Hello, Pretties

She had to fight the urge to whistle. This place was beyond chic, and they didn’t even care. Good money in… whatever the hell it was they did exactly. Great money. Probably because they were up against things that could kill them on a regular basis.

Aurora watched the cap sail across the room and still jumped when a person appeared as a result. Jesus, there are more of them. She looked between them (mostly at Matt) with an expression of ‘I am standing right here’ until the very excited one, Tristan, vaulted the couch. Twitchy or just bored? Hard to tell yet, but she shook his hand anyway. “Hullo. Aurora. If you’ll excuse me for a minute…” First door on the right. Right.

Nothing like an icy cold shower to hard reset a person’s brain. In and out, five minutes, dressed in clean leggings and a sweater, carrying her boots and her bag back into the front room. It was quieter there. “Please tell me you have another set of headphones.”

By the time she reemerged, Matt had his rifle dismantled across a towel on the kitchen table. He'd shed his mud-caked jacket and boots, but his own person came second to the weapon he worked on between sips of beer. He barely looked up at the mutant teenager, though his eyes did definitely move.

Tristan had gone back to his video game, but with one side of the over-ears cocked off his head. Aurora's question got a grin as an answer and he held out another set, along with a second controller. The colorful palette of an Overwatch match flashed across the screen.

kickassnympho:

Don’t be a dick, puppy. Mama’s hungry. Is this because I called you a good boy?

Two strikes now. Puppy and good boy are two strikes now, dove.

Aurora raised an eyebrow with a look of not-quite-concern. Skepticism, maybe. Now there was a pokerface. She would have believed it one hundred percent if she thought anybody could always be okay, but Kitty sold the shit out of it, so maybe it was true, at least partly.

She didn’t look around in the lobby. If you pretended you belonged there and everything was normal, people did likewise. That attitude didn’t work as well when you were covered in swamp mud and gods-know-what-else. But the hotel was swanky, she’d been right about that. It wasn’t their fault the elevator seemed much smaller once the doors shut. She didn’t want to look. She wouldn’t look. She shouldn’t look. She glanced up at Matt, all stone-faced and still as a statue. Was he used to this?

From there it wasn’t so far to look past him and, oh man, she should not have looked. Not-looking was easier than tearing her eyes away and trying to count the dimples in the metal of the doors. This elevator was way too small. Why wasn’t there some terrible muzak to distract her?

She resumed breathing when the doors opened, not having noticed she was holding her breath, and then Aurora just had to stand there a moment, a little dazed and pink in the cheeks. “I’m gonna go take a very cold shower,” she decided and forced her feet to move.

Matt snorted a bit, slinging his rifle from his shoulder as he walked past her into the rest of the penthouse. Unimpressed with luxury in general, it seemed, judging from the way he headed straight for the kitchen and laid his mud-encrusted weapon on the island, going for a beer next.

“Down the hall. First door on the right.”

With this gruff helpfulness out of the way, the soldier popped the cap and flicked it expertly toward the wide curving couch in the main sunken floor. An instant after it dropped out of sight there came a flailing of limbs and a messy-headed young man scrambled upright, yanking what was apparently very high-quality sound-cancelling headphones from his ears.

“Jericho!” His surprised elation shifted to the newcomer and an eyebrow arched. “And friend?”

“Houseguest,” Matt countered after a drink, setting his bottle down and beginning to dismantle bits of the rifle, uncaring of the flecks of mud and algae that fell on pristine marble. “Mutant houseguest.”

“Uhhh, are we cool with that?”

“We're cool with that.”

Stay with them, was she crazy? These three had given nothing but weirdness since she ran across them. Well. Weirdness and also excitement. But excitement that meant werewolves might also tear her to pieces. Then again, if she was safe anywhere in the city (which seemed unlikely now), it would be in company that was confirmed deadly. And just peculiar enough to be interesting.

Aurora had already made up her mind when her feet hit the pavement and she shut the car door. She had some clothes in her bag, enough to last a few days, and the hotel wasn’t exactly squalid. The fact that it had a penthouse and this lot were staying there proved it’d be nicer than going back to her apartment.

