Rushing to my bedside made me think he was serious when he made his promises to me. Refusing to kiss me in more than a platonic way made me think he had changed his mind. Though I had just suffered an injury to my jaw, which made getting hot and heavy difficult—and painful. But that still didn’t excuse the lack of communication since that night at the Lyceum. I didn’t need a phone call a day, but maybe once a week. Or a text? An emoji? Something. Goddess, I was giving myself a headache.
“Well, the boy’s got a reputation. I know you love him, that’s obvious, but do you love-love him?”
I mashed the button for the lobby hard enough my pointer smarted. “I haven’t figured out that part yet.”
“Fair enough. Do I get to know who his competition is?”
“Competition isn’t the right word.” The elevator stopped somewhere in the middle of the building, and a couple entered the booth, deep in conversation. A tingle swept down my spine, alerting me to the presence of vampires, and I tightened my grip on the phone. “I don’t have to choose.”
“No, you certainly don’t.”
“Goddess, Neely, that’s not what I meant.”
Busy choking on his coffee, he couldn’t answer.
“I meant I could stay single.”
The woman noticed me, and her stare intensified until I stopped counting down the floors. Murky green eyes swept over me, and a furrow gathered on her smooth brow. The coil of red hair crowning her head glistened under the soft lights and complemented her smart black pantsuit. Her bolero-style jacket, studded with silver, was the only flash in her ensemble, but the overall impression was stunning.
The man was her mirror image, red hair and all. Equally well turned out, he wore black slacks with a matching button-down shirt and boots. The silver flash in his outfit came from the studs adorning the wide leather belt slung low on his hips.
The couple held still the way predators do while hunting, and the man flared his nostrils, drawing in my scent.
“Are you new to the building?” Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “I haven’t noticed you.”
Unsure if that was an insult, I kept my expression and tone neutral. “I’m visiting a friend.”
“Some friend if he lets you wander unescorted,” the man huffed. “The Faraday isn’t a playground.”
“I’m not a child.” A clipped note sharpened my voice. “And I never said my friend was male.”
“She does smell of female…and cat,” his companion agreed. “That means she’s to my tastes and not yours, brother.”
“A pity,” he allowed, smirking. “Although, I am quite persuasive.”
“You didn’t hear the last five things I said, did you?” Neely buzzed in my ear. “Should I call back later?”
“No,” I all but croaked. “Keep talking.”
Concern at my voice breaking overrode his annoyance. “Are you okay? I hear voices.”
“A couple of Linus’s neighbors are introducing themselves to me.” I bucked up to keep them from closing in. “That’s all.”
The siblings recoiled at his name, their backs hitting the sides of the elevator.
The woman blanched as white as a corpse. “You’re the potentate’s guest?”
Holding on to the fragile connection with Neely, I nodded.
“Forgive our impertinence.” Her brother slammed his gaze to the floor at his feet and kept it there. “We meant no offense.”
“None taken,” I assured them, though my palms still sweated. “It was nice meeting you.”
The doors opened, and they huddled in their corner, allowing me to exit first.
Hubert looked up from behind his desk, spotted me, and charged across the marble foyer. “Are the accommodations to your liking, Dame Woolworth?”
Yep. He had spoken to the Grande Dame.
“Woolworth,” the woman gasped as the elevator sealed the siblings away from me.
The numbers ticked up—not down. They had decided against joining me in the lobby or sinking lower, into the parking deck, assuming that’s what the P button meant on the panel. For whatever reason, the combination of Linus’s name and mine had spooked them back to their room.
“Dame Woolworth?”
Swinging my focus back to Hubert, I told the polite lie. “Linus has a lovely home.”
“Are you going out? Alone?” Frantic to please, he trotted after me. “Shall I call your driver? Or would you prefer to use our car service? Only the best for our residents, and their guests of course.”
“I have a driver, but I appreciate the offer.” I picked up my pace to escape the lobby. “Still there, Neely?”
