Chapter Nine

Wren.

You don’t need to kill everyone, Wren. The words banged around in my head, drawing out shards of shame and guilt that I really didn’t need right now. My whole life had been dedicated to eradicating my mother’s killers by whatever means necessary. There was no room for anything so hindering as guilt.

It didn’t help that Zac was driving Birdie like some drunk Nascar driver along roads that needed serious attention. Being stuck back here in a trunk with a vampire who didn’t trust me while a human was fucking up my paint job was not my idea of a fabulous day.

It also didn’t help that we’d landed in the trunk so that my head was crammed against my guitar case and Ashe was spooned up against my back. Every bump made it feel like he was dry humping me. Or damp humping me since we were both in wet underwear and nothing more. We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to – and wanted to, we certainly did – but a ’59 Thunderbird isn’t known for its trunk space. It was tight as a coffin in there and kind of felt like one with the quilted lining I’d added to cover the bare metal and spare tire, among other things.

“Wren.” Ashe’s gentle whisper made me flinch. I wasn’t used to hiding with anyone but my mother, and that had been a long time ago.

“Who ratted us out?” I asked, the question sounding as bitter as the blood that lingered in the back of my throat.

“I don’t know. Maybe they followed us or Zac. Or…” He hesitated, groaning quietly as though he didn’t want to speak the truth.

“Or what?”

“It might have been Edna.”

“Edna? I thought she was on your side?”

“She is, I think, but she probably doesn’t have much choice in the matter.”

“What do you mean? Like she has to turn you in?”

“Uh, yeah, but it’s complicated. We should discuss it later.”

“Later? No, it’s already been later. It’s time for now.” As much as I could, stuck in a not-very-well-padded trunk while lying on a spare tire, I flipped around until I could face Ashe. By then, my eyes had adjusted from the bright flare of sunshine that had blinded me before we became undead luggage. I could see his face like a cool blue night vision camera. In his eyes, though I couldn’t see their copper color, I could clearly detect apprehension in his unblinking stare.

“Wren, I don’t think—”

“I don’t care what you think. Who was my mother?”

He finally blinked, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before opening them and not quite meeting my gaze. “She was the queen of the Southern clan of the Vampire Nation.”

My jaw trembled from an involuntary shiver. “Which means?”

“She ruled over all vampires from Texas to West Virginia, about fourteen or fifteen different states.”

“Ruled? As in an actual monarch?” I hated feeling so ignorant, like I’d been living in a hole in the ground, only now emerging to find that the real world was much more complicated than I had imagined. I didn’t currently own a TV, didn’t keep up with the news. All I did was sing on stage and track down my mother’s killers. My mother. A damn queen.

“Kind of. It’s a matriarchal system. Her mother was queen, and her grandmother before that. Which means…”

“What? That I should be queen?”

“Well, yeah, if anyone actually knew you existed. But your mother acted more like a president, unlike those before her, putting more power into the hands of governors and representatives from each state who could vote on various things. It had pretty much been a monarchy before. She was determined to lead us into a democracy.”

“So, is there no queen currently?”

“Uh, yeah there is, actually. Your mother’s sister, the next in line. After you, of course.”

“And her name?”

“Ravana.”

The name chilled my skin like icy fingers racing down my spine. I’d heard that name before, at the jail, but somewhere else too… A distant phone rang in the recesses of my memory. It was daytime. We were supposed to be asleep in the basement of a funeral home. I wanted to try sleeping in a coffin like Lestat. It looked so comfy in the movies. In reality, it wasn't as padded as it looked and smelled weird, like moth balls and varnish and the kind of synthetic plastic that makes you wrinkle your nose in the Walmart shoe section.

My mother hated coffins. Claustrophobia, probably, so she would sleep beside me on the floor. I remembered lifting the lid just a teensy bit, enough to peek through a tiny slit of daylight that filtered in through a humidity-fogged window overhead. She was standing by a phone mounted on the wall. Her white-knuckled fingers gripped the cord, wound it round and round her knuckles, one after the other. She spoke in a panicked whisper, upset with whoever was on the other line.

“He can’t be. Are you sure?” She leaned her back against the concrete block wall, covering her mouth to choke back a sob. “There’s no hope, then. Wren can’t fight her, not without them.” A pause, then she glanced toward my coffin but must not have noticed the tiny space I spied her through. “She’s too young. She’ll never make it.” Another pause, before her normally kind, soft eyes flared red with rage I’d never seen before. “Keep the rest of them alive. I don’t care what you have to do. I’ll make sure Wren is nowhere near them. Ravana can’t find them before they’re mated.”

I must have been saying that out loud, because Ashe’s hand was on my shoulder, shaking me.

“You remember her? Your aunt, I mean?”

I shook my head. “Never met her. I only remember my mother mentioning her name that one time. I had no idea who she was talking about. I remember asking her what was wrong, but as usual, she brushed me off and told me not to worry about it. But what did she mean by keeping me away from them? Who’s them? And before they’re mated? What the fuck does that mean?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but you know the symbols on our arms?”

I held up my wrist, where the pink circle with one blue star-point spoke still glowed with a comfortable, warm light.

“I think there’s more to that symbol, as in, I don’t think it’s complete.”

Then came the clueless slow blink as I tried to make sense of what he was saying. My brain had flatlined. “I don’t follow.”

He smiled and cupped my cheek, stroking my skin with his thumb. The same heat and ache built at my core as it had in the shower, but then he pulled back suddenly as if he remembered what had happened after our shower.

You don’t need to kill everyone, Wren.

“Like all queens before her, your mother had five bonded mates,” he said.

