“Where’s Jace?” I asked desperately, craning to see past him into the house.
“It’s okay, Red. He’s okay; he’s fine.” Len turned and called behind him in a louder voice. “Jace! It’s your mom! It’s safe to come out.”
“Mom?” I heard a commotion from the back of the house, followed by hurried footsteps coming our way.
“Jace,” I half-sobbed as he appeared in the doorway, squeezing past Len to run into my arms.
TWENTY
“THANK GOD you’re safe, kiddo,” Richard said, not sounding much better off than I was. From the corner of my eye, I saw him collapse against the wall next the doorway and slide down it until he was sitting on the floor.
I couldn’t spare any thought for him. I was too busy trying to squeeze the life out of my child.
“Are you okay?” Jace asked, sounding far younger than his fourteen years. “Are you both okay?”
“We’re fine, baby,” I promised him. “I’m so sorry we scared you like that. You did amazing, d’you hear me? I am so proud of you.”
I’d squeezed my eyes shut to better feel Jace held safely in my arms, but I opened them when I heard Zorah murmur, “Thanks, Len. You’re still an awesome friend, by the way. Just sayin’.”
She hugged him, and Len returned it awkwardly, the bat still held loosely in one of his hands.
“Yeah, that’s me, all right,” he joked. “Awesome friend; occasional blood donor. Speaking of which—where’s Bela Lugosi, Z? Did you finally decide to ditch him and keep that sweet motorcycle for yourself?”
“Nah. We left him behind to clean up the mess,” she said, giving him a final pat before letting him go.
“Nice one,” Len replied. “How about we file the details of that under ‘things Len doesn’t want to know about,’ okay?”
“Deal,” she said. “Love the new hair color, by the way. It suits you.”
He snorted. “It’s just a marriage of convenience. The drugstore was out of purple.”
I pried my arms free from Jace with considerable difficulty, planting a kiss on his forehead despite his avowed teenage hatred of such displays. Keeping a hand on his shoulder to reassure myself that he was really here and safe, I turned to Len with tears in my eyes and a quiver in my voice.
“Len. Thank you.”
He shook his head briskly, though, backing up a step or two. “Oh, no. Nuh-uh. No waterworks, Red. I’m just glad to see everyone in one piece.”
I wasn’t in one piece earlier, I thought. But that was not information for Jace’s ears.
“Too bad the same thing can’t be said for the front door,” Leonides observed.
When I glanced at him, it was to find him giving me a speculative look. A flush of heat rose to my cheeks. Though I had no idea how I’d accomplished it, there was little doubt that I was somehow responsible for the door’s destruction. Another thing I wasn’t remotely ready to think about just yet.
“Leave the door for Rans to deal with,” Zorah said dryly. “Let’s just say he’s got a track record with that kind of thing.”
Richard was still sitting hunched at the base of the wall, his fingers tangled in his dark hair. “Are we safe here?” he asked.
Leonides shrugged. “We weren’t followed, and the Fae have no way of knowing that we brought Jace here. It should be fine for tonight.”
Jace fought a yawn, shooting me a sheepish glance when I rubbed his back in sympathy. It was the middle of the night—it had already been late when Richard showed up at my apartment, and that was hours ago now.
Len noticed Jace’s exhaustion, too. “Hey, kid—it looks like the excitement’s over. The guest bedroom is a mess, but you can crash in my room for a few hours if you want. I’ll take the couch, and the rest of these guys are night owls anyway.”
Even though he was obviously about to fall asleep on his feet as the adrenaline crash set in, Jace gave me an uncertain look. I drew breath to offer to go with him, but Richard surprised me by beating me to it.
“Good idea,” he said, hoisting himself onto unsteady feet. “Thanks, man. Jace? C’mon, buddy. I’ll stay with you for a bit.”
Jace’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Okay. ’Night, Mom.” The words were barely above a whisper, and before he followed Richard toward the back of the house, he darted in to press a kiss to my cheek, shocking me.
