Chapter 11
Eve snuggled into the warmth surrounding her body. It had been so long since she had felt so relaxed, so comfortable. The heat covering her like a cocoon shifted, tightening around her. Instead of pulling away she wedged her body as close possible to it. Never before could she remember feeling so safe, so at sure that nothing bad was going to happen.
Something seductive and heady wrapped around her nose. A scent that was bold and rich, utterly masculine. She buried her head closer, nuzzling into a patch of hot skin, the source of all that smoldering heat. Her forehead rubbed against something scratchy and bristly. But the odd sensation wasn’t enough to make her separate herself from it. She didn’t ever want to part from the pleasant and comfy embrace. She just wanted to let the fire soak into her skin and thaw out the black ice that frosted her insides.
“Eve,” the deep, rumbling voice of the living furnace whispered her name.
That was enough to jolt her into full consciousness. She tried pulling away but didn’t get very far. Arms were locked around her and gave little room to maneuver. But she could pick her head up enough to see who it was that was holding her.
She lay stretched out against Qhuinn’s side. He had his eyes closed, his breathing still deep and even. He must have murmured her name in his sleep. Her hand rested on his chest, the steady thumping of his heart played rhythmically against her fingertips. He had the look of absolute relaxation. His face was devoid of any kind of intense emotion. No anger, no cockiness to paint his countenance…just a blank canvas for her to spy upon.
She reached up and brushed a few stray black locks of hair out of his eyes to see him better. His brow puckered and he muttered something indiscernible but did not wake.
It was a surprise that underneath all that gunmetal grey hardware and pure aggression was very handsome male. Eve knew he was good looking but now that she studied him he was more appealing than she would ever be willing to admit out loud. He still had a rough edge and all the metal made him appear tougher still. It was like watching a tiger. The animal was gorgeous, sleek, and powerful. But you knew to keep your distance, that all that intrinsic beauty was a cover for the dangerous predator lurking within. Most were enthralled by all that exotic loveliness. But Eve had seen too many mauled because they were seduced into falling for that illusion, that fallacy that beautiful things equated to a sense of goodness.
Eve pulled away from her observation of the vampire and wondered what had happened last night. She knew she had imbibed enough to get her comfortable with the idea of snuggling up to a virtual stranger. An empty rum bottle stood on the table next to another bottle of alcohol and two dry tumblers, telltale signs of what went down the night before.
She remembered bits and pieces but the rest was stuck in a grey haze of intoxication.
It was hard for her to believe that she had let go of her stalwart self-control long enough to get so drunk she blacked out. It wasn’t like her but if she were honest with herself it felt good to let go for once, to unwind, to lose herself in the moment and not continually worry about what happens next. For what Eve could remember of the night before, she forgot about her problems and was more at ease than she had ever been since she landed herself in a den of vampires.
At least she didn’t have a splitting headache. She wasn’t used to drinking, her tolerance for it was mostly nonexistent. It wouldn’t take much and Eve had downed a bottle that had been a little less than halfway full to begin with. She was grateful she wasn’t on her hands and knees praying to the porcelain god, although that might change if she started moving around.
Eve rested her head against Qhuinn’s shoulder. There would be no slipping away without waking him. Not only did she not want to rouse him, she was sure she didn’t want to chance getting up either. The way her head was still slightly muzzy and the ceiling had a tilt to it, she was sure she was still half in the bag. There was also a part of her that wanted to stay in his embrace and feel that sense of protection for just a little while longer.
One thing that she did notice was that the nightmares hadn’t plagued her this time. She wasn’t certain what had prevented them. Maybe it was from intoxication or from being in the company of another while she slept. If it was the drinking she didn’t think she could do that every night. If it was being with someone…well she didn’t think she could handle doing that either. Maybe it was feeling warm, feeling safe. There had to be some way to keep the dreams from seeping into her mind at night.
Thinking about the dreams her mind naturally wandered to Michael and the dilemma of his reappearance. She didn’t know what she should do about him – if anything could be done about him while she was stuck here. He was back in Caldie and her mother was out there with him and she had no clue how close to home he really was. Everyone had just figured he ditched town after he’d killed her brother. But obviously he was back. Perhaps he had never left at all.
Eve shivered at the thought. He had been this close to her for god only knew how long and she never knew, never even wanted to think about it and forget he ever existed.
He had to have figured out that he hadn’t killed her at that construction site. Would Michael now go after Dina next? Would he seek her mother out and try to snuff her out like he did with Eve? If he was one of those things, those
lessers, would he still be interested in the victims he left behind in his old life? Michael was as grotesque as ever now that he was a member of the undead. He probably thought he had executed Eve in that dark, deserted alleyway. The bastard could decide to seek out her mother and finish the job he had started seven years ago.
