by R. B. Fields
He remains still, his eyes on my face, searching, questioning, but I can take no more. I reach my hands down toward his hips and dig my nails into his skin. “Please,” I say. “Please fuck me.”
He stares me down, a look that says “no one tells me what to do,” and while I absolutely believe this is true, I beg him, again, again, arching my hips up to meet him, wanting every inch of him inside me.
Wanting to be his.
26
Markula
I’m powerless. I can’t smell the ones who are after us.
All I can smell is her.
The others were right. She is like a drug, invading my senses, the scent of her cloying in the back of my throat.
She has increased powers for Silas and Draynor, and each seems to become more powerful with every encounter. She is ready for me now, raising her hips, trying to draw me deeper, but I sense that the moment I give myself to her, the moment I allow her to take me fully inside her, I may lose myself to her forever.
And I am not one who loses.
But she’s so tight around the head of my cock. It takes everything in my power to kneel, unmoving, between her pale thighs. The candlelight plays on her porcelain skin as if even the flames want to touch her.
My eyes graze her side — her naked, uninjured side. Are you a witch, Dawn? Do I care?
She brings her fingertips to my arm — traces the horrid gouges I’ve put there — and stares into my eyes. Does she see the blood in them? The countless lives lost to my fangs? Will she be frightened of this, pull away from me? Will I let her? Can I?
“You’re beautiful,” she says again. “I just can’t get over how gorgeous you are.”
I balk. I know this is not true, not by the standards of any human — none of us are. We have the flesh of monsters. But when she raises her hand to my face, her eyes shine with truth, an honesty I’ve known rarely in life or in death. Even vampires will lie if they think they can get away with it — if they believe you can’t hear their thoughts. But this …
I lower my face to hers. Our lips meet, softly — tentative. She’s going to pull back from me, I know she is, but she snakes her tongue between my lips, between my horrible teeth. I can feel the subtle points of my fangs emerging from the gum line. They are but one moment from snapping together like a guillotine.
She presses deeper into my mouth, her fingers on my immortal flesh. Why is she not afraid? All humans are afraid when they look upon my face — all of them.
All except her.
I gaze into her eyes. And I realize I’m already addicted.
It is a weakness, it is, as it was for Silas, for Draynor. I no longer care about what she might do to my senses, whether she heightens my powers — that feels secondary to the exhilarating pulsing in my veins. For centuries I’ve been dull — dead. I am not, not anymore. My heart feels as if it is beating again.
I straighten my arms and rise above her. I meet her eyes.
I thrust myself into her as far as I can.
She cries out, a deep guttural moan of exquisite pleasure, and I thrust again, harder, faster, watching her face contort. She bites her lip, little whimpering sounds hissing through her nose, and I pause. “Am I hurting — ”
Her eyes fly open. “Fuck me, Markula. Fuck me. Harder.”
I do, oh god, I do.
She wraps her legs around me, pulling me deeper, deeper, and I wonder if I’ve ever been this deep before; if I’ve ever been so lost. This isn’t right, it can’t be love, it makes no sense, but there’s a deeper pull in my bones, an instinctual desire to keep her here with me. To never let her go. And then she’s spasming around me, massaging my cock with her pulsing, screaming my name, and I’ve never heard my name this way before, never felt it the way I feel it now — every pulse of her body seems to pump blood through my veins. I know this isn’t reality, I know I will never again feel my own living blood running through my chest, but I recognize the sensation. This is what the others were referring to — this power. This energy.
She is life.
I will not give her up. I will never give her up.
I stop moving, watching the blood throbbing in her neck, watching her breasts as she pants beneath me. I stroke her nipples, catching the hard nubs with my fingernails, and she arches her back. Arches into me. Wanting me, though she has seen my horrible face. Wanting me despite my ghastly teeth. So pure. So perfect.
I can’t look at her face any longer — my heart, my heart that no longer beats is moving, trying to rip itself from my chest.
I pull myself from her depths, and she gasps, then reaches for me. “Please — ”
“I have no intention of stopping, my love.” The words roll easily from my tongue, but I barely hear them. My love. Those words carry a sacred kind of power, and I have never spoken them, not even to my wife. She was intensely religious, thought she had to give herself to me because it was a sacrament of God, but she was terrified of me even in human form. I refused to take her. She blamed me for what happened next; what happened after. She died blaming me. She hated me.
