Delia covered her eyes with her fingers. She could see it all perfectly. While Henry was busy socializing and calling it ‘rainmaking’, his existing clients were suffering from his lack of attentiveness.
She tried to recall the solutions her father had offered in situations such as this.
“Did you offer them a discount on their bill? Are they willing to try another lawyer from the firm the next time?”
“They’re already gone,” Henry told her. He made a show of checking his watch. The sunlight filtering through the window made the diamonds on his watch’s face dance. “And I should be gone too if I’m going to catch this plane. So you’ll take the contract meeting for me?”
At this point, it didn’t look like she had an option.
“Go,” she told him.
Yet, once he had her agreement, he hesitated in the doorway. “You know, you could come up and join us for the weekend. It’ll be fun.”
“Fun,” she repeated, pronouncing the word as if it was foreign.
He stared at her. “Did you ever have any, doll? University, law school, the firm… Your life has been so linear. You could stand to branch out and take a detour once in a while.”
Delia thought of the trust account reconciliations awaiting her that weekend and inwardly sighed. The rest of the lawyers didn’t know how much work went on behind the scenes. Meeting with clients and going to court was only the tip of the iceberg. Now that her father was out of commission, Delia and the iceberg were on a collision course.
“It’ll be a chance to network, pick up some new contacts. Get some clients on board who aren’t thousand-year-old vampires with one-hundred-year-old ideas of how much to pay their lawyers.”
She stared before asking, the words coming slowly, “You don’t like vampires?”
Henry shook his fair head. “Not a chance. Give me a good honest demon or old world god any day. At least with them you know why they do what they do. With the vamps, shit, you can’t tell if they love you or hate your guts.” He smiled knowingly. “It’s not like that for you though, is it? You’re like your father. You get off on the vamps. You like that restrained power. You don’t go in for the flash.”
They’d been called to the bar in the same year and worked together ever since—five years now. It made sense that he knew her as well as he did, yet Delia was uneasy. Henry always gave the impression of noticing—and certainly caring about—nothing other than himself. To hear him sum her up so assuredly shook her own confidence.
“There’s a history there, I suppose,” he went on. “There usually is. Some ex-boyfriend of yours who liked to chomp on your neck? I don’t know how the human half of those relationships take it. All I want to feed off of is pussy and all I want to have any female feed off of me is c—”
“I get it!” Delia got to her feet, realizing that the only way she would be able to get rid of him was to physically see him out of her office. “You’ll be late for your plane.”
Henry looked at her with searching eyes. “You promise you’ll take my meeting?”
“Yes, yes, I promise.”
He grinned, stretching his arms over his head in a gesture that exhibited no inclination to hurry. “Good. It’s a private jet anyway. They’ll wait for me.”
She could either scream at him or laugh. She laughed. That was Henry.
* * * *
The six o’clock clients were newly-made immortals. Delia had learned to tell the difference between them and the ancients Henry had complained of.
The recently turned were impatient, restless and arrogant. They lacked all the subtlety and restraint that made her admire their kind. It took, as far as she could tell, at least a hundred years to acquire that maturity.
But there was still something to be said for this pair. Their very presence in her office seemed to shrink it to a small box filled with sparks. Any moment now, she expected an explosion.
Mark Lyons and Caleb Jennings were both tall and attractive but the similarities ended there.
Mark was a werewolf, as dark as sin with black hair and eyes that gleamed wickedly, no matter what mundane words he was speaking.
Caleb was only slightly less unsettling, a vamp with piercing light blue eyes and hair that was golden at the top and silvered at the sides. Premature gray, Delia might have guessed if he were human, but the act of turning did strange things to vampires, physically changing them in ways that were just as likely to be invisible as visible.
She knew too much about vampires, Delia thought, not for the first time.
She also knew that they excited her.
Her body quivered in these two males’ presence, sensing danger but also all manner of delicious things. Wild nights under the stars and hot, hard sex on top of silk sheets.
“Do you want to come to our club?”
