I Am Lightning (Laurel Defense Series) (5 page)

I sighed.  “I’m sorry too.  You have to understand that talk of mating with someone scares me.  I like my freedom.  You have rights over me and it scared me that you might assert them.”

“I didn’t mean for you to think that.  We already agreed that I wouldn’t force you if that’s not what you wanted,” he said and got closer to me.  He reached out and tucked a stray hair behind my ear.  “You probably deserve better than me.”

He moved his hand to grab mine.  We exchanged electricity and it felt wonderful.  It felt like a revolving door, a current, running through my whole body.  This is what I did to any other sprite.  I
am the only one with the ability to take another’s energy and make it turn electric.  I am a freaking eel.  Mark closed his eyes and enjoyed it for a moment.  The problem was that I was enjoying it too.  I closed my eyes, but all I could see was Robert’s face as I did something similar to him, albeit using only my own power.

I let go of Mark’s hand and stepped away.  I couldn’t have Robert, but I didn’t want Mark.  It was just too weird with my cousin.  Mark was right, though.  I should not have been attracted to Robert.  I would hurt him.  He would never be safe with me, his aversion to blood be damned.  He would want to bite me and I wouldn’t be able to stop him.  I would poison him.  I could kill him forever, not the state of suspended animation he was using as life.

As for Mark, I didn’t love him that way.  I cringed at the thought of having him in my bed, and I truly hoped that he would never, ever, decide that he wanted me.  Ever.  It would be a slow torture and death for me.

“Forget we ever had this conversation,” Mark said and swallowed.  He looked almost as scared as I felt.

“Easy for you to say,” I said and felt a shiver down my spine.  “If you ever called me I would have to obey.”

“I know how it works, Abby.  I won’t do that to you, please believe that.  I just… I wanted to see if you had changed your mind or would ever do so.  I’m confused.”  Mark began pacing from my living room on his left, through the foyer and into the dining room to his right.  His fingers turned into flowers and changed colors, then turned back into fingers.  It was
what he did when he was nervous or confused, as he was now.

I didn’t know what to say to help him.  Mark was jealous because I was making eyes at a man, and he’d never seen me do that before.  To me it sounded petty and a bit ridiculous.  I’d been living in his house for almost two years and he had dated many women.  I’d never felt jealous of his attentions.  I only knew jealousy through Robert.

“I’ll go now,” Mark said and reached for the door.

“I love you,” I said to him.  It wasn’t the first time I told him, and he knew what kind of love I could offer him.

He looked at me over his shoulder, refusing to turn around the whole way.  “I love you too.”  With that he left.

The soft knock on my kitchen door startled me as nothing else could have, not even Mark’s banging on my front door.  Immediately I knew the person knocking was dead.  “Robert…” I whispered to no one but myself, trying to make my feet move and answer the door already.  I opened it and stared out at the deck, which was dark as a wolf’s mouth.  Robert moved into the sliver of light that shone from the kitchen, his hands in his pockets as if he was cold.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his deep voice carrying in the night.  I felt my heart flutter but stamped down the feeling.

“I’m okay,” I said and took a deep breath.  “Did you follow Mark here?”

“Yes I did.  I wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to hurt you.  He was extremely irate when he woke up,” Robert answered, moving closer and hunching his shoulders.

“Come in,” I said and stepped aside.  The temperature was in the forties outside, and Robert looked as if he was suffering in the cold.  “Please h
ave a seat.  Can I get you some orange juice?  Milk?  Pizza?”

Robert smiled and shook his head.  “No, thank you,” he answered, and never sat down.  He stayed close to the door.  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner,” he said, eyeing the pizza sitting on top of my stove, not so fresh from the oven anymore.

“Technically Mark interrupted my dinner, and after fighting with him I’m not hungry.”  I put my hands on my hips.  “You should know that there’s no way for Mark to hurt me, not that he ever would.”

Robert narrowed his eyes.  He was about to smile but then his eyes got sad.  “I saw you hurt tonight,” he said. 

