Time After Time (Cora's Bond) (11 page)

Only after, when he’d pulled my limp body into his lap again, with my naked legs sprawled across the seat where he’d just taken me, did he let go of my mouth to kiss it long and tenderly.

He pulled away and looked down at me. “I didn’t tell you goodbye because I knew I had to come back to you, Cora. It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter who or what comes between us. I will always, always come back to you.”

“P
ar-TAY!” Lisette squealed, bursting into our apartment with Hannah, Sarah, and Clarissa in tow. And, to my disbelief, Paquita, Marie, and even the agnate Rebecca were there as well, the last standing behind the rest of the girls looking bemused. Of my wedding party, only the improbably named Karen was absent, along with the cognate whom Dorian had requested to fill in at the last moment for the slain Hattie.

“Are you ready to go?” Lisette demanded of me as Chelsea and Christina came out of their rooms to join us.

I put the last touches on my makeup and stepped out of the open door of the bathroom. “Thank you, Lisette. Yes, I’m ready, and I’m wearing the shirt, and I look ridiculous.”

“You should just be grateful that I didn’t get you penis-shaped noisemakers,” Lisette said unsympathetically. “And I think you look as awesome as any bride at her bachelorette party ever has.”

I looked down at my white rhinestoned shirt with the word
Bride
emblazoned across it in cursive. Lisette had a pink one that said
Maid of Honor,
while everyone else wore black shirts with
Bridesmaid
written on them.

The week before, Lisette had related some long story about Swarovski crystals being too expensive and their more affordable alternatives, but my eyes had just glazed over. I’d just nodded, smiled, and handed over all the money that I’d owed her for meals from the last several months with a nice premium on top—interest, I insisted, refusing Lisette’s attempt to give it back. And Lisette had turned around and spent most of it on these silly shirts and, of course, a beribboned headband with a short veil that she now plopped onto my head.

“Now you’re ready,” she said. “Let’s go!”

She herded all of us out of the room, and I grabbed my wallet and keys and shoved them into my pocket with my phone. I bobbed along obediently in the middle of the pack, finding myself next to Rebecca, who wore her riotous black curls in an elegant French braid that somehow managed to make her look queenly even in her silly shirt.

“Do you know what Clarissa got us?” Lisette asked as we all crowded into the elevator.

“Couldn’t guess,” I said honestly, not really quite daring to.

Clarissa shot me a toothy smile over Lisette’s head. “A party bus.”

“Oh, I wanted to tell her,” Lisette pouted.

I didn’t groan aloud. I thought I should be rewarded for that. “With strippers?”

But of course it was Clarissa. I shouldn’t have bothered to ask.

“With
special
strippers,” she said, winking.

I had no idea what she meant until we piled onto the bus and I realized I already knew a good half of the so-called strippers. Three of them were shifter guards from Dorian’s house, wearing little more than thongs, bowties, and their smiles.

They fit their role admirably for having been dragooned into that post, and I could only assume that Clarissa had conducted tryouts for the roles first. If they were embarrassed, they gave no sign—which was more than I could say for myself.

Another six men I could also identify as shifters, though I didn’t recognize them in particular—from other people’s entourages, I could only assume. And Raymond and Dalton were also there, presumably to protect Paquita and Marie. They looked like the worst strippers ever in their sport coats and casual slacks. But they were vampires, so of course no mere human would challenge the appropriateness of their attire for the role they were supposedly fulfilling. No one would even notice except in the unlikely event that the agnates wished them to.

“All right, everybody!” Lisette called, clinging to one of the poles at the center of the bus as the colored lights swirled off the recessed disco balls. “Let’s sit down and get this party started!”

I had to smother a giggle at that statement—so very like Lisette, to whom it wouldn’t occur that dancing around in a moving bus might be an option. But I was happy enough to forego any gyrations and hip-thrusts for the moment and take a seat while my maid of honor passed around champagne flutes and a magnum of Dom Pérignon.

“Courtesy of our new friend Rebecca!” Lisette declared.

The agnate was seated next to me at the end of the couch that stretched down one side of the bus, and as I filled up her flute, she smiled. “It was the least I could do. I detest bad wine.”

