The Immortal Warriors Boxed Set: Books 1-11

by H. T. Night

  Chapter Seven

  It was nearing seven o’clock and I was going to head on down to meet that girl.

  Annie.

  I was all showered up. I’d bought some cool threads from a nicer outlet store. I bought some nice-fitting blue jeans, a white cotton shirt and I decided to splurge on a $400 leather jacket. It was nicer than the one I had in my car. It fit real nice. The only thing that would make my look even more awesome would be a bike. So, if I couldn’t have the motorcycle I wanted, I would at least have the leather jacket I wanted. It was slick. It was classy. It was totally me.

  I hadn’t had a drink since earlier. I was a little tired, but I drank a couple of Red Bulls and I caught my second wind. Or was I on my third wind? I forgot. I had no idea how my liver was holding up. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I didn’t think werewolves could die of liver failure, but I would continue to test that theory.

  I finished primping and left my hotel room.

  I saw Annie waiting right outside the coffee shop. She looked incredible. She was wearing a long summer dress that was tropical. Her brunette hair made her look like an islander. I liked the look a lot. I hadn’t realized how voluptuous she was. She was quite large in the chest region.

  “You look incredible,” I said. I wasn’t a giant boob guy, but hell, it wasn’t like I didn’t like them.

  “Oh, this old thing,” she said teasingly. “I saw it in the window and I had to get it.”

  “It makes me crave coconuts.”

  “I’ll bet it does.”

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “Hold on, hold on. Let me look at you. Wow, you clean up pretty good. That jacket is off the hook.”

  “It should be,” I said. “It wasn’t cheap.”

  “Well, my dress was. So… ha! It was 50 percent off!”

  “I think they saw me coming and tried to jack the price out of my price range. Little did they know, I cleaned up at a poker table a couple of days ago.”

  “Big poker player?”

  “Not a big one. Apparently, a lucky one.”

  I smiled at Annie. She seemed to have brought a lot of energy to the date. Hopefully, it would be infectious because I had been drinking and shopping all day.

  “So, let me ask you again,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

  “I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since we saw each other this morning.”

  “Well, you and I have something in common. I haven’t eaten either. We can dine the classy route and go sit in a nice restaurant and pay double what you normally pay anywhere else in the continental U.S. Or we can hit a buffet and just go to town.”

  “Although going to town at a buffet would feed my animal side, I would like to sit down and have a nice dinner in a relaxing spot. Don’t worry. I’ll pay for my own. You made it clear this wasn’t a date.”

  “Well, I would like to treat tonight. You’re the only friend I have made up here and I have a pocketful of cash. Let’s have some fun.”

  “I’m in.” Annie gave me a big, beautiful smile. She had nice teeth. She couldn’t have met me at a worse time, though. But she seemed cool. Relaxed. I liked that.

  “First things first,” I said. “Where is a classy restaurant?”

  “They are all around us. Just pick one.”

  “You know, I have no clue what is a classy restaurant and what isn’t. I think IHOP is a classy restaurant because a person serves the food to you. So, why don’t you pick one and I’ll follow.”

  “Well, what are you craving?”

  I thought about and I was craving pasta something awful. “I wouldn’t mind if we went Italian,” I said.

  “Cool. There’s a place a couple streets up. I have passed it a dozen times this week and wondered if their food was any good.”

  “But is it classy? If I’m going to pay $35 for some Fettuccini Alfredo, I want some dude serenading me at the table, Pavarotti style.”

  “I don’t know about all of that. But, it looks nice from the outside. I like the ambiance it gives, even as you pass by it.”

  “You’re real big on how things make you feel?” I said.

  “Don’t we have to be? Our likes and dislikes are so connected to our emotions. It’s almost impossible to separate the two.”

  “I’ve been told all my life that I’m impulsive. Never quite sure what it meant, other than I don’t care what people think. Also, I usually do what I want. My rule is, if I’m not hurting you, stay out of my way. Because I promise to stay out of your way.”

  “Sounds very Libertarian.”

  “I don’t know too much about politics. If that word describes how I think, then I guess I’m a librarian.”

  “Libertarian,” Annie said, correcting me.

  “Whatever,” I said. I knew the difference between a Libertarian and a librarian. It was just funny to me sometimes to play the dumb-jock role. Even though I was anything but. I was just about to say, ‘let’s go’ to Annie when a couple walked by holding hands in a way that everyone knew they were in love. It stopped me in my tracks and reminded me very quickly of the pain that I was avoiding. I stared at the couple and my eyes moistened a little. I couldn’t stay in Vegas and get drunk for the rest of my life. I didn’t have enough money for that, and what would Maya think if she somehow knew? Could she look down from heaven and see me? Was there a heaven? I spaced out a little.

  “Do you know them?” Annie asked as she noticed me staring at the couple.

  “No,” I said, snapping back to the present. “Just reminds me. Of her. That’s all.”

  I was pretty sure Annie knew who I was talking about. But she had the sense to allow the conversation to stop there. “You ready to hit up this Italian place?”

  “Sure am.”

  We were off to the Italian restaurant.

