“To vampires you’re…special. Your blood is unlike anything else on this earth. I’d heard that nephilim blood was potent but I was surprised by how much. She’ll try and woo you from me and offer me things to give you up, but don’t worry, she won’t just grab you. Eva plays by the rules.”
Sera was about to ask more questions when Henri suddenly looked at the open doorway. Within seconds Leo was walking through it. He was completely naked and scratching his chest. Going by the look on his face he wasn’t exactly a morning person. She tried not to stare at him.
“I smell bacon,” Leo said as he walked over to the kitchen table and dropped into the seat next to Henri.
Henri smiled at him wistfully, his eyes tracing the lines of Leo’s body.
“Of course there’s bacon,” Henri told him. “You know I always look after you.”
Leo managed to smile back at him despite the fact that he still looked half asleep. It was soft and intimate, a look that Sera hadn’t yet seen on Leo’s face other than when he was looking at Henri. Henri went back to making breakfast for them. Sera turned to Leo and saw the way his gaze followed the vampire.
It was so bizarre to be there with them, knowing the history that they had and the feelings between them. She felt like she was intruding. She really didn’t want to go back to London, and she certainly didn’t want to meet this coven leader of Henri’s, but she guessed she didn’t have much of a choice.
Chapter Ten
All roads led to Henri it seemed. Leo’s plans for yesterday had been to complete a job and move onto the next one. Fate had other plans as it often did. It had been three months since he had last seen Henri. Looking back, the fight they’d had seemed petty now. Theirs wasn’t the most stable of relationships for Sera to be getting involved with. They were passionate and Leo could cross the line into possessive far too easily.
“How are you?” he asked Sera before taking a bite of the bacon sandwich Henri put down in front of him.
The young woman looked a little shell-shocked, which was understandable.
“I’m…I don’t know,” Sera answered honestly. Her own sandwich was sitting in front of her, untouched.
Leo didn’t know what to do or say to make her feel better, he wasn’t exactly good at that kind of thing. Henri often despaired at Leo’s ability to make a joke out of everything.
“You’ll be fine,” was what he finally decided to say. He was aware of Henri watching him from his spot by the counter. The vampire was nursing a mug of what smelled like pig’s blood. He always used a mug and not a glass when there were other people around, because no matter how confident he might seem there was a part of him that feared rejection because of what he was.
Sera looked at him and their eyes finally met. An attractive flush began to spread high over her cheekbones. She was still young and her whole life had just been flipped.
“Are you going to stay?” Sera asked him. She was clearly trying to act casual about it, but Leo could hear her heartbeat.
Leo looked over at Henri again. He was sure the vampire was wondering the same thing. “Yeah, I’ll stay for a while. I’ll have to call and cancel my next couple of jobs.”
“How did you become a bounty hunter?” Sera asked.
Leo reached over the table and pushed Sera’s bacon sandwich closer to her.
“You didn’t eat last night and you lost some blood,” Leo told her sternly. “Eat.”
It came out like a demand, and had it been Henri on the receiving end, Leo would have gotten a lecture on how he was a grown man who could look after himself and who didn’t need to be told what to do. Sera, however, smiled at him and grabbed the sandwich.
“To answer your question,” Leo said once Sera had taken a bite of her food. “I kind of got into it by accident.”
Henri let out a purposeful snort. “If by accident you mean that you knocked out a man in a bar fight and then found out there was a bounty on his head, then sure.”
“Wait, what?” Sera asked with a laugh. “Why did you get in a fight?”
Leo shrugged a shoulder. “The fella was harassing the waitress.”
Sera smiled at him with a soft look on her face. “You know, I’m starting to think this big bad wolf act of yours is just that, an act.”
“Oh absolutely,” Henri said as he came to stand behind Leo’s chair. He put his hands on Leo’s shoulder and gave them a squeeze. “He’s a puppy dog really.”
Leo couldn’t help himself. He bared his teeth and snarled at Henri, which just made the vampire lean in and kiss the tip of his nose.
