by Eve Newton
Chapter 8
Chester, England, March 2013 – Devon
He stares at the ceiling and sighs. His thoughts are errant, and he just can’t concentrate on the matter at hand. I’m done, he thinks. He pushes her head up from where she is sucking his cock and says, “This just isn’t working for me anymore. It’s over.”
“What?” she squeaks. “You can’t finish it. I love you.”
He rolls his eyes inwardly at this admission as he sits up and drops his feet to the floor. “Sorry, Veronica, it has run its course.”
“No, Devon, please.” She pushes her dark curls out of her eyes, the tears welling up.
Please, not the crying thing. Have a bit of backbone, woman, he thinks to himself, you are seven hundred years old. He didn’t really want to come here today. He only came because he is in the country and she wanted to see him. The three-hour drive was so not worth it. After Cole told them what Liv had said, he left straight away. He was restless and needed the time away from Cole. He has shown his hand a lot sooner than he had intended. Both with regard to his feelings towards Lizzie, but also towards his sibling. Not that he thinks Cole has any idea what those actually are. He didn’t outright say it.
He really doesn’t want to be here, especially now that is one hundred percent committed to his plan.
“Devon?” Veronica is weeping and asking him something, but he has zoned out and has no idea what she is saying.
He stands and pulls his pants and t-shirt on. Shoes and jacket next. He picks up the keys, wallet and phone from the nightstand, and turns to leave, never to return.
“Devon, please,” she begs. Fuck. He hates begging. Why do they always beg? Well, actually he doesn’t mind when Lizzie begs him to fuck her and to never leave her, he loves it, in fact. He loves that she needs him that much. But the others...it is such a pain in the ass.
“Veronica, I’m to be married. I just think it’s time to cut a few ties, that’s all. It’s nothing personal,” Devon says.
“Married?” Her tears start afresh, and he wishes that he hadn’t said that. He was trying to deter her, but clearly that didn’t work. He turns to the door and with his hand resting on the handle, she is there in a flash behind him, holding it closed. She is stronger than he is, and he isn’t going anywhere just yet. He doesn’t usually go for older Vamps. He gets enough of the domination from his sire. He prefers younger, pliable Vampires, or humans who will let him bite them. Mind you, that’s how he ended up in this mess with Jess.
“I can be just like her,” she says. “You can call me Elizabeth and tell me how to make love to you like she does.”
He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply. This is dodgy territory. Yes, he likes his women to look like her, yes, he wants them to be her, but they don’t understand that he wants them to be her. Not a pretend version of her. They could never be her. God knows he thinks about it. Of course, he does, but if she ever found out he had actual Substitutes stashed away, she would stake him. Then she would find a way to bring him back to life just so she could stake him again. It’s a sore subject for her after what her sire did, and Devon knows she had issues with Jess looking like her. He thinks she has mostly gotten over that now as she knows he doesn’t want her to be Elizabeth.
“Have a bit of dignity,” he says to her quietly. “You are better than that.” She drops her hand from the door then and lets him go.
He leaves without looking back and the tension leaves him as he opens the car. He swiped the McLaren this morning. It’s no Veyron, but it’s the next best thing. Cole has driven it recently. He can smell his scent, along with something or someone else. It makes him wonder who, when, and to where he drove? That feeling he has been pushing away recently flares up but gets replaced as he suddenly jumps a mile.
“Hey, baby,” Liv says from the seat next to him.
“Fuck sakes,” he says and casts his gaze over her. “What are you doing here?” he sneers at her. It’s not Liv, it’s Other Liv.
“I came to play. I did not expect you here though.” She waves her hand around the car.
“How did you even find me?”
“Works the same as Astralling, in a way. I think ‘you’ and here I am,” she explains.
“Well, fuck off. Go back to your own me,” Devon says.
“Ooo, such nasty words,” she drawls at him. “He’s no fun. I want to take you for a test drive.” She smirks at him as she draws her hand up his thigh. Despite how much he despises this woman, he feels himself go hard. “Get your hands off me.”
“No can do. I know you can feel the bond we have,” she says shrewdly.
He can. It’s slight, nowhere near the intense love and passion that he has with his real sire, but it’s there, nonetheless. That’s disconcerting.
“I wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole, now get your hands off me,” he snarls at her, as he roars the engine to life.
She touches his cheek and he flinches. “How about now, my darling boy?” she purrs at him in Elizabeth’s accent, and as he looks at her as his true sire, he stalls the engine and they both rock forward. He grows harder as he sees her blue eyes full of mischief and so help him, he wants to take her right there. He can’t resist her. He can’t resist her when she looks like this. Even though his brain knows it isn’t her, his dick has other ideas.
“Change back before I get her sire here to kick your ass,” he says to her as he restarts the engine and pulls away.
