Several of the largest dogs had sunk low, prowling forward with their hackles up and those bass growls rumbling from their throats. Shaking, Nico tried to steady himself enough to release a short spray of bullets at the nearest one, a mutt with dingy, scraggly gray fur. His aim was off, and he hit the ground beside it. Chips of concrete flew, and the dog leaped away, yelping loudly.
It was enough to give the other dogs pause, though. They crouched lower, their growls even more alarming. Another quivered on the brink of pouncing, but as his haunches tensed to spring, the short, sharp bark of Zach’s handgun thundered through the quiet, and the dog dropped where it had stood with a truncated howl, blood pooling beneath it.
Zach’s face transformed from grim determination to alarm as his gun came up, as if he were taking aim at Nico. “Nico, get down!”
Nico started to turn to see what Zach saw when something slammed into him, sending him flying. His head cracked against one of the cars still forming the barricade with an explosion of agony and white light. His skull made a sickening sound knocking against the pavement as the human figure drove him the rest of the way down. Panic sliced through the pain, knowing that had been a bad hit. He swore he could feel his brain bounce around his skull.
He wavered at the edge of consciousness, trying to fend off the body on top of him. It stank to high heaven, just like the woman outside the pharmacy had. Its putrid breath hit him like a noxious wall of fumes as he brought up his arms to try to keep the gnashing teeth at bay. And its eyes . . . There was nothing human in them. They burned with pure, inhuman hunger.
Nico tried to shout at Zach to run, but he wasn’t sure he actually managed to make any sound. A dark form flew at the man—thing—on top of Nico, striking from the side in a blur of filthy fur. The revenant threw the dog off with a snarl, twisting as he rose from Nico’s body and sprang to his feet to face the attacking pack. The dogs were darting toward him one after the other, trying to flank and hamstring him, sometimes dodging his attempts to strike back, other times catching the blows and being knocked aside.
It was impossible to tell which growls were revenant and which were canine.
Nico wanted to fall back on the ground and let unconsciousness claim him. His head throbbed, and everything looked blurry and just off. But the dogs and revenant wouldn’t keep each other occupied forever. Either the revenant would drive the dogs away and then kill Nico or the dogs would kill the revenant and then come after Nico. If they wounded the revenant, its blood might get on him, making it unsafe to be near Zach.
Desperately, Nico dragged himself down the freeway toward the truck, pulling with his arms since his legs didn’t seem to want to move and fighting off the waves of blackness threatening to tow him under. He could hear the savage battle between the dogs and the revenant behind him growing more frenzied, and all he could think was that he needed to get Zach away from it before someone started bleeding.
Unless he was bleeding already. Nico stopped and put a hand on the side of his head where it had hit the first time. He felt the tender lump there, and his hair was wet with sweat, but there was no blood on his fingers when he pulled them away from his scalp. Grit and gravel were tangled in his hair from the concrete, but again, no blood.
He staggered to his feet and ignored the pain and nausea that tried to overwhelm him as he broke into a limping jog toward the truck.
“Oh God. Get in, get in, get in!” Zach pleaded, his face pinched and pale. He’d already thrown open the passenger-side door, and Nico flung himself into the seat. He barely managed to slam the door closed behind himself before Zach put the car in motion, the tires squealing as he reversed at a dangerous speed, putting distance between them and the feral creatures fighting by the roadblock.
Then he hit the brakes and swung the car around in a sharp turn. It threw Nico against the door, and another wave of excruciating pain crashed through his skull. He was aware of the force of Zach’s acceleration pinning him to the seat, and then he lost his grip on consciousness.
When Nico opened his eyes for the first time since they’d sped away from the barricade, night had fallen. The world outside was so dark he had no way of knowing where they were. He only knew that Zach was driving very carefully, his hands clenching the wheel in a white-knuckled grip and his eyes intent on the road. He wasn’t even trying to be silent as he muttered a prayer for God to get them through without crashing into something in the darkness.
