Black bird a nevermore d.., p.38
Black Bird: A Nevermore Duet, page 38
“I’m going to give it to you. Let you decide where this goes from here. Seems fitting now that you’ve helped to ruin me.”
“Me?” Brent asked.
Conrad looked over his shoulder. “Yes. You.” He turned his body and stared him down. “Now you can figure out what kind of man you are. You can give it to your mother. You can save her life. You can give it to a ten-year-old girl that’s rotting in a hospital uptown, which by the way … made it very clear to Gretchen and I that you were her hero and demanded to meet you as the only condition in trying this blood. Or …” He shrugged. “You can give it back to the little bitch. Wash your hands of it altogether and do with that knowledge whatever you wish. It’s your choice, now.” He turned back toward the fireplace and picked his glass up from the table, swirling the scotch inside it.
“How did you get this?” Brent asked after a short silence.
Conrad chuckled. “Her nitwit boss.”
“Specter?”
“The one and only. I paid him a great deal to get me files on your girlfriend’s mother and the research that the government sealed about her disease. He was never able to figure anything out and gave both the coven leader and I a bag of blood each. She used it on one of her folks, and I’ve saved that one for the benefit.”
Images of the picture of Sarah and her mother from the apartment flashed through his mind. Sarah never wanted to talk about it. “What does her mother have to do with any of this?”
“Well … maybe you should ask her,” Conrad replied dryly. “Take it and get the hell out of my house.”
He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to think of everything his father had just unpacked and slammed over his head. His mind was racing. His pulse hardly kept up. Brent left the study without another word, the condensation from the blood bag dampening his palm. As he made his way down the dark hall, he passed the unlit library where he last saw his mother. Brent paused, peering in. If his mother knew that there was a little girl that could benefit from something like this … she’d never allow someone to use it on her. She had always been an advocate for the sick. Especially the children. She’d never accept this. He knew that. Brent continued down the hall and through the front door, hurtling down the front steps and slamming his car door shut. He opened his briefcase in the passenger seat and tucked the bag inside, latching it closed.
The right decision was obvious. He had screwed up every single time he tried to do right by Sarah. By Wren. By pretty much everyone. The blood in that bag only belonged to one person, and that’s where he’d take it. He started the car and fished out his phone. He was surprised when she answered on the second ring.
“Good, you made it out. I was gonna call—”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at home. You don’t have to freak out.”
“I’m glad you’re safe, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Are you okay? You sound … off.”
“I’m not sure how to answer that, Sarah. I need to see you. Right now. Can I come by?”
“Umm … yeah, I guess. I really hope this isn’t some kind of—”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. We need to talk. It’s really important.”
“… okay. There’s cops downstairs. I’ll let them know. Just come on up.”
“Alright.”
He hung up and sped around the curve of the long, gated driveway.
“She should have checked in by now. I should have known better than this. She’s too much like me,” Dahlia said as she paced her office down the hall from the raging club.
“She’ll be back, mi’lady. Have faith,” Decclan offered. She paused her steps, turning slowly and sneering at him from beneath her thick lashes.
“Have faith?” She snarled. “Interesting, Decclan. And here I thought I had fucked the humanity clean out of you.” He bristled, and her lips curled around her lengthening canines. “Don’t ever say anything like that to me again.”
“Apologies, ma’am.” He bowed his head.
“Get out. Don’t come back until you’ve brought me either news, or my little protege.” She started pacing again and Decclan left the office. Patrick stood by in the corner, and she approached him slowly. She was pleased to notice he no longer flinched when she neared him. “If I had given you the blood instead of her … would you have tried to escape me?” she asked, running a long, red fingernail down the front of his black button-up.
“I don’t think I’d dare to, ma’am,” he gently replied.
Dahlia grabbed him by the underside of his chin, forcefully enough that his cheeks puckered around his mouth. He surprisingly took it in stride and remained still. “Careful words, pet. You seem as if you’re trying to hide the fact that you’d want to.”
