“In what way?” I asked.
“You radiated anger and hate but kept it under control, which was a good thing. I didn’t want our, meaning vampires, presence revealed because you went off half-cocked. That’s why I started keeping track of you. Did your Sire know how you felt about humans?”
“Yes, and he warned me what would happen if I killed them and was found out. The whole declared rogue thing.”
“And yet you killed Comstock and that guy. Dex?”
“Yeah. In Comstock’s case it was expediency. I told you that. Dex? I needed to release my anger, he was there…” I shrugged.
“At least you were sensible about it, and about how you took out the bastard dealers. That told me you were able to control your emotions and change your tactics so no one would get suspicious. Then there was tonight.” He shook his head. “I get why you want to go after people like them. They’ll use anyone they can and then toss them aside like so much trash while laughing at how gullible they were.”
He was angry…now. As angry as I had been since I’d first come in contact with humans after my turning. I wondered why, and asked.
He gazed into space for a moment before saying, “My parents and I emigrated from Scotland to New York when I was a kid. It was a hard life, but they made the most of it. My father was friends with a man who was what was then called a constable in the night watch system. When I was old enough, this man suggested to his superior that I’d make a good municipal police officer. I was accepted and thought I had it made. I didn’t. The rich ran the city, doing as they pleased when they pleased and the law be damned, while the poor suffered. A wealthy business owner in the area I patrolled had his eye on me. Not to help me advance but because he wanted my body. Being homosexual, if you were caught at it, would get you tossed in prison because of the sodomy laws at the time. I still let him seduce me. He was rich, relatively handsome, and I hoped in time he’d help me advance in my…” he chuckled sourly, “chosen career. Instead, he used me and then introduced me to another man who was also gay.”
He paused, scowling darkly, before continuing. “Okay, he was a vampire, not a man, although of course neither I nor my benefactor, if you can call him that, knew that he was. He was wealthy, too, and wanted me all for his own. Long story short, he turned me and I became his sex slave until my year was up. Then he threw me out. Well, he let me go the way all Sires do with their Children when the time comes.”
“Damn,” I whispered. I wanted to hug him but when I reached for him, he pulled farther back into the corner of the sofa.
“I don’t want pity, Lucas. It was what it was and I survived.” He smiled tightly. “I was broken, and I hated him and everyone like him. I mean the rich who think they have the right to do what they want with no consequence. Broken and afraid to do what I wanted to, to the humans I detested. Afraid of being found out and declared a rogue. So I never did more that dream. Then you appeared, acting out my dreams.”
“Now, you can, too. We can. Like you said, we’ll have to be smart about it, but if we put our heads together…”
Suddenly, his mood shifted from angry and distraught to lascivious. “I’m going to take that differently than you meant it.” He grinned, and an instant later he was kissing me hard, his tongue probing when I opened to him.
I didn’t fight it. Quite the opposite, I gave as good as I was getting as we tore at each other’s clothes until we were naked. “Upstairs.” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the staircase.
We hit the bed as soon as we were in the bedroom, touching, teasing, exploring.
“Hands over your head,” Axel ordered as he kneeled between my legs. I flashed on Justin ordering me to do the same thing and gave Axel a hard shove that landed him on the floor, looking at me in astonishment.
“Bad memories?” he asked softly as he came back, lying beside me, stroking my forehead. I showed him and he said, “I should have thought about that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just…”
“Don’t do it again. Got it.” He kissed me before returning to what he’d planned—going down on me until I exploded in his mouth. Sitting back on his heels, he smiled in delight, saying, “Too bad we can’t feed that way.”
I snorted, picturing finding a donor, leading him to a dark alley and kneeling in front of him, sucking until he came, his cum ensuring my survival. “I’m not about to be arrested for prostitution.”
“Well, there is that.” By then he’d moved, sprawling on his back, and I went to work to bring him to completion. I didn’t get a chance to because he pulled away at the last moment, rolling onto his hands and knees, looking over his shoulder at me in question.
I didn’t bother to answer, getting the lube from the nightstand instead, spreading it liberally over my cock and fingers. “Thanks…whoever,” he said in relief. I had to agree, although I didn’t say so. I’ve only been fucked twice and they were the worst experiences of my admittedly active sex life.
I stretched him before slowly pushing my cock in, giving him time to get used to it. Then I began riding him, wrapping one hand around his member, pumping it in time to my thrusts. I felt him tighten around me as he came with a rafter-shaking shout of release. I was a bit quieter when I came a few moments later, but not by much.
“Think the neighbors heard us?” Axel asked with a wide grin when we’d recovered.
“At this hour? They’d better be sound asleep.” True, as it was closing in on four in the morning.
“Yeah, well…” He stopped grinning and started to get up.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To wash up before I leave.”
“You don’t have to. Leave, I mean.”
“Really?” He smiled, pulling me against his cum-covered chest. Not that I cared right then. Being held felt good. “If I stick around it’ll take my keeping an eye on you to a whole new level because you’ll know I’m doing it.”
“Which is fine by me, as long as you don’t make a habit of it while I’m at work.”