My palm came up to cover the place his lips had touched, as though I could somehow trap that small reminder of his childhood and hold onto it forever.
“Sleep tight, baby,” I whispered back, though he had already disappeared from view.
After a moment, I noticed that my hand was trembling against my face. Without Jace here to be strong for, I was once again in danger of falling apart. My eyes sought out Zorah, who had flopped down on the questionable looking couch earlier. Now she leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.
“Hey, guys,” she said, addressing the others. “I hate to kick you out, but Vonnie and I need to have a private girl-to-girl talk now. Can you give us some space for a few minutes?”
Len sighed. “Sure, why not? Right now, I’m tired as hell, and I’m also deeply regretting the lack of cigarettes in this house. So, how about it, Gramps? Can I bum a smoke off you?”
“You read my mind,” Leonides muttered.
The pair exited stage left, leaving me alone with a living reminder of one of the many screw-ups in my life over the past year or so. Zorah patted the cushion next to her, giving me a complicated look that I was in no state of mind to decipher. I was feeling shaky enough by this point that sitting down was definitely a good plan. But now that she’d beckoned me to sit on the couch with her, flopping down in the armchair instead would come across as pretty obnoxious.
I crossed the small distance separating us and lowered myself gingerly onto the sofa. It gave an ominous creak beneath me, but it held. Zorah half-turned to me and gathered my hands in hers. Her fingers were cool, the grip firm and comforting.
“Okay, sweetheart,” she said. “I’ve got some confessions to make—but you go first.”
I forced myself to meet her large, brown eyes. She looked exactly as I remembered—dusky skin, stubborn jaw, wild spirals of hair framing her lovely face. My throat tightened as I thought of everything that had happened since the last time we were together.
“Zorah,” I said in a wavering voice, “I screwed up. I’ve screwed everything up so bad, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
She ran her thumb over my knuckles, soothing. “Honey, I absolutely guarantee that you’re looking at the reigning queen of screw-ups. Whatever went wrong, we’re going to fix it. Okay?”
I tried to nod, but the motion sent pent-up tears spilling over my cheeks. Then slender arms wrapped around me, and for the second time that night, I let someone hold me as I cried against a strong shoulder.
It had been years... years... since anyone had comforted me when I was upset. When was the last time? I couldn’t even remember. Childhood, maybe—before I’d fallen off my parents’ pedestal of perfection. I clung to Zorah, just as I’d clung to Leonides earlier.
“I’m here,” she said. Nothing else. No meaningless platitudes, no exhortations not to cry, no shushing.
Somehow, it was enough.
I’d tried to take on the world alone, and the world had handed me my ass on a platter. But I wasn’t alone. Not now. I had people who gave a damn, even if I didn’t understand why. People who would risk themselves to save me and mine.
“I’m so sorry, Zorah,” I choked out. “I wanted to help you when you needed me last year, but I couldn’t even help myself.”
She eased me back by the shoulders so we could see each other properly. “I know, Von. I knew you weren’t okay—I could hear it in your voice over the phone. And I wanted to help you, too... but I was in the same position. Couldn’t even stay on top of my own shit, much less someone else’s. Now, though—you need to tell me what happened.”
I took a deep breath, the story pou
ring out of me in a desperate tumble of words. “I was such an idiot, Zorah. Richard took out a loan from the Russian mob when he couldn’t get money to finance his latest pipe dream. He couldn’t keep up with the payments, so they found out about me and came after me for the debt instead. I should’ve gone to the police. I should’ve packed a suitcase, thrown Jace in the car and headed for Canada or something. But I didn’t.”
She gathered my hands in hers again, grounding me. “You started paying them?” Her lips twisted unhappily. “Jesus, Vonnie—no offense, but your ex is one serious deadbeat asshole, and I kind of want to hit him right now. How on earth were you getting enough money together to manage it?”
I cringed inwardly. Zorah knew better than most people how close to the edge I’d been living, even before getting pulled into Richard’s mess. Our mutual poverty had been a frequent topic of discussion whenever we went out for our infrequent girls’ nights.
