B00T3PMJTS EBOK

by Tracy Tappan

  “A man named Edgar got in touch with you,” Ãlex said.

  Pändra arched her brow. “Truly?” Before she’d been wrangled down to Ţărână, she’d heard Edgar fell off the grid.

  “From the nature of the email, it was clear that he’s…uh, attracted to you.” Ãlex’s cheeks stained pink.

  Edgar must’ve been extra-descriptive this time.

  “We thought maybe you could persuade him to take you to one of Videön’s hideouts, then the warriors can storm in and deal with the rest.” Ãlex dipped his chin and gave her a pointed look over the rims of his glasses. “I assume you realize that by persuade, we mean seduce.”

  Pändra quirked her lips. “You did say racy.”

  Thomal’s scowl deepened. “We don’t need her for that. The warriors can follow this dude on our own.”

  Ãlex spread his hands. “Besides this email, I haven’t been able to unearth traces of him anywhere. I can’t tell you where to find this Edgar in order to follow him. If we want to get to Videön through Edgar, then Pändra is our best bet.”

  Tonĩ cupped her belly with her palms, probably trying to relieve pressure on her lower parts. “Would you be willing to email Edgar, Pändra? Set up a meeting?”

  “That would raise Edgar’s suspicions,” Pändra answered. “I stopped answering his emails ages ago. But I know of a sex club where he ponces about. Happens we could find him there.”

  “No,” Thomal said shortly.

  “Thomal,” Dev interceded. “You heard Ãlex. This is our only way to Videön.”

  Thomal swung around. “So you’d be all kumbaya about Marissa doing something like this, Nichita?”

  Dev regarded Thomal without expression. “Marissa lives with me in Ţărână’s family neighborhood and is pregnant with my child. I’d say our situations are vastly different.”

  Thomal’s eyes flashed and the skin across his cheekbones reddened.

  Pändra nearly sighed. Jolly. Such fun to discuss the sorry state of her marriage in front of everyone.

  “It’s still my call,” Thomal gritted. “I’m also not thrilled with letting her go topside. If things get hairy up there, she can use the distraction to her advantage.”

  Jaċken’s black brows drew together. “Are you saying you think Pändra’s a flight risk?”

  There was a tick of a weird pause, like the room was thinking that such a thing wouldn’t have been a consideration if Thomal and Pändra were a proper couple.

  Tonĩ shifted in her chair and grimaced. “This baby lives on my bladder. Pändra, don’t you have The Three Little Pigs play to put on?”

  Pändra paused over that comment, then realized what Tonĩ was saying and chuckled. “Ah, indeed. Best I come back, then.”

  Thomal’s eyes narrowed down to thin slits.

  Jaċken crossed his arms. “Look, Costache, you got something to say about this that outweighs the loss of all Fey power on earth, then by all means, let’s hear it. Meanwhile I give your wife high marks for her willingness to step back to her old ways. Personally, I’m not happy about having to ask her to do that.”

  At least Jaċken recognized how far Pändra had come in the last eight months.

  Thomal’s jaw flexed, muscles rippling up and down his cheeks. “I go with her. Every step of the way.”

  A snort slipped out of Pändra.

  Thomal glowered at her. “You got a problem with that arrangement?”

  “It’s just that…you don’t exactly fit in with the Iron Cock’s usual clientele. They’re a bit on the gritty side, and you’re…” She shrugged. “Pretty.”

  “Then I guess you’re going to have to hooker me up or slut me down or however you want to say it.” Thomal’s upper lip tightened at one corner. “You remember how to do that, right?”

  She met his icy blue gaze for a long moment. “I remember.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Faith carefully smoothed open the vellum page on the top of her desk, lightly brushing her fingers over the raised gold lettering as she read the invitation. Idyll O’Shaughnessy and Garwald Istok, the distinguished part-owner of Garwald’s Pub who’d stolen Aunt Idyll’s heart within three days of her arrival in Ţărână, were throwing a bonding celebration.

