Page 6 of Blood Magic (Ariel Kimber 3)

Quinton cleared his throat.

“I can’t sleep,” he admitted in a gruff voice. “Every time I close my eyes, I see my brother crumpling to the ground while clutching his hands to his middle, his hands that are covered in his own damn blood. And, if that’s not bad enough, what comes next is a horror show all it’s own. I see that creep slice your face open. It’s on an endless loop in my head. I’m almost happy I can’t sleep because the nightmares I would be having if I could sleep are probably a hell of a lot worse than the shit I’ve already got going on in my head and that’s terrifying.”

I closed my eyes, trying to picture what he said he saw when he closed his eyes. I, too, had the image of Dash being stabbed burned into my brain. Mine came with the image of Quinton, with a face the perfect mask of terror, running towards me and screaming my name in a voice I hoped I never had to hear come out of him again. It was part of the reason I couldn’t sleep as well.

Quinton and I were two peas in a pod, it seemed.

“I’ll tell you what,” I heard myself say as my brain struggled to play catch up with my mouth and I tried to get myself to shut it. I failed spectacularly. “Maybe it will be easier if we try to do it together. You know… maybe what’s going on in our heads won’t be so bad if we have the other person right beside us. Maybe, umm… we could even see if Dash would be cool with us,” Oh God! Abort! Abort! Shut your mouth immediately! “uh, sleeping with him until we can get past whatever this is.”

I winced.

Good fucking grief.

Me and my bright ideas. Out of all the things that could have come out of my mouth it had to be that.

Hey, Uncle Quint! How ‘bout you and me go get in bed with another dude and see if that will bring us sweet dreams even though neither of us have slept in the same bed together buuttttt… hey, I’d like to give it a try. Whoever said three was a crowd had no idea what they were talking about.

Yeah, as if things weren’t complicated enough already.

Chapter Three

Quinton stared at me for a second with an open mouth and wide eyes. Only for a second, though. He snapped his mouth shut, going from shocked to looking arrogant in a heartbeat. I did not like the gleam in his eyes. That gleam spelled out possible trouble ahead for me. The kind of trouble Quint was going to enjoy.

Oh boy.

Yeah, I regretted opening my mouth and blurting out words before my brain had a chance to get with the program.

Quinton reached out towards me and trailed the tip of his finger across my cheek, directly under the twelve stitches. The touch was feather soft and barely there. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have felt it, it had been that soft.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

Then he was out the door and gone, and I was the one left with my mouth hanging open. Why did he always have to be so weird and difficult to deal with? I did not know the why of it, I just knew that if I tried to figure it out, figure Quint out, I would lose my mind.

Ignoring the fact he’d said he would be back, I decided to take a shower. He hadn’t said when he would be returning, and if he got back before I was done he could just wait or go find something else to do with his time. If I was lucky (and I usually was not) he would come back with a large cup of coffee for me that he took the liberty of adding a heavy dose of both sugar and cream for me. Wouldn’t that be nice. With my luck, he would come back with a tray overflowing with eggs, toast, and greasy meat even though I told him food would likely make me barf.

Of course, I could always go downstairs to the kitchen and get my own cup of coffee. A glimpse of myself in the mirror hanging above the dresser told me that leaving the bedroom before bathing was out of the question. I hadn’t showered since that first day in the hospital, and I only did it then in order to wash the blood off of me. When I accused Quinton of looking like crap, I’m surprised he didn’t laugh in my face. My hair was a rat’s nest, and I probably smelled like body odor.

It was an attractive look for me, especially with my vampire pallor and bloodshot eyes.

I had no business giving Quinton a hard time for the way he looked or his lack of sleep. Doing so made me a hypocrite.

I pulled open the top drawer on the tall dresser and froze. These were not my clothes. I hadn’t checked out the contents of the dresser yet because I had been living out of one of my cute beach bags that one of the boys had been kind enough to pack for me.

Whoever put these clothes in the top drawer clearly had no clue about what kind of clothes I liked to wear. There was a whole lot of lace and… pink? I thought hard and couldn’t remember when the last time I wore anything in the color pink and drew a blank. A complete and total blank. It’s not that I had a problem with the color because I didn’t, honest. Pink was a perfectly good color for an oversized beach bag, a stud in my ear and maybe a cute little teddy bear. Oh, and fuzzy socks. I would absolutely sport some fuzzy pink socks. But anything else? Not likely for me. I didn’t even wear pink nail polish.

I pulled a lacey piece out of the drawer and held it up in front of my face for inspection. And it was a definite no-go. The fabric was see-through, the front a small triangle, the back nothing but floss. I wanted underwear that was comfortable, not something see-through that would ride roughshod on my crack and wedge its way up there.

Who in the world picked this nonsense out for me? Quinton? Tyson? No, not Ty, he knew better than that. And Quinton wasn’t stupid.

I threw the offensive object back into the drawer and pulled out another pink thing. This one was a lot less offensive than the first one had been. Pink boy shorts with white, lacey trim. Something I would normally wear if not for the bubble gum Barbie color. Success, I had myself a keeper here. If I put them on under my clothes I could forget about the colorandbe comfortable. And, besides, all the underwear in my bag had been worn and needed to be washed. I had run out of options until I found the washing machine in this place.

I dug around in the drawer until I found a bra that looked similar to the panties. Pink with lacey white trim. I held it up for inspection. Hmm… too big. Wishful thinking on some poor fool’s part? Yeah, probably. The rest of them in the drawer were the same size.

I closed the drawer and sighed. Braless it was. I could work with that, as long as I didn’t have to leave the house.

I pulled open the second drawer and prayed for a miracle.

God totally hated me.

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