He woke again for a moment hours later, this time in bed but still in the sweater, with Nico warm against his back, the fire burning low, and the afternoon rising outside. He sighed, contented, and wriggled one hand out of a sleeve to fold his fingers around the sleeping Elf’s wrist and seek out his pulse, then drifted back off into sleep, smiling.
Chapter Seven
“Okay…now.”
Miranda stepped back into the camera’s frame, and watched as her own image began to form on the laptop screen. As many advances as David had made with the tech there was still an odd delay of three or four seconds before whatever the camera recorded was translated into something that made sense.
It really hadn’t been that long since she’d seen herself—there had been the video posts on her website, and a series of increasingly clear but still slightly pixelated shots of her in magazines courtesy of the “paparazzi” also known as her husband—but it still threw her for a loop every time she looked into a screen and saw her own face.
Deven watched from his position cross-legged on the bed. She noticed he was looking particularly attractive tonight, in a sleeveless shirt and slightly ratty jeans, barefoot. There was just something about a barefoot guy in jeans. “Not bad.”
She held her arms out to her sides. “What about the shirt? I know it’s a little more conservative than I usually do on stage.”
A wry smile. “Just because nobody can see your cleavage doesn’t mean we don’t know it’s there…and as far as I know velvet can’t stop a bullet.”
Ah. Of course he saw through her anxiety. “I suppose not. Plus it’s itchy.”
“You could always cancel,” he remarked as if he felt obligated.
“No, I can’t. They’ve been planning this benefit for a year—it’s my Foundation, after all.” She looked herself over again, adjusting the shirt, knowing it was futile—if she wore this one she might feel less exposed but she’d also be uncomfortable. She’d have to change.
“I think I have something that might help,” Deven said. “Wait here.”
She started to ask where else she’d go, but he vanished; a moment later he reappeared holding a dark green garment box.
“Merry Early Christmas?” he asked with a shrug. “Or Happy Solstice in Five Days, or something.”
“I thought we weren’t all doing gifts,” she said, frowning. “I didn’t shop!”
Another shrug. “Then Happy No Reason. Or Many Glad Returns of Thursday and Thanks for all the Orgasms. Whatever. Just open it.”
Miranda giggled and took the box, flopping down on the bed. She slit the tape holding it shut with her thumbnail and lifted off the lid.
“A corset?”
“More or less. Here, let me show you. Stand up and take your shirt and bra off.”
Miranda wasn’t sure if she should feel awkward or not—he’d certainly seen her breasts by now, but there was something different about a more utilitarian view. Rolling her eyes at herself, she shucked the itchy shirt, then unhooked her bra and dropped both on the floor. Meanwhile Dev took her gift out of the box and held it up.
It was, as it seemed, a corset, but of a slightly shiny, ribbed material that looked incredibly stiff. She gave Deven a dubious eyebrow, but he only smiled and directed her to hold her arms out to her sides.
He reached around to her back, wrapping her in the odd garment, and she realized that the laces were actually ornamental; she would never have guessed they weren’t what Faith had always referred to as “girly scaffolding.” Instead the sides came together in back in two layers: first, a row of hooks like in a bra; then, a flap over that to conceal them. She couldn’t see how it fastened—he was going to have to take it off of her when the time came.
She expected it to be way too tight, but though the fabric held her in—and up—the way she’d anticipate a corset might, she could still breathe quite easily. Still, moving in it took a minute to get used to. It held her posture up straighter than normal.
“What is this made of?” she asked, turning around and running her hands over it. The decorative stitching and lacing was gorgeous, and it had black lace along the bottom edge to make it just a shade fancier without getting in the way.
“Something new I came across,” was the reply as he watched her move around in it. “It’s a material Army Special Forces is using—they call it Trelvex. Fireproof, knife proof, bulletproof.”
She looked at him. “Bulletproof? Seriously?”
A nod. “It won’t do much if someone shoots you in the head, but your midsection and sternum are protected—except obviously from a high overhead angle.”
She patted the laces with wondering hands. It certainly did feel sturdy. “A tactical corset,” she said.
He moved closer again and took her hand, guiding her to a tiny slit in the side where she felt the end of something metal. She got hold of it easily and pulled it out, revealing a curved, hilt-less blade with a loop on the end.
She nodded. “One of your up-close-and-personal blades of last resort.”
“Since we’re dealing with humans these days being able to slash a throat seems all the more useful.”
She replaced the blade. Then something caught her peripheral vision, and she looked over at the monitor again. “Whoa.”
Dev followed her gaze. “Oh, that. Now you know why I don’t like the whole camera thing.”
She could still see herself, but where he was standing between her and the camera, her form was blurry. Instead of Deven’s actual shape there was a watery kind of not-light, like a mirage, something similar to the portals Nico built from the Web.
David didn’t show up properly on camera either, but he’d improved the tech enough that he at least had a human shape and was almost recognizable as himself. Deven was twice his age, though, and suddenly she remembered all the times she’d looked at him and seen something otherworldly, something rarer even than the inherent strangeness of a vampire.
