Long fingers pushing self-consciously through honey-streaked waves, Benjamin faced Tzadkiel. Tzadkiel stared at the undeniably graceful gesture, and forcefully shook off his fascination. He couldn’t afford to get drawn in. Not tonight. With so much at stake, he had to be ready. That Benjamin was unbalanced suited Tzadkiel’s purpose.
“Ready to go?” It wasn’t half as difficult as Tzadkiel had imagined, adding that little extra something to the question—a note that hinted at thirst and desire, and the need to slake both.
Benjamin pushed his hair back from his face again, though it hadn’t budged from where it had fallen moments before. He seemed to struggle with himself for a moment before heaving a sigh and attending to his uncooperative coat buttons. Finally, he gave up with a muttered “Fuck it,” and felt for his cane where it rested against Tzadkiel’s chair.
The cane’s silver head glinted in the harsh overhead light. A dragon’s frozen snarl formed the grip—a symbol Tzadkiel knew better than the spelling of his own surname. Long-lived beings that preferred darkness and the comfort of well-secreted lairs that they had stuffed with beautiful treasure, his kind had identified with dragons and adopted them as totem creature eons past. A hunter—Benjamin’s grandfather—had stolen that cane from the mora’s horde—from Tzadkiel’s own father, in fact.
Tzadkiel gritted, “Nice cane.”
“It was my mother’s father’s. I had it extended,” Benjamin answered.
Fists clenched, Tzadkiel barely resisted the urge to snatch the modified cane from the hunter’s grasp and beat him to the ground with the heavy silver handle.
They left the bar. Tzadkiel held the door open, and stepped out into the night. Benjamin’s breath hit the snow-laden air as an almost solid white curl of smoke, contrasting starkly with Tzadkiel’s own, much fainter, stream. Until he drank the hunter’s blood it would be difficult to assimilate with ease. At least the winter air calmed his anger.
“Tzad? Did you hear me?” Benjamin weaved sloppily at the edge of a crosswalk, his cane poised on the bumpy rubber surface that signaled the ramp to the road.
Tzadkiel ignored the impertinent nickname, and sprinted the steps to Benjamin’s side with a quiet gait. He stopped several paces short of Benjamin, and made certain his next footsteps were audible. “My apologies. I was lost in thought.”
“Oh.” The hunter tapped the cane at the pavement and began walking again, just as the pedestrian light flashed red. They’d never make it across the slippery street before the traffic light changed.
“Here.” Tzadkiel drew abreast of the hunter. “Take my arm.”
Benjamin stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. Snowflakes swirled thickly around him like winter faeries in a solstice dance.
“If that is acceptable?” Tzadkiel amended, lifting his fingers so they hovered just above Benjamin’s shoulder. Heat beckoned, but Tzadkiel held firm, waiting for the hunter to invite his touch.
“I—sure.” Benjamin lifted his elbow, and Tzadkiel slid his arm under Benjamin’s coat and around his back. “It’s usually easier on my own than with a person tugging on my arm, but it is kind of slick out here.”
Tzadkiel nearly growled with hunger at the contact with wiry muscle and heated flesh. He reflexively dropped his dagger from his sleeve into the waiting fingers of his free hand so he could make the necessary cuts and feed. They’d crossed the intersection, and traversed the steep portion of Joy Street, ascending toward the crest of Beacon Hill before he realized he clutched his knife so hard that his fingers ached. He shrugged the blade back into its sheath and flexed his hand.
“You smell good,” Benjamin said, slurring his soft consonants. “Like sunlight.”
Tzadkiel smiled minutely, unable to help himself. Whatever he smelled of, it certainly wasn’t a sun he hadn’t seen in decades. He hadn’t been flirted with like this in a lifetime, especially not by a human.
Human…
Appalled, he stiffened his spine and smothered his smile. Benjamin Fuller was not human. There were many words for what he was, but one in particular would suffice.
Monster.
