bed friend 

            The bed shifts and Remy grumbles at the movement.  Lena has a habit of moving around all night long.  All night long, she bends her knees, flexes her elbows, turns to her side, and turns to her back. 

            “Lena,” whispers Remy, her voice thick from the sleep she so desperately wants to go back too.  “Quit it!”

            “It’s noon,” says Lena.  “I’m trying to wake you up without touching you.”

            “What day?”

            A giggle.  “Monday.”

            “See, I’m not late for anything, but you aren’t in school.”

            Sixteen year old Lena Roma hates school; she’d rather be at the store or out hunting with Dominic and Remy.  They were still in the same town as eight years ago.  Ten years in the same town.  Dax, their college brother, is finishing up his last year of medical school.  Remy had stayed after that day, after she’d brought Lena back from the dead and the Roma had made her one of their own. There was no way to leave after that, no, she had to stay.  She was now family.  A family of unexpected hunters.  The runner had become the hunter, and while she still thought of Fritz, she knows he is safer with her out of his life.

            The Roma’s are hunters.  Demon hunters: or more precisely, they hunt Vampires.  When Remy had blown into town, sleeping with a different man every night, they had assumed she’d been a succubus.  She wasn’t.  No, that would have been too easy. 

            Remy was a Nephilim. A half-human half-angel who had never tapped into her potential powers.  Remy had been adopted into the family after saving Lena’s life and they had simply accepted her as she was.  Her human mother had died in child birth and her angel father, now fallen for having sired her; had been nowhere to be found and Remy has never tried to find him.  First there was a group home in her youth and then adoption into a great family.  Until things had escalated to the point where she felt she needed to keep Fritz, her remaining parent, alive and safe.  These thoughts shift into her mind as she struggles to get back to sleep, the only time that these thoughts now grace the playhouse of her mind.  The memory of characters dance on the stage now and she remembers the first time that she knew, without a doubt, that she was not anywhere in the realm of normal. 

            Remy is pulled from her thoughts by Lena.  Luscious little Lena.  Sixteen and lithe, she stretches next to Remy.  “Get up.”  Lena reaches over to trace her fingers up Remy’s arm but she slaps the fingers away. 

            “I don’t want to get up, I want to stay in bed,” claims Remy.  She pulls the sheet over herself, her naked form now draped in the deep purple sheet.  “Last night’s little excursion into the city left me damn tired, little Lena.  I hate recon.”

            “Then let me stay with you,” says Lena.

            “You can sleep here whenever you want, little Lena, but you can’t stay in bed with me.”

            Lena groans, getting up from the bed.  Remy wedges her violet eyes open.  The family had grown accustomed to her nakedness over the years.  She had to sleep naked; she couldn’t be confined by clothes all the time.  In later years, Lena had begun to sneak into her room.  Slipping under the covers and nuzzling close to the warm half-angelic body of Remy.  This too, the family had scoffed at, but now it was simply something that happens.  Victor, or Papa to the family, had watched them closely for the first few years that this began happening, but now it was just what Lena wanted. 

            Lena made no secret of her love for Remy, not as a sister but as more.  But she was going to be promised, arraigned marriages still happened in the gypsy world.  Lena said she didn’t care, she’d never marry, she is Remy’s and Remy is hers.

            That isn’t how Remy sees it.  She loves Lena.  But Lena can never be with her.  That can never happen.  She’s never spoken to any in the family about it.  She still brings random suitors to her bed on occasion, or ventures out of town for her fun and games, but she thinks they all assume that she too wants some lasting relationship with Lena.  Her carnal urges would make being in a relationship with Lena too difficult, but Lena doesn’t see it that way.

            “You should get up,” says Dax at the door, smiling at his sisters.  “You should go to school, Lena.  Day is half over but you can still learn something.”

            “Shut up, what do I need school for?  I can kill you twelve different ways with one hand tied behind my back.”

            “Ah but can you tell me how much the human head weighs?  Or can you explain to me how the heart works?” asks Dax.  His ebony eyes filled with teasing delight.

            “Shut up,” says Lena.  She stomps away into her room, presumably to get dressed and head to school, albeit late.

            Dax grins.  “Papa has a meeting with C later, he wants you to go with him, see if you can tell if he’s trying to pull a con on us.  Word is we are supposed to move, I don’t think Papa wants to.”

