by Aya DeAniege
“How did you know I was going to ask?”
“You ask about everything. You asked if you could swallow this morning.”
“It was a valid question,” I said.
“Ask before, not during,” he grumbled.
“Who knew anything from a Maker could be swallowed?” I asked with a shrug.
“I did, and could have told you before you interrupted what was otherwise an average blow job to ask.”
“Well, I haven’t had centuries of practice,” I snapped back at him.
“Don’t use that tone with me. I’m your Maker, not your boyfriend.”
“That’s abundantly clear. Boyfriends reciprocate for that sort of thing.”
“Since when?” he demanded.
“Since women realised they could bite and straight out refuse to do it,” I said. “If we were dating and you didn’t return the favour, you bet your ass, that’d be the only subpar blow job you receive from me. Ever.”
“Anna says there are classes women take now,” he said.
Anna was Sasha’s friend. She had been in contact with Quin since the first night after I had been turned and she had the strangest conversations with Quin. They talked about everything, on the phone no less.
I had overheard them talking about the best way to hide a body in the modern day, to them reminiscing about starting an orgy in a convent.
“As soon as I get paid for this work, I’ll take the class.”
“No, I’ll pay for it.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I’ve not had attention like that in centuries, and certainly not often. I now have an opportunity to do so and with someone who is a fast learner when she puts her mind to it. So, yes, I will pay for the class, you will take the class and stop looking at me like I consider you a blow-up doll.”
“It’s not fair.”
“It’s not supposed to be fair. I’m your Maker.”
“Just because you made me, doesn’t mean you get free use of my body.”
Quin frowned at me. “Does this have to do with us, or with the fact that you are meeting up with your family tonight?”
“If you hadn’t turned me, would you reciprocate?”
He took another bite of his burger and considered me for a long moment. His response finally was a shrug before he reached for his water.
“I was still a part of Lucrecia’s family then,” he said quietly before sipping his water.
“Then the question is, are you exploring your sexuality after fifteen hundred years, or are you just that guy?”
Quin ate a little in silence as he considered. I was learning that sometimes he didn’t answer straight away and that I shouldn’t take offence to that. I just had to give him the time.
My phone went off again. I picked it up and stared at the image that the interviewers had attached.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I grumbled before I turned the phone around and showed Quin.
His eyebrows raised. “The art is fine, but that title?” My phone went off, and the eyebrows drew down in response. “They’re putting it under fiction. The Council has granted them another interview and promised not to turn the person.”
“Well, that makes sense. The world did know there would be forty of us,” I said. “So, you and Balor going on TV tomorrow and doing that interview, plus the story?”
“It will help obscure your part in things,” he said. “They’ve already signed the non-disclosure agreements, correct?”
“I’m more concerned with them following the agreement,” I grumbled.
“They’ll follow it,” he said pointedly.
That tone means something.
Which I was starting to suspect meant that something else was at play, under all the rest. Like, Quin would eat anyone caught talking. Or he was just trying to believe in other people.
Perhaps I should have told him ahead of time not to start trusting people again until after he met my family.
“Have you chosen a name yet?” he asked suddenly.
“For what?” I asked, then it dawned on me. “Oh, yes, Helen.”
“Helen?”
“They suggested it. Helen of Troy, I think was their way of it. That whole shit storm that started over little me.”
“You do have a face that could launch a ship or two,” he murmured.
“Very funny,” I said.
“And Troy?”
“Changed, of course. Every mortal has had their name altered. Erin signed the non-disclosure agreement along with the landlord. Not that he’d want to share anything about the break-in and his mistake costing a woman her cats.”
“Cats?”
“Cats. The four cats that Lu killed,” I said, then frowned at him. “Quin, they were actual cats!”
“Oh,” he said. “I should probably read this book they’re bringing together.”
“They think my chapter with Sasha in the car is too much. That as a character inside my own story, I wouldn’t address the fact that I was inside my story.”
“I think it’s adorable how you think you’re a Mary Sue.”
“Not being able to give a blow job does not discount me from being a Mary Sue. And just because Sasha was jealousy, doesn’t mean that counts either.”
“Androgen and Amma dislike you as well. Margaret certainly hated you. Lucrecia is on the fence. I’m betting your parents are probably on that list as well.”
“Especially when my father finds out I won’t be turning him,” I said. “And my mother the instant you say vampire. I’d have better luck coming out as gay, I think.”
