Chapter Ten

Cassandra

Not unexpectedly, the samples needed more care. Cass sighed.

“Shall we play another game?” asked Qadaire, his posture tense as ever.

“Can we play some music, too? It’s so damn quiet in here.” No wonder he was always talking to himself in this angry red silence. She swiped her phone from her bag and pulled up her music library.

“Of course. I have all of the greatest.”

“Really? There’s a speaker around here somewhere?” She scanned the room, ready to plug into the aux.

“Do you prefer Bach or Vivaldi? Monteverdi?”

Cass gaped at him. It had to be another poorly delivered joke, but he was stone-faced, serious. Each moment she didn’t respond had more confusion clouding his chiseled features. She laughed, a snicker at first, but it quickly built until she caught the hiccups.

“Dude, no,” she said on the end of a hiccup. “Oh boy, have I got so much to show you!”

The frown holding his features hostage transmuted into reluctant interest. She took that as a good sign. It was proving difficult to shatter his whole ancient vampire vibe, so any glimpse of his humanity—though that probably wasn’t the right word—was a win.

“Everyone knows music went downhill after the Baroque era?” His tone was definite, but the high note at the end belied his curiosity.

“Who’s everyone?”

His lips thinned. She didn’t miss the glance he cast to the rafters. She stifled another giggle and thumbed through her downloaded music. What’s going to blow his mind?

“All right, it’s gonna be a long night, so let’s start with some classics.” She shot him a look. “Not those classics. The good stuff.” With her volume at three-quarters, she played “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix first. She grinned smugly as his look of concentration gave way, his head bobbing the slightest movement at the riffs.

“Who is this?”

“That’s Jimi. My friend’s parents had an old record player and a bunch of vinyls, and every time I was over there—which was a lot—we’d listen to them. Jimi Hendrix was a god on the guitar. Unmatched!” She laughed at the thought of this ongoing argument between her and Ali. “In my opinion, at least. He’s the reason I learned guitar. Or tried to, anyway.”

“I see.”

The song ended. She watched his reaction and arched her brow.

Without a beat, he gestured toward her phone. “More?”

“I thought you’d never ask!” She queued up a dozen or so songs by some of her favorites, from The Gorillaz to Pink Floyd to Amy Winehouse to Billy Joel. She darted to the stairwell in the hall, where she’d noticed a piece of wood hanging loose earlier. She broke it off and used it as a microphone while dancing round like a total weirdo to all of her favorite songs.

“You are very strange, Dr. Billing.”

Laughter easily fizzled up her belly. When was the last time she’d let go like this? She turned toward the sound of his voice, having had her eyes squeezed shut as she sang the lyrics to “Super Massive Black Hole”, which hadn’t been one of the songs she’d queued.

Her breath caught. His hip leaned casually against the doorway’s mahogany decal, his bottom arms crossed. His upper left arm formed a triangle with his hip, while his right was bent above his head, his elbow in the corner of the frame. He looked totally unguarded. He looked. . .

She cleared her throat and sheepishly stepped her feet together. “Well, look at that. You do know how to have fun.”

For the entirety of three seconds, it was like there was an electromagnetic field around them. Like, at any moment, they would become twin stars, orbiting each other in a distant galaxy.

Then it was gone. The vulnerability washed from his face, replaced with walls of brick and mortar. The numbness crept its way back into her gut. She turned the music down.

“Let’s play another game,” she suggested.

He led her to a small office, a few doors from the main lab. If she didn’t know the mansion was huge from her accidental escapade to the creepy medical room, plus the long trek from the front doors, the livable area was like a simple two-story home.

The office showed signs of recent use. There was a shard of glass on the floor in front of the paneless game cabinet. She let him pick the game since she’d never heard of any of them. They returned to the table they’d played on before, but something was different this time. Cassandra struggled to pay attention as she read the rule card. She struggled to focus on the game at all.