            Remy nods and gets out of bed, not bothering to cover herself.  She knows Dax has seen her naked hundreds of times and today is no different than any other day.  She dresses in jeans, a tight tee shirt that accentuates her breast nicely, and her boots.  All the while Dax stands there, watching her.  “What are you looking at, brother?”

            “My sister,” says Dax.  “When you come back can we talk?  Something has been on my mind since, well, for a while.”

            “Sure,” says Remy.  She digs under a pile of stray comic books and finds her knife.  She steps past him, letting her fingers drift down his face, shaven and smooth.  He never lets it grow more than a day, preferring the clean shaven look, the doctorly look.  “Go study, brother.”

            “Come find me in the attic later.”

            The attic is Dax’s lair.  Where he keeps his books and studies, where he sleeps and breathes and sometimes even takes his meals.  It’s his life. 

“Sure,” says Remy.  He moves to the attic stairs while she heads down the stairs into the kitchen.  “Lena gone?”

“Yes,” says Victor with a snort.  “It’s getting harder to get her to go to school every day.”

“Where are we meeting C?” asks Remy, putting on her worn leather jacket. 

“Diner out on the water front.”

“What’s he want?” asks Remy.  Her eyes meet Victor’s dark ones.  He doesn’t seem happy at all and that worries Remy.  He picks up his cup of coffee and shrugs.  “You have no clue?”

“Remy, you well know that C is the head of the family, while I run this little clan of bandits,” he waves to the room with his deformed hand, “I still follow his directives.”

“Do you think he’s clued in about the money?” asks Remy, stealing a slice of bacon from Victor’s plate. 

When Remy had joined their family, she’d also begun helping them financially.  Over the years she’d acquired a rather lucrative amount of wealth.  The demons she killed were usually wealthy and before she killed, many times she pillaged.  While she had been born twenty some odd years ago, she could sometimes simply tell what would be a good investment and what would not.  So, she invested and shifted the monies from place to place, as well as her shifting identities.  When she’d been adopted, so to speak, C had asked what she brought to the family and she’d told him: her kick ass ways and her Roma blood.  Another lie, Remy was no more Roma than a random stranger on the street, but birth certificates proved otherwise.  The money was a secret.

“I don’t think so,” says Victor.  “Lena turns 18 soon.”

At first this doesn’t register with Remy, then her eyes widen.  “He wants to arrange a marriage?  He hasn’t for the boys yet, why Lena?  I mean Dax is 26 and Dom is 23!”

“I’m willing to think so, yes.  Our numbers are dwindling and, well, Lena is stunning: that goes a long way.  I am sure C has more than one begging for a shot at a good-looking Roma.”

“She won’t go for it,” laughs Remy.  She gets up and paces the room. “You know she won’t!  She will wage war, Papa.”

“C can do what he wants, it’s our way.”

“It’s antiquated!” says Remy.  Anger rifles through her and she battens it down.  Her anger is not something she deals well with.   

“When were you born, Remy?” asks Victor.

She’s quiet. 

“The 1950’s?

Remy still refuses to say a word.  Her age isn’t really something she knows she remembers the cabin and the blood.  When she was adopted she’d been told she was 13, yet, she looks not a day older than 21 and is routinely carded at clubs.  She just knows that she’s alive.  This life, her life as Remy began over not all that long after she met the Roma’s.  She likes to keep Papa guessing about it.

“Remy, you didn’t have a name when we met; you had identification but no real persona.  All you did was hunt and fuck.”

“I’ll meet you there.”  She wasn’t going to go into this, no way.  “I am Remy Roma now and that is who I am, I was no one before I met you, before Lena.  I never knew the passage of time as you see it.  I’ll see you at the diner I have things to do.”

“No, you’ll drive me.  You’re my muscle, act like it.  Lena will do what she needs to do, if she’s to be married he will join our family, he will come here.  I have that right as a father to oversee the first few years of the marriage.  I think C will allow that.”

Remy’s jaw juts out and she nods.  “Then I’m going to go get the appropriate weapons.”

Victor lets a smile come to his lips and then it widens.  “That’s my girl.”

