by A. J. Aalto
“G'night, Snickerdoodle.”
“How can a man with your sex drive say no to a chick in her underpants?”
“Because she's a crazy drunk chick in her…” He cocked his head to one side, frowning to make out the print. “Are those frogs on your panties?”
“Dude, be a pal.”
“Integrity, babe. Ask me again when you're sober. And remind me to bring a marker, so I can draw fangs on those frogs.”
I moaned in his direction. “I've had a shitty, shitty week and I need you to do me something fierce.”
He pretended to consider this, but even through the fog of booze I could tell he had no intention of losing the pants. “Fierce, huh?”
“Like, two-badgers-in-a-cardboard-box fierce.”
“That sounds messy and weird.”
“Sex with me is always messy and weird. Wait, that's not sexy. Pretend I said something sexy.”
“At this point I don't think that's possible. You need to sleep.” Batten retreated to the door and put his hand on the knob, indicated the bar lock. “Lock this behind me.”
“You and your stupid pink pansy heart.”
“Lock it,” he insisted. With a broad grin full of meaning, he left the room, and I promptly passed out.
CHAPTER 43
I WOKE UP ALONE, just the way I like it, sprawled out naked in the sweaty sheets like a happy tramp. It took me a minute or two of fuzzy blinking before I remembered my attempt to drunkenly seduce Hotass Batten. Burying my face in my pillow and calling myself every synonym for nitwit I knew did not help. Maybe I wouldn't have to see him for a while. Maybe I'd ride back home in Declan's car. Maybe I'd die in the shower and never have to face either one of them. Naked and sweaty, good. Writhing in mortified shame, bad.
I dragged myself to the bathroom to find my toiletries bag. Adding a couple extra Tylenol to my now-daily dose, I showered, thrice-brushed my teeth and whiskey-pickled tongue, and dressed warm, throwing a cardigan over my shoulders. The room was humid and hot but I was shivering. Whatever my nagging flu bug was, it hadn't abated with Harry's feeding or Wesley's forced drinking-from-Shield-through-IV-tube business. It also wasn't helped by a roaring hangover.
I schlepped to the motel manager's office, held my breath against the eye-stinging stench of ammonia, and grabbed some vague imitation of breakfast to take back to my room: a plastic-wrapped atrocity reheated in a sauce-splattered microwave and a rock-hard brownie dense enough to double as a doorstop. With the prospect of eating, my headache began to fade enough for me to marvel at the high-class accommodations the PCU had sprung for; this place was almost as swanky as the dump in Cheektowaga where Batten and I had first discovered our unfortunate addiction to hate-fucking the holy shit out of each other.
After guzzling half a gallon of tap water in the bathroom, I wondered if I should go back to sleep for another hour, but before I could choose sleep over forcing my breakfast down my throat, a knock on the door squashed that plan.
I whipped the motel room door open immediately upon Batten's insistent rap, which made him scowl, fist in mid-air.
“Oh God, it's you,” I groaned.
“Thought I told you to check before opening,” he scolded. “Good news is, I'm not a psycho.”
I gave him my primo deadpan. “Are you sure?”
“Bad news is—”
“You're here, that's bad enough.”
He cast a speculative eye around the room. “Take it you're hungover. Thought your new drinking buddy would be here.”
“Oh no,” I warned. “Irish tried to kill me with booze and fun. It's a death match between us. Put that on your thumb and suck it.”
“Come on,” Batten said, “the man taught you sea shanties. You bonded. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.”
“It was whiskey, and I'll never be able to smell whiskey again.” I offered up the soggy fresh-from-the-vending-machine food in my hand. “Breakfast taco? Full of scrambled-egg-and-bacon-y goodness, if by ‘goodness’ you mean ‘barely edible, from-powdered sludge’.”
“Pass.”
“It's got a cheese-like substance!” When he didn't take it from me, I offered, “Ten-week-old brownie?”
“How do you eat that shit and stay thin?”
“Good genes, Hood's demented Richard Simmons routine, and fueling Harry's metabolism,” I explained. “I think the Blue Sense might burn some extra calories, too.”
Batten nodded quietly. “Got something to show you.”
