Laws of the Blood 2: Partners (18 page)

“He was special,” she admitted. “We’re still friends—from a distance.”

“Generous of him to let you crash.”

Jimmy’s condo was, technically, what Haven would call a lair. There was no use giving up a place if you weren’t using it; you might need a secure place to sleep someday—or a good friend might need it. Keys got passed around, connections got made, all with a minimum of fuss and communication. You didn’t let just anyone crash, not in a place you’d called home. Or maybe Haven would think of it as a tomb with a view?

“What are you smiling about?” Haven asked.

“Nothing.” She ran her hands through her hair and checked the clock. “I need a shower.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, sliding out of bed. “I’ll join you.”

Char didn’t make any objections, and she could tell by the tilt of Haven’s eyebrow and the slight smile he gave her that he expected a protest. Why did she always give the impression of being the fainting maiden type?
’Cause it was true most of the time? “Planning to check me for bite marks, Haven?”

“Should’ve checked already.” He ducked his head and scratched his stubbly chin. “I didn’t pay much attention this afternoon.”

“Neither did I.” She waved him toward the bathroom. “Come on. We can soap each other down.”

“When’d you get to be so sexy?” he asked when the hot water was rushing over them.

She squeezed shower gel into her hand and slapped his chest. “I’m off duty until I’ve had caffeine. I’m not being sexy,” she added as she spread white foam all over his chest. “This is efficient. I’ll be all business in half an hour.”

He followed her example and began to rub the slick pink shower gel over her front, paying close attention to make sure her breasts had enough soap. The scent of strawberry rose with the steam. His thoroughness produced a pleasant tingle and buzz of sensation. Char arched into his palms when he cupped her breasts.

Then she remembered that she was going to kill Haven, and she slid away to face the falling water instead. She wished now that she hadn’t deliberately tried to attract him last night or had to seduce him in his dreams today. Or that he’d unselfishly acted to take her out of harm’s way when the psychic bomb went off. He was a hero in his own badass way, and she was the villain of this piece. She hated using sex as a weapon, because it had a tendency to backfire and leave the person who used it as damaged as the target.

They fit together into the large shower stall, but it
was a tight fit. Haven was a big guy. A big, hairy, hard-muscled guy with big, quick hands. He cupped her bottom with them and ran them down her thighs, and she found herself leaning back against him because real contact felt too damn good to deny for the sake of a little thing like ethics. The man’s touch felt so good it made her fangs tingle.

“Found any bite marks yet?” Char asked around faintly protruding teeth.

“Got to be thorough.” His fingers slipped between her legs as he spoke and began a soft, sweet stroking.

She bit her lower lip and tasted a drop of her own blood before it was washed away. She pressed her palms against the blue tiled front of the shower. A quick check of her fingertips assured her that her claws were safely sheathed. Of course, she was turned on, not hungry. She didn’t get hungry for mortals anymore. Yes she did—in the typical way a woman grew hungry for a man. She closed her eyes and let him touch her for a long time, absorbing the pleasure it gave him as much as responding to the stimulation he gave.

Eventually, she shifted against him, turned, and closed her hand around his erection. She rested her head on his shoulder, breathed in the warm scent of him, stroked him as he stroked her and made that be enough. After a time, the water that poured over them was cold as ice, and that served as good a signal as any to bring this joining to an end.

He wasn’t getting involved. He looked at Charlotte, who was very much not his type, and reminded himself that
he didn’t get involved. They’d only been passing the time. Usually Haven never put thoughts of sex and involvement together. He approved of one, avoided the other. “I’m not likely to live long,” he said to the woman seated across the kitchen counter from him. He rubbed his freshly shaved chin.

She gave him an odd look but said, “I’m well aware of that, Mr. Haven,” as cool and calm as you please. “Do you want the last piece of toast?”

He could use some fresh clothes, but he was clean, and he felt pretty good. “Too bad the boyfriend didn’t leave any of his stuff behind.”

