He considered her question honestly. “No.”
“Then it can wait until morning.”
She stepped into him.
He’d kissed her before. They had shared chaste intimate moments. Always on the edge of restraint. This was not that. This was her hands finding the lapels of his jacket with a directness that would have scandalized the 1906 version of himself and did something considerably different to the contemporary version of him. He caught her waist. His intention had been steadying. It became something else entirely as desire like he’d never experienced on a physical level surged from within him.
She tasted like the wine from dinner, like a night that had been building to exactly this, a choice made by Delphine both clearly and without reservation. He kissed her the way he’d been not-kissing her for months of careful evenings, which was to say thoroughly, and with more feeling—lust—than he generally permitted himself in the presence of other people. Their tongues met, and Delphine’s intake of breath let him know he could allow his restraint could fall, at least just a bit.
She made a small sound against his mouth and pulled him closer by the jacket, deepening their kiss before she ran her hands along his chest and pressing her body to his.
His hands tightened at her waist, then, as if there were an inch between them, one hand ran up her back into her soft hair as he devoured her mouth with his, and the other began drifting lower, just above her rear.
Later—years later, if he was honest with himself, if not for what happened next—he would not be able to say precisely how they moved from the middle of the room to the couch, only that the distance closed in the way distances close when both people have decided they’re finished pretending they want any space at all. Her heels had already been discarded. His jacket found the back of the couch. She’d made some efficient movement with the light sweater she’d been wearing over her dress and moved her lips to the column along his neck.
Chills ran through him and his hold on her tightened.
“Are you overthinking?” she asked against his jaw.
“I’m not thinking at all, cher.”
“Liar.” But she was smiling, he could feel it, and then she shifted against him in a way that made thought briefly impossible regardless.
The strap of her dress slipped. She let it. He looked at her—couldn’t help it, the lamplight doing something unconscionable, the strap against her upper arm, the small deliberate smile on her face—and felt the weight of everything he’d been holding at distance for longer than he could remember at the moment.
He kissed her throat. She tipped her head back. His fallen nature had not, apparently, made him any less susceptible to this particular variety of human gravity. If anything, the opposite, which was something he’d considered in the abstract many times and was now discovering in practice had been a significant underestimation. His desire to have her, to connect with her in the most intimate but carnal way, was bubbling to the surface in such a way he was becoming lost to it.
Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt.
His phone rang.
He ignored it.
It rang again.
She pulled back slightly, her hand stilling on his chest. Not withdrawing—just pausing. Listening. “You should answer; something tells me it’s important,” she said.
“Ignore it,” Bastien said, almost breathless, and with a mind for only one thing.
It rang a third time. Then a fourth, immediate, before the echo of the third had finished.
He closed his eyes.
“Go,” Delphine said. Not angry. Just Delphine, reading the situation with that clarity that had been making his life simultaneously easier and more complicated for three years. Her hand flattened against his chest—present, deliberate—before she moved back. “Whatever it is, it’s not calling four times for nothing.”
He answered.
It was. When he peered down at the screen he recognized the name instantly and concern replaced the heady feelings he had just moments ago. Baptiste did not call at midnight without reason.
Baptiste’s voice came through without preamble, because Baptiste had been a vampire for sixty years and had no patience for the social architecture of bad timing. “Dumaine Street. Between Bourbon and Royal. You need to see this yourself.”
“A body?”
Bastien had worked with Baptiste for three decades. He had heard him move through crises, through faction politics, through the precise variety of horror that accumulated in a city where multiple supernatural communities existed in uneasy proximity. He had never heard Baptiste sound like this.
“It’s still here. And you need to see it for yourself. Come at once.”
Bastien went still with different quality than before. His celestial senses prickled—the same wrongness that had been threading through the city’s edges for days, ambient and unresolvable, yet ignored by him. Something ancient had moved in the Quarter’s depths. Now it had left evidence.
