Blood of the Dead, page 11
A panicked “Jack!” echoed back from up ahead, and it was like hearing a gunshot at the starting line.
I leapt on the nearest Rojo and fought like a caged animal.
I knew I’d be high on my anger and despair, but what I hadn’t factored into the equation was the current depths of my hunger. It wasn’t picky, and it wanted a little carnage, as a treat. So when I broke and ripped off one Rojo’s arm and proceeded to stab another with the pinkish-white exposed bone through his chest, before both dusted, it felt entirely natural to me. I snarled, half feral, giving into all the hidden and dark parts inside of myself, letting them run amok. I grabbed a Rojo’s neck and hauled him forward to bite through a part of his skull then spit it out like a bad piece of apple, before he could turn into ash on my tongue. I disemboweled another with a rake of my hand, not even once wondering if I should stop, or if it was wrong—before I dove in again to wrap my hand around his spine and break it.
They did fight back, and all the while they were raining blows on me, but it was like either I couldn’t feel them or they weren’t trying very hard. But long-term common sense didn’t matter when you were fighting like this—everything was narrowed down to the next move, the next opportunity for violence, the next bloody, dusty glory.
And then I was standing alone, my chest heaving, breathing in all sorts of the detritus of my kind—me and some blindfolded, naked girl who was spreadeagled out on some sort of fuck-table contraption, locked at wrist, waist, and ankles on a slowly spinning X. If she’d been vertical, I’d assume she’d been called on stage to participate in a “hold this balloon while I spin the wheel” knife-throwing routine.
As it was, she was entirely helpless and all the horrible parts of myself that I’d just set free were noticing.
I took a lurching step toward her before I stopped myself, more to wipe my own blood off of my face than out of any sense of propriety, then I heard Luna shouting again.
“Jack!”
I quickly scanned the remnants of the Rojo on the floor, kicking through their clothes and belongings, sending up billowing clouds of dust, until I heard a set of keys, which I picked up and took with me, opening up a door that led further into the truck’s belly.
Chapter Twenty
Luna
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, the second I saw Jack coming through the door. “Whoever thought I’d be this fucking happy to see you?”
I teetered up to stand inside my cage.
I’d listened to the sounds of a fight over the generic rattle of the truck and road noise, and been scared half to death, with no idea what was going on. But I should’ve known that Jack would make it through all right. I didn’t know whether Jack was a bad penny, or a lucky one—all that mattered was he kept turning up for me.
“What the fuck is Hellraiser shit?” he asked, walking up and taking in the jail I was confined in.
“I don’t know, but I can’t get out.” I put my hands up to the barrier and leaned into them, feeling like the worst’s worst mime.
“Is that . . . Camila?” he asked, leaning over and lifting his lips a little to breathe her in.
He seemed a little fascinated with the blood coming out of her—and I could tell he’d lost more since I’d seen him last, in the crash.
“She could be the pope for all I care—get me out of here!” I said, bashing my hands against the barrier, before groaning.
Whoever was driving the truck hadn’t slowed down, and they had to know Jack was back here—there was something ominous about that.
“Please, Jack,” I begged, slowly crouching.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he begged off, considering the mechanism the woman was still tied to. “I don’t want this to be like a magical bomb, you know? Where if I cut the wrong wire, one of us dies.”
Then I heard a police-style bullhorn saying, “Pull over!” from outside, and felt the truck obeying, apparently jumping a curb.
“The cops?” I asked, my voice going high.
“No. The Faithful,” he answered, and before I could say anything else, Jack raised his hand. “I didn’t have any other clues, okay? Other than Paco, who’s probably halfway home already.” He stood up and looked to me. “Get back.”
I took a step back, as far as I could go with the magic surrounding me—and Jack stomped a booted foot on the blood-accordion.
Even more blood inside the mechanism itself spattered out when he did so, it looked like he’d stepped on a full fist-sized leech and burst it.
And some of the blood got on me—because the barrier had disappeared.
“What happened to it ‘might be a bomb’?” I asked, hopping quickly over the blood moat.
“It’s been a long day. Even if it was, I just wanted it to be over.” He pitched a ring of keys at me and I caught it against my chest. “Let the woman in the other room out, will you?”
I nodded, and ran to do as I was told—as a fleet of Men-in-Black-looking-motherfuckers flooded into the truck bed wearing respirators, kicking up dead-vampire-dust. I squealed as a flashlight blinded me. “Turn that off! We’re on the same team!”
