by Tracy Tappan
Gasping for breath, he sagged forward, utterly spent. He planted a hand on the mirror behind Toni to keep from collapsing on top of her, and hovered there for the small infinity it took his climax to finally lose some of its grip on him. Hell…shit, if there was anything better than an orgasm in this whole wide world, somebody needed to write an airplane banner about it.
He gazed down on her, still struggling to get his heart back into his chest and his lungs to a place where they could fully inflate again. “All right,” he panted. “That one might’ve been a little ‘good’.”
She exhaled a laugh. “Boy, howdy,” she agreed, and the hazy, satisfied look in her eyes made him want to spike the ball in male triumph.
With a contented sigh that cranked up his I-was-a-stud-horse-in-bed success even more, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a hug.
He moved to embrace her, his arms a little unsteady as—
His jaw unhinged in naked shock. When he’d swept his palm through the steam on the mirror just now, he’d opened up a visible patch of reflection behind her, and there on her back was—
“Holy shit!”
Chapter Thirty-six
The Rec Room was in an uproar.
Alex was laughing so hard he started hiccupping, and the villainous-looking one called Dev Nichita was really gone, rolling on the floor, his arms clutched around his middle. Male model dude, Thomal Costache, was trying to help Dev up, but was stumbling around so much from his own hysterical laughter, he kept missing Dev’s hand. Kasson Korzha had tears running down his face, super male model dude Arc Costache was close to needing CPR, and that one with the bull skull tattoo on his arm, Gábor Pavenic, was shaking so hard across the shoulders, he might as well have been convulsing.
Holy Christ, but it’d been one hilarious afternoon so far—or middle of the night to Alex, but he was having too much fun to feel tired. He’d always wanted brothers to screw off with, and these warriors were proving capable of degenerating into a pack of unruly frat boys with the right provocation. Like when man about town Roth Mihnea had passed out top-shelf bottles of scotch to Dev, Thomal, and Kasson as consolation for their loss of Toni. The three men had shared liberally with the rest of them, and now they were all pretty thrashed…which had naturally inspired Alex to teach everyone how to do blue flamers.
Yeah, light farts.
Alex laughed louder, his ribs starting to ache. Shit, man, there wasn’t anything funnier than a mighty blue flamer. The position a dude had to Gumby himself into just to complete the light-off was comical enough: ass scooted to the edge of a chair, knees jacked back to the ears, hand doing a reach-around so that a cigarette lighter could be held near the ol’ bunghole, not too close or else a dude risked catching his pants on fire.
Then, fwapp, let one rip and watch the spurt of blue flame.
Seriously, he’d never seen men—anyone—laugh so hard as when the warriors had started taking turns. Kasson had yelped like a girl for burning his sphincter, Gábor had nearly crapped his pants for pushing so hard to get a fart out, then Nỵko Brun, the most serious body Nazi of all them, had come up to bat. The man had exploded such an Aurora Borealis out of his butt that the current near-seizure-like laughter had promptly taken them all out. Jesus, if they all didn’t quit soon, they’d—
“What the hell’s going on in here?”
Jaċken was standing inside the doorway of the Rec Room, staring at them all like they were a bunch of headless zombie chickens.
Alex’s new brother-in-law was dressed only in a pair of hastily-donned black sweat pants, leaving bare what was one Holy Mackerel of a tattoo-embattled upper body. Daaaamn. Alex wished Jaċken had been his brother back when he was thirteen and wearing his first pair of eyeglasses. That way, when eighth-grade bully Bobby Knudson had knocked Alex’s new specs askew with a hard slap to the face and a sneering, “Hey, poindexter, nice coke bottles,” Alex could’ve said, “Oh, I’m sorry, haven’t you met my brother, Bad Ass?”
Tonĩ was at Jaċken’s side, her pink T-shirt on inside out, her pajama pants hanging low on her hips, and the bun on her head damp and unruly from whatever she’d just been doing with Jaċken. Grody!
Nỵko was the first to recover from his laughing fit. “Well, hey, look, it’s my new sister-in-law.” He smiled broadly at the newlyweds. “What a breath of fresh air you are now, Tonĩ. Jaċken obviously did his job well.”
