The Companion Contract

by Solace Ames

  Speaking of come, Snap sent me something about a blowbang looking for Asians. I replied with a thanks but no thanks because I didn’t want to burn any bridges.

  Just in case.

  I couldn’t build my future on a dream, after all.

  I heard a rumbling noise, and I was so lost in electronic dream calculations that at first I couldn’t figure out whether the noise came from the land or the sea. I snapped the laptop shut and looked around.

  Then I heard the noise again. Very close this time.

  I looked down and to my left.

  Two unblinking eyes the color of dark honey stared up at me, circled in sleek black spectacles.

  Gabriel.

  Oh fuck.

  His triangular head was delicate but huge. I caught a glimpse of sharp white teeth behind curled lips. The noise he made was too high and loud to be a purr, not to mention scary, a cross between a housecat’s growl and a chainsaw kicking into action. My heart pounded and I screamed silently at myself not to make any sudden movements.

  “Nice kitty,” I whispered.

  He lunged forward and butted my knee with his head.

  I put my hands on the arms of the chair, planning on steadying myself and slowly, very slowly, rising.

  That turned out be a mistake. He neatly wrapped his mouth around two of my fingers.

  My right hand was free. I used it to turn on my phone and send a text to Emanuel.

  Emergency. Gabriel is loose. Sucking on my fingers. How to distract?

  I remembered that kittens and puppies separated too early could develop a nursing fixation, a nervous oral habit. I was his pacifier. His human chew toy. His purr went lower and quieter as he sucked. I wanted to pull my fingers away from his creepy rasping tongue, but if someone took his toy away, he’d get angry...

  “Nice kitty. Very nice kitty. Why don’t you—”

  The chainsaw-growl whined higher. He didn’t seem to like my voice, so I shut up and concentrated on not freaking out. Someone would rescue me, eventually.

  A text came in.

  Don’t move or make noise. I will roll a ball and distract toward pool.

  I took a deep breath and told myself everything was going to be fine. Emanuel had a plan. And Gabriel wasn’t some kind of lethal murdercat. He was only twice the size of a housecat. Well, three times.

  Maybe four.

  Four big, mean cats with a mama complex.

  I didn’t sign up for this.

  Even though I really had signed up for this. Then again, contracts never entirely predicted the future or granted real security. I knew what I was in for when I signed my first one ever, but when the men cut off my panties with their sharp surgical scissors, a moment of absolute terror hit me and I almost ran away. Every one of my senses screamed danger. A dark wave towered over me, and I’d never swim fast enough to reach the crest.

  This wasn’t so bad. I could ride it out.

  A soccer ball hit the tiles with a soft thud and rolled outward, toward the empty swimming pool. Gabriel whipped his head in that direction, bruising my fingers with the sides of his teeth but not cutting my skin. His body pointed like an arrow and he snaked forward, impossibly beautiful and streamlined and fluid.

  I flicked my eyes over my shoulder and saw Emanuel walking toward me, quietly and quickly, almost floating. I knew once he got between me and the cat, I’d be safe. It wasn’t only my wish—the burning look in Emanuel’s eyes held the same promise.

  If Gabriel hurt me, there’d be hell to pay.

  “I got him! I got him!” Juan Carlos came running from the left side of the house, brandishing a mic stand in one hand and an afghan blanket in the other.

  Channeling a gladiator?

  I had a feeling this wasn’t in the plan.

  Emanuel shouted a curt order and made a chopping motion with his hand, but Juan Carlos must have missed it. He threw the blanket at Gabriel, who sidestepped it easily, howled like a wargoblin and sprang onto Juan Carlos.

  More screaming, from a human throat this time. Splashes of red. Emanuel was suddenly at my side, pushing me into the house, where Miles closed the glass-paneled door that sealed us safely away.

  “Jesus,” I said. “The poor bastard.”

  “Call 911.” Miles looked pale and tense and had his hand on the doorknob as if he was about to charge out there into the fray.