He’d seen tons more than that, I thought.  I cringed.  I so didn’t want to have this conversation, but it seemed we were about to.  Better to grab the bull by the gonads and get hit just the once.  “About the incubus… I’m sorry.”

Robert looked confused for a moment then understood.  “Don’t worry about that.”

“You don’t mind that I saw you naked?” I asked arching an eyebrow on the verge of laughing.

Robert did it first.  His throaty laugh melted my insides.  “No, I don’t mind.  Like what you saw?”

I laughed too, failing miserably at looking the least bit sexy.  I’d forgotten it was easy to talk to him.  By now he knew everything about my life.  “I’d be lying if I said no,” I said, blushing furiously.  My skin must have been the color of my hair and the kitchen got entirely too warm.  I turned and leaned my hands on the counter, wishing I could stand in front of the freezer without making it look obvious.  Robert was sexy as heck, and seeing him naked hadn’t changed my mind about that.  Still, there was something important I needed to ask, so I put on my big girl panties and made myself ask the question.  “Why does your blood feel like life and not death?”

Everything was silent.  All I could hear was the soft hum of the heater blowing air through the vents, which wasn’t helping with my current body temperature.  I could feel Robert moving closer but I couldn’t look, not yet.  I looked at my Pillsbury Doughboy spoon rest instead.

“I should trust you,” he said in almost a murmur.  I turned to look at him and met his dark blue eyes.  Not liking him was going to be harder than I thought.

“No, no you shouldn’t,” I said before I could stop the words.  He was taken aback.  “I’m not right for you. 
To trust… or to… anything else.”  Yay, I was eloquent… not.  I sucked at this.  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Before I could say anything else stupid, Robert closed the gap between us and grabbed my face between his hands.  They were downright cold, but that was not what had rooted me to the spot.  His blue eyes flashed with something from within, and I felt energy coming from him at the same time.  It was wholly different than anything I’d ever experienced.  I fed upon it without thinking and shocked us both, except it wasn’t like a shock of static electricity.  It wasn’t painful in the slightest.  If I had to describe it I’d say it was divine.

I closed my eyes and my knees buckled.  Robert caught me and gathered me in his arms.  We were as close as two people can be with clothes on, and he was still looking at me with the same intensity.

“D-do all v-vampires do… that?” I said and swallowed, barely able to get the words out.

“Only me,” he answered.  Yeah, I believed it!  Woo!  “That’s what I tried to tell you,” he continued.  “I would never hurt you, and would have never given you my blood if I hadn’t been completely sure that it was going to heal you.  I do trust you, no matter what you say.”

I felt
well enough to extricate myself from his hold.  He let me go immediately, not that I expected anything else.  I took a deep breath trying to steady my heart.  I liked Robert, I liked him a lot.  Too much.  “I would never hurt you either,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.  “When do you feed, how often?”

Robert was quiet for a long moment.  I seized it to look at him, to enjoy the last taste of him I would willingly give myself.  He was sporting a five o’ clock shadow and his hair was combed neatly back, as if he’d made it look nice before coming to see me.  He was wearing an inexpensive suit, the kind we all wore except for Ifan, in black with a white shirt underneath.  His broad body filled my small kitchen, and for one brief moment I imagined him in it, cooking dinner with me. 
With me?  That’s when I shook myself.

“I have to feed once a week,” he finally answered.

I nodded with purpose.  “I’ll help you with your feedings, until… until you find someone else.”  I swallowed the bile that rose into my throat at that statement, but I knew I had to let him go.  To that end, I refused to look at him again.  I focused all my concentration on a stain on the floor.  It looked like a drop of orange juice that I had neglected to wipe off.

Robert remained silent and motionless by my side, and for the second time that night I felt like crying.  To keep my mind occupied I began to track Paul.  He was in one of the spare bedrooms, probably scaring the neighbors half to death if they happened to look into the window.  When I couldn’t stand the silence anymore I looked up at Robert and found him staring.  His face was shut down from all emotion, his whole body dead.  Had I done that?

