Must Love Fangs (Midnight Liaisons) (16 page)

He smiled, and I watched his canines elongate. “Is this what turns you on, then, Marie? You want to see some crazy supernatural shit in bed? I don’t understand this fetish, but if that’s what it takes to make you look at me, I’ll give you what you need.”

He thought I was a freak with a vampire fetish? That . . . hurt. I gave him my iciest look. “Get your hands off me.”

He flung himself away, pacing into my living room. His movements were quick, jerky, as if he was working hard to control himself. He wouldn’t look at me.

I felt . . . awkward. Unhappy. I was losing his friendship, which wasn’t what I wanted. Not at all. How was I supposed to fix this situation? How could I? Why had I let him get close in the first place? “I’m sorry, Josh. You just don’t understand.”

He laughed, but there was no amusement in his voice. “I don’t
understand
? I’ve been hitting on you for weeks, Marie. I know it’s hard to get it through your thick skull, but I
like
you. I like your personality. I think you’re beautiful. I live for one of those rare smiles. I love it when you chop people down to size with that tongue of yours. I don’t even mind when it’s me. Every time you speak French, I get instantly hard. And all you want are . . . vampires?”

He turned around, and I saw frustration in his face. “So tell me, Marie. What does a vampire have that I don’t? Because I’m seriously interested, but it seems that all you’re looking for is a cheap thrill.
Is it that they have bigger fangs? Is it the undead thing? What?”

I said nothing.

He swore. “I’m sorry—I’m done here. I can’t win this one, and you won’t talk to me, so have a nice life, Marie Bellavance. I’m sure you’ll find just the right vampire, since only a vampire will do.”

He opened the door.

Panic flared in my chest. He was going to walk away. Forever. If he left now, it was for keeps. “Josh—I’m dying.”

He slowly turned. He stared at me. After a long, tense moment, he said, “What did you just say?”

I felt naked, laid open in a way that I was unused to. Josh was the first one I’d shared this with. “I’m . . . dying.” To my horror, my voice broke a little on the last word. “I probably have six months to a year before . . . the end.”

Which wouldn’t be pretty. And I’d be a mess long before then, completely out of my mind and unable to function.

He quietly shut the door and leaned against it, staring at me as if unable to grasp what I was telling him. “I . . . Marie, I didn’t know.”

“Well, of course you didn’t,” I told him, forcing my tone to be light and wry, as if my world hadn’t been falling apart right then. “I haven’t told anyone except you.”

“Is it cancer?”

I wish
. The thought came immediately, and I began to laugh hysterically, because the thought was absurd. God, that was fucked-up.

“No,” I said. “It’s not cancer. It’s something called fatal familial insomnia.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s very rare. My mother had it. Died from it ten years ago. I inherited the gene. It’s not supposed to kick in until I’m forty or so, but it hit early.”

He shook his head, moving closer, and reached out toward me. “Marie—”

I moved away before he could touch me, hugging my arms to my chest, feeling sick. Admitting it to another person meant that it existed. It meant really,
really
acknowledging it. I was flat-out panicking, and I felt the absurd urge to cry.

He followed me as I walked away. “Do you . . . do you want to talk about it?”

Another hysterical laugh bubbled in my throat. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. I just . . . ” I sighed, staring at my blank walls. I suddenly felt exhausted. “I want to take a freaking nap.”

“Fatal . . . insomnia,” Josh repeated. “And that means you can’t sleep?”

I pushed forward, suddenly desperate to show him what it meant to not sleep. To have someone else
get it
. I opened my closet door. Hundreds of boxes were crammed in there, neatly stacked on shelves that I’d built to hold them all. “I do puzzles when I can’t sleep. I’ve done every single one of these,” I told him. “Some, even twice.”

He said nothing, simply looked at the puzzles, then back to me.

“And here,” I said, racing across the apartment to my small bathroom. I went to the counter and
threw open the medicine cabinet. I grabbed boxes of over-the-counter sleep aids, prescription bottles, and shoved them all at him. “I tried taking all of these. None of them work.
Nothing
works. I close my eyes, but I can’t sleep. Maybe ten minutes, if I’m lucky, but after that, nothing. My brain can’t shut off, and I’m so tired that I could just collapse. Except when I collapse, I still can’t sleep.”

