“What about that one?” Harvest leans across the bar and angles her head as surreptitiously as possible.
Dominic doesn’t even look at the two vampires in the corner. He leans forward, replicating her whisper. “Nope.” This close, she can smell his scent, something fresh and breezy like a Sunday morning at the beach.
Maybe vampires don’t have visible auras, she thinks. Maybe their auras are divined through other senses.
She knows she shouldn’t be here at the Lighthouse. And yet, once she unpacked her small bag into the spare bedroom at Ronan’s place, her limbs felt restless, her mind racing over the events of the day. She had already made two very dreaded phone calls.
The first was to Herman, who picked up with a brusk “What?”
She could hear the sounds of a sports game in the background and a cheer from the crowd. The conversation did not fare much better, as she detailed her day with Quinn, ending with the murder victim in her bed. Herman was silent for a beat. Then he cursed under his breath. “Rosenbloom, if you start sticking your nose into other departments—”
“I know, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” She decided against mentioning that a temporary reallocation form might find its way to his inbox soon, and he hung up with another curse.
The second was to her father and her Aunt Bea, who spoke to her on speakerphone so that their questions overlapped with each other. “Hazel is alive? Why hasn’t she called?” Aunt Bea kept repeating. “Tell me more about this boy,” her father had insisted.
“I don’t know anything about him yet,” she said, “just that he’s a vampire and that he’s bad news.”
“And what about the poor woman they hurt?” asked Aunt Bea. Her aunt was putting it lightly, she thought at the time, remembering the stiff pale body covered in thick red blood.
“The Bureau is working on identifying her, but it may take some time. Didn’t Aunt Trixie tell you all this?”
But her Aunt Trixie hadn’t made it home from the mainland yet and wasn’t fond of cell phones—not an unusual proclivity considering the first twenty years of her life were spent in the Fae-Lands, away from the burgeoning technology of the early 1990s.
She and Aunt Bea moved back to Ilton in 2001 and by then, cell phones were well on their way to becoming an economic necessity. One that neither aunt could quite get used to after the relative isolation of the Fae-Lands.
“Hazel wouldn’t have anything to do with something like this, I’m sure,” her father had said. “But why hasn’t she tried to call us?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Harvest replied, blinking back tears at the wobble in her father’s voice. “But Quinn will help her. We’ll both help her, whatever trouble she’s in.”
She hung up feeling exhausted, her throat raw from trying to find new ways of explaining that someone had potentially murdered an innocent woman to fake Hazel’s death, and no, Dad, I don’t know why someone would do this. Yes, Aunt Bea, I’ll visit soon. Yes, Dad, I know that you’re happy I broke up with Ezra, you never liked him anyway.
The bar is relatively crowded considering it’s a Monday night. When she scans the room, she stops at any glimpse of light-colored hair, then moves on quickly before making awkward eye contact with a stranger. As a result, her eyes keep landing on Dominic, whose face is the only one she recognizes. She watches him place a pint glass down with a crooked smile that encourages the female demon to lean across the bar a little more than necessary to hand him her credit card.
The next time the door swings open and a vampire and a demon walk into the bar, Harvest flags Dominic down under the guise of ordering another drink but instead asks if the new arrivals work for Locke or Ozias.
And again, he doesn’t look over at them. He smiles slowly and leans his forearms on the polished wood bar, his attention fully on her. The female demon from earlier shoots Harvest a scathing look. “You’re playing a dangerous game, you know that,” Dominic says softly.
“I just want to ask them some questions.” She sips her club soda, moving the straw around the slice of lime.
He shakes his head. “Does Jules know you’re here?”
It takes her a second to figure out who Jules is. “No, Agent Quinn is not in charge of me.” She hasn’t had any alcohol, but she feels a little buzzed just the same.
“Questions can be just as dangerous as a knife,” he warns, leaning even closer. His proximity seems to block out their surroundings, lights and sounds dulled until it is just them—Dominic with his heady scent and parted lips, and her with her heartbeat in her ears. She would think he was using compulsion if only he was touching her.
She raises an eyebrow. “Stop teasing me,” she says, leaning back, annoyed that her cheeks are flushed. She takes a sip of her drink, only to find the glass empty.
He laughs lightly. “At least let me get you a proper drink. This is a bar, after all.”
