Taste Me (2 page)

If humanity had to learn that they shared their planet with other species, the Council was going to damn well control the timeline.

Bailey walked up to his desk and extended the mug to him, and revealed her own, which she’d been hiding behind her back. Lukas raised the mug to his lips and sipped as if from a holy chalice. It was all he could do not to whimper as the viciously strong blend finally washed away the ashy residue of some sick fuck’s depraved midnight adventure.

[ESebastiani:] Anything break yet?

Lukas sighed. He should have known his father had felt something too.

“I’ll let you get back to work.” Bailey turned away. “Catch you later.”

“Thank you,” he called to her back. Lukas flipped audio and holo back on, and watched his body shimmer into his chair once again. Several of the Council members were typing, getting other work done, while Krispin Woolf busily worked Willem Lund’s last nerve.

[LSebastiani:] Nothing yet

[ESebastiani:] Tailgater?

It hadn’t felt vicarious to Lukas. Whoever had force-fed him that noxious midnight snack had been wallowing in a swirl of pain and pleasure.

[LSebastiani:] Don’t think so.

“Mr. Sebastiani?” Willem said. “Lukas?”

Oops. Busted multitasking. And Woolf’s cheekbones were rippling with anger. “I’m sorry, Willem. Could you repeat the question?”

“Mr. Woolf has asked about the timeline on the archiving project.”

“The archives will be opened to Dr. Brown today,” Lukas responded. “The timeline is hers to establish. We’ll report status at next quarter’s meeting. Willem, my apologies once again for pulling us off the agenda.”

Lukas watched as Willem tapped at his keyboard and lodged an action for Sebastiani Security. Jack made a notation on his mini-comp, thank gawd. He did not have the patience to close action items—

Saliva spurted, and the taste of wet ashes flooded Lukas’s mouth. At the meeting, his father’s eyes narrowed slightly.

Lukas hunched over the wastebasket and vomited.

Krispin Woolf spoke from the boardroom. “Well, at least there’s no messy cleanup on this end.”

A red-rimmed dialog box exploded onto Lukas’s monitor as the Hot Sheet registered a Code Red. His mini-comp vibrated furiously.
Finally.
Lukas took a swig of coffee, swirled it around his mouth, and spit into the wastebasket. He clicked “Step Out” once again, and quickly read. Homicide. Werewolf club called Subterranean, two responders on scene. He saw Jack excuse himself and exit the boardroom.

An icon pinged as Jack came online, and they both watched the split-screen live feed streaming from the headsets being worn by the Commander In Charge and his partner.

“Don’t you dare yack at my crime scene,” Commander Gideon Lupinsky snapped to his trainee, who was identified at the bottom left of the video stream as “J. Williams.” Lukas blocked the rookie’s audio as his stomach lurched in sympathy. He opened up an audio channel to Lupinsky instead. “I’m here, Gideon.”

Lupinsky stopped just outside the entrance to a public bathroom, creating an establishing shot for the record. “Call came in about fifteen minutes ago,” Gideon said, looking around the room slowly. “Cleaning staff found her after closing.”

Lukas mentally sniffed. Ammonia. Incense, potpourri. Ozone? Something… electric. And yes, the slightest hint of ashes on the air. “Go ahead,” he said to Lupinsky.

Williams, pale and clammy, re-entered the room, looking anywhere but at the body sprawled in the handicapped stall. He reactivated her audio.

While Williams collected shards of broken light bulbs and placed them in evidence bags, Lukas watched Gideon snap on some gloves and approach the body. Unmistakably female. Brunette, looked to be about his sister Sasha’s age. Lukas quickly pushed the thought aside and focused on the details: jeans, a pair of those high-heeled boots he was amazed women could actually walk in, much less wear dancing. Her shirt was pushed down, exposing her breasts. It felt like a violation to film her condition for the record, but he told himself she was long past caring. Her face, neck, and shoulders were covered by waves of dark brown hair.

Gideon looked around. “I don’t see a purse,” he said. He knelt next to her, sniffed. “Were.” He carefully swept her hair away from her face. And recoiled. “Holy shit.”

Her identity kicked Lukas in the gut. Andine Woolf. Andi, Krispin Woolf’s daughter. He looked at the other open window on his desktop. Krispin Woolf’s day—hell, his life—was about to take a nasty 180.

“What the…” he heard Gideon say. Lukas looked back to the crime scene.

Andi Woolf’s ankle had twitched.

“Jenny, call the EMTs,” Gideon rapped out to his partner. “She’s not dead. Move it!”

