Chapter 7
Xander
Everything hurts. It’s a full-body weakness-pain that holds me like a vise. I blink, struggling to see where I am. The hallway in our Corbin apartment?
The evening starts to come back to me.
Slashing shadows—strange vampires attacking. They leaped out of a car, grabbed me, dragged me into an alley. Blood. Pain. They were rather clinical with the entire affair, taking turns slashing me with knives. It wasn’t bloodlust driving their attack, but something else.
A directive, it turns out.
Feeling stiff where I sit, I bend my knees. My pants are unbuttoned. Come is splashed over the front of me.
Autumn. I was with Autumn. Will was here, and Autumn fed me. She slid back and forth on my dick until we both came.
Where is she now? And why did Will leave me on the floor?
He could’ve carried me to my bed easily, or at least the sofa or a chair.
I struggle to my feet, bracing myself against the wall as I go.
Finally upright, I tug up my soiled jeans and start toward the living room.
The torn fabric of my shirt flutters around my chest and shoulders.
Will and Autumn are talking quietly. As I approach, Will’s words become intelligible.
“You can’t be our amant because we killed our last one.” His voice is emotionless and carries finality.
He’s telling her about Elisabeth. Why the fuck is he telling her anything? Does he want to terrify the girl?
I step into the room, leaning heavily against the wall. Weakened, and with come on my pants and my shirt in tatters, I hardly make the dignified entrance I’d prefer.
“Xander!” Autumn exclaims, sitting forward. “Are you okay? Come sit down. You should rest.”
The sweet little mouse is coddling me, right after Will has admitted to her that we’re killers. Right after I drank her blood and humped her like a lust-addled adolescent.
“Thank you for your blood,” I say, closing my eyes and breathing deeply, trying to keep my fangs in check. The very memory of sinking into her throat has me eager to do it again.
“You’re, um, welcome,” Autumn says. “What happened to you, anyway?”
Keeping my voice as dispassionate as possible, I say, “A couple of vampires attacked me when I was walking down a side street off of Caro. They dragged me into an alley.”
“Why?” she asks.
“They wanted to hurt me,” I say. “It was a punishment.”
Will frowns. “For what?”
“They had a message.” I stare directly at him. He should know; this is partly his fault.
“Well, what did they say?” Will asks, looking perplexed.
“They said Gaius knows we’re avoiding him. He requests our presence, and he doesn’t want to wait.”
Will
As pissed as I am at Xander, I know what he wasn’t saying last night about Gaius. What he left unsaid. Truth is, I fucked up. If we’d simply gone to Gaius without a summons, Xander wouldn’t have been attacked.
Autumn wouldn’t have needed to give him her blood.
He wouldn’t have called her amant.
My fuck-up is the reason why, several hours later, we’re getting ready to go to Gaius’s current quarters.
Autumn frowns as I dress myself in a suit. “Why do you have to dress up?”
“It’s Gaius,” I say with a shrug. “He likes ceremony, formal shit. Thinks it’s a sign of respect.”
“Well, you look good,” she says with an exaggerated leer.
I can’t smile. Can’t enjoy the levity. I finish dressing, make my way to the sitting room to wait for Xander. Autumn follows me. I want to take her in my arms. Too dangerous. Her scent would cling. Gaius would suspect.
Xander soon enters the sitting room, dressed similarly to me. “Ready?” he asks.
I nod. Turning to Autumn, I say, “We’ll be back as soon as possible, okay, little love?”
I keep my tone light. Unworried. I don’t want to frighten her. It’s likely that everything will be fine, and Gaius is, as I had formerly told Xander, reformed.
His attack on Xander suggests otherwise, unfortunately.
“Can I check my email while you’re gone?” Autumn asks. “It won’t, like, make it so anyone can track me, will it?”
“No one can trace you here,” Xander says. “We have several safeguards in place, in the building, in our tech, and on your phone. Don’t make calls on it to anyone from your old life, though.”
She nods. We leave her on the couch, her phone in hand.
Xander’s attackers were thoughtful enough to provide him with an address, so he and I get in my car. I head in that direction, not speaking. I’m still stewing.
I shouldn’t have ignored the threat Gaius posed.
Xander shouldn’t have called Autumn our amant.
I’m angry at both of us.
I just want Autumn to be safe.
To get to Gaius’s place, we have to travel through the Old Thirty-Three neighborhood.
Most of the houses here are modest. But after we’ve driven through it, the edges are populated with large mansions, relics of the 1910s and 20s.
Gaius came to possess one of these. I’d complain about how pretentious he is…
but I live in a fucking library, so I guess I don’t have much room to talk.
“This is it,” Xander says, pointing to a driveway.
The house is set so far beyond the gates, I can’t make out more than its towering, gothic shape in the darkness.
“Fucking typical,” Xander says with a snort.
I pull into the driveway, aware that we are likely being watched by security cameras hidden on the grounds. It takes a couple of minutes to reach the house. I stop in front of it and climb out of the car. It’s a short walk up a wide set up of steps to reach the door.
“Will,” Xander says.
I turn to face him.
“What the fuck is your problem?” he says. “You haven’t said a word to me since last night.”
It’s too dangerous to speak in a normal voice. I get close to him and lean in.
“She’s not our amant,” I say in a voice only loud enough for him to hear. “You had no right to call her that.”
“I was out of my mind,” he says. “And besides, brother, you were the one eager to bring her back to our arms. I did not know what I was saying, though, when I said it.”
“Still. Now she has the idea.”
“She was bound to ask eventually,” Xander says. “Ever since we told her about our social structure, about triads. I saw the little mouse’s mind working.”
