Red Light (7 page)

I glanced up and saw that Nina seemed ready to burst, but Samantha held up her hand and waved for peace.

“Ah, Tori, don’t you know a vampire when you see one?” she asked me gently.

“Hey,” Nina interjected as she stood anyway and ran a hand through her hair, “Kerry’s not a vampire, not a real one, anyway.” She grinned at Samantha, who grinned back, an amazing flash of light.

“True, that,” Samantha conceded, “but, Tori,” she turned back to me, pressing another scotch over ice into my willing hands, “
she
fucked it up, not you.”

I sipped and considered.

“Let’s go get your stuff,” Nina suggested into the silence.

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said, shaking my head vehemently. They were probably still fucking, I thought, fucking in the apartment I’d helped pick, in the bedroom I’d painted, on the bed I’d goddamn bought. Dammit.

Maybe I should have quit school altogether and gotten a different job—like the one Kerry always said I could get in her firm. But that would have meant giving up everything I’d worked so hard for—

“Come on, Victoria, where’s that Del Castillo blood?” Nina teased me lightly. One thing I had to admit, the Del Castillo blood was definitely prepotent: we all had such similar faces. Sure, we had different eye color, hair color, even different shades of skin, but we all had the same almost too-large eyes, the same curve of lip, the same bone structure.

There was, again, no doubt the Del Castillos were a very pretty bunch, and Nina was probably the prettiest of us all, I thought, though she was the only one who didn’t know it. Hell, I considered as I sipped from my glass, maybe that’s why she was the shortest of all the cousins, too. All that concentrated…whatever it was…became beautiful.

I shook my head and grimaced—I’d been staring at my cousin, the one who was about to save my sorry ass, and had caught myself admiring her lower lip, which was slightly fuller than mine.

“What do I need to go back there for, anyway?” I asked instead, trying to cover up that I’d been lost in thought about something other than my heartbreak. I didn’t really feel heartbroken. I felt cold, and where I wasn’t cold I felt nothing. The more I drank the colder I got.

My peripheral vision found Samantha smothering a grin at me. Caught. Ah, well, at least Samantha had a sense of humor, and I grinned in return as Nina grasped my shoulder. She crouched before me and I stared at my drink, clunking the ice around in circles.

“You need your books, Tor.” Her fingertips grazed my chin. “You need your notes.”

Her eyes were such a light blue fading into gray at the edges, so unlike my light brown ones that were now probably ringed in dark, dark green since I’d been drinking.

I tossed my head away from her touch and shrugged.

Gulping my drink, I looked around me as I thought about myself and my life: fucked-up home, fucked-up academics, and fucked-up life while I sat on the perfect sofa—all clean lines and espresso-colored leather. Perfect.

Perfect Nina’s perfect world. Perfect wife, perfect life, and then I remembered: she’d fucked my girlfriend first. Ex. My ex-girlfriend.

I had to know.

“When did you guys fuck?” I asked her and was instantly sorry. Still, as guilty as I felt, I wanted, I needed to know, and Nina knew exactly who and what I meant.

She pulled her hands away and stood.

“We were kids, Tori,” Nina sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair, “and that’s not what it was. We were just kids.”

I nodded as if I understood. I did, but that didn’t stop me. “Yeah…so?” I continued. “Did you fuck her? She fuck you?”

Samantha stirred next to me and set her glass down on the coffee table.

“Okay,” she announced and stood, clapping her hands together, “this is where I excuse myself.” She walked around the table toward Nina, who gave her an odd look.

“You can stay, Sammy. There’s nothing you don’t know.” Nina gestured her back to the sofa.

Samantha shook her head and gave her one of her diamond smiles as she closed the scant distance between them. “I’m not worried about that, love,” Samantha said softly, and put her arms around her. She kissed her softly, fully, as Nina returned the embrace.

God, they were so perfect together—it fucking killed me as I watched them, the fucking axe that drove through my ice, and once again I flipped from cold to heat because, as upset as I was about Kerry, I’d never had what these two did. My jealousy moments before was petty compared to this.

Samantha murmured something into Nina’s ear, who nodded in response.

“All right,” Samantha agreed, and turned to leave the room. She stopped and pointedly stared at me. “You,” and while her expression was very serious, she smiled anyway, “be nice. Nina’s your friend, not just your cousin, okay?”

I nodded agreement, and Sam held my gaze a moment longer before she walked away.

I didn’t love Kerry, not the way Samantha loved Nina, not even the way Nina loved me, and I knew I was missing something, a vital clue that would give me the answer I wanted.

Nina cocked her head to one side, her auburn-touched hair long and flowing, draping over her shoulders like a shawl. “What do you need to know, Tori?”

Samantha had shut off a light in the corridor as she’d exited to the stairs, and the shadow that reached back into the living room leached the rest of the color from Nina’s eyes, making them flash silver as she neared. I stood to face her.

Her walk was catlike, almost predatory, and the dim light from a table lamp winked from the ankh that hung about her neck from an incongruously pink ribbon, part of the whole Angel tour cancer thing she’d done, I supposed. Dammit.

At thirty-one, Nina still appeared twenty, but her face—something was different, even as defined as it was, something was…gentler, softer, than I’d ever seen there before, subtle, but still more pronounced than I had noticed that night at Nox.

I shifted from one foot to another to dispel my growing unease, knowing that I shouldn’t have asked about her and Kerry, but I couldn’t back down, either. That would have been too…too humiliating. Of all the cousins, Nina was the one I loved the most, the one I was compared to, the one I wanted to be. Oh, hell, I’d practically grown up in her childhood bedroom. But not only that, we were
both
Del Castillo: we had the same blood, the same pride. No way could I back down.

Nina tossed her head again to clear the long strands that fell over her face and crossed her arms over her chest.