“A non-combatant and the target—” one of them announced, as another stormed up and ripped the keys away from me.
A woman in a white suit that I regretfully recognized stepped forward and gave me a disparaging look. “Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused lately?” Sam asked me, her voice muffled by the mask she had on.
“What? No!” I protested. “And also? Fuck you,” I snarled. The Faithful who’d taken the keys away from me was working them through the caged woman’s locks like a low-rent Houdini. “Where are we? Who took me—and why?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to answer that,” she said.
Jack was far too comfortable with dealing with the Faithful for my liking, probably because he wasn’t actually all that bad, something I knew about him by now, after living at his place the past week.
Then again, he had done all . . . this. There was enough vampire dust here for an entire elementary school’s sandbox. “Is vampire dust bad for you?” I asked aloud, crossing my arms to hold myself.
“No. I just don’t want dead vampire hanging out in my lungs,” Sam said, popping her mask off, striding into the other room with Jack. “What did I tell you?” She accosted him. “You look rough—even for the undead.”
“Is that shit safe to drink?” he asked. “And she was dead by the time I got here,” he added. “Bled to death to feed this thing.”
The Faithful beside me finally managed to free the woman off the table—the same girl who I’d seen earlier, now naked and blindfolded.
I would’ve liked to think that Jack was so eager so save me he couldn’t be bothered with her, but looking at him from afar, I thought I knew the truth—he didn’t trust himself around her.
Which was why he was contemplating guzzling the blood on the floor in the other chamber right now, like a drunk searching through bottles in the trash outside a liquor store.
“Don’t!” I shouted up to him. “They mentioned something about me being a sacrifice—and—” I began as both Sam and Jack turned to look at me—and it was as if what Jack had said earlier about bombs became true, summoned into being by his words.
I saw an engulfing ball of impossibly bright light working its way up the truck behind them, immolating everything in its path. I saw Camila go up in flames and started shrieking Jack’s name, even I turned and ran for the back of the truck, shoving out Faithful in suits and gas masks wholesale out the door. “Jack-Jack-Jack—RUN!”
Chapter Twenty-One
Jack
Any vampire who tells you they don’t miss the day is lying.
You can stave it off for a year or two, a decade, perhaps—but there’s going to come a point in time when you’re watching a movie, or looking at a magazine, and you see the sun crest over the edge of the earth and some vestigial part of your long-denied humanity rises up from the tar pit of your soul to say: Goddamn. I miss that.
I expect that a fair amount of them just choose to die right then and there.
I mean, you can see the sun again as a vampire—it’s just that it’ll be the last thing you ever do.
So I imagine that that’s it, for the ones that haven’t managed to fulfill themselves in some other craven way, who haven’t sated themselves with bloodlust or lust-lust or whatever else a person does to keep themselves occupied the second you realize that your days—well, the night part of your days—will be essentially unnumbered.
I hadn’t gotten there personally yet, I didn’t think—but when there was a sudden unexpected warm and comforting light all around me, as bright as the Texas noon-time sun after you’ve laid down on a lawn with the sprinklers running—a part of me that I could hear quite clearly was all:
Yes.
About fucking time.
* * *
Finally.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Luna
I landed barefoot in the dirt behind the truck, scrambled forward, and kept running, until a Faithful caught me—and I slugged him right in the balls.
“Don’t you—we—” I panted, then dared to look back because somehow I wasn’t already dead yet.
What remained of the truck was in a construction site—the bumps I’d felt earlier must’ve happened when the semi jumped a curb—but there was a huge piece of it, and everything else surrounding, that was missing. Like something had chosen a spot just past the truck’s cab and then circumscribed it for about twenty feet in every direction to disappear—half the truck was gone, although the part that remained was in a sloping curve, there was a divot of ground missing, and some of the lights the Faithful were shining showed floors of nearby construction that looked like a giant had taken a bite out of them.
“What the fuck,” I whispered, not really comprehending.
“Contain this area,” someone commanded from behind me—as a strong hand grabbed my upper arm, wheeled me around, and didn’t let go.
Paco. And if I ever thought Jack had been frightening before, I was wrong. He looked like a motherfucking storm cloud. “Where is he,” he demanded flatly, and when I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know, he whammied me. “Where is he!”
