“What about Farlucci?” Nick said, remembering. “Does he think I blew him off?”
There was a silence.
In it, Jordan scowled at him, his eyes showing disbelief, like he couldn’t believe Nick was even asking about that.
“No,” he snapped after a few seconds. “Morley’s got Charlie’s back on this. They had lawyers contact Farlucci. They’re in negotiation. Farlucci’s people and the NYPD and I.S.F. lawyers who handle contracts for Midnights and other I.S.F. reg’d vamps who seek employment outside their I.S.F. classifications. They’ve managed to keep him occupied these past few weeks, arguing the terms of the contract for using you as a fighter––”
“So it’s still on?” Nick said.
Weirdly, his reaction wasn’t disappointment.
It was relief.
Well, not exactly relief.
It was more like aggression, anger, a burning desire to act… mixed with relief that he had some place to aim all those feelings. It didn’t really sink in what drove him in all that, either, not until he thought back on what he’d overheard them saying in the kitchen below, while he’d been sucking down blood bags and eavesdropping on what had happened to him.
He still didn’t know everything.
There was still a lot he didn’t know.
But he knew enough.
He wanted to catch these fuckers.
He wanted to be there when they brought them down.
“So Charlie still thinks Farlucci is involved?” Nick said.
“Nick.” Jordan sounded genuinely angry. “Are you seriously wanting to talk about the case right now? I mean, seriously… this is your priority? You almost fucking died, Tanaka. That St. Maarten lady was feeding you intravenously for days, and you weren’t coming back. You just lay there, like a corpse. We thought you were gone. We all thought you were really fucking gone, that you weren’t coming back––”
Nick frowned.
Jordan looked at him, as if expecting more of a reaction.
When he didn’t get it, the human exhaled in open frustration.
“You don’t remember any of this. Do you?”
Nick shook his head. “No.”
“Well, I was there when you finally woke up,” Jordan snapped. “You came out of it and you went fucking nuts. St. Maarten called in her guards and you went through then like they were the high school math club. I seriously thought you were going to kill all of us.”
Grunting a little as he seemed to think about his own words, the muscular human folded his arms across his chest, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“…Turns out,” he added sourly. “You just wanted to come up here and hang out with your girlfriend.”
Nick didn’t know what to say to that, either.
“So,” he said cautiously, when Jordan didn’t go on. “Am I still on the case?”
Jordan stared at him.
After a few seconds, he threw up his hands.
“I give up, man,” he said. “You’re as crazy as Charlie. Only difference is, she’s trying to get you killed. And for some reason, you’re trying to help her––”
Nick frowned. “Meaning I’m on it, or not?”
Damon glared at him. “You’re on it. If you want it. Morley wanted me to come up here and find out how much more time you need.”
Nick felt his relief sharpen.
Some of that must have shown on his face, because Jordan threw up his hands again.
“Just call me when you’re ready, man,” he said. “Or hell… come to think of it, don’t call me. Call Morley. I’m tired of being an accessory to your murder. I guess immortality is getting boring for you, and okay, fine, that’s your right. But maybe think about your girlfriend, Tanaka. Somehow I doubt she’ll be thrilled about you wading back into this bullshit, either.”
Nick opened his mouth, about to answer, when Wynter appeared in the doorway behind Jordan and the tall seer with the mismatched eyes.
He hadn’t even heard her on the stairs.
Seeing the expression on her face, Nick shut his mouth.
Her frown deepened.
She looked away, aiming that frown at Jordan and Malek.
“All right, that’s enough,” she said. “You need to go. Both of you. At least let him recover before you try to kill him again.”
Jordan gave her a surprised look, his eyes borderline offended.
“Hey, lady. Don’t go there with me. I’m trying to save his ass––”
“Then go talk to your boss,” Wynter snapped. “And that woman cop who wants him back in the ring this weekend… working for those same psychopaths who tried to kill him once already. Maybe tell them to leave him the fuck alone––”
“No,” Nick said.
When Jordan and Wynter turned, glaring at him, Nick gave Wynter an apologetic look, then met Jordan’s gaze.
“Don’t tell him that, Damon,” he said. “I’m in. I want in.”
Wynter’s stare grew murderous.
Nick did his best to ignore it, but wasn’t overly successful.
He watched Jordan stalk angrily out of the room, muttering,
“Preaching to the damned choir, lady…”
Malek melted out of the doorway as silently as he’d appeared there.
Nick watched them go, arms folded over his chest, ignoring his furious girlfriend’s glare as he listened to Jordan walk back down the stairs. He heard more murmurs and voices in the kitchen, then a lot of footsteps across the ground floor, presumably as everyone made their way from the back of the house back to Wynter’s front door.
A few seconds later, Nick’s suspicions were verified when he heard the front door open, heard more talking and murmuring as they collected coats, talking to one another as they walked out the open front door, and back out into the New England air.
Not long after that, the door closed.
Nick and Wynter were alone.
Chapter 15
Girlfriend
He glanced at her after the silence stretched a few seconds.
