Surrender the Dark

by Tibby Armstrong

  “Nice pants,” Marc cooed, confirming Benjamin’s suspicions as to the speaker’s identity.

  “Thank you.” The reply should have contained a hint of a wry smile, but it didn’t. The man’s voice was like granite. It might warm under the bright sunshine, but it would never be anything but intrinsically cool, smooth, and hard.

  Benjamin tried and failed to wed the aura he thought he’d seen to that voice. How had he not heard the man approach the alcove? Benjamin sat in this spot precisely because it was the one place where nobody could surprise him in the bar’s otherwise open floor plan.

  “Can I get you anything?” Marc asked the stranger.

  “Please.” The man paused, and Benjamin almost pictured him sniffing the air as he asked, “Scotch was it?”

  Benjamin managed a nod.

  “May I join you?”

  More curious about the man’s purpose in seeking him out than anything else—or at least that’s what he told himself—Benjamin nodded again.

  “Tzadkiel.” Fabric rustled as the man introduced himself.

  Benjamin lifted his right hand, and managed to find his voice. “Benjamin.”

  If Tzadkiel possessed magic or was supernatural in any way, the skin-to-skin contact should reveal the truth. Resolute fingers pressed and gripped his. Benjamin felt nothing. Saw nothing. He nearly sagged in relief. The aura had been imagined—likely an effect of agitation combined with a lifetime of hyper vigilance. Plus, there was the little fact he’d been drinking.

  “Tzadkiel.” Benjamin said the first thing that came to mind. “That’s…unusual.”

  Scanning his memory for legends, Benjamin retrieved only one. He considered it briefly. If angels existed, they might be able to mask their auras. There was no way to politely ask without getting himself potentially locked up. Again. Besides, a being of that magnitude, if they were real, had no reason to seek him out. He was hardly halo and celestial choir material.

  Tzadkiel remained silent. Seconds ticked by. Benjamin tightened and flexed his fingers, his mind frantically searching for potential meaning behind this evening’s turn.

  Marc placed their drinks down with a “To your right.”

  Benjamin’s cheeks heated, and he snatched up his glass. To your right was a comment he heard every day from Nyx and Akito—one that he normally appreciated if he even noticed it at all. In this context, however, with Tzadkiel, he didn’t want to be mistaken for vulnerable.

  “Are you from around here?” Benjamin asked.

  Ice clinked in a raised glass. “Greece.”

  Well, that explained the faint accent and stilted speech pattern. English wasn’t the guy’s first language.

  “My maternal ancestors were Greek,” Benjamin said offhandedly after a moment.

  It had been so long since he’d made small talk with anyone, he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. Words were like weights on his tongue, each one carefully lifted and set down again for fear he’d drop it clumsily on his foot.

  “Benjamin?” Tzadkiel’s confusion registered in the drawn out and careful pronunciation of the name. “The name is not Greek.”

  “My father liked the meaning. Son of my right hand,” Benjamin intoned, waving his hand in a vague flourish. “I was meant to go into the family business. But there is a Greek form, if you want to be picky. It’s Beniamin. I was always shit at Greek letters or I’d spell it out.”

  Something creaked like leather bending, and Benjamin remembered Marc had said the man wore leather pants.

  “Did you?” Tzadkiel’s question came from a more intimate distance. “Enter into the family business?”

  The sounds of conversation and the bartender’s shaker, scraping stools and raised laughter were constant now outside the alcove; the frenetic joviality was that of a town full of young professionals and college students. The buzz and hum cushioned Benjamin’s already-hazy senses, lulling him into a state of easy relaxation he often sought but rarely found.

  “Sort of. My parents are dead, so I had to start over.”

  Benjamin heard Marc’s voice nearby and motioned for another drink.

  “And are you good at what you do?” Voiced with languid precision, the quiet timbre of Tzadkiel’s question cast an erotic chill.

  If the man had a competence kink, Benjamin knew at least a half dozen ways to satisfy it. Usually, he preferred bottoming, but it might be interesting to strut his stuff for a man who was so obviously used to being on top.

  Feigning a relaxed posture, drink dangling between his fingertips, Benjamin gave a feline grin. “I am.”

  There was another stretch of silence. Benjamin’s grip on the glass gradually tightened, and he resisted the urge to squirm. Had he misinterpreted the innuendo? Been too forward? Ruined the moment? Confidence spun out of his control, both it and the drink ruining his emotional and physical equilibrium until he slouched in his chair. He shouldn’t be coming on to a man he barely knew.

