by TA Moore
“Turn over,” Madoc said.
Took gave his cock one last stroke, his fingers slick with come, and rolled over. His ass was lean and tight with muscle, a faded tattoo tucked into the crease of his thigh. He tucked one knee under him to raise his hips up off the bed.
“Not yet,” Madoc said as he pressed his hand down into the small of Took’s back.
He bit down on his tongue until the skin split, and chewed on the wound to fill his mouth with blood. Under his hand, Took squirmed on the bed to rub his cock against the rough cotton bedding. Madoc pulled the tight, still tanned cheeks apart with both hands, and Took swore under his breath as he clenched his hands in the sheets. The backs of Took’s thighs clenched as Madoc squeezed the taut globes of his ass in his fingers.
“Please,” Took groaned as he twisted on the bed. His trousers were still caught around his thighs, so he couldn’t spread them far, but he tried. “Madoc, God, please?”
There had been times Madoc had kept a lover on the sweet edge of orgasm until they begged him to come. He’d been there himself, and pride had kept the word caught behind his teeth until his lover had given in and fucked him anyhow.
No one had ever been desperate enough for him to beg before he even started. Madoc was surprised at the jolt of lust it delivered down his spine to his ass. He did as he was asked and pressed a bloody kiss to Took’s asshole. He licked his way around the tight ring of muscle and then pushed his tongue inside, the passage slicked with spit and blood.
Took swore raggedly at Madoc as he writhed under him, caught between the rough scrape of cotton and wool against his tender cock or the slick tongue at work inside his ass.
“Fuck,” he suddenly choked out. “It’s… is it meant to be… I don’t know. Hot?”
Madoc smirked as he leaned back. He skimmed one last kiss over the now slippery, still-tight hole before he crawled up onto the bed. “There’s a reason humans find us addictive,” he said as he sprawled over Took’s back, his painfully hard cock pressed against the crease of Took’s ass. Each restless twitch of Took’s lean hips flicked back along Madoc’s tender nerves to clench in the sweet spot between his balls and his ass. He pressed a kiss to the nape of Took’s neck and breathed in the scent of him. “After this, whatever we are, I won’t let you go again. You don’t have to be my lover, or even my friend, but I won’t just let you crawl away again.”
Took reached back and grabbed Madoc’s neck to pull him down for a kiss. “That’s not your call,” he said between their lips. “Now are you going to fuck me or not?”
Bastard.
Madoc chewed the kiss onto Took’s lips as he reached down to grab his cock. He guided the head of it to Took’s slick hole and pushed. The muscle stretched around him, still tight, and the glaze of his own blood was a chaser of afterthought pleasure down his cock. Took’s ass tightened around him, and the long play of muscle from his hips to his shoulders clenched as he pushed into him.
“Shit,” Took rasped out. He bit his lower lip and pressed his face into the fold of his arm. “I think your cock is bigger than mine too.”
The snort of laughter escaped Madoc. “You hadn’t noticed before?” he asked as he grabbed Took’s hip, fingers hooked around the jut of bone. He thrust his hips forward in slow, measured strokes, his cock buried deeper each time. “You spent enough time with it in your mouth.”
Took pushed back against him and lifted his hips off the bed to meet Madoc’s downward thrust.
“Shut up,” he grumbled. “It’s just… been a while.”
Madoc finally buried himself inside Took. The tight squeeze of muscle around his cock made his hips ache to thrust, but he held still as he lowered himself down so he sprawled along the tight length of Took’s back.
“It was a few days ago,” he said as he worked his hand under Took’s hip to the hard jut of his cock. “If it was that forgettable, maybe I have to try harder.”
Took choked on whatever he’d been going to say as Madoc squeezed the base of his cock hard. His ass tightened around Madoc’s cock, and he pushed back against him. Madoc let him squirm for a second, pleasure tight as a bruise in his balls, and then shoved him back down onto the bed. His cock slid deeper inside, and Took rasped out something that might have been meant to be “fuck” but never got that far.
