Chapter 3
Three
Tai had come to his best friend’s coed bachelor party knowing he was a minority of one.
Ryker and Leslie didn’t count; they were the guests of honor.
Among the rest of the group, Jake and Hannah belonged to the bride, and everyone else were clearly friends of both Ryker and Leslie, though they’d known Ryker considerably longer.
The thing Tai figured out within the first hour of their hike—these vampires weren’t only Ryker and Leslie’s friends.
They were Claire’s too. Every last one of them.
When Mackey was cool toward him, Tai hadn’t flinched.
The guy seemed cool toward everybody, even Leslie, who drew people to her quiet, wise warmth without effort.
When the twins, Logan and Nova, were equally frosty—though Nova seemed to forget she was supposed to be as long as they were discussing social issues—Tai got curious and made a few test approaches.
Then Philippa gave him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and Tai knew.
Claire had told all of them. She had painted him as greedy, arrogant, fake—and those were only the charges she’d leveled to his face. No doubt, to her closest friends, she’d called him other things too.
It hurt. Physically. Deep in his chest.
Which was ridiculous, because he’d chosen not to enlighten her. For the best. Only choice, really.
By the time they reached the waterfall, the twins had relaxed enough to tell him about themselves, and for a few minutes Nova seemed to forget all over again that she wasn’t supposed to get along with him. Idealist, indeed. Then the party moved on to the indoor art gallery, and she remembered.
Tai stopped trying to make friends and instead focused on the art. He’d been here a few times to socialize with potential foundation donors, but he never got tired of the permanent exhibits and always found some work in the temporary ones that moved him.
Here was one such artist. He read her biographical information, framed on the wall beside her featured pieces. Mariah Davis from Atlanta, fifty-three years old, both a sculptor and a folk musician who played mandolin, dulcimer, guitar, and fiddle.
No wonder she captivated him.
Tai shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans to keep his fingers from trailing over the breath-stalling creations in front of him.
Mariah took old, broken musical instruments and repurposed them.
Here she’d turned a violin into a hollow house for hammered-brass butterflies to pour out of.
Here she’d half-melted an unrepairable flute and shaped the melting half to resemble ocean waves.
Fluttering notes. A sea of music.
He loved the images. He could hear them, his mind forming melodies and counterpoints to match each vision.
His chest grew heavy, though he wasn’t saddened by the beauty of what Mariah made.
He was inspired. He longed for his violin.
If he drew his bow across the strings right now, it would all be there in the song—Mariah’s magical art, the way it buoyed him…
and Claire’s words behind his back, the way they cut him.
“Tai?”
He blinked himself out of his reverie and faced Philippa. He’d caught the scent of a vampire approaching but hadn’t bothered to look away from the art, assumed it was Leslie or Ryker.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sorry, I just…I thought you were…but you’re fine, I guess.”
“I’m not following,” he said, “but yeah, I’m fine.”
“Of course.” Philippa looked from him to Mariah Davis’s exhibit. “Wow. She’s really good.”
He nodded.
“Oh, you were having a moment. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I shouldn’t have interrupted you.”
“Philippa, what are you talking about?”
“It was the art, right? It made you emotional.”
Ryker liked to tease Tai that he knew “at least a thousand people,” and while this was an exaggeration, knowing a lot of people was part of his job.
He had an alpha wolf from Tennessee in his phone contacts, though they’d had only one conversation.
He had socialized with nearly every vampire in Virginia and quite a few beyond.
So it took less than three seconds for Tai to thumb mentally through his knowledge of people in general and vampires in particular and answer his own question. “You’re an empath.”
Philippa nodded. “I thought you were, um, sad. Never mind. I’ll leave you to the art.”
“Even if I had been,” he said, “why come over?”
She bit her lip, and her lavender eyes flashed. “Because I trust all my friends, and opinions on you are…varied.” She shrugged. “I’d like to know you for myself.”
“I appreciate that.”
“And because I never want to leave someone in their sadness, if I can help.”
A smile found him, maybe the first he’d felt in hours. “I appreciate that too.”
“You love music,” she said, nodding to the art again.
“I do.”
“And you play piano, right?”
She couldn’t possibly know that, so Claire must have mentioned it at some point. Which was…odd. He’d never imagined her telling them anything but how untrustworthy he was. “Piano, violin, a little guitar.”
“Okay, I’m officially impressed. Do you have a favorite? I mean, does one speak more to you, or however that works? I’m not a musician, so I’m probably saying it wrong.”
His eyes settled on another repurposed violin, the neck turned into a tree trunk, the body painted to resemble deep spreading roots, and the strings woven up around the pegbox in an impressionistic cluster of leaves and flowers.
“I started with piano as a kid, and it’s still my main voice,” he said, surprised to be telling her, then not surprised at all. Empaths were nearly impossible to stonewall. “It’s the one I choose most often for composing.”
“So you’re also a songwriter.”
He smiled. “Strictly a composer. I don’t do lyrics. What about you? If not music, what’s your preferred art form?”
“I’m not like you and Leslie, all traditionally creative.
But I’m a licensed stylist, and I’ve redeemed some disasters and taught many a woman how to nurture her hair.
And I love events where everybody comes in to get their best look—chignon, beehive, fishtail braid or braid out—you name it, I can do it. ”
“Well, for the record, in my book, what you just described is absolutely art.”
“It really is.” Her grin lit her eyes, and they flashed like amethyst as her full vampire nature peeked out despite the public venue. “Thanks for saying so.”
