He silently cursed himself when he stepped inside his entryway. The direction he held Quinn gave the boy a perfect line of sight to the spilled blood in the kitchen. No hope of him not noticing.
“Is that, um—blood?”
“Yes,” Alex answered.
He placed Quinn on the sofa, the same way he’d done not even a week ago. The human curled into a sitting position and stared at him with his hands fisted in his lap.
Alex crouched. “Let me see your palms. They looked scraped and bleeding.”
Quinn shrunk back into the cushions. “That’s okay. They not that bad, and I really don’t want you to—you know—lick them or anything.”
Standing, he said, “I wasn’t going to.” Except, of course, he wanted to—and not only because his first impulse after saving the boy was to reaffirm his survival by tasting his life’s blood. His saliva would help with the healing process. Quinn wasn’t in a frame of mind to hear that, though. Alex made himself move away and sit on the edge of the nearby chair. He braced his arms on his legs to give a casual appearance. If he kept his cool, maybe Quinn would, as well.
“Ask me whatever questions you have. I promise to answer them fully and truthfully.” It was a risk to do so, but Adrian and Alex’s own selfish desires had brought them to this point.
Quinn’s chest rose and fell on a few harsh breaths and his gaze darted around before landing back at Alex’s eyes. “Are you vampires?” The question came blurted out in a rush of air.
Alex smiled. “No. There are no such things as vampires.”
The boy shook his head. “No human can move as fast as you, Val and the killer did. It was like watching some superhero movie without CGI enhancing the speed. I saw the man’s eyes go from violet to red, the way yours are right now. And that noise you made? Like a hundred lions roaring at the same time.” He shook his head again. “Plus, there’s…you know, this…” He circled his mouth with his finger.
“What?”
Quinn’s eyes widened even more. “You have, ah, fangs.”
Alex ran his tongue across his upper teeth and, to his chagrin, felt that his biters had indeed descended. “Oh, sorry.” With effort, he retracted them. It wasn’t really surprising, given how upset he was. His body craved a fight and blood in equal measure.
“Yeah, like I said, vampires.” Quinn huffed. “Don’t tell me that’s normal, because it’s not.”
Alex dropped his gaze to study his hands dangling between his legs. “I won’t. I promised the truth and that’s what you’ll get. We aren’t vampires, but we’re also not humans, because we aren’t of this world.”
Quinn blinked rapidly at him a few times. “You’re aliens?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” He looked away again with furrowed brows. “I guess that is believable. I mean it’s the twenty-first century, after all, and an alien invasion is something that even scientists talk about.”
“It’s not an invasion. We’re marooned.”
Shifting into a more relaxed pose, Quinn blew out a breath. At least he wasn’t freaking out. Hopefully that was a good sign.
“Who are ‘we’, exactly? I know it must mean you, Val, Harry, Emil and that asshole who attacked me.”
“Yes, that’s right. There are a few dozen of us who survived the crash and are still living on this planet.”
“Not Kitty or Lucien.” He bit his lower lip. “Not Mackie?”
Alex shook his head. “None of them. Our species has no variability in skin tone or hair color. And there were no women on the ship. They don’t serve on long voyages.”
Quinn raised his eyebrows. “So, you’re sexist but not homophobic or racist.”
Alex had to chuckle over those observations. A band of tension relaxed inside him. Quinn was asking questions and not running screaming from the room. This might not be so bad after all. Before, when he’d revealed his true nature to others, it had been after a long period of developing a relationship of some kind. Quinn’s tolerance for the unexpected and unbelievable was amazing.
“When your species is monochrome, racism never has a chance to take root. Our sexuality is inherently more fluid that the average human’s. That’s probably due to our evolution. You see, at our biological core, we are more like bees than apes. Our queen is fecund to a degree no human woman could match. In her lifetime, a queen will reproduce more than a thousand times. She also births far more males than females. And while many of her daughters are fertile, we still don’t have anything like the equal ratio of male to female that you humans have.”
