God, I loved this woman. I loved her so much it made my chest hurt when I saw her. I loved her so much that the moment she came into view, all sounds stopped and no one else mattered, my attention condensing down to the single point in the room where she stood.
I didn’t know if that made me an inappropriate partner to work alongside, or the best one, but I’d give my life for her without question.
And now I had to explain this all to her.
Sky’s cheeks warmed with a hint of color, unmistakable arousal and interest in her green eyes. “Then…why don’t we…? I’m not afraid of sex with you, Gabriel.” Little Gabe perked up, stiffening beneath my fly. She touched my cheek, oblivious to the raging hard-on she’d inspired. “Or is that one of those two parts to accepting a claim?”
I nodded. “Yes.” My voice was a hoarse croak, and I winced.
“Oh.”
“Sorry. It’s…”
“Don’t apologize. You are who you are. I wouldn’t change that.” She cleared her throat. “It just seems irresponsible to leap in blind without knowing what I’m getting into. Once you get into me.”
Little Gabe throbbed again, putting me one step from excusing myself to the bathroom for a man-to-dick pep talk. Or a quick stroke-off so I could listen to her without following the slim line of her neck, or eyeballing her tits.
Feeling like an oversexed pervert, I tore my gaze back to her face. “Right. So, acceptance begins with sex—”
“But…you’ve had sex with Jada, right? Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt again, it’s just—I mean, you two dated for a long time, so it only seems reasonable that you two would, but you’re not bonded.”
Honestly, I tried not to remember those times. Nothing about them stirred pleasant memories, though there was a time long ago when teenage-me had been ecstatic to have any sex at all. Then it was just goddamned monotonous, a thing we were supposed to do for the hell of being a couple instead of something I actually enjoyed with her. I suppressed a full body shudder. At least the mere mention of Jada killed my erection. “It’s not just sex, Sky. It’s…” Trying to explain it aloud turned out to be harder than expected. I’d grown up knowing how things were.
“Take your time.”
“Sex on its own is a natural part of life, but sex with someone you’ve claimed is different because they’re the last person, the only person you want to have sex with. You share yourself, your very soul. The bond is for life, until one of you dies, because mates—”
A perplexed wrinkle slid across her brow. “Mates?”
“Oh. Yeah. Bondmates don’t always marry according to human custom, so that’s the shifter term for it. Marriage is a human invention.”
“Oh. Right. I knew that.” Another hint of color kissed her cheeks. “Fae unite in handfasting ceremonies.”
“Did your parents?”
Skylar nodded. “They had a ceremony in Tir na Nog after graduation, then a small wedding in Atlanta for Mom’s mortal relatives. So I guess I always imagined I’d do the same. Then I met you.” Her teeth skimmed her plump lower lip. “You said there are two parts to becoming mates. What happens after the sex?”
“To seal a bond, you present the mate who made the claim with a gift you’ve hunted with your own hands.”
Her nose crinkled. “I have to hunt for you?”
“Yeah. Did you forget I’m a shifter? We’re kind of food-oriented, so hunting matters a lot to us.”
“Why couldn’t I just bake you another manicotti?”
My stomach grumbled. “Sorry, it doesn’t work that way, but you’re welcome to bake for me any time.”
She studied me, eyes lingering on my face before her smaller hand lowered to mine. “Does this mean we can’t kiss anymore until I know what I want? I…I don’t want to cause you pain, Gabriel. I never wanted to do that. If I’m hurting you—”
This time, I interrupted Sky, leaning in and claiming her mouth the way she’d stolen my heart. She moaned against my lips, then my tongue delved past them and made a playful stroke against hers. I kissed her a while longer despite the endless longing to make her mine. Because I was man enough to wait. Because I wanted her to make the right choice.
“I’ll survive,” I whispered against the corner of her mouth a moment later. “You take the time you need to know what you want. I’ll wait.”
The tension drained out of her. “Okay.”
Finally, it was all out there in the open. Now I only had to survive until she made her choice.
