by Jax Garren
Javier cried out in pain, sending a spike of worry through Emma. No time. She drank the damn demon potion. It tasted disgusting, musty and rotten, like old meat. “I’m going to have a stomachache.”
“Kindle it,” the demon ordered Rhi, before grabbing Emma by the hips, his hands hot as brands, startling her so badly she chicken squawked. As quickly as he’d grabbed her up, he deposited her on the bed next to Javier. “Get him to drink you.”
Swallowing the bile that wanted to come up, she nodded. “Yes, uh, sir.” Lying down so her body created a wall between Javier and evil, she put her wrist gently against his mouth. “It’s time to do this again, sweetie.”
His eyes, a feverish brown, turned to her full of fear. “Are you sure?” he asked, voice barely audible.
“Sure as I ever been. Let’s do this and move forward, okay?” The gratitude in his eyes shocked her, before he latched on and bit down. Rhi’s chanting over the phone, along with the pungent incense, made the room feel dreamy, until she could block everything out and make it just the two of them.
Last time he’d bitten her, in his mother’s kitchen, his hand had wandered her body. It surprised her to realize she wanted that again. But at the same time, it was confusing and scary.
Maybe she should see a therapist. Whisky and a friend hadn’t cut it so far.
She pressed her forehead to Javier’s, put her free arm around his too-hot body, and whispered encouragement.
“That should be enough,” the demon rumbled behind her.
She ran a hand through Javier’s hair, wishing there was no hurry—but a horde of zombies outside would beg to differ. “Javi, sweetie, it’s time to get better.”
He coughed as he pulled away, then curled in on himself.
“Lemme see! Lemme see!” Rhiannon yelled through the phone. Elvira brought it over, and together they—minus the demon—watched breathlessly to see what would happen.
“Will it take long to know?” Emma asked.
“No,” Marbas said, wandering the room and opening cabinet doors with more curiosity than he spared Javier.
“Are we really safe with him out and about?” Emma whispered.
“No,” the demon answered, instead of Elvira.
“Uh…”
“But considering the horde of sickly undead clamoring to enter this facility, you may be safer than without me.”
Whatever that meant. But she quickly forgot as the black lines, which had reached Javier’s skull, began to shrink back like retracting tentacles. “Oh, thank God.”
“It had nothing to do with this,” Marbas stated dryly. “You could, however, thank me.”
Hadn’t Elvira warned her specifically about that? She shot him a frown.
Javier coughed. “Did you just call God It?”
Emma whipped her head back around to her fledgling and found him struggling to sit up. She quickly scooped an arm behind him and helped. “You okay?”
“I feel like I got hit by a truck, but other than that… yeah.” He started to pull her tighter against him affectionately, then relaxed and pulled away, as if he’d remembered not to.
Not knowing what else to do, she snugged up against him and didn’t let him go away.
He huffed an irritated sigh as he attempted to disentangle himself. “It’s all right, Em. I know you were just saying that to get me to drink. You can quit pretending.”
She wouldn’t let him go. “I know it’s going to take a while for you to believe me, Javi, but I meant every word.”
He looked at her like she’d lost her mind, but before they could continue the argument, the demon spoke. “So about this zombie problem you’ve created. I’d like to help.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Javier was about to make a deal with a demon.
“This isn’t a good idea,” Elvira warned. “At all.”
Javier rubbed his head, another, albeit lesser, headache starting to form. “And yet you haven’t offered an alternative. ‘Let the world get eaten by zombies while we hole up in a brothel for the rest of eternity’ isn’t a solution. Can you make a big enough triangle?”
“No. Which is why your proposed deal isn’t a solution either.”
The weird part was, the demon didn’t want anyone’s soul. He wanted a research partner. He was a demon doctor who’d been fascinatedly watching the zombie outbreak from his… bedroom in hell? Or whatever. Javier was unclear how that worked. But it meant Marbas had been watching Javier, Emma, Rhiannon, and the whole kit and caboodle of them run around trying to solve it. Marbas didn’t understand the earthly physics of magic either and wanted to study them. Which meant he needed a lab on earth. Like the one Javier was building at CoVIn.
