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Chapter Forty-Three

LUNA

When Carmine’s hand shook during the meeting with the Luganos, I thought he was just cold. The room wasn’t frigid exactly, but it was possible.

But he’s a fucking vampire, so… probably not. I hold his hand on the way downstairs anyway. Nunzio is already in the elevator with Sam, the lady lawyer, or so I think, because when she turns, I swear to God, she’s a man.

Then Carmine says, “Come with me,” and pulls me farther than the confines of the elevator should allow.

I yank away, of course. It’s instinct. I am his, and yet, in a split second, I am loose.

It doesn’t happen as fast as the trip to New York on my mother’s power.

I perceive the liminal. The cool outdoor air.

And then gravity. There’s nothing beneath me.

Neither ground nor floor. Orange-gray sky above.

Limbs flailing. He’s above me, getting smaller, then bigger.

I catch up to my situation. I’m falling, then I’m in his arms.

“What?” I gasp with the first breath I can take.

My bearings are lost somewhere between the cushions of consciousness, but I’m not upset or worried.

“Sorry,” he says, turning his face to the sky.

“Where are we?” I look around. The world stops spinning. I am floating above the city. The walls of this building are closer than anyone who’s not a window washer has ever seen.

“Here.” He sets me on a metal ledge at the top of a building, with bolts at the seams like a warship, but it’s a circle in the sky.

I cling to him, looking down to calculate the enormous distance between us and splatter. “I don’t like heights.”

He plucks away the handkerchief I’ve been clutching. The knife cuts bleed less, but enough to make his breaths shallow and quick.

“I am sorry.” He puts his face to my palm and sucks on the wounds, eyes closed.

I don’t know where I am or how we got here, but he is pleased.

More than pleased, he is enraptured. His tongue runs the length of the deepest slash, pushing into muscle and blood, sucking away what drips out.

The pain goes away as it always does, and his cheeks glow as they were meant to.

Every twitch of his lips arouses me further, until I’m gasping like a marathon runner.

I feel my soul being pulled away, into that core place inside him, where I can see and touch his essence.

With a hard breath, he pulls away. His lips are smudged with blood and his eyes are hot with hunger.

“You can have more,” I say. “Take it.”

“Look at me.” His palms engulf my cheeks and jaw. “I cannot.”

When I look up at him, the sky is in the background, and piercing it is a giant hypodermic needle. We are near the top of the Empire State Building.

“You can.”

“Luna,” he whispers. “I cannot let you inside me, and I can’t stop you.” His forehead touches mine. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“You left me. I couldn’t bear it.”

Without warning, he kisses me, and when his tongue touches mine, I can taste his emotions before he says a word.

First, on top of every other emotion, is fear. Of himself. Of his own mind. Of me.

Then lightning bolts of lust.

And under it all, something else. A flood pushing against the desire. Too translucent to read when my body is busy screaming for him, but as powerful and demanding as the grind of his hips. My legs wrap around his waist, and he pushes himself against me.

“I can give you more things. I can bring you places no mortal man will ever be able to. You’ll have an exceptional life.”

My fingers dig into his arms as I look into the distance below.

“Don’t look down. Look at me.”

I do it and feel safe.

“I’m going to shred these jeans.” He flicks his tongue against the tingling scar over my jugular, opening another pleasure center with his venom. When he drank from me, he created a place on my body that’s just for him. Then he disappeared.

I can’t push him away. My body won’t allow it, but my mind grabs control of my voice. “You left me.”

He stops kissing me and looks in my eyes. If a gaze could break a woman, this would be how it’s done. “I never left you.”

“You did. You knew I was going to wake up exhausted and confused. You left me in an empty house, with blood all over everything, and a stupid note that answered every question that didn’t matter. You put me in thrall. You knew it would hurt that you weren’t there, and you couldn’t just wait?”

His thumb courses over my cheek as if he’s never touched a woman’s skin before. “I could not.”

“Yes, you could have. That was really insensitive.” My heart and body allow my brain’s complaint. Apparently, objecting isn’t the same as disobedience.

“I won’t leave you again. Does that make you happy?”

“I mean, it addresses the problem. But… happy?”

“Where can I take you then? What can I do? What would make you happy?”

“Release me from thrall.”

“I can’t do that.” He kisses my throat. “Even if I wanted to.”

“Bite me then.” I gasp at a shot of pleasure from his tongue. “Please.”

“You have no idea…” He jams his hands into my waistband, pulling my pants down to just above my knees.

“Take my blood.”

“I need that blood, but you make me need to fuck you more.” He pins me against the metal wall at the center of the circular ledge and gets on one knee, ducking under my stretched jeans to breathe between my legs.

“But there’s no time to feed on you. Not the way you deserve to be fed from.

” He kisses my nub, then licks it, and the venom on his tongue does a hostile takeover of my senses.