Madoc tightened his grip on Took’s cock as he pulled back, the air chill around the base of his cock before he thrust back in. As he slid home, it drove Took’s hips down into the bed, his cock wrung between Madoc’s fist and the hard mattress. The cot rattled and groaned under them as they fucked, a broken spring hard under Madoc’s knee as he braced himself for a better angle.
It worked. His cock nudged against the smooth bump of Took’s prostate with each slow thrust. Took made a strangled sound and then again as Madoc chewed bloodlessly along his neck. He came between Madoc’s fingers with a wet spill of sticky fluid, and Madoc pulled out. He twisted his sticky hand down the length of his cock in two quick, impatient jerks and came over Took’s back and hip. Come dripped down to smear over the faded tattoo under Took’s balls.
He rolled off and sprawled out on the bed, trousers still caught around his thighs. There were a lot of things he should do, but instead he lay and wondered what to say.
“I was afraid you’d done it,” Took said. “I don’t think I really believed it.”
“Sophistry,” Madoc pointed out. He still took Took’s hand and wove their fingers together. It was a small memory to stash away, but he liked it. Sometimes, when he had to be the cardinal and let the smoke have him, small memories were all you had to anchor who you wanted to be. “It doesn’t matter.”
Took frowned as though he didn’t believe that, but before he could say anything, a fist hammered at the door.
“We’re ready to go,” the pilot yelled through the door. “If you want to leave tonight, we need to go now.”
Chapter Nineteen
QUICK LOOKED unconvinced.
“You’ve built a whole lot of castle on, what, some offhand thing a crazy, survivalist wolf said?” he said as he paused the game on his phone and set it down on the desk. “Are you sure it’s not going to just fall down?”
Took weighed that for a second. “No,” he admitted. “But it’s true. I always take point. The only reason I didn’t in Appleberg is because I thought Gatlin had wasted my time. Besides, if I am wrong, then you’ll be the only one who knows.”
Light flicked off the lens of Quick’s glasses as he sat up. He didn’t need them to see anymore, and he’d replaced his old Coke-bottle lenses with plain glass ones. It was just habit to have them on, something to straighten or peer off. Or, when he wanted to buy some time, to take off and polish.
“Shouldn’t you be in there with Waring?” he asked. “Pretty sure Madoc wouldn’t want SSA Crane in there on his own with our witness.”
“Waring sat through the best that VINE had to offer,” Took pointed out as he pulled a chair out and flopped down. He felt more alive than he had since he died, Madoc’s blood like an infusion of coffee into Took’s veins. The scars on his wrists were still there, bulky under the long sleeves of his T-shirt, but they didn’t itch or ache when he turned his hands. The door creaked open behind him and he glanced around. Lawrence hesitated in the doorway, and despite Took’s best intentions, he felt himself bristle. He squashed the resentment and gestured for her to come the rest of the way in as he went on. “West couldn’t interrogate a man who already confessed. They’ll be fine for an hour.”
Lawrence carefully closed the door behind her and leaned back on it. “I thought you and SSA Crane were friends,” she said.
“We were,” Took said, then caught himself. This case might not have the fallout that West had wanted, but that didn’t mean they’d be at odds, any more than their relationship’s failure in the wake of Took’s kidnapping had made them enemies. It was just life. Sometimes things didn’t work out, but it was West who supported Took when he thought Madoc had been the one
who turned him. That meant that Took owed him something. He corrected himself. “Are. It doesn’t make him a good interrogator.”
Quick kicked the chair next to Took out for Lawrence and reached for his keyboard. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to take an hour to get this done either,” he said. “I lifted everything the local Proverbial church had on their servers, while being preached at for a cup of underwhelming soup, but you have to give me some parameters to look for. I don’t suppose anyone has just dropped a confession in there.”
Lawrence glanced from one to the other. “I missed the start of this,” she said. “Is this to do with the werewolves that you met? Madoc says he believes that one of them really was Gabriel, the head of the Hounds.”
