THREE
“Oh Jack! Oh, my god, Jack! Yes, yes, yes!”
The busty redhead he’d run into walking her dog on the street was bouncing enthusiastically on top of Jack, her hands up in her hair in a way that struck him as comical. It was almost like she was putting on a show of what she thought of how a woman was supposed to act like when she was getting her brains screwed out.
It was almost like a joke with a punchline only he could hear, and when he thought about it that way he had a moment when he was sure he wasn’t going to be able to keep from busting out laughing. He wanted to laugh, probably would later, but he wanted more not to cause a scene. Besides, he had been the one to lure her into this scenario in the first place. Not because he had really wanted to, because he hadn’t. It had been more of a game, a game it turned out he wasn’t very interested in.
“Oh god! Yes! I’m close! I’m so close! Are you close?”
Jack made a noncommittal noise, something that seemed to be enough to satisfy this woman whose name he couldn’t even remember. She had been out walking her dog on a dark street with street lamps that only sometimes worked. Jack had been on one of his rambling walks. It was what he did almost every night, at least on the nights when he wasn’t in one of the many vampire clubs popping up throughout the less prestigious areas of Austin, Texas.
The clubs were fine, just like everything else was fine, but every now and then, it got to feeling a little bit boring, a little bit too domesticated. It was at those times that Jack would take to the streets, what his sometimes friend with benefits and fellow vampire called his “ramblings for trouble.” He supposed that was exactly what he was doing, but what was wrong with that? He was a vampire, for Christ’s sake. Wasn’t he supposed to be looking for trouble? Wasn’t that pretty much one of the key elements of being what he was?
“Jack! Oh, Jack!”
He looked up to see her head tossed back, red hair flying, with her mouth open in a permanent moan of pleasure. Her massive breasts were bouncing up and down so enthusiastically that he wondered if they might not just jump up and hit her in the face.
Her hands were splayed out on his chest, her fingernails digging into his skin in a way that would have probably drawn blood had he been a different sort of man. Or, to be more precise, if he had been a man at all.
He could feel the folds of her sex closing more and more tightly around his shaft as her hips gyrated with an enthusiasm that he could only think to describe as admirable. While his mind wasn’t nearly as interested in what was going on as it should have been, his body was responding exactly the way it should be.
He could feel the blood rushing to the one place this chick was really interested and his hands moved up to her waist without even realizing he was doing it. Her back arched further and then she let out a scream. She actually screamed with pleasure and then bucked forward, her breasts grazing his chest as she rode out the orgasm he had given her.
She took his earlobe into his mouth and, with her hips still riding him like he was some kind of a carnival ride, led him to his own happy ending. With a groan, he released himself inside of her, feeling himself quiver with relief.
For a moment, the two of them remained in just that position, both of them in the kind of sex haze that offered life’s most complete distraction. Jack would have been fine with staying that way for a while longer, but the woman who was still on top of him seemed to have other ideas.
“That was totally amazing.”
He made a grunting sound, neither an agreement nor a contradiction, and hoped it would be enough to shut her up. Why the hell did women do this, anyway? Didn’t they realize that no man wanted to have a chat right after sex? Especially not when he was still inside of her, for fuck’s sake.
Like she could hear the thoughts in his head, the chick rolled off him, burying her head in the crook of his arm like there was some kind of actual, real intimacy between them. Jack wasn’t a fan of the cuddling, but he was hoping that she might be content enough with that to stop talking. Fortune, apparently, was not on his side. Go figure, right? Served him right for thinking he could just screw her and not have to pay any kind of price. That kind of thing almost never happened.
“It was amazing, right? Don’t you think it was amazing?”
“It was good.”
“Good? That’s all? You think it was only good?”
Her voice had taken on a pouty, whiny tone that Jack didn’t care for at all. He wasn’t sure what exactly this girl wanted from him, but he knew for damn sure that he wasn’t prepared to give it to her.
She should have known what this was getting into, and if she didn’t, well as far as he was concerned, that was on her. It wasn’t like he had abducted her and dragged her to his apartment, after all. He wasn’t asking her to stay, either.
“It was good. Yeah, it was good. Fine.”
