by Beth Dranoff
I closed the door, but stood at the edge of the bed.
“Come on,” he said. “Get naked with me.”
Still I hesitated.
“And your wife?”
“She’s gone,” he replied, stretching out his hand to touch mine. Warmth radiating from his touch as he pulled me towards him. “We’re still alive.”
I managed to extricate myself for a moment, just out of reach as I pulled Sam’s T-shirt over my head and tossed it onto the chair. His eyes burned. I reached down, fingering the elastic of my underwear, and Sam was up, fast, standing behind me, hands running down the sides of my hips. Then he was kneeling behind me. Kissing the small of my back. Dipping his tongue into the top of the crevice, right there, teasing then pulling out again. Spinning me around to face him. My eyes closed, and then it was all I could do to throw back my head and remember how to breathe.
His tongue. God. The roughness of sandpaper was working its way across me, soft and hard at the same time, and my nails started shifting back and forth between human and Other. Fuck. I grabbed Sam’s hair and pulled his head back and away. Too much sensation. He resisted, hands cupping my ass, but I used gravity to sink down to his level on the floor. I pushed him back then crouched, cat-like, on my haunches and crept along the floor. My ass swayed as I tracked my prey. He watched me as I crept closer and closer. Shoulders down, I nosed in between his legs. Too much clothing; he was still wearing his jeans. I growled deep in my throat. Sam just chuckled and waited to see what I would do, how badly I wanted it.
Bad.
I reached forward with a single claw, hooked the eye of the zipper and pulled. Slowly. Watching Sam’s face. His breath caught as I reached forward and gripped him through his boxers. Royal blue. And then they were gone, torn apart by my claws.
I engulfed his length in my mouth with one full stroke. The temperature in the room ratcheted up with each ragged breath, each stroke, each drop of delicious salty goodness. And then everything was a blur of fire and fur.
His clothes were gone and we’d just managed to get that condom on before he was inside me, who knows who was on top, who knows who got what and when and how. We rolled around on the floor, arching and moaning. If I was going to hell, gods, this was the way to get there. We ground together and back until there was no more past, only this, now, falling away into each other’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I woke up with the faint scent of dusty roses tickling my nose. Another woman’s scent from another time. The weight of Sam’s careless touch as he slept, trusting me. Trust that could lead to need.
It hadn’t worked out so well before. Relying on other people was a mistake I’d made—and paid for. Whoever said love conquers all wasn’t paying attention.
What was I doing here?
If Sam started relying on me, and I fell into old patterns? What then? Hadn’t he been through enough pain already?
Away. I had to put distance between us. Now.
Gently, I moved Sam’s arm from across my chest and quickly, quietly gathered up my clothes and my bag. I thought I’d wake him up when I grabbed my keys, but he kept snoring, his head resting on a pillow grabbed from the bed, curled up on the plush rug on the floor.
Yeah. We never quite made it to the bed.
The thought of the wife and the bed made me move even quicker. Shit. I was going to hell in a hand basket and eating chips and dip on the way down. My hand hovered over my shoes. Deep breaths. I reminded myself that I did not force Sam into anything; what we’d done had clearly been consensual. Beating myself up was a waste of time. I needed to find out what I was before the second night of the full moon tonight.
And to do that, it would probably be good for me to get out of this room and have a conversation with someone who might actually be able to help me.
* * *
Anshell was sitting at the dining room table, reading the newspaper and drinking coffee—milk, three sugars. Never mind how I knew. He looked up, taking me in with an almost imperceptible nostril flare, and nodded an otherwise silent greeting.
I reminded myself that there was no shame in what I’d just done. Pushed down the sensation of moral filth, of having rolled in the sandy grit of someone else’s misery. Even though I knew. Intellectually, logically, I knew—nobody forced Sam to do anything, and being with me was probably a good thing.
So how come I was feeling a bit dirty, and not in a good way?
