Wicked After Midnight (Blud) (33 page)

His eyes fluttered open and met mine, and I was instantly shy, despite the fact that he was still inside me. Or maybe because of it.

“I told you you’d get your turn,
bébé
.”

In response, I tightened my muscles and felt him start to go hard again. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped down.

“You are going to kill me, little tiger. Or get me killed. Hurry, now. Get dressed. Before we are found.”

He gently lifted me, and I blushed and lurched to my bare feet, holding the untied skirt around my hips. I felt a breeze on my bare legs, a cold dribble down my thigh. As he buttoned his pants and tried to dab off the stains with a silk handkerchief, I blushed all the harder. He offered a tasseled velvet pillow to me, and I only hesitated a moment before sopping up the mess with the velvet and tossing it, stain down, back onto the bench. Hitching up the mess of my skirts, I fumbled with what went where, how to get the skirt back on and smoothed down as if it
had never been touched. In that moment, struggling in the darkness, waiting to be discovered, I felt a strange sort of shame. And then the Bludman in my heart rose up and said fuck the shame. I turned to face Vale, the cloud of skirts in one hand.

“One day, we’re going to do that, and then you’re going to hold me in the crook of your arm while I sleep.”

His eyes went soft, his fingers curling and uncurling on his thighs as if he ached to hold me, right then. He’d already slipped his white gloves back on, and his hands looked alien, too white for having touched my body so recently. “I will do that, yes. There is nothing I want more.”

“This meant something.”

“It did,
bébé
.”

“We’re going to find Cherie.”

“We are.”

“But first, I have to go out there and find the prince, because that’s my job.”

His eyes went dark and flat. “But you’re mine.”

I bared my teeth at that word. “Not to control. Not to own.”

“That’s not what I meant,
bébé
. When will you see that it’s a different sort of possession?”

“When men stop trying to claim me like wild animals pissing on their territory!”

He blanched and swallowed hard. “Perhaps you are right, then. I only wanted to cherish and protect you, but I see how that could be misconstrued. Better find a place to wash away the smell of me, then.”

My jaw dropped open, and I hid my rage and shame by turning my back to him as I hastily tied my skirts tighter
and arranged them to fall just so, a blooming flower again. How many times did I have to tell the jackass that I wasn’t sleeping with anybody? How long before he believed me? And how dare he try to make me feel bad when I was still dizzy from our time on the bench?

“Vale, I don’t—” When I turned around, he was gone. “You enormous ass,” I muttered as I slipped on my shoes.

Just then, Auguste poked his head into the tent.

“There you are,
mademoiselle
. The prince is waiting.”

There was no mirror to check my tumbled hair, no way to know if it was obvious why my cheeks were flushed. All I could do was nod and run a finger around my lips and sweep my bangs to the side.

Auguste held open the velvet flap, and I stepped through into a swirling chaos of sight and sound, a blizzard of sequins and feathers and eyes bright with lust and hunger. I hunted for the prince but saw only a sea of tuxedos until a slender gentleman in foreign dress stepped forward and gave a strange bow, the same one the prince had used.

“
Mademoiselle
, my master awaits you in the pachyderm.”

With a gracious nod, I took his arm, noting that he smelled of pipe smoke and hot metal under an unrelenting sun. As he escorted me down the brick hall that led to the elephant, did he feel my fingers tremble? Perhaps for the first time, I missed my gloves. For what the prince of Kyro had paid, biting him would never be enough.

The normally bleak
courtyard was lit with twinkling lanterns, and I had to shove one aside as the prince’s servant led me to the pachyderm’s door. He bowed again at the bottom of the stairs, and I nodded regally, my eyes drawn to the swaybacked lines of gently swinging lamps. It looked so romantic and innocent down here, the sort of place where a young couple might huddle together over steaming cups of coffee, waiting for the perfect moment for their first kiss. But no. This was Paris, and Mortmartre, and Paradis, and there was only one thing that brought couples to the world-famous copper pachyderm late at night. Well, two things. And I was pretty sure the prince wanted them both—at the same time.

I took a deep breath and put on my professional smile before I opened the door to the stairs. If there was one thing I had learned in my short time at Paradis, it was that men could be easily fooled into thinking that you utterly worshipped them, so long as your smile and your eyes focused on them as if they were the only thing in the world.

Upstairs, I swanned into the room like a queen. The prince wasn’t facing the door, waiting for me expectantly,
so my carefully practiced smile was utterly wasted. The room was empty. Which had to mean he was in the bedroom area, which was awfully presumptuous, even for a prince. I heard the door to the courtyard close and lock, far below me, and resigned myself to getting out of the elephant as quickly as I could and without the prince making any more headway than any other wealthy suitor had. Slipping a hand into the hidden pocket of my skirt, I made sure the sleeping powder was there. If I had to use it early, so be it. I wasn’t sleeping with the prince of Kyro or anyone else.

“
Bonjour
, darling,” I called, but there was no answer. “Prince Seti?”

Confused and a little off-kilter, possibly because the blood hadn’t returned to my brain after my time with Vale, I walked around the screen and into the bedroom. It was empty, too.

“What the hell?”

I sat on the bed, then fell dramatically back, making the blankets and my huge skirt poof around me. Everything felt sincerely stupid. Why was I even here? It wasn’t as if the prince was a local who might have a bead on my missing friend or some secret note hidden in his pockets. I was no closer to finding Cherie, and everything with Vale had just gotten infinitely more complicated, and there was this constant, whiny yearning in the back of my throat for Lenoir’s absinthe and dark, measuring glare. Back in Criminy’s caravan, I had wished for excitement and fame and complications, but I certainly didn’t feel satisfied now that I had exactly what I’d wished for.

