Blood Kiss (5 page)

The girl was a figurative ghost . . . on her way to possibly becoming a literal one.

“Shall we?” Butch drawled as he offered her his arm.

Marissa shook herself back into focus and smiled at her mate. “Yes, please.”

Taking hold of him, she walked by his side out into the foyer and entered the formal dining room. After the privacy they'd just had, all the chatter, laughter and bustling was a different social time zone, and she found herself feeling a little overwhelmed. Talk about filled to capacity. Even though the muraled ceiling was high as a kite, and the floor space bigger than a bowling alley, with the forty-foot-long table down the center crammed with the Brothers, their
shellans
, and the other fighters and members of the household, there was a joyful congestion ot it all.

Two seats were empty on the far side, and they went around to them, Butch settling her in her chair.

As he sat down next to her, he leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. “Eat fast.”

“You'd better believe it,” she said—even though she wasn't hungry.

And, she was sad to admit, she wasn't necessarily in a big hurry to get back to the Pit, either. The truth was, she'd seduced him because she'd known it was the only way to get her mate to move on from worrying about her.

When a plate of filet mignon was set in front of her by a
doggen
, Marissa moved things around, cutting up meat that she didn't try, messing the mashed potatoes, scattering bright green peas. And then she took her glass of cabernet sauvignon and sat back, watching the people, listening to the stories.

“. . . gonna want me to do?”

Focusing in on her mate as he spoke, she watched as he leaned around John Matthew to put the question to Xhex.

The female fighter laughed. “You should fear me.”

“Anyone who doesn't is an asshat.”

“You say the sweetest things. And I'm in no hurry to call my chit in. It's a good thing to have a male like you in my debt.”

For no particular reason, Marissa took note of how powerful Xhex's body was, her shoulders and torso cut with muscle that was set off by the skintight Under Armour shirt she wore tucked into her black leathers. Between her dark hair that was cut short and her gunmetal gray eyes, she was definitely someone to take seriously.

Meanwhile, Marissa was rocking her office-appropriate slacks and English school marm blouse routine.

As Butch offered his palm for a high five, Xhex laid one on him and the clap was loud in the room even with all the background noise.

“That's what I'm talkin' about,” Butch said as he sat back in his chair. “Unbelievable.”

“What is?” Marissa asked.

“Xhex was . . . well, actually, first, I was in an alley. . . . Ah, lemme back up. . . .” He swiped his hand through the air. “Actually, it's too much to explain. Bottom line, I was cornered with my pants down with two
lessers
, and Xhex had J.M.'s phone on her when I texted for backup. She came in a flash and—” Butch stopped short and shook his head. “Anyway.”

Marissa waited for him to go on. “Anyway . . . ? What happened?”

Butch cleared his throat and took a sip from the Lagavulin in his glass. “It's not important. It's just, you know, stuff.”

“You were in trouble, weren't you.”

He drew again from his rim. “It all worked out.”

“Thanks to Xhex.”

“You haven't eaten anything.”

She glanced down at her plate. “Oh, yeah. No, I had a meal before I left Safe Place.”

Both of them fell silent.

As the ribbing surged among the Brothers, Marissa felt herself receding, stepping behind an invisible screen that dimmed the sounds and the senses.

“You ready to go?” Butch asked a little later as people started to get up from the table.

“Sure. Yes. Thank you.”

On the way to the archway, Butch stopped to talk to V, the pair of them putting their heads together and murmuring. Meanwhile, Xhex walked off from the table with her mate, John's hand traveling down onto the tight ass in those pants, squeezing, pulling her toward him. He had eyes only for his mate, his warrior's body clearly needing to blow off steam.

The response?

Xhex let out a growl, the female's eyes locking on John Matthew's as she bared her fangs—like a lioness setting the stage for what was going to be a marathon sex session.

Clearly, she had an edge she intended to file off with her
hellren
as well.

“We're set for tomorrow, then, true?” V said as he offered his palm to Butch.

“It's a go.” Butch clapped hands with the Brother, their two heads getting close once more, their voices dropping so she heard only parts of the conversation: “Yeah. That's right. Uh-huh. See you back at the Pit?”

“You got it.”

Butch gave Vishous's enormous shoulder a squeeze before turning to Marissa. “You good?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said.

When Marissa went to walk along with him, she realized she still had her wineglass in her hand. “Let me put this back, hold on.”

Going against the tide, she smiled at Autumn and Tohr, nodded to Payne and Manny—waved across the way at Bella and Nalla. Leaning over her still-full but completely disorganized plate, she put the glass back and wished Fritz and the staff would let anyone help them clear the table.