Once he had, he winced.
She wasn’t looking at him.
She was staring at the tile floor, where he’d thrown the empty blood bags. Her jaw was clenched, her eyes overly bright.
“I’ll clean it up,” he said.
She shook her head, but her frown didn’t lessen. “How many did you drink?”
Nick followed her eyes back down to the tile. “I don’t know. Ten?”
She looked up at him, still frowning. “Do you want more?”
“No.” He shook his head, then jerked his chin towards the cooler. “There are more in there. I didn’t drink them all.” Pausing at her silence, he cleared his throat. “Could I take a shower, though?”
She blinked, staring at him.
“Of course,” she said, like she was bewildered he was even asking. “Do you want your clothes? I washed them,” she added, probably at the confusion on his face. “I don’t have quite your stamina for power sleeping.”
Frowning at the bed, she added,
“…I should change the sheets, too, now that you’re up.”
Nick shook his head, firm. “I’ll do all of that. Just let me take a shower, first––”
“Do you want company?” she said. “In the shower?”
He hesitated.
For the first time, he really looked at her.
It hadn’t fully occurred to him that he’d been avoiding doing that until he did.
He focused on her clothes first, on the dark pants she wore, the skin-tight blue-green top that matched her eyes, her bare feet, her long dark hair with the streaks of color. His eyes shifted to her face, her high, angular cheekbones, her sharp jaw, that mouth…
“It’s a bad idea,” he said, reluctant.
She stared at him.
“What?” she said.
Hearing the edge in that one word, he winced, wishing he’d stayed silent.
At the same time, he wasn’t sure what
to say apart from that.
“Let me shower first,” he said after a pause. “Let me… pull my head back together, Wynter. I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you, and I can’t do that if the first time we interact both of us are naked and I’m spending the whole time thinking about…”
He trailed.
Realizing he was avoiding her eyes again, he looked up, meeting her gaze.
“Okay?” he said, when she didn’t speak.
Looking at her, he felt his frustration worsen when he realized he had no idea how she’d reacted to anything he’d just said.
He worried he’d offended her.
Looking at her, he got increasingly paranoid he’d offended her.
“Wynter,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head.
Now she was avoiding his eyes.
She walked over to a door on the other side of the room.
It occurred to Nick only then that the second door, the one near the curtained window, must lead to her bathroom.
Wynter opened the door and disappeared inside.
Nick sat there, waiting, feeling increasingly uncomfortable as he glanced around the room. It hit him again that he’d really been in here for two weeks. Two weeks of her waking him up to feed him. Two weeks of him monopolizing her bed. Two weeks where she had to go to work, shower, work around the half-dead vampire in her bed.
The room probably stank.
He probably stank.
All he could smell was her, the blood bags, himself…
He wondered how different he and the room would smell to him if he’d just walked in here, versus having had a few weeks to marinate in whatever he’d done to her personal space. If this was the first time he’d smelled any of it, rather than having been in it for days, drifting in and out of consciousness, he suspected he’d be even more paranoid.
His guilt sharpened when she re-opened the bathroom door, and he got a whiff of the smell of flowers, soap, shampoo, tile cleaner, warm water.
It was definitely cleaner in there than it was in here.
“Wynter––” he began, his voice softer, deeper.
She talked over him.
“––Okay,” she said, still not quite meeting his gaze. “There are clean towels in there. I pulled some out of the cabinet. The blue ones. But if you need more, there are more. I have shampoo. Conditioner. Scrub. Soap. If you need anything that’s not in there, let me know.”
Nick tracked her with his eyes as she walked across the room.
He followed her course back to the door.
He hesitating, fighting with whether to speak as she walked back into the hall.
She shut the door behind her then, and it was too late.
It didn’t occur to him until the door shut behind her with a click that she’d left so he wouldn’t have to get out of the bed, naked, in front of her.
Scowling faintly, mostly at himself, he sat there for a beat more.
Then he threw back the comforter and regained his feet.
He stood too fast, and froze, hit with a head-rush so intense he briefly couldn’t move without falling. He stood there, unmoving, waiting for it to pass.
When it did, he walked, moving cautiously as he aimed his feet for the open bathroom door. His muscles and bones felt stiff, not quite weak but strangely mechanical, as if they’d been stuck too long in the same pose.
It felt good to move.
It felt good enough that he found himself relaxing into it by the time he reached the bathroom door. He began deliberately and methodically stretching his limbs, rolling his neck, head, shoulders, wrists, clenching and unclenching his hands as he toyed with the edges of working out some of the kinks in his unused body.
He entered her bathroom and glanced around.
Green tile. A long mirror. Two sinks.
He stared at the two sinks.
He wondered if she’d ever lived here with anyone else.
The thought brought a flush of heat, a hard pulse of possessiveness that briefly wiped out his rational mind. That heat reached his face and jaw, closing his throat, hurting his chest. It was intense enough that his fangs extended, even as he clenched his back molars.