“Maybe? What I’m hearing on your end doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“This is Linus’s world.” I shoved out into the fresh night air and sucked in lungfuls. “It makes no sense to me either.”
This whole trip was beginning to make me feel like a country mouse to his city mouse.
Savannah’s supernatural population averaged three necromancers to every vampire, which was to be expected in a city under necromantic control. But we didn’t get much variety outside that.
Mom and I had always played human, so I hadn’t come across more than the occasional necromancer or candidate for vampirism during our traveling years. We kept our heads down, settling in small towns and avoiding big cities. Even later, with Maud, we made social rounds together, and she kept to Society functions or human amusements like museums and libraries, things that fit the role she had carved out for me.
Linus was coaxing my eyes open to all the things Maud had hidden from me, starting with an education and ending with exposure to the world beyond the Lyceum and its rules. His break from Savannah ran deeper than I first realized. This wasn’t a rebellion against his mother, this was him thinning ties with her and the Society. He truly was living his own life here rather than coddled in a Society enclave like me.
“This is the real world,” Hood rumbled from his station near the door. “Your Society owns a chunk of it, but not all. Take a look around, Ms. Woolworth. What you see might surprise you.”
Startled he had spoken to me, I nodded my thanks for the advice. “I’m working on it.”
On my right, Cletus rippled into existence and evaluated Hood with a tilt of his head.
Hood’s answering chuckle allowed me to exhale with relief that I hadn’t inadvertently insulted him. “You do that.”
The doorman melted back into the shadows, and I started ambling with no destination in mind. Mostly I wanted to escape the Faraday and its menagerie of peculiar residents before having my reality stretched thinner. Cletus stuck to me, allowing me to walk off some of my jitters.
“I’m putting you on hold,” I warned Neely. “I have to call for a ride.”
“Don’t you dare.” He clicked his tongue. “I’m halfway to the car. I’ll pick you up.”
“Thanks,” I said thickly. “I could use a friendly face.”
I located a MARTA bus stop and collapsed on the slatted bench where my right leg started bouncing like it was pumping a bicycle tire.
Neely arrived fifteen minutes later, and I sprinted for the passenger seat of his car with all the grace of an antelope a hairsbreadth from being dinner for a lion. With the door shut behind me, I buckled up and exhaled like I’d run a marathon.
“I need to call Linus.” Severing the connection, even with Neely beside me, was hard. Vampires spooked me these days, a serious failing for a necromancer. “Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.”
“You’ll feel better after some retail therapy,” he assured me. “I always do.” He pressed a to-go cup into my hand. “Perk Up’s hot chocolate isn’t up to your Mallow standards, but it’ll do in a pinch.”
I drained half the cup before dialing Linus. “Hi.”
“You left without telling me.” A door slammed in the background, and a cat yowled with muffled rage. “What were you thinking? Did you listen to me at all?”
Never in all our time together
had he used this tone with me, and it felt like a slap in the face. Perhaps a deserved one, under the circumstances, but that didn’t lessen the sting.
“I heard your warnings.” I stared at the ceiling of the car, wondering if Neely was aware there was a soda-colored stain in the shape of a giraffe up there. “I brought my keycard with me.”
“Tell me exactly what happened from the moment you left my apartment.”
“Yes,” I feigned cheer. “I am with Neely, and we are going shopping.”
“I see.”
“You’re more than welcome to join us.”
“I planned on it,” he clipped out. “I was changing so I could go with you.”
Meiko was a dirty, rotten liar.
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“You mentioned a meeting. I assumed we were parting ways at the Faraday and would rendezvous at dawn.” The temptation to fling Meiko under the bus was strong, but I managed to suppress the urge. “I didn’t think you’d want to be stuck with us for hours and hours.”
Neely nodded support in my half of the conversation. “Guys hate that.”
“You’re a guy,” I pointed out. “Shopping is your number-one hobby. Probably two and three too.”
His harrumph killed all support on that front.
