Blood Trade

of coffee, starting to wake up. “Ketos was a sea serpent. Latin was Cetus. There’s a constellation by that name. Probably worth something on today’s market as a collectable and just for the silver.”

Sea serpent, not dragon. Somehow that made me feel better. “Huh.” I studied the coin. “Wonder how an old Choctaw woman got one.” When no one answered, I tucked it in a pocket and sipped my tea. Eli read a newspaper, a real paper newspaper, the New York Times, and the crinkle of paper and stink of ink took me back to my earliest days in the children’s home. Usually there were eight children in one house, and a married couple, sometimes with children of their own, living there with them, in an attempt to give the children the American ideal of a two-parent, two-gender family. The housefather had read the newspaper every morning, absorbed just like Eli, the smell and sound so distinctive. His name was Carlton. Or maybe Kevin. Something like that.

Eli said, “Media is reporting the number of deaths due to vamps. Locals are having meetings about it.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Maybe they can bore the fangheads to death with their meetings.”

Eli snorted. “Civilians.” It wasn’t a compliment.

Silent as a cat, Rick entered the room and peered into the empty frying pans. “Bro, that’s evil to fill the house with bacon smells and not leave a man any.”

Eli offered one of his microsmiles and said, “Feel free to cook anything you want. Or you can wait on Jameson. He’ll feed you after eight.”

“I’ll cook,” a soft voice said from behind. It was Soul, and I realized that she had been nearby for quite a while, her scent on the air. Today she smelled blue with touches of rain, which was weird, but that was what Beast thought. Soul handed Rick a cell. “You talk. It’s Monica.” Rick’s skin went a faint pink, and his breathing changed. His pheromones shifted from hunger into pleasure.

Rick has another woman in his life.

He wandered out of the room and toward the back door, his voice sounding far too interested, nearly cooing. Beast hissed with displeasure. I sipped tea, feeling a sense of space open up inside me, wide and empty. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, but it wasn’t happy. It was empty and lonely and . . . betrayed. Yeah. How stupid was that? Feeling betrayed because my boyfriend-who-wasn’t was chatting up some girl named Monica. Monica. Bet she had blond hair and big boobs and humongous green eyes. Or blue eyes. Yeah. Wonder how she’d look after tangling with Beast. A wry frown drew my mouth.

Eli got up and left. Alex picked up his tiny computer and wandered away, engrossed.

The sound of sizzling bacon rose from the hot frying pan. I sipped, but the tea had gone cold. After a few minutes, my lack of sleep caught up with me and my eyes started to close of their own volition. Rick still hadn’t come back in. I stood and said, “Night.” Soul didn’t reply, so I headed up the stairs, except that my feet went the other way, to the back door where Rick had gone, and outside.

I smelled him in the distance, his voice a murmur. And then he laughed. Heat shot through me, the heat of anger, the heat of jealousy, spiked and scorching. I wanted to go to him and break the phone into little pieces. And then break him into little pieces.

Instead I slipped silently to the garage and inside. I stood in the darkness, letting my eyes adjust, letting my nose tell me the state of the caged vamp’s health. I heard him breathing, scenting me as well. He was awake. And he no longer smelled sick. He smelled dry and dusty, like old ashes, dead roaches, and shed snakeskins. And he also smelled vaguely meaty, like a raw steak left out at room temp too long. Disgust made my shoulders cringe and made me want to look behind me for ambush, but there was nothing there. I knew that.

I moved through the dark to his cage, whispering. “Hey there, you blood-sucking piece of crap. Is it time for you to die, Francis?”

He didn’t answer. Something slithered across metal and I drew on Beast’s vision to see in the dark. Everything went sharply silver and green, the silver bars of the vamp cage looking like something out of a Disney movie, the thing inside like something out of a Wes Craven or Gregg Hoffman horror film. I leaned against the limo nearby, my weight on my left elbow—and was glad when an alarm didn’t go off—and studied the thing. It was vaguely humanoid, but its eyes were multifaceted, like a fly’s, black and sparkling. His chest was covered by a carapace, gleaming and dark, maybe brown. His hands were trying to transform into pincers, like a crab’s claws, and they were a shimmery dark shade, maybe blue. The transformation had been fast. He was still wearing pants, which was a blessing. His feet were unchanged, except for the toenails, which had grown out curved and thick, like a really bad case of toenail fungus. I let my mouth curl at the thought, knowing from the swivel of his eyes that he could still see in the dark better than I could. Vamp vision was better than Beast’s.

