“Lucky for you, I am feeling fanciful tonight and will gladly offer you one of my own.”
“I could not,” she said a little too quickly. For if she did, she feared she would do just what their kind has been doing for centuries… kill. It was the damning of the fae’s existence, their highly restorative and delicious blood. But, if she did accept his so generous offer, than she would be more than sated, strong enough to defend herself, to fight alongside Tristan again. And, despite the fact that she was using Audric’s resources, he would be in her debt. Silly vampire ethics again.
Audric smirked at her all too obvious turmoil. Just the right words spoken could mean the difference between her total submission and her fleeing. “Please, pick either of the two… Use them in any manner you so desire, but fill that deep need.”
She knew what he was saying. Kill if she needed to. “Why?” Ash asked in a near whisper.
“I wish you to be at your fullest when you face Lucien tomorrow night.”
“To—tomorrow, Master?”
“Yes of course… do you think that after you have indulged and found your way to Lucien that you will have time to kill him and seek sanctuary from the coming day? Your sense of time is still skewed.”
There was more than three hours of night left, plenty to have a quick bite to eat, kill Lucien and then back to the hotel before dawn. That was unless… Ash’s lips parted in understanding, Lucien really wasn’t here, something Ash had been convinced of. Audric had her, she needed his assistance, no matter the cost. “I see.”
Audric smiled in a dark, knowing way. “Your time with the lesser beings has dulled your mind. I am truly disappointed in you, you used to be such a proud creature of the night.”
“Proud?” She stood, looking stiff and rightly annoyed. “You think I was proud once of what I had become?”
Audric’s silver eyes glowed yellow in the light of the fire, making him look sinister and sexy all at once. “As we all are.”
Ash was too tired, too weak to argue her sentiments at the moment. Indeed, all she could think about right then was the taste of fae blood on her tongue. She could smell them from here, the rich flavor of earth and cleaner things that the fae emitted. She said nothing as she marched across the room and around the corner to the other part of the large chamber. The two fae were on the bed just as she saw them earlier, only they were fully awake now, one on top of the other, kissing slowly, deeply.
Both men were nude under those decadent silk sheets except for an ornate leather collar encircling their delicate throats. The part of Ash she tried so hard to suppress wanted so desperately to be in that bed with those beautiful fae. She wanted to feel the caress of silk against her naked flesh, the touch of strong hands over her body pulling at her, the scent of fresh green things filling her sinuses, the tang of fae blood down her throat.
Ash swallowed hard and went to sit on the edge of the bed very close to the two men. She could all but taste them on her tongue. The one on top lifted his head to look at her from a mere foot and a half away. He blinked large green eyes at her behind heavy bleach blond waves.
“Welcome, madam vampire,” the fae said in passible French. This one hadn’t been with Audric long, he was a German import.
“True,” the Master vampire said behind her, making her flinch. “The other one doesn’t even speak. But I am able to overlook their poor verbal communication in lieu of their other wonderful forms of communication.” The faerie on the bottom, a natural redhead, held a hand out to Ash. Audric came up behind her and took her shoulders into his hands, leaned down to whispered into her ear, “Their ability to reach us.”
Instinctively, she took the hand outstretched towards her. The surge of life shot through her where his flesh met hers. She could hardly breathe, so overcome with emotion, with want.
Audric’s lips nudged the rim of her ear and a tremble tore its way down her spine. “Their… services.”
“Services, Master?” It was but a mere whisper, overwhelmed by her desire.
“Yes,” he breathed, making her shudder again as his fangs grazed her. Fingers smelling of mint and green things traced along her cheekbone from the blond one, drawing a line of sensation between the fae’s and vampire’s touch.
“Would you care for a sample?” Audric whispered into her ear.
Eyes fixed upon Audric’s serfs, she whispered her affirmation. “Master…”
11: Weak and Powerless
THE moment the door shut behind Audric and Ash, the woman from the sofa got up and started a slow stalk towards Tristan.
“I’m Nadine.”
He gave her his best poker face.