  Faith smiled weakly. She was happy for her aunt, sincerely. Idyll was giddy as a schoolgirl, madly in love, and mated after spending her whole life unmarried because of being a Dragon. It was just…Faith closed her eyes, feeling an ugly coil of jealousy. Everyone who wanted a man around here seemed to have one.

  Except her.

  She wouldn’t have thought it possible to be even more unhappy and lonely than she’d been before, but here she was, reaching new lows of miserable. And stuck. Leaving this backward town had gone from highly unlikely to extremely improbable now that both her twin sister and her adoptive mother lived down here. Not only that, but there was nothing left for her to do topside anymore. After eight more months of nurturing along her MCL with no improvement, she’d finally had to accept that her knee was permanently disabled. It was over. No more professional ballet.

  “Acceptance” was one thing, though. “Moving on” was another. She just couldn’t seem to find anything to fill the hole that’d been bored out of her soul by the loss of dance. What made matters worse was that all around her people were living, making lasting friendships, fashioning new careers, dating, falling in love. Getting mated.

  Except for her.

  She’d held out for Nỵko for months, never dreaming the wait for him would be so interminable. In eight months that big lummox of a Vârcolac had never made even one move in her direction. She’d finally given up about a month ago and gone on a date with the owner of the community diner, Dănuţ Marga, who talked about himself the whole time and wasn’t at all like an oversized teddy bear, and then Oszkar Vasilichi, Ţărână’s head gemologist, who couldn’t stop bragging about how much money he made for the community and had neglected to gaze at her as if she smelled like someone he’d get along with very well.

  She’d given up after that. For good.

  She’d tried to find meaning in other areas of her life by helping teach at Kacie’s new dance school. But being at the barre reminded her of all her losses and failures, and she ended up just trudging through the motions. It was especially painful when Lysha, Deandra, and Kristara skipped in for the kindergarten class, dressed in adorable pink ballet gear. As the little ones rushed into the studio, Faith would rush out, choking back tears. Now that her name was forever off the ballet marquee, her maternal urges were on loudspeaker. She wanted babies, lots of them, and right away. But the only man she wanted as genetic contributor to her offspring—as mate, provider, and all-around hero—she couldn’t have. Why was the cosmos so determined to destroy her life on that score, too?

  A tear spilled from her eyes and landed on Idyll’s vellum invitation. Faith quickly sat back and—

  She nearly fell off her chair when an ear-splitting siren started wailing.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Topside: downtown San Diego, three hours earlier

  Pändra gave her best effort to viewing Thomal with merely a clinical eye as he stepped out of the dressing room of her former leather clothing store haunt, Rufskin, located in Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay district. But as her interest traveled down to his crotch, her stomach went base over apex into some strange gymnastics because—

  “Daaaamn, Costache,” Gábor observed. “Those pants are way too tight, bro. You look like you have a vagina, but, like, a mutant one that’s been injected with silicone or something.”

  Dev snorted.

  Nỵko didn’t react. He was staring in horrified fascination at a mannequin wearing leather pants with the arse cheeks cut out of them. But then Nỵko hardly talked anymore, anyroad.

  “Screw this, I’m changing.” Thomal took a backward step into the dressing room.

  “No, it’s perfect,” Pändra interjected. “Your trousers need to be that tight for where we’re going.” A
nd he didn’t look like he had a vagina, rather the tight black leather formed a pronounced vee at his crotch, drawing focus to linger on the hefty bulge there. She exhaled tightly as her stomach did another backflip-double-tuck. Hells bells, she really needed to get some pull. After more than eight months without sex, her nethers felt like they’d dried into an old husk. “Now let’s put on your shirt.” She pulled out a can of specialized spray paint and shook it with a rattle, rattle, rattle.

  One of Thomal’s golden brows hiked up.

  Gábor chortled. “Oh, this I gotta—”

  “Say, mate,” she said to Gábor. “Why don’t you pop out and buy me my cigarettes. Camels. I’ll need a lighter, too.” She turned back to Thomal and gestured to their private dressing room. “Let’s duck back in here. You’ll need to take your real shirt off.” And exposing a scaly dragon tattoo to public scrutiny was a topside no-no.

  Thomal stepped inside and stripped off his shirt.