I stop walking and stare at him, grabbing his shoulder to hold him still. “She is not our amant. Gaius can’t know about her. She is beneath notice—his and ours.”
The meaning of my words seems to sink in. He says, “Fucking hell. You’re right—he can’t know about her. Ever.”
“Exactly.”
Everything Gaius touches, he perverts. And not in the fun way.
“Me saying that to her changes nothing,” he adds. “I still think we should send her away.”
Must my frerte be against me on everything?
Before I can respond, the front door to the mansion opens. Pale yellow light breaks over us, and a tall, gaunt man steps out. Benjamin, Gaius’s frerte. He scowls at us with dark eyes.
“Gaius is waiting for you.”
Xander and I finish walking up the steps and join Benjamin in a narrow entrance hall. I’m surprised Benjamin is playing butler. Probably another one of Gaius’s power games. As a frerte, Benjamin ought to be Gaius’s equal. That’s never been the case. I wonder why Benjamin puts up with it.
Sometimes I wonder why I put up with Xander. I think the feeling’s mutual.
It’s one reason why having an amant increases a vampire’s power. Not only the blood source, but the way an amant creates a focus of mutual interest and responsibility between the frertes.
That’s the theory, anyway. Fuck, I don’t know. I just know if I were Benjamin, I would’ve left Gaius centuries ago.
Benjamin leads us through the entry hall. The walls are papered with an old, green and brown flowery design. It appears Gaius has commandeered a Victorian mansion with a 1970s aesthetic.
We enter a formal dining room, where a huge table is laid out as if for a large party. There must be thirty place settings. Only Gaius and Freya—his and Benjamin’s amant, are sitting at the table, though.
As a vampire, Gaius hasn’t changed much since we saw him decades ago. He still has his full, brown beard and close-cropped brown hair. His pale gray eyes remind me of cloudy days in Greenland.
Freya, as an amant, hasn’t visibly aged, either. Her blond hair is lighter than Benjamin’s, almost white.
“Please, have a seat,” Gaius says, gesturing toward Xander and me. When Benjamin moves to a chair, Gaius says, “Not you, Benji. Serve Freya her dinner.”
Looking like a kicked dog, Benjamin glides out of the dining room and into what must be the adjoining kitchen.
Xander and I face Gaius and Freya. Neither of us have sat down, but Gaius doesn’t seem bothered.
“Tell me,” he says, “what have California’s two most powerful vampires been up to?”
“Other than recovering from the attack your men made on me?” Xander asks. He affects boredom. I can detect the tension in his tone, though.
“Other than that,” Gaius says. “It is unfortunate we had to do that.”
That’s not an apology. Gaius doesn’t do apologies.
Benjamin returns to the dining room. He carries a plate laden with aromatic food—a well-seasoned steak, oil-fried vegetables, mashed potatoes.
Hearty. Something I would feed Autumn to help keep her strength up.
Freya gives Benjamin a faint smile as he places the food in front of her.
He moves to step back, as a servant would, but she reaches for his hand, tugs him to the chair at her side so she now sits between Gaius and Benjamin.
A powerful triad.
Intimidating.
I don’t doubt she planned for this visual reminder of their power. Although Gaius is the true puppeteer of their triad, Freya isn’t beneath her own manipulations and mind games.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter whether Neve has been filling your heads with terrors from the San Francisco Bay Area,” Gaius says idly, watching his amant push food around on her plate.
“No?” I say, taking the bait. The sooner he gets to his point, the sooner we can leave. The sooner I can return to Autumn.
The less chance he’ll have of figuring out we’ve been caring for someone.
“No. Because at the end of it all,” Gaius says, “I think you’re hiding something from me. I think you’re hiding a new amant.”
Autumn
As soon as they leave, I set down my phone and tug a blanket tighter around my shoulders. The basement apartment seems so much quieter, colder, with the men gone. I don’t like that they’re walking straight into the arms of the guy who arranged Xander’s attack.
This isn’t my world, though. I’m not their amant, Will said, and I can’t be.
Because they fucking killed their last one…what in the actual hell? There was no way for me to ask about it. I’m curious, but despite his expressionless face, Will was upset. I couldn’t see it; I could feel it. I’m not going to pry into his and Xander’s trauma.
Settling the blanket firmly around my arms, I pick up my phone again and tap over to the email app. It takes me a couple of tries to remember my password, but finally, I’m able to sign in.
My inbox is flooded. I vaguely recognize several names—acquaintances from college, and even some from high school. A friend of my mother’s.
And of course Dale. Lots of messages from Dale. I open one and see a bunch of bullshit about “misunderstandings” and my “mental health” and how he just wants me to come home and be safe.
The very thought of returning to the house I shared with him has my stomach tightening with nausea.
There’s an email from Clarissa in the mix. The subject line reads, I miss you.
Hell, I miss her, too.
Maybe she has info for me, maybe she can tell me what’s been happening in Altera. I’m sure Dale got in touch with her, but she won’t tell him anything—we’re ride or die besties, always have been.
I click open her email and start reading.
Autumn, I hope you’re okay. I want you to know that you can trust me in anything and everything, and I always want you to be happy.
You left suddenly, and I’m very worried about you and your mental state.
Which is why I wanted to tell you something, and I hope you don’t get mad but I think you should hear it from me instead of finding out some other way.
Neither of us wants to hurt you. Please understand that. I never planned for this, and his love took me by surprise. But Autumn, I love him, too. It’s serious. I can’t stay away from him, not even for you.
Please don’t be mad at us.
Dale and I are in a relationship.
I’m in love with your stepdad.