All my favorites, present and accounted for. Maple glazed. Cinnamon buns. Lemon filled. Chocolate cake. From this box, nothing was missing. I picked up the maple-glazed and destroyed half a doughnut in one bite.
“We could have used you in the Parthian War.”
As it turns out, half a doughnut heaved at the head of an opponent offers little defense, even when combined with an eardrum shattering shriek.
Crixus brushed a flake of glaze off his forehead and ate the remainder of my weapon in another bite. “Gods, these are good.”
Gods. Plural.
He reached into the box and picked out a raspberry jelly filled doughnut, which he deflated with one, swift suck. “Have you ever had a fucking honey cookie?” he asked my open-mouthed panic-stricken mask of a face. “Honey, stone ground wheat flour, and sesame seeds mixed into a paste that could double as cement and baked until it surrenders. Tell me I didn’t get fucked over in the dessert department.” Half the doughnut disappeared between his shapely lips.
“You! You shouldn’t be here. How did you get in here?”
“I’m a demigod,” he said, by way of explanation.
“Yeah. I heard. How did you get in here?”
“Materialized.” Another half doughnut disappeared as quickly as the first had.
“You came through the wall?” I tried to assign irritation to my words, and anger.
“Hanna, if I came, you’d know.” He picked up one of the maple glazed doughnuts and relieved it of icing with a dexterous flick of his tongue. “You always talk to yourself out loud?”
I forced myself to focus on anger instead of arousal, though I had them both unequal measure. “Exactly how long have you been here?”
“Long enough to be disappointed at the lack of nocturnal happenings around this place.” Sapphire eyes winked below dark brows. His skin was too smooth for such hard features, his small ears too beautifully shaped and boyish. Today, those ears bore small silver hoop earrings that lent him a piratey sort of mischief. The shifting mounds of muscle in his arms bunched as he squished the doughnut into a ball and shoved it into his mouth whole. Even his jaw was buff, flexing as he chewed and swallowed. “I thought you two were going to get down to it for sure, the way you attacked the guy.”
My cheeks burned with a sudden rush of blood. “What does or doesn’t happen between me and James is none of your business! You can’t just go materializing into people houses, and bedrooms any time you feel like it!”
A sultry smile slid across Crixus’ face. “You didn’t seem to mind before.”
I picked up another doughnut and winged it at him. “That’s because I thought you were Mark! And by the way, what the fuck was that all about? Do you just randomly climb into women’s beds pretending to be other people, or is mine a special case?”
He laughed, picking up the doughnut and licking off the chocolate icing. “I like fighting with you.”
How the hell did he get his tongue to move like that?
“Seriously though,” I said. “You got me in so much trouble it’s not even funny. I owe you a hell of a lot worse than a doughnut.”
“Is that what you call what happened in the attic? Trouble?”
Another wave of scarlet seared my cheeks. “How do you—”
“Demigod, remember?” He winked at me.
I snatched the doughnut out of his hand and stuck it on a napkin. “Bad demigod. No doughnut.”
“Look, I can’t say I blame you for being conflicted. But between you and me, I think you’re better off with the cop.”
I took a bite of doughnut to buy myself the time required to chew it. “I can make up my own mind, thanks.”
“Really? Because to the casual observer, it looks like you’re in love with both of them and are completely incapable of making a decision.”
My hand itched with the need to throw something at him, but having just reclaimed my last projectile, I thought better of lobbing it at him a second time. “It’s complicated.”
“Hey, I know that better than anyone.” Crixus pushed himself up from the table and sauntered over to Morrison’s refrigerator. I slid a sideways glance over the sculpture revealed by his tight jeans and plain black t-shirt as he walked. Taller than Morrison, though not as tall as Abernathy, but equally muscled. He pulled out a gallon of milk, popped off the lid and chugged.
“Hey,” I said. “This isn’t even your house. You can’t go drinking from the milk carton.”
