by Jax Garren
“Emma, I left my clothes in the bedroom.” Javier sounded so damn irritated with himself, it made her smile.
She shoved her phone into her pocket. That mess could wait. Javier was standing naked on the other side of the door. Naked and dripping. No, wrapped in a towel. Barefoot, his dark skin glistening with droplets, brown eyes squeezing in frustration because he’d forgotten something. God forbid he be less than Mr. Perfect.
Although now, at least, she understood why he felt like he had something to prove.
A stack of clothing was on the bed. She should open the door wide and hand it to him, prove with her serenity that she was unmoved by his trim figure, a towel barely hanging on his hips—because of course it would be barely hanging on. She didn’t do the girlfriend thing, never had. She didn’t want him to crawl over her and press her down, caging her against the mattress as he jerked into her. Not that sex with him had been like that, but the whole purpose of having a girlfriend was to secure a regular source of free sex. She wasn’t a girlfriend. She got paid.
Still, the towel-clad image of Javier made her imagine running her hands over her own body. Maybe squeezing here or stroking there, just to see what, if anything, would happen.
“Em? I’m opening the door.”
Using her vampire’s speed, she scooped up the clothing and made it to the door just as he opened it. His eyes went wide at the sight of her so close. She forced a smile, glad she was so practiced at faking pleasure that it came easily, and dumped his clothes into his hands. She was practiced at that too.
Except this time they tumbled down, a mini-avalanche—how many articles of clothing was he planning to wear to bed?—and landed in a soft heap at his feet. “Oops,” she said.
Yep, the towel clung tenaciously to hips that were narrower than she’d realized. A dark trail of hair curled from his navel and down below the blue fabric. She’d seen his treasure trail before, but she hadn’t really been paying attention. Hand here, mouth there. Press, twist, suck, flick. It was a routine that worked with the mechanical grace of a machine. She didn’t even have to be there. Not usually, anyway. He’d kept throwing her out of it that night, wouldn’t let her paint by numbers. Irritating man.
And now she should pick his clothes up. She’d spilled them after all.
Her legs locked up. She didn’t want to be on her knees in front of him, and wasn’t that just the strangest mental breakdown for a whore to have in front of the man she’d just asked to be a part of her life? She forced herself to sink down.
He caught her shoulder. “I got it.” Then he dropped to his own knees in front of her, his mouth just the right height to help her out in that daydream of touching herself. Heat and discomfort filled her, a turbulent cloud, and she wanted to step back, relieving the pressure from the storm of energy that crackled around them. But that seemed cowardly to back off. Surely he’d know why.
He straightened his legs but still bent at the waist, his strong back to her as he finished collecting his things and then looked up. He smiled with renewed swagger, like he knew he affected her. “Asshole,” she muttered. “Just go ruin my daydreams of chivalry, why don’t you?”
He pulled a T-shirt on, covering that lovely chest, and stood, arrogant smile still on his face as he shoved on boxers under his towel and then sweatpants. “I didn’t say anything. Whatever you’re thinking is not my fault.”
She rolled her eyes, exaggerated so he knew she was kidding, and turned away. “Yeah, fuck you and the pinto you rode in on.”
He laughed.
“I ain’t never telling you or no one else again that you’re good with your mouth. Invitation to trouble.”
“Oh,” he said, voice low. “That’s what you were thinking about.”
The lights blinked, CoVIn’s building-wide signal for sixty seconds until sunrise. “No time for banter. C’mon.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him up onto the bed, determined to break the edge off with a silly game. “You played collapse, right?” She jumped. He frowned at her, probably about to tell her not to jump on the bed or something stuffy like that. She tugged his hand and bounced in a circle, pulling him with her.
“What’s collapse?”
