by Lola Gabriel
“I’m sorry,” Cayden was trying to say, but there were tears, there was rain, “I love her. I love you.”
And then, in the last moment, there was a clanging like an old church bell, and a small, reddish wolf came careering down the slope. It dropped something at Cayden’s feet. A small bottle of purplish liquid, stoppered with a cork.
10
Claudia
“Do we have to, really?” she asked, looking across the table at Cayden.
“Clauds, it’s our anniversary, of course we have to…”
Claudia rolled her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said, dog-earing her book to save her place and leaning back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest, “I wish you were your old, thoughtless self!”
Cayden smiled, and his one dimple arrived on cue. It still melted her heart a little. His hair was shorter than it had been before. She had told him he had to look just a little bit more like a leader.
“Really?” he asked. “Because I met this girl, and honestly, I’d like just one more mad night. One more night being my bad old self.”
“Cayden!” Claudia said, aghast. She stood and moved behind her chair as if to shield herself from him. Cayden stood too. His tight t-shirt was half tucked, half fallen out and crumpled. He moved like a stalking animal, and then leaned on the table just beside where she was, his arms taut, his lovely fingers spread out on the wood to balance himself.
“I just can’t,” he said, “stop thinking about her…”
Claudia nearly laughed, but managed not to. Her mate took a step forward and pushed his nose against her neck, kissed, softly nibbled, licked.
“She tastes like salt and…is that vanilla?” he said, and then he pulled Claudia to him, hands on her waist.
Claudia half shrieked, even though she knew this game. Through laughter, she said, “Well, I suppose one night wouldn’t hurt, and Mrs. Cruikshanks is on holiday.”
Their mouths met, and this time, just like every time, like all of the many times a day Claudia and Cayden kissed, it was as electric as the first time, as passionate as the first time.
Cayden pushed himself toward her, and she could feel him straining for her, wanting her…
“Hang on,” Claudia said, and for just a moment, she pulled away. Both her hands were on his upper arms. She could feel the warmth in her face, and her sore grin, even as she pushed back. “This doesn’t mean we can skip Matherson’s speech this year, Cay, you know that, right? He brought that elixir from their apothecary, and he gets to tell the story of his moment of battle. That’s the rule.” She leaned in again, pushing her hair behind her own ear and placing her lips on his. “And your prize,” she whispered, “is me…”
Cayden made an audible moaning sound at that. He bit her neck lightly and flipped them around so that she was against the table. She pushed her hands up under his shirt. The warm comfort of his body had become a part of her routine, but it never got old, they never let it get old.
Claudia undressed herself before he could start doing it for her. She threw her t-shirt in one direction, jeans in another, and then Cayden was naked too, and he knelt in front of her. Kissed her knees, her thighs, and then between them, exploring, acting as though this was brand new. He pushed her into the table, and it hurt, but it was a good hurt. She hoped it would leave a bruise. Remind her of what his fingers and tongue were doing before, a moment later, she pushed him over onto his back and positioned herself on top of him. She let herself sink down and envelop him, so that he had to force himself to open his eyes and watch, biting his bottom lip, and she began to rock and sway.
She loved this. She loved making him helpless. Cayden. Her elder, her lover, her womanizing pig…reduced to mush. Reduced to whatever she wanted. Reduced to a thing that gave her pleasure, felt pleasure, felt nothing but pleasure, no pride, no overthinking…
The floor was cold under her knees and with every movement it added something. A layering. Every time they fucked, they added layers somehow. Their love was this giant growing thing and as she moved on top of him, it swelled, and she moved, and it swelled, and she moved, and he bucked his hips and used his thumb to rub circles on her and he knew her so well, and it swelled, and it overtook her and she gasped and shook and felt complete. Felt whole. One with him. Her mate. Forever. And then she flopped across him, and they were just lying there on the kitchen floor again, smiling, sweaty.
Their heavy breathing slowed. His heartbeat, beneath her, returned to normal. He was stroking her hair.
