17. Chapter 17
Carter
“You might want your fuckboy to leave,” the Vampire said, tilting his chin toward me as I still stood half in front of Lola in a protective stance.
“If you think I’m going anywhere, you’re fucked in the head,” I snapped back, unable to hold back the lightning striking on the floor next to him.
His smile widened, revealing sharp canines. This was her brother? Lola sidestepped me, placing herself between us, making a point to take my hand.
Oh my god, she’s taking my hand. Why am I freaking out? Why does it make me want to fucking purr?
Some tension left my body, but I didn’t let the fucker out of my sight.
“Can you imagine my surprise, Lola, when Amyntas came to me, a few days after you and I parted ways, to tell me that our father was not only alive, but had no recollection that you even existed?”
Lola’s throat bobbed. Amyntas. That name was familiar.
“That’s the deal you made, right?” he continued as all the blood left my mate’s face, leaving her sickly pale. “Your soul in exchange for our father’s life. In exchange for their memories of you.”
That seemed to support what she had told us pretty well, but her hand tightened around mine. She was nervous. Anxious about her brother being here.
Maybe it was the perfect opportunity to get more information on her past. On the whole Maiden thing.
“Your fucking soul, Anastasia?” he continued, revealing her birth name.
Pretty…I wondered why she changed it. Was it to hide from him? From other people looking for the lost Maiden? How many times did she have to switch names?
“Watch it,” Lola spat.
She gave me a concerned look. What was she worried about? My reaction? My—
Fuck, she looked terrified. Distressed. So much that I could hear her blood pumping through her veins.
“Watch it?” he repeated with a scoff. “Send the Thor look-alike away, we gotta talk.”
“I said I’m not moving,” I answered, tightening my hold on her hand.
I got you, my sweet temptress. He won’t bother you tonight.
“And I said—”
Another lightning strike hit, this time not missing him. Bingo. I smiled. Once the smoke had vanished, her brother was nowhere to be seen. She gasped, dropping my hand as she rushed to the spot he previously stood in. Lola paused to stare at the enochian symbols burnt in the wood.
“What did you do?” she panicked.
“Relax,” I muttered, shaking the electricity off my limbs and retracting my wings. “I just sent him out and banished him from the fucking house.”
Her eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. She really had no idea what Divines could do, did she?
“You can do that?”
I nodded, crossing my arms over my chest as I looked outside through the window. She followed my line of sight, and there her brother was, casting an angry look at us from the street.
“Well, shit. That’s a convenient power.”
A scoff escaped me as I let myself fall in the armchair we were previously making out in.
“Yeah. I don’t like unwanted visitors. It’s not permanent, though.
The rune will vanish in about two to three days, and he’ll be able to break in again.
” The scared look was back on her face. I frowned, extending my arm to her. “Come here.”
She hesitated, but I wasn’t sure why. Was it that the moment was gone? Fucking cockblocker.
“I think I should head back home,” she said, rubbing her palms on her naked arms. Her dress was all wrinkled and her hair had wild strands sticking out in all directions.
God, she was beautiful.
“Isn’t that guy—your brother, living there too? You didn’t seem too keen to talk with him.”
She sighed, closing her eyes and tilting her head back toward the ceiling.
The delicate silver chain hanging around her neck and disappearing in her cleavage glinted in the faint moonlight coming from outside.
Maybe we should have turned the lights on…
We definitely would have seen the creep hiding in the corner then.
“I-I don’t know. I guess it took me by surprise to see him, and I wasn’t ready to have that weird conversation yet.
I mean, I thought he’d forgotten about me like the rest of our family.
I thought he was—I don’t know, dead? Certainly not that he changed his name and became the infamous first Vampire. ”
I straightened, reaching for her and sliding my hand on her waist to pull her to me. She rolled her eyes but didn’t fight me as I led her to sit on my lap.
“So…you want to go back to your apartment? Talk to him now?” I prodded.
She shook her head. “No, I guess not. Not now.”
“Did I…overstep when I cast him out?”
It had felt like the right thing to do. I wanted us to get a fresh start, and him being here was an obstacle.
I mean, I wasn’t stupid. She was the Maiden and she had escaped.
He probably would have revealed things I was looking into.
After all, she did mention that he had helped her run away from that situation…
And yet, she had looked ready to burst into flames if it could have avoided him to talk about anything in front of me.
“You didn’t.”
I pulled her closer against me as I leaned back against the backrest of the chair. She was all tense in my arms. Fuck, was it awkward? I had no idea what I was doing.
“Are you staying for the night?”
There was a silence and my phone buzzed in my pocket against my thigh. Not now.
“I’m not sure it’s a good—”
“You can take whatever room you want,” I interrupted. “I’m not asking you to stay in mine, even though I’d like that. I know it’s not—you’re not…I mean, we’re not there yet.”
She seemed to relax against me, nestling closer, rubbing her nose in the crook of my neck. Do not. Get. Hard. Now.
My stupid phone buzzed again.
“I guess something requires my attention anyway,” I said, lifting my hips to be able to slide my hand in my pocket and retrieve the source of my current frustration.
Lola stood up. Noooo, please stay, I almost begged.
Instead, I gave her a weak smile. “I guess I’ll find you in Dimitri’s?”
She gave me a slight nod. “Yes. Thank you, Carter. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
Before she had the chance to take too many steps away, I jumped up and dropped my phone on the seat, grabbing her hand and pulling her back in my arms. The skirt of her flowy dress swirled around her with the motion and she gasped right before our mouths collided.
