Rans made a dismissive noise. “Pfft. That was a motorcycle chase, not a car chase. And it hardly qualified as a good one. With that silver knife sticking out of my shoulder, I barely enjoyed it all.”
“You are certifiably insane,” I said, carefully obeying all relevant traffic laws as I turned left onto a random street.
He let out a soft snort and didn’t try to deny it. The silence stretched as I drove through the unfamiliar city with no destination in mind. As I thought over everything I’d learned, another question occurred.
“It must have been pretty difficult for Caspian and Albigard to influence all those cops,” I said, remembering the police swarming the bus station, not to mention the ones waiting for us at O’Hare yesterday.
“Indeed so,” Rans agreed. “Though I’ve suspected for a long time that the Fae single out members of law enforcement who are... shall we say, on the less stable side. PTSD, anxiety, addiction problems, borderline personality disorder—those types of things would make them more vulnerable to Fae influence. But even so, it was a startling display of blunt force on both occasions.”
“Should I be flattered?” I grumbled. “Because I don’t feel flattered.”
“Let’s just say, you seem to be a very popular individual among the inhuman crowd.”
I shot him a brief glance before returning my attention to traffic.
“Including you,” I said flatly. “Although I still don’t claim to understand why.”
It would be way too easy to fall into the fairytale princess narrative with this man. This vampire. He’d ridden to my rescue, saving me from a fate worse than death. I’d cradled his body against mine... taken him apart, and been taken apart by him in return. All of it had felt so goddamned right.
But a seven-hundred-year-old vampire did not fall for a twenty-six-year-old mostly human waitress just because her succubus-tainted blood acted like Viagra for the undead. There was more to this story, and until I learned it, I needed to keep my head on straight. Faeries might be real, but fairytale endings sure as hell weren’t. I’d learned that lesson at the tender age of six.
Rans regarded me for a long moment. “There are reasons why the Fae are so fixated on you, and I don’t know yet what all of those reasons are.”
I scowled. “I thought it was because Grandpa Demon shit all over the Big Important Peace Treaty by knocking up a human woman on the sly. And because my mom somehow managed to get pregnant with me, in turn.”
“Then why not just kill you?” Rans asked. “It wouldn’t have been difficult, and it isn’t as though they lack practice at it.”
My head whipped around so fast that the car swerved in its lane before I corrected it. “Wait. Are you saying you think the Fae were responsible for killing my mother?”
Snippets of conversation and memory slotted into place in my mind like puzzle pieces. Fae found it easier to control the mentally ill. My mother’s assassin had been mentally ill. He’d scrawled ‘Kill the demons’ on his cell wall in blood, the night he’d hung himself.
“Oh, yes—almost certainly,” Rans said, breaking through my moment of revelation.
I swallowed hard. “The forensics report said that the hollow-point rifle round the gunman used had been filled with salt. Do you know why that was?”
“Full-blooded demons are functionally immortal,” Rans told me, “but their bodies are vulnerable to salt. It burns them, and enough of it can incapacitate them completely, at least for a time. From what I know of cambions like your mother, the salt was probably an unnecessary embellishment. The bullet alone would have sufficed. It’s inclusion does, however, imply more knowledge and preparation than your average demon-fearing religious lunatic might be expected to employ.”
My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the knuckles turned white. “So I’ve been right, all this time. There was more to my mother’s death than a random lunatic’s delusions.”
“Far more, yes,” Rans confirmed.
Vindication should have felt better than this.
“Doesn’t really help, does it?” Rans asked, eerily perceptive.
“Ask me again after I’ve got Dad back, and when no one is trying to kidnap or kill me,” I said at length.
Rans did not reply.
I refused to acknowledge the little voice in my head that whispered, And when will that be?
* * *
Ninety minutes later, I pulled into Tom and Glynda’s garage. There was no indication that anyone had attempted to follow us, though Rans had even gone so far as to direct me out of the city to a heavily wooded area that would confuse any potential aerial surveillance.
