Natalie stopped trying to reach her phone, which had slid across the floor just out of reach, and stared at him. To be honest, he did look a little more . . . wolfie.
“I guess I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted. “I mean, you’re the most . . . human of all of us, at least most of the time.”
“Thanks, I think,” Alec groaned.
She edged closer. “So what exactly do you mean by ‘complicated’? I think I should know, if we’re living together.”
He flopped back against the couch and shut his eyes. “Everything is heightened, including pain unfortunately, but so is my ability to heal. All my chemistry is going crazy. A few tests and I’ll end up being a pincushion for some new disease . . . until I go all Wolf Man in the middle of the intensive-care ward. So please, please, no hospital.”
Natalie flinched. She got his aversion, for sure. She avoided hospitals, too, for fear they’d figure out the origins of all her kooky scars, or discover that she had the DNA of ten people floating around inside of her, making life interesting.
“Okay. I get it. I’ll, um, get you some ice and some bandages and some antibiotic ointment and I’ll see what I can do for you, okay?”
He let out a long sigh of relief. “Yes. Thank you.”
She looked at him for a moment more, then got up and moved toward the kitchen just a few steps away. As she opened the freezer and grabbed a couple of packets of frozen peas, she called out, “So what happened to you, anyway?”
There was a moment’s pause from the other room and then Alec replied, “I found Rehu.”
Natalie nearly dropped the frozen vegetables. “You did?”
“We were both right in our suspicions. Kai was hiding him in an apartment in the Meatpacking District.”
Natalie scowled. “That bitch.”
Except her nasty words didn’t really reflect how she felt. In that moment, she wasn’t mad . . . okay, she was mad, but she was also hurt. Since the beginning, she and Alec and Kai had been working together on this sticky problem. She had begun to like the Mummy Girl, despite her gruffness. Maybe they weren’t friends, but they were close to it.
And now Kai had betrayed that for a guy who’d gotten her killed, reincarnated, and then nearly killed, like, twenty times since then.
“After she left the place where I followed her, I knocked on the door and there he was.” Alec sighed. “Needless to say, he was a little pissed about (a) being found, (b) being found by me in particular, and (c) being accused of the murders in our little group.”
She moved into the space between the kitchen and the living room and stared at him. “So you just told him we suspected him? Way to go, Sherlock Holmes.”
He shrugged one shoulder and winced. “I wanted to see his reaction. Just for the record, it was displeasure. And he expresses displeasure with his fists.” He motioned at her. “Can I have that ice or what?”
“Oh, sorry,” she said and hurried over to him.
She knelt down and pressed one of the makeshift ice packs against the bruise on Alec’s eye. He winced and a low growl rumbled in his chest.
“Sheesh, okay, okay,” she muttered.
“Sorry about the growling, it’s out of my control,” he said with a shrug. “Stupid moon.”
He took the other ice pack and slowly lifted his shirt to reveal toned abs and a big bruise on his ribs. It was already purple and ugly and would only get worse.
“Alec,” Natalie whispered as she shut her eyes.
“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “You can hurt me, but there’s only one thing that can kill me, right? And Rehu didn’t have a silver bullet. Or at least he didn’t use it.”
“I knew Kai was lying about not knowing where he was,” she said as she got out the antiseptic goo and started dabbing it on the cuts on Alec’s face.
Alec nodded. “Yeah, me, too. Though I didn’t quite expect her to be visiting him with fucking coffee. Like Kai was in a chick-lit book that involved hot boys and Manolo Blahniks.”
Natalie blinked. “Which one? Wait—you know about chick-lit and shoes?”
Alec shifted and then winced in pain. “When the moon gets close, I have a hard time sleeping. I read a lot.”
“Okay, well, tell me more about Rehu,” Natalie encouraged, though she couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Alec flipping through girl books. She’d have to get him a few for this moon’s cycle . . . if they could work out this person-trying-to-kill-them thing.
