Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
SANTA
Another Monday night, another date with Boz.
This time, I was going to do it right. Instead of dragging him on my idea of the perfect date, I would do what he wanted instead. He'd requested pizza and movie rentals, or streaming, or whatever they called it these days. I could do that.
Besides, staying home seemed safer, since the trip to Blood Drive after our date had led to unplanned extracurricular activities. Boz didn't seem the type to want me to save his life every time we went out, so a night in made more sense.
I was already thinking of other places to take him, though. Restaurants. Bars. BDSM clubs. I wanted him to eat, drink, and relax a little while I tied him up. If he consented, of course .
I liked the way he responded to my orders after I shared my blood with him. Maybe I liked it a little too much. I'd hated my sire and the amount of control he'd had over me. Why was it such a turn-on when Boz did what I said without his usual backtalk and questioning?
I wanted him to trust me, that's why. Maybe one day he would. Until then, I couldn't allow myself to think his behavior when under the influence of vampire blood, my blood, was real.
Real or not, I wanted to spend more time with him. But only after I drank my fill of blood for the night.
I wasn't chancing another run-in with unwelcome vampires. I drove my Chevelle to Blood Drive to avoid going inside. Feeling festive, I ordered nutmeg-infused human blood. I swore they had a witch on staff. So far, none of their infusions had made me sick. Other blood stores got too much food in the mix, and I sometimes found myself puking for hours.
Within the five minutes it took to return to my parking spot outside my shuttered apartment window, I'd finished my drink. It was still too early to check on Boz after his first day at work. I didn't want to impose before he could decompress. He seemed the type to need a glass of wine and a half-hour of mindless television before a vampire rocked his world.
I hopped across the rooftops to Irena's again. I'd promised to visit, and I didn't want to keep her waiting. If everything went well with Boz, I was about to have a very late night.
Empty tables greeted me once I made my way downstairs. The one perk of the winter solstice and the days preceding was how much time I gained in the afternoon. Irena's would be quiet for another hour, the perfect length of time for a chat.
"Vampire," she said when she saw me. She'd worn a long button-down dress, green with white trim. It was a sharp contrast to her silver hair, pulled into a severe top knot. She wasn't much over five feet, but she carried herself like the former ballet dancer she was, head high, somehow both looking down her nose and up at me at the same time.
"I have a name," I reminded her.
"Yes, but you insist on using a pretend name like a child, so I call you by your kind instead."
I snorted. "You used to call me Santa like everyone else."
"And last Christmas, you disappeared. Didn't call, didn't write."
I took both of her gnarled hands in mine and brought them to my lips, kissing her knuckles. "I'm sorry I worried you. I promise, I'll do better from now on."
"Ha," she scoffed, but there was a tinge of pink along her high cheekbones. She tugged her hands from mine, and I let her go, following her to the same table where she'd seated me and Boz last week.
"Sit. Tell me why you stopped coming, on Christmas of all days."
"I didn't think you'd be open," I said. "And then it seemed too hard to come back."
The words were easy enough to say, but they ripped a gaping wound in my chest as easily as silver.
"I left the roof door open for you, you know. Bought a case of synthetic blood to tide you over if the place you like wasn't open. Our door, my door, is always open to you."
If my eyes could have watered from the strain of staring at her for over a minute, they would have. "You stayed open for me?"
"Lot of good it did me. Fifty weeks, you don't come back."
"You counted?"
"I know how many weeks are in a year." She rolled her eyes at me, and I laughed. "Give or take one or two." She crossed her arms on the tabletop and leaned over them. "I called that place you work after a month. They said you still worked there, were working the night I called. I asked if your schedule had changed, and they said it had not."
She shook her head, and I felt like the worst friend on the planet when she sighed.
"I thought about leaving a message, but I talked myself out of it. 'He'll come back,' I said. 'He always comes back. For twenty years, he's come here to talk me through my depression.' But you never came."
"You weren't depressed," I said. "You were grieving."
"I was depressed enough to recognize a kindred spirit, even an undead one." Her gaze pierced my very soul through the hole she'd ripped in my heart. "It is good to see you still alive. That boy is good for you. Tell me about him."
The tables had turned. I'd been the one to ask Irena about her day and to point out the little pinpoints of light she'd missed while she wallowed in her grief. Now, she asked me about the source of light in my life, and I clung to the opportunity to share like a life raft. The words poured out of me. I'd only known Boz for three weeks, and already, I could fill an hour talking about him to my old friend.
I'd just gotten through telling her about the disastrous ending to our first date when a server interrupted us.
"Reservation for twenty in a half-hour."
Irena nodded in acknowledgement, but her gaze never left mine.
"I'll let you take care of that," I said.
"Thank you," she whispered, "for coming back. I thought I had said or done something to push you away."
"I had nothing to offer you," I said. "You'd finally moved on." I nodded to the head chef, who entered through the swinging door into the dining room, presumably to search for his absent wife.
She glanced over her shoulder at him and waved him over. "Fyodor, look who has joined us."
The big man took my hand before I'd fully risen from the table, a speedy feat for a human. He was that grateful, gripping my hand in both of his, telling me in Russian how happy they both were to see me again.
"She loves you, you know," he said. "Like a mother."
She was far too young to be my mother. She reminded me more of my little sister. I'd never consciously noticed their resemblance before, but I'd been drawn to Irena from the start.
I'd left my sister behind in America when my sire whisked me away to Europe. When I'd returned, she was long gone, dead of some disease or another.
I was still alive, a vampire who liberated himself from his sire bond and lived to tell about it, all thanks to a mix-up in Rome. Another vampire had died for my crime, freeing me to return to Boston.
Alone. I'd been alone a long time, but then I'd met my friends. Irena and Fyodor. Key and Greed.
