Текст книги "Hot for slayer"
Автор книги: Ali Hazelwood
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 6 страниц)
He stares, patient.
“You’re a CPA, Lazlo. You do my taxes.”
He sighs. Shakes his head, but his mouth twitches. “I remember why we were in that building now.”
“You do?”
“Hm. To go over your itemized deductions.”
“Precisely.”
He looks at me, amused. I look at him in pretty much the same way. And when I can no longer stand the tension of it, I ask him, “Do you, um, maybe wanna play cards?”
He immediately puts the blade away, like sharing an activity with me is the only thing he has ever desired, and it’s . . .
Nice, kind of. Shared. Pleasant. Not really what I usually do during the day, which is . . . maybe not lonely, but definitely on my own.
This is different. Playing cards with Lazlo. Watching him realize that “Clearly we are both very competitive people.” Laughing.
I can make my own meaning. I can find my own joy. But there is a different kind of happiness in this companionship. A sense of something coming. Like the breeze picking up before a storm.
It’s possible that I am, like the abbess said, just a fanciful, too-distractible girl. But for the first time in nearly one and a half millennia, I forget to keep track of time, and I don’t feel the need to run outside the exact moment the sun has set.
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Chapter 9
Lazlo’s response to the hordes of kids wearing costumes, adults sitting on their stoops giving out candy, and jack-o’-lanterns casting rich golden light across the neighborhood is a simple, unfazed, straightforward nod. I’m not sure whether he remembers what Halloween is or just thinks that this is what goes on every night in the West Village, but he’s game, and I cannot help but laugh.
“What sharp teeth you have,” he tells a group of little vampires who hold out their baskets to him. Then he distributes some of the cash I found in the back pocket of his jeans before washing them—all one-hundred-dollar bills.
I mouth Sorry to the children’s baffled mothers and quickly pull Lazlo away.
My people are, unsurprisingly, highly represented in this year’s costuming choices. I glance at Lazlo, wondering if seeing them is jogging his memory, but all he says is, “I’m hungry.” He eats a hot dog. Then a candied apple. Not once does he ask me if I’m hungry, too, or if I want a single bite.
I think he’s done with my bullshit. And I think that he’d rather I stay quiet than lie. So I do. When a pack of sexy Slimers tries to step between us, he grabs my hand to pull me closer, and doesn’t let go, not even when a fortune teller tries to sell us a couple’s reading.
“We’re not a couple,” I explain just as he loftily proclaims, “I am a man, and I make my own fortune.”
The teller’s eyes fall pointedly to where his fingers are closed around mine. “No matter,” she says. “Your fates are already intertwined.”
I scowl and let Lazlo drag me away into the night, watching the crowd as it transitions from adorable children to adults in skimpy costumes drinking questionable alcohol mixes from poorly disguised cups.
“I like it,” he says when we dip into a narrow, semi-deserted alleyway to avoid the throng. “We’ll do this often.”
“Halloween is only once a year,” I say, leaning back against the wall. “By the next, you’ll have remembered enough of who you are to spend it with . . . with whomever it is that you usually do.”
He stares down at me, patiently amused, arms crossed. Steps closer. “Just tell me, Ethel.”
“Tell you . . . ?”
“What we are.”
I straighten a little. “We are people. I thought you knew that.”
“What we are to each other,” he clarifies, a note of Come on, Ethel, don’t be obtuse in his tone that I should take more offense to.
But I am being obtuse. And he is being remarkably forbearing. “Should I redefine work nemeses for you?” I ask archly.
His smile just widens. “I think you’re tired, too.”
“Of what?”
“The lies.”
I look down at my shoes. Back up. “How are you so sure that—”
“I told you, Ethel. I know how I feel about you. And I know how you feel, too.”
“And what would that—”
He bends toward me slowly enough that I could conceivably stop him, but I don’t care to conceive of it—before his lips touch mine, or after.
I’ve kissed and been kissed by many people. None, however, who were, fundamentally, at an atomic level, like me. None whose feel and scent and body I’d learned over centuries, through endless battles and close calls. None who were anything like Lazlo.
That’s the problem, I think. After a while on this earth, one rarely experiences new sensations. But nothing has ever felt as good as Lazlo’s leg slipping between mine and pinning me to the wall. As the warmth of his hands closing around my lower back and my nape to turn me into him. As his tongue sliding against mine with no hesitation.
I can’t make us stop. Instead, I reach up, fist his shirt, and deepen the kiss. I press myself to his body and listen to the faint, pleased groan he lets out. I rub my core against the meat of his thigh while his breath hitches inside my ear, and he says, “Ethel.”