Score! my privates rejoiced, before common sense stepped in to remind me how slim my chances were, especially with Dr. Edgar due any minute and me looking like death warmed-over. Except when I closed the door behind him, his hand went for his zipper. My eyes must have bulged, because his lips curved into a smirk chock full of ego.
“Relax, Baranuik, I'm not whipping it out.”
I swallowed hard. “Could have fooled me.”
“You said you wanted to see it.”
I blinked. What the fuck do I say? Other than, yes please?
“My injury,” he said helpfully.
“Oh.” More than a little disappointed, I nodded. “Of course.”
He eyeballed the doorknob pointedly. “Guess you should lock that.”
I did so, and while my back was turned I heard the distinct shuffle of Batten taking off his jeans. Have mercy. Thinking I'd chew off my own arm to get just one more glimpse of him naked in this lifetime, I waited a beat to allow space for him to comply.
When I turned around, he was sitting on the end of the bed in a white button-down shirt and black boxer briefs; what stopped my heart were his powerful, tanned legs, muscles hard and cut from chasing monsters. I pictured him in action in Panama, and of course my imagination insisted that he did this sort of thing buck-ass naked. I forgot I had feet to work; the left foot rolled over on itself. My breakfast flopped from my hands.
We stared in unison at the mess on the rug.
“You owe me half a taco,” I told him.
“Nice to know I still have an effect on you when you're sober.”
“It's not you. I'm naturally spazzy. And I may not be entirely sober yet. What time is it?”
He wasn't buying it.
“I don't see any injury.” Or imperfection. At all. His body, at least from the waist down, was as soul-crushing and lust-inflaming as I remembered. I pretended I didn't notice the promising bulge in his underwear; my knees wobbled and my girly parts wept for him, but my eyes behaved. Mostly.
“The scar's not easily seen,” he said. Then, to my surprise, he looked bashful. “There a stereo in here?”
“You want mood music?” I joked, then realized that's exactly what he needed; acoustic distraction. It was too quiet in the room, and the silence was awkward.
I hit the switch on the clock radio, and Right Said Fred's “I'm Too Sexy” blared tinnily at us. I gave Batten a full, feral grin, “Work it, baby, that's what mama's talkin’ about.”
He scowled at me, making desperate “change the station” hand gestures.
Led Zeppelin's “Kashmir” seemed a lot less ridiculous. I don't know if I'd have pegged him as a classic rock guy, but he relaxed visibly and caught my eye.
“You looking or not?”
“I'm gonna look! I'm looking!”
“Then look already, I'm not sitting half-naked on this bed all fucking day.” He parted his thighs, and began to pull the tight fabric of his boxer briefs up, exposing slightly paler thigh. I had to remind myself to breathe.
“I find your trust in me very flattering,” I sighed, going to my knees between his. “Wildly misplaced, but flattering.”
“You can put your tongue back in your mouth,” he said. I actually touched my mouth to check before realizing he was teasing.
“Smug prick,” I whispered at him, wishing my cheeks weren't quite so hot, blaming the flu so I wouldn't feel embarrassed.
However, when the scar came into view, I completely forgot the substantial temptation of Batten's man
ly bits. I slipped my gloves off and tucked them in the back pockets of my jeans, freeing up my bare hands to tentatively inspect the scar. Atop the femoral artery was an ugly gallery of knotted tissue, red and terrible, savage even after all these years. Someone who fed a revenant regularly would not show marks like that; the subtle nature of a partner's feed and the healing power of revenant company would prevent such injuries. It was the casual bleeders and victims of attacks who held onto their wounds like fresh reminders.
My breath hissed out of me in a sad stream and I tried to imagine this was a patient's leg, an anonymous leg, a stranger's leg that I didn't want to kiss and make better. “These are some gnarly fang scars,” I diagnosed clinically, though detachment was the last thing I was feeling. “Big. An old revenant.”
“Ancient. Our intel said two thousand, but we were way off.”
