by Nya
Voice muffled, his faced buried in a pillow, Jef asked, “They still there?”
“Yeah, two in the dark blue sedan,” I moved the curtain aside to see better, “and just one in the van.”
“Probably out doing a food run.”
“Yeah. Speaking of, I’m starved.”
Jef held out a wrist, grimaced and moaned, “Are you ever not hungry, Dreu?”
“Well, you grow five inches almost overnight, then we’ll talk.” I let the curtain fall back into place and padded back to the bed. Standing to the side, I watched my lover, my friend, my assassin and protector give me a squinty-eyed going over. When he didn’t follow up with a comment, I asked, “What? Did I grow again?”
“More or less.”
Confused, and a bit worried that what went up might come down, height-wise, I gulped and followed his line of sight, ending with an, “Oh,” as I realized what he meant.
Grinning, Jef said, “Do you mind if I pass? What I really need is coffee.”
“Uh, yeah, sure.” My body had other ideas but the brain suggested ‘too much of a good thing’, something old petite Father Dreu would never have voiced, let alone thought, not once in nine hundred years. And the suggestion of coffee, once planted, was compelling enough to get us both squeezed back into our jeans and tees and out the door in search of a restaurant.
Before we got down the hall to the stairwell, my demon stopped and gripped my elbow.
“How about we leave now, before dark?” He sounded anxious. Not that we both didn’t have reasons for being squeamish about the task ahead, but that eight hundred pound gorilla of Fane, me, loyalties… That sat like a heavy weight on both our chests.
Shrugging an okay, I followed him back to room number one, the one that looked like a rock band had had an après-concert bash. Jef left a wad of Euros on the desk and proceeded next door to grab our duffle bags.
For some reason, I was feeling awkward and out of sorts. When I got that way, my mouth usually took over, spewing brain farts, even into an empty room. New and improved, mostly demon-me, apparently hadn’t outgrown that proclivity.
I whined, “We have to do it this way.”
“And what way is that?” He chuffed, half a snort, half a hiss, and reminded me, “This was your idea. Let’s just get it over with.” He presented his imposing broad back, ramrod straight and radiating displeasure.
Hooking a hand on his forearm, I dragged him to a halt before he could vault down the first flight of stairs. “Jef.”
“What?”
“We have to let them take me.”
“And exactly why is that?”
It was a fair question. The answer was murky in comparison. “We don’t know where they are,” and held up a hand that he couldn’t see when he muttered, ‘In fucking Romania,’ trying to remember all the reasons why this was a really bad idea and that we had little or no choice. Pops had us on the clock, the timer was ticking down.
What worried me more than anything was that the timer on that errant nuke might also be ticking down, putting my kind at risk of total annihilation, along with a huge chunk of what had once been my favorite food supply.
Logic also suggested that maybe somebody in the werewolf community with an IQ higher than an acorn might want to consider the consequences of releasing hell on earth. It was one thing to take out the last ruling nest of Vampyr up on the Transylvanian Plateau, it was quite another for the world’s human techno-scanners to go into mindless retaliation and finish the job to everyone’s detriment.
The demons had less to lose, though with Pops’ shaky hold on the levels, there was no guarantee that planet-wide Armageddon wouldn’t move the agitators into pressing their advantage. The fact was, Dad had only passable control over levels one and two, both of which would be heavily impacted in terms of access to resources, and Shades forbid, breeding opportunities.
The other forty percent, the ones who weren’t on board the du Velours bandwagon, might not be as tuned into the critical nature of the supply train as my father. Michel du Velours was a modern man in every sense of the word, and the notion of returning to his dimensions’ version of a Dark Ages was something fearsome to contemplate.
What Jef and I had finally come around to understanding was that what was at stake was far more complex than any of us had heretofore considered, and in between bouts of rough monkey sex, we had walked through every possible scenario. There was one thing we agreed on: getting that nuke was mission critical. Everything else—my feelings for my demon, for Fane, my place in the universe, where my loyalties might lay—none of that compared with ridding the planet and all its dimensions of this threat of total extermination.