“Actually…” Rhi said over the phone, her voice hesitant.
Marbas, who’d appeared to be taking a nap while they all discussed his offer, lifted his head from the fainting couch and yawned. “The witchling speaks.”
He’d been pretty impressed with Rhiannon. That part bugged Javier quite a bit. His sister cleared her throat. “There’s already a triangle there. I’m not sure exactly how it lines up, but we could probably work something out.”
“A triangle there?” Elvira asked.
Rhiannon shrugged. “CoVIn poured a block-sized pentagram out of cement, poured a shit ton of magic into it, then built the headquarters on top of it. I can feel it when I’m working magic there. That makes five triangles, actually, one for each point of the star. I’m pretty sure about half the medical ward is over one. We just make sure to set him up with space inside that area. Can you work with a triangle that’s already there?”
Elvira nodded slowly. “It’ll be easier than drawing a new one, actually. And more stable.” She bit her lip and lifted her brow at Javier. “Sure you’re up for this?”
Marbas hopped up and strode to Javier. Before Javier could stop him, his hot hands were on Javier’s shoulders, rubbing like he was a prizefighter before a match. “It’ll be fun! Think what I can teach you.”
Javier slid out from under his grasp and spun. “If we’re working together, you can’t trade for information. I can’t be constantly on my guard for you to trick me.”
Marbas tilted his head, his creepy goat eyes narrowing. “And I can’t give thousands of years of work away for free.”
“I’m not asking you to teach me everything you know, but if something is pertinent to what we’re working on, then you should. I won’t point at a spectrometer and say, ‘Go for it,’ without explaining what it does, and you won’t keep me in the dark about information we need to solve a problem. That’s what working together is.”
The demon’s lips pursed. “A spectrometer?”
Marbas was playing class warfare—I’m better than you by virtue of who I am. But Javier was done with that game forever. He knew his worth. “You know eye of newt, I know fluorescence spectroscopy. I’m sure I’ll find you helpful—I’ll get more done faster because of your knowledge. But I’ve got forever. Speed isn’t necessary for a vampire like it is for a human. But you need me to get anything done at all—and not just because it’s my lab. You need my modern training, or you wouldn’t be entertaining this deal to begin with.”
The demon chortled as if he found this conversation highly amusing.
“Now,” Javier suggested, feeling hella cheeky all of a sudden. “Let’s solve this problem to see how we work together. Then, if we think we can make a partnership work, we’ll write up an agreement, overseen by Elvira. But I sign in ink, not blood.”
* * *
To Emma’s shock, it took less than an hour—between the demon, the witch, the mambo, and the scientist—to come up with a cure. At Emma’s suggestion, they decided to build bullets with the potion inside. Apparently Rhiannon had tried coating bullets with magic at some point, but the gun’s explosion burned it off.
Of course it had, silly girl.
And so it was less than two hours later that Emma found herself back on the streets with a stash of ammo
created by Miguel’s people, shooting zombies in nonlethal locations and dragging the resulting human-with-a-gunshot-wound back to Scarlet. In the ballroom, Javier led a team of vampires with more recent Blood Safety Certifications in patching everyone back up. Trey had already finished injecting the cure into anyone at the brothel who’d been exposed but not turned yet.
Rosie was going to be fine. Or, at least, not a zombie. The rest of her life was still pretty fucked. Dez was trying to convince her, along with all of Charming’s former girls, to join their bakery. Technically several of them were too young to work, but hopefully they’d figure some way around that. Emma and Dez had a lot of work to do.
For the first time, though, she thought maybe she could handle it.
Cash, heading out for another run as she was heading in with her team, snickered. “Zombie bit you on the ass.”
She tried to turn and see whatever it was. “Am I bleeding? Least I’m immune to this shit.”