“Fuck,” he said, forcing himself to dial it back.
He looked to the glass-enclosed shower in front of him, then turned his head, staring at the giant, claw-footed bathtub to his right. That brought back another twinge of possessiveness, and further convinced him he was fucking crazy.
“Fuck,” he repeated, running his hand through his hair.
He glanced at the mirror, looking at himself.
He had blood on his neck.
He’s spilled blood on his fucking neck.
Had he been talking to Tai like that?
Probably.
He looked insanely pale, even for what he was.
His hair looked longer––the hair on his head, that is.
One of the weird side-effects of becoming a vampire was that he no longer had to shave. He didn’t grow hair on his face anymore. He’d come across a few vampires with beards, so he knew it wasn’t universal, but being a vampire for Nick meant having his late-twenties face, only better-looking than he had been as a human, and entirely clean-shaven… not to mention about six shades paler, in terms of his skin tone. He’d been dark in his twenties, and not only from surfing––not even from being stationed in mostly hot-as-fuck, sun-beating-on-your-face places during his years in the military.
It still occasionally surprised him, how young he looked in the mirror.
He’d been forty-four when he was turned.
He knew what he looked like, when he looked older than he looked now.
He wondered how he looked to Wynter.
Shoving that from his mind, he walked to the shower, back to swinging his arms, testing out his joints, his muscles, even the pliability of his skin, given how dehydrated he’d felt when he first woke up.
He wasn’t himself, but he was coming back.
He was coming back.
He’d be ready when he went back into that ring.
He came out of the bathroom some time later.
He didn’t know how long.
It felt like he’d been in there for hours.
The entire bathroom was one giant steam cloud when he finally left the shower––and he could have stayed in there two hours longer.
He’d never known a shower could be so damned heavenly.
Showers felt better as a vampire anyway.
His vampire senses loved it; his hypersensitive skin loved it. His vampire ears even loved the sound of it, and his vampire sense of smell loved the smell of it. Maybe some of it was that he increasingly loved anything warm and sensual, given that his vampire body was cold and hard for the most part.
He made himself get out because of Wynter.
He washed his hair three times.
He scrubbed his whole body.
He stood under the hot water until he couldn’t stop thinking about her, out there, waiting for him to come out. He heard her in the other room with his vampire ears. He frowned faintly when he realized she was probably cleaning up, despite what he’d said to her.
His suspicions were confirmed when he finally shut off the water, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked out of the bathroom.
The room was unrecognizable.
The drapes were open, and Nick realized for the first time a balcony lived out there, not just a large window, as he’d thought that first night. She’d opened the balcony doors, flooding the room with air and light from outside. He smelled trees, grass, the faint smell of barbeque, probably from one of her neighbors down the street.
The sun was falling in the sky.
From what Nick could tell, it was roughly five o’clock.
Maybe as late as five-thirty.
She’d changed the sheets.
The old ones had been all white. These were pale blue and pale green, like the throw pillows Tai had been playing wit
h.
The blood bags were gone from the white tile floor.
She’d removed the small cooler, and the heater.
Fuck. It looked like she’d mopped the floor.
He stared around, a little bewildered at how much she’d done while he’d been in there. When she appeared back in the doorway, he looked at her, that bewilderment reaching his voice.
“How long was I in there?” he said.
Surprised flickered across her face.
She followed his eyes around the room.
Then she seemed to understand what he meant, why he asked, and laughed.
“A while,” she admitted, quirking her lips at him. “Truthfully, I’ve been dying to do all this, so I worked fast. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I’m kind of a clean freak.” She paused, studying his eyes. “Do you feel better?”
He nodded. “Unbelievably better.”
He gauged her face, cautious.
“Are you mad at me?” he said.
There was a silence.
Then her scowl returned, making him immediately regret the question.
Her sharp jaw hardened, and he found himself tracing the line of it with his eyes.
He’d never reacted to a face, any face, the way he reacted to hers.
He liked every part of it. He liked her mouth, her eyes, that angular jaw, her high cheekbones, her eyebrows. He even liked the line she got in her forehead when she was pissed off at him. He was still studying those lines and shadows when she turned, glaring up at him, her blue-green eyes glinting in the late-afternoon light.
“Why would I be mad at you, Nick?” she said at the end of that long-feeling beat. “Just because you still won’t let me touch you, or see you naked, unless you’re literally on the brink of death? Or the fact that you simply can’t wait to go back out there and try to kill yourself all over again? Or that you’re willing to go back to work for a guy who might have put those vampire hunters up to kidnapping you in the first place––”
“He didn’t,” Nick cut in.
“You know that?” she shot back. “You really know that? Really? Because I heard you tell Detective Jordan that you don’t remember anything.”
“I’m just saying… it doesn’t make sense that it would be Farlucci,” Nick explained. “He knew I was a Midnight. I told him. Why would he go through all the work of negotiating a contract with the I.S.F. and Morley, if he tried to get me killed?”
Eyes of Ice Page 18