Best policy was to show them the monsters right away. Sure the little runts would have a much shorter blissful ignorance period, but that kept them alive longer. Didn't often make them productive members of society, but maybe the world could use a little less blind productiveness.

Ah, she'd gone and got philosophical. Anything to distract her from the pheromones in the air and magical hook in her gut. It was days like this she reconsidered having an incubus for back-up, especially with her “condition” as the shrinks so blithely put it. But Lucan was good people. For a demon. And remarkably controlled. Better than her even on her best day. Usually he only broke out this kind of sensation for playtime. It was so much more intense when he was doing it to survive.

Kitty blinked at the teen. Perceptive as fuck, or was her guard that far down after everything? Studying the girl a moment, the assassin canted her head and decided maybe it was both. She smirked and turned to lead the way inside.

“Pretty, I'm always okay.”

They moved briskly through the lobby. Thankfully it was late, but Kitty had found if you moved anywhere with enough purpose and speed, you could get away with almost anything. They got one or two stray looks, but the hotel staff had already had their pockets lined and didn't make a fuss or ask about ambulances.

Once inside the elevator, Kitty slipped the key in and hit the button for Penthouse and smoothly crossed to Lucan as the doors shut. Matt let go of the incubus without a word or a glance and stood nearer to Aurora, very blatantly fixing his gaze on the numbers rising in value above the doors while in one corner, his tiny boss had pinned the towering monster to the wall.

It was difficult for a regular human such as himself to hear and see what happened. It wasn't sex, but it was a placation of sorts. Clothes shifted just a little out of place. Whispered promises that could be called teasing. Lips brushed to lips, jaws, throats, chests. All of it very slow, almost cautious. Like approaching a wounded tiger.

Distal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, proximal phalanges, metacarpals, carpals…

Without quite eliminating the girl's teacher as a possible link, but moving right along, Kitty leaned forward a bit to catch sight of a street sign and relaxed with a little exhale. The hotel was within sight range at last. As she spoke, she got their jeep right up to it and into a parking spot.

“Listen, sweetie, I'd really recommend you staying with us until this is over. It's up to you, of course. We're out of immediate danger. But werewolves are majorly into scent and you were all over that little scrap. Their minds, you're with us now. I don't mind you hunkering down until we get rid of the problem, but you can clearly handle yourself and ain't nobody says you gotta trust a stranger. Especially ones like us.”

Kitty opened her door and hopped out. Matt had already exited and circled around the back, half-pulling Lucan out, supporting him on his shoulder. Kitty stood on Aurora's side, smiling a little tensely and a little tiredly.

Normally not so talkative, at least not about absolutely nothing, Kitty could appreciate the radio white noise and the focus that giving a stranger a ride entailed. Ride. Goddammit. Lucan laughed again, louder, like he could read her mind, and Kitty almost slammed the car into park to crawl into the back, but instead it gave her an idea and she let the fantasies run a little wild. 

At the very least her heightened lust on the air seemed to settle the demon a bit. She glanced sidelong at the girl, peeking in her peripherals at the feverish incubus. The slight film of sweat on him only helped her current plan.

Aurora was biting her lip, and she only realized it when that horrific noise appeared. What the blazes was she doing? It hurt. Not as much as finding out firsthand what had made that sound would. All… however many of them there were. She didn’t even consider protesting at the new plan, despite not knowing where they were going or how far that would take her out of her way or when she’d be back. Didn’t matter.

He sat there and said nothing, but the little noises were enough. He could’ve been bound and gagged and still sent those waves out on the air, provoking lust and snacking on it, greedy for more. Bound and gagged....

No, focus.

“Talk to me, pretty,” Kitty said, focusing on the road and the girl next to her and ignoring the entire back half of the jeep with difficulty. “What’s your name? What you doing in town? Or don’t answer that. It’s your business.”

In the backseat Matt shoved Lucan into the door with a grunting swear to stop it and the demon’s low chuckle made Kitty swallow a moan.