Blood Claim by Laura Mykles (free e books to read .txt) 📕

alley. The owner of the garage had tried to keep the unwanted visitors away, from an angry yellow “no trespassing” sign to the hundreds of nails holding two-by-fours in place over the door and windows. The nails currently in use still hardware store shiny, but Cory had obviously burrowed down and under. Lathe would be damned more than he already was if he did the same thing.

Instead, he put his hand up, pressing it against the wood. It didn't take much to force the decay already in the wood to swell and reject the new steel. One by one, the wood pushed out the nails with a sickening squelch.

"Hey!” Lathe heard behind him. He turned as the sound of the metal hinges of the gate reached him. It was the owner of the house. He was taller than most humans, and the hair on his head was crazy around his face. “You can't just—"

Brutus, lolling by Lathe's feet, perked up. He didn't growl, not in the presence of prey, but Lathe felt the hunger from him.

Whether the human saw the great beast by Lathe's feet was irrelevant. Some did; some didn't. It was better if they did see; at least then they understood their role in the universe. Lathe looked at the human, wanting to see the dawn of comprehension on his doomed face. “Um, never mind,” the human said, reaching behind him for the gate. This one was smarter than most of his ilk. “Please."

"We do mind,” Lathe said and then nodded. “Take him.” Brutus was up in the next second. The human had been standing in the shadow of an old, dead tree, and that was where Brutus erupted from, fully formed. There was no blood, not even as Brutus's jaws clamped down. Brutus wasn't actually biting. Everything from the human's silent scream to his desperate attempt to protect his vulnerable throat was absorbed through Brutus's cold touch.

The grass in the alley was already shocked from the cold, but as Brutus fed he bled out the last bit of stored color in it. The brown shadow spread through the fence to the bushes that still held the ghost of blooming flowers. Brutus poisoned the roots. The already hibernating wood died and crumbled. It even stretched to the climbing ivy running up the walls of the house. The vines dropped free from their hooks and roots and fell to the ground in a brown shower of leaves.

There was nothing left of the human by the time Brutus stepped free from the newly scorched earth. He licked his lips and whined up at Lathe. Lathe scratched the back of the beast's ears, feeling the ice-cold skin, and then kicked the door to the garage the rest of the way open.

Cory wasn't inside. Lathe didn't know why that was such a disappointment. The interior wasn't sun proof, but Corbin had solved that problem by burrowing under the abandoned car and letting the iron underside protect him from the sun. It wouldn't have been a perfect nest; he would have had restless, painful dreams, but he was still young. Long black feathers lined the pit, with the plume end smelling of Cory's blood, and Lathe saw Cory pull out his own pin feathers in order to make the nest homier and to protect himself from the worst of the dreams. He knew Cory wasn't beyond a little pain to solve his problems.

"Where did you go, my little bird?” Lathe asked. The silent garage failed to answer him.

But Brutus would. “Go. Find him."

Brutus howled again and was gone. Lathe couldn't keep up, not in the time he had left of the night, but Brutus would lie low in a cold, dark place and let him know the next evening where he was. He returned to the restaurant to sleep.

* * * **

Cory found more than blood in the fridge. He pulled out two beers, opened them over the sink, and poured them into glasses. The downstairs rec room actually had a wood-burning fireplace, as opposed to the hermetically sealed gas fireplace upstairs, and they sat on the floor in front of it. Luke took the warmed blood pack first. Cory had already fed; that was obvious from the flushed cheeks.

The plastic gave way to Luke's fangs reluctantly, and once he breeched the seal, it didn't hold tension like human skin. But the harmless chemicals suspending the blood kept it alive for them to feed from. He drained it, feeling his body assimilate the blood. He opened his eyes, for that second hyper alert to everything around him. If this has been the bad old days, he would have pinned Cory to the table and fucked him until neither one of them could move, but that item was off the menu. Cory smiled ruefully, obviously thinking the same thing, so Luke raised the glass of beer instead. “It wasn't all that bad,” he said.

"It wasn't,” Cory agreed. “But it wasn't all my fault, either."

"No, it wasn't.” Luke took another drink, then held the glass between his fingertips. “Did you find it?"

"Find what?” Cory was curious, not defensive, and it wasn't a tone Luke was much used to.

"Your greater purpose. The thing you left me for."

"I didn't leave you,” Cory said. “You'd all but packed up my things and threw them out on your sun-drenched lawn."

"You killed someone, Cory."

"I killed a human,” Cory said, voice dark. “And he needed killing."

"It doesn't work that way. Dead humans bring police officers—"

"Not that one,” Cory said. He'd been a worker in a shelter, a volunteer who brought juice jugs around to all the tables and brought the younger, prettier men to the storage room. It had come out in the investigation, and with so many potential motives for the crime, it stalled out. But it meant that they probably had Cory's fingerprints on record now.

"We can't afford the attention."

"And I couldn't let him keep doing it."

"Have you done it since?"

Cory's eyes were blank for half a dozen seconds.