Blood Ascendant (Blood Stone Book 5)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  When the ball thudded into the side of the barn, Roman swore softly.

  “Right between them,” Garrett added.

  It was the admiration in his voice that irritated Sasha the most. It was the last straw. Sasha found himself moving with no clear decision to do so anywhere in his mind. “I can do that,” he said flatly.

  Everyone turned to look at him. Dante lifted his head, his black eyes narrowed.

  “Do what?” Nial asked.

  “Hit the barn with the football.”

  Dante snorted. “You?”

  Sasha walked over to the grass, his heart working harder than it should, his jaw aching from gritting his teeth together. “Which space between the windows?” he demanded of the others. “The first or second?”

  Nial crossed his arms. “The first one. The one on the left.”

  The football rested on the grass about twelve feet away from the barn, where it had landed after bouncing off the wall. Sasha considered it.

  “Want me to get the ball for you?” Roman asked.

  “No,” Sasha said flatly.

  “You don’t get to move closer to the barn,” Dante said.

  Sasha looked at him. “I don’t need to.” He reached under his jacket for the Makarov, aimed and fired, all in one smooth motion that needed absolutely no thought at all. He had done it so many times, the gun was an extension of his arm now. His aim, adjusting for the angle of the ball and how it lay on the lawn and the elliptical shape and how it would respond...all of it went through his mind as invisible, instant computations.

  As the gun appeared, the three of them standing on the edge of the brickwork—Garrett, Roman and Patrick—all shifted back in surprise. Only Nial didn’t flinch.

  The bullet tore through the stretched leather of the football and the inner bladder. The explosive evacuation of air shot the ball up into the air just as if someone had kicked it. Sasha had aimed for the bottom of the ball, just beneath the sharp end, creating a rocket ship reaction with the bullet.

  The ball slammed into the wall, an almost flat piece of leather, slid down into the bushes and plants in the garden bed below and disappeared.

  Silence.

  Sasha looked at Dante as he put the gun away. “I hit the side of the barn,” he pointed out.

  “Damn, I should have put money on it,” Roman said softly.

  Patrick smothered a laugh.

  Dante, though, looked pissed and that was fine by Sasha. He went back to the table and poured himself another drink, sat down and sipped it. Suddenly, he felt good. His jet lag had disappeared, too.

  Shooting the ball seemed to signal the end of the entertainment to everyone else. Nial came over and picked up the book he had been reading and patted Sasha’s shoulder and headed back inside.

  Azarel, who had not moved from the open door, now shut it softly and turned back into the shadowed interior of the pool house, out of sight.

  Patrick, Roman and Garrett were standing with their heads together. They, too, turned and headed back into the house, talking quietly.

  That left Dante, sitting on the board with his feet dangling just above the softly lapping water. He waved away a bug from his face, watching Sasha.

  Sasha ignored him.

  Finally, Dante slid off the board into the water. His head popped back up, then he did a lazy overarm crawl down to the shallow end of the pool and climbed out, slicking back his thick hair. He came around to the table where Sasha was sitting, rivulets of water trailing him. He stood looking down at Sasha. “You couldn’t have just kicked the ball?”

  “I did kick your ball.” Sasha looked him in the eye. Then he knocked back the shot and slammed the glass back on the table.

  Dante grabbed the bottle and filled the glass, then picked it up and knocked it back in one smooth movement. He hissed and grimaced, then slammed the glass down just as Sasha had done.

  Right.

  Sasha refilled the glass and looked at Dante expectantly.

  Dante grinned and picked it up and drank. Then he pushed the glass toward Sasha. “You.” His voice was hoarse. Zelyonaya Marka was not a smooth drink.

  Sasha poured and drank. He put the glass in front of Dante again.

  Dante pulled out the chair next to Sasha and sat. He reached for the bottle and held it up. There was only a few inches of colorless liquid left in it. “You’ve had a head start. I’ll have to catch up.”

  “You couldn’t keep up. Not with me.”

