by Jenn Burke
“You’re not. You flickered. Like you were doing when you showed up in my bedroom.”
I still couldn’t quite remember that. The memories of being grabbed, being scared, were there, but not the ones from my escape. “Wasn’t that during the day, though?”
“Yeah. Something dragged me awake. Thank god,” he murmured.
I contemplated the ceiling some more. “So...a witch cultist, a vampire, and an unknown monster all want a piece of little ol’ me,” I said, happy that my voice didn’t tremble. “Any thoughts on that?”
Hudson grunted.
“Come on. You could at least pretend it’s because of my good looks.”
“I don’t think Marcello’s coming back.”
“Does Kat really know where you are?”
Hudson made a dismissive noise. “Are you kidding? I don’t have anything to tie Salvay to the victims other than Lexi’s research. And he was right—it’s not like that info would be admissible in court.”
“Shit.” If Kat didn’t know, then there went my hope for rescue by the cavalry. Except... “Lexi and Evan know.”
“Please god don’t let them mount a rescue mission.”
I opened my mouth to protest but quickly closed it. Hudson was right. Evan was a baby in vampire terms, and Lexi’s magic wasn’t reliable for a rescue.
So if we were going to get out of here, we’d have to do it ourselves. I couldn’t ghost, and I certainly couldn’t break out of my bindings, so that meant it was going to be up to Hudson using his vaunted predatorial skills. Still, there was the challenge of the steel chains...
Oh, I had it.
I angled my foot so I could use the edge of the table to catch the ridge of the sneaker’s sole at my heel, and pulled my leg up. Marcello had bound my hands and my chest, but for whatever reason, he hadn’t secured my legs. Maybe he figured the bindings around my upper body would be enough—it wasn’t like I was all that athletic or anything. And, technically, those bindings were enough to keep me in place.
But if I could get my shoe off...
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Remember when Evan bit me?” I grunted as my foot slipped but the shoe remained stubbornly in place.
“Yeah,” Hudson said, his voice full of caution.
“He got super strong.”
“Maybe not super—”
“Hudson. Work with me here. He got stronger.”
“Right, okay. He got stronger. So?”
I twisted my ankle, still trying to encourage my shoe to abandon my foot. “So maybe my blood will make you strong enough to break steel.”
“You remember how high he got, right? So high he couldn’t walk for an hour?”
“He was a baby vamp. You’re, like, a teenager vamp.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“You’ll be able to handle it better.” I hoped. With a final grunt and a yank, my shoe popped off. I held out my socked foot in Hudson’s direction. “Can you reach?”
He eyed my foot. “I’m not sucking your blood through your dirty sock.”
“Then pull it off.”
“How?”
“With your teeth.”
“Really, Wes? Really?”
“You want to wait here to see what Marcello’s going to do next? It won’t be good. I’m strapped to a table in a sacrificial murder room. I’ll tell you what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna come back in here with a bigass knife, chant some bullshit Latin, and stab me.” I wiggled my foot again. “Suck my toe, Hudson!”
Groaning, Hudson extended his neck as far as he could—which wasn’t far—and managed to grab my sock with his teeth. I pulled my foot back. Slowly, and with a few misfires when he had to get a better hold on the sock, my foot in all its skinny, pasty glory was revealed.
Hudson spit out the sock and narrowed his eyes. “Where do you want me to bite?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, neither do I.”
“You’re the vampire.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never fed from someone’s foot before.”
I flexed my toes. “Go for the big toe then. Can you reach it?”
“Yeah.” Hudson sounded anything but happy about this task. But he took a deep breath—thank god my feet were not the stinky sort—and his fangs descended. “Hold still.”
I did. And—“Fuck, that hurts!”
Hudson’s only response to that was a heartfelt moan. Okay, good to know my blood had the same effect on him as it had on Evan. He sucked, pulling more blood from me, and it didn’t feel bad, necessarily, but I wasn’t reduced to a quivering mound of lustful jelly as the sexy vampire movies would have you believe. Maybe it would be different if he was feeding from the neck.
Maybe I’d ask him to try that next time.
With the next time still echoing in my inner ear—because what the fuck—I said, “That’s enough.”
Hudson groaned and sucked harder.
“Hudson, enough.”
As I was about to yank my foot away, Hudson released it, licked the wounds—which tickled—and leaned his head against the wall, eyes closed.
“Are you okay?”
He let out a series of sounds that might have been words strung into a sentence, but I couldn’t understand a single one.
“Hud?”
He blinked and opened his eyes, and gasped as he stared at the ceiling. “Holy shit.”
I looked up. “What?”
“The walls are whispering colors to me.”
Oh my god. I chuckled. “You’re high.”
Hudson lowered his chin to look at me. “Hi.”
“No, I said you’re high.”
His brow furrowed but quickly smoothed out. “Hi.”
I stifled a louder bark of laughter. “Hi. You think you can get out of that collar now?”
“Huh? Oh. Right.” He reached up to grab the collar, then paused to look at me again. “Your hair has streaks of sunshine.”
“Thanks. You want to focus, though?”
“On your hair?”