Struggling to find his emotional footing, Tzadkiel reached for the familiarity of hunger and anger, rediscovering them easily. Ice seemed to flow through his veins in sluggish, mind-numbing pulses of rage. He and the hunter walked on for long minutes, and rounded the corner of Joy Street. Tzadkiel forced his feet forward. The chimes of Park Street Church began to toll in the distance, and he battled welling nausea.
Church bells chiming the half hour. The slide of a van door. Labored breaths of his captors as they carried his much larger form. The world was upside down, the walkway to the house making up his sky. Oppressive summer air shimmered with heat even in the city’s relative darkness. A creaking doorway. The bright blue eyes of a boy, held by the scruff, forced to watch those first moments of pain and degradation.
Tzadkiel came to a standstill in front of the walkway to Benjamin’s home, immobilized by the unexpected rush of memories. Behind the hunter, the house projected a silhouette over the monochrome sweep of walkway, its Grecian revival architecture now lovely only when cloaked in darkness with its crumbling columns and rotted eaves disguised as shadow. Though he knew the hunter must have more than enough money to keep up the house, the place was in a fitting state of disrepair that matched Tzadkiel’s every nightmarish memory. The wind gusted violently, shaking loose one of the shutters so that the place seemed to crumble further in recognition of its fate. Indeed, he wanted to watch the house collapse in flames. But that would have to wait.
“I know you don’t know me—can’t really be attracted to me, but…” Benjamin swayed toward him. “I’m a better lay than I look.”
Tzadkiel tore his gaze from the house. “I beg your pardon?”
Extricating his arm from Tzadkiel’s, Benjamin faced him. The lamplight shimmered over the hunter’s sunglasses, casting him as even more other. Alien.
“I know you’re only with me because I’m a sure thing.”
Tzadkiel frowned. Surely, he must have misheard the man. “I am afraid I do not understand.”
“I can’t see and my face is scarred, so lots of guys think I’m desperate.” Benjamin spoke, his lips the only fixed point in Tzadkiel’s world. “With you it’s all right though. I don’t mind if you just want an easy lay.”
The man standing before him—this aspiring villain from a villain’s bloodline—was accusing Tzadkiel of…“What?”
Tzadkiel faced Benjamin squarely, anything else he might have been thinking obliterated by shock. Snow squalls danced around the Victorian lampposts, buffeting Tzadkiel’s shoulders. The wind lifted the hunter’s blond locks, depositing crystals that sparkled with a mocking gaiety.
Though Tzadkiel hadn’t looked his best when he’d last caught a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window, he was sure his relative state of dishabille didn’t warrant a pity fuck—not that the hunter would know this. Benjamin insulted them both with his insinuations.
“I mean, I do mind.” In the lamplight, Benjamin’s rising blush was apparent. “Because I want you to think I’m…” The hunter waved a negligent hand, as if vanishing the word sexy or handsome with insouciance-laden prestidigitation. “But I know that isn’t always important and—and—and, um…” Benjamin slapped his cane against the fence in apparent frustration. “Shit. I blew it.”
Knowing a denial would ring false, Tzadkiel remained silent. There was attraction, yes, but also a revulsion that had nothing to do with Benjamin’s scars. The man was beautiful, but his lineage was an ugly truth Tzadkiel would not be able to deny. Now that the flirtation had been broken, and his own prowess called into question, Tzadkiel found passion’s fires temporarily banked, especially as he regarded the hunter against a backdrop of that accursed house.
“Fuck.” Benjamin spun away. The abrupt motion sent him into a wobble that he stopped with a stagger into the crooked gate. “Forget it. Forget I said anything.”
Tza
dkiel remained still, unable to command his feet to follow as Benjamin retreated to the house. The dilapidated structure loomed at the end of an alley-like yard, a beast that seemed to crouch in wait for him. Fingers of fear dug into his brain, sending palpable shock waves down his spine and into his tailbone. Like a green recruit led by an incompetent commander, he wanted to run, to escape the nightmarish visions that assaulted sanity’s front lines with renewed vigor.
