by Amie Gibbons
My stomach heated as I met his eyes.
He stared into me as hard as Carvi could.
The air rushed outta my lungs as heat spread through my groin and down to my toes, something better than oxygen bubbling through my system as it went back up.
The world drifted into darkness and red tinted it.
Clouds made their way through my brain and the heat traveled up.
Searchin’.
I jerked my eyes away and Grant looked down.
I shook and Pyro looked between us before wrapping around my shoulders like a cape.
Coolness like a stream rushed through me, cleaning out the steam.
“That,” Grant said, voice so clipped and careful it was like he was relearning how to speak after a stroke. “I. Did not. Mean to do.”
“You usually run cold,” I said, tapping my head. “Your magic feels like ice. That wasn’t it.”
“Magic!” Carvi practically yelled, making me jump. “I was wondering why I was getting so testy with you. Someone has put a spell over this place.”
“To do what?”
“Heat the blood, make passions rise, make tempers flare.”
“What could do that?”
He shrugged. “Anything with the power to pull it off and knowledge of the spell. Except Fae. The hotel is shielded against those bastards. After the party, we can hit the library. Grant, would you mind starting there now?”
“Show me where,” Grant said.
No fight? Wow.
Grant was more freaked than he was lettin’ on too.
Good.
Wait, why did I just think good?
Did I not trust Grant as much as I thought? Did him being confused make me think maybe he wasn’t lying to me?
Not that I was one to talk.
I didn’t tell anyone about Pyro because I was afraid his old owner would find him. But then years passed and Quil met him and it was fine.
Why didn’t I tell Grant then?
Why didn’t I tell him two weeks ago when Pyro flew me to the park to grab Grant’s daughter?
Maybe for the same reason he wasn’t telling me about his powers now.
Chapter four
We left the hall and went back towards the party. Carvi said the blood would be explained by our tryst.
Any dirt too probably.
Especially since I’d been kneeling on the floor.
“Won’t they be able to smell we weren’t together?” I asked.
“Good point,” Carvi said, grabbing my arms and pullin’ me in close. “You need my scent on you.”
He tapped me against the wall next to the elevator and everything shot up about twenty degrees as he met my eyes.
“Um,” I said, knees shaking. “What… what are you…?”
“I think a few minutes in the elevator will make it enough for us to be believable, lea. And after that scene in the kitchen, I could use a little pick me up.”
He kept his eyes on mine as he reached behind me.
The elevator dinged open and it took me a second to realize he must’ve pushed the button.
He walked me backwards into it, eyes locked on mine.
Oh crap!
He wasn’t serious!
He grinned as butterflies erupted in my stomach and I licked my lips. He pulled the emergency stop button after the doors closed.
“Carvi,” I said, shaking my head. “We can’t.”
He grabbed my chin and slid his other arm around my back, pullin’ me into him and kissing me too fast for me to pull away.
He kissed like he stared, powerful, intense, all consuming.
I moaned, kissing him back.
What about Quil? popped into my head like a gnat and I broke the kiss.
“Carvi, I’m taken,” I said.
“So?”
“I love him.”
“I told him what this weekend would entail, lea. He was not happy, but did say if you consented, he would not blame you.”
“But… but wouldn’t he be hurt? Betrayed? Break up with me?” I asked.
“Possibly. But he made it sound as though he would not challenge me as long as you were willing, and he would not ask.”
“That’s not permission to cheat, Carvi,” I said. “I want you. I want Grant. Hell, sometimes I want the guy that delivers from my favorite pizza place. I think that’s why it’s my favorite pizza place probably. But I can’t just do whoever I want and expect the person I promised I’d be loyal to to be waitin’ for me. If we weren’t going steady, I would. I would cave and I would have sex with you, and I’d enjoy it. But we are, so I can’t.”
“That’s a lot of words to say no, lea.”
“Hey, you’re not one to talk. I mean, cuz you never stop talkin’ either. You take-”
He pinched my lips shut.
“I’m going to take a taste,” he said, leaning in. “That was part of our deal. I get to feed on you.”
I grabbed his arms.
To support myself or to push him away, I’m not sure, but I held on as he eased his body against mine, moving slow, careful, probably not wanting to scare me.
“Carvi, what’s Grant?”
“I’ll tell you when I find out,” he said into my neck.
His phone rang and I jumped, knocking his chin with my shoulder.
“Sorry!” I said.
Carvi growled and pulled out his phone. “This better be the most important fucking phone call of your unlife.”
The guy on the other side said something and Carvi hung up with harsh words in some other language.
“What?” I asked.
“Those,” foreign words I couldn’t follow spilled out and he finished with, “got into a fucking bar brawl. We need to go.”
###
We burst into the ballroom, Carvi in full swagger, me trailing behind like a damsel after her man.
The room was in chaos.
Shouting and movement seemed to coalesce around one side, but I couldn’t see what they were actually doing.
I climbed up on a chair next to the door, looking over the crowd.
