’d cheated on him? I thought about it for a while, but that didn’t feel quite right, either. It wasn’t like this had had anything to do with romance. If Pritkin had been a vampire, I’d have given him blood; as it was, I’d given him what he needed to heal. And considering that he’d almost died in both instances because of me, I’d sort of owed him one.
And yet, for whatever reason, this one felt different. I hadn’t had any trouble meeting Mircea’s eyes after the last time. I didn’t know if that would be true now, and it pissed me off that I didn’t even know why.
However, I did know one thing. I wasn’t going to get any absolution—not that I needed any, damn it—because I couldn’t tell him. Not because I didn’t think he’d understand. Vampires tended to be a lot more pragmatic than humans, and if I could explain that it had been a life-ordeath situation . . . well, there was a chance Pritkin wouldn’t lose too many limbs. The problem, of course, was that I couldn’t.
I couldn’t tell Mircea anything, because if I told him why, I’d also have to tell him what—specifically what Pritkin was. And if I told him what he was, I might as well tell him who he was, since there’d only ever been one humanincubus hybrid in all history.
And I didn’t think the magical community was quite ready to hear that Merlin had returned.
Of course, I didn’t know that they w
ould hear about it. I didn’t think Mircea would plaster it all over the front pages, for instance. But he’d do something with it. He wouldn’t be a vampire if he didn’t.
And I really didn’t want to find out what that something would be.
After a while, I sighed and gave up. I’d figure it out later when maybe I didn’t feel like I was about to fall over. The water had stayed hot, but my knees were starting to get wobbly, so I shut it off.
God, I was tired.
I dried off and pulled Caleb’s shirt and a half over my head. The “short” sleeves came down past my elbows, and the hem almost hit my knees. I decided it would do and padded back outside.
The jogger had gone off somewhere and no one had taken his place, so the cavernous space felt kind of creepy. I looked around for Pritkin, because it would be perfectly in character to find him pumping iron even after being almost dead half an hour ago. But I didn’t see him.
The gym was big but it was also pretty open, with no real obstacles in the exercise area and only industrial fluorescents overhead. So it wasn’t like I could have missed him. For one, brief, panic-filled moment—or it would have been panicked if I’d had any panic left—I thought he might have gone back to pick a fight with Caleb. But then I heard water running.
I debated it for a couple of seconds, in case it was the runner who had decided to have a sluice down. But I was really too tired to be embarrassed, and war mages tended to take things in stride. I decided to risk it.
The guys’ bathroom looked exactly like the women’s, other than being larger and having a line of urinals. I walked past the bathroom stalls and into the big shower room in back. There was no door—of course—so it didn’t take me long to find him.
It took me a little longer to figure out what to do.
For a guy who was as loud as Pritkin, he really didn’t lose it very often. Maybe all that yelling served as a release valve; I don’t know. But no matter how bad things got, he kept his shit together better than most people I knew, including me. Not that that was saying much. I was usually the run-screaming-at-the-first-sign-of-danger type, but Pritkin was Mr. Cool under Pressure.
Which was why it was a little strange to find him standing in the spray, staring at a bar of soap with the air of a man who has forgotten what he’s supposed to do with it.
It didn’t look like he’d used it. There were streaks of blood on the powerful legs, oil or something black on the broad back and livid bruises pretty much everywhere. The black stuff had run, dripping down the multicolored skin, making him look like some kind of avant-garde painting or vandalized sculpture. The Thinker in yellow, purple and green.
The hair was wet and plastered to his skull. It made the bones of his face stand out more, and his nose look bigger as he turned his head to me. It wasn’t with his usual rapid reflexes, but in a bewildered kind of way that really worried me. Not that an assassin was likely to be sneaking up on him at war mage HQ, but still. I had the disturbing impression that, if I had been an assassin, Pritkin would have just stood there and let me kill him.
Okay, then.
I walked over, despite not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do. Growing up at Murders ’R’ Us, I’d seen a lot of nasty stuff, and my visions had shown me a lot more. Pretty early on, I’d learned to distance myself from inconvenient feelings, from anything I couldn’t easily handle. And by now, I was tops at the Scarlett O’Hara school of emotional distancing. I always thought about the uncomfortable stuff tomorrow, and, as everyone knows, tomorrow never comes.
And despite what psychologists would have you believe, living in denial actually works pretty damn well. At least most of the time. It had worked for me, keeping me functional, keeping me sane—more or less—long after anyone could have reasonably expected.
It wasn’t working so well right now.
It meant that I didn’t know how to talk to Pritkin about his shit, whatever his shit was, because I rarely talked about mine. I didn’t know how to tell him it was going to be okay, because I wasn’t sure that it was. I didn’t have anything useful to say at all, so I didn’t try. I slid my arms around him from behind and held on.
The water was still warm. I supposed that was something.
