Juggling both relationships with Shane became easy strangely fast. Every time he slipped up behind Shane on the way to his car in the evening or as Shane lingered with a drink on the dark porch in front of his apartment, Andres could be his favorite parts of his vampiric presence: sensual and in control and just a little bit demanding, and with the Shane he spoke to over text, he could bare the deepest parts of his soul, switching seamlessly between the two; soft smiles for one and dark smirks for the other.
But Shane would never truly belong to either version of Andres in the way he wanted, not while his mask was necessary.
He was accepting of Andres’s bite. He never fought, never asked Andres to stop, merely trembled, his lashes fluttering and his breath quickening. As much as Andres enjoyed that vulnerability—that fear—he worried more with each passing meeting that he’d played their first encounter too mysterious. He had thought, vaguely, that Shane would either grow comfortable with him, or else push back if he didn’t. Instead he kept quivering and wilting and finally submitting.
Andres couldn’t stop his doubts from creeping in, slow and sure.
He had the lingering taste of his little swan’s blood in his mouth as he paced his living room and racked his brain for any way he might bring up vampires with Shane through text, in the hopes that Shane might reveal his true feelings to the wreck he’d met at the Fishnettery like he had with so many other things. Each typed and retyped question about monsters and bites seemed more obvious than the last, though. He pressed the phone to his forehead with a growl.
Its sudden call vibration nearly launched Andres out of his skin. Goddamn Frederick Maul. At least this was better than being ordered to a physical meeting.
Running his fingers through his hair, he begrudgingly answered the phone.
Three minutes of Maul’s incessant plotting later, and Andres wished he’d pretended he was busy. “I can’t do it, it’s too risky.”
“If you’re not capable—”
“Let me rephrase that.” Andres cupped his arm over the side of his head, slumping against the wall like it might give him the strength to weather this conversation. “If we go after that blood while the robbery from two weeks ago is so fresh in their minds, we will set ourselves up for failure. There’s difficult and then there’s ignorant. I warned you this would happen.”
“I want to ramp up our Coachella presence next week, then.”
Andres had driven the hour and half back and forth from the event all that weekend, helping smooth over his deceptive connections and ensure Maul’s faux blood-donation vans and underhanded backroom setups could collect and transport their bags without getting caught. “We’re pushing our luck there as it is.”
“You can’t keep telling me no, Andres.”
“I don’t know what else to tell you when you ask for impossible things.”
“Excuses—”
Andres tipped the phone away from his ear in preparation for the incoming tirade, but Maul’s grumbling was cut off by one of his subordinates nervously explaining that one of the storage fridges had risen above acceptable levels.
“Can no one do their goddamned jobs?” Maul hissed under his breath. “If you have to be spending all this free time not stealing me blood, your investigation into Vitalis-Barron had better be making progress finally.”
“I have a lead now. Be patient.”
The shop where Tara had met Shane had given Andres nothing, and neither had relentlessly walking the surrounding area, poking his head around until he had memorized every neighborhood micro-cemetery and gentrified coffee shop—of which there were nearly equal numbers now; enough coffee to support the tourists who came to see the American city with the most cemeteries. With flowers blooming along the sides of the walkways and the air warm enough to make boating pleasant, they were slowly funneling back in.
It was a habitual tourist from San Diego who had finally helped him, claiming to have a friend who commuted to San Salud to attend Tara’s work on the regular. Andres kept reminding himself that there were still plenty of ways for this lead to fall through. If it did, then at least they were only a few weeks from the Vitalis-Barron Met-inspired gala. That had to pan out, because he would be squeezing something useful from it even if it meant tearing through the offices of every executive on their staff.
“Just a lead.” Maul huffed. “Sometimes I wonder why I let you live.”
Not out of the goodness of his heart, Andres was certain of that. “We’ll have enough blood to get through, don’t worry.”
“You’ll certainly have enough.” It sounded half an accusation. “How is that living blood bag of yours faring? Not causing too much trouble, is he?”
Andres didn’t think Shane could be any less trouble if he’d tried. For some god-awful reason, Andres’s mind went straight from that to the image of his little swan on silken sheets, the picture he’d painted for Maul two weeks before coming to life behind his eyelids. He blinked it away. “He understands his place in this… arrangement.”
“Maybe that’s the future,” Maul began to say, and the icy chill of those words was still sliding down Andres’s spine when his boss switched targets again at the shouting of a subordinate on the other end of the phone. “Bring her here!”
The sharp edge of his voice made Andres flinch irrationally, his heart rate kicking up. He ran one hand through his hair.
Over the line, someone apologized, her words becoming clearer as she neared the mic on the other end. “I swear, it won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t,” Maul agreed, his tone so terrible that Andres moved to end the call. His fingers slid over the screen, not quite hitting the red button before his boss continued, “Hold her down.”
When the line went dead, Andres wasn’t sure which of them had disconnected.
He leaned against the arm of the couch, forcing himself to draw in long, slow breaths, and waited for the numb chill to subside.
He hadn’t thought Maul was still doing that shit. But then, he’d been having as many of his interactions with Maul over the phone as he could since he’d been trusted with the position as his boss’s practical right hand, manager of everything blood collection-related while Maul handled the distribution end. The thought of what that poor vampire was likely suffering at this moment made him sick.
He tried to put it out of his mind—what other option did he have? If he left, there would be no one else with the confidence to say no to Maul when it mattered most. And he had no doubts that Maul would simply make another of him: a weaker, more malleable version. Regardless of how great his life was now, he could not put another person through that. Maul’s next victim would not have Andres’s luck of coming out unscathed.
Andres would just have to quiet Maul’s temper with fresh dirt on Vitalis-Barron; give him something else to fight that wasn’t his own employees. When his phone chimed with a text from his lead ten minutes later, he tried to relax. Then he read the message. He stared at it for so long that his contacts felt dry when he finally forced himself to blink. The vision of Shane returned the moment he closed his eyes.
He could almost convince himself not to act on the information. It was too perfect—too much like it had crawled into his mind and curled up in the darkest, filthiest parts of himself. But it was so perfect, down to the smallest details.
And it would be for his investigation, after all. Not just to see a piece of his deepest desires played out in front of him. It didn’t make him a monster—not if his little swan agreed to everything.
Still, when he wrote a note to slip under Shane’s door, he could not seem to find an explanation that didn’t tug every inch of his gastrointestinal tract into knots. So he kept it vague. Vague and demanding.
Be outside tonight an hour after dusk.
We’re going shopping.
~ Your vampire
(PS: I found Tara.)