Moon Rise

I could tell you about the long talk about our relationship that followed, but frankly, I don't want to bore you with the details. I spent the day in bed, shamelessly, with Naberius, as we talked like two souls who had known one another forever. It was a strange thing, this feeling. He intoxicated me with his endless stamina and desire for me, and intimidated me in such a delicious way that I was highly unused to. I felt lightheaded just being around him, to say nothing of how he made me feel every time he touched me.

We talked about my life, my childhood. He talked about his own "youth", if you could call his first life as Hades' guard dog as "youth". He didn't remember being young, exactly. If he ever was a pup, physically, he said, he didn't recall it, really. It's not like Hades was necessarily a father figure, to have celebrated the years of his birth like humans did their own children's. We talked, we flirted, we fucked. We negotiated.

Naberius was dead serious about how much a stickler for the rules he was, in some manners. It gave me a very clear, insightful view to his strange code of honor. Tapping phones? Not a problem. Murder? If the situation called for it. Proceeding in a sexual relationship where a power dynamic was in play without clearly set rules and boundaries? Not on the River Styx.

"If we do not practice safely with one another, how can we be expected to follow the rules with human beings?" He pointed out with a shrug. "And in the end, it keeps the wrong person from accidentally getting killed."

"I like that you specify 'the wrong person'" I observed dryly. Again, he shrugged.

"Aren't you at all worried?" I asked, suddenly, as the thought hit me, now that I could think clearly.

"About what?" He asked, with genuine curiosity.

"What others will think? If you're seen as being intimate with me? Even if they knew who I was... I'm still treating you like food. That you're feeding me; many elder Crypti will see that as a weakness in your make up. That you allowing yourself to be made prey."

His laugh was genuinely mirthful and his eyes flashed dangerously, his lips curling in a small, almost taunting smile at the idea of any of his peers suggesting he was weak for bedding me. He met my eyes, his still dark and full of pain for anyone who would be so reckless, and his hand wrapped in my hair, pulling it taught, stretching my neck as he drew me forward and then he laid his teeth possessively over my windpipe. The growl he emitted vibrated through my body, straight to every erogenous zone I had, and I gasped in surprised as an orgasm built and shattered over me instantaneously, unexpectedly, at this gesture of ownership.

He kissed my throat gently, and laved it with his tongue. Then, with his hands never leaving my deep red tresses, and my scalp tingling where he gripped me tightly, he leaned closely and said very quietly into my ear: "I dare anyone to suggest that I am the one who yields when they see how you moan when I touch you. How you shiver when I kiss you. How you obey me so very well. How could I do less than let you know you're a good girl by allowing you to drink of me now and again?" He winked at me. "Doesn't matter if we're here or in any other Realm, appearance is really all that matters. If you appear submissive to me, no one will question it. They'll assume with your age, and relative power that I am the one using you."

I pondered that, but decided, in the end, he was likely very correct. No one would think I was slumming it with him. And as long as no one knew who my parents were, no one would question his choices.

"Some things are the same wherever you go," I muttered. "No one ever imagines it's the weak woman doing the using."

"That's not what—"

I was reaching for a sip of water from the bedside cup I had, when Naberius went unnervingly still. His nostrils flared and his head tilted, just as his eyes narrowed as he went silent, midsentence. I held my breath almost instinctively; recognizing that the sudden change in his demeanor meant something had changed and had put him on alert. It was like watching a Doberman pincher suddenly perk up in the middle of the night. I could all but imagine his ears perking up in canid form.

He was up and climbing into his pants at warp speed. It rather surprised me how quickly and smoothly he slid from the bed, snagging the pants from the chair as he swiftly moved to the door to my master suite, putting the garment on as he went. In less than thirty seconds, he was at the front door, and I'm not entirely certain where he had unsheathed the vicious looking glittering silver blade from that was clutched in his grip, down by his side, out of view of whomever might be on the opposite side of the door as he swung up open, and looked down.

"Stay in there," he said in a short tone. It was so cold, I knew immediately something was wrong. His tone had been nothing but affectionate and warm with me, even when he was being dominant. I was out of the bed, not bothering to grab a robe, and at his side a moment later.

He growled and hauled me back against the door and inside the house, but not before I saw the blood covered ball of orange fur on my doorstep, its tiny paws and tail the only parts that remained free of the red sticky substance. A cat. A housecat.