Sera was watching them both. Leo could only guess what the nephilim thought of them.
“It’s a good way to make money and I can take or leave jobs when I want,” Leo finished, addressing Sera. “I like being my own boss.”
Sera looked down at her barely touched sandwich. “Yeah, like me. I guess I got lucky that you took that job and not someone else.”
“Sera,” Henri said. “This entire situation is weird. I can’t imagine how freaked out you must be. How about this? When we get back from seeing Eva, the three of us will sit down and talk. It’ll give you a chance to really get to know us.”
Leo could talk with the best of them, as well Henri knew, but it was mostly all bullshit and banter. He wasn’t the sort to open up to people. Henri, on the other hand, was an open book.
Like it or not, and it wasn’t that Leo didn’t like it, the three of them were in this together now. Their lives had been inexplicably entwined. They had to make the most of it, there was no other choice.
Sera looked hesitant but then she had pretty much looked that way since Leo woke up.
“Sounds good,” Leo finally said. “We can fire up the grill.”
“Mmm, yes, speaking of, first we’re going to need to dispose of the bodies in the living room,” Henri said.
Leo had forgotten about them, and judging by the look of utter horror on Sera’s face, so had she.
Chapter Eleven
A vampire didn’t get far in the world alone. Henri’s early years had been something of a struggle. Now, however, he knew people. He had someone to run errands for him if the sun was too bright, he had a butcher who supplied him with pig’s blood, and he had a coven, a coven who knew what to do with dead bodies.
His leader, or queen as she liked to be called, had sent a couple of guys down in a van to collect the bodies. Her plan was not to dispose of them, as Henri had suspected, but to take them back to Bale so he could see what happened to people who messed with her coven. It was brutal and cruel, but probably effective.
He and Leo walked back to the house under the shade of the umbrella in Leo’s hand. The werewolf stopped him before they reached the door.
“I guess we need to talk,” Leo said.
“Leo Ryan willingly offering to talk about his emotions,” Henri joked. “What’s next? A plague of locust perhaps?”
The corners of Leo’s mouth twitched as he tried not to smile. “Whoa there, luv, emotions? Who said anything about those pesky bastards?”
Henri just looked at him and waited for him to take it seriously. He usually got there in the end.
“I shouldn’t have taken off like I did,” Leo finally said. He looked uncomfortable but Henri had grown used to it.
It would be easy to blame it all on Leo, but Henri wasn’t exactly without fault.
“And I shouldn’t have lied to you,” Henri said. He put his hands in his pockets and watched Leo’s face carefully.
“You know how I feel about lying,” Leo said. “I grew up in a family of lies. I need you to be the one person I can trust completely.”
They both typically stayed out of both werewolf and vampire business, but Henri had agreed to help Eva in a dispute with a werewolf pack and had kept it from Leo for months. When Leo found out about it, he hadn’t been angry that Henri had gotten involved, just that he had kept it from him.
“I know that being a part of a coven is important to you,” Leo said. �
�And that when your queen calls upon you, it’s hard to say no, I get all that, and I’m not asking you not to, just don’t lie to me about it.”
Henri nodded and looked down at the ground. Leo could probably smell the shame on him.
“It wasn’t the fact that I was involved that I was afraid to tell you about,” Henri confessed. “It was the fact that I killed a werewolf.”
“We both killed werewolves just last night,” Leo pointed out. “You think that because I’m one of them I’m going to have a problem with that? As long as you felt your life was at risk, then of course I’d want you to fight for it.”
A small smile graced Henri’s lips. “You just assume that if I kill someone it’s because I have a good reason?”
“Of course,” Leo said. He reached out and cupped Henri’s face, forcing the vampire to look at him. It wasn’t often Henri saw Leo in daylight, if possible he was even more beautiful under the gentle glow of the afternoon sun. “I know it haunts you, how you were in those early years after your transition, but that’s not who you are now. The things you did, they weren’t your fault.”
