Oh, limey. You have no idea.
“You don’t happen to be musicians of any kind, do you?”
The smiles evolved into grins of the shit-eating variety.
“Funny you should say that,” Tall and Tattooed answered. “We’re in a band together. Just on our way to rehearsal. Wasn’t we, Dave?”
“We sure was.”
Decent grammar was apparently too much to hope for. Vinnie consoled herself with a glance at their trousers, which she noted were hiding some decent equipment.
“If I had to lay a guess, I’d say I have the bass player and drummer before me.”
“Cor!” Tall and Tattooed elbowed his neighbor. “How’d you know that?”
Vinnie thumbed his lip ring. “Just a guess.”
*****
“She’s in London.”
The chair fell back as Crixus shoved away from the table at Café Marley outside the Louvre where he’d been parked all afternoon. Guests at the tables on either side of him pressed their napkins to their faces in disdain.
It took every ounce of restraint the demigod yet possessed not to show them what disdain really looked like.
“How sure are you?” He was already marching toward a spot between buildings where he could materialize without drawing the attention of tourists. Even in Paris, disappearing in broad daylight was considered a faux pas at best.
“My informant saw her heading to one of her known addresses with not one but two budding stars of the underground London punk scene.”
“Two? Must be a slow afternoon.”
“Do I detect a hint of jealousy?”
Not for the first time, Crixus lamented the fact that the most connected supernatural in his network happened to be female. Rare was the occasion where she let him get away with anything. Frequent was the occasion when he had something to get away with.
“I’m not jealous. I’ve just become more…selective these days.”
A bark of laughter on the other end had Crixus’s teeth grinding together.
“That sound you just heard? That would be the Earth’s female population all bursting into tears at once.”
“Where in London?” Crixus asked, hoping to move this conversation onto territory that didn’t make him want to fold every passing motorist into a pretzel and use their blood to grease their own axles.
“Chelsea. She has a flat in Glebe Place.”
“Got it.”
“Please tell me you have a plan that doesn’t involve you getting blown up this time.”
Crixus muttered a curse into the phone as he narrowly dodged a passing motorino. The driver honked and gave him the finger.
“My plan is none of your concern.”
“So you don’t have one?”
“I do have one. I prefer not to discuss the details.”
“One that doesn’t involve seduction, I mean,” the voice teased.
“Not all my plans involve seduction.”
Silence crackled over the phone between them.
“They don’t,” Crixus insisted.
“Assuming the seduction doesn’t work, what’s your plan B?”
“Look, I really don’t have time to do this with you right now.”
“When should we do it, then? You’ve been promising for ages.” The suggestion in her voice nearly ran him headfirst into a garbage dumpster.
“How about when I’m not chasing a man-eating succubus muse from Hell through London.”
“Fair enough.”
Chapter Four
Vinnie had them naked.
Now it was time to assemble her mise en place. First, she had to determine the proper seasoning for each. She approached the tall bass player lying across her bed, his cockstand all the more vibrant against the tapestry of ink dancing across his abdominal muscles.
“Give me your hands,” she said.
He held them above his head like a willing hostage.
Vinnie traced their creases with a fortune-teller’s focus. This lad was left-handed. Had a tendency to grip the neck of his instrument too tightly and knock his notes too fast. An excess of energy that would make him sloppy. He could do with a little patience and precision.
Both could be taught.
She brought his fingers to her lips and tongued the calluses on the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. Her eyes fell closed to savor the subtle notes sliding onto her palate, a culinary synesthesia of sound and flavor.
Delicious.
His band mate watched this from the end of the bed, where he had arranged himself in a contrived sexy sprawl. His lower lip caught between his teeth.
“And you,” Vinnie said, turning to face him. “Let me see your arms, little drummer boy.”
He flexed, the poor lamb, believing this had any effect whatsoever on what she was able to see. Vinnie ran her hands up the length of his forearms, appreciating the way his veins slid beneath her palms. His blood rushed under her touch, pulsing a primal throb through her.
He had been gifted with natural rhythm, yes. But was too fussy in its application.
Perhaps she could impart to him some of the savage.
Vinnie floated over to her well-stocked larder of goodies and consulted the shelves like a chef consults their pantry.
She ran her fingertips across the strings of a lute. Its melancholy voice had last been evoked by celebrated lutenist Gaultier de Lyon in the mid 17th century.
Her mouth watered at the sound.
Cradling the instrument like a newborn, she handed it over to the bass player, who received it with a furrowed brow.
“You are some kind of wacky bird, you know that?” he said.
“Don’t be cheeky,” she scolded, mimicking his south London dialect. “Or I won’t let you play the big boy instruments.”
Her hand trailed the length of her braid and unfastened the band at the end. Waves the color of autumn-hued leaves tumbled free, falling well below her breasts.
“Yes, mahm.”
“Now for you…” Vinnie knelt and stretched into the bottom cupboard until her fingers slid over silky wood. Her ears echoed with the sound of a thousand heartbeats, moving together toward bliss.
“Open your knees.” She walked the drum toward him, rolling it on the rim of its wooden base.