3
When My Girl is a Living Sun
Our second night in New Orleans, Sky convinced me to go on a ghost and vampire tour. We meandered at the back of the group, finding the restraint to remain silent when the guides delivered embellished stories about ancient vampires, voodoo witches, and lingering spirits. Not that they were entirely wrong, but the inconsistencies and exaggerations made me wince.
No wonder normal humans feared us.
After the tour ended, we chose to wander around more on our own. The party never seemed to end as tourists and locals—but mostly tourists—ambled from bar to bar.
“Where to next?”
“You’re letting me choose?”
I grinned and hooked my arm around her waist. “It’s your first visit. I will happily do all the touristy crap you want.”
“And if I said I want to go on a cocktail tour?”
There it was, that fae mischief I knew to watch out for. Chuckling, I kissed the top of her head and gave her a squeeze. “That would be irresponsible of me.”
“Spoil sport,” she said without any real heat.
“I—” As the hairs on my nape prickled and a chill snaked down my spine, the foul stench of mud and molding meat drifted toward us on a warm breeze. “We gotta go. Now.”
“Nosferatu?”
“Yeah. One by the smell. No more than two. No, wait, it’s three.”
Sky grabbed out her phone but fumbled when I took her by the arm.
We hadn’t made it more than ten feet when a dark shape darted out from the alley by the fire department, aimed straight for Skylar. The nosferatu’s clawed hands swiped through thin air, my girl already airborne on a pair of spectral butterfly wings.
During some point after adolescence, every fae reached maturity and Ascended, totally pulling off a Dragon Ball Z sort of transformation and achieving their final form. They could become a leprechaun, a selkie, or even a dryad, but seventy-five percent of them were just aos sidhe—normal faerie muses. Then there were fae like Skylar who became extraordinarily rare beings. Her particular type were known as sylphs, winged air elementals with semi-corporeal wings.
Those wings lit up and became a dozen tendrils of living light dotted with glittering specks of stardust. I’d once tried to count all of the glowing colors, but I couldn’t, and they frequently morphed, transitioning from one shade to the next.
Another vampire came up from our rear, his arrival picked up by my sensitive shifter hearing. Drawing the SIG Sauer P229 I’d purchased as a graduation gift to myself over a month ago, I whirled on him and squeezed the trigger. The round hit him point blank in the forehead but didn’t penetrate his skull. Old vamp bones were hard as fuck. He kept coming even as black blood seeped from the hole, just in time to catch my foot against his jaw. That rocked his head to the side, but I wasn’t done yet.
Where was a stake when I needed it? My eyes darted around the area for something I could improvise with, even a tree limb of the right species would work, but the fast pace of the battle we entered didn’t allow me to rush off. Two more vampires emerged from the alley and pursued Sky, but she flew loops around them, sliding from the mortal plane into the Twilight realm of the spirits before they could land blows.
Damn, I’d taught her well.
I whipped my abuela’s crucifix from inside my jacket and tossed it. “Catch!”
Sky snatched the silver cross, twisted in midair, and thrust it against the forehead of a nosferatu divi
ng at her from behind. A satisfying sizzle occurred, and he fell back from her, bellowing and clutching his brow.
Fuck yes. Man, I loved this girl.
And now was definitely not the time to pop a boner over my badass faerie girlfriend fighting off a pair of undead leeches. Another emerged from the shadows, the three of them trying to take her down, frenzied and salivating. Skylar evaded capture by weaving back and forth across the Veil between worlds.
At that moment, my sharp eyes picked up several things. A luminescent tendril from Sky’s wings curled around a nossie’s upper arm while she was still in this realm, leaving behind a scorch mark. He shrieked and jerked back from her. The ones fighting Sky still had their hair, though they were definitely nosferatu. Just young as fuck, probably only a few days or weeks into darkling status. And none of them could fight.
Though they were uncoordinated and clumsy, they had speed and supernatural strength on their side. Skylar had the former, and I had both, so it didn’t matter that we were outnumbered. I blocked a punch, twisted under another, and then performed a kick split that took one of the nossies off his feet. The collision of my boot with his chin could have been heard around the world, and he flew far enough to take my ego up a few notches.