It’s not my real name. Not the one the real Lazlo, the Lazlo who remembers, likes to use. And that, at last, is the bucket of ice I need.
I push him away, both my hands against his rib cage. He stumbles backward, breathing fast, his expression half delighted, half outraged.
Shit.
“No, I– No.” I shake my head. “This is wrong. I can’t do this to you.”
He frowns. “You don’t need to do anything. I do things. To you.”
“You—” I want to bury my face in my hands. “You don’t even know who I am. You don’t remember who you are. This is– I am basically deceiving you, and—”
“I know that. You are odd. And a terrible liar, and not good at being secretive. But I don’t care.”
“Well, you should care. You cannot consent to being with someone who hasn’t been open with you about their identity, and—”
“There is nothing that I could discover about you, or about myself, that would make me want to do this any less.” His tone is arrogant and self-assured, and brooks no argument.
I hate it.
Sadly, I could see myself loving it.
He steps closer once again. “I know we have done this before, Ethel.”
“No. No, we haven’t. How do you even . . . ?”
“I know your smell. I know your skin. Your hair. It’s all familiar. I have it all memorized. And I dream of you—of this. So many dreams, all so different, we must have done it a million times, in a million different ways. Tell me what you’re hiding from me, let’s get this over with, and then let’s do it a million more times.” He stops when a masked man trips drunkenly inside our alleyway. “Not now,” he orders the intruder before turning back to me.
“Actually, sir,” I say, shrill, panicky, eager to end the conversation, “this place is all yours. My friend and I were just getting ready to go our separate ways.”
Lazlo rolls his eyes, but the man in the Edward Cullen mask nods his thanks and walks closer.
And that’s when something starts nagging at me. There’s an odd familiarity to his gait. To the grace of his movements. To the speed of—
“It’s you,” I whisper.
I barely have time to shove Lazlo out of the way before the vampire who tried to kill me two nights ago attacks me again.
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Chapter 10
Imay have been a little overoptimistic about the death of Teenage Dirtbag Vampire. In that sense, the Halloween crowd is both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, the loud music and festive atmosphere are noisy enough to cover the sounds of our fight, which guarantees that people won’t interfere and accidentally get themselves torn to pieces. On the other, it means that I’m on my own. A problem, since despite my first impression of him, the vampire trying to kill me is very, very strong.
When we met before, in Central Park, he must have been injured. Or starving. He has now recovered, and his assault is becoming harder and harder to fend off. He attacks me silently, precisely, with none of the sloppiness of two nights ago. He’s not of my bloodline, but with power like this, I have to scrap my Teenage Dirtbag assessment and admit that he has to be at least as old as I am.
We are that evenly matched.
I stab at him with my dagger and try to overpower him once and for all, letting out a frustrated grunt when he disarms me. A group of teenagers walk past the mouth of the alleyway, glance at the struggling outline of our bodies, and let out lewd, suggestive noises. “Get a fucking room, losers!”
It may look like we’re making out, but I just want to get the vampire off me and go check on Lazlo, who hasn’t gotten up since I shoved him against the wall.
I put all my might behind a powerful push and manage to throw Adult Dirtbag inside a dumpster. When he doesn’t immediately reemerge, I take a second to run to Lazlo and kneel at his side, pushing back the hair on his brow.
He is unconscious, and my stomach drops. I know he can’t die, not from this. But he could forget even more. His brain is clearly susceptible to . . . anything, really, and my stomach tightens with worry and regret and something that feels a lot like desperation. “Are you okay?” I shake him to no avail. “Lazlo? I—”
A clawed hand grips the back of my sweater, pulling me away. The world goes upside down, and a moment later the vampire is on top of me. “You are in my territory,” he growls, lips and tongue mangled by his own teeth. His eyes are milky white all over, with the sole exception of his pupils.
I was wrong. He’s not an adolescent, and he’s not my age. This vampire is at least a millennium older than me. His power is unstable and impossible to predict. The realization hits me when he tears at my jugular with a swift strike of his fangs, causing my blood to erupt out of my skin.
The pain eviscerates me, and I scream. My neck throbs like it’s on fire.
He’s fucking ancient. That’s why he can take me so easily. I try to kick him off, but he has me pinned underneath him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you,” I hiss at him.
“You should have left when you had a chance.”
“Fuck you. I was here first.”
His smile is shark-toothed, as if every single one of his teeth is a canine. “You’ll be here last, too.” He opens his maw wider, spit and blood mixing as his head bends over to strike my vein again, and—
It rolls away.
His head, that is.
It wobbles above the vampire’s neck, dangles forward, and then rolls away.