When she returned her gaze to the actual person in front of her, fighting off a ripple of uneasiness at the way he just…didn’t seem to exist, entirely, the way she did…for a second that otherworldliness was intensified, and she thought of what the Priestesses of Elysium had called him, what he’d named his sword, and how none of them believed in coincidence anymore.
“Are you the oldest vampire left alive?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Among the Signets, certainly. Even Dzhamgerchinov is younger than I am, though he likes people to believe otherwise. But the bare truth is, even by vampire standards, I should have been dead a long time ago. Don’t forget the only reason I’m still here is Elven magic and, well, you.”
“How…” She didn’t know what she was trying to ask, or if she really wanted to know the answer. Instead she shook off the feeling, the thoughts, and all of it, and brought her attention back to the here and now, for both their sakes. She switched off the monitor and asked, “How do I look?”
Deven smiled, letting his hands rest on her sides. “You just need blood trailing down your neck from a puncture wound and you’ll look like the perfect vampire novel heroine.”
Miranda laughed. “I’m probably less angular than most of them. Plus I’d hate to stain this contraption. Is it waterproof?”
He grinned just a little wickedly. “Let’s find out.”
Before she could react, he leaned in and bit her.
Pain—and something that was definitely not pain—arced through her body and landed pitilessly between her thighs. She moaned aloud, then blushed at the sound, and pressed against him as hard as she could.
A low chuckle at her ear, and his arms slid around her, one hand drifting down over her hip, the other around her waist. His tongue flicked against her bare skin, stopping the trickle of blood from quite reaching her cleavage, and her knees nearly gave out. Luckily there was no way he’d let her fall; she felt muscles shift and contract and hold her up, his casual strength always something o
f a surprise even after everything she’d seen…after all, one of the first times they’d met, he’d shielded her from a bomb and pushed a wall off of her.
Remembering that night, and the events leading up to it, she had to laugh a little.
“Ticklish?” he asked. “That’s new.”
“No…I was just thinking about how our relationship has…evolved…over the years. How much I hated you in the beginning…”
“I certainly did earn it.”
“…and now, well…”
“And now.” He nipped lightly at her earlobe, then left a meandering line of light yet somehow still scalding kisses along her neck, over her collarbone, and to the upmost edge of the corset.
“Breasts are such an odd thing,” he noted almost casually, in amongst kisses. “I’m never entirely sure what to do with them.”
Miranda let out a slightly ragged breath. “I think you do fine.”
“Of course, I’ve had some fairly fleshy men, so at least that part I’ve approximated. Others, not so much. You would think over the centuries I would have encountered a trans man or two, but if I did I was too high to remember.”
“Again…you do…just fine…” She let her head fall back, getting caught up in the softness of his lips, gaining just a tiny thrill from something she had tried not to admit, but couldn’t seem to help: “I kind of get off on knowing I’m the only woman you’ve ever touched like this.”
He chuckled again. “Do you, now.”
“I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. I mean, this part of you obviously does…” She took hold of his belt buckle and tugged on it lightly, which led to him sliding a knee between her legs. She locked on with her thighs partly to keep from toppling over. “But most guys could get hard brushing up against a tree.”
“Have you seen the redwoods? They’re pretty damn sexy.”
Miranda snorted, a decidedly un-sexy noise, but didn’t have much time to be embarrassed; Dev kissed her then, slowly, with the kind of care that reminded her of Nico, as if her mouth were some sort of forbidden fruit whose attending damnation he wanted to savor. She was caught between wanting to pin him to the bedpost and wanting to just stand here, winding around each other, unhurried.
“Do you think you’ll ever be interested in another?” she asked in his ear.
“Another woman?” A kiss, hands roving languidly down over her hips. “Never say never, I suppose, but I doubt it.”
“Not even to compare?”
“There is no comparing you,” Deven said, taking hold of her ass and lifting her up off the ground. Her legs wound around him automatically, and next thing she knew her back collided with the bedpost—he must’ve read her mind.
Neither bothered removing any clothes, only pulling aside and unzipping what was necessary. Miranda reached up over her head to grab hold of the post and use it as leverage, hissing as their bodies collided, that hiss turning into a strangled cry cut off by a mouth clamping on hers.
One of his hands covered hers on the post, the other held onto the small of her back. For a moment the only sounds were harsh breaths and the creak of leather.
Finally, though, he said to her breathlessly, “You, my dear, are a singular event in the world. Persephone Herself couldn’t be a more rare and lovely creature.”
She groaned. “Say more things like that.”
Then she heard, at a distance, the door opening, and grinned up at the ceiling when she recognized both the presence and its wide-eyed reaction to the scene before him.
Miranda generally had bad luck with intimate moments turning into hilarious ones, and true to form, she managed to push sideways gradually until at the height of one undulation of her hips, her back slid off the bedpost and they both toppled over.
Vampire physics being what it was, David was there before she hit the mattress, catching them and steering them onto the bed.
Miranda laughed breathlessly, seized Dev’s shoulders and pulled him against her again without missing a beat.