Sickened by the pain in his skull, Nico closed his eyes and left Zach to it.
Dawn was spreading tendrils of pink into an inky-gray sky when he woke up again. “Where’re we?” he slurred, blinking.
Zach’s eyes flicked over at him in an uncertain glance before he turned his attention back to the road. “I’m not sure. Somewhere in Missouri still? I keep seeing signs for Kansas City, but I have no idea how we’re going to get around it.”
Nico started groping urgently for the door handle. “Pull over.”
Zach barely managed to come to a stop before Nico flung the door open and leaned out of the car, retching out the meager contents of his stomach. He would have tumbled out into the small pool of his own spew if Zach hadn’t caught hold of his shirt and kept him from falling.
“This is not good,” Nico panted when the dry heaves subsided. His throat burned from the acid backwash, and he could feel his own skin covered in a clammy, cold sweat. The pain in his head was blinding even in the dim, predawn light.
“I saw you hit your head.” Zach’s voice was tight with emotion, sounding as worried as Nico felt. “I even heard it. For a moment, I thought— I wasn’t sure you could have survived that. It sounded like a melon breaking open.”
“Sorry.” Nico wasn’t sure why he was apologizing, except that Zach seemed afraid and he couldn’t stand to be the cause of that fear. He struggled to get himself back upright in his seat. It took several attempts to get the car door closed because any exertion came with a fresh explosion of pain in his skull, but eventually he succeeded. “Have to keep going.”
“You sure? I’m trying to find someplace safe to stop.”
“Need sleep?”
Zach scoffed, but it was shaky, like he was trying to laugh and couldn’t quite pull it off. “I’m too afraid to sleep. You’re injured, and I don’t know what to do for you.”
“Don’ worry ’bout me.” Nico could see his hand trembling as he lifted it and laid it on Zach’s arm. “Do what’s safe f’you. Stop if y’have t’sleep.”
“God, knock it off!” Nico winced when Zach’s raised voice cracked. Zach shot him an angry look before turning back to the road. “I’m not the only person in this car. Quit acting like only one of us needs to be protected.”
“Ow. Please don’t yell.” Nico sank down in his seat, closing his eyes as the sky brightened with the day.
“Sorry.” Zach hardly even whispered the word, and when Nico ventured to slit an eye open, Zach was staring at the road with the sort of fixed concentration people acquired when they had to focus on something or else fall completely apart. “Don’t suppose you know what to do for head injuries?” he asked after a moment, one corner of his mouth lifting with just the barest amount of wry humor.
Nico swallowed against another wave of nausea. He tried shaking his head, but then thought better of it. “’Fraid not. Guess I’m just going to have to pass out here and hope for the best. Pull off and get some sleep if you need to.”
The day passed in sporadic bursts of painful consciousness, punctuated by sweet oblivion. Nico had no appetite and couldn’t make himself eat, even though he knew that whatever the Bane Alpha virus was doing to his body, it required far more fuel than it was getting. Whenever he woke up, Zach would force water down his throat, which he usually vomited right back up. He wasn’t sure he should be sleeping so much, but he didn’t seem to have much of a choice in the matter.
He had the feeling it had been another day of slow travel as Zach tried to find routes around Kansas City, Wichita
, and God only knew what other cities they had passed by now. It was too dark around the truck for Nico to tell where Zach had eventually pulled over that night.
Zach was snoring behind the driver’s console, his seat reclined and his face turned toward Nico, slack with sleep. Nico stared at him, not quite praying—certainly not the way Zach did—but hoping with all his heart that he could find a way to protect him. Just this one guy. He didn’t delude himself into thinking he could do anything to stem the destruction he’d unwittingly helped unleash upon the world, but this one man, this one life. This decent, sincere, kind person who would hold a gun on his own father to protect a stranger. Maybe if Nico could just preserve that, it wouldn’t have all been a waste.
Zach’s eyes blinked open in the moonlight, and he shot upright, immediately on full alert when he saw Nico. “You okay?”
