Accidentally Demonic (29 page)

“Centuries.”

“How many—and I warn you, I want a full sentence.”

“I was turned in the year 798.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Turned into a vampire?”

He gave her a bland look.

She sighed. “Sorry. Of course you meant a vampire.” Casey frowned, then smiled with mischief in her eyes. “Boy howdy.You’re old. You want me to see if I can hook you up with a wheelchair—maybe some Ben-Gay?”

“You want me to hook you up with a roll of duct tape and a gag?”

Casey giggled. “Holy cow—the man’s sense of humor’s returned. So this is good, right? Us all communicating. So, next question. Who turned you into a vampire? I mean, why would someone do something so ugly like that?”

“Revenge.”

“It’s full-sentence time. Revenge for what?”

“A Viking raid.”

“Omigod—you were a Viking?”

“I was.”

“Wow. Who’d you piss off?”

“A vampire.”

“Who was a Viking, too?”

“Your powers of deduction are amazing.”

“Don’t be a wisenheimer.”

“Don’t I get credit for using a full sentence?” He chuckled.

“You’re back in black. So what did you do to make this Viking vampire angry?”

“I stole his lunch money.”

“Be serious.”

“I raided his ship.”

She winced. “Oh. I’m guessing that went badly.”

“Well, no. The raid went off without a hitch—it was the aftermath that became a shit wreck.”

“He was tweaked you raided his ship, huh?”

“Nah—he was in love with it. So much so, he spread his happiness near and far.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Lame question. So, you were turned into a vampire. . . . I guess you did all the typical stuff like ‘boo hoo—this sucks. I can’t believe I’ll never eat oxen again. I’m going to live forever, blah, blah, blah.’ Then what?”

“Oxen and I had a sorrowful parting?”

“Stop making this so difficult. How did you end up with Hildegard? If you had to mate with her on your five hundredth birthday, that means it was 1298—which was more than seven hundred years ago—and I’m not going to linger on the math of this because I still can’t wrap my brain around it. So I repeat, in 1298, how did people get together?”

His wide shoulders shrugged. “How does anyone get together with anyone?”

Her shoulders hunched in a shrug. “I don’t know? Nowadays, it’s the Internet or speed dating. Both a complete waste of time, by the way. So did you date? Did people even date back then? Oh, wait! Were you betrothed? You know, the whole dowry thing?”

“No.”

“You’re headed for the red zone, pal. How did you and Hildegard end up in this not so connubial bliss?”

“I was turning five hundred. My choices were few.”

“Yeaaaah. That’s been troubling me. Wanna know why?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Do you want one?”

“Yes.”

She giggled again, gazing at him from hooded eyes. “Then no. You have no choice. So here’s what’s been bugging me. You just don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d cop to marriage—even if it meant death to get out of it. Being all stoic and serious like you are with all these principles and such, you seem much more like the kind of guy who’d rather be dead than hitched to some woman for eternity.You joke a lot but when it comes to Hildegard, you’re not laughing. So what’s the dealio?”

“Maybe I’m not as principled as you think. Maybe I’m just an egotistical asshole who wants to live forever?”

“Nice. That was two sentences. But maybe you’re lying to keep me from finding out something. I just can’t figure what it is.”

“Then here’s my suggestion—stop trying.”

“Why are you making it so hard to be friends?”

“I don’t need more friends. And friends don’t do what we did last night.”

Her face flushed, but she wouldn’t be daunted. “You didn’t need another mate, either, but here we are. Besides, you can never have enough friends, and if we have to be chained to each other until I’m deemed independent enough to strike out in the demon world on my own, would it
kill
you to be my friend?”

He gave her another bland stare.

“Right. Sorry. You’re already dead. Forgive my insensitivity.”

“Forgiven.”

Christ, there was just no budging this man when he didn’t want to budge. “Good. So seeing as you’re not budging on Hildegard I’ll let it be—
for now
. But that’s all in the spirit of friendship. Friends do that for each other when they need space.”

“Thank you for recognizing my spatial needs,” he joked with that disarming grin.