“Can we skip the bit where Ali tells the whole romance from his point of view, like about me being a terrible person and stuff. All the bad jokes…”
Claudia hit Cayden lightly. “You know we can’t,” she said, “you know that.” And Cayden caught her hand, but they were both laughing, just lying on the cold kitchen floor, laughing, almost one single person, they were so in sync.
Rex: Vampire King of London
1
Rex
Rex sipped his ice-cold Guinness and cursed his own idiocy. It was Thursday, of-fucking-course it was. And here he bloody was in a crowded corner, with a full pint of stout, and plans to meet Terry, who was of course late, at this table at the back of the King’s Arms. But Thursday meant karaoke, and karaoke meant drunk humans warbling into a dirty microphone on the stage in the corner. He’d be lucky if his fangs stayed sheathed, with the racket they tended to make. Besides, there hadn’t been a pedophile ring busted for a while, or a serial killer caught. Rex always got first dibs, obviously, as leader of the vampires, but there hadn’t even been a whiff of fresh blood for weeks. And reheated, blood bank slop got old. At least, Rex thought, he had Guinness. The Irish hated how much vampires loved their national drink, but they shouldn’t have made it so damn iron-rich if they didn’t want blood suckers taking an interest.
The first human up was a sweaty man with a comb-over. He ground Rex’s gears, yes, even the way he moved was irritating. Somehow he was heavy-footed and yet also incredibly tentative. Like a mouse wearing fucking lead boots. He sang a song about angels, and he sang it very, very badly. Yet he was so deeply unappetizing, Rex didn’t even want to hate-eat him. Instead, he did his best to tune out the warbling. He took a pack of cards from his top pocket and began building a castle out of them. The cards were old and soft at the edges, which actually helped them to balance and to hold one another up. And Rex didn’t have to suck in and expel air in his usual pretense of breathing if he didn’t want to—sure, the urge tended to stick around after death for vampires, but after long enough it began to fade, and by Rex’s age there was no panic at all involved in stopping it. So, there was no risk of him knocking the cards over that way. Terry was thirty minutes late, which was ridiculous even for Terry. Rex looked up at the clock by the bar, which was next to a moth-eaten deer’s head and a murky-looking painting of a rainy London street. The deer’s head had been on that wall for centuries—two, maybe even three centuries. The taxidermy wasn’t great, and Rex could only imagine what disgusting things might be living in it.
Rex was just about to top his card castle—which was the length of the four-seater table at its base and had more than used up his pack of cards so that Rex had been forced to move on to layers of beer mats—with one final triumphant triangle when… bump! A human ass had smacked into a chair, which had smacked into the table, which had knocked over his creation.
“Watch it!” Rex looked up, seeing first the ass, in a tight skirt, and then the woman it belonged to. Brown curls, big brown eyes, a heart-shaped face.
“Crap, sorry!” the woman said, her hand over her mouth, “I’m trying to get up to sing, it’s a work thing, and I’m bloody nervous. I mean, I’m all fingers and thumbs at the best of times. What I’m trying to say is basically I’m a Neanderthal…”
“They’re given a bad rap,” Rex said, mindlessly, still taking this odd ball of energy in. “They were actually quite intelligent, but you’re right, I guess they weren’t dainty.”
The woma
n cocked her head to the side. “Okay,” she said, “what are you, an archaeologist? Ethnographer? Look, your house of cards was wonderful, but they’re notoriously unstable, aren’t they?” Another woman, this one older, stick thin, was pulling at her hand. “Oop, I’m up, then! Get a drink on me, I’ve a tab, Maddie, okay?”
Rex wanted to grunt at her and return to staring at his own hands. That was what he wanted to do, but he found himself saying, “Thanks, Maddie. I will.” And then, “Good luck up there.”
Good luck up there. What was happening? She was pretty, yes, and seemed, well, fun and full of life. But she was a human. And he was an ancient vampire king and definitely did not wish karaoke singers good luck. Rex drank the rest of his slightly warm pint and put his cards back into his pocket. Yes, he used a little bit of object control to get them neatly into his hand, but none of the humans noticed. He stood and pushed out the table. Made his way to the bar. If Terry wasn’t here in another fifteen minutes, Rex was going to leave. But that was enough time for one more quick pint.
