To Be Where You Are, page 4
The concern in his voice was almost enough. Almost. “I’d rather not.” Adin couldn’t bring himself to describe Celia’s freakout. He didn’t understand it, and he sure as hell didn’t want Jackson jumping to any conclusions about the future of their relationship based on this incident. “I just needed to hear your voice.” He smiled. “Does my cum taste like buttercream?”
Jackson chuckled. “Now I know why you’re feeling down. You’ve been overdosing on your medication again.”
Adin laughed. For the time being, at least, he felt good.
“So when are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?”
“Once I puzzle my way through it.” Adin moved to a sitting position in the hammock. A leaf drifted from one of the anchoring trees and fell in his lap. Were he a superstitious man, he would’ve seen it as a portent, some kind of message. But he wouldn’t have been able to interpret it anyway. “About this Chicago connection, because I know what you’re wondering—yeah, I used to skulk around there in years past. Emphasis on past.”
“And none of your associates from that period have kept track of you?”
Adin’s smile became wan. How gingerly they danced around the subject of his former vampiric life. It would never go away, of course. People couldn’t shed their pasts like snake skins.
“Why would they keep track of me?” he said. “I never got close to anybody. Ships passing in the night and all that. Why are you so concerned about it?”
“It’s something Noah said. He hasn’t explained yet, but I’m sure he will.”
Adin shook his head. “Don’t you have any normal friends, Jackson?”
After a pause, he answered, “So what’s normal?” A sigh came through the phone. “In case you’re wondering when I’ll be home, I still don’t know if it’ll be today or tomorrow.”
“That’s okay. Take whatever time you need.” Adin thought of Celia’s odd change of heart, and his spirits sank. He almost said, bitterly, Don’t worry about it; right now the issue is moot. But he still couldn’t bring himself to broach the subject.
“Don’t you miss me?” Jackson asked, hitting that deep, sweet, intimate tone that meant Jackson missed him.
Adin smiled and closed his eyes. Lowering his head, he drew two fingers across them. “Yeah, I miss you. You know I do.”
It hit him hard, then. How much he indeed missed their conversation and laughter, their shared touches and shared breathing. He hated being away from this man, hated that some thin tendril of sound made Jackson only seem close by. It was like a sadistic joke.
“Should I tell you how much I love you?” Jackson asked gently. “Will that make you feel better?”
Adin had trouble freeing his voice. “Yes and no.”
“Well, let’s give it a shot. I love you the way the Chinese love American money and the Canadians love hockey and the French love themselves. You light up my life. What’s more, the sound of your voice is making my dick restless, even though we can’t have phone sex now.”
Adin’s snickering had escalated throughout this declaration. “I really, really want to be with you.” You light up my life. The phrase made him cough out another chuckle.
Jackson was silent for a moment. “Then do it. Be with me,” he said somberly.
Adin lay down again and threw an arm over his face. “You’re supposed to make me feel good, not bad.”
“I’m sorry.” Jackson took a breath. “Listen, I’d better get back to Noah, find out what the hell is going on and what he expects me to do about it.”
Adin felt a twist of anxiety. “Do you think there might be sex magic involved?”
“No, I won’t go there. Not anymore.”
It was a much-needed reassurance at the moment, and Adin was grateful.
“Why don’t I call you back later?” Jackson said.
“That’ll work. I’m sorry for the intrusion.”
“Don’t be. I hope you feel better, baby. I love you.”
Every time he said that word, he wrapped it in velvet. “You keep calling me ‘baby,’ honey, I’m going to start coming in my underwear.”
“You keep talking like that, so will I.”
* * * *
Jackson ran back to the house and blew through the front door. Panting, he strode into the parlor, the hardwood floors reverberating beneath his feet.
“It’s time you cut to the chase, Noah. I have a life to get back to.”
Noah was standing at his memento table, holding a photograph of Perez. He didn’t look shocked by Jackson’s outburst; he looked sorrowful. “All right.”
“Now who the fuck did you meet in Chicago? What are their names? And what’s the connection to Adin and me and to Perez being gone and all the other shit you haven’t explained?”