The two leaders walk to the middle of the diner, as Victor approaches he bares his neck, a sign of a lesser Gypsy meeting his superior, or his Alpha.  They shake hands and then take their places at a far table at the back of the diner.  Remy remains standing against the back wall, and a burly balding man stands a few feet from C.  They eye each other and Remy scans him, finding all his weapons, a gun, two knives and she is sure a set of brass knuckles in his front pocket.  How retro, she thinks. 

C.  Not Cee, but just the letter C walks with the air of a man who cares about nothing and the graceful swagger of a Pricolici.  He was a wiry man, older than Victor by at least twenty years, his eyes are ebony orbs, or at least had once been, now the milky film of cataracts glazes them over. 

“I’m impressed,” says C.  “You have been productive in this sliver of the world, Victor.”

Victor shrugs, putting that off to nothing.  “For the family.”

Remy’s gaze drifts over to the body guard, who keeps letting his fingers flutter to his belt, touching it, adjusting it, flittering to the back side of it.  He keeps checking his weapon and Remy wonders why.

“You have Dax in school here, don’t you?  I heard he does well.”

“We thought having a doctor in our brood might be worthwhile, not having to rely on others, instead having it all stay in the family.”  Victor’s hands move in his conductor’s wave, as if commanding a crowd and not just a table with one man.

They talk about business, about hunting, about how the plan of having a central base of operations and going out from there seems to work for them.  That having a business has also been financially better than roaming the countryside as gypsies once had. 

“Dom is a good hunter?  Has he sought out a bride?”

Remy’s head jerks slightly to the left, now listening more intently.

“Not as of yet.  We don’t get to see and talk too many of the families all that often.  I think Dom likes his hunting and isn’t in the market for a woman, at least not yet.”

“Then there is Remy here.”

Remy chuckles.  C’s face hardens.  “Something funny?”

“I’m not promised and I’m not going to be,” says Remy with a half-grin.  “I might be with the Roma family but I don’t follow that law, per say.  I’m not taking a man.”

Victor’s lips press into a hard line of colorless flesh.  He gives one quick shake of his head, but Remy ignores him.

C leans back into the cracked plastic of the red and black booth.  “Sit.”

“I’m good right here.”

“Sit,” orders C.  “Or I’ll make you sit.”

Remy sized up the balding man, he had over 100 pounds on her, but she had no desire to make a show of beating him down.  The bodyguard twitches.  Ah so this is what he’d been afraid of having to shove a woman into a seat?

“Remy,” says Victor hotly.

Remy sits.  Only because it makes Victor look good if she sits after he’s ordered her to.  Remy adjusts her leather jacket, her violet eyes narrow as she stares C down.

“The Roma family is a powerful bloodline, Victor.  It once carried the ability to shift, while other lines lost this many moons ago, your line was the last to be true hunters.  Our numbers grow smaller and smaller because none stay, none want this crazy life.  The outward life of distrust and the inward life of the hunt,” says C.  “You have one of the purest of lines and you need to expand, your boys are to have wives by years end.  Lena and Remy are promised.”

“The fuck we are,” growls Remy, beginning to rise.

Baldy reaches over and shoves her down but when he tries, he can’t.  Remy uses her forearm to push his hand away and grabs it, twisting savagely, dislocating his elbow in the process, snapping the tendons like old tree twigs.  “Never touch me.”  Her voice takes on a deep edge to it, darkening the room with its timbre.

The bald man drops to his knees but doesn’t scream.  C glares at her.  “You will release him.”

“You can have me, but Lena is exempt,” says Remy through gritted teeth.  “Or I pull and yank his shoulder from its socket then beat him with the bloody appendage; are we clear?  Then I might move on to you if I’m so inclined.”

“I make the rules here,” commands C.  His eyes slits of anger.

“I am a free woman even if I am of your blood, I was so before I came to Victor’s family and I am so now,” says Remy.  “I give myself over to you, but you leave Lena alone.  An even swap, you get something and I get something.   You want fresh blood in your lines you won’t get that from Lena, she can’t bear children.”

C shoots an angry glare at Victor.  “Is this true?”

Victor gives a single quick nod.  “Yes, she fell as a child and those organs were damaged.  Lena can’t have children.”

“You have a choice, make it, old man,” says Remy, pulling on the body guards arm; this makes him whimper loud enough for the waitress to look over.  Remy raises her hand to her and gives her a winning smile, and she looks away.  “I’m not going to wait around all day.”