  The door shut, enclosing them together. Alone. In intimate proximity. With one of them half-naked and wearing sexy leather pants. She heard herself breathe. She should get credit toward her debt of amends for this torture, shouldn’t she?

  She cleared her throat. “Turn around,” she instructed him. “I need to spirit gum a layer of fake skin over your scaly dragon.” Of course, she had to touch him to do that.

  He gave her a dark look and didn’t move.

  She busied herself twisting open the bottle of spirit gum, just as casual as could be.

  He turned around, and heat flushed through her. Cor blimey, her hubby had an outstanding rack of muscles cutting grooves into his v-shaped back. She licked her lips and went to work, begging her naughty bits not to juice up. A Vârcolac could scent that. After ignoring how firm and supple his skin was, she moved on to the rest of his getup, applying a temporary tattoo of a scorpion on the left side of his very kissable-looking throat, then preparing him for his spray-on shirt. She taped off his neck and halfway down his biceps, then tucked a towel around the waistband of his pants, her fingers brushing against the taut muscles of his lower abdomen. Her belly tightened. A few centimeters lower and…best not to think about it, girl. She chanced a glance at Thomal’s face.

  His eyes were focused across the dressing room, and they were dark and intense, his nostrils flared wide.

  She swiftly moved on to the next task. Picking up the paint can, she proceeded to cover Thomal’s torso in neon blue. That done, she added the finishing touches, dabbing purple hair dye onto the tips of his blond hair. Removing the tape and towel, she stepped back to view the finished product, and—

  Love a duck.

  “Well?” Thomal asked.

  She couldn’t answer, momentarily robbed of speech. She’d turned him into a one-thousand-horsepowered sex machine. Considering that his shirt was, quite literally, painted on, every chiseled, carved, cut, and sculpted muscle on his upper torso, along with the flat discs of his nipples and an old bullet wound on the left of his abdomen, were displayed for all and sundry to drool over. The getup accentuated the steely blue eyes and dizzying handsomeness that were already his claim to fame. He looked hotter than a sauna in Hell, and there wasn’t a man, woman, or animal on earth who wouldn’t want to jump his meat and two veg the second they took a gander at him.

  She finally got her mouth to produce a sound. “That’ll do,” she murmured. “Now out you go, love. It’s my turn to change.”

  He didn’t say anything. Just left. As the door opened and he stepped out, she heard the warriors start in on him. The door shut, muffling the voices. Right, then. Get yourself together.

  She tarted herself up in an ankle-to-neck leather bodysuit a lá Cat Woman. The garment might as well have been spray-painted on her body, too, it fit that tight. Like a second skin, it left nothing to the imagination, although it still did its job of covering the dragon tattoo on her back and her fecked-up belly. Metal zippers accented both sides of her calves, her left thigh, and her right breast. All the zippers were faux, except for the one over her boob. That one was unzipped, her breast swelling through the opening, appearing naked, when, in fact, it was concealed by skin-colored material. But it took a double- or triple-take to realize it, and the effect was eye-popping sexy.

  “Wow,” Dev said when she stepped out of the dressing room.

  Thomal’s jaw locked down.

  “Hey, look,” Gábor chirped. “It’s the Camel Toe Twins.”

  Pändra called Duane to find out where the Iron Cock was tonight. Her former minion copped an attitude with her for being gone so many long months, but he also sounded creepily excited when he promised to meet her at the club tonight with Bo Bo. Sorry, chums. She planned to have all done and dusted well before those two showed. “Here’s the address.” She handed a piece of paper to Dev.

  Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of a grubby four-story apartment building, the entire top floor of which was supposedly dedicated to the sex club tonight. They got out of the Dodge van, and Dev stepped up to Pändra and Thomal. “Here are your earpieces.” He held out two on the palm of his hand.

  Thomal took one.

  She took the other and jammed it into her right ear.

  “Gábor, Nỵko, and I will man the perimeter.” Dev glanced between the two of them. “We’re here for you if you need us.”

  Thomal shoved his earpiece deeper. “I think I can say with reasonable accuracy that my old lady doesn’t need help in the seduction department.” He spun around and stalked inside the building.

