InsistentHunger (10 page)

Brady fell silent, his hand rubbing his chest where an ugly
scar marred his chest. Paige waited. “So one might grab you?” Brady finally
asked. The red in his eyes intensified again.

“I think one tried. But face it, I’m too damn mean to get
pushed out of my own body.” Paige grinned at him. “Jim said that you can kill a
vampire by destroying the brain or staking it. He suggested that you stay away
from close combat and just blow the brains out, and when he did just that, I
could feel something pulling at me.”

“Shit. You fought these guys. You fucking promised me that
you would wait until I was there to back you up and you went in there anyway.”
Brady reached out and grabbed her arm. His fingers pressed deep into her flesh
and Paige felt a flash of fear, but then she’d just spent all that time
convincing Brady he wasn’t a demon…or he wasn’t only a demon, anyway.

“That hurts,” she said calmly. Brady looked down to where he
was holding her and immediately loosened his grip.

Pressing his lips together, Brady thunked his head back
against the cinderblock and dug his fingers into his own knees. He was
struggling for control and Paige rested her hand on his arm.

“You have control over yourself, Brady. And yes, you have a
right to be angry, but just remember to keep control.”

“Right now I want to lose control,” he said tightly. “I
don’t suppose you’d be willing to handcuff me to some pipes so I can really
lose control and call you all kinds of names for pulling that stunt?”

“Nope. You’d rip my pipes out of the wall. Sorry, you’re
just going to have to control yourself. However, if it makes you feel any
better, I never left the car until I saw the hunter going up to the house.”

“It doesn’t,” Brady said.

“Well then, try this. As the senior partner, it’s my call
and you’ll just have to suck it up unless you want to go to the captain and
complain.”

Brady opened his eyes and rotated his head so he could glare
balefully at her. Paige patted his arm. “Trust me, you are not the first
trainee to have those thoughts about me,” she assured him. “We have a few facts
now, so maybe we can go on the Internet or dig up a few books that seem to
match what we know.”

“I really hate that you’re being logical with all this,”
Brady said.

“Yep,” she agreed. “But I have to live with being short and
you’re going to have to live with being annoyed. You may also have to get used
to wearing a sheet because those are your only clothes and you’ve made a mess
out of them.” Paige used her hand on Brady’s knee to push herself up. “I’m
going to go close all the blinds and make sure we have privacy before you come
up for a shower.”

Paige headed for the stairs. They had a lead they could
follow up. Police work often meant days of no leads or bad leads, so any day
where they got a solid lead was a good day. Today just might turn out to be a
good day. At the stairs, Paige turned and looked back at Brady as he sat
crumpled on the floor. The joy drained from her. No matter how many leads they
got, today was still the day some monsters had killed Brady. But she’d fix it.
Somehow. She wasn’t going to let her partner down.

Chapter Eight

Brady came out of the shower followed by a cloud of steam.
“Is there any hot water left for me?” Paige asked.

“Um…” Brady gave a comically exaggerated cringe. “If you
wait a couple of hours, sure.” He pulled the sheet closer. The little roses
were a cute touch. Very metrosexual. “Are my clothes done?”

“If you wait a couple of hours, sure,” Paige answered. “Look
what I found.” She turned back to the computer and showed him the Wikipedia
page.

“I hope you did better than I did. I totally struck out on
researching the symbols. There’s just too much stupid shit on the net.” He
leaned over her to read the page. “Strigoi?”

“They aren’t fond of light, but they don’t go up in flames,
garlic does work against them and they have red eyes.”

“They’re also witches that can turn into animals,” Brady
said as he leaned over her. She swallowed and tried very hard to ignore the
warm, well-muscled man leaning close to her. Her sheets weren’t very substantial
and she could see a shadow of Brady’s thigh and the curve of his ass. She
worked around handsome men all day and didn’t normally have a problem with
that, but this was a handsome man who had just admitted having a crush on her.
That was harder to ignore.

“Paige?” he asked, his voice confused.

She yanked herself away from an incipient fantasy. “Um…
what?”