“No, but he ripped your trousers, and now you’re half mooning everyone.” He pulled off his jacket, which would fall below her ass, and put it over her shoulders.
“So, uh…” Emma started, unsure what Cash knew. “So in all the excitement of Javier and the cure and whatnot, did anyone mention that a demon’s going to be volunteering at the CoVIn hospital lab? We probably shoulda gotten approval on that, I guess.”
For once, Cash looked flummoxed. “A demon?”
“Uh-huh. He and Javi are going to invent that new branch of science for you together. They started by making the zombie cure, with Rhi and Dezi.”
Cash’s face pinched as he slowly nodded. Then he shrugged. “I’ll smooth things over with Mo. As long as she thinks they’re solving the fifty-fifty turning problem, she’ll be cool with it. I think.” He sighed. “The twenty-first century is weird, Em. I’m getting too old for this.”
Near the door, a startled shout made them both turn to find Nikolai dragging his wife away from a zombie-hunting party by the elbow. “You went out there?”
Winnie just rolled her eyes. “I’m a warrior. I belong in war.”
“You’re not a warrior! You’re a princess!”
“Fine. I’m Xena.”
Nikolai looked deeply confused for a moment. “Who? Never mind.” At the stubborn jut of his wife’s chin, he softened his tone a tad. “Why aren’t you in there with Elvira helping tend to the wounded?”
A softened tone didn’t help when those were the words. “Really?” Winnie asked, drawing out the ea just a bit for emphasis.
“Fine. Why didn’t you at least tell me you were going?”
“Gee, Emma,” Cash muttered, “why aren’t you in the hospital helping your boyfriend? You also possess a vagina. I know; I’ve seen it.”
Emma shot him the bird in jest. “Yeah, well, by that logic the whole goddamn world knows you’ve got a penis, so…”
He petted the ax he’d coated with potion, instead of bringing a gun. “I like having a manly thing to poke people with.”
Nikolai spun to them. “Did you know about this?”
Cash just shrugged. “Your wife’s a badass, Kolyan. Have a little faith in her.”
The man huffed, half irritated, half amused. “This is your fault. You taught her to fight.”
Winnie gave Cash a high five and proceeded to rejoin her group.
Nikolai trailed after her. “At least let me join your group on the next outing.”
Emma and Cash both burst into laughter. Finally Cash hip-bumped her. “Did I mention it was a weird era? Goes to show you can learn new things at any age.”
“Winnie’s a pretty good fighter too—you trained her well.”
“I was talking about Kolyan accepting that his wife is not the sit-at-home type.”
That made Emma laugh again, and she turned back toward the ballroom, where the hospital was set up, wondering if she should go check on Javi or head back out for another round.
“Fuck it, I suck at subtlety,” Cash said. “I was talking about you.”
She frowned at him. “You talking about me and Javier? I’m gonna give it a try.”
His face brightened. “I wasn’t, but I’m glad to hear it. You deserve a good guy—even if he is hella stodgy. Maybe you can fix that? I meant humans have come a long way in helping people with”—he poked her in the forehead—“weird-ass brains like yours to learn shit. Like reading. You know that I’d be happy to fund classes for you. Just keep my pantry stocked with fudge.” He grinned, voice turning teasing. “No nuts.”
She blushed, despite him baiting her with an old joke. “Oh, I don’t need no edu—” She sucked in a breath as fear overwhelmed her. Learning to read was scary—it was so much work and made her feel like there was no one stupider on the planet. But it would help—a lot—if she wanted to run a business. Hell, it would help a lot with everything. Was it even possible that reading wouldn’t always be a total struggle?
No way to know unless she tried, really tried, to learn. She gave Cash a tentative smile. “You’re a good friend, you know that?”
“Oh, I’m magnificent, no question. Go check on your baby bat. I imagine it’s crazy in there, and he was sick two hours ago. I’m going to go stab people.” He cleared his throat. “Zombies, I mean. I’m only going to stab zombies.”