“Put it on that girl’s tab,” Rex said to Felix, the barman, or bar vamp, as was the actual reality. Felix, pale, blond, rakish, dead since 1923, placed the pint of black beer in front of Rex.
“What?” he asked, his eyes meeting Rex’s. “Why? You don’t pay…”
“She offered,” Rex growled in his most disaffected tone, “and you know I fucking hate karaoke, you need to stop holding it every damn week.”
Felix shrugged. He wiped his long-fingered hands on the cloth that was hanging over his shoulder. “We have to turn a profit these days, Rex, you know the rules. And the after-work crowd loves it. I mean, look at them!”
Rex turned to the stage again, where Maddie was blushing. Her coworkers whooped and hollered as she sort of shaded her eyes, covering the top half of her face, and began singing a somber jazz number.
Her voice was unbelievable. Rex heard “Shit!” from the crowd of coworkers. Mouths began to fall open. Behind the bar, Felix whistled. “I should offer her a regular spot,” he said, but Rex found he could hardly hear the barman. He couldn’t hear anything but Maddie, couldn’t tear his eyes away from her awkward sway on stage, her shakily lowered hand, her sheepish smile as she realized everyone was listening to her, listening to her with genuine interest.
It was a song about New York in winter, and Rex remembered New York in winter, New York in 1940, snow falling as he made his way into a smoky jazz club. The taste of rye whisky in a cocktail. Women with fur muffs, and men in good tailoring. Trumpets.
“Mate!” said a voice from his left, and something shoved his shoulder. Rex turned and he felt his teeth reveal themselves. He let out a hiss. Then he covered his mouth with his hand.
“Shit,” he said. “Don’t know what’s wrong with me this evening. Except that you’re ridiculously bloody late, Terry. Now let’s sit as far from the stage as possible, yeah? It’s human soup over there.”
Terry had turned to the bar. He looked back at Rex. “Yeah, sorry, lad,” he said, which was not the correct way to address a vampire king, but they had been friends for a long time. “She’s alright, though, eh?” he nodded at the stage, at Maddie swaying toward the end of her song.
Rex shrugged. Grunted. “She’s a human,” he said. “How good can they be at anything? Scourge on society.”
Terry nodded. “Not wrong. Delicious, though!” he laughed much harder than this stupid joke deserved. Rex chuckled.
“Let’s get this meeting going, then,” Rex said. “And let’s get drunk, too.”
Rex and Terry were on their third drink by the time they got down to talking about what they were there for—Rex was trying to get more vampires into prisons, and Terry had an in at the Ministry for Justice.
“The thing is,” Terry said, leaning toward Rex, “we need to know they’re guilty, right? So, we need some men or, indeed, ladies. We’ve got to be careful these days, eh? We need some vamps on the inside, not just as guards in high-security prisons, but also as prisoners. I mean, who would do it?”
Rex thought for a moment. He could think! “The racket has stopped,” he said. “Bloody humans are done warbling.”
Terry nodded appreciatively. “So they have. Just as we’re getting down to business, too. Perfect.”
“We could make it an initiation right,” Rex suggested, “for those disgusting vamp-by-choice lot—the ones who fraternize with humans. I mean, obviously it would be great to stamp them out totally, but as we apparently can’t…”
Terry nodded, looking thoughtful. Terry was, unfortunately for him, and for Rex right now as he was sitting across from him, an ugly bugger. Vampires tended to be attractive, with even average-looking humans leveling up once they had that undead glow and stopped aging, plus there were all the blue eyes, but Terry had clearly been another level of unattractive as a human. He was pudgy and hairless, except for one big eyebrow and some strange, wire-like fluff on the outsides of his upper arms. His elbows were little dimples, and he had the doughy forearms and hands of a toddler. He also always wore dirty vests, complete with pit stains, which was impressive given that vampires didn’t sweat. But somehow, Terry got stuff done.