“I have no idea!” I said, throwing up my hands, half in protest, half to protect myself, before wrapping an arm around my chest to hold onto my creaking ribs.
That was clearly not an acceptable answer as he stared past me and I watched the pain of Jack’s mysterious absence—and let’s be honest, likely fucking death, after the explosion-thing I’d seen—finally hit him.
I shook myself free of his stunned grasp. “Oh? I’m sorry—did you fuck around and then find out?”
He refocused in on me and I prepared to withstand personal violence, but then he shoved me aside and ran into the center of the earthen divot and screamed.
It was heartrending, and it went on for so long I covered my ears to block out the sound, knowing that I’d hear it anyhow, that it was echoing in my soul already.
I couldn’t help it; I started crying.
A little bit for everything: I hurt, I was exhausted, for Paco’s current pain, and Jack . . . but mostly for myself.
Because I’d missed my only chance.
If Jack was dead . . . no one else would ever turn me.
It wasn’t fair.
But I don’t know what I fucking expected, right? Because Huntington’s “wasn’t fair” and working for Rosalie for almost a decade without being turned “wasn’t fair” and not getting to take Jack up on his genuine offer “wasn’t fair.”
If there was a Land of Unfairness somewhere out there, I was its fucking queen.
I slid my hands down to cover my face and sobbed as great big pellets of rain began to fall from the sky, like the world was crying with me, and that made everything even worse somehow as I choked on both snot and my own upcoming mortality.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I whispered into my palms, shuddering with each soft exclamation, unsure how things could get worse in this lifetime, while having an unerring certainty that—given my luck—somehow they would.
And then someone put something over me to block the rain out.
I took a moment to gather myself, still looking at the dirt between my toes as it turned to mud. There was no reason for me to rush to acknowledge their misplaced kindness: my new dress was torn, I was spattered with blood, some of the grime on my feet was almost certainly vampire dust, and I’d just cried so hard my eyeliner was probably decorating my cleavage.
So I waited until I was fucking good and ready before I finally glanced up—and found a rather concerned looking Nilesh, in the same suited getup as the rest of the Faithful, holding a black umbrella and looking down at me.
Watching me like I was something he’d caught on a table under a glass, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to kill or free it quite yet.
“Ni-lesh?” I said, stammering his name.
“Luna,” he said, nodding.
I finally managed to take in things beyond him. There were more Faithful in suits milling about, taping off perimeters and setting up tents and tables—I wasn’t sure if this’d just become a crime scene or an archaeological dig.
“What are you doing here?” I slowly asked him, still not fitting him in. “You’re—one of them?” I reared back a little, back into rain-range, then shuffled forward, remedying my mistake. “We—we fucked,” I said, quite loudly, within earshot of several of the others.
“We did,” he agreed. “But then you bailed and I never got the chance to talk to you.”
I frowned, and stepped away from him fully, raindrops-be-damned. “Talk to me about what?”
“About myself, and that thing you took from Rosalie’s,” he said, utterly calm and matter-of-fact. “The bone weapon—that was actually neither bone nor weapon, but a piece of an ancient creature’s feeding apparatus.”
“But—you—you’re a tattoo artist.” My face scrunched up. “I saw you work—I’ve seen your work on people! You—”
He spun a hand between us. “Can I show you my back already?” he asked, handing the umbrella over.
I took it, gawking, then watched him take off his suit jacket, and let him pass that over too.
“We knew that when Rosalie died there was going to be a power shift in the local paranormal communities—she was too influential for there not to be,” he said, taking off his tie, then beginning in on shirt buttons. “And we’d known that she’d had several objects of interest, for quite some time. Frankly, as dangerous as they were, they were better off with her than us,” he said, his hands sinking down his chest as they worked, revealing a thin cotton undershirt beneath. “As bad as her actions sometimes were, she kept a steady hand at the wheel. Smart enough to know not to get too greedy, while prideful enough to keep other contenders down. A true apex predator, in all senses of the word.”
His shirt was free from his slacks now, and he quickly unfastened his cuffs to remove it.
“So we weren’t really interested in disrupting the status quo—and if we’d taken her toys, we would’ve had to deal with them, which is oftentimes harder to do than it sounds. Some items are dangerous to destroy, and you can trap whatever you want in a lead casket and toss it out in the middle of the Atlantic ocean—a trawler will still dredge it up, if it wants to be found. So it was better that she watch over them, with her continual cunning vigilance.” He handed his linen shirt to me, and reached for his undershirt. “But once she died, all bets were off,” he said, finally showing me the chest I’d kissed not that long ago, his nipples hardening against the night’s chill—and then he turned around.