Lisette turned the music up—not to the blasting level that I’d feared but to a loud-but-not-unpleasant volume that still allowed for normal conversation.

To my surprise, I relaxed and began to enjoy myself. If Lisette was doing my bachelorette party wrong, I thought as the thong-clad men passed around trays of delicious hors d’oeuvres, I didn’t want to go to one that was done right.

I joined in on the chatter when I felt like it—and when I didn’t, I let it flow over me. With Lisette and Sarah in the bus, there were two bubbly people to effectively take the spotlight off me any time I wished. That was something I hadn’t had much of a chance to enjoy in Dorian’s world, where I’d been the focus of far too much attention from the very beginning.

Nothing of note had happened in the past week. Nothing at all. On Saturday, Dorian and I had attended the funeral mass followed by the burial of Jean and Hattie, and on Sunday, he’d gone alone to Dr. Sanderson’s funeral. And in the intervening hours, we’d spent a great deal of time affirming our own lives in a most direct way.

During the course of the week, I’d frittered away countless hours with Jane Worth, dealing with the endless minutiae that had seemed determined to arise with the last-minute tweaks to the wedding plans, while Dorian continued to tackle the logistical problems that came from scaling the perfected test that his and Hattie’s research had found.

There hadn’t been a peep from the Kyrioi, not even a trace of evidence that they were planning anything soon.

Maybe Dorian was right. Maybe the Adelphoi had forced the Kyrioi to be more cautious, at least for the moment. If we could only be so lucky, it would last until after the wedding....

I sat back and took tiny sips of the champagne as Sarah retold the story—again—of the outrage against her human rights that she’d suffered at the hands of the Student Health Center. Minutes later, the bus pulled up at our first stop, and everyone clambered out—“strippers” included, as they quickly pulled on dress-code-appropriate clothing over their skimpy costumes.

Some bachelorette party,
I thought. The ten women had eleven male escorts between them.

“Oh,” Lisette said in disappointment, surveying the street front entrance of the first club. “There’s a long line. My research said that it doesn’t normally get bad until ten, and it’s barely nine o’clock.”

“There may be a line for some people,” Clarissa said, flicking the hair of her short bob. “But it isn’t for us.”

She walked forward confidently, and I followed, knowing what would happen even before the bouncer at the door waved us all enthusiastically inside.

The club was louder than the party bus, but the rhythm was seductive, and the beat in my chest for once made me smile rather than want to find a quiet corner and surf the web or read a book.

Lisette was right. This was my party, and I should enjoy it. I pushed past Clarissa and strode up to the bar, slapping down my freshly paid-off credit card.

“This is my bachelorette party,” I said, “and the first round’s on me!”

Lisette came up to my elbow. “The club-rating website says that this club is popular among young professionals, but sometimes a celebrity will make an appearance. Maybe we’ll see one!” she screamed above the music.

I grinned and handed her the Mai Tai she’d ordered. She eyeballed the size of the glass and tapped through the apps on her phone.

“What are you doing?” I yelled at her.

“I’m the designated tour person,” she shouted back. “I have this sobriety app, and it tells me how much I can drink.”

Yep. That was my best friend, all right.

Christina and Chelsea had each grabbed a shifter guard by the hand, and together they dragged them onto the dance floor. They missed the first round of drinks wriggling in front of the two men who, it turned out, weren’t very good dancers at all. I decided that it a good thing that Lisette hadn’t asked them to perform in their thongs.

I roared with laughter along with everyone else at their antics. At the end of the song, Christina and Chelsea thrust me at their former dance partners. I gamely—if clumsily—attempted to move to the music with them in what was quite possibly the most awkward club dance ever as the shifters carefully kept a respectful distance from the body of their employer’s future wife.

Maintaining Lisette’s grueling tour schedule, which was set to end precisely at my two a.m. pre-arranged meeting time with Dorian, we were soon off to the next bar—which was, incredibly, country-western themed, complete with a mechanical bull.

I obediently clambered onto the saddle amid the cheers and jeers of my college friends as the rest of the party watched from the bar. I tensed as it started up, my grip tightening on the leather strap as the operator eased into the controls and it began to move under me.