“So now that we’re friends, I’ll tell you something meaningless and inconsequential about me—like, not super-deep stuff—and you do the same. Deal?”

His silence was deafening.

Casey rolled her eyes. “Okay—like this—here goes. Let’s see. Oh, I know. Music . . . I like Yanni. No. I
love
him. Nothing beats a bubble bath with Yanni in the CD player.”

“You mean the guy who plays the piano?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t find that at all surprising.”

Oh, really. “Why?”

“The romantic in you is pretty obvious. I’d bet you have a deep affection for kittens and snuggling on the couch, too.”

And if she did? “So what you’re saying is you don’t like kittens? Who doesn’t like kittens?”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. I like animals just fine. I especially like your goldfish, Shark. What I’m saying is you’re a romantic—easy to spot.”

He said it like it was a disease. “What’s your problem with romantics?”

His wide shoulders rose and fell. “Oh, I dunno. Could it be that I’m mated to someone who drives me bat-shit? It doesn’t get any less romantic. And I don’t have a problem with romantics. Don’t pick fights where there are none.”

Team Clay—one. “Okay—so forget the romance thing. What kind of music do you like?”

“Nine Inch Nails.”

“I don’t find that at all surprising.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re as bipolar as their music. All fun and games one minute, serious as a heart attack the next.”

“I prefer to think of it as music that makes you think.”

“Or want to cut yourself.”

He laughed and conceded, “Okay, it definitely has some darker elements.”

“What kind of food do you like?” She frowned. Shit. He didn’t eat. “Never mind, scratch that. It was insensitive of me.” So much for small talk. What did you talk about with a vampire? How many knots per second he could fly?

“No, actually, I can eat from time to time. I just have to be careful, and I don’t do it often. I love the smell of Italian food. Especially pizza. Ever since it was invented. There was this place down in the village called Angelina’s and every time I had to walk past it, I wanted to go in and get a slice, but I never got around to it, and they ended up closing.”

“I love pizza, too, but not quite the way I love French food. I love escargot. Love it.”

Clay made a face.

She waved a hand at him. “I know, I know. It’s not like a bag of chips and a beer. It’s for the discriminate food connoisseur. Of which I am—and I’m very happy as a demon I can still eat food. I’d be very sad if I couldn’t still eat.”

He shuddered. “It’s not discriminate, it’s disgusting. Snails are slimy and they live in dark places.”

“Speaking of dark, I guess when you’ve lived as long as you have, you’ve seen some pretty dark stuff. Like Hildegard . . .”

“Casey . . .”

“Look, fair is fair. My past isn’t what started this—it was yours with the big blonde. So just tell me what happened because it’s clearly what led us to where we are. Mated. You know, like an episode of
Big Love
gone awry.”

“Okay. You’re right. Fair is fair. So here it is. Hildegard forced me to mate with her. It had nothing to do with survival and everything to do with happening against my will. Now that I’ve debased my manhood, do you want to try and make me cry, too?”

How did anyone force this man to do anything? It was preposterous. “Forced . . .”

Clay gave her the white flag look. “Yes, Casey,
forced.
I was fully prepared to end my immortality on my five hundredth birthday. Hildegard wasn’t exactly above letting me know she wanted to mate with me just prior to. But I didn’t want to mate with her. So much so, I was willing to go to my death because of it. She didn’t much like that. So she took matters into her own hands and fed from me while I was in vampire sleep, thus mating us—for eternity. And here’s something else that, while ironic, doesn’t exactly work in my favor. I think, before I was turned, I had what is now called narcolepsy. I was prone to drifting off during the day when I was human. Right in the middle of everything.”

“Damned inconvenient if your ship’s being raided, huh?”

“Exactly. But to make matters worse, I think being turned exacerbated my narcoleptic issues. It’s why I warn you that when I’m due for vampire sleep and I’m a couple of hours into the process, there’s just no waking me. Becoming a vampire seems to have magnified my narcoleptic attacks, and my vampire sleep can’t be thwarted like it can with some.”

“So she was already a demon when she met you?”

“She was.”

“And she basically planned this, knowing you were the force that could sustain her? That’s sick.” Jesus. Casey’s stomach roiled.

