Apocalypse Happens (3 page)

“Let me touch those breasts. They’ve been in my mind for a decade.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “I’m twenty-five.”

“What do you think a fifteen-year-old boy has in his head? You’ve had those breasts since you were twelve, even though you did your best to hide them.”

I’d been mortified to develop early. I’d worn loose clothes and hunched my shoulders. Not only because of my mortification, but also because I knew all too well that a girl in the foster-care system needed to slide through life unnoticed.

But I didn’t want to think about the past now. Maybe never again. I was strong. Invincible. How did that song go?

“I am woman,” I murmured.

“Not really,” Jimmy said.

I gave his thigh a final lick—the wound had already healed—then straddled him, allowing his erection to slide exactly where I needed it to. “Tell me more of what you’ll do if I release you.”

His lips curved, though the smile never reached his eyes. “Grab those hips, pull you down, push myself up so deep you’ll remember me for days.”

“Mmm, and then?”

“Sink my fangs into your breast, drink from you as you come. The usual.”

“Yesss.” I took him in, rode him beneath the moon; he lasted a long, long time.

The chains rattled. “Let me go.”

I was so close to an orgasm, I listened, sliding my palms down his legs, up his arms, snapping his restraints into pieces. Then I waited, breathless, for him to touch me. And he did.

His hands at my hips, he pulled me close; then he arched and filled me up. He rose from the sand, his lips took my breast as promised, and he suckled, the rasp of his teeth almost, but not quite, enough to send me over.

He put his hands around my throat, squeezed just a little. They were rough. I liked how they made me feel. Breathless, on the edge of life and death, blood in the air, on the ground, on me. It didn’t get much better than this.

“Mmm.” I let my head fall back, my eyes slide closed. “Harder.”

He wouldn’t kill me. I wasn’t sure anyone could.

“No problem,” Jimmy muttered, and in his voice I heard something disturbing.

My eyes snapped open just as the catch of my jeweled collar snapped closed. I let out one furious shriek at the moon, and then I was me again.

As always, once the vampire was back in the box, I cringed at what I’d said and done and been. My breath caught, a sound very like a sob, except I didn’t cry, had learned long ago that crying did no one any good.

Jimmy and I were still wrapped together; he was still deep inside me. He was hard; I was wet. Despite the change in my mind and my heart, my body still trembled on the edge of orgasm, and so did his.

His hands slid from the collar to my shoulders, clenching for an instant. I thought he meant to push me away. I didn’t blame him. What I’d done to him, what I’d forced him to do to me . . .

I tensed, prepared to move before he made me. I tried to see his eyes, but he pulled me close, buried his face against my breasts.

“Jimmy—”

“Don’t talk.” He traced his hands from my shoulders to my hips and cupped them. “Just . . . don’t.”

I swallowed, tasting things I didn’t want to think about. But an instant later I forgot everything else as his body moved against mine.

We’d always had this. No matter how much time
passed, when we came together we couldn’t help but touch each other, and when we touched . . . sex happened.

I rocked against him, his hands showed me the rhythm, his breath against my skin, my cheek against his hair; only a few slick movements and I came. As I clenched around him, he did too, shuddering in my arms as the silence twirled around us like mist.

When it was over, I lifted my head; he lifted his. We disentangled ourselves. Our eyes did not meet. Would it be like this between us forever from now on?

Our clothes were nearby—a little torn, a lot bloody. We’d left the car on the road maybe a quarter of a mile east. In the trunk we kept clean jeans and shirts, a jug of water, some towels.

We’d done this before; we knew what would happen. If we lived, we’d look like the lone survivors of a mass murder. We’d need to clean up before we could find a hotel and then . . . clean up some more.

Jimmy snatched our things, and I followed him to the car. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Are you going to be like this forever?” I asked.

Jimmy dug the key out of his pants, hit the button for the trunk, tossed everything in. “Forever? Doubtful.”

“A week, a month, a year?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly.

“Nice job, by the way.”

He frowned, but he didn’t glance up. “Glad you enjoyed it.”

“I
meant
pretending to be into it, then snapping the collar on.”

“Someone had to.”

And that someone was usually him.

