Cunningham, Pat - Legacy [Sequel to Belonging] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (27 page)

“Relief,” she echoed. “As in…?”

“As in,” he said drily. “It’s called blood lust. It hits any vamp who overindulges. It’s why we can’t get hung up on gender. When a vampire’s in blood lust, they may only have minutes. The flock looks out for each other.”

“And you,” she said as understanding dawned, “you looked after your family.”

“Some of the younger ones slipped up sometimes. They’d all been so good to me, I couldn’t just stand by and watch them suffer.” He spoke quietly, even fondly. “I had to be specially trained. Sex with vampires gets intense. But you know that already.”

“Wallace doesn’t do that, does he?”

“Not since we’ve been together. He’s a lot more careful now. It helps that he can perform without having to feed first. Other vampires can’t.”

“Because he drinks vampire blood.”

“Uh-huh. It knocked him off the norm. Let’s face it, a vampire’s technically dead. Wallace is as close to living as a vampire can get.” He leaned back with a sigh. “All the vampires in the world, and I fell in love with a slayer.”

“It could be worse.” Colleen got up, circled the table, and slid onto Jeremy’s lap. She hadn’t touched him in nearly fifteen minutes. Her hands needed to slide over his skin and bring his desire to a boil. She pressed her lips to his throat, near the mark, and tasted his sweetness, and his shiver. “Look at me. I fell in love with his boyfriend.”

Jeremy anchored her on his lap with an arm around her waist and a hand in her hair. He scoured her face with hot, desperate kisses. His mouth seared a path down her neck to her collarbone. She drank in his cinnamony scent and the odd, scorched tang that seemed to have joined it, like burning oil and flesh. Like burning—

“Shit!” Jeremy dumped her off his lap and bolted for the stove. Colleen saved herself from a spill by grabbing at the table. She stared across it to Jeremy, who held up the frying pan with their dinner in it, now a charred mess on the bottom. Jeremy looked from the frying pan to her and could only offer a helpless shrug. “How do you feel about Chinese takeout?”

Colleen had to giggle. “That sounds—”

Somebody knocked on the door.

Instantly, Jeremy went on full alert. He motioned Colleen to be quiet then crept up to the door with the dinner-caked frying pan still in his hand, this time gripped like a weapon. “Who is it?” he shouted.

“It’s me. Sully. I’m here to…you know.”

“Shit,” Jeremy said again. “Hold on. Go upstairs,” he said to Colleen.

She didn’t ask questions. She scurried up the stairs and ducked into the bedroom. However, she kept the door open a crack and stood beside it, listening.

She heard Jeremy open and close the front door, but no sounds of anyone entering. Then his visitor spoke. He had a tenor voice, made higher by a push of nerves. “Jesus. You trying to burn the place down? Tin Man’s not here, is he?”

“He’ll be back. Let’s get this over with.”

“Yeah. Okay.” She got a sudden psychic image of the visitor sniffing the room like a bloodhound. Vampire.

And Jeremy, the man she trusted with her life, had just let him into the house.

The vampire’s voice picked up an oily leer. “Tin Man know you got a human chick in here?”

“Tin Man knows where your nest is.”

“Right. Not my business.” They moved into the kitchen. That faint clack must have been Jeremy setting the frying pan on the counter. After that, things got ominously quiet.

Minutes dragged like centuries while Colleen pressed next to the door and strained to catch any slightest sound, any hint of what was going on. Why in God’s name would Jeremy let a vampire in when they were hunting her? He’d never betray her or Wallace. She knew that down to her bones.

The vampire’s voice at the front door startled her after the tense, prolonged silence. “There’s a flock moved in on Montrose. You know that big house at the end of the street, out by the old bus station? They’re in there. Six for sure, more when they party. You’ll tell him?”

“I’ll tell him. Thank you. He’ll want to check it out.”

“You make sure you tell him who told you. By name. We don’t party at our nest. You tell him.” The front door creaked open then thumped shut.

Colleen crept down the stairs without waiting for Jeremy’s okay. He turned toward the stairs just as she reached the bottom. He held a Mason jar three-quarters full of thick, red liquid. Colleen’s gut squeezed.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

“Wallace’s dinner,” Jeremy confirmed. He followed her nervous glance to the door and shrugged. “That was Sully. He’s a local. He keeps his nose clean. We’re okay.”

“I don’t want to know about this, do I?”

“It’s nothing. Call it tribute. Or a bribe.” Jeremy went back to the kitchen. Colleen followed. She clutched the back of a chair but didn’t sit. Jeremy put the jar of blood in the fridge. “Wallace likes to call it ‘protection.’”

“From him,” Colleen deduced. “Because he’s a slayer?”

“And because he drinks vampire blood. Like I said, not all vamps are killers. However, Wallace doesn’t always differentiate, especially when he’s hungry. The local flocks started coming to him with offerings so he’d leave them alone. They tip us off to the ones who do kill. Do me a favor? Stay away from Montrose for a while.”

“Not a problem.” Colleen looked at her hands, locked on the back of the chair. The knuckles were as white as bone.

“Hey.” Jeremy crossed the kitchen to her side, nearly as silent as Wallace. His hand caressed her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but this is how it is. This is how we live. There’s just no way to pretty it up. This is what you’ll have to deal with if you stay with us.” He smoothed her hair back from her cheek. “We both want you to stay.”