His broad back framed two strange markings that mirrored one another, that I realized were not tattoos.
Brands, possibly?
No.
Scars.
Like a person might have if they’d had their wings hacked off.
It took me a moment to absorb what he was showing me, and even then—
“I don’t believe you,” I said, as he turned back around.
He snorted and scanned everything that was being erected behind us. “Somehow, all of this, you’re fine with, but not some small faint proof of former divinity?”
I dropped the umbrella so I could slap him. “My mother died. Where the fuck was your God then?”
“I don’t know, Luna.” He cupped the skin I’d hit with his palm and nodded, considering me. “There’s a reason I’m stuck on Earth. I like to ask a lot of questions.”
I started shaking my head and didn’t stop, unwilling to accept any part of this new reality. “No. Absolutely not.” I threw his shirts at him, and pulled on his suit jacket to stay warm with—then I realized he didn’t start working at Dark Ink until I did.
And that when that first Faithful had gotten inside the truck he’d said he’d found the “target.”
He hadn’t meant Jack—he’d meant me.
“You just go around sleeping with girls to gain their trust?”
His eyes narrowed. “Someone has to. These putzes have too much honor,” he said, jerking his head back to where the Faithful were still scurrying. Rain beaded and then trailed down on his warm brown skin.
“But aren’t you . . . the baddie?”
“I’ve kind of wrapped around to the other side now. I think my thing is that I like fighting for the underdogs, and I don’t know if you noticed, evil’s kind of having a field day.” He didn’t look cold in the least as water sluiced off of his chiseled pecs. “Plus, also—live a few thousand years, and you see what you’re willing to do to pass the time.”
Me, apparently. I gave him the coldest smile in my arsenal. “So you’re saying you have met a lot of girls like me then, before,” I said, and then turned on my heel.
Behind me, Paco’d fallen to his knees and was sobbing on the mud in the divot’s deepest spot. He was covered in it—like he’d been scrabbling through it with his hands. I swept the umbrella up and walked over to him.
I leapt on the nearest Rojo and fought like a caged animal.
I knew I’d be high on my anger and despair, but what I hadn’t factored into the equation was the current depths of my hunger. It wasn’t picky, and it wanted a little carnage, as a treat. So when I broke and ripped off one Rojo’s arm and proceeded to stab another with the pinkish-white exposed bone through his chest, before both dusted, it felt entirely natural to me. I snarled, half feral, giving into all the hidden and dark parts inside of myself, letting them run amok. I grabbed a Rojo’s neck and hauled him forward to bite through a part of his skull then spit it out like a bad piece of apple, before he could turn into ash on my tongue. I disemboweled another with a rake of my hand, not even once wondering if I should stop, or if it was wrong—before I dove in again to wrap my hand around his spine and break it.
They did fight back, and all the while they were raining blows on me, but it was like either I couldn’t feel them or they weren’t trying very hard. But long-term common sense didn’t matter when you were fighting like this—everything was narrowed down to the next move, the next opportunity for violence, the next bloody, dusty glory.
And then I was standing alone, my chest heaving, breathing in all sorts of the detritus of my kind—me and some blindfolded, naked girl who was spreadeagled out on some sort of fuck-table contraption, locked at wrist, waist, and ankles on a slowly spinning X. If she’d been vertical, I’d assume she’d been called on stage to participate in a “hold this balloon while I spin the wheel” knife-throwing routine.
As it was, she was entirely helpless and all the horrible parts of myself that I’d just set free were noticing.
I took a lurching step toward her before I stopped myself, more to wipe my own blood off of my face than out of any sense of propriety, then I heard Luna shouting again.
“Jack!”
I quickly scanned the remnants of the Rojo on the floor, kicking through their clothes and belongings, sending up billowing clouds of dust, until I heard a set of keys, which I picked up and took with me, opening up a door that led further into the truck’s belly.
Chapter Twenty
Luna
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, the second I saw Jack coming through the door. “Whoever thought I’d be this fucking happy to see you?”
I teetered up to stand inside my cage.