The thought of him getting to Dina made her insides roll. Where the alcohol didn’t make her want to hurl, even the most fleeting thoughts of Michael Zimmerman did.
She wished she had some way to reach her mother, to warn her. She trusted that Freddie would protect Dina. That he would keep her safe from her psychotic ex-boyfriend. But would that be enough?
Their relationship had been a short one, but it had lasted longer than any relationship that Eve could remember her mother having.
Dina had met Fredrick Malone at the Riverside Diner where she had worked as a waitress. Freddie was there meeting with the locals, putting his name out there in the political playing field. Both of them had claimed love at first glance.
Eve had rolled her eyes when they had first begun dating. Dina was like a teenage girl in a room full of boys. She fell in love with every hot face that passed her by.
All her mother’s “true loves” had started out as love at first sight. All her prince charmings had turned out to be snakes that hissed sweet words to get into her pants and wallet – not that there had been much money to take. They slithered their way into her home and leeched off her until they were ready to move on. It was a never ending vicious cycle that Eve had played witness to countless times.
Even Butch had been a onetime prospect for Dina when Eve had been a little girl and her brother was barely a year old. But it was a fling that only lasted a few weeks before they were evicted and had to move on to an even crummier place. Butch hadn’t been like the other men only because he wasn’t a freeloading sleazeball and he didn’t treat Eve and her brother like parasites. But he didn’t attach strings either. He only wanted one thing from her mother and that had been a couple of tumbles between the sheets and that was it.
With all the experiences Eve had with men through her mere twenty-three years, it wasn’t a wonder that she was sleeping with another woman. Eve knew she would never find domestic bliss with anyone, at least not the way her mother had always dreamed of for her and herself. To be honest, she never sat down and thought about sharing a life with anyone. The only concerns she had were what was going to be on her next canvas. Eve just took everything day to day. Her career was the only thing that she had ever had that had been a permanent fixture in her life, the only thing she found complete comfort and solace in, the only sun that she revolved around. Without art, she was nothing.
Nothing but a newly made angel.
Eve still didn’t know what to make of that.
Did she ever really believe in God before? Maybe when she was a child and still believed in magical rainbows and unicorns and shit. Did she believe in God now?
She didn’t know.
Eve never grabbed on to religion the way some people do. She never had to go to church, never had to read the bible, never had to have any interaction with something she always thought of as a cult. When she had lived with Butch, he had tried to get her to go – mostly because he thought she needed to be in some form of therapy. She had always declined his invitations never wanting to integrate with the devoted that looked to someone else to fix their problems.
Was it because of all the snubbing she did that her life was shit? Was this some sort of divine punishment? Everything that she had ever loved had been taken away from her. She wasn’t on speaking terms with God anyway. Praying and begging wasn’t in her nature.
What was she going to do now after her life had changed to drastically yet again?
She didn’t have her career any more. She didn’t have a family or the few friends that could put with her. She had nothing here. She
was nothing here. She had no trade that would be useful in this world she was now stuck in. Nothing was real. There was nothing left to her that she could call her own. Not the bed she slept in, not the clothes, not anything but a few pictures and notebooks.
Eve was trapped like a wild thing in a cage.
She hated this feeling of being trapped, of being taken away from the only world she knew and held in confinement somewhere completely foreign to her.
Eve sighed and pressed tighter to the vampire’s comforting warmth.
It should have felt odd to sleep next to Qhuinn, to be as intimate as she was being with him. They had started off as not necessarily enemies, but they had been against each other, antagonizing and hurtful. Now she didn’t know what they were. Not exactly friends, but a truce was drawn. They would be pleasant to one another as long as they had to see each other every day. Eve didn’t think she had the emotional capacity to deal with fighting him either.
Judging on their current positions alone, one would not think that they were uncomfortable with each other but Eve was still uneasy. She was still learning what buttons were allowed to be pushed and which ones were forbidden. Not only with Qhuinn, but everyone else that lived in the compound.
Qhuinn had been acting rather strange when he had come down earlier. If it hadn’t been Qhuinn, she would have said he was diffident, so not the playboy that she had met a few nights ago. He had barely looked at her at first, avoiding her gaze. And when he finally did, it was as if she had grown a second head. Something was up with him or maybe he was just over taxed from sparring with the others.
Who knew what was going on with that vampire.
Eve closed her eyes and willed herself to fall back asleep. At least she could try to get a few more uninterrupted hours without the terrible nightmares plaguing her.
However, luck was not on her side. She floated into a dream as soon as she dozed off.
Eve was in a dark room. She thought everything was decorated in black and white when she realized it was her eyesight that was dulled, devoid of any color. She blinked a few times, trying to correct her vision but she was stuck in a monotone world. Candle flickered around the room. Gauzy material draped from the ceiling concealing something in the center of the room. She could hear soft breathy sighs, the sliding of flesh against flesh.
