Chapter Four
FOUR
The werewolf tasted good.
Eleonore licked her lips, catching the residual drops of his delectable blood. Ben Rosewood tasted of chocolate, earth, cinnamon, and a tumult of restrained passion. There was a sharp note of fear to the blood, yes, but it didn’t diminish the full flavor. The werewolf might come across as bashful, but blood didn’t lie. There was a carnal beast inside him, eager to be freed.
That beast had briefly risen to grind against her, hard and hot. His sexual energy felt like the psychic equivalent of his blood—wild, rich, rare. Was he actually shy, or was it an act to distract others from perceiving the predator within? Eleonore despised lying, but she’d been forced to play many parts over the years in order to feed and kill, from knowing temptress to virginal ingenue. She knew well that what a person appeared to be on the surface rarely matched their true self, and that those true selves were almost always grim, disappointing, or disgusting.
Whatever Ben’s truth, ugly as it likely was… gods , she would commit crimes to taste his orgasm. She shuddered at the thought, head falling back against the kitchen wall. She despised him for holding the crystal and thereby controlling her, but liking or trusting someone wasn’t a requirement for fucking them, and it had been forever since her succubus half had fed. Her lower belly was heavy with want, and though she couldn’t feed on her own orgasms, she was considering sliding a hand into her pants when the front door opened again.
Eleonore was back in the living room in a flash, in time to see Ben poke his head in. He looked mortified. “Forgot my keys.” He scooped them up from a bowl on a low bookshelf. “And my wallet. And my phone.” He grabbed both from the table, then looked down. “And my shoes.”
Eleonore folded her arms and gave him an unflinching stare.
His cheeks grew redder above the edge of his beard, and he gave her a half wave before running out of the room again.
Strange werewolf. Wanting to understand the truth of the man who held her fate in his palm, Eleonore decided to follow him. She watched through the front window as he got into a green, boxy-shaped car. So long as he didn’t drive too quickly, she ought to be able to keep up with him.
It was a common misconception that vampires teleported when they wished to move quickly. In reality, they ran—their movements just happened to have a preternaturally fast top gear. She could sprint down a block in the blink of an eye.
She waited until he was a block away before beginning her pursuit. He drove carefully, halting completely at each cherry-red stop sign in a way other drivers seemed disinclined to do. Easy prey, but the thrill of the hunt coursed through her anyway. Both vampires and succubi were predators and loved a chase. Adrenaline gave blood a sharp, intoxicating edge, much like a consensual taste of fear or pain could intensify sexual pleasure.
As she pursued Ben one sprint at a time, concealing herself behind bushes or other cars, Eleonore took measure of her surroundings. It was a warm day, with sunlight cascading over green trees and quaint houses. The neighborhood sprawled in the neatly planned way she remembered from the American suburbs of 1969, but it was saved from uniformity by the individual touches on homes. The structures were painted in a rainbow of colors, and it was evident a variety of creatures inhabited this place. One house bore the massive door and entrance ramp common to centaur abodes; another had a pond in the front yard in which a naiad reclined nude, scales shining at the border between her forehead and hair; and ribbons fluttered from a tree in a third yard, marking wishes or spells.
A supernatural-friendly district. Most cities had areas like this where magical creatures congregated. She expected the town to grow more boring and ordinary outside of Ben’s neighborhood, but the opposite happened. Asphalt turned to red brick where branches interlaced over the street, and the houses grew more eccentric, with peaked gables, unusual expansions, and all manner of oddities in the windows. A pixie fluttered by overhead, books tucked under one arm, while a warlock cast illusions before an admiring semicircle of children.
When Eleonore stopped beside a parked red truck, waiting to see which direction Ben would turn, she was intrigued to see a blond woman straddling what looked like a demon in the passenger seat. The two were kissing passionately, which gave her a brief burst of energy before they broke apart, looking startled at her appearance. Eleonore had no desire to explain herself, so she merely bared her teeth and ran on.
At least that hit of arousal combined with Ben’s animalistic response to her drinking had managed to take the sharp edge off her succubus half’s hunger. Get too desperate for sexual energy and she might end up pinning her new captor down and grinding them both to completion, and she was feeling too spiteful to gift him with an orgasm.
She reached what looked like the downtown area, where shops and restaurants clustered around a village green. Ben pulled to a stop next to a black-painted storefront whose dramatically lettered sign proclaimed it to be NecroNomNomNoms. Eleonore crouched behind a newspaper box that held copies of the Glimmer Falls Gazette , ignoring a gnome who squeaked and scurried away at the sight of her.
When Ben got out of his vehicle, he was greeted by a group of people walking down the sidewalk. “Ben!” one proclaimed. “I’m surprised you aren’t at the Emporium.”
He grunted and shrugged one shoulder. “Construction.”
“I can’t wait to see the new space,” someone else said. “Are you still thinking about adding a stage?”
Eleonore’s brows furrowed. What space were they speaking of?
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I want to get the coffee shop established first, though.”
Ben was a business proprietor? Eleonore filed that away in the mental encyclopedia entry she was building. Ben Rosewood: Werewolf, possesses stabbing implements, owns a coffee shop, either bashful or using a fa ? ade of shyness to cover up his dark nature, tastes good .
