Necromancing Nim (28 page)

“Sebastian?” I tried, quietly so as not to wake him if he was, indeed, asleep. “Sebastian?”

He made a low, acknowledging hum, and I blinked. He sounded stoned. Nice. My blood made vampires high. I tried to think of ways that could come in handy, and, other than raising my personal street value, I came up empty. I leaned back on a pillow and waited for Colin to come back.

Which he did, fairly promptly, carrying a glass of orange juice.

“Here,” he said, passing it to me. “How is he?”

“I’m not sure. I think he’s stoned.”

Colin’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Interesting.” He peered at Sebastian, then back at me. “Huh.”

“Huh?”

“Could I have some?” Colin asked.

Of course he would ask that. “No.”

“Damn. I could use a good high right about now.”

I shook my head. “You’re…” I faltered for words.

“Irresistible?”

“An asshole,” I provided. When had that quality become endearing? He just laughed.

“Drink your juice.”

I drank the juice. It tasted sweet and good, better than orange juice had ever tasted to me. I supposed I could declare myself completely healed, at least in that respect.

I wasn’t so sure about Sebastian, though. While I hoped my blood would prove helpful to him, I also hoped that wouldn’t mean he’d need a pint or so a day to get back on his feet. Although, judging by his current state, a pint or so a day sold on the street could set us up for life. Who knew I’d someday produce bodily fluids that made vampires high? It wasn’t the kind of thing you thought about when you were putting together your life goals.

Setting aside the empty glass, I realized Colin was staring at me. Not in a leery, stalkery way, but in a sober, contemplative way. Given the choice I would have picked the former.

“What?” I asked.

“You feel up to talking? Somewhere else?”

I considered. I didn’t feel up to jumping jacks, but I figured I could toddle my way into the living room. “Sure.”

He nodded and reached down to take my arm. Somewhat to my surprise, he guided me out of the bedroom and into the living room, as concerned for my wellbeing as I’d ever seen him. When we got to the living room, he watched me take a seat on the couch, then retrieved an afghan from the back and settled it over my lap.

“You’re scaring me,” I said as he tucked it around me, only half kidding.

His soberness didn’t abate. Gently, he touched my face. It seemed like a caress at first, then his hand shifted, touching me more as if he were checking my temperature. “You’ve been through a lot.” He withdrew, taking a seat on the chair opposite the couch. I was relieved. The way he was acting, having him sit right next to me would be too weird. “So has Sebastian,” he went on. “I’m worried about both of you.”

“I’d be more worried about Sebastian.” I tucked my feet up under the afghan. “I think I’m okay, or I will be. But he…” I trailed off. “I don’t know him well enough to say he hasn’t been himself, but I don’t think he’s been himself.”

“He hasn’t. Not since they put him in the sun.”

“He should be able to recover from that, shouldn’t he?”

“Yes.” Colin was quiet a moment, the contemplative concern on his face no longer focused on me. “I think it has to do with the stone. He was bound closely to it at one point, and having it in someone else’s possession must be draining him.”

“You don’t know how it works?”

“No one does, not really. That’s my guess, though.”

“Somebody has to know.” I frowned, grumpy. “You damn vampires are immortal—don’t you keep track of this kind of thing? What good are your vampire librarians if you don’t have research compiled so you can deal with shit like this when it goes down?”

“I admit it’s a bit of a knowledge gap. But when you’re dealing with something this powerful, people get stupid about it.” Oddly, my comment seemed to have made him more thinky than annoyed. “We do need to do some legwork. I won’t argue that. But the papers you sent to Illinois should get us a bit further ahead in the game. Aside from that…” He stopped and rubbed his face.

“What?”

Colin was silent a moment, his eyes distant, his face creased with concern. “I’m afraid we’ll lose him.”