The horrified gasp turned into a ragged sob. "Lina!" I could hear my pulse beating in my ears, suddenly, and I felt my vision sharpen defensively, all of my senses heightening with the rush of adrenaline. I could smell the metallic tang of blood in the air.

"Did I not say to stay put," Naberius demanded, almost shaking me. "I cannot protect you if you will not follow simple commands, Tempest!" But I was senseless. All I could see was that small little body. "It isn't the Cait Sidhe, princess. It's just a cat; an ordinary housecat."

"How do you know?" I demanded, quickly moving from horror to rage. "You barely looked yourself!"

"Her scent is all over this house," he said calmly, moving his hands to my shoulders and leaning down to look into my face intently. "I can smell the blood and the fur; it's just a natural housecat." He sighed. "Go put on some clothes while I take a closer look. That whomever left this here is already gone and I don't scent him or her nearby concerns me even more than the crudeness of this... gift."

I went back to my room, shaking. What did this even mean? Why a cat that looked so like Lina? Why kill it? Don't get me wrong... I'm not a pet person, really. When you live for centuries, do you have any idea how painfully short a pet's life is? To me, the adopting of a cat or a dog feels like growing to love something and losing them a month later. It seemed... madness to keep them. So, if this was a message, and someone was trying to move me the way they might a human, it was poorly planned. In fact, if it were a "message" from one Crypti to another, it seemed genuinely weak a message. Most Crypti viewed human beings to be more like pets. They lasted longer, and the same level of affection seemed to apply to those Crypti who fed on them. My own thought that they, as senescent creatures that could communicate their thoughts and emotions made them as valid a lifeform as us is what made me strange in the eyes of my peers. If this were some Crypti supremacy group... wouldn't they be more likely to threaten me with a human I knew and perhaps cared for?

I was pulling on a pair of black jeans and a loose v-neck emerald sweater when Naberius came in holding a blood-splattered paper. He held it by the smallest corner of the paper, careful to touch as little of it as possible. "Does this mean anything to you?"

There was one sentence on the paper, printed in simple black letters, in a blocky, almost ominous font, in all caps: "I WILL ENSURE YOU LOSE ALL THAT YOU LOVE, TOO."

I blinked at it, shocked. "I... I have no damn clue."

He nodded and took it from the room, grabbing his cell phone from the side table as he left. He hit a button on the phone and put the call on speaker. A coolly accented female voice answered the phone: "Yes, boss?"

"I need a team at Ms. Moon's immediately." Naberius said, setting the bloody note down on the nightstand while he gathered up his own clothing and began to dress swiftly, without preamble. "Have Remi include a full analysis kit and himself. We have a...body. A small one, animal. But it was left on the door with a note, clearly meant to intimidate or cause her to think her roommate was in danger."

"Copy, boss. Remi and the boys are en route and ETA is fifteen."

"Also, Chista, you're on speaker, and I wanted to make sure you and Ms. Moon had been introduced in case she reaches you rather than me in an emergency."

"Ah!" She sounded genuinely pleased. "Salam, Ms. Moon."

"Hello," I said, realizing her lovely accent definitely had a lilt to it that did, in fact, sound a touch Persian. I hadn't been off this content in some time, and I felt a wistful tug of wanderlust.

"If the boss is unable to take your call immediately," Chista said, her voice warm and friendly. It was vastly different than how she had spoken to Naberius. It was as if she seemed to know he preferred her to be cooly professional, and I was always swayed by a friendly personality. "I'll always be on standby to take it and make sure that you are ok. We're taking the threat to your safety seriously. There will always be someone within minutes of you should you need anything.

"I'm a former Goddess of communication," she added almost shyly. "I can promise you that your messages will always get through to me."

"Oh," I breathed, properly impressed. Our world was littered with faded deities, great and small. Naberius, himself, was one such creature. It only made sense that he would align with others like himself. Still, former deities were nothing to mess with, I often found. Even diminished, there was someone, somewhere who still worshipped them, and that gave them power. Dangerous power. "Well, thank you, Chista. And please... just call me Tempest. Or Tempi. All my friends do."