When Philippa moved on, Tai lingered, taking in every detail of the featured exhibit one more time until another vampire joined him. This time he checked his peripheral vision, and everything in him went still. It was Claire.
After their hike and swim she’d donned a silver wrap dress that flattered her every line and curve.
In spiky hot-pink heels, she stood nearly as tall as Tai.
Her espresso-brown hair was still damp, blunt cut just above her shoulders, and he couldn’t help flashing back to the moment she surfaced beside him in the cave, water streaming from her hair to make little runnels into the dips of her shoulders.
She studied Mariah Davis’s work, and her lips pursed. From the day he’d met her, Tai had wanted to taste those lips. He still did, because he was just that pathetic.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Look at these.”
He nodded.
Claire wandered a few steps to a guitar that had been cut into pieces and reshaped to resemble cracking ice. A single musical note appeared sunk into the sound hole, the source of the cracking all around it.
“She doesn’t just use instruments to make art,” Claire said. “I mean, tons of people upcycle old trumpets and flutes into lamps, you know?”
“She uses music to make art about music,” Tai said.
“Yeah, that.” She met his eyes for a moment, then looked away, focused on a mosaic made of broken bits of vinyl records. She gave a little laugh. “Whoa, major breakage. Kind of hurts to look at this one.”
Her tone was bothered only by the literal shattered records in the art piece.
She didn’t intend alluding to their record store that never was.
But when he didn’t respond, Claire’s eyes darted to his, flared with sudden emotion and understanding that deepened their blue-purple to a royal shade. Then she looked away again.
“Tai, I… When everything happened, Ryker told me there was more to it. I didn’t believe him. I still don’t, to be honest.”
He could only nod.
“But if you ever want to prove him right, I’ll hear you out.”
It was more than she’d offered him…ever.
Tai had thought he’d prepared himself to see her again.
Not that he hadn’t laid eyes on her in three years, but they hadn’t talked, not really.
A few business phone calls and emails, and one other significant call where she’d reluctantly asked him to track down Ember Reed’s missing nephew, a recently turned wolf pup.
Tai had asked why him, and she’d said everyone knew he knew everyone, vampires and wolves alike.
When he came through thanks to a few mutual connections, she’d managed to thank him, but the grudge hadn’t lifted from her voice.
Now she stood beside him admiring art made of music. For three years her disdain had remained lodged in his chest like a knife, and now here they were, and she said she would listen. Not a demand but an offer.
For a teetering moment, Tai wanted to tell her.
Then reason took over, reminded him that if he told her, she still wouldn’t trust him, and she’d never come near him again either. As much as it hurt to know Claire saw him as arrogant and fake, to know she saw him as weak and defective would be a hundred times worse.
As his silence lasted, she stiffened beside him. She looked away from the art to him, and he did her the courtesy of meeting her eyes, because he could at least give her that.
“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“I appreciate the offer,” he said.
“I love Slake It Off, Tai. I love what the business grew into and what it means to so many vampires, and I’m never going to wish I’d stuck to the original plan.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“Okay.” She waved a hand at the Mariah Davis exhibit. “Enjoy, I guess.”
Then she walked away.
And he couldn’t catch a break, because Ryker ambled up to him in less than thirty seconds. Said nothing, only stared.
“Don’t, man,” Tai said.
“Haven’t said a word.”
Tai folded his arms over his chest and pretended to study the half-melted flute he’d already committed to visual memory.
“Look, I didn’t mean to overhear.”
Tai nodded. In fairness, it was a vampire hazard whenever groups of them were in public.
You could be habitually not listening and then someone happened to utter your name, and after that, tuning back out was like deciding not to think about a pink elephant because someone offered you twenty bucks not to think about pink elephants for thirty seconds.
On the plus side, not a living soul knew Tai found the woman who called him her “nemesis” distractingly attractive. Not even Ryker.
“It’s not too late to tell her,” Ryker said.
“No, it’s not.” Too late didn’t factor into his decision at all, and Ryker ought to know that.
Apparently, his friend did know. Ryker rolled his eyes, gently boxed Tai’s shoulder, and then nodded to the exhibit from which Tai still hadn’t moved on. “Hey, this stuff was made for you.”
“Yeah.”
“Look at all the violins. You ought to buy one from her. It would look cool in your den at the penthouse.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. Tai smiled. He could picture several of these finding a place in his home—the butterfly-pouring hollow especially.
Fleeting, delicate beauty. He felt it in his chest, the constant longing to capture what he saw and felt, the way his music so often almost held onto something while a piece of that thing remained free and fluttering just out of his grasp.
As if sensing Tai was feeling too much for words, Ryker didn’t expect any, instead nudged his shoulder again. “Can I bring Leslie over here? She’ll go nuts for these. Sculpture is her baby.”
“Of course,” Tai said.
When Leslie joined them, she spent several minutes ooh-and-ahhing, but then she and Tai talked—about art and music, the work of creation, the lifelong pursuit of beauty.
As a diorama artist who specialized in realistic landscapes, she tried to capture nature, its seasons and moods.
Hers was a more concrete vision than the musical tapestry that lived inside Tai, but nonetheless he loved talking to Leslie about art. Artists were all alike in some ways.
By the time the wedding party left the gallery and headed to dinner, Tai felt overfull of the creativity and beauty he’d observed today. At the restaurant, he sat on one end of their long table, and Claire sat on the other, and it was for the best.
It had to be.