Rans crouched in front of her so he could press a slow, filthy kiss to her lips, and she hummed in satisfaction.
After a few moments, he broke the kiss to look up at Len. “You’ve outdone yourself, mate,” he said in a low voice. “Believe me when I say, I’m currently bemoaning my lack of a functioning camera.”
“She’s a good subject,” Len said. “I don’t usually get a chance to play at these levels. You should let me try a couples’ scene with both of you sometime... preferably when a scary death-monster isn’t trying to eat Tinkerbell’s soul.”
Rans let out a huff of dry laughter. “I’ll keep the offer in mind.”
Len kept a weather eye on his subject—not that there was any possibility of nerve damage or breathing restriction in Zorah’s case, but it was habit, long-ingrained. Still speaking low enough not to be heard over the buzzing of the crowd, he said, “Once Z’s topped off with sex mojo, I’m going to do a couple of private scenes in the back for cash so I can head home. Going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing I won’t be much help with containing the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“I shouldn’t think so, no,” Rans replied, kindly enough. “Albigard seems to be of the opinion that any traces of him you might be carrying around will fade quickly, so you should be fine.”
Len nodded. “What about you three, though? You gonna be able to handle things on your own?”
“In other words, how worried should you be about the repercussions of this newest clusterfuck?” Rans shrugged. “It’s a bit of an unpredictable situation, obviously. However, I can’t help but think the Fae will notice what’s going on before long—if they haven’t already. Things on Earth are already a bit of a shambles. It’s not in their interest to have the Hunt roaming out of control on top of everything else, and I imagine they’re best placed to deal with the situation.”
“We can also call Nigellus for help if we need to,” Zorah added, still sounding a bit out of breath. “He’s a demon, and a damned powerful one. He may have some ideas.”
Rans released a huff that could’ve equally been amusement or irritation. “True. It might be worth it just to force the Fae and the demons to work together for once. Anyway, leave it to us, Len. With luck, we can hide Alby behind the wards here for as long as we need to, and there’s no reason for the Hunt to cause trouble elsewhere when he’s the one it’s after.”
Relieved that he wouldn’t be stuck playing house with the World’s Most Irritating Faerie overnight, Len nodded again. “Cool. In that case, let’s get Zorah down and untied so I don’t look like a negligent rigger. Five or ten minutes is more than enough for this kind of suspension bondage.”
Rans raised an eyebrow at her. “Very well. Are you done snacking yet, love?”
She smiled at him—a predator’s smile. “Much better now, thanks. Though maybe we can still grab a bite before we leave.”
Len groaned, and went to untie the loose end of the suspension rope. “He’s starting to rub off on you, girl. That vampire pun is even older than he is.”
Zorah only laughed.
FOUR
WHILE HE WAS untying Zorah, people began wandering up to ask Len questions about shibari. Once she was loose, the two vampires left him to it with reassurances that they could get back to Albigard’s house on their own, and didn’t require a ride from him.
Several members of the curious crowd just wanted to talk to him. A few expressed interest in being tied up themselves, but balked at the proposed price tag for spending an hour in one of the back rooms. A handful of women offered sex in lieu of payment, which wasn’t helpful since A) they were the wrong gender, and B) sex wouldn’t buy gas for the pimpmobile unless the economy in Chicago worked a lot differently than it did in St. Louis.
In the end, he found one woman and one couple who considered two hundred dollars in cash under the table a fair trade for experiencing artistic bondage at the hands of someone who knew what the hell he was doing.
He took them into the back and ran through the safety spiel, reassuring them that he’d been an EMT and had extensive first aid training before quizzing them on their general health, range of motion, and past experience with bondage. Once each client’s scene was set up, he took pictures for them on their phones to commemorate the experience. Then he told them that, no, he didn’t have a professional website or social media they could follow, and sent them on their way—hopefully satisfied with what they’d paid for.
