Authors: Debbie Johnson
It was too dark to see properly, so I walked over to one of the braziers, as yet unlit, to see if I could perform some magic trick and make it poof into life. Surely handy stuff like that should be included in my new skill set? I mean, did it all have to be doom and gloom and sticking knives in my tits? Couldn’t I at least get one break, and have fag-lighter fingers or something?
As it turned out, I didn’t need them, so I never got to find out. There was one of those old-fashioned long metal gas lighters resting on the edge of the bowl, the kind Nan used to use to light the oven before the days of automatic ignition. I clicked the button, and a blue flame shot out. The minute it touched the coals they blazed into magnificent orange life, and I jumped back to avoid getting my eyebrows singed. Possibly I said ‘eek’ as well.
As I stared at the fire, hypnotised by its flickering dance, I realised I wasn’t entirely alone after all. A huge dog appeared from the shadows and ambled towards me, all legs and muscle and haunches. Like a five-foot-tall lurcher. His coat – her coat, I corrected myself, after a surreptitious glance at the relevant body parts – was a smooth, sleek black, giving her inquisitive head the look of a curious seal. Her fur was shining and glinting in the firelight, the sparks dappling over the elegant lines of her long body, as though a thousand tiny jewels were trapped beneath her skin. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Maybe it was a magic dog.
She came closer, sniffing and snuffling and fixing me with huge, freakishly intelligent eyes, arctic blue ringed with gold. I held out my hand, and she took a gentle push at it with her wet nose. I had the strangest feeling that she was giving me time to get used to her, letting me become accustomed to her look and her scent, in the same way we all teach kids to safely approach new dogs. That she was the sentient being, and I was the easily spooked animal … well, that was fine by me, as long as she didn’t expect me to start sniffing her arse as well.
I leaned down, ran my fingers over her sparkling, smooth seal’s head, scratching behind her ears in a way that seemed to meet with her approval.
‘Hello, girl,’ I murmured, ‘aren’t you the beautiful one? What’s your name, then?’
‘What would you do if she answered?’ came a new voice from the corner of the room. A familiar voice. One that was, as usual, laughing at me. I shrieked, and ran for the cover of the bed, skidding my fine naked self so far across the shiny bearskins that I thudded against the eroded stone wall on the other side.
I ignored the sharp scrape of rock on my flesh, grabbed one of the coats, and threw it over me.
‘Jesus!’ I said, so loudly that the dog cocked her ears and looked at me in question. She closed the distance between us in two athletic strides, jumped straight up on to the pallet, and circled exactly three times before curling herself up in a tight ball, nose tucked into tail. Dogs on beds. Probably not in the Barbara Woodhouse training manual, but I kind of liked having her there. I’d learned to take my allies where I could find them.
‘Where are you, Luca?’ I shouted. ‘And how long have you been there?’
He emerged from the same dark corner of the room as the dog had, and strolled close enough that the light from the braziers flickered across his body. His completely, totally, day-he-was-born naked body.
‘Long enough,’ he replied, grinning so broadly I could see the tips of his fangs. Ugh. He’d been there long enough to see me tarting around starkers, obviously. And while that state of affairs didn’t seem to bother Mr Free and Easy over there, I was feeling decidedly squeamish about it. As well as decidedly … well, curious would probably be the right word.
I realise this may seem a strange confession for a grown woman, but I had, up until that point, never seen a real-life penis up close and personal in my entire life. Unless you counted that time I caught Jason McGee wanking over a poster of Mariah Carey on the backseat of the school bus – and I had looked away pretty damned fast on that occasion, as any sane person would.
Now, here was Luca, strutting his pretty magnificent stuff right in front of me, stretching and twisting and doing all kinds of things to make his muscles pop and his skin ripple in all the right places. Probably, knowing him, one hundred per cent on purpose. He was a damned fine specimen of manhood, and boy did he know it.
I found my eyes drifting from his dark-blond head to his golden-brown shoulders. To the powerful chest, scattered with silky hair, and the super-flat stomach, ridged with gracious lines of muscle. And after that … yes, there it was. In all its dangly glory. I tried not to, but I really couldn’t help but stare. I knew he wouldn’t mind. In fact, I deduced from the fascinating amount of twitching and swelling going on down there, he actually quite liked it. Pervert.
