Sabrina's Clan (16 page)

As Jake left and Nyanther shut the door and turned back into the room, his gaze met hers. He frowned, then the frown cleared and he just looked at her…almost as if he was waiting for her to do something.

She realized she still wanted Nyanther, after all. She wanted him more, now he was with Jake.

Forbidden fruit.

She got to her feet, moving slowly, trying to hide the trembling that was making her clumsy. What sort of a hypocrite was she to profess she want nothing of this world, yet lust after one of them with a power that was making her dizzy, as soon as it was safe to do so?

What was wrong with her? Nyanther could never be a part of her life…not the sort of life she wanted, anyway.

So she made herself walk downstairs and stand shivering on the sidewalk while the cars were packed. As the little group chatted, sorting out who would ride with whom, they called out to each other and made jokes, mostly about how far down the road Miguel’s beat-up minivan would make it before breaking down one final time.

Sabrina watched them, not joining in. She wasn’t a part of the group, she reminded herself, except in the most superficial way. Yet, for a moment as the cars pulled away, heading for Buffalo, leaving her standing on the sidewalk with Damian and Chloe, she wished she might be a part of it all.

Just for one insane, shining moment.

The hunters returned very late on Sunday night…which had by then become Monday morning. Sabrina woke when she heard soft voices and the sound of movement in the room next to hers.

Jake was staying the night, then. It made perfect sense. She might even have done the same thing. A tiny seed of hot emotion bubbled in her chest, waking her up even more. She tried to relax so she could return to sleep. She had a busy day tomorrow. Mondays always were frantic as everyone tried to catch up with weekend market activity and the impact it had on their work and besides, Sabrina had to out-perform everyone this week to make up for last week’s near disasters.

Only, sleep floated farther away as her mind geared up and thoughts started to circle.

Then she heard someone groan.

It was unmistakably sexual. There was a quality to the sound that grabbed her by the throat. She froze in her lonely bed, as her heart leapt. She realized she was straining to hear anything else. No other sound was made.

It didn’t matter, anyway. The single low, pleasure-swollen expression had brought her body to high alert. Her nipples crinkled and her clit throbbed, while every other inch of her seemed to heat and glow. She pressed her hand to her belly, yearning for someone else’s touch.

Her mind whirled not with thoughts of work and projects and people to herd, but with images. Bodies in the dark, moving together, sheened with sweat and passion.

She swallowed, lying in the same darkness and deliberately pulled her hand away from her belly and curled it into a fist by her side. She would not touch herself, not even for the relief it would bring. If she did, it would feel like she was participating in their pleasure and that wasn’t an option for her.

Halting the images flowing through her mind in a steady, erotic stream was not as easy.

She rolled onto her side and brought the covers up over her shoulder. Then she closed her eyes and focused fiercely on the dancing afterimages on the backs of her eyelids. She counted her heartbeat. She counted her inhalations.

Were they done, yet? Was Jake drifting to sleep, satiated and exhausted? Did Nyanther stay with him while he slept? It was a startling question, one that Sabrina could not guess the answer to. Riley had mentioned before that either Damian or Nick stayed with her through the night. That might just be their personal arrangements, though. Did vampires have a custom when their human partners slept?

Did vampires often take human partners?

Why would they choose to do that, anyway? They would outlive them. Why would they risk their hearts and their happiness by letting themselves fall in love—

Sabrina sat up with a jerk, her heart thundering. How had she got to thinking about love? Nyanther and Jake were simply having sex. That was all. Any talk of love was ridiculous and way, way,
way
too premature.

Wasn’t it?

She pressed her fist against her aching chest, trying to relieve the pressure. Why was she even worrying about this?

With a sigh, she settled herself back down again. She simply
must
sleep.

Instead, she watched the digital readout of her clock scroll through the hours, until the light coming through the window over her head was undeniably that of dawn and the sounds of a work day started up outside.

When six a.m. arrived and sleep finally started to steal away her alertness, Sabrina felt for her cell phone and thumbed out an email to Cory Morse and her assistant. She couldn’t go into work in this state. She’d be useless. She’d worry about the consequences later. Right now, she could barely think above the simple function of putting words together to form a coherent sentence.

