by Joey W. Hill
It was just them, now. Them and the two lying in the driveway.
No. She was wrong about that. Alistair didn’t come to her immediately. He waited, until Stanley and three other vampires returned, bearing drop cloths from the maintenance shed. They wrapped up the bodies and carried them back in that direction.
I’ll let Donovan burn in the sun behind the shed, Nina. They’ll bury Curtis next to him.
She let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, close to a sob, and swallowed it down, her eyes closing.
You’re right. There’s violence and hate enough in our world without feeding the beast. Be easy, sweet nurse.
Alistair returned to the veranda, mounting the steps with decisive steps. He was upright, his arms swinging naturally, and she had a feeling the effort to do that was equal to him trying to lift the whole house on his shoulders. There was a paleness under his usual skin tone, suggesting she wasn’t the only one who needed more blood. Again.
“Soon.” He came and sat next to her on the veranda bench, putting his arm around her and lifting a casual hand as each car passed. Stanley was in one of them, and he gazed upon Alistair an extra somber minute before he, too, was gone.
Alistair let out a long breath. “Nero, I think there’s still some lemonade in the refrigerator. We could use some. Get yourself a glass, too. We’ll go sit on the back veranda, watch the ocean for a while.”
He rubbed a hand over his face and looked at Nina. A searching, long gaze that had her wondering what was going through his mind. He slipped his arms around her again.
“Don’t carry me, Alistair. They’re all gone. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re mine to care for as I see fit. So be quiet, sweet nurse. And the pain of carrying you in this moment is only an additional pleasure.”
She sighed at his stubbornness, but looped her arms around his neck. This time she did lay her cheek on his chest. He went through the house as Nero peeled off near the kitchen to get the beverages Alistair had mentioned. Alistair carried her out to the screened veranda, settled her on a long carved bench there, but this time he left her in his lap, her legs bent and stretched out beside him so he could rest his arm on her knees, fingers curved over her calf. His other arm held her close, his palm warm against her rib cage, his shoulder and chest supporting her head.
“You need…” she began.
“Nina, who is your Master?”
“You are.”
“Then be still,” he said absently. Just stroked her hair, gazed out at the ocean. She was curved against him, her face resting against his chest, so she wasn’t looking at the ocean. Just hearing it, smelling the sea air and him, feeling his heat against her. None of it was disturbing her.
Nero came with the lemonade, but he didn’t stay. He left the two of them there, cocooned in shadows, and went down the steps, headed toward the beach. As his silhouette disappeared among the dunes, Nina listened to the thud of Alistair’s heart. She wondered what he was thinking. What he’d said to the other vampires that made them look toward her, made some of them smile. What had made Donovan’s vampires look toward her the way they did.
“We are on the edge of Donovan’s territory here.”
She nodded. “Stanley told me.”
“Then you know a Region Master’s property is an independent wedge amidst the territories, like Australia’s capital Canberra is, between Melbourne and Sydney. The hospital, where my staff goes to the market, that’s in Donovan’s territory. What used to be his territory,” he amended, a dangerous satisfaction to his tone. “I’ll be evaluating who’s best suited to be head of that territory, but for now, I’ll be doing double duty as Region Master here and overlord there, so I can get a full sense of who populates it.”
He nudged her with his chin, rested it against her temple. “I indicated that my InhServ is a gifted nurse, and it suits me to have her work at the hospital to keep her skills sharp, both for human interaction and other requirements. And that if anything untoward happens to her as a result of that, I would hold every one of their lives forfeit.”
She glanced up at him. His expression reflected the lethal surety of it. He would not hesitate to kill every one of them. It was the face he had shown them as he spoke to them, and now she understood that quick look toward her, the even quicker “my lord,” acknowledging it. She shivered, and he held her closer, rubbing his hand up the goosebumps on her arm.
“I mean you no harm, sweet nurse,” he said quietly. “You needn’t fear my wrath.”
“Violence chills me, my lord,” she said, just as low. “I wish there was no need for it.”
“Wishes mean little in my world. In either of our worlds. Didn’t we cover that once, long ago?”
I hope we both see a day where wishes are more than a candle, sweet nurse. I’d like them to be a fucking bonfire in the night, and dance in the flames with you.
“Look,” he whispered, and she did.
A fire had been started on the beach. A bonfire, Coleman apparently having collected enough wood to get it started. It was already starting to throw sparks to the sky, an erratic pattern carried by the sea breeze.
She turned her gaze back up to Alistair. The lights from inside the house threw shadows up against his cheekbones and forehead, glittered over his gaze that was mostly dark in the night.
“My lord…will we have children?”
He looked down at her. He didn’t appear surprised by her question, and she suspected he might have caught it in her mind once or twice before now. When she was drafted into the InhServ role, she’d pretty much assumed children would not be part of her future, but at some point during the journey she’d taken with Alistair, she’d started thinking and wondering exactly how born vampires came about. She swept her gaze down, drawing small circles on his chest with her fingertips. His hands tightened on her.
“It’s very rare,” he said at last. “So rare that no one ever counts on them. But it happens. Also…once you’re third marked, the only way you can get pregnant is by your vampire.”