Noah tenderly set down the picture he’d been studying. “They were vampires. We talked about the transformation. Perez and I have been considering it, but we have reservations. For obvious reasons.”
Jackson gaped at him. His heart seemed to loosen and slip within his ribcage. “What were their names?” he whispered.
“Rugh and Rahenna.”
Jackson swayed. His heart sank further. “I can’t help you.” Blindly, he turned toward the foyer.
Noah lurched up to him and grabbed his arm. “Now you know why I called you. Your lover is acquainted with these individuals. The woman was his birth mistress; she’s the one who changed him. The man was once his companion.” His voice became hurried, almost frantic. “If Adin can help me find them, I might be able to find Perez.”
“You son of a bitch,” Jackson said in an ominous tone. He wrenched his arm out of Noah’s grasp so forcefully, Noah stumbled backward. Scowling, Jackson jabbed a finger toward Noah’s face. “Adin isn’t one of them anymore. So keep … us … out of this.”
Noah held Jackson’s gaze. His face trembled, but more from stubbornness than fear. “He’s already involved, my friend. So are you.”
Jackson felt the blaze of his own power. The front door banged open. The chandelier in the entry hall began a manic tinkling. Wind gusted through the house, but it didn’t come from outside.
Noah wasn’t startled; he knew what was happening. Face rumpling, he clutched his own shirtfront and cried, “My soul screams from the pain of missing him! Don’t you understand?”
After a frozen moment, Jackson sagged. The chandelier went still. Noah’s explosion of feeling had blasted the rage out of him. Suddenly and profoundly, he empathized.
“Yes, you do,” Noah said. “You do understand. And all too well. Your heart’s been scalded by the same water.”
Jackson squeezed his eyes shut, shoved his hands into his hair. “Fuck.” With a kind of dismal resignation, he ambled outside and sat on the porch steps.
Noah joined him. “I wouldn’t have bothered you,” he said, “if I didn’t need you. I hope you realize that.”
Jackson let out a long exhalation and propped his elbows on his knees. He lowered his face to his hands. Noah wasn’t lying. About any of it. And he wasn’t exaggerating his distress.
“Do you have any idea where Perez could’ve gone?” Jackson asked.
“All I can presume is that he tried finding Rugh and Rahenna. He was quite enchanted by them. They said something about going to New Orleans.”
“But they could’ve moved on by now.”
“Or they could be staying for a while. We got the impression they like it there.”
Jackson shrugged. Vampires did prefer cities. “Could be. Have you tried every possible method to get in touch with Perez?”
“Every last one, technological and paranormal.”
“Why haven’t you filed a missing person report with the police?”
“That isn’t really appropriate under the circumstances,” Noah said. “Perez is very independent, you know. And very impulsive. He’s gone away before and returned after a week or two. So the police would hardly take his disappearance seriously.”
Jackson faced him. “I don’t like bringing this up, but there’s always the chance something bad happened.”
Noah vigorously shook his head. “Perez isn’t dead. He isn’t inanimate. That’s one thing I do know. I can still feel him.”
“But he could be something like dead if he went ahead with—”
“No.” This denial was just as emphatic. “He’d never do anything that life-altering without me. Never.”
“Not all vampires ask permission first,” Jackson said. “The two vamps you happened to meet are from one of the more civilized breeds.”
“Indeed. Very civilized … and very appealing. As, I’m sure, Adin was.”
Jackson looked down and tensely stroked his mustache and beard. The more they talked about it, the less he wanted to get involved. Just recently, too recently, Adin’s past had reared its ugly head in an ugly way. He didn’t want to deal with it again.
“You know them,” Noah said, “don’t you? Rugh and Rahenna. Weren’t you all at Adin’s thirtieth birthday party last October? That’s where they claimed to have met you.”
“I met Rahenna. Rugh kept himself … inconspicuous.” Jackson tapped his fingers together as they hung between his bent knees. “I don’t know anything about him except what little I was told.”
“By Adin.”
