A mutter ran through the crowd as the fighting abruptly ceased. “It's Raven,” someone murmured.
"He doesn't look all that bad-ass to me,” someone else grunted. “That's the big, bad boogieman?"
Raven caught out the speaker with a razor glare, shrugged, and then shot him in the knee. The pistol report echoed through sudden silence as the mouthy vampire clutched his ruined leg. “Hurts, don't it?"
"Shit! You crazy sonofabitch!"
Raven stepped back, favoring them with a frigid smile. “Yep. I'm a crazy sonofabitch. And I'm not here to play games. I want to know what all this is about. Without anybody trying to bullshit me or give me any more grief."
"It's about territory,” one of the vamps standing with the wounded one said. “Vamp Town is ours."
"Ours as in whose?” Raven asked, eyes narrowing.
"Ours as in ours,” spoke a female voice from the crowd. A tall, slim coffee-colored woman with kinky black hair to the shoulders stepped out of the shadows. “How large a population of vampires do you think the Puget Sound can support?"
The question gave him pause. He hadn't thought about it before, though he probably should have. “And your objection is—what?"
"You may be dangerous, and kinda cute, but you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you?” she snapped back. She drew herself up to full height—which wasn't much more than six foot, at least three inches taller than Raven, and endeavored to look down her sharp, aquiline nose at him. “Do you vampires have any sense of how quickly you can strain the resources of the area without risking the creation of a whole bunch more vampires?"
He stared at her, puzzled. “So this is about territory?"
"This is about territory?” she echoed, in a mocking tone. “No—it's about overusing resources, you numbskull. It's about Tacoma and Vamp Town being a goddam Mecca for the undead from all over the world.
"First of all, we need to find a way to control the creation of new vampires, and take down the freakin’ ‘bloodsuckers welcome’ sign over Tacoma. You getting this, whiz kid?"
He squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, then opened them again. “Way too political for me,” he said over his shoulder to Ben. “This girl has got to meet your mother-in-law."
"This girl has a name, Mr. Raven. You can call me Rio."
He looked her up and down, frowning. “You're a new one, aren't you?” She smelled almost alive. One of the recently dead—within the past couple months, perhaps. But remarkably self-assured for all of that.
He wondered who'd brought her over. Despite her suggestion to the contrary, accidental infections were becoming far less common. The vampire population was getting educated—they knew that the Nosferatu virus couldn't turn a healthy donor. Only if they were already dying, or if their immune systems were already depressed, could a normal feeding cause infection. And most of them knew that much.
But she had a point, though the last thing he was going to do was admit it to her. His politics, such as they were, came out of the barrel of his Glock 33. Her concerns were more the realm of Gina Keening or the former President Lynn Mendoza. They were the ones trying to organize some sort of system to deal with the vampire community without resorting to the ‘clan’ system the rogue Gina's Jason Keening wanted to implement.
"I may be new,” she responded, “but I'm not new."
He offered her a spare smile in response. “What does that mean?"
She rolled her whiskey-brown eyes. “It means—even though I haven't been a vampire for long, I'm not stupid.” The implication was that Raven was.
He ignored the suggestion, reaching into his trench coat and drawing forth a card and a pen. He dashed off a couple of numbers and handed it over. “Give them a call. C'mon, Ben, I don't have to take this kind of abuse from her."
"Don't I know it,” his friend replied. “You've got thousands of people waiting in line to abuse you."
"Not funny,” Raven growled. “Not funny at all.” He turned and walked away, leaving the woman behind him staring at his retreating back with a baffled look on her dusky face.
"So,” Ben said, as they approached the other group, lined up about fifty feet down the road. “How are you and the Ranger doing?"
"Don't ask,” Raven replied. He stopped in front of a large, bleach-blond vampire holding a baseball bat. The vampire gave a weak grin and dropped the bat. “So what's your story?"
