This Side of the Grave (Page 65)

"She’s dead?" I asked in resignation. Poor Timmie. He’d held out such hope that she was okay.

"No," Mencheres said, surprising me. "On the contrary, she’s quite well, according to what I discovered."

"So why do you have that uh-oh tone to your voice?" I asked warily.

His lips curled. "My uh-oh tone is because you indicated your friend had more than a platonic interest in Nadia, and she is now the lover of a powerful vampire who has no intention of sharing her."

"Oh," I repeated, more thoughtfully this time. Then, "His willing lover?" Some vampires weren’t up on the whole "no means no" concept.

"Her willing lover," Mencheres corrected.

Well. Timmie’s chances with Nadia just went from slim to never gonna happen. I was glad she was alive and not being held against her will. Considering I’d thought Mencheres had come to bear more grim news about Apollyon, this was almost cause for popping the champagne, if I’d had any. Timmie’s heart might be bruised, but there were far worse things that could have befallen Nadia. She’d gone looking for vampires and apparently found a whole lot more than just proof of their existence.

"Your sources are good? There’s no doubt Nadia’s with this vampire of her own free will and not just tranced into staying?"

"I know the vampire Nadia is with," Mencheres stated. "It would be very unlike Debra to force a human into staying with her, even one who’d discovered our race. Debra could have easily sent Nadia away with no memory of her discovery."

"Unless Nadia is like me," Kira said, with a slight smile. "Erasing my memory didn’t work out so well for you when we met."

Mencheres let out a growl so edged with passion that I had an urge to glance away. "It worked out extraordinarily well in the end," he murmured to Kira.

Her soft laugh was also filled with things that were best left behind closed doors.

Technically, they weren’t doing anything but sitting on the couch together, but with the newly charged air around them, I felt almost like a voyeur in my own home. I looked away to study my fingernails, as if struck by an urgent need to get a manicure.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Bones’s slight grin. He knew how this would affect me, but the sudden heat coming off the two of them did nothing to discomfit him, of course.

Mencheres and Kira could start boinking like rabbits right in front of Bones, and he’d probably just warn them that the sectional they were on tended to flip over during such activity.

If Mencheres and Kira wanted to take this upstairs to a guest room, they were welcome to, but if they were staying down here, I was defusing the mood.

"Not nice for Nadia to disappear without telling her friends she was okay, though," I said, clearing my throat.

Mencheres rescinded the energy he’d been emitting until the room felt back to a PG – 13

level, instead of R heading into NC – 17. "Debra is what you would refer to as old school," he replied, pulling his gaze away from Kira to look at me. "She would not want Nadia contacting people from her former life, especially those who had an interest in exposing our race." Her former life. I almost let out a snort. That was the damn truth, because once a person became involved in the vampire world, nothing about their life would ever be the same again.

Then I glanced at Bones’s profile, noting his curly hair, richly defined cheekbones, dark brows, and lips that were firm enough to be masculine and full enough to be sinful. Nothing about my life had ever been the same once I plunged into the vampire world, too, but looking at him, I wouldn’t want it any other way. I hoped Nadia found half as much happiness in her undead relationship as I’d found in mine.

"I’ll call Timmie, give him the news," I said, rising.

"Poor bloke can’t catch a break when it comes to women," Bones noted.

I met his dark brown gaze with my first real smile in the past several days. "He just hasn’t met the right one yet, but once he does, he’ll forget everyone else." His smile became full of promise even as his power seemed to encompass me like a slow, sensual fog. "Indeed," he agreed, his tone now deep and silky. "The right woman is well worth waiting for."

Now it was Kira who cleared her throat at the decided shift in the atmosphere. I went upstairs to my room, still smiling in a lingering way, to call Timmie and give him the news that was both good and bad.

Chapter Thirty-three

I hung up half an hour later, blowingout a sigh. Timmie had taken the information about Nadia well enough, albeit needing to be talked out of seeing her in person so he’d know she was all right. I negotiated it down to a phone call. Timmie had no idea how strong vampire territorialism was. If he showed up reeking of lust and unrequited love for Nadia around the admittedly "old school" Debra, he’d be lucky to walk away without a permanent limp, if he walked away at all.

" . . . saw them myself several years ago, though Marie only used them to threaten me instead of having them attack me," Bones was saying.

That perked my ears up. I’d gone in my room and shut the door so my conversation wasn’t distracting to everyone below. Talking Timmie out of doing something dangerously dumb had tuned me out to what they were saying, too. Had the conversation turned to Remnants?

Bones never told me he’d seen them before, let alone that Marie had threatened him with them.

I hurried downstairs just as he finished with, "Who’s to say she doesn’t use them often, and most people don’t live long enough to tell the tale?"

"I imagine it takes quite a lot out of her to raise and control them, which would preclude Marie from making Remnants her most common weapon," Mencheres stated before raising an inquiring brow at me. "You were very tired afterward, as I recall." I sat next to Bones with an affirmative grunt. "At least Marie was right and their effect wasn’t as overwhelming as it was the first time."

I’d still felt tired and cold everywhere for a few hours after raising them with Vlad, but I was able to keep control of myself the whole time. Nothing like when I first drank Marie’s blood and then went nuts for two days.

Bones turned to stare at me. "The first time? You raised them again?" Oh crap. With everything that happened, I hadn’t had a chance to tell Bones what I’d done in the graveyard that night with Vlad. Now he thought I’d been hiding it from him.

"I did a trial run of raising Remnants a little over a week ago," I said, raising my hand at the whiplash of disbelief I felt across my subconscious. "Before you get pissed, I didn’t deliberately go behind your back. It just happened. And no, I didn’t have a case of the sluts again."