“Oh yeah, the decor is great. It does feel like it’s missing something, though.” Cole snapped his fingers and added, “Maybe a big pipe organ and some dude in a cape hanging from the ceiling! You’re not going to make this poor guy dress in some frilly shirt before he gets fed upon, are you?”
Stephanie hopped off her living prop’s lap and walked over to Cole. The man on the couch made the best of her sudden departure by gluing his eyes to her naked shoulders. When she got close enough, Stephanie took hold of Cole’s wrist and tried dragging him down the hall. Since she was obviously used to men following her like puppies, he held his ground.
Letting go as if Cole’s arm had turned into a decaying tentacle, she lowered her voice to a hissing whisper that could barely be heard over the soft piano music piped in through hidden speakers. “Look, this is a business. You want a tour? Fine. You want to talk? I guess that’s fine too. Just don’t come in here and try to drive off my customers.”
“You gotta admit,” Cole replied in a voice just as low as hers, “you do seem to be laying it on kinda thick in here.”
“Well, we can either hunt the way we’re supposed to hunt or play it up a bit to have them come to us. There are Nymar clubs in plenty of other places that do the same thing. Some are bondage dungeons, some are spas, some give customers a private booth where they can get bitten and feel someone drink from them. Since you came all the way down here to single us out, maybe you should try it for yourself.” With a smile that showed the lower quarter of her feeding fangs, she added, “I’d do you for free.”
“Why don’t we start with a tour?”
She wrapped her arm around his and led him down the hall. “Do you really think you need that stick?”
“Yes.”
“Then will you at least cut the smartass comments when we’re around my customers?”
“I suppose that’s fair.”
“These,” Stephanie announced in a normal tone of voice, “are the rooms where our customers have their experience.” The first three doors had red ribbons tied around the handles, so she passed them up. Upon reaching a door with a bare handle, she opened it and stepped inside. “As you can see, there’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
For the most part, she was right. It was a fairly plain bedroom that had been decorated as though large doses of lace and velvet were legal requirements to appease the Cook County fire inspectors. A full-sized bed in the middle of the room was covered with velvet blankets. A small table, chair, and nightstand were all trimmed in lace. The air, which smelled like incense mingling with the subtle remnants of pot smoke, made Cole think back to his college days.
The moment Stephanie sat upon the edge of the bed, he shut the door and scooped up a chair to wedge under the handle.
“Big mistake, bruiser,” she said. “There’s a camera in every room and any one of us could punch through that door.”
“And scare away the customers?”
As if to prove him right, there was a quick series of taps on the door instead of a Nymar fist exploding through it. He grinned at Stephanie, who shot him a tight-lipped scowl in return.
“There a problem?” someone asked from the hallway.
Stephanie began to speak, but cut herself off when she saw Cole reach over his shoulder to pull his spear halfway from its harness. Locking eyes with him, she said, “I’m fine. Just go back to the security room.”
With every inch of the second level floor covered in such thick carpeting, it was impossible for Cole to hear if the people in the hall walked away or not. He looked up and couldn’t find the camera, but did pick out a few cheap little sculptures along the edge of the ceiling that could easily hide an eye in the sky.
“The last time we met, I probably didn’t make a very good impression,” he said.
She smirked and replied, “You tried to hit me with a trash can lid and then pushed me into the sunlight. Hah. And you’re the one calling me cliché?”
“What was your girl doing in our part of town?”
“My who was where?”
Cole narrowed his eyes and stepped closer to the bed. “You know goddamn well what I’m talking about. All of your girls are marked with pigtails tied back with the little cat bands. One of them, some asshole with a mullet, and a guy named Sid were caught sucking businessmen in an alley.”
“Did they tell you who they worked for?”
“The one with the mullet did some talking, especially after I cracked his skull against the side of my car.”
“Yeah,” Stephanie said as she stood up and took the single step required to put her within a foot of Cole, “but did they tell you they worked for me?”
When she was that close, he could smell the fruity scent of whatever she used in her hair. He could see the subtle texture of the tendrils that slowly writhed beneath her skin, and felt the heat emanating from her body. Apparently, that stuff about vampires being cold was as big a myth as the one about them burning up in the daylight.
Her eyes looked brown or possibly dark green from a distance. From where she stood now, Cole thought they had a slight purple hue to them. Those eyes silently assured him that they could pick up any lie he tried to float past her. Of course, there was one surefire way to test that theory.
“Yeah,” he lied. “Mullet boy brought your name up once or twice.”
Without skipping a beat, Stephanie raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders. “I guess you got me. Seems like Paige really has whipped you into shape. Tell me something. Have you fucked her yet?”
“There’s the Stephanie I remember.”
“You haven’t, have you? I can feel that much just like I can feel, well, this much.”
Before Cole could do anything about it, Stephanie slipped her hand between his legs. She squeezed a bit too hard, as if to remind him who was in control, but eased up quickly and started rubbing him back and forth. “You’ve been with her all this time and no action? What’s the matter? Oooh, I can tell it’s nothing to do with your plumbing. Must be her. Is she freezing you out?”
Cole shook his head, intending on saying something but not quite getting there.
“I may have been a little rough on you when we first met, but you’ve shaped up since then.” Placing her hands upon his arms, she squeezed them and smiled. “You’ve been working out.”
Trying to distract her as well as himself, he asked, “Do your customers even know what you are?”
“I doubt it.”
“What about those?” he asked while tapping the thickest black line on the side of her neck. “Don’t they notice anything strange about those? I mean, sometimes they move.”
“They move a lot of the times, but we keep the normals too busy to notice. We tell them they’re tattoos, and that’s good enough. I told one of my customers something of the whole story when he put some of the pieces together about what’s actually going on. You know what he said? He said it was weird. Can you believe that? A guy who paid me to make him bleed and lick the wounds actually called me weird!”
Pulling the strap of her dress over her head, Stephanie wriggled just enough for the garment to slide off her body. A few more well-practiced shimmies and the dress was bunched around her high heels. “I mean, see for yourself. Do I look so weird to you?”
Cole knew he shouldn’t look at her. Stephanie might not have been his favorite person if she was human, and being a Nymar only cranked her attitude up to unbearable degrees. She knew just how to roll her eyes or curl her lip in a way that made him want to wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze. Even so, with her standing naked in front of him, he had to remind himself over and over again why he shouldn’t like her.
She was a Nymar.
She admitted to sending more Nymar to scout a few blocks from where he and Paige called home.
She’d threatened their lives more than once.
She…looked damn good wearing nothing but black heels and a grin. The markings beneath her skin didn’t cover her entire body, but radiated from the middle of her chest. Spots along her stomach and waist were perfectly smooth and clean, while sections of her neck, arms, and thighs were marked in a way that resembled standard black tribal tattooing. As he examined her, he could see the tendrils writhing slowly inside of her. With his eyes already below her waist, he couldn’t help but notice the way she’d trimmed her pubic hair into a design that resembled more tendrils running between her legs. That was a little unsettling, but she made it work.