Gilded Destiny

Moons

  Calli

  I blinked in darkness. Where’s that silk? I reached up to find my pillow and it wasn’t there. My hand connected with something hard, and I gazed up and felt at it a little more. A headboard, carved patterns in wood. I fingered it for a moment and then blinked more, wishing the darkness would clear. This wasn’t my bed. And though somewhere in my fogged brain I recognized that I should panic about that, I didn’t.

  I dragged myself upright and patted my body down. Still dressed, nothing broken. It was relieving news. I spent a moment concentrating on my breathing. There were no memories missing, this time… I remembered it all. Freddy, drunk. The stranger killing and eating him. Eating him. Seriously? I exhaled sharply and patted the bed around me, but felt nothing but mattress.

  “Why do you do that?” The stranger’s voice welcomed me awake.

  “Do what?” I glanced around but couldn’t see a thing.

  “Fall asleep standing up. Why do you do that?”

  I hesitated for a moment, unsure if I should answer him, scream, or what. “Can we turn the lights on?”

  It was his turn to hesitate. “Lights hurt. Why do you want them on?”

  I shook my head. “Because you don’t glow in the dark so I can’t see you. Where’s the light switch?”

  “I think it’s on the wall.” His tone sounded slightly displeased, and his answer didn’t tell me much. No kidding, on the wall.

  I rose to my feet carefully – still wearing boots, yes! – and fumbled for the wall. Halfway around the room, I found the switch and flipped it on.

  The room was cozy and fine, with antique furniture and soft, warm lighting. I turned, taking note of the familiar heap of clothing on the floor: Freddy’s clothes. I gazed around, admiring the ornate, carved headboard of bed in which I’d awakened. The blankets were on the floor with the pillow, too. The stranger sat beside the bed, so close that I would have stepped on his lap had I risen on the other side. His golden cords of thick, shiny hair were loose about his bare shoulders, and his pants were black and heavy. Probably work pants made of a sturdy material, I guessed. He squinted in the light and I raised my eyebrows as I took in his form: pale, heavily muscled, his hair long enough that it rested on his knees where he sat, cross-legged. He was absolutely huge even without the trench coat on.

  “Why do you fall asleep standing up?” the stranger repeated.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and shivered. “You scared the hell outta me. I fainted.”

  “Fainted?”

  I raised my eyebrows. Was he really this clueless? I needed to spell it out for him like I would for a kindergartner because… oh yeah, he’s not human. “I lost consciousness because I was so afraid.”

  “Both times?”

  Both? I had never met him before, I knew, but I also knew I had met him. “Yes. I had an accident a few years ago, and my brain doesn’t work quite right anymore.”

  His eyes showed some kind of alarm, and he parted his lips as if to speak, but no sound came out.

  “What kind of drug did you give me, the first time? I can hardly remember anything except your leather coat.”

  He glanced at the door to the room, and I followed his eyes. The worn, brown leather hung on the back of the closed door. The stranger frowned and sighed. “I meant to eat you. To end it all, for you. But I was surprised by your… colors. Then, you fell asleep.”

  “I fainted.” I glanced down at my arms. My tattoos?

  “Do they come off?”

  I raised my head to regard him quizzically. My tattoos or my arms, I wondered. But his gaze trailed over my arms, admiring my tattoos, the bright, brilliant daisies in every neon ink known to man; the gold laced between the daisies like ropes of riches. The pattern wrapped fully around both – an expensive, double-sleeve tattoo I commissioned from a guest artist I’d had in my shop once, shortly after my accident which left me with all my artistic skills intact, but that annoying lack of ability to remember anything. Goosebumps pricked up on my skin with every inch he caressed with his scrupulous gaze. I swallowed hard. “No, they don’t come off. The ink is inside my skin.”

  “How did it get there?”

  I shifted, confused. Yep, he’s totally clueless! “With needles. Needles dipped in ink.”

  He spent another moment admiring me, and I held out my palms, turning the undersides of my arms out for him to see. He stared as though memorizing the pattern to copy later, and I hid the urge to beam at him, totally flattered by this weird demon who had killed my friend.

  At least I never pretended to be normal.

  The stranger’s eyes perked up and he met my eyes, a grin cracking along his lips. The grin pulled his cheeks wide and exposed his deadly fangs, but I’d never seen such light in a dark face before. I smiled back, timidly.

