by Vremont, Ann
"I love you even though you still smell like...the car."
The car. Five screaming climaxes, Danny's body hot and sweaty against mine. My underwear and then my jeans and then the seat wet from my body's response to a lover other than Chris.
He dropped his hand to the button on my jeans and thumbed it open. "Stand up."
I did. He pulled the zipper tab down as he leaned in close to capture one of my breasts with his mouth. As he pushed my jeans and underwear down my hips, I toed my sneakers off. The clothes dropped to the floor and I stepped out of them as his fingers brushed against my thighs.
Shaking, I gripped the towel rack for support. His fingers began to probe inside me. When they met with resistance, he moaned. He took a long drawing suck on my nipple and then released it, looking up at me as his fingers butted against the fragile barrier.
"You're healed."
I nodded.
Withdrawing from me, he turned the water on and stood up. He stripped his jeans and shoes off and stepped into the tub, pulling me with him. I drew the plastic curtain closed as he reached behind him to switch the water from the bath faucet to the shower head.
There was a dust covered bar of soap in the dish and he began rubbing it over my body, massaging my breasts, my ass, down its crack and then between my thighs and the lips of my pussy. He kissed me as he did it, biting softly at my lips, invading my mouth with his tongue, darting and thrusting with it until I was rubbing against him and we were equally lathered.
He kept my hands off him with deft little misdirections until I was almost senseless with wanting him.
"Let me touch you," I begged.
"In bed."
"Then, let's--"
Smiling, he pulled me under the showerhead, the water rinsing the soap away. He turned the faucet off and stepped onto the bath mat. Our bodies still dripping wet, he guided me into the bedroom and onto the bed. The shaft of light from the bathroom illuminated our bodies.
I touched his knee. "You're still hurt."
He brushed my hand away and pushed me further along the mattress until my ass was in the center of the bed and my head was half hanging off the other side. Draping his arms about my hips and stomach, he dipped his mouth to my cunt.
Feeling the slide of his tongue over my clit, I forgot about his injury and his reluctance to discuss it. I forgot about Danny, too, as Chris began to thumb the opening to my pussy.
Little moans escaped me, deepening and elongating as Chris began to pinch and pull at my nipple while the small circles at my pussy became more persistent. I wrapped my arms around my shoulders, trying to hold myself together as my lower body jerked in climax.
Chris climbed the rest of the way onto the bed, his weight on me and his cock hard and nesting against my mound. I tried to coax him into me, kissing him and stroking his back and hips. When he still seemed content to touch and tease me, I rolled him onto his back, ready to break his resistance.
He put his hand between us, two fingers and a thumb riding my clit like a saddle. I reached down, wrapped my hand around his cock. We skirmished, back and forth, trading moans and strokes but I couldn't wear him down.
Releasing his erection, I rested my breasts against his chest and wrapped my arms around the side of his head. I let the tension in my clit build, felt it crawl up my spine until my hands were wound tight through his hair and I was bucking against his palm.
I tried to will him to enter me. He was so hard and ready. I could smell the faint trace of pre-cum, knew he must be ready to burst, but still he evaded me.
I kissed him on the mouth, a little too hard and desperate. "What is it?"
"He can't feed you, not with the blood he lost."
I stopped rubbing and straining against Chris.
"He can't, you know that."
I knew. I knew Danny's recovery was as much show as anything else. He'd been exhausted on the drive to and from Robles' house. He had, at one point, been close to passing out in the back seat of the station wagon. Necessity had kept him going through the day. But more than the issue of whether I could take blood from him now was the question of whether he would ever let me set my lips to his skin again. He might be intent on keeping me alive and safe, but I couldn't forget the look in his eyes when I had told him I could fix his wound or the way he had sought comfort in the crucifix he had brought with him.
I shook my head. "I don't need to feed and...you'll lose your secret."
"I know," he whispered. "I don't know how else to tell you -- especially now."
