Falter Read online

  “You guys went through something together,” I said. “The same thing happened to Azazel and me.”

  “And you guys have been together ever since?”

  “Well, we had some rough patches,” I said. “But we always end up back together. No matter what.”

  “So, you think I should just be with Grace,” he said.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “She’s too young,” he said. “I want to date someone my own age.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, that’s what you’re doing. So, everything’s okay, then.”

  “It’s not, though. Because the whole time I was on this date tonight, I just kept thinking that this girl could never understand me. She doesn’t know anything about who I am. And, you know, I’m a Nephilim, and I’m probably going to live for, like, a lot longer than she is. But Grace is like me. And we’ve been through all the same stuff.”

  “So, you do want to date Grace.”

  “I want...” He laced his hands together in his lap and stared at them. “Can I be honest with you? Like really honest?”

  Whoa. This was starting to feel like this kid was coming to me for advice. Real advice. And I wasn’t sure if I was a great person to get advice from. But I guessed he didn’t have anyone else. His parents were dead. He was on his own. When I was his age, sometimes I’d wished I’d had someone to talk to about this stuff, but all I’d had was Hallam, and—at the time—he knew nothing about girls. So I nodded. “Of course you can.”

  He lowered his voice. “I want to get laid. Like, yesterday.”

  I laughed.

  “Don’t laugh.” He ducked his head. I thought he was blushing. “You know what? Just forget it.”

  “Sorry.” I stopped laughing. “It’s not funny.”

  “I’m like the oldest virgin in my school.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” I said. But I remembered how awkward all of that had been back then. Being unsure of myself, and having missed out on the same kind of socialization everyone else had gone through, and girls being everywhere, and being terrified and confused about all of it. “Look, as crazy as it might sound, that stuff just takes care of itself.”

  “What?”

  “It happens. Usually when you’re not expecting it to happen, when you’re not prepared. And it’s not as big of a deal as you think it’s going to be.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You have no idea. Things are so different now.”

  “I’m not that old,” I said. “Anyway, what does this have to do with Grace?”

  “Well, she’s too young for that.”

  I nodded slowly. “I see. And the girl on the date? She’s old enough?”

  “Yeah, but I feel like a jerk. Like I’m just taking her on a date so that she’ll eventually sleep with me.” He looked at me. “That’s a jerk thing to do, right? I bet you’ve never done anything like that.”

  “Me?” I pointed at myself. “Um, you know about Chance’s mother, right?”

  “Mina?”

  “No, his biological mother,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Boone. “I guess that’s why his hair’s red when neither you or Mina have red hair.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. Uh, Polly died in childbirth during the blackout. And I wasn’t anywhere around. At all. I was too busy rallying armies to try to kill everyone Azazel cared about.”

  His eyes widened.

  “See, that’s a jerk thing to do.”

  He nodded wordlessly.

  “Sure you want advice from someone like me?”

  He looked back down at his hands. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, the thing about advice is that you don’t have to follow it, right? So, what do you think I should do?”

  Oh. Crap. “How old is Grace?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And how much older than her are you?”

  “Three years.”

  I was quiet, thinking it over. “You know what? I don’t know what you should do.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  “I do know you should use condoms,” I said.

  He got out of his chair. “Save it, Jason.”

  “And that it’s going to be more fun to have sex with someone you actually like than with someone random.”

  “What?” he said. “Dude, seriously, you are completely out of touch.”

  So much for my giving advice, then.

  He left the room.

  I sighed. I guessed I was going to need to face Azazel now, wasn’t I? I went up the stairs to our bedroom. But when I got there, the lights were already out. I nudged her and whispered her name. She was asleep. I climbed in next to her. Listened to the steady sound of her breath. Wished things were different.

  * * *

  ~azazel~

  I woke up in bed with Jason. Sometime in the middle of the night, we’d migrated close to each other, and now our limbs were all tangled up. It should have been uncomfortable, but for some reason, it wasn’t. I pressed close to him, sighing in contentment.

  He woke with a start, pushing me away from him and sitting up. “Azazel?”

  That was Jason for you. He woke up that way every morning. He was always prepared for danger, ready to run from the minute he awoke.

  “Hey,” I said. I reached for him. His chest was bare, and I ran my fingertips over his skin. He’d been lifting weights in the gym a lot, and his muscles were more defined than they used to be. I liked it.

  He lay back down sheepishly. “Good morning. Guess no one’s chasing us?”

  “Not today,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m sure that won’t last.” I scooted close to him, pressing my body against his.

  He sighed in contentment. He kissed me. “I like waking up with you.”

  I met his lips again. “I like it too.” Then I kissed the tip of his nose. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around.”

  “Well,” he said, his fingers working their way under my tank top, “I guess you didn’t feel safe. I’m sorry about that. I promise I’ll never let you feel like that again.”

  I gasped at the sensation of his touch on my bare skin. “No, Jason, I don’t blame you for it. It was more that I blamed myself.”