The room broke into applause and whoops.
Yuuuukkkk!
“Hell, Jaċken,” Arc gasped out, still trying to control his laughter, “what’re you doing coming up for air so soon? We didn’t expect to see you till—”
A lamp crashed to the floor as Dev staggered drunkenly to his feet.
“Smooth move, bumblefuck.” Gábor snickered.
“Would everyone shut up! I need you to check something out.” Jaċken pulled Tonĩ closer.
“Oh, shit.” Thomal covered his eyes with one hand, peeking out the edge of it at his brother, Arc. “He wants to show us that he knows how to bang a chick now.” He cleared his throat. “Yo, chief, it’s really not necessary to—”
“Now, hold on a minute.” Dev swiped some magazines off the coffee table. “The table here’s clear.”
Someone chortled.
“Assholes.” Kasson planted his hands on his hips. “The woman’s brother is sitting right there.”
“I said everyone shut up the fuck up!” Jaċken roared. “This is important.”
He turned to the Felix Ungar of all doctors, Jess, who was deeply ensconced in a worn leather armchair, an indulgent smile wreathing his flushed face.
“Can you take a look at something?” Jaċken pulled Tonĩ against his body, her front to his front so that her back was facing the room.
“What is it?” Dr. Jess rose smoothly from his chair, moving with studied grace even though he’d downed just as much scotch as the rest of them.
Jaċken yanked Tonĩ’s T-shirt up in back.
Jess came to a shocked halt. “Goodness gracious!”
“Shit….”
“Damn….”
“Wow…,” and the like, came out of the rest of the men.
“It’s fantastic,” Jess breathed, hurrying forward.
Alex moved to huddle around Tonĩ with the rest of the men. Daaaamn, again. Spread across the length and breadth of his sister’s back was the same dragon tattoo Alex had seen on Thomal’s back earlier, brilliant scales and all. Instead of green and red, though, it was—
“Why’s it blue and red?” Thomal asked.
“That’s the color of the Fey,” Dr. Jess answered.
Kasson was frowning at Tonĩ’s lower back. “Is her dragon missing a foot?”
Dr. Jess looked again. “Ah, yes. She had it lasered off.”
“What’s that thing?” Gábor stepped forward and pointed a finger at the lightning bolt in the upper left quadrant of Tonĩ’s—
Jaċken’s fist flashed out.
Alex gaped as, impossibly, the punch sent Gábor flying out of his boots and soaring across the Rec Room. He landed ass-first in the middle of the foosball table, skid-bumped across the top, then flipped to the opposite side, bringing the table crashing down on top of him with a splintering thwack.
The rest of the warriors threw up their hands in an I-surrender pose and quickly backed up several yards.
Alex just stood there, still gaping.
Dr. Jess pulled him back with the rest, murmuring, “It would be best not to get too close to Tonĩ and Jaċken at present.”
“Damn it to fuck!” Gábor scrambled out from under the table, roughly swiping little hockey men off him. “What the hell is a newly bonded male Vârcolac doing in general population, anyway?!” He staggered sideways, blood leaking down his forehead.
“Your own fault, dickhead.” Thomal snorted softly. “You got too close to her.”
Nostrils flared aggressively, Jaċken rounded on Jess. “Is Tonĩ okay?”
“Of course,�
�� Jess replied hastily. “She’s better than okay, I’d say. She’s fully Fey; she’ll get her power now. That mark Gábor indicated designates her enchantment skill—although I haven’t the foggiest notion what a lightning bolt signifies.” The doctor paused thoughtfully. “What activated this?”
“My Fiinţă, I think. The tattoo popped up after the second bite.”
“Hey!” Alex came back to life. “Could this Fiinţă stuff boot up my enchantment skill, too?”
Everyone turned to look at him. Except for Tonĩ, who was cuddled sleepily in Jaċken’s arms, and Gábor, who was kicking debris out of the way and pouting.
Alex went on, “I could read the Străvechi Caiet Book, then, right?”
Dr. Jess’s cheeks flushed redder in excitement. “Oh, holy Heaven. Yes, just so.”
