Page 20 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
“That’s not strictly true.” Andres had been able to buy a sufficient bagged supply on his current paycheck; the problem would come when his car went out, or he had an accident his increased resilience couldn’t fix, or Maul raised the price of his rent with inflation again, and he had no buffer in his bank account to keep him above water. “Though you’re not wrong either,” he admitted, quieter, a little hollow. It felt too much like the Andres he’d been at the bar—the person he tried so hard to hide from others. He buried that person back down. Without tightening his grip on Shane’s fingers, he tugged at him, teasing him closer.
Shane could have let his arm extend, but instead he stepped forward with a little inhale and a backward lean. “I could pay you back,” he said, weakly.
“Do I act as though this situation burdens me, my little swan?” Andres growled, tender and fierce all at once. “I don’t regret that you’re mine. Your bared neck brings me far more delight than a thousand chilled bags. And,” he added, harsher, “whether you’re indebted to me or not, I will care whether this article you’re trying to write inspires you to keep poking your neck places that will put it in range of Maul’s fangs. He will kill you, Cygnus.”
Shane closed his eyes. “I don’t want that either, but I need to dosomething.” It sounded so much like a plea, small andhelpless and delightful. “If you’re still investigating whatever nefarious plot was happening with Vitalis-Barron back in October, let me help you with that. Please, I can’t just sit here on the edges of all this and pretend it’s okay. I already have a media pass for their onsite gala next month—I can be useful outside of Maul’s domain.”
Andres wanted to give Shane everything in that moment: not just free rein in a world without Maul, but the world itself, every joy and pleasure it had to offer. That was not their reality though, not the reality of any vampire. “I had planned to find a way into that gala when the time came, so I won’t say no to the help, but I doubt there’s anything you could do for me rightnow. Vampires have been disappearing, and that woman I cornered at the gala is just one cog in a much larger machine that works within Vitalis-Barron. I’m looking for one specific vampire, who vanished almost a year ago and was rescued from within the Vitalis-Barron complex in October. If I can find her, I can find the people who broke her out—people who must know more than I do.”
“Vitalis-Barronis the one abducting vampires?”
“Something like that.”
Shane sighed. “If you tell me the truth, I promise I won’t publish anything recklessly. I’ve seen the ways the media will turn something into a shitshow of needless debates and illogical objections instead of focusing on the real harm that’s happening right before their eyes. I want us to have the best chance of doing what we can from the shadows before then.”
His Cygnus was sincere about that—Andres could tell by the way he said it, each word deliberate and fiery, like he was speaking it to life. And Andres… Andres wanted to trust him.
So he did.
“As far as we can tell, Vitalis-Barron has been experimenting on vampires in secret for a number of decades. They collecttheir victims in part by offering blood or money or research opportunities to volunteers they know can vanish without causing too much of a stir—which, for vampires, is most of them—and when that isn’t enough, they send their personal hunters out to compensate.”
More and more of those hunters lurked the streets these days, but Andres was just as disgusted and enraged by the research board’s leadership—people like the woman he’d cornered at the gala six months earlier, happy to sit back and reap the benefits of their heinously unethical research without ever dirtying their hands.
“Vitalis-Barron operates under the knowledge that it’s, in the most technical terms, still not illegal to coerce vampires into dangerous scientific testing when all laws around research ethics were written for humans. If we can prove what they’re doing to the public, though, it’s possible for a court case to change that legality—to force them to stop their experiments.” The darkness had turned Andres’s vision monochromatic, and between the tunneling effect of his contacts and the literal blinders of his mask, he wasn’t sure what Shane’s expression meant. “Doyoubelieve me?”
The little huff Shane gave would have been precious, were it not for the genuine annoyance in his expression. “I’m diabetic. I know very well that these big pharmaceutical companies will let people die if it makes them a profit.” He lifted his brow. “So, what have you been doing about it?”
“I can keep singling out Vitalis-Barron employees as I did at their October gala, but confessions given under duress are useless at this point.” He needed to go deeper. To get inside… or find someone who had. “I’ve heard reports of a vampire who escaped from Vitalis-Barron, and while they’re still hiding—and likely don’t know much themself—every rumor includes the detail thatsomeoneset them free. It’s a wild goose chase thatmight lead nowhere, but finding them is the best lead I have right now.”
Shane nodded along, looking more and more grave as Andres explained. “Tell me about this rescued vampire?”
“First name Tara, but I couldn’t get a surname. She’s Black, uses both she and they pronouns”—it made Andres happy just saying it, remembering them and their dual pronouns weren’t alone in the world, though that joy was immediately doused by the knowledge that she might no longer be living in this world at all, if his inability to find her again was any sign—“and last summer she had a very distinctive afro in pastel pink and blue.”
“Tara Williams? They drew cartoons outside the bars sometime in the summer?” Shane’s lips quirked. “They were buying candles at a twenty-four seven magic shop near the boardwalk last week. They refused to let me interview them, but we had a very nice conversation about the effects of lighting on mood. Apparently they do staging and hospitality for a mysterious interactive-style theater event that I assume caters to vampires, likely one that serves blood if they’re so secretive. I never figured out the name or location though.”
Andres just stared at him. “How the hell do you know all that?”
Shane snorted. “I’m not an incompetent investigative journalist, just, it seems, an undesirable one.” He appeared completely oblivious of how magnificent he was, and it left a pang in Andres’s chest. “If you can find this secret club where Tara works, I imagine we can go speak with them.”
We. Andres and his swan—his constellation—tackling this threattogether. It felt like a light had been turned on within his rib cage, aiming a high-beam onto an emotion that suddenly seemed an awful lot like loneliness. He wanted to cry. He wanted to break apart like he had at the Fishnettery, but thistime not from sadness—not entirely. The sadness was there, but so was relief, hope, fear, desperation.
He boxed in the fluttering of his heart and merely purred a sultry, “Perhaps. We shall see.” He stepped forward and slipped around Shane, angling himself once more over his little swan’s shoulder. “Right now, stay away from other vampires—stay safe. Your attention belongs to no one but me.”
The way Shane shivered beneath his touch was a pure delight.
And perhaps that he enjoyed it should have worried him. But he could feel that guilt later. For the moment, he was going to drink, and drink deep. “And you, my little swan, still owe me a piece of yourself.”
9
SHANE
Shane hated this.
He hated, specifically, that he kept thinking about that fiction his vampire had painted: Shane wilted across his bed, chains at his wrists and two fresh bite marks in his neck. Despite the fear and confliction that had already been coursing through him, when he’d heard it, his heart had donesomething—something indescribable and terrible. It left him hot and his neck strangely tender, so tender that Maul’s voice had felt like bruises beneath the skin and his own vampire’s like a gentle caress. Even through their talks of Vitalis-Barron and the merits of his article, Shane could not quite dislodge the feeling.
It roiled in him as his vampire whispered in his ear and pressed at his arms and hips, smoothly nudging him against the frame of the door. He was pinned, he knew, but he didn’t feel it, because his vampire’s grip continued to be soft, the tugs and grasps more like questions than demands. Still, when his vampire tucked back his hair, and his hot breath brushed over Shane’s bare neck, it wasn’t tenderness or chains his body remembered, but the unwanted clamping of fangs deep into his skin, the suffocating grasp of a hand on his mouth, the complete disregard for his terror and his pain.
Shane flinched, the way he’d been instinctively flinching at every remembered horror all evening. Each time so far, hisvampire had pushed gently past his guard, soothed him with a touch so light it could never have come from anyone else. Shane waited for it—anticipated it so much that when his vampire’s fingertips slid along his neck, his nerves lit, not in fear but in relief.
