“Yes, I am. It’s so beautiful up here.” She let her head fall back and spun in a lazy circle. Adlai caught her and pulled her tight against him.
“It’s beautiful downstairs too. First window on the right.”
“Are we here already?” She focused on Adlai, seeing his shiny, black eyes. Blood stained his face like a haggard beard and made his breath irresistibly sweet. She pressed her body against him, letting her face skim his, breathing in the scent of him, hearing his heart hammering beneath his clothes. She twined one leg around his, grinding against him, and clutched the back of his neck, whispering into his ear.
“Don’t say no to me.”
“Get inside.”
She jumped through the window first, the darkened room now brilliant with her blood-high eyes. It was as empty as it had felt but Stell spied a rumpled bed at the near end of the room. As Adlai landed on the floor behind her, she dropped her jacket and headed for the bed. Before she could peel her t-shirt off, he came up behind her and grabbed her around the waist.
She could feel his hands everywhere as she spun to face him, kissing him roughly as they staggered several feet into the room. His coat disappeared and her hands tore at his shirt, trying to get to the burning skin she could smell beneath. He tipped his head back as her mouth explored his chest and shoulders. She loved his arms. Biting into his shoulder, she watched the light ripple like mercury over the contours of his muscles and the sounds he made as she worked her way over his skin thrilled her.
She climbed him, wrapping her legs around his waist, wanting to be as close as possible to his body, but he pushed her down. He had to push hard but held her at arm’s length. For one horrible moment, she feared he would refuse her again.
“Take off your shirt.”
She ripped the shirt over her head as his grip tightened on her hips. His eyes moved slowly, obviously, over her body and his vision felt like fingers on her hypersensitive skin. She squirmed in his grip, wanting to be in contact with his skin once more, but he held her away.
When she was sure she would scream from anticipation, he jerked open the button fly of her jeans, pushing them down to just above her knees. Stell gasped at the cold air on her skin. Free of his restraint, she pulled at his jeans as well, pushing them down and plunging her hands in. She freed his cock, white-hot in her hands, and tried once more to climb his body but her jeans at her knees restricted her. Not wanting to release her grip on him, she kicked and squirmed, swearing at the restraints as Adlai watched her dilemma.
“Shit.” She used both hands now to try to push the jeans down off her legs but he stopped her. She huffed in frustration. “I’m stuck.”
“I know.”
He leaned in and bit her lower lip. She opened her mouth for more but he whipped her around by her hip, slamming her forward into the rough brick of his apartment wall. Her fingers dug into the brick as he kicked her legs apart, one arm wrapping around her body, his hand sliding between her legs, holding her in place as he entered her from behind.
Still trapped by her jeans, her movement was restricted and Adlai took full advantage of his control. The fingers of his left hand massaged the tender cleft of her body in time with his vigorous thrusts while his right hand slid up her body, over her shoulder and grabbed fiercely at a handful of hair.
The sounds coming from Stell weren’t human as she arched and writhed, growling at the restraints, crying out at the intensity of the pleasure. The rough brick scraped at her aching nipples as she bent backward, trying to push him even more deeply within her. Her hands scratched at the wall then clawed backward, trying to find purchase on his pale bare skin.
He bit down hard on her neck, not yet breaking the skin. “Oascaru li da. You are so fierce, Stell, so fucking deadly.”
She groaned as he bit more deeply into her skin and she reached back to wrap her hands around the back of his head. She pulled his ear to her mouth and bit down sharply on his earlobe. “Wait until I get my hands on you, you’ll know oascaru.”
“I’m counting on it.” A sharp bite and Stell smelled her own blood and felt the ecstatic sensation of his lips and tongue feeding from her.
Tomas left Dalle asleep on Sylva’s couch. His mentor had told him he planned to spend most of the day in deep meditation. “Recuperating,” he’d said. Tomas watched Dalle’s eyes flutter shut and heard his breathing even out. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder about the toll training an apprentice would take. Despite Dalle’s reassurances, Tomas worried he’d acted too rashly, feeding so soon after his induction, missing the chance to fully explore his vision.