“You smell different.”

“If you feel like biting something, the chickens are
outside. Try to avoid the small, fuzzy ones because the silkies are new. The
big white one is a real bitch when you try to collect eggs—feel free to eat
her.”

He sat on the edge of her bed and pulled at the sheet. “Not
like that.”

“Oh.” Paige was almost sure she knew exactly what he was
getting at, but she was going to ignore it and hope the smell went away. He was
a partner, a victim, a trainee. The ethical reasons for staying away from him
were pretty overwhelming. “About half the department called and left messages
on my phone,” she offered after an uncomfortable moment. “They all miss you.”

“Huh.”

She turned and looked at him because his tone was just off.
“What?”

He scratched and Paige tried hard to not notice where he was
scratching. “Who called?”

“The guys from the shift—Rick, Veronica, Alex, John, Phil.
Bryan from Records and Michael and Paul from Forensics called. I bet your
parents are buried in sympathy right now.”

“My parents,” he echoed. With a vacant expression, he got up
and turned toward the window, flinching as he caught a glimpse of himself in
the mirrored closet door.

“Brady?” Paige called as he walked to the side of the window
and lifted the curtain a fraction of an inch to look out into the dark
backyard. “Someone’s going to see you, Brady.”

“No one’s out there.”

“You can’t know that.” Paige went over to pull him away from
the window. The second she curled her hand around his arm, he swung around,
snarling at her—literally snarling with his lip raised. Paige fell back, her
heart pounding painfully fast, but Brady didn’t move. He just went back to
looking out the window through his tiny crack between the wall and curtain.

“What the fuck?”

Brady shook his head. “My parents.”

“Yes, your parents.” Paige edged around the bed so she’d be
closer to her bedside table. She hadn’t locked her gun safe and now she was
grateful.

Brady slowly turned and looked at her. The red had faded
from his skin, but his eyes were still grotesquely bloodshot. He looked like he
had a raging case of pinkeye. “I should feel something.” He sounded confused,
but Paige still kept her distance.

“You don’t have to feel anything in particular.”

“Shouldn’t I?” He tilted his head. “Shouldn’t I feel
something about all these people who care about me? Shouldn’t I love my
parents?”

“I know you—”

“I don’t,” he said, cutting her off.

“You don’t what? Brady, you aren’t making sense.”

“I don’t care about them. I don’t care that these people are
missing me. I don’t care if people are sympathizing with my parents. I mean, I
remember my parents, but I don’t actually care about them.” Brady gave a casual
shrug. “If I really were Brady, wouldn’t I care about them?”

“You are Brady.”

He shook his head without answering.

“You care about me. You stopped when I said you were hurting
me. You got pissed because I got out of the car without you there to back me
up.”

The red of his eyes intensified when she brought that up and
Paige made a mental note to avoid the subject. However, he just said quietly,
“You’re different.”

“Why?” Paige asked. “Brady, maybe you just can’t let
yourself feel anything for other people right now. Have you considered that?”

“So you have a psychology degree now?” He moved to her chair
and sat down, looking more weary than she’d ever seen him.

Paige moved forward a step, but she sat on the end of the
bed rather than get too close. He was Brady, but people suffering grief and
pain could sometimes strike out. Paige usually avoided the worst of that
because she was short and a woman, but she’d had grieving fathers and husbands
strike out at partners before. Grief didn’t take one predictable course. Every
person dealt differently, and if Brady dealt by not feeling anything, that was
valid too. She’d gone that way herself once.

“You know I lost my mom pretty young,” Paige offered softly.

Brady laughed and pulled his sheet closer. “Who knew that
all I had to do to get you to open up was to get killed?”

“I don’t let people in easy, I know that. But my therapist
said it’s a defense mechanism.”

“You have a therapist?” Brady sounded like he didn’t believe
her.