Shaking his head, Jef said, “You think too much,” and took the stairs two at a time, muttering something about loving me too much … or more likely, loving me was a major pain in the patoot. He was probably right on both counts.
At the car, I asked, “How do you want to do this?”
“I don’t,” and he stayed my objections with, “but you’re determined to put your head in the noose, so how about you wait here while I run across the street and grab those coffees?”
“Um, won’t they smell a set up?”
“Of course they will.” How he could make his voice sound like a sneer yet keep his beautiful face totally blank was beyond me.
“Well…”
He brushed my lips and murmured, “This isn’t my first rodeo, sport. Those yahoos around back aren’t weres,” and stuck his tongue halfway down my throat to keep me from blurting what I was thinking: if they weren’t the wolves, then who the hell…
Oh right, the wolves weren’t the only interested parties in removing the heir apparent off the leader board. My inner Vampyr took a run at the numbers and came up with Dreu’s toast. Everybody: demons, weres, Vampyr, and probably a stray human or two had every reason to clock me. I’d become that euphemistic weapon of mass destruction by just walking into a room full of predators and raining on their personal ego parades.
Whoever was running the opposition to Dad’s hegemony would most likely be taking an active interest in my whereabouts. They had a boatload of options. Keep me alive and toady me up with the throne, assuming that demon-me had the same kind of eye-to-the-prize that the opposition touted. Killing me would be a hoot also, although it would make Pops madder ’n Hel and would most certainly result in the purge-to-end-all-purges.
Call me selfish but I liked the alive option for several reasons. For now it seemed to be shared with all the interested parties. How long that lasted depended on deliverables.
And right now, the blue light special was me, in all my six-two glory. And that, in a nutshell, might be a stumbling block with my half-assed scheme.
Jef was looking more archangel than demon, protective, moving air around his aura as if feathering his capacious wingspan, the invisible one I sensed but still couldn’t see. Taking conscious control of my tendency to spew, I directed my tongue away from that dangerous train of don’t go there to a slight fact we’d overlooked until now.
“Um, Jef, I don’t look like me anymore.”
“Whadya mean, you don’t… Oh shit.” Raking his eyes top-to-bottom and side-to-side, he held onto the glamor enough to not send telltale shockwaves into the aether, but it was a close call.
At six-two, bearded, shaggy-haired, attired in casual work clothes, and looking way younger than I had two weeks ago, there was zero resemblance to the diminutive monk in undyed wool with pleasant if unremarkable features. I still had a few Vampyr tells: the weird eye color, über-pale complexion, other stuff the outside world couldn’t see like enhanced hearing and night vision supreme, but it was the demon image that outweighed all other factors.
Jef had shoved his hands in his pockets and was rocking back and forth on his heels, for all intents and purposes looking annoyed. If anything, that was the dead giveaway.
Everybody, and I do mean everybody, got around to that annoyed thing the longer they
were with me. As a personality tell, it was a dead giveaway. On the other hand, if our stalkers were working off a general description or a facial composite, they might not be connecting the dots.
I explained my convoluted theory and finally settled on a reasonable question. “So who’s the guy in the SUV three rows over?”
Chuckling, Jef said, “I was wondering when you’d notice him.” He turned away and bid me follow with a toss of his head, angling directly toward the SUV. Two vehicles away, he said, loud enough to be heard in Bulgaria, “I’ll get coffee and a snack, wait here. Be right back.” And then he left, jogging across the highway.
Even with enhanced hearing, the road noise and the sounds of a city in full voice nearly drowned out ignitions firing and two vehicles moving in opposite directions, circling the building behind me. In front of me the wolf went invisible, crouching low, out of sight.
