The Bloodline War (35 page)

“Now, hold on a minute.” Dev swiped some magazines off the coffee table. “The table here’s clear.”

Someone chortled.

“Assholes.” Kasson planted his hands on his hips. “The woman’s brother is sitting right there.”

“I said everyone
shut up the fuck up
!” Jaċken roared. “This is important.”

He turned to the Felix Ungar of all doctors, Jess, who was deeply ensconced in a worn leather armchair, an indulgent smile wreathing his flushed face.

“Can you take a look at something?” Jaċken pulled Tonĩ against his body, her front to his front so that her back was facing the room.

“What is it?” Dr. Jess rose smoothly from his chair, moving with studied grace even though he’d downed just as much scotch as the rest of them.

Jaċken yanked Tonĩ’s T-shirt up in back.

Jess came to a shocked halt. “Goodness gracious!”

“Shit….”

“Damn….”

“Wow…,” and the like, came out of the rest of the men.

“It’s fantastic,” Jess breathed, hurrying forward.

Alex moved to huddle around Tonĩ with the rest of the men.
Daaaamn
, again. Spread across the length and breadth of his sister’s back was the same dragon tattoo Alex had seen on Thomal’s back earlier, brilliant scales and all. Instead of green and red, though, it was—

“Why’s it blue and red?” Thomal asked.

“That’s the color of the Fey,” Dr. Jess answered.

Kasson was frowning at Tonĩ’s lower back. “Is her dragon missing a foot?”

Dr. Jess looked again. “Ah, yes. She had it lasered off.”

“What’s that thing?” Gábor stepped forward and pointed a finger at the lightning bolt in the upper left quadrant of Tonĩ’s—

Jaċken’s fist flashed out.

Alex gaped as, impossibly, the punch sent Gábor flying out of his boots and soaring across the Rec Room. He landed ass-first in the middle of the foosball table, skid-bumped across the top, then flipped to the opposite side, bringing the table crashing down on top of him with a splintering
thwack
.

The rest of the warriors threw up their hands in an I-surrender pose and quickly backed up several yards.

Alex just stood there, still gaping.

Dr. Jess pulled him back with the rest, murmuring, “It would be best not to get too close to Tonĩ and Jaċken at present.”

“Damn it to fuck!” Gábor scrambled out from under the table, roughly swiping little hockey men off him. “What the
hell
is a newly bonded male Vârcolac doing in general population, anyway?!” He staggered sideways, blood leaking down his forehead.

“Your own fault, dickhead.” Thomal snorted softly. “You got too close to her.”

Nostrils flared aggressively, Jaċken rounded on Jess. “Is Tonĩ okay?”

“Of course,” Jess replied hastily. “She’s better than okay, I’d say. She’s fully Fey; she’ll get her power now. That mark Gábor indicated designates her enchantment skill—although I haven’t the foggiest notion what a lightning bolt signifies.” The doctor paused thoughtfully. “What activated this?”

“My Fiinţă, I think. The tattoo popped up after the second bite.”

“Hey!” Alex came back to life. “Could this Fiinţă stuff boot up my enchantment skill, too?”

Everyone turned to look at him. Except for Tonĩ, who was cuddled sleepily in Jaċken’s arms, and Gábor, who was kicking debris out of the way and pouting.

Alex went on, “I could read the Străvechi Caiet Book, then, right?”

Dr. Jess’s cheeks flushed redder in excitement. “Oh, holy Heaven. Yes, just so.”

Alex adjusted the set of his glasses, his excitement growing along with Jess’s. “All righty, then. Just tell me what I need to do and point me in the right direction.”

Laughing, Dev gave Alex a staggering whack on the shoulder. “Well, okay, human. You just have to fall in love with a Vârcolac female and be willing to spend the rest of your life with her. Nothing too major, right?”

“Actually…” Alex smiled. “That’s exactly in line with my plans.”

Dev’s silver eyes brightened. “Ho, shit, wait! I need to introduce you to my sister, Luvera.”

“Screw that, Nichita,” Kasson inserted hotly. “I’ve got four sisters who—”

“Would somebody get Jaċken the
fuck
out of here?” Gábor growled. “And a damned bandage might be nice.”

“Yes,” Tonĩ murmured, “let’s go back to bed, Jaċken. I want to…” She stretched languidly and gazed up at her new husband with sleepy adoration, her smile slipping sideways. “You know what a blow job is, right, honey?”