Lukas absorbed the Commander’s shock and adrenaline as he moved with speed, preserving the scene now forgotten as Andi, sprawled in the handicapped stall, seized uncontrollably.

Gideon leaned over her, examining her face, her crushed throat, the flecks of blood on her lips. Lukas could see the damage as well as Gideon could. Andi tried to drag breath through her ruined airway. No go.

“Lick her,” Lukas said softly.

Gideon’s head whipped up. “What? Jesus.”

Lukas closed his eyes against the vertigo Gideon’s sudden motion had caused. “You’ll have to help her shift. She has a better chance of surviving in werewolf form.”

“Jesus, I don’t know if she has the energy reserves to…”

“She’ll die if you don’t,” Lukas snapped. “Just do it.” A sweet clover essence swirled onto his tongue. This girl wasn’t ready to die yet.

Andi seized again, her head rhythmically bumping into the cold tile wall. Lukas saw Gideon reach to her, hesitate, then lay his hands on her torso, avoiding her exposed breasts, her damaged throat. And as Lukas had hoped, Andi instinctively responded to the scent of Pack pumping off the werewolf male kneeling next to her.

Gideon pulled her out of the stall by her stiletto-booted feet, her head bumping over the rough floor tiles, her arms dragging overhead. As he dropped onto the floor and ranged his upper body over her bare torso, Lukas got a better look at Andi’s crushed throat, using the bathroom’s unforgiving fluorescent light to note the placement of the blooming bruises. Gideon finally lowered his head, dragged his tongue along her jaw line, over her open lips, over her cheekbones, eyelids, eyebrows. Gideon’s physical reaction pulsed through the room as he used his scent, his sexuality, to catalyze Andi’s shift.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Gideon breathed as Andi’s nostrils twitched, her eyelids fluttered. “Good girl, good. Keep going.” He snuffled his nose into her ear, and a moan escaped along with her precious air.

The bathroom door opened as the EMTs arrived. “Stay back,” Gideon ordered from his position atop her body. “Lupine, shifting. Get ready to intubate, her airway’s gone.”

The EMTs goggled at the sight of the straight-laced Commander stretched prone over their patient.

Time dragged as Gideon worked. He finally backed off as nostril became snout, as sleek brown fur sprouted over Andi’s ruined neck. Her torso pulsed. Whiskers sprouted. Her hands turned to paws, her fingernails to claws. And all the time she instinctively lurched toward Gideon. To Pack. It was wrenching to watch, and seemed endless, her bones shifting, popping, with yelps of pain coming from her mouth.

“Shit, she’s losing it.” Gideon quickly shrugged off his jacket, unbuttoned his cotton oxford shirt, and pressed their torsos together, skin to skin. He grasped her head, brought their faces together, and locked his lips to hers.

His desperation flooded the room.

Several minutes passed. Finally, through Gideon’s vid feed, Lukas saw the color of Andi’s eyes as they fluttered open, then closed—a mossy green, like her father’s.

“Gideon, let the EMTs at her now,” Lukas said softly.

Through Jenny’s eyes, Lukas watched Gideon shakily lever himself off her body and lean wearily against the bathroom wall. “Okay,” he growled to the EMTs through a bloody, half-lupine mouth.

The EMTs scooped Andi up, quickly found a vein, and inserted an IV. At the board meeting, Krispin Woolf listened while the siren, Claudette Fontaine, spoke, unaware that his daughter was fighting for her life.

“Jack and I were attending a meeting with her father when you called,” Lukas said. “We can notify him and meet you at the hospital.”

“Okay. Give us a few minutes here,” Gideon said as the gurney rolled briskly out of the bathroom, wheels clattering against the uneven tile.

Through Williams’ video feed, Lukas watched Gideon raise his hand to his mouth, pause, put it back down again. Gideon looked to his trainee. “Can you bring the kit over here, Jenny? We’re going to have to process me for evidence.”

Williams gulped audibly as she brought her commander the kit. Through her vid, Lukas watched Gideon extract a tarp and spread it on the floor, then step onto it. He removed a large evidence bag from the kit, set it on the tarp, and opened it.
Snap.
His gloves dropped into the bag. His shirt quickly followed. “Get a swab,” he said grimly. “I tasted semen.”

Lukas’s stomach dropped.

*ping*

[JKirkland:] I’ll bring Krispin to the hospital.

[LSebastiani:] k

While Lukas opened a chat with his father and gave him a quick update, he saw Jack approach Krispin Woolf, put a hand on the man’s shoulder, talk quietly. The other man’s flint-tinged fear, his father’s horror, spilled onto Lukas’s tongue.