“I wouldn’t hide it from you, mi’lady. I’ve already been honest about how I feel. I do miss my family. I can’t say it wouldn’t have crossed my mind.”
She released his face and rolled her eyes, turning away from him. “I’ll never understand for the life of me why you men are never satisfied. I suppose I appreciate your honesty.”
“Could I ask you something?” Patrick asked. She didn’t turn around.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m only curious, but … what is it that satisfies you?” For once in her very long life, Dahlia was at a loss for words. Shocked really. She wasn’t sure if it was the question itself that rendered her speechless—rather … she had no honest answer—or if it was the fact that this young vampire who was shamelessly transparent, actually seemed to genuinely care about her response. She turned to face him.
“Why are you asking me this?” A strange feeling started in her gut—one she’d never felt before. She couldn’t help but wonder why she had such a soft spot for this child. Had it been any other person she would have likely snatched their heart out already and found a new toy. But that face … the pretty blue eyes. She was intoxicated by his youth, and how much he reminded her of—
“Maybe if I knew … I could … find a way to be better about giving it to you?” He shrugged with a slight smirk. Dahlia returned it, stepping toward him.
“Let me show you something.” She raised her wrist to her mouth, biting into it and letting her blood pool. Patrick watched; his expression more curious than intimidated. She offered it to him. “Drink.” He obeyed and the pull of their connection as he fed from her ignited a fire between her legs. Her head fell back, and she closed her eyes, a sharp moan freeing itself from her throat. “Enough, Patrick,” she whispered. He promptly released her, breathing heavily. She nearly melted at the sight of her blood on his mouth. She unbuttoned his shirt and spread it open to reveal his bare chest. “Now … place a hand over your heart.”
Patrick slowly obeyed; his eyes locked onto hers. She watched his pupils dilate until the blue in them was a mere sliver around the edges. She leaned in and slid her tongue over his bottom lip. “Dig your fingers into your skin until I tell you to stop.” The look he had in those eyes turned into a sickening worry, but without an ounce of hesitation he obeyed that command as well. Blood trickled down his chest and abdomen and he winced and groaned as he carved a way into his own chest cavity. His breathing became a broken rasp. “Close your hand around your heart, Patrick.” He did, his groans of pain becoming louder. She breathed against his mouth. “If I told you to rip it out of yourself … you’d have no choice but to obey me.”
He blinked, as if in a silent plea for mercy. “What would satisfy me, pet … is if I could find one person that didn’t have to be told what to do. One person that found pleasure in spending an eternity beside me.” She grazed her long claws over the back of his wrist that was still half-hidden inside his body. “Let go, and button your shirt,” she ordered, swiping her fingertip through his blood and stepping backward as she sucked her finger into her mouth.
Once he’d fulfilled her demand, he stared at her blankly. “Do I have permission to offer you my thoughts?” he softly asked, still in obvious pain from her torture.
“Consider me interested in them enough to allow it.”
“From what I can tell … everybody here is terrified of you. I’d be lying if I said you didn’t scare me to death, mi’lady.” He paused and their eyes met. “But if I’d known that it was alright to reach out for you anytime that I’d felt like it since you first—” He swallowed. “I think you’d grow pretty sick of me needing you every second of every day.”
“What are you saying?” Dahlia breathed.
“I’m saying I wish you’d come over here and take this shirt back off of me. I wish you’d let me strip you down and do unspeakable things to you.” His chest rose and fell with an eagerness she’d never seen in any other man she’d sired. She felt her own chest involuntarily doing the same. He stalked toward her, taking the side of her face in his hand and claiming her mouth. She surprised herself when she let him. Surprised herself more when she kissed him back. Some part of her suddenly felt different. Like something just clicked—no … snapped. Patrick backed her up against her desk and leaned her back across it, that kiss deepening. “I wanna be the only thing you want,” he rasped.
