Wicked as They Come (Blud #1)

“I don’t normally talk to strangers,” I said, arms crossed.

“And I don’t normally escort naked hoydens about the countryside,” he said. “But if you stand around here uncovered for too long, something even more dangerous than me is going to find you. Besides, I can’t take you home like this. It has to be respectable.”

“What has to be respectable? And where do you think you’re taking me?” I asked, but he was already shrugging out of his coat and holding it out to me.

“Go on,” he said. Then he grinned like a wolf, showing his teeth. “It won’t bite.”

I wasn’t too worried about being naked, but if he wanted me to wear his coat, that was fine. The air was chill and clammy, raising gooseflesh on my arms. I shrugged into the coat, and he buttoned it up to my neck. As he twisted the top button right under my chin, our eyes met, and I had to blush and look down. Too intense, his gaze. He was just a little taller than I, rangy but muscled, as I could see through the open neck of his shirt.

I wasn’t used to things tight around my neck, and I struggled to unbutton the top button.

“Mustn’t,” he said, his glove catching my hand. “That’s the most important one.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” I growled as he swatted my hand again. “What is this—Victorian England? No one buttons anything up to the neck, unless it’s snowing,” I complained. But I left the button alone.

“Victorian England?” he said. “Never heard of it. But showing your neck is dangerous here. Showing any skin, really. If it were anyone but me, you’d most likely be dead.”

He held out his arm, and for lack of options, I took it. His black coat was worn but thick and beautiful, fitted and darted in a way that made me feel curvy and pretty, even with nothing else on. His own shirt fluttered in the breeze, the scarlet waistcoat enhancing the paleness of his skin.

As we began to walk, I breathed in the scent of his coat. It smelled lovely, like berries and wine and something sharp and green. I got a little light-headed, drawing in the aroma.

He was watching me, and he chuckled. “Do you know how a man tames a wolf?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“You get some clothing you’ve been wearing for a while, and you toss it in with her. In the cage or the cavern, where she sleeps. That first one, she rips up, shreds it to nothing. The second one, she just mouths it a bit, gets a taste. Inhales, like you’re doing there. The third bit of clothing, she starts dragging it around, loving on it, sleeping with it. And then you’ve got her under your spell. She’s got the scent of you, wants to keep it around. She’ll follow you anywhere.”

“Are you calling me a wolf?” I asked.

“Are you calling me a man?” he said.

“What else would you be?”

He shot me a wicked grin full of pointy teeth. I started and then shook it off.

“I’m not scared,” I said. “It’s my dream. Nothing can harm me.”

“A dream?” he said, one arched eyebrow raised. “You think this is a dream?”

“I know it is,” I said coolly.

He grinned. “Sweetheart, you couldn’t conjure me if you tried.”

We glared at each other then, a battle of wills.

Motion caught my eye, and I looked down to see a small brown rabbit tenderly nosing out from the wood. It hopped and halted, hopped and halted, almost to us.

“Did you dream that?” he said.

“The rabbit? Sure, I suppose I did,” I said. “He’s a cutie. Probably represents my kindness. Or innocence. Something like that.”

The rabbit sniffed my foot, nose twitching, eyes bright. I smiled.

And then it bit me, sinking fangs into my bare ankle.

I shrieked and, without thinking, kicked it. It shrieked, too, tumbling head over fluffy white tail through the air and landing with a thump in the grass. When it finally righted itself, it turned to hiss at me before darting back into the underbrush.

Hmm. That was different.

I looked down. My ankle was bleeding from two puncture wounds. And it hurt. Bad.

“You’ll have to watch out for that one now,” the man said with another sly grin. “He’s got a taste for you.”

“Still not scared,” I said. “Just a bunny, fangs or not. It’s all in my head.”

“He’s got friends,” the man said. “And they’ll be back, and they all have fangs. And you’re bleeding. If you think you’re strong enough to fight off a warren of bludbunnies, I assure you that you’re wrong. You’d better come with me. Now.”

I wasn’t buying it. I needed to take control of the dream. I held out a hand with fingers splayed and focused my will.

“Zzzzzzzsssst! Pshew! Zzzzist!” I said. But nothing happened.

“What in Sang are you doing, love?” he asked.