Lukas sat for a moment, his bleary eyes staring sightlessly at the glowing monitors. Rancid tastes and toxic smells converged: the rookie’s diesel-tasting horror, Gideon’s soil-scented helplessness. Andi Woolf’s sweet, grassy musk. Cooling coffee. Krispin’s mothballs. His own vomit.

As he took a healthy swig of antacid from the bottle on the desk, Lukas watched Claudette Fontaine rise and put her arms around Krispin Woolf.

From this angle, Claudette looked more like Scarlett’s sister than her mother.

Shit, where had that come from?
Lukas wearily speared his hands through his still-damp hair. He’d managed to put the Scarlett’s Web show out of his mind, for a while, anyway. Thankfully, Scarlett Fontaine was Jack’s client, not his. Jack’s problem, not his. And if Lukas knew that her tour bus had already pulled into Underbelly’s underground parking ramp, right on schedule?

It was only because it was his name on the door, not Jack’s.

Scarlett Fontaine tried not to wince as laughter exploded around the table like shrapnel. The band’s traditional “welcome home” celebration was just getting warmed up, and she could barely keep her eyes open. She rolled her shoulders and tried to get comfortable in the padded chair. Her apartment—her bed—was ten floors overhead, so close, yet so far away.

Just hold it together a little bit longer. What’s a half hour more after a year on the road?
She sighed and took a sip of the excellent Chianti that Flynn, Underbelly’s night manager, had just poured. “Mmm, just what I needed,” she said to Flynn, burrowing into his hug.

“The wine?”

“The hug,” she replied with a smile. “It’s good to be home.”

“Glad to have you back. And don’t think I don’t notice how bony you are under that floppy sweatshirt. Are you okay?”

No. I’m not.
“Just tired,” she responded instead. And other than a raised eyebrow, he didn’t call her on it, thank the universe—not that he’d hold off for long. But she couldn’t explain how she felt to herself yet, much less to someone else.

“Hey, Flynn!” a disembodied voice hollered from the club’s back office. “Are you going to close out the tills here or what?”

Flynn hesitated.

“Go count some money,” she said, shooing him with one hand and picking up the bottle he’d set beside her with the other. “You’ll have all the time in the world to browbeat me.”

As Flynn departed, Michael, the band’s incubus lead guitarist, said something that made the group guffaw once again. Clangs and curses echoed from the industrial kitchen as the last pots and pans were washed. Plastic cups and bottles clacked as one of the closers pushed a huge broom across the darkened dance floor. Behind the bar, backlit liquor bottles gleamed like rough-cut jewels, and glasses clinked as everyone’s drink orders were filled. Sound bounced off every surface, hitting the back of her skull with the subtlety of a nail gun. She wanted to plug her ears. Put on her headset. Scream for silence.

But if she let herself scream, she wouldn’t stop. So she breathed deeply, tried to push the noise, the panic, into the background.
Focus on something else, anything else.
Her eyes cruised over the plum-colored walls, nearly black in the shadowy light, and locked on to the most dominant thing in the room: the sculpture that surrounded the stage and formed most of the club’s west wall. Steel, aluminum, and pewter undulated three stories to the ceiling, in a functional piece of art that cleverly directed sound from the stage out into the performance area. It was gorgeous, and both
Architectural Digest
and
Audiophile
had featured it in their magazines.

“Toasts!” Tansy, their valkyrie bassist, called from the far end of the table with a glance at her watch. “Let’s get this show on the road, people!”

Scarlett smirked. Tansy’s bondmates, gorgeous twin vampires, were probably waiting up for her. Naked, in bed.

“Stephen, here’s your—where’s Stephen?” Flynn asked as he strode from the back carrying the bottle of absinthe the drummer preferred.

“He didn’t feel well and went home awhile ago. He’ll meet us at Crackhouse for brunch before sound check,” Scarlett said, referring to the other business housed in the Sebastiani Building. Her best friend Sasha Sebastiani managed both Underbelly and Crackhouse Coffee, and they also shared one of the building’s penthouse apartments with Scarlett’s sister Annika. “But he left me his toast.” She waited for the table to quiet down, for Flynn to fill a delicate glass with the glowing green liqueur. Scarlett raised it. “To groupies.”

The toast was so like Stephen, and so not like Scarlett, that laughter rolled.

“He’s the reason the tour bus smelled like sex all the time,” Tansy grumbled. “On the next tour we need to have a ‘no sex on the bus’ rule.”

“You can’t be serious,” one of their roadies said. “Good luck with that.”