I’d listened to the sounds of a fight over the generic rattle of the truck and road noise, and been scared half to death, with no idea what was going on. But I should’ve known that Jack would make it through all right. I didn’t know whether Jack was a bad penny, or a lucky one—all that mattered was he kept turning up for me.
“What the fuck is Hellraiser shit?” he asked, walking up and taking in the jail I was confined in.
“I don’t know, but I can’t get out.” I put my hands up to the barrier and leaned into them, feeling like the worst’s worst mime.
“Is that . . . Camila?” he asked, leaning over and lifting his lips a little to breathe her in.
He seemed a little fascinated with the blood coming out of her—and I could tell he’d lost more since I’d seen him last, in the crash.
“She could be the pope for all I care—get me out of here!” I said, bashing my hands against the barrier, before groaning.
Whoever was driving the truck hadn’t slowed down, and they had to know Jack was back here—there was something ominous about that.
“Please, Jack,” I begged, slowly crouching.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he begged off, considering the mechanism the woman was still tied to. “I don’t want this to be like a magical bomb, you know? Where if I cut the wrong wire, one of us dies.”
Then I heard a police-style bullhorn saying, “Pull over!” from outside, and felt the truck obeying, apparently jumping a curb.
“The cops?” I asked, my voice going high.
“No. The Faithful,” he answered, and before I could say anything else, Jack raised his hand. “I didn’t have any other clues, okay? Other than Paco, who’s probably halfway home already.” He stood up and looked to me. “Get back.”
I took a step back, as far as I could go with the magic surrounding me—and Jack stomped a booted foot on the blood-accordion.
Even more blood inside the mechanism itself spattered out when he did so, it looked like he’d stepped on a full fist-sized leech and burst it.
And some of the blood got on me—because the barrier had disappeared.
“What happened to it ‘might be a bomb’?” I asked, hopping quickly over the blood moat.
“It’s been a long day. Even if it was, I just wanted it to be over.” He pitched a ring of keys at me and I caught it against my chest. “Let the woman in the other room out, will you?”
I nodded, and ran to do as I was told—as a fleet of Men-in-Black-looking-motherfuckers flooded into the truck bed wearing respirators, kicking up dead-vampire-dust. I squealed as a flashlight blinded me. “Turn that off! We’re on the same team!”
“A non-combatant and the target—” one of them announced, as another stormed up and ripped the keys away from me.
A woman in a white suit that I regretfully recognized stepped forward and gave me a disparaging look. “Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused lately?” Sam asked me, her voice muffled by the mask she had on.
“What? No!” I protested. “And also? Fuck you,” I snarled. The Faithful who’d taken the keys away from me was working them through the caged woman’s locks like a low-rent Houdini. “Where are we? Who took me—and why?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to answer that,” she said.
Jack was far too comfortable with dealing with the Faithful for my liking, probably because he wasn’t actually all that bad, something I knew about him by now, after living at his place the past week.
Then again, he had done all . . . this. There was enough vampire dust here for an entire elementary school’s sandbox. “Is vampire dust bad for you?” I asked aloud, crossing my arms to hold myself.
“No. I just don’t want dead vampire hanging out in my lungs,” Sam said, popping her mask off, striding into the other room with Jack. “What did I tell you?” She accosted him. “You look rough—even for the undead.”
“Is that shit safe to drink?” he asked. “And she was dead by the time I got here,” he added. “Bled to death to feed this thing.”
The Faithful beside me finally managed to free the woman off the table—the same girl who I’d seen earlier, now naked and blindfolded.
I would’ve liked to think that Jack was so eager so save me he couldn’t be bothered with her, but looking at him from afar, I thought I knew the truth—he didn’t trust himself around her.
Which was why he was contemplating guzzling the blood on the floor in the other chamber right now, like a drunk searching through bottles in the trash outside a liquor store.
“Don’t!” I shouted up to him. “They mentioned something about me being a sacrifice—and—” I began as both Sam and Jack turned to look at me—and it was as if what Jack had said earlier about bombs became true, summoned into being by his words.
I saw an engulfing ball of impossibly bright light working its way up the truck behind them, immolating everything in its path. I saw Camila go up in flames and started shrieking Jack’s name, even I turned and ran for the back of the truck, shoving out Faithful in suits and gas masks wholesale out the door. “Jack-Jack-Jack—RUN!”
Chapter Twenty-One
Jack
Any vampire who tells you they don’t miss the day is lying.
