And the pants weren’t the only problem. There was the paisley eternity scarf looped around his neck and a tragically hip cardigan covering his vintage t-shirt. All of which were useless to her. At least she could have used a traditional scarf to tie his hands to the bed, where they couldn’t keep reaching out to caress her cheek or gently tuck a stray hair behind her ear.
“Vinnie,” he whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like you.”
He was doing the thing again.
Staring deep into her eyes, making comparisons about the sea after summer rain. Next it would be her skin, and the finest Delft porcelain and blah-de-fucking-blah.
“They’re green,” Vinnie said. “So is grass. And horseshit.” For the third time in the course of this conversation, she extracted his hand from her thick, garnet-colored braid and placed it on her breast. Subtlety was lost on this one. “So, are we going to do this?”
The poet yanked his hand back as if she’d just pressed it against a stove. “That isn’t—I’m not—you don’t think I brought you to my loft just to seduce you?”
“Seduce me?” She laughed, a sudden sound that startled this delicate coffee-house flower. “Cupcake, you couldn’t seduce me if you wrote those poems of yours with a ten-inch cock.”
And he didn’t. He couldn’t. A fact that had been the sole reason for the inception of her skinny jeans rule: if it fits in there, I don’t want to see it.
“Well if that’s how you feel—” He started to rise, but Vinnie pulled him back down to his throw pillow-choked futon by one straining belt loop.
“Relax, kid. That’s not why I’m here. That’s not why we’re here.”
“It’s not?” Any minute, his black-rimmed glasses were going to fog over.
“At that little café down there, you said you were blocked. I believe your exact words were, ‘I’d do anything just for a sip of inspiration.’ He’d also taken a demonstrative sip of his chai latte at that point, which memory almost killed Vinnie’s lady boner at the prospect of an afternoon snack. “I’m here to help.”
“What are you?” the kid asked. “Some kind of writing teacher?”
“I’m a teacher of many things.” Vinnie’s hand found the poet’s knobby knee, her fingers sliding suggestively over the muscles of his thigh.
The kid watched her palm ride north toward his crotch with growing interest. “You are?”
“I am.” She popped the button on his pants and guided the metallic teeth of his zipper open. They weren’t quite to that stage of the process yet, but Vinnie feared the kid might stroke out on her if his erection got stuck in these leg tourniquets.
“But I—”
“Shh….” The pad of Vinnie’s finger pressed against his lips. She dragged her red nail down the cleft of his chin and lowered her mouth to his.
She took her first slow, silky sips of him. She tasted his words. Drinking them from his mind, letting them fill her blood with heavy, drugging sweetness. They assembled themselves into infinite poems within her. Everything he had yet written, all he would yet write without her help.
He was better than she’d expected.
Showed some real sensitivity.
Then came the bitter lumps of his fear. His own terror of failure. Of mediocrity and despair. More heat would be required to melt it.
Vinnie’s fingers slid between them, expertly freeing him while drawing her own skirt up around her thighs.
The poet’s body jerked from head to foot when she sank down onto him. His eyes widened with the imagery she returned to him now. His words, but reordered. Ideas coming in a rush from the pathways no longer choked by fear.
She let him pull her deeper. He was beginning to understand.
A deafening pop sat the poet up and would have tumbled Vinnie to the floor, if she were any mortal woman.
It was not a sound made by any mortal man.
“What the fuck—” The poet stared at something over her shoulder. Something Vinnie herself was in no hurry to see.
Someone.
She knew his face already. The arrogant angles, the damnable smirk. The sandy hair and sapphire eyes. The impossible height and weight of him.
“If it isn’t the gladiator,” she said, not bothering to cease her hips’ rhythmic sway. Inside her, the poet was losing potency. “Come to watch?”
“Levane—”
“Bye-bye.” She glanced over her shoulder, kissed her palm, and blew it in the intruder’s direction. The resulting force knocked his broad body into the kitchen wall.
Vinnie took a moment to relish the shock in those oceanic eyes before the kiss landed on his square jaw.
The gladiator’s head exploded, filling the room with blinding light.
When the flash died, the gladiator was gone, along with any evidence of his having come in the first place.
You had to love a man who cleaned up after himself. She supposed this might be the one saving grace of the demigods, creatures she found to be vapid, self-centered, and about as useful as a three-legged centaur.
Vinnie turned to her poet and commenced riding the life back into his wilting stalk.
“Where were we?”
*****
“Ow.”
Crixus awoke with searing pain stabbing the backs of his eyeballs and something hard and cold pressing into the side of his face. Searing heat still lurked behind his eyelids. He opened them and saw nothing. His fingers crawled toward his jaw, which he was relieved to find he still had.
He could feel, but not see, his hand.
“I’m blind,” he said, stunned. “That bitch blinded me.”
“You’re not blind.” Hades’s distinctive baritone rumbled through his ears. “But you might wish you were.”
A heavy hand fell across Crixus’s forehead, and the image before him swam into focus. The curtain of fog rolling away.
Upon closer inspection, he discovered he was lying facedown on a stone floor.
Not just any stone floor.