“Mm, her sire is delicious,” she draws the word out as she licks her luscious lips. “If you can call him here, I wouldn’t object to a three-way.”
“He wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole either. Say what you like about the man, but he has high standards.”
“You still have some fire to you. My Devon lost his a long time ago.” She sighs.
“No doubt stamped out by you and your whoring ways.”
“Ouch,” she says with a sidelong glance. “Does she know you talk about her like that?”
Devon slams the brakes on suddenly and turns to her. “I am talking about you,” he hisses. “My sire is nothing like you.” He pulls away again, lucky to be on a quiet strip of road. Liv would kill him if he damaged her car.
“Isn’t she? Seems she is almost exactly like me,” she says, and he wants to throw her from the moving vehicle.
“Get out,” he says to her again.
“Not until I get what I came for,” she says as she slides her hand closer to his crotch. She leans closer to him and all he can see is Elizabeth. Encouraged when he doesn’t push her away, she unzips his pants and slides her hand inside, breathing in deeply as she strokes him. Fuck. If he could just pull over, close his eyes and let her get on with it, no one has to know. He could let her do everything she wants with him and no one would ever have to know. He twitches in her hand at that thought and she moans slightly before she pushes her tongue in his ear. He runs his hand through his hair in agitation. This woman is getting to him. He grips the steering wheel tighter and he almost loses it when she rubs her thumb over the tip of him and wipes the bead of moisture off and licks her fingers. The last time he got a hand job in a car, it was with Lizzie. His Lizzie. She leaned over and took him in her mouth and that thought alone gives him the strength to push her back. His dick cries out in frustration. That’s twice he has denied himself release in the last half an hour. He has no option but to take it out on Jess when he gets home as his sire isn’t here. He totally understands, in that moment, where Cole is coming from. Almost as if she knew he was thinking about her, his phone rings through the sound system.
“What?” he asks rudely, not really caring that much.
“Hey, are you coming home soon?” she asks hopefully, ignoring his tone. It bugs him. If he spoke to Lizzie like that, she would kick his ass. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he has no bond to Jess, but he does not see the appeal of this sire worship. He definitely prefers to be the one worshipping his own sire.
“Awhile yet. I have s
omething to do and the drive is long. Are you okay?” he asks now, only just remembering that he left her in a house full of ancient predators.
“Yeah, fine,” she says.
“Good,” he says.
“I love you,” she whispers.
He hangs up, annoyed.
Thank the gods Other Liv has Shifted back to her normal self and snarls at him, “And here I thought you were going to be fun. What’s with the girl anyway? You know in my world she is my sibling. She lives with our sire.”
“Not with you.” Devon struggles to do his pants back up with one hand. He knew Constantine was her sire, but he didn’t know that they lived together. She is too young, even for him. Constantine is such a pervert in every universe.
“Well, you can’t deny that you want me. I have seen the evidence. Think about all I can give you and when I come looking for you again, maybe you will think differently,” she says.
“Never,” he says unconvincingly. He sees the sign for Helsby and takes the exit. He hasn’t been back here since Elizabeth took him away. The memories are just too much. Finding her, being happy and human, making plans to be together in the Holy union, and then it was all shot to Hell when his own mother took it all away. Even after all this time, he has never forgiven her for taking that away from him. Nor himself for never following through with his plans to marry Lizzie. What a complete asshole.
“You’re going back?” she asks him. “My Devon hasn’t been back in five hundred and seven years.”
“Neither have I,” he says through gritted teeth. “Now get out. It’s something I have to do alone.”
“I get that,” she says softly, and he looks at her in surprise. “I have compassion, Devon. I’m not the monster you all seem to think I am.” And with that she leaves him alone and he sighs in relief. He knows this place is going to be nothing like he remembers it and he gets a pang of nerves as he drives down the main road. Just a regular English country village. No big deal.
He attracts stares with the car as he inches it slowly down the road looking for a parking space. Never short of admirers, usually he welcomes it, but today he just wants to be left alone. He parks up and gets out, locking the car, and slowly turning around in a circle. He sees in his mind's eye exactly how it used to be. He can see himself and Elizabeth walking down the street, so much in love. His heart clenches and he needs a drink. He finds the nearest dark watering hole and slips inside. It’s a nice, typical English pub, quiet and dark. Perfect. He orders a pint of Guinness with a Scotch chaser and takes it to the empty table in the corner. He has a lot of thinking to do and now is as good a time as any. He knows he threw Cole completely off guard this morning in his haste to spill the beans. He should have waited. But he was surprised his sibling took it so well. He had half-expected a punch up over it, knowing how Cole feels about Constantine’s engagement to his wife. How he has managed to deal with it all on his own is a fucking mystery. He knows that there is no way that Cole can confront Constantine about it. It would be a suicide mission. Christ knows, it would be for him as well, but he would do it anyway because that man pisses him off like no other man has before, or since, Devon met him.
