Page 18 of Collected By the Crow

“Who’s everyone?”

His lips thinned. She didn’t miss the glance he cast to the rafters. She stifled another giggle and thumbed through her downloaded music. What’s going to blow his mind?

“All right, it’s gonna be a long night, so let’s start with some classics.” She shot him a look. “Not those classics. The good stuff.” With her volume at three-quarters, she played “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix first. She grinned smugly as his look of concentration gave way, his head bobbing the slightest movement at the riffs.

“Who is this?”

“That’s Jimi. My friend’s parents had an old record player and a bunch of vinyls, and every time I was over there—which was a lot—we’d listen to them. Jimi Hendrix was a god on the guitar. Unmatched!” She laughed at the thought of this ongoing argument between her and Ali. “In my opinion, at least. He’s the reason I learned guitar. Or tried to, anyway.”

“I see.”

The song ended. She watched his reaction and arched her brow.

Without a beat, he gestured toward her phone. “More?”

“I thought you’d never ask!” She queued up a dozen or so songs by some of her favorites, from The Gorillaz to Pink Floyd to Amy Winehouse to Billy Joel. She darted to the stairwell in the hall, where she’d noticed a piece of wood hanging loose earlier. She broke it off and used it as a microphone while dancing round like a total weirdo to all of her favorite songs.

“You are very strange, Dr. Billing.”

Laughter easily fizzled up her belly. When was the last time she’d let go like this? She turned toward the sound of his voice, having had her eyes squeezed shut as she sang the lyrics to “Super Massive Black Hole”, which hadn’t been one of the songs she’d queued.

Her breath caught. His hip leaned casually against the doorway’s mahogany decal, his bottom arms crossed. His upper left arm formed a triangle with his hip, while his right was bent above his head, his elbow in the corner of the frame. He looked totally unguarded. He looked. . .

She cleared her throat and sheepishly stepped her feet together. “Well, look at that. You do know how to have fun.”

For the entirety of three seconds, it was like there was an electromagnetic field around them. Like, at any moment, they would become twin stars, orbiting each other in a distant galaxy.

Then it was gone. The vulnerability washed from his face, replaced with walls of brick and mortar. The numbness crept its way back into her gut. She turned the music down.

“Let’s play another game,” she suggested.

He led her to a small office, a few doors from the main lab. If she didn’t know the mansion was huge from her accidental escapade to the creepy medical room, plus the long trek from the front doors, the livable area was like a simple two-story home.

The office showed signs of recent use. There was a shard of glass on the floor in front of the paneless game cabinet. She let him pick the game since she’d never heard of any of them. They returned to the table they’d played on before, but something was different this time. Cassandra struggled to pay attention as she read the rule card. She struggled to focus on the game at all.

Qadaire sat with two hands tented under his chin, the other two roaming the board or gripping the table, his features contorted, utterly lacking a poker face. She’d rarely seen much emotion from him, but while in the zone on a board game, little flickers slipped through his cracks. His wings flicked in annoyance every time she gained the upper hand. When he got stuck, he sneered so deeply she would be surprised he didn’t have permanently wrinkled lines in his brow if not for the whole immortal vampire thing.

It was endearing.

As hard as he tried to carve it away, his loneliness was in the way he looked at her, the way he tried to make her laugh even though he barely had a sense of humor. A thrill ran through her as she recalled his little joke about feeding on her. She’d been terrified at first, but then she’d sort of wanted it to be real. Not for any freaky reason. For science. Obviously.

It was easy to let time slip by like this. With him. Her stomach flip-flopped as she finally admitted to herself what was happening. One glance at his lower hands trailing gray fingers along the table and she was sure of it.

She was attracted to him.

“You win. Again. What’s next?”

Qadaire smirked the boyish smirk of a high school heartthrob and started to gather the pieces. Mid-cleanup, he paused, twitching his head to the side in that birdlike fashion. His eyes glazed, like he was far away. When he regarded her again, there was a ring of red around his pupils.

“Excuse me.”

With that, he dismissed himself. Cass finished clearing the table and bent down to Zero.

“Hey, buddy. Wanna go outside?” Zero perked up, stretched, and licked his nose. “All right. Just gotta find a way outta here.”

She knew the back of the house was nearby. She’d rather not make Zero walk all the way to the front doors. So she followed the direction Qadaire had gone and walked the narrow hallway all the way to a dark brownish-reddish door. She pushed it open and let Zero out first, following close behind.

The smell of death sent her hand flying over her nose. It wasn’t the chemically controlled scent of an autopsy or dissection, but a fresh, pungent scent. She whipped around to see what it was.

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