Chapter 17 – Jack
Chapter Seventeen
Jack
When I woke up in my coffin, I was starving, but it didn’t matter.
I finally had an airtight reason to find Paco.
He’d be pissed that I had, of course, but he’d been mad at me before and we’d gotten over it—plus he owed Luna for getting him through his first night safely.
I knew when he balanced his personal scales between being angry at me versus his overdeveloped sense of honor, he’d tip towards helping her, eventually.
And I’d deal with whatever relationship fallout we had after that.
I got dressed, fed Sugar, then checked my phone and messaged Sam. Any leads?
Not yet. Still working, she texted back quickly.
And while I was worried about Luna, I couldn’t claim to have my head fully in the game, not with the hope of seeing him on the horizon.
I grabbed Zevvi’s keys and locked my apartment door behind me.
My first lesson of being vampirically in charge of anyone else, was that I shouldn’t have done it inside a moving vehicle.
I’d started blindly driving towards Paco’s place out of habit, and then unlocked the part of myself that I’d been keeping hidden like Pandora’s Box, and all of my wants and needs where he was concerned came rushing out.
What was he doing?
What was he thinking?
Where the hell was he right now?
For a second it felt wrong—and then it felt far too right—and I shifted over three lanes to drive downtown without thinking. Other cars honked their horns, and it was a wonder I wasn’t in another accident, but I knew where I was going, pulled to him like I was a magnet and he was my North Pole
So I drove like an asshole, feeling the tether between us tighten, cursing every time I had to go forward only to double back to stay road legal.
I was all too willing to drive Zevvi’s car over medians and through crosswalks full of tourists to get to what I wanted—the man I loved—and to somehow fix things between us, right after we’d found Luna.
Maybe even before, if I was lucky.
Then I pulled up outside of a club I’d been to, and realized he was inside it somewhere.
Feeding.
Without me.
I ground my all-too-human teeth together as a valet ran out for my door, wearing a uniform almost like the one I’d fucked Zach out of several times already. I barked “Leave it here. Leave it running” at him, and he had a dazed look on his face, compelled to obey me while I walked past him.
I walked up the queue of people waiting to get in, in no way, shape, or form dressed to club, and whammied everyone in earshot on my way in the door past the bouncer, hoping that if there were security cameras out here keeping an eye on the line, that they were unmonitored.
After that, I went a little slower, using my eyes instead of the growing tension in my gut.
I’d dreamed of what would happen when we met again, of course.
I was wise enough to know not to hope, but foolish enough to do it anyways.
I’d just guessed it’d just be more organic, like we’d both be stumbling along, and then I’d have accidentally wound the thread between us into a ball of yarn again, and we would somehow meet like Lady and the Tramp over spaghetti.
All around me tourists were laughing, dancing, taking selfies, looking forward to getting high, already being drunk—living their most exciting, shining, human lives—and I couldn’t say I wasn’t tempted.
I was starving, my hunger roiling around inside me like a hurricane on a weather map, so much so that it made it hard to concentrate.
I oftentimes had to force myself not to think about humans as abstractions, because I needed to move among them to get by in the world, but also because it made it easier to prove to myself that I still was one, at least a little bit.
But now I let that go, even if it put all of the ones around me in slightly more danger. If I reduced them down to mere blood cells, it’d make Paco that much easier for me to find—because he was my heart.
I went up to the club’s balcony level, carefully pushing by people on the stairs, until I exited onto a landing and could scan my surroundings, and that was when I saw him. Wearing tight dark jeans and a well-fitting button-down shirt, with an expensive watch on one wrist and a smile on his lips.
Chatting up someone who wasn’t me on a lounging couch.
It wasn’t like I would’ve judged him for hanging around other humans—he’d lived with a monogamish boyfriend when we were together, for fuck’s sake—but at seeing him in action, I felt like a man crawling out of the desert only to have someone spit water in front of my hands.
So my first instinct was one of violence—I stormed through the people blocking my path and came up behind him. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t pretend he’s a pinata,” I said—and watched him slowly turn.
At seeing me, his face fell, and the pain of seeing that made me take an involuntary step back.
“Jack,” he said flatly, then actually took me in. “You look like shit.”
“I’ve definitely been better,” I said, then looked around the club meaningfully. “Can we go somewhere? We need to talk.”