I don't know what it was about her that made me just want to be friends, but it was instantaneous, and I felt I could trust her. I was usually quick to mistrust such feelings, well too aware that too many creatures used your own emotions to hunt you. But usually that involved being in the same room with them, not over the phone. Damn, she was good. I was more than suitably impressed. A little afraid was more accurate. I looked at Naberius and his lips curved into a knowing smile and tilted his head as if to ask: "so what do you think of her?" in both a professional way but also in a smolderingly sexual way that made things low inside my body tighten and my breath catch.

"Tempest, then," she said and her tone once more switched when addressing Naberius. "ETA 10, boss." Naberius was readjusting his tie and my eyes fell on something I had absolutely failed to notice in my starving state earlier; the leather shoulder rig that had been immaculately hidden beneath the expensive suit... expensive, enchanted suit, it would seem. He met my eyes once more, seeing that I was aware of the weapons for the first time. He paused and said to the phone: "Thank you, Chis," he said, hanging up.

I said nothing as I sat at the foot of the bed, continuing to watch him dress. If he was looking for more than mild surprise, he wasn't going to find it. I knew who I was dealing with. Sort of. I think. Maybe.

Fuck.

"What's really impressive," I said casually. "Is not so much that I can't spot the guns or the knife. But that the katana is completely invisible,"

"Dwarves do good work," Naberius said with a shrug.

"I'll say."

"You are handling this remarkably well." He noted.

"What sort of princesses are you used to guarding, Barry?" I quipped.

His eyes barrowed and flashed dangerously. "Certainly none so impertinent."

The hours of having been in his arms earlier that day emboldened me to wink at him as I reclined back on the foot of the bed with a smirk. "I'm not going to be made to feel fear. Not by some idiots who seem to feel we need to dominate this plane like every other world the Crypti have ever inhabited. Not by some weird... stalker person. Not by my mother or my ex. Not by you or your secretary. And let's be honest, I'm not some neophyte vampire or newly shifted were; I'm several hundred years old, and a soul drinker; a succubus. If someone is trying to terrorize me, this is pretty weak."

At that, Naberius paused and seemed to look at me with a newfound respect. "That was my thought also. About the types of threats that you are getting. I still want it investigated by our people just in case. The last thing we want is the human police on this and to have it end up being something I have to handle, in the end. I generally have enough contacts within the human law enforcement machine to get things handled, or if not there, then within the criminal organizations in the area. But in the end, it is so much easier if we police our own."

"I can understand," I acknowledged, almost a little insulted that he seemed to think me so dense that I might not have come to this conclusion on my own. But I let it go. Maybe he'd only known some really stupid princesses? Not that I really bought this princess B.S., but whatever.

There was a knock at the door, a series of short, precise beats in a quick pattern. Clearly a code that Naberius recognized, he walked calmly to my front door, and opened it.

I stood and followed. Three men in dark suits similar to Naberius's but all with varying ties came into my living room, all with suitcases in hand. A fourth man, dressed in a pair of jeans and black cable-knit sweater followed them in. He had a well-kept goatee of dark hair and a matching unkempt mop of it upon his head. He had his hands in his jeans pockets and a pair of gold rimmed glasses perched on his nose.

"Remi," Naberius said with a nod. "I know this isn't your normal... client, but I thought it would be good to have you take a look."

Remi shrugged. "As long as they have a brain and eyes, I can take a look. I assume my..." he glanced at me. "'client' is under the plastic bag on the porch?" He jerked his thumb behind him to the door from whence he had only just come. He gave me an awkward smile. "Sorry, ma'am."

"She isn't my cat," I said.

"Still. Sorry it happened." He said no more and went back outside with one of the other men on his heels.

"You'll have to forgive Remi," Naberius said. "He's oddly sensitive for a Psychopomp."

"Oh," I said, understanding instantly. Psychopomps were creatures that led the dead onward. Every culture had them. Some were major deities, like Anubis or Thanatos, and some were simply minor reapers or soul harvesters. They all had their own unique abilities with the dead, and Naberius was right, most of them tended to very emotionless about the concept of death, as they were so immersed in it all of the time. Remi seemed genuinely saddened about the death of a house cat.

The other two Men in Black placed their cases on my dining room table, opened them and began unloading laptops, and what appeared to be an entire on-the-road CSI lab kit. I almost blinked at the expediency and efficiency that A and B (as I had begun thinking of them, since I didn't know their official MiB tags yet) displayed turning my small dining room table into a miniature lab and data processing center.