"Y-you're R-R-aven, aren't y-you?” he stuttered. Then it all came out in a rush. “We didn't start it, I swear. It's hard to acclimate ourselves here. I mean—the locals aren't exactly welcoming. Us outsiders have to band together or they'll just drive us out."
"Well, shit,” Ben muttered. “Didn't expect this."
"Wait until there are more lycanthropes out there, Ben, and you'll know what it's like.” Raven nodded to the blond vampire and let his voice rise to echo down Ruston Way. “No more fighting,” he called. “I'm leaving it to ... Rio and—hey, what's your name?"
"Brendan. Brendan Kincaid."
"Brendan here to figure out some peaceable settlement between the two groups. I'm not going to put up with this fighting in the streets shit. You either handle your differences like civilized people, or I'm going to come back and kick some serious ass. Is that understood?"
A discordant murmur ran through both sides, as if they didn't believe this problem could be resolved through simply talking, but no one seemed willing to incur Raven's wrath by speaking aloud. Grumbling, the crowd began to disperse.
"Now wait a minute,” Rio objected, drawing close with a spark swirling in her eye. “I'm not political. I wasn't trying to become this group's spokesperson—"
"Tough,” Raven interrupted. “You're officially appointed. Those who can't keep their mouths shut should put them to good use. Now figure out some kind of tolerable agreement for both parties.” He made a slight motion with his hand for Ben to follow and began walking away. He paused, briefly, and cast a flat, snake-like glare over his shoulder. “I don't want to revisit this,” he warned. “Don't make me come back."
He drew down one of his major spells and used it to create a ten-mile transit tube. Moments later they were back in Raven's office at PAC headquarters. Ben hesitated in front of the door, then slowly pushed it shut, turning back to face his friend. “So—you going to tell me about what's going on with Marissa, or do I have to beat it out of you?"
Raven looked singularly unimpressed. He sighed and slid behind his desk. “She doesn't like what I do, Ben. And I'm not about to quit just because it gives her a bad taste in her mouth. What else is there to say?"
"Are you calling it quits?"
"I'm going to let her do it,” the vampire answered with a helpless gesture with his hands. “I'm happy enough except for her harping—I'm not going to call it off."
Ben shook his head. He couldn't imagine what it was like, Raven realized. He had his lady and their three year old and they were like the perfect family—as perfect as anyone in this screwed up little slice of the world could be. “How's the tyke?” He'd have asked about Amanda, but he saw her nearly every day.
"Conner?” Ben laughed and shook his head. “He's a tank with a fondness for chasing squirrels."
"Chasing squirrels? You're kidding, right?"
"No. We're not sure what to do with him. We had him in a regular daycare, but that went south when he climbed on top of the roof and refused to come down until he got chocolate milk with lunch rather than the regular stuff."
Raven snorted, then shrugged at his friend's irritated look. “So what about the squirrels?"
"He can't shapeshift yet, but we're pretty sure he's a ‘thrope. He's too damn sturdy to be anything else. We take him to the park, let him play on the equipment like any other kid, and suddenly he spots a squirrel, jumps fifteen feet off the damn jungle gym, and goes tearing after it like his butt's on fire. I don't even want to guess what he might've done if he'd have caught the blasted thing.
"At least he's mostly
civilized. I'd hate to think what we'd have to do if he wasn't. As it is, we've got him over at the Academy for the time being, though Thoth is making grumbly noises about not being a daycare center."
"I could have a talk with him if you like,” Raven offered.
"And what good would that do? He's just being bitchy. He knows we don't have any other options. Amanda's already talked to him. He'll go along with it for the time being—it doesn't hurt that Conner's got the mage genes, too. Eventually he'll end up attending the Academy anyway.” Ben shrugged. “It'll turn out fine."
"Okay. Any other news?"
Ben gave him an odd look. “You managed to change the subject pretty smoothly there, Cory. We were talking about you, remember?"
"I was done,” the vampire replied coolly. “If you expect me to pour my heart out for you, you've been hanging out with the women too long."
