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wrong with Crispin now, that he'd let his kiss be starved to the point of
craziness, but at the beginning he could have taken Sezan out. So, whatever
this is, he's using others of the Goddess' get not vampires, but pretty much
everyone else.
"Why wasn't she affected?" This was one of the elves the one who liked really
tight leather pants I think his name was Gref.
"Two reasons." I said, thinking out loud. "One, I'm human, and most of the
humans passed out when the vampires did that's probably why I didn't get
shaken apart.
"So why didn't you drop?" Asked Marcus. Marcus was way too analytical to get
excited about any of this.
"Adrian was holding my hand and Green's you all know about that power surge
thing we do, right?" At this there were several snorts and half laughs, mostly
from the elves. I was going to say how that power surge protected me, but one
of the smaller elves interrupted.
"You still haven't thanked us for cleaning up your mess." He hooted from the
back of the room.
"You still haven't thanked her for cleaning up ours." Arturo said, shouldering
his way through the crowd. He had Grace by the hand. "If not for Cory, we'd be
hip deep in policemen after Mitch's death.
"Instead of one cop being balls deep in her." The same joker said from the
back of the room. I winced, and was in the process of making Brack sit down
when I heard a gurgling sound and turned to see the same elf a short, wiry boy
elf with extremely large hands and feet and lank, rat-tail hair down to the
waist of his old running shorts being held in the air by the throat. By Green.
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"Cory's mine." He said. "And Adrian's. And since I'm pretty sure it was her
power surge that saved us all last night, I suggest we say nothing about her
that isn't nice. Right then, Cocklebur?
There was silence in the room, and a now contrite Cocklebur was set back on
his feet he bowed twice to me and sank to his knees to press his head against
the carpet. I was left speechless. Fortunately, the rest of the room had
plenty of questions.
"How did she save us?" Phillip asked.
"What did she save the elves from?" This from Gref.
"Who was that asshole on the stage?" This was from Brack, and it was the
question that shut down the entire room, because it was the question that had
been plaguing us from the beginning. Who, exactly, was Sezan?
Adrian
Vulnerable
It's a good thing Green moved with faster than human speed, because I would
have killed the fucker, and that's no way to be a leader. All Green has ever
asked of me has been to be a leader I can't deny him that.
Because if I weren't the Head Vampire right now, besides killing that bastard
gnome, I'd be on a motorcycle ride with Cory, or inside of her, or inside of
Green, living that fantastic promise of all that should be love that she had
given to me not long before. My death would have been a lot more fun if I was
that dissolute playboy I'd pretended to be when I first walked in that badly
lit little station that she clung to like a weapon. Imagine all that emotion
hiding behind a pair of brown contacts, black dye, and about twelve pieces of
metal sticking out of her ears and her nose and her eyebrow.
I watched as Green put Cocklebur back on his feet, and bared my teeth in his
direction, letting my eyes glow and my face change. Little bugger turned blue
he was so frightened, and that made me happy. For all of a second.
I looked back at Cory; she'd been pulled back into the conversation, and
watching her face was more entertaining than any movie. But she looked
thinner not in a lean, predatory way, but in a stretched too thin way, and she
was wolfing down that pasta crap that Grace makes that I would have loved when
I was human but that made me queasy now.
"Red meat." I said, out of the blue, and I realized that the whole room had
been looking at me before that, and the words had apparently been pulled out
of my ass.
"Sezan's red meat?" Brack asked, moving his eyebrows like he was trying to
shape the man out of the word. Fuck. Now I really didn't want back in the
conversation.
"Cory needs red meat, moron." I said wearily. "We keep feeding her like an
elf she's a human, and occasionally she's dinner, and that's why she looks
like she's going to wither up and blow away." I wanted to call to Grace, but
she was too smart to throw back into the kitchen. I called for Renny
instead I'd fed often enough from her recently that she heard me quick, and
changed shape when I asked. "Renny, luv make Cory a giant steak, rare, lots of
garlic and mushrooms, eh?
"No garlic." Cory said from the floor but her eyes lit up at the mention of
steak.
"You love garlic." Green said in surprise.
She blushed. "No garlic." She murmured, looking at me under her lashes in a
way that made Renny's blood rush in my body.
"No garlic." I agreed, and the rest of the room faded out of existence, until
Arturo cleared his throat. Bless the elf he loved me, I knew, like a son he'd
never had and he loved Cory too. But he was right. We had work to do.
"So..." Brack said dryly, "About that other thing.
Christ, I didn't want to be here for this. Of all the things in the world I
didn't want the world to know, it was what I'd told Cory, that night in
garden.
"Sezan was a bad man." Cory said softly. "He's dead now." The elves looked at
her, some with resentment, but most accepting. She was afraid of all that
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regard I could feel it in our hearts but you wouldn't know it to look at her.
So good at deception, Cory my love that's why she could blind a helpless old
man with a genuine smile it was like one of the fey, dropping their glamour.
When she drops her glamour, like that whole punk-goth-bitch thing she had down
when we met, when she drops that, she's blinding. I can't believe Arturo and I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]