Logically, Henri agreed with him. He had been a hungry newly turned vampire left to fend for himself. It didn’t stop him from remembering everything he had done though.
“You were strong enough to break free of that,” Leo reminded him. “To change the way you were, all by yourself. I’m proud of you for that.”
Henri pulled his hand free of his pocket and placed it over Leo’s before turning his head and kissing the werewolf’s palm. “Price will still try and come for Sera, you know. And there’ll probably be others.”
Leo nodded and pulled his hand free. “At least now it’s been made clear that she’s yours to Eva, and it’ll get back to Price. He can’t do anything that’ll come back on him.”
Henri sighed out of his nose. “I know what he’s like. Hell, he probably has spies inside Eva’s court.”
“True,” Leo conceded. “It’s not going to be easy. Keeping Sera safe means at least one of us will have to be with her all the time.”
Henri looked back at the house where Sera was. “What she did with the light bulbs that was something else.”
“I was kinda focused on the men we were fighting to really notice it until it was over,” Leo told him.
“I consider myself quite knowledgeable on matters of the underworld,” Henri said. “I’ve an extensive library. I’ve even met a nephilim.”
“Okay?” Leo said. “And?”
“I’ve never heard of a nephilim being able to do something like that,” Henri said. “If we could help her learn to use it—”
“Then she could protect himself,” Leo finished.
“We also haven’t talked about the fact she’s going to be living here with us now,” Henri said. “That she shared our bed.”
“The bond that you share,” Leo began with a sigh. “How does it feel? I mean, if it wasn’t there do you think you’d still want her here?”
Henri thought about the question for a minute before he answered. “I do. I can feel the bond like a sense in the back of my mind. Now that the initial blood lust has worn off I still want her. I still want to comfort her and protect her.”
He looked at Leo hard, studying his face for any subtle tells of how he was feeling. Perhaps that was a part of why he had kept Henri so hooked all these years, he was still something of a mystery at times. He was like a puzzle that Henri would never truly solve, and he liked that.
“I felt that way for her even without a blood bond,” Leo finally admitted. “I don’t know how this can possibly work, but I know that I want it to.”
That was enough for Henri. As long as they were both on the same page then the rest could be figured out in time.
With that, Henri opened the front door and stopped at the sight before him. Sera was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the blood out of Henri’s antique rug with a damp cloth. He realised that she was trying to help but he couldn’t help but grimace at the thought of what that frantic scrubbing was going to do to the fabric.
“Sera, darling, you really didn’t need to do that,” Henri told her.
Sera had found a pencil and was using it to keep her twisted hair up in place. “You both killed to protect me last night, the least I can do is help clean up.”
Henri looked over at Leo and saw that the werewolf was biting his lip in an effort not to laugh. The bastard knew how much Henri loved that rug.
“Would now be a good time to tell you that I never really liked it?” Leo asked.
Henri glared at him and gave him a gentle shove.
“So is it all…taken care of?” Sera asked with a wince. Dead bodies were unfortunately something Henri was used to. The supernatural really did like to settle things with a fight. He didn’t want it to become the norm for Sera.
“It is,” he said brightly. “No pesky werewolf carcasses stinking up the place.”
This time it was Leo’s turn to glare at him.
“Speaking of,” Henri said as he looked pointedly at Leo. “Perhaps you should go and take a shower, the sooner we go to London and get this over with, the better.”
“Um, I don’t have any clothes,” Sera pointed out. “And I’d really rather not have to wear my work clothes any longer than I have to.”
Henri looked Sera up and down. Her jeans were fine but the T-shirt that read The Train Station Café in bold red wasn’t.
“I see what you mean,” Henri said. “Not to worry, we can stop at a department store on our way and buy you some new things.”
Sera looked down at the rug. The stain was still there but it was somewhat diluted. “So, all my things at my flat, I just have to leave them behind?” she asked.