  “I wanted to touch the flowers, to see if they were real. But you were sleeping, so I didn’t touch them. I didn’t think you’d like that.”

  I let out a nervous chuckle. “I appreciate that, thank you,” I lied. His grin – or maybe that shirtless perfection - was so infectious that if he told me he rubbed his face all over the flowers while I slept, I’d probably have thanked him like an idiot for shining them up. I wondered if it was my mid-twenties libido or the brain damage that had me falling apart groin-first every time he spoke.

  “I did smell them, though. They don’t smell like flowers. They smell like you.”

  He fucking smelled my arms?! O…kay. I knew I should object, but I also knew he could devour me in one gulp like a shucked oyster if he wanted to. Logic danced with lust as I thought of the stranger running his nose along the inner crook of my elbow. “What’s your name?”

  He smiled even brighter. My God, how big can a man smile, really? I remembered a flash of the night, of his gape stretching wide to inhale Freddy, and suppressed a shudder.

  “Nycholas.”

  “Nycholas,” I repeated. “I’m Calli. What the hell are you?”

  His smile faded and he furrowed his brow. “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

  I nodded. What kind of government of demons made such a law?

  “Well, I’m not supposed to let you live, either,” he continued, regarding my tattoos again. “And he’ll kill me when he finds me, anyway. So I suppose I can tell you.”

  “He?” That didn’t sound good. Possibilities rampaged my brain… the thought of a bigger Nycholas, or a scarier one… “You’re running from someone?”

  Nycholas rose to his feet, a few inches taller than me, and folded his hands behind his back, rocking on the soles of his feet with a strange innocence. Here, in this room, he didn’t look like the monster that mummified and inhaled Freddy. Here, he looked remarkably lost.

  “My master. I shouldn’t tell you about him, either.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m the kind of girl that gets excited by things I shouldn’t know or shouldn’t do,” I snapped. “So leaving me all these hints isn’t helping my curiosity, Nycholas.”

  Nycholas’ frown deepened. “I don’t mean to be difficult. I’m not that smart, you see. My master’s told me a million times.”

  My eyebrows shot up with shock. “You’re not that smart?”

  Nycholas laughed and paced to the bookshelf. He flipped a few books onto the floor and threw his hands up in the air, shrugging at me. “Can’t read, can’t write. I do know numbers, though. Numbers make sense. I love numbers.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there, surprised, confused, and totally curious about this simple, yet complex man... demon... whatever the hell he was.

  Nycholas swiftly strode past me and opened the curtain to the window. He pointed up at the moon and then leaned closer to the pane to peer at the glowing orb in the sky with adoration. “Like that, for example. I know I have seen the moon one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one times since I ran away. That’s over five years. I know that.”

  He had fled. From that master that said he wasn’t that smart. “And befo
re you ran away? How many times did you see the moon before?”

  Nycholas continued to stare up at the moon, smiling, the glow of the night sky illuminating his unbelievably sculpted chest even whiter than his already-vivid pallor. “Oh, I don’t know. He didn’t let us keep all our memories. I was human before, but I don’t really know where or when. And then I was with him for a long time… a few lifetimes, at least.” His smile melted to a solemn expression. “There were a lot of rules, and I just wasn’t that good at following them.”

  “Rules like the ones about not telling me anything?”

  Nycholas nodded before pulling his gaze away from the window. His glare was humorous, daring, and delighted. “And not letting you live.”

  I shivered again, but the half-sneaky grin on his face smothered my fear and I returned his humor with a cocked eyebrow. “You’re really not that good at following the rules.”

  He winked at me. “I told you that already.”

  Standing there with a monster, a killer of dark, unknown origin who winked at me, I kind of wanted to just… die. I wanted to be killed by awesome demon sex. We’re so sorry, Blair, but your sister Calli suffered a fatal attack of persistent orgasmotitis, the cops would say. A common condition for those abducted by sexy monsters that swallow people whole and steam like a sauna when they’re finished.

  “So… if you’re not following the rules, can you tell me what you are?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  I waited to see if he’d speak again, but he didn’t. “Are you going to, anyway?”

  Nycholas shrugged and grinned at me once more, and his cheer was so infectious that I grinned in reply. “Yes, I probably will,” he said.

  “You look like a vampire.”