“Fight in the middle of the group,” I yelled to Carvi to be heard over the din. “Looks like two groups of guys beating the crap outta each other.”
One of the brawlers grabbed one of the fancy expensive chairs and slammed it down on the back of another one, sending him crashing to the ground in a hail of splinters.
“They just broke one of your chairs!” I yelped.
Carvi shrugged off his jacket. “That’s not all that’s going to be broken.”
“Carvi?”
He looked up at me, fangs out, obviously hard even through his pants.
“Lea, I’m going to smash some heads, get out some aggression. Don’t fret. Back soon. And then, I’m taking you.”
“Taking?” I asked.
He was already shoving through the crowd.
The ones on the edges soon realized he was amongst them and scrambled outta his way.
As he hit the inner circle of watchers egging the fighters on, he really did grab a few by the heads and slam them together before tossing them on the ground behind him.
He entered the ring like a prize fighter going up against the new little guy everyone said was scrappy but knew would lose.
And he let loose.
He ripped through the fighters, punching and tossing them like they were stuffed animals. He got to the two in the middle, probably the two who started it and grabbed one, shaking him and asking him something.
Probably what was going on, with a few more profanities tossed in.
Carvi apparently didn’t like the man’s answer cuz he let him go and backhanded him, sending him flying into the crowd.
I knew Carvi had more mental powers from his age. Was he stronger than normal vamps too?
He grabbed the other fighter left and the man looked away, turning his face in my direction.
His mouth worked and I wasn’t quite close enough to tell, but I swear
he looked terrified.
Carvi patted his shoulder and nodded, looking over at me and gesturing for me to come over.
I hopped off the chair and the crowd parted for me.
Some of them bowed.
What the quack?
Why were they bowing to me?
I reached the middle just as the man Carvi had thrown got back up. He stayed far back but the hatred came off him in waves.
“Um, yeah?” I asked.
“I’d like you to come with us,” Carvi said. “We have something to discuss with these gentlemen.”
“Okay?”
Carvi jerked his chin at the first one and he scowled but followed as Carvi swooped towards the back, arm still around the second guy.
Gee, he wasn’t takin’ sides. No, not at all.
We went out a back door into a hall and Carvi let the second guy go.
“Well?” he asked.
“I… saw red, your majesty,” the second one said.
He was cute in a floppy puppy way, probably younger than me when he was turned, with wavy auburn hair, big brown eyes and a wide mouth that would’ve looked more natural smilin’ at the prom queen than pinched up with confusion here.
“I have no explanation,” the first one said.
He was big, buff, dark and dangerous. On the older side for a human to be turned, around forty, I’d say. And he oozed unpleasantness like a sewer.
“We were talking and this anger came over me, this desire to destroy. I punched him because he was the closest.”
“Magic,” Carvi said. “The spellcaster must be close.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because that kind of magic takes exponentially more power the farther away from the target you are.”
I shrugged. Made about as much sense as anything. “What did you need me for?”
He nodded to the first one. “Read him.”
I met his eyes. “Do they know?”
“They do now. I don’t like it, but they’re my people, and I need to see what happened.”
“You see?”
“Yes, I’ll go in with you. I can’t… get visions on my own, but I can piggyback.”
“Okay.”
I walked up to the guy. “Do I do anything different?”
“No, just touch him, focusing on the party.”
“Whenever I touch someone for the first time, I get the First Impression. That’ll come up before I get anything else.”
Carvi sighed. “Fine. Do that, then focus on the party.”
“Sorry about the intrusion,” I said.
“Not the first time a psychic has read me,” he said. “I’m just sorry about what you’ll see.”
I paused with my hand halfway to him. “Why?”
“I’m black and I was born in the eighteen forties. You do the math.”
“You were a slave?”
“Oh look, little white bitch gets it in one.”
Carvi moved so fast I could barely track it and smacked him across the mouth. Not as hard as he tossed him earlier, just enough to move his head, but the hatred in the man’s eyes was clear when he looked up.
“I see why the spell affected you first,” Carvi said. “Don’t talk to my guest that way. Don’t look at me that way. You are not the only person who was a slave as a child. Get over it.”
“Never.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So the answer to how long does it take to knock a chip off a shoulder is longer than a hundred and fifty years.”
He growled at me and Carvi smacked him again.
“Fall in line, or I will kill you,” Carvi said.
“You don’t know the anger. Little trumped up white cu-”
Carvi punched through his chest, just right to his heart and the man cut off, coughing up blood.
“I can feel the magic in your blood, like a poison,” Carvi said. “She’s a little Southern white girl, yes, but this isn’t the eighteen hundreds, and she’s not the one being rude. You are. The magic is making you angry. Rise above it. You are a vampire. You’re above human pettiness like this. She is not the representation of what happened all those years ago. She is mine. And you will treat her with respect.”
The irony of him sayin’ it wasn’t the olden days and thus there were no slaves in the same sentence as claiming me as his was probably lost on him.
