“Who’s injured?” the man said dispassionately, tossing a T-shirt to Alaric without giving him more than a cursory, uncaring look. Like a storm cloud, he moved farther into the room, dark, angry. Would he bring a soft rain or a violent squall?
“Her name is Z,” Eve offered. This was the guy Alaric had thought would help? Hopefully what he lacked in personality he made up in healing skills. She gestured toward Z, encouraging him to do whatever it was he was supposed to do, like make Z feel better and maybe not be a grumpy butt.
Except the man didn’t bother to glance at Z. Instead he stared at Eve intently. Refusing to be quelled, she returned the favor. She knew how to deal with dicks. You either got them off or stood your ground until they shriveled up and went away.
Gray shirt, black pants, black boots. Above one ear a swath of gray striped through otherwise thick, dark hair. Blue eyes, like Alaric’s. No, not like Alaric’s, whose eyes twinkled, laughed, practically glowed. This man’s eyes were shadowed. Haunted. Seeming more dead than alive.
Finally he dragged his gaze from hers and looked toward the sofa where Z rested, Alaric’s partner seated next to her. In this staring contest, Eve had won again, thank you very much.
Now wearing the shirt, Alaric stepped close to Eve’s side. “Thank you, brother.”
Brother? Ouch. No love lost in this family. How Alaric had said it with kindness and without an ounce of sarcasm, Eve had no idea.
Alaric’s brother glared at him, a snarl lifting his lip. “I’m not your delivery service. If you need something, get it yourself. What is with you? So helpless you can’t do anything? Next time, I’m not coming. Not for you.”
“This is for Z,” Eve reminded, hoping to shed some sunlight on this brewing storm.
With one final, angry glance at Alaric, his brother stepped toward Z.
“That’s your brother?” Eve whispered to Alaric, shaking her head at the retreating back of Alaric’s sibling. “I see who got all the charm in the family.”
“Yeah,” he said on a harsh exhale. “He’s great, isn’t he? Only takes a couple thousand years to get used to.”
Two millennia? Screw that. Who would want to hang around that jerkface for so long? Her lives were too short.
Chapter 6
If one more person put their hands on Z, she was going to punch them in the throat. At least then the touching would be by her choice and not require getting up off the sofa. With the pain emanating from her gut and head, she was pretty sure standing wasn’t an option.
When the new guy, all crabby and pissed, stormed into the house, dumped all over Eve and the strongman, and then stalked toward her, Z sighed. This was her help? Well, he could help himself right back out of here. She’d experienced the life leaving so many people’s bodies in a morbid mishmash of ways and survived each time. Death could kiss her ass.
So could her help.
When her help gave the ghost-seeing boy-toy next to her an impatient move look, he jumped to his feet. Kinda cute that he’d asked her out for a drink. Too bad he was a stick in the mud, trying to tread water in quicksand. Maybe she’d throw him a life preserver. Though it was fun watching him flail too.
“Really glad you’re here, man,” he said eagerly. “She’s—”
“She needs help,” her helper noted not so helpfully, sounding more asshole than Good Samaritan. “I can see that.”
Her boy-toy slapped a hand on her grumpy helper’s shoulder. Huh. He wasn’t cowed by him. That was kinda hot. Maybe she’d have a drink with him after all. Maaayyybe.
“This is Alaric’s brother, Cas,” ghost boy offered, because apparently he had good manners and introduced others, but couldn’t remember to give his own name. “He can do some amazing things. He’ll take care of you.” He gave Z a two-fingered salute goodbye before joining Eve and the strongman on the other side of the room.
“Amazing, huh?” she said, laying on the doubt thick and heavy.
“What hurts?”
Z wasn’t interested in giving this irritable guy—Cas—the time of day, let alone a laundry list of her ailments, but of course this was when her body decided to be a jackass and cough. Hard. Making her world gray around the edges. A fresh mist of blood spotted her hand, which she hid by wrapping it around her container of alcoholic bliss and taking another drink.
