“I...you...” Words were a concept I couldn’t quite grasp at the moment. Six hours of labour down the drain.
Andrei cast a disparaging eye over the mess he’d made. Then he staggered to the side, caught himself using the bench top, and took another swig of purple liquid from a squat bottle with a crystal at the base.
“Jeez, cupcake,” he said. “You really didn’t need to go through all this trouble for me.”
The tray that I tossed at his head only just narrowly missed its mark. “You selfish jerk!” I screamed. “Is that all you can say?”
He ducked his head, laughing cruelly. His eyes were unfocused. There was a gash across his expensive grey shirt that was still glowing with silver angelfire. He stumbled forward, stuck his fingers in his own spew, and fished out a mini quiche. He shook it vigorously, managing to make more mess, and handed it to me.
“There you go,” he slurred. “All better.”
I was going to wring his neck. Casting around for a weapon, I picked up the iron poker from the fireplace. Iron wasn’t particularly useful on vampires, but the tip was new and sharp. His grin only fuelled the fire in me.
“C’mon,” he said. “I came here for a shoulder to cry on.” His gaze tracked to the bows on either of my shoulders. Red bled into his irises. “You know, I never noticed how cute you are. Sure you want to hold out for Fur-Face?” It was the mocking in his voice that sent my fury skyrocketing.
“Oh, and you think you’re some kind of prize?” I snapped. “Let me guess, you’ve pissed Astrid off and she told you to get lost, and now you’re sulking?”
His features darkened as the red began to saturate the rest of his eyes. I didn’t care that I was butting heads with a vampire. When his canines elongated and I saw that they were washed in blood, I knew how close to the edge he really was. But the more fresh blood he had in his system, the more vulnerable he was to my alchemy.
He knew it too, because instead of attacking me, he crumbled the bench in his palms. “Stop it!” I screamed.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, taunting me. “Don’t want to ruin your perfect little paradise?”
I wanted to kill him. I was going to kill him. After all the time we’d spent together, he didn’t have the slightest consideration for how important this was to me. Or how truly frightened I was. And yet, he just kept standing there watching me. His blood-soaked eyes were so full of an emotion that I couldn’t quite place.
My rage fizzled a little. “What did you do?” I asked.
Though I didn’t really want to hear it, getting it out of him was probably the fastest way to get him to leave.
“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t need pity friendship!”
I threw my arms in the air. “Then what do you want from me, Andrei? Why did you really come here? I know you’re not totally selfish, despite all evidence to the contrary.”
“Oh well, when you say such nice things, why wouldn’t I want to talk to you?”
I breathed through my nose and sank into the Ley dimension. His aura was simmering with such self-loathing that it was impossible to ignore him now. The crimson shell around its core was fluctuating rapidly as a result of all that enhanced alcohol he had ingested. But at his very core, he was in a great deal of pain. I could only guess at what the root of the problem was.
“You’re not Kai,” I said when I flicked my eyes open. “You never will be.” His cheek twitched. His top lip curled over those white teeth that were suddenly wickedly sharp. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You are your own person. You can’t keep spending your life living in his shadow and hating him for your choices.”
He lashed out. Sticking his hand into the smaller hearth, he grabbed the handle of the cauldron. It was all kinds of stupid. “Andrei!”
The heat of the burning metal scalded his hand. He gave a pained roar and hauled the cauldron out, throwing it through the window to my left. I jumped back a mile as glass shattered. A piece of the window frame cracked as the cauldron swiped it. Glass belched everywhere. Pain sliced into my arm as I threw them over my head to protect my face. I screamed as I tried to leap over the mess of glass on the floor. It cut into the soles of my feet. I winced. He appeared beside me via teleport.
Giving up his liquor prize, he wrapped his arm around me and teleported us away. I had no idea whether he did it on purpose or if his head was all screwy from his breakdown, but when we came through on the other side of the teleport, we weren’t inside the house anymore.
Cries of surprise and growls of anger filled the air. I landed on my back in the grass with Andrei wrapped firmly around me. The scent of barbecue and burned sugar hung in the air. We had landed smack bang in the middle of the conference room field.
The bow on my right was half hanging off my shoulder. The already short skirt was somewhere around my hips. Andrei, the bastard, grabbed hold of the skirt and dragged it down. I imagined he thought he was doing me some kind of favour but he was too forceful. The tug ripped the camisole down my chest, exposing the top curve of my breasts.
A roar filled the night air with a menace so pervasive I felt my bladder loosening. “Shit!” Andrei spat. He teleported us back to the house. We came through on the other side with the sound of his incredulous laughter ringing in