Eve swam though the colorless sea of black, white, and gray, pushing aside black silken fabric that hung like spider weds. The moans got louder, the slapping of flesh increased. When she got to the middle of all the drapery she froze at the sight before her.
A large body was stretched out, obscuring a smaller, more delicate frame. Male and female, both nude. He had one pale white ankle in his grip stretched up over her head as he pounded into her.
Eve’s hands tingled – and maybe a few other places, too. She wanted to touch all that bared male beauty, to feel those muscles bunching under the pads of her fingers, to run her nails down that smooth tanned skin. She watched on as the male’s hips swiveled and twisted, rutting into the female like a thing possessed. By the pleas and sighs it was obvious that whoever was beneath him was enjoying everything done to her.
Sweat glistened in the candlelit, dripping down rippling skin. The scent of salt and sex blended and created a heady, luscious perfume in the air.
Even though it was her dream she felt like a voyeur intruding on an extremely intimate moment between two lovers in the middle of some serious hot and heavy. But she couldn’t turn away from the captivating sight even if she wanted to. It was so entrancing, so sensual that a thrill coursed through her. Heat prickled her skin. Her breathing hitched, coming out in breathy pants.
Reaching out, she poised her hand over the undulating bodies. She couldn’t help it. She had to feel all that perfection running beneath her fingertips. Eve had never seen anything so raw, so primal, so utterly extraordinary. It was like a masterpiece given animation and she wanted nothing more than to explore it. She never considered sex something beautiful – much less with a man. But this…this was pure art.
Her gaze roamed from the pumping hips up to his back that bunched and flexed with every movement. Before she could take in any more of him, the male twisted his body, taking the female with him so that she ended up on top riding him.
Eve froze. Her eyes went wide with shock with what was before her.
Holy shit!
It was
her riding him like a seasoned porn star, her that was gasping and calling out for more.
She looked down at who she was straddling.
Holy motherfucking shit!
Qhuinn was her costar in the dream, the one pumping into her like a well oiled machine.
She must have said or did something that caught his attention. His hand went to dream-Eve’s hips and a glazed mismatch set of eyes focused on her.
Eve and Qhuinn both woke with a jerk at the same time. They both looked at each other in a jumbled expression of equal parts shock, horror, and confusion.
She just had a sex dream of her and Qhuinn getting it on. Never in her life did she ever have any kind of erotic fantasy like that.
Suddenly the confused dazed look on his face dissolved into outrage. His jaw clenched and unclench, his nostrils flaring so wide she was surprise flames didn’t start shooting out.
“Were you in my head?” he asked harshly, slipping off of the couch and towering over her.
“What? I…” She was still too shocked to speak, too busy trying to sort through what had just happened. Had she been in his head? She thought it was her dream, but it had been different from all the nightmares that she had been having lately. Not once in her life had her mind ever created such a scenario. “That was your dream?” It had to be. Her normal dreams were akin to Michael Myers not Debbie Does Vampires.
“You stay the fuck out of my head!” he bellowed and then took off, storming out into the vestibule.
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered to the empty darkened room before sinking further into the couch. She buried her hands in her head and groaned.
Eve was mortified. She hadn’t meant to intrude on anyone’s dreams. She sure as hell hadn’t meant to intrude on
that kind of dream. She didn’t even know it was possible that she could do such a thing.
Was it some newly gained angelic ability? Was it going to happen every time she went to sleep?
Just more questions to tack on to an infinitely growing list.
And speaking of angels, where the hell was Lassiter? He should be here helping her figure all this out, guiding her through so she wasn’t stumbling blindly into these situations. Instead he was off doing who knew what.
As if the mere thought conjured him, Lassiter came strolling through the door looking as fresh as a spring daisy basking in the high noon sun.
“Where have you been?” Eve asked, glaring at the angel’s glowing form through her fingers.
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Here and there. Why do you care?”
“Because, Dr. Seuss,” she gritted out, “you’re supposed to be helping me work through all this freaky shit that’s happening to me and you keep disappearing.”
One sandy blond eyebrow arched high on his head. “What’s happened to you?”
“I went to sleep and the next thing I know, I’m poking around in someone else’s head. What the hell is that about? Is this going to start happening every time I go to sleep?” she demanded.
“No, not every time. And not at all if you can control it.”
Her glower softened a bit. “How do I control it?”
“With practice.”
All remaining embarrassment melted away into anger. “Enough with the cryptic bullshit. Can I get one straight answer out of you?”
Lassiter held his hand out to her. Eve looked at it then blinked up at him.
“I’m pissed at you,” she snarled. He kept leaving her alone, not giving her much in the way of help when it came to sorting this stuff out. It was frightening not know what was going on with her own body. Even worse that she felt absolutely alone in this.
