Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [114]
“Hey,” I said, sticking my head around the door. “Thanks for waiting up for me.”
The lights were off, but I didn’t have a problem seeing Dmitri wrapped in nothing at all atop my sheets. It was stuffy in the room, stale and unpleasant, and I sneezed.
“If you’re sick, do me a favor and don’t spread it around.”
“Oh, gee. Hex you too.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and slipped out of my sweats, rolling over to lie next to Dmitri. He shoved me away. “Get off. It’s too hot.”
“Oh, gods,” I hissed at him. “Look, I’m sorry. I was tied up when you called and I came straight home to apologize. I didn’t realize that tonight was the night we both acted like twelve-year-olds.”
There was silence for a long time, and I listened to Dmitri breathe and smelled his sweat mixed in with beer and a little bit of soap. “I’m sorry too,” he said finally. “Just … I heard someone else’s voice, and I assumed…”
“Sweetie.” I took his hand in the dark. “My captain is a man. I work with four guys. Hell, even my manicurist has a penis.”
He stiffened again. “Was that your manicurist I heard on the call?”
“No,” I said, moving my free hand over his stomach, fingers scrubbing in small circles. I stopped, thinking about the desperate way Bryson had followed me.
“Who was it, Luna?” Dmitri sucked in his breath.
“It doesn’t matter. It was nobody I want to keep thinking about.”
He jerked away from me and sat up with a snarl. “Tell me who was fucking there with you! I can smell him all over your skin!”
I sat up too, rod-straight, and we quivered silently with our backs turned to each other. “It was David Bryson,” I said. “He accosted me in the locker room after I was washing the blood spatter from a suicide jumper off of me, and he followed me out to my car and I have had a really shitty gods-damned night, by the way, so thanks for asking and you have sweet dreams.”
I snatched my pillow and the blanket from the bed and started to storm out, but noticed just before I reached the door that my pillow case was decorated with blood droplets.
Those hadn’t been there when I’d left for work. “Dmitri?” I said.
He rolled over with a snarl. “Oh no,” I exclaimed, grabbing him by the shoulder and rolling him back toward me. “What on earth…”
His face was puffy at the jaw and his left eye was blackened and scraped on the orbital bone. The cuts were already healed over, but the old blood remained. I reached over Dmitri and turned on the bedside lamp, bumping his side as I did so. He hissed in pain when I brushed his ribs.
“Okay,” I said, as I surveyed the cut lip, the array of bruises on his torso, and fresh scars on his knuckles. “Don’t tell me. You went down to the slaughterhouse and beat up some meat, and the meat won.”
“Funny,” he muttered. “Real funny.”
Guilt sucker-punched me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see… What happened? I’m sorry we fought.” My words tumbled like gangly things, not sure of their legs. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled again.
“No big deal,” Dmitri said, throwing a hand over his eyes. “Just a misunderstanding.”
I got off the bed and walked around to his side, and stood over him with my hands on my hips, glaring, until he rolled his eyes. “Bleeding all over the house?” I said. “That pretty much defines ‘Big Deal.’ Who did this to you?”
Dmitri sighed. “I walked down a street I thought was safe, and it wasn’t. Territory had shifted. I got jumped.”
“By what, a Transformer?” I said. The bruising was bad. Dmitri was tough, and big, and had daemon-powered blood running in him, a bite that turned him from were to something else whenever he got too angry or too … anything. The bite made him black out and a host of other unpleasantries, but it also made him damn near invulnerable. This shouldn’t have happened.
“Six or seven weres from some pack running things on Cannery Street now,” he said. “They came up on me fast, had baseball bats, mostly. I think one had one of those police batons. Anyway. I knew you’d freak out so I thought we could discuss it after I healed.