Page 46 of Bottoms Up (Mythic Beast #4)

“Where’s Mikey?” Micca asked.

“You didn’t see him with the twins at the back of the stage?” Ghost asked. “Mira split off and went with him. Drake’ll send backup. He’ll be fine.”

My phone dinged, and Julian tipped me up so he could fish it out of his pocket. He’d held it for me while I was on stage.

My brother had sent a picture of me on stage from near the front.

He’d been in the fucking audience?

I could’ve gotten you onstage with me if you’d let me know you were here!

You kicked ass baby brother. Love the new song. I’m here with someone. Nothing special, just someone who’ll let me do naughty things to her body since I paid the way for her to check something off her bucket list.

That sounds terribly cold.

Just the truth. I enjoy her company but I’m under no delusions she loves me as she says she does. She loves the lifestyle I can provide. Not me.

You need to see a therapist about that. Are you afraid of dating someone who’s your equal? Because I know the pickings are slim but they aren’t non-existent. Stop fucking around with users already!

Never one to mince words, but it’s okay. Your damned song spoke to me. No more biding time with lovely women who want what I can give them and not me. Time to man up. Love you, Jules.

I love you too. Call me when you get home? I need to kick your ass over video, not just text.

Of course. Ciao.

I smiled at the screen, then looked up. “My brother was in the audience. Didn’t tell me until after.”

Julian had read over my shoulder, which was fine. When do couples reach that level of intimacy, where it’s okay to look over and see who the other is texting? When you share everything, so nothing is secret.

I had a text from Kirsten, too. It’d come in while I was performing, and she knew the bracelet was on my arm. I’d somehow managed to forget about it.

I’m sending someone to ride the plane back with you. She’ll stick with you until we figure a longer-term solution. She’s from Vegas, Ellania. Atlas knows her, and they work well together. Stick with them.

I texted her during your performance , Julian telepathed.

I looked down at my bicep and thought Go Home at it, and a second later, it vibrated a little, but didn’t leave.

I narrowed my eyes. Show me you’re an asset and not a problem, not a threat, and I’ll change my mind about you. For now, I don’t want you near me. If you’re so smart, figure out how to change that.

There are a lot of people in and out of a small airport when you have this many bands performing over a three-day period. Well, the bands with enough income to fly private instead of commercial, anyway.

Heather was waiting for us on the runway, in a high-speed jet so we could get home before sunrise in Chattanooga, but another band was in the small terminal, and we stopped to talk to them.

As we walked through the terminal to greet another band, I felt the torc leave. I’m not saying it fell off my arm, I’m saying it fled.

There was no visible shimmer, no motion, no sound. But I felt it slither off my bicep like smoke through skin. A faint cold tingle, a flash of static.

My breath caught. Pulse raced. My face went hot.

I turned in a slow circle, eyes scanning every wrist, arm, ankle in view — nothing. It was just… gone .

Maybe it went home.

I waited until we were on the plane to text Kirsten.

It left me, in the airport. I have no idea if it went home or transferred to someone else. About to take off. Won’t be able to talk until we land.

We were wheels-up less than five minutes after boarding. The jet roared down the runway, lifted smoothly, and angled into the night. We had a copilot for this flight, so Heather stepped back to talk to us once we were leveled off.

“Thanks to this fancy schmancy barely-below-Mach-1 plane ya’ll rented for me to fly, we should land in Chattanooga an hour and twenty minutes before sunrise.”

We got off the stage at the festival a little later than expected, but we’d figured that was likely, so we were still good.

Thankfully, there’d been a regional airport with a runway long enough for this jet only ten minutes away.

It’s the three-hour time difference between Tennessee and California that caused problems, but we were good.

If something went wrong, we had a vampire bag and a battalion of werewolves who could lift Julian’s gigantic ass like furniture.

Hailey doesn’t die at sunrise, she just gets burned if she’s in the sun, so she could cover up and handle short distances, if it came to it. But it wouldn’t.

