by Aja James
He’d been hit again. And not by just any bullet.
By a vampire-killer.
The mini-torpedo-shaped bullet was still drilling through his flesh, determinedly moving toward his heart.
In the next split second, he was suddenly knocked flat on his back, Simca’s considerable weight pressing him down.
For a timeless moment, she stared into his eyes. Greenish gold drilling into azure blue.
I’m sorry, my warrior, she seemed to communicate.
A moment before she dug her dagger-like canines into his chest just as the bullet reached his heart.
Instead of exploding when the tiny missile found its mark, the bullet sluggishly changed direction, possibly deflected by Simca’s canines, and burrowed a fiery path through Maximus’ chest cavity until it finally stopped, quagmired in one of his lungs.
Maximus opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
The breath was still knocked out of him from the panther’s considerable weight on top of his chest and the staggering pain of his internal organs getting torn to shreds.
But his eyes were open and seeing, even though he could no longer feel his limbs, and all the sounds around him faded into background noise.
He saw and felt Simca’s body crouched on top of his shudder repeatedly as bullets tore through her hide, burying themselves into her flesh, instead of into his.
There was an infinitesimal pause in the shooting as their ambushers reloaded.
Simca pushed off of Maximus’ prone body, bleeding from multiple bullet wounds, and used the brief reprieve to launch an attack at the nearest shooter.
Time slowed to a crawl in the last moments of his consciousness.
Through a rapidly blurring vision, Maxmius saw the panther take one shooter down, then another. Saw the female FBI agent dash out of her hiding place, firing with deadly accuracy and efficiency from her handgun.
Blink.
More shooters felled. Simca was slowing down, her wounds sapping her strength, while the human female took aim of her next target.
Blink.
Maximus could no longer hear sounds. His sight was receding rapidly.
The one remaining shooter, perhaps desperate to take down his prey, perhaps because he had better visibility in the open, came out from behind the crates he’d been using as a shield, and opened fire with one machine gun in each hand.
A spray of bullets arched like a hail of fiery arrows toward the female agent, who was moving in a crouched zigzag closer toward the shooter, trying to aim for the best possible shot, as if she were down to her last bullet.
The other explosion of bullets rained down upon the panther as she bounded into the air from a pile of crates.
But her trajectory was not to flatten the shooter from above. She was poised to bear down upon the female agent, suspended in mid leap above the female’s head as if time had frozen.
Blink.
Finally, the agent pulled her trigger. The last shooter went down, his automatic weapons still firing as he fell. The agent looked up just in time to see a black panther pounce from above.
Her eyes widened in silent shock, but she stayed glued to her spot.
Through Simca’s eyes, Maximus took in her features with crystal clarity.
Just as the panther looked like it would knock her flat on the ground, its body unraveled midair, and a shower of stardust enfolded the agent in a blinding glow.
And then—
Nothing.
Chapter Two
2 nights later.
She looked into the bathroom mirror through a stranger’s eyes.
No, not a stranger. It was her own reflection staring back at her, after all.
She was Ariel Kyles.
Five foot six, one hundred thirty-five pounds. Black hair, green eyes. Left-handed.
Green eyes that were now ringed with gold.
Those intense, spiky lashed golden green eyes stared back at her as if her reflection in the glass was separate from herself. As if it were someone else’s reflection instead of her own.
She turned to look uneasily about her.
No, there was no one else in the bathroom. Just her freshly showered self. Why, then, did she feel as if she was not alone in this tiny, locked bathroom?
And why, even after just showering, did she still feel unclean? She had the almost irresistible urge to lick herself. If not directly put tongue to skin, then lick her hands and rub them all over.
She scrunched her nose with disgust at the image in the mirror.
So ugly. Pink and naked and hairless. Except for the top of her head and between her legs.
Unbidden, the image of a mole-rat flashed in her mind.
She let out a shaky breath and ran a hand through her haphazardly chopped, short black hair and continued to mentally catalogue what she knew about herself.
For, if she didn’t try to remember, she felt as if she’d suddenly lose herself. Like losing a wallet or forgetting your coat at a restaurant. Or worse, having your laptop stolen and returned only to find the hard drive completely wiped out.
Or re-programmed.
Could that happen? Could a person actually lose themselves? Misplace their soul?
She was Ariel Kyles. Middle name……
What was her middle name? Did she even have one? Why couldn’t she remember with certainty one way or the other?
She’d obtained a Black Belt First Degree in MCMAP when she used to be in the Marine Corps. Black belt in Kung Fu, and Master Black Belt in Krav Maga. She was also a chemical explosives expert. She could speak French, Russian, and Spanish fluently in addition to English, and graduated at the top of her class from West Point.
She had five scars on her body, and she traced them now in the mirror with her strange golden eyes—one appendectomy, two bullet wounds, one long knife slash and ten stitches cutting through her right eyebrow down the side of her face from a street fight gone bad.
Vaguely, she recalled that fight. Her enemies had been much worse off at the end of it—as in, stone cold dead.