One of his eyebrows rose high. “I already told Luna everything I had to say.”
“And she passed it along to me, word for word,” I said, and then my mouth went dry, everything I should be saying jumbling up on my tongue, rendering me speechless.
He started ruefully shaking his head. “But you couldn’t let it go, could you. You couldn’t just listen to me. You couldn’t do the one thing I asked—you couldn’t even pretend to let me be in control, not even for one fucking week, Jack.”
The guy Paco’d been hitting on also made to get in my face, to back up his new man, and I looked at him.
“Talk to me and it’ll be the last thing you do on this mortal plane.
” I didn’t use my whammy, but he felt the force of my commitment behind my words, then raised his hands and backed away like Paco was too much trouble, which, yes, he was, only for entirely different fucking reasons.
I whirled on him. “I wouldn’t be here if—” I weren’t dying without you. If you weren’t the first thing I thought of every night when I woke up and the last thing I thought of before I died every morning. If being apart from you wasn’t fucking wrecking me. “Luna’s been kidnapped.”
Paco’s eyes narrowed warily. “You couldn’t even try to come up with a good story?”
“I swear it’s the truth,” I said, and raked my hands wildly through my hair. “I’m not an idiot. I know that when you sulk you—”
Paco stood up. “You think that’s what I’m doing? Sulking from you?” His voice rose, and we had the attention of far too many people nearby, but he didn’t care. “You fucking ruined my life, Jack!”
I wanted to refute him and say that I’d done it for his own good, or mention how he’d be dead otherwise, but even if those things were true, they didn’t negate his statement.
I’d started ruining his life ever since I’d first told him what I was without pushing him away, up until I’d taken everything he’d had from him without asking. It was like he was Sleeping Beauty and I was a prince with a poisoned kiss.
“I know,” I said, letting my shoulders sink.
“But Luna still needs your help. And while she’s definitely fucked in the head—she never hurt you.
” I decided to go for broke, not caring that we were surrounded by bystanders.
“Maya says she can help, but I’ve never fed from her.
She and I don’t have a connection.” I waved a hand between Paco and I, wishing he’d remember ours.
“I know you can, though,” I said and clapped a hand over my own heart, indicating where he’d bitten Luna just over a week ago.
She was the first person he’d fed on, and I’d watched the bruise he’d left on her chest blossom and fade for seven days.
“Do you think I’d want to go to Maya if I absolutely didn’t have to? ”
“Do you think I want to go there again?” he pressed back, willing me to remember how he’d been turned.
And I did—oh fuck, I did—because while whatever I was feeling now was shitty, nothing compared to when Luna had shown me that video of him, beaten and tied up, subject to Rosalie’s whim, and my whole world had turned inside out.
I composed myself as best I could under the circumstances. “I wouldn’t ask if there were any other way, Paco.”
He stood, his eyes roaming up and down me, as he curled his upper lip like I was disgusting. “Somehow, I doubt that,” he said, but he made to follow me anyways.
He didn’t question why a strange Volvo was running in the club’s roundabout, with one poor valet staving off all the others who I hadn’t whammied, who wanted to know what the fuck was going on.
He just got into the passenger side as I walked around it, hopped in, and was quiet as I drove us toward Vermillion.
I tried to talk, three different times, but I didn’t want to say anything until it was the right thing, and since I had no fucking idea what that could be, he was the one who broke our silence first, after a long-suffering sigh.
“So who’d you piss off now?”
“Other than you, I’m not entirely sure,” I muttered, and he gave me a dour look.
“Set the scene,” he prompted. “Where was she when she got taken? What time of day—or night?” he asked, and then I remembered that security was literally his occupation.
Or rather, it had been.
“Yeah, well,” I said, then dryly caught him up on my last week of life without him, skipping the parts where I stared into the mirror and hated myself, until I got up ’til the end of my night at Francesca’s.
“You went and hung out with a Faithful again?”
“Not intentionally. But she did give me ballet tickets. I took Luna, and on our way home we got pushed off the road.” Because that’s what it was now, I realized, in hindsight. My noticeable car was an easy target.
They’d been specifically going after her—and for some strange reason, they hadn’t killed me.
Even though I’d been right there.
“Why would anyone want Luna?” Paco asked, his mind running down the same channels.