“Fine?! Seriously? Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel special, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to be making you feel special. Is that a given when you’re fucking these days?”
She let out an exasperated exhalation of air and leaped to her feet. Jack thought it was probably pretty hard to look indignant when you were buck-ass naked, but this chick was doing a pretty good job of it.
She stood with her hands on her hips, a look of disgust in her eyes and her large, perky breasts pointed at him with nipples that were still hard. Or maybe hard again. Hell, maybe she was one of those girls who got like that any time she got any kind of excited, whether it was sexual or angry or something else entirely. It wasn’t like he would know. He didn’t know anything about her.
“You’re kind of an asshole, you know that?”
“I believe I’ve been told.”
“So like, what’s your deal? You just charm random girls and bring them home? Just so you can be mean to them after you get what you want?”
“Look,” he propped himself up on his elbows, feeling himself losing his patience with this whole scene. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. You asked me a question, I answered it. It was good. It was a good way to pass a Friday night. It’s not winning any awards or anything. If you don’t like it, feel free to leave.”
“So now you want me to leave?”
“If you like. Or stay for a while. Although I don’t know how long I would leave my dog tied to a street pole if I were you.”
She made a little screeching sound and threw the closest thing she could find. It happened to be a very old, very expensive vase that sat on one of his bedside tables. He moved his head as it went soaring through the air and shattered when it hit the wall behind him. He turned his neck to survey the damage and then turned back to look at the one who had thrown it. If he had been losing his patience before, it was more than gone at this point. She must have seen it, too, because she stopped her screaming and took a quick, uncertain step backwards.
“Are you done?”
“I don’t know,” she answered with a false toughness neither of them believed. “I haven’t decided yet. Are you done being an ass?”
“No, I don’t believe I am. What I can tell you, however, is that I believe it’s time for you to go. I don’t care for people destroying my things. I must say, you’ve overstayed your welcome.”
She made a strangled sound that landed somewhere between a yell and a sob and bent to retrieve her clothing as quickly as she could manage. He didn’t move as she dressed, didn’t say another word. He knew he should feel bad for treating her this way, but it was an emotion he just couldn’t manage to muster up.
All he did was watch as she gathered her belongings and stormed toward his door. She opened it, but turned, yelling out to him to make damn sure he got an earful of her parting words.
“Pricks like you always get what you deserve. I hope you know that. I don’t even know why I went with you in the first place, but I hope to god I never see you again. You’ll get what you deserve. You’ll get what you deserve for sure.”
She slammed the door hard enough to knock a picture off the wall, something else expensive and irreplaceable. But then again, that was what most of the things he had decorating his place were. That’s what happened when you had lived for almost two hundred years.
You collected things that most normal people would have been happy to see in just a museum, let alone right in front of them. All those precious things should have meant something to him. They probably had, at some point. But now? Now, they were only more things for him to look at and not find terribly exciting. That was one of the major bummers about living forever that nobody ever told you about. Things got really fucking stagnant.
“Bravo, Jack. I mean really, job well done.”
Christ, the hits just kept on coming, didn’t they? Not that this was a hit he was all that upset about. Scarlett Belmont was the kind of girl who had a habit of coming and going as she pleased. She’d done so ever since the two of them had met, somewhere around the year 1900 in a dirty little hovel of an apartment in the not-so-nice area of Paris.
Out of the many women Jack had experienced, and he’s guess it was somewhere well into the thousands at this point, she was the only one who’d ever stuck. Not that it was anything special. More so it was an occasional meeting born out of familiarity and whenever Scarlett happened to be around. Jack thought of her as a kind of an alley cat. She had never taken to being tied down to one place, one home.
She wasn’t even content to live a long-term nomadic life as many of their kind did. With Scarlett, staying put in one location for even a month was almost impossible. Jack would go whole years without ever seeing her and then he’d look up and there she would be. Just like she was now.
“Scarlett.”
“Oh lord, don’t you just know how to make a woman feel special?”
“Not doing it for you?”
“No, darling, not at all. If you aren’t careful, I’ll think you aren’t happy to see me. Please, tell me that’s not the case. You’ll hurt my feelings. You know how delicate I can be.”
“Delicate? Please. Delicate is nothing I would use to describe you. Not now, not ever.”