“I don’t want to trespass on your time with your friend,” Linus said at last, “but this isn’t Savannah.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” We zipped over asphalt marked with rubber skids and debris from accidents past, and I kept wishing for the bump-bump-bump of cobblestones. “How about we get started and you join us?”
“Let Cletus keep an eye on you.” His sigh blasted over the line. “I’ll be there shortly.”
Given the fact his wraith was on guard duty, he didn’t have to ask where we were going, not that I had a clue. Cletus would tell Linus, or show him. I wasn’t clear on how their bond worked, if they conversed or traded thoughts, sensations, and images between themselves the same as Woolly and me.
Buildings whooshed past in a brick and metal blur. “What about your meeting?”
“I can make time, Grier.”
Home for the first time in months, a meeting on the horizon, and he was prioritizing my vanity.
Being prioritized for a change felt…nice.
“Tell him to meet us at Haywood Square,” Neely prompted me. “They have the best selection.”
The mall was a Society holding, and it kept much later hours than the surrounding shopping centers. And Neely was right. Thanks to its investors, Haywood had the best of everything Atlanta had to offer in order to please its nocturnal clients.
“I heard,” Linus informed me. “I’ll see you soon.”
I sat there after I ended the call, staring at the phone, the blacked-out display and its reflection of me.
“Girls do call boys these days,” Neely suggested. “It’s modern, not desperate.”
I squinted at him. “What makes you think I’m waiting on a call?”
“Please,” he huffed. “I haven’t been off the market that long. I recognize that face. I used to see it in the mirror every time a cute boy forgot my number.”
“Boaz has been busy.” The defense sprang to my lips with ease. “He has a lot on his plate right now.”
“How long has he been busy?” Neely cut his eyes toward me. “You’ve been wearing that expression for weeks.”
“You’ve barely seen me,” I argued. “Maybe you just caught me in a weak moment.”
“You’re a lot of things, Grier, but weak is not one of them.”
Knowing he was thinking of Volkov, of the story I had spun about the vampire being a controlling boyfriend I had escaped with only a few bruises, made me think of him too.
He was out there, somewhere, locked in a cell I was certain lacked the amenities lavished on me. But bars or not, a cage was still a cage.
“Forget I said anything.” Neely made the peace offering, but his eyes remained troubled, and it didn’t escape my attention he hadn’t asked about Amelie. According to our cover story, she was here in the city working an internship. Yet he didn’t offer to include her in our outing. It made me wonder if he was avoiding the topic. Maybe he was hurt to have lost her too. “Tell me what we’re shopping for and how much money I get to spend.”
The budget was a good question. Too much would make him suspicious, but too little wouldn’t get me the polish required to pass among High Society. I might as well get more jeans and tees while I was at it. I could use some underwear with elastic too. All mine had been stretched and washed past the breaking point. One pair I tied on over my right hip with the lacy detail unraveling from the waist.
“This asshat won’t get off my bumper.”
I checked out the mirror and winced from the bright lights. “Maybe they’ll take the next exit.”
“Maybe.” Neely accelerated, nudging us a few miles over the posted speed limit as he took an overpass. “Let’s see how he likes that.” Flicking on his blinker, he changed lanes for good measure. “We’ve got two more exits until our next turn. We’ll just chill over here and— Grier.”
Metal screeched, and the car lurched sideways. I was falling, and then the seat belt yanked me back, its edge cutting into my throat. But we kept tumbling, over and over. Glass crunched and scattered, pelting my face and neck. An explosion whited out the corner of my eye—the airbag deploying—and Neely lost his grip as his head shot back.
Blood scented the air, almost indistinguishable from the hot metal smell permeating each breath.
Dipping my fingers in a gash across my cheek, I swiped a protection sigil on Neely’s arm and then mine.
What damage had already been done was beyond help, but it might save us from breaking our necks.
Impact, harder than all the rest, made the frame surrounding us groan, and the car rocked to a stop.