The drink is a cocktail that Dominic makes with ease, without thought, and with little notice of what his hands are doing. His eyes dart around the bar as he works, but seem to land on her far more often than they need to. Dominic places the drink in front of her with a mock bow. “A daiquiri, made just the way Hemingway preferred, or so Jules told me once.”
She almost spills the cocktail as she carries it toward her mouth. “Quinn knew Hemingway?”
He nods. “I’ll tell you something else about him too.” He leans forward again, arms resting on the bar. “He’s a shameless flirt. Don’t trust any compliments from him.”
She smirks. “So are you. Does that mean I can’t trust you?”
“You can trust me,” he says, an undertone of earnestness in his voice. “You can trust him too. He’ll always do the right thing, though he might take a roundabout way to get there.”
“I do trust him,” she says, taking another sip of her drink. “More than some Bureau agents, anyway. That’s why I asked him to help me with this in the first place.”
A twinge in her chest, a niggle of guilt. Rotten to the core.
He frowns, a small line forming between his eyebrows, as she reminds him why she’s there. “Be careful,” he says. He leans even closer, though it’s only to keep his words between them. “Locke is dangerous. You should let Jules handle this.”
“I’ll be careful. But I can’t sit by and let Hazel deal with this on her own.” Not again, she adds to herself.
Dominic opens his mouth to reply, but the crowd seems to swell around them suddenly, and his attention is pulled away by a customer. Harvest decides to move away from the bar and toward a high-top table in the middle of the space, her eyes scanning the crowd as she attempts to catch snippets of the conversations around her.
She wanders every few minutes, sipping her drink until it’s empty, ordering another, then continuing her slow turn around the room. She hopes no one looks over at her as she switches her vantage point every few minutes. Or if they do, she hopes her route looks random and innocuous to any who might glance her way.
She learns a lot about her fellow bar-goers but makes little headway otherwise. She continues her wandering.
Some hours later, Harvest is on her third daiquiri when a voice floats its way to her.
“…that witch got what was coming to her.”
She turns slightly, pretending to look toward the door, then lets her eyes wander to her right, where the words came from.
She wishes she could blink into her second-sight without giving herself away. Her eyes may be easily explained as a trick of the light in south Valkaria, but not so much here, with so many mischief-bound people milling about. She thinks the man is a vampire, but can’t confirm until he opens his mouth again. For now, he’s listening to something his companion is saying, nodding along with a close-lipped smile—and then, he laughs, mouth open wide.
She can see his fangs, teeth yellow even in the ambient light of the room. “I’m surprised Ozias kept her around as long as he did,” he says. He pauses to look down at his phone. He mumbles something to his friend, places his empty drink on the bar, and then makes his way toward the exit.
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She waits two seconds after the door closes behind him, before finishing her drink and setting the glass on the bar, in front of Dominic. She doesn’t see Dominic’s frown, because she’s already pushing open the door to follow the vampire, phone in her hand, ready to call Quinn.
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There is nothing quite like the taste of demon blood. Burrows’s head is thrown back, and she gasps, her hands curling into his hair. “Slow down,” she mumbles against his temple. He readjusts his grip on her waist to pull back a little.
Neither of them is that worried though. She’ll be fine. Demons have healing abilities that rival vampires. It’s just been a while since he’s had a fresh meal. Typically, his diet is constrained to livestock blood poured from a bottle spelled for freshness and temperature. It’s just as nourishing, but it doesn’t taste quite as good.
And Burrows’s blood is delicious—a unique blend of copper and spice that burns the back of his throat like liquor. It tastes so good, he can almost convince himself he’s stealing her magic, her heartbeat in his mouth telling him that if he truly wanted, he could open a portal to the depths of Hell and grant wishes in exchange for carefully worded promises.
Not that Burrows is that kind of demon.
Her heritage is seen in her ink-black eyes and two tiny horns protruding from her hairline, poking up on either side of her fringe, but her profession and lifestyle differ from those of her peers.
She’s shared little about her family life, but he does know that she is only half-demon. Her father was a witch who specialized in healing, and her mother was a low-level demon who fled as soon as Burrows was born. She was raised by her father and, in many respects, lives more like a witch than a demon.
When Quinn pulls back, licking the honey-spice of her blood from his lips, he presses a kiss to her neck, just above the quickly healing bite mark.
He knows he shouldn’t be here. He has no intention of taking his relationship with Burrows any further than it is now, and he certainly has no intention of using the key to her condo that is still sitting on his kitchen counter. It’s better this way, he thinks.