He thinks to his feelings for Cole. He feels a lot for the man. It’s weird. It hurts him to know that Cole hurts. He has never worried about anyone else’s feelings before except his own, and he had so much resentment for Cole when he first came into the picture. He knew Liz was going to sire him long before she did. He had been expecting it for centuries but was lucky enough that she didn’t want anyone that way. Except Fraser and he turned her down. To this day, he is thankful even though it ended up causing her so much pain. And, of course there was Pierre. He still hates himself for hurting her in the way he did by going behind her back to his grandfather to tell him what she was. Devon knew his son and daughter-in-law had been killed by a Vampire, seeing as the Vampire in question had been him, and Devon also knew the grandfather would do everything in his power to keep Pierre away from her. It hurt her, but she got over it.
He wasn’t ready to let her go, so he did what he had to. He thought about it, briefly, with Cole. It was why Devon told her sire about him. A man so jealous, he never expected Cole to live to see the sun rise. But he did, and so he had to listen to them fucking, wanting to rip his throat out, but he had never seen her so much in love before, except with him. He just couldn’t do that to her again.
So, Cole lived, and she turned him. He had no idea what to expect. He had never had siblings before; he had never wanted any. He did not expect to feel anything quite like he does. Gregor said in the beginning that siblings rarely bond, but they were drawn together by the Power of One magick in their sire. He grew to like him, and they got on once they got past the petty jealousy stage. When Lizzie asked him into their bed to share her, he had never experienced anything like it. He lives now for those moments that they both take her, when his hands are on her as she rides Cole and vice versa. It is a huge part of why he has decided to take this monumental step.
Oh, gods, he’s getting hard again just thinking about it. He wants it to be the way that it used to be. He knows he can convince her, especially as he will have Cole’s support. The last time he and Liz shared a feed and drained her seems like eons ago. He wishes that she was as she used to be. But that one day, that one stupid day that she came across a human who looked like Lance and she lost control and killed him. And never again. She turned it off. Completely. And that day, he lost a part of her that never came back. He had been ecstatic that he had finally got her to focus on him again, but after the switch, when he had taken her so desperately that he didn’t even know it wasn’t her, that was like a ton of bricks had hit him. He knew then that he had to go all in, or all out. And all out is just something that he cannot bear.
He takes out the ring that he has been carrying around with him for days now and taps the box on the table. He opens it and stares into it at the huge diamond. It is nothing compared to that fucking blue diamond she wears on her right hand. One that he hopes she will take off eventually. But he knows that the size, the price, doesn’t matter to her. If it is from the heart, then she will love it. All he has to do is get up the balls to ask her when the moment is right. And that is half the problem. There is always something cropping up to blow everything to Hell and back. Take now, for instance. She is locked away in the fucking Fae Kingdoms, a place he has only ever heard of in passing, to swear allegiance to her father, the Dark Fae King, for fuck’s sake. And he had to find out about it from Constantine. That is the part that stings the most about all of this. She didn’t even tell him. He used to be the one that knew everything firsthand. Sometimes even before she knew it herself. And now he is resorted to third place. It makes him despise that bastard even more.
Sure, they smile at each other and pretend they are getting along like one big, happy family when Liz is there, but underneath there is a searing hatred that has only grown more intense since that first time he saw Constantine with his hands on her at Versailles. Devon knows Constantine feels the same way, that he wishes he didn’t exist. He said it in Sibiu and even though he backtracked when Liz threw a shitfit at him, he meant every word. It disgusts him that her sire made her exactly to his liking. That every little sexual act she performs, he taught her to use on him. Devon doesn’t know if Cole has figured this out yet. Probably not and he won’t hear it from him. It will destroy him to know that, that little clenching thing she does that makes you just explode inside her whether you are ready to or not, Constantine taught her to do that.
Devon likes his women pliable and to do certain things, but to take an innocent girl who knows no different and mold her as your own little sex toy is despicable.
“The way you are staring at that thing, you either have cold feet or you think she is going to say no,” a voice says from across the table. He hadn’t even noticed that someone had sat down. She peers over the top of the lid and whistles, “I’m guessing cold feet because only a fool woul
d say ‘no’ to a rock like that and your pretty blue eyes.”
Devon glares at her, not in the mood for flirting, or talking, for that matter. She smiles back at him and he studies her closer. Black hair, brown eyes. Pretty enough, small rack, but it suits her. It’s the woman who served him at the bar.
“Neither,” he says. “I’m asking her, and she won’t say no.” Or at least he hopes she won’t say no. As much as he can usually predict her behavior with pinpoint accuracy, lately she has been pretty volatile, and very secretive. Fae King father, notwithstanding.
“Mm, confidence. I like it,” she says. “So why the angry face? Did the diamond do something to piss you off?”