Ben gave him a level stare and broke into a sudden grin. “You may be right. I'm just worried about you."
"No need. I'm not going to bury my Glocks because she doesn't like what I do. Without an enforcer things would go to shit in a hurry and, to be brutally honest, I can't think of anyone else I'd give the job to."
"What about Jaz?"
Raven grimaced. “Let's not go there, okay? That woman disturbs me. I'm not even sure why."
"That's not to say she wouldn't be good at it."
"No—it's to say she'd probably enjoy it a little too much."
* * * *
The woman was driving him crazy. Shea ground his teeth together and choked out a smile. “No, I don't have to follow you into the restroom,” he gritted.
"Well, you're following me everywhere else,” Breed replied with narrowed eyes.
"Under your best friend's orders,” the ugly little man reminded her.
"Fine. Well, if it suits you well enough, I'm going to go in and take a leak. You can stay out here in the hall like a good little bodyguard."
"Wait a minute,” he told her, then brushed past into the women's restroom. He leaned down and ran a scathing glance under the bathroom stalls. “Is anyone in here?” he asked. Then he proceeded to push every stall door open and inspect the cubicle in minute detail until he was satisfied the restroom held no lurking would-be kidnappers. He then emerged from the restroom and held the door open for Breed. “It's clean."
"That's debatable,” she murmured as she passed him, “but at least there aren't any bad guys in there."
"Funny woman. Go do your business. I'll wait here."
She graced him with a obviously insincere smile and pushed through the restroom door.
Shea stood in the hallway, grimacing painfully at the few employees unfortunate enough to have to walk past him. His mood had grown distinctly surly in the past few days and most of the employees were wise enough to avoid him by this point. The whispers—some of which he overheard—suggested that his problem was a growing infatuation with the woman, a charge he wanted to flatly deny in the loudest tones possible.
Unfortunately, no one would have listened. He was in one of those regrettable situations in which denial nearly always told the opposite story. The more he swore he didn't have a growing affection for Nemesis Breed, the less anyone would believe it.
Frankly, that pissed him off more than she did.
What was really bad is that he did find her attractive on a purely physical level—the level he'd long since learned to pretend didn't exist. He wasn't one for casual sex so, as a creature bound to outlive any prospective partner, he'd simply given up on the notion altogether.
Lately, however, spending time with the blonde cop had been prodding his libido into a sort of half-life he hadn't experienced for several centuries. And that bugged him.
She wasn't deliberately sexy—but, unfortunately, that was what he found most attractive about her. Had someone pointed out that it was this trait that made his adopted daughter, Jasmine, sexy as well, he might have agreed, though he was quite incapable of seeing Jaz that way.
It was confidence, partially, and a rough attractiveness that female cops, athletes, and outdoorsy types seemed to generate. Some—mostly women, who made more of this sort of thing than men—would have pronounced her long face ‘horsey’ and ignored her large eyes and the sheer magnetic quality of her most common smile, a slightly mocking twist of her full lips.
He stomped down on this line of thinking before it traveled to other parts of her and produced a certain discomfort he'd grown to resent. He even liked her sharp tongue, he realized, but he'd never been drawn to submissive women. She knew who she was and liked it. He could appreciate that. He felt the same way about himself.
But he wasn't going to fall in bed with her. He may have liked her, even admired her, but getting involved in that way with a mortal—even a super mortal—wasn't something he was willing to do. It would be stupid and painful and he wasn't willing to do that to himself for all the love, money, or hot, sweaty sex in the world.
It was bad enough he had made an attachment with Jaz. When she finally died, as she inevitably would, unless she were somehow turned into a vampire—something he also didn't want to contemplate for a variety of reasons—he would look back on her life, grieve a little, and go on with his existence. What else could he do?
But to have sex with a woman, to bind his heart to her in the way that came naturally to many of his kind, would simply lead him to suffer too much when her time came to ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’ as the old poem went.
He was in no way masochistic enough to see that as an option.