  He stopped touching me. “Blamed yourself? How could it have been your fault?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.” I leaned in to kiss him again.

  He moved out of the way. “What do you mean, you blamed yourself?”

  I sighed. I rolled away from him. “This isn’t going to happen, is it?”

  He got out of bed, throwing a shirt over his head. “It isn’t if you’re not going to talk to me.”

  I stared at the ceiling. “I blamed myself for how I felt.”

  “You mean, because you were angry with me? But you had every right to feel that way.”

  “That’s not how I felt, Jason.”

  There was a knock at the door. “Azazel, you in here?”

  Jason yanked open the door. “Jude? You think we could get a little privacy here?”

  Jude peered inside the room. “We were going to go through some of the footage this morning?”

  Right. I’d made plans with Jude to watch some of the video that Boone had been collecting of blood dealers selling their product. We were looking for clues to trace it back to whoever might be in charge of the blood ring. “Yeah, I didn’t forget,” I said. “I just need to get dressed.”

  Jason folded his arms over his chest. “You’re going off with him?”

  “Well, not right this second,” I said.

  “Take your time,” said Jude. He eyed Jason. “You can’t tell her what to do, you know. You don’t own her.”

  Jason shoved Jude back through the door and slammed it. “I really wish he’d stayed dead when I killed him before.”

  I was searching through my closet for a pair of jeans. “You don’t mean that, baby.”

  “Like hell I don’t,” said Jason. “You and I were in the middle of a conversation.”
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  “I know,” I said. “But maybe we can talk about it later on? Maybe this evening?”

  He sighed.

  I kissed him. His lips didn’t respond to mine. I threw a pair of jeans onto the bed. “Or not. I guess.”

  “Maybe the reason you want me to go on missions with you is because all you want to do these days is kill vampires,” he said. “Or maybe you keep trying to convince me, because you know I’ll say no, and then you have a good excuse to be alone with Jude.”

  I glared at him. “Jude is only my friend, you ass. I’ve been telling you that ever since we met him over ten years ago. But you can’t get it through your impossibly thick skull, can you?” I swept up a shirt and a bra. “I think I’ll change in the bathroom.”

  I slammed the bedroom door in his face.

  * * *

  I covered my face with my hands. “There’s nothing here!”

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Jude and I were sitting in the main meeting room in headquarters, going through video. It was a tedious and thankless job.

  Boone had been hacking into security cameras and street cameras in places where we suspected vampire activity. Jude and I were going through those videos, trying to find video evidence of blood deals. Thus far, we hadn’t found a thing.

  The videos went on for hours and hours, and even speeding them up didn’t seem to make them less interminable. When we finished one, there were ten more to go through. I was bored to tears. It didn’t help that I’d run out on Jason this morning, and I felt guilty about it.

  That boy just made me crazy angry sometimes.

  I’d wanted to fix things, make up, or whatever, but everything had gone wrong. And to make things worse, I’d promised I’d talk to him this evening. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to run away from the entire situation.

  Jude reached over and paused the video we were watching. “You want to take a break?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but we shouldn’t.” We’d gotten back from lunch only an hour ago. “If we keep taking breaks, we’re never going to get through these videos.”

  “Maybe not,” said Jude, “but there’s got to be a better way to track down this blood ring.”

  “Boone says he can’t hack their site on the dark net,” I said. The dark net was an anonymity network that could only be reached through proxies and layers of encryption. The vampires sold blood on it, and that was how Boone knew they existed, but he couldn’t figure out who they were.

  “There’s still got to be a better way,” said Jude. “Say we do find a few deals on these videos. How does that get us any closer to finding the source?”

  “Well, I guess we can go and question the dealers, like we did last time.”

  “That guy didn’t know anything,” said Jude. “Even if he had lived, he wouldn’t have given us any information.”

  I sighed. Maybe he was right. “So, you think we should give up?”

  “I think we need to put our heads together and come up with a better way to track these guys down. Maybe instead of questioning these guys, we follow them or something.”

  “We’d still need to find one,” I said. “Which means you need to turn the video back on.”

  “True,” he said. “Maybe we should think a little longer. I’m sure we can come up with some way that we can help out without watching this damned street-camera footage.”

  I laughed. “You hate doing it as much as I do.”

  “Anyone would hate doing it,” he said. “We need to get out in the field. It’s what we’re good at. You remember that time that you almost got snatched by Sutherland in Florida? We were good together then.”

  “We?” I raised my eyebrows. “What did you do? I seem to remember that you just stood there and yelled and stuff.”

  “I was maintaining my cover as a mild-mannered gay boy,” said Jude.

  I snorted. “I liked you better gay, I think.”

  He looked wounded. “Why?”

  “It was just... less weird, you know. Like, when Jason gets jealous now, I miss having the high ground to jump onto.”

  Jude leaned back in his chair, cradling his head with his hands. “Jason still gets jealous of me, huh?”

