Chapter Eight

Qadaire

Bereft of his bedroom, Qadaire stayed in the study. He didn’t require sleep as often as humans, so there he was, pacing and flipping a particularly shiny gold coin over his knuckles.

He stopped at the window, where a few crows huddled in the corner, watching him. “I should kick her out in the morning. This is no place for a human.”

He glowered at the crows and their raspy objections. “I am a threat to her and she doesn’t even seem to care!”

Whether his friends agreed or not, he knew. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his body parts to himself, not with how her aroma taunted him, how her insightful questions challenged him intellectually, how the chorus of her blood sang in rounds. He imagined pulling her close, his lower hands on her waist and his uppers buried in her slick black hair. How the slope of her jaw would feel under his fingertips. How her fingers would feel buried in his feathers. How his fangs would feel plunged into her supple flesh.

“Enough!” he barked. The gold coin flew across the room, smashing a glass cupboard to pieces. He growled and retrieved it from the floor. He stood and considered the broken cabinet, where a stack of board games sat on the shelf. His head tilted. He grabbed the top one, a card and dice game, and set it aside. The next was a character-piece game with challenge cards and a tiled road. The third was a marble game, the fourth a satirical murder mystery. The last, a critical-thinking game of mathematics.

Did she like games? He fussed with his arm feathers until they lay flat. Would she play with him? He glanced at the window, where one crow remained.

“She’s guaranteed to be a better opponent than you lot. I’m sure she doesn’t cheat, and I bet she learns the rules the first go round.”

Qadaire smirked when the crow promptly flew away. Sore losers. He’d been the reigning champion of the entire game closet for far too long. If anyone could give him a taste of his own medicine, it was Cassandra.

Soft footfalls alerted him that she was awake, then the shower turned on. He tucked a box under his arm and paced to the lab. A few minutes later, she was about to descend the stairs, her heart hammering loud enough to give him pause.

When he walked in, he saw that her worries had naught to do with him. She glared down at the petris as though they’d insulted her. She worried her bottom lip with her teeth, little flecks of skin peeling from the abuse. He longed to smooth her chin, to release the poor pink lip. He plunged his lower hands into the pockets of his trousers and squeezed his uppers tightly around the cardboard box to keep from acting out his fantasies.

Cassandra didn’t spare him a single glance. He slipped through the arched doorway to the sitting room he typically played games in and set down the box, then met her at the samples. Her face contorted, her mouth pursed in a line so tight that her lips disappeared. Her hands flew to her jeans and swatted her thighs one after the other.

The darkness within Qadaire stirred. Her behavior was no less captivating than it’d been from miles away. The way her thighs jiggled with each slap, her skin-tight jeans barring all, made his teeth ache. He wanted to sink his fangs into the meat there, to be smothered by those luxurious thighs. Then she started humming. His attention snapped to her mouth, which was now pursed to the side so tightly he was surprised any sound could leak out.

He cleared his throat, willing the venom filling in his fangs to ebb. “As you can see, they require more attention. We’ll drip on this half and use the other to test further and check our results.”

Her concerned tics ceased and she gave him a coy smile. “Yeah, I know what I’m doing.” Her sideways smirk fueled his rising temperature, but the playfulness quickly left her. “It’s just, every morning I wake up, Zero sleeps in a little longer. It’s awful, not knowing how long he has. Every dog has been different. Could be days, could be . . .”

Qadaire wasn’t accustomed to dealing with others’ feelings. He hardly had enough emotions within him to need regulating. He placed a stiff palm on the roll of padding under her shoulder blade and nodded awkwardly. She tilted her chin toward him and giggled.

He withdrew his hand like she was a hemlock bush. “What?”

“You just—you look so uncomfortable.” She made a mockingly similar face to his and crossed her arms the way both sets of his now were.

Qadaire frowned, confused. Was this a game? “None of this is comfortable.”

“Yeah, I get that.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Maybe I’m just hungry. I don’t suppose you have human food?”

He rapped his knuckles on the table and tried to filter the sinister joke that immediately came to mind. Maybe he was testing her or maybe it was the mischievous crow in him, but he couldn’t help himself. “Yes, I have a human to feed on.”

Her brow furrowed, then shot off her forehead. Her heartbeat stuttered, that tantalizing scent wafting.

