Elusive Hero

by Joey W. Hill

  Please, I want to go back to the room. I want to be just with you. No one else watching.

  SS

  The way she held onto him when she was like this made his heart tilt. While it was pretty private here, he understood her request, even if he hadn't been so far into her head it was like having two different minds in his own, side by side. She always had to stay aware of her environment, of who might be in her space. She didn't want to hold onto any of that.

  He lifted her in his arms. Vampires were extremely dense, her weight more than he'd expected, but he could carry her as far as she needed. He'd do it or die trying.

  He'd collected the pieces of her swimsuit, putting them in the cradle of her body. This lagoon was on the fringes of the adults-only part of the island, so close to the BDSM public play area that nudity and sex play were tolerated. A guy carrying a naked female through it wouldn't cause any problems. Nevertheless, he was glad not to meet anyone along his way and he stuck to the darker, unlit paths, well familiar with them. He took the tunnel back to her suite and, once safely inside, he didn't turn on any lights. With bad vision, he was used to navigating more by shape and shadow, so that wasn't unusual, but it wasn't until he was halfway across the room that he realized he hadn't used the lights for a wholly different reason.

  He could see in the dark. Not fully, but like the grey light of dawn. Yet the room was fully dark. Was it his imagination, or did his vision seem sharper?

  He pushed that away. It didn't matter now. She was his full focus. This time he'd use a shower to ground and relax her. Going into the bathroom, he put her down on the commode and turned on the shower jets. Making sure of the temperature was a matter of lifting her hand, holding it cradled in his, and putting it under the spray. He felt it register, felt her desire that it be warmer, and accommodated. She was floating again, but basics like physical comforts seemed to be handled by a different department of the mind. He was bemused that he received that information not exactly in words, but in a shared satisfaction with the temperature. Fucking amazing. He could anticipate her every need not only by the instincts that had always served him well, but through the mind-to-mind connection.

  Dropping his swim trunks, he got her to her feet. "Here you go, baby. I've got you."

  Again her arms slid around him, held, while he moved them under the spray and closed them in. He combed his fingers through her hair, getting the chlorine off her. Despite all the excellent efforts to make the lagoon look like a real live lagoon, even down to the emerald green coloring, they still had to maintain it like a public pool to keep it clean. Particularly given what things humans did in it. Erotic, unforgettable things.

  He smiled at that. She stood quietly in his arms, let herself be turned and rinsed. Every once in a while her eyes opened and she focused on him. He stayed hand in hand with her mind to be sure she wasn't thinking, wasn't chewing on any worries. That was where he wanted her, though he saw shadows he wished he could dispel. They were waiting just beyond the fringes to cover her, to turn this into something she needed to worry about. He'd hold that off as long as he could, be her umbrella against the rain. No one had ever taken care of her. Not like this.

  Next on the list was drying all that long, silky red hair. He sat her down at the vanity, worked the towel over it, massaged her scalp. Picking up a brush, he began to comb it out. It was startling to see only himself in the mirror. He hadn't been sure what about vampires was fact or fiction, but the lack of reflection part was true.

  Even so, he could feel her gaze as he braided her hair, finding a hair band in the well-stocked cabinet which had everything from mousse to ribbons and curling irons. He suspected a vampire's hair dried like silk, but since sleeping on wet hair didn't feel good to anyone, he did the braid.

  As he fixed the band to the tail, he realized he'd been doing everything in the dark. He snapped on the shower light. Though it only cast a dim light over the bathroom, it still made him stop, momentarily frozen. He wasn't imagining it. He could see better. Not a hundred percent, but far better than before. Christ. And his hearing...he'd been listening to her inside her mind as well as to her voice, but now he realized he could hear the water dripping down the drain. He'd taken the hearing aids off for the visit to the pool and hadn't put them back in, yet he could hear the plop, plop of those drops, something he might have had trouble detecting even with the hearing aids.

  Her hand covered his and he looked down at her face. The shadows were there, but a poignant smile was in her luminous eyes as well. "I'm glad I could give you that, if only for a little while."

