by Kat Cotton
“They aren’t human, and they’ll kill you if they get you first.”
“I can kill,” said Rose.
The way she said it made me wonder if she’d killed before.
I gave them a demonstration, slicing the mat with the knife before knocking it to the ground and staking it.
“Whoa, you’re scary,” said Francine.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I told her. “Your turn.”
By the time we’d finished, those mats looked a bit ratty. We’d have to keep using them, though, because it wasn’t like we had anything else to train with. Maybe we could get a few stray demons for practice.
“I feel better already,” Francine said. “I’m not sure if I could survive a serious attack, but if one of them comes at me alone, I reckon I could take him.”
“Good. You need to know how to protect yourself in this world. We should see about some protective charms and things, too.”
I showed them my rings. The wolf one with the eyes that flashed when I was in trouble. The other one for protection.
“Silver is always best. This wolf might look like it’s just a very cool ring, but if you get in a decent punch, that silver will sear the bastard’s flesh off. It won’t kill, but it might give you time to run. Crucifix necklace, also good.”
The silver orb I always wore stayed tucked into my top. I didn’t want to talk about that.
“I don’t have any silver,” Tabia said. “I have no jewelry at all.”
“You should tell Jeb to get something when he goes out.”
She’d smiled at that. I wasn’t sure of the situation between them, but she really did like him.
Even with training going well, I still had too much spare time. And this waiting was proving to be hell.
“Surely they’re finished already,” I said. “How long do you take to feed?”
“Not this long, usually, but it’s his first time. How would I look with a mustache? One of those twirly ones. They’re very popular nowadays.”
He put his fingers on his upper lip to demonstrate.
“Is this the right time to discuss your facial hair?”
“Well, we’re just sitting around, waiting. We’ve got time to kill. Seems appropriate to discuss it now.”
“You’d look shit.”
I took a photo of him with my phone and then put a mustache on it. I showed it to him.
“I think it suits me. It gives me an air of mystery.”
I showed it to Jeb. “She’s right. Shit.”
“If I start taking style advice from the two of you, just stake me now.”
I was about to agree to staking him, but I heard footsteps on the stairs. Kisho. He was done. He’d done it while we were arguing over the twirly mustache. I hadn’t noticed a thing, not even a burp in the universe. I’d really expected more. Some sign. After all, the Vampire King would know as soon as it happened, so surely, I would too.
Jeb jumped up. “Kisho, mate, welcome to adulthood.” He put his hand up to high-five Kisho.
Kisho walked past him, totally ignoring the hand. He sat down without looking at anyone. That didn’t bode well. Vampires post-feed didn’t normally look like that. Euphoria was more the after-dinner mood.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I need a cup of tea. Does anyone else want one?”
He got up and went to the kitchen.
I looked at Nic and nodded toward the kitchen. He should go talk to Kisho.
Nic shook his head.
“Wimp,” I mouthed to him.
He pointed to me and then to the kitchen.
I shook my head. I wanted to know what had happened, but I didn’t want to blatantly ask. Kisho didn’t want to talk about it, and while the curiosity was burning inside me, I didn’t want to seem overly curious.
Francine came downstairs. “Goodnight,” she said before hurrying down to the basement.
Nic just shrugged.
“I’ll ask him,” Jeb said.
Hell, that was the last thing we needed. Jeb made me look sensitive and tactful.
“No, I’ll go.” I walked into the kitchen. “Need a hand?”
“I should be fine,” Kisho said.
He didn’t look fine. He looked like he’d lost his puppy. Tears glistened in his eyes.
I rubbed his shoulder. God, sadness looked insanely hot on him. I guessed it was wrong in a way to be turned on by someone else’s misery, but the unshed tears, the trembling lip, all of it made me want him more.
“If you need to talk, I’m here.” I leaned against the counter while he made the tea.
He kept his head down. “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I failed.”
His voice was barely a whisper. I’d kind of figured something like that had happened.
“That’s not such a terrible thing. You can try again.”
“I can try, but I don’t think it’ll work. I just freeze up inside. I don’t think I have the ability to feed like a normal vampire. And all the time, those poor kids are trapped.”
I should’ve been able to say something to reassure him, but there were no words.
Chapter 16: Dog Walk
“Are you walking Hellhound?” I asked Nic as he put the dog’s lead on. “Can I come with you?”
“Are you trying to steal this dog back off me?”
“No, I’m just bored and sick of being in this house. Some fresh air and exercise will do me good. And since you won’t let me out of the house on my own, I’ll tag along with you.”
Hellhound jumped around, totally overenthusiastic about getting out of the house. I knew how he felt.
We walked down the street. There were some really nice houses in this neighborhood, but most of them were standing empty now. One had the front window broken. A few had been graffitied.
All the leaves on the trees were turning orange. The silence of the street gave me the willies. I hated quietness.
“You should sleep with Kisho,” Nic said.
“Huh? Where did that come from?”
Even though Nic had mentioned it a few times, I hadn’t expected him to just blurt it out. And in front of the dog, too.
“You want to. You’re just holding back. And if you plan to, you should get in while the getting’s good. Once he feeds, who knows what will happen. He might completely change. Don’t live your life with regrets.”
