by Cat Marsters
Tears rolled down her cheeks. Rafa was fifteen-hundred-years-old, immensely powerful, and had a severe impulse-control problem. Jamie was twenty-nine and had never, to Paige’s knowledge, wielded any weapon more dangerous than a letter-opener.
When the great door slammed open and Masika’s shrouded figure appeared, supporting Jamie with her arm around his waist, Paige forgot about the sunlight and ran forwards.
“Jamie!”
“Sunlight,” Masika yelled, dropping Jamie and kicking the door shut. “Stupid girl.”
Paige didn’t hear her. Catching Jamie as he stumbled, she crushed him against herself. Blood and dirt matted his hair, coated his skin and clothes. The sharp scent shot straight to her brain; but under it was Jamie, her own sweet Jamie, and he was breathing and moving.
She found his mouth and kissed him hard, holding him up, tears falling down her cheeks as she tasted his health, felt his heart beating against her chest.
“I thought he’d kill you,” she hiccupped, for once not caring at all that she was sobbing like a little girl. “I thought you’d be dead.”
“Not yet,” Jamie said, and passed out.
People came and went. Masika arranged for someone else from the Sundown office to go and collect Rafa, who was, in her words, frothing in a pool of his own blood and rage in the ruined warehouse. Rafa, incensed at needing to be rescued, spat and swore at the unflappable blonde escorting him up the stairs.
“Aren’t you worried he’ll hurt you?” Paige asked, as the blonde locked Rafa’s bedroom door behind him.
“I’m a werewolf,” she said pragmatically. “Unless it’s silver, nothing hurts me much.”
Paige couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
The werewolf looked her up and down. “So you’re Paige,” she said, a smile curving her lips.
“That’s what it says on my passport.”
The blonde smiled wider. “Sofie Angeletti. We’ve all been desperately curious about the girl who’s had Jamie refusing dates left, right and center. Women are falling all over him on a constant basis, but he always says no.” She frowned. “I thought he might be gay, but Finn assured me otherwise.”
“Finn?” Paige asked. Her brain was starting to shut down.
Sofie smiled. “You’ll meet him. He has a sort of sixth sense for these things.” She checked her watch. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and change.”
“Going somewhere nice?” Paige asked politely, and Sofie laughed.
“Probably somewhere that involves rodents,” she said, “or garbage cans. It’s a full moon,” she explained, and Paige felt her face heat up. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. I did.” She hesitated, then indicated the closed door Paige seemed to be guarding. “Is Jamie… will he be all right?”
Paige closed her eyes and the sharp, desperate scent of blood came back to her.
“He will be,” she said, and Sofie gave her a smile, and left.
Paige slipped back inside the room. Like everywhere in Rafa’s house, it was heavily shuttered against outside light. Darkness blanketed the room, but Paige found her eyes adjusting easily. There were bags of blood on the nightstand, and she tore into one before she approached the bed.
Jamie’s arm had been stitched and bandaged, and the blood had been bathed away, but even so, she didn’t want any temptations. The horror story Masika had told her about Rafa’s transition still resonated in her brain.
Discarding the empty bag, she looked over to see Jamie watching her, peering through the darkness.
“Did I wake you?”
He shook his head and reached out to switch the light on.
“Don’t move. You need to rest.”
“I’m okay.”
Paige turned the bedside lamp to a low glow, and glared at Jamie. “No, you’re not. You got bitten by a demon and a vampire, you lost a lot of blood, and you scared the life out of me.” She considered this. “Well, the unlife, anyway.”
He gave her a tired smile. “I got angry. I’m sorry.”
Paige shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re apologizing to me.”
“Well, I said some stupid things, and did some --”
She put her hand over his mouth. “You don’t need to apologize at all,” she said. “I’m the one who went crazy and… well, you know what I did.”
Jamie swallowed. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I do.”
Rafa’s room was also blanketed in darkness, but when the door opened he didn’t even offer to put the light on. He could see perfectly clearly, and he knew his visitor could too. She was one of the few vampires around who was older and stronger than he was.