The stone floor in the office he’d just come from. In Hades’s office.
She’d killed him. The crazy-ass Celtic bitch had killed him. Even for immortals, having your body destroyed bought you a ticket to the processing station. Fortunately for Crixus, his was a round-trip ticket.
“Back so soon?” Hades was seated in a chair beside him, his silver-buckled shoes resting on the floor near Crixus’s head.
“Shut up.”
“No need to be ill-mannered just because you were bested so quickly.”
Crixus rolled over to his back and tried not to groan. “I wasn’t bested. I was…surprised.”
“Indeed. Having my head explode would surprise me as well.”
Hades offered a hand, which Crixus slapped away.
“It’s a temporary setback. I have a plan.”
*****
Pop.
Vinnie rolled her eyes and hips simultaneously. He was back.
“Did I blow your mind, pretty boy? Come back for sloppy seconds?”
Beneath her, the poet bucked not out of surprise, but ecstasy. He was coming. Or soon would be. She could feel it building inside him. Ready to pour into her the heady draught she needed to survive.
Only he didn’t.
He didn’t, because he couldn’t.
He couldn’t, because he had vanished. Evaporated from beneath her just as she could feel his imminent release.
Disappointment and desolation became kindling in her belly. The demigod’s smirk was the match that set it aflame.
Vinnie turned to him, anger climbing her spine like sparks up a fuse. “What did you do?”
“I took away your toy, Levane.”
“Then it’s only fair I take away yours.” Vinnie kissed her fingertip and flicked it at him, a gesture so quick, it could have happened in the space of a blink.
“Don’t!” the demigod shouted as his hands clapped over his crotch.
But he was too slow. Too young, too green to keep pace with the likes of
her.
The ball of flame blew the demigod in half, bisecting him messily right between his powerful thighs.
A shame, really.
The gladiator had an excellent cock.
*****
Hades sucked air through his teeth and pressed a sympathetic hand to the front of his own trousers.
Crixus was back on the floor, face down and mumbling curses in time with his breath, ragged and torn as he felt.
Panic seized the demigod and his hand went on a quest. He heaved a sigh of relief when all his parts had been accounted for. “Kill her,” he groaned. This was the first thought that had brought him any comfort. “I’m going to kill her.”
“Perhaps you better come up with a better plan, then. You’re nil for two. Well, three, depending on how you count—”
“Shut. The fuck. Up.”
“I’m beginning to think I might have called in the wrong man for this job, gladiator. Just how many more times will you have to die before you bring me what I want?”
“I will deliver.” Crixus peeled his face from the floor and pushed himself to his knees. “I don’t care what it costs me.”
“I have to hand it to you,” Hades said, seating himself behind his desk. “You have ballocks. Let’s hope Levane lets you keep them.”
*****
Crixus arrived back in the poet’s neo-bohemian flat with his crotch burning and head buzzing like Hell’s own harmonica. The smell of brimstone still clung to him, as did the last flashing image of Lavinia, smiling as she blew him in half with a flick of her finger.
The space was as empty of her as a discarded husk, the only evidence of her having been in residence was the note scrawled on the mirror in blood-red lipstick. She detailed for him, in several languages, no less, how many ways he could fuck himself.
A couple were new to him.
Crixus was beginning to feel something like hatred for her. Or admiration. It was difficult to tell with his lower half impaired.
The poet popped back from the closet where Crixus had temporarily stashed him. Bunched in a heap that looked like a hipster’s laundry pile, this kid was an amalgamation of textures and patterns that made Crixus’s face itch.
Seeing Crixus, he crab-walked backward on the couch until his back was flush with the arm and held up one of the many pillows like a shield. His pants—if any respectable man could call them such—were still unzipped. “Don’t hurt me.”
“Put that thing down, Slim. I’m not going to hurt you. In fact, I saved your life. A few minutes more, and that bitch would have sucked your soul out of your ass.”
Confusion crinkled the kid’s face. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. First I was here with her. Then I was gone. Now I’m back again and she’s gone. And didn’t I see your head explode?”
“Don’t think about it too hard.” Crixus passed a hand over the place on the couch where Lavinia’s knees had been dug in while she rode this twerp to Timbuktu. He felt no trace of her. “Wouldn’t want you to strain anything.”
Watery eyes the color of weak coffee scanned the apartment. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” Crixus said. “Yet.”
“Where did she go?” There was a note of longing in his voice that told Crixus everything he needed to know. Warnings would do no good. Even knowing that Lavinia could have him drooling down his own chin in a coat that buckled up the back wouldn’t discourage the poet from letting her in. If she wanted this kid, he was toast.
“Believe me when I say that I intend to find out as soon as possible.”
“Will she come back?”
Crixus walked over to the tangle of angry red smudges on the mirror, feeling for any lingering essence of her that might help his chase. Nothing. “Not if you’re lucky.”
“But she was helping me with my poetry.”
“You’d be better off getting a tutor. Tutors don’t eat people, as a general rule.”
“Eat people?” The poet pulled his scarf away from his neck as if it were a noose, tightening. If Crixus had his way, this wouldn’t be far from the truth.