  “The bottle won’t last that long.”

  “There’s plenty more where that came from,” Sasha assured him, thinking of the tray of bottles from which he had plucked the vodka.

  “Get another glass while you’re getting the next bottle,” Dante said, pouring himself another glassful.

  Sasha considered him for a long moment. Then he went and got another bottle and another glass.

  Chapter Ten

  Sasha knew he was very drunk. It wasn’t often he felt secure enough to drink even a little bit. His life was usually so filled with paranoia that relaxing just wasn’t possible.

  Here, in this big house, the threats were all known and understood. They were extrinsic, too. There was no one in the house who might be posing as a friend while plotting again him. Not these people. Here, Sasha could afford to let down his guard, just for a little while.

  That came with its own dangers, though. Introvert, Kate had named him, yet Sasha knew himself well enough to know that alcohol slipped the noose off his tongue. It was another reason not to indulge. At least, not in company he didn’t trust.

  Yet here he was, blasted out of his skull and just barely staying on top of his runaway mouth. The whisky, for that was what they were drinking now, made him not care that his lips were working independently of his good sense and caution.

  That was okay, too, for Dante was just as pickled and just as chatty. It was staggering, the difference in him.

  Dante reached for the bottle and carefully filled the two glasses once more. He took his time and didn’t spill a drop, but it was a close thing. Then he very carefully and slowly put the bottle down, finding the surface of the table by feel, rather than sight.

  “Can’t afford to be prejudiced,” he said. He wasn’t slurring. Instead, he spoke with studied preciseness. Dante was drunk as a skunk, although his control wasn’t slipping a notch.

  Somehow the conversation had turned to bigots and bastards and enemies they had known…and now Dante was talking about prejudice.

  “Why not?” Sasha asked curiously. “In Russia, everyone hates someone or something. They love other things just as much. It’s all black and white. Hate. Love. We even hate indifference.”

  Dante grinned. “My mother was almost pure Italian. My father though…his grandmother was Choctaw and one of his great grandfathers was a freed slave that came out of the south after the civil war. My grandmother was Mexican and her husband arrived on the boat from Spain after the second world war. I’m part black, part Hispanic, part Native American, part white. I can’t afford to hate anyone.”

  “Not even your parents, for giving you that name?”

  Dante shook his head. “My mother read. Everything. She hoped it would rub off on me.”

  “Did it?”

  “Sort of. Football pays better, though.”

  The glasses had emptied themselves. Sasha poured more, moving slowly.

  “You hate your parents?” Dante said.

  “Hate?”

  “For your name. Marlen. Right?”

  “Marlen Alexandrovich Mikhailov.” He lifted his glass in salute.

  “Mouthful.”

  “Russian.”

  “Still a mouthful.”

  Sasha shrugged.

  “Your parents were into movies?”

  He reached for the bottle. “Marlen. Not Marlon. They were into socialism.”

  Dante frowned. “Nope. Don’t get it.”

  “Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin were their heroes.” Sasha sipped.

>   Dante was still staring at him, not putting it together.

  “Mar…Len,” Sasha said, separating out the two components of his given name.

  Dante’s brows rose. Sasha could almost hear the ooohhhhh in his mind. “And you still don’t hate them for it?”

  “The Wall was pulled down not long after I got my name.” Sasha drew in a breath and let it out. “My parents never recovered from their disappointment in the world and in me.”

  “You?”

  “Things that come easy in the west are still difficult in Russia.”

  “I hear you just fine. It’s not pulling together up here.” Dante tapped his temple with his finger, then drank and hissed, showing his white teeth. “Damn, I’m drunk.”

  “Pay no mind. I’m drunk, too. I say things I shouldn’t when I am.”

  “Makes up for all the things you don’t say, other times. I’ve noticed you not saying much.”

  Sasha shrugged. “I can’t hear other people when I’m talking. So I don’t. Talk. Then I hear.”

  “That a spy thing?”