“Obviously.” Jackson straightened. “Don’t overlook my original point. If Perez has been hanging around the haunts of these creatures, he could’ve been taken against his will. Some vampires are ruthless. And if that happened, there isn’t a damned thing I or anybody else can do about it.” Jackson rose from the stair where he’d been sitting. He felt restive and queasy. All he wanted to do was jump on his bike and take off. “Calling me wasn’t a good idea.”
“Where are you going?” Noah asked anxiously. He, too, stood.
With a unique kind of longing, Jackson eyed the worn leather jacket draped over the seat of his bike. Slipping into it was the first step in a whole different kind of ritual, a potent and very personal magic. There was truth in all that freedom-of-the-road folklore. Even though he’d almost lost his life on a motorcycle, he’d also revitalized himself a thousand times over. Riding was a brilliant flight that always bore him to the same destination. “There’s stillness in that thunder,” his father had said after they’d rebuilt a ’58 Harley FL together. Jackson was only fifteen at the time and didn’t understand. Two years later, he did.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t think I’d be of any use to you. My heart wouldn’t be in it—not when there are vamps involved. You should be able to understand that. I’m sure there are other Worthies you can turn to.” He briefly laid a hand on Noah’s back. “I feel for you. Believe me, I do. But this shit with Rugh and Rahenna…” Jackson didn’t explain. He shouldn’t have to. The cause of his aversion should’ve been clear to anybody who knew about him and Adin.
Eager to be gone, he trotted down the steps.
“Jackson!”
He turned. Although his hand hadn’t yet touched the sun-warmed leather of his jacket, he could smell it, almost feel it.
“I’d never thought of you as a coward.”
Jackson stiffened. Noah had just pushed one of his now-you’ve-really-pissed me-off buttons. “Don’t try to play me, man. You know damned well this has nothing to do with cowardice. But frankly, Noah, right now I don’t care what you think.”
Noah stomped on the riser, making the wind chime shiver. “God damn it. I knew you’d be resistant. I knew you’d be angry. But I didn’t think, in the end, you’d turn your back on me. And now I have to resort to my trump card.” Regretfully, he shook his head. “And, my friend, you’re not going to like it.”
Jackson narrowed his eyes. He didn’t take well to threats. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve secured control of something you want. Something you need. Something you’ve been waiting for. I’d only intended to use that control as leverage and then relinquish it after you’d made a sincere effort to help me find Perez. But now that you refuse to make that effort—”
Jackson bounded toward the porch. “I swear on everything I hold dear, if you fuck with Adin—”
“I would never be either foolish or cruel enough to manipulate someone you love so dearly and have fought so hard to claim.”
“Then what the hell are you saying?”
“I’ve suspended Celia Quill’s willingness to let him go.”
Chapter Five
“He’s a very kinky girl,” Perez sang in a soft falsetto, looking into the room’s only mirror. Tilting his head, he ran the backs of his fingers over the graceful slope of his neck. Need a shave. Hate shaving. The mirror’s patchy loss of silvering made the glass look moldy, and those dark spots and streaks interfered in a most annoying with his reflection. Perez lowered his hand and simultaneously lowered his voice to a growly baritone-bass. “He’s super free-kay.”
The juxtaposition pleased him. He decided he would one day absorb Rick James and Beyonce, mix them up inside himself, then put the resulting creature back out into the world. Just as he was considering hair-style and costume choices, he asked himself, But which world?
A feeling of disorientation swirled around him, as if he had one foot in a dream. He walked to one of two grimy front windows, their lower sashes raised, and looked out. Rural Mississippi—is that where he was? Not near the river, not near the gulf. Probably forty or fifty miles from any large store. Vaguely he recalled passing over the state line from Louisiana. He remembered cruising through modest towns that bore evidence of recent renewal—recreation areas and strip malls, blocky school buildings and balconied condos. Eventually he’d wended his way from highways to dirt roads.
He’d never seen so many rusty tin roofs and rusty old signs and rusty hulks of once-useful things. Every other building, it seemed, had fallen victim to weather and termites and neglect. Their clapboards tilted forlornly within seas of shoulder-high vegetation.