She responded to the kiss eagerly, but her hands were shy as they landed softly on my chest.
“You might sleep in someone else’s bed, but if you thought I’d let you go without at least a goodnight kiss—”
She chuckled, rolling her eyes. The heavy mood her brother’s appearance provoked now gone. I gave her hip one last squeeze before reluctantly letting her go.
Only once she had disappeared at the top of the stairs did I let out a heavy breath and turned my gaze to my phone, which kept buzzing on the cushioned seat.
What now?
“You took your sweet time,” Jeremiah said from Lola’s seat, feet up on the Archives’ desk. I kicked his legs away and he had the nerve to scoff. “Really? It takes your best friend disappearing with the shady Nephilim for you to give a shit about your mate?”
I didn’t bother to correct him on the fact that, at the moment, my best friend was the shady one, and took a seat on the armchair facing him.
“Get to the point, I’ve had a shit night.”
Well. Not shit, but it didn’t go the way I hoped it would. Damn Vampire.
“Out of Datura?” he teased.
“Out of patience.”
Jeremiah chuckled, distractedly grabbed a pen next to the keyboard and started fumbling with it.
“Angels scouts just came back,” he said, tone suddenly more serious. “They flew to the area Dimitri pointed out, and there was the huge facility. I mean, if it’s just a prison, it must be able to hold thousands of people. But I don’t think it’s only that, there are two distinct buildings.”
“Dimitri didn’t mention that,” I mused.
Jeremiah shook his head. “He did not, but he didn’t fly over the whole thing. Might be more obvious from the sky.”
I nodded, hiding the disappointment of only finding out now that they were actually doing something to try and find them.
“They also reported that at least eighty percent of the people walking freely in the facilities are of Hellriser’s origin.”
“Is that relevant?”
Jeremiah shrugged. “I’m not sure. But it’s odd, don’t you think?”
Considering what my little trips into Arc’s head had shown me, it wasn’t that odd. Arc could kill and apparently manipulate Hellriser blooded Immortals. It made sense he’d be surrounded by more demons than angels.
At least, if what I saw was as it seemed. I still struggled to believe my closest friend could have fooled me for so long and so easily.
“Carter.”
I shook my head, clearing my mind from the mess the whole thing was. “Yeah, sorry.”
“I asked how Lola is coping with all this?”
Not well.
“I’m distracting her.”
Jeremiah lifted a brow, his hands freezing as he stopped playing with the pen. “Distracting her?”
“Yeah.” I gulped. “I—we’re figuring it—us, out.”
My friend stared at me, blinking slowly in disbelief. “You. You’re telling me that you, of all people, are using sex as a way to distract a Succubus out of searching for her other mates.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Sex? Man, you smell like sex. Actually, this whole fucking place reeks of it.” He winced, looking around warily. “My god, did you fuck in here? Poor Marga—”
“We didn’t,” I gritted out. “And you’re one to talk. I heard you and Carrie are getting frisky at all hours of the night in her office.”
A grunt. An eye roll. I chuckled at the implication.
“I fell for lust, it’s not a scoop that I get around,” he said. “You, on the other hand—”
“Well, yeah, she’s my fucking mate. You know why I fell, is it really that surprising? And we didn’t actually have sex.”
He scoffed, leaning back until the backrest of the chair creaked. “So, the voices are off your back?”
“Sort of,” I gritted out.
“Datura?” he asked as our eyes crossed, giving a small nod.
My past addiction to the damned plant was not a secret. The voices in my head were particularly vicious and hard to tune out without its help. A lot of us were using the plant on a daily basis, but Jeremiah had been there during a time of my life I constantly had a joint to my lips.
And yet, I didn’t have a single puff in over a week.
“Blood,” I admitted.
That seemed to catch his attention.
His back straightened as he leaned forward, placing his elbows on the desk to rest his chin on crossed hands.
“Blood?”
I nodded. “Probably because she’s my mate.” Even though I was still unsure if it was the actual reason. “The voices freaked out when I bit her. I thought I was going to die or something.”
Jeremiah’s eyes narrowed pensively. “If one’s mate’s blood silenced the voices, don’t you think we would have heard about it by now?”
I frowned. “Do you have a mate?”
“Well, no but—”
“Then talk about things you fucking know about.”
The muscle in his jaw twitched as we stared at each other in silence for a too-long moment.
“Fine,” he said. “How about we make sure you don’t fuck up the whole sex thing.”
“What are we, a teenager and his dad?” I drawled. “Aren’t I a little too old for the sex talk?”
Jeremiah chuckled, picking the pen back up to fumble with it some more. “Well, aren’t you still a virgin?” he mocked.
My teeth grinded in the back of my mouth. “I seem to have done just fine.”
“Fine isn’t good enough.”
“What’s your point? I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation this awkward.”
“Your mate is a Succubus, Carter. Not only that, she has like two other mates.”
“Technically four,” I corrected through gritted teeth.
“Even worse!” For fuck’s sakes. “You need to know what the fuck you’re doing. What have you guys done so far?”
“I’m not talking about this with you—”
“Oh, shut up. Since you’re not ready to hear about the fact that Lola’s blood curing you has probably nothing to do with the fact that she’s your mate, take the fucking sex advice instead. I have one hour to kill before my date, don’t waste it.”