My arm dropped to my side. “I was trying to shoot lightning bolts out of my fingertips,” I said. Then, quietly, “It usually works.”

“Told you it wasn’t a dream. Do you want to try flying, too?”

Sheepishly, I gave a little hop, but my feet came back down to the ground.

“No,” I said, feeling sullen and embarrassed and on the verge of outright panic. Things weren’t going at all the way they usually did. He should have exploded in a ball of blue lightning by now.

“If you’re done playing around,” he said, “we really should get moving before something smells that blood on your ankle.”

Again, the glove waited for my hand. I considered.

It was just a dream, whether or not the usual tricks worked. Might as well see where it went. He couldn’t be more dangerous than a pack of deranged, bloodthirsty rabbits. I took his arm again, and we began to walk down a strange sort of path formed of two deep ruts in the earth. They were about six feet apart and very straight, cut as if by a machine.

The sky hung too low over a landscape of bleak, endless grasses and small copses and woods. It made me think of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The air was hazy, almost smoggy, but that went with my dreams, where things were often obscured or blurry until I was right up on them.

As we walked, something began to form in the sunrise haze ahead, dark shadows standing stark against the pearly lavender clouds.

“That’ll be the caravan,” the man said conversationally. “My caravan.”

“Ah,” I said, unsure what to say.

The silence between us deepened. He seemed pleased about something, but I was suspicious of his good humor. There was something going on, something obvious that I was missing, that he wasn’t telling me. Squinting into the haze, I saw smoke rising from the caravan and tried to puzzle out the shapes.

“Is it a train?” I asked.

“You’ve never seen a caravan?” he asked. “Oh, love, you slay me. You’re like a babe in the woods, trying to pet the bludbunnies.”

His accent was growing on me, something close to British but with a touch of pirate growl. Very musical. I wanted him to talk more, even if what he said made no sense.

“Why does half of what you say start with ‘blood’?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer for a moment, just smiled at the nearing caravan. “I keep forgetting,” he said, almost an apology. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know what?”

“Anything, really,” he said with another deep chuckle.

OK, that was just annoying.

“Are you just trying to make me feel like an idiot?” I asked.

“I’m not trying anything,” was his response, but it was clear that his mind was elsewhere.

We were close enough now to pick out the individual features of a strange parade of wagons, all attached in a line. The first one looked like a cross between an old-fashioned locomotive, a brass pipe organ, and a chemistry set full of bubbling green liquid and black smoke, and the last one was a little red caboose. The ruts that we were following terminated in the wheels of the caboose, where a capuchin monkey in a red fez sat, looking bored.

I sniffed the air, but all I smelled was smoke. That was when I realized that I didn’t see a single creature, except for the monkey on the caboose. No horses or cows or pigs, as I would expect outside a circus, and no accompanying stink. Not even an elephant or a giraffe. Peculiar.

“I suppose I should tell you everything,” he said. “So you’ll know what to expect when you meet everyone. We should be safe, this close to the wagons.”

He led me back down the path to a little copse we had just passed. A wide, gnarled tree stump surrounded by leggy little saplings rose from the long grass, and he bowed to me and gestured to the stump.

“Milady,” he said.

I looked at the stump and tucked the coat behind me, quite sure that I didn’t want to sit my lily-white fundament on a pile of splinters and bloodthirsty ant larvae, even in a dream. Seeing my reticence, he reached into an outside pocket of the coat and pulled out a brilliant crimson handkerchief. And then a yellow. And then an emerald. And then a vivid violet. And then a live dove, which flapped toward the caravan in a flurry of feathers.

I laughed, and he grinned. “Abracadabra,” he said quietly. Then he spread the big fabric squares out until they covered the stump.

I sat with a mumbled “Thanks.”

As I settled myself, he started pacing, his high boots swishing through the grass.

“Where to begin?” he asked himself.

“The beginning?” I said sweetly.

“Yes, but which one?”

As I waited, a rabbit shyly lolloped out from the grass. I pulled my legs up onto the stump.

“Shoo! Bad rabbit!”

Looking up in irritation from the apparent war in his head, the man picked up the rabbit by the scruff of its neck and twisted its head until it popped. He threw the limp body back into the grass and continued pacing, deep in thought.

I was speechless. I didn’t relish another fang bite, but I recoiled from the thoughtless, swift brutality of the action.