  Chapter Eight

  The restaurant’s name was Alfredo’s. I loved Alfredo sauce. It was probably my favorite of all sauces. So, a place that called itself Alfredo’s better have the best Alfredo sauce I had ever tasted.

  I took a deep breath and knew I needed a drink fast. The loss of Maya was starting to take over again. Boy, I didn’t want to cry in front of all these people. Not in front of Annie, especially.

  It was hard to not ache over Maya. It didn’t matter how drunk I was. The pain of losing her was unbearable. I must have been wearing what I was feeling on my face because Annie’s voice sounded tender.

  “You okay?” Annie asked me.

  “I’m just peachy. Let’s find the hostess, so we can get a table.” I looked around and there seemed to be more than enough tables available. This place must be expensive. There are 100,000 people outside walking the streets of Las Vegas, yet this place had a total of twelve people in it. The food was either incredibly bad or incredibly expensive. I hoped it was the latter.

  The hostess came over and she seated us near the back. The lighting was dim and there was romantic Italian music playing over the speaker. There was no live opera singing at the table. But I had to admit, the place was classy.

  “They’re sure making this hard not to feel like a date,” Annie remarked and swept her hands over the table with the wine bottle with a lit candle, the bud vase with the red rose, and the checkered tablecloth.

  “Don’t think of it as romantic,” I joked. “It’s straight out of that silly scene from Lady and the Tramp.”

  She laughed as I pulled out her chair and she sat down.

  “It’s good to know that you’re a gentleman, even when you’re not on a date,” Annie said in a flirtatious way. She was, indeed, a pistol.

  I sat down at my side of the table. The table wasn’t that big. I was across from Annie, but we were so close that I could smell her breath. Minty with a strong scent of alcohol, which, for some reason, didn’t bother me at all. It sort of made me feel a connection with her… that she wasn’t going to judge me for drinking. With the meal, of course.

  The hostess handed us our menus and told us about the specials. None of
the specials seemed too appetizing.

  I said thank you and the hostess left our table to take care of other customers. I buried my face in the menu. I was avoiding eye contact with Annie. Which was hard because she only made eye contact when she spoke. She was that cool. With just insanely bad timing. I was a drunk werewolf in mourning.

  The waitress came over. “Hello, how are you folks today? May I start you off with some house wine?”

  “Fine and sure,” Annie said, answering both of the waitress’s questions.

  I looked at Annie, and I said, “That sounds good to me. I haven’t had a wine buzz yet today. Bring it on.”

  The waitress looked at me like I was low-class to make such a statement inside this fine eating establishment. Like she didn’t know what was happening to her patrons after they ordered wine after wine at $8 a glass or a hundred bucks a bottle. Servers wanted to ignore that drinking was about getting drunk, at its core, and not typically about admiring the bouquet and the tang of the beverage, or whatever. It was their job to serve it and the way they get paid was through tips. The waitress left the table and I thought I didn’t make a new friend because of my inner-city manners.

  Annie grinned at me.

  “What,” I said.

  “Nothing, Tommy. You sure are your own man.”

  “Let’s leave my masturbation habits out of this.”

  “I’m not sure what you said made any sense. I think you just wanted to shock me by saying the word: masturbation.”

  She may have been right. Maybe I was doing it. But I couldn’t let her know that.

  “A guy like what a guy likes,” I said, continuing my own private joke that I was pretty sure I was the only person to think it was funny.

  “Again, I’m not sure what that even means,” Annie said. She looked me in the eye and was trying to figure me out. I’m pretty sure she had no clue about what kind of man I am. She was the type of girl who was intrigued by my bullshit. All my life, women were intrigued with my bullshit and tried to figure me out with just one goal in mind. Every woman wanted to save me from myself.

  “We are at the table. Let’s change the subject from masturbation,” Annie finally said, classy girl that she was.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Annie paused and I knew something was on her mind.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Huh?” Annie said. Annie now was the one in deep thought. It sort of threw me because she hadn’t been reflective all night. I looked at her and we made eye contact. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  Annie sighed and said, “Nothing, sweetie pie.” Then Annie said, “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m usually up to talk about anything.”

  “How much did you love your fiancée?”

  “How much?” I thought about and then said, “Can you measure that?”

  “Well. Tell me about you two. Tell me what happened. I’m sorry if that is straightforward, but I feel like, if I’m going to hang out with you tonight, I need to at least know what makes you tick.”

  “And you can find that out by listening to me talk about a relationship I had with a woman who is no longer with us?”

  “You’re right. That was wrong of me to ask you such a tender question. I’m sorry. We all have our secrets.”

  “Actually, I’ll tell you, Annie. It would be my honor to share with you what a fantastic woman my fiancée, Maya, was. I’ll tell you. If you truly want to hear. If you can bear it, I think it would… help me.”

  Annie gave me the most genuine look of compassion I think I had ever seen and then she said, “I would love to hear. Tell me about her.”