With four hundred dollars in his pocket, he treated himself to an overnight stay at a decent hotel an hour outside of Chicago—well away from the craziness caused by two and a half million frightened people crammed into a rioting city.
Len found it equal parts amusing and reassuring that kinksters across the Midwest could apparently be relied on to act like civilized human beings even when everything around them was burning. Sometimes the BDSM community felt like the only place he fit in anymore. He wasn’t sure what that said about him.
The following morning, he drove the rest of the way back to St. Louis while carefully signaling every lane change and following the speed limit with religious fervor. When he made it home without being pulled over in his less-than-low-key car, he breathed a sigh of relief. As a tattooed guy with facial piercings, blue hair, and no ID, driving a car with bullet holes in the quarter panels, he hadn’t been looking forward to trying to talk his way out of any potential traffic tickets.
He should probably get around to fixing those damned holes with some putty and spray paint one of these days, now that he thought about it.
As he turned into his neighborhood, Len gave his surroundings a careful look. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. He drove through the spot in the middle of the road where the Wild Hunt had tried to claw its way into the world, unable to suppress a shiver as he did. Nothing happened. No monsters jumped out of the shadows; no fresh holes opened up in reality.
Pulling into his driveway and turning off the engine, he braced himself for what he might find inside. Shockingly, no one had burgled his unlocked house while he’d been gone. He did a quick walkthrough, pausing to dump the day-old food he’d been prepping on the counter into the trash. Unable to let things go quite yet, he walked across the street to the nice old lady who lived catercorner from him and knocked on her door.
She opened it a minute later, appearing none the worse for wear. “Hello, Len. Is everything all right?”
“Hi, Betty. I was just about to ask you the same thing,” he said. “Are you okay after that weirdness yesterday? Is everyone else?”
She gave him an odd look. “Well, yes, of course. Those nice men came around the neighborhood a few hours later and explained that it was exhaust from a sewer line they were cleaning on the main road. They were using some kind of steam treatment to flood the pipes, and the manhole cover at the end of the block was loose.”
Len blinked at her, astonished anew by people’s capacity to rationalize literally anything. Creeping evil from the dawn of time trying to claw its way through the veil between worlds? Oh, don’t worry—it was probably just steam from the sewer lines.
She frowned. “Didn’t they speak with you about it? They were going door to door.”
“I... uh... had to leave town to... pick up my car,” he told her, gesturing at his driveway as evidence.
“Oh,” she said, her expression giving away her real thoughts about having his vehicular eyesore back in plain sight of her front windows. “Yes. Your car’s back. That’s... nice.”
He cleared his throat. “As long as everyone’s all right. I’ll just let you get back to what you were doing, shall I?”
She gave him a vague smile. “Of course, dear. Don’t worry. It was completely harmless stuff. Have a good afternoon!”
* * *
A week passed, and the world didn’t end. Political leaders had stopped dying, right after whatever happened at Stonehenge scuppered the Fae plans for open world domination. Some geographic regions that had been unstable
to start with were still a mess, but most of the major countries were gradually clawing back a sense of normalcy... for a given definition of normal, anyway. Len eventually stopped watching the news out of mental self-preservation, limiting himself to a daily email digest from the New York Times and not allowing himself to click through any of the article headlines.
He got a couple of texts from Vonnie, the ex-coworker whose kid Albigard had saved during the Stonehenge battle. Since Len was still more than a little pissed off at her for having run off into danger in the first place without telling him where she was going, he didn’t answer. Then, of course, he felt guilty about not answering. And then, he berated himself for feeling guilty, because even now she was being cagey about the details of where she was and what she was up to.
The texts only said that she and her son were safe, and that their former boss Guthrie Leonides was with them as well. They were flying under the radar for a bit in a remote location, along with the families of a bunch of the other kids they’d rescued from the Fae. If Leonides was involved, it meant they had plenty of money, at least—the guy was obscenely rich. And if she said they were flying under the radar, she probably had a good reason for not telling him exactly where they were.
