Gathering her composure, she smirked. “I see. You must be too shy to talk about yourself. So, let me just refer to your card then.” She picked up a white four by six index card with the number seven in bold at the top. “I see you like long walks on the beach and pina coladas.” He barked out a laugh in spite of himself. He had to give it up. Torn Finngarick was a funny guy. “Let me guess. I’ll bet you also like getting caught in the rain.”
“Yes. I’m a simple guy, easy to read. Long walks on the beach and pina coladas are my idea of fun.” Her rust-colored eyelashes swept down and to the side as she looked away. “Sooooooo. Let’s see what your card says about you.” He shuffled through cards and held one up pretending to read. “Here we are. Little Miss Sheltered McManners. For fun you like spraying with Lysol and wearing stilts. All the better to look down on other people.”
“Mr… you know, really, the most interesting thing about you is that you chose Nightsong for a fake name. I don’t need stilts to look down on you. I could be lying face down on the floor and wouldn’t have any trouble.”
One of his brows arched. “Well, well, well. Honesty. Wasn’t expecting that.”
The facilitator’s voice rang out, “One minute.”
“Sixty seconds.” His malicious grin was sexy in spite of its intent. “Just long enough for me to say that I’ll bet your cunt is buttoned up tighter than your sweater. I’ll bet it’s so sanitary that it doesn’t even smell like pussy. A shame because I like the smell of pussy. For one thing it’s honest.”
Mercy didn’t think of herself as prudish, but hearing that tirade come from the mouth of a complete stranger sitting on the other side of white linen was shocking. While she was trying to make up her mind between blushing and blanching, he decided to add one parting comment.
“You know, hives is not a good look for you.”
“Time!”
She wasn’t about to allow that to be the last thing said between them. “You’re an authority of good looks? Have you seen a mirror? When did post-apocalyptic remnant become the new GQ? You look like an extra from a zombie movie set.”
“Time!”
He glanced toward the facilitator at the front of the room, who had repeated herself, more forcefully, for their benefit.
“Good. ‘Cause we’re done here.” He shoved the chair back as he stood, throwing his splayed hands out in front of him to punctuate his exit like a petulant teenager who’d been wronged.
“Excellent. Because I couldn’t have stood the smell a second longer.”
Three minutes later they were still standing at table seven, locked in an argument that seemed to be spiraling into a frenzy instead of winding down. While the other would-be speed daters turned spectators looked on, the facilitator kept helplessly calling “time” and was ignored.
Finally, Raif ended it by storming out of the restaurant and walked for two blocks in dense New York City pedestrian traffic before ducking into an alley. He stopped and put his forehead on the cold composition wall of the closest building.
“Gods’ teeth, why am I such an asshole? A big mouth, broken asshole?”
Fingers shaking, she gathered her purse and jacket without meeting the eyes of any of the onlookers. If she’d ever been more humiliated, she couldn’t remember when. She got almost to the end of the block before bursting into tears. So much for speed dating.
She was glad it was windy and cold for the six block walk back to Columbia. People would assume the color in her face was from weather and not from crying.
CHAPTER 2
Sol in Shamayim
He could pinpoint the moment when the well-oiled machine jumped its tracks. In fact, on reflection, he sensed she was going to be trouble the minute she materialized in midair and plopped on the floor as a bloody, oozing, pile of goo. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was a harbinger of change. Elora Fucking Laiken. Turned things upside down and inside out and, if it ever got back to ‘normal’ after she arrived, it never stayed that way for long. Babies at Jefferson Unit! Unbelievable!
In the beginning, after she recovered from the interdimensional journey and was given conditional freedom of the facility, he was resistant as stone to the idea of using her in Hunter Division. The idea of a female knight in Hunter Division would remain eternally ludicrous even though the gifts she acquired through transition to a new dimension outfitted her perfectly for the job of slayer.
There was only one thing that might change his position on the matter. It just so happened that the one thing was what they had to have – the help of a very old vampire. Luckily the vampire in question, Istvan Baka, took a fancy to the young lady. First he wanted a private audience, private being a highly relative term given that his every move was monitored by Knights of the Black Swan through a glass enclosure.
After he signed a contract to act as consultant, the vampire more or less embarrassed Sol into using Laiken’s unique talents by pointing out that she was very likely Black Swan’s most powerful asset. Yes. That’s exactly what he’d said during the same phone call when he’d asked for cleanup because the girl had just taken out a vampire. Alone. Without any training. With a toothpick!
After that he couldn’t really say no without looking like a chauvinistic ass wipe. So he let her replace Sir Landsdowne as fourth member of B Team. He’d hoped the three remaining members would draw a line, but two of them gave her an “up” vote.
For a little while it seemed like it might work out okay. Then Sir Hawking was disabled in a confrontation and she responded rash and ready, which got her eaten and infected by vampire. Well, that may have been overly harsh. No one asks to be eaten. Exactly.
Her partial conversion to vampire made for a fairly tense twenty-four hours, but it led to a miracle of science, courtesy of Laiken’s blood and Monq’s brilliance, Or so they believed.
Certainly the advent of a vaccine that would cure the vampire virus was heralded as the most important development in Black Swan history and none of them doubted it. Why would they? It seemed that centuries of dedication would resolve the vampire part of the organization’s activities with a feel-good win. Something no one would have ever thought possible.
It was The Order’s first ever cause for real celebration. Sol would never forget the slogan that popped up right away. “Shoot to cure.”