  Tzadkiel set his glass on the table with a bright clink. “You had a good walk here?”

  The question shook Benjamin by the scruff, and set his libido aside with an emphatic whump to his midsection. A startlingly clear and contemporary vision of himself, complete with the monochrome of lamplight and the hilly backdrop of Joy Street, rose in his mind.

  “How did you know that I walked here?” Horrified disbelief broke through alcohol’s fumes. “Did you follow me?”

  “Yes.” Tzadkiel’s answer hung in the air until Benjamin swore he could feel the man’s gaze boring straight through his anger to expose the marrow of his fear.

  Crushing the emotion, Benjamin forced a “Why?” past his numb lips.

  “I saw you nearly struck by a vehicle when you crossed the road earlier.” Scent—smoky with bergamot undertones—tickled Benjamin’s nostrils. Tzadkiel certainly didn’t smell like a vampire, or even a werewolf, for that matter. When the man spoke again, his voice was closer. “I wanted to make sure you were all right. So I finished my business and followed you here.”

  Relief brought blood rushing back to Benjamin’s limbs, and heat flooded his cheeks. He didn’t know which idea was worse—that the man found him pathetic enough to follow him out of some misguided good-Samaritan impulse or that Tzadkiel might have followed him here in hopes he could kiss a blind man’s boo-boos and snag a sure thing.

  “Who are you, anyway? Some angel of mercy jonesing for extra credit?” Benjamin spat the questions, covering his embarrassment with reflexive pride before manipulating the conversation into another direction. “And since when is the name Tzadkiel any more Greek than Benjamin?”

  “It’s not.” Voice hollow, tone dry, Tzadkiel spoke into his glass. “My father had the same fondness for angels that yours did for…business partners.”

  The music in the bar grew more grating, an industrial alternative that rattled Benjamin with its jagged rhythm. Alcohol had warped his hearing so that the notes seemed to stutter, taking on a warbled quality reminiscent of underwater listening. He swallowed down the rest of his drink and trusted Marc to bring him another.

  “Well.” Benjamin turned his head, wishing for some way to dismiss the stranger. “You’ll have to satisfy your hurt-fix fetish with some other, less suspecting blind drunk. I’m fine.”

  Only he wasn’t fine. The man had rattled him to the tips of his steel-toed boots. Marc brought another round, and Benjamin drank deeply. That drink disappeared and another followed. Alcohol clouded sense and memory. Benjamin tried and failed to remember if his questions had ever been answered. Too drunk to be cautious, he straightened and involuntarily swayed in time to the music’s suggestive rhythm.

  His pulse was a sluggish beat that seemed to match the slur in his words. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Do you know what I am?”

  Fabric rustled, suggesting a shrug.

  “Use your words.” Sarcasm bled from him.

  The sweet scent of Scotch tickled Benjamin’s nostrils when Tzadkiel leaned in close. Too close.

&
nbsp; Tzadkiel’s breath hit Benjamin’s cheek, then his ear. “I am so very intrigued. Beniamin.”

  The name, uttered like a cold caress in flawless Greek, sent a shudder down Benjamin’s arms to his fingers. Benjamin sat back swiftly and skimmed his fingertips along the tabletop until he found his glass. Raising it to his nose, he sniffed, and grounded himself with the peaty aroma.

  Unbidden, an image of the vampire from the night his family had died—dark haired and with exotically deep-set eyes, their color at once lovely and strange—flashed bright with violet hues. The remembered eyes were ancient, and mocking, as if the vampire had possessed knowledge Benjamin didn’t, and would never have.

  That was the second time tonight he’d visualized a scene so vividly, and he had the feeling that it wasn’t just a memory. He shook his head to clear it of things that didn’t belong there. Instead, the visions intensified, running together so quickly that they bled into each other.

  Color. Light. The slant of moonbeams across his bedroom on a silvery winter’s eve. So beautiful and so lifeless and so cold. The monochrome bloomed into a summer’s day. Blue sky and green leaves filtering the brightness. Tulips. A red-and-yellow-striped beach ball rolling down the front steps and onto brick pavers. Midnight blue eyes, and pain. So much pain. Technicolor reality knifed through Benjamin’s head, along with shouts and cries, and imagined red—too much red—seeping under the partially opened basement door.