“He didn’t introduce himself to me,” Took said dryly as he shied away from the topic. He didn’t think Lawrence was as good as him, but she wasn’t stupid either. It was her job to catch liars and people with secrets, and Took was both. “And sort of. I think that the missionaries didn’t just take the scriptures over to the poor, benighted humans of Europe. I think they brought something back.”
“Probably clap,” Quick interjected. He raised his fingers in the air and wriggled them expectantly. “Parameters, Took.”
Took hesitated as he rubbed his hand over his jaw. He could hear the chatter of the VINE offices behind him, the carefully pitched murmur of office small talk, the clatter of keys, and the stutter-hum of the printer. None of the agents in there had any idea how bad he was about to make their lives.
If he was right.
“How many missions were the Arons involved in?” Took asked after a moment’s thought.
There was a pause as Quick darted his fingers over the keyboard. “Many,” he said lightly after a moment. “They led one every two years as a couple when they were first married. Then, once they had kids, one of them would go every other year. That’s only our late and lamented Arons. Before that, their father was deeply involved in the Proverbial Church as well. In fact, he was the Deacon of a church we know and love in Appleberg, before he moved to Charleston.”
“How many of the children on those missions died?”
“None,”
“What?” Lawrence blurted out the interruption.
“Check that again,” Took said. Any death on a Mission would be recorded by the Church. It was a way to show respect for the dead, to remember their sacrifice. The Franklin boy who’d died should be marked down there and, morbid as it was, if he was the only martyr on the Arons’ missions, they’d have been considered failures. “You must have missed something.”
Quick snorted his opinion of that but tapped at the keys. His smug expression hung around for a minute and then faded as he scanned the screen.
“Now that doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “If you look at the official documents, flight registers, carnets, and the rest, the same amount of people left the country as came back. But when you go into the different family registers, they lost three or four people each trip.”
Lawrence leaned forward. “Even for a Proverbial mission, that’s a lot of dead children. Sacrifice is one thing, slaughter is another.”
“At least one of them was just left behind,” Took pointed out. “Maybe to make room.”
“For whom?” Lawrence asked with a frown. “Do you think they smuggled dissidents out of the Empire?”
“When it started, maybe,” Took said. He made himself admit that it wasn’t a bad theory. Jealous as he was to see Lawrence take his place, she wasn’t bad at it. “How many of the families who lost children had ties of some sort to Appleberg?”
Quick raised his eyebrows. “Are you going to share your theory?” he asked. “Or wait for the rest of us to catch up?”
It wasn’t a theory yet, just a hunch and a lot of ideas that didn’t quite make sense of everything that had happened. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. He had all the pieces. He just needed to get the outline, and the rest would fall into place.
“I’m giving Lawrence the chance to show her chops,” he said. Next to him, Lawrence flinched at the challenge and straightened up attentively in her chair. Even Quick glanced up from the computer to give Took a reproachful look for that one. He wasn’t wrong. Took ignored it and pushed on. “Appleberg?”
“I’d forgotten what a dick you could be,” Quick muttered as he hunched back down to work. This time it took a bit longer. “If we include the Arons, eight of the families either lived in the area, attended the church at some time, or their children attended the Proverbial summer camp that is located just outside of town. Although that closed a few years ago.”
“Why?”
“No reason listed,” Quick said with a shrug. “Bad touches probably.”
The Arons had worked at the summer camp, Took remembered, during the years they didn’t go away on missions. Annabelle Franklin had gone there. The photo of her in the salmon-pink camp T-shirt flicked into his mind. Even a month in the outdoors hadn’t given her any color in her cheeks.
“Do you have a picture of the Aron children?” Took asked. He swiveled around in his chair and pointed to the screen mounted on the wall. Quick snorted at the change in subject, but after a moment, the pictures of two boys and a girl appeared on the screen. Before her years in the ground, Nora Aron had been a brown-haired little girl with see-through gray eyes and pallid skin. Her brothers were just as pale, with blond hair and brown respectively, but the same strange, almost translucent, eyes. “What about Annabelle Franklin?”