Demons have a longer lifespan than most, but it does not rival the immortality of vampires. Quinn has long since abandoned the idea of a romantic relationship that requires any sort of solid commitment. Give the most committed of couples a few hundred years, and they will inevitably fail, succumbing to a degradation that is as natural as coastal erosion.
It’s not so much that everything perishes as that everything changes. Certainly, when things are lost, they are perhaps found again, but nothing—even love—will remain unmoved through the passage of time.
It’s a cynical outlook, as Dominic once told him, but that doesn’t make it not true.
He moves his mouth up her neck, feeling her pulse thrumming blissfully against his lips. She shifts to make sure that his next kiss lands on her mouth. His phone rings, and he removes it from his pocket to toss it onto the table next to the couch, refocusing on Burrows’s mouth.
It is only later, when Burrows is in the kitchen to refill her glass of wine, that he remembers the phone call. He reaches over to tap the screen, reading his notifications while buttoning his shirt.
But he is only half dressed when he stops, picking up his phone to call Harvest back.
It goes straight to voicemail. He swears under his breath and tries the next number in his missed call log. “Dom. What happened?”
When Burrows comes back, he is hunched over, his elbows on his knees. His phone is clutched to his ear as he listens intently. He swears again. “I’ll be right there.”
When he hangs up, he looks over at Burrows, taking the proffered glass of wine with little thought. He takes a gulp. “I know you’re comfortable with dead bodies, but what about a stupid little witch who’s gotten herself attacked by a vampire?”
She sets her glass on the table with a sigh.
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“Really, I’m fine,” says Harvest breathily. She licks her lips, wondering why they are so dry. “I just need some sleep.” Her eyelids are so heavy. They flutter as she attempts to focus on Dominic’s face, which swims in and out of various states of emphasis. Smooth blobs of color one moment and then thrown into stark relief, grainy and sharp, the next.
At one point, she thinks she can see his aura, but then the image refocuses, and it’s just his eyes sparkling like gemstones in the moonlight.
Dominic raises an eyebrow while pressing the cloth tighter against her neck. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
She smiles weakly and sways slightly, admitting to herself that, perhaps, she is more hurt than she realizes.
It’s not that she had willingly put herself in harm’s way, but that she had been so focused on getting answers from the vampire who talked so loudly about their murder victim that she followed him outside and into the alleyway without much thought.
She wasn’t worried when the door slammed shut behind her, cutting off the comforting chaos of voices from the bar as it plunged her and the vampire into a cold, silent darkness. She wasn’t worried when the vampire she thought was in front of her was suddenly behind her, a leer turning his lips into a grotesque facsimile of civility. She wasn’t worried when she saw his teeth, sharp and gleaming in the glow of the sodium light above them.
Really, it wasn’t until he grabbed her throat, forcing her head back at an awkward angle to allow him access to her jugular, that she began to worry. His other hand grabbed her thigh, and she tried to push back, twisting her hips and pulling away from him. Her head hit the wall, and a shooting pain erupted behind her eyes even as his compulsion thrummed in her chest. It won’t hurt. Don’t scream. It won’t hurt. Don’t scream.
Her false thoughts dimmed her reactions and her eyes began to droop. But then the pressure against her throat was suddenly gone. She nearly fell to her knees, but Dominic’s arm around her waist held her up. As he led her up the stairs to his apartment in the lighthouse tower, she looked back to see the vampire crumpled on the ground, his neck bent at an angle that no mortal could survive.
She had tried to call Quinn, of course, before she walked outside. When he didn’t answer and the vampire left the bar, she felt desperate to follow him.
Now, she’s not so sure why it was so important.
It won’t hurt. Don’t scream.
Dominic lowers the cloth to see if she’s still bleeding. A thick bead of blood wells up, and it tickles as it trails slowly down her neck. “Are you hungry?” she slurs, looking at his teeth. She reaches out to touch them, but her finger doesn’t quite connect.
Don’t scream. It won’t hurt.
Dominic frowns and cups her cheek in his hand. She feels like she could fall into his touch, warm like sand dunes in the afternoon. “I think his compulsion is still holding you,” he says softly, his voice rumbling through her chest.
“I’m fine, really,” she says again, but instead of brushing him away, she leans closer. She’s not sure what he’s on about anyway. Compulsion and vampires and blood. She closes her eyes and inhales his cologne, feeling the roughness of his skin on her cheek.
Don’t scream. You want this.