“When I can, I’m going to suck you dry. Not all at once. ” He licks again. “It will take days.”

When he drives his tongue inside me, I explode from the inside out, screaming my orgasm over the entire city and into the sky.

Then he’s standing before me, bending my legs over his elbows. He unleashes his dick. I don’t need a preamble and I don’t get one before he enters me.

“Fuck.” I grind into him.

“Listen to me.”

“How? My mind is is?—”

“Your heart will hear.” He kisses the pulsing vein on my throat, then sucks on it with a groan. “Nazario, the lawyer, he’s not a friend or an enemy.”

“Not sexy, Carmine.” My complaint is stupid. He could talk about sewage lines and every thrust would still drag me closer to wonderful oblivion.

“Your perfect little cunt is sexy,” he continues. “He’s unpredictable, but you’re safe with him. Utterly safe. Stay there and I’ll come get you.”

When I come, I don’t see his golden spiral or enter another world. It’s just a solid human female orgasm that wipes my brain clean.

“Damn, Carmine,” I say as he pulls up my jeans. “No tricks. No magic. No spit.”

“Those are extras, not necessities.”

I button my pants and realize there’s no deluge of vampire fluid between my legs. “Did you…?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You’re going to see people before you see a bathroom.”

“And you didn’t want me to be a mess?”

“Correct.”

“That’s the most considerate thing anyone has ever done for me.”

He fixes my shirt. “That is very sad.”

Drawing his hand up to my throat, he closes his eyes, and we are in the liminal again. Everything is gray, muted, with the density of a cardboard cutout.

“I don’t like having you here,” Carmine says.

“It’s kind of peaceful.”

“Humans belong in the Manifest. Every second in this place shortens your life.”

We speed up Fifth Avenue, then make a hard turn at Central Park North. The curves stretch and the lines shorten. Time isn’t a line here, but a weird fan-fold that sometimes pulls out and sometimes collapses.

“Why couldn’t we go diagonal?” I ask.

“There’s a reservoir and a lake. Liminal water is like quicksand. We cannot move through it or fly over it.”

Invisible in the liminal, he slows and drops us on the north side of the park.

“You stopped shaking,” I say, holding up our clasped hands.

He lets go. “I wasn’t shaking.”

But I can see his emotions in this in-between place. I can see cagey denials and outright lies.

Once, I called him an emotional haiku. He is still different than humans, but either he’s become more complex or I see him better.

He is ashamed. He wants to dismiss it. He considers more lying.

I crane my neck to get my face in his so I don’t have to use words to say that he’s safe telling me, and that I’m not going to let him distract me enough to let the question go.

“Let it go, Luna.” Distress seeps through his shapes. A grief tinged with regret and a deep avoidance. He doesn’t want to lie, but he will, and not so much to deceive as to protect his pride.

“Carmine.” I squeeze his arm but he goes straight and sharp.

“You’re reading me.”

He doesn’t wait for confirmation. With a blink, the muffled gray of the liminal disappears and we’re in the real world.

The Manifest. The sounds of the city rise, crackle, whine, and buzz.

This world is saturated with color. Even at night, everything is sharp and solid.

A dense mist has settled into the air. It hasn’t grown into rain yet, but it will.

Water sheen lands on our skin, chilling me.

After the emptiness of the liminal, I have never felt so visible.

We are on the corner of 110th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard—Central Park North, in front of a row of six-story brick apartment buildings.

Carmine puts his arm around me. His emotions are cloaked now, just as he wants them. “You’ll be safe with Nazario as long as you’re in his house.”

“I want to stay with you.”

“I know.” He puts his forehead to mine. “You’re more protected here.” He’s about to kiss me. I ready myself for the taste of his inner life, but he speaks in a voice meant to be heard in the street. “Shouldn’t you be running from the dog catcher?”

He turns his head to stare down a pair of glowing eyes hiding in the shadows. The eyes disappear with a rustle in the park. It wasn’t a dog. It was a wolf.

“Why do you antagonize them?”

He looks back at me. “Because it’s fun.”

“When all this is over, we’re going to work on modern socialization skills.”

A limousine stops at the curb in front of us and idles there, the drizzle condensing on the windshield like diamonds.

“When all this is over, we’re going to work on you screaming my name, day and night.”

“Luna!” Serafina calls from the limo window. “I knew it was you!” She turns to the driver. “I told you.”

The driver, a slim man whose features are hidden by the shadows under his hat brim, gets out and opens the back door.

“Can’t you come with us?” I ask Carmine.

“I want to. My whole body, and the soul I thought I lost long ago, wants to be with you. But keeping you safe from everything means keeping you safe from me.” He kisses my forehead. “Go, before I change my mind and piss off the heavens.”

I get into the car because he told me to, and my body is under his control.

The door closes and he waves before folding into a plane, a line, and emerging as a raven so majestic and so black he is darkness itself.