by Mark Tufo
But his gray cuticles were a little gross.
He peeled the canvas to one side, testing the light of the room to make sure it was safe. Old habits were hard to break. In the gloom, she could barely make out his listless form in the boat’s interior. Even without a piercing sun to repel him, Luke simply wasn’t a day person.
“I missed you,” she said.
“You left before I had a chance to kiss you good-bye.”
“You were out like a light.”
She bent over the side of the skiff. Luke smiled, still a little groggy, but his eyes were open, the pupils and irises both solid black. He smelled of sweat, carnations, and dirt, plus that masculine but faintly decaying odor underneath it all.
Ah hell, no man is perfect.
She leaned in and kissed him. His lips were as firm, smooth, and cool as polished marble. He responded, though still a little sluggish, and his mouth worked gently against hers. She could never get used to his lack of breath, but she didn’t have a lot of room to criticize, because her breathing was an autonomic reflex left over from her days as a mortal.
They were quite a pair. She hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be alive, and Luke hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be dead.
“Mmm, nice wake-up call,” he murmured.
“Got room in there for me?”
“Always.”
She climbed over the edge of the boat. One of her wings brushed against his face. “Careful,” he said. “I’ll have to pluck you like a chicken.”
She folded her wings behind her and snuggled against him, relishing the coolness of his body. He was naked, but he had a thin cotton shroud draped over the lower half of his body. Despite his pale flesh, his chest was robust and muscular. He’d been turned into a vampire in the prime of his life, and despite some minor desiccation, he was holding out just fine.
Really fine.
“I don’t think there’s enough room for all these clothes,” he said, reaching for the top button of her blouse.
“Do we have time?”
“We have forever.”
That was a good line, and he used it often. Foreplay, loveplay, and afterplay, he never rushed.
Except, of course, when he needed to feed.
But they tried not to talk about that.
“We’re supposed to take the boat out with Cherry and Roy,” Sabrina said.
Luke’s fingers froze just below her throat. “When?”
“Tonight, of course.”
He turned away and let his hand drop against the black velvet lining of the boat. “I’m busy tonight.”
“You told me you were off. Don’t tell me Commander Hampton called you in.”
“There’s some suspicious activity off the Banks. The official line is it may be drug shipments from Costa Rica.”
“But you think it might be something else?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
“You get cold when you don’t know what you think,” she said, trying once more to interest him in play. She didn’t think the storm would hold out much longer. The rain was easing off and the thunder had rolled inland.
She rubbed her hand over his chest, teasing the taut curves of his abs. She pressed her palm against his heart and felt its slow beating. Asleep, it might only beat once a minute, and when awake, it beat about six times a minute. It only accelerated when he was feeding, fighting, or…the other F word.
Sabrina snuggled against him and nuzzled his neck, letting her wings brush gently across his skin. It was one of her favorite maneuvers, the old “turnabout is fair play,” and it usually got a rise out of him. “You’re the only vampire I know who would join the Coast Guard Auxiliary,” she murmured.
“It’s the best way to keep my finger on the pulse,” he said.
“Well, I’ve got a pulse you can finger,” she said. “That is, if you don’t have anything better to do.”
Distracted, he gazed at the diminishing storm beyond the window. She wondered what he saw there, and if his memories haunted him, or if there were so many that they were all jumbled into one big stew so that no single event of the past could stand out.
Sabrina wondered if she’d be lost in his memories as well, and then shook her head. At least he had the presence of mind to cup one of her breasts, although he gently kneaded it like a distracted kindergartner toying with Play-Doh.
I didn’t get my flesh back for this kind of treatment.
She pulled away, or at least as much as she could inside the small boat.
“We need to talk,” she said.
To his credit, he didn’t sigh.
“Look, you’ve got a mission,” she said. “Duty calls, and all that. The last of the unsung heroes. And that’s sort of sexy, in a Robert Pattinson kind of way. But I’ve got a mission, too.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, suddenly sullen in a Robert Pattinson kind of way. “I have to save the world while you get to save heaven. You’re always trying to one-up me.”
She swatted his muscular chest, causing her hand to hurt. “No, my darling. I have a much tougher mission than that.”
“What could be tougher than that?”
“Saving your soul.”
“I don’t have a soul.”
“Exactly. God sent me to Beaufort because you were here. Not just because it’s the probable entry point for the Gog and Magog.”
“What would God want with a creep like me?”
“God’s love is generous and boundless.”
“After all the people I’ve killed? All the good Christians whose necks I’ve pierced and whose pure, redeemed blood I sucked into my belly? I can’t respect any God who would have me as a servant.”
God had acknowledged the task was daunting. And He’d blessed her with extra assets, similar to the way the government bought body armor for the soldiers sent into warfare. One never asked if perhaps they should have just skipped the battlefield altogether. After all, the armor was already purchased and it would be a shame to waste it.
Plus, God’s armor came with curves and all the temptations of mortality.
She could roll with it.
“I can see this won’t be easy,” she said.
“I was doing this long before you were born. It’s just the way I am.”
