Chapter Four
WINGING IT
STELLA watched all the guys leave Cort and Drake’s apartment with a sense of total disbelief from where she hovered by the ceiling. What the hell had happened last night? Granted, she had to admit she was grateful Cort was whisking the shrieking washboard player out of the room because Katie was about to shatter her eardrums. But the fact that Wyatt was going off in search of her, Stella, when she was right there in the room was a frustrating irony for a self-proclaimed control freak.
Never in eighty-five years of her undead life had Stella found herself trapped in bat form. Saxon did it all the time but Saxon smoked too much of the wacky weed. Stella never even drank, if you didn’t count the last two nights, and she swore once she was walking on two legs, she never was touching the stuff again.
Stiff from hanging upside down off the chandelier all night, Stella took another turn around the apartment, doing a kitchen flyby in search of blood to drink. It seemed logical to her, given the deep thirst she was feeling, that she was dehydrated, and once she had a pint, she would be able to morph back. But Cort didn’t have anything in his kitchen but a pile of mail and Victoria’s Secret catalogs. She tried not to throw up in her mouth. Sometimes it wasn’t a lot of fun being the only girl hanging with a bunch of boys—in fact, most of the time it involved a lot of eye rolling on her part. The question was why she stayed.
The real answer was she had stayed because she loved her brother. She loved New Orleans. She loved rock. And if it meant she had to organize their blood bags for them and soothe their ego-induced spats, she had.
Overcome with melancholy in the suddenly super quiet and empty apartment, Stella rested on the counter, her wings heavy. How the hell bats didn’t get tired of the damn things she didn’t know, but then again she’d frequently asked herself how men could stand walking around with testicles and yet they seemed pretty happy with them. It was just a matter of what you knew, she figured.
A snore cut through her musings.
She remembered there was a mortal guy in the bathroom. There had been a whole lot of yelling to that effect earlier. Apparently they’d left him there.
Perfect. Breakfast.
Stella flew into the bathroom and eyed the priest passed out in the bathtub. He didn’t look like a real priest. He looked too young. Too good-looking. Not that men of the cloth couldn’t be hotties, but she hadn’t seen any lately. You know, with all the time she spent in church. Stella mentally eye rolled herself. Settling on his shoulder, she went for the open ribbon of skin between his collar and neck and bit.
It had been a long time since she’d fed off a live mortal. It wasn’t really de rigueur these days in socially acceptable vampire circles. It was more for rogue types and newbies. But she had to wonder why they had ever stopped, because truth be told, it tasted divine. Salty, warm, delicious. It slid over her fangs and down her throat with satisfying ease. Though it wasn’t as good as sex with Wyatt, it was a close second, reminding her of the pure physical and emotional joy she’d gotten as a mortal child licking a stick of candy.
So good she didn’t realize that her donor had woken up from his snooze until a sharp pain hit the side of her head and she lost contact with his flesh, tumbling down onto his crotch. Yikes. Wincing as he started yelling and waving his arms, Stella was horrified to find she was morphing back. When the hell had she lost control of the ability to morph? But she clearly had, as last night and now proved. While she was grateful to be back in human form, she wasn’t loving that she was sprawled across a stranger in Cort’s bathtub.
Or that he had seen her transformation.
His eyes were huge, his breath coming in rapid little anxious bursts. His fingers inched up to his neck and when he pulled them back covered in blood from her feeding he said, “Holy shit.”
That about summed it up.
“It’s okay,” she said, in the most soothing voice she could muster. Every vampire had the ability to influence humans, but Stella’s had always been slight. She was a veritable weakling when it came to talents primarily because Johnny had turned her as a fledgling himself. It had never particularly bothered her because she had always wanted to live as normal a life as possible, but at the moment she could have used some memory wipe mojo.
Maybe he hadn’t really seen what had just happened.
“Oh, my God, you’re a vampire,” he said, gazing from the blood on his fingers to her and back again. “That is the shit.”
Or maybe he did. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Stella pushed on his very muscular chest and sat back away from him.
“You were a bat and you were biting me and OMG you just turned back into a beautiful woman vampire.”
Well, that was nice to hear considering her hair was a wreck from the wind and the dunk in the river. But it was irrelevant. “I’m not a vampire.”
“Yes, you are. Bite me, please, Dark Angel.”
Oh, no. He was tenting that priest robe, his eyes rolled back in ecstasy, his hand reaching for hers. This was creepy. “I’m not going to bite you.”
“You already did.”
“No, I didn’t. There was a bat in here biting you and I came and swatted it away. It flew into the other room. I hope your rabies shot is up to date.” Stella hauled herself out of the tub and away from Boner Boy. “Who the hell are you and why are you dressed like a priest?”
It was New Orleans. There was probably a festival of some kind going on. Maybe there had been a showing in the CBC of The Exorcist or something. So truthfully, the costume didn’t really matter. What mattered was that she was now realizing that she was at Cort’s with no purse and no cell phone and Wyatt was who knew where with both.
“I’m a dancer at Bounce.”
Ah, a stripper at the g*y bar. That suddenly made so much more sense, though she had to question the political correctness of his outfit. “You strip as a priest?”
“It was tarts and vicars night,” he said. “Tranny crowd. The tips aren’t as good, but hey, it’s a living. I’m Benny, and I’m straight. Who are you, besides my darkest desire?”
Stella sighed. Curses on all the vampires in pop culture. It made being turned suddenly sexy.
“I’m Stella. And you need to leave.”
Benny struggled to sit up, his erection no longer on full display, which was an improvement. “What happened last night? My head is killing me and I don’t remember anything after I left work.”