Pritkin didn’t say anything, either, so we just stayed like that for a while. I found that I was in no real hurry to move. I was bone tired, but he was warm and solid and easy to hold on to. I got this weird kind of floaty feeling after a while, a combination of exhaustion, relief and the thrum of his heart under my ear.
He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, so the only illumination was whatever filtered in from the bathroom or through the open top of the shower area. It wasn’t much, and the water hitting the tile sounded like rain, the kind Vegas rarely got. I pulled him closer and felt my eyes slip closed.
I thought maybe I’d just sleep here.
“Her name was Ruth,” he said hoarsely. And then he stopped.
His back was warm against my cheek. I could feel the column of his spine just under the surface. I didn’t say anything.
“My wife,” he added, after a while. I nodded, but he couldn’t see it, so I just tightened my grip for a moment. I’d kind of thought that might be it.
I wasn’t an expert on Pritkin’s past, but I knew a few things. Like the fact that, more than a century ago, he’d married a woman he’d presumably loved a lot. I didn’t know much about her, because that was one topic that got a very swift conversation change. But I knew the important thing: I knew how she’d died.
It had happened on their wedding night, when the incubus part of Pritkin got out of control—seriously out. For some reason, instead of simply feeding, which would have been normal under the circumstances, it had decided to drain her—dry. Pritkin hadn’t been able to stop the process, and it had killed her.
Or, rather, he had killed her, because as the only halfhuman incubus, the two parts of his nature were forced into an uneasy cohabitation. It was like being Jekyll and Hyde, only at the same time, all the time. Other incubi could leave their bodies behind when they weren’t feeding, since they’d only borrowed them from a human anyway. But Pritkin couldn’t.
I didn’t know if that had something to do with why he’d lost it that night or not. Because he’d told me those few hard facts and nothing else. It had been around the time we’d started to notice an attraction, and I guess the idea had been to scare me off.
It had worked like a charm.
The idea of ending up a straw-haired, desiccated corpse had proven a real incentive in ignoring any inconvenient feelings. Pritkin and I were together a lot, often in circumstances that got the blood pumping, if not spurting. It was only natural that there might be an occasional spike of something. It would have been strange if there hadn’t been, really.
But we’d ignored them by mutual consent, because, clearly, they weren’t going anywhere. I was dating Mircea, and Pritkin . . . Well, as far as I knew, Pritkin didn’t date anyone. Ever. I’d gotten the impression that he wasn’t going to risk whatever had happened happening again.
I suddenly found that really sad.
Someone cursed behind us, but I didn’t jump. I was too tired, and anyway, I knew that voice. I looked over my shoulder and saw Caleb’s big body outlined in the doorway for a second before he disappeared.
But a moment later he was back with a couple of large towels. He shut off the water, wrapped one around me and threw one at his buddy. Or former buddy, given the scowl marring those handsome features.
“Out,” he said roughly, pushing us at the door. “It’s getting too close to morning. There’s going to be people showing up soon, and we got enough to explain as it is. And that vampire’s on the phone, fit to be tied.”
“Which one?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
“Marco. Said you either call him or he’s accusing us of kidnapping you.”
He handed me a phone and I took it with a sigh. I punched in the suite’s number and it was picked up on the
first ring. “Cassie, what the hell—”
“You know what the hell. Am I still a prisoner?”
“You know damn well you aren’t!”
“Then I’ll be back. Now stop calling.” I hung up.
Caleb just looked at me. “That was it?”
“That was it until I figure out what story I’m using.”
“I know the feeling,” he snarled, and pushed us toward the office.
Chapter Twenty-eight
We walked back into the little space and Caleb slammed a bottle of Jack down on the desk. “Talk about whatever the hell it is you need to talk about, and get your story straight. I have to make out a report before the bosses show up, and it needs to be tight. You feel me?”
I nodded. Caleb left.
The air conditioning was on and my makeshift dress was clammy. I pulled it off and draped it over the back of Caleb’s desk chair, and wrapped myself in a towel instead. When I turned around, Pritkin had pulled the sweats back on and sat on the stinky sofa. He had his arms crossed in front of him, like a man who doesn’t want company, so I took the hard plastic chair in front of the desk.
I poured the Jack, but not because I wanted any. My stomach felt like it might be fine without anything in it for a year, maybe two. But if a guy had ever looked like he needed a drink, Pritkin was him.
“We don’t have to talk,” I told him. “I mean, I don’t mind listening, but it’s . . . I don’t need an explanation.”
“But you deserve one.”
“Do I?” I kind of thought we were even. He’d saved my life; I’d saved his. But it didn’t look like he agreed.
I handed him the whiskey and he threw it back like a pro, not even wincing. He noticed my expression and smiled faintly. “Compared to what I grew up on, this is . . . fairly mild. And yes, you do.”
I was wondering what the hell he’d grown up on—the Celtic version of rotgut? But I didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. He just sat there, cradling the empty paper cup gently in his hands.