The Viper, page 19
None of it was clean, and as she lifted the tunic, the whiff of the prison camp lingered in the cloth like a stain.
Unable to bear the smell, she wrapped herself in the blanket and stood over what she had worn, wondering where she could find replacements. The fact that she had no options for something as basic as clothing was chilling, and she felt the pull to return to what she knew, the delusion that she could somehow hide herself amid the more structured arrangement of the new prison camp a tantalizing lie.
“You are a coward,” she said.
Riding that condemnation, she gathered everything she had to her name, and carried the small pile over to the door.
When she opened things, Kane was sitting on the couch at the foot of the bed. He had his head propped up on his fist, his elbow on the arm of the sofa, his body in a relaxed arrangement that belied the strength he had somehow gathered within his previously injured flesh.
He looked up. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She indicated the bathroom behind her. “They have soap and hot water.”
“That wolven is a good host.”
“He is.”
She glanced around and intended to make a comment. Instead, she fell silent.
“It’s after sunset,” he said. “The wolven is coming back here soon. That’s what he told us.”
“Then you should wait for him, yes.” Nadya held her clothes even tighter. “And I… well, I don’t know where I’m going, but you’re right. It can’t be back to the prison camp.”
He exhaled in obvious relief. “Oh, blessed Virgin Scribe. Listen, you can come to the wolven clan’s territory. Mayhem is still recovering there, and I’m sure they’ll give you a place to rest and—”
“They’re strangers who owe me nothing. I can’t impose on them.”
“Then where will you go.”
“I’ll figure something out.” As she dropped her stare, she could feel his frown as if it were a gust of dissatisfaction. “I can take care of myself, you know.”
“Nadya—”
“And you? Where will you go off to?”
As a wave of exhaustion crept up on her, she leaned against the doorjamb and thought back to the apple they’d shared sometime around dawn. She had to eat properly before she left—and then she realized that not only was she not very mobile, she had not been able to dematerialize since she’d been wounded.
Cursing herself, she detested the helplessness—
“When was the last time you fed?” Kane asked. Then he put up his hand. “Please… just answer the question. I don’t think either of us has the energy for any more arguments.”
* * *
As Kane waited to see if she was going to answer him, it took everything he had to stay where he was on the couch. Over in the bathroom doorway, Nadya was looking as though she was ill from fatigue, and as he imagined her setting off in the dark, alone, unarmed and unable to protect herself, his stomach turned.
Which was why he’d asked her the intimate question.
“I’ll eat before I go,” she said. “I was just thinking that very thing, actually—”
“I’m not talking about food,” he cut in darkly. “And I know you fed me back at the clinic.”
When she looked over sharply, he nodded. “You opened your vein with your own fangs and put your wrist over my mouth. The taste of you was the first thing that I remember that wasn’t pain. Come to think of it, it was the only thing that did not hurt me.”
She lowered her eyes to the bundle of clothes that she was holding tightly to her chest. “I did not know you were aware.”
“I’m only alive because you shared of yourself.” He cleared his throat. “So will you let me replenish you?”
“You already saved my life.” She fiddled with the blanket she’d wrapped around herself. “So your perceived debt to me has been repaid. We’re even now.”
“Well, if that’s the logic you want to use, you have to allow me to repay the gift of your vein, too. It is only fair, do you not agree?”
In truth, fairness was the last thing on his mind. He was just flailing around for any argument that would get her to agree to feed from him. Vampires had been designed by the Scribe Virgin to require the blood of the opposite sex to maintain optimal health. Feeding was not an every-night kind of thing, but it had to be done on a regular basis, and going by her obvious exhaustion, it had been a very long time for her. Also, he was worried about her lack of resources and contacts. Her parents were gone. That nurse who had been her mentor, too. She was all alone.
So if not him, who? Although… when he even hypothetically considered her at another male’s vein, that strange side of him, the one that had come to the fore when he’d been determined to rescue her, lit up with aggression.
To the point where he needed to get a hold of himself.
“Look, I would give you money,” he said grimly, “but I have none myself. I would ask you to stay with me, but I have no home. I have no clothes, no shoes, to offer you. The only thing I can present to you is what you yourself gave me—and please, don’t argue that you’re not my responsibility. That’s not the point.”
At least not from the way she saw things.
As she fell silent, he studied her, and when her scars and her baldness registered, he thought of how much he wasn’t aware of either. It wasn’t that he didn’t see her disfiguration and hated what it represented. It was that he saw through the damage.
Attraction was physical. Connection was soul to soul.
“I don’t like to rely on others,” she said softly. “I don’t like to be in debt.”
He frowned, wondering if there was something else she was worried about. And then he thought… well, of course: “It won’t be sexual. I promise you.”
She laughed in a short burst. “Oh, that I know. I would never think you’d… well, anyway.”
“I mean, you can trust me.”