When she turned back around, she paused.

Butch was standing in the archway, legs braced in his leathers, brows down tight. None of that was unusual. But he'd taken the enormous gold cross he always wore out from under his shirt and was playing with it, winding the heavy weight in and out of his fingertips.

An odd sense of foreboding came over her.

“Marissa?” a female voice said.

Jumping to attention, she smiled at Bella. “Hey. I was watching you two across the table. Are you a cutie?” She gave Nalla's cheek a little stroke. “I think you are, yes, I do.”

“She's too much to carry now.” Bella bent down and put the young on her now-steady legs. “And I'm investing in running shoes.”

“For you or her?”

Nalla took off at a dead run, but across the way, her father was on her, striding tight on those little heels. Even though he looked like a looming monster with his scarred face, skull-trimmed hair and slave tattoos, Nalla giggled in delight, glancing back and smiling up at her daddy as she ran, ran, ran around the table and dodged in and out of the
doggen
who were clearing.

“I need Nikes for the both of us.” Bella smiled. “Listen, I wanted to ask you. I heard a rumor you're going to be chairing the Twelfth Month Festival Ball—”

“What?”

Bella frowned. “Wait, I thought . . . did I get this wrong?”

“No, it's okay.” Great. “What were you going to say?”

“I just wanted to tell you that I'd like to help in any way I can. I was surprised to hear that you took it on, but
I get why you would. We need . . . I don't know, I think it's time for the race to reestablish the traditions that worked. There was a lot that didn't, but the festivals are important—”

An unhappy wail lit off in the now-empty room as Nalla lurched and was caught by her father just in time.

“Crap, I gotta go,” Bella said. “She's having growing pains. It's been a long couple of days, I'll tell you. Just remember I'm here for you, okay?”

Bella hightailed off for her family, reaching out for Nalla, who in turn put out one arm for her
mahmen
. The other stayed with Dad . . . so that the three of them were united.

Yes, Marissa, thought. Growing pains were a hard time, at least from what she had heard. For some reason, vampire young struggled with spurts of intense growth, as opposed to the long, slow, steady route to adult height that humans enjoyed.

Just one more fun part to the species.

Like their festivals.

Marissa rubbed her temples as she went back over to Butch. “God, my head is pounding.”

“Is it?” he said. “Let's get you into bed.”

“Good idea. I think I need some sleep.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you look tired.”

“I am.”

Annnnnnd that was pretty much the end of her night: Ten minutes later she was in bed, eyes closing, images of the last few hours flashing like strobe lights through her head.

While Butch headed back out to sit in the Pit's living room.

Alone.

T
he following evening, Paradise took the bus to school.

So to speak.

There were actually two “buses,” each holding about thirty people, and any similarities between the ubiquitous yellow mini-human transporters ended with the shared name. The vehicles the Brotherhood used to pick up the training center candidates were like something out of
White House Down
, all black inside and out, with thick, darkened windows that had to be bulletproof, tires like snowplows, and grilles that reminded her of a T. rex.

Like everyone else, she had dematerialized to a tract of vacant land out to the west of Caldwell's suburbs. Her father had wanted to go with her, but it had seemed important to start as she meant to go on. This was her independent decision; she needed to do what everyone else did—and she was pretty certain no one else would bring a chaperone.

Especially not a chaperone who happened to be the King's First Adviser.

To see nearly sixty people she didn't recognize had been a surprise. Then again, the application had made it clear that anyone was allowed to join the program, so there were a lot of civilians. Actually, it looked as if it was all civilians and the male/female ratio was, like, ten to one.

But at least her sex was allowed.

Refocusing, Paradise shifted in her seat and made sure her elbow didn't disturb the male who was sitting next to her. Other than exchanging names—his was Axe—they hadn't said anything, and his brooding silence fit his image completely: The male had killer written all over him, with his black spiked hair, those black piercings on one side of his face, and that tattoo of something evil running vertically up half of his neck.

If her father knew she was thisclose to a male like that? They'd have to put Abalone on life support.

And this was exactly why she'd wanted to do the program. It was time to break out of the restrictions of her station—and cut the hothouse flower crap. If working around the King had taught her anything, it was that no matter what class you were in, tragedy didn't discriminate, justice could always be served, and nobody got out of this life alive.

“So, you're really going to take it this far.”