“Funny how sexuality doesn’t mean as much when immortals make themselves known.”
“Yeah, funny like that,” I said. “Anyhow, they want me to alter the chapter and such. Like… I’m sorry I had magical powers shooting off like gunpowder hidden in a log tossed on the fire. There was no control there and doing things impulsively really made it worse.”
“Are they also complaining about the fever?” he asked. “How it changed your behaviour?”
“They wonder how you didn’t notice I was bleary at the beginning of the night.”
“I thought it was adorable, was all. You hadn’t had coffee yet. And no chance to watch a hipster neckbeard nurse his coffee.”
“Mr. Fedora, we’ve been over that. I never called you a neckbeard. And how can I watch a hipster drink his coffee when you got rid of the beard and look more like a young man about to be introduced to a set of parents?”
“I’ll grow it back eventually,” he said. “It does make keeping that mask on difficult.”
“People will remark on you being beardless for a century.”
“I’ll be leaving the lower half of the mask on, and it may or may not be a hundred years. Why, do you prefer the beard?”
“I like playing with it,” I said.
“Wow,” he said, looking a little startled. “That may very well be the first time that you’ve sounded like a woman. That was infatuation in your voice.”
“Though without the beard, it’s a great deal easier to tell what you’re thinking, so I’m caught. Do I want the beard, do I not want the beard? Who knows what we should do? I don’t, that’s for sure.”
“We need to head out early,” he said, abruptly changing the subject. “Two in the morning at the latest.”
It was my turn to raise my eyebrows.
“We’re meeting up with my parents, Mr. Fedora. They’ve been up since seven or eight and have day jobs. If we’re here until two in the morning, we’ll have bigger problems.”
“The city is only an undetermined amount of time away, I suppose,” He said, lips curling up in a smile.
“I see what you did there,” I said. “Now I don’t have to edit the time out, thank you.”
“Though it would be the biggest gap in the story.”
“Technically no more than when I was unconscious during the change,” I said. “That was over an hour all togeth
er. You can reach a lot of cities in an hour.”
“I don’t think the reader grasps the time change there.”
“Neither did I, until they asked about the missing time. Sort of surprised you didn’t monologue through the entire time.”
“I couldn’t, I wanted to make certain you were all right, and Margaret wasn’t taking samples.”
“I still woke up wet,” I said.
“Yeah, but not sopping wet, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Did none of you dry me off?”
“Lucrecia tried to, I almost bit her, so… no.”
“Uh huh. Finish your burger, would you?”
“You still haven’t told me anything about your family.”
“And they know nothing about you, so doesn’t that just put you all on even ground? They aren’t supernatural at all, and I don’t know which of them is the descendant, or if they both are.”
“How would you like to tell them?”
“Mum, dad? I’m a vampire.”
“Just like that?”
I sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “You never had to tell your family. None of you did. What I have to do is unique and kept to just myself and Troy, and his parents were only concerned about your reaction to his being turned. Then they accepted him as one of their own again because they trust that you will look after him no matter what Balor says or does. Balor will never have the chance to cross a line because before all this happened. Before Troy was Troy, he was your boy, and he was your stock. You have a history with not only him, but his mother and father too.
“So, at the end of the day, that just leaves me to come out to my parents, and yeah, it’s going to suck, and there will be no hugging and kissing or happiness on my part. That is not the kind of people that make up my family. They will not look at this as a blessing.
“It is an opportunity, plain and simple, one that they have had almost a week to consider, of how they can manipulate this entire thing to their benefit and what they can get out of this so-called reality narration. They want the money and whatever else they can get out of you.
“Who, if you recall, has been painted as an eccentric millionaire to keep their reaction genuine.”
“That’s the most you’ve said about them in all the time I’ve known you,” he said. “And I’ve asked multiple times.”
“Well, you all allow one another to keep your secrets, so why not me as well?”
Quin took in a long, slow breath. “I respected your wish because forcing it out of you would not be the way to build trust. Lucrecia told me that like is drawn to like, that you could very well be more like me than I might like. So, I have a question for you.”
“No, you don’t have to dig a grave for that. I’m empathetic to your plight because I can put myself in your position, not because it’s happened to me.”
“I like how you didn’t try to tell me that I wouldn’t be digging a grave for another reason,” he said with a small smile.
I hesitated before answering because I didn’t know what I could say.