“Once I managed to get inside, we had a . . . shall we say, heated exchange.” Alec flinched as he shifted the ice pack slightly. “He denied, strenuously, any involvement in the murders.”
Natalie shook her head. “So, let me get this straight. While he was beating you up, he told you he has no reason to hurt us.”
“Pretty much.” Alec sighed.
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m totally believing that.”
“But like I said, he didn’t shoot me with a silver bullet. Small favors.”
Before Natalie could reply, there was a pounding on the door behind them. Both of them tensed and Natalie peered over her shoulder.
“Shit,” she muttered. “Okay, you stay here. If that’s him on the other side of the door, he’s about to experience a damn monster he’ll never forget.”
She got up and started for the door as Alec called out, “Wow, my hero!”
Natalie ignored him and peeked into the peephole. To her surprise, and just a tinge of disappointment, Kai stood on the other side. Her arms were folded and her body language was angry and annoyed. But Natalie’s own anger and annoyance were a lot stronger and she almost pulled the door off its hinges as she opened it.
“What the fuck, Kai?” she snapped.
“What the fuck, me?” Kai answered as she shoved past Natalie and into the apartment. “What the fuck, you? Did your boyfriend go harass Rehu?”
Natalie tensed. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said as she followed Kai toward the living room. “And you weren’t supposed to know where your boyfriend was!”
“Well, that was a . . .” Kai trailed off as she made it into the living room and saw Alec on the couch. She stared at him with his bruised-up face and flinched. “. . . lie. Shit, what happened to you?”
Natalie folded her arms. “You get one guess. And it rhymes with Day-who.”
Kai spun on Natalie and her eyes were wide. “He didn’t kill anyone!” she said. Her tone was pleading.
Natalie had never heard that kind of desperation from Kai before. Normally the Mummy Girl was tough, certain, and no-nonsense.
Alec sat up a little. “Actually, I don’t believe he did, either.”
Natalie looked past Kai to stare at Alec in shock. “Seriously? After what he did to you? He beat you up, numbnuts!”
Alec covered a grin. “Yeah, but he didn’t kill me. And he could have, more than once. It made me wonder: If he’s trying to wipe us out, why wouldn’t he just shoot me right then and there in the apartment? Hell, he could have called it self-defense to the cops and probably not even have to clean up the body.”
“I don’t know why he didn’t kill you today.” Natalie threw her hands up in the air. “Because he intends to kill us in a certain order? Because he didn’t have a silver bullet handy? Because he likes your hair? I don’t know.”
Kai shook her head. “No, listen, he wouldn’t hurt anyone.” She stopped and looked at Alec again. With a shiver, she corrected herself. “Okay, he wouldn’t murder anyone. He’s just angry and a hothead.”
“Sounds pretty killer to me,” Natalie muttered. “Sociopath.”
“No. No, really. I know he didn’t kill anyone,” Kai insisted.
“How?” Natalie asked.
The Mummy Girl shut her eyes. “Because he probably would have started with me if he wanted to kill anyone. We have the deepest history. I mean, we sort of killed each other before, you know. And I’m the one who told everyone about the artifacts and got him kicked out of the group and e
verything.”
Natalie was going to retort, but cut herself off. “That . . . kind of makes sense, actually.”
Kai looked relieved. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he knows something we don’t. He could have even been confronted by Trench Coat himself.”
Natalie folded her arms and glared at Kai, but before she could say anything snarky, Kai interrupted.
“Please. He could help us, I swear.”
Natalie shook her head and paced away without another word. If Alec wanted to forgive and forget and dismiss Rehu from his list of suspects, fine. But she wasn’t about to be so naïve.
“I’m sorry,” Kai added. “Really.”
Natalie looked at Kai. She’d certainly never heard her apologize to anyone before. Even when she made someone cry. Hard.
Of course, that someone had been Linda . . .
Alec shrugged. “I appreciate the apology, but this isn’t your fault, you know.”
Kai flinched. “Maybe not all of it, but a big portion is my fault. I—I should have told you all that Rehu was back in town. Especially when his name got brought up in all this murder business.”