Boz.
I gave Fyodor's hand a gentle squeeze and let him go. Then, I turned to Irena, kissing both her cheeks. "I'll see you next week. "
"You'd better," she said. "It's the eve of Christmas Eve."
Time to prove I could be a better person, vampire, whatever.
The pizza was late. That was my excuse for not knocking down Boz's door the minute I returned and kissing him senseless.
I wanted to woo him with the best pie in Boston, first. They called it Chicago deep dish, but it smelled best from a little hole in the wall just down the street. Better than anything I'd scented in Italy, and miles above any of the rat food they served in the Big rotten Apple. I'd never been to the Windy City, but I assumed it was better than theirs, too.
Finally, the delivery guy showed up with the two pizzas and large order of breadsticks I'd ordered. He almost fell on the slippery sidewalk leading up to the building. I didn't know when it had started snowing, but it wasn't his fault he'd been a little late. Before I helped him back to his car, I tipped him an extra twenty for the weather and put sand down for traction.
I was racking up good deeds all over the place tonight. Surely, that meant I was about to score big with Boz. He seemed like the type to be impressed with charitable actions .
When I knocked, he answered the door right away. He didn't look or smell pleased. I'd never seen him so scared, not even when those vampires had jumped us on the street.
"Is everything all right?" I asked.
"No."
At least he didn't sugarcoat it, or worse, lie to me.
"The vampire from last week, the one who bled all over you?" He asked it like a question, as though I slit another vampire's carotid with my silver dagger so often, I might have forgotten.
"Yeah?"
"He works at Imperial Accounting. He's in our financial planning division, and my boss just put me in charge of their internal audit."
"That's good news, then," I said. The random attack had puzzled me. Boz was attractive, but there were easier human targets, those without vampire companions, on the street that night. This gave the attackers a motive.
"How the fuck is that good news?" Boz asked. I was surprised I saw the bigger picture before he did with his brilliant mind.
This wasn't a conversation for the middle of the hallway. Granted, some of my tenants could hear us regardless, but I liked the appearance of privacy. I pushed my way inside and shut the door while he continued to stare at me in disbelief. I slid the pizza boxes onto his kitchen counter and turned to face him, placing both hands on his shoulders.
"They can't hurt you now that you're coworkers. If they did, the empress would be back in Boston so fast?—"
"He didn't hurt me at all, remember? His fucking friend dropped me."
I released his shoulders. My brain worked better when I had one hand on my hip. With the other, I tapped my bottom lip with my index finger, recalling memories of past job-related intrigue between vampires and humans. "I still think it's fine. You'll make it look like he's embezzling from the empress, she'll kill him, and he'll never hurt you again. Easy peasy."
"That only works if he is embezzling from the empress!" Boz whisper-shouted, like every vampire in the building couldn't hear him, or maybe he thought his employers had bugged the apartment.
"If you're going to live long enough for Colette to turn you, I need you to think like a vampire."
He laughed. "She said the same thing this afternoon during our debrief."
Colette would protect Boz from other vampires, but too many humans and shifters worked at Imperial Accounting, enough to make me suspicious. What if one secretly supported the financial advisor who had attacked us, Boz, in the street?
I'd kept myself so far removed from the empress, I didn't know where to begin to help Boz with his problem. "Have you told Colette what happened?" I asked.
"No! Why would I?"
"It could be a coincidence," I said, mulling it over. "Or it could be they wanted you dead before you started your job. It would have delayed the investigation at least two more months, since you were the only one who passed Colette's test. It's too close to the holidays to start the interview process again. Colette would have needed to recruit a new candidate pool next year."
Boz swallowed hard and nodded. "You have a point." He paled. "This past weekend, I went to my parents' place. I went shopping with my mom! Were they in any danger?"
I didn't want to scare him with the truth. "Ask Colette to give you a security detail, if she hasn't already done so."
"They do that?" Boz frowned. "I will. But you didn't come over to talk about my problems." He pointed at the pizza. "And you brought food, though my stomach is still in knots. Will it be good for breakfast?"
I shrugged. "No idea."
"That's right. You can't eat it." Boz's cheeks tinged pink as he walked past me to the wall of cupboards to grab himself a plate. "I'll serve myself a piece and then we can find something to watch. Go have a seat." He shooed me to the living room.
Instead of sitting in the middle of the couch, I picked the corner without an end table, since I didn't need it. Boz still had the coffee table, if he wanted to live dangerously and sit beside me.
He surprised me by setting his plate in the middle of the low table and sitting close enough for me to feel his body heat through his lounge pants and sweater.
The pizza looked as good as it smelled. The meat and tomato sauce pooled around the bottom crust like a crime scene. It was the kind of pizza that required a fork. After a few bites, Boz gave up the formality of sitting on the couch and fell to his knees on the floor to devour it.
I imagined him sucking my cock with the same fervor. I had to move, lest I bite his neck while he ate. Until he finished, I paced behind the couch.
"I'm sorry," he said, wiping his face with a paper napkin. "I thought I wasn't hungry, but I also stress eat, and it's so good …"
"No need to apologize," I said.
"Does it make you uncomfortable, watching me eat?"
"It made me too comfortable," I said. "I've already imagined several other uses for your mouth tonight."
"Oh." He blinked and sat up. "Oh!" He scrambled back onto the couch, and his fork clattered to rest on his empty plate. "I'm such a pig! I'm so sorry!"
"You made me jealous of a piece of pizza," I corrected him. "No one's done that before. "
I returned to my spot on the couch, turning toward him and draping my legs over his. "What did you want to watch on television?"
"You?" He drew his hand up and hesitated before cupping my cheek. "I want to watch you."
I couldn't argue with that, especially when his marinara-coated lips pressed against mine.