“So, you had an all-male crew because your women are too busy popping out kids?”
Alex winced. “Not exactly. Women do whatever they want. Being pregnant and giving birth doesn’t hold them back, but of course, most jobs are filled by males. That’s just a statistical issue. They also instinctively stay away from the more dangerous roles because our species can only survive if they produce enough offspring.”
“Okay, so you and your crew are marooned here. How did that happen, exactly?”
Alex didn’t answer right away. The question itself sent him careening back emotionally to the incident and the nagging feeling that he should have been able to somehow stop it. Unable to sit still with his memories, he rose and paced over to the draped windows. He took a few deep breaths to get himself under control before turning to back to Quinn.
“My people have been exploring space since humans walked Earth. We found and figured out how to exploit wormholes.”
Quinn twisted onto his knees, his interest and excitement obvious. “You mean there are wormholes? It’s really a thing?”
“Yes.” He smiled—or maybe it became a grimace. “They do, and it’s tricky to use them. My navigator was young. It was his first voyage and he miscalculated our descent out of it. Instead of coming into your galaxy to explore, we crashed on your planet. Most of my crew were killed on impact.”
The boy was silent for a few seconds as he digested the tale. “You were the captain?” he finally asked in a hushed tone.
“Yes, I was responsible.”
Quinn shook his head. “No, your navigator screwed up.”
“I was the captain. I was responsible,” he reiterated, because that was the rule, even on this pitiful planet.
The human rolled his eyes. “Whatever. So, why are you like vampires?”
Alex couldn’t hold back the groan. He felt confident enough in his welcome to go back to sit on the couch next to Quinn. “That’s humans making up a story to explain what they don’t understand and what they fear. You see, we crashed in the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Romania.”
“Oh, you mean, like Transylvania?”
“Exactly. I tried to keep my people separate from the indigenous ones in the vain hope that we’d be rescued. Of course, it didn’t work. Slowly the natives noticed us and created stories about who and what we were.”
Quinn wrinkled his nose and the casualness of the gesture gave Alex even greater hope that the boy would accept him as he was. “You drink blood.”
“Part of our natural diet, and human blood is very tasty,” he added with a guilty sigh.
Quinn made a disgusted face. “Ick, but go on.”
“We’re obviously taller, stronger and faster than a human. We climb easily because of our long fingers. Our body temperature is lower, so we’re cooler to the touch, making it seem like we’re dead. And your planet is closer to your sun. That means we don’t tolerate the brightness and the heat of the day very well. We like being out at night better.”
“Garlic?” Quinn asked, angling his body closer to Alex’s.
“Ask Emil about how much he loves cooking with it. That part of the lore I can’t explain.”
“Hmm.” The boy pursed his lips, making him look adorable. Alex wanted to haul him in for a kiss. It was too soon, though. “I’ve seen you make the sign of the cross, so that part’s bogus, too, huh?”
“Our species has no religion. We adopte
d Christianity because we were trying to blend into the place where we’d settled. It made no difference. Our ‘otherness’ was still obvious.”
“Yeah, you really do stand out in a crowd. Adrian’s been stalking me for a few days.”
“What?” Given the attack, he shouldn’t have been surprised or alarmed. Knowing that his boy had been close to danger more than once drove him mad, however. He grabbed Quinn’s hands and was grateful when the human didn’t try to pull away. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know what was happening.” Now, he sounded peeved. “You didn’t come clean with me from the beginning. You’ve always known it was him, didn’t you?”
Alex kissed the backs of the boy’s hands, ignoring the hint of blood emanating from his palms. “Yes. I’m sorry, dearest boy. I should have done a better job of protecting you.”
“It’s not your fault—not really. I’m kind of quietly freaking out right now about what you’re telling me. And that’s even given what just happened out there. I wouldn’t have been able to accept any of this a few days ago. But, please tell me this. Why? Why is he killing people and why did he want me?”