Emails sent, she closed her eyes, shoved the cell phone under her pillow and finally,
finally
, slept.

* * * * *

Even their narrow, primarily residential Soho street was busy on a weekday, with delivery trucks, workers heading for work and mothers taking children to school. The sun climbed higher and beamed almost directly into the room, making Sabrina hot and uncomfortable. She glanced at the clock. Nearly eleven.

With a groan, she pulled herself from the bed and threw on her wrapper and headed to the kitchen. Coffee was most definitely the first priority.

Jake and Nyanther were sitting at the tiny table, talking in low voices.

Sabrina paused at the doorway into the kitchen, surprised.

Jake put down his coffee cup. “I just made a fresh pot,” he told her.

“You’re not surprised to see me here.” She moved into the kitchen and glanced over her shoulder as she opened the pantry doors to survey the contents for a meal idea. “Did you smell me again, Nyanther?”

“I heard you,” he corrected in his deep voice. “You tossed and turned all night. Then you didn’t get up to go to work.”

“Ny said you were waking again and I desperately wanted coffee anyway, so….” Jake shrugged.

She wanted to be annoyed that Nyanther was able to glean so much personal information about her, that her privacy was a joke when he was around, except the powerful aroma of fresh coffee and their thoughtfulness was hard to ignore. “Thank you for the coffee,” she said at last. “No day job for you today, Jake?”

“We didn’t get in until late.”

“She knows,” Nyanther said, his voice rumbling.

Sabrina closed the cupboards and settled for pouring coffee, instead. She wanted coffee more than she wanted food. She could think about breakfast while she was drinking it.

Then she heard a soft baby sound from the floor above and her chest squeezed. “Chloe is up. I’m going to go and say hello,” she told them and picked up the mug. Then she got the hell out of the kitchen before she said anything more.

The fact was, she didn’t know what to say to either of them. The simplest comment, an innocuous observation that Jake hadn’t gone into the office, provoked odd responses that reminded her yet again that Nyanther was not human and Jake was a part of
his
world, not hers.

She had plans. Ambitions only a normal human could have and they were good dreams. Even Nyanther had said so. She hadn’t survived the last thirty years of her life just to give up on everything she had worked for.

She refused to.

Sabrina climbed the stairs to the next floor carefully, so she didn’t spill any coffee. She had learned the hard way the iron stairs became as slippery as ice if liquid was spilled on them, despite the tread pattern stamped into each step.

Riley was sitting on the baby blanket with Chloe, talking and playing with her. She smiled at Sabrina as she sat on the sofa next to them. “You look tired,” she told her.

“So do you. I think we’re both operating on about four hours of sleep right now. How did the hunt go?”

“Are you asking to be polite, or do you really want to know?”

Sabrina blinked, surprised at the question…and her answer. “I really want to know,” she said honestly. “Until Saturday, I don’t think I really understood what the gargoyles were. Nick and Nyanther…they’ve really been hunting them all their lives?”

“Pretty much,” Riley said. She resettled herself so her knee was behind Chloe, who was sitting most of the time but still had moments when her balance deserted her. Riley’s change of position put her in front of Sabrina, so she could look at her more directly. “The hunting was a bust,” she added.

“Sorry.”

Riley shrugged. “It happens. The gargoyles know we quarter an area straight after we’ve found one of them, so they usually relocate immediately afterward and we have to go back to waiting for them to screw up, which tells us where they are.”

“I thought you tracked them? Isn’t that what you do?” Sabrina was puzzled.

“Outside the cities we can track them if we know where to start. They can fly…well, they glide, but they’re very efficient at it. Enough to cross oceans when they need to, but they usually glide over land where the thermals are. It can take them a long way away from northern New York.”

“Then why do they keep coming back here?” Sabrina asked. She knew enough of Riley’s history to know the gargoyles had returned here several times. “Are they…do they feel emotions? Are they coming back for revenge or something like that?”