“Yeah, you should have,” Natalie snapped. “Why didn’t you?”
Kai’s gaze drifted somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes and stayed there, even as her cheeks brightened to a dark red. “Come on, Natalie. You must know why.”
Natalie stared at her for a long moment and then shook her head. “How can you still love that ass? He got you killed the first time around, has almost gotten you re-killed how many times in the last ninety years or so?”
“I know, I know,” Kai groaned.
Alec nodded. “He’s just not a nice guy; you deserve better.”
“Did you get that from chick-lit, too?” Natalie asked. Alec shot her a glare.
Kai looked between the two of them in confusion before she shrugged one shoulder. “He’s a hard habit to break. I wish I could explain it, but I can’t. Either way, I’m so sorry that it led to . . .” She looked at Alec again. “That.”
Alec straightened up a little on the couch. “Come on, Kai. You might have kept the truth about Rehu quiet, and that wasn’t cool. But you didn’t beat me up. You can’t take responsibility for your jerk of a boyfriend’s actions. I don’t blame you.”
Kai breathed a sigh of relief, though Natalie could see she wasn’t totally convinced.
“I still have to make it up to you, though. Look, like I said, I’m going to go talk to him. He owes me big time, now that I see what he did.”
Her eyes narrowed, and Natalie had to imagine Rehu wasn’t going to get a very nice version of Kai knocking on his door in a little while. At least that was something.
“I’ll see what he knows about Trench Coat,” Kai continued. “And I’ll report back as soon as I hear anything.”
Alec nodded and Kai somehow saw that as a dismissal and started for the door. Natalie rolled her eyes and followed her. Everyone else seemed to think this conversation was closed, but it still felt pretty open to her.
Kai paused at the door and turned back to look at Natalie. “Are you going to be pissed at me forever?”
Natalie drew back. Since when had Kai ever given a damn about anyone else’s feelings on any matter?
“I haven’t decided yet,” Natalie said with a shrug. “You were supposed to be my friend, but you lied to me.”
Kai wrinkled her brow. “You consider me a friend?”
Natalie shook her head. “I did. Now I don’t know what you are.”
Kai nodded. “That’s fair.” She dug into her purse. “Look, these are a new over-the-counter painkiller my company is putting out in a few months. They work great, better than anything else out there. Give them to Alec once every four hours and they should help.”
“Okay,” Natalie said as she took them. Then she met Kai’s gaze evenly. “So are you really going to let us know everything about Rehu or just what you want us to hear about your dearly beloved?”
Kai turned her face slightly. “Okay, I deserved that. I can’t make up for what I did before, but I promise you: I will tell you when I know something, anything.”
Natalie didn’t say another word, but closed the door in Kai’s face and deadbolted it. Through the peephole, she saw the other woman hesitate like she was going to knock, but then she walked away.
Natalie sighed as she went back into the living room and popped a few of Kai’s experimental pills from the packaging. As she handed them over to Alec, she said, “That was nice of you to let her off the hook like that.”
Alec shoved the pills in his mouth and swallowed without water. “She might as well not beat herself up. Anyway, the worst Rehu did is scar me for life. Make me hideous.”
He laughed, but Natalie didn’t join in. Instead, she flinched and then turned away. She didn’t want to let him see what those words meant to her.
“Yeah, well, I’m going to bed.”
She started down the hall toward her bedroom, but Alec called after her. “Hey, wait!”
She ignored him and kept going.
“Natalie!” he snapped.
She turned to find him getting up off the couch. He hobbled toward her. She held out her hands.
“You’re going to hurt yourself!” she snapped.
“Super-healing, remember?” he said. “So the pain is temporary. But clearly I said something wrong here. What?”
“Nothing,” she said, but she couldn’t help tugging at her sleeve in the hopes she’d cover one of her own scars.
Of course, Alec caught the action and shut his eyes with a sigh.
“Shit. Look, I wasn’t thinking when I made that crack, okay? I know you have all those scars from when you were . . . were . . .”