“You two, I swear to God,” David murmured, voice touched with something like awe. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Shut up and help me get this off!” Miranda commanded, gesturing without any real coordination at the corset.
If he had questions about the garment or where it had come from, he tabled them for later discussion, and instead lifted her torso up off the bed to lean on his shoulder while he felt around for the hooks. Meanwhile, Miranda busied herself dragging Deven’s shirt off over his head, and for a minute or so there was a good deal of frantic unbuttoning and shoving.
Unfortunately all the supernatural coordination in the world didn’t help when, in the process of getting her rather snug pants off, Miranda’s hand slipped off the waistband and her knee jerked forward.
Fortunately what she lacked in physical grace she apparently made up for in fortune’s favor, as her knee hit him in the stomach, not lower. Still, it earned a loud grunt, and Deven rolled face-first into the pillows, doubled up for a second.
“Are you okay?” she asked, fighting a case of the giggles and losing. When he answered with his middle finger, she inquired politely, “Don’t you want to keep going?”
Now they were both laughing, and so was David.
“Sorry love,” Deven said breathlessly, uncoiling. “That’s a bit of a showstopper.”
“She’s soft in a lot of delightful places, but her knees aren’t one of them,” David commented. “Her elbows are even worse. Trust me.”
“We were really having fun, too. Sorry, Dev.” He rolled his eyes, and Miranda sighed dramatically. “If only there were someone who isn’t temporarily incapacitated and could—”
She was on her back before she finished the sentence, giggling over her Prime’s shoulder.
*****
The Porphyria Foundation benefit wasn’t exactly the kind of crowd Miranda was used to. There were about five hundred people, but instead of t-shirts and jeans these fans were in ball gowns and tuxes. They were some of the richest people in Texas and a few surrounding states, and had shelled out a pretty penny for dinner and a concert.
Many had brought teenage daughters or other young people that fit more in Miranda’s usual demographic, but there were plenty who were excited on their own behalf.
The first part of the evening there were speeches and a presentation from one of the primary researchers with the Foundation, as well as another from Dr. Novotny of Hunter Development. Their team was about to enter the second phase of human trials on a topical treatment to help porphyria patients lead more normal lives, and Miranda’s fund-raising and her matched donations had pushed the science forward by leaps and bounds.
It was the least she could do given there were actual people suffering from the condition she used as a smokescreen. Porphyria wasn’t exactly an epidemic, but like many niche conditions it suffered from lack of attention.
She listened to the presentation from the green room, nervous, but a bit more confident now that she was in the closest thing to a suit of armor she had: Deven’s corset, black leather thigh-high boots over skin-tight black pants, and her leather trench coat that let her conceal Shadowflame.
Not to mention the place was crawling with Elite, APD, and of course her favorite personal bodyguard, David Solomon.
He, too, was decked out in vampire badass chic. In the last few weeks he’d left the house a lot less, and when he did he was always fully armed. She knew he worried about their security, given how many Signets had fallen even when surrounded by their best warriors. Now that there were four in their bond it made all of them both exponentially stronger yet perilously vulnerable; if any one of them was killed, that was it, and not just for the Tetrad. There was too much on the line now for any of them to take safety for granted.
Just now he was staring at a wall, or rather through it—she could feel him searching the building with his senses, looking for any sign of danger. All the sensor networks an
d swords in the world couldn’t outreach a combination of empathy, telepathy, precognition, and Sight, boosted by the strength of the four most powerful vampires on Earth.
He sighed. “I don’t feel anything particular amiss,” he said. “I still need to work on refining the empathic reception—it’s hard for me to differentiate among your emotions, mine, the boys’, and the crowd’s, and then to refine it further still and tell what’s just a random bad mood and what’s truly a threat. The more I can sense the less I really know, half the time.”
She did as he had, and swept the building, just with her empathy; she was used to it, and was able to work a lot faster without involving the other gifts. Having half a dozen extra abilities wasn’t as all-powerful-making as it seemed. Most of the time using all of them together brought on debilitating overwhelm. For the most part they tried to work with one or two at a time, maybe three if they were feeling frisky.
“I’m not really getting anything either,” she said. “Everyone out in the ballroom is pretty relaxed—there are some seriously unhappy people out there, but it’s mostly marital problems, personal stuff…oh, and that closeted gay Senator we keep running into at these things. He’s still shagging the gardener, and his wife still knows, but they still won’t talk about it.”
David shook his head. “Poor bastard. And poor wife.”
Miranda shrugged. “She’s fucking the pool boy. But regardless neither of them are likely to cause a problem tonight. There are disgruntled employees on the wait staff, nothing extreme. I’m familiar with all of our people and nothing’s out of place. Just the usual surface emotions, angst, fun vampire stuff.”
She had finally stopped feeling guilty for reading the hearts of her employees after David had the idea to put a clause in their contracts stating they and their quarters were subject to physical search at any time and psychic monitoring and evaluation every moment while on duty. There was a strict confidentiality agreement on both sides—their bosses agreed not to use anything they discovered against them unless it was related to the security of the Shadow World or might contribute to a hostile work environment. But everyone working at the Haven knew Miranda was watching them.
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