“No, of course not,” Leo said. “We can go and pack it all up one day this week.”
“I don’t even have my phone, I left it at the café, along with my jacket and keys,” Sera said. “Not to mention the broken window. Oh my God, they probably think I’ve been kidnapped or something.”
“Do you know the number for the café?” Leo asked.
“Yes,” Sera said.
Leo took his phone out of his pocket and tossed it to her. The nephilim scrambled to drop the sponge and grab the phone, just about managing it.
“Call them. Tell them a man was there last night acting crazy he went outside and smashed the window with what looked like a crowbar. You got spooked and ran, you crashed at a friend’s house, and tried to call them to let them know, but you couldn’t remember the phone number because you were in shock and you didn’t have your phone. You woke up a little while ago feeling clearer headed.”
Sera looked at him, absorbing what he was saying. She still looked utterly overwhelmed.
“I know you’re fond of your rug, Henri, but what if the police come looking for those guys?” Sera asked as she stood up. “Shouldn’t we like…burn it or something?”
Henri actually flinched at the barbaric suggestion. “The police won’t come looking. Here in the underworld, we take care of things ourselves. No one will report them as missing, unlike your boss.”
He nodded to the phone in her hand and Sera finally dialed the number.
“And you, please take a shower,” Henri told Leo.
Leo rolled his eyes at being told what to do but he smiled nonetheless. He also placed a kiss on the side of Henri’s head before he left. Henri had some phone calls to make of his own. He could only imagine how Eva would react to Sera, even standing with her now, feeling the bond between them, there was still a part of him that wanted to drain her dry. The vampire that attacked her the night before was no doubt young and unable to control himself. For Sera’s sake, Henri hoped his own resolve was better.
Chapter Twelve
On the car ride into the city, Sera had sat up front with Leo while Henri sat in the back. The back windows of Leo’s car were tinted so it helped with Henri’s aversion to sunlight. They had stopped off at a department store and Henri
and Leo hung around in the women’s section while Sera picked out some new clothes.
She had been hesitant at first about spending Henri’s money, but she soon got over it when she saw a fitted leather jacket she really liked.
By the time they got to London the sun had gone down completely and the moon shone above them, nearly full. The full moon was always an interesting time for Leo. Everything was heightened for him. It had led to some of the best sex they’d ever had.
Although Henri was glad he was part of a coven, there was a reason he chose not to live with them. Now that his bond with Sera was firmly in place he felt uneasy about bringing her around so many other vampires.
“Is there anything I should know?” Sera asked as they got out of the car.
Eva owned a large building in Chelsea. The penthouse was hers while the others were given to those in her favor. Henri had been in and out of her favor many times. She seemed to like that he played hard to get by insisting he have his own place. It made her want him more.
“Try not to piss anyone off,” Leo answered simply. “If anyone gets too close to you tell them you’re Henri’s and they’ll back off.”
“What if they don’t?” Sera asked.
“Then I’ll bite them,” Leo told her.
Henri tutted and rolled his eyes. “You’ll do no such thing. I know you don’t like these people but—”
“They don’t like me,” Leo corrected.
“But we might need them down the line, so try to play nice,” Henri said. “And if anyone challenges my claim on Sera, I’ll be the one to deal with them, as is my right. If you do it you’ll basically be declaring war.”
Sera frowned and looked between the two of them. “Yeah, still not loving this whole ownership thing.”
Henri understood that, he really did, but it couldn’t be helped. “Sera, it’s in name only, okay?”
He reached down and took her hand in his. It managed to put a slight smile on the nephilim’s face, so Henri chose to take that as a win.
She was wearing a simple black dress that stopped just above the knee and the fitted leather jacket she liked so much. She had proclaimed herself as more of a flats kind of girl, and completed her look with the pair of black Converse she had been wearing the day before. It was an odd look but somehow, she managed to pull it off.
Welcome to the Underworld (Siren Publishing Menage Amour) Page 7
