Chapter 13 #3
“Caleb!” Panic twisted in my chest. I slung an arm around him and pulled him into the night-drenched alley. The door swung shut behind us.
He slumped against me, sweating and shaking. His lips were bloodless. His throat bobbed under his tie like he fought the urge to vomit.
“I’ve got you,” I said, wiggling a finger under the knot and loosening it. “Breathe, baby.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “Just a headache.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” Tightening my arm, I hustled him away from the opera house. When we reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street, he stumbled against me.
“I’m getting a cab,” I said.
“No.” He swallowed hard. “I’ll be sick in a car.”
“All right.” I kept walking, my arm tight around his back. Traffic streamed next to us. Pedestrians passed, but few gave us a second look. To humans, we were just a businessman or clubgoer escorting a drunk friend home.
By the time we stumbled into the rental’s foyer, Caleb’s hairline was dark with sweat. I didn’t ask permission, just bent and swept him into my arms.
“I can walk!” he protested.
I crossed the marble and started up the stairs. “Yeah, you were doing a great job of it just now.”
“Jesse—”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve carried you upstairs. Now be quiet and try not to puke on me.”
He clamped his mouth shut, and I kissed his forehead. He was okay. He was alert and breathing, and the vampires couldn’t touch him. He was going to be fine. I kept telling myself that as I hurried down the hall.
In the bedroom, I set him on the edge of the bed and stripped off his suit with speed I’d learned from the stretcher bearers in the trenches. He swayed when I pulled back the sheets.
“Easy,” I said, guiding him down to the pillows and pulling the blanket to his shoulders. I sat beside him and felt his forehead. His skin was clammy but cool.
“Sorry to wuss out like that,” he croaked, staring up at me with summer sky eyes.
His color was back. When I listened for his heart, the thump-thump-thump was strong and steady.
“You didn’t wuss out.” I stroked his cheekbone. “What did you see?”
He frowned. “It was more like what I felt. My head was fucking killing me. Like someone split it open with an axe. Everything was foggy, and I couldn’t breathe or move. It was like I’d maxed out squats. My legs were jello. It was like—” His eyes went wide.
“Like what?”
“Like the silver handcuffs. The first night we met, you cuffed me to the bed—”
“I remember.” I was never going to forget. The image of a shirtless Caleb stretched on my guest bed was grooved into my brain like a 45.
“It was the same kind of drain,” Caleb said. “The same agony.”
I froze. Caleb didn’t say agony. He said things like brutal and ball buster. Agony was specific. Memorable. And he’d reached for it.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
He nodded. “Do you think the door had silver in it?”
The door was modern, plain steel. Every kitchen I’d worked in had featured the same. It was a service door designed to keep out prowlers and stand up to a thousand feet kicking it open and shut. Doors like that didn’t contain silver.
“I don’t know why it would,” I said.
“Silver only affects us, right? Not vampires?”
“Just us.”
He went quiet. “We’ve passed through that door twice now. If there was silver in it, wouldn’t we have felt it before?”
“Yes,” I said. An unsettled feeling moved through me. Nothing made sense. Every day in Rome brought a new mystery. A dead rogue whose scent kept disappearing. An entire country missing its werewolves. A modern door that hit Caleb like silver. A Council I wasn’t certain I could trust.
How were they connected? Were they connected?
Caleb’s eyes had gone heavy. He yawned, belatedly throwing his forearm over his mouth. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I stood and stripped, wanting nothing more than to stand in the shower until I’d washed the opera house off my skin. But I wouldn’t leave Caleb.
I slid into bed, and he turned toward me without opening his eyes.
“What the fuck was that dungeon club?” he asked against my shoulder.
“What Carlo wanted us to see,” I said.
Caleb grunted. “Gross.”
I brushed my lips over his hair, smiling in spite of myself. “He showed us the humans and the orgy so we’d stop looking for whatever else he’s hiding.”
Caleb yawned again, his warm breath teasing my skin. “What d’you think he’s hiding?”
“I wish I knew.” And it was just another mystery piled on top of the others. Worry and doubt swirled in my mind. One doubt in particular rose to the surface.
I needed to tell Caleb about the Council. If we were being moved around a chess board by people playing a different game, he deserved to know.
“Caleb, I need to tell you something.”
His soft snore answered me.
I looked down.
He was asleep. His face was slack, his lashes thick fans on his cheeks. A lock of blond hair had escaped my attempt to smooth it and curled stubbornly over his forehead.
I tucked it back with the others.
And I lay in the quiet bedroom with my worries circling like vultures and the sounds of Rome drifting from the night outside the window.