  “Vampire. You made those up, right?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t make them up.”

  “No, not you. Humans. You made them up, right? Humans do that a lot. Make things up?”

  Oh. “Yeah, we’re a creative bunch, I guess.” Like me, imagining that you were going to cool this fire between my thighs with the chill of your touch.

  Nycholas chuckled and folded his arms across his chest, mirroring my stance. “Forgive me. I haven’t spoken with anyone in a long time. No one since I ran away. Before that, just my brothers. Levi and Festus. Good men, I miss them, though the other brothers are not so good.”

  “Yet you left them behind?”

  Nycholas nodded, a moment of disappointment glancing across his sharp features. “They should leave, too. I wanted them to leave. But they won’t. Our master beats them too much, so they’re afraid.”

  Beats them? What the hell kind of a world did this creature come from? “Did he beat you, too, Nycholas?”

  “Yes. But he also took from me, and that’s worse.”

  “What did he take from you?” I glanced around the house. Nycholas seemed to have everything he needed, here.

  His expression darkened as he took a deep breath and blew it out with a shudder, and I got the impression he had to strain to suppress a violent remark. “That doesn’t matter, anymore. I didn’t let him scare me, because I don’t know how to worry.”

  I couldn’t stop the laugh that escaped my mouth. He didn’t know how to worry? What the hell?

  Nycholas shifted on his feet, offense dragging the middle of his brow down.

  “Oh, Nycholas, I’m sorry,” I said, taking a step forward. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me, at humans. We created worry, too, I think. It’s a wonderful thing if you don’t know how to do it.”

  Nycholas regarded me for a moment, and then his expression drew even more serious as he stepped toward me once – with caution, not threat. “Calli.”

  I searched his eyes. “Yes?”

  “Why did you put needles into your skin to color it?”

  I gulped down fear. “Human beings do stupid things, I guess, in order to look pretty.”

  “I can’t bring myself to eat you, to make that… pretty… disappear. I should want to. I tried. Do your colors make you tasteless?”

  I’d never had someone discuss with me whether I’d pair well with red or white wine, so I didn’t know how to answer him. “Um, no. Freddy – my friend – he had colors, too.”

  “He tasted fine. But he wasn’t your friend.”

  I remembered the alcoholic stench rolling out of Freddy’s mouth as he loomed over me on the staircase, and nodded. “You’re right about that.”

  “Am I your friend?”

  Was Nycholas my friend? Well, gee, let me think, dumbass, you came into my shop with the intent to eat me, you chased me, twice…

  And then set the bone in my hand, left me alive, and saved me from a nasty encounter with Freddy that probably would have turned quickly to drunken revenge rape.

  “Yes, Nycholas, I think you are my friend.”

  Nycholas stepped closer and I lifted my chin, suppressing my fear, inhaling that smell of steel off his skin. His breath rushed like ice across my cheek. “I’m a Vesper.”

  I licked my lips because they were dry, and Nycholas’ eyes dropped down and he sucked in a barely-audible breath. “What’s a Vesper?”

  “Me,” he said. “Half-snake. Half man.”

  “Nocturnal?” Must be. Vampire legends started somewhere.

  “Exclusively.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “The same place you come from.”

  I shook my head. “Portland?”

  Nycholas laughed, and I jumped a little at the force of it, his heavy chest shaking with the deep bass of his humor. He shook his head. “No. The Garden. The same place as the humans.”

  “You came from Adam and Eve?”

  “We don’t call them that, because we know their real names. But yes. And the apples. Apples are important.”

  I took a breath to ask another question, but Nycholas’ eyes perked up suddenly again. “Hey!” he said. “I found something for you.” He swept past me to the door and left the room, and I stood for a moment in stunned silence, and then followed him out the bedroom door into the hallway of what seemed like a two-level, suburban home, not the most modern place I’d seen but certainly well-kept. I took the stairs slow, not trusting my consciousness after two fainting spells. Nycholas stood in the kitchen, an orange in his hand, holding open a drawer and frowning.

  I stood beside him at the drawer and accidentally brushed my shoulder against his cool, bare arm. I wanted to shiver, but the softness of his powder-white skin spread comfort through my veins before fear could set in. Nycholas hummed, a low, puzzled sound that was sexy as hell, and I followed his gaze into the drawer.

  “I can’t remember which one,” he said.

