6. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Felix

Grinning to myself, I lean toward the mic to close out the episode. “And that, my friends, is a wrap for this week’s The Nerd Word. I’ll be diligently sifting through your requests for next time, so don’t hesitate to email me suggestions, and maybe if you’re all very good girls and boys, you might hear your word on Crude Corner. Until next time, word warriors…”

I switch off the mic, then remove my headphones, momentarily satisfied with those parting words.

I don’t know what the hell has gotten into me, but I was feeling myself a little bit tonight.

Scratch that, I know exactly what has gotten into me, and it’s not even a what but a who .

Zia’s last email was a little more aggressive than normal, a little more possessive if I’m being honest, and while that should have probably made me block her and start searching for virtual restraining orders, it didn’t.

No, the email put a smile on my face and an erection in my jeans because the idea of someone wanting me based on nothing but my voice? Well, it caters to that incredibly lonely side of living the way I do.

It is kind of creepy, though.

I’ve seen Play Misty For Me . I know how this could turn out.

That’s still not enough for me to try to cut Zia off or anything. Her attention is a nice change of pace, but I’ll keep it in the back of my mind. I don’t really have to worry, anyway. I’m a fucking vampire, so if things come to a head I’d be able to handle myself, and I’m sure it would end poorly for Zia because of that alone.

Probably .

It’s been so long since I’ve actually acted like my kind that I’m not sure I’d remember how if I needed to, but natural instincts would most likely take over and I’d be fine.

Not that I think it’ll come to that.

She’s been emailing me almost daily and sent her last one a few days ago, but I haven’t heard from Zia since then. And the desperate for attention and connection side of me is butt hurt over it, which is exactly why I did what I did tonight.

Still smiling, I start to put away my equipment and check to make sure everything is saved on my laptop.

I might have finally chosen one of Zia’s words for Crude Corner, and I might have used a slightly deeper tone while I discussed impact play and how it can be incorporated into many facets of sex, including degradation and praise kinks. And that’s why I threw in the bit about good boys and girls. It felt right after an episode where I somewhat gave into the overall interest the show has piqued, but it was mostly to get a rise out of Zia.

I want to see if she’ll email me again after hearing her requests on air, and after I addressed the masses instead of just her. She seems to struggle with that based on the needier aspects of her emails.

Egging on a potential stalker isn’t the best line of thinking, but I’m lonely and bored, and thanks to this new segment of my show, I’m horny as hell.

“You know you had someone trying to break in through the back door?”

I nearly jump out of my skin and spin in my chair at the voice coming from behind me. “Jesus fuck, Silas. You scared the shit out of me.”

“If you didn’t hear me, that means you’ve been living up here way too long,” he says with a raised brow. “Your senses are taking a hit.”

Giving him my back, I finish taking care of my mess from recording. “And where am I supposed to go? Back to Purgatory? That’ll go over real well, considering I was all but banished from there.”

“You weren’t banished,” Silas scoffs just before I hear the click of his lighter.

“Exiled, then.”

“Hardly.”

“ Sent away ?”

“Eh, kind of.”

“Well, what the hell do you call it when the ruler of Purgatory has had enough of the complaints about someone and boots them permanently to the surface?” I get to my feet with a grunt, annoyed as hell that we’re having this conversation again after years of it getting us nowhere. “I’m here against my will, because I didn’t have any other choice, and because no one down there wanted the freak around anymore.”

“You could have gone to Hell.”

Silas smirks as I whip around to face him, my irritation growing by the second, but I just huff instead of continuing the argument.

We’ve been through this before, so many times, and it does nothing but piss me off and make him laugh.

“Brought you something.”

My brow furrows as he tosses a smallish rectangular package wrapped in brown paper at me. One I carefully start to open before I let out a sigh. “Silas, you know I—”

“I know,” he says as he takes a hit off his cigarette. “Call me what you will, but it drives me nuts thinking about you living off that damn coconut milk.”

I turn the pouch of blood over in my hands with a small, genuine smile, the thing obviously packaged and frozen by Silas himself at home.

Call me what you will.

I’ve secretly called him my best friend, my brother, even though we don’t share genetics, and I’ve done so ever since we were kids. Silas knows it too. He just won’t acknowledge it because he’s not into that sappy shit.

And frankly, neither am I. I’m just more prone to letting it slip than he is.

But after one hundred and ninety-eight years of this guy coming to my defense and trying to take care of me in some way—by choice—it’s hard not to get a little up in my feels over things. Especially when I know how much Silas is risking to come up here every night so he can check on me. He could lose a lot more than just his job by leaving Purgatory so frequently, and doing that on top of the impromptu and unexplained visits to Hell? Yeah, Silas deserves those titles I give him in secret. Even if he is a huge dickhead most of the time.

“You gonna acknowledge what I said when I got here?”

I blink a few times as I look up at him. “What?”

“Fucking hell, Felix, where are you right now? You’re not normally this hard to talk to when I stop by.” He takes a long drag of his smoke as I stare blankly at his face. He needs to shave . “The person trying to break in?”