I might not have been hungry when I’d picked up food for Rans’ blood donors earlier, but my stomach was rumbling audibly by the time we entered the deserted house.
“Pizza,” I declared without preamble. “I am totally ordering a pizza right now.”
If I was going to end up being hunted for the rest of my tragically short life, I was damn well taking advantage of my apparent physical recovery while I could. Pizza was an autoimmune dieter’s nightmare—dairy and nightshade sauce served on a gluten-y crust. And I was going to eat an entire Hawaiian one just as soon as a delivery driver could get it here.
“If it involves pineapple, I don’t want to hear about it,” Rans said with clear distaste. “But yes, you might as well. You’ll need the calories for later.”
I eyed him warily. “Why? What happens later?”
His quick grin was the slightly unhinged one I’d seen on a few occasions before. “Training, of course. Had you forgotten?”
Between the day’s revelations and the small matter of a random old woman attempting to plunge a knife through my eye, I certainly had forgotten about his musings this morning regarding self-defense training.
“Oh,” I said. “That. Okay.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t have misgivings. I did. But I also had a body that—for the first time in years—felt strong and vital. Part of me was intrigued to find out what I could do with it.
“Order your disgusting fruit-on-a-pizza while I talk to Albigard,” Rans said. “Or while I leave a message for Albigard, at least. The useless sod is probably nowhere near his phone right now.”
I frowned as I hunted for a phonebook, since the cheap flip-phones I’d bought were no good for internet searches. “What do you mean? Doesn’t he have a cell?”
“He’s Fae,” Rans said, as though that explained anything. “Their magic is hard on tech. The irritating twat has an analog landline with a remote voicemail service that mostly works... when he can be bothered to answer it or check messages.”
I raised my eyebrows, remembering the fried clock display in his Mercedes. It hadn’t just been flashing twelve; it had been completely scrambled. The car looked like an older model, too—perfectly restored and maintained, certainly, but I wondered now if that was because newer models relied so heavily on computerized components.
“Mind you,” Rans continued, “the upside is that Fae are rubbish at electronic surveillance. Not that they can’t get humans to do it for them, but in general it means that you won’t find them tapping phone lines or using technological tracking devices on cars. It’s just not the way their minds work. They’re more likely to use spells.”
“And yet you got us fake ID and credit cards,” I pointed out. “And you wouldn’t let me call Dad for fear they’d find out.”
“That’s different,” he said. “They’ve got human law enforcement involved in their attempts to track you down. But while Albigard may be out of favor with the Unseelie Court, they’re hardly going to sic human police or private investigators on him in the normal course of things.”
I shrugged. “If you say so. I’m calling for that pizza now. I’d ask if you wanted anything, but I don’t think they carry merlot. Or plasma, for that matter.”
“Pity,” he said, and went to the next room to place his call so we wouldn’t be talking over each other.
&nb
sp; The pizza arrived thirty-five minutes later, and was every bit as good as my appetite had insisted it would be. Rans watched me eat it with something between fascination and disgust, raising an eyebrow at the nearly orgasmic noises I was making.
He’d ended up leaving a message for Albigard, who wasn’t picking up his phone. I chafed at the delay in moving forward with finding out where Dad was and how I could get him back, but Rans convinced me to give it until evening, when Albigard was more likely to get the phone message.
After allowing me a scant hour for my late lunch to settle, he chivvied me into clothing suitable for a workout and dragged me to the downstairs family room.
“I can’t believe you hypnotized the homeowners to leave, and now you’re moving their furniture,” I said, trying not to stare as he pulled a large sofa off to the side with inhuman strength.
“It’s in my way,” he said with a faintly predatory smile that reminded me he’d said the same thing about my nightgown last night. I supposed that meant I should be glad he was moving the furniture instead of breaking it into pieces and tossing it aside.