In the past we’d always had love, shared memories,
Jimmy and me against the world. Now, I wasn’t so sure what we had and it bothered me.

“You hurt me too,” I murmured.

A few months ago, Jimmy had been possessed by his demon of a vampire father. Jimmy had kept me as a sex slave, drunk from me until I nearly died, until I wanted to.

“You think I don’t remember?” Jimmy’s fingers clenched on the open trunk of the car. “You think I don’t hate myself still? But you of all people should know what it’s like to be forced to do things you don’t want to. To have your body betray you while your mind screams, ‘No.’ ”

I did know. I also knew I’d had no choice.

I took a step forward, and he took a step back. “Let it be,” he said. “You got over it; I will too.”

I wasn’t sure I’d gotten over it. But I’d gotten past it. I understood that when he’d done those things, Jimmy hadn’t been Jimmy. Unfortunately, when I’d seduced him I’d been more me than I was now.

We washed up as best we could with the water and the towels. Basically cleaning our faces, necks, hands and arms, leaving the rest for later.

Jimmy tossed me some clothes. I put them on without looking at them, but Jimmy’s made me smile. He wore one of his T-shirts.

Jimmy’s “cover” for his globe-trotting demon killing was portrait photographer to the stars. Someday—if we weren’t all dead—he’d be able to collect his greatest hits into a few coffee-table books. He was a genius with a camera. Almost as good as he was with a silver knife.

His pictures had graced magazine covers, book covers, posters, CD cases, once even Times Square. Up-and-coming
rock bands, country western wannabes, fresh-faced tween queens and steroid-puffed future action stars knew that if Sanducci took their photograph, they had arrived.

Jimmy liked T-shirts. He wore them with jeans, dress pants, sports coats, tuxedos and sometimes nothing at all. The true sign of becoming the “it” guy or girl or the band of the century was when Sanducci was photographed in your shirt.

Dozens arrived at his postbox every month. He donated them all to charity. He only wore the shirts of those he’d actually photographed. But that never stopped anyone from sending the garments.

Tonight his shirt read:
NY Yankees
. I hated the Yankees. The reason I smiled? Jimmy knew it. Needling me about the Yankees was another of Jimmy’s favorite things.

I was a Brewers fan. Milwaukee was my hometown. Had been since Ruthie brought me there at twelve. It was the only place I’d ever been happy, and right now I missed home like a piece of my heart.

“When did you do a shoot with the Yankees?” I asked.

Jimmy cast me a surprised glance, then glanced down with a puzzled frown. The expression made my heart hurt worse. He hadn’t known what shirt he’d put on. He hadn’t been needling me at all.

“When they won the division.” Jimmy shrugged. “Last year?”

“Or the year before or two before that. It ain’t hard to win if you buy every damn prospect.”

“I’m not gonna argue baseball with you tonight.” He sounded so tired.

I turned away, watched the remaining mounds of
varcolac ash shiver and shift, then drift off into the night. “I shouldn’t have killed them all. I should have kept one alive to question about the key.”

“You think you’ve got any restraint when you’re like that?”

I didn’t, no, but—

“Some do.” I turned back. “Your . . . father for instance.”

Jimmy’s mouth thinned. He was understandably touchy on the subject of dear old dad—a strega (definition: medieval vampire witch). He’d done things to Jimmy that rivaled what had been done to him on the streets, and that was saying quite a bit.

I was so glad I’d put a stake through the miserable bastard’s black heart.

“The strega had centuries to work on his control,” Jimmy said. “And he never confined his nature like we have. When you do that and then you let it out, bad things happen.”

I returned to watching the varcolac ash swirl, the moon shimmering through each particle as if the heavens were spilling silver-tinged snow. Pretty if you didn’t know what those flakes had once been.

“Or good,” I said. “Depending on your point of view.”

Jimmy remained silent. I knew his point of view. Going vamp was never good. On the one hand, I agreed. On the other, fighting extreme evil called for extreme measures. I’d pledged myself to saving the world. I wasn’t going to go about it half-assed.

“By restricting our vampire nature, we only make it stronger, more volatile, if possible more violent,” he continued. “The monster can’t wait to get out and kill.”