Know thy enemy , someone had once said. Eleonore was hit or miss on that advice—sometimes you just needed to shout Surprise , rip out a throat, and be done with it—but this wasn’t an assassination. This was psychological warfare with the highest of stakes. On one side, a werewolf with ultimate power over Eleonore’s entire existence. On the other, Eleonore herself, who had learned early in life how to be a weapon. She hadn’t managed to break the enchantment yet, but she refused to give up.
After a few more vague pleasantries, Ben made his excuses and disappeared into the building.
The opened door let a waft of blood-scented air out, and Eleonore’s mouth watered. At least now she knew one place to go if Ben stopped providing her with blood.
“What are we looking at?”
Eleonore spun, baring her fangs and hissing. Somehow, a woman had crept up on her and was now crouched in an identical position behind the newspaper box, peering at the shop. She had red hair a lighter and more coppery shade than Eleonore’s, and black horns ran along the sides of her head, pointing straight back. A demoness.
Two demons in one morning seemed odd for the human realm, since they lived in their own plane and rarely emerged except when hunting for souls, but Eleonore didn’t know what had occurred while she’d been dreaming this last time. Perhaps there was an infestation.
“Nice teeth,” the demoness said, eyeing Eleonore’s mouth with eyes of a pale crystalline blue. “It isn’t Halloween, but I haven’t seen a daywalking vampire in over a thousand years.” Her forehead furrowed. “Unless it is Halloween?”
Many immortals were time-maddened, the Witch in the Woods included. The older they got, the less connected to reality they were. “Who are you?” Eleonore asked.
“I would ask you the same thing,” the woman said, smiling in a vague sort of way, “but I’d just forget.”
Eleonore took in other details. The demoness was dressed in a frilled white shirt, black pants and boots, and a piratical red sash, and her fingernails were filed to a point and painted black.
“It’s impolite, you know,” the demoness said.
Eleonore blinked. “What, staring?”
“Oh, no, staring at me is always allowed. I am extremely attractive.” She gestured at nothing in particular. “But there should only be one hot, ominously crouching redhead allowed in Glimmer Falls at a time.” Her mouth turned down in a pout. “I have to warn you—if you try to supplant me, I’ll be forced to dismember you and feed you to my hellhound.”
“I’m not trying to supplant you,” Eleonore said, feeling like this conversation was the metaphorical equivalent of quicksand. She had stumbled into it inadvertently and couldn’t get her footing. “I don’t even know who you are. I’m spying on a werewolf.”
“Oh, fun!” The woman clapped her hands. “My current boy toy is a werewolf. I spy on him for fun, too.”
Boy toy? Eleonore filed that away to look up on the PADD later. “Is your werewolf named Ben Rosewood?”
The door to NecroNomNomNoms swung open and Ben walked out, a paper bag in one hand and the PADD pressed to his ear with the other. The coppery scent wafting from the bag made her stomach growl, and Eleonore ran a tongue over her fangs.
The demoness followed her gaze, then made a face. “Oh, not him. He’s boring.”
Remembering the wild taste of his blood and the silver stakes on his couch, Eleonore wasn’t sure she agreed. “On a scale of one to ten, how nefarious is he?”
“Negative five,” the woman said, sounding disappointed by the fact. Her gaze moved beyond Ben toward the park, and her face lit up. “Almost time for my carnal ambush of Kai.” She giggled. “He’s been tied up in my den for three hours.”
With that, the strange woman stood, then sauntered toward the park. A red clock marked the entrance, its face covered with various runes and numbers, and Eleonore wasn’t sure why it had approximately two dozen hands moving at various speeds. She watched, perplexed, as the demoness traced a fiery oval in the air, then stepped through, disappearing into nothing.
“How odd,” she said. This whole town was odd. Multiple demons, strange clocks, and a hodgepodge of architecture that spoke of poorly organized city planning. Glimmer Falls…the name wasn’t familiar, but Eleonore hadn’t socialized much in the human world of the past few centuries. The majority of her time had been spent with the Witch in the Woods.
The thought of the witch made her bare her teeth. Speaking of insane. The last conversation they’d had before Eleonore had apparently been sold like cattle had jumped from the relative attractiveness of Starfleet captains—much as Eleonore regretted agreeing with the witch on anything, Janeway’s carnal appeal could not be denied—to creative uses for menstrual blood to an exhaustive list of every enemy the witch had ever made, most of whom were now dead at Eleonore’s hand. At the end of her rambling speech, the witch had turned her hooded face toward Eleonore, a lock of long black hair slinking out from the shadows. “I’m so glad we’re friends,” the witch had said solemnly.
Friends. Putain de bordel de merde. Eleonore hadn’t seen her expression, of course, but the witch had actually sounded like she meant it.
Oh, she was going to enjoy turning that bitch inside out.
She looked toward the store again, then realized she’d missed Ben driving away. She whipped her head around and spotted the green vehicle turning a corner.
The Witch in the Woods was still her greatest enemy…for now. It remained to be seen how terrible this Ben Rosewood would be.
Eleonore shot to her feet and resumed the hunt.