“Not whole people. Only the useful parts. Where did you meet her?” Crixus’s nostrils flared as he searched the air for any lingering note of her signature scent: wild heather, rain, and sex.
He found only patchouli and the distinctly musky note of trying too hard. He could guess where that was coming from.
“At the coffee shop down the street.”
Useful information, at least. Her habits hadn’t changed much in the centuries since their last meeting. In the last half of the nineteenth century, it had been Paris cafés she’d liked to haunt. Her red hair a flame shaming the jaundiced gas light. Cloaked when it was no longer fashionable to wear them, her face a jewel set in satin black as night.
Even through the burning scrim of intense dislike coloring his vision, Crixus could see why Lavinia had snared everything from painters to poets, a mysterious pale-skinned, emerald-eyed woman winding her way through time on canvases and the written page. You couldn’t throw a rock in the Louvre without hitting something she had inspired.
She was infinitely fuckable, imminently destructive.
And hungry.
Crixus pulled out his cell phone—one of the few pieces of modern gadgetry he had willingly adopted over the millennia—and dialed a number without looking.
When the feminine voice on the other end answered, Crixus spoke only four words.
“I have a runner.”
“Name?”
“Lavinia.” Crixus felt the amusement emanating from the darkness over the line. The sound of a stifled laugh.
“This didn’t end well for you last time.”
“Spare me the lecture. I need eyes in every city with a major museum or accredited art school.”
“That’s a lot of eyes. This is going to be expensive, you realize.”
Crixus sat through an uncharacteristic silence. “Not as expensive as failing to bring her in.”
“I’ll put the word out.”
“Good.”
“And Crixus?”
“Yeah?”
“Watch your ass.”
Chapter Three
London was a city that knew its age and didn’t apologize.
Vinnie loved this about the rain-soaked streets. Loved that she could walk past the trendy exterior of some new pâtisserie or gastro pub and run straight into a rough-hewn Roman wall. The old and the new juxtaposed on a canvas always changing with the shifting fog. Her past and her present sharing space.
Her memories of this place were as stratified as the city itself, built layer on layer. She walked not through alleyways, but civilizations. All which was now bright and beautiful would age and crumble. The young voices spilling into the night would be silenced and the nubile bodies they came from would rot in the earth.
She would still be here.
Provided the gladiator didn’t get his way.
Vinnie planned to make certain that he didn’t. One look into those arrogant eyes had assured her of what she already suspected.
He didn’t remember.
Oh, he knew her and knew of her. Their little run-in over Van Gogh had been enough to etch itself into his slippery memory.
But he didn’t remember what he had done to her. What he had taken from her.
Vinnie would remind him, but not until the moment was right. And in this case right meant as painful as possible.
The memory of the surprise on his face before she had split his atoms like egg yolks brought her the first smile of this day.
He would find her again. Of this she had no doubt. The gladiator was nothing if not persistent when it came to hunting his quarry. She knew this much about his reputation in his current occupation, but could have predicted it by the young man she first saw among the glinting arcs of weaponry in the gladiatorial ring.
She was younger then too.
Naïve.
Time had since purged her of such luxurie
s with the help of the gladiator, and men like him.
Even those men were preferable to what the world offered her now. Shallow, vapid, superficial and distracted. About as nourishing as the hideous fast food drive-through fodder humans seemed obsessed with consuming.
Gone were the days when all she need do was press her lips against the cool marble mouth of one of Michelangelo’s prophets, gritty from the chisel, and she could breathe for days. Never mind the artist himself, cantankerous lout that he was, who was grateful to have her alone nearby, whispering. Humans grew ever more shallow and the energy she could drink from them less satisfying with each passing century.
She had come to Chelsea for this reason, she supposed. Wanting to catch some of the old scent. Life had once been good to her here.
A hotbed of artists and writers in Queen Victoria’s day. She’d lingered in rooms filled with the scent of paint and cigar smoke, drunk on air saturated with ideas and inspiration.
Her chest tightened as she neared Trite Street, where she and Oscar Wilde—a name more apropos than most people knew—had spent so many nights playing with words together. Lingering over a little story called The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Oy, look at this one.
Lavinia heard the thought when she was yet a block away from the two men striding toward her. Saw both sets of eyes move down her body, barely concealed by the sundress she still wore. A remnant of her attempt to seduce the poet, who thought he liked his women tragically beautiful—which was to say slutty and slightly damaged.
She let her gaze roam over them in return and was pleased and surprised by what she found. Early twenties. Fashionably tattooed. Pierced, but not so much that she’d be picking buckshot from her teeth. The midsummer air sweetened in her nostrils, a heady combination of flowers and herbs from a nearby porch garden and the unmistakable scent of band boy.
Best of all: faded work jeans.
“Evening, lads,” she said, looking at them from beneath her lashes. “I wonder if you could help me.”
They exchanged looks, which turned into mirrored grins that reduced their IQ by a score of points.
“Hello, love.” The taller and broader of the two, the one she’d noticed first, had appointed himself their representative. “We can certainly try.”
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