Nigellus snorted softly, hiding the reaction behind his drink. Leonides only gave me a flat stare.
“No,” he said. “I’m really not.”
Right. Because vampire.
But, did vampires really have kids?
I opened my mouth to ask a question about vampire reproductive habits, and how that even worked. Fortunately, I thought better of it before the words escaped.
“Yeah, don’t ask,” he agreed. “Look, this is all just a coincidence, I’m sure. I mean, St. Louis isn’t that big of a city. It happens.”
Nigellus made another small noise into his drink, and Leonides’ glare landed on him.
“Shut it, Nigellus.” His gaze never wavered, even though he addressed the next words to me. “Vonnie, go home. Trust me when I say, you don’t want to get dragged into anything related to demons, or Fae, or any of it. Especially not this demon.”
And... okay. Demon. He’d mentioned demons that first night, in the same breath as vampires and Fae.
I’d admittedly kind of blown that part off. But now, I was supposed to believe the guy sitting there sipping the club’s best scotch was the spawn of hell. Because it’s not like that was any weirder than vampires or people conjuring glowing balls of magic from nothing.
It also didn’t address what seemed to me like the most important question.
“These missing kids. What’s happening to them?” I asked. “Or... is this guy lying about that?”
Leonides still hadn’t abandoned his staring match with Nigellus. “Don’t know, don’t care, and no idea,” he said.
The alleged demon lifted both eyebrows, his cool expression becoming chiding. “Really?” he drawled. “Because you should care. Not caring will become cause for regret in the future.”
“And yet, I still don’t,” Leonides bit out... but I could see his hand clench against his thigh beneath the table, out of Nigellus’ line of sight.
Nigellus tipped his glass back, finishing the contents in a swallow and setting it down on the table decisively.
“Very well,” he said. “Should you change your mind, you might consider contacting your Fae acquaintance, if you don’t wish to involve Ransley or Ms. Bright. Assuming, of course, that he’s in any position to help these days. To say that he is currently out of favor with the Unseelie Court is putting it mildly.”
“I’ll give that suggestion all the consideration it deserves,” said my boss, in a tone so cold it sent gooseflesh up my arms. “Goodnight, Nigellus.”
Nigellus rose, buttoning his tailored suit jacket with precise movements. “Goodnight, Mr. Leonides. And thank you for the drink, Ms. Morgan.”
Nigellus nodded to me and headed for the locked doors. Behind me, Leonides cursed low and sharp, pulling my attention back to him. When I turned toward the entrance once more, Nigellus was already gone.
“I... didn’t tell him my last name,” I said stupidly. Then, to further compound that stupidity, I reached up and twisted my nametag around so I could peer down at it and ensure it hadn’t mysteriously changed during my shift. Nope. It still just said ‘Vonnie.’
“No. You didn’t,” Leonides confirmed, still looking like he wanted to hit something.
I walked to the nearest chair at his table and pulled it out, sinking into it with shaky knees. “So, demons, huh?”
Leonides’ chair legs scraped across the floor as he pushed abruptly away from the table and stood up, looming over me. I pressed back into my seat. Even though I wasn’t afraid of my boss, per se, it didn’t stop the sudden movement from ratcheting my heartbeat into a startled gallop.
“Sore subject?” I hazarded.
He whirled away with an audible growl and started pacing. When he turned to me again, violet swirled in his irises, doing nothing to calm my pulse.
“I am here, instead of peacefully buried in a graveyard somewhere, because I was stupid enough to make a literal deal with the devil,” he bit out.
I blinked, trying to assimilate that statement into what I knew of the way the world worked. I’d been brought up in a family of fundamentalists, and when they’d tossed me to the curb for getting pregnant before marriage, I’d tossed most of what I’d been taught about religion to the curb shortly thereafter.
“Are you telling me,” I said slowly, “that the whole fire and brimstone, selling your soul to Satan thing is real?”
