by Eva Sloan
~*~
Andy felt warm and safe in her old room. Her mother was well again, and it only seemed right that she was back under the same roof as her mother and sister. But a couple of hours later she was still lying in her old bed, wide awake.
Why can’t I sleep?
Because this isn’t who you are anymore.
She punched her pillow and scrunched up her eyes. She was so tired. Vaporizing a faerie queen really took it out of you. But she just couldn’t relax completely. Part of her, a very big part of her, wanted to be home, and this just wasn’t home anymore.
Her little dog looked up with worried doggy eyes from where she lay on the bed beside her. Andy rumpled his little furry ears, and then pulled herself up out of bed and got dressed again.
She gathered up Brutus, who was quivering with excitement, and called for a cab. The taxi company called a couple minutes before the cab would arrive. Standing all alone, even on a well lit street, made Andy’s nerves stand on end. She turned and looked down the street to find nothing. Then she turned the other way and about jumped out of her skin. Min’s vampire, Luca, was standing there silently, looking across the street.
“This is really stupid of you.”
She scowled at him and then turned to face away from him. “My cab should be here any minute. You should go back to Min.”
He shook his head ever so slightly. “Min would want me here, with you.”
“I can’t sleep, okay? I thought, since none of the fae would be coming near me for a very long time that it would be safe to go home, to my own bed.”
“I get that.” The vampire stood unbelievably still for a moment, not breathing, not blinking. He was like a statue, literally. “But I can’t let you travel there alone.”
Andy glared at him menacingly. “I’m not going back in—”
“I’ll ride with you, and make sure you’re safe.”
“Oh,” Andy said, the anger dying from her like a snuffed out candle. “Ah, thanks.”
The cab pulled up a moment later, and Andy and the vampire got in. It wasn’t much of a drive, and thankfully the vampire didn’t feel too chatty. But Andy finally found herself babbling. About how she understood now why her mother had kept this from her, but that it still kind of pissed her off. And she was glad that Min had him, but “If you ever hurt her, I-I…I’ll…”
Luca looked at her nonplussed.
“I’ll make what I did to the Winter Queen look like a bad sunburn. We clear?”
A smirk played on the edges of the vampire’s lips. “Crystal.”
Andy turned away, shaking her head. But a smile was pulling at the sides of her mouth. She liked the vampire. It was hard not to like someone that had literally risked life and limb to help save you. You’d be a sorry piece of work if you didn’t.
Finally the cab arrived in front of Andy’s house. She sighed as she looked up at the huge granite edifice. There were lights on here and there, but mostly the apartment building was asleep. It was well after midnight, after all.
Andy pulled her dog closer to her and looked over to the little park where she usually walked her. It was usually dimly lit, but the moon was full and illuminated everything until it practically sparkled.
That’s how she saw that Sam was sitting there at the lone picnic table, his big beast of a dog by his side. Her heart leapt up into her throat, and then she felt a surge of adrenaline. She wanted to go talk to him in the worst way. And since he was just sitting there, it seemed that he might be waiting for her too.
“I thought you were going up to your apartment?” the vampire asked. And then he looked over to where Andy’s eyes were focused. “Oh, I see.” And then he gave a little laugh. Not an unkind sound, just amused. “Well, he seems safe enough.”
Andy glanced at him, not really knowing if he’d meant that last as a small insult, or whether he meant it. In truth she didn’t care. She just wanted to get to her not-so-secret crush. The dark creatures and monsters of the world would just have to find someone else to hassle for a little while. She had plans.
She got out of the cab and set Brutus on the ground. She listened to the cab drive off as she and Brutus walked quickly toward the park. She must have been walking pretty quietly, because Sam was muttering to himself, and didn’t seem to know she was approaching.
But Shylock noticed, and whined affectionately when he spied her coming.
Sam turned, the look on his face turning from surprised to happy in a heartbeat. But she saw that something long and shiny had been in his hand, and now wasn’t. Just that fast.
He stood and was about to say something, but just didn’t seem able to do so. It was comical, and endearing, and a couple days ago it might have been disastrous. If he’d gotten tongue tied, then her nerves would’ve jumbled, and she would’ve been tongue tied too. Or worse, she might have started babbling. But instead she smiled and said, “Waiting for me?”
His handsome Anglo Saxon face blushed, and a guilty smile lit up his face. She loved his smile. It was boyish yet masculine at the same time. It didn’t hurt that it belonged to such a great looking man.
He had broad shoulders, a well muscled body, and straight brown hair long enough to brush his shoulders. Not to mention his hazel eyes. They changed with his mood, or what he was looking at. And as he looked at her they changed from a cool blue to a radiant green.
“Yeah…I missed you last night. I was home but you weren’t”
Andy didn’t take her eyes from his, just shrugged. “I had a family thing across town. Stayed overnight with my mother and sister.”
A relieved look shown on his face, for just a moment, and then he covered it up with a hasty smile. “Good, I mean, it’s good you get along well with your family. Family’s important.”