All eyes snapped over to the couple.

Crimson heat shot into Alex’s face as Jaċken bolted from the Rec Room with Tonĩ at ass-on-fire speeds.

Aw, man
…. Now he needed to take a shower or something.

Chapter Thirty-seven

“I need to know how to fight these guys, Tonĩ.”

Tonĩ slanted a glance at her husband as she unwrapped two pounds of ground beef. “Yes, well…I wish you luck with that.” She plunked the meat into a large mixing bowl. “Make sure you slice that green pepper into small pieces, okay?”

Jaċken gave her a perturbed look from the other side of the kitchen island, a large Chef’s knife poised in his hand.

“You’re not chopping….” She sighed, then laughed. “What do you want me to tell you, Jaċken? Those Topside Om Rău seem pretty damned immortal to me.” She cracked an egg into the bowl. “You saw shave-headed guy die, I saw the young, creepy one as a corpse.” She shook in salt and pepper. “Yet, they both looked really alive when they showed up at the Water Cliffs.”

“They wouldn’t be immortal by nature.” He started cutting up the green pepper with quicksilver speed; the man definitely knew his way around a knife. “They’d have to be under the power of an enchantment, and what can be enchanted can damn well be
un
enchanted.”

She
plunked
down the salt and pepper shaker. “Why do I keep letting these things surprise me?” she asked rhetorically, then gave Jaċken a droll look. “Enchanted?”

“Certain Om Rău and Fey have the ability to manipulate power through rituals.”

“Not you?”

“I wish.” He snorted. “No, only Pure-bred Om Rău.” One side of his mouth hooked upward. “But you. Soon.”

That much was true. She’d felt strange power surges inside her ever since she’d gained her Fey status two weeks ago. Nothing she knew how to use or control, yet, though.

Jaċken scooped up the diced pepper and dumped it in the bowl, then glanced around the counter. “What next?”

She pointed at the can of Progresso Bread Crumbs.

His brows shot up. “Bread? In
meat
?”

“It’s meat loaf, and, yes, you’ll like it.” She handed him a measuring cup. “One cup.”

She hid a smile as she watched him measure out the bread crumbs with unnecessary exactitude, once again tickled by how enthusiastic he got over all things domestic.

It was a Brave New World for her husband, though, now that they were tucked away in Ţărână’s white picket fence neighborhood in a house next door to Arc and Beth. Before that, he’d lived his entire adult life in Roth’s mansion. He’d never needed to contend with life’s banalities, washing a load of laundry or shopping at a grocery store for more than beer and snacks, or cooking a meal, and now that he had a home of his own, he wanted to master it all. Anything that needed doing, no matter what it was, he wanted to do it with her. And ridiculously enough, she found herself racing home after work to do mundane chores, like make dinner or fold underwear or show Jaċken how to pick out a ripe melon. Because mundane stuff turned into fun stuff when they did it as a couple.

Tenderness filled her heart as she watched Jaċken upend the cup of bread crumbs into the bowl. If she thought she’d been in love with this man before, the last two weeks of marital bliss spent getting to know him, the real him, available to her now that his iron defenses were down, had catapulted her right to the top of Guineas Book contenders for the most in-love girl ever. A state of emotions which was having an unexpected effect on her.

It was putting her into a state of outright, unadulterated fear.

For the first time ever in a relationship with a man, she was truly, deeply in love. Never before had she felt like she had so much to lose. If something ever happened to Jaċken, if she lost him or he left her, it would throw her into such a deep, dark pit of despair and loneliness it would make her former life look like a big sorority blowout. She’d been wracking her brain for ways to get past this fear, but had been drawing blanks, which had succeeded in keeping her at a low simmer of panic.

“Anything else?” Jaċken asked.

“Um….” She closed her eyes for a moment to banish the thoughts from her head. “Ketchup.”

She watched him open the fridge and take out a bottle of Heinz from the side shelf.

“Hasn’t Cleeve been able to find out anything?” she asked, steering their conversation back to their original Topside Om Rău topic.

“Nothing that’s frigging helpful. Only a complaint lodged last year by the bar manager of The Blarney Stone about some chick with a black flame tattoo on her belly. Apparently, the woman ripped a guy’s arms out of their sockets during an arm wrestling match.”

She gave him an arch look.

“Yeah, sounds pretty Rău-like, doesn’t it?” He handed her the bottle of ketchup. “And weird shit like that going down is dangerous for all of us, you know. It starts the police asking too many questions.”

