Afterlight - Elle Jasper [66]
I gave a little smile and a shrug. “Thanks.” I gave Eli a quick assessment, and he looked just as mouthwatering as he had before. “Not so bad yourself. Ready?”
Shaking his head, Eli moved toward the kitchen table and grabbed a box. He handed it to me. “For you.”
With brow raised, I gave him a skeptical look and took the box. “What is it?” I said as I opened it.
“Protection,” he answered.
I nodded. “This size box could hold a lot of condoms,” I said, grinning, and Eli chuckled. Once I got the flap opened, I peered inside and was surprised to see a flat black half helmet with a metallic purple tattooed butterfly painted on the side. I lifted it out and looked at Eli. “Cool. Thanks.” I grinned and gave an approving nod. “Biker chic.”
He shrugged indifferently. “No problem. I already took Chaz out. Let’s go.”
I stopped long enough to scrub the fur between Chaz’s ears, and we stepped outside into the fading daylight. “Where exactly am I going to fit on that bike?” I asked, knowing that Eli’s Silverback had a single scooped seat. I didn’t have a wide ass, but that was definitely a seat made just for one. Then I looked beneath the streetlight at his bike and noticed a single seat had been mounted on the back, and a set of foot pegs had been placed directly behind Eli’s.
“I had it done while we were getting pierced,” he said. “No room for you on the scoop.”
“Yeah, I got that,” I said, and walked to the bike and inspected the seat. I gave it a tug.
Eli pulled on a solid black half helmet, I did the same, and once he’d started the bike I climbed on behind him. The rumble of the engine hummed through my entire body as I settled my heeled boots onto the foot pegs; I wrapped my arms around Eli’s waist, and he took off. As he pulled out of Factor’s Walk, he turned left. I leaned close to him. “You’re going the wrong way,” I said, knowing the Panic Room was off Martin Luther King Boulevard on Williamson.
“You said we had some time to kill, right?” Eli answered, and continued on his way. “There’s something I want to check out first.”
As we rode along President Street, then Highway 80 toward Tybee, I nearly forgot that I sat clutching a nineteenth-century vampire and we were looking for others. Eli’s muscles flinched beneath my hands, and I could feel the ripped abs under his T-shirt. He seemed like an average hot guy riding a chopper; I knew he was anything but, and I found myself wishing hard that things were different, and that Eli wasn’t a vampire, and that Seth wasn’t becoming one. It was useless wishing and an utter waste of time, and yet I found myself constantly doing it. Pissed me off, really.
Highway 80 had its usual backed-up traffic, so it was slow going toward the island. The air was thick with pending rain; it carried that indisputable scent, and it even permeated, or enhanced, the heavy brine of the marsh. It was low tide—I could tell without even seeing the water. The rotting sea life was always thicker at low tide. Cattails and oyster shoals sat visible in the river muck as we crept along.
After we crossed over the main bridge to Tybee, Eli turned into the first subdivision and down several streets before stopping at a stilted house at the end of a cul-desac. An old white caddy sat parked in the driveway. I climbed down, and Eli turned the engine off, threw his leg over the tank, sat, took off his shades, and looked at me.
“What?” I asked, and looked around. “What’re we doing here?”
“There’s something you need to know,” he said, and beneath the streetlight I saw his eyes studying me.
I had no idea what to expect. “Okay,” I said, and waited.
“Remember when you asked if any of Preacher’s people had changed, way back when?” he asked. “And I told you a mortal quickening couldn’t occur unless they drank the blood of a vampire?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, not liking at all where this was going. “So?”
“Well,” he said just as slowly. “That’s not completely true.”
I could do nothing