He couldn’t look at Quinn as he answered, “Because, to my ever-lasting shame, I wasn’t able to keep my crew together. Half of them want to take over this world and rule it to their own selfish ends. To them, humans are mere cattle to be controlled and exploited. This thing with Adrian is the latest iteration of a long war we’ve been waging with humans used as proxies and always as victims.”
“You mean like a civil war?”
“Yes.”
“How long as this been going on?”
Alex raised his head to gaze into Quinn’s eyes as he answered, “Nearly a thousand years.”
* * * *
I’m in love with an alien. Quinn couldn’t get the thought out of his head. It kept ping-ponging around his thoughts all morning.
After a restless night spent in his own bed at his insistence, he still had a hard time accepting everything Alex had told him the evening before. He couldn’t reject it, either, especially after a kind of test. He’d allowed Alex to lick his scraped palms. He could actually see the minor wounds healing before his very eyes, like his own personal special effect. It had freaked him out.
So, yeah, everything fit, and as frightening as the idea of being caught in an alien fight was, the alternatives were worse. If Alex was lying, then either Quinn was losing his mind or Alex and the others were Earth-made monsters. Neither of those possibilities made any more sense or made him feel any better.
“Eat, kiddo,” Kitty ordered with a smile. “Everything’s going to be okay, but not if you let yourself get weak from hunger.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He dutifully shoveled more eggs into his mouth. He’d chosen to eat at the bar instead of the kitchen because knowing that Kitty was both human and in on the truth made him feel relaxed. With the club closed due to the ongoing threat around the city, the place was pretty empty. Most of the staff had been ordered to stay home, with pay, because Alex was a stand-up guy, even if he was an alien. Other than Mackie, Lucien and maybe Logan, Quinn and Kitty were it for the human contingent.
It wasn’t that he felt unsafe—quite the contrary. And Quinn understood why Alex wanted him to stay in the building, even while accepting that he needed some space to process all the weird revelations. Still, the club took on an otherworldly vibe, the way it had always done, and it was a little uneasy now that he knew it wasn’t his imagination. The bar just felt like a secure zone. That was all.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
He startled, the question coming out of left field. He swiveled to look into Alex’s concerned eyes. Alien though they might be, the violet color was still beautiful. Alex was undeniably gorgeous and sexy for any species. Quinn’s body reacted with the same needy desire that it had before the big revelations. However else he might take Alex’s alien nature, he couldn’t regret that they’d become lovers.
Quinn blushed and smiled. “I’m fine, thanks. I’m just—you know—processing everything.” He made a circular motion with his hand to vaguely encompass the world then inwardly cringed at his own awkwardness.
“Good. I want you to be comfortable here, Quinn, whatever you may decide to do once we take care of Adrian.”
Yeah, they’d put their relationship on hold, something that Alex had raised even before Quinn had thought it through. Right now, Dracul and his minions had their sights on making Boston a terror ground in the first volley of a new round of fighting. Quinn had somehow jumped onto their radar screen and that made Alex vulnerable. The man had said something cryptic in explaining it to Quinn.
Dracul knows how crippling it would be for me to lose you.
Quinn hadn’t pressed him on explaining that because profound sadness had crossed Alex’s face. They’d both been drained from the encounter with Adrian and hadn’t needed to drag out the information dump more than necessary. It had been enough to learn that he meant a lot to Alex. Despite everything that had occurred, Quinn knew he’d fallen for the man, and knowing Alex might feel the same way made him ridiculously happy when he should have been shitting himself six ways to Sunday.
He wasn’t sure what to say, however. Even given his burgeoning love for the man, he couldn’t say what he intended to do. Can I make a life with an alien? And what exactly does that entail? Lucien seemed to be happy with Harry, although Quinn hadn’t spoken more than a few words to the guy. Mackie obviously loved Val, but then the kid was cool with the whole blood-sucking thing. Besides, he’d talked to him briefly before going to bed. Mackie had been too out of it from hitting his head to realize all that had happened with Adrian. He hadn’t been let in on the truth about Val’s nature, according to Alex, and still didn’t know.
