Cunningham, Pat - Legacy [Sequel to Belonging] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Pat Cunningham

  She came in on the tail end of what sounded like a heated argument. Jeremy cut through whatever Wallace was trying to shove on him. “Don’t. Just don’t. I don’t need to know.”

  “Gus says this guy keeps tabs on other slayers. We may never get a better chance.”

  “I don’t care. For once in your life, will you listen to me? Leave it alone. Please. For me.”

  “I’m doing this for you,” Wallace said then noticed Colleen and broke off. “Hey, sweetheart. Looking good. I was hoping to catch you before I left.”

  She glanced at the sky and its lingering streaks of blue. “You’re out early.”

  “Sooner gone, sooner back.” He removed his dark glasses and squinted against the fading sunlight. His smile showed fang. “You going to miss me, too?”

  “Not your mouth.”

  Wallace laughed. “Y’see that, Scarecrow? She’s got the right attitude. You can take a lesson from her. Stop giving me that look. I’ll be back sucking on your body parts before you know it.”

  “You’re going after a slayer. How do you expect me to look?”

  “So? I’m a slayer, too. If he’s as good as he’s supposed to be, he’ll know who I am. I’ve got a rep, too, y’know.”

  “Swell. A slayer and the vamps will be after you. We’re a flock now. We should be going with you.”

  “Don’t start that again. You’re both safer here, and both of you know it. Anyway, with you two along, I’d never want to get out of bed. Unless you want to go for a foursome with that other guy?” He winked at Colleen.

  “You’re sick,” she said. “Just go already.” Before I do what Jeremy wants to and drag you back into the house. She didn’t add that aloud but figured from the quirk of Wallace’s lips he must have caught the gist of it anyway.

  Jeremy hauled Wallace into his arms and bear-hugged him as if he would never let go. “You watch your ass, you stupid shit.”

  “Back atcha.” Wallace half turned in Jeremy’s embrace and beckoned for her to come over. He pulled her up against him. His lips caressed her cheek. “Take care of Scarecrow,” he murmured. “If he goes all broody on you, just kick him in the ’nads.”

  Jeremy released him. “Good-bye, Wallace.”

  “I love you, too.” He kissed Jeremy with a ferocity that belied his flippant tone. His emotions blew through Colleen’s mind. He didn’t want to leave them. His love was a physical force that made her eyes water and her knees buckle. Abruptly, he vaulted into the van. The sun had finally set, and the Tin Man was back on the clock. He stuck his arm out the window for a farewell wave before the van turned the corner.

  Colleen continued to watch the corner long after the van disappeared. Already, she missed his snark. Poor Jeremy looked positively bereft. She slid her arm around him in the hopes she could hug the growing emptiness out of both of them. It actually helped a little. She urged him toward the house.

  “Come on. He thinks we’ll go to pieces without him. We don’t want to give him the satisfaction of proving him right, now do we?”

  * * * *

  Once inside, and in his kitchen, Jeremy perked up a little. He got out pots, pans, chicken, flour, veggies, and cutlery with an efficiency Colleen found a little too precise, just a hair too controlled.

  “Why don’t I cook tonight?” she offered. “I do know how, you know.”

  “No. You sit your butt down, and let me wait on you.” He emphasized his order by firmly placing her in a chair at the kitchen table. He began to bread chicken with a vengeance. “If I don’t do this, I’ll go nuts. You can cook for us when Wallace gets back.”

  “Are you sure? My stroganoff kicks ass.”

  “I can’t wait to taste it. Just not tonight, okay?”

  While oil warmed in a pan, he turned to the counter and attacked the vegetables. He chopped faster than Colleen would have dared, with impressive accuracy.

  “You’re really good,” she admitted.

  He grinned faintly. “Out of necessity. I guess you know by now I was raised by vampires. Well, vampires and one human. Ken was one of my mom’s other adopted kids. He looked after me during the day, until he died when I was thirteen. That left me as the only member of the household who had to eat actual food. It was learn to cook, or live on mac and cheese.” He dumped the vegetables and chicken strips into the pan. “Home Ec. saved my life.”