Absently he rubbed his hand over his mouth, obviously thinking over what he was going to say next. But Andy noticed something peculiar. A ring, old and gold, and topped off with a ruby and diamond insignia. She’d seen this emblem before, in books, and had always thought they were either remnants of a forgotten time, or simply fiction.
But standing across from Sam, the moon shining down upon them, she just knew he wasn’t just some pretender. The light made him shine just a little more than anything else. An inner light she had somehow ignored up until then.
Faith.
No, he was the real deal. An honest to goodness Knight of the Cross.
Andy gasped as this realization hit her brain. She was a star—or a piece of one—fallen to earth and was now human. Well, human with a bunch of unknown powers. And she had a huge crush on her neighbor…and he was a freaking holy Knight of the Cross, a crusader, a fist of God.
“What’s wrong?” Sam’s expression had turned alarmed.
Andy realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it out, took another deep breath and smiled, more to herself.
Any other day this might have all been too much for her to handle. But today, after the couple of days she’d had, it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
She walked past Sam and sat down at the picnic table, letting Brutus pounce around on her leash.
“Nothing,” she said. She decided to let him tell her about his real job in his own time. She knew that secrets were tricky things, and that they were usually kept for a good reason. She leaned back against the wood of the table and extended her arm to point at the bench left beside her.
“Want to sit and talk for a bit?”
Sam’s face lit up again, and he quickly sat down beside her. “So,” he said, “do you come her often?”
Andy laughed. “All the time. I like the swings the best.”
***End***
Check Out Not Dead Yet: A Lucy Hart, Deathdealer Novel. Book Two
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At Last
Ella Stone
Copyright 2012, 2013
Previously published as Rebound
Kindle Edition
Cover Image, 123RF.com
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Chapter 1
IT COULDN’T BE HAPPENING. Standing there in her pearl-white strapless satin gown, her blond hair painstakingly straightened and pulled back in a perfect twist, the veil already in place, she just couldn’t believe it. With her bridal bouquet of pink miniature roses in her left hand, Susan Rhodes couldn’t get over how heavy the generic white cocktail napkin seemed to be as it drooped in the palm of her right hand.
How could it be burning her flesh? How could the message scrawled across it be English one moment and gibberish the next? And how could that short, inadequate message have so much power over her?
She had been so happy: in love and engaged to a handsome, successful attorney--on the cusp herself of becoming partner at the architectural firm that practically worshipped her like a Greek goddess. She’d always known she would be a great architect, just as she knew she would make a wonderful wife. She had it all planned out, could call up the image of herself, her career, her husband and two tiny children, with such perfect clarity.
And now the shitty little cocktail napkin had destroyed it all, with eight near illegible words:
Suzie-Q,
Can’t get married. Marry someone else.
Mark
Tim, Mark’s best man and best friend since college, stood there in his tuxedo jacket and slacks, clashing ridiculously with a garish pair of green hiking boots and a faded orange t-shirt with Orgasm Donor emblazoned across his chest. He slouched, staring at Susan, obviously waiting for some scathing reply to the message he’d just pressed into her hand. Susan was known for her temper and for always having the best comebacks anyone had ever heard--sometimes polite yet viscous, sometimes so expletive-laced sailors would blush. But as he waited for Susan to lay into him, his drunken, apologetic smile slowly turned to stunned horror.
Susan just stood there with the napkin in her hand, her face falling from a bewildered smile to a completely blank stare. Her body slumped the tiniest bit, the arm holding the bouquet dropping to her side, the flowers absently dropping from her freshly manicured fingertips. Her flesh turned cold as if snow and ice had replaced the blood in her veins. Tim started backing away from her when he saw the first tears trickle from her eyes, sliding down her cheeks.
“Suze, what’s with dropping the flowers?” Liz, Susan’s best friend and maid of honor, bent to retrieve the bouquet from the floor of Saint Anne’s vestibule. “It’s like dropping the ball...” That’s when Liz spotted Tim, a guilty expression on his face, right before he turned and slunk out the door he’d entered.
She shook her head and smiled, her mouth opened as if she were about to say something, then her eyes got wide as she took a step closer to Susan. “You’re whiter than your dress! What’s going on?”
Susan said nothing, not moving. She wondered if she was even breathing. Her heart had definitely stopped beating. Liz looked down at the cocktail napkin and read the message upside down, her warm hand closing around Susan’s now trembling wrist.
Without looking away, Liz started to speak in the way she always spoke at her art gallery when she wanted everyone’s attention--her tone bright and sweet, yet steeped in authority.
“Ladies,” she said to the bridesmaids. “May the bride and I have the room for a moment?”
Thirty seconds later, the two women stood alone in the room, surrounded by wedding gifts and flowers, standing facing each other, Liz’s hand still gripping Susan’s wrist. “Suze?” she said, her clear blue eyes beseeching.