Which made her one of the few who could kill him.
He sighed, and pulled the sheet down to expose his chest. “Come to stake me? Make it quick. I’d like to be buried in the sun, if you’ll pass the message on.”
Masika rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to stake you,” she said, and then added, “Well, probably not, anyway.”
“Beheading then, is it? I’d be obliged if you didn’t try to burn me. There’s a lot of highly flammable stuff in this house, and it’d be a real shame if --”
“Shut up, Rafa,” Masika said, and to his own surprise, he obeyed. “I haven’t come here to kill you. I just want to talk.”
“About?” he asked suspiciously.
“About the fledgling and the human next door,” Masika said. “About this afternoon’s little display. About this.” She pointed to the scars on her face. “About Caleb.”
“So, nothing much then?”
“I need you to be serious.”
“I am serious. Caleb was nothing much.” Rafa gave a half-smile. “And now he’s nothing more than a smear on the pages of history. Quite literally, actually -- if you go to this little temple in Istanbul, there’s a stain on the floor that --”
“ -- is all that remains of a sadistic torturer who succeeded in twisting you up so badly that fifteen hundred years later you still can’t function normally,” Masika said.
There was silence, broken only by the pointless beat of Masika’s heart. Rafa wondered why she bothered. After all, she didn’t need a heart any more than he did.
Eventually he sighed and sat up, leaning back against the carved headboard. The healing wound on his abdomen ached like a mother. He ignored it. “What do you really want?” he asked, and she came forward to lean against the bedpost.
“I had a little talk with Paige today,” she said. “I like her, Rafa. She’s a nice girl.”
“Yes,” he said cautiously, not sure where this was going. “She is.”
“But she’s going through a lot right now. Three days ago she didn’t even think vampires existed, and now everything’s turned on its head. She doesn’t have any control over her own wants and needs.”
Rafa snorted. “I know how that song goes.”
“But the difference is that she actually has a sire who can help her,” Masika said.
“Can I? Can I really? Look at me, for fuck’s sake. I’m the one who bloody killed her.”
“And you’re the one who saved her. If you really were a monster, you’d have just let her die. And you wouldn’t have taken the time to explain anything to her last night.”
Rafa scowled.
“Look. You had the worst possible sire. Caleb was a psychopath, we all know that. And what he did to you was even worse, considering he knew you were his Childe and you’d be damaged badly enough to last an unlifetime. I, of all people, know what you can survive when you’re a Childe,” she said, and Rafa tried not to look at the scars that dribbled down her face, neck, and arm.
“Survive, or endure?” he asked quietly.
“Sometimes there’s not very much difference.”
There was another pause.
“She doesn’t know she’s your Childe,” Masika said, “does she?”
Rafa was still. He hadn’t even been really sure. The overwhelming surge of emotions he felt whenever he e
ven thought of Paige was so complex it was hard to figure out what stemmed from ordinary, everyday lust, what was a product of Caleb’s masterful perversions, and what was honest love.
He cleared his throat. “Probably best if she doesn’t find out,” he said.
“What, like me, you mean? Two and a half thousand years of wandering in a metaphorical desert because no one ever told me why I had so much power, or how to use it? I was the pack whore, just like you, just like all the other fledglings who’ll do anything for protection and companionship. Only difference is, if someone fucks them too hard, if anyone drains their blood or lets them starve, they die. We didn’t.” She gave a humorless laugh. “You know, it’s amazing I’m sane.”
“Well, you’re a damn sight saner than I am, and I always knew what I was,” Rafa snapped.
“Just because Caleb was a psycho doesn’t mean you have to be,” Masika snapped back. “And it doesn’t mean Paige has to be, either. You can’t go on passing down the… the hate, Rafa, the fear, the madness. It has to stop somewhere.”
Suddenly -- so suddenly he’d have sworn it had just popped into existence -- there was a stake in her hand.