“I won’t, as long as you quit letting guys pick you up.”
I lifted an eyebrow, partly in amusement, partly in disbelief. “You can’t be jealous. You hardly know me.”
“Au contraire, mon ami. I’ve been around you for the last almost two months. I know you very well.”
“Thought you were Scottish,” I retorted, feeling a bit nonplused although he had a point.
“I am! It doesn’t mean…Oh, never mind. You like throwing me off the subject, don’t you?”
I looked up at him and winked. “Speaking of subjects, will you stay?”
“Yes.” He dropped a kiss on my lips then released me and got up—and this time I let him—going into the bathroom. I heard the shower running and followed. Not to start something but because I was sticky, too, after leaning against him. We showered quickly since if I, at least, didn’t, I would have fallen asleep where I stood. He laughed when I pointed that out, saying he’d catch me. “I’m older than you, so I have a few minutes grace after sun-up. I’d carry you to bed if that happened.”
He didn’t have to. We returned to bed where we shared a couple of kisses before I passed out.
Chapter 8
“We need a plan.”
“That’s the umpteenth time you’ve said that,” I groused. “We’ll make one, after we decide who we’re dealing with.”
Axel had been staying at the house since he first revealed himself over three weeks previously. I had no problem with that. I also understood—on the day we went to his place to get some of his clothes—why he seemed reluctant to go home. He had been living in a studio apartment on the third floor of an older building that didn’t have an elevator.
“Why the hell…?” I’d muttered moments after entering. It was nice enough, I supposed, for what it was, with white walls, a carpeted floor, the requisite furniture, two closets, and a tiny bathroom and kitchen.
He’d shrugged. “I only use it for sleeping so si
ze didn’t matter. And it’s cheap.”
Cheap did matter to him. He’d been in Denver a month longer than I, and still hadn’t found a job.
“Yeah, I’m picky,” he’d admitted when I’d asked. “The thing is, the security companies I checked out all said they had enough nighttime security guards on their payroll which sucked because that’s what I’m good at. I’ve done it several times, starting back before I was turned as a matter of fact, if you call being a municipal police officer one. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a maintenance man or clerk at a sleazy hotel, and the good hotels aren’t looking for anyone. Before you say it, restaurants want waiters who can work over dinnertime, which obviously isn’t happening.”
With no money coming in, he was living on his savings from jobs he’d had over the past hundred years or more. A sizable sum, according to him, but it wouldn’t last forever.
At that point, I told him to pack up everything he wanted to bring with him because he was moving in with me on a permanent basis. He’d protested, but it was only for show, or to salve his conscience, I thought, because he quickly did as I’d said and we took his stuff back to the house in his car. It was an old one, and looked its age and then some, but it ran like a top thanks to his auto repair skills.
“Learned them from a man who owned a garage, hell, fifty years ago. Crusty old codger, but damned good at what he did. I told him I was in school so I’d only be available nights and he bought it. When I left, because I wasn’t aging and couldn’t stick around until he realized it, I knew enough to keep any car I own in top shape, as long as it’s not a newer one with all the electronics they put in them these days.”
Anyway, long story a bit shorter, he moved in. Now, we were thinking about what rich son of a bitch we should go after first.
Axel had the society pages from the local papers spread out on the dining table. I was checking online for the shakers-and-movers who might be ripe for elimination.
“Look up this guy,” Axel said, handing me the newspaper folded to the page with a picture on several men and their wives at some sort of charity gig.
“Be more specific,” I replied. “Which one?”
“Him.” He tapped the face of the man he was interested in. The peoples’ names were listed under the photo. He was, and so help this is the truth, Percival Hathaway the Fourth. I snorted when I saw that. “I wonder if he’s called Percy by his nearest and dearest.”
Axel burst out laughing. “I know. If I had a name like that I’d have changed it the minute I legally could. And he’s a ‘fourth’? Damn. I feel sorry for his forbearers. Well, not really. I wonder what his middle name is.”
I checked and shook my head. “Wainwright.”
“Too much. So tell me about him. All it says in the story is that he’s a renowned local tycoon.”
It took some searching, but I eventually found what I was looking for—a reason for us to deal with him. “He’s definitely well-known in some circles, and not in a good way. He owns a manufacturing company which, it says here, has rejected any efforts to unionize its workers, who are primarily immigrants from Mexico and South America. He pays substandard wages and doesn’t provide healthcare.”
“In other words, it a damned sweatshop,” Axel said angrily.
“So it seems, although when this story came out, Hathaway claimed it was a hatchet job by the newspaper’s editor who has it in for him because he’s, and I quote, “Doing my best to help people from impoverished nations and the paper’s labor editor is anti-immigration.”
“Any truth to that?”
I did another search and came up with nothing that said Hathaway had a leg to stand on in that respect. “The editor is definitely pro-union, if that tells you anything,” I told him.
“Before we go off half-cocked, who takes over his company when he dies?”
“You’re going to make me work for this, aren’t you,” I grumbled, getting a raised finger in reply. A few minutes later I had the answer. “His stepson from his wife’s first marriage. Apparently he can’t have kids, which is probably a good thing. How would you like to be a ‘Fifth’?”
