Kiss the Dead (25 page)

I fought not to be sullen about it, and to be a reasonable grown-up. In that moment the grown-up in the room wasn’t me. I leaned my back against the cabinet, leaning back on my butt, so it was a type of reclining. Cynric stood in front of me. He’d let his hair grow out in the year and some change he’d been with us, so that now it touched his
shoulders. He usually brushed it out when it was wet and tied it back tight in a ponytail. His hair managed to be thick and luxurious rather than just soft. I think he had the thickest straight hair I’d ever touched. He had it back in a ponytail, not quite tight enough to hide the fact that there was a lot more hair behind him. His face had thinned down, letting nice, triangular cheekbones come out of what I could only have called baby fat, though no one called it that now. He was leaner from gaining extra inches of height and hitting the gym in a serious way. Nathaniel worked out because he was a stripper, and when you take your clothes off for customers, you need to look good. I worked out so I could fight bad guys. The bodyguards who stayed at the house with us, and at the Circus with Jean-Claude, worked out to stay in shape to protect our asses. Richard was Ulfric, wolf king, and occasionally you had to fight to keep the title, so he worked out to make sure he could do that. Micah worked out because I, his leopard queen, did, and because occasionally the leopard king had to fight for the right to keep his title, too, though it was a lot rarer among the leopards than the wolves. Wereleopards were more practical creatures than werewolves, as a general rule. Micah didn’t work out as much as I did, but then neither did Nathaniel. I was the one most likely to be depending on my body to save my ass on a regular basis. It was a serious incentive to exercise.

I’d insisted that Cynric take fight practice with me and the guards, because I preferred my people to be able to defend themselves. I couldn’t be with everyone all the damn time, so fewer victims was a good thing. Cynric had gotten his ass kicked at the hand-to-hand and non–gun weapons practice, so he’d started lifting weights and running with us, so he’d be in better shape for practice. It had probably helped give him that extra height and widen his shoulders, fill out his upper body, and just put muscle on what had been a slender, softer frame. Now he was lean and had more muscle. He didn’t bulk up as much as some of the other men; Nathaniel had broader shoulders and put on muscle easier. Cynric muscled up not much better than Micah did,
which meant he fought for every ounce of it, almost as much as Micah. Micah looked amazing out of his clothes, lean, muscled, strong, and so very male, but in clothes, especially anything that wasn’t tight, it was harder to see the workout. Cynric had some of the same problems. It meant that in the new preternatural high school football league, he was quarterback. He didn’t have the bulk to be much else, and he had a good eye, good hands, lightning-quick reflexes, and dead-calm nerves even with kids three times his size barreling down on him. He also could run like a son of a bitch and would have made a good running back or wide receiver if he hadn’t been so good at quarterback. Considering he’d never played organized sports in his life, it was pretty impressive. His couch bemoaned all those years of lost opportunity.

He was also running track again, in a preternatural league, and there he excelled at anything that required speed and agility. He was a sprinter, not a distance runner, but within his distances he was almost untouchable. We actually had college coaches sniffing around, because there was talk of a college preternatural league, and there were already amateur adult leagues across the country, with some talk of a professional one starting up, at least in football.

There weren’t enough preternaturals between one school and another to have more than one team between states right now. Which meant the St. Louis team was really a Missouri team. We were doing well in football, and a lot of that was due to the guy standing in front of me.

Nathaniel loved going to the games and meets, and they introduced themselves as brothers, which left me in the interesting situation of having a few parents at the games wondering exactly what I was doing with Nathaniel and his younger brother. I didn’t really care what strangers thought about me, but Cynric bothered me, personally, and always had.

Cynric was wearing jogging shorts and no shirt, so he’d either worked out already or been about to when he heard me get up. He wasn’t sweating, so he’d been getting dressed to run, and just stopped in
the middle to come out to me. The shorts left his upper body bare in the last of the late-day sun, so that the dying gold of the light painted his muscles in amber highlights, giving them even more depth and shading. At least he was wearing the bottoms; a lot of the wereanimals went around nude unless my modesty protested—though Cynric had come with his own share of modesty and rarely went around buck naked, come to think of it.

