"But can you produce it fast enough?" Niko asked, and laughed again as my blood ran cold. He hung up, and I sat there listening to the dial tone while cold sweat gathered on my skin.
I'm putting the phone back on the hook as Arsen leaves the bathroom, towel around his hips and another drying his hair.
"Did someone call?" he asks. I nod, my mouth a little dry.
"Niko."
Arsen tenses for a moment, then grins.
"Good," he says.
"In what universe is that asshole knowing where we're sleeping a good thing?" I ask.
"Now we don't have to track him down," Arsen says. "The bastard will come to us. And I'll tear him apart."
His smile is savage and sends an odd rush of heat through me. Before I can say anything their familiar sound of Arsen's ring tone echoes from the bathroom. He hurries to retrieve his cell phone from his pants.
"Is it him again?" I ask, worried. Arsen shakes his head.
"It's a friend from the compound," he replies, and accepts the call. "What's up?"
I can dimly hear the voice on the other end, which greets him with restrained warmth.
"Can you talk? It's about your sister."
I see the instant tension in Arsen's entire body.
"Yeah, hang on," he says hoarsely and takes the phone out onto the balcony, closing the sliding glass door behind him.
I watch him pace the narrow balcony, face pale and lined, waiting nervously for the news. At last he hangs up and comes back inside, sitting down on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands.
"What is it?" I ask nervously.
"It's my sister," he replies, and for a moment I'm certain she's gone. The cure didn't work or the virus had already progressed too far or- But then Arsen drags his hands down his face and I see his smile and the tears of happiness in his eyes. "She's awake. She's going to be fine."
"Arsen, that's amazing!" I shout, forgetting myself for a moment in relief and joy for him. I grab him and kiss him hard in celebration, forgetting the earlier tension. To my delight, he kisses me back. He stands from the bed, picking me up in the process to spin around, laughing against my mouth. I can't stop kissing him, the relief of just that little bit of good news a much-needed balm for all the stupid shit that's been happening lately. His warm mouth devours me, tongue sliding against my own, teeth pressing against my lip. Heat rises in me and his kisses grow slower and more lingering, his hands sliding down to my hips. He pulls my hips against his and I feel him through the thin towel, my pulse jumping and my sex tingling with interest. But as his mouth moves to my throat I laugh and stop him.
"Wait," I insist. "I still smell like river water. Let me shower first."
He smiles at me, eyes heated.
"Why not both?"
We don't even wait for the water to warm up before he presses me to the shower wall, having stripped off my wet clothes as fast as vampirically possible. He showers kisses and small bites over my throat as cool water rushes over us, rinsing away the evidence of the long, terrible day. Ash and river water swirl away down the drain as he cups my wet breasts, tongue rolling over my nipples, the bare graze of his teeth making them stand flushed and full.
I bite my lip, leaning back against the slick tile, but my impatient hands wander down to his half hard cock, squeezing just hard enough to hear him inhale sharply, hips thrusting into my slowly stroking hand.
Not one to be outdone, he kisses me again as his warm fingers slip down between my lips, thumb rolling in slow circles over my clit as he strokes my entrance, not quite pressing in, teasing me. I try to choke back my moans, knowing it will make him only work harder to hear them, and stoke him with both hands, teasing his head, tracing the veins, stroking the sensitive frenulum until he shivers, whispering my name against my lips.
He kisses me harder, lips sliding on wet skin and tasting only of clean water. His fingers curling inside me at last, enhancing the pulses of pleasure from my clit at the slow relentless grind of his thumb. He spreads my slick up through my lips, takes my whole vulva in his hand, heel of his palm still rocking against my clit as he squeezes me, spreads my lips, strokes the very edges of my need. Playing with me, exploring, taking note of the things that make me bite back gasps and press into his hands.
"Please," I beg at last, half because I know he loves hearing me beg. "Give it to me."