He slipped out of Sylva’s office and headed for a meditation room. The hours of flip requests he’d done with Dalle, dreaming decisions for Nahan he had never met, had lit him up. He felt giddy and warm, better than he had in days. Before he could open the door of Dalle’s favorite meditation room, the door to the right opened and Tomas heard an unmistakably gravelly growl.
“Desara.”
“Lucien, hello.” The Storyteller looked terrible, like he’d just run down a hot highway. His hair stuck up in clumps and his eyes were painfully red. He smelled sour and Tomas tried not to flinch when Lucien crowded him against the door.
“Don’t you look fresh, young Storyteller.” Tomas didn’t know what to say to that so he tried to lean away from Lucien’s bitter breath. “Back in the trenches so soon? All recovered from your induction? Even with blowing it by feeding from your little girl?”
“Dalle said it was all right, that I’d be okay.”
“Well, Dalle is a good mentor, isn’t he?” Lucien looked him over from head to toe. “You really lucked out with him. It could be a lot worse, but you know that, don’t you?”
Tomas looked for someone, anyone, to come down the hall and rescue him from this odd confrontation. Lucien saw him search. “Nobody here but us, kid. Storytellers make the rest of them nervous. They give us a wide berth.” He put his hand on the wall beside Tomas’s head.
“Is there something I can do for you, Lucien?”
The Storyteller’s breath was hot on his face. “Tell me what he said. Hess. Did he ask for me?” Lucien grabbed Tomas’s arm. “Can you talk to him?”
“I don’t know.” Tomas winced from the grip. “I haven’t meditated since—”
“You talk to him,” Lucien hissed. “You tell him—”
“Lucien!” Sylva ran down the hall. She pulled Lucien off Tomas, pushing him back against the other wall. Lucien let the tiny woman manhandle him. “This is not appropriate. You want to have this discussion, you go through Dalle. Am I understood?”
He nodded, his head falling back against the wall. Tomas could see tears streaking his cheeks. Sylva turned him, pushing him down the hall away from Tomas. He let her move him several feet before he called over his shoulder.
“Desara. You tell him I’m sorry.”
“That couldn’t have been easy for you.” Sylva followed Tomas into the meditation room and waited for him to settle cross-legged on the carpet with her. “You should really talk about this with Dalle. He’s your mentor.”
“He’s meditating.” He touched her hand. “You’re my teacher too. Why won’t anyone tell me about Hess? What happened?”
Sylva stared into the carpet, her voice low. “Hess had dreams, awful visions, they were killing him. They were worse than Lucien’s ever were and Hess hadn’t even been inducted yet. The meditations only made the dreams worse. The more he meditated, the more focused his dreams became until he begged Lucien to release him.”
“Why couldn’t he just leave?”
“And do what?” Sylva asked. “You can’t unring that bell, Desara. You can’t unlearn how to meditate. He was petrified of the common; he was petrified of himself. The last thing any of us need is another branch of the True Family popping up. If we had let him loose, they would have gobbled him up and then there would be even more people in rags living in the woods bleeding themselves.”
She smoothed the
nap of the carpet. “We were desperate. We even used the drone to calm him down.”
“The what?”
“Just a stupid idea Lucien had.” She waved it away. “A noise machine, an electronic droning. It made it impossible for any of the Storytellers to meditate. It made them all miserable but it did help Hess for while. It held his dreams off. He began to relax. Not being able to meditate kept him from being so afraid. When Lucien thought he was rested enough, we turned off the drone. We took him to the pool for the Eighteen-Step Meditation and, well, you remember what follows that.” Tomas nodded, still haunted by the confusion of the attack and the horror of the Vint.
“He called out the Vint. It was terrible to watch just like it was with you. Like it always is. But before Lucien could give him the oleander, Hess just . . .” Sylva’s voice disappeared. She took a deep breath. “His screams were so horrible. It was all horrible. His fear was like a bitter smoke, you could smell it everywhere. I looked into his eyes and there was no doubt he was gone. He was completely gone.”