They signed the contract—it had been the work of no more than a few minutes since neither male seemed to have any questions—but they showed no signs of wanting to leave.
The danger Delia sensed wasn’t an actual physical threat. The law firm was buzzing with activity since so many of their clients did their business under the cover of night. It was a darker danger—a danger to her morals.
It was Caleb who’d spoken. His voice was like velvet brushed against the grain, rich and rough at the same time.
“I thought you were in the music business,” Delia stalled.
Caleb smiled. His teeth, like all vampires she met nowadays, were immaculate. “It’s a music club,” he said.
“Among other things,” Mark added. He didn’t smile. His eyes did the work for him. Right now they were mocking with challenge. He didn’t believe she would accept the invitation.
“Don’t let the other things scare you,” Caleb put in. “We cater to diverse tastes.”
It was those tastes that scared her. Henry was right. She hadn’t seen much of the world, not even of the darker underworld the firm catered to, except second hand from behind her desk.
She suspected the vampire fetish websites she visited would never prepare her for the live-action versions.
Her only experience, now well faded, had been with Daniel. And he’d disappeared from her life so suddenly it was as if he’d never existed.
“Have you ever been with an immortal?” Mark asked suddenly. His bold black eyes swept her up and down, although there was little he could see of the lower half of her, hidden as it was behind the desk.
As for the top half, she knew what he saw—an unsmiling woman dressed in drab business attire meant to cloak rather than emphasize her curves. Delia was ashamed of her voluptuousness, as she was of the wavy brown hair that never stayed in place and the overlarge brown eyes that always appeared anxious in the mirror.
“Mark!” Caleb’s eyes softened a little as he looked across the desk at Delia. “Don’t bother with him. We’d just like to show you a fun time tonight…as a thank you for listening to our complaints and making those assurances about next time.”
“Henry is a very good lawyer,” Delia said, just as much from truth as out of loyalty. She’d carefully avoided criticizing his work while she’d apologized for the several delays in the contract negotiation process. Henry had dropped the ball but it was obvious from the correspondence she’d reviewed that the lawyer on the other side had been dragging his feet as well.
“He didn’t like us,” Mark said. “Or is it all immortals he doesn’t like?”
She could see how the pair’s masculinity might have threatened Henry but she couldn’t exactly account for their treatment at his hands.
“He’s very good with all our clientele,” she insisted.
“Except he hasn’t been in the business as long as you.”
Delia smiled slightly. “Henry and I are the same age.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Mark clarified. “I was referring to the longer legacy. I understand that your family’s firm and their clientele have existed for a long time.”
“Seven generations in this country,” said Delia. “No one knows how long back in the old country, but we have editions of English law in the library that are nearly five hundred years old and the original owner was apparently a Darker.”
“History,” Caleb said. “You can’t buy that on the open market. That’s why we chose you. There are rival firms who do the same work but not with the same, shall we say, sympathy.”
“Thank you,” Delia said primly. “That means a great deal to me.”
“Are there any other Darkers left in the firm?” Mark asked.
“Just my father and me.” It took her a strong effort to speak evenly.
“But you’re in charge?” he pressed.
“I’m in charge,” she said, feeling like an impostor and sincerely hoping that she didn’t sound like one too.
“Then you should meet some of the people who come to our club,” said Caleb. “They all need lawyers from time to time and they all go to human ones.”
Delia was amused. “We’re all human here,” she reminded him. Then she remembered the little goddess Vashti in the tax department and the new summer student in litigation…wasn’t he a half-demon of some sort? “Well, most of us are.”
“You know what I mean,” Caleb said. “You’ve lived with us for a long time. You understand us.”
The recently turned. They were so easily impressed by their own newfound history.
“Come on,” Caleb coaxed, his eyes twinkling. “I promise you at least two new clients.”
Delia glanced at Mark, who’d left all the wheedling to his friend. He didn’t offer a word but his eyes promised more than new clients. They promised…excitement.
“Okay,” she found herself saying. “I’ll go.”