  “It’s a Sasha thing. So Kate says.”

  “Kate? This Kate here? Movie lady?” Dante narrowed his eyes. They were blood shot. “You like her?”

  “Not as much as I like Rory.”

  Dante’s eyes opened wide.

  Sasha sighed. “See?” He held up his empty glass and wiggled it. “Most people can’t talk straight when they drink. Me, I talk perfectly straight…and too damn much of it.”

  Dante pushed on his wrist, making him put the glass back down. Then he filled it. “Don’t worry. Most of the rest of the world likes Rory, too. That’s just the way she is.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  Dante concentrated on filling the glasses. “So why were your parents disappointed in you?”

  Sasha let him change the subject. Dante’s control was astonishing. Admirable, even. “I never settled down. Russia had let them down so they gave up their communism and looked to me to fill the gap. I never did.”

  Dante just looked at him.

  “A wife. Grandchildren. The family they had thought a good Communist should deny themselves for the sake of the Motherland.”

  “You didn’t because of your work? Did they know what you were?”

  “Nope.” Sasha drank. The whiskey tasted like nothing now. His taste buds were numb. “I could have married if I had really wanted to. Just never wanted to. After my sister died….” He paused, remembering that harrowing year and the first time he had met Marcus. Marcus had got him drunk that time, too. “After Katya died, I really didn’t want someone in my life. Not when it might easily end up the same way my sister’s life had.”

  “So, no one special at all?”

  “Lots of ‘em,” Sasha said, with a smile. “I was single. Not a monk.”

  Dante’s smile was small. “Didn’t think you were. That strong, silent thing and your accent would make women swoon.”

  “Men, too.”

  Dante didn’t quite freeze. Sasha could feel his hesitation, though. Then he finished lifting the glass to his lips. “And I’m just a boring retired football player.” He put the glass down. “That’s what you meant about it being difficult in Russia?”

  “There were certain freedoms I got to enjoy when I was posted elsewhere that in Russia are still not well tolerated.” Sasha shrugged again.

  Dante reached for the bottle, his gaze on what he was doing. “Not tolerated well in football, either,” he muttered.

  Sasha considered him. “Is that so?”

  “They didn’t mind me fucking a different woman every night of the week. That was fine. I have no objections to that, either.” Dante grinned. “Occasionally, very carefully, I indulge myself in other ways.” His grin broadened. “Then I got here and found out the vampires have something to teach me, after all.”

  “Three together. They make it work.” Sasha leaned forward. “I thought…you and Rory…?”

  Dante’s smile faded. “Not that way,” he said simply.

  “Why not? Don’t you love her?” Sasha had seen the way Dante had watched her. Watching people, breaking down their strengths and weaknesses, was his profession. If Sasha had been asked to provide a profile on Dante, he would have listed Rory as his major vulnerability.

  “There’s a thing about Rory,” Dante said, looking into the bottom of his glass. “She’s like you. Like me, too, I guess. Independent to the point of phobia. Knows what she likes, though. She likes men. Lots of ‘em. I don’t want to be just another notch for her.”

  Sasha knew he was in no danger of becoming one of her scores, either. He lifted his glass. “Here’s to not competing.”

  Dante tilted his head. “Competition. Fuck it.” He knocked his glass against Sasha and threw his head back as he swallowed the shot whole. “That’s how Rory and I got to be friends,” he added.

  “Fucking the competition?”

  Dante’s grin returned. “That, too. The 49ers Goldrush cheerleaders are stunning. Fit, too. What they can do in bed is unbelievable.”

  “That’s how you met Rory?”

  Dante shook his head. “Knew her for years before we got to be friends. She owns my team. Part of it, anyway. Players and owners…it’s a cautious relationship. They’re the boss, right?”

  Sasha nodded.