I rose up, resting on my elbows as I stroked his hair. It was more than a lost scholarship or a hurt leg.
Rolling to my side, I brought him with me. Still up on one elbow so that I was looking down on him, I draped my leg over his lap. He had his hand on my hip, holding me in check.
I pushed the hair from his neck and rubbed my lips and nose against the warm skin. I licked where the pulse trembled in his throat. His breathing quickened and I snaked my hand between our bodies to grab hold of him again, stroking his cock as I nuzzled, sucked and licked his flesh.
When he was at the edge of climaxing, I sank my teeth into his neck. He stilled, his hand on my hip tightening. Sucking gently, I let the blood slow crawl up my tongue. The memories were faint at first and, at first, they were about me. The two of us in the greenhouse, in his car, him alone in his bedroom, me in the back seat of the station wagon. I pulled another mouthful in, feeling the first hit my stomach.
I saw him in an office of wall-to-wall polished wood, some suit behind the desk, Ted and Edna standing behind him as he signed something -- paperwork for his scholarship. And then a man in a white coat and filled with plastic concern and big, clinical words.
Osteosarcoma.
I didn't know what it meant. Neither had Chris. The doctor explained and this time the words were smaller, more terrible in their familiarity.
Cancer.
Chemo.
Limb salvage.
Images of the doctor faded to Ted and Edna telling Chris that the checks had stopped with his last birthday and they needed his room back soon.
No longer drinking from him, I hugged Chris to me. He rolled me onto my back, his hand under my bottom to hold me tight to him as he penetrated me. It was sweet and slow -- like he had all the time in the world instead of being eighteen and dying.
I held him to me long past our climax and the point at which our bodies passed into sleep.
Chapter Ten
I woke under the covers, tucked up against Chris, his arm cradling me to him. I could hear Danny in the next room - the front door opening, the refrigerator and the muted sound of silverware landing against plastic dishes.
Next to me, Chris stirred. I looked up and he smiled a sleepy smile at me. Neither of us wanted to leave the bed, but reality was calling. He got up first, taking a few minutes in the bathroom to get dressed, and then he left the room. I was slower to leave. I took a quick shower and made the bed. The sound of the television promised some normalcy and drew me from the bedroom at last.
Chris was sitting on the couch, finishing a bowl of cereal. Briefly I touched the crown of his newly dyed hair. He cast me a sideways smile.
Danny crossed near me but didn't look my way, just went into the bathroom and started a shower. I sank into the recliner.
"You get the silent treatment, too?" I asked.
Chris shrugged. "Can't blame him - I didn't want to talk to him yesterday."
Feeling like I was in an all-too-modern version of Pong, I snorted. I felt like pacing, but that would only take me near the windows, and the urge to look out them already pricked at my skin.
"Can we pick up Phoenix," I asked as Chris flicked through the morning news channels. I was still having trouble accepting Danny's answer that the police would refrain from plastering our pictures all over the place.
The only Phoenix channel we could get was KPHO. I snorted again as I read the segment's title out loud, "Girls Wrestle in Gravy for Char
ity - really, that's news?"
"Better them, than us," Danny said, sliding his shirt back on as he left the bedroom.
Guiltily, my eyes slid from Danny's muscled stomach to Chris's face but his attention was focused on the television. The guilt was replaced by a twinge of annoyance.
"Really," I asked, turning to look at the screen, "Are the Gravy Girls that-"
My voice froze in my throat. The broadcast had cut from the charity segment to a picture of a third-grade girl. It was a school picture. She had high cheekbones and slightly troubled eyes. Long-limbed with finely sculpted hands. Except for the frizz of dark honey-blonde hair, I could have been looking at my own third grade picture.
The picture was Elliot's daughter Casey and the red band running below her name proclaimed an amber alert.
I found my voice at last. "Turn the sound up."