“Would you just stand there and say nothing if I didn’t start?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I sipped the coffee; it was hot, and Nathaniel had taught Cynric exactly the way I liked it, but today, even good coffee couldn’t cheer me up.

“Why?” he asked.

“You’re the one who made everyone else leave the room, Cynric. You wanted the talk, not me, so you get to talk.”

“God, you are so much the dude.”

I shrugged and sipped my coffee; maybe if I just kept drinking it, I’d enjoy it eventually. It was a shame to waste good coffee on such a bad mood.

He ran his hands through his hair, but in the ponytail he couldn’t finish the gesture, so he pulled out the tie and let the thick, straight hair fall loose. It fell around his face like a dark blue curtain, making the ring of pale blue in his eyes richer, closer to cornflower blue, and the darker ring of midnight blue, almost as dark as Jean-Claude’s eyes, look richer, more blue, a navy bordering on something less deep.

He ran his hands through his hair, now that he could, and started pacing a short, tense circle in the largest piece of unobstructed floor in the kitchen. That just happened to put him directly in front of me, pacing, like one of those big cats in the zoo that forever paces, miserable, and eventually they go mad. His thick hair spilled forward around his face, so that as he turned it fell in disarray around his face. The morning light had made his hair oh so blue, but this was a darker shade of light, thicker, holding shades of gold so deep, it was like fire as it fades, so that some of his hair was rich, deep blue, but some of it
looked black, so that the highlights and lowlights of his hair were… heart-stopping.

He stopped in front of me, at last, his chest rising and falling as if he’d been running. The pulse in the side of his neck pounded against his skin, already darkening from running shirtless in the spring practices. He tanned, did our Cynric. He stared at me, eyes a little too wide, lips half-parted in that triangular face, hair in that artful disarray.

I had the urge to push it back from his face, out of his eyes, but stayed leaning against the cabinets. I would lose ground if I moved toward him, and I would lose a lot of ground if I touched his hair. If we were going to fight, I didn’t want to do it with my fingers remembering the warm silk of his hair.

“I’m worried about you,” he said, at last.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and started to sip the coffee again, but realized I didn’t want it. I set it on the cabinet beside me.

“Sorry about what?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Sorry my job upsets you, I guess.” For Micah, or Nathaniel, I would have taken this, owned it, maybe even agreed, but Cynric hadn’t earned this yet; he wasn’t the boss of me.

“I’m a weretiger, Anita; I can smell your emotions and you’re not upset.”

“Now you’re telling me what I feel,” I said.

“You want this to be a fight. I don’t want to fight.”

I crossed my arms under my breasts and settled against the cabinets again. “I don’t want to fight either, Cynric.”

“Please, at least, call me by my name.”

I sighed. “Sin; fine, I don’t want to fight either, Sin. You know I hate the nickname.”

“I know you do, but then you hate a lot of things about me.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“Maybe not, but it’s true.” He took two more steps toward me, so that if I’d unfolded my arms I could have touched his chest easily. “I can’t help being this young, Anita. It’s not permanent; I’ll get older.”

I hugged my arms around myself, because I wanted to touch him. It
was one of the up/downs to him being one of the animals to call. It felt good to touch the type of animal you could call, and it felt especially good to cuddle your very own animal to call, and Cynric was one of mine. The fact that I had a record number of animals to call didn’t seem to make any difference; I wanted to touch them all when they were near me. It was damn hard to fight when you wanted to wrap your arms around someone so you could breathe in the scent of their skin.

“I’ll get older, too,” I said.

“Older in years, but as Jean-Claude’s human servant, you won’t age.”

“I haven’t taken the fourth mark from him.”

“But you and Damian shared it, and he’s a vampire, too.”

“He’s my vampire servant; we’re not sure if that will change the dynamics.”

“I know that there’s a chance you shared your mortality with Damian rather than him sharing his immortality with you, but so far you both look great. I think you just don’t want to accept that it’s not an age thing.”

“I’m sorry if it wigs me to be sleeping with a high schooler.”

“I graduate this year, Anita; then what will your excuse be?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” I held myself very tight, because I was afraid that Cynric—Sin—was about to say some very grown-up things that I didn’t want to hear.