“I’m sorry.  I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, even though my throat was closing up.  I could only keep the tough girl act for so long.

“You just did,” he said and was gone in the blink of an eye.

CHAPTER 5

The Laurel Defense is a lot like any regular police force, except that we actually don’t have any policing, not really.  We are cops, detectives, and forensic scientists all rolled into individual guards.  We can all kick some serious booty if kicking booty were required.  We can all run investigations from start to finish, some better than others.  And… all of us are magical or supernatural.  Therefore, our roll call room looks like a page was taken out of a human’s fairy tale book.  There are demons, fairies, goblins, sprites, wizards and witches, and one vampire… who had not been turned from a human.

I had come to this conclusion in the few days after he’d visited my house.  There had been something magical about him before he became the undead, I was sure of it.  What had he been though?  I’d spent countless hours racking my brain trying to figure it out in vain.  He didn’t look like a fairy since his eyes were not large enough to be disproportionate to his face.  He was definitely not a goblin: they were short and green.  He wasn’t a duende: they were short and gnome-like.  Brenton, the fire demon, was good looking and scary as Hell, like all humanoid demons, whereas Robert was runway-model material.  He could have been an elf… I’d met an elf once.  They tended to be singularly obsessed with everyone’s fertility.  The elf had told me I was very healthy in that respect, and offered to do the honors.  I remembered he’d been a good kisser…

“Abby, are you with us?” Ifan asked from the front of the roll call room, which coincidentally was the break room.  I was standing toward the back next to Rhiannon, which was an unusual spot for me.  I u
sually stood next to my partner.  But, in a show of utter disregard to the fact that I was a mature adult lightning sprite, I’d been avoiding Mark.

“Not really,” I answered Ifan, which was the truth.  If I’d lied and said I had been paying attention, whatever piece of information Ifan had just tried to convey would have been lost to me forever.  He had no choice but to roll his eyes at me and tell me to see him in his office after roll call.  I nodded and hung my head in shame, though I felt nothing of the sort.  I hadn’t wanted to draw attention to myself, and in my hiding I instead became a giant billboard for “you shall not be like Abby! 
With her head in the clouds and her terrible taste in men.”

I remained behind and grabbed a cup of coffee and a muffin while waiting for everyone to file out with their orders and assignments for the night.  I knew the moment Robert had passed beside me because his spicy manly scent assaulted me and made me almost choke on my coffee.  My sole concentration had been on that coffee up until then.  As I almost choked and Rhiannon was returning to offer aid, I looked up.  My eyes met Robert’s and I felt a dull pain
in the middle of my forehead… a stress headache, no doubt.

“What’s the matter with you?  You’ve been like a zombie since that incubus attacked you,” Rhiannon said, holding my arms up in the air until I could breathe without coughing.  “Are you sure you’re cured from the attack?”

“I’m a hundred percent cured from the attack,” I said, wheezing a little.

“So what’s the matter?” she asked, letting me go and turning me to look at her.

Before I answered I sat down.  I could confide in her some of what was plaguing my brain.  She sat across from me and gave me her undivided attention.  I put the coffee cup down next to the muffin, lest I choke on either of them again.

“Mark came to my house the night of the incubus attack, telling me he was jealous of the regard I have for Robert,” I said, looked down at my hands on the table and continued.  “Mark says he’s confused, but that he thought that maybe we were meant to be mates after all.  He assured me he’d never call me unless I was willing to be his, but I just don’t know…”

“I sometimes forget sprite biology,” Rhiannon commented.  “Female sprites have it rough, huh?” she asked and I nodded.  She continued, “I know that Mark cares for you, and the jealousy he feels could be felt by any close male.  It’s his way of safeguarding you.  Do you really have regard for Robert?”  Rhiannon’s tone assured me that she wasn’t passing judgment, merely ascertaining what she had heard, perhaps gauging my feelings.

I sighed deeply.  “Even if I did, I can’t entertain the notion.  He wouldn’t be safe.”

“You’re right, he wouldn’t.  He would want to bite and then he would…”

“Be poisoned,” we both said in a chorus.