Qadaire sat with two hands tented under his chin, the other two roaming the board or gripping the table, his features contorted, utterly lacking a poker face. She’d rarely seen much emotion from him, but while in the zone on a board game, little flickers slipped through his cracks. His wings flicked in annoyance every time she gained the upper hand. When he got stuck, he sneered so deeply she would be surprised he didn’t have permanently wrinkled lines in his brow if not for the whole immortal vampire thing.

It was endearing.

As hard as he tried to carve it away, his loneliness was in the way he looked at her, the way he tried to make her laugh even though he barely had a sense of humor. A thrill ran through her as she recalled his little joke about feeding on her. She’d been terrified at first, but then she’d sort of wanted it to be real. Not for any freaky reason. For science. Obviously.

It was easy to let time slip by like this. With him. Her stomach flip-flopped as she finally admitted to herself what was happening. One glance at his lower hands trailing gray fingers along the table and she was sure of it.

She was attracted to him.

“You win. Again. What’s next?”

Qadaire smirked the boyish smirk of a high school heartthrob and started to gather the pieces. Mid-cleanup, he paused, twitching his head to the side in that birdlike fashion. His eyes glazed, like he was far away. When he regarded her again, there was a ring of red around his pupils.

“Excuse me.”

With that, he dismissed himself. Cass finished clearing the table and bent down to Zero.

“Hey, buddy. Wanna go outside?” Zero perked up, stretched, and licked his nose. “All right. Just gotta find a way outta here.”

She knew the back of the house was nearby. She’d rather not make Zero walk all the way to the front doors. So she followed the direction Qadaire had gone and walked the narrow hallway all the way to a dark brownish-reddish door. She pushed it open and let Zero out first, following close behind.

The smell of death sent her hand flying over her nose. It wasn’t the chemically controlled scent of an autopsy or dissection, but a fresh, pungent scent. She whipped around to see what it was.

Qadaire was kneeling on the ground behind some trees a few paces away. Below him was a beefy buck. All of his hands gripped the dead carcass’s fur coat, shrinking it to the size of Bambi. She ripped herself away and tried to breathe normally through the hand covering her face. Her heart thundered as she watched Zero, hoping he would hurry the fuck up so they could get back inside.

He really was a vampire, and he really did feed off of blood. Some piece of her had continued doubting it was true, easily compartmentalized with no proof. Was he liable to snap? Was he in a feeding frenzy? What if he was incapable of shutting it off and came for them next in a bloodthirsty rage?

Zero trotted back to her, tongue lolling. Cass hurried to open the door and follow him inside.

She shut the door softly, leaned onto her knees, and wheezed. By the time she’d finally caught her breath, the door swung open with a creak.

Cass went rigid. Qadaire glided right past her down the hall. Reluctantly, she followed, hoping she didn’t seem as rattled as she was. It was one thing to believe someone was an immortal vampire, and yet another to witness its truth.

“Gruesome, isn’t it?”

He spoke quietly, like always, but she didn’t have to lean in to hear the hard edge of his tone. She froze under his marble glower, blood still circling his lips.

“You think I didn’t recognize your heart signature before you even opened the door?”

“H-heart signature?”

“Every heartbeat has its own melody. Yours is like the soft misting of the morning grass. Little drops of dew washing the blood left by night creatures on the forest floor before the sun rises to shine a light on it.”

Cass took a stumbling step backward, then another. How was he doing that? Being so terrifying and yet so charming? Was there any cuter way for him to say she had a tasty-sounding heartbeat? Was he going to kill her now?

“I won’t harm you, Dr. Billing. We were about to play another game, were we not?” He stood so still he may as well have been a statue but for the occasional rippling of his feathers, though there was no breeze.

Cass backed against the wall. She splayed her fingers and took a steadying breath. He didn’t step closer. He didn’t so much as twitch.

She’d been warned that he was a vampire, that he fed on blood of living creatures. That improbability was proven true, so why not another? That she was safe in his presence?

She squeezed her eyes shut and pictured the version of him across the table, cards in hands, two more hands thrumming ashen fingers on the table or preening his feathers. The furrow in his brow that proved even immortal vampires had feelings, thoughts, worries. The version of him she felt safe with.