Her smile broadened as she tried to look meek stalking up on him like a tiger. “You’re not just human, are you?”
From the floor before the fire Julien snickered, kicking his feet happily in the air. When he caught Tristan’s eye, he lifted a single finger to tap the side of his nose. Tristan bristled at the shared secret.
Nadine stopped three very short feet away. Tristan shifted uncomfortably against the wall, eyeing her, fingers caressing the gun butt.
“No need to be shy, I don’t bite...unless asked.” She smiled wide enough to flash tiny fangs.
Tristan scoffed and looked away. He felt more than heard movement to his right and snapped back around to look at the others. The two previously hidden vampires had moved forward. Both men were shirtless, dark hair, dark eyes. One wore a pair of grey slacks, the other in white and both had on leather collars. As far as Tristan could tell, the two men and the woman, Nadine, were all fledglings. The only old vampire in the room right now was the child, Julien, and he looked content to just watch. Not that there was much a vanilla vampire could do.
Julien harrumphed. “Mind yourself, lad.”
The smaller of the two men, White Slacks, met Tristan’s eyes. Those dark eyes widened and boy’s whole body went rigid and then he was scampering across the floor like Golem to cling to Nadine’s leg. His whole body was trembling as he clung to her, lips pressed against the back of her knee. “He smells tasty,” he said in a low, raspy voice hinted with French accent.
“Now that’s just creepy,” Tristan muttered to himself.
Eyes fixed on Tristan, Nadine reached down and patted the clingy vampire’s head. “I know, Theron. I know.”
“Can I taste him?” Theron all but whimpered. Nadine looked genuinely startled when she looked him in the face. He blinked up at her with big, hungry eyes. “Just a bite.”
“Master said we are not to eat the guests tonight, sweets.”
A pathetic whimper dripped out of Theron as he dropped his head, hiding his face against her leg. His fingers flexed, opening and closing on her calf as if he were playing a flute.
The whole room froze, collective breath held as Audric’s voice screaming at someone in angry French filtered out. When it was quiet again but for the crackle of flames everyone breathed out, letting go of some tension.
Nadine gave Tristan a coy smile, taking in the unsure look across his face. “He must really like the way you smell.”
Tristan shot her the barest of looks, unspoken questions behind it. He didn’t want to talk to her, he just wanted to storm into that other room, get Ash and leave. Fuck Audric and his castle, they’d find Lucien on their own.
Nadine’s expression quickly shifted from quiet wonderment to a look he really didn’t care for. It was an, “I’m thinking dirty thoughts about you” sort of expression. Tristan cleared his throat lightly and stood off of the wall, uncrossing his arms.
“Though,” Nadine said, taking a step forward. Theron whined when she pulled her leg free of him. “I agree, there is something extra fascinating about you. You are special.”
Tristan immediately flicked the safety off on his gun, making Nadine grin at him. He wasn’t willing to pull it and shoot either of them for the threat of just touching him, but things with vampires always got out of hand fast.
“Master said we couldn�
�t bite our guests, but you can give us permission for a little sip.” She stopped within touching distance. The fingers of her left hand played along the bare skin of her right arm like she was imagining touching someone else. Like him.
“Don’t think so,” Tristan answered, sliding a step away.
Nadine followed the movement, keeping the distance between them uncomfortable. He’d just looked away, feigning disinterest when something touched his leg and his middle tingled. He jumped, trying to move away but the weight bore down on him. Theron blinked big brown eyes up at him from where he clung to Tristan’s leg.
“Hey pal, you wanna back the fuck up off me?” He tried to jerk his leg away, but the fledgling tightened his fingers into his leg until it hurt. Nadine smirked and reached for him. Instinctively, he tried to take a step back. At the same time, Theron gave his leg a little yank, throwing Tristan off balance. He grunted when he toppled over onto the cold stone floor. He managed to stop most of his weight evenly except for his elbow. Tingling pain shot all the way up his arm and into his neck.