“You and your rules,” Michael said with a roll of his eyes. “You’d have to wallpaper it from stem to stern to cover all the places Stephen’s had sex on that bus. And then he’d just find places no one had thought about yet.”

“Those damn socks of his. Jesus, he’s got some foot funk,” Joe, the vampire who played rhythm guitar and keyboards, chimed in. He raised his creamy Guinness. “Here’s to clean socks.”

“To 3:00 a.m. greasy spoon breakfasts!”

“To room service!”

“To Nessie, who got us here safely!” “Nessie” was the band’s nickname for their workhorse tour bus, which had covered over 50,000 miles on this last tour, with only one stop for repairs outside Calgary.

A cheer went up. “Hear, hear!”

“To the next tour!” someone called. Everyone groaned again. Scarlett laughed as she was expected to, but her gut bubbled in warning. “Let’s finish this one first, okay?” she said. “We
do
have one more show to go.” And she was dreading it.

Flynn appeared at her elbow again and lifted the bottle of wine, but she put her hand over the top of her glass before he could pour. “Nope, I’m cutting myself off.”

He peered at her. Too closely. “Good call. Ready to call it a night?”

“Yes, yes, yes.” A yawn escaped, and she shivered through her layers. “Brrr. It was freezing when we left the hotel in Chicago this morning, and when we pulled in tonight, it was hot enough to steam rice. Now I’m cold again.”

Flynn nodded in agreement. “Fall in Minnesota. Why do we live here again?”

“So we have something to bitch about, of course.” Scarlett snagged her purse off the floor and stood.

Accusations of “party pooper” rained over her as the others noticed she was leaving. “I’m following Stephen’s lead and getting some sleep. We have one more show, boys and girls, and I, for one, need my beauty sleep.”

“Scarlett, what’s your toast?” Tansy called.

Shit, the last toast was hers. She paused and closed her eyes. “To…”
To silence, to solitude. To hibernating until the snow melts next spring.
When she opened them, everyone was looking at her expectantly. No way could she say what she really felt. She picked up Stephen’s absinthe and raised the glass. “To our homecoming. To sleeping in our own beds tonight—whether alone or with company—and to a great show tomorrow night,” she finally said. A cheer went up as she drained the shot of glowing green liquor.

She responded to the calls of “Good night” and “See you tomorrow!” with a wave and almost sagged against Flynn as he walked her through the unmarked door leading to the back of the house.

“Want to raid the refrigerator, have a bedtime snack?” Flynn said as they passed the noisy kitchen.

“No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

Flynn eyed her. “You look like you haven’t been hungry for a while. You sure? How ‘bout a Milky Way milkshake?”

Scarlett’s stomach lurched. “No thanks, I just want to go to bed.”

They stopped at the private elevator leading to the penthouse apartments. Scarlett stood there blankly, blinking when Flynn pulled a card out of his pocket and swiped it. The elevator doors opened with a swish. Flynn bundled her in and smacked a kiss on her temple. “Welcome home, darlin’. Get to bed. Sleep well.”

“Good night,” she called as the elevator doors closed. “Thank you, Flynn.”

The butter-smooth ride to the tenth floor started, and she turned her back to the elevator’s smirking mirrored walls. She didn’t need an up-close-and-personal view of the damage the road had wreaked, thank you very much. Her weight loss and the condition of her skin had had Jesse, her bodyguard-cum-stylist, tsk-tsking for the last month or so. With no makeup on, her green eyes were the only shot of color on her face, and her red hair was wilted and limp. While Tansy had recently started complaining that her favorite leather pants were getting too tight— “too many damn Hot Pockets”—Jesse had had to alter some of Scarlett’s performance clothing. But on the plus side, shopping had been required. What woman didn’t get a zing out of buying her jeans a size—okay, two sizes—smaller than usual?

The elevator drew to a stop, and the doors opened onto the dimly lit foyer for the two penthouse units on the top floor of the Sebastiani Building. Scarlett forced herself to move before the elevator doors closed on her and took her back downstairs.

The foyer was blissfully silent. On the table directly across from the elevator, a Tiffany lamp burned in welcome. A trio of pictures of the aurora borealis still hung on the wall above the table, greenish blue magnetic sheets coating the night sky. A single, exquisite orchid stood in a crystal vase, its petals a pink so pale they seemed white. She picked up the small lavender note card leaning against the vase, and read. “Welcome home, darling. Love you, Mom.” Smiling, she touched the flower’s delicate petals with her forefinger, and then tucked the card in her back pocket.

Elliott Sebastiani’s stately apartment was off to the right. She veered left, to the four-bedroom unit.

Key, key… where was her key?