I wanted to disagree, except I knew he was right. Sometimes when I was sleeping and I awoke into that
twilight time between states, I heard my demon screaming. A few times when I was alone and wide awake, I heard a murmur in my head enticing me to do terrible things. When the collar came off, I did them.

“We need to find a way to release your demon more than once a month,” I said.

“Not.” He slammed the trunk and headed for the driver’s seat.

I stood there for a few seconds, then scrambled around to my side and jumped in just as he hit the gas.

“You know that we do.” Jimmy didn’t answer. “Ruthie said.”

“ ‘Ruthie said,’ ” he mocked. “I don’t give a flying fuck.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that.”

Ruthie wasn’t above smacking someone in the mouth for “smart talk,” “back talk,” “blasphemy” or pretty much anything she didn’t like. Her being dead hadn’t stopped the back of her hand from connecting with my face. It had hurt even if it had been in a vision. However, since Jimmy wasn’t able to channel the dead, he was probably safe.

“You need to convince Summer to reverse the spell,” I said.

Jimmy’s vampire had been pushed beneath the moon. In other words, he became a monster only when the moon was full. The other twenty-odd days, he was just Jimmy. Dangerous as hell, but not damn near unstoppable. Like me.

“She won’t.” His hands clenched on the steering wheel. “I don’t think she can.”

Summer Bartholomew was a fairy. Think life-sized Tinkerbell without the wings; add cowboy boots, a white hat and slutty clothes with a lot of fringe.

Summer and I hadn’t bonded well, mainly because
she was head-over-heels, do-anything-and-everything in love with Jimmy. It hadn’t helped that when he’d left me the first time, he’d gone to her.

She was also the one responsible for the dog collar around my neck. Not that I didn’t need it, but couldn’t she have bespelled a nice silver chain, a diamond ear stud? Even a leather bracelet would have been better than what I had. But Summer had seen a way to infuriate me, and she’d taken it.

That I’d have done the exact same thing were I capable of performing magic didn’t lessen my irritation with her one bit. To make matters worse, Summer had performed a sex spell to confine Jimmy’s demon.

I know. I shouldn’t throw stones—sexual empath and all that—but the fairy annoyed me. Probably because several times when I’d touched her, or touched Jimmy, I’d seen them. Made me want to scrub out my brain with a gallon of scalding water and a whole lot of bleach.

“What’s so hard about it?” I asked. “Can’t she just . . . do you backward?”

“Apparently not,” Jimmy said.

“She’s refusing to reverse the spell because she knows that you don’t want her to.”

“I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. I think we need a bigger fairy.”

I’d been taking a sip from a tepid bottle of water I’d left in the car earlier. That sip sprayed all over the windshield. “What?”

His lips twitched. “A more powerful fairy.”

“There are grades of fairyness?”

“So Summer says.”

“Repeat
that
five times fast,” I muttered. “Where do we find a grade-A, top-of-the-line, more-powerful-than-Summer fairy?”

“You’re gonna have to ask her.”

“You didn’t?”

“I don’t
want
to go back to the way that I was.”

“You said you would.”

“I didn’t say I’d help.”

“Fine,” I snapped. I hated asking Summer for anything, but I was the leader of this merry band of demon killers, and Summer knew it. She’d tell me.

Or I’d make her. I kind of hoped she didn’t want to tell me.

“I really thought the Nephilim had the key,” I murmured. How else had they released the Grigori?

“It’s probably a good thing if they don’t.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say,
No shit
, but I refrained.

“Do you know anything about the
Book of Samyaza
?” I asked.

Jimmy cast me a quick glance, his dark eyes unreadable in the eerie glow from the dash. We were headed toward LA; the press of the lights against the night made the sky luminescent and really kind of creepy.

“That’s a myth.”

“So are we.”

Every legendary tale of monsters from the dawn of time was true. They were Nephilim or breeds, but they were very, very real.

Remember Goliath—that giant of antiquity? Nephilim.

Vampires. Werewolves. Evil, dark scary things. Nephilim. Or, in some cases, breeds.

Witch hunts? They probably had the right idea but the wrong execution. Pardon the pun. You can’t kill witches just by drowning them. Most of them won’t even burn.

“Samyaza was the leader of the earthly angels,” I said.