“So you’re going to pout like a child about it?”
Eve took a deep breath before she started screaming at him. She accepted his hand. What he did next wasn’t what she had expected. He pulled her into an embrace and held her.
She squirmed in his arms. “What are you doing?”
“Comforting you. You’re emotions are grating on mine and it’s bothersome. You’re also intoxicated. I can smell it.”
“So what,” she muttered.
“You shouldn’t drink.”
“I’m an adult. I can drink if I want to.”
“Drinking lowers your ability to control your powers which is one of the reasons why you found yourself dream weaving. Come on. Let’s go outside.”
“Again?”
“Rain is coming soon. We might not have tomorrow.”
Eve followed behind as Lassiter pulled her out into the bright and sunny late spring day. The air was fresh and slightly cool. Clusters of birds whistled and chirped in the trees. She squinted up at the sun that shined on cheerfully. She had never been a daytime kind of person. So it still spooked her that she actually enjoyed the warm rays soaking into her skin and rejuvenating something inside of her like a withering plant suddenly watered.
He didn’t take her to one of the lounges like before. They kept walking to the edge of the property, coming to the dense woods that surrounded the fortress.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere secluded. Somewhere where we will truly be alone and not be spied upon by those bloodsuckers.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to walk through the forest barefoot.”
Blue-rimmed pupils looked down and her bare wiggling toes then back up to her face. “You young ones always make things so difficult.”
She opened her mouth to say something but suddenly dangling in front of her face was a pair of plain black leather boots Lassiter held by the laces. “They’ll fit. Put them on.”
Eve was flabbergasted. Lassiter had just pulled them out of thin air. Even decked out in cargo pants, there was no where that he could have stored them. “How did you do that?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “I have my ways.”
“You so have to teach me to do that.” Maybe being supernatural wouldn’t be so bad.
“I’m not so sure you’ll ever learn. In any case, we start with the small things first. Got to see how much is there to work with,” he said in a tone that suggested he didn’t expect much from her.
Eve used Lassiter as a prop so she could slip the boots on and tie up the laces. They were a perfect fit.
“We good?”
She nodded.
The two trudged through the woods. There was no path so brambles clawed and yanked at her clothing with their numerous thorns. Low hanging tree branches pulled at her hair. It was like cat fighting with Mother Nature and the bitch was kicking her ass. By the time they got to a clearing, she was looking like a wild woman. Leaves and twigs were tangled in her tresses. There were bloody scrapes on her cheeks and hands. However, Lassiter looked none the worse for wear. There wasn’t a snag or snarl to be seen.
The clearing was actually quite beautiful and made the trek worth it. It was a sunny patch with a small stream that trickled through. Wildflowers grew in clumps of all different colors and made the air smell fresh and sweet. Butterflies fluttered on delicate colorful wings. A few of them even mistook Lassiter for lunch and landed on the long strands of gold and black hair.
“It seems you’ve made some friends,” Eve teased as he shooed them away with a wave of his hand. Some of the more determined insects wouldn’t take no for an answer and found purchase on other parts of his body. The rejects came to her for a landing strip. There was no harm done so she didn’t bother chasing them away.
Lassiter signed in defeat, resigned to let the damned things have their way.
There was a recently felled tree they used as a bench. They sat side by side facing each other.
“Try to open your mind to me,” Lassiter began.
“What do you mean?”
“Try to feel me out mentally. Close your eyes and concentrate. Focus on everything around you. You’ll feel my presence, my energy reaching out to you. Find the link between us.”
Eve did as he instructed. She could feel a little something. She didn’t know how to describe it. It was like a gentle, feather light touch against her mind. It was warm, tingly and it made Eve jerk away from it immediately.
“You have to relax. I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.”
“I don’t want you poking around in my head.”
“I’ve already poked around in your head.”
“What! When?” She was outraged. It had been an accident what she had done to Qhuinn. She didn’t like it any more when it happened to her.
“Relax. You weren’t in good shape the other day. I was the one who kept your nightmares at bay so you could sleep. You needed to rest. I did nothing else to you.”
“Is it like the same thing I did to Qhuinn?”
“So he’s the bloodsucker I smell all over you.”
Eve blushed. “It’s not like that.”
Lassiter smiled but made no move to argue with her. “It’s a form of telepathy. You can ghost in and out of others’ minds, their dreams. With enough skill they won’t even know you are there. Judging by how you trampled down half the forest like a rampaging elephant, you’re going to need a lot of work in subtlety.”
Eve rolled her eyes. “Sorry I lack the eloquence and grace that you do, Twinkle Toes. I’ll try harder next time.”
He angel sighed and shook his head. “Are you ready to begin your first lesson?”
She had to stop herself from repeating the same gesture. “About as ready as I’ll ever be.”