It rocked and turned gently at first, then harder, and then even rougher until it bucked and swooped and spun. My headband flew off , and I crowed with the sheer exhilaration of it. All too soon, the ride was over, and Lisette jumped over the barrier to hug me.

“Look at you!” she shrieked. “You’re like the best bull rider
ever!”

I thought it smart not to mention that my cognatic strength had its advantages. But Lisette’s comment must have reached more than my ears, because just then, Rebecca left her seat at the bar. As she strolled over, every human man’s gaze snapped over to follow her progress. She could have pierced hearts with her stiletto boots.

Rebecca stopped in front of the mechanical bull operator.

“This one’s on the house,” she assured him in her throaty voice.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in his faux-Texan accent with more vehemence than he typically used.

I retrieved my headband, and Lisette and I left the bull-riding circle as Rebecca entered. She swung one leg over the contraption and nodded at the operator. “On high, please, or whatever it is that you call it. For everything.”

The bull leaped into motion, raring and whirling until my head spun with it. And on the top, one hand holding the strap and the other resting lightly on her thigh, Rebecca perched casually, almost carelessly, only the bobbing of her French braid betraying the force with which the bull was moving.

When she stopped, the entire bar burst into applause, and with a tiny smile of satisfaction, she inclined her head regally to the other patrons and returned to the bar.

I looked at Lisette, and she looked back at me for a long moment before we both burst into giggles.

“Best bull rider ever? You totally miscalled that one,” I said.

“Okay, okay, maybe I was a little too enthusiastic in my praise,” she admitted. “It’s what best friends are for.”

We continued on, hitting pubs and bars and clubs. Soon, the shifter guards weren’t even bothering with their pretense of being strippers between the stops. Few of us cared, and those who would have—specifically, Chelsea and Christina—were quickly too drunk to notice.

As it got later, the crowds got rowdier. At one bar, I found myself dragged onto the karaoke stage with all my friends for a rousing, if badly off key, rendition of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” By this point, Paquita and Marie were tipsy enough to give in to Lisette’s urging despite their assurances to her that they had never heard that song before or seen karaoke performed by anyone. But given the state of Chelsea by then, that hardly seemed like the biggest handicap to be working with.

Lisette’s clear voice had more than a tinge of impatience as she tried fruitlessly to herd our ragged chorus through the song, but by the end, even she had given up and dissolved into hoots of laughter as the crowd alternately cheered and catcalled us.

“Oh, come on, you can’t disappoint them like that,” I said to Lisette as we stumbled off the stage, weak with giggling. “Do a good one. Just you.”

“Oh, no, this is your night,” she said.

“Do it for me, then.” I waved at the karaoke DJ. “Hey, put on ‘A Natural Woman,’” I bellowed at him.

“You’ll have to wait your turn again,” he said.

I shot a look at Clarissa, who was sitting at a table in the front row, and she stood up, rolling her eyes. “Manipulating people is only bad when it isn’t for your benefit, I see,” she murmured to me as she passed by.

“No,” I corrected, “it’s only bad when it’s less harmless and I’m more sober than I am right now.”

Seconds later, the first strains of “A Natural Woman” rose over the stage, and I pushed Lisette into the center of the spotlight. She blinked at the audience for a moment, but when the first word of the lyrics began, she was there, her voice carrying clearly over the music without the need for the microphone that stood several feet away.

The jeers hushed instantly, and as she reached the chorus, the rest of the conversations dropped into silence as everyone turned to look at her. Even the agnates, the men and women alike, looked stunned. Finally, the song ended, and in utter and complete silence, she left the stage.

“Well,” she said, frowning as she stepped down. “I might not have hit everything perfectly, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

And then the room exploded into applause, and a ragged cheer of “Maid of Honor!” rose up from the tables.

Lisette grinned and preened slightly. “Well, that’s more like it.”

At our last stop, we sat at a quiet clutch of back booths and sipped what were supposed to be the best, hottest, and most original cocktails in the District. To my not-very-discerning palate, mine tasted like fruity booze, which suited me fine.