He barely breathed when the hunter opened the screen door. It creaked on its un-oiled hinges and the key grated in the lock. The right panel of the double front door opened and closed. Then the lock turned from the inside. A punch accompanied the hunter’s audible curse. Something toppled and smashed.
Coming to himself, Tzadkiel clenched his fists and hurled an even more creative oath of his own. Of all the ways he’d imagined his plans unfolding, this outcome had never insinuated itself into decades of revenge-driven fantasy. Shell shock had completely undone his resolve. If that wasn’t bad enough, it was clear bloody Benjamin Fuller thought himself a charity case for men with a need for minimum-fuss conquests. And he thought Tzadkiel one of those men.
Tzadkiel’s beleaguered mind latched onto safer visions of white sheets and blond curls tumbled about a handsome face. Someone should have shown the hunter long before now what sex could really be—a feast for the senses and a beacon for the soul. Could the man really be so unaware of what he looked like? At the obvious answer, guilt stabbed at Tzadkiel’s midsection, sharper than the knife Benjamin’s uncle had driven into Tzadkiel’s belly.
He slammed the gate shut, furious he’d let everything get so out of hand. The thing groaned back at him in accusation, and bounced open again. Lip curling, he turned away from the cursed property. He pushed through a snowdrift that a lumbering plow had formed, welcoming the exertion. Dryas would have said he’d missed a prime opportunity by not following the drunken hunter inside. Tzadkiel glanced over his shoulder. At this distance the house was veiled by snow. A quiet voice whispered perhaps Tzadkiel had let Benjamin go so easily because he had not considered exactly how difficult crossing that threshold to that house might be, even after all this time.
It was his responsibility to ensure the mora was secure. To do so, he would need to unravel his enemy with careful malice and forethought. Something he realized he had not done in his zeal to enact his half-formed strategy. His new plan began to take shape as he descended Joy Street in the snow-wrapped hush of the pre-dawn hours. If he could entice the hunter to accompany him to the mora’s stronghold, the terrain would provide Tzadkiel with an advantage. Once there, he could retrieve the kylix and quickly conduct the required ceremony that would allow him to regain his full power. His mora would be able to latch onto his strength to fortify its own abilities.
Benjamin’s execution would be clinical and quick—downright merciful in comparison to Tzadkiel’s own treatment at the hunters’ hands. Of course, he would relish revealing his identity and intentions before the little drama unfolded. Tzadkiel visualized Benjamin’s lips at the moment of truth. Lips parted in a pink O of surprise, the hunter’s fear-tinted shock would be enough to satisfy Tzadkiel’s sense of justice as he drew his blade. After, it would be done, and three millennia of strife for Tzadkiel’s people would be over. With a sharp nod to steel his resolve, he leaned into the wind’s icy embrace and made his way back to his damp hole under Boston’s streets one last time.
Chapter 5
Benjamin stumbled into the kitchen. Although he knew it was too late in the afternoon for there to be sunlight streaming through the window, he swore it couldn’t be anything else that sliced across his skin. He sidled to the sink and clutched the counter’s edge. Coffee already burbled, its aroma strong enough to soothe his stomach’s incessant roiling. He’d puked half a dozen or so times since noon. Probably there was nothing left, or he’d still be heaving.
“You look like hell.” Nyx rattled her paper—either the Times or the Globe.
Benjamin jumped, his heart threatening to follow last night’s liquor. Apparently his hangover was bad enough that it had muted his ability to pick up on Nyx’s aura. “Holy crap. Warn me, will you?”
Usually she worked the afternoon shift at a local used bookstore on weekdays. Except, it was…Saturday. So she hadn’t worked at all. He frowned and immediately regretted the chiseling pain at the bridge of his nose.
The paper rattled again, more forcefully. “Figured you knew I was here. I made coffee.”
Nyx’s golden glow resolved, and Benjamin winced as the brightness flared, setting fire to nerves that could have done with another five or six hours of sleep and a hell of a lot less abuse. His gorge rose, and he swiftly turned his back to her.