It made her blood sing. That persistent pull in her middle grew stronger and he lifted her long black skirts, exposing her silken white thighs. For the first time in her long existence, she felt foreign in her own body. Dahlia stopped him and he froze, pulling back to look at her. They stared into each other for a heartbeat, and she gently pushed him off her, leaning herself up to sit. Patrick stood a breath away, both of them still breathing frantically. “I—I need you to go,” she stuttered.
“Go where?” he asked, his eyes pleading.
“Just—go do … whatever you want. I need to be alone for a bit,” she replied, dropping her gaze to the floor. When he didn’t move, she realized that she’d given him a command—and that he hadn’t obeyed. “Why aren’t you leaving?”
“I—can’t …”
“I told you to leave.”
“You said to go do whatever I want,” he corrected. Her stomach fluttered.
“I’d like you to go enjoy yourself … at the bar. In the club. Just leave me by myself.”
He dropped his chin and slowly nodded. A moment later, she was indeed alone, still sitting with her gown half-hiked on her desk. It had hit her then. She commanded that he go do what he wanted … and he remained there with her. What had she done? What just happened? Why did she suddenly feel so powerless?
Dahlia pulled her skirts back down over her legs and ran a hand through her long silvery hair.
CHAPTER 17
LENORE
Sarah had spent two days trying to figure out what to do with the information Brent had given her after he came by her apartment that night. Her blood remained in a bag in her fridge and her sanity was becoming dangerously close to slipping. Was there a single person in her life that hadn’t had some part in shoving a knife into her back? She’d worked so hard. So damned hard to get that job. She promised herself a bright future and the answers to all the questions that had haunted her like a chained ghost of her precious mother, who she desperately wished she could talk to about everything that had happened. Wished she could get some kind of advice about love … about pretty much anything. She missed her.
“What do I do, Mom?” she whispered into the dark of her bedroom as she clutched the old blanket to her chest. She turned onto her side and curled her knees up, a single tear falling onto her pillow. “Everything is so fucked up.” Her eyes found the photo on her nightstand. The faces were barely visible with the small amount of streetlight coming in from her curtained window. Whispers feathered through her mind as if in answer.
Just a bunch of nonsense … utter nonsense.
Sarah squeezed her eyes shut and tried to concentrate on them as they grew louder. All the voices seemed so jumbled … unorganized. Floor? Shore? She imagined a hand in the darkness—her hand … reaching out toward some kind of answer. Some of the voices began to quiet as if they were moving farther away. Still, she reached out. One voice seemed to remain …
“Lenore.”
Sarah’s eyes tore open and focused on her mother’s sweet face in the photo. The whispering became a longing call … a name she’d buried but realized how it suddenly all made sense.
“Lenore …” the voice repeated, the voice a song within her.
Sarah’s eyes filled with tears as she turned her wrist and peered at the tattoo. “Nameless here forevermore,” she whispered back. There was a reason. A reason that fate had brought the two of them together. A reason that her mother gave her a name she’d never use but had so much purpose. Every purpose. She sat up in her bed, leaning over to switch her lamp on and looking across her apartment to the discarded poster in the corner with the busted frame. She wondered if he knew. She glanced at the clock that rested on the nightstand. Nearly two in the morning and she’d never even dozed off, although every part of her felt heavy and exhausted. Sarah’s mind fluttered with so many things, but his face was the most demanding of all of them.
It was real for her. Still was, and God help her, she missed him. She couldn’t sleep. Had eaten very little in the last couple of days, save for her coffee and cigarettes. Although it seemed like the wisest decision to let him go, she wondered if she’d ever get over it. Wondered if he was awake … if he was thinking about her. If there was even the slightest chance that he hurt as deeply as she did right now. Sarah’s head hung and she sighed deeply, sniffling and reaching over to switch the lamp back off and grab her phone from the nightstand. She opened his name on her contact list and stared at the picture she’d snapped of him sleeping the morning everything had gone to shit. Stared at the number beneath it.