“It’s a game. A ridiculous one, which is why it’s fun. You jump at the last moment, holding hands, and see how you wake up. You win if you’re still holding hands. It’s extra hilarious if you’ve got a lot of people. You wake up like a drunken Twister game.” She took both his hands, and he smiled, getting into the spirit of it. “Joe and I used to play, back in New Orleans. For three months we had to sleep in this closet because all the other rooms had windows of sunshiny death. We’d shut the door, it’d be pitch black, and we’d jump as high as we could. One time he tossed me just as sleep hit. We woke up with my feet tangled in a coat and his head buried in my stomach with his ass in the air.”
Javier looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
She snorted. “Yeah, it’s stupid. I know. But it’s—”
Her damn fledgling grabbed her ankle with his free hand and flipped her upside down.
Dawn hit, and she fell into nothing.
Chapter Eleven
Darkness. Clean, warm skin. Emma’s face was pressed up against a hard thigh, and her arm was stuck… in Javier’s unmentionables.
They’d dropped hands, but just about everything else was pressed together and upside down, like they’d fallen asleep with busy mouths. His chin nestled in the crook where her thigh met hip, his strong cheekbones against the soft part of her thigh. She and Joe had occasionally landed in what might be termed a “compromising position” by the hoity-toity, but they’d been much more likely to wake up with somebody’s toe up the other one’s nose. But she and Joe, well, they’d been comfortable together. Joe had slept with anyone, but mostly men, and she’d been more than happy to be his beard, as they said nowadays.
With Javier, though, it wasn’t so simple. It was nice waking up tangled with cold arms, the smell of pine soap, and no demands. He lay heavy on her, with sun-sleep still holding him, and she dented into him in awkward ways, and it was lovely. She could just be still and feel nice and not worry in the least what thoughts went through his head, because he wouldn’t have any for another hour or so. She took a deep breath, and it rattled out shaky, making the dark curls of hair on Javier’s thigh quiver. He had an interesting body, with lots of scars to explore. How pissed would he be if she looked him over while he slept?
She grinned. Not pissed at all. He’d never know what she did. Dumbass had fallen asleep next to her knowing she’d wake up first. She wanted to see the scars on his foot, the ones he’d told her about. She’d take a look…
Later. She closed her eyes and opened them slowly, nestling against his lovely body. She’d peruse him more carefully after just another moment of lying here in peace.
“Ooookay. I’m not going to ask.”
She popped her head up to find Javier’s little sister in the doorframe, coffee in hand. Normally this sort of thing wouldn’t throw her, and yet her cheeks got hot as embarrassment clenched her tush up like a tight-ass.
“Want one?” Rhiannon waved her beverage. “We have another hour or so before the brown wonder awakes, but when I realized you were here too, and that was not a figment of Cash’s drunken imagination, I spelled open the door and made caffeine.”
There was no reason to be self-conscious that here she was in a convoluted mess with Rhi’s brother. More than once she’d caught Rhi with less clothes and more gasping breaths with a certain Viking, and they’d all had a good laugh about it. Sex was many things, one of which was ridiculous looking.
But she and Javi hadn’t even had sex. Still, it took effort to detangle herself. “We was just playing a game.”
Rhiannon cracked a laugh and turned back toward the living room with its half-kitchen. “I don’t want to know this game.”
“No. You just jump and—”
“Lalalalalala!” With one finger in her ear, she got a clean m
ug with the other hand and poured. “Red eye, splash of cream, and small mountain of sugar?”
Emma put her hand on her hip, frustrated by Rhiannon’s assumption but smart enough not to push the issue. “Yeah. I got it.” Except she didn’t know where the sugar was. Blood and cream were in the mini-fridge, and those she acquired, but then she stared at the row of cabinets, unsure where to go first.
Rhi lifted an eyebrow. “Someone else set it up, eh?” Her tone couldn’t carry more disapproval. “He’s lived in that old apartment with bloodstains on the floor since June, you know.”
And Emma hadn’t set him up like a good sire should. The accusation hung in the air between them as Emma opened cabinet door after door looking for sugar.