Tomas didn’t know what to say. They sat in silence until Sylva smiled up at him. “I’m sorry we never told you this. I should have known there would be some energy left over from all of it that only a young Storyteller would have picked up on. It was just so horrible for all of us. Everyone in the complex suffered. Dozens of people left and never came back. Forgive me. Forgive us all.”
Tomas took her hands and held them between both of his. He still loved her hands after all they had put him through. He trusted these hands and trusted this woman and so he asked her the question that started it all. “Where is Hess now?”
“With his family. I don’t know where. He never wanted to see us again. He wanted his family to take care of him.”
“And the drone? Do you use that anymore?”
“God, no. That’s long gone.”
“What happened to it?”
Sylva shrugged. “Vartan took care of it. Like I said, the whole incident rattled everyone, seeing a young Storyteller shatter like that. Vartan removed the drone, took care of moving Hess, everything. It seems even a bureaucrat will cooperate if you frighten him badly enough.”
Chapter Ten:
TU BITH
tu Bith: class of Nahan responsible for moneymaking; bankers
Thirst woke Stell. The apartment was sweltering, the steam radiator beside the bed popping and singing. Sweat pooled on her stomach, where Adlai’s arm lay across her. She slid out from beneath his arm and rolled onto her side to study him with her still-sensitive eyes. He looked like he had been in a fight or maybe thrown through a window, the pale skin of his chest and shoulders torn and bruised.
She traced a long streak of four cuts, her fingernail tracks, along the curve of his rib cage ending at a fading bite mark on the cut of muscle just above his pelvis. The wounds excited her and she would have run her tongue along the cuts on his collarbone but she was too thirsty to swallow. Sliding off the mattress, Stell padded silently across the dark loft.
The bike sat in the center of the space surrounded by tool chests and racks and greasy rags. It was clearly Adlai’s favorite, if not his only, real possession. Under the window, an industrial-sized washer and dryer sat silent, their clothes from last night peeking through the round window, dry and wrinkling. It was too hot to dress so Stell didn’t bother to fetch her clothes. She walked naked the length of the loft to the open kitchenette, really just a small refrigerator and gas stove with a set of shelves between them. Stell opened the refrigerator and poked through the contents. There were several take-out containers with Chinese and Mexican foods, which Stell pushed aside to pull out a can of grape soda. She popped it and drank half of it in one pull. With a quiet belch, she continued her tour of the hidden world of Anton Adlai.
She could smell him everywhere. There were no bookshelves, no magazines, no mail or catalogs strewn about. On the other side of the refrigerator sat an industrial sink, battered and scarred with grease and paint. The concrete floor dipped slightly under her feet toward a drain in the floor. She puzzled over its location, several feet from the wall until she noticed copper pipes trailing along the wall. Above her head hung a shower nozzle. Apparently Adlai preferred to shower in the open. That wasn’t all. In a dark alcove, a toilet crouched, open to the room.
The space felt good and Stell could feel her body relax as the blood high waned. She made her way back the length of the loft, stepping over a set of free weights in the floor. As she lifted her leg over a weight bench, she saw an ugly purple half-moon on her thigh the exact size of Adlai’s bite. She rubbed the mark, knowing it would fade, and felt a sharp twinge in her side. The bullet hole had closed but the bullet remained inside. Adlai had told her the kill would help the wound heal faster but the damage wasn’t gone.
She twisted her back, bracing herself on the wall to stretch. The wall was bare, a long expanse of exposed red brick, broken up occasionally by pipe ends or bolts but two thirds of the way down the wall, Stell spied a small, white square. Stepping closer, she saw it was a photo balanced on the edge of a jagged piece of brick. She held the photo up to catch the light from the street and could make out two figures.