“Oh, all right, but you could have at least pretended. Played along with the ruse, shall we say. You never know, do you? Maybe I’m looking for someone to make me feel more feminine. Maybe that’s why I’ve come here to begin with.”
As she spoke, Scarlett bent and undid the straps of her incredibly high heeled sandals. As she did so, her mahogany hair, set in rich, loose curls, fell into her face. She looked almost more animal than human. That was the kind of vampire Scarlett was. Her body was lithe and supple, her heart shaped face and wide blue eyes making her look caught somewhere between girl and grown woman.
She was heart-breaking even to look at, but the sweetness of her appearance was nothing but an illusion. It was an illusion she used to her advantage, that was for sure. She gave Jack a veiled look, like she knew exactly what he was thinking (which, come to think of it, she probably did) and then perched on the end of his bed. No, not on the end of it. Not on the foot of the bed the way a person might.
She literally sat on the foot of the bedframe, perching on the antique brass foot board as if she weighed nothing at all. She was nothing human. Even if Jack hadn’t known that, he would have been able to tell by looking at her now. He felt the same complex stirring of emotions he had felt about her for more than a century. There was a part of him that loved her, and an equal part that felt something very close to loathing.
It was the way the two of them were together. They had always been that way and would go on like that until either the world ended or one of them decided to make a last stand out in the desert and go the way of the ancient ones who were too tired to keep on living. One thing was for certain. Predator or not, which she surely was, Scarlett had zero problems looking feminine.
“Is that it then? Are you looking to get some compliments? If so, you know you’ve come to the wrong place. I’ve used up my compliments for you long ago.”
“That’s true. Although you could always give it a try.”
“Interesting. Do you have any compliments for me?”
“For you? Oh god no. You’re such a mess, after all. But then you knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I did. Still, you do seem to keep showing up.”
“Yes,” she sighed, her lip poking out in a pout that was insanely sensual. “You’re right about that. A glutton for punishment, I suppose. And then there’s the comfort of the familiar and all of that. Really, there’s no excuse for it. I should just go back the way I came.”
“No,” Jack answered quickly, hating himself for wanting her to be there at all. “Don’t do that. You haven’t even told me why you’re here.”
“Because I’m bored, that’s why. Why else would I be here? I must say, I’ve already been infinitely entertained since being here. Who was that woman?”
“Honestly? I have no clue.”
“Of course, you don’t. So why were you so awful to her?”
“Was I?”
“Oh, come on. You know you were! And apparently, it was for no reason at all!”
“I thought it would be fun. I was wrong. I let her go though, didn’t I? I could have made her stay, but I let her go. That should count for something, don’t you think?”
“Oh brother. It should count for something? Spoken like a true man. Always wanting your actions to ‘count’ for something, you men. I suppose it does, although the poor girl won’t ever know what a bullet she’s dodged by being thrown so unceremoniously out of your loft. Oh well. Such is the plight of the put upon, isn’t that so, love? To never be given the credit they deserve.”
“Ha ha. Fine. I see your point. Now seriously, why are you here, Scarlett?”
“Really, for no reason in particular. I just felt like it was time to blow back into town, see what kind of trouble you lot have been getting into. Are the Austin crows still the same?”
“Roughly. You know how it goes. Vampires come and then they go. They choose to move on the way that you so often do, or else they choose to go the way of the elders.”
“Has that happened here?”
There was a sharp tone to her voice that Jack didn’t often hear. It was the only thing that gave away any concern on her part at all. The rest of her, her posture and her beautiful, impassive face, gave the appearance of her having not a single care in the world. Only Jack knew better. He had known her long enough to be able to see through some of the minute cracks in her almost-flawless veneer. Even so, she remained largely a mystery to him, and also, he thought, to herself.
“Of course, it has. It always does. Texas is a good place for it. You know that. So much dry land the closer you get to El Paso. The desert is the perfect place to go to die.”
“Except that it’s worse than death.”
She was right about that. Jack didn’t doubt it for a moment. To die was one thing, and one thing that man and monster feared alike. To allow oneself to turn to stone, though; that was another thing entirely. The amount of desperation a vampire must feel to subject himself to such a fate was incomprehensible.