“Now what?” I asked, looking at the empty space he’d cleared.
“Now,” he said, “You show me what all that yoga has done for your range of flexibility.” He reached around to the small of his back and pulled out a short dagger. “And afterward, I’ll show you how to use this.”
SEVEN
I STARED AT THE dark metal knife blade. “How the hell did you get that? You said you didn’t bring any weapons to Chicago—”
“Because my contact here could provide them,” he finished.
“Your contact arrested us on sight!” I said.
“And before he cut us loose, he added a few essentials to our luggage.” Rans tilted the blade back and forth beneath the family room’s overhead lights.
I examined it, still unable to wrap my head around the relationship between Rans and Albigard. “Why is it so tarnished?” I asked.
“It’s not,” he replied. “Iron blades are always that color.”
Iron? That was the second knife I’d seen in the past few days made of an unusual material.
“What is it with Fae and weird metals?” I asked, reaching a careful finger out to run along the flat of the blade.
Rans huffed a breath of amusement. “Silver for vampires. Salt for demons. Iron for Fae. Earth metals interfere with their magical core—their connection to Dhuinne.”
My brow furrowed. “So Albigard gave you weapons that could hurt him and the other Fae?”
“As I told you,” Rans said, removing the sheath that had nestled at the small of his back and sliding the knife into it, “Alby’s aims don’t really align with most of his people’s aims these days.”
“Apparently not.” I took a breath and let it go for now. “All right. So... yoga? I should warn you, I’m not used to having an audience.”
One corner of his mouth twitched up. “Who said anything about an audience?”
I raised both eyebrows as he set the sheathed knife and his cell phone aside before unbuttoning his shirt. He wore a dark tank top beneath, exposing the abstract tribal pattern of his tattoos against the pale skin of his right arm. His belt, shoes, and socks followed, and okay, yeah—I was totally staring now.
The look he shot me was mock-severe. “Focus, luv. Mirror me now—back to back.”
He guided me down into a sukhasana pose—vertebrae stacked, legs crossed, wrists resting on knees. I could feel him take up the same pose behind me, and a little flutter began low in my stomach as our bodies relaxed into each other, spine to spine. Our difference in height meant that the back of my head fit into the curve of his nape.
“You’re breathing,” I realized, feeling the expansion of his ribs fall into sync with my own steady in-and-out.
“It’s yoga,” he said, sounding amused. “Breathing is rather the point, isn’t it? Now, stop talking and match me.”
The muscles in his shoulders flexed, and I saw his arms stretch straight out to the sides in my peripheral vision. Entranced, I matched his movement, and cool fingers twined with mine. He used the light grip to lead me through a series of basic stretches. My body melted into his as he lifted our joined hands straight up, putting gentle traction on my spine until it popped and eased.
Next he stretched my body to first one side, then the other, opening my ribcage. A gentle side-to-side twist at the waist followed. Then he leaned forward into a modified child’s pose, bowed over his crossed legs, my spine arched over his as I leaned back to maintain the contact between us.
“Very nice,” he said as he straightened, releasing my wrists with a slow caress. “Now turn around.”
I almost didn’t want to. What we were doing shouldn’t feel so intimate. My body was giving itself over to him, leaning on his strength in a way that seemed at odds with my mind’s insistence on maintaining my distance... on protecting myself.
But he was already rearranging us face-to-face, helping me stretch into a forward bend, deepening it further with a steady pull on my wrists, which I returned, keeping us in balance. Gradually, the poses grew more challenging and complex, testing my range of movement and core fitness.
I already knew that Rans’ lean-muscled body held a startling strength, but I hadn’t appreciated before how effortlessly controlled that strength could be. He lay on his back beneath me, legs straight at a right angle to his body, supporting me in a perfect folding leaf posture above him. No part of me touched the ground; instead, I hung perfectly balanced over the platform of his feet, which were pressing into the creases of my hips to support me.