  I stared at Annie and for the first time since we sat down, I looked directly into her eyes. “Loving someone so much. It takes you away from the rat race and makes you human again. The good kind of humanity. You’re no longer living on automatic reboot every day. You take in each moment and it means something special. And when a person is as wonderful as Maya was, it magnifies each situation. I fell in love with her more and more each day. It was real. It was raw. It was better than anything I ever imagined to be true. I was high on it. I was drunk on it. I was immersed in it. Everything I did, even my MMA fighting, felt like I did it for her. She was my champion, my savior, my reward for good behavior. My best hope for the future. She was my everything.” I stopped because I was gushing and I felt too exposed.

  “Wow,” Annie said. “I feel majorly guilty.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I believe you completely now. That you’re telling the truth about everything.”

  “You didn’t believe me?” I was pretty insulted.

  “I still thought there was a slim chance you were playing me. There are some real creeps out there that would say what you did just so I would have pity sex with them.”

  “You won’t have to worry about that.”

  “I would hope not. You say this is just ten days fresh from them calling the time of death in the hospital. I’m sorry for not believing you. I have a hard time trusting people.”

  “I guess that’s okay. You don’t know me. I’ve been drunk every time you have seen me. The fact that you trust me at all is amazing.”

  “Can I ask you a question about your relationship?”

  Before I could answer, the waitress brought our wine. She poured us each a glass of wine of the house carafe.

  “Should I leave the carafe?” the waitress asked.

  “Oh, please do,” I said.

  “There will be a by-the-bottle charge instead of by the glass.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “Is it good wine?”

  “Yes. Very good. The grapes are grown in Tuscany from 100-year-old rootstock and the winery makes this house label just for us. If you don’t love it, tell me and I’ll bring you something different. It’s my favorite, though, at the end of a long day of what I do for a living.”

  “Nice. Thanks very much. I’m sure we’ll enjoy it.”

  The waitress smiled at me. She seemed like she was an older, tougher woman who had seen some shit in her time.

  “One of those days, huh?” the waitress said to me.

  “Something like that,” I said. I was opening up to Annie and didn’t need to bring the waitress into the conversation, though she apparently wanted to be in it.

  There was a lull in the conversation as the waitress waited for me to taste the wine. I swirled it in the glass, inhaled a bit, and drank it like I was on the Food Channel. It was good, smooth and rich tasting.

  I nodded that I liked it and she left the table.

  “So, what do you want to know exactly?” I finally asked Annie when we were alone again.

  “Was she the one? I mean, was she the love of your life?”

  I became choked up when she asked that. I wasn’t ready to hear that question. “Yeah, Maya was definitely the one.”

  “Why was she?”

  “We fit like hand in glove. We were a perfect match. She knew me in a way that I have only shown a couple of people, and no one knew me better than she did. She knew what I needed, and she was always there to make sure I had it. Be it physical or emotional.”

  “You don’t usually open up like this to people, do you, Tommy?”

  I took a healthy sip of the wondrous wine. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?”

  She nodded. “So, why are you in Las Vegas, Tommy? You’re still in mourning. It’s too soon for you to take this kind of trip. You need to be around people who love you. Who know you. Who care that you are hurting. Not strangers. Not me.”

  “I don’t think you are a stranger anymore,” I said. And she gave me a sparkling smile.

  I was touched that this virtual stranger read me so well. “I’m okay, Annie, my new friend,” I said. “Let’s have a good time tonight.” I took a deep breath and downed my wine as if it was a cool glass of water on a hot summer day. I looked over at Annie and she did the same thing.


  “So, you’re a big drinker?” I said.

  “I was the beer-chugging champion in my sorority.”

  “A sorority girl?”

  “Yep. Vice President of Phi Beta Beta 2006. College is where they teach drinking as a sport.”

  “Then we might need another carafe,” I said smiling. “I didn’t realize I was in the company of a pro drinker. I always thought I was a pretty intense drinker. But I never won a contest.”

  “Don’t wuss out now. You going to outdrink me or not?”

  So, that’s what we did. We ate and drank for the next hour and a half. We talked a lot. It was like a life job interview. We just asked each other a ton of questions and gave long and detailed answers, with no punches pulled, no holds barred, no self-censorship.

  As I chewed and wolfed down my amazing lasagna, she talked and ate delicately. I found out she lived on the other side of the country in Connecticut. I told her more about being an MMA fighter, that I held a Theater Arts degree, and admitted that I would pretty much say anything to anyone. I didn’t have much of a filter. Most shit that I thought eventually came out my mouth. Or was translated into fighting.

  And yes, we did our best to finish off not one, but three carafes of that Tuscan house wine. Being drunk on wine was different than hard alcohol. Hard alcohol hit you over the head like a bag full of bricks right out of the gate. But… drinking wine snuck up on you and it was a total body drunkenness that I felt from head to toe.

  After wine, pasta, appetizers and a couple of desserts, I needed a big-ass nap.

  I yawned after I gave the waitress the check with the tip already on it. She received my usual 20 percent. But we still sat at the table. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do next. Another yawn escaped.

  “Don’t yawn,” Annie said. “That can get contagious. That will want to make me go back to the hotel with you and do things to you that would be life-changing.”

  “Life-changing?” I asked. “You haven’t been sexy with me at all tonight and you are talking the life-changing talk?”