When he finished, Aaron said, “Since the demon is already in our realm, this won’t pull him into the circle but towards it. It’ll draw him back to the house physically, probably on foot. We should go back upstairs to wait.”
Before we’d all made it back up, I heard fighting noises.
The demon came through the already shattered back door as we topped the steps, and Aaron practically flew across the room and engaged him in a fight. I pulled as much energy into me as I could and focused it to the inside of the demon’s head. It takes me about two seconds to put enough heat in to make someone’s head explode, but the demon figured it out at one second and managed a split-second of eye contact with me as he vaporized. He’d gone back home before I could kill him, and now he knew I could explode heads.
Not good.
I looked at Aaron, and he didn’t look happy either, but said, “What’s done is done. We’ll deal with it.”
Everyone looked at me, apparently realizing I was the reason he’d vaporized, but I wasn’t up for much conversation. “I want to go home now,” I told the room in general, then looked at Aaron. “If you can find out the demon’s name, that’d be great.”
I walked out the front door, sat on the front steps, and saw Denny drive up a few minutes later. He saw me and pulled to the side of the road to park. He must’ve been slowly circling the block. So much for hoping he’d follow instructions.
I stood and walked towards him, and heard the doors click as he unlocked them. I accepted the invitation, sank into the passenger seat, and softly closed the door. I knew the guys inside would still hear, but I wanted them to do whatever they needed in order to finish up without coming to check on me.
“Everything okay, Kirsten?” Denny asked.
I didn’t look at him, just stared out the front window. “I don’t know anymore, Eddie. Sometimes it seems that for every bad thing we take out, three more take its place.”
“You haven’t called me Eddie in more than a decade.”
I felt my eyes slowly close, and I forced them open but kept looking forward, “Shit, and I didn’t even realize I did. Sorry ‘bout that. It’s been a long night.”
The weight of his hand rested on my leg, the heat soaking through my jeans. “No need to apologize, I miss hearing it coming from your mouth. We were so close, and we had something special. I’m sorry I messed it up.”
I was so tired, I couldn’t even be angry with him. Just tired and sad. I shifted in the seat and he pulled his hand back.
I glanced at him before turning my head to look forward again, my eyes unfocused as they looked out the windshield. “I used to hate you, but you know what? Your fourth wife just left you, and now I consider it a favor that you lied and cheated in such a fabulously hurtful and embarrassing fashion, because it means at least I didn’t make the mistake of marrying you. You’re an asshole, but when your work day is over you’re a lonely, sad, asshole, and all I can muster for you now is pity. I hope you’re happy with your career, because you’ll likely have a hard time finding someone willing to be your fifth wife.”
Okay, that was probably
more
than enough personal venom. I was better than this — being tired, sad, and disheartened didn’t give me license to be mean. I sighed and added, “I appreciate you calling Aaron when there’s something you know your department isn’t equipped to handle, and I’ll continue to be professional around you so we can work together, but that’s as far as things are ever going to go.”
I’d said it all in a tired, monotone voice. No anger, no emotion. Just fact. He responded in a way I hadn’t expected — honest curiosity with no shades of anger.
“Why am I an asshole? What can I do to stop chasing the women I love away from me?”
I thought carefully before giving him the flippant “
stop being a lying and cheating bastard
” comment on the tip of my tongue. I didn’t owe him anything, and I also didn’t know what had happened with wives three or four, but he’d asked nice so I decided to give him an answer. It should be obvious, but if he didn’t know then maybe someone should point it out to him.
“You’re only worried about yourself, your career. You’re more concerned about what the general public —
strangers
— think of you than you are about the people who love you. You put your image and reputation above the feelings of those around you, and you’re willing to sacrifice friends and family in order to increase your political clout.”
I paused, realized he wasn’t understanding, and tried again. “You’re supposed to put the feelings of the people you love you first, above everything else. However, your career and your political image are the most important thing in your life, which is why those are the only things you have left. I don’t think a personal relationship will
ever
be more important than your career, or more important than what people think of you.”