There was nothing I could say in response to that. I was afraid of the same thing. I barely knew Sebastian, and the thought of his dying made me feel sick and panicky. It had to be worse for Colin, who’d known him far longer. Who’d slept with him. Somehow, I thought whatever brought them together was more than a casual need for sex. It was all so strange. I’d almost expected some show of discomfort, if not outright jealousy, from Colin, but there was none. He just seemed grateful that I’d been able to help Sebastian. Just as surprising, I felt no jealousy regarding Colin’s relationship with Sebastian. Whatever was brewing among the three of us, it…it just
was
.

I reached over and touched his hand, then let my fingers curl around it. “We’ll do everything we can,” I said. “It’ll be okay.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Thank you.”

We were silent a moment. I tightened my hand on his; it felt good there. My body still thrummed from the interlude with Sebastian. I felt wet and buzzy between my legs. And speaking of buzzy, I hadn’t had an intimate interlude with my vibrator for quite some time. But it was miles away in the bedside-table drawer at my house.

My fingers clenched down on his hand again, increasing the pressure. His head ducked as he tried to catch my gaze. “Nim?”

I kissed him. Hey, he’d kissed me first in the kitchen the other day, so I figured I had a standing invitation. His mouth opened under mine, and before I had a chance to think about it, I had shoved him back against the couch and straddled him.

“Shit, is it always like this?” I pulled at his buttons while his hands went under my shirt.

“Is what always like what?”

”The bite. Is it always…does it always…”

He kissed me again, probably just to get me to shut up. Or maybe not, because after he’d counted all my teeth with his tongue, he pulled back to answer my question. “If you do it right, yeah.”

“Is it… I mean do you…” I had no idea what I was saying or what I was trying to ask him, but then he shoved his hand down my pants, and it didn’t matter anymore.

I should have known this would happen. Once you start hanging out with vampires, there’s that slippery slope that heads straight to straddling them on their expensive leather couches. Or at least that’s what they say on the Internet. I decided I didn’t care.

And if he had his hand down my pants, then, dammit, I was going to return the favor. He was hard and solid and—wow—big. And…what was that? Oh right. Uncut. I hadn’t grabbed on to one of those before.

No problem. I could adjust. And I must have done something right, because he made a choked sound and arched under me, drawing his erection through my curled fist.

“Nim…”

“What?”

“Are you sure…?”

“Shut up. I’m on top—you’ll find out in a minute.”

I wasn’t sure, not really. There were options, after all. His fingers pressed into me, driving the heat that had built while Sebastian had been feeding. I could rock on his hand and get off just fine. He could hump my fist, and we’d both be happy.

But no. That dick in my hand was big and intriguing, and I wanted it inside me. We’d been headed this way for a while—it wasn’t like it was a big surprise.

Except it kind of was, but that didn’t make me want to stop. Instead, it made me want to get him out of his pants. So I did that. He worked mine open with his free hand, and I got them hastily off and out of the way. Perched over him, straddling his hips, his dark eyes locked to mine and his very generous manly bits pressing against my thighs, I gave it one last consideration. All I had to do was shift my hips, and there was no turning back.

I lifted myself and sank onto him.

And God, was that ever an excellent choice. He wasn’t buzzy, but he was bigger than my vibrator, and he was self-propelled, which was a great thing. His hands closed around my waist, and he thrust up into me, hard, while I rode him and rode him until everything exploded and every last bit of that knife edge of bite-induced need poured out, leaving me wrung and shaky.

I sagged over him, hands braced on his chest, and tried to catch my breath. He didn’t have any breath to catch, but he looked like he’d enjoyed himself as much as I had. He reached up and gently cupped my breast. Somehow I hadn’t expected that.

Then I had a thought. “Is this going to upset Sebastian?”

Colin shook his head. “No.”

I thought he might elaborate, but he didn’t. He lifted a hand to my neck and touched the wound there, then licked the sticky blood from his fingers. That should have grossed me out. It really, really didn’t.

He closed his eyes, savoring the flavor. When he opened them again, he didn’t appear to be stoned so much as very happy.

