Chapter Sixteen
Hard-on. Stiffy. Morning wood.
Boner.
As the list of crude vernaculars went through Allhan’s head, he stared down his body, dumbfounded at his dumb-handle.
The thing was lying up his stomach, thick as his fucking forearm under his flannel PJ bottoms, throbbing to the beat of his heart.
He could see the baseball-bat outline even through the blanket that covered his lower body, and unless he was totally delusional, it seemed to be chanting his name.
Glancing around the bedroom, he wondered what he did now—okay, fine. He knew… well, he could kind of guess what one of the choices was, and it involved a handshake introduction with some follow-through.
He also knew why it had happened. One, he was through his transition, which meant that he could now be sexually active. And two, not only had he fallen asleep to thoughts about that female down by the river, he’d dreamed of her.
Not naked dreams. Not nasty, naked stuff.
Just her dark eyes and her lush mouth, her beautiful black cloud of hair and her voice—
His arousal kicked under the layers of flannel and blanket, like it was looking for that handshake in the dark, and the sensation that shot into his pelvic floor was a revelation.
Actually, screw his hips. His entire blood volume seemed to be replaced with delicious purpose, all kinds of anticipation, energy, and feel-great endorphins taking over from the dread that usually coursed through his veins.
He lifted his head and looked down himself again.
He was probably the only male in Caldwell who needed an instruction manual to jerk off—nah, that wasn’t it.
He was the only one who, when in this state in the privacy of his own bedroom, had no intention of taking things to their normal, messy conclusion.
It just seemed disrespectful to that female, even if she didn’t know what he was doing.
He was a gentle-male, after all. In spite of his current circumstances. And even if he didn’t know anything about her, not even her name, he knew that she was a female of worth.
She must have had a really good reason to kill that human.
On that note, he checked the clock and saw that it was past six. On those rare occasions he slept in, Vishous usually played alarm clock. Not tonight, apparently. Guess the whole you’ve-been-benched thing was going to stick, at least until he proved that he was functioning just fine.
Or some kind of emergency required an all-hands-on-deck.
Probably was going to be the latter.
Gritting his teeth, he tossed the sheet and blanket off and shifted his legs to the floor.
As he got to his feet, the visual presentation down south was tent-pole absurd, and he supposed that, in a parallel universe where he had any prospects with any female, he might have been impressed with himself.
But that was not where things were going. Not at all.
Nothing was getting stroked. Not his ego, and certainly not his… you know.
As he headed into the en suite bathroom, he thanked Lassiter that he didn’t have to walk down the hall, leading with this obscene, 3-D dick-pic, and when he got to the loo, he pulled the waistband waaaaaay out and—
Jesus.
Shaking himself back to attention, he got his PJs past the erection and hesitated with his hand next to the shaft.
Touching it was not going to be a good idea.
After doing some logistics modeling, he decided to squat into his thighs and tilt over the bowl.
With one hand braced on the wall, and the other waving off to the side for balance, he did what he could to get the aim right.
Again, there was no way he was touching that thing. He was afraid it was liable to explode and take the rest of him along for the—
Nothing.
Clearing his throat like he was about to launch into a stern talking-to, he concentrated on getting things started. Still nothing.
“Are you even kidding me.”
Glancing around, as if the showerhead or the sink faucet could help the situation given that both were channels for water, he gritted his teeth and squeezed his internal organs.
When that also failed, he straightened and flushed the toilet. Then he rolled his eyes at the stupidity of habit and hobbled over to open the shower door—
Wha-BAM!
“Ow! Fuck! Fuck… fuck!”
It took him a couple rounds of dancing around and loosely cupping the area to figure out that he’d caught the arousal with the chrome edge of the glass panel.
The ringing pain was enough to back him up against the sink, and as his ass hit the counter edge, the hard-on bounced around like it was spring-loaded.
And what do you know. He felt every swing, each bob, all the weaves. Even caught the brushing of the air over the hypersensitive skin. It was awful.
Well… until he imagined how it would feel to have that female’s hand be what was creating the friction. That would be really fucking nice—
He cut that shit off real quick. For one, it felt just as skeevy as the way he’d woken up, and secondly, that took things in an even more concrete direction. Where what he was looking for was a deflation.
When he reapproached the shower door, he made sure he kept the length out of range as he turned on the hot water.
“Baseball,” he told himself.
Wasn’t that what men or males were supposed to think about? To, you know… distract themselves? Crap. He didn’t know a damn thing about America’s favorite pastime.
C++ coding did it.
By time the water was running warm and he stepped in, he’d created a user interface for banking transactions running between encrypted vendor prompts and Bitcoin wallets not on regulated exchanges. Just a little light programming.
And possibly something he could sell to some human financial speculator when his grim work was finally done.
He was going to need to support himself.
The shower took five minutes and not because he wasn’t thorough—well, he didn’t spend a lot of time on his junk, that was for sure. But the rest of his body and his hair, he covered with an efficiency he was used to, even if his surface area had increased tenfold.