Fingers running along the counter, he trailed them from dishwashing liquid bottle to dish drainer to the base of the wooden mug rack. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
Nyx, apparently lost in her article, made a noncommittal sound.
Benjamin placed the mug on the counter with a soft thunk and reached for the pot. A few drips fell to the burner and hissed. He poured until the bright music of the liquid against the ceramic grew dull. The mug was full. Turning with it cradled in his hands, he leaned against the counter. “I had fucking ferocious dreams all night.”
He cringed from the memory of a dream in which a male nurse with midnight eyes had chased him down antiseptic hospital corridors. Benjamin had run with an ungainly limp, the too-long arms of his straitjacket flopping violently. He could still hear the hospital paging system blaring, Patient Fuller, the doctor has time for you now. No wonder, after the stalkerish encounter with that stranger—Tzadkiel. A man Marc had said looked like he could fuck Benjamin into next week…
“Couldn’t have been all night,” Nyx said dryly, interrupting what was promising to be a better recollection than Benjamin’s freakish dreams. “Judging by the way you smell, you spent a good part of the evening at Whiskey Tango.”
Nyx tended not to pull any punches, and as one of his only two friends, she didn’t have to. Still, it would be nice if she modulated her voice, if not her opinion.
Benjamin rubbed his forehead with the thumb and middle finger of his free hand. “Could you shush?”
“Why?” The paper rattled again. “Do you have a hangover or something?” The chair scraped across linoleum, making an awful screeching sound as Nyx stood. “I mean, that would be pretty unusual.” Her footfalls pounded as if she walked on his head. “Because it’s not like you DRINK or anything.” The last she shouted in his face.
Coffee sloshed over Benjamin’s knuckles, scalding his skin.
“Ow! Dammit.” Slamming the mug down on the counter, not caring that the motion sent half of the liquid splattering onto the floor, he flailed for the kitchen faucet. “Nyx, you’ve been in that skirt long enough that you do raging bitch really well.”
Hand going to the cuff on her wrist, she bristled. “Well, you don’t wear a skirt, and you do whiny little bitch just fine.”
“Ha ha. You’re hysterical.” Cold water running over his hand, he bent his head and rested his forearms against the enameled sink’s cold rim.
“Gods, you stink. You must’ve drunk a metric ton last night, a lot even for you.” Nyx rummaged around near him, grabbing paper towels to mop up the mess he’d made. “Did something else happen after we split?”
Vague recollections of walking into the bar tumbled backward into more macabre memories of killing the vampire in the Common. Meeting the man—Tzadkiel—wasn’t quite as vivid as the rest, but that was more due to alcohol than a deliberate lack of attention on Benjamin’s part. Or was it? He lifted his head, frowning. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on—besides the fact he’d awakened alone—unsettled him. They had walked home together…hadn’t they?
“I met someone last night,” Benjamin said, ambiguous enough to suit his purposes. “We talked awhile.”
“Oh!” Nyx began.
Benjamin winced.
�
�Sorry.” She lowered her voice. “So you met a guy, and…”
“And…” Benjamin shrugged, shutting off the faucet. Something tugged at his memory. Just out of reach. He recalled a hand sliding under his coat and around his back, caressing his ribs. Then the sensual pressure of a broad forearm, steadying him. For the life of him he couldn’t remember whether he and Tzadkiel had kissed or…anything else. He licked his lips, but tasted only toothpaste and the sour tang of regurgitated Scotch. “And nothing. He helped me get home. I think.”
Nyx laughed, her aura waggling. “Get home?”
“In the non-euphemistic sense, you dork.” Benjamin’s grin fell as the plaintive sound of his own voice brought back memories of himself at the gate, whining at Tzadkiel about being a pity fuck. He groaned in embarrassment. “Though not for lack of trying on my part.”
“So what was this failed Casanova’s name?” Nyx asked, putting all the blame on the stranger and none on Benjamin—typical of her, and he loved her all the more for it.
“Tzadkiel,” he said, testing the name on his sober tongue. It rolled off in three syllables, hard around the edges with an exotic middle, not unlike the man.
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