Uninterested in visiting Level Six or Seven and Dad’s detractors, I decided that Plan C, getting it on with the wolves, was my best option. I opened the passenger side door, slid in and instructed my slack-jawed driver to beat paws to Elliot, otherwise opposition central would go all taxidermy on his ass.
Asking for Elliot wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was best to let them think I wasn’t up on current events. It gave them, and me, a nice baseline from which to move forward. Besides, for all I knew, Elliot might still be a force to be reckoned with.
The only solid fact I had was that Fane lived. Anything beyond that was pure speculation.
Meantime my driver stared at me like I had two heads, and given the dramatic changes over the last couple days, it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Then it occurred he might not understand demon so I switched to my fractured Romanian and offered to suck his dick if he’d just get a move on.
Knowing key phrases in any language always worked a treat. He fired up the rust bucket and we peeled away toward the bypass around the city, the van and the sedan keeping pace two and three car lengths back. I didn’t see Jef’s vehicle but I knew he was there, I could feel him, and that gave me a fool’s dose of confidence.
I needed something to occupy my mind so I slipped into summary mode. In one scenario, I had Fane setting up shop close to the border with Serbia. His home town was on the Danube, situated on a spit of land that hooked oddly like the boot heel of Italy, the name of which escaped me. There was some logic to that. It would give him access to the wilds of the western Carpathians or the Balkan Mountains, he had the river as a handy doorway to the north and the south, or he could jump into the boiling vat of ethnic cleansing in Serbia.
That a significant number of weres had taken refuge in that tortured country never ceased to amaze. Given the level of violence and hatred and sheer insanity of the politics and religion and the shifting loyalties over the centuries also had me contemplating about that occasional intersect with the levels of Hel. If the walls were thin in that area, the odds were pretty good inter-dimensional conflict had played a major role in centuries, if not millennia, of upheaval.
My escort and would-be abductor disappointed and turned north on a nice four-lane that gradually downsized to a passable narrow road climbing into the southernmost reaches of the Bucegi Mountains. Dusk was long gone but at altitude, light lingered, salvaged by an unimaginable canopy of stars and a full moon just peaking over the ridges to our northeast.
I’d avoided idle conversation for hours but after glancing in the side view mirror and not seeing any headlights, I broke down and asked, “Did we lose them?” We, as in this is a group effort, share away…
“Nu.”
“I didn’t think so.” Wondering if he was as dumb as he looked, I said, “You do realize they’re demons, don’t you?”
My captor shrugged. My guess was that he was paid to drive, not think. Evidence of that surfaced when we turned off the paved road and bounced our way along a rutted track to a gated fence, complete with guardhouses and flood lights, ala old Eastern Block detention centers I’d seen in history books. Razor wire: check. Fence electrified: my nose hairs tingled, so check. Two well-padded, burley wolves smelling of wet fur and sex: oops. Apparently we’d interrupted the oaste de strânsură, the para-military arm of the pack, in a moment of amorous diversion.
While the handsome lad to our right zipped his camo pants, the other one swaggered over to the driver side and exchanged pleasantries with my driver, too fast for my limited language abilities to grasp.
When the guard looked down the rutted path toward the road, it was a good bet that a welcoming party for the demons would be organized post-haste. The driver also mumbled something about promises and keeping me alive long enough to suck dick, then the cutie in the camos hauled me out of the SUV and toward the gate.
That should not have been easy, given my new size advantage. The problem with werewolves, though, was that the males tended to come in jumbo-sized containers with plenty of reserves of testosterone.
It really seemed cosmically unfair that I was still the smallest one in the forest, the runt of the litter.
Jefrumael chuckled in the far reaches of my brain. It was the last thing I remembered as twin tasers jolted my chest and my gonads.
When I awoke, I had a hard on for electrical currents and an up-close-and-personal with someone I thought I’d never see again.
Chapter Five
Fane brushed his lips along my brow, sweeping the hair away and crooning in his lilting native tongue. I recognized his scent, his touch, his presence as if it had been just minutes since we’d last coupled in joyous release.