Sabrina sat up and moved away from body contact. She had to fold her wings and legs, but it was possible. “You never did tell me how you got this way. I might be a little sympathetic.”
He put his hands behind his head. The thunder rumbled, causing the coffin-boat to tremble, and Sabrina was annoyed to be wasting a great afternoon of playtime. But a sacred mission was a sacred mission.
“I’ve never told this to anyone,” he said. “It’s a little embarrassing.”
I eat confession for breakfast, doll. Please dish.
She gave an angelic smile. “If you can’t trust me, you can’t trust anybody.”
“I’m a lost boy.”
She searched his eyes. Red gleams danced in the dark of them. She couldn’t tell if he was joking about the 1980s vampire movie or not. “Right. Like Keifer Sutherland? Or Corey Haim?”
“No, a real lost boy,” he said vacantly, as if he’d forgotten she was there.
Before she could goad him into telling more, the room was flooded with a flash of bluish light, causing Luke to wince in pain. The light vanished in a blink, followed almost immediately by a deep peal of thunder.
“That was a close one,” Sabrina said.
She wondered if it was God trying to get her attention and keep her on the true path. God didn’t appreciate modern psychology. How could she expect to figure out Luke’s heart and soul if she couldn’t dig into his mind a little first?
The lightning bolt had zapped Luke from his vulnerable moment, and Mr. Cool was back. He gave his sexy smirk as the rain continued its pounding on the roof. His hands touched her shoulders, strong and demanding, and she resisted only a little.
And then he pulled her close, featheri
ng his lips across hers, the friction creating the heat his flesh lacked. She surrendered and parted her lips, and the tip of his tongue touched hers. She flicked upward and caught the points of his teeth. He was aroused.
“We’d better hurry,” he said. “I don’t know how long the storm will last.”
“You don’t like to hurry,” she said. Quickies with the dead didn’t sound all that satisfying.
“I don’t mean ‘us,’” he said. “I meant tonight.”
“I thought you were on duty.”
“The commander let me off because it looks like the storm front is passing. There’s a recession, you know, even for the federal government.”
“What about your all-pervading sense of doom?”
“If we’re taking the boat out, I’ll be available, right?”
She hated to ask, but she needed to know. “You’re not going to feed tonight, are you?”
“Not planning on it.”
His curved canines suggested otherwise. It wasn’t a dead giveaway that the craving had set it, but it was a physiological response she’d come to compare with the salivating of a dog.
“Do you need some of my blood to tide you over?” she asked.
“I couldn’t do that to you.”
A guy who is not a user. The first one in history. Yeah, right.
“You did it before.”
“That was different. It was just a love nip. I was helpless. I was…overcome.”
A guy who is overcome. Another first. All the ones I’ve known have never come enough. They’re undercome.
The rain eased and she sighed, letting her wings curl around him. He sat up enough to accept the embrace. His fingers were back at the buttons of her blouse, and she reached down to the hem of the sheet at his waist.
And the dead shall rise.
“Uh…” he said.
Her eyes were closed and she relaxed beneath his touch. But his fingers stopped moving.
“What?” she murmured.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a rain check.”
She opened her eyes and realized the sun had burned through a crack in the clouds, and the room was filled with an orange-red glow. The rain trailed off and the silence was intensely loud.
T-Bird squawked and said, “Duck and cover, duck and cover.”
CHAPTER FOUR
With hours to kill until sunset, Sabrina went down to the waterfront, where yachts and sailboats bobbed in the marinas, signs warned against feeding the seagulls, fat kids with sunburns begged for ice cream, and the Bent Harpoon welcomed all who were of legal drinking age or had a passable fake I.D.
Sabrina had made a habit of visiting the bar almost daily, finding it a much richer source of information than the local newspapers. Because bars in North Carolina had to sell more food than alcohol, the Bent Harpoon served up baskets of greasy fries and clam strips, frozen fish sandwiches, and Cole slaw, all served with a red shrimp sauce that filled the air with a cloying sweetness.
Or that could have been the vomit. It all ended up the same anyway.
The place was barely a third full, with margaritas appearing to be in favor today. A couple of young, well-tanned construction jocks in wifebeaters looked her over as she strode in. One of them examined her shoes with flaring nostrils, and Sabrina registered the response as jealousy. She was relieved they were gay, because she didn’t want to be hit on this early in the day.
She slid onto her usual stool beside Cap’n Barney, who turned and squinted at her with one bleary eye. “’Tis a lurvely mermaid,” he said, in a lousy blend of pirate and Cockney. He sprayed a little spittle as he spoke.
“Hello, Barney,” she said. “Been here long?”
“Seven years,” he said, which was only half true. The joke part was that she’d never been in the place when he wasn’t on the third stool over from the cash register. On those rare occasions when he got up to relieve his bladder of massive quantities of beer, the permanent imprint of his ass was revealed in the aqua vinyl.
“Good thing you don’t need sleep,” she said.
“I need it bad, I just don’t want it.” He quaffed from his frothy mug, a little foam sticking to his white mustache. He wore a blue captain’s cap that matched his eyes, and it sported a frayed bit of braid as if it might have seen weather at some point.