Chris turned the volume up as the station switched from Casey's picture to a reporter outside Elliot's house. The reporter was interviewing an eyewitness to the abduction. Seeing the eyewitness, I sank to my knees on the floor.
Danny moved immediately to my side and grabbed me by the shoulders. "Lee?"
"Nestor," I whispered. "The witness is Nestor."
"It's worse than that." Chris, still following the broadcast, pointed at the television.
I followed the line of his outstretched finger to a driver's license picture plastered across the screen. Another location switch to a partially burnt-out house, overlaid by the reporter's voice.
"The suspect, Paul Fell, is believed to have abducted little Casey after setting fire to this house. While the police have not released the names of the two charred bodies found inside, they are believed to be the homeowners - Fell's mother and step-father."
They showed Casey's picture again, the alert re-starting itself with no new information.
Chris looked from me to Danny and back to me. "Who is Nestor? What does this mean?"
"Nestor was there when I was attacked."
"It's a message," Danny added. "They are trying to draw Lee out."
Chris waved his arm at the television. "But they have to know the whole city-"
"It doesn't matter," Danny interrupted. "They put their own guy on the scene."
I was clutching Danny's arm, my nails biting into his skin. "Do we tell them?"
"What, that their eyewitness and suspect are both vampires?" Gently, he removed my hand from his arm and grabbed my shoulders. "We'd all be sitting ducks in lock-up."
"I can't-" I started and choked at the thought of Casey with Paul or any one in Nestor's crew.
"Neither can I," Danny finished.
I looked at Chris. He had slid along the couch to sit closer to us.
"I'm in, you know that."
Danny nodded and told Chris to grab the map and a pen from the station wagon. Holding me, he waited for Chris to return before saying anything.
"They have to think Lee will know how or where to contact them." Danny spread the map on the coffee table and handed me the pen.
I stared blankly at the pen. Danny guided my hand to the map.
"You've got Army and Oscar's blood in you, Lee. You have to know some of their hiding places."
I looked at the map, seeing the small circle in Oro Valley and the address for what I assumed was the cabin. From there, I looked at Phoenix, starting with Maryvale. I marked the first house, the one I had been attacked in, with a K. Spreading out from there in a circle, I marked six more Ks.
"What are those?" Chris asked.
"Kill houses." I answered, half in a trance as I tried to coax details from the blood.
"They're in residential neighborhoods - too good a chance someone would recognize them from the amber alert."
Nodding, I marked another K in Guadalupe and, a few blocks over, a W.
"Weapons?" Danny asked.
"Yeah."
More Ks, Ws and Ds - for drug stashes - marked the map, all of them spreading south from Phoenix. When I hit the western border of the Gila River Indian Reservation, I put a fat B.
"Lee?"
A blood tear escaped, falling on the B and staining the spot red. "Bodies," I explained. I drew a rough border around the B that represented twenty or so square miles. "Lots of bodies. Women, mostly." I didn't add that they also were mostly Latinas.
The lines around the Bs grew bigger the closer my pen came to the Mexican border. But there wasn't a single location that suggested itself as a safe house.
I stopped marking the map when I reached Douglas. There was nothing of it in Army or Oscar's memories.
Chris tried to lighten the mood. "Even vampires hate Douglas, I guess."
Tapping the map just a little north east of the city on Route 80, I looked at Danny. "Here."
"They have a safe house?"
I shook my head. "No. But Paul does. He was refurbishing a closed motel last summer - his aunt's. She died from a heart attack before he finished and it's in probate now."
Chris leaned forward and looked at the map. "And if his mom and step-father are dead..."
"It'll take days before the cops know to look there," I finished.
"But would Nestor tell him to go there?"
"The reporter said a second eyewitness saw Paul and Casey alone in the car. A white four-door sedan, his step-father's." I put my hand on Danny's shoulder and looked him in the eyes. "I know Paul, he won't go where he's told. He has delusions of grandeur, a confidence that exceeds his ability. He's King-fucking-Kong and he won't want to share with the shit monkeys."