“It stops here,” she said. “Because if you don’t treat Paige the way a Childe should be treated, then I damn well will stake you.”
Everything was still for a moment, the entire world crystallizing as Rafa looked at Masika and saw the truth in her eyes. She’d do it. She’d killed her own sire. She killed vampires for a living.
In her eyes were eight-hundred more years of living under an uncaring Master; eight-hundred more years of pain and confusion. She’d been ancient before Rafa’s human body had even been born. In her eyes he saw the desert, the vast, ever-changing desert where he’d found Paige. He saw the sun and the sand and the unceasing cruelty of it all.
And he saw the pain.
“You’re a real bitch, you know that?” he said.
Her face didn’t change. “So I’ve been told.”
Yes, there it was. Pain, because her Master had treated Masika with the same criminal negligence Caleb had inflicted upon Rafa. So a Master couldn’t physically hurt his Childe, even indirectly. Caleb had been a master of many kinds of torture.
“How do you teach someone what you’ve never been taught?” he asked, and the stake was lowered a tiny fraction.
“You learn,” she said. “And you learn really fast.”
Rafa watched her impassive face, and thought about what Sofie had told him when she came to Rome: that she’d investigated the murder in Prague of Masika’s Childe. It had been a hell of a shock to Rafa to learn Masika had a Childe at all, a young woman with terminal cancer who Masika had bitten as an act of mercy.
Masika hadn’t learned fast enough.
“Do me a favor?” he said, as she pocketed the stake.
“What, apart from not killing you?”
“Paige is an Egyptologist,” Rafa said, and Masika groaned. “That’s where she was when I -- met her. If you could…”
“Do I have to? I hate all those boring academic questions, politics and what we ate for breakfast and whether Imhotep was real.”
“Fine, don’t,” Rafa said. “I’ll let her intellectual studies fall by the wayside. It’s okay. I mean, I’m sure she’s not remotely anxious to get back out there, in the sun, digging up pottery fragments. Won’t be pining for it at all. Isn’t likely to risk doing something stupid --”
“All right, all right,” Masika held up her hands. “Sheesh. You’re a real bastard, you know that?”
Rafa grinned. “So I’ve been told.”
Chapter Seven
Paige stared.
“So, er,” Jamie said. He looked decidedly pink. “It’s, er. I can’t really be all that, you know, mad at you. Since I really -- well, I know personally how, um… how it is when you get… bitten.”
She stared some more.
“I mean, it’s not as if I wanted to. I’m not, you know. I don’t like other men. I mean, look, I’ve been mad about you for as long as I can remember. And you know -- I mean, you and I, the other night…”
Paige blinked.
“For God’s sake, stop staring at me,” Jamie snapped. His fingers were mangling the edge of the bandage on his arm. “It’s embarrassing enough as it is.”
She covered her mouth with her hand.
“And now you’re laughing.” Jamie glowered at his arm and picked up the pace of the mangling.
“Oh come on, it’s kind of funny,” Paige said. She climbed onto the bed and curled up beside him.
“Is it? Yeah, I think it’s fucking hilarious.”
“Jamie.” She laid a hand on his upper arm, noting with some appreciation how nicely formed it was. In fact, lying there wearing nothing but a sheet riding low on his hips, pretty much all of him was nicely formed. “It doesn’t make you any less of a man.”
He glared at her.
“In fact it’s very twenty-first century of you. Very, what’s the word? Metrosexual.”
“I am not metrosexual. What the hell does that even mean?”
Hiding a smile, Paige said, “Stop picking at that bandage.”
“I can pick if I want to.”
“Right, and then it’ll start bleeding all over again, and Rafa will smell it and come rushing in here and fuck you silly.”
Jamie’s hand moved so fast it blurred. Paige swallowed her laughter. Her fingers explored the muscles in his shoulder. “When did you get so buff?”
“I’ve been training with Sofie.”
“The werewolf? Is she really a werewolf?”
Jamie cracked a small smile. “So much you don’t know. Today I was off fighting demons.”