“The only thing your detective is going to catch from me is awesome, and I don’t think he’d mind.” He threw back his head and slugged down a few more gulps.
“Bring that over here,” I said, chewing down a mouthful of chocolate glazed cake doughnut.
“Your wish is my command, Lady Hanna.” He plunked the milk down in front of me, and I took it, filling my empty coffee cup.
“So did you follow me here just to torment me further? Or does your being here and robbing me of doughnuts serve an actual purpose?”
“I’m here for the wedding, of course. You’re just a convenient way for me to entertain myself while I’m in town.”
“What wed—” Shit. Shayla had mentioned a whole passel of Greek relatives. Crixus, a demigod, would comfortably fit in the world of Nereids, nymphs, and satyrs. “You’re related?”
“Distant cousin,” he said. “I’m the unfortunate experiment between Zeus and a Gallic slave. The pantheon was falling out of favor by then. I think it was a revenge thing.”
“Made you one hell of a gladiator though, I’d wager.”
A nostalgic smile lit his face like sunshine. “It did.”
The milk was colder in the center than it was around the edges, heated by coffee-warmed ceramic. The sensation reminded me of the times my grandmother pulled a mug warmed from the dishwasher to give me milk and cookies before bed. “How did you end up as Klaud’s servant?”
Regret looked unnatural on a face should have been carved in marble. “Hubris.”
“Yours? Or others’?”
“Both. Demigod or not, I was the property of the man who owned my mother. He bet the emperor Nero that I was unbeatable. He knew nothing of vampires and at the time, neither did I.”
“Your servitude was the wager?”
“Yes. Until my death, or his.”
“But vampires are immortal.” Sugar and fat began to congeal in a heavy lump in my stomach. I set down the remains of the third doughnut uneaten.
“Which information would have been useful before I agreed to those terms. I felt fairly certain I would outlive him by an order of magnitude, in the worst case. In the best case, I would have won freedom. My own, and my mother’s. And a nice appointment for my master of course.”
“And Nero brought in a ringer, I’m guessing?”
“That he did.” Crixus snorted at the memory, apparently still chapped by it even now.
I pulled my knees up under my shirt. “Must have been one hell of a ringer to defeat a demigod. A vampire?”
“I have no idea what it was. Even to this day. It looked like a man, of course. Anyway, I lost, which is all that matters. I’ve been with Nero and Klaud ever since.”
“That’s a long damn time to be a servant. What’s to prevent you from just walking away?”
“It was a blood oath. Breaking a blood oath is a very risky business.”
“How so?” Before he could answer, my cell phone buzzed on the table. I glanced at the screen and felt my stomach do a death roll. Morrison. I thought about not answering, but then looked at the doughnut-laden table and felt a pang of guilt. “Not a peep,” I warned Crixus, tapping the screen to answer the call. “Hey there.”
“How the fuck did you do this?” Morrison’s voice bore the tightly coiled tension of a spring. Conversations that began with this tone typically did not end well for me.
I tried to keep my voice as neutral as possible. “Do what?”
“Your apartment. I stopped by this morning to chat with the landlord an
d check out the damage.”
“And?” I hoped the sound of the pulse rushing in my ears couldn’t be heard over the line.
Crixus watched my face as he selected another doughnut.
“And there wasn’t any.” James Morrison, master showman.
I blinked at Crixus.
“Completely clean. The whole damn place. Spotless. Windows replaced. Antique banister repaired.”
“Wow,” I said, twirling my hair as if he could see the implied innocence of the gesture. “That is so weird.”
“Weird?” Morrison barked. “No. It’s not weird. It’s fucking impossible.”
“Maybe the damage wasn’t as bad as it looked,” I suggested. “The strobe light did make it pretty hard to see anything.”
“Hanna, I know what I saw. I know what you saw. And, I’m pretty damn sure you either know who undid this, or have a pretty good idea.”
Many. None that I could share. A werewolf clean-up crew? Leprechaun luck? Unicorn magic? A satyr spell? “I was with you all last night. Remember? Whatever happened, I had nothing to do with it.”