When in moral doubt, defer and deflect. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, killing another couple of minutes, before plopping down in the chair across from Anshell. Watching as he folded his paper in half before placing it under the edge of his saucer. Yes, the big tough alpha shifter used a plate under his coffee cup. Someone’s mama trained him well.
The thought of Anshell with a mama paused the treadmill of anxiety my brain was currently circulating through. Was she a shifter? It was hard to picture Anshell as a child. I got the sense that Anshell was alone in the world, aside from Sam and his pack, but maybe I was wrong. The way I’d been wrong about supes before I started working at the Swan Song.
My spoon clattered out of my hand onto the grooved and scratched tabletop.
“Sandor,” I said, then stopped. My friend. My boss. Shit. “Sandor...” I began again, got about as far again.
The edges of Anshell’s eyes softened, wrinkles smoothing a bit in sympathy. “We haven’t located him yet,” he said. “Why don’t you and Sam head to the Swan, take a look around?”
I nodded. Blinking back the tears that swelled my throat, making it too hard to swallow. No longer hungry, I put my bowl on the floor for the cat doing figure eights around my ankles. It purred its thanks.
Wait.
Cat?
I looked. Jun, the furry bundle of sarcasm I’d relegated to drug-addled hallucination status, grinned up at me from my milk leftovers.
“Greetings,” he drawled. “Miss me?”
“Jun makes a great foot warmer on long cold nights,” Anshell commented.
The cat growled a bit from his position on the floor where he was now doing the feline version of a face wash. “I’m nobody’s footie,” he said with a throaty rumble.
“Sure, you keep telling yourself that,” I muttered. Both Anshell and Jun raised an eyebrow at me. Really. You’d have to see Jun try it to believe it.
Funny how the mind goes in rambling circles when irrefutably faced with a reality that seems impossible.
Jun jumped up onto one of the chairs, then up once more onto the table to lie down directly on top of Anshell’s newspaper. Typical cat.
“So.” Said cat yawned. “What’s the plan here?”
“I’m figuring shower, then Swan,” Sam said, appearing suddenly and heading over to the kitchen cupboard to snag himself a mug, pouring some coffee and cream and sugar into it before joining us in the dining room. He pulled out the chair next to me with his ankle and sank into it without sparing me a glance. Hmm. Someone was feeling testy about my good afternoon kiss-off.
“Any backup? If something could take down Sandor,” I said, “we might need a bit more than just the two of us.”
“Don’t worry,” said Anshell. “You’ll be fine. I’ll have someone meet you there.” He lifted Jun with one hand as he pulled out the folded paper the cat had been using as a butt pad with the other. It was clear we’d been dismissed.
Have I ever mentioned how much I love that feeling?
* * *
I took my time in the shower, washing off the scents of Sam and blood and fur and salt and sweat. If only I was religious, I could believe that the water was washing away my sins, cleansing me, my conscience; Dana reborn. But I knew it wasn’t true. I was me and I did the things I had done and now, when the water stopped running, I would face the demons.
* * *
I hung out with Lynna in her room while Sam took his turn in the bathroom. He’d nodded to me in the hallway but was otherwise distant. As though what had happened hours before hadn’t happened. Never mind that that’s how I’d been playing it, planning to play it. Never mind that I could think of a million reasons why maybe I shouldn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t get further involved with Sam.
Maybe I was overthinking this. Maybe he was just preoccupied.
“Let me guess,” said Lynna, shaking her head. “This morning. After. You ran?”
“What do you think?”
“Do you even know what you want?” Lynna pretended to study a spot on the wall for a moment, just below the framed poster of a vaguely melancholy Renoir rip-off hanging over the bedside table. “Who you want?”
“That would be too easy,” I replied. “What are you still doing here?”
“I have nowhere else to go,” she said simply. “Until you get your shit together, everyone who knows you is a target. And that includes me.”