You can stave it off for a year or two, a decade, perhaps—but there’s going to come a point in time when you’re watching a movie, or looking at a magazine, and you see the sun crest over the edge of the earth and some vestigial part of your long-denied humanity rises up from the tar pit of your soul to say: Goddamn. I miss that.
I expect that a fair amount of them just choose to die right then and there.
I mean, you can see the sun again as a vampire—it’s just that it’ll be the last thing you ever do.
So I imagine that that’s it, for the ones that haven’t managed to fulfill themselves in some other craven way, who haven’t sated themselves with bloodlust or lust-lust or whatever else a person does to keep themselves occupied the second you realize that your days—well, the night part of your days—will be essentially unnumbered.
I hadn’t gotten there personally yet, I didn’t think—but when there was a sudden unexpected warm and comforting light all around me, as bright as the Texas noon-time sun after you’ve laid down on a lawn with the sprinklers running—a part of me that I could hear quite clearly was all:
Yes.
About fucking time.
* * *
Finally.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Luna
I landed barefoot in the dirt behind the truck, scrambled forward, and kept running, until a Faithful caught me—and I slugged him right in the balls.
“Don’t you—we—” I panted, then dared to look back because somehow I wasn’t already dead yet.
What remained of the truck was in a construction site—the bumps I’d felt earlier must’ve happened when the semi jumped a curb—but there was a huge piece of it, and everything else surrounding, that was missing. Like something had chosen a spot just past the truck’s cab and then circumscribed it for about twenty feet in every direction to disappear—half the truck was gone, although the part that remained was in a sloping curve, there was a divot of ground missing, and some of the lights the Faithful were shining showed floors of nearby construction that looked like a giant had taken a bite out of them.
“What the fuck,” I whispered, not really comprehending.
“Contain this area,” someone commanded from behind me—as a strong hand grabbed my upper arm, wheeled me around, and didn’t let go.
Paco. And if I ever thought Jack had been frightening before, I was wrong. He looked like a motherfucking storm cloud. “Where is he,” he demanded flatly, and when I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know, he whammied me. “Where is he!”
“I have no idea!” I said, throwing up my hands, half in protest, half to protect myself, before wrapping an arm around my chest to hold onto my creaking ribs.
That was clearly not an acceptable answer as he stared past me and I watched the pain of Jack’s mysterious absence—and let’s be honest, likely fucking death, after the explosion-thing I’d seen—finally hit him.
I shook myself free of his stunned grasp. “Oh? I’m sorry—did you fuck around and then find out?”
He refocused in on me and I prepared to withstand personal violence, but then he shoved me aside and ran into the center of the earthen divot and screamed.
It was heartrending, and it went on for so long I covered my ears to block out the sound, knowing that I’d hear it anyhow, that it was echoing in my soul already.
I couldn’t help it; I started crying.
A little bit for everything: I hurt, I was exhausted, for Paco’s current pain, and Jack . . . but mostly for myself.
Because I’d missed my only chance.
If Jack was dead . . . no one else would ever turn me.
It wasn’t fair.
But I don’t know what I fucking expected, right? Because Huntington’s “wasn’t fair” and working for Rosalie for almost a decade without being turned “wasn’t fair” and not getting to take Jack up on his genuine offer “wasn’t fair.”
If there was a Land of Unfairness somewhere out there, I was its fucking queen.
I slid my hands down to cover my face and sobbed as great big pellets of rain began to fall from the sky, like the world was crying with me, and that made everything even worse somehow as I choked on both snot and my own upcoming mortality.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I whispered into my palms, shuddering with each soft exclamation, unsure how things could get worse in this lifetime, while having an unerring certainty that—given my luck—somehow they would.
And then someone put something over me to block the rain out.
I took a moment to gather myself, still looking at the dirt between my toes as it turned to mud. There was no reason for me to rush to acknowledge their misplaced kindness: my new dress was torn, I was spattered with blood, some of the grime on my feet was almost certainly vampire dust, and I’d just cried so hard my eyeliner was probably decorating my cleavage.
So I waited until I was fucking good and ready before I finally glanced up—and found a rather concerned looking Nilesh, in the same suited getup as the rest of the Faithful, holding a black umbrella and looking down at me.
Watching me like I was something he’d caught on a table under a glass, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to kill or free it quite yet.
“Ni-lesh?” I said, stammering his name.