His silence often held more danger than his words. In this quiet space, the engine of his mind processed information into assumptions and theories often too close to the truth to be comfortable.
“We are going to discuss this further, Hanna. And when we do, I am going to ask you some difficult questions. You might want to start thinking about how you’re going to answer them.”
A sweat bloomed between my palm and the mug handle I discovered I was crushing in a white-knuckled grip. “Okay.”
The line went dead. I dropped my phone and thumped my forehead on the table. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“Trouble?” Crixus asked.
“Always.”
“Cop catching on to your little secret?” Crixus grinned, a boyish dimple appearing in his smooth, tanned cheek.
“Little?” I raised my head from the table. “I don’t think what I have going on here qualifies as little by any explanation. For example, I’m sitting at James Morrison’s breakfast table with a Roman gladiator demigod, who has eaten six doughnuts to my two and a half. In the best case, he’ll think I ate nine doughnuts for breakfast. In the worst, he’ll add this to his list of questions to club me with at our next meeting. And that will be the easy one to explain away.”
“Which is exactly why you should choose the cop, in my famously un-humble opinion. You choose him, you choose to stay human, and all this weird shit stops.”
There.
He’d said it.
Had vocalized the very thought that had danced at the edges of my cognition since having accepted my soon-to-be ending position as Abernathy’s gallery assistant. No more severed vampire heads in my luggage, no more gory battles, no more unicorns, or leprechauns or satyrs, or myths. No more secrets.
No more Abernathy.
The ache in my heart grew to encompass other faces. Other voices. It wasn’t just Abernathy who belonged to this world. It was my brother, Steven Franke, his wife, Shayla, my new niece or nephew.
“It’s not that easy,” I said, rubbing the tension-taut muscle over my eyebrow.
“It could be. If you just—”
“Why did you come to my room?” The question sprang from some unknown source, freed only by my attention being focused elsewhere.
“I saw you wandering around your wing in Castle Abernathy. Shut away from everyone. Heard some of the things Abernathy said to you. Seems to me you’re getting the short end of the stick. I thought maybe I should stop by and give you the long end for once.” He waggled his eyebrows at me lasciviously.
Coffee-heated blood rushed to my cheeks. “It was a nice gesture and all. But you can’t just go around pretending to be other people.”
Crixus shrugged his bulky shoulders. “I only said what he should have said.”
“If he can’t say it on his own, it does me no good to have anyone else say it for him. I’d rather have an ugly truth than a pretty lie.”
“If you say so.” The rolling hills of muscle in his arms and chest tightened into sinuous bunches as he laced his hands behind his head.
“I do.” I pushed my chair away from the table and took my coffee cup to the sink to wash it. “So how does it work when you need time off for a family function when you’re the prize of a blood grudge? I can’t imagine Nero giving you PTO or anything.”
A hollow laugh escaped Crixus. “No, nothing like that. They came to town with me.”
A cold chill slithered down my spine. Klaud and Nero. Here in Georgetown. My home. My post-divorce recovery ward. “They’re not coming to the wedding too?”
“No, they won’t be attending.”
I froze with the dishtowel stuffed inside the mug. “They’re in town because of the missing vampires, aren’t they?”
Crixus met my eye and glanced away. “Something like that.”
“Why do I feel like this is a really, really bad sign?”
“Because it is,” Crixus admitted.
I rested my hands flat on the counter and allowed my shoulders to sag under the weight of this new knowledge. “So is war inevitable or what?”
Crixus rose from his chair and walked across the kitchen to stand before me in the arched cutout over the sink. “That depends.”
“On what?”
He froze me in the alpine lake depths of his sapphire eyes. “On what you decide.”
Chapter 21
“Why would what I decide have anything to do with the war?”
He leaned against the doorframe, somehow elevating it from a simple doorway to the hall of a Roman temple. “There hasn’t been a mated alpha pair ruling the werewolf empire since the time of Anubis.”