  She was worried it would affect him the way embracing her submission was affecting her. That it might be worse to do without it after having it again for such a short time.

  "Who says it has to be a short time?"

  Her gaze dropped and that tension returned to her shoulders. "Because that's the way it has to be, Garron."

  Once again, they were back to her not wanting to talk about it, the walls of her mind closing. He tightened his hand on her shoulder, drew her attention back up to him. He shook his head. "You don't hide from me, my lady. We talked about this."

  "Do you know with the third mark, a real one, I can destroy your soul, Garron?"

  "No one can destroy someone's soul, my lady. You can mangle it, shred it, but in time it knits itself back together. It may not be the same, but it survives everything, just like a cockroach."

  "You're so sure. But that was based on what you knew about life before. Now that you've felt me in your soul, you know what I'm telling you is true." Her gaze slid back down. "I've seen a vampire do it. Shred his servant's soul until she was writhing on the ground as if she were trapped in Hell with no way out."

  "Why did he do that?"

  "Because he could," she said quietly. "Someone at the dinner table, another vampire, doubted it was possible. He was proving it could be done, for their amusement and to satisfy their curiosity. It was early on, before I was an overlord. I had no power, no way to intervene."

  He saw how that had damaged her, how a hundred different things over the years had chipped away at her humanity, her belief that anything was possible, that dreams were anything more than wistful fantasies that had to be put aside in favor of survival.

  "There are many beautiful things about the vampire world," she said, softening that. "Amazing things. It's not all terrible. But the things that are terrible, are beyond nightmares."

  "Yeah." He leaned against the vanity, his stretched leg brushing her knee. "The bomb that blew up my team, blew up part of an apartment building. Families. I remember lying there, the medic working over me, and I was so out of it, but not out of it enough. Some things are so clear, I'll never get them out of my head. My hand passed over something in the wreckage, and I picked it up. At first I thought it was a doll's arm, but a doll's arm isn't soft like that, wet. It doesn't have tiny fingernails like an infant does. It's funny...that's the last thing I saw clearly with these eyes of mine until you gave me that third mark."

  As many years as she'd lived, he expected his lady had seen the carnage of war up close and personal. What he was telling her wasn't a new horror, but he saw it still had the ability to touch her. To ease it for both of them, he leaned forward, traced her cheek. "Gotta say, I prefer this view."

  She linked hands with him. "Garron."

  He shook his head. "It's a shitty world at times. It's also not so shitty other times. What's between you and me, that's a reciprocal arrangement, Master and sub. You have as much capacity to harm me as I do you."

  She didn't say anything to that, but he was done talking about it, too. For now. He slid a hand under her hair, massaged, while she continued to play with his fingers. The links of the choker clinked as he stroked, and she tilted her head toward him, responding to the stimulation. She was staring at the waterfall, caught in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. Dawn had come while they were taking care of her shower, and the rays were sparkles across the water. Since he
could see she wanted to go to it, he rose and lifted her again.

  "I've never been carried so much in my life."

  "Is that bad?"

  She shook her head, increased her hold around his neck. When he lowered her to the seat next to the miniature grotto, she hung on so he went to one knee by her, keeping his arm around her waist, the other over her thighs, hand curved over one. She remembered, loosening her legs so if he wanted to go farther between them he had access, but he held off on that now.

  Lifting his other hand, he closed it over hers to take it under the water, like he had in the shower, only this time they watched the sun warm her skin and he felt her wistfulness over that. "Magic doesn't exist everywhere," she said.

  "Depends on what you call magic. I see it pretty much everywhere."

  She closed her eyes. "But there are places where it can't exist."

  "Only if you refuse to believe in it." He turned her hand over, watched the water glittering off her wet skin. "Most of us wear different faces to cope with our daily lives, my lady. If we can wear the honest one behind closed doors, with at least one person we can trust, it makes the other faces bearable. Even helps us enjoy them more, see the good things about those different aspects of who we are."