We sat in silence for a moment, both of us lost in thought.  “Mark is a good sprite,” Rhiannon concluded.  “You guys love each other, can’t you talk?”

“I’ve been trying to give him some room to get his confusion under control.”

“That’s not going to work at all!  He’s liable to talk himself into a pretzel of confusion.  Maybe you should approach him…”

Rhiannon was interrupted by a throat clearing at the door.  It was Robert and I felt like my blood was being sent into my head. 
All of it.  Thankfully, Rhiannon was the type of person to catch situations quickly.  She sort of hid me as she turned to look at Robert.  “What’s up?” she asked him, like we hadn’t just been talking about him.

“Ifan wants to see
Ab- Parker,” he said, his voice low.  Without seeing his face I couldn’t read his emotions, but the fact that he didn’t call me Abby said enough.

“She’ll be right there,” Rhiannon said, and I could hear the fake smile in her voice.  After a short moment she turned back to me.  “Go, don’t get in trouble.  We have a big case tonight.  All of us are in on it.”

“Oh, Blessed Be!  I didn’t hear a word Ifan said.  Tell me quick!”

We both got up and walked, and as we did she filled me in: a female water sprite had been abducted, or at least that was the general consensus.  She was about my age and had been out with her
boyfriend at a club in DC.  We were all heading to the club’s immediate area to start the investigation.  Rhiannon delivered me to Ifan’s office and pushed me inside, shutting the door behind me.  Ifan didn’t look up from a large book on his desk when he started talking.

“Explain,” was all he said.
  When I didn’t talk right away, that’s when he looked up.  “I can make you talk, but I would rather you simply tell me,” he said.  I hated to make Ifan mad.  It was like letting down my own father, not that I knew what that was like.  I figured it felt a lot like letting down the one person who understood you best and liked you best despite all your faults.  My wizard boss had never been anything but giving, polite, wise, and sometimes even loving towards me.

So I talked.  I told him everything that had happened with Mark and Robert the night that both went to my house.  I explained why my brain had been so scattered in the days hence:  I was having a personal crisis and I had brought it to work.  And then I apologized profusely, because I knew I should have acted more professional.  Way more professional.

“I understand,” he said, “and the fact that you can see your own unprofessional behavior is a step in the right direction.”  There was no reproach.  The words didn’t come out harshly.  When he said he understood, he meant it.  “Now, tell me what I can do to help you.”

“I honestly have no idea.  Counsel me, I suppose.  Give me some advice to point me in the right direction, Boss.  I know what to do about Robert…”

“Do you really?” he interrupted.

I blinked.  “Yeah…” I began but he shook his head.  “Okay, maybe not,” I mumbled.

“I will tell you about Robert, but only what pertains to me.  The rest is up to him to divulge.”  Ifan sat forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the massive book in front of him.  “I found him when he was very ill.  I have nursed him back to health, as much health as a vampire can have, and maybe some extra.  He is smart, and he is kind.  He is also lonely and thought you a kindred spirit.  He told me as much,” Ifan’s eyes twinkled as he said that.  I saw mischief, but his eyes turned soft when he spoke next.  “You, to me, are brave and impetuous, a lot like Mark in some ways.  You also have a good grasp of other’s feelings, and also of your own.  You are a lonely girl, willing to accept the loneliness because you believe that mating would doom you to an unfulfilled life.  And perhaps that would be true if you had mated with Mark.  It is obvious to me that you are too similar to be mated.  You would kill him, is my guess,” he laughed, a low throaty sound, a comfort to me.  He was right!

I couldn’t laugh with him.  I was depressed, and for once I wanted to sulk and stay depressed.  I’d been playing depressing songs for two days straight on my iPod and in my car.  They added to my depression and made me sing at the same time.  I was depressed AND deranged.  Perfect, really.

“I’m sorry, Ifan, but what’s your point?  Would you have me be Robert’s mate instead?  You know that can’t happen, and you know that I would kill him too.  Besides, I hurt him, and now I don’t know how to make it better.”