She had no living relatives. Grew up locally in the Little Flower Orphanage until age six. After that, she was shuttled from one foster home to another, but none of them stuck. Until finally, she enlisted in the military at seventeen, having forged the parental consent as well as her identification papers. She’d actually been sixteen and a half.
Now, at thirty years-old, she lived alone in a tidy, uncluttered one-bed, one-bath apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She had no hobbies, no friends, and didn’t require much sleep. Twenty-four-seven, she was dedicated to her job, and she was so good at it, she turned down offers from other agencies on a regular basis.
She’d never taken on an assignment she couldn’t ace. Never met a target she couldn’t hit.
She didn’t need promotions. She didn’t need money.
The truth was, her employment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a front.
She was a double-agent, so to speak. Her real employer was Genomics Technology Incorporated, a top-secret, government-funded genetic engineering research operation.
On the surface, it was a legitimate medical and academic institution, producing white papers on its research, bloated with grants from both public and private sources to continue its cutting-edge work. In reality, its labs provided the governments of all of the G7 with genetically-enhanced humans to employ as assassins, spies, even politicians.
Ariel herself was the result of one of their experiments.
She’d been created in a test tube from the sperm and egg of parents she would never know. Her earliest memories were of endless days and nights in a small glass box, the better for observation by the scientists who watched over her progress and recorded her reactions to various stimuli.
Some of their tests were mild, some were excruciatingly painful.
She never had any feelings about it one way or the other. Besides her internal organs, she’d always felt strangely empty inside. A hu
sk with nothing to fill it.
Not anymore.
Now she felt everything. Emotions she never knew she had.
Urges. Desires.
Needs.
She felt too much. She was overwhelmed.
For the first time in thirty years, she felt awakened.
She stared unblinkingly at the image in the mirror.
She retained all of her memories as Ariel Kyles. But there was something else too. New memories now jumbled together in her head.
Millennia’s worth of memories.
Those eerie golden green eyes flashed at her in the glass.
She was suddenly starving.
Her mouth flooded with saliva as liquid warmth pooled between her thighs.
It wasn’t food she craved, and—lucky day—she knew just the male to service her needs.
*** *** *** ***
Maximus slowly regained consciousness to the feeling of sure, purposeful hands sliding and kneading across his naked body.
His eyes rolled restlessly beneath sealed lids that didn’t want to open.
He was so tired. He felt heavy and weak, his flesh and bones surrendering to the pull of gravity to stay horizontal and immobile on the soft surface of whatever it was he was lying upon. Perhaps a bed.
The fingers of his right hand twitched and curled, and he felt the smooth texture of cotton. He could also feel the weight of his body denting the mattress, carving out a shallow, cozy notch he didn’t want to leave.
Tired and sore. He was sore all over, especially in his shoulder, chest and thigh.
Mostly his chest. Everything inside was burning with a stabbing, fiery pain. As if someone had drawn and quartered him, left his insides to rot under an unforgiving sun before stuffing them back into his chest cavity and sewing him up.
But that wasn’t all. His heart hurt more than he could ever imagine.
It wasn’t just the searing pain that pulsed blackly with every belabored beat, it was a coldness at the core of him. As if the muscle that determinedly pumped blood throughout his body was long dead, rotted and hollowed out.
He’d lost a vital part of himself.
He just didn’t know what. He didn’t want to know. It would be infinitely worse if he remembered. He barely breathed it hurt so much.
But the purposeful hands distracted him from the gnawing, unrelenting pain, cool and soothing as they traveled leisurely over his flesh. They smoothed over his collar bones, gentled as they approached his pectorals and down his ribs, barely glancing his skin.
Something dipped into his shallow navel, warm and wet, making him suck in a breath reflexively.
He more felt than heard the rumbling purr against his thigh, as the hands firmly pushed his legs farther apart. And the owner of those hands came to lie between them.
More lapping and licking on the insides of his thighs, along the crease where his legs met his groin. The fingers of both those purposeful hands dug into his hips on either side—
As a velvety, wet tongue licked from his heavy balls to his thick root, up the long, vein-wrapped column of his sex to the engorged head of him that throbbed with exquisite pain.
On a broken gasp, Maximus opened his eyes and struggled upright enough on trembling arms to look down.
An elfin face looked steadily back at him through eerily familiar greenish golden eyes. Short black hair framed a ghostly pale visage. The large, thickly lashed, tilted feline eyes and the full red mouth made bold splashes of color amidst all that icy paleness.
“Wait,” he rasped out, his throat contracting roughly, his voice distorted from lack of use and a pervasive fog of exhaustion, when the elf opened her pillowy lips above the head of his cock.
The female tilted her head slightly to regard him, a questioning look in her eyes that communicated: Really? Do you really want me to stop what I’m doing? I’m about to give you the best head you’ve ever had.
Strange, that he seemed to read her mind so easily.
At least, that’s what he thought she was communicating. Perhaps he was mistaken. But he didn’t think so. Not when he heard her voice inside his own mind.
An eerily familiar voice.