My big-cat growled deep inside and padded close. In Beast’s vision, with the lights off, I could see the faint shimmer of magics on the vamp’s transforming body. And now, standing still and close, I could smell the magics, oddly familiar beneath the ammoniac stench, but the memory wouldn’t come. I let it slide away for now.

“The Cajun vamps. They got you some food?”

“Not enough,” the vamp said, the consonants sounding mushy, as if his mouth didn’t work right anymore. “Hungry.”

“Fame Vexatum,” I said. “Get used to it. If you live, it’ll be the only way you will survive.”

“I would rather die,” Francis said after a long silence.

“That won’t be a problem, actually. In fact, you’ve become a liability. The longer you stay here, the more you heal and transform, the greater chance that you’ll cause me problems.”

“Yes. You speak the truth. You smell of anger.”

“Yep. I’m pretty unhappy. So you give me something right now, something I can use to find my friend, Misha. Something I can use to locate Narkis and Zoltar. Something that will take me to the leader of the Naturaleza. Something. Or I’ll kill you. That’s simple enough.”

He tilted his head, and I realized that his neck had grown thicker and was jointed. Ick. “Our leader, if we had one, would need to communicate with us, mind to mind.”

“Yeah. So?”

“That is my gift. If you are wise, you might determine what it means.”

My whole face scrunched up. “Say what?” The vamp in the cage turned his head away. I shrugged and said, “No more food until you talk, Francis. Not one drop.” I left the garage.

Without looking into the shadows that might be hiding Rick, I entered the B and B, climbed the stairs, and found my bed. Or I’m moderately sure I did, because I woke up lying on my stomach, face mostly buried in pillow, fully clothed, hours later. The sun was still up, light slanting through the blinds. I no longer felt empty inside. Rick had moved on to Monica. I could accept that. I had hurt him so badly when I accused him of killing me that, of course he moved on. Who wouldn’t?

I blinked, lashes hitting the sheets. I didn’t like that Rick had a girlfriend. But I didn’t have to like it. I just had to live with it. I sighed, feeling the mattress move under me.

“I don’t need a guy,” I mumbled into the linen. “I love this bed, and it’s better than any guy.” The memory foam was even better than the mattress back at the freebie house in New Orleans, and that was saying a lot. I rolled over and stretched, pulling muscles that felt a lot better than they had recently. Shifting had been good for me, and when I’d shifted back, I had kept all the hard-earned muscles. I hadn’t been sure I would.

I made my way to the bath, stripped, and stumbled into the tub and beneath a scalding hot spray of water. I stayed that way for a long, long time, breathing in the steam, before I soaped and shampooed and shaved off all the body hair that had grown back with the shift. Feeling better, I shut off the water and wrapped one towel around my head and my body in another; this one was huge, bigger than a beach towel and ten times fluffier. I shoved the shower curtain.

I froze, steam swirling around me. Bruiser leaned against the counter, his arms crossed, his head tilted slightly to the side, an intense look on his face.

He was shirtless, his arms to his sides, lightly gripping the marble countertop at his back, his dress pants hanging low on his hips and resting over his bare arches. A coiling tension stirred within me—Beast rising.

Scattered on the counter behind Bruiser was an electric razor with three large circulating heads, an old- fashioned shaving brush and modern razor, a green deodorant bottle, toothpaste tube and toothbrush, what looked like bottles and jars of cosmetics, and a man’s black leather zippered toiletries bag. There was also a man’s shirt on a hanger, a tie draped around the neck, and a pair of men’s socks on the floor. I’d been too sleepy when I entered to see any of that stuff.

Crap. Bruiser had taken the room next to mine.