  “Stop it,” Benjamin hissed, wishing he could make the red stop. It had to stop. He pushed trembling fingers under his glasses and pressed them over the raised scars where his eyelids should have been, wishing he could reach into his brain and pluck out the nightmares.

  “Your waiter is worried about you.” Tzadkiel’s thoughtful tone said he watched Marc, not Benjamin.

  Dropping his hands, Benjamin fingered his glass as the visions, memories, whatever they were, came to a stuttering halt. “Should he be?”

  There was a surprised pause followed by Tzadkiel’s quiet laugh. The dark, rich sound loosened Benjamin’s muscles a fraction. He breathed deep and realized how absurd the question sounded. How absurd all of this would sound if he said it aloud.

  Everything he’d been dealing with tonight was a result of long-buried childhood memories married to macabre imagination. He should lay off the Stoker. Maybe read a little Jane Austen—he’d been meaning to get to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. As a tonic against further unwanted visions, Benjamin downed the rest of his Scotch, tilting his head back to catch the last drops, and signaled for another. He was already going to be nailed to the proverbial cross of his hangover come morning. Might as well make it count.

  “Are you always so…prickly?” Tzadkiel’s amusement called to mind a mocking grin.

  Marc came, forcing a pause in their conversation. When he left, Benjamin leaned toward Tzadkiel. “For the record?” Rolling the weight of his newly filled glass clumsily between his fingers, he spoke with amazing and deliberate care given how drunk he was. “When someone’s almost been run over? You ask them immediately if they’re all right. Then you leave when they say they’re fine. You don’t stalk them.”

  Though he knew now that he’d been followed, Benjamin wasn’t worried that the man—he had to be just a man—knew he was a hunter. Perhaps some magical residue from Nyx’s spell had allowed Tzadkiel to appear on Benjamin’s figurative radar when he’d walked into the lounge? Or maybe it had been as he’d surmised earlier—a figment of this evening’s overactive paranoia combined with habitual hyper vigilance. Either way, his sodden mind told him, the man was innocent of everything except bad judgment and perhaps questionable taste.

  “My apologies.” Tzadkiel paused. “May I make amends by seeing you home?”

  The formal request transported Benjamin a hundred years into the past, to a time when he imagined his home was newer and this area was teeming with streetcars and the clop of horses’ hooves. There was a certain comfort in that—a gentility that, rather than feeling stiff, spoke of steadiness and reliability.

  Gods, he was shitfaced. “I can get there myself.”

  At least he still had the good sense to make his tongue overrule his libido. No matter how much he wanted the oblivion a good fuck would bring to his overwrought mind, he knew better than to go home with strangers. Mostly.

  “The storm is upon us.” Wary consideration edged Tzadkiel’s observation.

  Upon us? That went beyond quaint into weird. Who spoke like that? “Who taught you English? Shakespeare?”

  Silence greeted the question and belatedly, Benjamin recalled that English wasn’t Tzadkiel’s native tongue. He winced. The man had probably learned what he knew from formal high school language drills and classic literature, and Benjamin had insulted his skill. Hell, it had been all Benjamin had been able to do to learn the Greek alphabet from his uncle—and even that had only come at the cost of brutal beatings and many sunny Saturdays spent indoors poring over musty books.

  “Allow me to make certain you get home safely.” Tzadkiel’s tone drizzled dark honey down Benjamin’s spine.

  One Scotch too many, his sixth—or was it seventh?—of the evening, had made its way into Benjamin’s bloodstream, eroding the foundations of his common sense until it crumbled in the face of arousal’s crashing onslaught. What did he have to lose? The man seemed to want to fuck him, and Benjamin wanted to be fucked. He’d done stupider things than go home with a guy who wanted an easy lay. Hell, he wanted an easy lay.

  “Marc thinks you’ll fuck me into next week.” Benjamin raised his empty glass in mock salute, and Scotch sloshed over his hand. “I say he underestimates us both.”

  In the back of his mind, the part barely sober enough to grapple with reason, he knew this was a bad idea. If Scotch goggles were a thing, he had slapped a big pair on his face. No matter what tomorrow brought, tonight he wanted to put away thoughts about monsters and death. He was tired of loneliness. Tired of waiting for permanent darkness to come. If only for an hour, he wanted to forget.