  "Have you had someone you can trust?" She sought his gaze. "I never asked if you'd been married, or had someone before."

  "A couple relationships, but I was too caught up in my military career to give them the time they deserved. It's only since I've been here that I've realized it's time...to go a different way."

  She didn't want to think of other women. He detected an intriguing spurt of bloodlust at the thought, his fiery submissive. But other thoughts poured into her mind. She needed him to need her now, use her now. Make her feel like his submissive. Their conversation unfortunately had reminded her she would have to do without soon enough, making her even hungrier for everything he could demand of her now. She didn't want to sleep, even if the night's exertions and the encroaching sun were trying to pull her into sleep.

  He could oblige her, since apparently even a temporary third mark made his cock spring to attention at the mere thought of sex, but he was pretty sure that wasn't what she truly needed. He wasn't going to rush a damn thing, because for him, this wasn't a ten day proposition. He took her back to the bed, though, reattaching the tether to the choker. Feeling her yearning stare, he hooked the chain to the bed post.

  "Eyes down, my lady. No looking through my mind. One way only for now."

  He felt a spurt of resentment at that, but he knew how to counter it. "Show me attitude and you'll sleep alone."

  He rummaged through the plentiful supplies in the drawer and chose a fleece-lined cuff, another length of chain. He attached the cuff to her ankle and tethered it to the bedrail, slid himself up behind her.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Sleeping here, as I said." He cupped her breast, squeezed. "Making sure you stay where I put you so if I wake up in the middle of the day with a hard dick, my sub can take care of that. But go to sleep for now. I'll wake you if I need anything."

  "We don't wake up at the height of sunlight," she said testily. "Not without great persuasion."

  "I'll have to be persuasive. Or let you wonder what wicked things I did to you while you were out."

  She let out a sigh petulant enough to make him smile. Usually he'd punish that kind of behavior, but he could feel enough things roiling inside her to know it ran deeper than bratting.

  The way her eyes had glazed when he chained her had been distracting, to say the least, so he compromised. He slid his fingers between her legs, made sure she was ready for him. She was. He fitted his cock to her cunt, pressed inward until he was seated. He grunted a reproof as she squeezed down, rubbed her gorgeous ass against him.

  "Cut it out," he admonished with a slap of her thigh. "We're going to lie here for a bit, just like this. I decide when it's time for us to fuck. Understand?"

  She let out an erratic breath as he pinched a nipple, found it pebble hard. Shit, this was going to be as much of a punishment for him as it was a lesson for her. But he wouldn't be led around by his dick.

  "Tonight we're going to go the 24/7 area. I want to show you off as mine, around other subs and Doms. Would you like that?"

  "Yes. I think so." She hoped so. It was something she'd imagined, but he also caught a niggling reluctance her mind couldn't define. He felt some of the same himself, wanting to keep her all to himself. But he'd give her the full Eden experience. A throaty sound broke from her as he increased the pressure on the nipple.

  "You'll see all sorts of things there, everything from public sex to Doms playing chess with the board balanced on the bare back of a sub."

  "Have you seen that?"

  "Yeah. They hooked him up to a fucking machine, spread his arms out wide enough they could put a sub beneath him to suck his dick while they played. It was to see how long he could manage before toppling the board. After which they both fucked and caned him as punishment."

  Feeling her shiver, he dropped a kiss on her throat. "You like that, do you? Imagining yourself in his place?"

  "That's what I do with Fran. When she tells me stories about her experiences as a servant, I imagine myself as her. But she doesn't have access to my mind, not the way you do. It's the first time I've been able to let myself show...why I like the stories. Will you tell me more..."

  She paused. "May I call you Master?"

  "Yeah. From here forward, whenever you want. And whenever I demand it." At the wave of pleasure from her mind, he increased his hold on her. "Though I'll live to regret it, I'm sure. Whenever you call me Master, I'm tempted to give you any damn thing you want. For a price."

  She let out a half chuckle, groaned as he moved inside her. "I want to do everything to you I've ever done or thought about doing to a sub, you know that?" He felt her shiver again.

