Page 10 of Three Bites

“Little? I am much, much bigger than you, Carl. You know, I think you are quite pretty,” Matthias purred. “The things I could do with that girly face—”

My ears painted me a picture even if my eyes were covered. Something crashed to the floor and hurried retreating footsteps told me Carl had run away when confronted with being, for once, on the other end of unwanted flirting.

When Matthias’s hands fell away I turned to him with a beaming smile.

“That was brilliant.”

He preened under the attention.

“Couldn’t punch him with my fists so I punched him with my words,” he said proudly. “It’s like me and Theo changed places: he dealt physical damage and I did mental damage!”

“Oh, are those your game stats?” I teased. “What’s Tristan’s damage then?”

Matthias grew pensive for a moment.

“Elemental damage,” he decided. “Tristan is like a force of nature. He can be a terrifying hurricane, a blazing fire, a raging storm… But he can also be a gentle, refreshing breeze, water in the desert, or a fire you can warm yourself with.”

“He is important to you.”

“Let’s just say you aren’t the first person he tried to save,” he gave me a crooked smile.

“Did he save you with the powers that brought destruction or the ones that brought life?” I asked.

“Both. Sometimes for life to have a chance to flourish the blazing fire has to happen first. He destroyed me. And it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.”

I didn’t know what to do with such raw honesty. Words failed me so I offered comfort through touch. My fingers looked tiny against the back of his big hand. We shared the silence between us and it rang more profound than any words.

Chapter Seven

Tristan

By the next meeting with Jonas I was better prepared. Theo had compiled all the available information on Victoria, her brother William Clement, and the company he was the head of. In that time, I had contacted members of the Sanguine to get me information that wasn’t so readily available and assigned a tail to William. I wasn’t taking chances that anything was going to happen to him. He was important to Victoria so he was important to me.

A few calls and I had a better measure of Jonas as well. I had agreed to the initial meeting with him because, frankly, I didn’t care about the fate of the Persimmon Club and Jonas seemed to be the highest bidder. The nightclub, which once upon a time was the apple of my eye, started to be a burden in recent years due to the local police taking too much interest in it, which made me switch the Sanguine’s less legal dealings to a different place. As a completely above-the-board business, the Persimmon Clubwas just barely making a profit so I decided to at least hear Jonas out.

With the introduction of Victoria, the negotiations became infinitely more complicated. The meeting on the first day came to a close fairly quickly when it became obvious Jonas wasn’t going to accept a low offer for what I wanted. In the face of that, I requested to postpone the negotiations until the next day to give us a chance to prepare a suitable offer. So here I was, with the ever-reliable Theo at my side, discussing not a mere sale of a single club but what amounted to a partnership between our organizations.

Every time the prodigal son of Jonas wasn’t in the room with us I worried about Carl getting his hands on Victoria but my worries were soothed by the thought of Matthias keeping watch over her. He had made himself into a protector and he took his role seriously.

Matthias always said I was his savior but sometimes I thought he was the one to save me. Before I met him I was only dispassionately drifting through life, observing the time passing by with the eye of an outsider. Matthias made me want to step into the moment and live.

It was amusing I found the difference between beingunaliveand merelyundeadin the middle of the Second World War.

After painstakingly cutting the bond of every vampire bound to me, enduring the backlash that felt like cutting myself open, I had traveled the world for hundreds of years. I never found a home during that time but I found solace in the ever-shifting landscapes and the flow of human life around me. It was in mysecond year of exploring the astoundingly beautiful fauna and flora of North Africa when the words of a big conflict that was spreading all over the world reached my ears. Second World War. The humans were trying to kill each other en masse. Again. And this time Libya, the country I had planned to stay in for a few more years, had become one of the important theaters of war.

I could have moved to another country and run away from this conflict, if not for a wrench thrown into my plans: over the past two years I had tried to ingratiate myself with the local supernatural community and my hard work finally paid off. I had gained permission to spend time among the various cat-shifter tribes and I had talks in progress with the fennec foxes. I wasn’t going to waste that, war or no war.

That’s how two years later I found myself in the middle of an abandoned camp. The fennec foxes worried about the front coming closer to their homes and asked me to scout the situation for them. I frowned at the devastation from the bombing sprawling around what once was an oasis.

From the tents and pieces of abandoned equipment, I could see this place had been an Italian camp. The English army didn't spare anything or anyone with their airstrikes.

My eyes darkened at the destroyed homes the camp had been set around and the now polluted water source, the precious life-giving water, the gold of the desert, now mixed with oil and half-burned debris. No matter who won it was always the local population who lost.

I had thought everyone who had been living here had left because of the polluted water, lack of shelter, and the toxic fumes from the still burning remnants, but my vampiric hearing had picked up a faint heartbeat.

And then the scent of fresh blood.

My nose led me to one of the collapsed homes. The whole construction caved in onto itself, burying the people there. I used my vampiric strength to shift the debris away from the spot where I felt the fragile signs of life.

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