  “Didn’t you get any grief from the other kids? I mean, this was middle school, right? And you were a boy in Home Ec.”

  “No, I was a jock in Home Ec. I helped our softball team make the semifinals. That bought me a lot of slack. Well, that and my growth spurt.” He waved his hand in a six-foot-five, head-to-toe sweep. “Nobody wants to mess with a giant, especially one with access to baseball bats. Besides, I was too valuable at the bake sales. My muffins were always in demand.”

  He turned to stir the veggies. Colleen eyed his ass and licked her lips. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “What? Oh.” Jeremy laughed. A healthy chunk of his anxiety faded from his face, replaced by that special look he saved for her alone. “There’s still time to take this off the stove.”

  “No, now I’m hungry. That smells delicious. You may have missed your calling.”

  “I don’t think so. I couldn’t do this all day long. I enjoy cooking for Wallace, and he’s happy to let me. I guess I’m lucky. I found the only vampire who eats.”

  “It sounds like you were luckier than me. Your family didn’t keep you around just for your blood, did they?”

  “Of course not. Mom wasn’t like that. She must have raised dozens of human kids over the centuries. She loved children, but vampires can’t—” He clipped that off.

  Colleen let it pass. “She sounds really special. Better than those bastards from the commune.”

  “Not all vampires are evil. I guess it depends on what they were like as humans.”

  “Uh-huh. So Wallace was always a smart-ass jerk?”

  “Pretty much. That’s what Annie tells me.”

  By now, both of them were chuckling. “I’d love to meet your mom,” she said. “Is she still around? Well, of course she would be. Vampires live forever, right?”

  Oh no. She knew she’d screwed it when all laughter vanished from Jeremy’s eyes. “If I just tripped over something bad, I’m sorry.”

  His anguish lasted only a moment, just long enough to alarm her. He dropped onto the chair across the table from her. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t. They’ve been gone for a couple of years now. A slayer got into the house. I couldn’t stop him.” The bleak look that replaced the anguish only scared her more. “That’s how I ended up in a brothel. I went kind of crazy for a while. Wallace pulled me out of it.” Whatever he saw on her face prompted him to take her hand. “I’m fine now, really. I’d just rather not talk about slayers.”

  “Okay.” Change the subject. Change the subject. “Back in school, you were a jock, and you were in Home Ec.”

  “Is this your subtle way of finding out if I dated boys or girls?”

  Colleen gulped. “I didn’t know you could read minds, too.”

  “I’m learning how yours works.” Thank God, his storm-cloud eyes had lightened up again. “I had a girlfriend.”

  “So back then you didn’t know you were, um…”

  “I’m not.” Jeremy leaned his folded arms on the tabletop. “I see I’ll have to bring you up to speed on vampire mores. We don’t follow rigid gender roles. We can’t afford to.”

  “We?”

  “They, I guess I mean. In this case, mostly they. This is where I really get ticked off at the movies and the TV shows. They make it look like vampires kill all the time. That’s hardly ever the case. You’d be surprised how little blood a vampire actually needs to survive. I mean, when you’re hungry for steak, you don’t eat a whole cow, do you?”

  “No,” she said cautiously, “but blood isn’t steak. There’s a difference between chugging an energy drink and chugging Jane Doe in an alley.”

/>   His smile surprised her. “You’re starting to get the picture, but there’s more to it than that. Vampires can go for decades without killing anybody. Every few days you go out and take a couple swallows from a couple different people. The donor doesn’t die or get turned or anything bad like that. Some flocks do keep blood banks, but the humans are all volunteers. They’re treated damned good, too.”

  “I’ll bet. The vampires wouldn’t want to mess up their food supply.”

  “I’m sorry about that. What those vampires did to your mother and the others was unforgiveable. Most vampires are decent, like most people are decent. They keep their heads down and try to blend in. Then you’ve got the deviants. Some of them do chug Jane Doe in the alley. That’s where the problems start. It’s like binge eating. They overdose. They overload their systems and they…” He waved one hand vaguely. “You ever watch Star Trek? You know how Mr. Spock has to get laid every seven years or he dies? That’s what happens to a vampire who takes in too much blood at once. It’s almost like their body snaps back to living, and their undead system can’t handle it. They have to get relief or the stresses will kill them. It literally shakes them to pieces. I saw it happen once.” He shuddered. “Way not pretty.”