“Head still hurts like a bitch, but I think I might live.” Nico rubbed the tender knots on his scalp cautiously. “Go back to sleep. I’m sure you need to rest.”
“Yeah, okay.” Zach twisted and tried to stretch in the confines of the driver’s seat, then settled back in. “You too. Wake me up if you need anything.”
Zach’s eyes drifted closed, but Nico found he wasn’t sleepy. He was in too much pain to think very hard about anything, but he couldn’t stop staring at Zach, as if he could make all this turn out all right if he kept watch over him.
Zach’s eyes didn’t open, and his voice was soft sometime later when he murmured, “You still awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What happened with us before? In my bedroom, and then in the parking lot. Why did you . . .? I mean, why didn’t you . . .? Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” Now Zach looked at him, and Nico found himself glancing away to avoid that searching gaze. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It was great. I wanted more. A lot more.”
“Then why did you run off?” Zach’s fingers crossed the distance between the seats to brush the back of Nico’s hand.
He sighed. “This virus . . . the one it mutates into when I bleed. I’m just not sure if it’s only in my blood, you know? I didn’t want to risk you getting the Rot if I came with you nearby.”
“Oh.” There was a note of relief in Zach’s voice. “Then, it wasn’t because you didn’t want—”
“To feel you jerk me off? To blow my load all over you?” Nico smirked. It was too dark to tell if Zach was blushing, but he’d swear he could feel the heat radiating from Zach’s face. “Believe me, I definitely wanted. I can’t remember the last time I wanted it that badly.”
“Oh.” Zach closed his eyes, frowning slightly, then looked at Nico again. “I suppose, considering your profession, it sort of, um, loses its shine?”
Nico pressed his lips together. That hurt. He knew Zach wasn’t trying to pass judgment, but it still stung.
“Is that what you think? That I’m jaded? That I’ve been fucked so many times, by so many people, I don’t feel anything anymore?” He shook his head. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh.” Nico was starting to hate that syllable, particularly for the hesitant silence that followed it. “I’m sorry. I want to understand. What was it like, then?”
Nico licked his lips, pulling his thoughts together as he tried to come down from his knee-jerk irritation. He was so primed for Zach to turn judgmental on him that he was ready to take offense at anything.
At least talking gave him something to focus on other than his headache.
“Well, when my mother started tricking, her claim to fame, as it were, was that she tried to emulate the cortigiana onesta of the Italian Renaissance. They weren’t simply whores. They were intellectuals. Poets. Entertainers. Musicians. Women with the freedom to pursue an education and a relative degree of ownership of their own bodies. Being with them wasn’t just a matter of money for sex; it was an experience.”
Zach blinked at him, and Nico could tell he wasn’t getting it yet. “How?”
“The men who employed them sought a companion who was witty and graceful and entertaining. Yes, sex was part of the deal, but sometimes men would contract my mother just to have a date whose company they knew they would enjoy. And when she began hiring other escorts, she looked for that same level of engagement from them.” Zach’s eyes widened at that, and Nico nodded emphatically. “And when it came to sex, that sort of dynamic meant that a connection was often formed. It wasn’t just a commercial exchange, money for orgasms. With the exception of the sort of jobs we sometimes did for General McClosky, we usually knew our clients. Frequently, we even liked them. Enjoyed their company. And, yes, enjoyed having sex with them. The sex was very rarely something we just gritted our teeth and endured because it was what we were being paid to do.”
He let Zach absorb that for a while. He looked a little dubious about the idea, and Nico sighed again.
“Look, I’m not saying it’s like that for every sex worker. The abuses of the corporate brothels are fairly well-known. Sure, they put the pimps out of business, but they replaced them with something even worse—a legally sanctioned something at that.” Nico grimaced. “Brothel workers aren’t given the option of turning down customers, and they make so little, it’s straight-up wage slavery. Human trafficking by another name. But my mother—she started tricking to get away from a man with that endgame, so she took what he wanted and expanded it, packaged and sold it on her own terms. I respect the work she did. And the work I did as her employee.”
