by Joey W. Hill
“She already knows you’re a vampire,” Allan pointed out. “And has taken it in stride. Two parts of the job description already handled, right?”
“She’s not an option for that,” Wolf said. He wanted to go downstairs, leave this discussion, but he needed to handle something first. The broken bottles and beer spilled on the floor.
Quelling a sigh, he moved behind the bar, retrieved mop, broom and dustpan, and pulled a bucket from beneath the sink. Allan, to his credit, took the dustpan and broom from him with a companionable nod and went to work on the broken glass. Wolf got the soapy water going to mop up the splattered liquid.
Watching them, Saturnia took a sip of her wine. “I get it. Look at Fort, how much of a wreck he was when he lost his wife. You and I weren’t around for it, Allan, but Wolf was. Fort almost walked into the sun a couple times, it got so bad for him.”
She pointed a finger at Wolf. “But most of the time, having a third mark isn’t about that. It’s practical, like having a car to get around. I didn’t care two shits about having a servant, until Holliman showed up at my door. He’d tracked me down, the dysfunctional son of a bitch.”
“That was because no one else knew how to work with him,” Allan scoffed.
“He’d left the company,” Saturnia demurred. “Or been encouraged to do so, with a generous pension and a consult upon demand requirement. More distance, better relationship for everyone involved. He’s too socially awkward, even for a geekhead.” Saturnia shrugged. “He couldn’t perform for people he didn’t click with. I’d always been his buffer, so the problem didn’t become evident until I’d left. Once I was working with him again, they let him come back to do consult work, which has worked out nicely for us, the intel he can feed us that aligns with our interests and the jobs we take.”
Wolf knew the bare bones of the story, but now he found himself reluctantly curious about more intimate details. “How did he handle finding out you were a vampire?”
“I didn’t let him know, not at first. Honestly, I kind of resisted the servant idea, even when it started to make so much sense it was hard to ignore. Eventually, it happened, the way these things do. And when I marked him…”
She paused. Saturnia never looked relaxed. Fully wound up, focused, able to tear into a problem like a backhoe until she found the solution. That was her baseline. Yet as Wolf looked at her now, an emotion crossed her face that startled him, because he’d never seen it there. Contentment. “Sitting in his head is like getting in a swimming pool and sitting on the bottom,” she said. “It’s silent.”
Her gaze met Wolf’s. “Do you have any idea how blissful that silence is?”
He thought of Ella on the cool tile. He wouldn’t say her mind was ever silent, but he didn’t need that. He needed the swirling, drifting currents, something that took him from himself, helped steady him.
Yeah, he understood.
“He doesn’t have moods or a bunch of emotional shit in his head,” Saturnia said. “Everything there is ordered, planned, targeted. He’s focused on the work or on the immediate moment. Anything I want or need—blood, sex, he’ll deliver it how I want it, no drama or emotional shit. He doesn’t even need to cuddle.”
“Do you plug him into a charger at night?” Allan queried.
She made a face, but continued. “What he did for the CIA, it was all about the data, the target, the goal. Rinse, wash, repeat. He’s kind of caught in the cycle. He’s a little fucked up. So am I, right?”
She looked toward Wolf. “The point is, I have a high regard for him, but he doesn’t have my heart. I won’t break if I lose him. And his mind is so quiet, I don’t need to listen in to find out if he’s happy or not. He’ll tell me if he needs something, but he’s okay if I say no. He gets what our relationship is.”
“You two could be a Hallmark movie.” Allan said solemnly.
Sat shot him the bird. The former Army Ranger pantomimed catching it mid-air, kissed it and fanned out his fingers, as if flicking it back her way.
Now Wolf did smile. His gut was still churning, but he was remembering why he enjoyed being around people like Allan, Fort and Saturnia. An important part of their human life had been involved in a world they all understood. When push came to shove, they could fall back into the rhythm of dealing and maintain a balance together, despite the craziness of anything else going on.
