FIVE
“Oh, darling, is this really one of the places where you spend your time? Please, tell me it isn’t so. It’s just so... kitschy.”
“Well, you’re the one who wanted to come. I’ll take you somewhere else, if you’re going to be a bitch about it. Or even better, you can take yourself somewhere else. I’m not your keeper, you know. Not anymore.”
“Don’t lie to yourself, Jack, you were never my keeper. Not really. Not ever.”
Jack felt the same old familiar agitation creeping up inside of him and willed himself to shake it off. One would think that after such a long amount of time had passed, he would know not to let Scarlett get to him this way. Although time and life had created vast amounts of distance between the two of them, as so often happened between people who were once close, they had been as close as any two beings could be at one point.
That meant he was well aware of how easily she could push his buttons, which gave him no excuse to allow it to happen. Still, he doubted he was the only man to ever allow something like that to happen against his better judgement. Even with the absence of any romantic feelings, she could still get under his skin. She knew it, too, and was grinning at him like she was having the time of her life.
“Oh, Jackie boy, don’t take offence. You wouldn’t be the first man to fancy himself the one in charge of a woman. The thing is, you really never are. If anything, it’s the other way around.”
“Jackie boy? Since when do you start treating me in such a diminutive way?”
“It’s something I do from time to time. You know that.”
Jack couldn’t help himself from smiling. There was some part of him that actually missed this back and forth with Scarlett, although there was an equal part that wanted to throttle her for it. He thought she was probably right, though, when it was all said and done. If he had learned anything during his long stay on the earth (and he wasn’t entirely convinced that he had), it was that women were nothing to be controlled. They were to be admired when you had one, and then let go. The last thing a man should do, if he was interested in looking after his own well-being, was let himself really want a woman. Or, god forbid, need her. Once a man let that happen, he was really sunk.
“What is it?”
“What is what?”
“That face. Don’t try and trick me, Jack, I’ve known you for too long. I can see when the wheels in your head are turning.”
“Nothing. I was just thinking about how foolish men are to ever really desire a woman.”
“Ha! Oh, that’s wonderful. That may be one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve heard you say a lot. Now, tell me about this place.”
“What’s there to tell?”
“I don’t know. There must be something. This is one of the places you frequent, is it not?”
“Sure, I guess you could say that.”
“Perfect. Then you must have something to say about it. Walk me through it, darling. Remember, I haven’t been here in quite some time.”
Jack surveyed the field in front of the bar he had chosen to take her to. Its name was The Blood, and it was a place he had mixed feelings about at best. On the one hand, it was sort of nice to have a place to go, a place where his kind was considered something to be celebrated instead of feared and delegated to the realm of make believe and make believe alone.
In all of his time being what he was, this had never been the case. If the ability to blend into human society was an art form, he had all but perfected it.
At the time of his turning, such things had been necessary for survival for any vampire who wished to live some portion of his life not in the shadows. There were those that wanted nothing of the sort, just as there were humans that wanted no part of the ordinary patterns of life their fellows enjoyed, but he had not been one of those.
Jack had possessed no desire to become a thing that lived only in the dark and amongst the dark creatures of the world, and so he had learned to assimilate. There had been many a ball he’d attended after he had become the thing that he was, and none of his fellow partygoers had been the wiser about what he really was. Quite the contrary, or so it seemed. People had been drawn to him, both women and men alike. That had been true to a certain extent when he had still been human, but the effect had been magnified tenfold after he had become a vampire.
It had almost become a problem. He had learned, over the years, to temper that effect, believing it was one he would both always need and always have to control. Now, however, he saw how quickly the tides were turning.
“Jack? Have you decided I’m not interesting enough to speak to? Not the most polite thing, to ignore a girl you’ve promised to take out on the town.”
“I didn’t promise you anything,” Jack said in a low, almost serene voice. “You broke into my home and demanded my assistance.”
“Same thing,” she answered airily, picking her way through the almost waist-high weeds in her approach to The Blood. “Either way, you’re here with me now. And your mind is somewhere else. Tell me, where did you wander off to just now?”
“I was just thinking about how far we’ve come since the days when we were so widely feared and had to hide ourselves.”
“The dark days, as the elders would have us believe.”
“And you don’t? Believe it, I mean?”
“I don’t know, do you? I’ve not visited one of these places, at least not one so celebrated and out in the open.”
“They don’t have this sort of thing overseas yet?”
“You need to get out more, love, go back out and visit the world. They do, at least they have places with some similarities. Private salons that cater to our kind and a very select few humans that serve unique purposes. But out like this? Out in the open the way this place is advertised? No, nothing like this.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?”
Scarlett stopped, standing on the edge of the field that served as the club’s overflow parking lot and staring at the building before her intently. Her face wore an expression he could hardly read. She was troubled, he could see that much, but there was more than that as well. There was a wildness he knew would never be tamed, and beneath that oceans of dangerous thought and feeling he could only guess at.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes and no, I go back and forth on the matter.”
“Because?”
“Because it brings us so far out into the open. And what do you think that really means?”
“I suppose I’ve never thought about its meaning. I suppose I’ve never really considered it to mean much of anything at all.”
