by eden Hudson
“How long was I out?” I asked.
She looked over at the old clock radio on her nightstand. “Only about an hour. By the time I finished sewing up your side, you were gone.”
I nodded. I remembered coming upstairs. Then she had said something about sutures and me laying down. After that, everything got hazy.
“I thought you would sleep longer,” she said. “You need it.”
“I don’t feel tired,” I said.
“Colt…” She shifted, then sat up. “What do you remember?”
My stomach twisted and my face burned. I looked down at the knees of her khakis.
“Everything. All of it.”
Tiffani took a breath and I recognized her expression before she started talking. She was going to ask me something she didn’t want to know the answer to.
The knot in my gut doubled up and pulled tight. There were so many things I didn’t want to talk about right now. Or ever.
“Do you remember me?” she asked. “Really remember?”
I was so relieved I almost laughed. All the tension drained out of my neck and shoulders. I dropped my head back on the pillow.
“I told you that you were addicted to smoking,” I said.
She stared at me.
“You said you just did it because of the mouth boredom.” I rolled up onto my elbow. “But you couldn’t go five seconds without a cigarette?”
The little crease between her eyebrows appeared. “Screw you. I cut myself in half and crawled across a sea of broken glass.”
“Not in the real world,” I said. “Just in some guy’s fucked-up brain.”
She pressed her lips together and exhaled through her nose.
“It felt real,” she said. Her voice was softer than I’d ever heard it. Almost fragile.
Kiss her. Hold her. Touch her. Do something. Make her feel better. I wanted to, worse than anything. But I couldn’t. If I tried to touch her… I couldn’t. She knew everything. It was a miracle she could stand to be in the same room with me.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could say.
“How much of it came from Mikal?” she asked.
My face got so hot that my eyes watered. I shut them tight. Clenched my fists. Anything but this. Please, let us talk about anything but this.
“Colt?”
I was breathing too slow, trying to keep it even like everything was normal, but I couldn’t. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to be somewhere else. I actually wanted to open my eyes and realize I was back with Mikal and this whole conversation—this whole night—was just her messing with my head. That I could take. I’d been humiliated and tortured and dehumanized and insane. Talking to Tiffani about this, though, trying to explain, seeing the look on her face when she realized how screwed up I was—that would be so much worse.
Icy fingers touched my cheek. I flinched.
“Stop,” Tiffani said. “That sounds awful. Stop grinding your teeth. Your enamel doesn’t grow back.”
“Probably all gone by now anyway.”
She didn’t even crack a smile.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Tiff. Really sorry.”
“Was any of it—the wire, the glass, the mines—was any of that what she did to you?”
“No.”
“The fire—”
“You did that.” That came out harsher than I meant for it to. “You picked the RPG-7 with the warhead even though I said not to. You did it to yourself.”
Tiffani’s back straightened. “I wanted something that would get the job done.”
“Well, great job! It’s done. She’s gone. And you know what it’s like to have your skull crack and your brain run out through your mouth. Mission accomplished.”
“I couldn’t know what it was like unless you knew what it was like,” Tiff said.
If she knew the things I know about you, Colter, she could never look at you again without being sick.
I couldn’t breathe. I could feel straps cutting into my wrists, pressure on my chest, and this sick anticipation. I was ready for it. I wanted it. I had brought it on myself.
“Colt, what did Mikal—”
I rolled over and got out of bed. The stitches in my side pulled as I stood up, but there weren’t any straps. No restraints. No straightjacket. No Mikal.
“Why are we talking about this?” I yelled. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over. She’s gone. She’s in Hell and she’s out of my brain, so why are we still talking about her?”
Tiffani appeared in front of me. “I have to know.”
“Why? So you can get off on it the next time you’re with a groupie? What part works best for you, Tiff? You already know about fire. Do you want to hear about having bugs burrowing around inside your skin? How about her electroshock machine?” I could feel the black noise building, creeping toward my brain. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t have Mikal to hold it back anymore. “Want to know what it’s like to spend a week in a pitch black padded cell in a straightjacket so tight you’re always a deep breath away from suffocating? Want to know how long it takes to start hallucinating? How long before you’re begging her to let you out, promising you’ll do anything she wants?”
“Colt—”
“Or is it the sex you’re interested in?” I took a step closer to her. “You want to know how Mikal was, don’t you? She’s immortal. She’s had forever to practice. Making me scream and cry and come all at the same time wasn’t really that big a deal to her.”
“Dammit, Colt, stop!”
I got up in her face. “No, tell me what part you have to know.”
“Stop it!” Tiffani had her eyes shut and her fists over her ears, like I’d been beating on her and she’d just been taking it.
Shit. I stepped back.
Tiffani took a long, slow breath, and opened her eyes. Her fists eased down to her sides.
“The whole time she had you, I didn’t do anything,” Tiffani said. “I just left you with her. I let her do that to you.”
My mouth opened, then shut again.
“You needed me,” Tiffani whispered. “And I didn’t do anything.”
For a second, I couldn’t do anything but stare at her. Then I reached out and touched her elbow with my fingertips. I expected her to pull away. I think if she had, I would’ve fallen apart right there.