***
Ten minutes later, after Danny had shown Chris and me how to shoot and reload the handguns, we were in the station wagon heading towards Douglas. Conversation consisted of Danny asking me everything I could remember about the motel. I wound up tearing the cereal box apart and drawing the layout of the buildings.
It was set back from the road, with a big dirt lot in front for the semi-trucks that comprised most of the traffic on the road. Twenty units and an office attached to the manager's living quarters. Each unit had only one door in, plus one front window and a much smaller window at the back for the bathroom. The office had big sliding glass doors opening onto the front lot, a standing-room only lobby and a glass enclosed counter for the desk clerk. From there, a door into a combined kitchen and living room, two bedrooms off to the side and a single bathroom. In the kitchen area, a door opened on the back of the building.
We stopped at the last gas station before leaving the Douglas city limits, fueled up and bought some water and canned meat. In the car, Danny went over the guns again and gave us a basic game plan. Chris wasn't happy with Danny having him stay in the car behind the wheel until called forward. Danny wanted to do the same with me, but I wouldn't let him. I would be better able to sense if the buildings were empty. And, vampire or not, Paul was too chicken shit not to kill Danny the second he had a chance. Danny had survived last night because Oscar had wanted to play.
Fifteen minutes later the motel came into sight. It was a little more run down since the last time I saw it. Paul had been stripping the roof shingles off when his aunt died. Now a couple of the units had holes in their roofs. Windows were broken out on several others. Someone had graffitied the aged plywood hammered in place to protect the office's glass sliding doors.
We pulled around back, starting at the far end of the units and slowly driving towards the office. Twice I touched Chris on the shoulder to have him stop. I waited, listening. Each time the movements I had heard turned out to be birds. We left the car running near the back door to the manager's quarters. Chris offered a final terse, whispered protest that Danny answered with a hard look.
When I opened the car door, Danny tried one last time to get me to wait with Chris. "You said you don't hear anything."
"And if you believe me, there's nothing to worry about."
He shook his head, biting his bottom lip. I pressed the gun into his hand and he offered me the same stony look he'd just given Chris.
"I'm not ready to find out how good a shot I am if Casey's in the room." When he still hesitated, I forced his fingers around the grip. "Please, it's worth more in your hands than mine."
He relented. At the door, he positioned me to the side, took one listen against the door frame and looked at me. I nodded. He kicked the door, shattering the frame where it met the handle and sending the door crashing inward.
A bird flew out, almost getting shot for its trouble. Danny stepped in first. I followed a few paces behind him. He cleared the two bedrooms, the bath and the office as I stood in the kitchen area. He came back to find me in front of the kitchen island, staring down at a dead rat affixed to an area map by a knife through its chest.
I pulled the knife out and used it to push the rat onto the floor. I didn't need Paul here to translate the message.
Danny stood beside me, looking at the map. Paul had taken a dirt road into the foothills, the entire area a shaded no-man's land. But the pen outline didn't stop when the road did. Another two or so miles were marked off.
Leaving Danny for a moment, I walked to the door and signaled to Chris that it was clear. He turned the car off and came inside. Seeing the dead rat, he curled a lip but said nothing.
I stared at Danny, watched the metaphorical gears turning in his head. He patted his jeans pocket, absently looking for the cell phone he no longer had.
"He'll kill her if he sees the cops," I said.
Danny looked up, his eyes questioning me.
"It's easy enough for him to grab another girl. She's bait."
He glanced back down at the map. Traveling on the dirt road, the station wagon climbing up into the foothills, and then traveling on foot - it would be hours getting to the spot marked.
Danny looked to the two of us and nodded. "If we leave now, we might reach the son of a bitch before dark."
***
We had no such luck, reaching the end of the dirt road after twilight. The road ended in a turn around. The ground fell away from the sides. There was a flashlight in the wagon and I took it, looking for signs that the vehicle Paul was driving had been there.