This, of course, wasn’t his only shortcoming, so I added, “I’m also not sure you’ll ever be able to keep your cock in your pants, and there are just too many opportunities for people to want to ride your power in whatever way they can, and you’re all too ready to let them try.”
The old hurt came back, and almost as an afterthought, I added, “When you hurt your girlfriend in order to further your career, there really isn’t any way to recover from it. Once trust is broken in such a cruel and public way, you can’t get it back.”
He’d hurt me bad, not just by cheating on me, but by making me look bad so he could look good. He’d made promises he didn’t keep, and I’d altered my life in order to be with him because of those promises. It’d been a train wreck, and it had taken me a long time to stop hating him.
My guys were coming out of the house now, so I got out of Denny’s car without saying goodbye. Aaron raised an eyebrow at me, but I averted my gaze and slogged back to his car, waited for the doors to unlock, and then climbed into the passenger seat. Aaron spoke with Denny a few minutes and then we were off. I was tired enough that if Nathan and Panda hadn’t been in the back seat, I’d have sat back there so I could lay down and sleep on the way home.
Aaron touched my arm once we were under way, and said, “Abbott wanted to talk to you tonight but I told him you’d need to go home and get as much sleep as possible since you’d have to wake at six tomorrow morning to get ready for your day.”
“Yeah, by the time you get me home I should have time for around four hours of sleep. I can survive on that okay, but not three. Should I give him a call to tell him myself?”
“Totally up to you.”
“Great. I’ll just see him tomorrow night.”
Chapter Ten
Wednesday’s workday was uneventful, thank goodness. I wished I could go to bed when Lauren did, but Abbott was supposed to arrive shortly after I got home.
I’d been thinking that we’d had several fires in the battlefield in the past from icky things, and Abbott had never shown up before. So why now? I didn’t think he knew about me hunting and fighting, so my guess was he knew Aaron would be called in and he wanted to watch him handle it, or perhaps just wanted an excuse for a conversation that might involve his learning something else about me?
I had let Lauren and Xiaolan know this morning that I was expecting company this evening and would need the family room. I’d rather entertain in the formal living room, but it was at the base of the stairs and they’d be able to hear our conversation from upstairs. So, it was in our very eclectic and casual family room that I’d be entertaining this ancient vampire who reeked of aristocracy.
He arrived around ten minutes after seven, and I walked him through the downstairs, to the back of the house, and into the family room.
I love my house. It’s a fairly large house with four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. Or rather, it’s large compared to most homes. Just not his.
My huge kitchen is light and airy, with a large round glass table capable of seating ten. My formal dining room is richly decorated in a Tuscan style, with a table capable of easily seating sixteen people, though we’ve fit more than twenty around it for Thanksgiving.
However, my family room is designed for comfort and leisure. Half of it’s set up as a home office — my desk has three monitors, and Lauren and Xiaolan’s desks each have a single twenty-four inch monitor.
The rest of the room is a grouping of two sofas and a couple of chairs facing a flat screen, eighty inch television built into the far wall. The room is done in earth tones, with a nice homey feel. It isn’t a fancy room, but it would have to do.
As we arrived in the family room I said, “I’d ask if I can get you anything to drink, but since I’m not offering what you really want, perhaps I should just offer some water or perhaps some hot tea?”
“I have already fed tonight, my darling, so no worries about my being hungry. I do not need anything.”
I grimaced, both at his formal speech and his possessive terminology. I hadn’t given myself to him, and it annoyed me when he spoke as if he’d claimed me. “There you go, saying I’m your darling again. If you haven’t noticed, the idea of you claiming me as
anything
tends to annoy me. Let me grab my ginger tea from the kitchen, and then I have a few hundred questions for you. Please, have a seat, I’ll be right back.”
I likely didn’t actually have several hundred questions, but I wanted to make the point there was much I needed to know about him.