  Chapter 4

  Last call saw the lights coming up in the bar. The hunter’s mirrored sunglasses reflected the harsh glare back at Tzadkiel. The modern, wraparound style issued an unspoken threat supported by ripped jeans and insolently crossed shin-high motorcycle boots. A white poet’s shirt that should have softened the outfit’s effect perversely amplified the promise of barely leashed violence, telling a story of camouflaged weapons and concealed wounds.

  Tzadkiel trailed his gaze lower, assessing weaknesses he might exploit. Slim hips and a dancer’s build said the hunter dodged well, but went down easily when hit. Without weight to throw behind punches, he’d require a weapon and quick footing to win his fights. Tattoo-emblazoned knuckles, their message blatant—FUCK across the right and MERCY across the left—both invited and mocked death, as did a heavy silver skull ring adorning the hunter’s right thumb.

  Benjamin’s face would be the first thing an adversary noticed, but the distractions presented there could prove costly. A network of ridged scars only briefly disturbed the arresting effect of high cheekbones and a luridly peaked mouth. Pale skin, almost translucent, had once been golden with the promise of youth and offset by luminous eyes of startling blue. Still-glorious curls, long and artfully unkempt, lay in a tangle that spoke of frustrated fingers and tendrils too thick to comb. As a boy, Benjamin had been this side of pretty. As a man, he wasn’t just beautiful. He was the epitome of careless Byronesque dishevelment and punk-rock fury.

  A startlingly winsome dimple softened one side of that sensually cruel mouth. “Do you want to get out of here?”

  “Of course.” Tzadkiel glanced at the clock above the bar. Two a.m. “It seems they will not let us stay in any case.”

  By his calculations, the hunter had been drinking hard for close to three hours. Either the bartender had watered down his libations, or Benjamin held his alcohol well.

  “Your place?” A vision of Benjamin answering No, yours made Tzadkiel bri
efly contemplate what the hunter might do if they entered the subway access tunnel under Beacon Hill and scrambled down a ladder into a disused sewer.

  Thankfully, his adversary answered, “Sounds good.”

  The tab arrived and Tzadkiel rustled obviously, making as if he withdrew an imaginary wallet from his jacket, but Benjamin was there before him, lifting a credit card from the plastic tray as Tzadkiel had hoped he would. In truth, he hadn’t had access to either money or plastic in decades and wouldn’t know where to find his wallet twenty years on from his abduction. Benjamin scrawled his name on the slip of paper, and Tzadkiel closed his jacket. Had the hunter known who sat across from him, he might not have found paying for the drinks quite as affirming of his masculinity or independence.

  Tzadkiel allowed himself a private smile at how the night was unfolding. Thinking of the heart-stopping moment on the way into the bar when he had struggled to keep his aura dampened, he wondered how long he could maintain his guard if things progressed in the direction Benjamin apparently hoped. That the hunter seemed to prefer men was a welcome surprise—one that would give Tzadkiel a distinct advantage in getting him alone.

  “I didn’t realize you would prefer the company of males,” Tzadkiel said, acknowledging the unexpected boon. He and his brothers had traditionally sought out male companionship themselves, since their magic worked to turn men but not women. It was easier should flirtation turn to something more.

  “I can’t think why else you tracked me down. You couldn’t have been all that concerned about my safety if you didn’t follow me immediately.” Benjamin tossed the pen onto the tray and stood, a tad unsteady. “And you came on to me the second you opened your mouth.”

  “Perhaps I am simply accustomed to my own preferences, and hadn’t considered yours,” Tzadkiel replied, moving to assist the hunter with his coat.

  Benjamin stilled, then snorted. “I can’t decide if you’re here to murder me or to fuck me.”

  Oh, undeniably both.

  Tzadkiel dropped his hands and stepped back. For a man who had to be outrageously foxed, the hunter was dangerously in control of his faculties. There had been a risk in coming inside the bar, but there was also everything to gain. If Tzadkiel continued to play his cards right, he could overpower the hunter when the man was weak with sated bliss. He should have gathered the kylix first, to fill with the hunter’s blood and raise to the gods in thanksgiving and supplication. Still, minimal violence could see the hunter bound in the basement of his house—a fitting irony Tzadkiel wished to savor—while he retrieved the kylix from his mora’s stronghold beneath Boston Common. Next would come the ceremonial bloodletting, ending with Benjamin’s quick death. Power would run through Tzadkiel’s veins, and he would be able to gather his men to him and confront the coven without delay. They would win back what was rightfully theirs, and life would go on.