“I’m fine.” Fuck if she was going to be a whiny baby about her owies just because this wasn’t her everyday reaction to dying other people’s deaths. Sympathy and platitudes didn’t earn her a paycheck, and only one of those kept her flask full of cheap, vile, body-warming booze.
Cas was still standing over her like a big, towering dick. What, did he think he’d glower her into submission? Not gonna happen. She pushed to her feet, hiding the agony flaring in her gut that made her think, okay, maybe this was borderline serious, which escalated quickly to holy-shit ouch when super-dickface Cas put a hand on her stomach—no fucking touching!—and forced her down until her ass, back and head smacked into the couch.
“Owwww. What the hell?” Throb. Burn. Misery. Dick!
“You can either help me help you, or I have to do it my way.” Like a giant, domineering asshole, he crossed his arms over his chest. “Obviously, the problem’s on the inside.”
No shit, Sherlock. “Your help might kill me.”
“Fine, suit yourself. You wanna die, go ahead.”
Sadly, that was starting to feel like a real possibility. Because, yeah, she’d experienced deaths that began this way. She’d prefer not to live it out in her own life—death—whatever.
“You’re a dick, you know that?” Just ’cause she might be dying, didn’t mean she was gonna lay back and take it, so she shoved his dickness down his throat like a bad blow job instead.
“I don’t have to be here. I don’t have to do this.” His voice lowered. “If you can just tell me what’s going on, I can make this easier for both of us.”
He’d actually sounded a teensy bit compassionate there. Maybe calling him on his dickitude had worked.
“It’s not usually like this,” she offered, still on guard. “I touch a dead body, I feel the death, I’m a little tired, I move on.”
He knelt on the floor in front of her.
“This death was different.” She shrugged, flinching at the rippling pain even that small action brought. “Some serious dark magic or something for me to side effect like this. I feel like my insides have been scrambled.”
“Scrambled. Great.” Could he sound any less enthused? Maybe it wasn’t a smart idea to put her life in his hands. “But what hurts?”
She gestured at her stomach and her head. Might as well tell him. It wasn’t like she had other help options.
“Is that all? I’m not the kind of healer who can just look at you and fix what’s wrong. I’m still learning.”
Still learning? Ah hell. Might as well craft her obituary now. She finally died her own death… “I think so.”
One of his hands landed on her stomach, and the other was moving toward her head. She threw her arm up to block and tried to merge into the plush leather behind her. “Whoa, Grandpa. I don’t like being touched.” Okay, maybe it was a cheap shot, calling him that ’cause he had a stripe of gray hair, but c’mon. Why was everyone here so grabby?
He pulled back. Wow. Someone who actually listened. “My name is Cas. I don’t like being touched either, but I have to touch you to heal you.”
Of course. He couldn’t just heal her by looking at her with his pretty blue eyes or anything.
“What are you going to do?” Might as well be prepared.
Cas stared at her and then at his hands, like he was trying to figure something out. Or maybe he was pissed about the grandpa comment and was reconsidering the whole helping-her thing. Aw hell. Since she didn’t feel like dying today, she forced her bitch to shut up—temporarily—and looked at Cas with interest and hope and, okay, a little bit of wariness, but really, she was only capable of so much.
“Her
e…” He held out his hand, and an aqua-blue spark about the size of a tennis ball unfurled like, well, magic from his palm. “I’m electric. This is my healing energy. You’ll feel it, but it won’t hurt.”
Okay, that was freaking badass. It writhed and shimmered over his skin, like a part of him, but not. “Can I touch it?” she asked, already reaching toward it. It was a fair question. If he was gonna zap her, she wanted to know how it felt first.
“Yes—” Before he could finish the sentence or change his mind, she layered her hand right on top of the spark ball. “It’s safe right now.” He sounded unsure, but she didn’t care because this was too damn awesome.