* * * *
“She’s not going to show,” Mark predicted, his hands stuffed deep within his pockets. In spite of his natural hairiness, he stamped his feet against the chilly autumn night. He felt she had to come and yet, at the same time, he was tense that she might not.
“She’ll come,” said Caleb, leaning against the brick wall next to the private entrance. Just a few meters away, a long line of eager clubgoers snaked its way down the street, passing other less in demand, venues. But everyone wanted to come here. This was where the immortals played and everyone who wasn’t an immortal wanted to be one.
Caleb tilted his head back against the wall. The light above him turned his hair into a silver helmet and his features into cast steel.
It was all right for him, Mark thought, since he didn’t feel the cold. None of the vamps did. But his own rich werewolf blood was more sensitive.
“Did you feel it in that office? That hunger? That power?”
Mark quit his stamping. He was surprised that his friend would ask. He and Caleb were those closest of creatures, turned on the same night. It was a bond that surpassed any he’d ever felt to his human brothers, when he’d been a mere mortal.
“I felt it all right.” He grimaced. “The question is, did she feel it?”
Caleb smiled. “She felt it.”
“If she did, she didn’t show it.”
“She was confused by its power. Many humans are.”
Mark ran his hand through his hair. “
I
don’t understand it. It’s madness. I still think it’s just vampire folklore. God knows there’s enough of that shit.”
“It’s real,” Caleb said, speaking patiently as if this was a lesson he’d given many times before. And he had. Ever since he sat at the feet of the one who made them and absorbed all there was to know of their kind.
Mark wasn’t a believer. Many weren’t. They were the ones doomed to spend eternity in ignorance, searching for what they didn’t even know existed.
Their one true mate.
It was the lack of belief in the old ways that made the immortals’ divorce rate so high. Something drove them to couple and try to live together, even to fall in love, but these efforts were all in vain unless they truly knew what they searched for—unless they followed the signs, unless they listened to the teachings.
Caleb had done both, following a solitary path Mark scoffed at. And Caleb had let him scoff—until he’d found out that ones such as they, a vampire and werewolf bitten on the same day, were bound to follow a single mate through eternity.
“If she exists, why didn’t we find her before?” Mark demanded. “You’ve been searching for decades.”
“Only two decades,” Caleb reminded him. “And technology has advanced in those years. No one can stay hidden for long anymore. Besides, twenty years ago, she was only twelve years old.”
Mark’s grin flashed out in the dark night. “Twenty years ago, you were chasing demonic pussy. Or was that your minor goddess phase?”
“At least I was trying something different,” Caleb shot back. “Unlike you, a series of one-night stands with brainless beauties doesn’t do it for me.”
Mark examined his fingernails. They were getting long and ragged again, a sight that disgusted him. Some werewolves preferred to keep their hair and nails long as a sign of their true natures, but he liked the old way. Hiding from the world. Changing in secret.
“What part turns you off? The beauty or the lack of brain? Because your women aren’t exactly easy on the eyes, are they?”
Caleb turned away. “I look deeper than the skin.”
“Sometimes,” Mark conceded. It wasn’t as if his friend was incapable of attracting the odd good-looker. It was just, for some reason, that he tried hard not to. “But you didn’t shy away this time, did you?”
The mocking questions seemed to find their target. When Caleb looked back at him, his pale eyes were glowing with tiny red pinpoints.
Caleb’s angry. No, it’s more than anger. This is to do with a mate. It’s rage—pure and simple.
It took a lot to get Caleb to that point but when he got there…
Mark threw up his hands, palms outwards. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t be teasing you.”
Caleb didn’t respond, just kept staring at him with those angry, hungry eyes, as if he meant to feed on him out of hatred rather than love. As if he could feed off him, which he couldn’t—not unless he wanted to make himself sick.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, more quietly this time. “I was out of line.”
“It’s your future too,” Caleb finally said.
What future?
Mark almost asked. As far as he was concerned, Caleb just hadn’t gotten it yet. An immortal’s life was an animal life. There was no meaning, just action. They existed only to fill their needs, to enjoy and to feed. There was no true mate. There were only fucks.