“Oh, I’m sure you have it in you to ask forgiveness.  I’ve seen you do it many times before.  You may be guilty of many things, but you are not too proud to soothe another’s pain, especially when it’s caused by you.  I admire that in you, I truly do.”

“You give me waaaay too much credit, there,” I said, but I had already been thinking of apologizing to Robert.  I mean, I’d thought about it over and over, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to apologize and have Robert turn on me without accepting.

Ifan seemed to read my mind, or maybe my thoughts had been plain on my face.  “Apologize to Robert.  Accept that you hurt him, and be strong.  It may hurt you if he doesn’t accept your apology, but you must remember that it was you who hurt him first.”

I nodded and smoothed my pants, even though they were perfectly ironed and creased.  “Thanks, Ifan.”  I stood up to leave and paused at the door.  I gathered my courage because I had to – besides asking Robert for forgiveness – see Mark and pair up with him for the upcoming investigation.  We were in work-mode.  Someone needed our help and we had to provide it, personal business be damned.

The office was in an organized chaos when I left Ifan’s small sanctum.  Everyone was getting ready for the excursion, fetching medallions, getting recording equipment and forensic equipment ready, looking at maps of DC, pinpointing places that needed to be scoured and by whom.  Casimir was standing on his usual stepstool looking grim.  He was about three feet tall, round and green: a goblin.  His voice was low and gruff, like you would expect from a chain-smoking giant; his nose was way longer than it needed to be, and his pointy ears flopped around when he walked.  His partner, a duende named Jaime, was sitting nearby.  He was slightly taller than Casimir at four feet tall, and looked like he could do commercials as a traveling gnome.  He even had the beard.  All he needed was the red hat, and to be standing on
someone’s lawn.  They were the team leaders during this investigation.  I approached Jaime to get my instructions.

“You and Mark will be going inside the club.  It’s a human club,” he said by way of explanation.  Mark and I blended with the human population better than others (better than Casimir and Jaime that was for sure).  “It’s a Goth club, and we can’t ask questions.  Any ideas?” he asked me.

“We can’t ask questions in our capacity, but as club-goers we can ask, right?” I asked.

Jaime smiled.  “I like the way you think.  You have half an hour to get ready.”

I was on a mission.  Mark and I needed to look Goth.  It would be fairly easy for me, even with my red hair… not so easy for Mark.  Mark was gathering equipment from a locker when I approached him.

“You and I need to change into our leathers.  Jaime said we’re going into the club,” I said and watched as he looked down at his suit.  “You can’t go in like that.  They’ll think you’re a cop.”

“I AM a cop,” he said, his eyebrows knitting together.  I sighed and crossed my arms over my chest.  “All right, I’ll change.”  His eyes softened and he reached out, rubbing my upper arms.  He may have been a hothead, but he was a caring hothead.  His kiss on my forehead told me much more than his words.  “Go get ready,” he said and let me go.

We both went into our respective locker rooms and changed.  I took my hair down from a bun and let it hang loose then I rummaged through my purse.  My small makeup case was sorely lacking in black.  I wore more muted tones that blended well with my green eyes and light complexion.

I ran back to our main office and stood in the middle.  “No black!” I exclaimed.  Tandy, a witch and colleague, ran over holding her purse.  I didn’t wait and sat at my desk.  She pulled a chair in front of me and began working on my eyes.  It was amazing that she had read my mind.

“You’ll look perfect, even with your red hair, maybe even because of it,” Tandy said.  She had a beautiful tan, and her dark brown curly hair and eyes shone under the lights. 
She certainly didn’t look like the human version of a witch any more than Ifan looked like a wizard.  “Put this on.  I have to do Mark’s makeup now,” she said, moving one desk over and leaving me with a blood red lipstick and a small mirror.  I looked at my eyes.  I wasn’t going to wear any other makeup besides the lipstick.  I thought I looked like a raccoon with the eyes heavily made up in black.  Once my lipstick was in place I looked like a raccoon that’d just found some red velvet cake.  Terrifying.