He shook his head sharply—a frustrated gesture. “No. But it’s a damned effective cover story for an immortal species that can bind human life force, and keep it on ice until they need a supernatural power boost.”
There was a lot to unpack in that statement, and I wasn’t sure this was the time. I decided to stick with the part about demons being another species like humans or—apparently—Fae.
“Okay,” I said. “And the guy who just left was one of those?”
“Yes,” he said sharply. “And I can’t help noticing you’re still here, when I’m pretty sure I’ve told you to leave on three separate occasions.”
“He knew my name,” I said in a small voice, unable to completely banish the Sunday school voice whispering ‘the devil knows your name, that can’t be good’ in my ear.
Leonides crossed the few steps to the table, gripping its edge as he looked down at me. “Yes. The Fae—Teague—took an interest in you. Nigellus knows your name. Jesus, Vonnie. I can protect my people from the kind of shit in their lives that makes them wash up here in the first place—if they let me. But they have to be smart enough to keep the rest of it at arms’ length. I can’t protect you from creatures who’ve lived for thousands of years... or millions.”
My thoughts shied away from the implication of his words.
“It’s hard to keep something at arm’s length when it keeps happening right under my nose,” I retorted. “What am I supposed to do when a guy’s about to shoot himself in the head right in front of me? Or when a vampire and a demon are discussing a friend of mine over drinks?”
Leonides pushed away from the table angrily. “A week ago, I’d have told you to throw that necklace in the river, and never poke your nose beneath the bed to check for monsters again. Now, I worry that it’s too late for that, and you may need the damn thing.”
I rose to my feet, locking shaky knees. “You never answered whether you thought that guy... uh, demon... was lying about children being taken.”
Frustration creased his brow. “Probably not. Call it an eighty-twenty spread, since I can’t see a reason why lying about something like that would benefit him.”
I frowned. “Which means you’re pretty serious about the whole ‘keeping everything at arm’s length’ thing, huh? I heard what he called this place—your own little world, hidden away from reality.”
At that, his expression turned cold. “Are knife-wielding stalker exes not real enough for you?” he asked. “You can’t hide from reality. You can only try to take it on in manageable chunks. Like I said, I can protect my people here—most of the time. But I’m not Nigellus’ personal paranormal bomb squad. I can’t fly around the world righting wrongs.”
“So why did he come to you, in that case?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Because demons used vampires as lackeys for millennia, before the last war with the Fae wiped most of them out,” he said in a monotone. “And while I wasn’t a vampire at the time, I’ve still spent enough of my life as a demon’s lackey that I’ve got no desire to repeat the experience, now that I’m arguably free of that taint.”
I ran through everything he’d told me tonight. “You made a bargain with the devil, you said. With... Nigellus?”
“No,” he replied. “Not with him. But I know someone who did make a deal with Nigellus, and it didn’t go so well for him, either.”
I mulled that over for long moments before speaking again.
“What about these kids, then? What happens to them? Couldn’t you at least contact the police?”
He snorted. “The police?”
“Or the FBI or
something!” I added defensively.
Leonides shook his head. “If you had any idea how much influence the Fae have on Earth, you’d run and never stop running. Vonnie—assuming the Fae are behind the disappearances like Nigellus was implying, law enforcement already knows all about it, and they’ve been ordered not to care.”
Cold trickled beneath my skin. “Ordered not to care?” I echoed.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the night we met already.”
A blond man with magic in his hands, controlling a crowd seemingly without effort... ordering a trained security guard to aim his gun at his own head. Controlling human will with a casual word.
“Oh, my god,” I whispered, as the implication of Fae in positions of power over human institutions truly began to take root.
“Now you’re getting it,” Leonides said, the words dripping with old bitterness. “And the worst part is, I won’t even offer to take this memory from you. Because frankly, at this point you may need it to help keep yourself safe.”