  “Wait a second. If the police get involved, that’s the end. You guys could get arrested over the ocelot. I mean, I’m only going to wait a few seconds. To make sure he isn’t going—”

  “To fucking die? Juan Carlos is bleeding out there. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “We’re going to wait and see what Emanuel says.” I meant it. Sure, I liked Miles, but if he made a move for my phone, he’d get my elbow in his face.

  We glared at each other until Emanuel opened the door. There were dark red blotches on his gray shirt, and he smelled of blood. His expression was unreadable. “We’re driving Juan Carlos to the hospital. Gabriel’s locked away. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Juan Carlos had gotten up and walked to the van, but he needed help, and he was nearly as pale as Emanuel.

  Before Emanuel left for the hospital with Fausto and Miles, he asked me gently if I was all right, and touched my left hand. I told him I was just fine. No harm done. And I’d lie for him, if I had to.

  “You won’t need to lie, Amy.”

  I stayed behind. Arturo and Fernando (I still couldn’t think of him as El Tigre) maneuvered Gabriel back into his aviary and patched the rusted section of fence that had allowed the disastrous escape.

  I wanted to help salvage what we could from the mess and prove myself useful. So I helped clean the living room, which Gabriel had completely trashed. At some point he’d ripped down the curtains, left scratch marks up and down the piano, scattered a bowl of potpourri and pissed all over it. The ammonia stench was gut-churningly awful.

  The band didn’t get back home until much later that night. Juan Carlos was high on painkillers and passed out on the couch. Emanuel called a war council of the entire household. The official version of events given at the hospital was “attack by strange animal while walking in the park.” He explained it so calmly and clearly, with such natural authority, that I couldn’t imagine any argument from suspicious nurses.

  Even though Juan Carlos had supposedly been walking in the park wearing a slim-cut burnt-orange raw silk suit.

  I made sure to sit between Juan Carlos’s slumped form and Miles, just in case Miles decided to raid those suit pockets for the painkillers.

  “Come,” Emanuel said, motioning to Miles and me. “We need to have a talk in English.” We followed him up the stairs to his room, the one that was right next to ours.

  He’d have to hear us through the walls at night. Did we keep him awake? And how did he feel about that? I wasn’t equipped to handle all these complex emotions. I’d been faking it, relying on the veneer of jaded sophistication I’d picked up in the business, but fake it till you make it wasn’t doing the trick anymore. I wanted my childish dream back, the comfort of simplicity, and I wanted it so badly there were hot tears gathering at the corner of my eyes.

  Emanuel’s room was like ours, spare except for a large bed and a nightstand. Like a hotel. I had a lot of associations with rooms like this, most of them pornographic. Weirdly, that helped settle me down. No, I wasn’t going to cry.

  Miles threw himself backward across the bed, willfully ignoring the tension building in the air. I sat down at the edge and folded my hands across my lap.

  “I hope you’re enjoying your front-row seat at our theater of the absurd,” Emanuel said to me, leaning in the doorway with a crooked grin on his otherwise perfectly carved face. He’d changed his bloodied shirt for a simple u
ndershirt, and I couldn’t help discreetly tracing the line of his scar with my gaze. What he wore, the languid way he filled the frame, made me think of places where the sun’s warmth never left the land. California was too cold for us. He should take me to another country. God, where was my mind traveling? I blinked and wrenched my eyes away to stare at my hands twisting in my lap.

  “It’s a little stressful,” I answered. “Is Juan Carlos going to be able to play bass? His hand looks messed up.”

  “No time soon,” Emanuel said, and closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, he looked unbreakable, not tired or defeated in the slightest. “We’ll continue writing songs. If necessary, I’ll call in a temporary replacement.”

  Miles laughed bitterly. “Who’d sign up? You don’t walk into a psych ward unless you’re already crazy.”

