Unraveled Page 4

  The line clicked and a male voice coughed.

  “Doctor Wolfe, how can I help you?”

  “Good afternoon, Doctor Schmidt. I don’t know if you remember me. We met at a symposium for the Psychological Stigma of Supernatural Ideations last fall.”

  I had trouble resurrecting the memory, in no small part due to the stubble of Crixus’s chin finding the tender flesh of my inner thigh. “I’m afraid I met a lot of people during that conference.” That part, at least, I could remember.

  “We talked about the success of exposure therapy in reducing instances of hematophobia for those with delusions of sanguineous dependency?”

  Sanguineous dependency. A polite word for vampires among the academic set.

  “Right, yes. Of course. How can I…be of service?”

  “Well, actually, I was hoping I might be able to help you.”

  The same sense of falling returned in a sudden rush. Crixus took my gasp for a sign of ardor and growled something hot and bit my inner thigh.

  “What was that?” Wolfe asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just practicing my Latin.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m calling because there’s a young man I’d like to refer to you.”

  “How thoughtful. You can leave his information with my receptionist and I’ll—”

  “No.” The sudden urgency in Wolfe’s tone startled me. “You must see him today. As soon as possible, in fact.”

  “Doctor Wolfe, I do appreciate the referral, but I have a full case load today.”

  “But you’re free now,” Wolfe said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be taking my call.”

  “It’s my lunch hour.” Breath was becoming a rarer commodity all the time.

  “And I’m starving.” Crixus sank down on his knees and proceeded to push mine apart. One quick yank saw the silky scrap of my panties discarded on the floor by his black motorcycle boots.

  “Doctor Schmidt, I would normally never ask this of you on such short notice, but the young man in question is at great risk. He claims to have information about the Dude Bro Strangler.”

  “Oh, God!” A certain demigod’s tongue had located a particular spot that folded my body up like a lawn chair. “That’s terrible,” I added in a hurry. “Wait. Did you say the Dude Bro Strangler?”

  “I did. I assume you’re familiar.”

  “I’m not, actually.” Episodes or no, I felt certain I had never heard these three words run together in any context.

  “I’m not sure how that’s possible. The most recent slaying occurred in your own backyard.”

  “Most recent?” All these words. Forming sentences. Meaning things. Requiring me to make sense of them when I all I wanted was a moment’s peace to focus on the small revolution occurring between my thighs. “How long has this been happening?”

  “For the past eight months. Bodies found all over the country. The only thing the victims share seems to be a predilection for weight training, popped collars and tanning beds.”

  “And this person you want to refer to me, he claims to know something about the murders?” I spoke every word with over-practiced precision, sure that ardor underscored every syllable.

  “Precisely.”

  “Shouldn’t he go to the police?” I suggested, modestly palming my husband’s cock through his jeans. For once, my memory and I were both pleasantly surprised. As was Crixus, if his muffled groan was any indication.

  “He’s expressed reticence to do so. Mostly due to his own…proclivities.”

  “You want me to convince him he’s not a vampire so he’ll go to the police. Is that it?”

  “A colleague of mine mentioned that you’d had some success with this sort of thing in the past.”

  “On occasion.” In all actuality, I’d received referrals from therapists all over the country who believed their clients were having some sort of psychotic break. Individuals claiming to be everything from vampires to werewolves to harpies and púcas.

  A word to the wise about the púcas—if you’ve never tried treating a shape-shifting Celtic poltergeist-goat for bipolar disorder, I’d recommend you engage a priest.

  And a shovel.

  Crixus had removed my hand from his crotch and brought it to his mouth, maintaining eye contact all the while. Slowly, he let my index finger sink into the velvet heat of his mouth, curling his tongue around the tip before withdrawing it and moving on to the next one.

  “So you’ll see him?” Wolfe asked.

  My hips went heavy, my legs slack, my arms melting from the fire blooming down deep in my belly. When I was certain I couldn’t handle another second of the decadent pleasure, Crixus scooted me forward until my hips were at the extreme edge of the desk.

  With a practiced ease I tried not to think about too much, he unbuckled his jeans and freed himself. One hand on his cock, the other beneath my buttocks, he angled me just so.

  Then filled me.

  When I expected him to draw back, to plunge again, he stilled. The finest of creases scored a line between his brows.

  Something about this felt at once illicit and familiar. Illicit not because were in my office, nor because our every sound could be heard by the open line on my desk, nor because Julie sat just outside the door. A feeling new and raw and forbidden traveled from my pelvic floor all the way to my chest and bloomed there, filling the dark places of my closed, imperfect human vessel.

  It felt like fucking a stranger.

  Like finding each other at the end of a long journey only to realize that time had made us foreign to one another.

  And this, Crixus hadn’t read in my thoughts, for I could see the same startled awe writ large on his unnaturally symmetrical face.

  The instant intimacy of our kiss…where had it gone?

  In his eyes was a wordless plea: Continue?

  “Yes.” I threw the word out like a life raft to us both.

  Unfortunately, Wolfe also scrambled aboard.

  “So you’ll see him?”

  “Yes!” I hadn’t meant to place so much emphasis on my answer, but Crixus had driven it out of me along with what remained of my breath.