“See,” Rhi continued, “I know you’ve been in San Francisco taking the longest time ever to sell a home in a hot market, but they invented this cool thing last century called an airplane…”
Score! A teeny bag was tucked into a back corner. Well, that was just too little. This needed fixing. Javier should have someone to bake piles of sweets for him, and despite all the things she couldn’t give him, she was just the vampire to do that. She pulled out God’s own condiment and dumped some into her coffee. “I can’t afford plane tickets.” That didn’t explain, oh, every other reason she was a terrible sire, but at least that much was true. Plus, now she’d be a sire who baked cookies. Infinite improvement.
“What do you mean you can’t afford plane tickets? You’re a vampire.”
Emma sat and sucked down sweet caffeine. “I mean, I ain’t got many zeroes anymore in that fancy bank account CoVIn set up.” She didn’t tell other vampires this—she didn’t dare. But Rhi lived in a clapboard nothing of a place in shitsville, Austin. It was okay to talk to her. And for some reason, Rhi’s opinion mattered. Funny. It hadn’t before last night. “You think I’m living with Cash for the fun of it? Well, not that it ain’t fun, but I ain’t got the money to afford my own place.”
Rhiannon nearly choked on her coffee. “You just sold a condo in San Francisco! One of the few cities more expensive than Austin.”
Emma scrunched her nose and looked away. This was the hell of it. The reason why she had no money. Like, at all. “Didn’t sell it.” Another sip of coffee.
“But that’s why you said you left!” Rhi’s eyes narrowed and her fist clenched as she righteously defended her brother against his sad-sack sire. “What the hell were you doing all this time?”
More coffee. More sugar and caffeine, blood and comfort. “I set it up as a halfway house for my girls.”
Rhiannon hesitated, her ire deflating. “Your… You donated it to sex trafficking victims?”
“Sex trafficking survivors. I got four women living there now.” She finally faced Rhiannon, pleading with her to understand. Yeah, it was a dumb-fuck move to give away her most valuable possession, but… “You don’t know how hard it is to find a place that’ll lease to you when you been arrested for prostitution. Those women ain’t got nowhere to go. So many girls go back to their asshole ‘boyfriends’ because it’s that or live on a bench. They needed the place, and I got somewhere to live. Cash likes people crashing at his house. Reminds him of the bad old days when he and twenty bearded dudes lived in a boat or whatever, but now with satin sheets and a movie theater. I got years—decades likely—afore I manage to piss Cash off so much he wants me out and I have to figure out something new.”
Rhiannon set her cup down and hovered over it, leaning across the table. “But didn’t you get, like, two million dollars or something when you fully vested in CoVIn a hundred years ago? Did you spend it all?” It took a hundred years dead to make full CoVIn status, at which point you got a cushy bank account, which Emma had indeed received in 1937 and quickly disposed of.
Damn, caring what someone thought sucked. Emma shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable. “Uh, yeah. I mostly have spent it.” So fucking irresponsible. “It was all just sitting there. And there’re people that need it.” Her frustration grew, part from shame but more from something else. Something angry that had chewed and gnawed on her for her whole life. “Investing’s ridiculous. I mean, that money—what does it do? Where does it go? It’s all paper. People are starving, but I’m the irresponsible one because instead of thinking of them, I should be thinking about pencil scratches on a ledger.” Finally she caught Rhi’s gaze and held it. “No. No, ma’am, I can’t live that way. My million bucks goes in a bank and what does it do? Lets me sit on my ass. Or—or—it stops people from starving to death. From dying of the cold on the street. That’s value. That’s real. I ain’t gonna hang out and watch people starve while I sit on my pile. No, ma’am. No disrespect to those who do, but I can’t. I been on that other side. I can’t do it.”
Time for another lecture, one more person chewing her out for being a naive idiot who didn’t understand how the world worked and blah blah blah. But those people were the real naive idiots. Emma understood reality in a way anyone who put more value in paper than in people ever could.
Rhiannon raised her mug. “Fuck the ledger.” Determination and the girl’s own low-simmering anger came through in the darkness of her eyes and the slight quaver in the mug. Rhi’s cotton-candy-blue hair was piled on top of her head in haphazard fashion. Her black shirt read, “Don’t like what I said? You should hear what I’m thinking,” in violet letters, scrawled like a marker font. The collar was gone, and rips in the shirt showed her colorful sports bra beneath.