“I wasn’t living apart because I needed to go to the university,” I said. “And I don’t want to dredge this up. I haven’t spoken to my father in years I don’t want to tonight either.”
“Without this, would you have been content with his dying and you two never again speaking?”
“I think so, yes,” I said, then I shrugged. “I hear people say it all the time, they tell me I only have one father and that he’s going to be gone one day, but the truth of the matter is: I don’t feel like I even had one. I don’t have memories of fun times. He didn’t help me with projects or do things for me because it was for me. Unlike your father, I wasn’t grateful when he gave me something because it always came at a price. Always.”
“Even this,” he said.
“Even this.”
Coming Soon:
Prototype
An Aurora Novel
(Working Title)
My name is Maggy Doyle. I have a three-year-old daughter, a husband, a home, and an extended family. I work a secretary job for a lawyer's office and spend my days just trying to fly under the radar of pretty well everyone.
See, five years ago, I was found wandering around a field. I don't recall anything before that moment. I had no idea who I was. If it weren't for Harry, if not for how much he loved me before the incident, I would have probably been lost forever.
Imagine my surprise when I opened my front door one day to find men standing there, demanding my daughter and I go with them. They wouldn't answer my questions or tell me where they were taking us.
There's this nagging at the back of my mind telling me that it has to do with Aurora. The still new, third world we were linked to, ruled by a woman who is said to have not only created the world, but also animals, and who knew what else.
What could she possibly want with twenty people ranging from late teens to middle-aged? The only thing we have in common is amnesia. Our lives before a certain point were erased. We didn't do anything wrong, none of us know each other and our incidents were months or even years apart.
We’re completely harmless.
I think.
My name is Nathaniel Edwards, I am just over forty years old as I write this introduction. I’ve chosen to write this of my own volition, I was not pressured into it, nor was I commanded by my wife and Mistress, Isabella. Today she may be Mistress, but tomorrow she will be my sub once more. Most likely you are reading this because you read Isabella’s books and were curious about my part of the story.
Or you whined about how you didn’t get all the details in the middle portion of her books and now you’re hoping my absolutely detailed account with her will rectify the situation.
I’m not the least bit sorry to say, you will be disappointed. This is not a detailed account of my time with Isabella Domme. You already know what happened when she was around me. I lost my mind, my lust got the better of me.
No, this account covers before I met Isabella, how I became the man that I was when she met me. Yes, I will cover—however briefly—my time with her during the contract but it will be focused on after she was removed from my home. While my journals from our time together are being collected, and edited slightly for inclusion in the national archives, I don’t much feel like sharing that with you.
My story does not begin and end with Isabella. Just as hers did not end with marrying me. Well, her written story did, but she went on to bigger and better things in the real world. My story doesn’t even begin when I met Him.
Master.
Fragments*
Working title
Daughters of the Alphas
My name is Rebecca, you may know of my sister, Rachel? I've been told her story, how she ran around claiming to be a faerie, beat up a bunch of Alphas and then broke the man who had broken me. Several days after those events, I woke whole, beside a man I had never met, with no memories of what happened.
None.
They tell me that I agreed to it, that there was no other way. They even had video to show me, but that doesn't make a body feel any better.
I lost two years of my life. Like coming out of a coma, I woke to a changed view. Children I didn't want, a changed family, I don't even recall my father's death. How does one even begin to pick up the pieces from that?
Rachel and I are back together, she's promised never to leave me again. The Alphas have already begun circling like sharks, wanting to draw her blood but unable to tell us apart. Only two of them can look at us and know which is which.
Morgan and Gerrid. Rachel says Morgan is unavailable, and that if Gerrid touches me she and Morgan will cause him harm. But Morgan isn't with us, and I'm not entirely certain that Gerrid considers Rachel a threat. It's not that I have a problem with Gerrid, it's just that...
Alphas, you know?
About the Author
Aya DeAniege is a Canadian author who wrote for years, first to please herself then writing sto
ries for free—believing no one would ever pay to read her stuff—before pursuing indie publishing. She still writes mainly for personal pleasure, with topics ranging from romance, fantasy, science fiction, on to whatever takes her fancy in the future. World creation fascinates her, and when she finds one she likes, she dabbles endlessly.
Connect on:
Facebook: Aya DeAniege
Twitter: @DeAniege_A
Email: [email protected]