“I’ve never doubted that either.” After a beat of quiet, she lowered the bundle of clothes she’d held against her heart. “It has been forty years.”
Kane blinked in confusion. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I haven’t fed since I was hurt.”
Shaking his head, he leaned forward. “But that isn’t possible.”
“It’s the truth. I’m very careful to conserve my energy, and besides, with my leg, I can’t move very well. Ever since the acid attack, I’ve been kind of suspended, neither living nor dead. A ghost that wanders among the living, I guess. So it makes sense that I wouldn’t require feeding.”
“You’re not a ghost.” He roughly yanked up the sleeve of the shirt he’d taken off that guard at the camp. “Come over here. Use me and help my conscience—be my salve, by taking my vein, so that I know, as we go our separate ways, you’re as strong as you can be.”
He laid his forearm along his thigh and just stared at her.
Forever passed in the silence between them.
And then she slowly approached and put her clothes down on the opposite side of the couch. “I’ll leave when it’s dark enough.”
Is that a “yes”? he wondered.
Except how was he going to leave her? They had spent so much time together back in her clinic, his suffering stretching the moments and minutes into years and decades. The idea that he would not see her after this, that she would go off, on her own, and he would never know how her life went, made him ache all over.
As Nadya sat down, he knew she was shaking, and he told himself to stay in the present.
This is a “yes,” he thought.
“I am just so tired,” she whispered.
“I can help.” He moved his bare forearm closer to her. “Take from me. It’ll make you feel better, I promise.”
The blanket shifted as she lowered her head, and he hated how frail she was, how thin her shoulders were, how hollow her collarbones.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I promise.”
What the hell was coming out of his mouth, he wondered as he extended his arm so that it was in her lap.
But she didn’t bite him.
With a tingle in his upper jaw, his fangs dropped down. It was clear he was going to have to get this going, and that was fine with him. Anything… for her.
Except just as he was going to score his own flesh, as she had done for him in her clinic, something hit the inside of his wrist, a droplet.
A tear.
“Oh, Nadya.”
“We’ll say goodbye after this.” Her voice was firm as she wiped her eyes like she was clearing her emotions away, too. “We go our separate ways.”
He cursed under his breath. “I don’t know why that’s so important to you—”
“Because I know what you’re going to do now.”
“Excuse me?”
She retucked the blanket a little tighter as she looked over at him. “I know what you’re going to do as soon as we’re finished. You’re going to go and find out who killed Cordelhia.”
A cold wash went throughout his body. Was it shock—or something else? “How, ah, how do you know about her?”
“You spoke of her in your delirium. So I’m very aware of what happened after you were drugged by that sherry… I know what you woke up to, and what happened next… I know everything you lost.”
Kane cleared his throat. “I wasn’t aware I was so verbal with all that.”
She nodded. “You told the story over and over again. It was as if your mind was churning over the events, trying to create another outcome from the fact pattern. I’ve done this myself so I know what it’s like, the obsessive rethinking, reimagining. It changes nothing, and yet you do it—”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Oh, I know that.” Her eyes were direct. “Unprovoked violence is not in your nature, not even with a stranger, and much less someone you love as much as you love her. That’s why I need to go my own way, you see.”
Kane shook his head. “No, I don’t see. At all.”
Nadya took a deep breath. Then she smiled in a stiff way, the false expression the kind of thing somebody does when they’re attempting to camouflage a vulnerability with nonchalance. “I can’t watch you ahvenge another, even though it is not only your right, but a sign of how much your shellan meant to you.”
“You don’t have to worry about my safety. I’m going to be careful.”
“That’s not the deepest why, I’m afraid.”
As her hand went to her eyes once again, he caught the scent of more tears, fresh as an ocean breeze. He wanted to reach out for her, to ease her in some way, in any way, but he knew she would move out of his reach.
“Nadya—”
She straightened herself and folded her hands in her lap, like she was gathering some kind of physical strength from the composure. “I have come to care for you—and not just as a patient or a friend. I suppose it doesn’t reflect well on my character, professional or otherwise, but we cannot change our emotions. We can only endure them.” Her hand brushed her cheeks with impatience. “So yes, that’s the truth of why I must go. I find being reminded of your love for another an intolerable pain, and how stupid is that.”
Kane just sat there for a moment, his mind replaying her words and trying to make sure he’d heard them right.
“I didn’t imagine it,” he whispered.
“Imagine?”
“I felt the warmth of you. All along. I used to anticipate it. After you would work around the clinic—cleaning and moving things—you’d come sit with me and I focused on you to try to get out of the pain. You were my lighthouse in the darkness. I used to get so impatient for you to finish what you were doing and come back to me.”
“I didn’t know you were so aware.”
“Of you, I was aware of everything.”