“Fuck,” he hissed under his breath as he tried to get up with the vampire still clinging to him and pinned by the wall on one side. He was about to curse out the two vampires when something caught his attention. It was the fireplace behind Julien and the room beyond. He could see Ash and Audric. There were two other men too and they were all on a bed. “What the…?”
Nadine flung herself on top of Tristan, landing so that she almost knocked Theron off, and face-planted Tristan’s crotch. “That sounds like an invitation,” she said, laughing. There was a second, masculine laugh and he realized the other fledgling, the one in grey, had joined the dog pile, hands going up Tristan’s thighs as he moaned along with Theron’s whimpering and Nadine’s giggles.
Tristan had never felt the panic of claustrophobia before. But now, under three vampires groping at his body, he felt keenly on edge. Reaching for the gun under his arm wasn’t even a conscious thought for him. He’d only been training for the last two months to take on the vampires and going for his only line of defense had quickly become second nature. Within seconds he had the gun pulled and a round chambered. The throb in the elbow he smacked into the floor said his arm wasn’t ready to be used and his gun arm trembled against the pain as he aimed at the closest head.
“I said, back the fuck off, lady.”
Nadine’s eyes slowly rolled up to his. She gave a noticeable start when she saw the gun barrel inches from her face, but her smile never faltered. “No reason to be so violent. Not all vampires like to have such rough sex, sweets.”
Someone moaned and a hand grabbed ahold of his crotch. While his mind didn’t like the idea, his body wasn’t so sure. He was still a little worked up from Ash’s parting gift/blood play and his Uruwashi blood betrayed him to baser things, telling him that he wanted to have the vampires on him. Blood or sex, he wasn’t entirely sure. All he knew was that the Uruwashi, the vampire in him wasn’t interested in killing at that moment. The gun in his right hand started to shake, the left pressed against Nadine’s shoulder to keep her at bay. Turns out, even as a fledgling, she was stronger and she started to move up, smashing her breasts against him.
His breaths started to come in and out too fast. He had to get up. But he wasn’t willing to shoot anyone just yet. They hadn’t actually threatened to bite or maim him, they were just groping and smelling him. As creepy as that was.
“He reeks of the woman,” Theron’s shaky voice said from under Nadine. “But he’s a blood virgin, he doesn’t share...” The last bit was merely a whimper, but it held the frustration of a man overwhelmed with need, a man with a psychopathic break down eminent.
Tristan was going get himself bitten.
“You’re right, sweets. He is a blood virgin... those are the best though right?”
Theron’s shaky answer came as a hiss, “Yeessss.”
Tristan shuttered at the coldness of it, of the madness Theron radiated, infecting everyone.
“You’ll share with us, won’t you sweets?” Nadine purred. “All you have to do is say yes.”
As Nadine’s face came into view over his, as the hands below his waist griped, groped and pulled at his groin, Tristan lost his reserve. He didn’t have the right to kill them, but feeling overwhelmingly trapped and violated, he did the only thing he could think of. He hit Nadine with the butt of his gun right at the base of her skull, hoping to knock her out. “Get off!”
Nadine only laughed, never letting go of where she had balled the front of his shirt with her fist even as a cut opened on the back of her head to leak down warm blood. Tristan felt horrible for having to hit her, but was distracted by the warm hand tickling its way up his bare calf under his pants.
With a roar of anger, he started beating on Nadine and Gray Slacks, the two in reach. If it were just one fledgling, he could have stood, lifting him, or her, up with him. Tristan wasn’t exactly a small guy, but with all three he couldn’t even lift his upper body up.
He was trapped under three fledgling vampires with nowhere to go.
Nadine lifted a hand and caught his fist into hers. When he tried to rip it away, she tightened her fingers, reminding him of his shortcomings as a something less than vampire. “We won’t hurt you. Just give us permission... a little taste...”
“No. Off. Now!” His finger bounced on the trigger. He wanted to squeeze down so bad even if the shot only went up into the ceiling. Then he remembered, how could he have forgotten the little one? “Julien?”
“Oui,” the small voice answered.