"Did Fort ever tell you how Nolan, his and Wolf’s sire, became a vampire?" Saturnia asked Allan. When he shook his head, Wolf grinned. They’d finished their clean up. After a moment of hesitation, Wolf decided to stick. He pulled the couple of spare beers out of the fridge where he’d stored them and slid one down the bar to Allan.
Saturnia tipped her head at him. “Tell our young’un the story, Wolfman.”
“Going to start calling you old lady, you don’t quit that young’un shit,” Allan advised her. He pulled out a chair at her table and straddled it, taking a seat as she showed her fangs.
"Not sure I can do it justice,” Wolf said dryly, “but Fort can tell it with all the voices and dramatic embellishments another time. I’ll give you what I think were the actual facts. Nolan was taken on as the security detail of an archaeologist who was sure vampires existed. He told Nolan everything he thought he knew about them, then had Nolan accompany him on an expedition to the Amazon. The archaeologist was sure that they’d find vampires in these caves he’d located.”
“Let me guess. The archaeologist left a memoir, and it became a movie, or TV series, or some shit like that.” Allan tipped his chair back, bracing his feet on the side of Saturnia’s chair. She gave his shoes a gimlet look but let them be, taking another swallow of her wine as she draped her hand over his shins. There was an easy affection between them, like siblings, an older sister, younger brother thing. Though Saturnia was the younger vampire, she’d been fifteen years older than Allan as a human, and she wasn’t turned too many years after him.
“Wouldn’t doubt it, but only if the archaeologist made his notes before the trip, because he didn’t survive this one,” Wolf continued. “They did find vampires in those caves. They were Trads. Vampires living away from human civilization, who viewed humans only as food. They killed the archaeologist, the four other geek squad members. One of the Trads wounded Nolan terminally, dragged him off to a private corner of his lair to enjoy his meal in peace, started drinking from him.”
“No shit.” Allan came down with a thump. “How the hell did he talk his way out of that?”
“Way Fort tells it, Nolan could keep his wits about him in the middle of the worst parts of Armageddon. As the vamp is feeding on him, Nolan paws weakly at the vamp, like he’s sort of disoriented. Which was just to get his hands where he needed them to be. See, the other members of the team had thought the archaeologist was nuts, that there was no such thing as vampires, but Nolan had listened to all the archaeologist’s theories and come prepared, just in case. He was wearing a pair of gauntlets loaded with wooden stakes.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Shoots a stake into the vamp’s heart. Problem is, blood’s pumping out of Nolan from these gaping wounds, and he already knows it’s a matter of minutes before he’s decomposing in that cave for the next few decades. The archaeologist had told him how he thought humans became vampires. So Nolan finds the place behind the Trad’s fangs that holds the turning serum. He puts the vamp’s mouth back on his arm, knocks those fangs back into his flesh like you’d hit the top of a stapler to make it work—”
Allan chuckled.
“—and jets it into his blood stream. Now, Nolan had no idea if the vamp had drunk enough of his blood to make the turning happen or not. However, since he was pretty sure he was half a blink from stepping into his dead momma's arms—his quote—he figured it was as close a chance to surviving as he was going to get.”
Allan’s brow creased. “He became a vampire without a sire?”
“The archaeologist had given him some theories on how the sire part of things w
orked as well. In hindsight, he believes that the archaeologist must have stumbled on some direct source about vampires. No idea how that would have happened, but Nolan’s alive because someone was loose-lipped with a human, or was stupid enough to write some of this stuff down where it was found.”
Wolf shrugged. “Anyway, Nolan drained blood out of his sire, stored it in an underground spring where it would stay fresh as possible. It didn’t last as long as he needed it, so it was a very difficult first few months of his vampire life, but the tough SOB did it. What saved him, ironically, were the other Trads. Once they saw how he'd turned himself, they were kind of impressed. They mentored and protected him until he got things going in the right direction.”
“So I wonder why he did that, instead of stepping into his dear momma's arms?” Allan asked.
Wolf winked. “According to Fort, ‘That tough old bastard wasn’t going out any way other than how he wanted to go.’”