Zach looked a little pained at that. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . the idea of a mother employing her son to do . . . that . . .”
“Yeah, I’m sure it seems a little warped to you.” Nico smiled sadly, longing for his mother, grief for her loss spearing him through the chest. “But she wasn’t ashamed of who she was or what she did or what she had built. If she wasn’t ashamed of it, why would she discourage me from following in her footsteps? And if I wasn’t ashamed of her, why wouldn’t I do it myself?”
“So you honestly never felt jaded about it?”
“Well, I can’t say I always felt the same degree of pleasure with every client, but it never became something rote that I had no feelings about.”
“Did you ever . . . date? Have relationships outside work?”
“Sometimes.” Nico shrugged. “Hard to date when I was so busy with school and work. Relationships were a little harder, for obvious reasons.”
Zach nodded understandingly. “Did it feel different?”
“What?”
“Making love with someone you weren’t . . . seeing on a professional basis?”
Nico chuckled. “You’re so diplomatic.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not. I just— I’m not sure how to answer that.” He shook his head. “I mean, I’m not cut out for celibacy. I need what I get from sex. I’m not talking about orgasms, either. I need . . .”
“What?” Zach’s face was sober in the faint silvery hint of moonlight and his eyes shockingly pale. He seemed to be hanging on to Nico’s every word.
“Touch.” Nico dropped his gaze, staring down at his hands. It felt like weakness to admit that. He’d never said it to anyone before. “Connection. Having someone’s skin on my skin. The smell of another person. The taste. The feeling of their hands on me. I crave it. I can’t seem to go long without it.”
Which was why he’d gone back to McClosky’s bed over and over during the winter, despite the fact that he’d come to loathe the man. He didn’t confess that to Zach.
“So I guess, in answer to your question, it was different but it wasn’t. For me, it was always about making that contact, whether I picked someone up at a club or they were paying me for the night.”
And I never knew it could be more than that until you put your hands on me and I felt someone who needed to touch me as badly as I needed to be touched.
Nico looked up when Zach’s hand sett
led over his. Of its own volition, Nico’s wrist rotated, turning his palm up so that his fingers could lace between Zach’s.
Even that. Even that little touch awoke a longing in his chest, making him ache for more.
“What about you?” he rasped. “No guilt? No penance? No little angels or demons on your shoulders, telling you how badly you sinned with me the other day?”
Zach’s lips quirked up into a small smile, and he shook his head. “No. You know, it was my first hint that my beliefs were different from my father’s when I realized I didn’t buy into the idea that God was some dirty old voyeur peeking in people’s bedroom windows to judge what they were doing in there and with whom.”
Nick tutted. “Dangerous, radical thought, there.”
“I know. Scandalous blasphemy, isn’t it?” Zach gave a self-effacing shrug. “Don’t get me wrong. I think God ultimately wants people to marry or form committed, lifelong relationships. To establish stable families and communities. I think He unreservedly sanctions sex within the context of those relationships. I just think that for those who have sex without that bond, it’s at worst a minor infraction against God’s plan for us. Not the heinous sin a lot of people would make it out to be.”
“So we’re not going to Hell because you’re not wearing my ring yet?”
Nico could have bit his tongue off at the last word, which had slipped past his lips without any thought. It implied all kinds of possibilities of a future that Nico had no business even thinking of. But either Zach didn’t notice or he chose to let it pass unremarked.
“No. I think He has other concerns right now.” Zach’s small smile faded, his eyes growing large and soft. The look on his face was so sweet and earnest, it made something in Nico’s chest ache. “If you weren’t injured, I’d want to do it again. Except—”
“What?” The pounding of his head negated the possibility of Nico’s cock taking much active interest in whatever Zach was saying, but Nico could feel his libido sitting up in the background, perking its ears curiously.
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