“Is there anything else you need before we leave?”
She gave in to the shiver working its way through her body, focusing instead on how similar the feeling of complete resignation was to the moment she decided to leave home. How empty it felt then, how hard it was to feel now.
When she was little, her mother always told her everything happened for a reason. That life was a series of fragile moments strung together with diamond thread, and how she believed those threads led to a defining moment that forever changed a person’s life.
Everything seemed to go still as memories Logan wished could be removed flashed in her mind. Images blurred and twisted. Hazy pictures of happiness melted into crudely drawn nightmares, brought to life through a soundtrack of angry screams.
She shook her head, wanting nothing more than to drown it all out. She couldn’t help but wonder how many threads connected to this moment. How many glittering strands were woven around her now, while she stood in more than just the darkness of the alley?
“Logan? Do you need anything?”
Pushing her memories as far back into her mind as possible, she forced herself to smile. “How about a juicy steak and a bottle of vodka?”
A cool puff of air caressed her ear at the same moment his arm tightened around her, pulling her body tight against his. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep your eyes closed. Mystical travel tends to be easier on the human psyche if the subject doesn’t watch.”
Better for the human psyche it might have been, but his comment only made her very human curiosity peak. She squeezed her eyes hard, fighting the urge to open them as wide as possible. But when wind screamed down the alley, kicking up trash, dust, and if she wasn’t mistaken, a squeaking rat or two – she was more than convinced of the reason to keep them closed.
It was when the wind reached fevered pitch that she felt the pavement drop out from under her feet and a wave of nausea crash over her. Her stomach churned and tightened. The muscles of her abdomen cramped and twitched. Bile seared the back of her throat.
For fifteen seconds, she felt like she’d been sucked into icy oblivion.
But as quickly as the sense of dislocation came, it ended.
She wiggled her toes, relieved to feel solid ground against the soles of her shoes again. She had no idea where she was, though she knew they weren’t outside because she wasn’t getting wet. She had no clue what the hell had just happened, she only knew she never wanted to do it again.
“Who the hell is that?”
She slowly opened one eye when a deep, gravelly voice filled the room. A rather dark room she quickly realized, save a subtle blue light flickering against the white walls.
“Her name is Logan.” She heard Kerestyan’s voice a second before his arm left her waist and a lamp clicked on a few feet away. “She’s a guest.”
“Whose guest?”
Logan really couldn’t do anything but blink when the owner of the voice stood up from a comfortable looking couch across the room and stared right at her. She’d seen a lot of strange things on the streets of New York City, but this…this took the cake.
Armor. The guy was wearing armor as clothing. Thick, black leather covered his body, and attached at the forearms, chest, thighs and shins were molded metal plates. The chest piece had the head of a dragon carved into it, but aside from that one simple embellishment, every inch of it was blacker than coal.
Kerestyan waved a hand in Medieval Man’s general direction. “Sit down, Odin. She’s my guest.”
Odin, if that indeed was his real name, looked almost identical to Kerestyan in every way, except for their clothes, the faint scar marring his bottom lip, and the fact that his eyes were black. And not just his irises; his eyes were completely blacked out.
He raked her with a hard glare from those creepy depths then scowled. “It’s wet and dirty. Where did you get it?”
Did she really just hear that? She stiffened and narrowed her eyes to match his. “I’m not an it.”
He turned towards Kerestyan, mouth agape. “You brought one home that can still talk?”
Kerestyan made a good show of exhaling a deep breath as he shrugged his coat from his shoulders. “Yes, she is wet and dirty. Yes, she can speak. And yes, she is human.” He stuffed his gloves into the pocket of his coat then draped it over the back of a dark grey chair. “Her name is Logan, not it, and you will address her by her name and nothing else while she’s in my home.”
Odin’s black eyes popped wide open. “You’re keeping it?”
Kerestyan disappeared through a doorway, but his voice seemed to stay in the room. “Do me a favor. Knock off the offended vampire routine. She’s more than aware of what you are, and probably cares less about your undead state than you do about her dependence on oxygen.”
Logan smiled as she looked around the room, but even more when Odin wrinkled his nose as her eyes moved past him. Now that she knew, she wasn’t surprised this was Kerestyan’s home.
It suited him.
The colors were dark but rich. The furniture wasn’t fancy, more comfortable in appearance and constructed from durable materials like leather. A few black and white photographs of the New York skyline from different time periods adorned the walls. Plants sat atop various dark wood end tables. Matching bookcases took up the wall farthest from her, and a line of heavy black curtains covered the entire wall to her right.
And of course there was the large television situated in the corner near the bookshelves, just a few feet away from the Renaissance Reject who was still giving her the evil eye.
She took a few hesitant steps towards him. “Do I offend you or something?”
It looked as though he intended to respond, but his mouth snapped shut when Kerestyan came back into the room with a cobalt blue plate in hand.
He held it out towards her. In the center was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, surrounded by apple slices. “It’s not steak, but it’ll have to do for now.”
“No! Don’t feed it. It’ll never leave!”
Logan would have responded to the Tin Can, she really would have, but there were two very different reasons why she didn’t. One, Kerestyan was already striding across the room. And two, she forgot just how sticky peanut butter, jelly and bread became when mixed with saliva.
By the time she managed to clear a path between her teeth and tongue, Kerestyan already had his finger jammed into Odin’s chest. “I told you what her name was. Brother or not, I’ll rend the flesh from your bones if you defy my wishes again. Remember where you’re standing.”
Brothers? Well that certainly explained the resemblance. Content to let Kerestyan handle his own obviously dysfunctional family member, Logan shoved a piece of apple into her mouth and savored the clean, sweet taste of it.
Besides, who was she to interrupt vampire dinner theatre?
Odin tipped his head down and stared at Kerestyan’s hand for a second before knocking it away. “Yeah, yeah. Your home, your law, and all that other old bullshit I’ve tried so hard to forget. What the hell is she doing here?”
“She isn’t here of her own accord.”
“Ooh, is she food?”
“No!” Kerestyan boomed. “She is not food.”
Logan covered her plate as Odin took a few steps in her direction, but relaxed when he stopped a good ten feet away. She arched a brow, feeling a sudden and rather strange kinship with the apples as he leaned forward and sniffed the air around her.
He scrunched up his face and covered his nose. “Oh, gross. She stinks like a Jersey sewer.” He lowered his hands and used one to waft air towards his face. “She’s also an addict. My nose says heroin, white not brown, injected. For at least three years, maybe four.”
Kerestyan shook his head. “She’s not a glass of wine.”
Logan straightened. “You can smell my blood?”
“When you open a package of meat, can you smell if it’s rotten?”
She didn’t award his response with an answer. Instead, she shrugged and took the biggest bite of peanut butter and jelly sandwich humanly possible. She’d been cut down most of her life, one more person demeaning her, vampire or other, wasn’t going to make a difference.
“Odin, leave her alone.”
“No. She seemed more than capable of defending herself when I called her an it, she can do the same now.”
Logan licked a glob of strawberry jelly from her lower lip and smiled up at Odin. Only one comment seemed to perfectly fit her current situation. “I see dead people.”
He leaned forward, hands on his hips. “Me, too. It’s the only explanation for what’s standing in front of me. Unless some high school kids broke into the anatomy closet and stole the classroom skeleton, stretched some cadaver skin over that bitch then cast an ancient ritual to animate it.”
She laughed. For as much as she now disliked the bastard, she had to admit he was amusing. “Did they do the same to that shit you’re wearing? You do realize it’s 2008, right?” She raised a hand. “Wait, let me see if I can reach you using your own language. You do ken ‘tis year of our Lord two thousand and eight, aye?”