  “Relief,” she echoed. “As in…?”

  “As in,” he said drily. “It’s called blood lust. It hits any vamp who overindulges. It’s why we can’t get hung up on gender. When a vampire’s in blood lust, they may only have minutes. The flock looks out for each other.”

  “And you,” she said as understanding dawned, “you looked after your family.”

  “Some of the younger ones slipped up sometimes. They’d all been so good to me, I couldn’t just stand by and watch them suffer.” He spoke quietly, even fondly. “I had to be specially trained. Sex with vampires gets intense. But you know that already.”

  “Wallace doesn’t do that, does he?”

  “Not since we’ve been together. He’s a lot more careful now. It helps that he can perform without having to feed first. Other vampires can’t.”

  “Because he drinks vampire blood.”

  “Uh-huh. It knocked him off the norm. Let’s face it, a vampire’s technically dead. Wallace is as close to living as a vampire can get.” He leaned back with a sigh. “All the vampires in the world, and I fell in love with a slayer.”

  “It could be worse.” Colleen got up, circled the table, and slid onto Jeremy’s lap. She hadn’t touched him in nearly fifteen minutes. Her hands needed to slide over his skin and bring his desire to a boil. She pressed her lips to his throat, near the mark, and tasted his sweetness, and his shiver. “Look at me. I fell in love with his boyfriend.”

  Jeremy anchored her on his lap with an arm around her waist and a hand in her hair. He scoured her face with hot, desperate kisses. His mouth seared a path down her neck to her collarbone. She drank in his cinnamony scent and the odd, scorched tang that seemed to have joined it, like burning oil and flesh. Like burning—

  “Shit!” Jeremy dumped her off his lap and bolted for the stove. Colleen saved herself from a spill by grabbing at the table. She stared across it to Jeremy, who held up the frying pan with their dinner in it, now a charred mess on the bottom. Jeremy looked from the frying pan to her and could only offer a helpless shrug. “How do you feel about Chinese takeout?”

  Colleen had to giggle. “That sounds—”

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  Instantly, Jeremy went on full alert. He motioned Colleen to be quiet then crept up to the door with the dinner-caked frying pan still in his hand, this time gripped like a weapon. “Who is it?” he shouted.

  “It’s me. Sully. I’m here to…you know.”

  “Shit,” Jeremy said again. “Hold on. Go upstairs,” he said to Colleen.

  She didn’t ask questions. She scurried up the stairs and ducked into the bedroom. However, she kept the door open a crack and stood beside it, listening.

  She heard Jeremy open and close the front door, but no sounds of anyone entering. Then his visitor spoke. He had a tenor voice, made higher by a push of nerves. “Jesus. You trying to burn the place down? Tin Man’s not here, is he?”

  “He’ll be back. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” She got a sudden psychic image of the visitor sniffing the room like a bloodhound. Vampire.

  And Jeremy, the man she trusted with her life, had just let him into the house.

  The vampire’s voice picked up an oily leer. “Tin Man know you got a human chick in here?”

  “Tin Man knows where your nest is.”

  “Right. Not my business.” They moved into the kitchen. That faint clack must have been Jeremy setting the frying pan on the counter. After that, things got ominously quiet.

  Minutes dragged like centuries while Colleen pressed next to the door and strained to catch any slightest sound, any hint of what was going on. Why in God’s name would Jeremy let a vampire in when they were hunting her? He’d never betray her or Wallace. She knew that down to her bones.

  The vampire’s voice at the front door startled her after the tense, prolonged silence. “There’s a flock moved in on Montrose. You know that big house at the end of the street, out by the old bus station? They’re in there. Six for sure, more when they party. You’ll tell him?”

  “I’ll tell him. Thank you. He’ll want to check it out.”

  “You make sure you tell him who told you. By name. We don’t party at our nest. You tell him.” The front door creaked open then thumped shut.

  Colleen crept down the stairs without waiting for Jeremy’s okay. He turned toward the stairs just as she reached the bottom. He held a Mason jar three-quarters full of thick, red liquid. Colleen’s gut squeezed.