But she didn’t. She didn’t even brush my hand off.
It felt like somebody had dug out my chest cavity and scoured the inside with steel wool.
I had to clear my throat so I could talk. “Tiff, I didn’t expect you to… I didn’t want you to come after me. I would’ve never wanted that. I just wanted you to be okay.”
She glared at me. “What part of you being tortured to death did you think would make me okay?”
“Come on, it wasn’t that bad,” I said. “She could’ve forced me to watch the last season of X-Files on repeat. The Doggett years?”
“This isn’t funny!” Tiffani shoved me.
I banged into the wall. This time I didn’t have to make the effort to laugh, it came out on its own. Tiff loved to pretend she was so cold and emotionless, but inside she was almost as unstable as me.
She sighed.
“Dumbass.” She leaned into my chest and wrapped her arms around my stomach.
The cold took me by surprise. I’d forgotten just how freezing Tiffani was. It felt good, like she was syphoning off some of my heat, keeping me from bursting into flames. I put my arms around her and rubbed her back, trying to warm her up.
Then I realized what I was doing. I was holding Tiffani—hugging her. I’d never hugged Tiffani before Mikal.
Before you betrayed Tiffani. Before you started depending on Mikal and needing everything she did to you. Before you started loving it. If Tiffani knew, she could never look at you again without being sick. If she knew—
I could feel my brain trying to slip off the foothold Tiff had given it and spiral back into insanity, but one thought stopped it.
Tiff does know.
She knows I’m twisted and sick and disgusting. She knows I gave up her memory so I could have more of Mikal. She knows everything.
Realizing that was like a shotgun blast to the stomach. I tensed up and tried to pull away, but Tiffani wouldn’t let go. She grabbed my chin, pulled my face down, and kissed me.
It felt just as undeserved and wrong as it had after she beat Mikal. And good. Incredible. I hugged her tighter, lifted her off the ground.
She laughed. Her breath came out cold against my lips.
“Put me down before you rip out your stitches,” she said.
I pressed my forehead against hers. “You punched me into a wall a minute ago. Now you’re worried about the stitches?”
“I didn’t punch you,” she said. “I shoved you. A little.”
“I’m pretty sure that bullet hit me softer than you did.”
Tiffani got that serious look on her face. “Colt, what I want to do with you can’t be done standing up without tearing your stitches. Put me down.”
Even I wasn’t crazy enough to say no to that.
Tiffani
The heat of Colt’s skin burned through my shirt and against my khakis as he slid me down his body to the floor. As soon as my feet touched, I pressed closer. Tangled my fingers in his hair and pulled his head down. His lips were scorching, full of that unholy fire. The sound of his sigh tingled along the surface of my skin.
It had been so long since I last felt like this, since I’d wanted sex in this way. Not because his body heat was confusing my senses. Not because the primal crow magic had been whipped into a frenzy by the smell of blood and arousal. Not because I wanted something to drown out the pain. I had Colt back. He remembered me. He wanted me. I wanted to get as close to him as I could, to be a part of him.
I undid the button on his jeans, but the zipper wouldn’t budge. I yanked harder. The denim along his fly ripped.
“Damn it,” I said.
“Screw it, they’re old.” He tugged on my khakis’ button fly. “Help me with these.”
“Here.” I stepped back and unbuttoned my pants. Shimmied them off with my underwear, then pulled my shirt and bra over my head.
Colt had stopped moving. He just stared.
I fought the urge to cross my arms over my stomach or try to cover myself. I’d been naked or mostly naked with hundreds of people over the years. I was too damn old to feel self-conscious.
“Well?” I said. I’d meant for it to be a demand that he get his clothes off, too, but it came out more like a question.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just… Tiff, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
I bit my lip and tried not to swoon like some moon-eyed virgin. “Get your pants off.”
He pulled the zipper back up, messed with it for a second, then jerked it down to the metallic sound of the teeth popping.
“Break it?” I asked.
“Who cares?” He dropped his jeans and stepped out of them. Grabbed my hand and pulled me close again. His palms slid over my back, up to my shoulders, leaving fiery paths in their wake. It wasn’t enough to drive the cold away. I wished he could touch every inch of me at the same time. Wrap me up in his heat.
Colt hesitated as his hands came around to the front. He traced my collarbones, my throat. His heartbeat had changed. From desire to something else.
The super-smeller picked up on it: fear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just—” Heat rushed to his face. In the half-light from the window, I couldn’t see him blush, but I knew the tops of his cheeks were dark red. He took a step back and scrubbed his hands across his face. “Shit!”
“Colt—” I reached for him, but he shrugged off my hand.
“Got to be fucking kidding me,” he said. “How is this happening?”
Then I saw it. He wasn’t hard.
I hugged my arms around my chest. “Is it because I’m too cold? I know Mikal was hotter than human body temperature.”
“No—shit—I swear it’s not you.” The words sounded raw in his throat.
“We don’t have to do anything,” I said.
“I want to.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I wanted to. I don’t know. Fuck!”
