Chapter 12 #2
Lorenzo wasn’t sure how to keep him at bay.
“Five minutes,” he said fervently.
Charlie made an excited sort of yip, and they crept toward the door.
Inside, the music was painfully loud, and Lorenzo frankly found most music from this millennium to be grating at best. The house was stately and moneyed, but the party was cheap—colored lights splashed along the walls, cups and cigarettes littering every surface, and vampires feeding out in the open.
Thankfully, it at least appeared to be consensual.
“Wow,” Charlie shouted at him over the music as they explored a few different rooms. “It’s so . . .”
“What?”
They passed a hallway where a vampire was feeding on a topless woman as she chugged a bottle of champagne. “So . . . cliché,” Charlie said.
Lorenzo laughed. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. They stumbled out of the path of a drunk man who was barreling toward them, and found a place to sit at the foot of an enormous staircase. “Your and Maggie and Rachel’s parties are way cooler than this.”
That was a ridiculous thing to say, but pleasantly so. Charlie found an unopened seltzer on the floor and cracked it open, taking a sip as they took in the atmosphere of the party.
“So are all these people going to become vampires?” he asked, gesturing to the humans around them in various states of being fed on.
Most of them were cradling their vampire’s heads in their hands, or urging them on in low voices.
Lorenzo looked carefully for any humans who seemed as if they might be struggling or incapacitated, but he didn’t spot any.
“Probably not,” Lorenzo said.
“Probably?”
He shifted a little, not sure if he wanted to be looking at Charlie while he explained this. “A new vampire is made when a human and a vampire drink each other’s blood,” he said slowly. “But only when both the vampire and the human want them to be turned.”
Charlie seemed to be drinking him up with his stare. “Right,” he breathed. “Because, um . . . magic is intent, right?”
Lorenzo nodded.
“So if that’s not the intent, the bite could just be to feed,” Charlie mused, looking out over the party. “Or for fun,” he added, turning back to Lorenzo.
He didn’t think he was imagining the glint in Charlie’s eyes. “Right?”
Lorenzo grunted. Charlie smiled and stood up, finishing his drink. Once he had, he cracked his back and took a look around the party. “Hmm,” he said, before turning behind them to the rest of the staircase. “Why don’t we go up there?”
A few steps up, a velvet rope hung with a sign reading PRIVATE. Lorenzo pointed at it.
“So what?” Charlie said, waggling his eyebrows. “That’s why we’re here, right?”
It was such a bad idea. “Two minutes,” he stressed. They crept under the velvet rope and climbed the stairs.
The second level was as large as the first, but quiet and empty.
They took a wild guess that Sebastian’s suite was the one behind the massive, elaborately gilded doors at the end of the hallway.
Lorenzo had Charlie wait while he listened inside, using his sharper hearing to make sure that no one else was there, but the room was silent. They ventured inside hesitantly.
Charlie snorted out a laugh as soon as they made it past the threshold.
The room was quite . . . bold, decorated in shiny black wood, red velvet, and neon.
There was a collection of artwork leaning against one wall, ornate paintings in gold frames next to unframed modern art.
And there were bloodstains on almost every surface.
“Oh my god,” Charlie wheezed. “This is so stupid.”
Lorenzo examined a dresser that had several objets d’art displayed on top, including a katana and what looked like a pair of engraved metal fang tips. “You think so?”
“It’s so cringe!” Charlie said, laughing as he picked up a black and white photograph of a naked woman covered in blood. “It’s like a set from Riverdale. It’s not even worth trashing.”
Lorenzo was about to respond when he heard a sound in the hallway. He gestured to Charlie, who looked confused and then panicked, as a gruff voice from outside called, “Is someone in there?”
Charlie’s eyes widened, and Lorenzo ran to him, pushing him back against the far wall. “This area is off-limits!” the voice called, getting closer.
He’d reach the door in a moment. They weren’t even supposed to be in this house, much less this room. And Lorenzo did not want Charlie getting in trouble at a party filled with vampires. Especially these vampires.
Footsteps approached, and Lorenzo turned around, ready to shield Charlie from whatever was coming their way.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder—Charlie turning him back around, pulling him closer. “Quick,” he said urgently. “Pretend we’re—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish before the door swung open.
Instead, Charlie just pulled Lorenzo roughly against him, hands fisted in Lorenzo’s shirt, and threw his head to the side, baring his neck.
Lorenzo’s hands came to cradle his head and the small of his back instinctively, and with Lorenzo crowding him back against the wall, his head buried in Charlie’s neck, he knew exactly what they looked like: a vampire and a human locked in a passionate bite.
He did not actually bite Charlie. He brought his mouth down to Charlie’s neck, burrowed his face into the crook of Charlie’s throat, and kept his lips about an inch away from his skin.
But with the way they were pressed together, their bodies entwined and wracked with tension, no one would be able to tell the difference.
Charlie was panting out into the room, his pulse pounding wildly in his throat.
His scent, so thick and close now, was rapidly fogging up Lorenzo’s ability to focus.
Charlie had gasped and arched into him when Lorenzo grabbed him, wrapping his arms around Lorenzo’s shoulders and digging his nails in.
That would help sell it, as would the way Lorenzo growled and ground himself against Charlie.
But it wasn’t real. That’s what Lorenzo had to hold on to, as he tried to ignore the sweet warmth of Charlie’s thin, delectable skin just a hair’s breadth away from his lips.
His pulse was right there, beat beat beating away, a delicious bass note to the sound of Charlie’s frantic breath.
And he could feel, in the way Charlie’s muscles jumped under his hands, and the way Charlie clutched at him back, that he wanted it.
“Guys,” someone said, with the irritated tone of having said it more than once.
Lorenzo pulled back and wiped his face, hiding the fact that there was no blood there. Charlie hastily grabbed his own neck, covering the nonexistent bite. “Yes?”
“This is an off-limits area,” the guard explained wearily. He’d probably chased people out of here dozens of times before. “You want to get your bite on, do it downstairs.”
“Oh, uh—very well,” Lorenzo said shakily. “Come, human.”
They made their way unsteadily down the grand staircase and back to the party.