Slay Alive

Chapter 20

twenty

“Bring me that basil,” Cade says, nodding to the window behind me. I slip off my seat at the kitchen island and head towards the window where his herbs are. The vampire has a damn herb garden growing in the space where a window seat would go in his dining room. I pluck a few stems of basil and give the herb a sniff on my way back to him.

He’s making me dinner. One pan pasta which he insists isn’t anything difficult but to me it’s everything. It’s not the effort, it’s the intent. He could have made a cheese sandwich and I’d feel the same. Warm and fuzzy feelings bubble up in me and mingle with the competency boner I’m getting from watching the vampire mince garlic and shallots with neat precision. Pancetta sizzles in the pan while I sip on a glass of wine.

We’re the picture of domestic bliss. If someone told me that Cade “The Nightstalker” Graves would be cooking me one pot pasta in his cute and trendy loft I’d never believe them. Getting sucked into a video game seems infinitely more plausible than my current scenario.

The loft is up a set of stairs that you’d miss if you weren’t looking for them, the door right around the corner of a red brick building with a potions master on the bottom floor. Through a midnight blue door and up a winding stone staircase is Cade’s home. Cade’s place is a big artsy looking loft that I wouldn’t have associated with him on account of all the scowling and black leather. Cade’s loft is on the North end of the city in Bloodstone Alley. It’s a place I know from shopping for ingredients for enchantments and potions, not anywhere I would have thought someone would live. Though, for a vampire it does make sense, even if it lacks the cover of fog the Veiled Quarter has going for it. Plus, it’s not that far from the Midnight Market which has me plotting on a way to get dessert after this.

Twenty foot ceilings, dark hardwood floors, and floor to ceiling windows in the living room make me wonder how he fares in the daytime. Books line the walls in built in bookshelves but there’s so many that the shelves aren’t enough and they’re stacked waist high against the walls. A couch that looks far too fluffy and soft to be Cade’s sits in the center of the room, an easel to the side of it and by the windows I see a desk littered with papers. Numerous paintings are stacked against the wall closest to the windows, but there’s so many more hanging from the walls. Some are of landscapes but others are of people…at least, I think they are until I get close enough and see the telltale sharpness to their faces that tell me they’re vampires.

I wonder who Cade remembers and paints, who he hangs like memories in his home. The loft is lit by magic, the gentle overhead light so warm it could fool me for sunlight if I didn’t know the hour. Everything feels softer here with Cade in his home. He feels softer here. The kitchen is sparse but clean. Everything you would need to successfully entertain and feed someone who actually needs to eat to survive.

All in all, the vampire is leaning hard into the eternal artist and poet vibe. I pause and look through the archway to the living room. The kitchen and dining room we’re in are joined through an open concept floor plan. From where I’ve been sitting I can see a door at the far end of the living room. I wonder if that’s his bedroom.

“Basil as ordered,” I tell him when I come to his side.

“Thank you, love.”

I shiver when he calls me that because it’s so damn sweet. I’ve never had a nickname I’ve cared for. Preston called me Bon-Bon which would have been cute, if it didn’t make me feel like he didn’t take me seriously. He’d always said it in a patronizing way. The way you talk to a naughty child or a pet that’s misbehaved with an aggrieved sigh. Bon-Bon sounded like disappointment. A ‘ what have you done now? ’ That isn’t cute, that isn’t love.

Is love Cade’s nickname for me?

Rhia’s guidance to find love as my way home starts to work in the back of my mind but I shove it away. It feels sour and wrong right now. Like a business transaction. “Say you love me so I can get my one way ticket out of here.” The last place I want to be is away from Cade. I want to keep this perfect moment with him safe and tucked close to me.

I want to be here.

“Hey.” Cade wraps an arm around me and stirs the pan that I see now has onion, tomatoes, garlic and pasta cooking away in it. I must have zoned out more during my existential crisis than I realized. “You look far too somber for someone about to be fed pasta. I promise I’m a decent enough cook. I won’t muck this up.”

I swallow hard and tell him something close enough to the truth that it’ll sound right. Something that won’t ruin this night. “No one’s ever cooked for me,” I tell Cade.

“I find that very hard to believe. You’re the kind of woman that inspires action.” Cade kisses my temple. It’s just a brush of his lips but it makes me spiral. I’ve been with the same man since I was a newly minted twenty-one year old. Back then I thought it was romantic if a guy brought me a jello shot and offered to get me Taco Bell after.

Preston had done that but he’d never cooked. He’d never put in much of an effort and I’d been too inexperienced to compare him with anything else. I’d only had one boyfriend before him and that had been casual enough, more a friendship than anything else. With no one to compare Preston to, I'd been content enough to convince myself that “this is just the way he loves” and “he’s not into big gestures,” or the old tried and true “he loves me in his own way.”

No one tells you how quiet and easy you slip away when the person you love doesn’t care enough to give you half of what you deserve. Preston didn’t hate me. He just didn’t care all that much.