Don’t do it. You’re stronger than that.
Sarah wasn’t sure which part of herself won that war when she moved her thumb away from the call button and dropped down onto her pillow, tossing her phone back onto the table. She didn’t know how long she lay there, still as death. Didn’t glance at the clock again. Her eyes fixed on a shadow casted on her ceiling from the dim window light and she daydreamed about any moment they’d shared those looks. As pathetic as it was to admit, he was still the only thing that seemed to settle her restless soul. And who would know how often he crossed her mind if she never said a word about it? The shadows became abstract shapes the longer she focused on them. Shapes that—like everything else in her life—made no sense. She laid on her back and tucked her arms beneath her worn-out blanket.
It was so windy out tonight. The chill of the late fall air soothed him as Athan stood out on his balcony and drew on the filter of his second cigarette since stepping out. The sky was clear, and the stars were bright as it neared the witching hour. He would almost find it beautiful if he hadn’t grown to resent the night and all it now represented these long years after he’d become what he was. He found himself longing more for the daylight now, than when it used to be a death sentence. He couldn’t get his mind off the woman who’d fixed that problem as he dragged another chestful of smoke and blew it softly through his nose. She was shutting everyone out again. Wasn’t speaking much to Wren, and none at all to Rhaena. Athan couldn’t help but wonder if she’d medicated that gaping loneliness with Stratford, or some other nameless prick. He wouldn’t blame her if she did, but he prayed to God he was wrong.
Athan’s eyes cut to the side of town where he knew she likely slept. Slept, or was up reading, or maybe neither. Maybe she was thinking about him, too. He’d be happy just knowing he was on her mind, even if when she thought of him it made her very blood boil. He told himself he’d hold out. If there was any truth to what Rhaena and Wren said about how women think … maybe she’d eventually seek him out again. He just wanted one chance—one chance to tell her she was wrong. So wrong.
“You made me believe that what we felt for each other, however forbidden it was, was something real, and—then I find out that it wasn’t real for you at all.”
But it was. It still was and would always be. She had changed every part of his lonely existence. She fought off the darkness that had consumed him for so long. She didn’t just gift him sunlight … she was his sunlight. The only thing that had thawed the ice around his heart after centuries of the darkest winter. He was nothing without her. If he could just hear her voice …
“Fuck this.” His cigarette flew from his fingertips and was caught on the biting wind that howled past him. Athan stepped back inside and grabbed his phone, resting his elbow above his head against the open sliding glass door and not giving himself any time to reconsider how stupid this was.
The phone started ringing.
Sarah’s deep moans were free to echo through her empty apartment but caught by her teeth as they sank into her bottom lip. She rolled over onto her stomach, her hips rolling against her slick hand as she let go of everything and let her body convulse around a truly forceful release. It wasn’t her touch that had her knees quaking, it was his head between her legs. It hadn’t been her fingers that she was riding, but him. Of course, she knew that neither of those things were the truth … however … he had been the reason for the mess she’d left beneath her blanket. Sarah’s hair blew in and out of her face with the shallow breaths she was heaving against her pillow. Maybe now she could sleep. She dragged her hand up from between her thighs and slid it under her pillow as her body sagged in debility.
No sooner than the thought of not moving a single muscle overtook her, the phone next to her bed started ringing, startling her enough to make her face tingle—or maybe that was from the aftermath of what she’d just done to herself.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she whispered, rolling her eyes in exhaustion and disbelief. She gathered any remaining strength in her still trembling arms and turned herself on her side to reach for her phone. She nearly choked when his picture appeared on the screen. Her finger hovered almost too long over the green circle, but her curiosity got the better of her. At least, that was what she’d blame it on. She was still winded and said nothing as she pressed the phone to her ear. She wasn’t really sure what to say.