The three of them looked toward the staircase in unison, a blink before Hollow appeared at the top of it. The man never appeared disheveled, always in severely creased slacks, a crisp shirt open one button at the throat. He wore it over a white undershirt to absorb perspiration he never seemed to have.
Hollow seemed as generic as a Ken doll, until a person looked into his eyes. The workings of a complex machine were there, permanently in overdrive. Wolf wouldn’t have suspected that there was a peaceful quiet inside the man’s head like Saturnia had described. However, as he’d realized from his short time inside of Ella’s, the mind was a far more complicated place than it seemed, with numerous chambers to explore.
In the time her eyes had met those of her servant’s, Saturnia had received a full progress report. “First phase of the IT revamp on the security system is done. We’ll pick it up tonight. Time to find a place to bed down. Dawn’s coming in a couple hours.”
“Anwyn offered her guest quarters downstairs,” Wolf reminded her.
“Appreciated, but I prefer to select my own spots,” she said, with a gracious nod. “Holliman found us a place.”
“Undisclosed location,” Allan intoned. Ignoring him, she rose and stood by Hollow.
“I was just singing your praises,” she told her servant. “You and your blissfully quiet mind.”
Hollow gazed at her as if she were the only person in the room worth noticing. Not a romantic thing, not exactly. As if literally, she was the only person that he would look at, acknowledge directly. “It’s your haven to enjoy,” he said.
It was the most intimate thing Wolf had ever heard him say. But he was glad Saturnia had found that. She needed it.
He knew her story from Allan, though hers had a lot less entertaining folklore embellishment than the one about Nolan.
She never turned her back to a door, never fully relaxed her guard. Not unusual for anyone with their training, but when she was with the CIA, she’d been burned at one point, outed to her enemies. Captured and held in some hole-in-the-ground prison, she’d been tortured badly enough that she never regained the composure to continue field work.
She’d continued to work for the CIA in intel and analysis, though. They paired her up with Hollow, not sure the match would work, but Hollow’s inability to relate to others had one single exception. Saturnia.
However, five years after that, she was diagnosed with a rampant cancer, likely triggered by what she’d endured.
Allan had been part of the team who’d rescued her when he was a Ranger. Since he’d kept track of her, even after he was turned, he brought her to Fort’s attention. Fort had offered her the vampire lottery ticket.
Though she indicated there wasn’t anything emotional between her and Hollow, Wolf would call bullshit on that. It didn’t present itself in a traditional way, but the bond between them was obvious.
Now she tipped her head to Wolf and Allan, a farewell, and left them, walking slightly ahead of Hollow as they headed back down the stairs.
Allan took the last swallow of his beer and tapped the bottle on the table thoughtfully. “The first time I saw her put Hollow through his sexual paces with other servants at an overlord gathering, it kind of freaked me out. They got into it full blown, but walking out to their car afterward, both of them looked deadpan as flat rock.”
“You said she was raped, repeatedly and brutally, as a prisoner. It’s probably easier for her to do it as an act.”
“Yeah.” The flash in Allan’s gaze told Wolf he was remembering how he’d found Saturnia, in what condition. His next words revealed that lethal side of him, the side that Wolf would always welcome at his back in a fight.
“Never been so glad to take someone out of this world. Those fuckers are rotting in hell. Shitty world sometimes.”
“Yeah. Good thing there’s always more beer.”
“You know it.” Allan tipped his toward Wolf. “On that note, let’s go again. Put more money in the till for your boss. It may not make us drunk, but it makes the dark dreams easier to sleep through. Right?”
“Right.” Though they both knew that it was a lie.
Chapter Seventeen
He and Allan spent a little more time shooting the shit, then Allan left Wolf to his thoughts. Wolf cut the lights and sat in the darkness. He had his back to the bar, his eyes resting on the dance floor. For probably the dozenth time tonight, he imagined his little girl turning there, her arms out, lovely ass shifting and sweet breasts quivering beneath his shirt, her hair swinging loose along her narrow back.