“Was that a joke?” She slammed her hand over her mouth.

Qadaire held his breath. When her shoulders hitched with laughter, he breathed again, a satisfied smile creeping its way onto his mouth.

“I don’t have human food. Other than berries and apples, perhaps some other fruit, but you’d have to share with my friends.” He gave a pointed glance toward the crows hanging out by the window.

“Friends. Interesting.” She smacked her thighs again—why in the nine rings must she do that?—and glanced around the room. “Berries sound, erm, fine, but I’d rather have a cheeseburger. I’ll swing by the grocery store on my way back.”

Qadaire followed her to the entryway and plucked her purse from the back of the couch. She took it from him and, to his surprise, touched him gently on the shoulder. His whole body went rigid, a fuzziness spreading outward from the point of contact.

“Sorry if I came off as an ass.” She smiled softy. “I’m stressed. And I guess you’re easy to be around.”

Unaccustomed to any sort of compliment, no matter how small, Qadaire froze like puddles in winter. Unsure of the correct response, he inclined his chin and crossed all of his arms.

Cassandra gave her pup some attention, then headed for the doors. “Do you need anything?”

He shook his head.

She left.

The castle quieted the moment the doors clanged shut. Qadaire stood there for a moment, staring at the seam where the doors had closed behind her. To his right, Zero was pathetically attempting to climb onto the couch. He used his bottom hands to give the pup a boost, scratching behind his ears all the while.

“There you are, furry friend.”

Qadaire then retreated to the makeshift gaming room. He unloaded the pieces and arranged them on either side. Once that was done, he went hunting. With a crow’s vision, he located a wild turkey and devoured it, leaving the meat behind for the wolves. He meandered through the greenhouse, checked the water levels, and whispered sweet nothings to the more difficult plants.

Qadaire didn’t bore. He always had plenty to busy himself with. A book to read, a game to play, a trail to jog. For the first time in ages, he was waiting. Not passing time. Waiting. Each excruciating second lasted an eternity. He launched into a series of exercises. When the burn in his muscles wasn’t enough, he took to the sky until his wings were also worn out.

He couldn’t shake the thought of Cassandra from his rapidly firing neurons.

“What have I become?” he ridiculed.

It was the image of her hips swishing, her lush thighs rubbing together in that heavenly way, that finally did it. The bump below his navel tingled, a tremor that shot straight down to his cock.

“Blast it, there’s no hope.”

He sat in front of his thick silver laptop. It powered on slowly, the aged fan inside working triple-time. He navigated to the web, patiently allowing the device to catch up. He had to find answers to his burning questions. It’d been centuries since he’d last lain with anyone, and even then, it’d been a vampire woman who worked on his twisted team. A brave scientist who later sacrificed her life to defy Dracula VI. As he typed his question, he muttered it aloud.

“How to please a human woman?” He backspaced the word human and clicked search.

He clicked through the first few articles, which all detailed the many ways to a woman’s heart through cosmetics and clothing. After amending his search to add the word intimately, the onslaught of images, articles, and videos was total overwhelm.

The first link he clicked nearly gave him an aneurysm. The couples in the thumbnails acted out scenarios much like he’d done with lovers centuries ago, but with a lot less blood and teeth. His cock stiffened at the thought of sharing these experiences with Cassandra, but when he scrolled past one with a female wearing a long white lab coat, he couldn’t suppress his groan. Clicking the video, he had a dire urge to palm himself.

With his upper hands, he clutched the monitor in a death grip as he undid his trousers with his lowers. His cock sprang free from the bonds that’d kept it under wraps for nearly half a millennium. It bobbed back and forth in front of his bump. The circular ridge of puckered skin was another blasted gift of the curse. Thankfully, it hadn’t developed into a full-blown cloaca, though it did seep with mating liquid similar to the pearl steadily growing at the slit of his cock. He hesitated as he reached for the gray rod, wondering if he’d still know what to do if he ever found himself in Cassandra’s arms.

“Damnation!” Qadaire slammed the laptop closed and hastily pulled his trousers over his waist, shoving the offending appendage back where it came from.

For the next few hours, he worked out harder than ever. With his super speed suppressed, he ran to feel the burn. He climbed the many staircases in the mansion, counting every single step he took, as though he could outrun the images swirling through his imagination.