“She sold her soul to the devil. It doesn’t get much more twisted than that.”

“So this feeding thing—that troubles me a little. Okay, a lot. It freaks me out.What does it mean? How does it work in Hildegard’s favor? Wanda told me a little, but she didn’t give me the deets, and it had nothing to do with it keeping her here on Earth. She made it sound almost . . . sexy, for lack of a better word.”

“When you’re mated like Wanda and Heath, it can be the height of a sexual encounter. But in this case it’s anything but. Feeding from me, a vampire with eternal life, thereby gives Hildegard eternal life. She has to drink my blood to do it. If she doesn’t feed from me at least once a year, she’ll be sent to the bowels of Hell to serve her time, something she’s escaped all these centuries. She certainly won’t be shopping and partying—which is what Hildegard loves to do.”

Casey’s knitting needles stopped clacking. She just couldn’t wrap her head around the concept. “But—how—I mean,
how
does she feed from you without you knowing? Why do you let her?”

The look of contempt on his face spread from his eyes to his full lips. “I don’t
let
her, Casey. She comes when I’m asleep—the kind I just explained to you. When I’m in my deepest state is when I believe the effects of my human narcolepsy are transferred to my vampirism. That’s when she comes.”

She nodded solemnly. The coma. Freaky. Then anger reared its familiar head. What a sneaky, fucked up thing to do. It was akin to putting sperm from a condom in a turkey baster and inseminating yourself. What. A. Hardcore. Bitch. Casey put down her knitting needles and clenched her fists at her side.

“I have no control over it, and to my detriment, Hildegard knows that. Clearly, the advantage is all hers.”

“So basically, you’re just a pawn to her. A means to an end.”

“Yes.”

“Yet, if you mate with anyone else, you’ll be shunned? How absolutely insane.”

“It is what it is, Casey.”

“Do the same rules apply to Hildegard?” How could that be if what the man in the coffee shop said about their encounter was true?

“They do.”

And then it hit her, and she spoke before thinking. “Well, that explains Bendy Bob.” She remembered what the demon in the coffee shop had said about his and Hildegard’s sexual encounter. Hildegard might not be literally consummating anything, but wasn’t she the creative one?

“Bendy who?”

Her face flushed. “Never mind. So there’s no way out? You’ll have to live for an eternity like this, after she duped you? There must be someone to appeal to.”

His face grew dark. Big surprise.

“Do not clam up on me, Clayton Gunnersson. Don’t. We’ve come this far, let’s go all the way. From the look on your face, there is a way out. Spill.”

“Her demon blood mixed with some concoction whose origins are unknown—at least to me. An antidote to this fiasco—or at least the hope of one—an antidote that took a hundred years to perfect, according to my source.”

“Holy shit! That blood you dumped on me at the club was the antidote?” Oh, Jesus Christ. She’d stolen his one opportunity to free himself from that whack.

“Yes.”

“And how do you know for sure it was going to work?”

“I didn’t. Look, Casey, I’d searched a long time—several hundred years—for a way out of this mess. The clan doesn’t want to hear about trickery in mating—they’re not interested in sob stories. Your mate is your mate—no matter the species. I’d exhausted what I thought was every avenue, until I heard about this shaman who claimed to have an antidote. I’d just met him at the club when I ran into you.”

“But wait—if you needed Hildegard’s blood to make this antidote, how did you get it? If she’s, er, drinking from you when you sleep, how did you get some of her blood to make this antidote?”

Clay’s smile was wry. “I know some demons—demons who don’t like Hildegard. That wasn’t the hardest part. It was getting this shaman to help me make the remedy for this shit pile. That took time, and research, and a fuck load of patience.”

“So call him up, for shit’s sake! Get some more.”

His laughter was brittle, leaving Casey desolate and not so hopeful. “Easier said than done. I haven’t been able to find him since that night. It isn’t like he left me his name and address. The demon world is very secretive. I imagine he wouldn’t want many to know about him.”

“So it was me who ruined your chance to be free of Hildegard.” The pit of her stomach bubbled in discontent.