* * * *
When she was finished in the restroom, Breed leaned against a bare space of wall next to the forced-air hand dryer and heaved a dark and heavy sigh. For her part she also found herself inexplicably drawn to the squat, homely immortal, and was far less happy about it than when she and Athena had conspired to make him her bodyguard.
The man was all too often annoying as hell. She was, however, forced to admit that some of it was her own damned fault. He seemed just as impervious to her needling as he was to things that would puncture, incinerate, eviscerate, or otherwise cause massive damage to a normal human being. It was like prodding a large chunk of granite with a toothpick. The toothpick would break long before the stone would respond.
When she'd tease him he'd just turn his dark and broody gaze on her and offer up a spare smile and act as though she hadn't said anything more relevant than the squawk of a distant crow. She felt like pounding her head against the wall, or at least smashing the dryer into its component parts. She hadn't been laid in months—not since her brief but overwhelmingly disappointing dalliance with the immortal rock star Stormchild.
He'd been an attentive and inventive lover, but hardly worth spending time with otherwise. He was a bit of an egoist. Big surprise. Big, blond, gorgeous, and a rock star? What the hell had she expected?
Shea, on the other hand, was short, squat and ugly as a dog that had spent its time chasing parked cars. He was also richer than God, yet didn't use that fact to lord it over other people—not even his own employees.
He had an ego too, surely, but he deserved it. When a man is powerful enough to stop a runaway freight train with the equivalent of a dirty look, he's entitled to feel pretty good about himself.
One of the things she found most frustrating, little as she wanted to admit it, was that he showed no particular interest in the body he was guarding other than as a potential target.
She finally scraped herself off the wall and exited to the hallway to find him leaning against the wall, pretending to casually inspect his fingernails. “Took long enough,” he grunted. “Where to now?"
Five
Lunch with Kali. An experience in itself. And that was without even considering the entourage of goblins.
It was like going out with supermom and a bunch of bratty kids. Six arms meant the little buggers couldn't get away with anything, but it didn't mean they didn't try. Kali handled it with a special kind of distracted aplo
mb. Jaz observed it all, shaking her head in disbelief.
One of the goblins, a snaggletooth creature with a long bulbous nose and a purple mohawk, unscrewed the salt shaker. As he moved on to his next attempted prank, Kali reached over with one hand and screwed the lid back on. Simultaneously taking one of the cloth napkins away from a second goblin, this one pale as a fish belly with huge froggy eyes, to prevent him from using it as a sling to hurl biscuits across the restaurant.
A third goblin, this one with bat-wing ears and an enormous hooked nose, was collecting ice cubes in his lap. Kali ignored that. She apparently considered it not nearly critical enough to bother with. Not when the two creatures at the opposite end of the table had decided to play mumbly-peg with a fork. The huge woman let out a long-suffering sigh and lashed their arms to their sides with a couple of mana strands.
Throughout all of this Kali kept up a running conversation with Jaz, barely doing more than glancing out of the corner of her almond shaped eyes before reaching out with one of her many arms to forestall some bit of goblin mischief.
They were eating at the Coyote Blue. Not the best restaurant in town, but the ‘Blue’ served decent Tex/Mex and had the added benefit of being among the only restaurants that would even allow goblins through the door. They'd been seated in the restaurant proper, far enough away from the bar that Loki would be unlikely to come over to chat. Not that Jaz had anything against Loki, but right now she just wanted to spend time with Kali.
The huge inhuman woman lifted a hairless brow. “Neanderthals, eh?” She snorted. “Well, I guess there's some consolation in the fact that you're not the first woman who can say she had her virginity stolen by a Neanderthal."
The comment was characteristic of the Goblin Queen, an example of her twisted sense of humor. Jaz forced a small smile in response. It wasn't meant to be offensive—Kali honestly couldn't help saying thoughtless things like that. “They didn't take my virginity,” Jaz sighed, with a tiny shake of her head. “That happened a long time ago."
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