Falter

by V. J. Chambers

  I sighed. “I didn’t say anything like that, baby. You’re reading stuff into this that isn’t there.”

  She pulled the car out. “You think that I spend way too much time killing stuff and not enough time with you and Chance. You think my priorities are messed up.”

  I slumped against the headrest. “Where is this coming from?”

  “You said that stuff to me,” she said.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “What I said was that you needed to be careful to make sure that you didn’t get a taste for the violence, and that Chance and I were inviting you to weekly family dinners. The three of us. Together. Which I thought would be nice. And you said you would think about it. But I never said that I thought your priorities were off. I didn’t.”

  “You implied it.”

  “No, I didn’t. And I’m not mad.” I touched her arm. “Azazel, are we seriously having an argument about whether or not we’re arguing?”

  “No,” she said. She glanced at me. “Maybe.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Jason. I’m really sorry I was late.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Seriously.”

  She shot me a sheepish smile. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.” I grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

  She pulled her hand away.

  Slowly, I pulled my own hand back. Right. We weren’t really touching each other that much these past two weeks.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s only...”

  “I get it,” I said.

  And then we were both quiet. I stared out of the window, watching the scenery of northern New Jersey go by—chain restaurants, gas stations, and stop lights. I didn’t know what to say.

  We didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive back to the house. She pulled into the driveway and stopped the car, but she didn’t make a move to get out.

  I followed her lead and sat there too.

  She looked at me. “Should we talk about this?”

  “Probably.” I looked away.

  She took a deep breath. “So, I guess we kind of took things too far.”

  “You mean I did.”

  She considered. “Now that you mention it, it is kind of rich for you to be talking about not getting a taste for violence.”

  I winced. “Look, you’re okay. I didn’t really do anything to you.”

  “Oh, so I’m overreacting.”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. Obviously, it freaked you out.”

  “Obviously?” She laughed bitterly. “You killed me.”

  “You’re not dead,” I said.

  “Only because I was pumped full of your blood while you did it.”

  “I didn’t mean to...” I flashed on the moment. Azazel lying under me in bed, naked, my fingers wrapped tight around her neck. Dammit. It was making me hard just thinking about it. I shifted uncomfortably. I was lying to her. I’d meant to do it. I’d gotten carried away, sure, but I’d known exactly what I was doing. And I’d wanted to stop her breath, cut it all off, snuff it out. I’d wanted... “It was an accident.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I did let you do it. And I’m not dead. But...”

  And we were both quiet again.

  I picked at a piece of lint on my jeans.

  Azazel tapped her fingers against the steering wheel.

  I tried to tell myself it was no big deal. Other couples experimented with erotic asphyxiation, didn’t they? It wasn’t like we’d gotten the idea from a vacuum. Okay, I’d gotten the idea. It had been my idea. But Azazel had been telling me she wanted me to open up in bed. She said she didn’t want me to hold back with her anymore. She wanted to experience whatever I wanted. And, honestly, before the whole accidentally killing her thing, everything had been awesome. For both of us. We’d been having better sex than we ever had, and we were like lovesick teenagers again. (When we were actually lovesick teenagers, we’d been chased across the country and half of Europe by people trying to kill us, and we hadn’t actually had a lot of time to perfect our lovemaking technique.) It had been easy for us to talk then, just two short weeks ago, and I remembered the way it felt to have her in my arms, whispering to me that she’d never felt more alive and that she loved me.

  “I promise I wouldn’t do that again,” I said.

  “I know.” She bit her lip. She met my gaze with her own. “It’s just that everything feels... different now.”

  “Yeah.” I knew what she meant. We were open with each other before. We were connected. And now there was a big barrier. And I wasn’t sure how to get over it.

  She shrugged. “Maybe talking about it really isn’t going to make any difference.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt. “Yeah, I don’t know what to say.” I opened the car door.

  “Um, give Chance a hug for me,” she said.

  “You’re not coming in?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to go check out the Nephilim we brought in,” she said. “I’m just going to pop over to headquarters for a few hours. Jude and I usually do a little orientation before we release a newbie back into his life.”

  Jude. Why was it bothering me that she was spending so much time with my little brother? When she and I were fucking like bunnies, I didn’t care. But now... “Okay.” I got out of the car.

  “You’re mad.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  She rubbed her face. “Jason, what day did you want me to do dinner with you and Chance?”

  “Tuesdays,” I said. “Which was yesterday. Chance is going to be with Mina tonight.”

  “Oh.” Her face fell. “Well, next Tuesday then. I promise.”

  “Okay.” I shut the car door. I watched her pull out of the driveway. Fuck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ~azazel~

  I sipped at my coffee. It was early morning, and Boone’s text had woken me up only about a half an hour earlier. Now, I was sitting in the main meeting room at headquarters, wishing I was still in bed.