Then I saw it, a fire escape rung that was hanging on by a rusty thread. I jumped up and used my body weight to snap it off, just as the swarm increased in size and a nosferatu body-slammed me.
“Gabriel!” Sky’s scream echoed against the brick buildings flanking us. A solar flash went off behind me as she channeled a Sunlight glamour. They shrieked. Somewhere, humans screamed too, but we were a little too short on time to shoo them away. They’d either run, or Darwin’s Law would prevail.
“I’m fine!”
We rolled across the grimy alley, throwing punches and kicks. The dude was enormous, football player big, and too bulky not to have hit the gym six days a week. He wore a T-shirt that had been converted into a muscle shirt with a pair of scissors, exposing his ripped upper body and big-ass biceps.
Teeth snapped at my face and a strand of drool glided down his dry, cracked lips. He had a broad neck like my bear shifter cousin, and trap muscles harder than stone. Dude’s facial features were still chiseled but distorted by becoming a nosferatu and exaggerated, the skin stretched taut over his high cheekbones and jaw. In life, he’d probably been beach-tanned and went by a name like Tad, Brad, or Chad. As a nos, the ugly bastard still outweighed me by about thirty pounds of muscle.
Faerie fire skimmed his crown. He snapped his head up, distracted from trying to pound me. That opening was all I needed to thrust up with the rusty piece of fire escape rung. I slammed it through him with all the power I had.
He jerked off of me at once, screaming and flopping to the side while clawing at his chest and the object protruding from it. I read the Greek letters on his shirt.
Definite frat boy here to party over summer break and turned vamp. Damn. Sorry, bruh.
A stake in the chest only killed a nosferatu under certain circumstances. Most people didn’t know it had to be carved from ash or rowan wood to be certain death. Otherwise, we dropped communion wafers in their mouths and sliced off their heads to be safe. With a nosferatu, you could never be too careful. General rule of thumb was to do every step in the handbook to guarantee the undead didn’t rise again.
I didn’t have any holy wafers on me to drop in his mouth, or a spade to decapitate him, but did the next best thing to put him out of his misery. I grasped the edge of the dumpster nearby, put some muscle into lifting it, and crashed the edge down on his head. It made a sickening kind of crunch, then his body continued to jerk, legs kicking as fire consumed him and his pieces disintegrated. Eventually, even the bones left behind would break down into ashes if ground under a foot.
Heh. And my instructors had emphasized the importance of always having an ash stake back in school. So much for that!
“Whoa! Holy shit! Back, people, back!” I caught a glimpse of a firefighter out of the corner of my eye. “Back away!”
“SBA at work!” another called. “Keep back.”
Thank fuck for men with common sense to stem the tide of busybodies with camera phones.
Back to Skylar. The nosferatu I’d kicked closed in on her along with six others. If she wasn’t a faerie halfbreed, I’d have taken offense and thought they saw her as the greater threat. The truth was that nosferatus were attracted to fae like bees to pollen. Because fae were magical creatures, their blood had restorative, healing properties that turned back time, making an ugly nos gorgeous again for a limited while.
All of them sported scorch marks and blistered skin for their trouble, and one of the guys could have given Freddy Krueger a run for his money.
I took his legs out from under him with a sweep kick and slid my improvised stake into his chest. He convulsed.
“Sky, brighten your wings!”
“Brighter than this?”
“Yes!”
Skylar’s light washed over the alley, spilling a golden curtain from one end to the next, so bright nothing escaped the tidal wave of magical sun. The nosferatu closest to her combusted, going up in a pillar of flame with a vaguely human center. I gaped.
Holy shit. I’d expected them to burn, but I hadn’t thought they’d turn into roman candles.
That hadn’t happened the last time Sky used her powers on a vampire. The only time I’d ever witnessed a vampire scorching like that, Sebastian had taken a bunch of us to watch a nosferatu execution. They kept the condemned in a stone chamber with a single impact-resistant, tempered glass wall for observers. When high noon came, the ceiling opened and the two dudes inside had gone up like matchsticks.