He scooted to the edge of the bed and did as he was told.
“Good boy. Now—” she lifted his hands off his thighs and placed them on the taut goat skin. “Play for me.”
“But I haven’t banged bongos since I was a kid—”
Vinnie pressed a finger to his lips. She had no use for his words. “It’s a djembe, and it’s older than your fear. Play.”
The order held more than one directive. Play was something most human adults had forgotten how to do, if they had ever learned properly in the first place. Only when their minds were free, their hearts light, their bodies loose could she really begin to work with them. And on them.
His hand rubbed a slow circle over the drum that Vinnie felt in a sympathetic caress on her skin. It was a dry sound. Sand whispering on a hot desert wind.
He moved slowly at first. Palms bouncing off the surface to release a vibration in the instrument’s hollow core. Her belly thrummed with every note, empty and open as the drum beneath his hands.
“Come now. Don’t tickle it.” Vinnie eased herself onto the bed beside him and brushed her lips over his ear. “Make it thunder.”
Vinnie watched his face tighten in concentration as he found a deeper beat. Sweat bloomed on his brow. The blows came faster and the rhythm found its way back into his body, tensing the muscles of his pectorals and biceps in time with his assault.
She tasted her way down his smooth neck, filling the well inside her with the salty song on his skin. It formed the base note on her palate. She would build on it with her next course.
Falling backward on the bed, she allowed the bass player to claim her mouth. He was young, and green, full of boyish enthusiasm for his childhood dream. Mi
sery lived in him as well. She tasted dusk on the tongue that glided over hers to the sultry, building tension of the drum’s percussive seduction.
When his hand found her breast, she guided it to the lute. “Pluck those strings well enough, and I’ll let you pluck mine.”
He looked her in the eye as he brought his fingers to the lute’s neck.
“Gently,” she advised. Her hand strayed up his thigh, where she gripped an instrument of her own. “You must learn when and how to apply pressure.”
His breath deepened as she skimmed her hand down his length.
When his fingers moved this time, it was with a care and precision that matched her efforts. The contractions of his abdominal muscles became the metronome by which he steadied his tempo, slowing when she did, racing ahead when she tightened her grip.
In the air beneath the bed’s canopy, drums and lute found each other, merging into a single song. Vinnie’s back arched, her body drinking the language of heaven through her pores and into the dull ache at her center.
So ugly then, when the window to her bedroom shattered, shredding her carefully cultivated symphony with the cacophony of breaking glass.
Both musicians halted and the notes did not carry. The sudden silence drove daggers through Vinnie’s bones.
The gladiator dropped the rope in his hand and righted himself, brushing debris from his hair and the shoulders of his black T-shirt.
“Drop the banjo, Crayola,” he said, pointing a finger at her bass player.
“What the fuck are you?” the drummer stammered.
“The fuckstick who keeps interrupting my lunch,” Vinnie answered for him. “Where would you like it this time? The chest? The ass? Judging from that entry, I’d say the boys are still a little sore.”
“Look, I just want to talk, Lavinia.” The brute held his hands up in a display of trust.
Unwise.
“It’s Vinnie, Crixus Autem Servus.”
“I am no one’s slave.” The gladiator’s jaw hardened around the word.
“Once a slave, always a slave.” Vinnie yawned and stretched out on the bed, allowing her open sundress to expose her breasts. “Whose tunic are you kissing the back of these days? Zeus? Or is it Hera? She always was a jealous bitch.”
Crixus’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I take the cases I want to take.”
“So I’m a case now, am I? I’m rather surprised they’re willing to keep paying you. You’re not very good at this.”
“What the hell are they saying then?” the bass player whispered to his friend.
“No one said you could talk.” Vinnie snapped her fingers and heard both jaws clack shut, where they would stay until she decided otherwise.
“Still playing with your food, I see.” Motorcycle boots crunched over the broken glass as Crixus took a daring step toward her bed. “Nasty habit.”
“So is banging everything with a warm hole. I’d say you’re not in the best position to judge.”
“I’m not here to judge, Vinnie. I’m here to talk to you. That’s all.”
Vinnie rolled her eyes—a facial expression she’d become exceptionally grateful for when the Egyptians invented it around 5,000 B.C.E. “You either need to start bedding smarter women or have a decent liar vet your pretenses before you bring them to me. I know what you do. And I have no intention of allowing you to do it to me.”
“Vinnie—”
“What do you say, boys? How should we dispose of our uninvited guest? Watching his head explode was rewarding, but he’s broken my window and ruined my favorite curtains.”
“I was trying to come here without using magic,” Crixus said. He actually had the audacity to look her in the eye. “I came to lay my cards on the table.”
“Oh, dear. Now he’s lying.” Vinnie wrapped one of the bass player’s curls around her finger. “I’ll bet he doesn’t realize I can hear his thoughts, and in that itsy bitsy brain of his, he thought he might be able to surprise me if he came in the old-fashioned way.”
It was official. Vinnie couldn’t make his head explode now. The expression of panicked shock on Crixus’s face was entirely too precious.