Wow, Nic had switched over to his motivational speaking mode. But the same thoughts had been running through my head, too. I had no idea what the feeding would do to Kisho.
At the moment, he mostly seemed despondent. The failure had hit him hard, but for my own selfish reasons, I was glad he remained the same lovely Kisho. I wanted to change the subject rather than discuss this with Nic.
“If he changes, does that mean you’ll have to do your own housework?” I asked. “He might be all alpha male and be like, ‘Hey, bitch, go clean the kitchen, and while you’re there, cook me a pie.’ You don’t know.”
Nic shook his head. “What sort of men do you hang out with? Barbarians?”
“Mainly incubi and regular dudes. Do you have any idea what regular human men are like? They love their entitlement more than you love cake. Actually, give me an incubus any day. At least they’re honest, and good in bed. Also, if they piss you off, you can kill them. They don’t keep ringing you in the middle of the night, crying because they want to get back together.”
“Kisho isn’t going to be like that. Feeding doesn’t change a vampire that much.”
Hellhound had wound his lead around Nic’s legs. We stopped so he could untangle it.
“Yeah, regular feeding for regular vampires. But, hey, let me consult my history of half-vampires feeding.” I loved throwing Nic’s insults back at him.
“So, you agree? You should get the sex in before then.” He seemed way too enthusiastic about it. “And, if you think the feeding will change him, what do you think killing the Vampire King will do to him?”
<
br /> I wrapped my arms around myself. Even with a heavy coat on, I shivered. I’d actually stopped noticing the cold most times because it was my default state. Then I’d warm up for a while, and that only reminded me how cold I’d been.
“I know what you’re playing at.”
“And what, exactly, is that?”
“You think if I sleep with Kisho, he’ll be able to feed. I don’t have a magical vagina, Nic. It can’t cure every problem with your pack.”
“I wouldn’t call it magic.”
“I think you actually did one time. But I’m not screwing Kisho just so he can feed. Next thing, Luis will have a cold and you’ll want me to have sex with him to cure it.”
“You know Luis is gay, right?”
“I was just giving an example. I wasn’t being literal. Well, then, Jeb will have an ingrown toenail...”
“You shouldn’t sleep with Jeb.”
“Because of some mystical reason? Tell me.”
“Because if you slept with him after me, you’d be bitterly disappointed. It’d be like going from caviar to tinned tuna.”
Hellhound ran to a tree, needing to sniff. He wouldn’t pick up any messages from other dogs. I didn’t think there was another dog even living nearby any more.
“Some people like tinned tuna.”
“Tinned tuna that’s been sitting out in the sun for a week? Nobody likes that. It tastes like shit and smells funny and gives you the runs.”
“What’s with this thing between you and Jeb, anyway?”
“Back in the early days, there was just Jeb and me. Then Luis and Shelley joined us. Suddenly, we became a pack. At first, Jeb and I thought we could share the leadership, but that didn’t work out. You can’t be leader just by saying so. You need to have the pack welfare at heart. Anyway, he’s always had this thing that I ‘stole’ the leadership from him. He thinks being pack leader is all sitting around eating cakes and looking pretty. There’s so much more to it than that.”
Weird. That was almost what the old man at the park had said.
I grinned at Nic. “Well, there is a fair bit of eating cakes and looking pretty.”
“True. But there’s the whole financial side of things. People think vampires have scads of money just from being vampires or whatever. That we steal it or have family money. I have no idea. But it’s not that simple. You don’t get paid for living a long time, and stealing is no long-term strategy. Then I have to make sure the pack can feed and have a safe place to live and sort out all the disputes. It’s a complex role.”
“Aha. You said you didn’t turn any of the pack yourself. What about their sire bond? Doesn’t that overrule everything else?”
“Well, Kisho wasn’t sired, so that counts him out. Luis and Shelley both had been abandoned by their sires. The bonds are broken. And Andre’s sire got staked.”
Hellhound pulled at his lead. Nic stopped walking until he fell into line.
See, I’d never do that. I’d just let the dog pull me along. Nic had been right when he said Hellhound was better with him. I’d never tell him that in a million years, but it was true.
“I’m worried about Jeb,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone told the mayor that Kisho is the Vampire Prince. How many people knew it was him? Not many.”
“What possible reason would he have for that? Anyway, it was Bob. I’m convinced of that. He came sniffing around, offering me scads of money, but he just wanted to case the place.”
“Think smarter, Clem Starr. Why would Bob think it was Kisho in the first place? He had a tip-off.”
The wind blew my hair into my face. I tried to push it back, but it didn’t make much difference. Nic reached into his pocket and pulled out a hair clip, then handed it to me.
“Jeb wants me to take action. If the mayor knows, it accelerates things. Well, he’d think that, anyway. He banked too much on my friendship with the mayor and not enough on my need to protect Kisho. The mayor is expendable. He’s a fool who needs to be managed.”
When Nic said things like that about the mayor, it made me wonder what he thought of me. Well, he made no secret of that. Although I knew a lot of his bitching was just talk. He needed me.
“Is it really that bad for the mayor to know?”
