Chapter 15 – Jack #2
“Excuse me?” I said, walking in to my place.
Sam was there, sitting on my couch in what looked like a full-body hazmat suit, only it was covered with arcane symbols and markings, all sorts of nonsense words that I couldn’t read, while Luna’s strange bone-scythe weapon was sitting in front of her on my coffee table.
I took everything in, and then flew at her without thinking, picking the weapon up on the way.
I had my arm across Sam’s neck, and the tip of the scythe pointed at her side just beneath her ribcage.
Her eyes were wide with terror behind a thick film of plastic, and her back was plastered against the wall behind my couch.
“Where the fuck is Luna at?” I demanded with my powers.
I felt the pressure I was using lessen, as I was pushed back by an unseen force—her own magic, answering me. “I was going to ask you!” she shouted when she could catch her breath, then she glanced over my shoulder and realized it was a different woman by my side.
Before she could make me hover off the ground I relented, pulling back, the weapon still in hand, and she reached for her own neck with gloved hands, as if to protect it from further attack.
“Unlike you, I don’t have to ask permission to go anywhere,” she said, like that explained things.
“So I just let myself in.” Sugar, my cat, meowed unhappily from the bedroom, like she was confirming Sam’s story.
“But instead of tossing your place and just taking that,” she said, pointing towards the scythe I held, “I decided to wait. I didn’t want to be a hundred percent rude. ”
“No? Just what, forty?” I gestured around with the thing and saw her wince—so I pointed it directly at her. “You don’t know where she is?”
“No. I thought you two would just go to the ballet was all. And then I could sneak in and out. Then I started to feel bad about things, because also unlike you, I have a conscience, and I thought I’d wait—plus I had questions for the girl.” She looked me up and down. “What happened to you?”
“My car was crashed off the road, and whoever did it took Luna.” I looked between the weapon in my hand and Sam’s partially hidden face. “Do you know why?” I commanded the truth from her again.
“Stop that,” she said, looking angry enough to spit, before fading into mystified. “But—no. She’s got a dark heart, but as far as we know, she’s human,” she said, but then she pointed at what I held. “That thing, on the other hand—it’s malevolent. I wanted to ask her about it.”
“It was Rosalie’s. Malevolent was her middle name.”
“Then you won’t mind if I take it?” Sam asked, standing up with her hand out.
I yanked it behind me. “Only if you agree to help me find Luna tomorrow night.”
Sam appeared to consider this. “On two conditions.”
“Name them.”
“You give me the weapon,” she said, and I nodded, “and you never, ever, under penalty of death, use your powers on me again.”
I felt Zevvi’s hand gently touch my back, and knew that was her way of telling me not to make this trade.
But I didn’t have any choice. Sam was in a much better position to make progress on Luna’s disappearance than I was, seeing as she wasn’t about to die shortly.
“Done,” I said, agreeing, flipping the weapon in my hand to lightly hold the knife’s blade carefully as I offered the handle out.
She took it, and put it into a wooden and velvet case with the same markings as was on her suit burned into it. “I’ll have my people look into things, and check in with you tomorrow night.”
I fished out my phone. “And give me your number. I’m tired of our relationship being one way.”
Sam pouted behind her headpiece’s plastic screen, but sighed in defeat. “My phone’s in here too. I’ll text you from my car, once I get all of this off of me.” She cast a glance at Zevvi, who’d been standing quietly behind me this whole time. “Are you here of your own will and personal volition?”
“Yes,” she answered, without hesitation.
Sam considered her with dismay. “You don’t have to do this, you know. The Faithful can help you escape. We know ways to break your bonds.”
Zevvi took my hand and sidled up to me, casting a dismissive glance back at Sam. “I have a job to do, do you mind?”
“You told me to stay topped up. I’m only doing what I was told.” I wrapped my arm around Zevvi without thinking. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t be interested in trying telekinetic sex, if you’re offering.”
“Tele-what?” Zevvi looked up to ask me, as I gave Sam a leer potent enough to make her go away.
Sam shuddered hard enough for it to telegraph from beneath her suit, then stepped out into the hall, slamming the door shut behind her with her mind.
“You shouldn’t even be talking to them,” Zevvi told me once she was gone.
I looked at her. I mean, really looked at her. “If you want to take her up on her offer, you should go. I won’t stop you.”
Zevvi reacted like I was clinically insane. “What is wrong with you?” she asked me, but she didn’t budge.
I sighed. “Nothing. I’ve just had some fuck-ups recently is all.” First Paco, now Luna—being with me as a human was a losing deal.