  “Splendid. He’s been waiting outside your building. I’ll tell him to head your way.”

  “Wait!” In my urgency to hang on for dear life in the midst of Crixus’s onslaught, I knocked my pencil jar and stapler off the desk. The industrial carpet muffled some but not all of the resulting racket.

  “Is everything all right?” Wolfe asked.

  “Yes. No. I mean, I’m just finishing doing some paperwork.” Okay, more like I was getting done on top of some paperwork, but I figured it was close enough. “Can you give me five minutes?”

  Crixus raised an eyebrow and lifted my hips, driving himself home at an angle that made my eyes go crossed.

  “Better make that ten,” I said.

  “Ten minutes, then. And, Dr. Schmidt?”

  “For the love of God, what?” My fingers curled over the edge of the desk, my knuckles pale with the effort of anchoring myself to the slick surface.

  “Be careful.”

  It’s hard to perceive anything as ominous when you’re mere seconds away from a supersonic orgasm, and supersonic orgasms were the only kind Crixus dealt in. It was never a question of how hard? It was a question of how many?

  The first one turned me inside out.

  The second bowed my back and jerked my limbs like someone had plugged my foot into an electrical socket.

  The third reached up and slapped me so hard I saw little pinwheels of light dancing across my vision.

  The fourth, we shared.

  Crixus’s grip on the hair at the nape of my neck prevented me from moving with it as I had the others, which somehow intensified it all the more. I could do naught but look into his eyes while the madness took me
and watch him do the same.

  I fell into the darkness of his dilated pupils. Somewhere down there in the deep lived a fear and wonder mirroring my own.

  The screams we could not release doubled back to feed waves of pleasure roaring low and wild from the place where we joined. He jerked me upward at the last second to exhale filthy words in my ear as he stiffened while we seized and convulsed together. He inside me, and me around him.

  We stayed like that for the space of several minutes. My legs wrapped around his waist. His hands resting on the desk beside my hips. Our foreheads pressed close. Our commingled breath humid on our cheeks.

  After we disengaged, I cleaned myself up as best I could while Crixus, lazy smile affixed to his face, set to putting my desk to rights.

  “We should do that more often.” Crixus took my chin in his thumb and forefinger and pressed a kiss to my lips.

  “What would become of my professional reputation?” I gave him a teasing smile and pretended to bite the tip of his thumb.

  “What’s losing a client now and then if it means we get to do what we just did? We both know you don’t need to work.”

  “A lot, actually.” A bit of the post-coital cloud burned off as a little flame of irritation flickered to life. “My work is important to me.”

  His blue eyes cooled a little, their color changing from hot spring to frozen pond.

  A brusque knock at the door preceded Julie’s curly blond head poking through a narrow opening. A sudden flush made apples of her round cheeks.

  “Dr. Schmidt, there’s someone to see you. He’s not on the schedule, but—”

  “He was a referral from Dr. Wolfe who called earlier. Please go ahead and send him in.”

  Julie looked from Crixus, to me, back to Crixus. I couldn’t blame her. Asshole or no, the man certainly warranted a second look.

  “I guess that’s my cue to make myself scarce.” He ran a hand through his disheveled mane and sauntered toward the door. “See you tonight.”

  Julie stepped wide, creating enough space for him and his ego to quit the room.

  When the doorway emptied, another figure stepped in to fill it.

  And when I say fill it, I mean fill it.

  If this kid really was a vampire, then there was no way he didn’t hear my throat making the telltale gulp sound as I swallowed. Not the best way to start off a session.

  At about this point, I realized that I had neglected to collect a name from Dr. Wolfe and Julie hadn’t offered one before high-tailing it back to her desk. Usually she would make some sort of introduction, but she seemed determined to put a desk between her and the creature glowering at my office’s threshold.

  Which wasn’t like Julie, for whom a hot pink drool cup to match her never-ending army of hot pink sweaters would not have been imprudent on days when vampires decorated the docket.

  “Please, come in.” I gestured to the long leather couch opposite of my chair.

  He seated himself of the cushion’s edge where no part of his body would come into contact with the ranks of decorative throw pillows.

  Before closing my office door, I leaned through it and caught Julie’s eye.

  “Julie, will you please let Doctor Dimlow know I’ll return his call as soon as possible?”

  This was our pre-established code for ‘stand by in case this bloodsucker decides to tap my jugular like a maple tree.’

  Brown eyes anime-wide, she nodded and patted the top drawer of the file cabinet behind her, where she kept patient receipts, extra paper clips, and holy water.

  “All right,” I told myself as much as her. “Let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His name was Vasili, and they called him The Vampire.

  They being his fans and colleagues in the professional mixed martial arts arena.

  He didn’t sit like a fighter, exactly. He sat like an A-plus, front-row kind of student. Back straight, knees forward. Ernest.

  A manner completely at odds with his looks.