Two thousand years of power facing off against one very mortal Mark Batten. Dark Lady defend us. My heart constricted painfully and I was tempted to change the subject, as if by denying that it ever happened, I could go back in time and protect him from it. But Batten had opened a little door, here, allowed me a peek into one of his painful corners, introducing me to the cold, hard facts of his past. If I shied away now, would he ever trust me to glimpse anything else?
“We should have brought fire,” he mused aloud; I didn't think he intended to say it, or for me to hear it. He said it with regretful surrender, like he was talking to a ghost, seeming to look through the dingy motel wall. I became aware that my palm was sweating against the warm, tight skin of his inner thigh, but I didn't want to move it and break him from his trance.
“Stakes and holy water. Big mistake. Should have kept the team outside and just torched the whole den. We should never have gone inside with it.”
I stared at the scar so I wouldn't have to look up at the pain in his freshwater-blue eyes; I heard it in his voice and knew he wouldn't want me to see it.
“How did he force his way to your groin? Mind control?”
“You assume it was forced?”
“Tearing isn't a sign of a passive event. This isn't the first unwilling feed I've seen.”
He yanked the briefs back into place. “Think you know everything.”
“If you want a second opinion, the expert and I are on the same-name basis.” I shrugged in an attempt to ease our mood back to casual. “Why don't you tell me how it went down?”
“Nah,” he said.
“Pussy,” I said, only because I knew he could take it; if I got all soft and squishy on him now, Batten would bolt. “What happened, Kill-Notch? Bad take-down? Was he awake or something?”
“Fuck you.”
“You know you can only handle the sleepers.”
The spread of his smile was slow, tinged with unspoken appreciation. “Fuck. You.”
“Did he have a name? Was he a mark, or a random encounter?”
“A mark,” he said, leaning back on his palms. The bed's old frame squealed unhappily. He motioned for me to hand him his jeans so he could redress, and I reluctantly obliged. As he crammed his legs into them, he said, “Jack got a line on an old one, Aston Sarokhanian. Lair was north of the border, near your old stomping grounds.”
“Niagara?”
“Near the lake. Municipal beach. At night, we could see the lights of Toronto across the water.”
I nodded, knowing exactly which beach he was talking about. My sister Claire lived in Port Weller by the Welland Canal, walking distance from that spot. I wondered which house it was.
“Had the thing's daytime resting place. Had back-up. It was…” His lips screwed momentarily, a hard twist of emotion, and my breath hitched, but he controlled it. “Flawless execution. Or it would've been, if the thing hadn't been expecting us. Precognitive, probably knew weeks before we did that we were coming.”
“How many?” I asked quietly.
“Killed ten men, took Jack, then me. But it didn't want to do us quick, got its fill of clean kills. Fucking thing wanted to play.” He shrugged, like it meant nothing. I nodded as though it were just business, as if he wasn't talking about the infamous Colonel Jack Batten, his grandfather, the only family he'd ever known, the original owner of all those old green glass Brut bottles in his kill kit.
“But you made it out,” I prompted, wondering if Jack had, if Mark was confiding in me the circumstances surrounding Colonel Batten's disappearance or death. The prospect of being let into this area of Batten's life, just a little, was enough to make my heart shudder, and I didn't dare push.
One of his hands went up to rub his chin, as though checking if he'd missed a spot shaving, rubbing and pulling. I waited to see if he'd continue, taking my cue from him. As the radio shifted over to the Doors’ “Riders on The Storm”, Batten did up his belt, hands fumbling a bit. His eyes clouded. I let him off the hook.
“It seems to have healed up all right,” I noted. “You didn't contract crypt plague, I'm guessing.”
“Yersinia sanguinaria,” he tossed out, with an inquiring lift of his brow. I gave him the reward of a nod.
“Nice,” I told him. “No long term disability. Didn't fuck up any nerves?”
“Nerves are fine,” he said, and met my gaze. He held it for what felt like forever, but was probably less than a minute. An intense minute, during which I'm not sure I breathed. Then he repeated, “Nerves are fine. Everything's just fine.”
“Better than fine, if memory serves,” I offered, and received the quirk of a smile. “Thank you, Mark.”
“For?”
“Sharing.” I stood, backing away to give him space to flee the room if he felt the need, moving away from the door to give him the option. “Guess I owe you, now.”