“He’s a lot smaller than you,” she said. She ate her toast, drank some tea, and then went on. “Here’s how you think it will be, one of the revenants you hunt will finally get its teeth into you. You’ll fight the infection, try to kill yourself before you lose your mind and change into one of the creatures. If you don’t manage to commit suicide, Baker and Santini have promised to do you, as you’ve promised to do them. If they don’t manage to kill you immediately, the hope is that they’ll hunt you down and get you before you get them.”

He nodded. “You have somebody to take you out when they get you?”

Charlotte ignored his question. “We’re talking about your survival strategy right now. The danger in Seattle isn’t from the blood-drinking monsters you’re used to dealing with. You know nothing about demons or sorcerers, and that might have gotten you killed last night.”

He took a sip of coffee, then lit a cigarette. Charlotte frowned as the smoke curled up to fill the kitchen, which
only amused him. “At least tobacco won’t get the chance to kill me,” he told her.

“It might be a contributing factor,” she said as she drummed her fingers on the countertop.

For a moment Charlotte McCairn looked very dangerous. It was kind of sexy. Then her big eyes widened and she began to cough. A choking fit took her, and her pale face went red. Haven figured the smoke bothered her, or toast crumbs must have caught in her throat. She grabbed a napkin and pushed away from the counter. She turned her back on him as she spit up into the napkin, but dropped it as she started coughing again. Haven heard a ping of something metal hitting the floor, but Charlotte scooped up whatever she’d dropped before he had the chance to look over the counter.

She straightened, took a deep breath. “This is your fault.”

She turned a glower on him as she tossed the napkin into a wastebasket under the sink. The venom in her eyes was almost enough to make him crush out his cigarette. Almost. Then she turned around with the coffeepot in her hand, poured him another cup, and sat back in the chair across from him. “Where were we?”

“Talking about dying.”

“Been there, done that. Let’s move on.”

“Demons,” he reminded her. “Sorcerers.” He finished the cigarette and put out the butt in a saucer she passed to him. “And what the hell happened last night?”

She nodded. “First, though, do you have any idea where Mr. Santini might have disappeared to? The spell
we encountered left you too incoherent to be of much help, and he was simply gone.”

“He’ll be in touch,” Haven said after he thought for a moment. “He always is.” Santini wouldn’t have abandoned them unless he’d come across something that needed to be followed. He was a hell of a tracker, and he did things his own way. Haven thought about another smoke but intercepted Charlotte’s look as he reached for the pack resting beside his coffee cup and changed his mind. The young woman across from him was full of information he desperately wanted. They’d had sex, they’d had breakfast. It was time to talk.

Char was aware of Haven’s sudden surge of hunger with an intimate flash of recognition. Looking at him was like gazing into a flyspecked, warped mirror. They were a lot alike, she and Jebel Haven, only he’d come to the hunger for knowledge later than she had. She was a scholar, a researcher. He was . . . scum. Would probably be proud to acknowledge it. The scum scholar was also a man of action with barely any education, but he was smart, in a native cunning sort of way. He’d discovered a small piece of the hidden world beneath the ordinary, and it had lit more than a sacred fire to defend the world from monsters in him. One small peek behind the curtain had sparked a latent need to
know.
He was looking at her right now like he could eat her up, and she was rather flattered that his lust was for knowledge rather than another roll in the sack.

“Demons aren’t immortal,” she told him, beginning with what she needed him to know. “Long-lived, yes, but not immortal.”

“How do you kill ‘em?”

“I’ll get to that. They come in different shapes, sizes, and colors, all of them ugly. They run the gamut of horns, fangs, claws, scales, and leathery skins. Typical modus operandi is to hide out somewhere isolated, gather a group of mortal followers, and send the minions out to do their bidding. Control of the minions is usually achieved through the worship of some old god and/or the help of a practitioner of ritual magic. The demon helps to enhance and focus the mortal sorcerer’s natural talent. So you frequently get the demon/sorcerer pairing. In some cases, the demon attaches itself as a familiar to several generations of a family of magic users. There’s some evidence of mortal and demon matings and offspring, but the demon seed B-movie ‘having my monster baby who’ll grow up to rule the world’ scenario is not what we’re dealing with here.”