  I groaned. Why had I said anything? “Let’s turn the video back on, Jude.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m really enjoying this conversation. What exactly does he say?”

  “Jude.” I fixed him with my best annoyed glare.

  It didn’t faze him. “I guess you and I do spend a lot of time together, don’t we?”

  I sighed. “You’re enjoying this because you like pissing off Jason, right? Not because you still have any kind of feelings for me? Because you know that I don’t think of you that way.”

  He sat up straight, putting his hands in his lap. “Let’s watch the video.”

  I bit my lip. What was that supposed to mean? Did he have some kind of crush on me? If so, working with him all the time was borderline cruel. I needed to know. “Jude? Do you... think about me like that?”

  “No,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was leaning over the computer, hitting play. “That would be stupid. You and Jason are together, and I know that you’ll never leave him, no matter what kind of psycho shit he does.”

  I remembered Jason describing his violent fantasies to me last night. They hadn’t even fazed me. I’d accepted that part of him. I’d had an epiphany that I was attracted to him because he was dangerous, and I didn’t want him to change. I didn’t want him to kill innocent people, either, but it was only a fantasy. I thought about doing all kinds of things that I’d never actually do. Jason took his thoughts too seriously.

  The video was moving again, and a guy was striding across a food court in a mall. He sat down all alone at a table. He didn’t have any food. He didn’t have a laptop or anything either. He just sat there by himself.

  I pointed him out to Jude. “What do you think about that guy?”

  He zoomed in on him. “Could be something.”

  We watched the guy sit there, doing nothing.

  “You know, Jude, maybe you should get out more,” I said. “You should try to meet someone or something.”

  He didn’t look away from the video. “Azazel, I have zero experience with women, okay? I wasn’t a well-liked teenager, and I’ve been locked up for ten years. You’re the only girl I ever kissed, and you only did that to manipulate me, or because you were being manipulated.”

  I was being...? Oh, he meant the aphrodisiac when we were locked up. The vampires who’d held us captive were trying to breed Nephilim, and they put this stuff in our food that had turned us all into sex-crazed beasts. I’d sort of accidentally kissed Jude under its influence, but Jason had pulled me away before anything else could happen.

  Jude was still talking. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to meet someone. I’d just make an idiot of myself.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “You’ve got a lot to offer.”

  He smirked. “Right. Sure.”

  On the video, someone sat down with the guy at the table. I pointed. “Look.”

  “Huh,” said Jude.

  We watched as the guy took a small cooler out of his backpack. He slid it across the table and then got up and walked away. The other person sat alone for a minute, stuffing the cooler into his backpack. Then he got up and walked away as well.

  “That was a blood deal,” I said. “Had to be, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t know of any other illicit substances that get transferred in a cooler,” said Jude.

  I grinned at him. “We finally saw one.”

  He high-fived me. “Good things come to those who wait.”

  * * *

  ~jason~

  “You still coming back this evening?” I was pacing with my phone in the bedroom. My laptop was open on the bed. I’d pulled up the site of the escorts again.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. “I completely forgot.”

  “Come on, Aza
zel, do not pull that shit on me,” I said. “I need to talk to you. I need you. I’m not feeling...”

  “Look, Jude and I found a guy who’s a blood dealer, and we’re trying to figure out who he is.”

  “And that can’t wait?”

  “It’s a big lead, baby. We haven’t had anything like that in a while. We might actually be able to figure out where he’s getting the blood from. Then we could take down the big blood ring.”

  I sighed. “Right. So, you’re not coming home, then.”

  “Can we just talk later?” she said. “Look, I’m sorry I stormed out earlier. You know how I get when you get jealous.”

  “How is Jude?” I asked, my grip on the phone tightening. I didn’t see why we had to be so nice to my younger brother. He’d tried to kill me, and he’d always had a big crush on Azazel. He wasn’t trustworthy in my opinion. But Azazel always had a soft spot for him. She was willing to forgive everything, like it was no big deal.

  “Don’t be like that,” she said.

  “Come on, what am I supposed to think?” I said. “You’re probably going to be with him overnight, aren’t you? You’re with him overnight a lot.”

  “Stop it, Jason,” she said. “If I were actually having an affair, don’t you think I’d come up with a better cover than telling you I was with him?”

  Affair? She made it sound almost respectable. But she wouldn’t. She doesn’t want Jude, I tried to assure myself. “Please, Azazel. Please come home. I really don’t want to be alone right now.”

  “So hang out with Hallam or something,” she said. “Stop being so melodramatic.”

  Melodramatic, huh? That’s what she thought I was being?

  “Look,” she said, “I promise we’ll find time to talk tomorrow. Okay?”

  I hung up the phone. Fuck her.

  I half-expected her to call me back right away.

  She didn’t.

  I waited for several minutes, expecting the phone to start vibrating and ringing in my hand.

  When it didn’t, I thought about calling her back. But what was the point? She’d said what she meant to say. She wasn’t coming home. She didn’t care what I was going through. I tossed the phone on my bed.