“But I—”
“I think something more…colorful might be called for, don’t you? Especially since he was just thinking about my tits even while I’m threatening him.”
“Vinnie, I’m a man. You can’t just—”
Vinnie held up her hand to silence him. In what might have been his first non-idiotic move of the day, Crixus actually shut his gob. Progress.
“Maybe you can’t, gladiator. But I can, and will.” She squeezed her fingers into a fist and watched his body collapse into a ball.
His scream of pain was satisfying if brief.
“There now. Your head’s much closer to your ass. That seems appropriate for you somehow.”
He might have muttered something like evil bitch, but it was difficult to make out with his esophagus tangled in his colon.
“Send Hades my regards.” Vinnie thrust her fingers out, her fist exploding like a bomb, and the gladiator with it.
When the last wisps of smoking demigod evaporated, she winked the window back into place and loosed her musician’s tongues.
“Now,” she repeated for the second time that day. “Where were we?”
*****
“You’re not very good at this.”
The fractured slivers hovering above him assembled themselves into a face as the last dent in Crixus’s skull popped back into shape. He had meant to say fuck off, but it mostly emerged as a tortured groan welling up from his punctured lung, hissing through his still-fractured jaw.
“Patience, Calliope.” Hades’s voice came from the shadows at his side. Crixus had not yet recovered peripheral vision. “His methods are unconventional.”
The cracking sound of his ribs knitting together echoed through the office.
“Very unconventional,” Hades added.
“I thought you said he was the best.” The normally melodic sound of Calliope’s voice rasped against Crixus’s ears like a buzz saw across a cheese-grater. He wasn’t certain if this was a function of the darkly seductive words still slithering through his mind, or a byproduct of ruptured eardrums.
“He is the best. Or was, until recently.”
Breath filled his lungs, ushering in a brand new realm of pain.
“She let me talk this time.” Crixus’s words came out of his mouth in a decibel Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hell, might have more easily heard. “Eleven whole sentences.”
“Eleven,” Hades repeated, sarcasm dripping from his tone. “Well, we are making progress.”
“Progress?” Calliope propped her hand on a hip Crixus couldn’t help but notice was a pale comparison to the dangerous curves hiding under Vinnie’s dress. “How many more of my artists have to die before you take this seriously?”
“I am seriously going to kill that bitch,” Crixus croaked, dragging himself into a seated position.
“All evidence to the contrary.” A shadow moved across the far wall. Hades with his back turned to them, examining one of his many paintings—not one Vinnie had inspired.
“Do you mean that sincerely?” The hem of Calliope’s gown fluttered on a breeze of her own making.
“Seriously, sincerely, however fucking many adverbs you want to throw at it.” Crixus bent his head to one side, unleashing a series of pops in his neck.
Calliope knelt and pressed a cool hand against his hot forehead.
“I may have something that could help.”
Crixus stared at the disk of matted fur in her hands and thought for a moment his vision might have been irreparably damaged. “How exactly is road kill going to help me?”
“This is no road kill.” Calliope clasped the ball of fur to her chest. “This is the pelt of Moritasgus, the great healer.”
The demigod blinked at the triangular face staring at him from Calliope’s bosom. The snout was sable, dissected do
wn the center of the skull by a distinctive white stripe right between the eyes—whose empty sockets were now home to yellow diamonds. He would have said raccoon, or possum, were it not for the small, round ears set far back on its head.
“This is a badger,” Crixus said.
“This is a hat,” Calliope corrected.
“This is a badger hat.” As usual, Hades had the final word in the matter. The candle flames flickered as he sat down behind his desk.
“Okay,” Crixus conceded. “It’s a badger hat. How, exactly, is a badger hat going to help me take out Vinnie?”
Calliope’s frustration was evident by her exasperated sigh. This was a noise Crixus had evoked from more than one woman in his lifetime. Sometimes from several women at once.
“Moritasgus was the Celtic god of healing,” she explained. As long as you’re wearing this hat, you will be protected from any power that Celtic whore unleashes upon you.”
“I’m sorry.” Crixus twisted the tip of his finger into the ear closest to Calliope. “My hearing must not be fully recovered. I thought you said as long as I’m wearing this hat…”
Hades and Calliope looked at him, neither speaking.
The demigod pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and shook his head. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Come on,” Calliope urged, waving the hat in front of his face. The beady diamond eyes seemed to wink as they caught the candle flame. “Just try it on.”
Crixus swatted it away. “That thing smells like gerbils and ass.”
Hades raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me,” Crixus said. “You don’t want to know.”
“You prefer the scent of failure?” Calliope petted the hat’s furry dome. “Or maybe you’re just not tired of dying hideously yet.”
“Last time, she let me talk. This time will be even better. You have to trust me on this. If I know one thing, it’s women.”
“She’s not exactly your average woman.” It was difficult to say how the Lord of the Underworld meant this. He thought he heard something like admiration in the statement.
“She’s not a woman at all.” Calliope, on the other hand, was as difficult to read as the front page of a tabloid. “She’s a predator. A vampire. A plague. A disease.”
Romancing the Paranormal Page 121