I half expect him to keep teasing me, but I think he's as desperate as I am. He grabs me under the thighs and lifts. I brace myself against the slick tile wall, grabbing the shower head for stability, as he spreads my legs wide and take a moment just to admire the view, water coursing down my body and my sex wide open, flushed and soft and desperate for him.
"/Please," I insist, only partly because I don't know how long I can hold this position.
He doesn't make me wait any longer. I hold my breath as I feel the hot head of his cock against me, sliding through my wet folds, and finally pressing in, slow and easy, aided by the ample lubrication of the shower. I let out a long low groan as he fills me, thick cock spreading me open, sending shivers of pleasure through my entire body. It's easy to underestimate how good he feels inside me any time we're not fucking. When I'm clear headed I always seem to think there's no way it could possibly feel that good. But God it does.
One hand grips my ass, holding me up, taking some of the strain off my taught thighs squeezing his waist. His other hand supports my hip and keeps a thumb on my clit. As he begins to move, he strokes me in time with his thrusts, slow and deep at first, then faster, harder, as pleasure builds rapidly within both of us. The slap of wet skin echoes in the tile bathroom. Water sluices down our bodies and runs over the place where we're joined, adding another layer of stimulation. My back hurts from pressing into the wall and my arms and legs are shaking with the strain and I don't care. The discomfort just adds to the edge of my desperate need to come. To feel him come.
"Sasha," he growls, ramming me harder, deeper, my skin squeaking against the tile as every thrust shakes my entire body. He's close.
"Inside," I tell him, my voice husky with need. It's an order, not a request, punctuated by my legs tightening around him. He groans, his hands squeezing me tight, trying to hold off just a little longer. I feel him pulse within me and I bite my lip in anticipation, squeezing around him. He chokes out a curse and buries himself within me as deeply as he can. I feel the warm rush, the additional little bit of fullness as every crevice within me not filled by his cock is flooded with seed. It's a sensation that makes me shake with pleasure. He keeps going, fucking me through his own orgasm, rubbing my clit fast and hard, until the pleasure overwhelms me and I cry out, walls rippling around his cock as every muscle in my body tenses and then relaxes at once. Pleasure floods through me, my vision blanking for a moment.
Slowly, he pulls out, cock dripping, and sets me down on my shaking legs. I release my white-knuckle grip on the shower head, which is bent and may never be the same, and lean against the wall to catch my breath. Arsen kisses me, slow and gentle, not demanding anything. But then he chuckles and my breath catches as his fingers explore my sex again, feeling the wetness of his own seed. He spreads my lips to appreciate the sight of his come dripping from me for a moment, then rubs it into my lips, spreading it messily over me. His come slick fingers graze my oversensitive clit and I shiver, excitement already stirring in my belly again.
"Looks like you still have some cleaning up to do," he says with a grin, fingers pressing into me. "We might be in here a while."
And what kind of idiot would I be if I said no to an offer like that?
Eventually, clean and deliciously expended, we fall naked into bed, legs tangled, skin to skin. It should be an incredibly restful sleep. But dreams find me, even curled up against Arsen's chest. It's vague, just ever shifting glimpses. An apple orchard, trees stretching as far as the eye can see, but every apple I pick is full of worms. Rats fleeing a plague ship, carrying the disease with them, one for every house in the city. A ma
n on fire, stumbling into a crowd, lighting the clothes of everyone around him, who panic and flail, spreading gas, flinging napalm, until the fire has spread to the entire crowd and keeps going, filling the air with screams and the smell of burning meat.
I wake, shaking with horror the images still lingering in my vision, and it wakes Arsen, who looks around for danger, then holds me close, blinking in confusion, until I stop hyperventilating long enough to speak.
"He's going to infect everyone," I say, the truth rising out of the weird metaphor of my dream like a monster out of the mist. "Niko is going to spread the virus to every human on Earth."
Chapter 13
Around sunset, we pull up to an old shotgun house on the outskirts of Seattle. It's an old residential neighborhood, run down and neglected despite its historic significance. Some of these houses probably date back to not long after the city's founding in the 1850's. It's humid but not hot, somewhere uncomfortable on the edge of rain. Washington, as a state, is one of the greenest places I've ever seen. It all feels thick with life the minute you get clear of the urban density.
