Page 37 of Countdown to Murder
Not that I think I’m the world’s greatest lay, but I know how to get a woman off. My dick may not be as big as His Majesty’s, but it’s big enough. Bigger than average, which may or may not be a good thing for a virgin, but I’d have her ready for me.
Truth was, we werebothon uncertain ground because I’d never fucked a virgin before, and I was more than a little afraid of completely fucking it up.
At times, she’s every bit the ice-cold assassin, and then a switch flips and she’s so fucking vulnerable, deluged by feelings she has no experience with. Somehow, I was going to have to walk her through an emotional minefield on the way to figuring out romantic love.Me, the lion who doesn’t do relationships. It’s possible we were fucked before we started, but no female had ever made me feel this way. If you’d told me a few weeks earlier I’d go against the Concilio for love, for a woman, I’d have laughed in your face. Now? I wasn’t planning to back down.
As with many beach houses, both the street-side and beach-side look like the front. Tonight, the trick-or-treaters would be coming to the street side, so it was the most decorated, but someone had gone all out on both sides. In a nutshell, it looked a little like the house that drops on the Wicked Witch in Oz, and they’d put huge legs sticking out from under the front, near the porch, with a spotlight on them. And, of course, the legs were in black and white striped tights with red high-heeled shoes.
And our costumes? I was the lion, and Mira would be Dorothy. For good measure, the neighbors, Pat and Ruth Williams, walked over with a little dog we were supposed to keep up with while we handed out candy. They gave us a warm welcome and made sure we knew the rules: These are slayer kids, and they taketrick or treatseriously.
I’d already been warned, so we had really good treats.
It turns out. Fawn had kept Mira away from kids, for the most part, so this was a big learning experience for her. She watched me handle the first couple of batches of kids, and she learned fast. In between, I explained that handling the three-year-old tykes meant using simple sentences and easy words, and you could never go wrong asking them to tell you who they were, or why they’d chosen to be that character. For the older kids, flattery was the way to go, but you had to be careful or they’d take it as a challenge.
She’d opened her mouth, let her fangs grow, and then closed her mouth so they showed. This was a Dorothyno onewould fuck with.
I grinned, and morphed part of my face into that of my lion.
“I like it,” she said, “but will we scare the little ones?”
“If you see one who’s scared, get rid of the fangs. Otherwise, let’s have a little fun with this.”
And we did. We played with the kids and their parents. We laughed. We ate candy. We went into the streets with our neighbors from both sides and across the street, and shot silly string at each other.Safe passagemeant someone gave us acceptance, and that meant the town accepted us despite the fact these slayers would’ve killed us in a heartbeat if they thought for a second we might harm one of their children.
It probably didn’t hurt that we’d just saved a famous human and taken out a bad vampire in the process.Whether that earned us acceptance, or Ryan’s decree of safe passage did, I don’t know. In all likelihood, it was a combination of the two.
The little kids were all home by nine, and then it was mostly teens without parents. A whole lot more silly string was involved at this point, and I was a little worried we might run out. During a lull, I told Mira we might need to start rationing it, and Ruth walked over to talk to her dog and give us four more cans of silly string.
The doglovedMira. He was wary of me at first, but I won him over with pieces of hot dog. When Ruth left, I watched Mira with the dog curled up in her lap, her hand absentmindedly petting him while she laughed with some teens, and I remembered what Aaron had said about how emotions and caring had been trained out of her — by forcing her to tame a wild, abused dog until it trusted her, and then being forced to torture it and eventually kill it. She’d eaten rice and beans for four months, until the stock was gone, and had lasted until she was nearly dead before she’d done as they wanted. They’d broken her, and she’d somehow managed to put herself back together.
No way in hell was I going to let them take her back.
The town’s celebration ended at eleven. The sweet little doggie went home, and the teens evaporated. They had school the next day, after all.
The house telephone rang when we stepped inside the front door, and we stared at each other, then the phone, andthen at each other again. I walked to the phone and answered it with a simple, “Hello.”
“You aren’t as smart as you believe yourself to be,” Apollonius told me.
“That’s probably true. I’m hoping to find a way for everyone to be happy. If you have a way to resolve our differences, I’m all ears.”
“The snake belongs to the Concilio. There is no room for negotiation or compromise on this. If she isn’t a virgin when she’s returned to us, you will die a slow and painful death. It could take centuries for you to die. Or, perhaps we will train you as a sex slave and lease you out to the highest bidder, a month at a time.”
“Thanks for making your position clear. Let’s talk again in a few days and see if we can begin a conversation that might help us find a way to a resolution.”
“You’ve learned from the Amakhosi, but smooth talking isn’t going to help here. We made her what she is. When the lease is up, she returns to us.Untouched.”
“Again, thank you for making your position clear. I hope you’ll let me know when it changes.”
“It won’t.”
“We’ve had a wonderful Halloween. I hope you’ve had the same. Let’s speak again in a few days.”
And I hung up. Bad form to hang up on someone so powerful, but the conversation wasn’t going to be productive. Not yet anyway.
“Is there a plan for where I’ll go if and when my time is up with the Slayers?” Mira asked me. She’d heard both sides of the conversation, so now she knew they wanted her to stay a virgin, and Apollonius had told her, not me.
“My hope is that we can wrangle an invitation either in Alfheim or on Olympus. I believe there are places in both realms Apollonius doesn’t have access to. He can’t get to Nathan’s basement, either, but that’s a last resort.”
“I can’t let you take my virginity until we get this resolved. I can’t risk the Concilio owning you, too.”