He didn’t have to imagine those things. She was close, close as a thought. He’d denied himself long enough. When he closed his eyes, he was in her mind again. And where she was, what she was doing, had his body tightening.
She was in her bed, but she wasn’t asleep. She lay on top of her covers and was looking up at a mobile of origami peace cranes, moving in the breeze from her open, screened windows. Atlanta had warmed up today, despite the fall season, so the tabletop fan facing the bed helped the paper flock spin and drift through the air. She had a window unit, but she apparently preferred the open windows tonight.
His shirt was gathered up on her stomach. Her hand rested on her soft abdomen, her fingertips loose and relaxed several inches above her mons. She’d bent her knees, her feet braced on the covers, and one knee rocked wide. So casual and relaxed in her nudity, letting the cool fan air reach all her sweet folds, slide along her inner thighs like the graze of fingertips.
On her back, her generous breasts were outlined against the fabric, her nipples tight points. She was imagining when he was inside her, thrusting hard, his hand on her shoulder, her throat. His mouth there. But she was taking it beyond where they had been, to other places, places she’d like to go. Him putting her over his knee and getting after her with his hand. Maybe a crop on the backs of her tender thighs.
He’d seen Ella embrace all manner of extreme BDSM scenarios, from spreader bars to suspension to forced orgasm towers or electric play. She’d participated with genuine enthusiasm and aroused pleasure, delighted to meet the needs of the Dom directing her. But none of them had the access he had now, to see the things that she truly fantasized about.
Her fantasies were sweet…almost gentle things. Because her fantasy was love. The love of a Dom who wanted to possess her, care for her, cherish her. And who would let her be and do everything she could to make him happy.
The kind of gift that he’d wasted and thrown away, so he didn’t get to have it twice. The gods knew how to twist the blade, didn’t they?
He’d told Anwyn this was a fucking mistake. He wished he could go back to that alley, reject the blood, take it from Gideon. Or even from one of those first responders, dull his mind, knock him out so he wouldn’t remember a vampire using him for sustenance.
Why hadn’t he gone that route? He knew logically he’d been out of it, and Anwyn was like Allan, probably thinking that the second mark, despite the circumstances, was a good idea. That Ella would be good for him. She was.
Which was why it pissed him off so badly.
Stop.
Ella froze. Damn it, he hadn’t meant for her to hear that. He was used to having his headspace all to himself, so it was still a conscious decision to remember to keep the door between their thoughts one-way access only.
“I’m sorry, Master,” she said out loud. I didn’t know you didn’t want me to…
The command had been aimed at himself. He’d been so into his own shit he hadn’t realized her hand had been drifting down over her labia, light caresses, her hips starting to rise. His cock hardened to steel at the sight of her touching herself.
She was flushed, flustered, which was unexpected. Until he saw it her fumbling explanation to him, an appalled admonishment to herself.
I don’t ever do that, self-pleasuring, without a Master or Mistress’s permission. I was just…I forgot myself. I’m sorry.
He needed to get the hell out of her head, but the savage, pissed off part of him wasn’t in the mood, and responded to her dismay with a good cleansing dose of lust. At least that was easy to understand.
Go back to your shower.
She obeyed and rose, padding the short distance over the boards to her bathroom. The shower was so small he wouldn’t fit into it. The shower head detached on a long cord so that the person squeezed in there could thoroughly rinse.
Get in. Keep the shirt on.
She hesitated, then complied. Wolf, are you—
You’ll only talk to me if I tell you to.
She pressed her lips together.
Turn on the water. Coldest setting, and douse yourself. Thoroughly. Look at yourself while you do it.
So he could see, too.
She liked his intent, but definitely not his method. She didn’t like cold water, his girl. But she dutifully turned on the water, her body tensing and bracing when the first rush of water hit her, the shock of it shuddering through her. She groped for the nozzle, lifted it out of its bracket and started following his direction, rinsing the frigid water over her hair, the shirt, until it started to cling to her skin, allow the pink color to come through.