Even thinking about it gave him a little shudder and when he looked at Scarlett, he could see that a dark cloud had passed over her face. It was only when she noticed that he was looking at her that it cleared. Old friends or not, she would not tolerate looking weak in front of him; not in front of him or anyone else.
“Well, that was foolish of them. We’re better off without the ones like them, our race. It’s too weak to be born. Now, if you aren’t terribly opposed to the idea, get up. I’ve heard the number of vampire clubs in this city is staggering at this point. I think it’s time you take me out to see what’s changed.”
Jack was terribly tired, but he wouldn’t tell her no. Besides, what else was there for him to do? He could sit around and brood like he had so frequently been doing these past days (or months, really), but that was beyond boring. At least with Scarlett, there would be a shot of something interesting cropping up. Possibly dangerous, but definitely interesting as well. He stood, his thoughts on which club she might like to visit best. It was the sound of her clearing her throat dramatically that brought him back to where he actually was.
“Um, Jack?”
“Hmm?”
“Were you planning on going like that?”
He looked down and saw that he was completely naked. She grinned, shook her head, and headed for his front door.
“Don’t tempt me, Jack. There’ll be plenty of time for that later, if the mood should strike me. For now, I’ll be waiting outside. Make yourself decent. I’m ready for a drink.”
*
“Oh. My. God.”
It was going to be too awful to tolerate. She could already tell. It wasn’t often that Delaney allowed herself to get really, truly smashed, but last night she most definitely had. The loss of her job had hit her harder than she would have liked to admit. Sure, she could say that she had basically quit, but at the end of the day did that really matter? Like, at all?
Fired or quit, it all boiled down to the same exact thing. She was now out of a job, and that was a bad thing. She had rent coming up, for one thing, and debt she needed to pay. She had all the bills an adult was forced to carry except that now she didn’t have the funds to take care of them. And on top of that, she now also had the most banging headache she could remember having in a long, long time.
She hadn’t opened her eyes yet, but even the black curtain of the back of her eyelids hurt like hell. The recognition of that only seemed to make matters worse, too. It was like the true depth of her miserable headache hadn’t revealed itself until she had given it the power of life. Now that she had, it was the most brutal feeling she could remember having in her whole life.
This was the kind of headache that made a person want to die. It would have been bad enough if that was where it had stopped, but it most definitely wasn’t. The more aware she became, the worse it got until the feeling in her stomach was one she could hardly stand. She couldn’t decide whether or not she was going to throw up. She couldn’t even decide whether or not she wanted to throw up. All she really knew for sure was that she was miserable.
“Jesus, I feel like ass.”
“Whoa! What?!”
Delaney scrambled up in her bed, her eyes flying open in shock. The last thing she expected to find upon waking was another person in her apartment, let alone in her bed. It wasn’t like she was dating anyone, and she wasn’t the type to just bring random guys home. Or at least she hadn’t thought she was the type.
The evidence in front of her, or beside her, to be more accurate, was to the contrary. She was only slightly relieved when she saw that the man in bed with her was Dale. Relieved because at least she knew him, but other than that, she wasn’t feeling too good about things. She had most definitely been flirting with Dale shamelessly for a while now, but that hadn’t meant she was planning on doing anything about it. She most definitely wasn’t.
“Oh, my god, Dale. You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“Yeah, I can see that. Calm down, okay? It’s just me. No big surprises or anything.”
“No big surprises. Sure. Right. Except that I don’t exactly remember you coming home with me.”
“Okay. Well, I can see how that might make a girl a little bit jumpy. How much do you remember from last night?”
She grimaced and did her best to look through the haze that was her previous evening. What exactly was the last thing she remembered? She remembered the incredibly strong drinks and Dale pouring the both of them shots. She remembered the snotty way the girls in the bar had looked at her, all of them interested in taking Dale for a ride and resenting the hell out of her for taking even a little bit of his attention.
She definitely remembered the feeling of abject desolation at the thought that maybe everything she wanted to do with her life was a complete waste of time, and then... then?
“Um, Delaney? Did you go into shock or something?”