  Our headquarters used to be the home base of the group of vampires that had kept us prisoner. But we’d killed all of them and freed all their captives, and now we had run of the place. The place was pretty big since a bunch of people used to live there, and it had two whole floors of apartments. That meant that whenever I needed to, I could crash here, something I’d been doing more and more often recently. Things between Jason and me were weird and awkward, and that was why I wasn’t rushing home to share his bed. In fact, I’d stayed over at headquarters the night before.

  Jude basically lived here. He was drinking coffee too. His hair was mussed. He obviously hadn’t bothered with a shower before coming upstairs to the meeting room. At least he was dressed. I could see his entire outfit through the glass table—jeans and a Fallout Boy t-shirt.

  “You like Fallout Boy?” I raised an eyebrow.

  Jude shrugged. “Shut up.” He looked a lot like his brother, but he and Jason were not buddy-buddy. They were civil to each other, and I figured that was about as good as it was going to get. They’d tried to kill each other in the past, so it was an improvement, at any rate.

  Boone strode into the meeting room. “Morning guys.”

  I made a face. “It’s too early.”

  “Just because you’re a vampire doesn’t mean that you can’t get out of bed before noon,” said Boone. He went to the head of the table.

  “Don’t call her that,” said Jude. “She’s not like the things we kill.”

  “Sorry.” Boone booted up the laptop at the head of the table.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” I said. Boone and Grace were both minors, and we’d enrolled them in the local high school despite their protests.

  “This was more important,” said Boone.

  “Boone, your education is important,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “No one I know actually uses anything they learned in high school.”

  “He’s go
t a point,” said Jude. “I didn’t finish high school. I’m fine.”

  I glared at him. “It’s the law that you have to go to school,” I told Boone. “And besides, Grace looks up to you. You have to be a good influence on her and model proper behavior.” I looked around. “Where is Grace, anyway?”

  “At school,” said Boone. “I didn’t tell her about this one.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well...”

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” sighed Boone.

  “Why didn’t you tell Grace?” asked Jude.

  “Yeah, she did an awesome job last week with the ambulance thing,” I said. “You should have seen the way she took that doctor down. No hesitation whatsoever. Awesome aim. I was so proud.”

  “No, see, you shouldn’t be proud,” said Boone. “She’s too young for this stuff, and I don’t like it when she’s out there. She could get hurt.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. So it’s more that you don’t want your girlfriend to be better with a gun than you are.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” said Boone. “No matter how much you still seem to want to push us together.”

  “She’s not?” I said.

  “She’s not,” said Jude. “Don’t you pay attention?”

  “I thought you guys were going on dates,” I said.

  “No,” said Boone, “we were not. You were sending us out to buy supplies and telling us to get dinner afterwards. That was all.”

  “Oh.” I winked at him. “Well, I’m still pulling for you crazy kids.”

  “She’s too young for me,” said Boone. “Stop trying to set us up.”

  I grinned. I thought Boone and Grace were adorable. They were obviously meant for each other. Boone was just being stubborn.

  “I mean it, Azazel,” said Boone.

  “So, you’re protective of her because you don’t like her.”

  “Hey, I like her. As a friend.” Boone sighed. “Let’s drop this, okay?” He switched on the LCD projector that was connected to his laptop.

  A screen in front of us came to life, showing a picture of a guy in sunglasses and tight jeans. His hair was spiky, with streaks of blue.

  “This is Dwayne Cryer,” said Boone. “He’s twenty years old, a student at a community college studying computer science, and he sells Nephilim blood on the side.”

  “He’s a kid?” said Jude. “We’re going in to kill him?”

  “He’s involved,” said Boone. “But actually, I wanted you guys to capture him. So that we can question him.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Question him? Why?”

  “Well, so far, I’ve figured out that he’s got this sort of business going on in the area, but I don’t know where he’s getting his product. I told you that I have a theory that these guys are getting stuff from one big supplier. It’s this giant blood ring, and everyone’s interconnected.”

  “Right, because they’ve taken over the protocol that Bartholomew and the others used to use,” said Jude. “So, we snatch this guy and interrogate him.”

  “Bring him back here?” I said. “That seems like a security breach.”

  “I was thinking a van,” said Boone. “There’s one in the garage. You guys contain him and question him, then drop him right back in his old neighborhood.”

  “It could work,” said Jude.

  “I’m in,” I said. “So where are we off to?”

  “Little bit of a drive,” said Boone. “Pennsylvania.”

  * * *

  ~jason~

  “You’re going where?” I said into the receiver of my phone. I was sprawled out on our bed in our room, my laptop open in front of me. Azazel was calling to tell me she wouldn’t be home tonight. Again.

  “Pennsylvania,” said Azazel. “It should only be for the night.”

  “The night,” I repeated. “So, you’re going to be gone overnight with Jude?”

  A sigh. “Jason, I thought we were over this jealousy stuff.”

  “Yeah.” She wasn’t interested in Jude. She wasn’t interested in Jude. “We are. I was making sure I had it straight.”

  “You know, you could come with us if you wanted,” she said. “We’re going to be interrogating this guy, and we could probably use you. It’s not even a kill mission.”