“I don’t want anyone else to know. That makes Kisho a target. The prophesy says the Vampire King can’t kill him until he’s fed. It doesn’t say anything about anyone else killing him. I don’t want that to happen.”
I nodded. “But if the King could do it by proxy, he’d have done that by now. He had years to do it.”
Nic didn’t reply. I guessed he had no more inside info on this than anyone else.
The wind got colder. Leaves blew around us. We got to a playground. If the quiet streets were bad, the playground seemed ominous and sad. Not a single child, nothing but the creak of a swing blowing in the wind.
“Do you think this city will ever go back to normal? Even if the Vampire King is defeated, there’s so much damage.”
“It will. Cities fall apart and get rebuilt all the time. The problem, Clem Starr, is that you only see things through the narrow perspective of your twenty-odd years on this earth. You don’t know what the real world is like. When you’ve seen cities bombed to pieces and recreated from the ashes, a bit of demon rioting looks like nothing.”
“Thanks, Grandpa.”
“I worry about those kids. As soon as we can, we need to rescue them.”
I nodded.
Walking with Nic like this seemed so comfortable. If I’d been with Kisho, I’d have grabbed his hand and we’d have sparks shooting between us, but Nic and I didn’t do that. My feelings for Nic would always be complicated. Sex with him was as good as it got, and we bantered with each other, but Nic could cut me cold at any moment. It wasn’t an emotional thing with Nic. Being with him didn’t warm me to the core of my being.
“Do you really think there’s any chance, however slight, that we can win? I mean, it’s just us, isn’t it? Portia and her team are more of a liability than an asset. The mayor can’t be trusted, and no one else gives a damn. If we don’t win this, the whole world is fucked. And if we do win, what do we get out of it? Huge risk, no gain. Not my kind of thing, normally.”
Nic let Hellhound off the lead for a run in the park. Hellhound barked at some birds in a tree. The birds silently mocked him.
“That’s a negative way of looking at things. If we win, we don’t get tortured to death. That’s a bonus.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. Dying, I could deal with. You don’t fight demons for a living without the risk of death as a constant, but torture? I hated the thought of that shit. Fuck torture. It hurt like a bastard.
“Do you think it will help Kisho feed if I sleep with him, really? Or are you just making that up? Because I have the energy in me. That repels him. Right now, he’s okay with it because it’s not so strong, but things have never been completely good between us. I don’t really understand how he feels about me now. I have no idea what he’s thinking.”
“Nobody does. But he opens up to you more than most people. I don’t just want you to do this to encourage him to feed. I’ll level with you, Clem.”
He turned to face me with an earnestness shining in his eyes that I’d never seen before. Either this meant a helluva lot to him, or he’d taken playing me to a whole new level. There was no mockery, no snarkiness, just honest emotion in that look. It scared me a little.
I nodded, encouraging him to continue.
“If this works, if he does kill the Vampire King, I want to ensure he has some humanity left in him. You know what the Vampire King’s like. We don’t want Vampire King version two on our hands. There has to be some connection to his old life, and, as much as I hate to say it, that connection can only come from you.”
Hellhound ran over to Nic, then bounded off across the park. I brushed away the strands of hair blowing on my face.
“I’m n
ot sure you’re on the right track there. I mean, yeah, having something to anchor him would be best, but is sex the way to do it? Maybe there are other ways.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t want to do it just out of pure wanting to get into Kisho’s pants.”
He took the clip out of my hair and readjusted it so that the strand of hair was properly secured.
“It’s just strange.”
“You think you have to choose between us, but you don’t,” he said. “It’s not an issue.”
Good thing, because I wasn’t sure which one I’d pick. Well, obviously, I’d pick Kisho, but there’d always be something inside me that responded to Nic. That something being mostly my vagina.
Nic put his hands on my shoulders and gently kissed my forehead. The tenderness of the gesture shocked me. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. A kiss goodbye? For luck? Or just Nic fucking with my head?
Before I could say anything, he rushed off.
Watching Nic bag up his dog’s poo was one of the more satisfying things in life. Hellhound might not live up to his name normally, but some of the stuff that came out of his butt smelled like it had come from the underworld.
Chapter 17: Training
“Maybe he could try apple cider vinegar,” Shelley said. “That fixes everything.”
“I’m not sure how it would help Kisho feed,” I said. I threw a punch at Shelley.
We had to have group training in the garden. Nic had decided the entire pack had become lazy. Training with Nic was pretty much up there with the most hellish torture you can imagine. The girls had decided to join in, more to have the chance to be around Nic than from any real desire to train, I think. A few rounds of this, and they’d see what he was really like. Ha, they thought I was bad. Nic forgot other people didn’t have vampire strength.
“Just give him time,” I told Shelley. “He’ll feed when the pressure’s off.”
“Apple cider vinegar can’t hurt, though.”
As the buzzer went off, I moved to train with Nic.
“You haven’t slept with him yet,” Nic said quietly. “That’s what he needs.”
I threw a punch at Nic. Not a training punch, either. One advantage of this training was that I could hit him. But he ducked, and the punch just swiped his head. That sweet, caring Nic of the other day hadn’t lasted long.