“On the collar.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay.” Wresting his arms from the chains that held them close to the wall took very little effort. Then he pulled at the collar, testing it, and added more pressure when it didn’t give. After a few more seconds, the collar cracked at one of the seams. It didn’t take long for Hudson to get rid of it once that happened. Next, he removed the remnants of the chains around his wrists, and stood up, completely free.
And swayed.
“You are so out of it.” But damned cute. I lifted one chained arm. “My turn?”
Before Hudson could destroy my chains, Marcello reentered the room. Immediately Hudson’s fangs dropped and he grabbed our host around the neck. Marcello made an unseemly gurgling sound as he tried to pry open Hudson’s grip.
“I should drain you.” Hudson’s voice was more animalistic than human.
“Whoa, okay, no. Down, boy,” I pleaded from my supine position. Goddamn it, Marcello had shitty timing. Two more minutes and I would have been free too, and maybe better able to convince Hudson not to rip out his throat. “We need to know about the artifact, remember?”
Hudson shook Marcello. “You heard him. Talk.”
Marcello gasped.
“Maybe let up on his neck a little, eh?” I suggested.
Hudson must have complied, because Marcello sucked in air like a greedy son of a bitch.
“Artifact?” he rasped.
“Don’t give us any bullshit,” I warned. “There was a magical artifact missing from Shawn Cartwright’s secret room. Spill.”
Hudson gave Marcello a little shake and the man quickly nodded. “Yes! An artifact. Right. Describe it again?”
I went to gesture, only to have the chains rattle
. Damn it. “About a foot long, half a foot wide, jagged edges, pointy tip.”
I hadn’t thought it possible, but Marcello grew paler. “You’re positive?”
It seemed my vague-ass description meant something to the man. “Yes.”
His gaze drifted to the side—before jerking back to Hudson. I realized that part of the buzz I was hearing was not exhaustion, but an actual resonance, like echoes bouncing back and forth and everywhere. Not a completely unpleasant sensation, but not comfortable, now that I was aware of it.
I followed Marcello’s line of sight—if he’d been able to fully turn his head—and saw it.
A piece of metal roughly the same size and shape as the echo in Shawn’s secret room.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“The Crown of Osiris—or a piece of it, anyway.” Marcello paused, then rushed on when Hudson growled. “It’s in four pieces. Broken in the early—early 1900s. Egyptian in origin, or at least that’s where the name comes from.” Marcello sucked in a breath. “I—”
“Thanks,” Hudson said. “Night night.” And he slammed Marcello’s head into the wall.
I winced as Marcello’s eyes rolled back into his skull and he went limp. “You couldn’t have waited two seconds?”
Hudson grunted. “Bored.”
Shit. “Is he alive?”
Hudson nudged Marcello with his toe and the man whimpered. Good enough. Then he stared at me for a few moments, his eyes going unfocused.
“Nope, no, uh-uh, come on.” I rattled my chains. “You’ve got work to do still.”
“You could harness your hair power and turn into the sun.”
“I’m not even sure where you’re going with that, but I’m not the sun, buddy. I need your help.”
“I’ll always be there for you.”
“Yes. Thank you. Be here for me now, okay?” Jesus, maybe the toe sucking had been a bad idea.
Finally Hudson grabbed the chains and pulled. The metal groaned and protested, but it didn’t take much effort on his part to get it to separate at the welds. Then it was a matter of unbuckling the chest strap before I could sit up. And wait for the room to stop spinning. Again.
I was getting fucking tired of that sensation.
Hudson steadied me as I hopped off the table—which was kind of a blind-leading-the-blind scenario, since he wasn’t much steadier than me. I offered him a smile, and got a full-wattage, unselfconscious response. His eyes crinkled, and his teeth were on full display—fangs and all. It was...actually so adorable I wanted to squee.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“Ready to get out of here?”
“Fan-fucking-tastic.” His brow wrinkled. “Wait. I already said that.”
“Okay, you figure out the right answer, and I’ll be right back.”
I pulled on my sock and shoe, then stepped over Marcello’s out-cold form toward the object he’d pointed out. I hesitated to touch it. What if touching it triggered something like the anomaly in Cyril’s apartment? Marcello made a low noise, and that prompted me to action. I shrugged off my shirt, threw it over the piece of the crown, and wrapped it up before tucking it under my arm.
There. Done.
Hudson was still smiling as I returned to his side. “Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“I’m ready to get out of here. Uh—you’re naked.”
“Shirtless.” I tucked my hand into Hudson’s elbow to nudge him forward. “There’s a difference.”
“I like your nipples.”
And just like that, my nipples tightened, sitting up like puppies begging for a treat. “Yeah, they like you too.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I tossed the shirt-wrapped crown to Lexi when we stumbled into Hudson’s kitchen. Luckily she had great reflexes and caught it with only the smallest bobble.
“What the hell is this?” She glared at me. “What the hell happened to you?”
“That’s a piece of the Crown of Osiris. And Marcello Salvay is an asshole,” I declared.
“Asshole,” Hudson repeated with the exaggerated nod of someone enjoying an altered mental state. His arm was draped over my shoulder and he was leaning, hard.