An older woman with straw colored hair is leaning on the porch railing smoking when we pull up, and stubs out her cigarette to slip back inside. By the time we climb out of the car, squinting at the fading red sun, Jackson is hurrying down the front steps to greet us.
"You made it here in good time," he says, patting Arsen's good shoulder. I'm surprised how much their relationship has improved over the time we've been working together. They're almost friends now, or at least respectful. "How's the injury?"
"Almost healed up," Arsen assures him. "Nothing to worry about."
"Everyone's set up inside," Jackson says, ushering us towards the house, glancing up and down the street in search of anyone watching. "Things are a bit... tense."
"The other coven leaders already here?" I assume, looking at the other cars parked on the street in front of the house. Plain black vehicles that, while not ostentatious, are still obviously new model luxuries. At least they tried to be discreet. Jackson nods, jaw tight. He can't be having a great evening wrangling a bunch of fussy vampire aristocrats in the same house with a loosely allied band of professional vampire hunters.
We head inside and I'm caught off guard the minute we walk through the door. It looks like the NSA is camped out in the dated 70's living room. There's a series of folding tables set up against one wall with three computers. Three of Jackson's people are working there, looking over surveillance footage, conversation transcripts, and complicated data I can't determine the purpose of. One person is sitting in an old wingback that probably came with the house next to the old landline phone, which is ringing off the hook every time they set it down. They're also juggling a handful of burner cells, relaying whatever information they're receiving to the people at the computers. Several more people are crowded around the coffee table, where a map has been spread out, heavily marked in red.
The only vampires in the room, representatives from Istria and Kresova, stand off to one corner, looking sour. Most of the hunters look like they're doing their best to ignore them. But more than a few are casting undisguised dirty looks in the vampire's direction.
There were two groups, an entourage of four or five from each coven, keeping their distance from each other as well as the hunters. I sighed. That mistrust was going to make things difficult. The covens had never worked well together. Let alone with hunters.
But as we enter and it becomes clear things are getting started Jackson shepherds us and some of his hunters towards the dining room. The coven vamps reluctantly follow. For a moment I think this all might fall apart over a seating dispute when a hunter and a Kresova vamp lock eyes over the chair nearest the door, but Jackson smoothly gets between them before anything can happen, shooing the hunter off to a spot near the window. Once we're all settled he begins, introducing the other vampires first as Lady Ghenna of the Istria and Duke Orsino of the Kresova.
"And of course you know Arsen and Sasha." He greets us with a nod for the benefit of the assembled. "You remember Rhett." He indicates the skinny Louisiana hunter we'd met when we chased Niko out of the street part. "He knows most of the hunters and the vampire activity out of the South and the Gulf Coast. Minnie here manages the mid-west." He gestured to the blond woman we'd seen on the porch when we pulled up. She's probably in her late forties, brown limbs corded with lean muscle, face lined with an excess of worries. A scar curves up from her lip towards her nose. She dresses in worn leather and eyes everyone at the table with equal suspicion. I'm simultaneously wary of her and kind of want to be her. She looks like she could kick the ass of anyone at this table and come back for seconds. "Zoe is representing the East Coast and our support division."
He gestures finally to a young black woman sitting near Minnie, who I almost missed entirely. She's extremely petite, probably only 5'5" counting the poof of her high natural ponytail. She's squinting at an iphone through the thin silver frames of her glasses, and laughs a little at Jackson's introduction without looking up.
"I mean, it's a bit disingenuous to call us a division just yet," she says, still scrolling through something on her phone. "We're more like a bunch of disparate sidekicks who've just finally started networking."
"Every hunter needs somebody handling the back end of things," Jackson explains. "Tracking down sightings, handling supplies and finances, organizing surveillance-"
"And managing territorial disputes," Zoe interrupts, eyes still on her phone. "I swear that's half the job. There's always some big dick hunter deciding he's got the entire PNW handled on his own and giving himself a hernia because someone dared to track a wendigo across his turf."