How the fuck could I have hoped he’d propose? What would that life have even been? Him, uninterested in my jewelry making and showcases? Me, making dinner alone and so starved for his attention that I just keep twisting myself into someone I hope he might like.

Gods.

My eyes prick with tears and I swipe at them with the back of my hand. “Ah, can I help with anything else? I should go get you a glass of wine, yeah?” I turn away from Cade but the arm around my waist hooks me right back into his side. He puts down the spoon and pushes me up against the counter.

“You’re crying.’

“I-I,” I think about lying but I don’t. It’s not worth it. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Would you believe me if I told you it was the onions?”

“Absolutely not.”

I huff out a laugh and lean back against the counter to look up at him. “I was just thinking how lucky I am and how insane this is. I can’t believe I’m here with you and that you’re making me dinner.”

Cade braces a hand on either side of me on the counter and gives me a shrewd look. “What, I don’t look like the chef type?” This vampire is so beautiful and so fucking dense that I laugh.

“You kill hunters, Cade. How many have you taken out?”

His lips purse like he’s tasted something sour and he looks away. “A few.”

“And yet you’re here cooking for one. You have to admit that’s not normal.”

Cade looks back at me and he nods slowly. “You’re right but I’m going to tell you something that will make everything make sense.” He moves away from me then and back to the pan. “Go on and sit down. I’ll have this done in a minute.”

I do as he says but I don’t go silently. “Why do I feel like the vibe just changed?” It does feel that way. Before, it was light, romantic, even heady but the atmosphere has an intensity to it now that I feel so often around Cade. It’s almost electric.

“Probably because I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. Not ever.”

My eyes go wide and I grab my glass of wine to take a big gulp. “I feel like I’m going to need this.”

He chuckles as he plates our food. “You will. Fuck. So will I.”

“I’ll get you a glass.”

I rise, get the glass and when we pass each other, that electricity ramps up another notch, like it’s a live and real thing. I let out a shaky breath when I sit back down as Cade puts the plate down in front of me and grabs the bottle off the table. I don’t say anything while he pours himself half the bottle of wine. When he leans back in his chair and picks up his glass, so do I.

“Cheers. To secrets told and hearts joined.”

“Cheers.” I clink my glass to his and take a sip. “Secrets told, huh? Is that literal or am I seeing your poet side finally?”

Cade smiles and looks down into his wine. “A little of both, actually.” I know well enough when to shut up so I pick my fork up and stuff my face with pasta while Cade takes his time finding his words.

“It’s been…oh, I dunno, a decade since I killed one of you.”

I choke on my pasta and Cade has to slap me on the back to get me breathing again. “What?” I suck in a deep breath and then grab my wine glass and proceed to drink half of it in one go. Is this where he reveals that he knows I’m not supposed to be here? That he knows all about who I am and what I’m doing here? What if he knows he’s been ax-murdering me in the game since day one.

I cough. “What do you mean one of me? ”

“A hunter,” he says. “What else would I mean?”

“Oh, right.” Realization hits me. Of course Cade doesn’t know about the game or the fact that he’s been my virtual murderer. He can’t. That’s…ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as my life, but ridiculous all the same.

“As I was saying, before you nearly waterboarded yourself via Vino, which–do I need to cut you off?” He makes a swipe at my wine glass but I block him.

“Touch my wine and feel my wrath.”

“Is that what you’re calling it now?”

I smile and settle back into my chair. The atmosphere between us is normal again, like someone letting the air out of a balloon and I take in an easy breath. “Shut up and tell me your secret.”

“Fine. Try not to die this go around.” I roll my eyes but stay silent and Cade starts speaking, “That witch in town did a number on me one night,” he says and it takes all my willpower not to scream. I know exactly what witch he’s talking about.

There’s only one witch in town as far as I’m concerned.

“Rhiannon, her name is. She runs that tavern down by Hunter’s Watch.”

“The Prickly Possum,” I whisper and he nods as he sips his wine.

“That’s the one,” Cade confirms, sealing the deal on the fact that Rhiannon is on my last fucking nerve. “Everything in my life was peachy until one night I go into that place for a drink. I don’t know why. I never had a taste for drinking ‘round your lot. Almost walked right back out when I saw it packed with hunters but the witch found me before I could. Forced me to sit and have a beer with a side of fortune-telling.”

I lean forward. Rhia causing havoc in a bar seems like her MO and definitely reminiscent of how she got me wrapped up in all of this. Is Cade on a quest too? “She told your fortune?”

“She did. Said that I ought to stop draining hunters on account of my soulmate being one.”

If I was chewing my delicious pasta dinner there’s no doubt in my mind that I would have choked and perished. Thankfully, I’m not. I’m drinking my wine so I only cough a little.

“ Soulmate ?” I squeak.

“Yeah, the one and only.” Cade leans forward, one elbow on the table and brushes my hair away from my face. “ When you walk in daylight, violence no more, with secrets told and hearts joined. When you set love loose will you find her in a hunter’s body. A champion you will be.”

“She said that to you,” I say it, I don’t ask. I already know the answer.

Cade’s words aren’t poetry, they're a prophecy.