The greenness was nearly as overpowering as the stifling humidity. Lush and vigorous, it seemed to mock those graying, manmade structures as it muscled toward the sun. If only, Perez thought, plants could lap moisture and bugs out of the air, this area would have a primitive beauty.
Yes, he was pretty sure he was in rural Mississippi. This wasn’t the gentrified country living he’d grown accustomed to. This was the genuine article.
Auntie Bechima, the mistress of the house, returned to the room and set two glasses of sweet tea on a small, wood table draped with moth-eaten shawls and studded with insect carcasses.
“Sit yourself down, Mister Lady,” she said irritably. “You already know you’re pretty.” She frowned at Perez. “Don’t that hair make you sweat?”
As he sat, Perez reached to the back of his head and slid the braid through his hand. Fleetingly, he thought of Jackson Spey, the wizard who had hair down to his ass. Or used to, anyway.
“It’s the climate that makes me perspire, Auntie B, not the hair.”
“Bechima,” she said in kind of a snarly way, giving Perez a disapproving, one-eyed squint.
“Excuse me. Auntie Bechima.”
“So black, it’s blue,” she murmured.
Reaching across the table, Bechima extended a finger. Not bony, not bent, but plump as a Vienna sausage. As soon as it grazed one of those blue-black strands, she jerked it back, as if she’d struck sparks.
“You got power,” she whispered, wide-eyed.
Perez smoothed his hair. “Some, I guess. From the ancestors. That’s what Noah thinks.” He checked his fingernails and nearly winced. They’d been neglected on this journey.
“How’d you find me, Mister Lady? I don’t believe in turning away strangers, ‘less they got bad intentions, but I do ‘preciate knowing how they ended up at my door.”
“I just drove ‘til I got here,” Perez answered honestly.
He took a drink. The chair creaked beneath him. Just drove ‘til I got to this none-too-sturdy chair with its crackled layers of paint that are probably flaking onto my white pants. He’d left his gold vest and jaunty Panama hat in the car, parked maybe thirty feet from the porch in the shade of a Tupelo gum tree.
“Just drove ‘til I got here,” he repeated more vacantly.
What he didn’t know was why.
* * * *
This was a bitch, all right. Jackson couldn’t undo what Noah had done to Celia’s mind without making matters worse. Practiced Adepts ensured their work was tamper-proof. High Magic didn’t operate on the same principles as folk magic, in which one spell could counteract another, or stronger mojo could overcome its weaker counterpart. That meant Jackson would indeed have to make a sincere, concentrated effort to find Perez before Noah would back off. And that, in turn, meant Adin would have to get involved. Jackson didn’t have much chance of finding Rugh and Rahenna without Adin’s help.
As he sped back to his flat from the farmhouse, his anger bounced off one target after another. He wanted to pummel Noah for putting him in this position, but his spring of empathy for the man kept dampening his rage. He was furious with Perez for being so reckless, but that was part of Perez’s nature and couldn’t be held against him. He was never driven by malice, just impulse.
Then there were the targets named Adin and Celia, both of whom Jackson couldn’t help resenting right now. No Adept could have power over Jackson if it weren’t for Adin. The man had become his Achilles heel. And Adin’s ongoing refusal to walk away from his former girlfriend had been straining Jackson’s patience and undermining his equilibrium for months. The situation wasn’t only frustrating; it was more heart-wrenching than he could easily admit. Yet, in spite of his own suffering, he liked and admired Celia for many reasons. And Adin? How could fury of any magnitude overcome his love for the man? And how could that love not be deepened by Adin’s chivalry, however misguided it might seem?
By the time he had his bike parked in the small garage beside his duplex, Jackson was already pulling his cell phone out of its pouch and placing a call. The ringing went on for a long time. Too long. Although Adin worked at home, this was a Saturday; he could be out. The possibility was maddening but not unexpected. What Jackson didn’t expect, though, was the voice he heard as he was about to disconnect.