He chose to sit on one of the sofas, situated so he could see something coming to him from the French doors leading to the back yard as well as the door going to the garage. It was also my favorite place to sit, and I wondered if he could smell the gun in the hidden safe about ten inches from his right hand.
I retrieved my tea from the kitchen and sat on the other end of the same sofa, sideways with my legs under me, facing him.
“The front rooms of your house are beautifully decorated,” he said, “but this is the true heart of the house, isn’t it? I imagine you’ve put just as much thought into decorating it, but you did so with more thought to family, camaraderie, warmth.”
“You’re probably right. I’d have preferred to entertain in the living room, but the girls could hear our conversation from the top of the steps, and I can easily imagine Xiaolan and Lauren sitting in the upstairs foyer hoping to hear me talk to what they are assuming is a new boyfriend. So, our conversation is safer in here.”
“You don’t consider me your new boyfriend?”
“I’m guessing you’re at least a thousand years old, and a vampire. The term
boyfriend
is the last word I’d use to describe you, but it brings me to my first question. Just how old
are
you?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I am somewhere around thirty eight hundred years old, give or take a few hundred years. Based on what is known in the written historical records, and what I can remember happening in my lifetime, I believe I was born around eighteen hundred years before the Common Era.”
Nearly four thousand years old? Stunned, I asked the first question that popped into my head. “What do you remember happening that’s recorded in prehistory?” I knew it was a stupid way to ask the question as soon as the words left my mouth, but hoped he’d understand what I wanted to know.
He shook his head as if he wasn’t going to answer, but said, “Events in Troy, as well as what was going on with the Minoans. Also, when certain metals came into use.”
“The Bronze Age,” I said, flabbergasted. “You remember the Bronze Age, and yet here you sit in my living room with a smart phone in your pocket. No wonder you know what Aaron is, you were alive when the dragons were.”
“Aaron is much older than I, but you know this so I thought you would be okay with my age.” He spoke cautiously, and I realized he was dismayed by my reaction.
“I’m not freaked out by it,” I assured him, “I’m just processing it.” Okay, so maybe I was a
little
freaked. For reasons I couldn’t explain without more thought, a four thousand year old vampire freaked me out a helluva lot more than a nine thousand year old weredragon.
I decided it was time to move on, so I smiled and said, “Okay, from Ancient Greece to modern day Chattanooga. How long have you been a Master Vampire? How long have you held the entire southeastern U.S. territory? And why are you in Chattanooga?”
I learned a lot over the next thirty or so minutes — he passed through Chattanooga early in the eighteen hundreds and noted it was someplace he might like to settle down, so it was on his list of places. He generally moves every ten to fifteen years, and has a group of vampires and other supernaturals who usually move with him. He needs around thirty ounces of liquid a day, though only six to ten ounces must be blood and the rest can be water, unless he’s injured or uses a lot of energy, in which case he needs more blood.
As Master Vampire he keeps what is indelicately known as a flock, instead of a human companion. His human flock feeds him as well as anyone else blood bound to him who is in need. His flock lives with him of their own free will, and are well compensated for their contributions. Most are college students, a few have graduated and have good jobs but continue to live with him, and most consider the flock their family. He had an affectionate look on his face when he spoke of them, and I had the feeling he cared for them as people, not just his food source. I’d want to know more about how this worked, but later. For now, I had too many other subjects to cover.
He “dies at dawn” but usually awakens several hours before sunset. His home on the mountain is his private residence, and the one on the golf course belongs to the local coterie of vampires, set up as a corporation with him listed as CEO. He is Master to all vampires under him, they must do as he says, though he wouldn’t tell me what happens if they refused an order. He is very fast (he moved at the Waffle house, didn’t disappear and reappear), he can fly, he is extraordinarily strong, he has exceptional hearing, excellent night vision, and an incredible sense of smell. He informed me that with his sense of smell and hearing he could tell exactly what I was feeling, because fear, anger, passion, jealousy, and every other emotion each have their own scent. He told me he can’t read my mind outright, but if I wished to project thoughts into his head I could do so.