This dude wasn’t just a matchstick. When he went up, he glowed like a blowtorch flame.
Our farthest attackers shrieked and hissed, fleeing so fast the smoke left in their wake resembled a jet’s contrail. The nearer ones weren’t as fortunate. Their flesh bubbled and cracked, splitting open as tiny spouts of flame burst from within the fissures in the dried-out darkling skin. Bits of their undead tissue flaked off and floated into the wind. Screaming and flailing in agony, they fell to pieces until little more than their skeletons remained and ashen bones crumbled to the ground.
Skylar descended and her light dimmed from celestial body bright to a mild glow.
“Damn, girl.”
“Wow.” When her feet touched down, I started checking her out for injuries. She squirmed away. “I’m okay, Gabe.”
“You sure? I—” The smell of another shifter reached me despite the charred nosferatu odor filling the alley. I swung around to face a guy at the mouth of the alley. He stood with his hands in his pants pockets, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A sentinel badge hung from his belt.
“You handled yourselves well.”
“Unfortunately, not our first tangle with nossies.” I rolled my shoulder. The slight twinge had already healed. “I’m—”
“Gabriel Fujimoto, newly licensed. Which makes your companion Skylar Corazzi, the fae anomaly. I know who you both are.” He stepped over and offered a hand. “Sentinel Thibodeaux, at your service.”
Fae anomaly. While accurate, the term made my skin crawl. Skylar wasn’t an anomaly, she was a goddamn miracle. A junior sentinel by her own merit.
I kept our handshake brief.
“There were at least five more,” Skylar said. “A small pack.”
Thibodeaux’s lips thinned. “Dammit. They’re growing.”
“So you’re aware of the issue?”
“We are.” He turned a studious gaze on me.
Thibodeaux couldn’t have been more than a handful of years older than me, ten at the most, and by the subtle musk clinging to his skin, a raven shifter. That made sense. New Orleans had a relatively large raven community. I even had family stationed here.
“Come on, you can file an incident report at the office. There’s nothing here the fire department can’t handle at this point
.”
He shifted and took to the skies without giving us a chance to decline. Skylar shrugged and pulled a glamour around herself to shield her from human eyes. The mortals may have known about us, but we tried not to flaunt our powers in their faces. Especially faeries. People tended to forget manners and swarm the fae, wanting a wish granted or some favor done for them. Mages had it almost as bad.
The flight didn’t take long. It beat dealing with traffic, at least. We touched down outside a four-story, red faced building near Lafayette Square. Thibodeaux led the way inside and vouched for us at the front desk. We passed through without any trouble, only lots of stares aimed our way. Especially at Skylar.
“This place is beautiful,” she said, marveling at the support pillars, high ceilings, and arched windows.
Thibodeaux shrugged, but then he looked over his shoulder and winked. “We work with the bones we’re given. This city has some pretty ones.”
Rather than wait for the elevator, we took the stairs all the way up to the top floor. Curiosity drove me to crane my head around and look out onto each level, hoping for a glimpse of some action. Not all SBA field offices were the same. The one back at home ran a tight ship, and they all wore ties and slacks, like Texas Rangers. Here, I witnessed a mish-mash. There were just as many suits as there were jeans and polos.
Our guide knocked on the open door of an office across the room. More than a few people suddenly gathered around the nearby coffee machine. “Hey, Chief, got someone here to make a report. Nos attack.”
“Come on in.”
The chief’s office reminded me of home in lots of ways. Clean, simple, and full of light. A Japanese wave painting hung on the wall behind the desk, and three beautiful bonsai trees occupied a long counter set beneath windows overlooking the park.
The man behind the desk rose and offered a friendly smile. Silver heavily covered his dark hair but his face remained smooth and unlined. “Ah, Gabriel, so good to see you again. I’d hoped you would drop by during your visit to the city.”
Birds of a Feather Page 2