"Amateurs," Minnie growls. "Dumbasses like that never last."
"Which is why it's a good thing y'all are finally organizing," Jackson put in. "Having a more solid structure of contacts will do all of a lot of good. It'll make things safer for you all as well." He nods to me and Arsen, then the other coven leaders. "Since we'll be able to put the word out about who doesn't belong on the hit list and keep a lid on any newbie hunters trying to kill anything nonhuman he comes across."
"Same thing for our side," I agree. "When new vamps decide to act stupid you can capture instead of kill, turn them over to us, and let us handle our own."
"If they've killed humans I'm not capturing shit," Minnie says with cold finality.
"I'm just saying," I try to stay diplomatic, knowing what she's probably seen in her career and that I myself wouldn't be so keen to forgive murder not that long ago. "We've both got inexperienced idiots endangering themselves. It's part of the territory for all of us. Working together we can make sure a lot less of those idiots end up dead."
"It's something to debate later," Jackson said. "Once Niko and the virus are dealt with."
"If this alliance lasts that long," Duke Orsino interrupts. "No one asked us if we wanted to team up with a group of vigilantes who've made a profession out of murdering us."
"You're here, aren't you?" Arsen says sharply.
"For the sake of protecting my coven and our race from the virus," He replies, voice icy. "I have no intention of working with these butchers any longer than absolutely necessary."
"Same to you, mosquito," Minnie adds, her stare like steel.
"That's enough," Jackson says loudly. "We'll worry about all that once the virus is dealt with. It's a danger to everyone. If we can't put aside our shit to deal with it, it's going to destroy us."
The table falls silent, like scolded children. Jackson sighs.
"Zoe," he turns to the young woman again. "Give everyone the breakdown."
Zoe finally puts away her phone and reaches beside her seat, pulling out the map they were looking at in the other room and rolling it out on the table.
"This is a satellite map of the US," she explains. "We've had reports of isolated breakouts of the virus in Europe and Asia, but this appears to be where Niko is starting his plague. The red marks are c
onfirmed outbreaks among vampire populations. The blue are infected human populations."
I felt a flutter of true fear looking at that map. The east coast already crawled with red, and there were blue points all over the map, clustered around population centers.
"As you can see, it's already got a pretty decent reach," Zoe continues. "It transmits like any virus, and through vampire bites. A vamp gets infected, bites a few more people before he becomes symptomatic, anyone he bit and didn't kill is now infected as well. And once the vamp succumbs to the virus and turns feral he'll be biting anything that holds still long enough, greatly increasing spread of infection. Starting in the east coast was unlucky for us as well. This area is a hub for travel. Once it got into the airports here it started popping up everywhere."
"Have the humans started noticing yet?" I asked. "Honestly, the CDC could do a lot to slow this thing down."
"They're starting to pick up on it," Zoe confirmed. "The virus isn't usually fatal to humans- it presents with mild flu like symptoms- but it can be deadly to anyone with a weakened immune system. We're seeing humans with elevated risk factors- Infants, old people, people with auto immune disorders, people recovering from surgery- dropping like flies in the areas with high infected density. But it doesn't respond to the usual flu treatments and with how mild it is in people who aren't immune compromised the CDC response is likely to move pretty slowly. Now, that could be fine- the virus dies off on its own in healthy humans after three to four weeks. There's an unusually high rate of reinfection, but with time and CDC intervention it could be wiped out in a couple of years. The only problem is-"
"Is Niko planning to spread it deliberately," I finish for her, my mouth a grim line.
"Exactly," Zoe confirms. "So our plan has three factors. One, getting the vampire population into quarantine, since feral infected vamps are the most dangerous and unpredictable disease vector. Two, getting the CDC to move faster on recognizing the virus as a potentially dangerous epidemic so we can slow spread among the humans as much as possible. And three, preventing Niko from intentionally seeding the infection."
Girl, Immortal (Girl, Vampire Book 3) Page 10