The vampire collapses on top of me in a puddle of viscous fluids. I push his lithe body away, smelling the metallic scent of blood as it blends with the rotting sweetness of the trash behind us, then scramble to my feet before his juices can soak through my clothes. “What the—” That’s when I notice that Lazlo has regained consciousness. He stands behind the remains of Ancient Dirtbag, a dagger in his grip. But he’s not staring at his handiwork.
No: He’s staring at me.
Thank you, I want to say. And: Are you okay? And: He’s not dead yet. We need to expose every part of him to the sun.
But there is a light in his eyes, new and old at the same time, that tells me that there’s no need for me to explain anything. He already knows all of this. Killing vampires is second nature to him—first, maybe.
I open my mouth. Then, unsure of what to say, close it. Suddenly, I feel like crying, and I’m not certain I know why.
Until Lazlo says, “Aethelthryth.”
My name. The one my mother gave me. Probably because it was all the rage at the time—over a thousand years ago.
It can mean only one thing.
That’s why, without any warning, I charge Lazlo Enyedi and begin to attack him.
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Chapter 11
Over the centuries, I’ve battled Lazlo more times than I can count. If there is one thing I’m certain of, it’s that when it comes to physical strength and fighting skills, he and I are equals.
That’s why it makes absolutely no sense that only a couple of seconds pass between the time I start running in his direction and the moment the blade of my dagger touches the ink wrapped around his neck.
Sure, he’s a little banged up. But I’m still bleeding profusely from where the vampire gnawed at me, which means that we’re both in poor shape.
And yet, here I am. Looking up at him with my knife at his neck, trapping his larger body against the wall with no difficulty. I have, at last, the opportunity to excise him from my life once and for all.
It would be so, so freeing. It might take fifty, even one hundred, years before the Guild finds someone else to hunt my bloodline. It would earn me decades of not watching my back. Of not having to move to a new continent because my hideout was discovered. Of peace.
And yet, I hesitate.
Do it. Do it now. He’s not the person who snored in your ear at two a.m. Who pretended to no longer understand the rules of cribbage once you started beating him. He’s not the man who kissed you. He wouldn’t have done any of it, not if he’d remembered what you are. He finds you disgusting. He hates you. His entire purpose is to eliminate you, which . . .
Doesn’t explain why his eyes, all of a sudden, seem so soft. Or the fact that instead of pushing me away, instead of hitting back with his own weapons and his own strength, he touches me tenderly. One hand lifts to cup my face, and he gently thumbs my cheekbone.
“What are you . . . ?” My voice trembles. I can’t bring myself to finish the question.
“Aethelthryth,” he says, calm. His voice is the same as it was before the attack, and yet completely different. He is the man who saved my life two days ago, the man who kissed me, the man who cleaned up the mess I made in my kitchen, but also something more. “If you want to kill me, I’m not going to stop you. But first, I’m going to need you to tell me something.”
I feel disoriented. As though someone is spinning me around blindfolded to make fun of the way I stumble to my knees. There must be something I’m missing. I certainly don’t know why I let him lean even closer to me, his own movements causing my knife to press against his throat and break the skin. The scent of his blood melts into me, tantalizingly sweet. His lips find my ear, and he asks, “Where do you think I’ll go once I’m dead?”
And then it’s my turn to remember.
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Chapter 12
His Excellency, Duca Aurelio Corsini, had been, true to his title, an excellent man.
An eccentric one, too. I had known him for approximately fifty years, and was therefore wholly unsurprised that only three months after his death, his daughters had decided to throw a masquerade ball in his honor.
It was, without a doubt, what he would have wanted.
The duca and I first met when he was a child. He had been traveling the Florentine countryside, on his way back from an excursion in the Apennines, when he and his escorts were attacked by a group of bandits. Normally, I wouldn’t have interfered with the affairs of the human aristocracy. But it was dusk, and I was hungry. The ducato may have been no friend of mine, but I did not approve of this specific gang of bandits. Torturing nearly twenty people with a semi-orgiastic relish was, simply put, in bad taste.
So I killed half a dozen outlaws, drank from them well past the moment of satiety, and when the last drained body fell to the ground, I noticed that not everyone from the ducal party was as dead as I had thought.
“Thank you,” a young boy said to me, his voice surprisingly firm. He couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. He ought to be screaming for the Tuscan hills. Instead, he held the hand of a rapidly cooling female corpse. “They were very bad to my nurse. I’m glad you were bad to them.”
The reasoning made sense to me, and I was too pleasantly full of fresh blood to panic at having been found out. In the moonlit night, I could see a shimmer of defiant tears in the boy’s eyes, and I took a liking to him.
So I asked, “Would you like me to escort you back to your home?”
“Please, my lady.”