The bartender came over, a square-jawed guy with tight curls who looked like he was training for a decathlon instead of working his way through oceanography school. “What you having?”
Cap’n Barney slapped a palm on the maple bar, momentarily stifling the clusters of conversation. “Avast, you baggywrinkle. Sabrina is a tee totaller. A rolly holer. A holy roller.”
“A Dr. Pepper, please,” Sabrina said. Cheerwine was the cult soda of the South, but Sabrina found it far too bubbly for her tastes. Pepsi had been founded in nearby New Bern, but it was too flat and sugary. She didn’t mind being a pepper, though it wasn’t as original as the television commercials made out.
“I respect a woman who can stay sober,” Capn’Barney said as the bartender went to draw the order.
“And I respect a man who can’t,” she said.
She enjoyed Barney’s company for several reasons. Most men took her to be Barney’s daughter, which kept away the land sharks, and anyone who tried to lure her to their table or offer her a rum had to fight through Cap’n Barney’s bluster and incoherent English. He was a suitable anchor for the storm, and he held a genuine, uncreepy affection for her.
But Barney offered another benefit as well. He was privy to much of the port traffic, from the shrimpers and charter boats to the larger Coast Guard cutters. Coasties occasionally hung out at the bar, and Cap’n Barney soaked up the rumors and reports like he soaked up Corona Lights. Since he was always on call, so to speak, Sabrina could gather daytime intelligence to pass along to Luke.
The only downside was he tended to say everything three times.
“How are the fish running?” she asked.
“Groupers, black sea bass, and amberjack are running deep. Spanish mackerel for the inlets, and you always got your croakers.”
Croakers were a common surf and inlet catch, and the nearby sailing center of Oriental even held an annual festival to celebrate the noisy fish, although it was mostly an opportunity to hawk overpriced crafts. Since Sabrina wasn’t an angler, she just used the opening to get Barney warmed up, although he already seemed to be well lit.
“Good to know what’s fresh,” she said.
He rolled his eyes, which were like the clouded blobs of jellyfish torsos. “Lotta boats hitting it right now. Lotta boats. Veritable flotillas, I say.”
“Well, it’s that time of year.”
“Cruising the Outer Banks. Something’s fishy out there, and I don’t mean that to be clever.”
The Outer Banks were a rare geological formation, a chain of barrier islands that stretched 200 miles off the North Carolina coast. They were most famous for hosting the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, but before that the area had gained a reputation as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because its ever-shifting shoals and sudden storms had sent everything from schooners to submarines to the bottom.
“It’s just tourists,” Sabrina said, and this was always where a chat with old Barney got interesting, because he had his own ideas about tourists that made Sabrina wonder why he had such a keen eye for surveillance. Like he was a watchman of some sort.
“There be tourists, and then there be visitors,” he said, taking a generous gulp that drained half his mug. “We’re all tourists in our way, because we’re just passing through and looking. We’re just a blink of the eye to the oceans.”
“Some of us have been around awhile,” she said. “You’re practically a coral reef yourself.”
He gave his sea-shanty laugh and said, “I guess we all get pushed here by different tides. But there’s a kind of tourist I don’t particularly care for.”
Sabrina looked around the Bent
Harpoon, which had the requisite ensemble of frayed nets, corroded fishing tackle, and nautical maps covering the tea-colored walls. “And what kind would that be, Cap’n?”
“Pirates,” he said, and his rolling eyes stopped in their tracks and settled on her with a firm intensity. “Privateers and buccaneers. Invaders and raiders.”
Sabrina would have chalked his words off to the work of the Corona, but his intensity cloaked the jovial old salt he seemed to play for the general public. God had told her that things happened for a reason, which she’d shrugged off as a one of those paternal platitudes you dispensed when sending angels out to do good in the world. She’d already met her guardian angel today, but who was to say that a person only needed one guardian?
But if she had more than one person watching out for her, it must mean this mission was way bigger than she’d figured.
Thank you, God, for putting so much trust in me, she silently prayed with a heavy dollop of sarcasm.
She decided to test him. God had always been one for testing, so perhaps he’d be proud. “Do you mean the Gog?”
He raised his mug. “Grog?”
“Gog and Magog. Like from the Bible.”
“I’m not much one for the Bible. Too many begats for my taste. I prefer a story with a predictable plot, like ‘Treasure Island.’”
So perhaps he wasn’t enlightened. But that didn’t mean his information wasn’t solid. “These people shipping around the Outer Banks? What would they be doing? I wouldn’t think there’s much to plunder out there.”
“It’s mostly national parks land,” he said. “There are some resort towns farther north, where Cape Hatteras and the lighthouses are. But down here it’s mostly sand. You get charters out there because people like to fish them, but there’s not much advantage for commercial shipping.”
“So you think it’s something else?”
He lowered his voice, although the background noise was starting to pick up as the drink count mounted. “Like I said, pirates.”
“We were planning a double date out there tonight.”
“Are you still seeing the young gentleman I met a couple weeks back? That Coastie?”