Someone spoke on the other side of the room, space, cavern, garage bay … I couldn’t be sure of where I was, let alone when.
There were things going on under my skin that indicated not all was well within the new Dreu landscape. The fear returned: the one that had the demon-me bubble busting open to spew the old vacuous, diminutive monk onto a cold stone floor, forever alone with only his dick for company.
I might have said as much because my darling Fane shushed me and gathered me into his arms, picking me up like I was a child and carrying me deep into the bowels of what had to be a cavern. The aroma of dank, musty air comingled with rank, organic odors, the tang of canine, a hint of musk, the odd flavor of violence that sits at the back of the throat when sight and sound fail.
Sight definitely faded as the bindings of coarse cloth sealed my eyes shut and not even my vamp heritage was good enough to penetrate thick, unyielding material. The other sense I’d relied on, my enhanced hearing, was compromised by the incessant buzzing in my ears, likely a residual effect from getting a double dose of discharge that jangled nerves and defribbed each and every internal organ.
The electrical shock had effectively incapacitated the neuromuscular network; that was the one that had impacted my chest cavity. The gonads were a different story altogether. That had been agony personified and no matter how far I dipped into that intersect of pain and pleasure, the stun gun had dropped me into a level of hell I had no wish to visit ever again.
Fane laid me out on what had to be a cot. He carefully straightened my legs and removed the boots. I listened as the Vibram soles made soft flicking sounds on the stone surface as he shoved them out of the way. With my upper body still numb and twitchy, the suggestion of shoulder muscles being pressed into a semi-rigid surface and arms extended parallel to my sides were more brain constructs than actual sensations.
The straps were another matter, they were that odd combination of stiff and yielding that only a plasticized fabric could deliver, unbreakable for humans, a mild annoyance for Vampyr and demon. But use enough of them, strategically placed, and name your supernatural species … you weren’t going anywhere.
Whoever applied the devices cautioned me against wiggling. “You don’t want these to touch your skin, sir, they’ve got silver threads laced in them.”
Two points of interest, the wolf called me ‘sir’ with a hint of respect, and they had serious incapacitation
in mind. I might be a mutt but that metal still had the desired effect of making life extremely unpleasant, draining energy and searing through flesh until it contacted bone, and the deeper it went, the easier it got as lubrication and conductivity conspired against vamp physiology.
Every species had an Achilles heel. And that included the weres, though the silver bullet was more on the order of an urban legend. Hollow points worked just as effectively on them. Demons were on another plane entirely, figuratively and literally.
Somehow I had developed the ability, out of the alphabet soup of my genetic heritage, to scramble neurons and implode demon innards, as if I’d stuffed them into a blender and hit puree. I wasn’t proud or boastful of that sad fact. It was what it was.
Humans popped like pustules and I cringed at the memory of slip-sliding on eyeballs and other unmentionables back at the casino.
I turned my head just in case my belly decided to hurl. It didn’t, but my head was set firmly back into place, covered eyes toward ceiling, chin up and forehead anchored firmly in place. The polite fellow with the sirs and tsks-tsks gently cushioned the final strap so that the metal wouldn’t contact skin.
Fane was no longer in the room, or more likely a cell, his scent lingering but not filling my senses with remembered desires and unrestrained lust. That used to be the thing I dreaded above all others: falling back into feelings and cravings and out-of-control sensations that ate through flesh like acid, erupting on the surface, making my skin crawl with such need it seemed there was nothing on earth that could slake the thirst I had for my wolf.
Now my skin crawled for other reasons: confusion, fear, a touch of guilt and a panic that washed over me like the tide. I recognized it for what it was as I confronted the real possibility that I might never feel my demon’s harsh caresses or his strength and the wicked demands he made of my body and soul. He drained me in ways that seemed outside time and space, as if he still harbored residual energies from an ethereal plane, my fallen archangel. Forever damned, seeking succor with the offspring of the man who had committed him to lifetimes of servitude.