That chill settled deep in my bones, leaving me to contemplate the idea that everything I thought I knew about the world might be wrong. If the bogeymen from scary bedtime stories were actually the ones running things, what kind of future was my kid going to grow up in?
TWELVE
AS I LAY AWAKE hours later, staring at the pattern of the streetlights on my bedroom ceiling, I reflected that it was times like this when I wished I had a normal sex life. Jace was gone until tomorrow evening; I was alone in the apartment. It would have been a relief to be able to send out a booty call and lose myself in no strings attached screwing for the rest of the night.
Failing that, it would have been a relief to be able to rub one out myself, and use the resulting endorphin rush as a sleep aid. I’d even gone so far as to worm one hand beneath my sleep shirt and the other beneath my pajama bottoms, a nebulous vision of my boss’s broad shoulders and intense, flashing gaze playing out before my mind’s eye—because, hey. That wasn’t weird at all.
It was still a lost cause. Of course it was. Ten minutes later, I yanked my hands out of my clothing, groaning in frustration and wondering why I’d even bothered.
Once a frigid bitch, always a frigid bitch.
Of course, it didn’t help that I couldn’t get the idea of children being snatched from their families and spirited away to who-knew-where out of my head. As Leonides had said, it happened all the time, and always had. Like everyone else, I felt vaguely bad about it when it was brought to my attention, and ignored it completely the rest of the time. So why did the idea of Fae stealing human children tug at a deep and primal fear buried somewhere beneath my ribcage?
Half-remembered fairy tales circled through my thoughts. Fairy tales. God. Life as I knew it was apparently nothing more than a comforting fabrication hiding a darker reality beneath. Vampires were real. The Fae folk were real. Demons were real. And regular humans were evidently little better than sheep, being herded to and fro by creatures too powerful to resist.
Fortunately, there was no booze in the apartment, or I might’ve been tempted into a repeat of my performance from a few nights ago. My cell phone vibrated against the bedside table. The blasted thing had already gotten me into trouble once tonight, but I dutifully checked the number to make sure it wasn’t Jace or Richard. It wasn’t, so I let the call go to voice mail, confident that it was just one of the loan shark’s goons harassing me for money as per fucking usual.
They’d recently taken to calling in the middle of the night like this. Usually, it was easy enough to put the phone on do-not-disturb when I went to bed, but I couldn’t do that when Jace was with his father, in case there was an emergency. Honestly, there was probably a setting for that in the phone somewhere, but if so, I hadn’t been able to find it.
Acknowledging the futility of trying to fight my insomnia without chemical assistance, I crawled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom in search of allergy meds that caused drowsiness as a side effect. Thankfully, there was a half-used box of diphenhydramine in the back of the medicine cabinet. It was only a couple of months past its expiration date, so I popped two pills and dragged myself back to the bedroom to wait for it to kick in.
When it finally did, my dozing was restless and shot through with disturbing dreams. I woke, hours later, feeling like my brain was wrapped in cotton wool and something furry was coating my tongue. Right... this was why I didn’t normally use Benadryl to go to sleep. Vaguely, I wished I’d remembered that last night, when it might have done me some good.
I shuffled to the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as I could stand it. Half an hour later, damp hair curling around my ears, I plopped down at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. Neither one did much for my screaming case of existential angst.
As I crunched on shredded wheat, I decided that I needed to talk to someone about this or I was going to explode. There was one very obvious person to call, and that was Zorah. The problem was, if I called Zorah, I’d have to tell her all the things I’d been lying about before.
I wasn’t an ambitious single mom making things work on a retail salary while going to night school to better herself. I was a wreck, and my life was perpetually one bad month from falling apart completely. I wasn’t okay.
Zorah had tried to help me, and I’d more or less thrown it back in her face. Then, as the icing on the cake, I’d ended up inadvertently crawling to the very man she’d been trying to get me to contact for help. Her grandfather... who I’d been perving on just a few hours ago with my hands down my pants.
Awkward didn’t really begin to describe the situation, at this point.