She looked over at him, not even caring that all she had on was a thin white t shirt that didn’t hide a thing and a pair of boy shorts. She should have been nervous, especially seeing how handsome Dale was even on the morning after a major binge. She would have been too, if it hadn’t been for the thing her hazy, angry brain was just starting to grasp again.
“Hey, was there some weird older guy talking to me last night, or am I making that up?”
“Oh no.” Dale grinned, folding his tanned arms behind his head and settling down into her bed so that his perfectly toned bare chest glinted in the sunlight. “You didn’t make that part up. I kind of wish you had.”
“But why?”
“Because! That’s when things got out of hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“You just couldn’t let that shit go. All it took was you Googling that address and you were off on a tangent I couldn’t get you off of. Giving you more drinks didn’t help. Shit, it just made it worse. I finally had to kiss you to get you to shut up.”
“Kiss me?”
“Aw, shit. Come on, Laney. Even a guy like me’s got an ego. You don’t remember that?”
She wanted to shake her head no, but just as she moved to do so she was hit by the memory of what he was referring to. Her and Dale out in the alleyway behind the bar, her back pressed up against the brick wall in the cold rain as Dale bent down and kissed her sloppily. Not that it was bad, really, just that the two of them had been so drunk! And the fact that she wasn’t into him. Which, knowing his track record, was probably a good thing for her.
“Ha!”
“What?”
“You do remember. That’s good. At least I haven’t lost my touch completely.”
“Nope, not completely. And by the way, speaking of touch…”
“Nah, you don’t need to worry about that. I don’t fuck girls who won’t remember it at all. At least not when they’re my friend. Not that I didn’t want to. Because I did.”
“Oh boy.” She rolled her eyes sarcastically, feeling a massive wave of relief wash over her nevertheless. “Such a southern gentleman you are.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you sometimes sound a little bit like Yoda?”
“Yes, actually, they have.”
“Of course, they have. But seriously, Laney, you don’t need to worry. All we did was come back here and make out for a little while, then pass out. You’re hot. I won’t lie, but I can’t do that with you. It would only fuck things up.”
“Good. I’m glad to know that. Now, can we talk about the weird old guy again?”
***
It took almost three hours, but Delaney was finally starting to feel a little bit like a human again. She and Dale had parted on good terms, both of them feeling physically like shit but otherwise solid. She was glad for that, gladder than she would have believed she would be over a thing like that.
If the evening’s shenanigans had taught her anything, it was that she actually valued the friendship she had with Dale. Hooking up would almost definitely have ruined that, and she would have been more than a little bit bummed by that. He had given her a kiss on the cheek when he went, which made her stomach give a little jump, and ruffled her hair.
“You’re all right, kid. You know that?”
“Thanks, Dale. Really. And thanks for, you know.”
“Not taking advantage of you?”
“Yes.” she laughed, her face turning a bright red. “Exactly.”
“Right back at ya. I’ll see you around, okay? Soon?”
“Definitely. Just try not to get me so drunk next time.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
He gave her a roguish grin and headed out the door, down the street and on with his life. She heaved a sigh of relief and went back inside. Her head was still pounding and her stomach none too pleased with her. It didn’t matter though, or at least not nearly so much as it had when she had first woken up. It didn’t matter because now she had a reason to be up and feeling like shit. She wasn’t going to just lounge around all day in bed eating fatty foods and feeling sorry for herself.
She wasn’t going to do that at all, because she had things to do. No, not things; one thing only, but one very important thing. Finally, right when she was on the verge of giving up everything about her hopes and dreams for her less than ordinary life, intervention had come in the form of an ominous looking, cranky aging man.
The moment she was on her own, she raced to her purse, ignoring the dizzy sick feeling the rapid movement gave her. She needed that card and that was all that mattered to her. Hangover be damned!
“Shit!”
At first, she was sure that it was gone. Of course, it would be. She had probably tossed it aside in a childish fit in favor of another round of shots. That would just be her luck, wouldn’t it? Precisely the kind of thing she would do. The thing about Delaney was that, although she was driven and had a very clear (if unconventional) vision of what she wanted to do with her life, she also had a tendency to sometimes be a bit of a mess.