Alex adjusted the set of his glasses, his excitement growing along with Jess’s. “All righty, then. Just tell me what I need to do and point me in the right direction.”
Laughing, Dev gave Alex a staggering whack on the shoulder. “Well, okay, human. You just have to fall in love with a Vârcolac female and be willing to spend the rest of your life with her. Nothing too major, right?”
“Actually…” Alex smiled. “That’s exactly in line with my plans.”
Dev’s silver eyes brightened. “Ho, shit, wait! I need to introduce you to my sister, Luvera.”
“Screw that, Nichita,” Kasson inserted hotly. “I’ve got four sisters who—”
“Would somebody get Jaċken the fuck out of here?” Gábor growled. “And a damned bandage might be nice.”
“Yes,” Tonĩ murmured, “let’s go back to bed, Jaċken. I want to…” She stretched languidly and gazed up at her new husband with sleepy adoration, her smile slipping sideways. “You know what a blow job is, right, honey?”
All eyes snapped over to the couple.
Crimson heat shot into Alex’s face as Jaċken bolted from the Rec Room with Tonĩ at ass-on-fire speeds.
Aw, man…. Now he needed to take a shower or something.
Chapter Thirty-seven
“I need to know how to fight these guys, Tonĩ.”
Tonĩ slanted a glance at her husband as she unwrapped two pounds of ground beef. “Yes, well…I wish you luck with that.” She plunked the meat into a large mixing bowl. “Make sure you slice that green pepper into small pieces, okay?”
Jaċken gave her a perturbed look from the other side of the kitchen island, a large Chef’s knife poised in his hand.
“You’re not chopping….” She sighed, then laughed. “What do you want me to tell you, Jaċken? Those Topside Om Rău seem pretty damned immortal to me.” She cracked an egg into the bowl. “You saw shave-headed guy die, I saw the young, creepy one as a corpse.” She shook in salt and pepper. “Yet, they both looked really alive when they showed up at the Water Cliffs.”
“They wouldn’t be immortal by nature.” He started cutting up the green pepper with quicksilver speed; the man definitely knew his way around a knife. “They’d have to be under the power of an enchantment, and what can be enchanted can damn well be unenchanted.”
She plunked down the salt and pepper shaker. “Why do I keep letting these things surprise me?” she asked rhetorically, then gave Jaċken a droll look. “Enchanted?”
“Certain Om Rău and Fey have the ability to manipulate power through rituals.”
“Not you?”
“I wish.” He snorted. “No, only Pure-bred Om Rău.” One side of his mouth hooked upward. “But you. Soon.”
That much was true. She’d felt strange power surges inside her ever since she’d gained her Fey status two weeks ago. Nothing she knew how to use or control, yet, though.
Jaċken scooped up the diced pepper and dumped it in the bowl, then glanced around the counter. “What next?”
She pointed at the can of Progresso Bread Crumbs.
His brows shot up. “Bread? In meat?”
“It’s meat loaf, and, yes, you’ll like it.” She handed him a measuring cup. “One cup.”
She hid a smile as she watched him measure out the bread crumbs with unnecessary exactitude, once again tickled by how enthusiastic he got over all things domestic.
It was a Brave New World for her husband, though, now that they were tucked away in Ţărână’s white picket fence neighborhood in a house next door to Arc and Beth. Before that, he’d lived his entire adult life in Roth’s mansion. He’d never needed to contend with life’s banalities, washing a load of laundry or shopping at a grocery store for more than beer and snacks, or cooking a meal, and now that he had a home of his own, he wanted to master it all. Anything that needed doing, no matter what it was, he wanted to do it with her. And ridiculously enough, she found herself racing home after work to do mundane chores, like make dinner or fold underwear or show Jaċken how to pick out a ripe melon. Because mundane stuff turned into fun stuff when they did it as a couple.
Tenderness filled her heart as she watched Jaċken upend the cup of bread crumbs into the bowl. If she thought she’d been in love with this man before, the last two weeks of marital bliss spent getting to know him, the real him, available to her now that his iron defenses were down, had catapulted her right to the top of Guineas Book contenders for the most in-love girl ever. A state of emotions which was having an unexpected effect on her.