My expression, my stance were arrogant, and I knew it, but even though I stood just that much taller than she did, she seemed completely fearless as she stared back up at me, through me, one brow arched perfectly as the color flooded back into her eyes and deepened. I wondered for half a second what color mine were, if they were mixed brown or if they’d shaded almost completely green as Nina read me, completely and correctly. I knew, because I knew her: same blood, same temper, but she’d always hid hers from the world better. Yet another thing she did more competently than I did.

“You wanted to know something, tough guy?” she asked me again. She was hurt, she was furious—I knew that, because I knew her.

“Yeah,” I drawled, my own anger and frustration at the surface because no matter what I did she was better than me, so much better that she was willing to help me out of my sorry situation, which I probably could have avoided if I’d been more like her in the first place.

“I want to know when you fucked,” I said, my voice sounding harsh even to my own ears. “I want to know how she let you fuck her tight—”

“Watch it, Tori,” Nina warned, “have a little respect for both of us.”

I laughed as I picked up my glass. “Respect?” I swallowed what was left and let the alcohol burn through me—maybe it would burn off some of the tension, take the edge off the arousal at the thought of
my
girl, wet and ready, waiting, wanting Nina’s long fingers inside her, filling her, fucking her, probably as perfectly as she did everything else.

“Yes. Respect, Tori,” Nina answered, her eyes flaring dangerously, “especially for yourself.”

I chuckled mirthlessly. “Especially for myself?” I mocked, and put my glass back down. I straightened, closed the distance between us, and looked down at the sensual curve of her lip, then into eyes that had gone dark. “Respect this,” I whispered, then kissed her.

The softness of her mouth surprised me, shocked me out of my anger, and I even forgot about it for about two seconds before the world flipped, and the next thing I knew I was on my butt back on the sofa.

“You’re doing a
really
great impression of an asshole,” Nina said, and I stared at her as she stood there, seeming as unflustered as if we’d just discussed what kind of tea we preferred.

She walked into the corridor, then returned a moment later with a pillow and a blanket and tossed them at me.

“Sleep it off—you’re not a pleasant drunk. We’ll get your stuff tomorrow. Good night.” She didn’t look back, not even once, as she left.

A mix of feelings warred in my head for dominance, from shame to guilt to yeah-that’s-right, how-do-you-like-them-apples defiance as I watched her. But under, over, and woven within that reaction was the one thing I really hated to admit: she was right that I was behaving like an asshole.

I shook my head, disgusted with myself as I kicked off my shoes. Maybe I’d be a better person in the morning.

*

Pain lanced through my head when the sun slammed into it through the bay window, and it physically hurt to open my eyes. Nausea jumped in like a jealous twin when my too-sensitive ears picked up a whirring sound from the kitchen.

It stopped moments later—the sound, not my head—and Samantha walked into the living room carrying a tall glass filled with something red and viscous.

“This…is for you.” She placed it on the table and sat on the sofa across from me, then watched me, an amused smile playing about the corner of her lips as I struggled against the fierce pounding in my head to sit up.

“Hold your breath,” she warned as I reached for the glass, “it’s got a bit of a kick.”

I looked at her blearily through the one eye that I could keep at half mast and nodded as I took the glass. I saluted her with it and, just as warned, held my breath.

It wasn’t too bad as I swallowed. In fact, at first it was fine—maybe a little salty, but fine. Then the fire started. As soon as my eyes stopped tearing and the roaring through my sinuses settled to a dull red glow, I was not only completely awake, but I also couldn’t have closed my eyes if I’d tried—they needed to cool down.

Samantha watched me, expressionless, as I choked and simmered. When the coughing and tearing ended and I could finally see her clearly, she stood.

“You know where the bathroom is—I’ll wait in the car for you.” She stalked away.

I nodded in agreement to her back, then felt around the floor for my shoes.

“Nina coming?” I asked.

She stopped and pivoted, her eyes piercing me where I sat. I never, ever, wanted to get that glare from her again because in it, I understood why she wore a sword around her neck. That look? Deadly.

“Nina’s sleeping in—she’s not feeling well, and we need to do this soon because she and I have an appointment.”

“Yeah, no problem,” I answered hastily as I stood.

“Good.” Samantha nodded and left.

As soon as I’d taken care of morning ablutions—face and hands clean, breath minty fresh, as my cousin would say, only in this instance it was cinnamon, and head no longer pounding—I slung on my jacket as I hurried outside to meet Samantha, who waited, as promised, at the curb in her favorite automotive toy: a ’74 Nova that shone like black oil in the early morning sun.

She pulled out of the drive.

“You know where it is?” I asked.

“I did know where to send the passes and the car, right?”

Oh, yeah. That was true—where the hell was my brain?

“Yeah, sorry,” I said instead.

Funny, I thought. This was one of the oldest sections of the island, and one of the nicest, because blue-collar workers and educators lived side by side with local politicians, doctors, business commuters, and local entrepreneurs. It was politely eclectic and I loved it.

“Just a couple of things, Tori,” Samantha said as she pulled into a vacant spot in front of the apartment building—my spot, in fact.

Those were the first words she’d said to me since she’d affirmed she knew the address. I blinked as I faced her—the sun was still a bit too bright for me. “Sure, Sam, what?”

She cut the motor and pocketed the key before she made sure she had my eyes on hers.

“If,” she began slowly and evenly, “you
ever
lay so much as a breath on Nina that she doesn’t want? I’ll deck you if she doesn’t.”

I’d forgotten about what I’d done, and my ears burned with a combination of shame and anger—anger at myself at having behaved so…so…crassly. I couldn’t think of another word, besides
asshole
, that is. “I need to apologize to her,” I said, forcing the words past the burning lump of shame in my throat. I might have been wrong, but at least I knew how to admit it.