“We should do this again sometime.” The smug in his voice was off the charts.

I leaned forward and bit his lower lip hard enough to make him wince. “If you’re lucky, maybe we will.”

Oh yeah. We definitely would.

Whether vampire kind has a religion, or a Bible, has been the subject of much debate. The assumption that all self-aware, intelligent beings have come to some conclusion about the existence of God and/or the afterlife indicates they must have some sort of religion, even if it was developed long ago and has fallen from disuse. The assumption that vampires do not have souls and therefore would not have reason to worry about an afterlife would indicate the opposite.—
Excerpt from
God and the Vampire—Is There Hope of Salvation?
, an official publication of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), 1981.

Chapter Eighteen

I slept for a time on Colin’s couch, waking once when he leaned over and tweaked the afghan. When I finally returned to full consciousness, it was dark outside, and Colin and Sebastian were sitting at the kitchen table. Sebastian had a stadium blanket draped over his shoulders and sat hunched over. He seemed almost to be getting smaller as time passed. I lay quietly for a time, watching them and eavesdropping. Sebastian was carrying the conversation at the moment.

“…so it turns out Aurelius is a prick. Fortunately, he was more after money than the stone itself, or he probably would have destroyed the records he found. Roland played him and got what we needed, though. Sounds like solid stuff. Stuff nobody’s seen before. Combined with my own research, well…” Sebastian’s voice was pitched low, presumably to keep from waking me. They had spread out an atlas and a number of printed maps from the Internet across the table. “The trick is getting there to get it all from her.”

“Yeah. I’d say drive, but we need to move fast on this.”

“I can’t fly,” Sebastian stated.

“We might manage it. Red-eye flight, departs and arrives after dark—it’s only about a three-hour flight—”

“No.” Sebastian’s vehemence surprised me, and evidently it surprised Colin as well.

“Sebastian…” His voice too was low but strained, as if he were fighting to hold back his temper. “It’s a twenty-hour drive. We can’t do that completely in the dark either.”

“But we’d have control of it.” Sebastian spoke quickly, his words clipped, as if desperate to convince Colin of his point of view. “We can make sure the car is suntight. We don’t have any control over the plane. If it’s late taking off, comes in during or after sunset—” His voice cracked as he broke off, and he swallowed. “Even in the cargo hold—”

“Bastian.” I’d never heard Colin call Sebastian by anything other than his full name before. “We need this. Roland practically died to get this stuff for you, and if we don’t follow through, the consequences—”

I made a snorfling sound as if I were just waking up. Things seemed to be getting tense between the two of them, and I didn’t like it when they weren’t getting along, so I figured it was as good a time as any to make my state of consciousness known. And Sebastian sounded like he was about to burst into tears, which also upset me. Maybe getting stoned on my blood had given him an emotional hangover.

Both of them swung around to acknowledge me as I rubbed my eyes. “Morning,” I mumbled.

“Evening, actually,” Sebastian said with strained humor.

“Whatever.” I got up and headed for the kitchen. “Mind if I make coffee?” There was an expensive coffeemaker on the cupboard, so I assumed Colin had beans and such as well.

“Sure. Beans are in the cupboard.” Colin stared down at the atlas on the table in front of him as if reconsidering his argument. Sebastian’s gaze followed me—I could feel it. A glance back found his attention riveted on me, his eyes pleading and desperate, as if he were begging me to help him find a way out.

The perusal made me uncomfortable. I glanced at the maps laid out on the table as I pulled a bag of coffee beans—Jamaican Blue Mountain, holy God—down from the cabinet. “What’s with the maps? Are we going somewhere?”

“Illinois,” Colin said. “Question is whether we fly or drive.”

Well, this wasn’t going well. He’d effectively put me in the middle of their disagreement, and I didn’t know what side I should be on. My first instinct was to pick whichever option wasn’t Colin’s idea, but that was just me being obstreperous. I needed to think about it more logically.