  The drawer was full of silverware, and in Nycholas’ hand was an orange. He couldn’t figure out if I needed a fork or a spoon to eat it.

  Don’t giggle. Don’t giggle! Oh my God. How seriously adorable. The big bad monster – the big bad man-eating Vesper – didn’t know how to feed his colorful, exotic human pet. I couldn’t speak or I knew I’d break into ridiculous giggle fits, so I just gently pushed the drawer closed and took the orange from his hand. I pulled back a bit of the peel and slipped a segment out, and then popped it into my mouth. I smiled as I chewed, and he blinked a few times, studying me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s delicious.”

  Nycholas watched my mouth as I chewed, and I swallowed and smiled once more.

  “Your hair is soft,” he said.

  “Yours looks strong,” I replied, and slipped another orange segment into my mouth. I could get used to this candid, no-nonsense talking. I reached forward and lifted a strand of his hair. It bent between my fingers like thick wire, and I stretched up on my toes to slip my fingers into his hair at his scalp. He turned his head to let me do it, and I realized his hair wasn’t dread-locked together by neglect – it truly was that thick and strong at the base, too. “What kind of drug did you give me?”

  “I gave you my poiso
n, mixed with my blood,” Nycholas said. “Had I given you my poison without my blood, you would have slept much quicker, and you’d remember nothing at all.”

  A glimpse of a memory – Nycholas stroking his fingers down his fang – danced behind my vision as he spoke. Poison and blood capable of wiping my memories. “Did you fix my hand?” I wiggled the fingers of my splinted hand around the orange I held.

  Nycholas nodded. “I shouldn’t have come back into your store, but I did anyway, to make sure you didn’t need my help.”

  “Why did you come back tonight?”

  His expression darkened and he took a couple breaths before speaking, his chest heaving slowly as he did. “You’ll run away, if I tell you that.”

  He stood so close to me I could have stretched my neck up and tasted the skin of his chin, and I very much wanted to do that, but I didn’t know what he would do, how he would react. Play whack-a-mole on my head with a fist? Tear my pants off with one hand? Yes, please. But he was poisonous to me, and it would be stupid to provoke him when I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me.

  So I stepped back, hummed, and then strode to the living room of the house and climbed onto on a couch, tucking my legs beneath me as I ate.

  Nycholas followed me more slowly than I’d seen him move so far. He sat on the floor by the couch and regarded me with interest as I finished my orange.

  I licked my fingers clean when it was done. “Thank you again, Nycholas.”

  “Do you need to go home? Is someone waiting for you?”

  I raised an eyebrow, surprised by the question. “Am I allowed to go home?”

  Nycholas flinched. “Yes. Friend, not prisoner, I thought…”

  Damn, offended him again. “Of course, I’m sorry,” I backtracked. “You scare me a little. I forget that you’re my friend, but I’ll try to remember.”

  He didn’t raise his head to look at me. “You don’t forget about friends. I don’t forget Levi and Festus, though I’ve been away from them for one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one nights.”

  I reached forward with my good hand and lifted Nycholas’ chin, aware that my fingers were inches from his mouth and certain death. “You’re not used to talking to people. I’m used to talking too much, to people. I’ll be kinder, I’m sorry. I forget a lot of things. Remember I said my brain doesn’t work right anymore? I sometimes have to write things down to remember them.”

  His black eyes searched mine for a moment, and then he relaxed so I pulled my hand away and tucked it beneath my thigh on the couch. He was so cold. So smooth.

  Was it his coat, or his palm, that I’d felt so softly along my cheek? His chin had no rough stubble to interrupt the powdery, velvety texture to his skin.

  “No one is waiting for me at home,” I finally answered his question.

  Relief visibly washed across his face for a moment, but then he shook his head. “Why? Did I kill him? Was that… friend…” he bit around the word, “the one who waits for you at home?”

  Freddy? I almost laughed, but again quieted my humor since he was bound to misinterpret my sarcasm. “No, no, not at all. Yuck.”

  “Why does no one wait for someone so colorful, like you?” It was his turn to reach out to me, and he lifted a strand of my shoulder-length, strawberry-blond hair with his first two fingers and examined it.

  “I guess in the human world, it’s not always about how colorful you are,” I said. “I haven’t found someone I cared about enough to ask them to wait for me at home.”