She hesitated in the middle of squeezing Heinz into a measuring cup.
Police
…. “Oh, God, I’m just remembering the night the police called me in to consult on the murder investigation for that creepy corpse. The kid was wearing some kind of strange ring.”

“Yeah? Strange, how?”

Shrugging, she finished filling the cup. “I guess it gave off some kind of an electric shock if anyone tried to remove it.”

“Holy shit, I think that’s it.” Jaċken planted both hands on the kitchen island. “That’s how those assholes are achieving their immortality. Their
rings
are enchanted. That’s right. Skull was wearing a ring the night he tried to steal you at Scripps. I remember because it tore a strip of skin off my face, here”—Jaċken drew an invisible line high up on his cheek with the tip of his index finger—“when the fucknut punched me.”

She set down the ketchup. “Well, good, you have it figured out. Now you can help me mix the meat loaf.” She bobbed her eyebrows at him. “It’s the funnest part.”

“Oh?” His expression lightened as he strode around to her side of the kitchen island. “Why’s that?”

“We get to do it with our hands.” She stuck her fingers into the bowl.

He drew up behind her, extended his arms on either side of her body, and put his hands in the bowl next to hers. She began to knead the ingredients together, and he copied her, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“Doesn’t it feel good.” She chuckled. “All that stuff squishing between your fingers?”

“It feels great,” he said, making it clear what he really meant when he pressed his hips forward against the curve of her rump.

“Jaċken. For Pete’s sake, we’re making dinner.” She tried to sound scolding, but it was difficult to be convincing with a long, hard phallus prodding her buttocks.

“Last I checked, sweetie pie, we were grownups. So I think we can have dessert first if we want.” He lowered his lips to the curve of her throat and kissed her, the tip of a fang grazing her skin.

Excitement spun through her tighter than an over-wound top. Groaning softly, she rolled her head to the side, giving him more access to her neck, blatantly inviting him to take a vein.

“You’re shameless,” he murmured.

“Very true.” Marriage to a Vârcolac was proving to have more than its fair share of magnificent perks, but being fed on was definitely the humdinger. The intimacy of the act itself was a total turn-on, Jaċken’s need for her life-sustaining blood something indescribably special, but she’d be a huge liar if she didn’t admit to really getting off on the Holy Moly ecstasy Fiinţă gave her. By itself, the stuff was an Elixir of the Gods, but an orgasm-Fiinţă combination was like sending her whole body, especially her vagina, on a rollercoaster ride through Nirvana, Mount Olympus, Heaven or any other celestial sphere where pleasure was unutterably fantastic. Was it any wonder she was always game?

She laughed softly as Jaċken nipped at her collarbone, then ducked away from his teasing lips. He wouldn’t feed on her tonight; every two to three days was about the schedule he kept, and he wasn’t due. “Enough now, husband. We have to get this blob of food cooked.”

They scooped up the meat loaf mixture and patted it into a loaf pan.

“Stick it in the oven, would you?” she said, washing her hands. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She dried her hands and tossed the dishtowel on the counter, then headed into the bathroom at the base of the stairs. She plopped down on the toilet, her body still humming with desire, but…there was also a strange, hard twist in her belly. She stared forward, absently unwrapping an O-stick. Rule Number Something of marriage to a Vârcolac male:
test ovulation cycle regularly
. She urinated on the stick, then checked the results.

“Hey,” Jaċken called to her. “How long should I set the timer for?”

She stared at the O-stick another second, then tossed it in the trash. She rose from the toilet, pulled up her jeans, buttoned them, refastened her belt, her movements mechanical. She washed her hands, then exited the bathroom.

“One hour,” she told Jaċken as she entered the kitchen.

* * *

The punching bag was gashed open from top to bottom and gutted, cotton stuffing littering the floor mats like baby synthetic snowballs. Large pieces of steel were joining the puffs as Sedge systematically ripped chunks of metal frame out of the middle of the bag.

Three other warriors were training inside the gym along with him, all of them pretending to work out while they really kept a wary eye on him.

His body ran with sweat, his hair soaking wet by now, and his muscles quivered like undercooked egg whites. He’d been going at the bag for hours. As soon as he’d put his wife to bed, he’d sneaked out of the house and come here to empty himself of his rage. But it wasn’t working. His mind was a seething mass of pictures he couldn’t shut down or control. It wasn’t working! Sedge cranked back his head and let out a sharp yowl.