Chapter 86 - From Cool To Cooler

That night, I dreamed about burned flesh and murderous harpies again, but when I woke up and had time to clear my head a little from the leftovers of these dreams, I felt fine again. Better than ever. Well, not really, but certainly good.

I went on my morning with a shadow of Christina's threat hanging over my shoulder again, something I carefully ignored for the sake of my sanity, but I had a lot of better stuff to hide it under. The anxious jitters in my stomach over a meeting with Avarice that I planned on weren't exactly a good thing, but they were a distraction, nonetheless. The warmth of seeing JJ's smile and the trill of feeling his greeting kiss on my lips, his slender fingers on my skin and my clothes.

He found a lot of opportunities to touch me in passing as we opened the store today for his shift. In the dispersed sunlight that fell through the curtains on the windows, his pale skin looked like condensed mist. I found myself touching him too, without thinking about it, and saw him smiling each time I did.

That smile fell a little when I announced my plans to go to Avarice today.

"Ah… You picked an inconvenient time for this, ma chèrie." JJ threw a somewhat helpless glance at the cashbox before turning to me with a slight frown pinching his brows. "I'm torn between my business obligations to you and the more basic ones. I wanted to take that walk with you when the time came, but…"

I frowned at him, confused and a little suspicious. "Didn't you say she was fine and won't harm me?"

JJ nodded. "She won't. I can't say, of course, I trust her implicitly, but I trust her to be reasonable and even have some modicum of ethic when it comes to negotiations. She won't lay a finger on you, ma chèrie, because she knows that you are under my protection. She also knows that none of her guards, no matter how strong they are, can protect her from me if it was my goal to lay a finger on HER."

My frown didn't smoothen, but I nodded. "Yeah. She is really a vampire mafia." I snorted, then another thought appeared in my head and I gave JJ a smile. "Just keep the cash going, alright? I'm pretty sure I will need it for Avarice. I will be alright. It's bright outside again, and I'm a big girl." My smile turned into a joking grin.

He returned it with one of his own, much whiter and sharper thanks to his fangs. "So you are, my ignorant witch, all trained up and not so ignorant anymore."

I looked away and pulled my bangs behind my ear, hiding my embarrassment. "I'm not a wizard, I'm only in training," I quoted. "Well, have a good day, JJ. See you soon, and hopefully less in debt than I was before."

"Just don't make it worse," he replied with a humorous smile and leaned down towards me.

I met him half-way, my hand raising towards his hair, still way too short but just a little longer than it was yesterday. He mirrored my gesture, and for several syrupy-long and sweet seconds we stood with our lips locked, warm against cool. Not like ice and fire, but like a heated apartment on a rainy day. Cosy. Comfortable. Nice.

More than nice, truly. My chest didn't feel all these funny thrills and clenches on a simple 'nice'. But I didn't think about it then and was intent on not thinking about it for a while, because, ultimately, who was to say that I wasn't way over my head?

⠀⠀

In most vampire stories I remembered reading, vampires lived in castles. Mansions. Penthouses, at least. There were vampire kings, vampire lords, vampire mafia bosses, vampire butlers (also with their own castles too)… I don't think any story I read ever featured a poor vampire in its main cast. It was very contrary to JJ's state of being when I found him (i.e. piss-poor), and it wasn't something I thought about until I saw Avarice's house.

It wasn't a mansion—too small for that—but it was close. For starters, it was a private two-storey house in a middle of a city where most buildings, even older ones, with false columns and winding bas-reliefs, were at least three or four stories tall. Not all of them—my house was an exception already—but it stood out, because all other one- and two-storey houses belonged to businesses (like mine).

Second, it was a house built to look like an eighteen century summer palace in miniature. All false columns, winding bas-reliefs and other Baroque stuff. It also had a tall stone fence and thick curtains at all windows, closed.

'Good to see that at least someone here follows stereotypes,' I thought to myself, hiding my nervousness under a chuckle.

I looked around the fence's gates (locked, of course) until finding an intercom. For some reason it had a full dial of buttons from zero to nine, even though it's not like there was more than one place to call through it. It was probably just standard-issue thing. A black, glassy eye of camera was visible on top of the fence.

I reached towards the buttons and then froze with my hand in the air. 'What exactly I'm going to dial? If there's only one apartment… Should I just press 'one' and call?'

With no better ideas, I did, but the intercom beeped at me to show how wrong I was and left me to stare at it, even more puzzled. After several more seconds of hard thinking about whether it would be a good idea to just start pressing all the buttons at random, the intercom suddenly sprang to life, jolting me out of my musings.

"Just come in, girl," a familiar female voice came out of it. "Or are you going to stand there for another half an hour?"