“So I hear. Is that what cut you?” He nodded, and she gently stroked his bandaged arm. “There was blood all over you.”
She knew. She’d washed it off.
“Most of it wasn’t mine. Well,” he glowered at the bedclothes, “not to begin with.”
“I guess a lot of it was Rafa’s? That’s why he bit you then, because he needed blood.”
“And he was angry.”
“Because you were trying to kill him?”
Jamie shrugged.
“So you didn’t want him to bite you?”
His expression could have boiled water.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Jamie,” she said, idly stroking his chest. Damn, he really was buff. “He bit you and you liked it. Hell, he bit me and I liked it. It’s just a normal reaction.”
He was still sulking, so she teased, “It doesn’t mean you’re gay or anything.”
“I am not gay.”
“Of course not,” she soothed. “And it wouldn’t matter to me if you were. I’d still love you anyway.”
“But I’m not gay.”
“I’m not judging you. It’s perfectly normal. After all, Rafa’s a very powerful, attractive man.” She ran her fingers around one nipple without really thinking about it. “Very strong, great body, handsome man, with those great pecs,” she stroked Jamie’s, “and his washboard abs,” she let her hand fall down the muscles of his stomach, toward the sheet which was covering his lap, “and his really big --”
“Would a gay man do this?” Jamie grabbed her suddenly, and kissed her so hard she couldn’t breathe.
Hot damn, how had she known Jamie all this time and never known how well he could kiss? He was a bloody genius. Admittedly, she was already turned on just a bit by his hot naked body, especially now that he was pulling her against it. She straddled him eagerly, feeling the push of his cock against the sheet and wishing she wasn’t wearing so much.
Gasping, that handsome chest of his rising and falling, Jamie let her go, and Paige realized that she hadn’t been breathing while he kissed her.
His blue eyes met hers, sparkling blue, and she swallowed and said, “I think I might need a little more, uh, convincing.”
He gave a half grin, and obliged, kissing her again with great enthusiasm. His hands s
wept the length of her back, pressing her body against his. Damn, he felt good, so hot and hard and right, just like he had that first time.
“You --” she tore herself away from his delicious mouth, “you should be resting.”
Jamie gave her a wicked grin. “Well, I am lying down,” he said. “And besides, I have my manhood to prove.”
“Honey, I’ve already felt its proof,” Paige said, but Jamie was already kissing her neck, making her shiver. Her nipples puckered, tingling where her t-shirt brushed against them, and she moved back to tear the offending item off.
“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in these,” she said, arching her back so her breasts stood out, nipples tight and aching.
“Yes,” Jamie said, pulling her toward him and murmuring a muffled, “Hell yes,” against one breast.
* * *
Rafa lay back with his hands behind his head and wished he didn’t have such excellent hearing.
Through the wall he heard the murmur of conversation being quickly replaced with the gasps and whispers of passion. The mattress in Jamie’s room rattled. The headboard shook.
Rafa’s cock throbbed.
He leapt out of bed and stalked over to the fridge for some blood, but one bag wasn’t enough and neither was two, and that was all he had left after force-feeding Paige last night.
Mustn’t bite them, mustn’t bite them.
But he really needed the release. Bringing himself off just wouldn’t be the same. By the sounds of it, Jamie and Paige were having a whale of a time and probably wouldn’t even notice if he sneaked in and stole some of her blood. After all, he’d seen Masika carrying a large cooler of the stuff up for her.
Through the wall, Paige moaned and Jamie laughed, low and deep. Rafa shuddered. Okay, what he really wanted was to go in there and fuck them both silly, but he doubted they’d let him.
But he did need that blood.
Stepping into a pair of sweatpants, grimacing as the fabric brushed his aching cock, Rafa moved silently from his room and pushed open the next door.
And froze.
Jamie lay back on the bed, head thrown back and eyes closed in ecstasy as Paige rode him, her body gleaming in the low light, her hair a long shining curtain down her back, her breasts bouncing as she slid up and down on Jamie’s cock.