I snapped my eyes shut, and physically slapped myself across the face, hard enough to leave finger-shaped tingles across my skin. The dog quirked one eyebrow at me, obviously wondering what all the fuss was about.
‘Put some fucking clothes on!’ I hissed. ‘I won’t open my eyes until you do!’
I heard him laughing, and gave some serious thought to asking Fionnula how I could turn him into a toad. Or a hyena, so he could chuckle away to himself all day long, the twat. But I also heard him rummaging around on the floor, and the welcome sound of a zipper being tugged up.
I risked a quick peek, and saw that he was dressed – on the bottom half, at least. The half I’d been most concerned about. There was pretty much a fifty-fifty mix of relief and disappointment in me at that one, so I concentrated on playing with the dog’s ears instead – trickier than it sounds when you’re also trying to use a bearskin to protect your fast-disappearing modesty in front of a sex-charged vampire Adonis.
He sat down next to me on the pallet, and reached out to give the dog a scratch under her chin. She rolled over, lifting her legs in the air to show him her belly, and gave his hand a quick lick. The floozy.
He made a clapping noise on his thighs, and gave a quick whistle. Another three dogs appeared from the darkness, and trotted towards us. They all had the same build as my dog – because, well, in my newly acquisitive frame of mind, I had decided she was mine – long, lean, with racing legs and powerfully muscled haunches.
They also all had the same shimmer to their coats, even though they were all different colours, as though there was something glowing beneath their skin. They all sank to Luca’s feet, and he started to tickle their tummies with his bare toes.
‘We’re old friends,’ he said. ‘I snuck in here last night and slept with them. Donn has forbidden me from staying with the others for my slumber, and I found I missed the warmth of a body next to mine. I didn’t think you’d be overly thrilled if I climbed in there with you, so I stayed with the curs. I needed their companionship, and I needed to be near you. Was that all right?’
All right? Was it all right that he chose to sleep with the dogs instead of me? That Donn had forbidden him from staying with the others? That he
needed
to be near me? That he was even asking my opinion about all of this anyway? No. Precisely none of it was all right. Apart from the bit where I got to see a nice big willy for the first time, anyway – that had been bearable.
‘Depends,’ I said, refusing to look into his eyes, and making sure our hands didn’t touch over the now-snoozing form of the dog. No touchy, no tempty. ‘On what you mean by “slept with” the dogs …’
He laughed, and I felt the bed shake. He was edging a bit closer as he guffawed, obviously hoping I wouldn’t notice. That I’d be so distracted by the sight of his perfectly formed pecs bouncing up and down that it would pass me by.
‘Stay right where you are,’ I said, holding out a hand to ward him off, ‘and tell me what I’ve missed. And tell me why Donn’s pissed off with you.’
He took his attention away from the dogs, and turned to look at me. His chocolate-drop eyes suddenly swam with tears, and it was all I could do to stop myself from reaching out to console him. I bit down on my lip, using the pain as a reminder of all that could go hideously wrong in my life if I let this man get too close to me. I could, with one touch of his fingers, turn entirely into the World’s Biggest Ho. Seriously, the world’s biggest – people would queue up to see me as a freak-show attraction.
‘My former lord is pissed off, as you say, because I let you feed me. I drank of the Goddess’s blood, and now I belong to you. After centuries of living with them, of sleeping with them and eating with them and travelling with them, I am now cast out. I am cast out, and he is punishing Isabella for allowing it to happen. She is forbidden to drink human blood for a month, and instead must sustain herself on the fruit of rats and other vermin.’
Nice image, I thought, all too vividly picturing her chomping down on a wiggly tailed rodent.
Bon appetit
, Isabella.
‘You mean he would’ve preferred it if you’d died?’ I replied, after glorying in that concept for a moment. OK, so she’d saved my life on the odd occasion – but we weren’t exactly BFFs. She tended to rip holes in my flesh a bit too often for that level of bonding.
I didn’t much care about her new pest-food diet, but I was worried about the situation. For a start, the band was going to have to find a new drummer – always tough. And more importantly, what was I going to do about Luca?
