Chapter 1 Jason
Jason
Whine, whine, whine. Honestly, if one more word came out of Francois fucking Ricard’s mouth, I’d grab it from the air and stuff it back down his throat myself. His French accent grated over my nerves, and the French words he peppered through his speech were more than my ears could handle.
And my eyes! Oh, my eyes. I’d stopped looking at the guy because no eye bleach in the world would help me unsee his flouncy shirts with too many cuff ruffles, his knee-length boots, with the silver buckles at the sides, and his strange, strange pants that looked like someone had last worn them in the Regency era.
Next time Nic picked me as babysitter, I was saying no. Hell to the no. Fucking hell to the no. Or maybe not. Nic was my king and sire, after all. There were things I probably couldn’t say to either of those people, and particularly not to the guy who was both.
I’d grown up with Nic after my parents sold me to his family as a servant and companion for him. Our relationship was no longer like that, though. We’d become friends over the years. More like brothers, really. And he’d turned me so we could always stay that way.
Except…I glanced at Francois and sighed.
No, now Nic had sent me to be servant and companion to someone else.
I guess if I waited long enough, history really did repeat itself.
I couldn’t even call myself a glorified bodyguard in this situation because that was usually a role for Kyle. Or Kyle certainly thought so, anyway.
“Jason!” Francois managed to be both imperious and whiny at the same time. “Are you no longer listening?”
I gritted my teeth. Hell, I’d been trying not to listen since the day he first came to see me at Nightfall, but I swear I even heard his voice whispering to me in my sleep.
And I had so much more on my mind than just Francois, yet he was like the world’s most annoying gnat buzzing around, dive-bombing my face for attention, and I couldn’t seem to slap him away.
I’d found my mate. My actual mate. Only she lived on pack lands, and she was Conri’s human sister. Those were two huge problems. Bigger ones than Francois and his silly whims. And I wanted to spend my time thinking about her… Figuring out how to be with her. I had to see her again.
But how could I orchestrate a meeting?
I shook my head as I pondered the question. It wasn’t really important how. Now that I’d found her, I had to have her. There wasn’t another option.
She was a tug in my chest. Currently, she was the missing piece of my heart.
“This will not do, comprends?” Francois almost stamped one of his booted feet, drawing my attention back to him, as he looked up at the apartment building in front of us.
I sighed. Yes, I understood just fine. Francois was unhappy. “When are you ever happy, Francois?” I rolled my eyes, not bothering to hide my impatience from him.
Then I looked up at the squat apartment building in front of us.
The white stucco was peeling and dirty, and the balconies hosted a myriad of multi-colored loads of laundry and broken garden furniture.
Yeah, I wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events either, but I wasn’t complaining about it out loud for our new neighbors to hear.
The fewer ripples we made here, the better.
We needed to be literal shadows. Ghosts. The two guys occupying apartment 206 that no one noticed or knew about. Our business needed to be our own with no unnecessary distractions or interference. Nic would have vampire business conducted no other way.
That, and too many people here would recognize Francois’s… I wanted to say face but they’d probably recognize his distinctive wardrobe first. Captain Jack Sparrow, eat your heart out.
We were here to track down information about the threat to Nic’s reign. Not draw attention to ourselves, so nice and normal was the order for the day. All the days.
“Jason!” Francois barked my name out again, his accent cutting off the n entirely.
I shook my head. That was going to piss me right off, I could already tell.
“What?” I growled the word. “Stop shouting your displeasure in the street, Francois. Do you want the whole of New Orleans to know you’ve returned before we even get moved in?”
A small smile tugged at his lips, like that idea appealed to him.
“Really?” I moved closer to him. “Then let me explain things to you. We are on the down low. The reason we’re in an apartment that looks like this one—” I gestured to the building “—is because we are hiding. So, no, you do not want to be seen by anyone or noticed by the neighbors. Comprends?” I gave the last word a heavy dose of sarcasm.
Part of me didn’t care whether he understood or not. He just had to do as I told him.
Damn, it was going to be hard being in charge of a disgraced vampire prince, especially one who still seemed to expect all the usual trappings of royalty.
And while I was on the subject, I also missed my trappings of royalty.