His wrist was right at her eye line. An ugly flash of memory hit her like a slap, Wallace’s bloody wrist pressed to Jeremy’s mouth.

“Will he try to turn me into a vampire?”

“What? No,” Jeremy said on a laugh. “He doesn’t do that. I practically had to tie him down and torture him just to get him to mark me.”

“You drank his blood. I saw you.”

He shrugged it off. “Just a swallow. It strengthens the mark. He’d never do that to you unless you really wanted him to. Even then, he’d bitch about it.”

“What if you change? What if he changes you into what he is?”

“Is that what you’re afraid of, that he’ll turn me? I’d still be me, just on a different diet. Would I scare you that much?”

Colleen buried her face against Jeremy’s chest and held him tight. “You could never scare me. Wallace either. I don’t care what he is, or what you are or do or will do or eat or whatever. I love you. I’m not walking away.”

Jeremy sighed into her hair. “He already asked you, didn’t he?”

“Last night. I’m okay with sharing you, really.”

He chuckled. “That’s not how it is and you know it. We’re sharing him. Am I right?”

Colleen’s protest died out before it reached her lips. Jeremy didn’t look a bit surprised. “That’s how it works in a flock. There’s a king or queen vampire, and then there’s the others. He leads, we follow.”

“No. I love you.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but he’s the one who matters. I know it, and I’ll bet on some level you know it, too. We can love each other on the side. Wallace is fine with that. He’s not as big a jerk as he acts sometimes.”

“If you love him, why won’t you let him turn you?”

“That’s not what I want. All I ever wanted was to belong to a vampire, not become one myself. They need us, and not just for blood. Wallace won’t admit it, but he needs me human. It keeps him human, too. That matters more to him than you can imagine.”

“But,” she whispered, “you’re mortal. You’ll die.”

“Someday. That’s life. When my brother Ken got sick, he chose to stay human even though he knew it would kill him. He wasn’t afraid. Neither am I.” Jeremy smiled down at her. “Anyway, I can’t stand the taste of blood. It’s gross.”

“I can’t give you children.”

“Neither can Wallace. I’ll manage. If I feel the urge to play daddy, I’ll go borrow Shayla.” His lips whispered their way along her forehead. “I suppose a turn is out of the question for you.”

Colleen’s shudder answered for her. “Not even for him.”

“That’s fine. He’ll have us for as long as we live, and we’ll have each other.” The lips against her skin turned down. “We should have gone with him. To hell with what he said.”

“No, he was right. We’re better off here. He’ll focus better if he isn’t worried about where we are or what’s happening with us.” Colleen stopped herself. How quickly her decisions had shifted into what would be best for Wallace. He hadn’t even marked her or anything. “Can we talk about something else? This is getting heavy.” She went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “I believe you promised me Chinese.”

* * * *

Jeremy ordered kung pao chicken, wonton soup, and two egg rolls. Colleen had vegetable lo mein and half of one of Jeremy’s egg rolls. Jeremy’s fortune cookie read,
You will enjoy excitement in love.
Colleen’s said,
You will find yourself in a new position.
After dinner, they went upstairs and fulfilled each other’s predictions.

* * * *

At the second fang bar he tried, Sully found his target. He approached the other vamp with a cringing deference worthy of an omega wolf. The stranger smelled heartier, somehow richer, than the bats Sully knew from LA. Sort of like the hot blasts the Tin Man gave off. The blood must run really meaty up in Sacramento. Someday he’d have to head up there and give some of those necks a whirl.

The upstate vamp had a woman with him. Her glassy stare never wavered from her captor, not even when Sully sidled up to their table. The vampire’s eyes thinned to silver slits. “I do not appreciate my dinner’s interruption. Is the news you bring me worth your life?”

“It is. You bet. You’re still looking for that woman, right? Forrester? You said we’d know her by her smell. It’d be really robust and all.”

The upstate bat showed fang. Sully clamped his lips down over his own meager canines. Damn, those suckers were lengthy. Lebec must be one of the old schoolers. You didn’t grow fangs that impressive without having at least a century behind you. Nobody stayed king for that long unless they outlasted all comers.

“If you have a point,” Lebec hissed, “come to it.”

“Sure.” Sully temporarily straightened his spine. “I know where she is.”

Chapter 15

Wallace rolled into Sacramento two hours after sunset and started making the rounds. The city had a good-sized bat community and a wealth of fang bars. Not those fake places kids went to, to pretend at being vamps, but the real deal. His nose told him the difference. He passed by one noisy club packed with gloomy teens swathed in black and ruefully shook his head. Who in their right mind would choose this hell of a life? Scarecrow had been raised by vamps and loved them more than the living, and even he wouldn’t take the turn. That said everything right there, as far as Wallace was concerned.

A sullen boy who looked about twelve, even with the makeup, glared at Wallace as he passed. Wallace let his eyes go red, bared his fangs, and snarled. The kid gulped and ducked back inside. Wallace snorted.
Get a life, kid. A real one
. He shook his head again.
Shit. I’m getting old.

He found a real fang bar and went inside. The clientele gave him the once-over, checked his scent for authenticity, and went back to their blood-based drinks. No costumes or makeup in evidence here. These bloodsuckers knew the score. Wallace strode to the bar, thankful his axe tattoo was hidden under his jacket. It wouldn’t do to tell a barroom full of bats the Tin Man was in town. Vamps had long lives, and longer memories.