“Maya said you were difficult, but sheesh,” she said, beginning to take off her clothes, starting with her top, and suddenly my hunger was back in charge. I took a step toward her without thinking, then forced myself down.
“Go home, Zevvi. Thanks for the ride.” I turned on my heel to head for my shower before morning.
“You can’t wake up like this, Jack,” she called after me. “You won’t be safe.”
“I know,” I agreed with her. But currently I just wanted to be in charge of one thing in my life. “But I’ve got friends. Werewolves. I’ll go to their place when I wake up. Shoo.”
I undressed in my bathroom, finally getting a good look at myself in the mirror.
Judging from my injuries, the crash had probably dented part of my skull in, which was why it’d taken me so long to recover.
I never would understand the magic that made me me and how it could heal my body all night long, as long as there was blood or life inside me to do so, then just go and give up during daylight hours.
I showered quickly, scrubbing the dried on blood off my skin and clumps of it out of my hair, before grabbing a towel. I heard my phone buzz on the bathroom counter—hopefully Sam’s number incoming—and I picked it up on my way to my bedroom, wearing just a towel, heading for my coffin.
Only to find Zevvi ensconced inside of it, naked.
“Cozy,” she said, looking around at the plywood walls.
“Cat proof,” I corrected her, with a frown.
She eyed me smugly. “You look a lot better after a shower, Jack.”
“Feeding me is not your problem.”
She batted her eyelashes at me. “Maya told me to service you. And I like to do what I’m told,” she purred.
I had a feeling she meant every double entendre she was offering, and my hunger was listening. She was here, she was beautiful, and she was giving me permission—and if I fed from her, I wouldn’t have to waste time feeding tomorrow night before attempting to find Luna.
“Even if every human I touch has bad things happen to them later?” I asked her.
“Jack,” she said softly, giving me a momentary look of charmed disbelief, sitting up.
“Some of us like bad things.” Her hands reached for the knot on my towel and when I didn’t stop her, she used the edges of the towel to pull me to the bed’s edge.
I could feel the pressure of the upcoming dawn like a quiet hand pushing me forward to rest and the pull of my unsated hunger, holding me back to feed.
“So can we do it in here?” she asked, beaming at me. “Like, coffin-style?”
For some ridiculous reason I’d always assumed the first time I fucked in my “coffin” would be with Paco. He’d slept in my coffin with me for three nights while I’d waited for his vampirism to kick in—the first and only time he’d ever spent the night at my place.
And just before he’d bitten Luna . . . .
“No,” I told her, then retook my towel from her and stepped back. “Get out, Zevvi.”
She pouted, but she still stepped down onto the ground, just as beautiful as all the other times I’d seen her nude before.
She had perfect proportion of soft flesh over strong muscles, the kind of woman who had some give to her.
My hunger wanted to lunge at her like a rabid dog, but it wasn’t in charge of me—yet.
“And now what?” she asked, her tone bright.
“Get dressed. Call a ride back to Vermillion—but leave me your keys and your car. Tell Maya I’ll bring back her ride back tomorrow night.”
Right after I hunted Paco down and enlisted his aid to my cause.
Zevvi frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m not hungry,” I told her, slightly more stern.
She boggled at me. “You probably just washed more blood than I’m willing to give you down your shower drain, Jack.”
“I don’t want your blood.” I hitched the towel around my hips tighter, and went into the living room to find a pen and paper and wrote down Betty’s license plate number before returning with it.
“What I want is for you to call around tomorrow and figure out which impound lot Betty went to and get her out—tell Maya to put it on my tab.”
She took the paper from me and gave me a mystified look. “Jack—”
I didn’t have time for this—and the sooner I died, the sooner I could live again to find Paco. “Do as you’re told,” I snarled, and Zevvi’s head reeled back just like I’d slapped her.
She picked up her clothing and pulled it back on quickly. “You’re mean and that’s rude,” she said, jumping her jeans back on.
My hunger gave me a crisp and disturbing vision of all the things I could do to her between now and the moment she got her top button fastened, like picking her up and planting her against the wall to fuck, not even managing to get inside her, just me ramming my dick into the soft place where her thighs met, grinding my shaft against her clit until the friction made her moan—but then she was finished and the temptation was gone, even if my hard-on wasn’t.
She noticed me looking at her though, saw my expression, and blanched. “Maya promised me you weren’t scary,” she said, like telling me that would make it so.
I let the towel drop to the floor, and mounted my bed to lie down in my coffin, hoping beyond hope that this would be the last time I would be alone inside it.
“Do me a favor. Don’t tell Maya she was wrong,” I told her as I pulled the lid of the thing shut above me.