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I was a little flustered after witnessing Brian defend my honour again, so I blushed when his piercing blue gaze landed on me.

“Sorry,” he said to me, and I didn’t know if he was apologising for what Simon had said or because he’d spoken up, but it didn’t matter either way. I quickly shook my head.

“Don’t be. Thank you.” I couldn’t stop myself from leaning in to press a shy, grateful kiss to his mouth.

Okay, so maybe the date wasn’t ending with a wild, passionate fuckfest. But it was ending with a big, gorgeous, sweet werewolf defending my honour against my douchebag roommate.

And in some ways, that was even better than sex.

Well. Almost. Let’s not go crazy.

Chapter 27

Lovers Through the Ages

Klaus

Our date on Wednesday morning went just as well as the last, and it felt like I was walking around everywhere in a cloud of pure joy.

My mood seemed to be affecting my pheromones, too, which was something I’d never noticed happening before. Concubi always secreted a very low dose, because that was just how we worked, but it was barely noticeable to most other supernaturals and tended to just make us somewhat magnetic to humans. Humans always paid more attention to concubi in their vicinity. They’d keep looking at them. They’d approach them and try to befriend them or, more often than not, flirt with them.

When we got aroused we pumped out our pheromones thick and fast, but their only purpose was to, for lack of a better term, lure in potential partners, as well as make the sex feel so good that they’d want to have sex with us again and again and again. It was to attract, to make us even more irresistible. Our overall demeanour shouldn’t have really affected that either way.

But I could’ve sworn people were starting to look at me differently as this haze of excitement and exhilaration and hope warmed me like my own personal sun. Differently in a good way. In a really good way. People weren’t just staring at me with obvious lust or attraction in their eyes anymore. They weren’t craning their necks to check me out, examining my body like they were already imagining what they wanted to do to it.

Now, they were smiling at me. I mean, obviously people had always smiled at me, but those smiles in the past had usually leaned more toward lecherous, carnal, sometimes predatory. These new smiles were warm, friendly, big and beaming, as if the sunshine-happy rays were warming up everyone who crossed my path too, infecting them with my joy.

I noticed it especially on my breakfast date with Brian. A few times in the past, people had been so brazen, or so affected by my pheromones, that they’d actually come up to me and hit on me while I was mid-date with someone else. I’d found it embarrassing and stressful, and the idea of it happening while I was with Brian had been causing me a lot of anxiety.

I didn’t know if it was this new joyful tinge to my pheromones, or maybe just the way I looked at him and couldn’t take my eyes off him and couldn’t stop smiling at him, but everyone we interacted with on our breakfast date, like the server at the café we went to, was just… normal. They were friendly. They didn’t flirt. They didn’t give me lechy looks. They left us alone.

This was technically a brunch date, seeing as we met at around ten thirty, so the café was almost empty when we went in, aside from a few people working on their laptops at the window seats. It was a human-run place, so there wasn’t a secret supernatural menu or anything. We ordered honey lattes and a big stack of pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon to share. We sat close together on the same side of the table, and Brian draped his muscular arm along the back of my chair, and the butterflies in my belly went wild once again.

The conversation flowed just as easily as it had on our first date. Once you got Brian talking about a topic he was interested in, he could talk endlessly. I loved seeing how animated he got and hearing that big, loud laugh he seemed to immediately get self-conscious about, so this time, I made sure to tell him how much I loved his laugh. That made him blush sweetly, which obviously meant it was physically impossible for me not to lean in and kiss his cheek.

Once we’d eaten, we got two iced teas to go and went for a slow, wandering walk down some of the city’s quieter back roads. A lot of the town was modern and built-up, but in this district, closest to the park, there were areas that were much older, where the earliest buildings had been preserved. Probably because a lot of them had been built by supernaturals, and some supernaturals lived a very long time. The unofficial history of the city was that fae had crossed over in what was now Tirnal Park and settled here, which had attracted other supernaturals as well as humans, who saw a thriving community being formed. No one was really sure how true that was, though. The fae liked to say they were responsible for everything.

But there was no denying that some of these older buildings had definitely been built—or influenced, at the very least—by the supernatural community here. There was the Victorian Gothic architecture that vampires loved, with added flowing, smoke-like lines that shadowpeople favoured. The grotesques and gargoyles, which had been designed to look like… well, real gargoyles. The cornices, architraves and cresting that were undeniably fae-influenced. I didn’t get to see them often, because these surviving old buildings sat behind the gleaming, modern main streets of the city now, so it was nice to wander around them with Brian. They were also very quiet, because the businesses operating down these streets were very niche or specialist, and—for the most part—supernatural. It kind of reminded me of the descriptions my Aunt Greta had given me of London when she and Uncle Bernie went there on vacation years ago. She said you could turn off a busy street swarming with people and suddenly be on a deserted little road that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the eighteen hundreds.

We came across a supernatural graveyard attached to a tiny, crumbling church that definitely hadn’t been built within the last hundred years or so. It also looked like it hadn’t been used at all in just as long, like no one had stepped foot here in decades. It was kind of eerie, but mostly cool, because I had Brian with me—holding my hand again, I’d like to add—so I wasn’t at all scared.

The church had definitely been built by vampires. Vampiric churches were rare, and they were always this small, but I could recognise the signs because my aunt and uncle travelled a lot and made a point of visiting historical supernatural sites, and then I always had to sit through Aunt Greta showing me endless photos of their vacations. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, and I’d love to travel as much as they did myself one day, but did she really need to take ten photographs of the same pigeon she saw eating an entire hot dog?

The gargoyles on their little perches either side of the front doors were too realistic, too detailed, to be anything but supernaturally sculpted. The stone surrounding the doors had been carved meticulously into an endless, flowing tangle of figures twisting and arching together. Kind of erotic for a church, which was how I knew it was vampiric. There was also the fact that, if you looked closely enough, every one of those carved figures had fangs. And while I couldn’t understand all of the Latin words carved above the doors in elaborate Gothic font, I did recognise one—sanguinis. Blood.

“This is definitely a vampire church,” I told Brian, who was looking around as he stood beside me, holding my hand. “Isn’t that cool? I didn’t know this was here. It’s so well hidden!”

We’d taken a tiny, twisting road between a closed vintage bookstore and a walled garden to end up here. It was completely deserted. I couldn’t hear a single sound coming from nearby, no cars or other people or anything, just the quiet rustle of the gnarled old trees and long grass in the graveyard moving in the breeze, and the occasional chirp of a nearby cricket.

“Do you think anyone’s here?” I asked Brian.

He cocked his head, sniffed and seemed to listen intently for a few seconds, then made a face. “There’s something somewhere nearby… probably a vampire. But it’s midday, so…” He shrugged.

Right. Any vampires would be fast asleep right now, hiding from the sunlight.

“Shall we peek inside?” I tugged Brian closer to the doors.

“I mean, it might not be structurally sound…” He sounded a little anxious now.