Paradise looked into the black glass of the window beside her. Reflected in the mirror-like surface, Princeps Peyton, first blooded son of Peythone, was just as she remembered: classically handsome, with those intense blue eyes and his thick blond hair brushed straight back from his forehead. He was wearing his signature rimless, sapphire-tinted sunglasses to hide the fact that he was probably high, and his right-off-the-yacht clothes were tailor-made for his muscled body. With an aristocratic voice that had a rasp, and a brain that was somehow able to counter-act all that THC, he was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in the
glymera
, part Great Gatsby, part Jack Sparrow.

As she breathed in, she could smell his cologne and a hint of smoke.

“How are you, Peyton,” she muttered.

“You'd know if you answered your damn phone.”

Paradise rolled her eyes. Even though the pair of them had only ever been friends, the bastard was wholly
irresistible to females. And one of his problems, among many, was the fact that he knew it.

“Hello?” he demanded.

Paradise turned and faced him. “I don't have a lot to say to you. Which, considering you reduced me to nothing but a pair of ovaries for breeding, shouldn't be a big surprise. I don't have much to offer other than that, right?”

“Will you excuse us?” he said to the male sitting next to her.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.” Axe, the tough guy, slipped out as if he were getting away from a stink bomb. Or a squeaky female dressed in pink ribbons and bows.

Peyton sat down. “I've apologized. At least to your phone. What more do you want me to do?”

She shook her head, thinking of that first year after the raids. So many of her kind had been killed by the Lessening Society during that horrible assault on the race, and those who had been lucky enough to survive had left Caldwell, retreating to safe houses outside of town, out of state, out of New England.

Peyton had gone south with his blood. She'd gone west with her father. And the two of them had spent countless, sleepless days talking on the phone just to keep sane and process the fear, the sadness, the horror, the losses. Over time, he had become someone she touched base with not just once a night, but all throughout the endless twenty-four-hour cycles of days, weeks, months.

He had become her family.

Of course, if times had been remotely normal, they wouldn't have gotten so close—especially not if the contact had been in person. As an unmated female from a Founding Family, she wouldn't have been allowed to fraternize so freely with any unmated male without a chaperone.

“You know all those hours we spent on the phone?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I felt like you had my back. You didn't judge me if I was scared or weak or nervous. You were just . . . this voice on the other end of the connection that kept me sane. You were sometimes the only reason I made it to nightfall.” She shook her head. “And then this comes up, and you body-slam me with the
glymera
bullcrap—”

“Now hold on—”

“You
did
. You laughed at me and told me I couldn't do this.” She clamped a hold on his mouth, shutting him up. “Just stop talking, okay? Let me get this all out. Now, you might be right: I might fail out of the program. Fine, I'll fall on my butt—but I'm allowed to be here on this bus, and I have the same shot that everyone else does. And you of all people, who's made fun of every one of the idiot society females your family's tried to set you up with, who's told me you think the festivals are stupid, who's rejected the business expectations your father put on you—you were the
last
person I thought would ever go old-school on me.”

He sat back and stared at her through those blue-tinted lenses. “Are you done now? You off your soapbox?”

“FYI, being a smart-ass is
really
going to help you here.”

“Just want to know if you're ready to put this feminist shit aside and actually listen to me.”

“Are you
kidding
me?”

“You haven't once given me a chance to explain. You're too busy filling in my side of things with all this free-the-nipple crap. Why bother letting the other person in on the conversation when you're having such a great time being judgmental and superior? I never thought you were this way.”

Welcome to a parallel universe, Paradise thought.

Before she could stop herself, she snapped, “And here I just thought you were a drug addict. I didn't know you were a misogynist as well.”

Peyton shook his head and got to his feet. “You know what, Parry? You and I really do need to take a break.”

“I totally agree.”

He looked down at her from his height. “Fuck me for thinking you'd need a friend in all this.”

“Someone who wants you to fail is not a friend.”

“I never said that. Never once.”

As he turned away, Paradise almost yelled after him, but she let him go. It wasn't as if the talking was getting them anywhere. What was happening instead? Pretty much everyone on the bus was looking at them.

Man, things were getting off to
such
a great start.

•   •   •

One hour after dark, Marissa dematerialized to a thicket of forest on the far side of the Hudson River. The cold wind whistling through the pine boughs made her shiver, and she pulled her Burberry wool coat closer to her body. Breathing in, her sinuses hummed from the lack of humidity and the fantastically clean air of the Canadian high-pressure system that was blowing in from the north.

Looking around, she thought there was something fundamentally dead about November. The colorful leaves of Fall were down and rusted on the ground, the grass and underbrush were wilted and gray, and the cheerful, false-cozy of winter's snowfalls had yet to blanket everything in white.

This was the vacant transition between one version of fabulous and the next.

This was nothing but cold and empty.