Keys clicked and then Annabelle joined the grid, a few years older and a little more faded but with the same eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” Lawrence murmured. “All of them?”
“We’ll see,” Took said. He turned to look at Quick. “I want to see pictures of the kids from every single family that went on one of the Aron’s missions. Start with the ones that have ties to Appleberg.”
Quick hadn’t caught on yet. He glanced curiously from the screen to Took and Lawrence but finally shrugged. “It’ll take me a minute,” he said. “They aren’t in our files, so I’ll need to trawl social media.”
It turned out that Quick was wrong, at least partially. Most of the Mission children he pulled off their parents’ Facebook pages or from sheets of posed selfies, children with curly hair and tans at the beach or in profile at their birthday parties. The others he didn’t need to trawl social media for. They popped up from the missing persons database. Nine missing children from Appleberg, the three missing Aron kids—two Aron kids now, Took supposed—and six they hadn’t even known about.
The children on the missing reports had all disappeared in the same three-month period, after Waring had gone to jail, and they all had the same pallor, and the same washed-out, almost colorless eyes behind glasses they probably didn’t need.
Took stared at Nora’s picture. If she woke up her eyes would be gray, the same as Madoc’s. He wondered what color Madoc’s had been back when he was still alive—maybe the same gray as Annabelle Franklin’s or the sepia brown of Brian Larkin.
There had been no reason for anyone to see it before. Dhampir children in the US were too rare for anyone to just jump to the conclusion that a pallid child was one of them. Especially when it was a pallid child from a staunch Proverbial clan. Besides, none of the Anakim had any reason to fear their children going missing then. They had all disappeared before Waring’s murders started, before the Aron family died. Once you saw them all together, though, the effect was amplified, unmistakable, until even Quick couldn’t miss it.
“Holy fucking hell,” he muttered. His hands were still for once as they settled on the keys. “They are all dhampirs. Shit is about to hit the fan.”
THAT TURNED out to be an understatement.
The Director of VINE, a harder, more polished version of her daughter, was in front of a computer monitor in Philly. Her clipped questions were aimed at how VINE had missed something like this right under their nose. The fact that her daughter was involved didn’t
seem to make her want to cut them any slack.
“Not for the first time in connection to this case, I am disappointed,” she said icily. Took, relegated to the back of the room after he’d given his testimony, gave a reluctantly sympathetic glance to Lawrence. She looked like she hadn’t heard it. “Not only did you miss the connection to the Arons, you apparently just overlooked a dozen other missing children since we arrested Waring. We already had a shit show to navigate with the public after you discovered the kidnapped dhampir might be alive after all. Now this. Should I just expect mistakes and dhampir children every time you turn over a rock now?”
West cleared his throat. “The Biters’ lack of overview has always been a problem—”
He never could read a room, Took thought wryly as Lawrence turned her cold glare onto him. This wasn’t the sort of disaster that could be used to score political points. Not yet, at least.
“Apparently one that you should be well versed in, SSA Crane,” Lawrence said pointedly. “Since a child-trafficking ring has apparently been run out of your city for the entire duration of your time in charge there.”
While West tried to splutter his way out of responsibility for that on the two other screens, Charleston’s Anakim and human representatives in the Senate bickered over each other as to what the priority was next.
“If Waring is innocent,” Isaac Garcia, still human and breathing at sixty-four, said as he leaned in to peer through the screen, “we need to issue a statement that clears his name, and an apology, as soon as possible. As it is, this could completely alter the balance of power in the district. Liam Waring could become a real threat, not just a pain in our—”
“Ridiculous,” Robin Dale, his Anakim counterpart, snapped as he jabbed his finger at the web camera. “This whole problem with the Proverbials and their dhampirs might have no connection to the Waring case. For all we know, Waring still murdered those families and kidnapped their children.”
“But we don’t know that,” Garcia fired back. “He never confessed, remember? The conviction was carried on a wave of outrage and grief for those children. Or, for all we know, those dead families were somehow involved in this too. The murders only started after the Aron family was killed.”
