Page 43 of Fanged Embrace
A weak sob vibrated against my ribs, and then she lifted her head. “River?” The word cracked like dropped pottery.
“Present and horizontal,” I confirmed, tilting my head to meet her eye. I exaggerated another inhale, exhale. Shemirrored me, this time without a hitch, holding my gaze with her lips slightly parted. I cracked a smile. “Welcome back.”
She seemed to register then that she was stretched out over my stomach with only the barest threads between us—and she immediately tensed up.
In the next breath she jerked off me, scrambling backward on the groaning mattress. Her knees shot to her chest, arms wrapped tight around her legs as the metaphorical drawbridge between us yanked up again. The look she fixed on me wasn’t panic so much as pure—albeit, sleep-fogged—outrage.
I propped myself on my elbows, still reclined across the mattress, hair in complete disarray. “Feeling better?”
“How the hell did you get in here!?”
“Secret tunnel.” I grinned, entirely too pleased with myself. “Thank you for reminding me that they exist.” When she immediately swiveled her gaze around the room, I wiggled a bare toe at the closet. “Goes from a wardrobe full of powdered wigs straight to your shoe rack. Ten-second commute, tops.”
Laurie’s mouth opened—closed—opened again. She glanced down at the crisscross tripwires snaking across the floor. “You tripped my perimeter.”
“Effective.” I sat upright and slid to the edge of the bed to inspect her handiwork. “Terrible for stealth rescues, though.”
Her head snapped toward me. “You could have just knocked!”
That spark behind her eyes was back again, but her voice still came out quaking, and she watched me with the same old wariness. She was shaken by the nightmare, I could see it, and she was masking it under a mouthful of snapping teeth.
I quieted the grin and let my face settle into something somber. “Do you often get nightmares like that?”
Rather than offer an answer she groaned, then flopped face down on the mattress, dragging a pillow over her head. Herreply emerged muffled and petulant. “That’s none of your business.”
“Fair.” I adjusted my perch on the edge of the bed. “But if you ever want to trade horror stories, I’ve got plenty to share.”
Silence. A faint, watery sniff from under the pillow.
“Or… maybe we can start with something a little lighter.” I tipped my head back, working at maintaining a soothing aura to counter her simmering energy. “When I first came to New York, years ago, I had this building commissioned—secret passages and all.” I glanced over my shoulder with a wry smile she couldn’t see. “They weren’t built solely for sneaking into the guestroom.”
Again, silence. And then, a muttered response from under the pillow. “All right, I’ll bite. Why did you build them?”
“Safe passage.” I scooted back slightly to tug the blanket over her. “I built this home to be a safe haven for people like me.”
“Vampires?” Laurie murmured under the mound.
“Not exclusively. Think… outsiders of every flavor. We threw outrageous parties down on the sub-basement level—music, dancing, the works. All the tunnels eventually converge at that floor, where people could love who they wanted outside of societal expectations.”
An incredulous grunt floated through the pillow stuffing. “Are you telling me you ran a secret gay club in your basement?”
I snorted out a chuckle. “Yep, pretty much.”
“But this place is ancient…” Another long pause from the pillow princess. “Exactly how oldareyou?”
“You know, after the first few decades I kinda stopped counting.” I picked at a stray thread on the bed sheet, taking a merry stroll down memory lane while my aura unfurled, silently soothing out the wrinkles in her psyche. “I was alonefor most of it. I spent a lot of my long life wandering about, moving from place to place. Never thought I’d fit in a coven.”
Laurie’s voice was faint now, tinged with tendrils of sleep. “Why?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am a little bit strange. Too strange even for most vampires.” It had been long enough that I could laugh at myself now, at my complete inability to fit the mold the world demanded of me. “I actually avoided New York because I’d foreseen a coven starting here—knew they’d welcome me with open arms. But the vision looked too good to be true, so naturally I ran the other way.”
“What changed?”
“Took the wrong train in Prague.” I sighed, huffing out a small chuckle. “Ended up at Grand Central, decided I liked the smell of pretzels. Fast-forward a few decades: met Jordan before she was bumped up to leader of the Leyore coven, got dragged along to a party, and the next thing I knew, I’d been adopted.”
“And you stayed.” That statement was delivered with a yawn.
“I stayed.” I smiled at the memory, at the roots that had finally grounded me after years of wandering alone. “Turns out the vision was right. Jordan and her crew got their hooks in me and our family has been growing ever since.”