It was putting her into a state of outright, unadulterated fear.
For the first time ever in a relationship with a man, she was truly, deeply in love. Never before had she felt like she had so much to lose. If something ever happened to Jaċken, if she lost him or he left her, it would throw her into such a deep, dark pit of despair and loneliness it would make her former life look like a big sorority blowout. She’d been wracking her brain for ways to get past this fear, but had been drawing blanks, which had succeeded in keeping her at a low simmer of panic.
“Anything else?” Jaċken asked.
“Um….” She closed her eyes for a moment to banish the thoughts from her head. “Ketchup.”
She watched him open the fridge and take out a bottle of Heinz from the side shelf.
“Hasn’t Cleeve been able to find out anything?” she asked, steering their conversation back to their original Topside Om Rău topic.
“Nothing that’s frigging helpful. Only a complaint lodged last year by the bar manager of The Blarney Stone about some chick with a black flame tattoo on her belly. Apparently, the woman ripped a guy’s arms out of their sockets during an arm wrestling match.”
She gave him an arch look.
“Yeah, sounds pretty Rău-like, doesn’t it?” He handed her the bottle of ketchup. “And weird shit like that going down is dangerous for all of us, you know. It starts the police asking too many questions.”
She hesitated in the middle of squeezing Heinz into a measuring cup. Police…. “Oh, God, I’m just remembering the night the police called me in to consult on the murder investigation for that creepy corpse. The kid was wearing some kind of strange ring.”
“Yeah? Strange, how?”
Shrugging, she finished filling the cup. “I guess it gave off some kind of an electric shock if anyone tried to remove it.”
“Holy shit, I think that’s it.” Jaċken planted both hands on the kitchen island. “That’s how those assholes are achieving their immortality. Their rings are enchanted. That’s right. Skull was wearing a ring the night he tried to steal you at Scripps. I remember because it tore a strip of skin off my face, here”—Jaċken drew an invisible line high up on his cheek with the tip of his index finger—“when the fucknut punched me.”
She set down the ketchup. “Well, good, you have it figured out. Now you can help me mix the meat loaf.” She bobbed her eyebrows at him. “It’s the funnest part.”
“Oh?” His expression lightened as he strode around to her side of the kitchen island. “Why’s that?”
“We get to do it with our hands.” She stuck her fingers into the bowl.
He drew up b
ehind her, extended his arms on either side of her body, and put his hands in the bowl next to hers. She began to knead the ingredients together, and he copied her, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“Doesn’t it feel good.” She chuckled. “All that stuff squishing between your fingers?”
“It feels great,” he said, making it clear what he really meant when he pressed his hips forward against the curve of her rump.
“Jaċken. For Pete’s sake, we’re making dinner.” She tried to sound scolding, but it was difficult to be convincing with a long, hard phallus prodding her buttocks.
“Last I checked, sweetie pie, we were grownups. So I think we can have dessert first if we want.” He lowered his lips to the curve of her throat and kissed her, the tip of a fang grazing her skin.
Excitement spun through her tighter than an over-wound top. Groaning softly, she rolled her head to the side, giving him more access to her neck, blatantly inviting him to take a vein.
“You’re shameless,” he murmured.
“Very true.” Marriage to a Vârcolac was proving to have more than its fair share of magnificent perks, but being fed on was definitely the humdinger. The intimacy of the act itself was a total turn-on, Jaċken’s need for her life-sustaining blood something indescribably special, but she’d be a huge liar if she didn’t admit to really getting off on the Holy Moly ecstasy Fiinţă gave her. By itself, the stuff was an Elixir of the Gods, but an orgasm-Fiinţă combination was like sending her whole body, especially her vagina, on a rollercoaster ride through Nirvana, Mount Olympus, Heaven or any other celestial sphere where pleasure was unutterably fantastic. Was it any wonder she was always game?
She laughed softly as Jaċken nipped at her collarbone, then ducked away from his teasing lips. He wouldn’t feed on her tonight; every two to three days was about the schedule he kept, and he wasn’t due. “Enough now, husband. We have to get this blob of food cooked.”