  I thought about it for a minute. I could help her. I knew I’d be good at the kind of stuff she did. I’d spent my youth being trained to do that kind of work by a secret society. They’d taught me strategy, tactics, and how to shoot a gun amongst other things. Most of Azazel’s skills she’d learned from me. She thought I was wasting myself. I clearly had the ability to help them take down vampires. “You’re not killing him, huh?”

  “We might have to rough him up a little bit, but no, not at all.”

  Rough him up... I thought about Jude in a basement in the school in Italy. His nose was bleeding. I was hitting him. He wouldn’t talk. “Um, no. I better not.”

  “I figured you’d say that,” she said. “Okay, baby, well, I’ll be home soon. And I haven’t forgotten Tuesday.”

  “Good, Chance and I are looking forward to it.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  We hung up, and I went back to the computer.

  Where I was scrolling through an escort service site. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there. I’d been coming to the website for months now, almost since we woke up from the coma six months ago. I’d even sorted out my favorite girls.

  I peered at their pictures now. The girls all kind of looked alike. They were redheads, well-endowed. They all kind of looked like Lilith if I was honest with myself.

  Lilith had been Azazel’s best friend when I first met her. She was promiscuous and confident, and she’d spent most of her time flirting with me every time I’d been around her.

  I hadn’t ever really been attracted to Lilith—okay, that’s a lie. I found Lilith attractive, but it wasn’t like I actually wanted to be with Lilith. Not to date, not even to fuck. It wasn’t like I didn’t have chances to do that if I wanted. She and I hung out a lot when we all lived in Florida. We were often alone in the apartment while Azazel was out of the house because she was working (with Jude, just like she was right now), and Lilith wasn’t exactly subtle. But I never tried anything with her.

  Well, okay, there might have been this one time when she tried to get me to touch her. But I didn’t do it. Which was a good thing, because, apparently, Azazel had been eavesdropping on us the entire time.

  I didn’t want Lilith. She was too forward, too sex-crazed.

  When I was growing up, I was raised by a bunch of celibate men, and they taught me that all women wanted to seduce men and force them to do what they wanted. They taught me that women used sex as a weapon to steal men’s power.

  It was bullshit. I didn’t believe it, even then.

  But Lilith fit the bill somehow. She was exactly that kind of slutty siren. Giving in to her seemed like it would mean giving up my own power. And that was why, I guessed, I had to show her that she didn’t have any power over me. I had to show her that, over and over and over and over...

  I pushed my laptop away, but not far enough. I could still see the girls in their barely-there outfits.

  Escorts.

  You paid them, and they came to you, and you got to do whatever you wanted with them.

  It was appealing.

  I didn’t want to fuck them. No more than I really wanted to fuck the concubines I kept in Jasontown. When I was the head of my own little cult, I did have sex with the concubines occasionally, but only because I had itches to scratch. But usually, I just... did things to them. I liked to humiliate them in whatever ways I could devise. Sometimes, I liked to hurt them.

  Azazel’s face swam in front of me, her eyes bulging, my thumbs digging into the soft flesh of her neck—

  It was never supposed to be like that with her.

  Never.

  I dragged a hand over my face. I thought I’d beaten this. I
’d spent five years hiding out, cutting myself to punish myself for my past transgressions, to quell any urges I got. I thought I could keep myself under control.

  But ever since we’d woken up from the coma, things had been different. Sometimes I remembered things, little bits of a long, long dream I’d had when I was there. Azazel’s angry voice. I found the cabin. The dead girls. All redheads, of course. That’s your favorite flavor.

  We weren’t supposed to wake up. We weren’t ever supposed to wake up.

  Something bad was going to happen because we woke up. We were out of control, and we were losing each other. I couldn’t believe that I’d hurt her. That I’d strangled her in our bed. And that it had turned me on.

  Now she didn’t want to be near me, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Our time had already been divided, because she spent most of her time working with the others on catching vampires, and I avoided the whole thing like the plague, but it hadn’t mattered because we’d been so connected. But we’d only been connected by sex. Now, we had nothing.

  And I was looking at escorts.

  I wasn’t going to call any of these girls. I promised myself that wouldn’t happen. This was only a fantasy. I looked at them, and I thought about what I might do with them if I had them. How I might make them beg me to stop. How I might make them assure me that they didn’t have any power over me.

  I laughed bitterly.

  But they did have power over me. My obsession to put them in their place was power in itself. And it was twisted and disturbing and...

  If I knew these things were wrong, and I hated them about myself, why couldn’t I stop doing them?

  I took a deep breath. “I’m not doing them,” I said out loud. “I’m thinking about them. I’m fantasizing about them. But that’s not the same thing. I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  The door to the bedroom opened up. “Who are you talking to, Daddy?”

  I slammed the computer shut and sat up. “No one. I was talking to myself.”

  Chance pushed the door open. He gave me a mischievous smile. “Doesn’t that mean you’re crazy?”