The spark was cool fire, a voltaic thrum and hum against her skin, reacting with and to her. Electric tendrils like octopus tentacles came from the main mass, weaving around and between her open fingers. She laughed as it buzzed over her flesh, tingling and tickling, responding to the way she moved.
Z knew what it was like to die by electrocution. This was what it was like when electricity made you feel alive.
Chapter 7
Cas kept a wary, worried eye on Z’s hand as she waved it in his healing electricity. Focusing on safely containing his energy over his palm was preferable to witnessing anything happening on the other side of the room.
How could they? That woman. The calamity that was Alaric.
The wicked, unfortunately inevitable, vainglorious karmic payback unnerved Cas. Yet somehow he was supposed to give of himself when he had nothing left.
Spark tendrils flew in every direction, and by the look of wonder on Z’s face, she was enjoying how they felt. She didn’t know how hazardous that jagged little orb could be, though.
Pushing the air out of his lungs slowly, struggling against the river of uncertainty raging within, he forced calmness through his body.
“It’s warm.” Z smiled. “Tingly. Like when your hand falls asleep and you get pins and needles, but this doesn’t hurt.”
“If I ever tell you to get away from it, just do it, or it will hurt you and I won’t be able to stop it.” Cas couldn’t bring himself to tell the full truth—that he could kill her in an instant. As the centuries progressed and his calming practice strengthened, he got closer to maintaining control of his energy, but it was still unpredictable and extremely dangerous.
Flashes of his light reflected in her brown eyes as she nodded. She understood the gravity of the situation and surprisingly wasn’t afraid. Good. He didn’t want to scare her off. Since he’d shown her the spark, she’d stopped fighting him and calling him names. Pain strained her features, but she was smiling. Why? How? There wasn’t anything to be happy about here.
She was so enthralled though, and it made him uneasy. “So...are you...ready to feel better?” He hated watching his voltage churn and sputter, a volcano on the verge of eruption.
“I already do. Well, a little bit.” She lifted her gaze from his hand to his face, looking at him with…interest? Trust? Hope? He didn’t know what to do with that. “What else do you have to do?”
“Just touch you. Where it hurts. So I can make it stop.” Being touched was always traumatic for him, and apparently for her too. He’d accidentally killed a lot of people and animals with his electricity simply because they’d gotten too close to him at the wrong time. Z had a different issue, but the outcome was the same: no touching. Just don’t.
Instead of retreating, she let out a quiet breath and lifted her shirt, revealing a few inches of stomach. “Go for it.”
Z offering her naked flesh was a strange welcome, and not one he’d abuse. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Cas maintained the intensity of his healing energy as his fingertips grazed the pale softness of her abdomen. Curiously, the first brush of skin against skin lit a fire within him to help her, heal her. It’d been several decades since last he’d touched a woman so intimately. It was… This was… Almost too much. As his palm gently settled on her, she flinched, but once he sent his spark into her, she relaxed.
To balance the energy and help further, he generated a second healing spark in his other hand. Slowly, so as not to make an uncomfortable situation any worse, he pressed his palm to the side of her head, fingertips tangling in the silky hair above her ear.
“Do I need to do anything to help?” She closed her eyes as he sent his magical essence within her.
“No. I can feel what happened to you now.” He connected up to the nerve impulses in her spinal cord, drawing her agony within himself while using his energy to repair her many internal injuries. “I’ll fix the damage, take your pain. This shouldn’t take much longer.”
“I can feel it.” She opened her eyes, a small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “Like warm static electricity buzzing inside.”
“I wish it were like that all the time.” Instead it was an incessant reminder of his mistakes, a painful reality that had destroyed so much, the ugliness that had kept him alive unendurably longer than should have been possible. Never a comfort. Always a tragedy. And beyond his full control.
Z’s gaze shifted to his hair, studying his hideous, unnatural stripe. “You know, some people think premature gray is sexy.”
“Yeah, well my gray is not from age. I was born this way.”
Her voice softened. “I guess some people would say you were always sexy then.”