Davy asked Heather a couple of questions about the plane, and she invited him to come to the cockpit.

Once they were gone, a tall, statuesque woman walked to us from the security area and motioned me to follow her back up front.

The cabin was broken up into conversation areas, so the four band members and our significant others were all in kind of a square, facing each other.

A flight attendant was bringing food out when we walked away, but I followed her anyway.

You know what I like , I telepathed Julian. Get me something good.

Of course, mon trésor.

The tall woman motioned for me to sit in an empty chair near Atlas, so I sat.

“This is Ellania,” Atlas told me. “She’s been in contact with Mordecai, and at this time, they aren’t certain where the bracelet went. It didn’t go home.”

“So, is there anything for me to do? Am I free of it?”

No one said anything, and I told Atlas of the little possible-conversation I had with it. “I have no idea if it understood me or not.”

“It knew it wasn’t safe with you,” Ellania said. “You were around people smart enough to try to kill it. They didn’t succeed, but it was apparently scared into pretending to be dead until it thought it might have a chance of being seen again.”

“But no one will recognize it, right?” I asked. “Even if it went to someone famous and they wear it on stage, it’s just a bracelet, though it sized itself for my bicep, maybe to draw more attention to itself? The coin was unique and easily recognizable. It looks nothing like that, now.”

She shrugged. “We don’t know. It’s also possible the other magical items put in with it gave it powers it didn’t have before.

Or, it might be weaker. The answer to your question before is that in all probability, your part in its tale is over.

There’s a chance it will come back to you, but it’s rarely done that over the known history. ”

“Rarely?”

“Twice, that we know of, it’s returned to a former owner. In both cases, centuries had passed and it returned to a powerful vampire. It’s never gone to a human that we’re aware of, until you, much less returned to one.”

I returned to my seat as the wait staff were bringing plates out. We had a full meal on the plane — salad, steak, baked potatoes, and everyone’s favorite beer. Julian had saved me some onion rings and cheese sticks from the appetizers, too.

I love my bandmates. My vampire. We’re a family in ways it’s impossible to explain, forged in music, art, fire, and blood.

We ate, laughed, swapped stories about worst gigs, worst dates, worst outfits while we rocketed across the continent. Hailey and I got into a debate about stage monitors versus in-ear systems. Davy curled up against Will after the main course and dozed like a cat.

I leaned back, watching the stars through the tiny window and thinking about my brother, at the show without telling me. Watching from the crowd. Sending me a selfie and a callback to the lyrics. Time to man up.

Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d grown up lately.

And maybe it’s not such a bad thing to want permanence. A house. A bed no one else had shared. A vampire mate. A family.

The landing was smooth, and the two pilots stayed on the plane to fly it back to wherever it’d been rented from. My understanding was that Marco had paid the difference between this plane and the one Heather would normally rent to fly us to California and back.

And that was one of the things that made me want Marco to turn me, the way he takes such good care of his people — but I also trusted Benji, so I needed to meet this Zander guy.

But Marco could’ve told Heather to find a workaround. Could’ve told Julian he should just stay home. But he wanted him to go with me, wanted all of us safe.

It’s one of the reasons I trust him.

I’m 90% sure I want to be a vampire. The 10% unsure? Just all the unknowns. The worry. But that’s life. You take a chance and step into the void for the really big things, sometimes.

I’m worried about controlling the hunger, but I’m not as afraid of it as I was. I’m not afraid of the blood at all.

I will be sad to never see another sunrise, though.

Julian pulled me downstairs to our suite the second we arrived at Homewood.

“Jeans down and bend over,” he said, voice a rasp against my skin, pressing me over the back of a sofa.

I did.

Bent over, doubled, my jeans halfway down my thighs, my mouth open on a gasp while he fucked me fast and rough and merciless. A silent, brutal claiming before he vanished into his hidey-hole.

No orgasm. Just ache and heat and sweat. Just ownership.

I slept in his room, in his bed, in the dark.

Still wet from his come. Still denied release.

And happy.