Len would text her back... eventually. Just not today.
There was very little point in trying to call Zorah or Rans for an update on the Void Creature situation, since they were hanging out with a guy whose aura could fry technology at twenty paces. He was pretty sure they hadn’t had cell phones on them when they’d showed up at his door, either. And while they’d probably acquired new ones by now, Len knew from experience that they always switched to different numbers whenever they got new burner phones. He didn’t have their numbers, but if they needed him for something, they knew his.
In a moment of weakness, he had emailed Zorah a few days ago. A single line—so, has Albigard been eaten yet? He did it knowing full well that she didn’t check her email very often, and indeed, there’d been no reply so far. Len reminded himself that he did not, in fact, particularly care whether the Fae had been eaten yet—and let it go.
Toward the end of the week, his boss Gina bcc’d him on a staff email. The message conveyed welcome news that the insurance payment on the demolished nightclub was in the works, and she hoped to have a lease on a new venue by the end of the following month. Len looked at his finances, did a few back-of-the-napkin calculations, and breathed a sigh of relief that he wouldn’t need to get serious about finding a new job after all.
He’d liked his job at The Brown Fox... aside from the occasional glitch like the building getting blown up, anyway. He liked the jazz music. He liked his coworkers, even if he was still pissed at Vonnie. He liked the fact that running the kitchen and designing the club’s trendy tapas menu might become a stepping-stone to a head chef job at an actual restaurant one day. So, the email was a piece of good news in an otherwise crappy week.
Len scheduled another couple of shibari clients to keep the bank account padded until Gina got things organized for the reopening. As he readied for bed, he congratulated himself on keeping his shit together despite the various ongoing threats to the world.
That night, he dreamed.
FIVE
IT WAS DARK. In his dreams, it was always the middle of the night—that surreal few hours when most normal people were asleep in their beds, the third-shifters were hard at work on the factory lines, and anyone out on the streets was either asking for trouble, or making it.
Some nights, it wasn’t entirely clear which of those categories Len fell into as he sat in a parked ambulance next to a coffee shop, waiting for the next call to come over the radio. Jill, his partner, pushed the door of the shop open with her shoulder, emerging with two obscenely large cups balanced on a plastic tray. Len leaned across and opened the passenger door for her, accepting the caffeine goddess’s offering gratefully.
“Anything on the scanner?” she asked, settling into the seat next to him. Casually, she reached into a duffel bag stowed underneath the seat and rummaged for the metal flask she kept there, coming up with it a moment later and tipping some of the contents into her coffee cup. As always, she proffered the flask at him in invitation. As always, he waved it off.
“Nothing in our part of town,” he told her. “It’s been a quiet night—so far, at least.”
She nodded and took a careful sip, the cup shaking due to the fine tremor in her hands. That barely noticeable trembling would, Len knew, get worse as the shift rolled on—unless they got a call. Once the sirens turned on and the pedal hit the metal, Jill became a salt-and-pepper haired medical sniper who could hit a vein on the first try during the middle of an earthquake.
They all had their methods of coping. Jill, a paramedic, had been on the job for twenty-two years—a record in the department. She was a longstanding member of the local ‘Medicaholics Anonymous’ chapter, a group that met at a restaurant bar downtown to drink themselves into a stupor when the night shift let out at seven a.m. They weren’t actually all that anonymous, and they pretty much agreed it was a horrible coping mechanism that didn’t even work very well. Yet the bar stools filled up nearly every single morning.
Len, by contrast, had managed to stay sober in the job for about eighteen months before he cracked. Now, he took benzos to chill out and Adderall to stay up. Alcohol had always thrown him into a black depression, so he avoided it for the most part. So far, he’d kept his drug use confined to his downtime, outside of his scheduled shifts. The scary part was, as a member of the Detroit Medical First Responder Program, that accomplishment made him something of an outlier.