“You’d better call these guys off me, there’ll be hell to pay if I’m bitten.”
Not missing a beat, he said totally deadpan in French, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English.”
Not knowing what the boy vampire said, but having a pretty good idea, Tristan scoffed and jerked his gun hand away from Nadine’s hold to aim at her head. She could see how close he was to pulling as she watched his finger dance on the trigger. She laughed and pulled herself up so that she was sitting on his waist, her face lowered to within inches of his. One of the two men started to undo Tristan’s pants and he panicked, bucking under the weight of vampire.
“Fuckers!” he screamed at a loss.
There was a crash as the door to the other room burst open. Everyone’s hands stopped mid-violation, frozen as the pile of Uruwashi and vampire looked up to Audric. Master didn’t have to speak a word, the anger coming off him was palatable. The fledglings all cowered. Theron shook the hardest of the three, a fear so strong Tristan could taste inside his head, cold and metallic, electric. There was a brief moment of disorientation as the fear threatened to consume him, own him and make him bow to it. That’s when his eyes found Ash.
“Tristan,” she whispered. A moment later she was kneeling at his head, looking down as confused and concerned as ever. “What is this?”
Tristan’s nose crinkled as the scent of blood found him. He didn’t even have time to wonder or worry about what’d happened in that chamber. All he needed to know was that she got the info on Lucien and that they could go now. “He tell you where Lucien is?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Great. Now tell theses assholes to get the fuck off me. Apparently they don’t speak fucking English.” Which, of course, he knew they did.
Ash looked up, meeting Nadine’s eyes over him, their noses almost touching. “Get off or he will shoot you.”
Tristan shut his eyes, sighing to himself, thinking that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. A hand found the front of his neck and his eyes shot open.
“Then he will have to shoot me.”
Nadine was bluffing a very dangerous game. Tristan was just about at his limit and might actually do it, despite knowing that they hadn’t committed any crimes worthy of Uruwashi judgment. That he knew of anyway.
Ash stood and crossed her arms under her chest, looking down her nose to the female fledgling. “You heard her. Shoot her.”
&
nbsp; All three reacted to Ash’s words, the silent telepathic warning that she meant those words and believed Tristan would really do it. Hands tightened all over him, the worst of which was Nadine’s hand across the front of his throat. Her hand was small but stronger than he liked as his air was cut off. The fledglings were afraid. He could taste it again, their fear, like a phantom mist in his head. He wanted to go easy on them, try not to kill anyone he wasn’t sure deserved it, but when he met Nadine’s eyes and saw the determination to hold her ground in them, he knew he had to. It was the only way to stop this.
He let out a long breath, his last with no new intake of air and pulled the trigger. Nadine’s shoulder exploded in a spray of warm blood and Tristan jerked his face away to keep it from pouring into his mouth and eyes. She screamed and tumbling back, fell off Tristan to curl into a ball on the floor. Grey Slacks gave a deep groan and started to move but then Ash grabbed him, ripping him up and off Tristan. She didn’t hesitate to subdue him with her fangs. Theron gave an angry cry and leapt up to land on Tristan’ chest. Tristan pressed the muzzle of the gun to the fledgling’s head. He was less than a second away from pulling the trigger when a voice brought them all to a startled stop.
“Enough!”
The breath left Tristan in a sigh. There was more than a statement in that one word, it was an order. He felt in in his body, felt it become part of his blood as it rendered him immobile to pull the trigger. Theron whimpered, unable to move away from the threat of death. He was young enough that a gunshot to the head just might have done him in.
Lounging could-care-less on the far sofa, Audric was mindlessly petting Julien’s curls where the child vampire rested his head in his Master’s lap. “You have made your point. I do not wish to see any of my scions dead tonight, though they deserve whatever you would do to them. I’m sure.” His tone said he was skeptical.
Well fuck him, he was the one with the unruly scions.
Ash gave a disgusted huff and shoved Grey Slacks to the floor, making sure to rip open his neck with her teeth as they came free. Unwilling to give up, the vampire started to reach for her leg.
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