A low throb had taken up residence between my thighs sometime earlier, competing with whatever complicated thing my heart was trying to do. I didn’t like the combined feeling... and I also craved it like a drug I hadn’t known I needed. Strong hands slid down my shoulders, brushing along the length of my arms and guiding me into a new pose that stretched my spine between the grip he now held on my wrists and the fulcrum of my hips resting on his feet.
And—holy Jesus fuck–it felt good. Not just because of the deep stretch through my pelvis and back, but also for the feeling of flying... of being suspended above the earth like a bird on the wing. A faint moan slipped out on my next exhalation, and his grip on my wrists tightened, his thumb caressing my pulse point.
I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be letting these walls crack, because I wasn’t at all sure what sort of monsters lay in wait behind them. As though sensing that I was in danger of being overwhelmed, Rans completed the pose and helped me dismount, my feet landing lightly on the carpet as he bent his knees and stiff-armed my upper body into an upright position.
I took a step back, my breathing going ragged as he relaxed back, lacing his fingers across his chest and looking up at me from the floor with depthless blue eyes.
“I, uh, need to use the bathroom,” I stammered, and fled the room.
A few moments later, I closed the upstairs bathroom door behind me and leaned on it. My eyes were burning and I didn’t even know why.
Shit, shit, shit.
Was I so pathetically desperate for some kind of intimacy in my life that I was going to have a meltdown after a goddamned yoga session? Rans needed me to help him figure out what the Fae were up to, and I needed him for the protection he could offer.
Okay, so we’d fucked a few times. I was part succubus. I needed sex, and he knew that. He seemed to get enjoyment and a bit of temporary mental peace out of it, so it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. That was all. Anything else was just my loneliness reading things into a purely practical partnership. Things that weren’t there.
My heart was pounding again. I had to start thinking about how to extricate myself from all of this. I needed to get my dad, and then I needed to get out. The Fae would never stop chasing me. Eventually they’d track me down again. Hell, if Rans hadn’t been successful in overcoming Alma’s conditioning and making her forget about me, they
might well know already that I was in Chicago.
If they descended en masse and Rans tried to protect me... well, I’d seen him fight off a few Fae, but now I also knew that the Fae had a weapon that could murder vampires. I absolutely refused to be the reason he died.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I had already agreed to giving Albigard a few hours to get the phone message and start looking into things. Since I was the Fae’s real target, it wouldn’t make any sense for them to hurt Dad, or... kill him.
No sense at all. They probably intended to use him as some sort of hostage against me, right? There was still time to save him.
And now all I had to do was go back downstairs to the family room and pretend I hadn’t just come close to sniveling like a little girl because someone finally cared enough about me to do all the things Rans was doing. Because I’d finally found someone who fit inside my messed-up life.
I thumped my head gently against the door a couple of times, in the vain hope that it would make my brain stop being stupid. Then I flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink to support my paper-thin excuse for running off.
When I returned, Rans was waiting, leaning against the foot of the couch in an easy sprawl. “All set,” I said, too brightly. “What’s next?”
Rans shot me an enigmatic glance from beneath his dark fringe of hair. “Next? Why, Zorah...I’m so glad you asked...”
* * *
Four hours later, I was a sweating, shaky mess after an afternoon spent going over and over basic self-defense moves. Maybe Rans had sensed my inability to cope with gentleness, or maybe this was simply the usual way you taught someone how to fight. Whatever the case, my gooey, doe-eyed emotions had been replaced first by surprise, then frustration at being overpowered again and again by a much larger and stronger opponent... and finally by sheer exhaustion.
I didn’t feel that I’d made any significant amount of progress in my skill set, but there had been a couple of occasions before my fatigue started to overcome me where our sparring fell into a sort of rhythm, almost like a dance. The feeling lasted for only a few seconds each time, at which point Rans would duck through my guard and subdue me.
The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set Page 23