If Emma’s “low-class” speech was her protest, Rhiannon’s outfit was hers. Javier might be doing his damnedest to fit in, but his little sister was a kindred spirit to Emma’s own refusal to give in to the system. A slow smile spread across her face as Emma raised her own mug. “Fuck the ledger.” They clicked and drank, and the fellowship warmed Emma more than the coffee. She eyed Rhi over her mug, resizing the woman up, and noticed the double puncture on her inner elbow—a fresh bite mark. “Cash feed you like a good vampire after that deuce, or can I get you something?” She got up anyway. Cash would’ve offered Rhi plenty of food after biting her this morning, but feeding people was love, and Emma felt the need to love on her. She wished there was a real oven here, and not just a microwave and stovetop. She’d bake up something good. Or best she could, anyway, with Javier’s meager cupboard.
Rhiannon rolled her eyes. “I’m not hungry.”
Emma opened the refrigerator anyway and pulled out an apple. Only now, she remembered Vince talking about Rhi—she and Vince were best friends—and how she didn’t eat enough. Feeding wasn’t love when it was pressure; she knew that logically, but it was still hard to wrap her brain around. Intentional starvation was incomprehensible. Emma tossed the apple, and Rhi caught it. “Well, just in case. Gotta be careful when you’re donating.” She kept her voice neutral and moved on, denying the instinct to encourage her to eat it. “So what brings you here before your brother’s even awake? I can only surmise you’re looking for me.”
Rhiannon set the apple down and drank more coffee. “Both of you, actually. I figured you could share when he wakes up. Officially CoVIn isn’t investigating this, but Cash is pissy about it—you know how he gets when he wants something and Mama Mo turns him down.”
Emma snickered at the epithet. Before Rhiannon, Cash had been the only person she knew who dared call Modron Mo. Granted, he was her favorite fledgling now that Alaric, her first-turned, had gone rogue. Cash could get away with shit nobody else could. And now Rhiannon, a tiny girl with the potential for big power, was training as a witch at Modron’s side.
“I can’t believe you call her that. She scares the shit out of me. I think she can hear through walls or in her magic mirror or whatever. She knows, girl. She knows what you’re saying.” Emma made her tone joking, but she really wasn’t sure how joking she was. Modron was freaky as hell, and possibly crazy as guano.
Rhiannon laughed. “She’s not that bad.”
Emma puffed out air disbelievingly “The Wild West wasn
’t exactly a peace-love-and-hippie fest, but hanging robbers in the square’s got nothing on ancient Europe. A Viking is her primary sanity check. How far off the reservation are you when a man who spent his humanity pillaging up and down the coasts of Europe is the one telling you, ‘That’s too crazy; tone it down, honey’?”
Rhi laughed even harder, and to Emma’s relief she took a bite of apple. “Yeah, it’s the insane leading the deranged around here.” Two dimples made her angular face less severe. “I think that’s why I fit in.”
“Speaking of his royal blondness, what does Cash want from us? He already mentioned Javier’s responsible for inventing a new branch of science today. Got some gravy for that goose?”
More crunching, and Emma relaxed further. Sharing food made folks friends. “Inventing a new branch of science? I didn’t realize the Jav-ster was doing that today. Always the underachiever, my brother. No, I’m working on a tracker spell, something that’ll take us back to where the zombies originated.” She spread her feet out and leaned forward, eyes sparkling with interest. “See, Jav has this idea that magic is just another branch of science that we don’t understand yet. We’ve been working together some. He’s helped me tweak spells a few times using scientific methodology. So much magic is superstition—you know, something that’s been passed down a certain way because we know it works, but that doesn’t mean each element is necessary or that there aren’t other ways to create the same result. Anyway, I need to talk to him after he gets a good look at the zombie blood. Then I’m going to use a locator to track it down, see what we can find.”