He remained silent, his eyes dark as he watched me.

“Do you know what it’s like?” My hands clenched into fists as my frustration and helplessness built inside me. I wanted to scream, but I forced my voice to be calm. “Imagine being hungry all the time, yet you can’t eat. You just can’t. For no good reason at all. I go through that every single fucking night. And it’s going to kill me.

“There are four stages of the disease. When I was eighteen, my mother stopped sleeping. Then she started getting panic attacks, kind of like I’m having right now,” I said, feeling my pulse flutter wildly in my chest.

“Marie—”

“I need to get all of this out while I can.” I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm a little. “It starts with the inability to sleep. Next you have panic attacks. Then paranoia. Then, you start to hallucinate. The insomnia continues to get worse, and toward the end you become completely out of your mind from the lack of sleep. And then you die. It’s horrible, Josh. Absolutely horrible. My mother . . . she was beautiful. French-Canadian. Long, dark,
curly hair and the happiest smile. I miss her every day,” I said softly.

“What about a doctor?”

I shook my head. “They can’t help. I’ve tried pills of every kind. I’ve tried therapy. Hypnosis. I’ve seen specialists. They all want to run tests on me, and if they discover the cause, then the experimental treatments will begin. I’ll spend the next six months being monitored and drugged and poked and prodded, and none of it will do a bit of good, because no one knows how to fix it. I’m better off spending those six months actually doing something about my disease.”

“And this is why you want a vampire,” he said quietly.

I nodded. “I thought of it a few weeks ago. That I could get someone to turn me. Sara said that diseases skate right off shifters. And vampires, well, they’re already undead. I have all these resources in the agency, right? So why not use them?”

He reached for my hands and tugged them into his own. “Why not a shifter, then? I can change you.”

“No, you can’t,” I said quietly. “You’re Beau’s brother. He’s trying to hold the Alliance together with the force of his will alone. Everyone’s freaking out over that tiger clan incident. They exiled that tiger couple, and exile is permanent. For a shifter, I imagine it’s close to death. You’re so close to your family—I won’t have you living in exile just to turn me. Not when there’s a perfectly good vampire
around—they don’t have to follow all of the Alliance rules.”

“But vampires don’t turn just whoever they want and then walk away. There’s commitment involved.”

“I know. I just have to take that chance. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find a nice vampire to spend eternity with.”

Josh gave me a flat, emotionless look. “So I’m off the table because I can’t turn you. But I’m perfectly fine for a one-night stand?”

I bit my lip. “I shouldn’t want to sleep with you, but I do.”

“Damn, Marie,” he said, yanking his cap off and raking his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to say.”

I twisted my fingers. “I know it’s complicated.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Yeah, I’ll say. Call me crazy, but it doesn’t sit quite right with me to sleep with you and then turn you over to the next vampire in the hopes that he’s the one for you.”

It didn’t sound right to me, either, but I didn’t know what else to do. “You said yourself that you weren’t big on commitment. I’m the ultimate in noncommitment relationships.”

“That is
not
a selling point.”

“You could always wait until I’m turned,” I said softly. “Maybe we could always give . . . you and me . . . a try after I’m turned.”

He shook his head. “Marie, if a vampire turns you, he’s going to want you to be his blood partner.
That’s a mate for life. It’s taken very seriously. If you get turned, you’re off-limits. Jesus,” he swore. “This is a hell of a plan.”

So I could have hot Josh and an early tombstone, or I could have a cold vampire and eternity. “I’m not changing my mind,” I said quietly. “Not when I’m this close to getting someone to turn me.”

Not when I was hallucinating at least once a day now. My disease was accelerating at a rapid pace.

He stared at me for so long that I felt uncomfortable. “Marie . . . I need time to think about all of this. I don’t know that I can keep helping you. I just . . . I don’t know.”

I was guessing that the one-night stand was off the table now, too. I felt a flash of bitterness at that, but I wasn’t surprised. Finding out that someone was dying totally changed the dynamic. It was hard to nail and bail on a dying girl, after all.