Abruptly, he thought of Cordelhia, picturing what he remembered of the way she looked and scented, dressed and spoke. The memories of his blond, waifish betrothed were not as sharp as they had been back in the beginning of his incarceration, the details of her dulled as if his recollections had been worn down by too much examination.
And then he remembered the choice he had made the night before: To stay alive and help Nadya, rather than go unto the Fade to be reunited with his mate.
“You ask me how I can bear to look at you.” He shook his head. “I became attached to you when I couldn’t see. Those feelings don’t go away. Your scent, your voice, your care for me were what saw me through, and what defines you for me.”
As she seemed surprised, he fell silent—until words left his mouth without any forethought, a truth shared because it had bubbled up within him and had to be expressed: “I had to come back to you for the same reason you feel the need to go now.”
He could sense her shock as a charge in the air.
But then she composed herself. “It’s not uncommon to think you have feelings for someone you see as your healer.”
“And maybe it’s just you. Maybe it’s not about the nursing… and all about you.”
When she just looked away, as if she wasn’t going to argue with him because the truth was too obvious, he had no idea what to say or do about any of it.
So he extended his wrist.
“Take my vein for any reason you want to justify to yourself,” he said. “I don’t care about the why. If we’re going our separate ways, I want you to be as strong as you can be. It will help me construct a future for you that I can be at peace with.”
In the silence that followed, the details of the living quarters they were in, from the blues and grays of the rug, to the plain walls and the comfortable furniture, became super-sharp in the periphery, as if his mind were recording everything about Nadya with such intensity, even the background around her was drawn into the intense focus.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what,” he prompted, when she stopped there.
“Your vein.”
With that, she lowered herself, and he felt the brush of the blanket’s fringe on his forearm first. Then came her small, cool hands, so gentle, so soft. Closing his eyes, he let his head fall back. As his breath began to pump, a tingling went through his body from the anticipation of the sharp points scoring his—
Her bite was slow and gentle, to the point where he worried she hadn’t seated her mouth properly—but he knew the instant she began to draw against him. There was a pull upon his vein and then she gasped deep in her throat and her hands tightened on him.
The drinking was very restrained, as if she were determined to cause him no discomfort. Except there was no way she could hurt him.
Actually, no… that was not true.
His free hand lifted because he wanted to draw her closer—and as his arm hovered in the air over her bent shoulders, he wondered how this had happened… how he had become attached to another other than Cordelhia. What did that matter, though.
Like their parting, it was something he could not change.
And she was right. He had a purpose to carry him onward, and vengeance was no casual thing. He just wished she could believe that, if not for ahvenging his murdered shellan, he would have begged to stay with her.
But if not for Cordelhia, he wondered if Nadya wouldn’t have asked him to stay.
He couldn’t not ahvenge his mate, however. And anyway, it was clear that Nadya didn’t believe what he’d said to her.
So after this feeding, they would part, and if there was any fairness in destiny, he was going to kill someone if it was the last thing he did.
And he had the sense… it probably would be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Thanks to the newscast’s footage about the burglary in Leczo Falls, Vishous was able to re-form safely in the middle of a picturesque town square, right behind a white gazebo that looked like it had been used in any one of the Kevin McCallister movies. As he glanced around the park-like public lawn, he checked out the line of nineteen-twenties-era storefronts across the street.
There was a diner, a clothing boutique, a grocer’s, and a butcher’s. Also a flower shop and a mail place.
And the pharmacy.
Had he been here before? V wondered. Because he had the sense he’d seen the layout somewhere, even before some parents had left a nine-year-old behind at Christmas.
“Well, if this isn’t a gingerbread village. Looks good enough to eat.”
As the female voice registered behind him, V smiled in the dark and turned around. His blooded sister, Payne—also a product of the truly toxic union of the Bloodletter and the Scribe Virgin—was standing tall in all her black leather, her shitkickers planted in the grass, her lean and powerful body set, but not tense. With her long black hair braided, and no makeup on her face, she looked beautiful and deadly.
“Hey, Sis,” he said.
“I was surprised to get your text.”
“You told me you wanted to be more involved.”
“I’m not complaining.” She put her palms forward, all chill, brother. “I did have to tell your boss that I had to reschedule our sparring session, depending on how this goes.”
V winced. “So you made Wrath’s night, huh.”
“He took it as well as could be expected.”
“Did he light something on fire? Or just steam from the ears.”
“It was over text, so I can’t comment on anything other than the words he used. The tone and whatever else he felt were mercifully absent.”
“He says you’re the best partner on the mats he’s ever had.”
“There he goes, making me blush.”
The King had lost his eyesight completely a couple of years ago, but he’d kept his hand in the fighting game, even though to his immense dissatisfaction no one would let him out into the field. His life was just too precious to roll any kind of dice with, and besides, considering the straight-up killer he’d been for most of his adult life, he’d already run out of luck in battle.
“So, what are we doing here?” Payne glanced around. “Other than reenacting Back to the Future.”