“Rage defines them,” Riley said, rubbing Chloe’s tummy as she gurgled and whacked the stuffie in her hand against the floor, to make it squeak. “You heard Nyanther on Saturday. The gargoyles became what they are now because of resentment. Because they wanted more. More strength, more land, more power.”

Sabrina nodded. “So they come back here because of you.”

“Me, my family and Nick. Nick is their nemesis. He killed the last of the clan in the 1870s and again, thirty years ago. Now he’s doing his level best to kill them all over again. They know as well as we do that with Azazel gone, this will be the last time.”

“So they’re pissed off
and
desperate,” Sabrina concluded. “Yeah, I’d probably come back to shit on the guy who did that to me, too.”

“Spoken in true Sabrina style,” Riley said, grinning. “How come you’re not at work?”

“Everyone coming back last night woke me. Then my brain kicked into high gear and that was me done for the night.” She sipped the coffee, trying to make it look casual, even though her heart had jumped again as she remembered
what
her brain had been obsessing over last night.

At least Riley couldn’t hear her heart or smell her reactions the way Nyanther could.

Riley tilted her head. “Got a touch of the envies, Sabrina?” she asked softly.

Sabrina drew in a breath very slowly, trying to hide her reaction to Riley’s near-miss guess. “Nope,” she said flatly.

“Jake was with you before he was with Nyanther…and Nyanther would have been willing to take Jake’s place, if you’d let him.”

Sabrina sighed. “Nick and Damian told you, didn’t they? It’s just unfair the way they sense everything.”

Riley shrugged. “I told you, I’ve given up resenting the complete lack of privacy one gets, living with vampires. They’re never malicious about it. They told me when it was clear Nyanther was actually with Jake. They were worried about you.”

“Nick and Damian? They were worried about
me
?”

“You think they shouldn’t be?” Riley asked curiously.

“Honestly, Riley? I sometimes think Nick has forgotten I exist. He rarely speaks to me directly.”

“Because he knows you don’t like being reminded of the hunting world and the supernatural and he is both.”

Sabrina gripped her mug harder. “Why is everyone reminding me of that lately?” she muttered.

“Of what?” Riley looked puzzled.

“It’s like everyone is tiptoeing around me, making allowances for what you make sound like a dysfunction.”

“They’re being kind,” Riley said flatly. “As much as they can be, anyway. I know you don’t want to hear this, Sabrina, but you’re a part of the hunting world whether you like it or not. It’s my fault, because I was actually born into this world. I just didn’t know it. It’s also your fault, because you could have walked away from all of it and lived a purely human life.”

“I couldn’t leave Chloe. Not completely,” Sabrina said stiffly. “Especially not now.”

“Why not now?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said quickly. “I’m not a hunter. I never will be.”

“It doesn’t mean you can’t be part of this world. Look at Damian.”

“He’s a vampire. He’s part of the hunting world whether he picks up his sword or not,” Sabrina said.

“So what is it about supernaturals and hunting you
really
object to, then?” Riley asked, with a touch of asperity. “Because you’re not one of those people who think anything not human or natural is demon-seed and should be cast out with brimstone and fire.”

“What do you care? You have Chloe.”

Riley’s lips parted in surprise.

Sabrina tried to claw it back. “I mean…it’s not what I meant to say. At all. I’m sorry.” She was making it worse, so she gripped the mug and stayed silent. She considered getting up and going back downstairs, only Nyanther and Jake were there, with their uncomfortable observations about her.

Riley had always been good company…until now.

Riley patted Chloe’s back and resettled her on the blanket as she reached too far and almost fell over. She put the stuffie back into Chloe’s hands, studying Sabrina as she did it.

“What’s happened?” Riley asked softly. “I thought nothing mattered to you except financial independence and success, so you could tell the world to fuck off?”

Sabrina winced. Their long cherished ambitions had always been to rise above the scars of being a foster child, the woeful start in life it had given them and become raging successes at whatever they wanted, despite everything. Nights spent drinking too much and talking had always revolved around this shared ambition and the bitter memories that drove it.