“I mean,” Terry said, and then he stopped to chew on his chapped bottom lip. “I mean, this is complicated, isn’t it? Do we really need to have caught them at it? There’s some bad bastards in prison, yeah, and let me tell you, there’s some bad bastards out. I mean, you know I’m connected to their government, right?” Terry waved a vague hand at the humans in their former karaoke corner, who were now milling about aimlessly, and hugging one another goodbye. Somehow, he managed to actually smell of sweat. Maybe he kept bottles of it around for spritzing?
“Well,” Terry continued, not waiting for an answer from Rex, “you should see their bloody House of Lords. My god, barely a good-hearted one in there, and the number who have committed blood-sacrifice-level crimes… oi!” Terry clicked his fingers in front of Rex’s face. Only Terry would do that. Anyone else would lose their fingers. Or at least Rex had left everyone with a strong enough impression they might lose fingers if they snapped them like that, they wouldn’t try in a hurry.
Terry was right, though. Rex was distracted. The human woman with the voice… Maddie? She was picking up her handbag to leave. She was wearing a gold crop top with the pencil skirt, and it shimmered as she moved. She went to the bar, bag in hand, and leaned over to say something to Felix.
Rex wondered what she smelled like. That raw, human smell they all had. Who was she? And why couldn’t he stop bloody looking at her? And now she was coming over!
“Lad,” Terry said, aghast, as Rex tried to focus on his old friend. “Lad, are you blushing? Can we even blush?”
But Rex didn’t have to answer the question—could he answer the question? His face was tingling, but he hadn’t thought that vampires could blush either. Certainly not undead lords of…
“Hello,” Maddie said. Rex could feel her behind him. He could hear her heartbeat and sense the blood rushing busily around her lovely body. Slowly, Rex turned to face her.
“Hi, Maddie,” he said, “you have a great voice.”
Maddie smiled. She had dimples, and her eyes were happy, twinkly. Why was Rex so interested in a human with twinkly eyes, of all things? And who had ever heard of a vampire being attracted to dimples? Or, for that matter, amateur jazz singing?
“Thanks,” Maddie said. “I didn’t catch your name before. We’re off now, the legends I work with want a pub crawl, but hopefully I’ll see you in here again soon? I’m new in the office, and it’s just around the corner.”
Rex just looked at her, his ears humming with the sound of her human life.
“No karaoke next time, I promise,” she said.
“Rex,” said Rex, “I’m Rex. And yes, I’m here from time to time.”
Maddie lit up at this. She nodded enthusiastically, and then looked around and saw that her coworkers had almost all filed out of the pub, up the narrow stai
rs to the alley the King’s Arms was perched on close to the river. “Crap, I’ve got to go,” the human said. “Sorry again about the cards. God, I never do this. I suck at it. I’ll see you another time, okay?”
And with that, she turned, giggling slightly and sort of shaking herself free of her attempt to flirt with a little shimmy, and rushed after the group.
Terry raised his eyebrow. “You’ve got a fan there,” he said, and he opened a packet of salt and vinegar crisps he had bought earlier. “I like to feel the fizz on my tongue,” he said by way of explanation before placing a crisp into his mouth and leaving it there for a while.
Rex tried not to watch Terry’s disgusting display. “So,” he said, “what you’re saying is, you want to go around draining everyone who might be a piece of shit? Because Terry, those used to be the rules, and they didn’t go well. This code we have, it’s for the other immortals too, not just the humans. And some of the others like humans, don’t they? The witches, the fairies… Didn’t that fae princess just run off with one?”
Terry swallowed his wet crisp. He shook his head. “She’s marrying Archibald, high warlock of la-di-da. Thought she had a hard on for humans too, but I think it was just their parties.”
Rex raised his eyebrows. “Humans do know how to have a good time. I think it’s their short life span, they have to pack everything in, you know? But regardless, we can’t go killing them willy-nilly. And I don’t know why you think it’s appropriate to discuss the possibility of doing so with me, of all vampires.”
“Not willy-nilly, more—” Terry had his bone, and he wasn’t going to give it up. His hand was in his crisp packet, so Rex reached forwards and grabbed him by the wrist, holding tight and then twisting, trapping him in the plastic of the packet and nearly ripping off his hand.