With a light punch to her shoulder, Cash headed back toward the door and the zombie battle. Emma headed toward the ballroom. Inside, Javier was looking a little ragged around the edges, but he spoke to patients with calm kindness as he stitched them up with nimble fingers. Around him, Trey, Elvira, Sofia, Scarlet’s nurse, and a few other folks tended to those with smaller injuries—likely given by Cash, Winnie, Alex, and Miguel, who had the weapon skills to get close and nick their opponents instead of shoot them in a major-ish location like everyone else was doing.
Javier turned away from his latest patient, and his bedside manner devolved into weariness. He was going to run himself into the ground for other people.
Emma frowned and strode through the crowded makeshift hospital to him.
His face brightened, then his look shuttered warily. “How’s it going outside?”
“Slow but steady. And we been administering the vaccine to any survivors we found, just like you said. But, uh…” How did she say this?
He frowned. “Something the matter?”
Eh, just see what happens, girl. She forced a little ominous tone into her voice. “There is something I need to talk to you about.”
He sucked in a quick breath—like, “What next?”—but nodded. “Let’s find somewhere private. We’re mostly under control here for the moment.”
She quickly led him back to an empty room, with its high-dollar sheets, and suddenly bit her lip, afraid.
“What is it?” he asked, hesitating in the doorway.
No, she was fighting through the fear. She grabbed the handle and closed the door, pushing him in next to her. “So…” she started, then wasn’t sure what to say next.
Javier stood up stiffly. “So?” Then he looked down at the floor, like he was uncomfortable and couldn’t figure out where to look. “You heading out?”
“My hunting party’s on break. They’re eating. I’m…” Trying to flirt with a cute boy and failing utterly. How pathetic was that?
“No, I mean, heading out. Like, out of the barricade and to wherever. I’m fine now. Thank you for saving my ass once again. I’ll try to make it less necessary in the future.”
She couldn’t think of a single flirty word. So she just grabbed his hand. “Javi, I could go. I know the barricades are still up, but I could sneak out real easy. And I did already rescue your cute ass, so I did my sire duty to keep you alive. Again. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because, well… would you ever consider having a girlfriend who’s in therapy because she’s afraid of sex? I mean, I know that’s a big ask.”
“But… what’s going wrong?” He turned to the door like something must be going on outside.
She
grabbed his arm and tugged him back. “Your impending blue balls while I’m trying to figure my shit out is what’s going to go wrong. Ain’t you—aren’t you—listening to me? There’s no reason for me to ask you except I want to. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And you’re cute. And I really do like your mouth on my hoo-ha—at least when I ain’t freaking out about it. So what do you say? I’m completely fucked up. Want me?” Worst pitch ever.
Javier blinked at her. “You’re serious?” He squeezed her hand, then answered his own question. “You’re serious. I’m not the picture of sanity myself. I’m a pain in the ass—demanding and driven.” He swallowed. “And I don’t mind if we don’t have sex for a while, but I would want you to, you know, work on that.”
“Oh yeah. I want to.” She slid a little closer to him. “You know you could do a whole lot better than me, right?”
Javier touched her cheek, his hand warm. “I don’t think there is better than you. I’ve been crazy about you since we met.”
“Well, I know there isn’t anyone better than you, at least not for me.” She reached up on tiptoes and still had to tug a little on his head to reach him. The kiss she gave him, barely a press of lips that ended nearly as soon as it began, felt bumbling and shy and small, but she meant it.
He leaned back and studied her for a moment as her face heated. Finally, he said, “You weren’t trying to impress me.”
She pursed her lips into a frown. “Hoo, boy, here I go trying to be sincere, and you go insulting—”
His serious expression turned into an impish grin. “I know. You weren’t trying to impress me or distract me or cajole me into anything. Which I think means you just wanted to kiss me.” His arm scooped her against him as he leaned down to kiss her one more time, another quick press that didn’t push any boundaries but still had her flapping her arms like a flustered chicken. He released her, completely letting her go. “Was that all right? Or should I let you make all the moves for a while?”