I chewed on my lower lip, rolling it between my teeth. After thinking about it for a couple of minutes, I let the spoon clatter into the bowl and reached for my phone. Scrolling through the contacts, I tapped Len’s name and opened a text window.
Hi. I talked to our boss last night and now I’m having an existential crisis. Wanna have lunch?
I left the phone on the table and took the dishes to the sink to wash them. It was only a few minutes later when I heard the phone ping with a notification. I wiped my hands on a dishtowel and scooped it up.
Dunno, said the reply. Will church be out by then?
Both Len and I had grown up in strict fundamentalist families, and both of us had gone on to become dire disappointments to them in our teens. I, of course, had managed to get pregnant the very first time I had sex, at way too young an age. Len, meanwhile, had the audacity to be born gay.
To say that neither of us was too keen on Christianity at this point was an understatement. And that was before I’d learned that demons were real, and belonged to a different species that used religion as some kind of crazy propaganda machine.
I’m willing to risk it if u are, I texted back.
Deal, Len replied. Where & when?
I suggested eleven-thirty at a cheap fast food place about half a mile from the Den, and told him to invite Kat if he had her number.
She really WILL be at church, he texted. Otherwise I would. See you then.
I set the phone aside and looked around the kitchen, trying to decide how best to distract myself from my own thoughts until it was time to leave. Cleaning, I decided. Might as well channel my nerves into something productive. Grimly, I headed for the broom cupboard.
* * *
A couple of hours later, I sat hunched in an ugly plastic booth, staring at the limp hamburger in my hands. Across from me, Len worked his way steadily through a large order of french fries, watching me with a careful expression.
“So, existential crisis, huh?” he asked when I’d let the silence stretch for too long. “What happened?”
I continued to pin the hapless hamburger with my gaze rather than meeting Len’s sympathetic gray eyes. “Yeah, um... so this guy wandered in last night after close—which was a pretty good trick all on its own, since the place was locked up. He as
ked for a glass of the Macallan, and then the boss came down and sent me home.”
I set the uneaten hamburger down and reached for my drink, twirling the straw between my fingers as Len waited for me to go on.
“I would’ve done it,” I continued. “Gone home, I mean. But I forgot my phone behind the bar, and when I snuck back in to get it, I overheard the two of them talking about a friend of mine, Zorah Bright—”
Len froze with a fry halfway to his mouth. “Are you shitting me?” he asked. “Zorah Bright?”
“Uh...” I said, feeling reality sliding sideways again.
His brow creased in a confused frown. “How do you know Zorah?”
“How do you know Zorah?” I shot back, because... seriously?
“We used to be coworkers at AJ’s Bar and Grill,” he told me, still looking at me strangely. “And I’m kind of living in her house right now, while she’s out of the country. She’s also the boss’s granddaughter. I’m guessing you figured out that part, though.”
“This is too weird,” I muttered, before continuing in a more normal tone. “She and I used to volunteer at a mental health non-profit downtown. Sometimes we’d hang out or go for a meal afterward as an excuse for some girl time.”
“Do you still talk to her?” Len asked. “She’s been gone for a while now.”
“No,” I said blankly, feeling the familiar swell of guilt at having let down a friend when she needed me. “I don’t. There was this really weird thing at the office. She got accused of cooking the books—but Zorah wouldn’t do something like that. There was a meeting with the board of directors that sounded more like a witch trial. She ran out in tears, and I didn’t see or hear from her for a couple of months. Then she emailed me asking for help... but I was too wrapped up in my own problems by then to do anything for her. We talked on the phone for, like, thirty seconds, and that’s the last time I had any contact with her.”
“Shit,” Len said.
“Yeah,” I agreed in a hollow tone. “And just to make the situation a little bit weirder than it already was, she tried to give me her grandfather’s phone number, because she could tell I was in trouble and she thought he might be able to help.”
Vampire Bound: Book One Page 9