She wonders what his aura would be if she could actually see it. A soft, earthy umber with flecks of blue like his eyes? A rich mahogany with burgundy edges and a core of midnight, the same shade as the ocean right now if she were to glance out of the window?
The sound of the door slamming against the wall causes her to jump. She sees Quinn standing in front of her, his anger brimming behind his eyes.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Quinn’s voice is gravel against her ears.
Suddenly, she feels awake, the fog from the vampire’s touch fading from her mind. The pain in her neck comes rushing into her consciousness, along with a keen sense of embarrassment as her last few words to Dominic are still echoing in her head. She opens her mouth but is spared from conjuring up an answer by Dr. Burrows, who pushes Quinn to the side.
“Hello,” she says gently. “I’m Dr. Burrows. We didn’t properly meet earlier, did we? Is it okay if I take a look at your neck?”
Harvest nods, and Dominic removes the cloth, taking a step back as Burrows moves closer, probing the edges of the bite with cold, soothing fingers.
“It was Roderick,” she hears Dominic telling Quinn. “By the time I figured out where she went, he had her pinned against the wall. I think she’s still under his compulsion.”
Burrows looks into Harvest’s eyes, her inky black sclerae reflecting tiny Harvest-blurs. “Your pupils are dilated. Can you tell me your full name?”
“Harvest Jane Rosenbloom,” she slurs.
“She…she also might be a little drunk,” Dominic adds, and when Quinn shoots him a glare, he mumbles, “It’s a bar…”
Harvest looks blearily at Dominic and Quinn. Dominic’s hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans, and he looks at Harvest with concern, a line forming between his eyebrows. She feels another stab of embarrassment as she wonders if his hands are covered in her blood. They must be, because he had been holding the cloth to her neck, and there is still a lot of blood trickling down from the vampire bite. The collar of her sweater is soaked.
Quinn looks oddly unkempt, his shirt untucked and only half-buttoned. His hands are on his hips, and his face is unreadable.
“He mentioned her,” she says, her voice too loud in her ears. “He was talking about a witch and something bad happening to her. He mentioned Ozias. I tried to call you.”
“You should have waited.”
“I didn’t want to—”
“I was going to call you back—”
“You should have answered in the first place.” The forcefulness in her voice surprises her, and for a second, she thinks Quinn is going to reprimand her for speaking out of turn.
Instead, he stares angrily at her for a second, a muscle in his jaw clenching, then unclenching. He tears his gaze away and turns to Dominic, who is eying them warily. When Quinn does say something, it is to Dominic. His voice is a low growl. “Where is Roderick now?”
Harvest doesn’t hear the rest of their conversation. Burrows catches her eye, turning her attention back to the injury on her neck and the pain radiating down her throat. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” Burrows asks.
“My head. I think I hit it against the wall.”
Burrows frowns as she gently turns Harvest’s head to the side so she can look for a wound. “You have a bump, but it’s not bleeding, so that’s good. You were definitely compelled, but it was sloppy. You may have a concussion, too. How does your neck feel?”
“It hurts,” she says with a short laugh.
Burrows digs around in her bag, looking for a small blue vial. “I have a tincture that could help.”
Harvest can see inside her bag, which is filled with various medical instruments and an assortment of vials and jars. “You have a whole apothecary in there.”
Burrows shrugs, applying a few drops of the tincture to a sterilized cotton pad. “I’m only a half-demon. My father was a witch. I learned herbalism from him. Before he passed away.”
“I’m sorry.”
Burrows smiles softly as she presses the cotton pad against Harvest’s neck. “It was a long time ago.” A pause. “I hear you know something about loss too, though.”
Harvest frowns.
“Your sister?”
“Oh, I suppose so. But it turns out she wasn’t lost. Just…misplaced.” She no longer feels the effects of Roderick’s compulsion, but she is still a bit drunk.
“It happens,” says Burrows, pressing a piece of medical tape against the cotton pad, securing it to Harvest’s neck. “Jules will help her. He won’t stop until he does.”
With the pain in her neck numbed and Roderick’s compulsion fading quickly, Harvest wonders at the informality of Dr. Burrows using Quinn’s first name but doesn’t feel comfortable enough to ask. Still, she notes the makeup lining Burrows’s black eyes, the red lipstick slightly smudged—by a long day at work or by another pair of lips. A date interrupted, she thinks. “Speaking of, where did Quinn and Dominic go?”