“How so?”
“You answered my question. You didn't have to. If you ever wanted a favor from me, I guess I'd have to oblige.”
His eyebrow and one corner of his mouth quirked upward. “Think I'll take you up on that.”
“Whenever you're ready.”
“How about now?”
“Wow.” I cleared my throat. “Take some time, think it over, don't waste your favor.”
“I don't like your nickname for me.”
“What's wrong with Jerkface?”
“The other one.”
“Hard-ass? Kill-Notch? Shitdick? Uberdouche? Fucktard?”
“They're all awful.”
“What are you saying?”
“Snickerdoodle is a cute nickname,” he said; I marveled at how soft his voice had become, tentative. My belly trembled. Sharing and cuteness? Oh boy. I was in trouble.
“You're not adorable enough to warrant a cute nickname.”
“I'm not adorable?” The smile that reached his eyes said he knew better. “At all?”
“Not even remotely.” Too harsh? I compensated with, “You're a hunk.”
“Guess I'll have to be satisfied with the fact that you have no warm and squishy feelings in that hard heart for me.” He sniffed, mock indignant.
“Awww, Hunkypants, don't be like that.”
Batten laughed with bright surprise and made a grab for me that I sidestepped. “Hunkypants?”
I felt a lopsided smile growing on my lips. “Better?”
“Much better.”
I checked my watch, then ducked past him to fix my face with some make up in the mirror above a plywood-and-veneer bureau that was probably older than me.
“Of course, it'll have to be your secret nickname,” I said, reaching for my brush and pinching a hair elastic between my teeth. I flipped my hair back into a tail, gave it a twist and tucked it, forcing it into a messy blonde bun. “Heaven forbid Chapel and the PCU team hear me calling you Hunkypants.”
“As I believe we've established…” His smile was entirely too smug. “I like my dirty little secrets.”
I swallowed hard and blushed at him in the mirror. “Oh. Yeah. Say, about last night…”
I didn't have any idea what to say; I'd thrown myself at hi
m like a hussy and he'd declined like a gentleman, which was not what I would have expected. He seemed perfectly content now to wait quietly while I struggled, though his brow furrowed like he was trying to read my mind. When I wasn't able to put my thoughts into words, I dug for some lipstick and started applying it like it could shield me from embarrassment.
“So, when are we going to hunt the zombie-vamp?” he asked.
“When you lend me your balls,” I said, trying not to poke my eye out with my mascara wand.
“There you go, bringing up my junk again.”
“I meant, lend me your — what did Harry call it? Oh, right — testicular fortitude. Not your actual cojones, however nice they may be.” I took a moment to remember them fondly, then smiled at myself in the mirror and continued sweeping my lashes into pretty curls.
Batten folded his big arms over his chest. “I think you're obsessed with my balls.”
“Tell yourself whatever you need to, to make it through the night. Or the shower. Or the commute to work.” I slammed my mascara closed and chucked it in my toiletries bag, giving him a casual shrug. “Far be it from me to presume when it is you're fantasizing about tea-bagging me.”
“According to Drunk Marnie, you need me something fierce.”
I turned to face him. “Uh, according to back-in-my-bathroom Mark, you ‘can't give a man that kind of heat and expect him to forget it’.”
“And I haven't.”
“Neither have I,” I retorted; it really didn't help my argument.
Batten smirked. “I'd do you right now, if your lips would stop flapping.”
“I'd do you right now, if common sense didn't tell me you're a dickhead.”
“Who are you kidding? You have no common sense.”
“I do when I'm sober! Look at me common-sensing right now.” I struggled not to smile back at him but he was starting to make me throb, and from the look in his eyes he knew it too. “You're a bad man, Mark Batten. I have people skills, not bad man skills, dammit.”
Batten's shrewd smile tilted towards vulpine and my nipples hardened inside my bra. “If I was a nice boy, you'd get bored.” He took an insistent stride forward, that broad expanse of chest taking up a lot of space in front of me. If I wanted to, I could bite into a hard pectoral from where I stood. When I didn't retreat, he chanced one more half-step into my personal space. “I think you prefer me honest.”