A low rumble began somewhere above me, and I bolted upright. Was a dirigible crashing? I stood and walked
to the window in the elephant’s face, which was normally covered, as everything in Paradis was, by velvet curtains. Everything outside looked totally normal, and there was nothing visible in the dark, cloudy sky. Even the moon hid from view, and I didn’t blame her.

With my bare hand on the windowsill, I felt the first tremor shudder through the thick copper plating. The noise grew louder, the grind building with the pump of pistons like an old-fashioned train starting up. I grabbed the sill with both hands as the entire elephant lurched sideways with a screech of rending metal. The world outside tipped, and I stared down in time to see one of the giant legs tear free from the ground in a shower of bolts.

I screamed and fell sideways, desperate to find something solid. I managed to get both hands wrapped around the iron-scrollwork headboard, bracing my knees on the bed as the next lurch and screech of metal signaled the freedom of another leg.

“Prince Seti? Auguste? Anyone? Hello?”

The only answer was terrifying chaos as the behemoth tipped sideways, sending the unsecured furnishings and trinkets raining around my head. I ducked as a little table crashed past and clung to the bed like a monkey on a ladder. At least the bed was bolted to the floor. Above me, an engine pumped and groaned, while below me, the next giant leg pulled free from its moorings with a shudder I felt in my teeth. I couldn’t imagine what sort of power it took to move something as large as a building or what the prince—or whoever was controlling the elephant—thought he was doing. But I wasn’t about to be kidnapped in a giant robot. It was finally time to test the indestructibility of a Bludman’s body.

I waited until the pause after the last leg broke free and leaped off the bed, dashing for the ladder set against the round interior of the elephant’s stomach. I’d noticed it the first time I’d been brought here for an assignation and had assumed it led to a romantic gazebo topside, since you couldn’t really see it from the ground. Considering that the elephant’s head and belly were occupied and that the grinding gears were coming from overhead, I was guessing the pilot, or at least the engine, was somewhere up the ladder. Whether I was facing a man or a machine, I was ready to throw a wrench into the works.

I tripped on my skirt and went sprawling, narrowly avoiding a concussion, thanks to an ornate urn that was tumbling all over the place. Growling in frustration, I made it to my knees and untied my skirt, then whipped it off and tossed it to the ground before taking off again on my journey to the copper ladder. Ricocheting awkwardly between the bed and the wall, I managed to reach the ladder and start climbing up the rungs. The elephant was really moving now, the metal creaking and swaying as if we might fall with each heavy footfall. I pushed down a wave of nausea. Seasick and about to barf blood from riding in a runaway steamwork elephant—how ridiculous could this world get?

The hatch at the top of the ladder was loose, and it only took a few turns before I was able to lift it. Hot, oily air spanked me in the face. The steaming engine roared with such a thunderous rumble that the figure seated on a captain’s chair didn’t hear me or turn around. I climbed into the cockpit with utmost stealth, grateful that I’d dropped the huge skirts, even if it meant I faced my enemy wearing my lacy underpants. After slipping off my satin shoes,
I tiptoed across the warm metal. Along the way, I selected a weighty-looking wrench from a bolted-down box of tools and held it aloft. Whoever the dude was, he was going down.

Just behind him, I could smell his expensive hair oil and see the etchings on the brass of his posh pilot’s goggles. He’d taken off his tuxedo jacket and had his white sleeves rolled up as he pulled levers and pushed buttons and twisted dials. The elephant was moving as smoothly as could be expected, the legs working in tandem to propel us through the streets with a lolloping rhythm. The windshield showed screaming crowds scattering on the cobblestones and conveyances rattling away down side alleys on two wheels. A throng of gendarmes up ahead was readying a catapult, and I knew that whatever Sang had for defense, I wanted the elephant to stop moving before I suffered for the driver’s insanity.

As soon as the pilot chuckled darkly and reached for a lever that looked too much like a joystick with a trigger, I knew it was time to act. I whipped the wrench down and cracked him across the skull. When he tried to turn around and grab the wrench from my hand, I smacked him again, harder and at the temple. It wasn’t as easy to put a man out as it looked on TV.

He slumped over, his hands forcing the two large levers forward as he fell.

And the elephant fell with him.

It caught me by surprise, and I slammed forward, right into the windshield. The glass cracked beneath me and gave just a little as the entire monstrosity continued in a slow, graceful fall forward. I reached wildly around
me, trying to find something solid to hold on to as, bit by bit, the glass behind my back caved outward. When the unconscious driver crashed into me, the glass finally gave, and I fell out with a gentleman kidnapper and a million-pound copper elephant right on top of me.

*   *   *

I wanted to pass out,
but I didn’t. It hurt like hell, a hundred times worse than my fall from the catwalk at Paradis. And it didn’t help that I was covered in broken glass and twisted metal and the hot, heavy body of my kidnapper. Luckily, I’d fallen out of the window seconds before the entire elephant collapsed, so the cockpit had basically fallen around me, forming a protective, air-filled bubble. Still, I was completely trapped in the pitch-black dark, and no one knew I was here, except for the dead guy on top of me.

Wait.

No, he wasn’t dead yet.

As the fear ebbed away, his smell replaced it, forced into my nose and mouth by his closeness. I was pinned, with no way to rid myself of his weight. I tried to shove him away, but he was limp and thick and floppy, and I only succeeded in making the meaty part of his arm fall against my mouth.

Screw it. Dude tries to kill me with a copper elephant, eating him is totally fair game.

Considering the fact that I wasn’t trying to woo him or bring him any sort of comfort, I just flat-out bit the bastard’s arm, sinking my fangs in like traditional vampires do and ripping a little until the blood really started to flow. The sustenance was more than welcome, considering
the fear and exhaustion weighing me down. I’d never felt more like an animal, a creature with no empathy or kindness or reason. In the dark, I became nothing, just an appetite.