He was heavy.
Lexi eyed Hudson. “Is he okay?”
“Holy shit,” Evan said from the doorway. Based on the murmurs from the TV, I assumed he’d been watching something to pass the time. “Is he high?”
Hudson smiled at him. “Hi.”
“Oh god, not this again.” I briefly outlined what had happened during our visit to Marcello and how we escaped.
Lexi valiantly fought to keep a straight face. “He sucked your toe.”
“Didn’t want to,” Hudson told her seriously. “I don’t have a foot fetish.”
“Good to know, big guy.”
Sick of being Hudson’s personal leaning post, I pushed him upright onto his feet. He cooperated and stood straight—straight-ish, anyway. He was listing a little. “There. You’re home. Think you can walk around on your own now?”
“No.” He made grabby hands at me. “Need you.”
Oh. Um. “You need my help to walk?”
“Need you.”
Evan coughed and shot me a grin. “Okay, well, I’m gonna go downstairs.” He held up a hand in farewell and beat a hasty retreat to the living room to turn off his show, then went downstairs.
Lexi bundled my shirt with the piece of the crown into her bag. “And I’m gonna go do research.”
Oh, they weren’t seriously leaving me alone with him, were they? “Guys.”
“You heard him, Wes. Hudson needs you.” Lexi swung her bag onto her shoulder, then gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Have fun,” she whispered.
“He’s not in his right mind!” I hissed at her.
“Like there’s been anything but that on his mind for the past few days. You didn’t see how strung out he was when you were unconscious.” She rubbed my upper arm.
“Ugh. You suck. Be careful with that thing, by the way. I don’t know what the fuck it is.”
“Will do.”
In moments, we were alone. And Hudson was looking at me with the puppiest puppy-dog eyes I’d ever seen.
“C’mere.”
“You’re high.”
“On you.”
I burst out laughing. “That was the cheesiest line ever.”
“But literally true,” he pointed out.
“I’m not having sex with you.”
“Like, not tonight or not ever?”
“Not tonight.”
“I can work with that.” He treated me to that giant smile again, the one that lit up the room like the sun. His fangs were still down. “Look at you, being all chilav—chivar—being all caring and shit.”
“I’m not a complete asshole.”
“C’mere, Wes.”
With a sigh of protest—but not too much protest—I gave in. Hudson wrapped me in his arms, and oh my god, I’d forgotten how damned good it felt. He’d hugged me after the police interview, and we’d woken up in each other’s arms more than once now—but this embrace was simpler and more profound all at the same time. This wasn’t comfort after an intense, emotional event—though I suspected the crash from tonight’s adventure would come soon. It was warmth, and welcome, and—fuck. Home.
“You feel it too, right?” Hudson whispered into my hair.
“What?”
“That walking away from each other was the stupidest fucking thing we’ve ever done?”
“Is that what you think?”
Hudson’s hot and cold running attitude had left me confused and twisted up, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to make of it. He’d admitted he had been trying to keep me at a distance, but why? Why admit t
hat and then still do it?
He sighed. “I’m done fighting this.”
My heart gave a little jump. “What?”
“I was being stubborn—”
“What, you? Stubborn?”
“Shut up and listen as I say things I wouldn’t normally say. Stupid blood.”
“Best blood.”
“God, it really was.” Was that a whimper? Hudson cleared his throat. “Um, so yeah. Me being stubborn. When you called me—when I saw you—a ton of bricks, man. Right on my heart.”
Did he mean I crushed his heart, or...?
“My heart hurt and I wanted you. Not just in a sex way, but in a heart way.”
The awkward. Oh man. It was adorable, but also painful. I’d blame it on my blood, but this was just Hudson.
He rubbed his cheek against my hair. “Except we’d broken up for valid reasons. Reasons that were still mostly true. Plus there was the vampire thing and—I didn’t want you to know that. So, yeah. I was stubborn. If I kept you at a distance, then you wouldn’t like me, and I wouldn’t like you, and our lives wouldn’t change that much.”
“Except you do like me.”
Hudson sighed. “A lot. Still. Yeah.”
I tilted my head back to look up at him. His pupils were dilated. We probably shouldn’t be having a serious conversation right now, but he’d started it. “And I like you.”
“But I’m an asshole.”
“Well yeah, but so am I.” I grinned. “You’re also dedicated, honorable, and good. The same guy I fell in love with while having sex to Meat Loaf.”
Hudson laughed. “God, why did we put that album on?”
I laughed too, and leaned my cheek against his broad chest. “So to answer your question—yes, I think walking away from each other was the stupidest thing we’ve done. But maybe the most necessary too.”
Because this conversation? Neither of us had been ready or able to have it thirty-three years ago. We hadn’t been ready to compromise, to meet in the middle. Hudson had been too driven, and I had been too selfish.
A shudder ran through his body. “I did a lot of thinking when you were unconscious.”
“Yeah?”
“A lot of wondering what it meant, that you came back into my life. Was it a second chance? Was I wasting it? I decided none of that shit mattered—it was clutter. All that matters is that I want to try again.”