  “Or unless you’re fucking one of the nurses.” I’d never heard Emanuel say something quite so crude and clever before, and he said it with an amazingly straight face, although a hint of amusement rolled in the deep tones of his voice. I had to hold back a giggle. So Miles brought out the worst in everyone. “Ask him where he was a few hours ago, Amy.”

  My jaw dropped. “For real?”

  Miles laced his hands behind his head and shrugged horizontally, a sinuous, decadent and uniquely Miles-ish motion. “I met someone getting off her shift. We were chatting outside the ICU. We ended up in her car. I mean, it’s not like I had to be there every second for Juan Carlos,” he added defensively. “And I used a condom.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I said. “I just didn’t know you were that much of a player.” I shrugged to show I didn’t care, but the truth was, I was furious. I was supposed to be watching Miles. I didn’t care who he fucked on my watch, but I should have had some oversight.

  “Well, now you know. And I swear I didn’t trade sex for Vicodin. I’m clean. Pass me a cup and I’ll take a test.” He unzipped his jeans and dove his hand into his boxers, eyes wide with devilish glee.

  “Put it back in your pants,” I snarled. I didn’t get mad easily, and now that I was heated up, I wasn’t sure how to cool off. My skin prickled, and I could hardly breathe, all the muscles in my body were held so tight. I kept staring at my hands because I couldn’t stand to look at Miles or Emanuel. Emanuel, with his supernatural patience and control...I was embarrassing myself in front of him.

  A single word from Emanuel sliced through the air. “Enough.”

  Goddamn, I loved hearing him put Miles in his place. The heat inside me wasn’t all rage or shame anymore.

  Miles took his hand out of his pants and drummed his fingers on his thigh. Marking time. Waiting to see what trouble he could cause next, no doubt. He wasn’t really a devil, but then, he wasn’t anything better. I think the ancient Greeks or Romans might have had a word for him.

  My own thighs tensed with every tap tap tap of his fingers. I crossed my legs like the proper lady I wasn’t, but my body couldn’t lie, not on the inside. I looked up toward Emanuel but kept my head bowed, and wondered if my sulky submission touched anything in him at all.

  I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or looking at Miles. His slate-blue eyes seemed to pierce us both.

  Oh, now I was jealous, all right.

  Jealous of Miles.

  “I won’t spring this on you, Miles. I might call in Xiomara.”

  Jealous and lost. So much history layered between the two of them, and somewhere deep in those layers that strange and beautiful name—Syomara, I’d heard it before—set off an explosion. Miles convulsed, doubled himself and tumbled off the bed to land on one knee and one palm, shook himself upright and stalked up to Emanuel. He’d morphed from trickster to rebel in the space of three of my heartbeats. His shoulders shook with a rage much greater than my own.

  Emanuel didn’t move an inch. Not even a hurricane could move him.

  Don’t fight. Please don’t fight. Although I couldn’t imagine the fight would last long—the corded muscles of Emanuel’s arms were massive and brutal. He could hold Miles down without hurting him.

  I got up. In case I had to help with that holding down. I was that deep in their story already. I didn’t even think twice about it.

  Miles sucked in a breath with an audible hiss, as pretty and malicious as a spitting cobra.

  Emanuel interrupted whatever Miles was about to spit out. “Grow up,” he said, with nothing more than mild irritation. “Or you will never be more than what you are now. Control yourself or walk out the door.”

  “I’ll walk,” Miles growled.

  And he did.

  I heard him slam open the door to our room. Heard a soft thud and a loud metallic noise.

  So he was packing his bags.

  “Amy.”

  I felt very small and low in that moment, but the tenderness in the way Emanuel called my name lifted me back up. I raised my chin. “Yes?”

  “For you and me, whatever happens, this is not the end.”

  The room spun. I sat back down on the edge of the bed, because I’d collapse otherwise.

  “I’ll get him back for you,” I promised.

  “He’ll take a strong hand.”

  I nodded, got up and went to follow Miles. As I brushed past Emanuel, I felt his gravity, as if I were falling into his orbit, a comet spinning around a sun. I felt his eyes at my back.