“What, like a male harem?”

“Yeah. I…think it’s supposed to be the same for you.”

“You’re supposed to be my mate.”

There was a long pause—too long—while his expression blanked. “Yes.”

He certainly seemed excited about it. Was I? The hell if I knew. This was too much to process.

Mates. Five of them. “Then that means…”

He nodded. “There are four more guys out there dying to get into your pants.”

****

My second shower of the day was much less exciting than the first. Either the budget hotel we'd wound up in had installed a low-flow shower head, or it needed some serious unclogging. Three streams spit water that couldn’t decide if they wanted to be hot or cold, alternately freezing and burning me. The vinyl shower curtain was spotted with mildew. Stale vomit odor blew up from the A/C vent every time the cool air kicked on.

Legs still aching from being crammed into a coffin-trunk, I turned off the water and wobbled out of the tub. The men were arguing on the other side of the door.

“Yeah, and what’s your plan, big man? Keep hopping from one ratty hotel to another until what?” Ashe demanded.

“Until we find answers!” Zac shouted back.

I toweled off, feeling more like a mother to two testosterone-fueled teenagers than a queen in hiding. A queen. Me? It still didn’t make sense. Nothing in my life had been tea-and-crumpets comfortable. Then there was the issue of five, count ‘em, five mates. I towel dried my hair and ran my fingers through the damp platinum strands. In the mirror, I looked nothing like a queen, just a pale, tattooed woman with yellow-orange eyes who looked a little too bony from having lived mostly on rats and dying humans, only some of whom I’d actually wanted to kill.

“Oh really, and what are the questions?” Ashe’s voice rumbled with a distinct growl that meant trouble if I didn’t intervene.

So I did. I opened the door and strode through the room over to the curtain-covered window. I peeked out. The sun hadn’t set yet, but a rainstorm had moved in, so the daylight was tolerable.

“Well?” I asked. “What are the questions?”

I looked over my shoulder with a half smile at the men who had now gone dead quiet, their eyes as big as Moon Pies, staring at my bare ass.

“Uh…” Zac shook himself out of his trance and turned away, digging through his bag that sat on one of the beds. “The main question is who killed Queen Bronwen, and why? There are plenty of other questions, but I think those will lead us to her killers. Wren’s taken care of some of them already.”

“How many more can there be?” Outside, a hunchbacked old man leaned on the railing that surrounded the walkway of the hotel’s second story. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth, cupped his hand over it, and tried to light it. Was that a signal of some sort? I couldn’t let myself be paranoid over every stranger that crossed our path. Chances are he knew nothing about vampires. But in any case, we couldn’t linger here for long.

Ashe groaned and blurred himself into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

I chuckled and turned in time to catch a wad of clothes Zac threw at me.

He shook his head, grinning. “You’re evil.”

“Vampire. Whatcha gonna do?” I tossed the clothes on the bed. A hot pink bra and panties—both sheer—were bundled in the middle of a racer back black tank top and black leggings. “Pink’s really not my color.”

“Only thing they had at Walmart.”

“Yeah, right. But…thanks for getting me clothes and rescuing us and all that.” The underwear Ashe and I still wore when we arrived at the hotel were now dry but crusted with dried blood. Zac must have gotten the leggings and tank when he was out fetching my car. I had a few changes of clothes hidden in my trunk which I'd forgotten to bring inside, but he wouldn't have known that unless he searched the car.

I still didn’t know how fully I could trust him, or Ashe for that matter. The past couple of days had completely scrambled my brain. I’d thought my original life goal of tracking down and killing my mother’s killers was hard. Compared to what I’d just learned about my origins, that had been a piece of cake.

“Sure.” He glanced at me then averted his eyes again. “How about you put them on?”

“Okay, if you insist.”

As I pulled off the tags and put the decidedly scratchy bra on, Zac cleared his throat.

“Your car stands out too much,” he said.

“Birdie? Yeah, so?”

“We’re going to need to ditch it for something less conspicuous.”

I slipped on the panties. Yep, also scratchy. “That’s a no from me.”

“Wren, I’m serious.”

“Fine. I’ll take care of it.” I slipped on the shirt and sat on the bed to put on the leggings.

“What?” Zac slowly turned his eyes toward me, his shoulders relaxing when he found me clothed. Then he was back to serious bodyguard mode. “You can’t just steal a car. We already have enough trouble following us.”

I laughed. “How little you know me.” I went to the window and looked out. The rain had stopped. Zac had parked Birdie behind the hotel, backed between a dumpster and the building so no one could see the car from the road. It should give me enough cover to do what had to be done.

“Stay here.” I went to the bathroom, where steam rolled out from beneath the closed door. The shower was running. I turned the knob, which was unlocked. Inside, I grabbed a clean towel and started to leave, but the temptation was too much.

Pulling back the edge of the shower curtain just enough to peek in, I saw Ashe, one hand supporting himself on the tile in front of him, head down, the water pounding his hair, cascading down his back, over his firm ass and muscled legs. His other arm moved in front of him with quick stroking motions.

Everything in me wanted to join him.

He sagged forward, his fingers digging into the tile, while his low groan vibrated the air in a direct path between my thighs.

Breathless, I licked my lips, squeezed my legs together at the sight of him. He seemed so vulnerable in that moment.

Then he opened his mouth.

“Watching me jack off now? You could have been nice and took care of it for me, or are blowjobs beneath a queen?” He looked over his shoulder and gave me a hard stare.

His words bit into me, froze the heat between my legs. I turned and left the bathroom, but not before having the last word. “Guess you’ll never know now, asshole.”