He pulled his hand out and met the man’s eyes as he held up his fist and licked it.
“I understand,” the man said. If he was in pain, he wasn’t showing it.
Now that I could respect.
I’m kinda a wuss when it comes to pain.
“The anger is still here,” he said to me. “I think it is affecting me still. I’m normally not like this.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said, grinning so wide and hard I thought it’d split my face. “I’m still holdin’ a grudge against my sister because she was awful to me when I was fifteen.”
He actually managed a small smile.
“I’m Ariana,” I said, holdin’ out my hand.
“Claude.”
He grabbed my hand.
Flash.
The world swam in front of me, solidifying with strokes like it was being painted onto my third eye.
Claude ran through the dark woods, ropes still around his wrists, like he hadn’t bothered to shake them off after getting them undone from each other so his arms could move.
Whoever had tied him up hadn’t been too bright obviously cuz they didn’t bother tying his feet.
He ran and the vision jumped forward like a movie and it was day.
He hit the road and stared at a sign.
The marking point for the start of Ohio.
He was free.
I pulled out of the vision and dropped his hand.
“You think psychics see bad stuff when they touch you?” I asked.
“I know they do,” he said.
“Maybe after the first time, but your most significant moment, well, it was more like experience cuz it jumped, it wasn’t bad. It was you runnin’ in the woods, then crossing into Ohio. You stood there and stared and you realized you got it, you made it. You were free.”
I shrugged. “Your most significant moment wasn’t despair, it was joy at that first taste of freedom.”
He smiled, covering his face for a moment.
“You’re the first one to tell me that, little girl,” he said.
“Maybe they don’t get the significant moments like I do, or maybe looking back, you changed your opinion about what was most important in your life.”
“Lea,” Carvi said, “this is touching and all, but we need something off of him before he calms down. He’s our strongest tie to this spell right now.”
Oh, right.
I shook out my hands. “Okay, can you drive? I don’t know how to do this.”
“I can.”
Carvi took my hand and reached it out to Claude.
“Both of you, focus on the moment when the anger took you, imagine it washing through you. Feel your blood boil that moment right before you punched Patrick.”
That must’ve been the second guy.
I closed my eyes and let Carvi put my hand against Claude’s arm.
Flash.
The ballroom blinked on and the people swirled around us like jewels.
Took me a moment to realize I was actually standing in the ballroom, looking at everyone around me like I had been a few minutes ago, only the party was in full swing and everyone was having fun, chilling, talking and dancing.
“What the?” I asked, my voice actually coming out so I could hear it with my ears.
This wasn’t a vision. Or at least not any vision I’d ever had.
“We’re walking through it,” Carvi said.
“Ah!” I jumped higher than a startled cat and Carvi grinned at me.
“You… this…”
“We did this before, lea.”
“But not like this. We were still floating above everything and wa
tching it. That’s how it always is, or at least listening if I can’t see. I’ve had a few where I was the person I was touching, but nothin’ like this.”
I looked down. I was wearing my gold dress and it was me, right down to the smears still on the front from the freezer.
“Carvi, what is this?” I asked.
“We’re vision walking, lea. Just like last time. I’ve done this a thousand times with other psychics. Calm down. I need to follow Claude’s emotions, not yours.”
I took a deep breath. The air smelled like a mix of perfumes from the people around us with a hint of alcohol. I turned and smelled Carvi.
The spicy cologne mixed with an undertone of animal that was all Carvi was there, just like he smelled in real life.
Carvi threw his head back laughing.
“It’s not real,” he said, “but we are in a built memory. You remember me and my smell, your dress, your shoes, everything like that, so it’s here, but I swear it’s not real.”
I pinched myself, feeling my skin just like I would in real life, but the pain wasn’t as sharp as it should’ve been, enough to feel it, but just an echo.
“Not real, right. Okay, you’re driving.”
Carvi looked over the crowd. “They were over there.”
He walked through the people like they weren’t there and I followed, passing through them like they were ghosts.
Or like I was.
Carvi paused. “Here!”
Claude was dancing with a pretty vamp that had to be from the New York branch based on her showing up in an itty bitty black dress that showed off, as Mama would say, parts only God and husband should see.
Claude spun her around, making her hair fly around her and she laughed.
The other guy, Patrick, bumped into her, making her stumble on her heels. He apologized and she waved it off, sayin’ something I couldn’t hear.
“Why can’t I hear them?” I asked.
“The music was probably too loud for them to hear,” Carvi said. “It’s not coming through the vision because I’m filtering it so it doesn’t interrupt us, but also means we can’t try to hear them.”
“You can filter! Like a spreadsheet?”
He smiled. “I’m a man of many talents.”
Something flashed in the corner of my eye and I whirled, catching a glimpse of a black dress on the floor before it disappeared.
What the?
I turned back just as Claude got up in Patrick’s face, mouth movin’ and body language aggressive.