“Right, yeah, sorry. I guess I skimmed over that. You saw someone?”

Silas rolls his eyes. “Since I’ve brought it up twice now, yes. When I was walking up to the building, I saw someone at the back entrance trying to break in.”

I frown. “Why would anyone want to break in here?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Good point. “What’d they look like?”

He shrugs one shoulder as he says, “On the shorter side, dressed in all black, and they had a crowbar.”

“That is not helpful at all. You don’t have any more details?”

Silas shakes his head as he puts his cigarette out on the heel of his boot.

“You couldn’t tell anything else about them?”

“Not really. I was coming up through the woods, so I was getting nailed with a lot of other scents, and I’m pretty sure they heard me.”

I glance at the clock, noting it’s close to when my shift ends, which also means both of us have a very small window to get out back and see if the would-be intruder left anything behind before sunrise. “Don’t really give a shit anymore, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Well, go see if you can find anything. Mandy will be here in a few minutes and not only does she not need to find you here, I have to finish getting everything taken care of before I leave. And you’re a distraction.”

Carefully, since it’s starting to thaw, I slide the frozen pouch of blood into my messenger bag before shoving the rest of my shit in there. Then I pack up all of Roger’s stuff, close up the room I was using, and head down the hall toward the tiny break room.

I hit the button to start the coffee brewing, and then coax my sleeping cat into his carrier—he refused to walk tonight and I was already running late—thankful I have it right now.

Arguing with my cat over what to do or how to move while I go look at the potential vandalism to the back door is not high on my list of things I’d like to do tonight.

Roger finally gives in the moment Mandy drags ass into the break room, settling into his carrier with an annoyed huff.

I exchange pleasantries with Mandy, she thanks me for the coffee, and a few minutes later I’ve clocked out for the day and am joining Silas in the back lot.

“Crowbar was kind of a stupid choice,” he grunts as I stop next to him.

My eyes follow his and land on the crowbar, bent awkwardly at the flat side so both ends now have a bit of hook. There are scratches along the edge of the doorframe, a few smaller dents, and there’s a larger one on the bottom of the metal door itself. One that looks like someone very strong kicked it in frustration.

But the weirdest part of all of this?

The brick along the edge of the frame, where the door sits inside the wall, is crumbling.

It’s falling apart like whoever was here was using the crowbar like a pick in order to chisel away at the brick and mortar that’s been here since the sixties.

Before it was a recording studio, this place was a small local armory where a few soldiers and a tank stayed during the Vietnam war, but shortly after it ended, they relocated both and that’s why it’s built the way it is.

The door is purely an emergency exit so there’s no handle on it, and it’s set deeply into the wall so it can’t be pried open. And there aren’t any windows save a couple in the front and one on the side where the office is, so why this is where someone decided to break in is beyond me.

Just like the why .

Unless they wanted to steal all the radio and recording equipment, there’s no other reason to be here. And most of it is so old that it wouldn’t be worth anything anyway, so that reason is out too.

I slowly shake my head as I lift my gaze to look along the back wall, first to the right, then the left, then I take a few steps back and look up at the roof.

“What the hell are you doing?” Silas asks as he joins me.

“I don’t smell anything.”

He frowns. “Neither do I, now that you mention it.”

“But someone was definitely here.”

“No shit.”

Rolling my eyes, I walk backward to get a better look as I say, “And they couldn’t be human if we can’t smell them. Which means—”

“Oh, come on. Don’t start that shit again.”

“You know I’m right about this. The only one who could or would bother masking their scent so a vampire can’t smell it is—”

“Davina is not here , Felix. She has no reason to be here.” Silas kicks at the crowbar, then starts looking for his smokes as he walks away. “There is zero reason for it. None.”

“You don’t know that. She could be here.” I stare at the roof a little longer before I jog after him. “Davina might be bored enough to travel up here. You never know.”

“I do.”

“You can’t.”

Silas stops abruptly and pins me with dark, angry eyes as he pokes a finger in my chest. “She wouldn’t dare. I made it clear to her that she needs to leave you alone. Davina did her damage and now it’s done.”

Always looking out for me.

But something was definitely at Hellcat, and it definitely didn’t have a scent. Which means it intentionally covered it up so we wouldn’t know what it was, and since there are few creatures who do that, I find it hard to believe it wasn’t one of us.

I start after Silas again, the male turning abruptly to lumber off.

Although, breaking in through the back is kind of strange. And it doesn’t really fit the MO of anyone I know from back home.

If Davina really was here and decided to come see me, she probably would have made some grand entrance through the front door or some shit, scaring me worse than Silas did for a number of reasons.

I look over my shoulder just before we get to the end of the sidewalk to take the right turn toward my place, and when I do, I swear I see movement up on the roof of the station.

Movement and a quick glimmer of something shiny.

It was brief and barely noticeable, but I did see something, and that just further proves that something otherworldly was trying to break in.

I keep staring even as I nearly trip over my own feet, but the longer I look, the less I see, and then I don't see anything out of the norm at all.

But I know in my gut there is something out there, and whatever it is, it definitely sees me.