“But it does. It most certainly does. It gives us more freedom, but it also takes away one of our most precious lines of defense,
“Which is?”
“Fear, darling. Nothing works quite so well as a healthy dose of fear. It’s always kept people away, or most of them at least. Even the idea of things like us has always inspired a certain amount of terror. That’s not a bad thing for us. It may take away some amount of freedom, but it gives us freedom also.”
“And you think clubs like this will get in the way of that?”
“I’m not sure. They might. I go back and forth on the matter. Much as I do with almost everything else, a fact you well know about me.”
“Do you even want to go in? We don’t have to, you know.”
“Don’t be silly, darling! Why on earth would I have you bring me here just to stand outside of the place in the weeds and dirt and trash?”
“Perhaps. How would I know what goes through your head?”
“You’re right.” She laughed. “You wouldn’t. But yes, I want to go inside. I must see what all the fuss is about. The whole idea is terribly enticing, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. Maybe not so much to me, not now. I’ve been here more than once, you know.”
The two of them had begun walking toward the front door, Scarlett grasping his hand as if they were two teenagers in love instead of vampires who had been enemies almost as many times as they had been friends.
At precisely that moment, as if to punctuate his point, the man working the door (a vampire whose name he could never quite remember) stood and grinned.
“Jack Swells! My man! Back again so soon?”
“Hello, yes. Back again.”
“What is this, like the third time this week? You just can’t stay away, can you, brother?”
“I guess not.”
Jack was well aware of the smirk Scarlett wore on her beautiful face, although he would never own up to it. She was already enjoying herself too much and the last thing he wanted was to give her more ammunition. She definitely didn’t need that.
“So he’s a regular, is he? Excellent. Do you have any stories about him? Only embarrassing ones, nothing tame. I don’t care about anything PG.”
“No, darlin’, he’s a regular but I don’t have any stories about him. I’m interested to learn a little more about you, though, you can be damn sure about that. You aren’t a regular.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well how come? You’re a face I’d like to see around here more often. Every day, if I had my way.”
Jack cringed on the inside, but he was also amused. The door guy wasn’t anything special. He was one of those vampires that had been a piece of shit when he was alive and was a piece of shit after he was turned. He was skeevy, and that wasn’t anything Scarlett was likely to put up with. All Jack had to do was stand back and watch while Scarlett did her thing.
“Every day? Is that right? Do you think you could handle that?”
“Shit, could I handle it? I’d like to handle you, that’s what I’d like to handle. No offense, Jack my man. Not trying to step on any toes, if you know what I mean.”
“No.” He smirked, making a point of not looking at her while he spoke. “You do what you need to.”
“See? He doesn’t care, sugar. Road’s all clear.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
Scarlett moved closer to the unsuspecting door guy, practically purring. Everything about her came off as feline, which was what she did when she wanted something. The door guy must have picked up on that, but what he didn’t know what it was she wanted. Jack didn’t know either, at least wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but he had a pretty good idea. He’d seen her do this kind of thing before.
“Hey now, look at you? Feisty little thing, ain’t ya?”
“Do you think?”
“I do. I think it and I like it.”
She was practically wrapped around his body, one hand running along the inside of his thigh suggestively. It might have gone on like that for a while if the guy hadn’t made the decision to touch her. Of course, he made that decision, what guy wouldn’t? Even a saint would have struggled to keep his hands off her, and this guy was no saint. He should have been. though, at least in that moment, because the second his hand landed on her ass, everything changed.
It happened so quickly that only Jack saw it coming, and he wasn’t likely to offer a warning. It wouldn’t have done any good, even if he’d been inclined to. Which he wasn’t.
“Whoa! Hey, what the fuck?!”
“What’s the matter, sugar, you don’t like this?”
“No, I don’t like it, it fucking hurts!”
“Does it? I didn’t realize.”
She had taken his hand, a hand that had moved around her and taken a firm grip on her ass, and twisted. If one were to look at her face, it would have been impossible to tell that she was exerting any force at all. Again, Jack knew better. He saw her give a little flick of the wrist and then watched the poor bastard in her grasp as his face contorted in pain.
“How about that? Does that hurt?”
“Yes! Goddammit, yes, it fucking hurts! Quit it!”
“Say please.”
“What?! What are you talking about?!”
“It’s simple, really. I’ll gladly let you go, and all you have to do is say please.”
While the guy was stalling, Scarlett was still twisting and any minute now something was going to snap. He must have gotten the reality that she really wasn’t going to stop and, despite his stupid macho pride, he wasn’t going to play her game of chicken any more. He wanted out, which was something Jack could identify with.
“All right! Please, god almighty woman, please! Please just let me go.”
The moment the word passed his lips, Scarlett dropped his hand. Immediately, it turned a bright, angry red and he pulled the limb in closer to him so he could nurse it like an injured puppy. That was something Scarlett very much enjoyed. She liked making people hurt, something Jack had liked less and less about her as the years had trudged by.
“There you go, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“What the hell’d you do that for?”
“Because I can. You should remember that, next time you decide to come on to a girl. She might just be the one who breaks you in half.”
Without saying another word, she blew past him and Jack, opening the door to the club and stepping inside. At that point, the only thing Jack wanted to do was go home.