  With a hairline low over dark brows and a physique that suggested he might be part bear, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the man on my couch licking blood he’d freshly spilled from the canvas. Which is how he tells me he became a vampire in the first place—by exposure to contaminated blood. A scrappy kid and would-be mixed martial artist, he had been cleaning the dank, dirty boxing gym on the outskirts of Vladivostok, Russia in exchange for ring time. After scribbling down a phonetic pronunciation of his city of origin, I circled the first four letters, deciding this bore further research.

  “Just a moment, Vasili. Are you saying that you don’t have to be bitten to become a vampire?” This was news to me, as every vampire I had previously treated told a similar story of being chosen, hunted, and ultimately seduced into the ranks of the undead by a Creator or Mentor or some iteration thereof.

  “Yes. This is what I say.” Vasili spoke a thoroughly charming brand of English I’d decided to call Tolstoyese. His eyes were the exact color of uncut garnets. “One day I am cleaning, but I am not careful. My knuckles are broken from face of opponent and I think this is how it starts. Next day, I am starving. Have hunger like bear. I try shashlik but I vomit. Later, I pass musorshchik on the street and I bite. He is delicious.”

  “You bit what?”

  “Musorshchik,” he repeated. “I think is, eh…garbage man?”

  “Right,” I said. “Please go on.”

  “I tell myself, is not good to bite musorshchik. He is kind to Vasili. So later, I am cleaning the ring, and I see blood. I lick. I feel strong.”

  Here, he stops to flex grapefruit-sized biceps that I can easily imagine crushing necks. I should consider this more threatening. All of it.

  “I ask coach for chance to fight and he laughs. So I break iron bar and make to shove up coach’s zhopa. He let me fight.”

  “No one wants an iron bar up the zhopa,” I said, guessing the meaning from context.

  “Yes,” he nodded emphatically. “This is right. It is only five minutes later, and I have best fighter in gym pinned to mat. I twist his arm like pretzel. And so I say to him, ‘just give up. I do not want to smash your face.’ And he give up. Next day, I get contract to fight in America. And here is Vasili.”

  I took the invitation to look at him. Really look. He lacked the pallid, waxy skin tone of others of his kind I had seen. Aside from the unnaturally colored eyes and pointed canines, I might find it difficult to believe he was a vampire at all.

  “Tell me something, Vasili. How is it you’re able to come see me during the daylight hours?”

  “Ahh.” His smile was narrow but deeply carved into a stony jaw. “Vasili wonders this himself at first. But he makes the Google and finds vampire site that say, older is vampire, more sun hurts him. I think this is correct.”

  I made a note of the theory, which sounded as plausible as any of the other rules I’d discovered regarding the vampire game. I’m referring to such classics as: only blood has a flavor and the flavor of Vegan blood is roughly equivalent to ass.

  “How long ago did your—” I paused, searching for the right word “—transformation take place?”

  He considered for a moment. “I think is two months?”

  Well, that explained the oddly naive and enthusiastic energy he seemed to radiate by the metric ton.

  Vasili was the vampire equivalent of a zygote.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a few practical questions?”

  “What means this? Practical?”

  I really wished he’d stop making that face. The one that made me want to snuggle his close-cropped head to my understanding bosom and explain to him the mysteries of life and syntax.

  “Just questions about your day-to-day life.”

  Vasili hunched over to rest his forearms on his knees. His trapezius muscles responded by bunching i
nto a small mountain range at the base of his abbreviated neck. “Pretty doctor may ask Vasili anything.”

  One of the difficult things about treating clients who prefer, shall we say, alternative food sources, is that when one stares at the curve of your calf, you never quite know which kind of hunger is driving it. I could only hope Vasili’s frank appreciation of my leg as opposed to my neck was a good sign.

  “Most official fighting organizations have regulations. Blood tests. Physicals. That kind of thing. How do you get around that?”

  “Vasili, he is think about this too. So, is night before blood test and I am doing squats at gym to make quads like mighty oak. I overhear bor talking about passing blood test—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting him once again. “What’s a bor?”

  A heavy fold appeared in Vasili’s brow. “What is word for man with big muscles and tiny penis?”

  “Oh! A bro,” I corrected.

  “Yes! I overhear bro talking about passing blood test, and Vasili thinks, if I eat man’s blood, I pass test too.” He gave me a huge cat-ate-the-canary, or in this case, vampire-ate-the-dude-bro grin. I was loath to admit that the pearly white tip of one fang protruding over his dark red lip struck me as adorable. Apparently, he still wasn’t used to his dental artillery quite yet. “I trade him tanning pass for pint of blood. I eat. I pass. I sign contract.”

  “What about the physical examination? Wouldn’t they notice your teeth?”

  “I show you.” He reached into the pocket of his tracksuit and came out with what looked like a plastic retainer case. Head bowed, he slid something into his mouth and came up smiling.

  “Oh,” I said. “Wow.”

  The blindingly white game show host smile was alarming, but not unusual in today’s aesthetic of ubiquitous veneers.

  “Ith thrap-on,” he said, pecking on the oversized porcelain grill with a close-cropped fingernail.

  It took me a moment to absorb what he’d said through the powerful lisp. Strap-on. “You mean snap-on.”

  “Ith thame thing, yeth?”

  “No. Very much no. And you can take it off now.” The chances of my retaining my professional composure were rapidly declining by the second.