I must have been screaming. My throat hurt like it did when I woke from the dream. Silence descended, a cocoon that wrapped my senses, the utter quiet only punctuated by Neely’s too-sharp breaths. “Neely?”
A low moan was his only response.
With a grunt of effort, I reached out and mashed my thumb against his pulse. Quick but steady. That was all the energy I could scrounge together while my heart raced so fast my legs felt the burn.
Treading the familiar path to the door in my head, my consciousness locked me away from the pain.
“The Master will kill us for this,” a masculine voice hissed from the shadows.
“The Master wants her,” a woman answered. “Well, there she is.”
The crunch of approaching footsteps shocked me back to my senses, and I forced myself to assess the situation.
Neely and I hung upside down, suspended by our seat belts. The car had flipped so many times the doors were bowed out and the glass had shattered in all the windows. Neely was alive, but hurt. I was alive, but so weak I must be losing blood. Or I had a head injury making me sluggish. With the ringing in my ears, I conceded that maybe it was a little bit of both.
“A salt circle won’t keep out that wraith forever,” the man warned. “We need to leave.”
“We will,” the woman soothed, “as soon as we have our prize.”
The familiar tickle down my spine confirmed my worst fear. These were vampires, come to fetch me. Part of me had hoped I’d hallucinated the first part of their conversation, but there was no denying biology.
Fingers trembling from shock and fear, I wet my fingers against my cheek and started drawing.
Cletus might be out of action, but he was still broadcasting to Linus. Help was on the way if I could just hang on.
“Ah. You’re awake,” the woman crooned. “Fear not, mistress, we’ll have you back where you belong in no time at all.” Recognition kicked in a heartbeat later. The elevator. She was one of the siblings who’d panicked upon hearing my name. “The Master has been beside himself since you left. He forgives all your transgressions. He only wishes you to
return home where you will be kept safe and cherished.”
Returned to a gilded cage, that’s what she meant. I would rather die than hear a lock turn at my back.
“Fuck.” I dipped my fingertips in the blood running up my jaw and finished my sigil. “You.”
“That’s not very nice,” she gritted from between clenched teeth. “I am here to serve.”
“Linus is coming.” I spoke with absolute conviction. “Leave now or suffer the consequences.”
“We can’t be here when the potentate arrives,” her brother pleaded. “He’ll kill us.”
“We won’t be if you’d get over here and lend a hand,” she snarled. “Give me your knife.”
Metal glinted in her palm as she reached through the busted window, blade aimed at my throat and the seat belt cutting into my neck. Light exploded in a blinding flash from the frame as the wards ignited, and the vampire howled in agony then fell on her butt in the gravel.
I shouldn’t have laughed, goddess knows I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. I kept going until I hurt all over, but I couldn’t stop. The manic relief bubbling up my throat kept spilling over until both vampires took wary steps away from me.
“She’s unhinged,” the sister lamented. “Do you think she was like this before?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” the brother countered. “Come on, Ernestine.” Shuffling ensued, but all I could see were two pairs of black-clad legs tussling. “The wraith is like a beacon. The potentate will come for her.”
“We’ll never get another chance as good as this one,” she argued.
“You’ll never get another chance period,” a new voice, dripping with ice, assured them.
The night came alive around us, shadows roiling, darkness rippling. A bone-deep cold pervaded the car until my teeth chattered from the sudden temperature drop. The hem of a wraithlike cloak swept into view, black tendrils whipping out, striking at the fractured light from the streetlamps overhead.
“We meant no harm, Potentate.” The brother was quick to drop to his knees. “Have mercy.”
There was no hesitation, no deliberation. “No.”
Moonlight glinted off a wide blade as it completed its arc, and the man’s head rolled to a stop against the car door. His disintegration was a slow, pathetic thing. He was new. Still juicy. Only the cast-iron stomach that came standard on necromancers kept me from spewing my hot chocolate.
How to Break an Undead Heart Page 14