“I’m sorry,” I started, but Lynna cut me off.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not your fault. I understand. We both know I have absolutely zero way to defend myself against this kind of thing. Zero. Anshell has kindly offered me a room, a place to stay until whenever, and I’ve accepted his offer. But when this is all over,” Lynna said, almost an under-her-breath afterthought, “I think maybe it’s time to take a self-defense course and actually pay attention to something other than the instructor’s abs.”
I snorted. “That’ll be the day.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gravel and ice and snow ground crisply underneath our feet as we wound our way to the side door of the Swan. Foot and hoof and claw prints crisscrossed the pathways outside the snot-green, peeling aluminum siding that lined and reinforced the structure.
My key was out but I didn’t need it; the employee entrance at the side was open, the blackened door flapping and banging in the wind.
Sandor never left that door unlocked, even during business hours. Never know what might choose to slither in uninvited, he’d say. Made me wonder. Like maybe whatever had happened had been invited. Or at least had access to the code.
I said as much to Sam. He grunted in response.
Fine. Play it like that.
I eased in through the door, back against the frame, carefully skirting the edge and into the inky blackness of the Swan. On the far wall, green effervescent light cast a thin web of luminescence. Sam’s warm bulk flanked me from behind; a partner in battle.
I ignored the whispering voices in my ear, in my head. Words that said Sandor was no friend, that he had sold me out. Words that said he was a true friend but was going to die because of me. Voices telling me I was an ungrateful wretch. That I deserved to die. So many good thoughts to wrap around myself like a living scarf that weaves tighter and tighter, cutting off light and hope and air.
I gulped back a choking breath and crept forward once more. Behind me, I heard rather than saw Sam choking as well, gasping for breath. I turned around, took both of his hands in mine, and looked into his eyes until I saw their churning depths calm, until the Sam I recognized was staring back at me again.
Physical contact seemed to help.
This feeling of hopelessness, of fatigue, of blinking fruitlessly at tears that forced their way out regardless of what I wanted; I’d felt it before. A déjà vu moment. Saw Sam struggling with the same.
“Fuck,” he said.
Was this emotional warfare the weapon used to take Sandor? Or was it an aftereffect, a lingering scent of magic like a signature at the bottom of a masterpiece, daring those who came into contact with it to press on further? The fear certainly didn’t make it easy.
I wondered whether it worked as well on demons as it did on humans. Wondered if Sandor was still alive. Wondered if maybe I might be better off not wondering so much.
“Something happened over here.” Sam pointed to the entrance to Sandor’s office. I slipped my hand into Sam’s and held on, willing us both the sanity we needed to move forward, deeper into the melancholy gloom.
I wondered where everyone was. How did they know not to come into work? Their apartments hadn’t blown up and their cell phones hadn’t been melted by an ice demon.
Dialed Janey on my new gas-station-special prepaid mobile. Amazingly, after a series of pops and clicks (lousy reception at the Swan), the line connected.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, it’s me,” I said. Formal introductions were unnecessary between us, even if she didn’t recognize the number.
“Mmm hmm,” she said. “Where you been, girl?”
“I’m at the Swan now.” I almost didn’t tell her. The silence of her response suggested my hesitation was justified.
“Girl, that place has some bad juju going on,” Janey said, her lazy drawl now tightly clipped in what felt like fear. Mmm, delicious. A voice, not my own, was muttering in my ear. Oh, this just kept getting better.
“What happened here? Where’s Sandor?” My voice rose.
“Gone,” she said. “He met some guy in the back corner—you know, the one with all that red velvet and the privacy spell. There was this blue fog, and a screech, then this wailing like nothing you’d ever heard before. Well,” she amended, “I ain’t never. The supes neither—it was like they couldn’t even hear it. Didn’t so much as lift a snout to check things out.”
“And then what?” I turned back to Sam, who was now a puff of empty space. Shit.