“I’m telling you this because you’re my friend, Josh,” I said. “Not because I want more than you’ve already given me.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my forehead. And then sighed. “I have to go. I need some time to think about all of this.”

I didn’t try to stop him. Either he’d see things my way, or I’d lost a friend. I didn’t have options this late in the game, and if he didn’t understand that, then I was better off without him.

Strange how that wasn’t sitting so well in my gut, though.

• • •

Josh didn’t call me that day. I knew it was hard for him to absorb all at once. I’d been living with it for ten years, and it was still hard for me.

But I was exhausted, mentally and physically. It was as if telling Josh had sucked all the energy out of my body. Normally I held it together pretty well, but by the time I got to work that evening, I was running on empty. I’d doubled my daily vitamins and sucked down an espresso on the way to the office, but I still felt tired as hell.

Which was why it took a moment for it to register when I sat down and noticed that Savannah Russell sat at Ryder’s desk, and Ellis Russell sat at Sara’s. I stared at them, frowned, and checked the calendar on my computer. I had the right day.

Oh, no. A sick feeling landed in the pit of my stomach. I rubbed my eyes. Was this a hallucination? Oh, God. It seemed so real. Anxiety fluttered through me, and I felt my jaw clenching in the onset of a panic attack. This was bad—

“There you are,” Sara said cheerfully, sticking her head out of Bathsheba’s small office. “Come here for a second.”

I walked carefully to the small office at the back. I was surprised to see Ryder inside, sitting across from Bathsheba.

“Good, everyone’s here now,” Bath said with a smile.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Girl’s night out. It’s time for a little team bonding. How do you feel about heading out to a bar and getting our drink on?”

I hesitated. I was exhausted, and with the cocktail of (rather useless) medications I was taking, I wasn’t supposed to really drink. “Who’s going to man the phones?”

Sara laughed. “Jeez, you are totally a zombie before you get a few cups of coffee in you. Didn’t you see Ellis and Savannah out there?”

So they were real? Oh, thank God. My knees felt weak with relief. I put on a big smile. “So where are we going?”

• • •

I stared at the tight, gleaming butt cheeks ten feet away and turned to glare at Ryder. “Who thought a strip bar was a good idea?”

Ryder sipped a margarita and pointed at Bathsheba. Bathsheba turned bright red and pointed at Sara.

I turned to my left. Grinning and shaking her ass to the thumping music, small, innocent Sara waved a five at a nearby dancer.

I stared at my watered-down hurricane. “I think I need to have what she’s having.”

“I think we all do,” Ryder said with a grin.

The wild, thumping beat made my eardrums want to explode. A new guy danced out onstage, dressed as a cowboy. Naturally. He wore a sparkling silver vest with lots of fringe and pants that I was
sure were about two minutes away from being flung into someone’s face. Women crowded all around us in the club, shoving forward to look at the dancers, laughing and drinking.

“I thought it’d be fun to get out and unwind,” Bathsheba yelled as he began to dance. “I didn’t get a bachelorette party, and Sara thought this would be a good substitute. I never see you guys anymore, now that Beau and I got married.”

I was pretty sure it was more due to everyone’s life going to hell all at the same time, what with my disease, Sara’s coming out as a werewolf, and Ryder’s secret transformation into . . . whatever Ryder was.

“I think the timing has just been off for everyone,” I told Bath.

She looked relieved, and I immediately felt bad. I’d been a bridesmaid in her wedding a few weeks ago; I’d even caught the damned bouquet. Before she’d gotten married we’d chatted regularly, and while I wasn’t exactly the most open of friends, I considered her one.

It seemed like I’d been shutting everyone out lately.

“Heeeere,” Sara slurred, and shoved a five into my hand. “You’re supposed to be enjoying the dancers, silly. Go and enjoy that one.”

As if he could smell the money, the dancer ripped his pants off and grinned in my direction.
Tabarnak
. I got up, folded the money neatly in half, and patiently waited amongst the shoving women until he
wiggled his G-string in my direction. I tucked it in, then retreated to my seat.

Ryder high-fived me.

“Why aren’t you up there shoving money into his pants?” I asked.

“Because I like to watch,” she told me with a feminine leer.

Sara wobbled past me and slapped a few ones into her sister’s hand. “Your turn!”