When Remi came in a moment later, he looked both baffled but strangely happy. It was such a peculiar look that even Naberius tilted his head in a way that any dog owner would recognize as confused curiosity.

"It was all done post mortem." He said simply. "The damage to her. Her last memories are of her head hurting for a long time, so much she couldn't stand it. Her owner took her to the vet. Then, her leg hurting because someone stuck her with a needle. Her human was holding her and her face was wet, but she was talking to her and telling her she was a good kitty. Then she went to sleep. That was it. I think she had cancer. She was humanely euthanized. She was a good kitty," he added, a tear falling down his cheek. Something tugged at my heart a little, and I felt warm wetness on my lower lashes in response.

"It's just weird, boss," said the MiB who had gone out with Remi to inspect the cat's body. "I'm sure you smelled the antiseptic on it. It's like it came here directly from the vet's office."

"I wasn't sure if it was used to mask any human evidence on it," Naberius said honestly. "Or, if it was, truly, one of ours who left it, if the antiseptic was used to scent-mask. Because if there is scent from the person who handled it; the owner, the vet, the person who defiled it and left it here, all it if is impossible to distinguish beneath the chemicals."

"As far as I can tell, there is a human hair in her fur, some linen fibers in her claws, but we won't know if that hair belongs to her owner or someone else until we analyze it." C (shall I just think of him as C, since we aren't really on a first name basis, here? I wonder to myself, a little annoyed), said holding up a pair of plastic vails.

I was feeling overwhelmingly claustrophobic, suddenly, and put on my small ballet flats by the front door, needing to just get away from all of this. I could feel all of them, and my anxiety was making my pheromones spike. None of them showed it on their faces; they were very professional. But Remi was the only one who wasn't trying to disguise a very male reaction to the scent of my anxiety. It was all just a little too much, even as freshly fed as I was. "Ok, so the kitty didn't have a horrific death. This is good. Someone's just a sick asshole but doesn't seem to have the balls to genuinely do harm. Also good." Naberius didn't look convinced. I glanced at my watch; it was just edging up to evening time. Had we really spent the whole day in bed? Yes, yes we had. And then it had seemed like the apartment was perfectly cozy. Now, it felt like I was being smothered.

"I suppose you'd protest if I asked to put in cameras?" Naberius asked dryly.

"Yes," I responded with annoyance. "I need to be able to breathe, Naberius."

"And I want to keep you breathing." He responded, under his breath, but I heard it.

"This is stupid!" I said, gesturing to all the people in my small apartment. "This is annoying, yes, these little... presents. But it is so not worth all this." The MiBs all paused, as if waiting to hear what Naberius would say, their breath collectively held. I imagine people didn't often question him. Or tell him his methods were stupid.

"Princess," Naberius said, quite clearly and calmly. "If it's a waste of time, it's *my* time to waste. And before you argue it's theirs also; I pay them, so their time is literally my money. Again, mine; to waste as I see fit. Perhaps this is some petty human quarrel that we needn't be involved in. But you cannot change who and what you are... and on virtue of that alone, it behooves us to be certain before we disengage."

I walked over to my purse by the door, tossed him my spare set of keys. "Have them lock up when they're done. I need some air."

"Tempest—" Naberius began, catching the keys without even looking at them and taking a step forward.

"I'm going to the Vixen," I responded shortly. "I need to breathe. You can come or not."

I didn't look to see if he thought about it. I didn't check to see if he wanted to. The dead cat had been a cold bucket of water over my head. I needed to shake him and the way he made me feel. He made me weak. He made me want to kneel and crawl and beg, and I needed to take care of myself right now. I did not need some big, strong man to save me.

So, I walked out. I got in The Cherry Mistress and didn't even look back as I took her away from my cheap little apartment complex, onto the onramp of I-5 and toward Downtown. And it was just before the exit on Mercer that I realized I was being followed. My heart beat began to pound in my heart, and my vision sharpened as I glanced in my rear view mirror. I changed lanes abruptly, as if I didn't intend to take the exit, and the car followed. At the last moment, I swerved onto the off ramp, taking a hard left as the lane broke away to descend into the city proper. I nearly ended up being sandwiched between a massive SUV and a semi-truck as I slid between them, certain there was no room for the driver behind me to exit against the commercial truck behind me.