“Made?” Natalie finished softly. “Yeah, well, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Now I’m tired and—”
She turned, but he caught her arm and held her steady. His golden eyes didn’t flit away from hers. Not even a little. The intensity of his stare was both mesmerizing and disconcerting.
“I get it, Nat,” he said, his tone very quiet in the dim hallway. “I get feeling awkward and weird. I get hating what you see in the mirror because it’s like a neon light flashing Monster.”
Natalie shook her head. Alec didn’t get it at all.
“Oh yeah, because you’re so hideous.” She rolled her eyes. “Please, you are built like a god and you get laid, like, four times a week.”
She expected him to crack some joke or something, but his face remained serious and focused. “Why do you think I steal razors, Natalie?”
“Because you’re vain,” she answered immediately.
He smiled slightly. “Actually, it’s because the hair is really embarrassing. The full moon makes it pop out everywhere . . . everywhere. And every time I see a new hair on my wrist or my elbow or my forehead, I feel like someone is screaming out that I’m a freak.”
She shook her head. “But the thing is, Alec, the hair isn’t with you every day; it just gets worse with the full moon approaching, hence the dozens of dull razors currently in my bathroom garbage. And when it does get worse, you can make it go away.”
She shoved her sleeve up with a deep blush and revealed one of the ugly long scars that stretched from her inner elbow to her wrist, where it slashed across and around the entire circumference. It marked where her hand had been attached almost two hundred years ago.
“These don’t go away. No matter what I do,” she said.
Alec was silent for a moment, but then he stepped forward. She backed up and found herself in her bedroom. He reached around the door and clicked on the light. She trembled as he edged even closer, caught her hand, and lifted it.
She didn’t know what his plans were. Kill her? Bite her? Kiss her?
“Let me see it in the light,” he said, his voice soft.
She normally would have argued. Showing her scars, especially up close, was not her thing. But with Alec grabbing her arm, lifting it up to see better, sh
e found herself too mesmerized to argue.
He looked at the scar.
“Did it hurt?”
“I don’t remember,” she muttered with a dark flush of blood rushing to her cheeks. “I wasn’t alive yet, remember? I woke up like this.”
He nodded, then let go of her hand. Without warning, he tugged his shirt off his body and leaned sideways so she could see a dark red gash of a scar on his stomach.
“Oh my God, did Rehu do that?” she asked as she leaned closer.
Alec shook his head. “No. This one is from . . . gosh, sixty years ago, I guess.”
She blinked as she reached out to trace the line. “Did it hurt?”
He shrugged. “Not when I got it. I was in wolf form at the time, so I don’t really remember. But when I woke up in human form the next day, yeah, it hurt like a motherfucker. And since it had been festering for twelve hours, it put me out for almost a week before I could even get up.”
“How do you not die?” Natalie asked with a shake of her head as she noticed at least three more scars, all likely from bullet wounds.
He shrugged. “No silver bullets so far. Just lucky, I guess. I tend to steal chickens from very poorly read farmers.”
She couldn’t help but smile. For the first time in a long time, being a monster didn’t seem so . . . lonely.
Alec was super-close now. She hadn’t realized how close until she stopped looking at his scars and glanced up into his face. She had spent years thinking he was nothing but an annoying mutt. And he still was . . . but . . .
She reached up, threaded her fingers through his hair, and pulled him down for a kiss.
Alec froze for a minute, but then he responded with a kiss as hot as her own. And as they sank backward onto her bed, Natalie couldn’t help but think that, as annoying as he was, he was definitely a good kisser.
And getting better as he pushed her deeper and deeper into the bed, tangling his fingers with hers and driving his tongue hard into her mouth. Suddenly her body, which she had just been cursing, woke up from whatever dead slumber she’d been in lately and all those stolen nerves started to fire.
She shivered as sensation rushed through her, making her body tingle from her head to her toes. But just as she gave in to that feeling, accepted it, and decided to just not worry about the consequences, Alec pulled back.
Club Monstrosity Page 14