He brushed her hair from her cheek, and his touch was gentle as she lifted her attention to his expression. The sea breeze continued to lift and dance the strands across her parted lips. “I’m sorry, Nina,” he said. “I can’t even pretend to be sorry for keeping you, but I can be sorry that I can’t give you everything you wanted in your life.”
She didn’t like the shadows that had come back into his gaze, a trace of that distance that sometimes came between them in moments like this. To counter it, she put both her hands on his face, tried to tell him in her eyes, in her voice, what she felt, which was so much truer than whatever confusion her thoughts were.
“I’ve been given a lot.”
“And had a lot taken away.”
“So have you,” she said, and meant it.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t feel that way right at this moment. We ask so much of life, when so much is already given. If only we notice. Someone very wise I know once had that thought.”
“Oh, Alistair.” She caressed his jaw, tried to lighten the weight she felt on both their hearts. “Getting everything we wish for in any life is too much. Far better to always have some wishes pending, right?”
His lips curved in a grim smile. But he cupped her head in that way he had, and pressed a hard kiss to her forehead. When he released her, he rose to his feet, taking her with him.
“Come dance with me by the bonfire, sweet nurse. We can’t dance in the flames, but we can dance near them.”
He didn’t give her a chance to say or think anything else, simply scooped her up off her still tender ankle. He was moving even more stiffly now, but he still wouldn’t let her give him any blood. He carried her through the dunes, along the sandy path, toward that bonfire.
When he put her on her feet by the fire, he slid his arm around her back, taking her hand to fold it in his, high on his chest. She sighed and put her cheek against him, lips brushing his biceps as t
hey swayed and four-stepped at an easy pace through the sugar-soft sand. She could smell the ocean, the rush of it some yards away, but the fire was between them and it, masking it with the heat and crackle of the flames. The sky above sparkled with stars.
Behind them, the Victorian house was a picturesque silhouette dotted with welcoming lights in the windows. The flame warmed her back, and Alistair warmed her front. She tipped her head back to gaze at him. She didn’t have to think. She just wanted to look at him.
When she’d thought of having a husband, she’d imagine a bloke who was nice-looking enough, but it wasn’t as important as how big his heart was, and if he was kind. She’d seen men do kind things for one another in her wards, time and again, to bring a mate’s spirits up. The plainest man in the world suddenly became Jimmy Stewart or Gregory Peck when he showed his character that way.
“I guess I’ll have to settle for being a handsome shell,” he murmured. “Because I’m not particularly kind.”
“Kind isn’t always what you expect it to be, either,” she said. She slid her hand over his shoulder to tease the short dark hair on his neck. As she scraped his flesh with her nails, she earned sparks from his blue eyes, dark as night against the flames. It made her think of the many things he demanded from her, so ruthlessly. Until she craved that ruthlessness. “There’s a type of cruelty that’s a far cry from wanting to be cruel…just to be cruel.”
Perhaps it was the proximity of the ocean that made those four simple words invite in a memory she decidedly hadn’t intended. The Japanese soldiers lined up behind the machine gun, their expressionless eyes. She’d always thought of cruelty as an active thing, but what she remembered most was their apathy. Her life, Helen’s life, all of the nurses and soldiers they’d executed…their lives had meant nothing. A logistical inconvenience to be eliminated, too many prisoners to manage in the wake of the fall of Singapore. She’d read that in some of the post-war reports.
“Nina. Come back to me, sweet nurse.”
She put her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes when he began to stroke her hair.
“So sorry,” she murmured. “Bollocks.”
“No sorries to be said,” he responded, giving her a squeeze of reproof. “But it does tell me what we’re going to do next.”
“What?” She spoke against his firm flesh, anticipating what her thoughts about his ruthlessness might have conjured. He dug fingers into her hair, a light scalp pull that had her drawing in a breath, but when he spoke, it wasn’t at all what she’d expected him to say.
“We’re going swimming,” he said.
That brought her head up. “Oh, I… There’s no need to do that right now.”
“Hmm. I disagree.” He eased back from her, squeezed her hands. Then he started unbuttoning his vest.
Since he necessarily had to let her go to do that, she started backpedaling toward the house. “We really shouldn’t… You’ve just gotten over being injured, and I’m sure there are other things, far better things, to do. Wouldn’t you prefer to do other things?”
She kept babbling on, quickly explaining why they needed to wait, and the things that needed doing in the house. He shrugged out of the vest, then went to work on his shirt. Normally that would distract her, the way his fingers flicked open the buttons, the shrug of his broad shoulders as he removed it. But this time, she couldn’t take her gaze off his, which stayed locked on her, tracking her every retreating step.
Then came his socks and shoes. His trousers. When she was nearly at the boardwalk back to the house, he finished. He set his clothes to the side, straightened, and his gaze sharpened in an unmistakable way.
“Oh, crikey,” she muttered. She turned, intending a straight bolt for the house, and he was standing in front of her, just a bit of breeze fluttering through his hair explaining how fast he’d moved. He put his hands at her waist.