It was so weird, he thought as he stared down at his relatively flaccid sex. When he’d gone through his transition, he hadn’t gotten an erection. He’d heard some males did, and maybe it was because, in his case, there had been so many people around when the change had happened.
Maybe it was also because Lyric had been the one letting him take her vein and he’d had enough presence of mind not to disrespect her like that. Whatever the reason, this evening’s wake-up call had certainly dispelled the notion that he might be impotent.
He was the damn poster boy for Cialis.
By the time he was dressed and stepping out into the hall, he didn’t feel totally refreshed, but he was definitely restarted.
And when it became obvious that nobody else was in the residence, and a check of his texts confirmed this, he felt bad that he was so relieved.
He couldn’t dwell on that, though. He had shit he needed to take care of.
On that note, he made sure location services were off on his Samsung.
Hitting the Wheel on a fast-track tempo, he skirted along the circular corridor while praying he didn’t run into anybody. Given what had happened last night, he did not want sympathetic eyes or words. He wanted everybody to ignore him.
Duck-and-cover remained his mode while he went through the check-ins required to come up into the interior of Fritz Perlmutter’s house.
He kept expecting to be denied passage, given that Vishous ran all the security, but clearly the Brother didn’t intend on keeping him a prisoner.
Emerging onto the yellow Colonial’s front porch, he glanced around the development.
When nobody rushed forward to stop him from leaving, he closed his eyes and dematerialized toward the downtown, praying that he didn’t re-form in the middle of a road sign or a lamppost.
Or a moving car.
By some miracle, he managed to avoid an embedded impairment, and as a chaser, he also found himself where he’d intended to go.
The roof of the Caldwell Public Library.
Taking out his burner phone, he stared at the darkened screen. The city was alive all around him, cars flowing over the twin bridges in both directions, lights twinkling in the windows of the skyscrapers, pedestrians walking in huddles to parked cars, to the bus stop.
He was jealous of every single one of those rats without tails.
Whatever their problems were, at least they were not betraying the very male who had taken them in and treated them as a son.
As he signed into the unit with a code, his gut rolled and he bent down, thinking he was going to dry-heave again. When he didn’t, he went into the phone log. There was only one number listed, the back-and-forth of calls received and sent out going to the same 518-area-code-led destination.
Things were answered on the first ring.
“Where were you last night.”
Allhan closed his eyes and pulled his shit together. When he reopened them, there was no wobbling, no hesitation, no stutter.
“There were extenuating circumstances.”
“Oh?” came the drawl. “Tell me more. No? Cat got your tongue?”
The accented voice made Allhan’s skin crawl, and he remembered the bodies in the snow last night. The blood. The suffering.
“You’re out of time, vampire,” the lesser cut in. “I’ve been patient with you, but I’m done with that.”
“You’ll get what you need. This is not an easy task, I told you.”
“It’s been six months—”
“No, it’s been three since I’ve started to really get inside.
” A wholly unfamiliar surge of aggression went through him, his fangs tingling in his upper jaw and then descending.
“If you want the addresses of where the Black Dagger Brotherhood stay, I have to get them under the radar. I’m of no use to you if I’m caught and killed by the King because I rushed this. ”
“So give me what you have.”
“One whole list. That was our deal. Besides, piecemeal is useless to you. You have to attack all at once or they’ll move and the addresses will be worse than worthless. They’ll become traps for the likes of you—”
“You have no idea about my plans.”
“You want to be Fore-lesser.” When there was a beat of silence, Allhan heard his new, deep voice go even deeper.
“Did you think I don’t know how things work for you?
And strategy is everything in war, whether you’re going after your enemy or your enemy is your own fucking job competition.
Don’t blow your chance with impatience.”
“You have a week,” the slayer gritted out. “And then I’m going to visit the one address I do have. I’ll be sure to give your regards to your sister. She’s going to like me. A lot.”
A cold shaft of terror sharpened Allhan’s mind to a dagger point. “You don’t know where she is or you would have already gone there.”
“But last night changed everything for me. Do you miss the friends you’ve been going to Bathe with? Those males who smelled like cologne and wore such beautiful clothes? Those males, the ones I met last night. In the alley.”
Allhan felt the world spin and threw a hand out for balance.
“I thought you were getting a little complacent,” the slayer said.
“Focus is an important characteristic in life if you want to get ahead, if you want to do important things. So myself and an associate took care of your distraction and I learned all kinds of things. You have one week, and then your sister dies—oh, and don’t try to move her.
We have her glass house staked out as we speak—I’m watching her cut melon at her counter right now. She obviously takes care of herself.”
The connection got cut off, and in a fit of rage, Allhan hauled the burner back like he was going to throw the fucking thing to the other side of Caldwell.
Except he couldn’t lose his one way to keep in touch with the enemy.
As his emotions exploded in his chest, he opened up his mouth.
And roared into the night.