Susan gazed at Liz, startled, just comprehending her best friend was speaking to her. Her face crumpled, the tears spilling chaotic down her face in rivulets, a gasping sob escaping her lips. “Oh, Liz...”
Liz crushed Susan’s shaking body against hers, holding her up, protecting her too late from what had already harmed her.
~*~
Kevin Jacobs didn’t want to be in Chicago, he didn’t want to be going to his best friend’s wedding, and he certainly wasn’t masochistic enough to want to watch his best friend march down the aisle to marry another man--he was in love, not stupid.
And he wasn’t really “in love.” Not really. He’d let that go years ago, when, after trying to woo Susan their entire junior year at Dartmouth, she’d simply blurted out--in typical Susan fashion--she didn’t see him as a “romantic possibility.” But after two weeks of licking his wounds, he’d decided he couldn’t live without her being his friend. So he swallowed those lustful, romanticized feelings, burying them deep in him.
The rest of their college experience was a rose tinted haze of pizza and music and frozen margaritas--and all night cram sessions when they invariably partied too hard too often.
Graduation came, followed by jobs in separate cities, in separate states, on separate sides of the continental United States. Yet somehow they’d become even closer over the years, the distance acting as a magical truth serum, letting each share things they would never tell someone they actually had to look at in the morning. For five years, texting two to three times a day, and calling each other at least twice a week to share good news or to just sound off about what pissed them off.
Kevin could’ve done this long distance thing for the rest of his life, never having to meet any of his best friend’s boyfriends and bed partners. He had stopped dating after the second year after college, recognizing he unfairly compared these women he dated to Susan and always found them lacking no matter how wonderful they were. Instead he’d thrown himself into his work, and when not designing buildings or whole cities, he would spend his leisure time working out compulsively at the twenty-four-hour gym down the street from his apartment.
But no, that easy routine of listening and being able to be detached--because, after all, she was just a voice on the phone--was blown to hell. Susan was getting married, and she needed her best friend--well, her second best friend--to be there for support.
Swallowing the regret and long buried feelings he’d had for her--and had thought he’d forgotten--Kevin hopped on a plane for Chicago, and once there, froze his ass off as he flagged down a cab and made his way to Saint Anne’s Cathedral to do what he hadn’t been able to do all those years ago when college had ended. Say goodbye.
The church was packed with familiar and unfamiliar faces. Amber and rose-colored light filtered through the stained glass windows. The sharp, sweet smell of flowers filled the air, their bright colors popping against the dim interior of the church. As if by instinct, Kevin found his way back to the corridor leading him straight to Susan. The mahogany-lined hallway was cluttered with half a dozen bridesmaids, their lilac dresses clustered like living bouquets against the walls, the plethora of their flowery perfumes overwhelming him. There was also one rather disturbed-looking groomsman named Tim. Kevin recognized him from pictures Susan had emailed over the last year of her engagement with Mark, aka, “the shit-head.”
Kevin pushed through the door to the vestibule and stopped in his tracks. Susan was clinging to her best friend Liz, gasping heart-ripping sobs as if someone had died.
Had Mark, the shit-head, died? The possibility was intoxicating, yet Kevin refrained from asking.
Liz’s eyes met his and he mouthed, What’s wrong?
Liz held out the crumpled cocktail napkin and mouthed, Tim gave her this.
Kevin read the words, not comprehending that t
hey were not just some frat-boy joke, but as he read them again, he understood they were the end of Susan’s dreams, or at least that’s how she would see it.
Looking back into Liz’s eyes, Kevin could tell they were thinking the same thing. That shit-weasel! And when Liz’s usually hostile expression abruptly turned beseeching, Kevin knew exactly what she wanted him to do. Find Tim.
Kevin sprinted down the corridor and shot with increasing speed through the long sanctuary of the cathedral, the wedding guests’ jaws dropping as they watched him hurtle past them and through the front doors of the church.
The sun beat down on the rain slicked streets, making the city glare as if it were constructed of industrial strength halogen lightbulbs. Kevin squinted and turned in quick circles until he spotted the still-tipsy groomsman about to crawl into a cab. As Kevin ran toward the car Tim’s drunken face changed expression, a slow comprehension dawning. He tried desperately to yank the cab door open, his hands slipping as he scrabbled against the handle. Kevin was upon him all too quickly, pulling him around to face him and slamming him hard against the cab door. The look on Tim’s face was so ludicrously horrified it would’ve been funny if Kevin didn’t feel so violently enraged.
“Where is he?” Kevin seethed, his voice a thinly restrained snarl.
The front passenger side window of the cab rolled down and the cabby leaned his head out. “Get the fuck off my cab!”
Kevin turned his dark glare toward the cabby, daring him to say another word.
The cabby gulped and looked away. “Take your time,” he said as the window whined back up to closed again.
Kevin turned his gaze back to Tim and leaned in a little closer, not saying a word.
“I don’t know what you’re--” Tim mumbled.