  "I'd stay so distracted I couldn't think."

  "That would be the point. I'd do a hundred things every day, big and small, physical and mental, to remind you that, no matter what you're facing, you belong to me. You have a Master who cares for you, who knows you, who needs you."

  She stilled at that, swallowed under his hand when it closed over her throat, caught the chain. "Do you like wearing this?"

  "Yes. So much."

  "We'll figure out something like it you can wear all the time."

  "Tell me other stories of what you've seen. Please?" He was scaring her, he knew. Taking her down that path she couldn't go, intruding on her fantasy of what was possible.

  "We have a water tank with a platform over it. A frame is welded to the platform so you can suspend or restrain your sub multiple ways. You lower the platform into the water until it laps at her chin. Just like water guns at a carnival shooting gallery, the tank has jet hoses you can aim at the sensitive points, to stimulate or make her come that way. They work with the tank dry or filled, so if a Master wants to do it with the tank empty, make the roar of the hoses against the glass part of the experience, he can. That assault on the senses can make the sub feel even more out of control."

  He saw her absorb that image, felt her muscles clench him even tighter. He took a steadying breath. He reminded himself he was trying to teach her about deprivation, the pleasures of waiting on his command, yet all he wanted to do was fuck her like he was a damn rabbit. He cleared his throat. "You can also fit her with an oxygen mask and take her beneath the water, deprive her of her hearing and sight. For extreme edge play, you take her under water without the mask, so she has to trust you to reverse the platform, bring her back up in time to breathe. Not all subs can handle that," he added.

  Vardalos didn't trust guest Dominants with it either, mandating that a Club Sin staff member handle the water controls at all time. Even if the visiting Dom was calling the shots, the staff member had override power. Garron had done water platform duty plenty of nights. Protecting the guests from themselves as well as from each other was as m
uch the job as anything else.

  "There's other edge play stuff as well," he concluded. "Plenty of methods to see how much of your sub's trust you've earned.

  She was feeding on his description, still milking his cock with those little involuntary contractions. He was just as bad, realizing he was pushing against her in a slow, short rhythm, keeping his cock moving forward and back in small increments inside her. She made a soft sound as he toyed with her nipple, keeping his grip over the choker on her throat to add to her passion.

  As hot as they made each other, trust was the crux of it all, wasn't it? She might be an amazing supernatural creature, but trust worked the same across species. He knew what level of it he wanted from her, but he had no way of earning it unless she let him leave the island with her. A chicken and egg dilemma.

  "Will you tell me more?"

  "No. I want your fantasies. Tell me every wicked thing you've imagined or feared a Master doing to you. I want to know what limits I can push, break and destroy."

  She quivered, but he saw it unfold in her mind and gave her throat a little squeeze. "Say it aloud, my lady."

  "It's one that can never happen, but I imagine...you commanding me to my knees in front of the entire Vampire Council. Just to touch my face, but it says...I belong to you, not the other way around. When it happens, everything in me...sighs with relief." She paused. "There were lots of times over the past century I thought it would be better to come out with it like that, and die honest. True to myself. Since I became overlord, I buried that feeling. At least until I decided to come here."

  The resigned way she said it gave him a spurt of fear, and he slid both arms around her, thrusting even deeper, earning a surprised gasp from her.

  "If I thought for an instant you would ever try to hurt yourself, Kaela, I'd never allow you to leave."

  "How would you stop me?" she said dully. "When it comes down to it, Garron, all of this is because I allow it, isn't it?"

  He thought carefully about that. He'd told her to stay out of his head, but when he did allow it--or she forgot, as he expected she'd do for a while out of long habit or to protect herself--she could see how he picked up and discarded thoughts like clothes until he found the one to wear. In the meantime, she'd know everything in his wardrobe about the topic. But maybe that was okay. If she was following his mind, just like he was following hers, it was like learning a new language, where you had to weed through the different statements, questions and random interjections to find out what was truly being communicated. To learn the nuances, what was true and what was chaff.