Two young men leaned against a big car. The one on the left stood with muscular arms folded, long, stringy hair covering a good part of his scowling face. It was Adlai. Beside him, a taller and skinnier young man with wild, curly hair had his arm around his friend and his head thrown back in a widemouthed laugh. Stell smiled, tracing her finger over the image of Adlai in younger, happier days.
“That’s Shelan.”
Adlai had slipped up behind her, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“You’re young.”
“Uh-huh. That was our first car. Legal car, that is. A Nova. Had a V-8, an eight-track tape player, and kicking speakers. We were bad motherfuckers.” He wrapped his arms around Stell’s waist and pulled her closer to him. She leaned back, enjoying the solidity of his body.
“I wish I could see his face. He’s laughing. All I see is teeth.”
“You’d have to be quick to catch Shelan not laughing about something. We used to laugh so much. We had more fun and made more money and got more pussy than . . .” The words disappeared in a heavy sigh and Stell could feel his grip on her tighten.
“Just so you know, I’m glad your Tomas survived that place. I’m glad he didn’t have to go through what Shelan did. And even if your friends can’t find out where he is, I’m going to. I’m getting him out of wherever they put him and then we’re gone.”
“I know.”
“If it goes wrong, if something goes wrong,” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “you can come with us.”
“What’s going to go wrong?” She didn’t want to ask but couldn’t stop.
“Tomas might be different.”
“He’s not different.”
He nodded against her cheek. “But if he is. That’s what they do, Stell. The Storytellers, those bastards in that complex, they change people. It’s what they do, what they tried to do to Shelan.”
“Don’t.”
“If you need to get out, if you need to get away from the Council, you can come with me. Come with us. You never have to look back.” Stell squeezed her eyes shut, his words swimming before her. He kissed her neck and pulled away.
“How’s your back? The hole is closed.”
Stell nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“It shouldn’t hurt too much until the bullet starts working its way out. I’m not going to lie to you. That’ll hurt because it’s got to break the skin to get out. It’ll feel like you swallowed a mouse with really sharp claws.” He stepped away from her to the laundry machines where the Russian’s briefcase sat and tossed her a bundle of wrapped bills. “This’ll make you feel better.”
Stell examined the money like it was an alien artifact. “I thought this belonged to your friend, Boxi.”
“No, the diamonds belong to Boxi. The money is windfall. I’ll take what
I need and give the rest to him. Boxi will take the money and the word will go out that there’s cash around and if any of our people need it, they’ll get it. Simple as that. Don’t need the Council to tell us how to do it. It’s a lot easier than begging that fucker Vartan for pocket money, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any money.”
“Where do you get your food? Your clothes and stuff?”
Stell shrugged. “Commons bring in groceries. They do our laundry too. And clean the apartment. They even bought my clothes.”
Adlai sat back on his heels and watched her as the morning sun filtered through the grated windows. “Then consider that your first payment toward independence, Stell.”
Stell let herself into the apartment, listening for Adlai’s motorcycle long after it had passed out of earshot. Still in her coat, she examined the apartment she shared with Tomas with new eyes. She and Tomas were no more evident in the well-appointed apartment than Adlai was in his bare loft. They had picked out none of the furniture. There were pictures on the wall of places Stell couldn’t identify. Paintings of wine bottles and blurry renditions of French cafés, hung in their small dining alcove, a woven bowl with an African design that had never seen an African waited on the entrance table for mail that never arrived.
She stepped into the kitchen, opening a stocked cabinet. The crackers and dips and pastas and sweets within were all satisfying enough but for the first time Stell wondered what she would have bought for herself. The Kott were attentive. If the stone-ground crackers didn’t get eaten, they never appeared again. When the M&M’s were gone in a day, three packages took their place. The sight of an open package of the peanut butter cookies Tomas loved so much made Stell’s breath catch in her throat, loneliness soaring in from nowhere and punching her in the stomach. She let the cabinet door slam shut.
“Stell? Is that you?”
She turned, gripping the countertop behind her, and called out to the bedroom. “Tomas? I thought you’d be at the complex. Why are you home?”
Ourselves Page 25