  Nycholas nodded, still staring at the strand of slightly-curled hair he twisted between his fingers.

  “Is this your home?”

  Nycholas grinned and dropped my hair. “No. I eat, live in their place for a while, and then move on. Can’t stay still for too long. He’d find me if I did.”

  That master of his, again. I shivered at the casual way Nycholas spoke of one so supposedly brutal, so abusive and powerful. “No one waits for you?”

  He frowned, not understanding my question.

  “Women. No girl of your kind is looking for you, too?”

  Nycholas burst into laughter that shook the house, catching me by surprise. He threw his head back, fangs protruding, the golden cords of his hair dancing along the floor behind him, and guffawed for a moment. I took the opportunity to thoroughly drink in the sight of his sculpted torso, his pectorals so thick they dwarfed my tits by comparison. His arms were thick and I thought I caught a hint of the blackness of his veins along the biceps, but it was faint behind the pure white of his skin. When he finally composed himself, his eyes were warm with sincerity and sorrow. “No. The Maids aren’t nice like you’re nice. They’re evil. Our master says so, so we only see them when we have to.”

  I blinked a few times as Nycholas smiled boyishly at me. Five years on the run, and God-knows-how-long before that. No woman in this beautiful man’s life?

  “Is that why you came for me, Nycholas? Because you were alone?” My voice was small as I asked the question… the answer, as an unknown, filled me with terror and thrill.

  “No, Calli. The first time, I came to eat you, but you’re too colorful to waste.”

  Huh. Tattoos saved my life. Didn’t see that one coming. “And the second time?” I wanted the answer, whether he thought I was going to run or not.

  He dropped his smile and jumped to his feet, casting his gaze side to side, sweeping the room. I rose with him and looked around, but nothing seemed out of place. “What is it?”

  “Train. Do you hear it? There’s a train coming.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t hear it.”

  Steel fingers curled through mine. Oh, oh, my.

  “That’s because your ears are small.”

  “They are not!” I absently thumbed my lobe, and I figured he meant it as a metaphor.

  “We have time to go. It’s still far away. He can’t get to us if we go fast.”

  My heart iced and I ordered myself in my head not to faint. Fear seized my muscles and I shook. The master? No!

  I swallowed once as Nycholas froze, perceiving my fear easily, and I realized I wasn’t afraid of the master hurting me. He’d probably kill me if he found me, and it would surely be quick. But for Nycholas… my new friend… what would the penalty for this friendship be?

  He let go of my fingers and stepped back. “I can get you home. I can blank your mind and get you home. You never met me.” He reached to his mouth.

  “No!” The word tore from me like a lash or a scream, so forceful that Nycholas almost ducked. “No,” I repeated, firm but quieter. “Don’t make me forget, again. If you leave me behind, let me remember.”

  Nycholas let out a growl – holy fuck, a real growl, from deep inside his body - and paced back and forth across the living room. “It’s getting closer. You’ll hear it soon. What to do? Blank her and leave her or just leave her? Can’t do it. Not allowed.” He muttered to himself as he paced.

  The sound of a train horn seeped into my senses as Nycholas froze once again. Close enough for me to hear was not good, if the master was on that train. Did he know which house Nycholas would be in? Could he smell his traitorous subordinate, or track him some other way?

  “Decision,” Nycholas said, his mouth set with determination and his eyes flashing with excitement, danger, and certainty. “I’ll take you home. Might not get away, this time, but I can get you home.”

  I smacked him on the chest with my palm and he stiffened at my contact, his eyebrows knitting with anger or alarm. I didn’t care which. I took a shaky breath. It wasn’t like I could work this week, anyway!

  “Just take me with you, already. Get me home another time. Let’s go!”

  Nycholas didn’t hesitate even a breath. He bolted up the stairs and came back with his leather coat, which he slung over my shoulders before he scooped me up. I stuffed my arms into the sleeves, but he was already in motion, his heavy feet pounding the ground as he blasted out the door into the night.

 
Beyond Portland, we ran, into the forest outside the city, and he raced with a steady pace, the night blasting by, as I huddled against his skin, breathing deeply of the steely scent off his powder-soft, sculpted chest all the way through the night.

  The horn of the train sounded, and the darkness around me slithered, so I burrowed closer and tried to forget everything but the iron arms holding me tight.