The tone of his voice, his abrupt movements, and the coiled tension in his muscles warned the vamp senses to stay still and calm. Wheels turned in my head. The super-smeller went into overdrive, searching out the emotions. Anger. Fear. Something harder to define. Shame?
“Colt.” I took a step toward him. “You spent the last six weeks being tortured and raped—”
The air hissed out of his lungs. “Don’t say shit like that.”
“It’s true.”
“Everybody already knows I was Mikal’s bitch. I don’t need it all over town that I’m a limp-dicked pussy now, too.” He laughed, the sound short and angry. “Besides, it wasn’t that long before I was as into it as she was, so ‘rape’ probably isn’t the right term.”
The vicious bitch inside me flared up, dying to rip something apart. I forced it back down.
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” I said.
“I want to!” He threw his hands up. “I want to, all right? I just—This isn’t—I can’t…like this.”
“Then tell me how.” I sounded more frustrated than I’d meant to. Eighty-five years’ worth of suppressing emotion out the window, just like they always went around him. And always at the worst damn times.
Colt glared down at the floor. When he opened his mouth, his heart raced. He closed his mouth and his heart calmed down again.
I tried to think of a way to apologize. A way to explain that I just wanted to understand so I could be there for him.
Hell. That sounded as cliché in my head as it would have if I’d said it out loud. How do you tell someone that you would do anything to be with them?
The image of Colt licking Mikal’s boots forced its way into my head as if to further punish me. He said that he’d been as into the pain as Mikal was. He begged her to hurt him. Colt—using Mikal’s memory as a mouthpiece—had told me that I could never give him what he needed.
Over the years, I had run into vamp groupies who wanted to be humiliated and controlled. I only played along when I was starving or desperate. The rest of the time I let the vampire superiority types deal with them. I had enough issues of my own to deal with, I couldn’t waste the energy worrying about why some humans became blood slaves. Maybe I should’ve been paying closer attention.
There was an unfolding sensation in my brain. Mitzi’s connection.
Oh, looks like I got here just in time, she said.
I snapped my eyes shut.
Come on, Tiffani, don’t be a bitch. I let you see Tough from every angle, his good sides and his bad sides. I want to see how Saint Lover-boy measures up.
Reacting would just encourage her. The only way to get rid of Mitzi was to ignore her.
Open your eyes, Tiffani, she whined. Tiffani? Tiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffani—
Like a damn child. Sometimes I could swear that getting made stopped your emotional development the same as it did your aging.
Fine, Mitzy snapped. Have it your way. Don’t say I didn’t try to help, though. When Saint Lover-boy’s begging for some kink and all you’ve got to offer are your old-dog-no-new-tricks excuses, don’t come crying to me.
She slammed the connection shut.
I took a deep breath in through my nose, then opened my eyes.
Colt’s face was burning. Even in the dark, the vamp senses could feel the hot blood in his cheeks. I wondered what I looked like to him. Was I glaring? Did he think I was mad at him? Hell, if anything I was mad at myself. Mitzi was right. I was an old dog. It was too late for me to learn the tricks I needed to be with him.
A memory of the day I had fed from Colt’s wrist flashed through my brain. His ropey muscles tightening, his heart pounding. Hearing him grit his teeth, feeling and smelling
his body react. The pain had turned him on. Before Mikal, before any of this, I had turned him on.
Biting, hurting, attacking wasn’t even a trick, it was just instinct. The vampire ultimate predator senses lit up, eager for mutilation, sex, blood, living sacrifice.
As he reached for his jeans, the scents of Colt’s anger and frustration and embarrassment became bright slashes of color in the darkness.
I grabbed his wrist.
“You have to tell me if it’s too much,” I said.
Colt cocked his head at me as if he was afraid to ask.
“There’s a good chance I won’t be able to pay close enough attention once the blood starts flowing.” Blood, the predator in me growled, straining at the end of its leash. “You have to stop me if it hurts too much.”
“It won’t,” Colt said.
I took a step closer and pinned him against the wall. His heat soaked into my skin, waking dead nerves in little bursts of light. My fingernails bit into the plaster, dying to feel the warmth and give of flesh.
“Promise or get out,” I said.
“Fine.” He swallowed. “I promise. But it won’t hurt too much. It can’t.”
I grabbed the back of his head and pulled him into a kiss. My fangs punctured his lip. Blood welled up. The crow magic screamed at the taste. Colt made a sound halfway between a sigh and a wince. The tension in his body shifted, intensified. He slipped his tongue between my lips and searched out my fangs. I bit again. Not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to hurt. He picked me up and hooked my legs around his hips. I licked the bloody cut in his bottom lip.
“You promised,” I reminded him. “If it’s too much—”
“It won’t be,” he said.
To prove him wrong, I bit into the bunched muscle at the top of his arm. The groan rolled out of his throat like smoke. He ground his erection against me. I dug my fingernails into his back. I wanted to rip him apart, gulp down his blood while he lay dying in my arms.
“The bed,” I said.
Vertigo spun through my head as he dropped me onto the mattress, then climbed on top of me. He hesitated. Leaned down and brushed his lips across my throat. The scent of fear grew stronger and mingled with his arousal.