Sebastian’s house had been the bomb, but did Francois hear me complaining?
Well, I’d be complaining with my foot against his ass if he carried on.
“It’s an ‘ovel.” Francois at least lowered his voice while he proclaimed our new home a hovel, but I flinched anyway.
“I’ve seen worse.” I kept my words terse as I opened the back door to the truck with our few pieces of furniture.
And I had seen worse—Kyle had recently stayed in a really shitty apartment while he did some work for Nic, but maybe that was just because Temple didn’t like Kyle a whole lot, so he hadn’t gone out of his way to arrange something that didn’t look flea infested and capable of growing mushrooms right out of the carpet.
I stood on the tailgate of the truck and surveyed our meager items of furniture, all picked up from a local thrift store.
“Come and grab this end table?” I looked at Francois expectantly.
In return, he looked at me, his eyes dead. Everything about his stance said, Oh, really? like the world’s most petulant teenager.
I huffed, obviously playing my part of world’s most exasperated father. “Just get over here and help me unload. The sooner we’re inside the apartment, the better.”
Locking the door and kicking my feet up sounded perfect—even better if the locked door involved Francois being on the other side of it, but that wasn’t going to happen for a while. I needed to know where he was at all times while he was still essentially in rehab for his dead man’s blood addiction.
I shook my head. Nic was taking a real chance by letting Francois out into society again—and particularly into New Orleans society, the city Francois and his father had once ruled over.
“Once we’re all unloaded, you can start filling me in about what you know about the Ancients.” That was the real reason Francois was here with me at all.
The Ancients were back, allegedly to pass their judgment on Nic, but we didn’t know enough about them to trust their motivation.
Francois allegedly knew more, and he was supposed to impart all of this information to me.
I lived in New Orleans to oversee our alignment with the local pack of wolf shifters…
ergo I was now a babysitter to a vampire as well as a group of dogs.
Still… the Ancients. They were the stuff of myth and legend.
Their reputation definitely preceded them a little.
Knowledge of them was all but lost to the oldest of books, but some said they were our oldest ancestors.
The ones who started it all. That idea alone suggested their power would be immense.
We desperately needed to find out what we were up against, what we could be fighting.
An uncharacteristic shudder stole through me before I squinted up at the sun. Did life get any better than this? Shit, I had to hope so or this was going to be a long fucking immortality.
“Ahh, the Ancients.” Francois sounded thoughtful as he tilted his head to look at me. Then he waved his hand. “Pas aujourd’hui.”
I set my end of the table down with a thump.
“Not today? What do you mean, not today? We need to get started on this information exchange shit.” The sooner we started, the sooner we could end this shitshow of a living arrangement.
And it was far less of an actual exchange than Francois just telling me everything he knew.
Francois merely smiled. The kind of smile I wanted to help remove from his face. Then he shook his head, the movement condescending and giving me a glimpse of the prince who used to run this city while his father idled in one of his frequent bouts of stasis.
“I think, Jason…” Again, he labored over my name. “I think we have many things to discuss.”
I picked up the table again and walked backward toward the entrance to the apartment. “Like what exactly?” I really didn’t have time for this level of…Well, whatever Francois was trying to achieve with his half-assed furniture moving and refusal to discuss the Ancients.
We could have moved all the furniture easily if we weren’t pretending to be two regular guys…although Francois helped with that aspect of being undercover by not wanting to do anything at all.
“Like a certain little she-wolf?” Francois’ eyes shone suddenly, mischief evident in them, and every muscle in me tensed.
I remained silent, forcing myself to relax, but my words emerged from behind gritted teeth despite myself. “Ciara isn’t a wolf.” Just her name on my lips warmed my insides.
Francois shrugged, the movement a huge lift of his shoulders. “Semantics, mon ami.”
“We’re not friends,” I retorted, although it was most juvenile reply I could have made.
He ignored me, though, more intent on Ciara as a subject. “Do vampires often lie down with wolves?”
I sighed noisily. “She’s human.”
“Still,” he pursued. “She has grown up among the wolves. Her brother is alpha. She’s merely a…” He paused and looked thoughtful again. “Quirk of genetics.”