“Sandor wasn’t there no more,” Janey replied. “Then, next morning, we all get this weird recording saying don’t come into work for a few days. Sounds like Boss Man. Something about fumigating the place.” She stopped, realizing what she’d said.
I turned around, slowly, and squinted my eyes. Thanks to Claude’s scratch, I could now see in the dark almost as well as I could see in the light. Too bad I would rather not be seeing what I was currently looking at.
“Know of any cockroaches or mice stupid enough to set tentacle or whisker in the Swan, considering what we put into our drinks?” A rhetorical question.
Sandor’s face was protruding from the wall, covered in a sheen of frost so opaque it could have just as easily been plastic, scratched and scored and even chipped in spots around the edges. Eyes wide, all three of them, but the one at the very top was still twitching. Was that even possible? What exactly was the physiology of Sandor’s species—could a single eye operate independently of the whole, or was it just a post-mortem spasm?
“Yeah, I’ll let you know if I find anything out.” I said the words, knowing they were a lie. Kind of like Janey and I agreeing to stay in touch, knowing that we probably would not.
Okay. I was going to go with twitching eye meant Sandor was still alive. So, rescue mission versus body retrieval mission. Check.
But there was no sign of Sam or of the promised backup team. Just me, a frozen bar owner, and whatever put him in that ice-olated state. Ha ha.
Then I felt it. A shadow. Behind me.
Deep, indigo purple. Beside me.
Behind me.
I reached out and grabbed a handful of the purple-lit gloom. It whispered in my ear. “Dana, let me go.”
A voice I knew from the dark. Blindfolds and bindings and cravings with complications. Jon. Then I opened my mouth and caught the scent of another shifter, not Sam, but other.
“Claude,” I said tonelessly.
“Princess,” he replied, mocking. He may as well have been saying Bitch-Goddess-who-I-hope-dies-for-what-she-did-to-me.
“Ass,” I muttered.
Jon narrowed his eyes at me in warning. Those beautiful, almond-shaped, green-blue eyes that made places deep within me ache with loss, emptiness. Shit. I blinked and looked away.
/>
“What are you guys doing here?” Seemed the obvious question. Jon’s shrugged response and Claude’s smirk were not exactly what I’d call an answer. “No, seriously. Did Anshell call you in?”
“Do you know what happened?” Apparently it was change the subject day in Jon’s world.
“He froze,” I said, eyeing my boss statue. Forcing down the bile that threatened to spew every time I looked at Sandor’s immobile form. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
“Nope,” said Claude, earning himself one of Jon’s pointed looks this time.
“I don’t smell much other than frost demon,” Jon said. “I don’t feed on Sandor’s species, though, so I might not be able to pick up on his lifeblood as strongly as I do yours or Claude’s—someone who could nourish me.” A faint eye-flick to indicate that Jon’s ironic phrasing was intentional. I ignored the barb. Why couldn’t life be simple?
There were questions I needed to ask, sounds I’d suddenly forgotten how to form. I shook my head to clear it and looked over my shoulder for Sam. Still not there. And so I found the needed words.
“Jon,” I said, “where is Sam?”
Jon flinched.
Claude smirked.
Tension made the space between my shoulder blades twitch. Sexual and emotional ambivalence aside, I was responsible for keeping an eye on my recon partner—and so far, I was not doing a great job. On all fronts.
I took a step forward and Jon stepped between me and his supposed ex. His hand on my shoulder. I opened my mouth to speak, to say I don’t know what.
“Dana, I’m fine.” Sam’s deep baritone came from behind me. I was acutely aware of my proximity to two of my lovers. Could almost smell the spike in testosterone as they both realized the same thing.
A growl from my left brought my attention back to the situation at hand. Again, I wondered—what the hell was this firecracker of unexploded jealous Claude potential doing here? Jon had sworn they were finished, but here they both were—together? I shoved those feelings down deep as I turned around to Sam. Took a deep breath; held it a moment before letting it out. He looked fine.