  I felt his power inside me.

  Chapter Seven

  I closed the door behind me, leaned against it, crossed my arms and stared thoughtfully at Miles. He crouched in a corner, quivering with nervous energy as he punched down his clothes into a duffel bag. The room was a wreck already. I’d never met anyone with such a gift for causing chaos.

  “Do you think you can stop me leaving?” he asked, not even looking up at me.

  Yes. “I’m just making sure you don’t forget your underwear and your toothbrush. Where are you going? Your mother’s?”

  “No.”

  “Then where? And who’s driving you?”

  I think Miles realized that whatever he answered would be damning. He froze, maybe looking for the perfect snappy comeback or insult, but he was too close to the emotional edge. His silence was agonizing.

  I couldn’t help enjoying it a little.

  Wait. I wasn’t allowed to be angry anymore, or petty, or malicious. To make this work, I had to feel for him. Get inside his skin.

  Perform.

  Performing was its own pleasure.

  “You want to talk,” I told him softly. “You can talk to me.” I stepped closer, dipped my fingers under his chin and pulled his head up, baring his throat.

  He shook my hand away. But he didn’t rise from his knees.

  Maybe this would be easier than I thought.

  “And then I’ll drive you, Miles. I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go, after we talk.” I took his chin in my hand again. His skin was smooth, almost as smooth as a woman’s. He took good care of himself when he wasn’t on the needle.

  “All right,” Miles whispered. He sounded lost.

  “Get on the bed.” I pushed gently to guide him. The pads of my fingers trailed against his inner forearms, tattooed even in the tender crook of the elbows. I sat down on the bed next to him, stroked his shoulder without leaning on him, and made a humming noise.

  “You sound like a bird,” he said. His eyes were closed and his eyelids were as raw as I remembered from the day we met. “I have to leave.”

  “Why? What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid.” He sighed. “I just can’t live like this. I can’t see her again.” He twisted his mouth. The pain in the curve of his lips was shameless, unmanly, unguarded.

  A slow, deep tide of desire tugged at me, made my jaw tremble until I pressed my lips together in a false
mirror of his own pain. I kept stroking his shoulder, sharing my warmth with him.

  “You need to go out of yourself for a while,” I said. “So you can think clearly. Make decisions. It’ll be easier then. You’ll know what to do. You have time.”

  “I have another lady who takes me there.”

  Heroin. His mouth relaxed as his eyelids fluttered, anticipating the needle’s kiss. I’ve never touched junk, but God I know that sick-sweet look.

  “Lie down, Miles. Keep your eyes closed. I have something to show you.”

  I hoped he’d let me lead him. I couldn’t drag him, I could only nudge and sway. Still, he followed. Maybe he believed, on some willfully childish, subconscious level, that I’d lead him to his other lady.

  I turned off the ceiling light, leaving only the slanted light from the mirrored bathroom spilling out onto the bed where Miles lay, a sleeping prince wrapped in shadows and silence.

  And razor-wire pain.

  I got what I needed from my suitcase and came back to his side. Draped the cold metal over the backs of his palms until his eyelids shivered open.

  “Handcuff yourself to the head rail,” I told him. “I’ll make you forget. I promise.”

  His jaw clenched and he let out a hissing breath. I stroked the side of his face and shushed him.

  “Have I ever lied to you?” I whispered, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice. Steady, like Emanuel. I could be like Emanuel. Emanuel’s right hand. The thought had me feverishly hot and wet and needy—one second I was the cool architect of an elegant plan and the next I was overthrown, in heat like an animal, desperate to fuck or be fucked, dying for it.

  No. Wait.

  I imagined Emanuel at my back. It wasn’t hard to do. He was barely ten feet away, on the other side of the wall. My hips canted forward to his phantom urging and I saw through architect’s eyes again, feeling the sweet ache in my shameless cunt but no longer driven by it.