Maximus braced himself unsteadily on his elbows and held her glittering green stare.
Her pink tongue darted out from between the full, wet lips and swiped slowly across the upper lip, then around the corner to the lower lip.
The motion reminded him strangely of a lioness licking her chops before digging into a wildebeest.
Or a panther wetting her muzzle.
“May I?” the woman, who was a complete and utter stranger to Maximus, said in a low, sultry voice, tinged with a growl, as if she didn’t appreciate his untimely interruption of a long-awaited feast.
Perhaps he was dreaming, Maximus thought, his mind hazy at best, delusional at worst. Perhaps this was a hallucination.
After all, it had been many months since he’d had release with a female instead of his own hand. Too many to count.
Finding himself in bed with a stranger wasn’t anything novel. He was a vampire warrior male. He was a solitary, bloodthirsty predator. One who controlled his base needs remarkably well, but nevertheless indulged them, long and hard and rough, on occasion.
He didn’t do relationships, beyond his comrades in arms and his…
Maximus’ mind shied away from that thought, as one might jerk a careless hand away from a hot stove.
He didn’t do relationships. Only females who Consented to his taking of their blood for a night of nonstop rutting, whose faces he never recalled after he was done with them. And since he always fucked from behind, he never had to take a good look in the first place.
All that was to say—looking directly into the face of the female who was about to eat his cock was a situation Maximus couldn’t recall ever finding himself in. His dreams were never this vivid. His encounters were never this…
Identifying and personal.
He blinked slowly, involuntarily signaling his consent, and pulled his body up slightly so that he could lean against the headboard to watch.
She licked her red lips again, her eyes glinting with something fierce.
Slowly, keeping her eerily familiar eyes locked on his, she closed her luscious lips around his pulsing glans and sucked strongly without preliminaries, making his hips jerk and his cock leap.
The vibrating purr increased in volume, and he felt it rumbling through her throat to wrap around his monstrous erection.
Dark Goddess! He couldn’t recall the last time something felt this good.
Her hands were strong on his hips, holding him where she wanted him as she slowly moved her mouth upon him, taking him harder and harder with each draw, squeezing him with exquisite pressure in the hot, wet recesses of her mouth, continuing to hold his slitted gaze.
Deeper and deeper she took him into her throat, the long, pale column of her neck working convulsively to accommodate his thickness and length.
But it was not nearly enough.
As much as she opened herself, it was anatomically impossible for her to take him all the way inside. The other half of his penis screamed at being left out, his veins standing in stark relief against the thin, vulnerable layer of skin over his stone-hard shaft.
Perfectly in tune with his body’s needs, her hands left his hips to wrap around the base of him that couldn’t fit into her throat. Her saliva and his pre-cum coated his entire length from root to head, and she worked the wetness all around him until a hot, delicious friction stole his breath.
She continued to work him with her clever mouth and ingenious hands as she maintained eyeball intensity, her golden green eyes piercing into him as if she could see everything he didn’t show.
All the darkness and need and savagery that he’d always held back, carefully leashed beneath a veneer of calm and control.
His hands fisted into the sheets beside him, but he didn’t reach out to tangle his fingers in her short, choppy hair like he wanted to
. Didn’t hold her fragile skull within the palm of one large hand and force her to take him deeper beyond deep, harder and faster and rougher until her teeth scraped him raw.
This was her turn, he strangely understood from her piercing gaze. She was taking her pleasure from him because she’d earned it. That she gave him pleasure in the process was a mere added bonus. She was the predator in this scenario, and he, the prey.
Not faceless. Not like any of the purely physical encounters he’d had before.
No, the recognition and possessiveness in her eyes told him she knew exactly who he was, and the way she refused to relinquish his gaze told him that she wanted him to know her too.
She was making sure he’d never forget her face and what she did to him now:
Her claiming of him.
As if she approved of his silent understanding and acceptance of the power play between them, she growled low in her throat and nicked his sensitive, swollen flesh with her teeth, making his buttocks clench and his cock jerk with pained pleasure inside her mouth.
She squeezed him harder now, both with rhythmic twists of her hands and increasing torque from her mouth upon him.
His own upper lip curled involuntarily to reveal the gleaming fangs that had punched through his gums, dripping with saliva, vibrating with need.
He clenched his buttocks again to give her warning and locked his hips.
He was too close. He wouldn’t be able to hold back much longer.
She only clamped harder down upon him, squeezing him tightly, still holding his stare.
Come. Her husky voice commanded in his head.
Come for me now.
His body obeyed mindlessly on a shuddering exhale, his balls drawing tight as they filled his shaft full of scalding hot seed that erupted in surging waves into her mouth.
She sucked him hard and fast through his release, swallowing everything he gave her, never breaking the seal of her lips around his sex, wringing him dry of every last drop.
Finally, his head fell back, his eyes slid shut, and the bone-deep exhaustion that weighed him down before took him under again.
But this time, the soreness in his tissues faded to a dull throb, as hot, soothing pleasure flooded his veins.