And that was it. When I dropped him off outside the gates of the palazzo, he asked if I would come to him again. “Please,” he added, and only because of that, I promised that I would. Once he turned fifteen, I visited, convinced that he’d have forgotten all about me. But he remembered, and he welcomed me at his court. He never asked me to explain my actions or my nature. He never brought up what he’d seen or my extraordinary, never-ending youth.
And yet, he knew I was not like him. He would ask me questions about history and the meaning of life. He would seek my company and my conversation. He extended friendship and protection without demanding anything in return.
It was refreshing. Throughout the centuries, there had been a handful of humans to whom I had shown my true nature. Alas, faced with the reality of immortality, people either deemed it a symbol of evil or they demanded a piece of it for themselves. Not the duca, who knew me for who I was and offered nothing but acceptance, making me feel as though I was something more than a figment of people’s nightmares.
I loved him dearly, and I knew that I would miss him. Therefore, the least I could do was to put a traditional Colombina mask over my eyes, show up for the odd ball his daughters were throwing in his honor, and watch the attendees get wine drunk as they shared improper stories about his life.
“Were you a personal acquaintance of the duca?” a deep voice asked, Italian but accented. Someone else who had traveled from far away to pay their respects.
I was leaning back against the stone wall in the great hall. When I turned around, I found a tall, broad-backed man whom I hadn’t noticed before. He wore a charcoal cloak, a matching three-cornered hat, and a black-and-golden volto mask that covered his entire face.
My first instinct was inexplicable and yet very clear: to excuse myself and step away. Go back to the inn where I had already decided I would spend the day. But it was just that—instinct. It lasted a fraction of a second, and then I subdued it.
“I was, yes. You?”
He nodded, but said, “‘A friend of a friend’ might be a better definition. You must have known him better than I did.”
I smiled, even as a pang of sadness spread through my chest. “He was a very kind man. A rare thing.”
“Kind men?”
“Kindness, in general.”
The ensemble, which comprised a lute, a harpsichord, and a viola, began playing a beautiful, slow piece, clearly intending for the guests to dance a saraband. When the man offered me his hand, I briefly hesitated, surprised. The steps I’d learned were probably one or two decades old by now, and I was unlikely to keep up with the rest of the dancers.
On the other hand, the duca would have been highly amused by the mess I was going to make of it.
“Please,” I said, smiling, and sure enough, it was obvious from the start that I should have declined. But half the attendees were in their cups, and the man guided me through the steps until I was less of a disaster, his assured hands pointing me in the right direction. Once, I even felt him grip my waist, stopping me from walking into a young girl dressed like a Harlequin. Perhaps I should have gasped at his daring, but I couldn’t find it in me to mind. When it was the turn of the couple next to us to take the stage, he asked quietly, “Was the duca your lover?”
There was some impropriety to the question, but I assumed that the man had overindulged, or that he was simply honoring the Italian custom of being nosy. Either way, I didn’t take offense. I enjoyed the deep rasp of his voice, the line of his shoulders, his quiet questions. So much so, I found myself wondering: When was the last time I had taken a lover? Years. Decades. What about the last time I had considered taking a lover?
“No. We didn’t suit that way. He was more special than that to me.”
“A friend cannot be more special than a lover.”
I turned to glance up at the man—uselessly so, given that I could not glimpse a single inch of his skin, making it impossible to read his intent. Moreover, I couldn’t very well tell him why the duca was so unique a presence in my life. Still, I attempted to explain. “Some lives run invisibly. Undetected by most. And when a person comes along who sees those lives for what they are, who acknowledges their reality, who reminds people that there is value in different ways of existing . . . A minute of that is worth more than a thousand nights with a lover. Wouldn’t you agree?”
It was our time to dance again, but as I stepped forward, the man froze in place. Even when I turned around, reaching for his forearm to remind him of our turn, he remained immobile. In the shadowy socket of the mask, his eyes were dark and inscrutable. “Is everything well?” I asked.
But he didn’t answer. Nor did he move. All he said was: “Where do you think he went?”
“Who?”
“The duca. Where do you think he is now that he’s dead?”
“Oh.” I bit the inside of my cheek, uncertain. Truth was, I had no idea. Some might assume that immortality would offer insight into the afterlife, but that was not the case for me. I had no idea whether something existed past the current realm. If it did, I doubted that it would welcome the likes of me. The cursed. “I don’t know. But I am not convinced that it matters.”
“You aren’t?”
I shook my head. “The duca was a kind man who earned the love and gratitude of many. He will live forever through the memories of those who outlast him. I will remember him for as long as I live, and as long as I carry him in my heart, he will be here. With us.”
I smiled at the man, but he didn’t smile back. And when I next turned from him, he disappeared into the night.
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