“Luna,” he said, nodding.
I finally managed to take in things beyond him. There were more Faithful in suits milling about, taping off perimeters and setting up tents and tables—I wasn’t sure if this’d just become a crime scene or an archaeological dig.
“What are you doing here?” I slowly asked him, still not fitting him in. “You’re—one of them?” I reared back a little, back into rain-range, then shuffled forward, remedying my mistake. “We—we fucked,” I said, quite loudly, within earshot of several of the others.
“We did,” he agreed. “But then you bailed and I never got the chance to talk to you.”
I frowned, and stepped away from him fully, raindrops-be-damned. “Talk to me about what?”
“About myself, and that thing you took from Rosalie’s,” he said, utterly calm and matter-of-fact. “The bone weapon—that was actually neither bone nor weapon, but a piece of an ancient creature’s feeding apparatus.”
“But—you—you’re a tattoo artist.” My face scrunched up. “I saw you work—I’ve seen your work on people! You—”
He spun a hand between us. “Can I show you my back already?” he asked, handing the umbrella over.
I took it, gawking, then watched him take off his suit jacket, and let him pass that over too.
“We knew that when Rosalie died there was going to be a power shift in the local paranormal communities—she was too influential for there not to be,” he said, taking off his tie, then beginning in on shirt buttons. “And we’d known that she’d had several objects of interest, for quite some time. Frankly, as dangerous as they were, they were better off with her than us,” he said, his hands sinking down his chest as they worked, revealing a thin cotton undershirt beneath. “As bad as her actions sometimes were, she kept a steady hand at the wheel. Smart enough to know not to get too greedy, while prideful enough to keep other contenders down. A true apex predator, in all senses of the word.”
His shirt was free from his slacks now, and he quickly unfastened his cuffs to remove it.
“So we weren’t really interested in disrupting the status quo—and if we’d taken her toys, we would’ve had to deal with them, which is oftentimes harder to do than it sounds. Some items are dangerous to destroy, and you can trap whatever you want in a lead casket and toss it out in the middle of the Atlantic ocean—a trawler will still dredge it up, if it wants to be found. So it was better that she watch over them, with her continual cunning vigilance.” He handed his linen shirt to me, and reached for his undershirt. “But once she died, all bets were off,” he said, finally showing me the chest I’d kissed not that long ago, his nipples hardening against the night’s chill—and then he turned around.
His broad back framed two strange markings that mirrored one another, that I realized were not tattoos.
Brands, possibly?
No.
Scars.
Like a person might have if they’d had their wings hacked off.
It took me a moment to absorb what he was showing me, and even then—
“I don’t believe you,” I said, as he turned back around.
He snorted and scanned everything that was being erected behind us. “Somehow, all of this, you’re fine with, but not some small faint proof of former divinity?”
I dropped the umbrella so I could slap him. “My mother died. Where the fuck was your God then?”
“I don’t know, Luna.” He cupped the skin I’d hit with his palm and nodded, considering me. “There’s a reason I’m stuck on Earth. I like to ask a lot of questions.”
I started shaking my head and didn’t stop, unwilling to accept any part of this new reality. “No. Absolutely not.” I threw his shirts at him, and pulled on his suit jacket to stay warm with—then I realized he didn’t start working at Dark Ink until I did.
And that when that first Faithful had gotten inside the truck he’d said he’d found the “target.”
He hadn’t meant Jack—he’d meant me.
“You just go around sleeping with girls to gain their trust?”
His eyes narrowed. “Someone has to. These putzes have too much honor,” he said, jerking his head back to where the Faithful were still scurrying. Rain beaded and then trailed down on his warm brown skin.
“But aren’t you . . . the baddie?”
“I’ve kind of wrapped around to the other side now. I think my thing is that I like fighting for the underdogs, and I don’t know if you noticed, evil’s kind of having a field day.” He didn’t look cold in the least as water sluiced off of his chiseled pecs. “Plus, also—live a few thousand years, and you see what you’re willing to do to pass the time.”
Me, apparently. I gave him the coldest smile in my arsenal. “So you’re saying you have met a lot of girls like me then, before,” I said, and then turned on my heel.
Behind me, Paco’d fallen to his knees and was sobbing on the mud in the divot’s deepest spot. He was covered in it—like he’d been scrabbling through it with his hands. I swept the umbrella up and walked over to him.