It was a sign of everything that was wrong with her life that she didn’t know where her own damn house key was. When was the last time she’d unlocked anything other than a hotel room door for herself? She wearily opened her landfill of a purse, pawed through candy wrappers, pens, matchbooks from the clubs they’d played, enough tubes of lip gloss to stock a cosmetics counter, a stray tampon. Her wallet. She found the right card, slid it into the slot underneath the doorknob, waited for the light to turn green, and opened the heavy door. Closed it softly behind her.

Home. She was home at last. Away from the incessant attention that made her feel like a wild animal pacing behind bars at the zoo. Alone. At least for a few hours. No autograph seekers, no star fuckers, no paparazzi. And, love ’em dearly, no band mates, no roadies, no crew. They were all overdue for some time to themselves. It had been months since she’d slept in her own bed, and it was just fifteen strides away. She just… had to convince her feet to move.

She took a step in the dim light and promptly stumbled over a suitcase. “Damn.” Had she wakened Sasha and Annika? It had been so long since she’d been home that her roommates would be more apt to think a robber was opening the door than her.

Nah.
No robber would ever reach this door, because with his sister living here, and his father living across the foyer, Lukas Sebastiani had used every bit of his legendary skill to ensure the place was locked down tight.

Her own safety? Just a happy coincidence. Lukas avoided her like the plague. She sighed. Yeah, okay, the avoiding was reciprocal, but occurred for completely different reasons. Lukas didn’t care about her, and she… cared too much. Hurt too much. But that was going to change. Once she felt better rested, she would deal with Lukas, once and for all.

Scarlett made her way to her bedroom without turning on the lights or waking her roommates. She shut the door behind her, flipped the switch, and flooded the room with light. Though the turquoise walls glowed and there was no dust, the room felt a little sterile after such a long period of disuse. For a few minutes, she simply puttered, reacquainting herself with her things. A faint scent of rain permeated the room from a candle that someone—Sasha, most likely—had left burning in welcome on her bedside table. Passing the sound system, she unclipped her iPod—facetiously named Sigmund in honor of the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud—from the hip pocket of her jeans, docked it, and pressed Play. She barely blinked when the shuffle feature queued up Michael Jackson’s “Scream.”

It just figured.

As the music throbbed softly into the room, she trailed her hand over the intricate contemporary quilt covering her maple four-poster bed. Priceless, too precious to take with her on the road. The faerie quilt swirled with all the colors of the ocean: teal, turquoise, tanzanite. Indigo and midnight blue tipping to nearly black, the occasional flash of lime green. She’d commissioned it the day she’d turned eighteen, the youngest age the faeries would consider such a request—her illustrious lineage be damned—because in addition to providing warmth and beauty for a lifetime, faerie quilts catalyzed dreams, and such things could not be trusted to youth. During her hypnotic blur of an interview, Scarlett had apparently described her favorite childhood fantasy: She was a mermaid, swimming through the bath-warm tropics, caring for the creatures feeding near the towering kelp forest.

Not a siren singing men to their deaths, thank you very much.

Her eyes were drawn to the plum-framed Annie Leibovitz prints lining the walls, pictures of the musicians she respected, some of whom she’d been lucky enough to collaborate with and now counted as friends. Her own photograph by the famed rock photographer hung around the corner, tucked in the alcove which held her desk and computer—part of the collection, yet not. Hers was a matted pair of prints: first, the staged shot which had appeared in
Vanity Fair
about a year ago as part of a story on emerging female songwriters, Scarlett presented as a majestic siren luring ships into the cliffs with her voice, standing strong and sinuous on a bluff overlooking the pounding Irish Sea near dusk, barefooted on the rocks, arms stretched to the elements. Power pulsed off the picture, and Scarlett stared at it in amazement. Who was
that?
Was even a fraction of it real, or was it all smoke and mirrors?

She looked at the second print and smiled. She and Annie were hugging after the shoot, Annie seemingly impervious to the weather, but Scarlett bundled into an ugly, ankle-length, down jacket, UGGs on her feet, knit cap on her wet hair, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. Bedraggled, runny nose, blue lips and fingernails.

This
Scarlett she had no problem recognizing.

The bed called to her, but she checked for messages first, and then quickly flipped through the piles of mail someone had deemed important enough for her to see, but not urgent enough to deliver to her on the road. How did Garrett receive her mail? How had he delivered her latest house key when he was on the road with them most of the time? She’d never thought about it before. She’d gotten used to being hustled and bundled from location to location, conserving her flagging energy for the next performance. The road was a bubble in which real life fell by the wayside. An escape. Just like she’d wanted, had asked for.