It was nothing out of the ordinary for a girl her age, but that didn’t mean it didn’t get in the way. She couldn’t have even counted the number of coats she had left behind in restaurants or bars (either drunk or otherwise), but she had a feeling it was a lot. Fortunately for her, this was not another one of those times when she left something in a place where it didn’t belong and then promptly forgot about it.
After rummaging in her bag from the night before for the third freaked out time in a row, she found the card at the very bottom. It was bent and already ridiculously dirty after only a few hours, but it was there.
“Thank god! Now who the hell are you, you fucker?”
It was maddening for a girl who wanted to be a reporter of sorts to not know anything, let alone something that might actually make a difference to her. Assuming that it would, which was a big “if.” She hadn’t allowed herself to really think about what that little card might give her if she actually found it but now that she had it in her hand, she was practically salivating to see what was at the end of her new yellow brick road. She scrambled to her laptop and started tapping away furiously, eager for any kind of information she could get.
“Shit! Shit, shit, double shit.”
Delaney was in full rabid reporter mode at that point, which only made the fact that she couldn’t find anything at all about the mystery address she had been given all the more annoying. Literally, there was nothing. In the day of the internet, that was pretty much unheard of. Because Delaney was a product of that same internet age, not getting what she wanted right when she wanted it was infuriating.
It also left her with only one more option. She was going to have to go there. She knew she probably shouldn’t do it. She was well aware of all of the Dateline style stories about women being abducted while doing things a whole lot less stupid than going alone to an unknown address to do unknown things.
What she was planning was right up there with taking candy from a stranger hanging out in the back of a van and offering a free puppy if she got inside. She was a smart girl and she knew all of that. It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered but her getting to the bottom of what was going on here, especially if doing so might mean she didn’t have to go out and look for another shitty waitressing job. Because if there was ever a job she wasn’t suited for, it was that.
She nodded her head to herself, doing her best impression of one of those old timey fifties style sleuths, and made her way to the shower. She hardly even noticed that her body was still feeling like shit. She dressed and slapped on makeup as quickly as she could manage it, not once bothering to look herself over to see how much of her former night still showed on her face.
Instead it was out the door, a quick dash into her local bullshit chain coffee shop for the biggest cup they had, and then off to her mystery address. She took a cab so as to avoid having to put any money into gas (now that she was jobless she needed to think about that kind of thing) and drummed her fingers nervously on her thigh the whole way there.
And, as it turned out, the whole way was a hell of a lot further than she anticipated. The cabbie drove her right out of the Austin city limits, then deeper and deeper into the hill country. This was the point when a normal person would have turned around and headed straight back home. but Delaney was apparently not your average girl. There was absolutely nothing on the planet that could have convinced her to turn around at that point. Not a single damn thing.
“This looks like the place.”
“Huh?”
“We’re here, lady. At least this is where the GPS is giving me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. I’m the one who does this for a living, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Look, are you sure you want me to drop you here?”
“I’m sure.”
“I don’t know, lady. This place don’t look so safe. It looks like the kind of a place a serial killer might hang out in.”
“I said I’m sure. Thanks though, for the concern and everything.”
“Sure, I guess.” The much older and not-so-clean-cut-looking man shrugged his shoulders at her, clearly already losing interest in the whole ordeal. “Whatever you say. Just, you know, don’t say I didn’t warn ya, all right? I mean, I don’t wanna see you on the news or anything and know I didn’t say nothing.”
“It’s okay. I appreciate it, really. But I’m going to be okay.”
“Whatever you say, lady. Just in case though, here’s my card.”
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, a guy she didn’t even know was handing her his card. She didn’t know if this was a testament to the life choices she was making, but it kind of felt like it. This was a feeling that only intensified as she got out of the cab and watched it drive away. Now she was legitimately on her own out in the middle of nowhere and standing in front of the largest, strangest looking house she had ever seen.
It wasn’t a joke anymore, not some half-cocked idea. This thing was for real. The mystery address on the back of a dirty old business card had led her to something that looked like a rambling gothic mansion picked up out of old school Europe and set down in the middle of Texas. She didn’t know what this place was, but she was definitely surprised by the fact that nobody ever talked about its being there.
“Oh Toto,” she whispered to herself and nobody else in particular, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”