Suffice to say, the city had been an urban disaster area for years, and people weren’t exactly signing up in droves to drive around at three a.m. dealing with overdoses, gunshot wounds, suicides, and dead sex workers.
Technically, departmental policy included random drug screening for all employees, along with mandatory testing after any road accidents involving an ambulance. In reality, no one had been terminated from the department in the nearly two years Len had worked as an EMT... and he personally knew several people who’d been making a pretty damned concerted effort to get themselves fired.
It was the kind of job that sucked you in with the adrenaline high of saving someone’s life, only to beat you down afterward with the reality and inevitability of death. Then, just when you thought you couldn’t take it anymore... when you’d seen one too many self-destructive acts... one too many instances of casual cruelty for cruelty’s sake... you’d get that perfect call. You’d deliver that healthy baby, or save the life of that forty-five-year-old husband and father who’d gone into cardiac arrest. You’d be somebody’s hero for a day, and everything was worth it again.
Len could really use a call like that, right about now. He suspected Jill was in the same boat.
He scrubbed his free hand through his short, dark hair and took a scalding sip of coffee. On the scanner, dispatch sent another ambulance to a report of a woman bleeding from an apparent knife wound behind the bus station at Sixth and Howard.
“So,” Jill asked, filling the silence that followed. “How’d that date go on Saturday?”
Len grimaced. “We’ve been over this, Jill—it wasn’t a date. It was a hookup.”
Jill eyed him. “Close enough. Was it at least a decent hookup?”
Len shot her a quelling glance in return. “I’ve had better. I’ve had worse. And for someone who’s been married for twenty-five years, you seem to have an unhealthy level of interest in my sex life.”
Jill snorted and tipped a bit more of the flask’s contents into her coffee. “Like you said, I’ve been married twenty-five years. Any action I’m getting these days is strictly of the vicarious variety.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re also straight.”
She shrugged. “Well... I mean, yeah? I like dick. You like dick. We agree that dick is good, so I don’t really see your point.”
Len swa
llowed a bark of laughter, almost despite himself. Before he could tell her to fuck off and mind her own business, the radio crackled to life.
“X-ray forty-niner, pick up,” said the dispatcher. “I’ve got a juicy single-vehicle accident for you in Madison Heights. Kid wrapped his car around a tree on Hales, just north of the Red Oaks Nature Center.”
Jill exchanged a look with him and answered the call. “Copy that, dispatch. We’re on our way. ETA ten minutes.” She turned to Len, a spark entering her eyes. “Make it eight, and I’ll pay for the coffee next time.”
Len flashed her a grim smile as he hit the lights and sirens, peeling away from the curb.
The streetlights flew by, lack of traffic working in Len’s favor as he blew through intersections and took turns at a speed just below what would roll the bus onto its side. License to drive like a maniac was one of the definite perks of the job, even if the old Braun Chief XL on its Ford F-450 frame wouldn’t have been his first choice for street racing.
Eight minutes and thirty seconds later, he approached a curve in the road, and the headlights illuminated the remains of a car maybe twenty feet from the edge of the pavement. A couple in robes and slippers played flashlights over an area of grass a little way beyond the wreck—homeowners awoken by the crash, presumably. They looked up as the ambulance came to a halt on the shoulder.
“Beat the uniforms to the scene again,” Jill crowed, already halfway out the door as Len put the brake on. “Good one, kid.”
Jill got ridiculously smug whenever they managed to best the cops’ average fourteen-minute response time to a call. For something like this accident, Len could appreciate her enthusiasm. But when it came to situations where broken bottles—or bullets—were flying around, he’d always been happy enough to let the unis show up first.
Len grabbed two of the equipment bags, leaving the third one for Jill. The woman with the flashlight hurried over to them, waving the beam in their faces in her haste.
Forsaken Fae: The Complete Series, Books 1-3 (Last Vampire World) Page 4