“Anubis. As in, the Egyptian god of the afterlife Anubis?”
“That’s the guy.”
“He of the jackal head?” I asked.
“Jackal…or wolf.”
Images flashed across the slide projector in my mind, and with them, the notecards I had created to prepare essays for tests. I’d had a whole graduate theory class on Egyptian Iconography and Mythology. “Half man, half wolf, the dog of Egypt, weighing the hearts of the dead.”
Surrendering his place in the doorway, walked over to where I stood at the counter. “The same.”
“He was deposed by Osiris, or so the myth says.”
“Also correct.”
I called to mind all the imagery of Osiris stored in my mental slide library. A green skinned man. Green-skinned to represent both death, and rebirth. The living dead. “He was a vampire,” I said, slowly coming to the end of the trail of breadcrumbs Crixus had left for me. “He was killed by his brother, Seth, the embodiment of chaos, and his body cut into fourteen pieces and scattered across the earth.”
“Which, as I suspect you know, would be a great way to make sure it took a very long time for a vampire to heal.”
“Right,” I continued. “Only his wife, Isis, gathered him together again. And the gods were so impressed by her devotion that they resurrected him, and made him Lord of the Underworld.”
“And the balance of power has remained with vampires ever since,” Crixus said, resting his elbows on the table. “Never has there been a pair powerful enough to unseat them.”
“So was rulership passed down, then? From Osiris to Akhenaten?”
“Hadn’t you guessed?” A broad smile split Crix’s face. “Akhenaten is Osiris.”
“Oh my God!” Akhenaten’s otherworldly visage flashed through my head, merging with the images of Osiris still lingering there. He’d broken all the staid Egyptian canons of kingly depictions with his elongated features, exotic eyes, and odd proportions. And his wife, Nefertiti had been the subject of the most celebrated bust in all Egyptian art history. Were it possible for the powers of love and valor to be rendered down into unapologetic beauty, hers is the face that would emerge. “It makes perfect sense.”
“I can’t speak to Akhenaten’s thoughts on losing the b
alance of power, but surrendering a thirteen thousand year reign doesn’t go over so well with all the vampires.”
“Sheesh. No wonder Nero’s got his toga in a wad. He doesn’t seem like the type to surrender power easily.”
Crixus tapped the end of his nose. “The lady guesses well.”
“So is that why you’re here? To persuade me to choose Morrison so the vampires keep the crown?”
He was no longer in front of me, but behind me. Materialization, it seemed, put fast-moving to shame.
He pinned my hips to the counter with his, stunning me into immobility for a few breathless seconds by the size of what pressed against my back. “I can be very persuasive.”
“Good God,” I whispered.
“Only half.” As quickly as the pressure had arrived, it evaporated. He sauntered away, that damnable mischievous grin plastered all over his face. “Never played with an heir before. I’ll bet your body could do all kinds of things.”
“Played? This is fun for you? Popping into people’s houses, toying with their emotions, seeing what you can get them to do?”
He rewarded me with a self-satisfied smile. “You know what your problem is?”
Which one? “Please, Dr. Crotch, enlighten me.”
“You need to have more fun,” he said.
“Right.” I blew hot air from my nose.
“I’m serious. Get out there. Play the field. Go on a vacation, drink a few dozen Mai Tais, dance your ass off in a club, pick up some local stud and ride him back to the dock.” Here, he moved his hand like a jet ski skimming over the waves.
A sigh broke free from my chest before I could stop it. God, but that sounded nice. “Not likely to happen any time soon.”
“Give it some thought.”
“Right now, I’m giving thought to everything I need to be doing instead of standing in Morrison’s kitchen chewing the fat with a demigod.”
“Like showering?” A suggestive smirk notched his broad jaw.
“No. There will be none of that. And, by the way, it would be super creepy if you go all magically invisible so you can watch me. Don’t do it,” I said, wagging a finger at him. “Don’t be that guy.”
Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3) Page 21