  “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

  “Wallace’s dinner,” Jeremy confirmed. He followed her nervous glance to the door and shrugged. “That was Sully. He’s a local. He keeps his nose clean. We’re okay.”

  “I don’t want to know about this, do I?”

  “It’s nothing. Call it tribute. Or a bribe.” Jeremy went back to the kitchen. Colleen followed. She clutched the back of a chair but didn’t sit. Jeremy put the jar of blood in the fridge. “Wallace likes to call it ‘protection.’”

  “From him,” Colleen deduced. “Because he’s a slayer?”

  “And because he drinks vampire blood. Like I said, not all vamps are killers. However, Wallace doesn’t always differentiate, especially when he’s hungry. The local flocks started coming to him with offerings so he’d leave them alone. They tip us off to the ones who do kill. Do me a favor? Stay away from Montrose for a while.”

  “Not a problem.” Colleen looked at her hands, locked on the back of the chair. The knuckles were as white as bone.

  “Hey.” Jeremy crossed the kitchen to her side, nearly as silent as Wallace. His hand caressed her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but this is how it is. This is how we live. There’s just no way to pretty it up. This is what you’ll have to deal with if you stay with us.” He smoothed her hair back from her cheek. “We both want you to stay.”

  His wrist was right at her eye line. An ugly flash of memory hit her like a slap, Wallace’s bloody wrist pressed to Jeremy’s mouth.

  “Will he try to turn me into a vampire?”

  “What? No,” Jeremy said on a laugh. “He doesn’t do that. I practically had to tie him down and torture him just to get him to mark me.”

  “You drank his blood. I saw you.”

  He shrugged it off. “Just a swallow. It strengthens the mark. He’d never do that to you unless you really wanted him to. Even then, he’d bitch about it.”

  “What if you change? What if he changes you into what he is?”

  “Is that what you’re afraid of, that he’ll turn me? I’d still be me, just on a different diet. Would I scare you that much?”

  Colleen buried her face against Jeremy’s chest and held him tight. “You could never scare me. Wallace either. I don’t
care what he is, or what you are or do or will do or eat or whatever. I love you. I’m not walking away.”

  Jeremy sighed into her hair. “He already asked you, didn’t he?”

  “Last night. I’m okay with sharing you, really.”

  He chuckled. “That’s not how it is and you know it. We’re sharing him. Am I right?”

  Colleen’s protest died out before it reached her lips. Jeremy didn’t look a bit surprised. “That’s how it works in a flock. There’s a king or queen vampire, and then there’s the others. He leads, we follow.”

  “No. I love you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, but he’s the one who matters. I know it, and I’ll bet on some level you know it, too. We can love each other on the side. Wallace is fine with that. He’s not as big a jerk as he acts sometimes.”

  “If you love him, why won’t you let him turn you?”

  “That’s not what I want. All I ever wanted was to belong to a vampire, not become one myself. They need us, and not just for blood. Wallace won’t admit it, but he needs me human. It keeps him human, too. That matters more to him than you can imagine.”

  “But,” she whispered, “you’re mortal. You’ll die.”

  “Someday. That’s life. When my brother Ken got sick, he chose to stay human even though he knew it would kill him. He wasn’t afraid. Neither am I.” Jeremy smiled down at her. “Anyway, I can’t stand the taste of blood. It’s gross.”

  “I can’t give you children.”

  “Neither can Wallace. I’ll manage. If I feel the urge to play daddy, I’ll go borrow Shayla.” His lips whispered their way along her forehead. “I suppose a turn is out of the question for you.”

  Colleen’s shudder answered for her. “Not even for him.”

  “That’s fine. He’ll have us for as long as we live, and we’ll have each other.” The lips against her skin turned down. “We should have gone with him. To hell with what he said.”

  “No, he was right. We’re better off here. He’ll focus better if he isn’t worried about where we are or what’s happening with us.” Colleen stopped herself. How quickly her decisions had shifted into what would be best for Wallace. He hadn’t even marked her or anything. “Can we talk about something else? This is getting heavy.” She went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “I believe you promised me Chinese.”