  “So for years, not much more than nodding and ‘yes, ma’am’ if she ever said anything to me. Whole team wanted to get her in the sack. Locker room was obsessed about it. No one did who ever talked about it, though.” Dante shrugged. “Found out later, Rory likes players as much as she likes any other man. Happy hunting ground for her. Only, she’s very, very choosy. The ones she takes to bed…they’re smart. They don’t feel the need to boast. Found all this out later, though.”

  “After you became friends because of fucking the competition?”

  “Yeah. Cheerleader went wrong on me. Wouldn’t stop calling. Sobbing about love and all that stuff. Rory found out somehow.” Dante grinned. “She turned up at my place out of the blue, just when the cheerleader was throwing over-ripe avocados at my windows and screaming down the neighborhood. I figured I was in deep shit, right?”

  “‘cause you didn’t clean up your mess?”

  “Right. At that time, I thought Rory was the original Ice Queen. Everyone wanted to fuck her, only no one ever got passed the shield. That’s what I thought. Then she pulled the cheerleader inside, sat her down and explained to the girl that she was giving away her personal power. Wasting it on me, at that point in time. Also wasting it on any man she spent more than a nanosecond thinking about if he wasn’t really interested in her.” Dante ran his thumb around the edge of the glass, his gaze unfocused as he remembered. “Blew my mind, listening to it. I’d never thought about it from the other side like that. Rory went on about taking her pleasure then walking away with her nose in the air if necessary. Accepting the consequences of any decision she made, even if she didn’t like them. At the end of it, the cheerleader stopped sniffing and got up and went away, very quiet. Her nose was in the air, too. That was the end of it as far as she went.” Dante shook his head. “Only I was in deep shit after all.”

  “For fucking the cheerleader?”

  “For not picking more carefully. For letting my cock make decisions. For getting into the mess in the first place. If I was smarter, she said, I would have set it up so we both could have had fun then walked away with no regrets. Only I was stupid and male and probably beyond redemption, even though I was apparently smarter than everyone else on the team.”

  Sasha could almost hear Rory saying it, in her rich voice.

  “So you were smarter, after that?”

  “No, I was a numb-nut fucking idiot. I told her at least I had a cock to make decisions with, which probably explained her lack of friends.”

  Sasha drew in a sharp breath. “What did she do?”

  Dante grinned. “She smiled. That’s the thing. Rory doesn’t boast. She doesn’t see th
e need to impress people. She just goes around arranging life to suit her and her personal tastes. If that means she sleeps alone, then fine. Except she doesn’t do that very often. So I found out, later. Right then all I could see was that this snotty bitch had to have the loneliest life on the planet with her superior attitude and nerdy profession.”

  “She is a scientist?” Sasha asked curiously. “I thought she owned the team?”

  “Minor owner, in her spare time. She’s a theoretical physicist. She works for NASA.”

  Sasha blinked. “So she…just smiled?”

  “When I said it, yeah. She just smiled and left. Next morning, I went to get in my car and that’s when I found out she had arranged life to suit herself.”

  “What did she do to your car?”

  “She got about a hundred shopping trolleys from the nearest supermarket and made a ring of them around my car.” Dante grinned. “They were the locking kind. One chained to the next, right around the ring. They were squeezed in so tight, I couldn’t pry ‘em apart, not without damaging the Ferrari.” He laughed. “Had to get a dozen other players to come muscle the carts out of the way, an inch at a time. Took hours. They all thought the cheerleader had done it. I knew it was Rory.”

  “And that made you friends?” Sasha asked, amazed.

  “That made me want vengeance,” Dante amended. “I spent the next six months thinking up ways to get back at her. Prank calls. Messing with her satellite navigator so it always sent her to the local police station. An elephant in her living room—”

  “A real elephant?”

  Dante nodded. “I rented it. We had to take the sliding doors out of their frames to get it in there, too. Every single time I thought up something brilliant, she went one better. Then I realized, that was the whole point.”

  Sasha shook his head, then stopped and held still until the dizziness subsided. “What was the point?”

  “The game was the point. It wasn’t about getting even. It was about coming up with better, unique, funnier comebacks. Over and over.”