He reeled a little at the sweet sentiment. He’d only been sexy to one woman, and that was a long time ago. So why had Z’s words made him feel lighter?
“No. Just you.” He returned her smile with a small one of his own. It felt unfamiliar. Strange. Good.
“I didn’t say it was me.” She looked uncomfortable, her gaze shifting away from him, like she was already planning an escape.
“Oh.” That hurt more than it should have. Now he was left to choke on the awkward silence. Humiliation. All-around embarrassing disaster.
He took solace in knowing he was helping Z, healing her. She would be good as new and live to fight another day. Her goth friend would be pleased.
And Alaric could go to hell.
Chapter 8
Alaric watched in wonder the scene unfolding on the other side of the living room on the couch. Z had gone from frowning and “No touching” to an unencumbered lightness and laughing as she waved her fingers through Cas’s healing energy before allowing Cas to lay hands on her to cure her ills. In only a couple minutes, she’d blasted through Cas’s defensive, asshole façade and discovered the good in his electricity.
Cas had stayed holed up for centuries because he thought he was too dangerous to live, even though he could never die. He’d chosen to push everyone away by being mean, hateful, denying himself and the world of a remarkable, good, loving man, a man Cas didn’t believe existed.
Alaric always pointed out the positives of Cas’s abilities, but his brother refused to see them and tried to prove otherwise by vilifying Alaric at every opportunity. Maybe Cas would believe Z and her unabashed thrill. Maybe he’d smile again.
What an odd world it would be if Cas took to Z like Jax had. Both socially inept in different ways. Both really in need of someone who would challenge them and love them equally, make them see past the limited life roles they’d placed on themselves. Maybe this cute punk girl with a gritty exterior who straddled the line between life and death would be a sweet kick in the ass for both Jax and Cas.
“This is bigger than Trevor, isn’t it?” Eve interrupted his curious musings with serious talk, putting a delicate, ring-and-chains-clad hand on his forearm and staring up at him with investigative interest. Once he shifted his gaze back to her, he couldn’t remember why he’d ever looked away. She was…amazing. Everything. “You said you drank a vial of blood. Trevor’s blood. Which means you were sent to kill Trevor. I know he wasn’t a saint, but still, I want to know why my friend was marked for death.”
He put his hand over hers, wishing he had an answer for her, that he could give her peace of mind and help her make sense of T
revor’s death. “I’m not briefed on the whos and whys. If I’d found him alive, I wouldn’t have killed him. I wouldn’t’ve had to. He was part of something important, and it must’ve gone sideways, so I’ve been triggered to clean up the mess.” That was par for the course. He was almost always a last resort, his special skill set rarely called upon for simple target removals that could be expertly handled by several of Slade’s other agents. The blood curse kept him in pursuit no matter how long it took. His immortality made sure the job got done.
“…We’re on it.” Hanging up his phone and returning it to his pocket, Jax walked up to Alaric. “I need to talk to you.” He side-eyed Eve, then emphasized, “Alone.”
Alaric bit back a smile, since he didn’t have to look at Eve to know that wasn’t going to fly.
Eve forced herself between Alaric and Jax. “If this is about who killed Trevor, I need to know too.”
Jax stared at her uncompromisingly. Had the kid ever broken a rule in his life?
“C’mon, man, they were friends.” Not that Eve needed Alaric to fight her battles, but there was no reason to turn this into an extended game of tug-of-war either. They had a murderer to catch. All three of them could agree on that.
If Jax’s jaw got any tighter, he wouldn’t be able to talk. “He was murdered. By who, we don’t know.” So Jax could stretch a rule on occasion. It was a start. Maybe Alaric was finally rubbing off on him.
Dropping Eve in favor of Alaric, Jax continued with, “We need to go.” He didn’t say why or where, though, which meant Jax had probably learned something more about the case during that phone call. Something ugly.
“I’m going too.” Of course Eve was coming.
Electric Anomaly (Necrolectric Book 3) Page 3
