Off The Grid (Kindred Series-3)

Off The Grid - 8

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.