She looked at him again. “Yes. Another game sounds good.”

A flicker of something whispered across his granite features. She tried to smile at him, but her lips quivered. When he took a step forward, she pressed her back harder against the wall. He watched her reaction, then took another step, another, until he was close enough to smell his woodsy scent tinted with copper. He stood there, scrutinizing her, for long enough to slow the frightened beating of her heart. As she studied him right back, she noticed something else in his pained stare. He expected her to reject him. She suddenly wanted to reach for him, to smooth his feathers and tell him to relax. She’d always found wild animals to be better company than humans, anyway.

“Are you afraid of me, Dr. Billing?”

“First jokes, now asking obvious questions?” Her voice was hoarse. She pushed away from the wall and straightened her spine. “Yes. I’m afraid of you.”

“Do you wish to leave?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You promised me a formula.” Another flicker of something unreadable. She reached out, her hand still shaking, and swiped her thumb over the blood on his cheek, then brought it to his lips. Unlike his skin, the inside of his mouth was warm. His tongue was not quite as coarse as a cat’s as it laved her thumb. Her eyelids fluttered, but she held his gaze as he sucked longer than she thought necessary, heat pulsing between her legs. “We have work to do.”

A hand grabbed her wrist and flattened her fingers against his cheek, leaning into it heavily. Another cupped her chin. His gaze was all fire and heat and blood. She hummed in delight as two hands pressed her waist against the wall. Her heart fluttered once more, but this time it wasn’t with fear, at least not completely. She arched toward him, waiting with bated breath for those gray lips to claim hers.

They didn’t. Qadaire dipped his head into the curve of her neck, hungry nips blazing a trail from collarbone to jaw. Her head dropped back and his touch became more insistent, one hand driving through her hair. Her thighs squeezed together, a pool of heat steadily gathering there. She reached over his shoulder toward his undulating black feathers. They were as soft as they looked.

“Cassandra.” His voice was barely a rasp. It was so rough she wondered if it was like that from desire or from swallowing gallons of blood.

“Qadaire,” she responded, her own voice shaky.

“I want to unravel you.” He kissed the soft spot under her ear. She wanted him to travel higher, to kiss her, but he reversed course. An arm slipped around her waist, another firmly placed at the small of her back, making her arch into him more. “Tell me you want this.”

She whimpered. She wanted his kiss, wanted to be enveloped by all four of his arms. She could only nod.

That was all he needed. He pushed his knee between her thighs. A hand on the wall held him steady while another fumbled with her jeans. He was taking too long. She murmured and undid the button herself. He nuzzled her neck, strange, inhuman sounds tumbling naturally from deep in his chest. What was that? A warble?

He tugged her jeans down enough to fit a hand inside. Over her panties, he rubbed her slit until she felt the slickness of the fabric slipping under his finger. She panted against his shoulder, wanting more, wanting to touch him, too. But when she slipped from his neck and reached for his waistband, he growled like a predatory beast and pinned her wrist above her on the wall. He slid her panties to the side and pressed the pad of one finger against her opening, trailing it through her parted labia, all the way up to her clit.

“Qadaire,” she breathed, her free hand bunching into his feathers. He snatched her other wrist and held it up too, forcing her body to curve into him. More of those soft sounds poured from his lips, their sweetness juxtaposed by his gruffness.

“Let go, Cassandra.”

His finger dipped inside her then, but whatever noises she made were too far away for her ears to perceive. His thumb circled her bud, another finger pressing inside. She tried to writhe, but his godforsaken arms were everywhere, and one held her waist firmly in place. Another slipped up her shirt and under the wire of her bra, kneading her breast before squeezing and twirling her beaded nipple.

“I can’t!” she begged breathlessly. “Please.”

He leaned his forehead against hers. His eyes were black and red, a primal hunger leaking from his pupils. He swirled his thumb and fucked her with his fingers as a wolfish smile split his face in two. If he’d been boyishly handsome before, he was devilishly so now, his voice dripping with sensual confidence.

“You can. There’s nothing else you need to do right now. Let go. Come for me, little dewdrop.”