I hadn’t expected Donn to be delighted with this turn of events, but, well, there were extenuating circumstances, m’lord. I’d hoped to be giving Luca back sometime soon, and certainly wasn’t keen on the idea of him following me around and sleeping with my dogs. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I also registered the fact that having the Lord of the Dead as your frenemy probably wasn’t the coolest thing in the world.
‘Yes, of course he would have preferred me to die,’ he said, as though it was obvious. ‘Isabella should by rights have let me pass … It was a weakness on her part that we must now all pay the price for. I have certainly lived long enough, by anybody’s standards,
bellisima
. But what is done is done. Donn has no further use for me, and I am yours to do with as you will.’
He raised an eyebrow at me with that final line, and I saw some of the usual flirty spark return to his eyes. Enough of it that I just shook my head, and moved on. Vampires, eh? Can’t live with ’em; can’t shag ’em in case they eat you.
‘What about everyone else? I assume they all made it here OK? I’m sure Carmel did, but what about—’
I was about to say ‘Gabriel’, or possibly fudge it a bit and try to appear unconcerned by saying ‘everyone else’, but I didn’t get the chance. The dog on the bed leaped off, flying through the air in a graceful, glimmering arc, and ran to the door. The rest of the pack all followed her, whining and barking and scratching at the ground with their claws, as though they were trying to dig an escape tunnel to the other side.
They’d obviously heard something out there that I couldn’t, and before I got pissed off at still having no new superpowers, I reminded myself that even normal dogs could do that. Carmel’s family pooch was always waiting in the window way before the car pulled up, smiling its daft Staffy grin, its stubby tail wagging its whole fat body in a frenzy of happiness.
The door swung open, heaving wood on inches-thick hinges, and the Boss walked in. At least, he was obviously that as far as the dogs were concerned. They all jumped up around Gabriel, which was an impressive sight as they were as tall as him on their back legs. They rested their paws on his chest, his shoulders, anywhere they could find a spare bit of flesh, and set about licking him and nipping him and generally adoring him, cord-thin tails whipping like windscreen wipers in a storm.
For a moment he completely disappeared inside an excitedly wobbling canine curtain, and I had an unwelcome flashback to the night before: to Gabriel staggering and falling and finally succumbing to the pressing crowds of Faidh around him. I drove back the anguish, but held on to the thought: I might feel decidedly ambiguous about the man right now, but when he was under threat, I’d cared enough to sacrifice myself to save him.
That wasn’t an easy thought to maintain, as he pushed the dogs aside and strode angrily into the room. His poor face was battered and bruised, his beautiful nose slightly less straight than it used to be, purple flowers blossoming over the high arcs of his cheekbones. I could see scars and scrapes and jagged, half-healed cuts running over his neck where they’d hacked at him, and I should, by rights, have felt nothing but sympathy and regret.
But the look on his face did a pretty good job of chasing all of that away, and replacing it with a stone-cold anger of my own. He stared at us sitting together on the bed, Luca half-naked and me clasping the bearskin to my exposed flesh, clutching it over my chest like a starlet caught out by the paparazzi, and growled. Actually growled, in a way that made the dogs cower and whimper at his feet, and didn’t do much for my state of mind, either.
His eyes were blazing, and he stood tall and arrogant before us, taking in the scene. No ‘How are you today, Lily?’ or ‘Good morning, Lily,’ or ‘Hey, thanks for saving my life by sticking a knife in your own heart, Lily.’ Nothing but that violet glare and a sense of rapidly building fury swelling through his trembling body.
‘Get out, leech!’ he hissed, and I guessed he was talking to Luca. I’m clever like that. The vampire responded with a hiss of his own, which was far more impressive – sibilant and bloodthirsty all at the same time. He was definitely winning on the hissing contest front.
Luca leaped up from the bed, seeming to fly through the air kung-fu legend stylee, and landed in a crouch in front of Gabriel. I recognised the pose now – the battle-ready stance of the vampire, half-human, half-animal, ready to attack at the knees and bring down their prey. I could see tiny sparks physically jumping from Gabriel’s fingers as they faced off, and felt the crackle of magic pervading the air.
Luca was snarling and circling. Gabriel was channelling Carrie. This, I decided, was a situation where one of them could very easily die. If I was lucky, both of them …