Before Quinn could think of something to say, a commotion took both of their attentions.
“Val, please. Don’t do this!”
Quinn whipped his head around to witness Val and Mackie coming out of the elevator. Actually, Val was dragging the boy out with one hand grasping a biceps and the other carrying a duffel bag.
Mackie was trying to dig in his heels, his fingers scrambling to unlock Val’s hold, causing Quinn to flash uneasily on his own fight with Adrian. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause trouble. I was just trying to show Quinn a good time and it was daylight still. How was I supposed to know the killer would come after him?”
Grim-faced and implacable, Val continued to tug the boy across the room and over to the front door.
“Please, Val! Punish me. Beat my ass bloody or use the whip. Anything but this. Please, don’t throw me out!” Mackie’s obvious panic was heartbreaking.
“No.” The word was out of Quinn’s mouth and he was on his feet before he even knew what he was doing.
Alex grabbed his arm before he’d taken two steps. “Quinn, stay out of it. Val’s only doing what he thinks is best, and Mackie’s being taken care of financially.”
He tore his gaze from the scene unfolding long enough to scowl at Alex. “You think this is about money? Mackie loves Val. He deserves to know the truth the same way I do.”
“You don’t understand. Val can’t commit to that boy. Cutting him loose is kinder and safer in the long run.”
“Says who?” He shook off the man’s hold. “He’s sending him out where the killer is. How is that safe for him and not me?”
“Because Adrian targeted you, not Mackie, and Val is about to make sure that if Adrian is watching, he’ll know that Val doesn’t care about the boy.”
“But that’s not true. He does care. I’ve seen how he looks at him.”
“It’s not the same for us. Our emotions are similar, but you can’t judge us by human standards.”
“Really? Well, that’s good to know. Thanks for setting me straight.” With that, he ran after the others, fighting sudden tears because had he just learned that Alex didn’t really love him after all. Or wors
e, never could—not in the way that mattered.
He caught up to Mackie and Val at the curb outside the club. A car waited with its engine running. Val had already tossed the bag in the backseat and was in the process of shoving Mackie in after it.
Tears streamed down the boy’s face. “Please, Val, I’m begging you. Give me another chance. I’ll take any punishment but this.” He hitched a breath. “I’ll suck your cock the way you like it and never ask for anything in return.”
“Son-of-a-bitch!” Val yelled right in the boy’s face. “Stop acting like a whore.” The bitter order made Mackie flinch. “Do you think this is a game? That all you have to do is be a good little sub and all is forgiven?”
Mackie whimpered. “Please.”
“We’re through. I don’t love you. I don’t even like you. You’re a whiny, clinging little brat. You were a tight enough hole and decent play partner to amuse me for a while. Now it’s over. I have more important things to do and I can’t stand the sight of you. Go find some other guy to leach off of.”
Mackie reared back his head as if slapped. Then he straightened and dropped his hands from Val’s. He turned to get into the car as if in a trance, then he squared his shoulders as if he were trying to retain a tiny shred of dignity.
“Mackie!” Quinn called out and ran over to the boy, shoving Val away. Surprisingly, the guy allowed it, stumbling back as if Quinn had been a tank instead of a small human.
He threw his arms around Mackie. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “This is all my fault.”
The boy returned his embrace. “No, it’s not.” He pulled away and sniffed back his tears. “I’ll be fine. I still have my apartment and Val gave me a year’s worth of pay.”
“You’ve been fired, too?” Quinn was incredulous. “He can’t do that. It’s Alex’s club.”
“He knows. Alex signed the company check.”
Quinn glared at Alex, who stood outside the doors. He could see the truth in the man’s expression. How come a break-up means that Mackie has to lose his job? Oh, right, because the aliens are all related, part of being in a hive. And blood is always thicker than water.
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