“With that name, I think I’d kill myself first.”
“No shit. There’s very little that I can find out about the stepson, but even if his business practices turn out to be as bad as his father’s, at least we’ll be getting rid of one bastard. That is if you think we should go after him.”
“You better believe I do!”
I had a feeling part of his reason had to do with is being an immigrant himself which to some extent had led to his being here now, almost a hundred and seventy-five years later.
“Then he’s it. Next, we have to learn all we can about his daily, well, nightly habits so we can figure out how the kill the bastard without it’s coming back to haunt us in a bad way.”
Axel spent the next few nights, because I was at work, either watching Hathaway’s house or following him when he left, which was most nights as it turned out. He had an active social life, whether accompanied by his wife or on his own.
“Following him is boring,” Axel said at one point. “It makes me want to drag him into some dark corner to destroy him the way you did with your first two victims. But we can’t, so I think we should check out his company. I mean the building.” When I asked why, he explained his reasoning. “There might be something there we could use to explain his death, if we can get him there. I mean, it’s a manufacturing plant. There have to be machines, right?”
“True,” I replied, getting his drift.
We did as he suggested, and left with Axel grumbling, “OSHA sucks.”
For our purposes, I agreed, but as I pointed out, “If it wasn’t for all their rules and regulations his workers would have even worse problems, like losing a hand or an arm.”
“I know you’re right, but damn.”
He didn’t say anything else on our drive home, but it was apparent he was thinking about ways to kill Hathaway from his nods and brief smiles, which unfortunately were quickly followed by scowls as he shook his head, muttering “Nope”, or “Get real, damn it,” under his breath. Then he snapped his fingers. “Why not?” Glancing at me he said, “Don’t ask. I’ll tell you if I decide it could work.”
“Yeah, leave me in suspense. What happened to two heads are better than one?”
“Wait ‘til we get home. Okay?”
In my frustration, I tried one last thing, probing his thoughts. Not happening. He was shielding. He did pick up on my attempt, though, and laughed. “You have no patience.”
I shrugged. “Comes from being so young.”
“Had to go there, didn’t you?”
“Well…yeah.”
He finally revealed all but not until after I’d plopped down on the sofa and picked up the book I’d been reading, patently ignoring the fact he was watching me as he began to pace. So he stopped and took the book from my hands.
“What if there were things that terrified you?” he asked. “More to the point, what if your fear manifested without warning while you were at work, or out for the evening with friends, or home in bed trying to have sex with your wife.”
I almost said I don’t have a wife but didn’t because I knew he wasn’t talking about me personally. “Fear of something physical, like, I don’t know, bats, or dogs, or lightening?”
“Yes. What about bugs? No one likes them unless they’re entomologists, especially if they find them in their food, or crawling on them, right?”
“Big time.” I shuddered. “What’s that got with Hathaway?”
“Okay, suppose instead of killing him, which would definitely send up red flags no matter how we did it, we drove him crazy? It might not be as physically satisfying but watching him deteriorate might be more fun in the long run.”
I thought about what he was suggesting. “Mind control?”
“You bet. We’d have to get him away from everyone long enough to take over, but it’s possible. When he’s out to dinn
er he generally goes to the restroom. That could be the perfect spot.”
“To plant the idea he hated bugs with a passion, because he might not. But we’d have to reinforce it every once in a while. No, we’d have be around so we could suggest that there were insects crawling over his meal, or on his chest, or in his hair. That could be tricky.”
“Invisibility, Lucas. We could be standing across from him at dinner, or sitting next to him at a meeting, or…well, you get the picture.”
I nodded. “It would have to be you. My mind control isn’t that strong, yet. I can deal with someone to feed from them, but that’s a case of making them forget what happened. I don’t think I could make them do something.”
“You must have controlled Dex to get him to drive into the mountains.”
“True, I guess, but he knew me and trusted me. Make sense?”
“It does. So we could take turns.” He sat next to me, taking my hands. “I’ll do it most of the time, but not always. If you do it, too, it’ll strengthen your ability to control someone you don’t know.” He grinned. “If it works with Hathaway, we can do it to other sons of bitches.”
“And fill the mental hospitals.” I found that idea amusing.
“Unless they killed themselves to escape their terrors. Hell, all we’d have to do is send bugs crawling over Hathaway while he’s driving and he’d probably run off the road trying to escape them. Plan it right and he’d hit an abutment at ninety miles-per-hour, or go straight off a steep embankment.”
“That last could work if we ‘suggested’ he take a drive into the mountains. Yeah, I like that idea. I like the whole thing. This could be fun.”
“Could, couldn’t it?” Axel agreed.
* * * *
We high-fived each other Thursday night when we saw Hathaway excuse himself from the table and head toward the restroom. I glanced at his wife, not at all surprised to see a momentary flash of relief cross her face before she turned to say something to the woman sitting cattycorner from her. Then, Axel and I followed the man into the restroom. He was already unzipping when Axel moved to the urinal next to him, while I leaned against the door to keep anyone from entering.
I Hunt by Night Page 7