“I’d been lying to everyone for months, even before that,” I said softly. “Even to you. I wasn’t going to night school to become a paralegal. I had to drop out of college when my hours at Barton’s got cut. Instead, I was working in a call center. But one of the women there started working a side gig, and she kept going on about how much more she was making.”
Zorah nodded. “So, you tried the same gig? What was it?”
I swallowed, lowering my voice even further—painfully aware of Jace’s presence in the house. “Phone sex operator.”
“Huh,” she mused. “Yeah, I can see it—you’ve definitely got the voice for it, and I hear that kind of thing can bring in some good money. So you were able to keep them off your back for a while that way, I take it? And then what?”
I blinked, trying to reorient my brain in the face of Zorah’s matter-of-fact indifference to my shameful secret. “You’re... not shocked that I was a sex worker?”
Zorah let out a small huff that sounded like ironic amusement. “Trust me when I say that I am the very last person on Earth to take the moral high ground regarding sex work. But keep going. You’ll get my story soon enough.”
I tried to marshal my thoughts. I wasn’t quite ready to relate the part where I’d been hired by Zorah’s grandfather to have sex with him and/or become his vampire sippy cup. There was weird, and then there was oh my god we are not going there, ever.
“It was still barely enough money to keep Ivan’s goons from harassing me day and night,” I continued. “Then my hours at Barton’s got cut even further, and I couldn’t make it work anymore. Long story short, I ended up at the Vixen’s Den, and your grandfather—who happens to be a frickin’ vampire, hello—offered me a job as a bartender.”
“Yeah,” Zorah said with a grim little smile. “He tends to do stuff like that sometimes.”
That startled a breath of laughter from me. “I’d sort of gathered. Especially after the other employees started talking about his habit of taking in strays.”
“Exactly. Hell, an argument could be made that I was one of those strays, long before we found out he was my biological granddad,” Zorah said, sounding both fond and amused. “Did you know he named the club after me? My name, in Spanish—it means either a female fox or a promiscuous woman. Gotta say, I generally prefer the first option.”
“I really love that place,” I told her. “Which is nuts, because ever since I started working there, my life has become certifiably insane. Things were a lot simpler when I didn’t know the monsters were real.”
Her smile turned sad. “The monsters were always real, Vonnie. The only difference is, now you’ve seen that some of them aren’t human.”
The horrible truth of that drilled into me.
“Yeah.” With a deep breath, I returned to my story. “Anyway, the bartender gig is great. But there was a learning curve at the beginning, and I was too stubborn to tell anyone that Ivan’s goons were turning up the heat on me while I was still training—before the big paychecks and tips started rolling in. I guess he finally got tired of waiting for his money.”
Zorah squeezed my hands as my voice grew distant, the firm grip drawing me back from the phantom sound of gunfire and screaming.
“So, where do the Fae figure into all of this?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I have no freaking clue. One of them came to the club a couple of times. He seemed to really have it in for Leonides, but I guess you know about that part already.”
Zorah’s expression grew grim. She let go of my hands and scooted back a few inches. “Yeah. I did. And with that, I think it’s probably my turn for story time. You were worried about the secret you’d been keeping? Well—here’s mine. I’m a vampire-succubus-Fae hybrid, and I was very nearly at the center of a supernatural war between the three realms. Though in my defense, when we met at MMHA, I still thought I was just a normal human. Things didn’t start to get really weird until I met Rans.”
I sat frozen, running the words through my head a couple of times. Zorah was a vampire, too? Christ. And not just a vampire, apparently—
“Oh, dear,” said a cultured English voice from the doorway, cutting through my confused thoughts. “No wonder my ears were burning on the flight over here. Also, your front door appears to be broken again, love—and I swear it wasn’t my fault this time.”
TWENTY-ONE
“EAVESDROPPING IS rude, lover,” Zorah said, sounding unperturbed. “And I know it wasn’t you—I was here when it happened. But will you fix it again for me anyway?”