“We’ve discussed you running from me,” he mentioned. He began to peel the dress from her shoulders, remarkably efficient, though he took the time to stroke her skin as he exposed it to the night air. She shivered, but it wasn’t from cold.
“I was running from the water, not you, my lord.”
“Hmm.” He unhooked and slipped off her bra, making her breath catch as he cradled and caressed flesh before setting it aside. Per his mandate, she wore nothing else. His gaze swept her, and she grasped a momentary hope that typical male priorities might derail his intent.
Her male was not so typical. Taking her hand, he put them in a waltz position. Then he started to sway as if they were dancing, no matter that they were doing it naked, standing on the sand.
“You’re mad,” she told him. “Short a full quid.”
“I have an abundance of quid. Don’t think about it,” he admonished gently as she glanced nervously over her shoulder, gauging the distance between them and the surf line.
“Notice you didn’t remove your boxers,” she said.
“Neither man nor vampire fully exposes his dangly bits to the murky ocean depths,” he informed her. When she tensed at the next turn, he made a soothing noise.
“Look at me. Let’s imagine the life we would have had if we were just Joe and Jane Average. I think I would have been a banker. And a volunteer footy coach, for the kids.”
“A banker?” The wholly unexpected subject managed to pull her attention away from the approaching water. Mostly.
“A banker,” he confirmed. “I’m good with numbers. Put your hand all the way up on my shoulder. You’re digging a hole into my arm. We’re dancing. Just waltzing.”
At his encouraging look, she made herself put her hand on his shoulder. Yet her fingers stayed tight on him as he moved her in the waltz step, circling closer to what terrified her. But she rallied. She would do this. She could do it. “And a footy coach?”
He shrugged. “I like watching kids learn how to play it.”
She met his gaze, held onto that lock, and made herself go along with it. Told herself it would work. “You’d call me from the office,” she said bravely. “Remind me that you were coaching a game that night and wanted me to pack you a dinner.”
“Which you would already know, being my efficient wife. I’d just be calling for the excuse to hear your voice. And to tell you I expected you to go with me.”
Her cheeks flushed, and she found herself stifling a chuckle, even as her stomach leaped with nerves. “Daftie. So you’d come home to our tidy house in a tidy neighborhood. You’d look so handsome in your business suit. I’d see you out the kitchen window when you pulled up, got out of your car.” She remembered him getting out of the car with Stanley, that first night, but overlaid it with the fantasy they were crafting. “When I sent you off that morning to work, I’d straightened your tie for you. It’s still straight, but a bit loose, because you like to loosen it on your way home.”
“Because I want it to be ready for other uses,” he said smoothly. “But tonight there’s a game. So I need to go get changed. Which I do. After I roger my wife over the kitchen table, because when she wears that apron, she knows what it does to me. And I like bending her over, lifting up her skirt, pulling down her knickers and taking her like that, right when I come home.”
While still wearing his suit, Nina imagined, and her body tightened at the thought. That thought helped the noise of the water die back better than the rest of their imaginings so far. “After that?” she said.
“We’d head off to the fields. My wife made us a picnic dinner, after all.” He smiled down at her. “We’d wave to our neighbor Bill. Who I know fancies my wife because she’s such a looker, but is proper with it, watches after her when I’m not home.”
“And I watch after Bill, because he eats too much salt and fat in his diet and I’m always afraid he’s going to keel over in a stroke when he’s mowing his yard. We’d invite him to go with us to the footy field, but he’d say there was a radio program he wanted to hear that night.”
She stopped. It was getting too close. Alistair got
her started again, merely lifting her off her feet for the turn. Nina’s gaze shifted down to their interlocked hands, folded on his chest, as his fingers tightened. “It would have been a nice life, wouldn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah.” He brought her hand to his lips as the poignant ache in her chest spread. She tried to dispel it with humor.
“Except when my husband, Mr. Banker, was being difficult or thickheaded.”
His lips curved. “There’s the pot calling the kettle black. Stubbornest sheila I know, right here. Even as Mr. Banker, I suspect I’d regularly have to turn her over my knee and spank some sense into her.”
“Mr. Banker is a twisted bloke himself, one who’d be looking for the right excuse to do that far too often.”
His vivid blue eyes smiled easily, but she saw a lot of other darker and more serious things behind them. The water was much closer, she realized. She could almost feel the mist from the crashing waves. Then her feet faltered, her hands tightening on him. Her feet were in the water. She made a noise, clutching him in panic, and he shifted a hand to her face.
“Alistair,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m frightened.”
All these images of a life she wasn’t going to have vanished. What had happened to her, the terrible things that had brought her to now, were rushing into that void. She needed out of the water. Needed out now. Those memories, to0 close to be called something as harmless as memories, would swallow her whole.
“Nina, look at me.”
She shook her head.
“It wasn’t a request. I won’t repeat myself.”
Her head came back up. The sharpness of his gaze, the firm way he was holding her, his tone, it had all shifted. And suddenly the ocean’s noise, its proximity, was competing with something else. Something that might be stronger than an element of nature itself.
He saw it, his blue eyes flickering with a burning light. He shifted his touch to the side of her face and throat, his grip on her waist tightening. “Joe Banker can’t get you into this water, can he?”