“You agree to marry who I send?”

“Don’t care, Lena stays free, that is what matters to me.  You can get your fresh blood into the line of your choosing with me.”

“She remains in the family,” says C.  “She is to marry, even if her works don’t work, but on this I can give her time.”

Remy yanks hard and the body guard’s eyes roll back in to his skull and passes out.  His body makes a mail bag thud as it collapses to the floor.  “Little Lena does who and what she pleases, old man.  You send who you want for me.  Just remind him he’s not getting a pure bride.”

Remy stands, stepping over the fallen body guard.  Victor shakes hands with C; a hot blush refuses to leave his cheeks.  “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

anger

“You what?” asks Lena fiercely stomping around the room.  “You said you’d get married!  To a man, any man they send?  Have you lost your mind?  Are you crazy?”

Remy says nothing; instead she continues to whittle a thin shafted stake.  The knife a blur as the bark is cut away to reveal dark wood.  She makes them short, so that when she stakes someone not much of the shaft protrudes from the body so that a slow dying Vampire can’t pry it out.

“For me?  You’re going to have a husband so that I don’t have to have one?  Papa told me!  He told me, what were you thinking?”  Lena’s anger colors the room and her eyes blaze the green of the Pricolici.

“That you don’t want to get married?  You don’t want a man in your…”

“You’re right, I don’t want a man.  I want you in my bed, Remy,” says Lena stepping closer to Remy and she feels her breath catching in her chest.  “That is what I’ve always wanted and you damn well know it, but that won’t happen if you have a husband!”

Remy’s eyes close.  Oh her heart breaks because she does love Lena but Lena is her sister, albeit adopted sister but her sister nonetheless.  Just as Fritz had been her only father once; and MJ had been her mother.  Family.  “Lena, we will never be a couple.  It will never happen; you and I will never be together.  I have told you that, you knew this was coming.  This is the way of the family.  Hunters can rarely be made but they are born.”

Lena’s hands shake as she picks up a stake and points it at Remy, the tip touches her shirt and presses light into the flesh underneath.  “You can’t do this.”

“You can’t have babies, Lena.  That is all that C wants, more Roma babies.  The shame of that would have been worse than you, maybe, finding someone else to love.”

“I love you,” says Lena softly.  “As for babies you can’t have any either, Nephilim.”

The air grows cold between them.  Never, after the first few times of speaking that word when Remy had become part of their family, has that word been spoken.  “Never say that word again.”

“So you’ll shoulder the shame, the marriage, for what?  For me?” snaps Lena, pushing Remy’s shoulder hard, the contact an electric spark between them, “You took you away from me and I’m supposed to what?  Be thankful!”

“You are to live,” says Victor.  His frame fills the doorway.  “She did something honorable today.  Also, C saw her strength; saw what she is made of.  He’ll pick well, no street urchin for her, I am sure.”

“You’re mine, Remy.  I’ll never fall out of love with you because you were the one to pick me up when I did fall, I have a piece of you in me, and you know that!”  Lena thumps her chest.

Remy refuses to meet her eyes.  She just continues to whittle down the stake.  Lena storms out of the room, the stake thrown in a corner as she exits. 

“Remy,” says Victor, crossing into the room. He winces as Lena’s bedroom door bangs shut.  “Lena is right, you – you can’t have children, whoever they send will want that.  The research; the books we’ve read, all the stories, Nephilim can only have children with other Nephilim.”

“At least he’ll have fun trying,” says Remy, her eyes twinkle.  Victor takes the knife away from her.  “I know what I am, Papa.  And I know Lena loves me because in her is a piece of me and in me a piece of her soul.”

“We’ve never explored just what you are, Remy.  What if this man, this boy, this husband, finds out what you are?  There is danger in that.  If you’d waited I might have been able to convince him to let you marry Dax or Dominic.  C thinks you are of Rom blood, you and your hacking skills made sure of that.”

            Remy smiles, Victor doesn’t know her true last name.  He doesn’t know that she is of Rom blood.  “I’m not marrying a brother.  The same way I won’t sleep with Lena and be with her in that way.”

            Victor’s dark eyes look to the ground, his bare feet dirty from having walked in the newly tilled earth of the garden earlier.  “That is what Dax