“Then why’d you bring it up?”

“Because once I get started on a subject, I have trouble shutting up.”

“Focus, Charlotte.” He did that head tilted look up through the long eyelashes disarming smile thing that was so appealing she almost forgot she was scheduled to kill him. Then he reached across the table and poured her a cup of tea from the blue Fiesta ware pot, waited for her to take a sip of orange and spicy Constant Comment, before prompting, “Go on. What’s Danny boy have to do with demon boy?”

“This is supposition,” she said, sipped, and put her cup down. “But my theory is that the sorcerer and the demon are on a quest for immortality. If you want
immortality, you need a vampire. At least in every recipe for the stuff I’ve ever encountered.”

His eyes narrowed with more than their usual suspicion, and his curiosity emissions went up by several thousand. Char could anticipate all his questions. She would even like to answer them. She so rarely had anyone to talk shop with. Never, actually. Istvan asked her for research, she hunted up the data for him, but all he wanted was extracted answers, not discussion. Istvan wasn’t much of a talker. Probably too many teeth.

“You’re going to explain about immortality recipes, right?”

She’d gone off on one of her mental digressions, hadn’t she? That’s what came of being a fount of knowledge with no one to spout off to. Well, here was the perfect audience, a captive one, so to speak.

“Okay.” She rubbed her hands together. “Stop me if this gets boring.”

“I doubt you could ever be boring.”

She wondered what he meant by that and knew he did, too. They let it go, and she went on. “What I think we’re dealing with here is black magic.”

“Satanists?”

“More than likely they’re pulling an angel of light scam, using the young vampire they’ve captured to make slaves that serve their bidding. You think that vampires are bad enough on their own, but believe me, when you bring unscrupulous mortals into the picture, things can get much worse.”

He nodded. “Add human greed to unnatural evil.
That’s an easy complication to imagine. How does this scam work?”

“The cult members get to have sex with the ‘angel,’ who drinks a bit of their blood, they drink a drop of his.” And she knew that there was at least one of the cult members who’d had enough of Daniel’s blood to develop a companion bond with the youngster. This was very bad for both Daniel and the companion, though she was sure neither of them knew this. She almost shuddered at the memory of the intense insanity of the thin creature that attacked her in Pioneer Square.

Haven made a gagging noise. “Sex with a vampire?”

Char refused to indulge in any indication of irony. “The blood connection ensures that the followers do their master’s bidding. Only in this case, it’s the sorcerer who tells the cult members what the master wants them to do. So we’ll probably have to go through the usual mob of rabid fanatics to get to the inner sanctum of this nut cult. Your shotgun will come in very handy, I’m afraid.”

“How do you know I use a shotgun?”

“I do very thorough research,” she said, countering his sudden suspicion. She glanced at the digital clock on the microwave. “And I really should explain what the bad guys are up to so we can hit the streets and continue looking for them.”

“Good point. Go on.”

“The spell the sorcerer is preparing is ancient and dangerous—”

“Aren’t they always?”

“Yes. It sounds melodramatic, but the world you and
I inhabit is. It’s fraught with dark and dire Gothic nonsense—that can get you killed and damned and cursed.”

“Fraught.” He tapped a cigarette out of the pack, but rolled it between his fingers instead of lighting it. “That’s a good word. Fraught. That makes us the Fraught Squad.”

She gave a low and throaty laugh. “Perhaps the reason the vast majority of the world remains oblivious of the supernatural is because it’s just too bloody embarrassing to pay attention to. Pretend paranormal stuff isn’t happening on the bus seat next to you, and you won’t have to cringe in response.”