  She and Thomal had to walk up all four flights of warped stairs, the elevator being clapped out—hardly surprising in a place like this. They passed a long line of scantily-clad people assembled on the stairs. Hungry, devouring stares followed their progress, necks craning, although for the first time ever in an arrival at the Iron Cock, she wasn’t necessarily the headliner.

  At the top, she blazed up a Camel, puffing smoke sideways to avoid giving the bouncer a face full. “’Ow do, Curtis,” she greeted the large black man. “Some good bagging off happening in there tonight?”

  “There’s a cover charge.” Curtis didn’t bother to look at her as he passed on this information. His attention was stuck on Thomal. “Economic downswing.”

  She tut-tutted. “Cor, what’s the world coming to when good folk won’t spend their brass on a proper felching or snowballing? Anyroad, get knotted. I brought a toy with me.” She waved airily at Thomal. “He’s my pass.”

  Thomal played his part, forming his lips into a cocky smile that had Curtis rapidly reconsidering his straightness, his eyes nearly pinwheeling in their sockets.

  She pushed past the bouncer and made her way inside, Thomal next to her.

  The Iron Cock’s typical dark, sordid atmosphere instantly engulfed them: loud music, streaks of white light slicing across the shadows, the suffocating heated whoosh of too many bodies packed into a too-small place. The smell of sweat and the distinctive musk of sex assaulted her senses. It had never bothered her before, but now she had to drag hard on her cigarette to keep the vom down.

  Beside her, Thomal lifted his lip into a derisive sneer. “Look at them,” he said, a glare aimed at the dance floor, where people were moving in an undulating mash of simulated sex acts. “They’re making a travesty out of what sex is supposed to be. It’s grotesque.”

  She held her Camel between the vee of her fingers and flicked her pinkie against her thumbnail as she surveyed the crowd. Edgar had to be here. The Iron Cock only operated one night a week, and he never missed. “Didn’t know you were such the romantic type, hubby.”

  “With the right woman.”

  Pändra clamped her teeth into a tight grind. Aye, that’s right. She was Dirty Pändra. Polish a pence to a high shine and underneath the gloss, it’ll always be copper, never gold. She squeezed her eyes closed against a spike of temper. God’s balls, why was she doing this? If she were back in Ţărână right now, she’d be making faces out of snack time pretzels and raisin
s for her students. Not being reminded of all the arsed-up things she used to do. And be.

  She felt Thomal stiffen beside her, and turned to see what had snagged his attention. He’d spotted a couple in the act of oral sex, the man propped against a wall, neck arched and mouth open around moans the music was drowning out. The woman was on her knees in front of him, her hands wrapped around his naked buttocks, her cheeks hollowing and bulging as she worked the guy’s stalk. Both the man and the woman were blonde, probably creating a decent facsimile of what Arc and Pändra had resembled the night of the “event.”

  Pändra’s heart slumped into her stomach, and then both dropped away. That’s that, then. The end of the road, girlie-girl. Accept it. Thomal would never forgive her. Time to give up the fantasy that he’d eventually see all she’d done to make amends and give her a chance. He’d never acknowledge the changes in her. Never. There was just too much wreckage on the road between them.

  Oddly, such a thing would’ve been a doss for Old Pändra to deal with. But New Pändra had feelings, too many for her not to care about that loss. “Let’s push off.” Her voice grated through the narrow opening of her larynx. She’d come so far these last months, only to discover she’d moved the sum total of a gnat’s whisker.

  Thomal frowned. “You don’t see the guy?”

  She did, actually. Edgar was at the bar. He’d already spotted her, zeroing in on her as if through a gun sight. “He’s here.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  She held her cigarette in front of her and stared at the glowing red tip as she worked to ice herself down, shoving emotions back into the trap of her ribcage like biting cobras. “Nothing,” she said in a jaundiced tone. “Everything’s brill.” She mashed out her cigarette against the wall and tossed it aside. “To the dance floor, love. It’s time to put on a show. We’ll have to pretend to get into a fight.” Her smile felt like it deformed her face into a unnatural mask. “Think you can pull that off, snookums?”