The blue-eyed vampire eased through the gap, and propped the ruined door back into the doorframe as best he could. “Oh, very well. Might as well keep in practice, I suppose,” he replied.
“Thanks.” Zorah gestured him to the armchair. “And, sorry—I guess you two weren’t really properly introduced earlier. Vonnie Morgan, Ransley Thorpe. Rans... Vonnie.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” said the vampire. “Any friend of Zorah’s...”
Connections snapped into place in my memory. “Oh my god,” I blurted. “You’re the hot English guy from Zorah’s ten-minute date last summer. The one who was trouble!”
Zorah let out a sharp bark of laughter, quickly stifled. “Oh, wow. That might just be the most succinct and accurate description of him I’ve ever heard.”
Rans raised a sardonic eyebrow, though he didn’t seem overly offended by the temporary failure of my brain-to-mouth filter. “Hmm. I feel as though I should dispute at least some of that, but I’m at a loss as to how to proceed.”
I frowned, as hazy memories of swallowing his blood and watching the gaping gunshot wounds in my knees knit together assailed me.
“You saved my life,” I said quietly.
But he only shrugged one shoulder, a grim smile lifting the corner of his lips for only the barest of instants before it disappeared. “Well—your mobility, perhaps. Kneecapping isn’t usually lethal, given prompt medical attention.”
“Either way,” I told him, “it’s kind of a big deal from where I’m sitting. I have to ask, though... am I going to need to join the vampire union anytime soon? After... uh... swallowing your blood, I mean. Not that I have a problem with vampires,” I hastened to add, my eyes turning back to Zorah in wonder. “At this point, it’s not an exaggeration to say that some of my closest friends are vampires.”
Leonides’ voice came from the doorway leading to the kitchen. “Don’t worry, Vonnie—you’re not in danger of joining the room-temperature club anytime soon. Turns out, we aren’t really recruiting these days.” He and Len entered the living room, the faint smell of tobacco lingering around them.
“Quite so,” Rans agreed. “Let’s just say, being a vampire carries some complicated political connotations in the current climate. Best not to stir the pot by adding further to the ranks.”
“So,” Leonides said grimly. “The bodies are taken care of, I assume?”
Rans nodded. “The fish at the bottom of the Mighty Mississippi should eat well for a few days, if nothing else.”
Zorah
was watching my reaction carefully, and it occurred to me that I should probably be more upset by this casual discussion of cold-blooded murder and corpse disposal. Again, the phantom memory of that first bullet slamming into my leg flickered through my awareness, chilling me.
“Good riddance,” I decided, half-wishing that Ivan had still been around when the vampire hit squad arrived. If he had been, it would have simplified at least one aspect of my life pretty significantly.
Footsteps approached from the hallway, and Richard appeared.
“You really killed those guys tonight?” he asked, his tone wary.
“Well, I certainly didn’t weight them down and throw them into a freezing river while they were still alive,” Rans said. “That would just be vindictive.”
Richard appeared to absorb that reply for a moment or two. “Okay. You know what? I’m not even gonna touch that. Does someone want to explain what exactly is going on? Because I feel like I’ve stepped into the Twilight Zone.”
Zorah pinned him with eyes that suddenly seemed to glow with a coppery inner light. “Sure thing, Vonnie’s Deadbeat Ex. Short version—vampires, Fae, and demons are real. Magic exists. Oh, and you’re a selfish asshole who doesn’t deserve someone as cool as her in your life.”
Richard’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “You think I don’t know that last part already?”
Zorah only gave him a sharp little eyebrow shrug in reply. Her lip curled, revealing a hint of fang that dispelled any doubts I might have harbored over what she’d told me about herself.
“Is Jace okay?” I asked, before the exchange could escalate into anything uglier.
Richard had paled and taken an involuntary step backward in response to Zorah’s toothy display. Now he crossed his arms—a defensive gesture. “He’s sleeping. But... Vonnie. We’ve got to get him away from here somehow. And you, too. You’re both in danger.”
Vampire Bound: Book One Page 15