“Had, past tense. I like to think I’m normal enough that I
don’t need one now…at least I thought that up until about four o’clock this
morning. Anyway, my mother was killed and I shut down. I couldn’t feel anything
because if I did I was going to feel everything. It took me a long time to get
over that, and what you’ve gone through… You’ve suffered more than I ever did,
Brady. If you have to shut down to deal with this, then that’s what you do. But
don’t guilt trip yourself.”

Brady shook his head. “I just don’t feel for them.”

Paige moved slowly, watching Brady for any sign of the anger
she’d seen in him before. Instead of getting angry, he watched her wearily.
When she was in front of him, she crouched down and rested her hands on his
knees.

“You can’t let yourself feel. That’s normal—maybe not normal
for everyone, but for us, that’s normal. Hell, I’d be running in circles and
screaming if I didn’t have this emotional shut-down thing going for me. The
officer who trained me, he was ex-military. He always said that if I wasn’t too
short and too female to meet the requirements that I would have made a good
sniper. But Brady, the emotions come back eventually. Eventually you will feel
them again. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Moving slowly, he let his fingers follow the line of her
vein over the back of her hand and up to her arm. Paige waited. When it seemed
like Brady was ready to sit there all night, she tried again. “You care about
me, Brady. I can see that. You care about me.”

His fingers paused. “I do,” he confessed, but his voice
sounded pained. He looked up at her and she could feel her own heart contract
at the visible evidence of his agony. She knew what it felt like to lose your
world. When her mother had been killed, she was everything to Paige, and losing
her…seeing her die…it had ripped something out of Paige’s soul and she could
see Brady struggling with the same pain.

“Oh Brady,” she said. Tears prickled at her eyes and he
raised his hand to cup her cheek. His thumb brushed against the soft skin just
under her eye and a tear slipped out. Paige reached up to brush it angrily out
of the way. She didn’t cry.

“I had a crush on you from the first day I saw you. You were
chewing out some cadet for making some stupid joke.”

Paige ducked her head. “It was a racist joke,” she pointed
out. She’d come to the training station to meet her new partner and this
asswipe of a kid was entertaining the troops with Mexican jokes. She thought
she was going to wash her partner out the first day of training, which would
have been a new record, but then it turned out Brady had the balls to turn his
back on the asswipe and walk away.

At first she’d thought it was because he was Mexican. He had
the dark look that people from Mexico sometimes had. But his mother was Italian
and he’d walked away because he’d honestly been offended. “I knew you were a
good man when you chose to walk away from that.”

“I’m not the same man now.”

“Yes, you are. You’re just hurting. If you want, I can give
you the name of my therapist,” Paige suggested with a smile. Brady’s hand still
cupped her cheek, and Paige could feel something uncomfortably close to lust
start to gather in her stomach.

“You smell good again,” Brady said softly. His hand slid
down until it rested against her neck. A little part of Paige screamed at her
that she should be scared shitless, but Paige had years of experience when it
came to ignoring that voice.

“Yeah, well I did say you were cute.” She cleared her
throat. “However, we have some answers to find.” Standing up, she pretended to
not feel the loss of contact as his hand fell away. When she turned to look at
the computer, Brady got up and reached out so his hand rested against her hip.

“I’m cute, huh?” he asked. Paige reached down to push his
hand away and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the sheet slip to the
ground.

She closed her eyes before her body could hijack her better
sense. “Brady, this is a bad idea.”

“Because I’m a monster?” he asked calmly, as if it was a
simple fact.

“No, because we have a case to work.”

“Whatever they did to me, they did it and it’s done. I’ve
lost so much, Paige, but maybe I can still get one thing I want.” He brushed
her ponytail to one side and kissed the back of her neck. A shiver went through
her body and Paige could feel her pussy tighten at the promise in that small
gesture.

“It’d be a bad idea,” she warned. His arm slipped around her
waist, pulling her back into his strength.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice desperate as his hand slid
down until his fingers pressed right into the soft spot where her pubic hair
started. She could feel his body tremble with need and her own body was warming
to the idea—literally. She felt feverish as she reached down and caught his
hand. He didn’t protest when she gripped his wrist, but she didn’t do anything
with it. It’d been so long since she’d felt hands on her.