Pivoting around, her keen vision zeroed in on an utterly unremarkable concrete structure about fifty yards ahead. Single-storied, with no windows, and only one dark blue door, it looked like something that the city of Caldwell had built for water-treatment purposes and then abandoned.

As she took a step forward, a stick broke beneath her loafer—and she froze at the sound, wrenching around to make sure there was no one behind her. Damn it, she
should have told Butch where she was going. He'd been so busy getting ready for the new recruits' orientation, though, she hadn't wanted to bother him.

It was okay, she told herself. There was always Last Meal.

She would talk to him then.

Crossing the distance to the door, her palms broke out into a sweat in her gloves, and her chest got so tight, she felt as if she were wearing a corset.

God, she hadn't had one of them on in how long?

As she tried to do that math, she thought back to her life before she'd met Butch. She'd had all of the status and none of the position that anyone from the
glymera
could have asked for. As the unclaimed betrothed of Wrath, son of Wrath, she had been a cautionary tale, a beautiful curse who had been pitied and avoided at the aristocracy's events and festivals.

Her brother had always watched over her, however, a largely silent and yet loyal source of comfort. He had hated that Wrath had always ignored her except when he'd needed to feed—and in the end, that hatred had driven her brother to try to kill the King.

One of many attempts on Wrath's life, as it had turned out.

She had been suffering and limping along in her unhappy lot, expecting nothing more, but wanting a proper life for herself . . . when she had met Butch one night at Darius's former house. Her destiny had changed forever as she had seen the then-human standing in that parlor, fate giving her the love she had always sought but never had. There had been repercussions, though. Perhaps as part of the Scribe Virgin's dictate of balance, all of that goodness had come at a huge cost: Her brother had ended up kicking her out of his house and his life just moments before dawn one morning.

Which was what happened when you were a Founding Family's daughter and you were dating what was then assumed to be a mere human.

It had turned out that there was a lot more to Butch, of course, but her brother hadn't stuck around long enough to learn about all of that—and Marissa hadn't cared. She would have taken her male any way he came to her.

Save for running into Havers at a Council meeting, she hadn't really seen her brother since.

Until last night, that was.

Funny, she hadn't spent any time looking back at what she'd once had, where she had been, how she had lived. She had cut herself loose from everything that had come before her mate, living only in the present and the future.

Now, though, as she walked up to the threshold of her brother's new state-of-the-art clinic, she realized that the whole clean-break thing had been an illusion. Just because you moved on didn't mean you shed your personal history like a suit of clothes.

Your past was the same as your skin: with you for life, both the proverbial beauty marks . . . and the scars.

Mostly the scars, in her case.

Okay, where was the bell? The check-in? Last night, they'd come in the ambulance to a different entrance—but Havers had told her to go here if she were dematerializing in.

“Are you here to meet with the doctor?” a disembodied female voice said over a speaker.

Jumping to attention, she pushed her hair back and tried to find the security camera. “Ah . . . actually, I don't have an appointment. I'm here to see—”

“That's all right, dear. Come inside.”

There was a
thunk
and a push bar was revealed on the door's face. Giving it a shove, she emerged into an open space that was about twenty by twenty. With inset lights in the ceiling, and concrete walls that had been whitewashed, it was like a prison cell.

Glancing around, she wondered . . .

The red laser beam was wide as a palm, but no thicker than a strand of hair, and she noticed it only because of
its warmth, not because it immediately registered to her eyes. Traveling in a slow, steady sweep from her feet to her head, it emanated from the corner up on the right, from a dark pod that was mounted with bolts to the ceiling.

“Please proceed,” the female voice said through another hidden speaker.

Before Marissa could bring up the fact that there was nowhere to go, the wall in front of her split down the middle and peeled back, disappearing to reveal an elevator that opened soundlessly.

“Fancy,” she said under her breath as she got in.

The trip down lasted longer than a one-story drop, so she had to imagine the facility was not just nominally subterranean.

When the elevator finally bumped to a stop, the door opened again, and . . .

Busy, busy, busy, she thought as she stepped out.

There seemed to be people everywhere, sitting in chairs around a flat-screen TV over on the left, checking in at a reception desk to the right, hustling and bustling through the center of the large room if they were in scrubs or white nursing outfits.

“Hi! Do you have an appointment?”

It took her a moment to realize she was being addressed by the uniformed female sitting behind the front desk. “Oh, I'm sorry, no.” She went over and lowered her voice. “I'm the nominal
ghardian
of the female who was transferred from Safe Place last evening? I've come to check and see how she's doing.”

Instantly, the receptionist froze. And then her eyes went up and down Marissa, rather like the laser beam had done at ground level.