“Nathaniel was only nineteen when you met him; Jason, too. That’s just a year older than me. It isn’t just my age, Anita.”

I looked into those eyes, those almost frantic blue-on-blue eyes, and couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought of him knowing that I didn’t love him. I couldn’t bear to hear him say it out loud, and yet part of me wanted someone to say it, if it meant he’d go back to Vegas and I’d have one less person to take care of in my life. I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with police work, and everything to do with the fact that no one person could date this many people. You could fuck them, but you couldn’t have a relationship with them. Maybe I’d been ready to jettison Cynric out of my bed and life, not because of him, really, but because I had to find a way to thin down the people in my life,
and concentrating on how young he was seemed a reasonable excuse to thin the herd. Was my issue with Cynric not him personally, but just being overwhelmed with all my lovers? I collected them the way a crazy cat lady found strays to bring home, except I could afford to feed and take care of all of them, I was just running low on emotional resources, or so I told myself.

Was I really ready to send a whole person away, just so I could date the leftovers more easily? Put that way, it seemed a shitty thing to do. Hell, it didn’t sound good to call the men I loved and slept with the “leftovers.” If I was going to get rid of Cynric and risk Nathaniel losing yet another brother, I needed a better reason than being emotionally tired; didn’t I?

I reached out, touched his hair, and smoothed it back from his face. His hair was so soft, softer than Nathaniel’s, but not quite as thick; almost, though. I wanted to say,
It’s not you, it’s me
, but it sounded so fucking cliché. Maybe the reason it’s a cliché is that it’s true, so much more than people want to believe. You can be a perfectly good person, wonderful lover, great friend, and it can still not work. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He put one hand over mine, holding it against his face. His eyes closed, and he leaned his face into my palm, rubbing his cheek against me, scent-marking me as his, like cats will do. Was I his? Was he mine? Fuck, I didn’t know. How could I not know after more than a year? How could I not know the answer to this? What the fuck was wrong with me? What the fuck was wrong… with me? With… him and me, with us? No, with me. With me. What was wrong with me?

His other hand went around my waist, drawing me in against his body. It was a possessive gesture, one that marked territory if other men were present.
This is mine, not yours
; mine, just by that arm around me, that drawing me into him. I just didn’t think it was true.

I stared up at him, studying his face, trying to see something that would help me know what the hell I was feeling.

He drew me in tighter to his body, and I put my hands on his waist, just at the top of his hips, not holding him, but keeping that last fraction of a distance between his body and mine. I knew what was under
the silky jogging shorts. I knew what he had to offer, and I knew my reaction to being pressed against it, even through clothes. It wasn’t just love that made me react to the men in my life, and somehow if I reacted to Cynric the same way, it would mean something. I wasn’t sure what, but something, something I didn’t want it to mean.

He tried to pull me closer, but I stiffened my arms and kept the small distance. He didn’t fight me. He just let me go and stepped back a few inches, so we weren’t touching at all.

I reached out to him, but the look on his face made me drop my hands to my sides. It wasn’t the anger that I’d earned, but the disappointment in his eyes, the pain; I hadn’t wanted to see that. It made my chest tight, and there was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t seem to swallow around, as if I were choking on something more solid than words.

“I’m not jealous,” he said, “but after what I heard and smelled you doing with Micah and Nathaniel, and you won’t even let me hold you close…” He shook his head, making a little push-away gesture with his hands. He turned and went to stand by the sliding glass door, as far from me as he could get without leaving the room.

I didn’t know what to do. If Nathaniel hadn’t adopted him as a brother, if Jean-Claude didn’t seem to take such pride in his accomplishments, if he didn’t try so damn hard to do everything that was asked of him, if… how would I feel if I never saw Cynric here in the kitchen again? What if I never saw him painted in dark squares of amber light and shadows again? He was beautiful standing there with the light making his shoulder-length hair rich blues and blacks, as if someone had painted him with the color of dark ocean water, but… but I could live without him. I’d miss him, but I couldn’t wrap my head around helping him pick out colleges and fucking him. It felt too much like a conflict of interests. Could you finish raising someone, kiss him and send him off to school every day, and be sleeping with him, and have it be okay? I didn’t think so.