But not Dawn. She gazes at me, her eyes hooded with desire, her flesh calling me, accepting me, open to me in all the ways another can be.
My heart — my chest.
I grab her hips and flip her over in one motion. I draw my fingers down along her spine and over the round curve of her hip, under her waist, skirting her belly button, until my fingertips find her center. Her clitoris is swollen with need, and I circle it, soft and steady until she moans and rocks back against me. I do not need to guide myself into her — our bodies are magnets, yearning to be joined, and when I thrust myself into her once more, it is like a dance that we never paused. She rocks against me. Her hair is like flowers in my nose. This is all that matters.
I fuck her, loving how hard she shoves herself back against me. I watch the pulse of blood in her throat. I smell her sweetness. I feel her, tight and wet around me. My mouth waters. My fangs sting against my gums.
I can’t take this anymore. I shove myself inside her as far as I can and lean down to test my teeth against her flesh, the soft spot between her throat and her shoulder. I tongue her skin.
She stills beneath me. Waiting.
I am vibrating with need. I want to mark her — to claim her as my own. Kain was right — she is inamorata. Beloved. Fated.
For all of us.
I wrap my arm around her ribs and lift her up until she is on her knees, my cock still buried deep inside her — she weighs nothing. I want to bring my lips to her ear, but I find I cannot pull my teeth from her skin. “Let me taste you,” I whisper.
She rocks her hips back against me, but upright as we are, she can’t get me as deep as she wants me — where she needs me.
“Yes,” she whispers. She’s panting.
I need no further invitation. I ease her back to her hands and knees and grab her hips. I slide myself all the way out of her, and then slam myself in to the hilt. She screams — “Oh god, oh god” — and I do it again, again, snaking one hand beneath her to twist her nipple. Her hands fist the covers. She cries out again, and then I feel her contracting around me in pulsing waves of pleasure — she’s coming.
“That’s it, my love. Oh yes.” It’s just as sweet as the first time.
Her blood will be so much sweeter.
She’s still quivering when I flip her over onto her back and ease myself inside her again. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back, and the veins in her neck pulse, pulse, pulse.
My fangs drop, my mouth waters, but I can’t bite her there — I’ll kill her if I lose control and tear out her jugular. I lower my face to the space near her shoulder.
I test her flesh gently, rocking my hips, and each time I thrust, I press my teeth a little harder against her skin. Control. Control. But I can’t take it anymore. I groan and let myself pierce her flesh — her blood flows into my mouth.
It’s not sweet. It sizzles against my tongue. I can smell my lips burning
. No, it can’t be.
I leap back, gagging as her eyes fly open.
A hunter. I know the taste; I’d know it anywhere. This is far worse than I imagined, and as she stares at me, her eyes wide and innocent, it feels as if I’m dying all over again.
I don’t know why she’s infiltrated our hive, but a vampire hunter has only one purpose in life.
She wants us dead.
27
Silas
“Who are you working with?”
Markula’s voice booms through my head as well as in my ears. I throw open the door to see Dawn on the bed, bleeding from the shoulder. She’s hurt. And terrified. But above the fear is something far stronger; she’s screaming in my brain with a sharp and unbridled fury.
Draynor runs to her side and scoops her into his arms as if prepared to protect her from Markula, but if our leader wanted her dead, he’d have killed her already. He wants answers, and his thoughts … I frown.
She’s shaking, but she relaxes against Draynor as he eases himself into the chair and grabs a sheet to cover her naked body. Her shoulder is bleeding freely, staining the cotton in a garish scarlet.
“A hunter?” I say, leveling my gaze at Markula. He’s already buttoning his pants. “She’d be repulsed by us, she wouldn’t even be able to stay in the same room.” I raise a finger as if ticking off all the reasons he’s wrong. “The other vamps came right at her — no vamp charges a hunter.” Two fingers, three. “And she didn’t heal the way a hunter would. That bloodline has very distinct traits, including a sensitivity to our powers, even just our presence — hunters can smell us the way we can smell them.” I lower my hand. “If she was a hunter, she’d have known what Mikael was on that bridge. I might be trusting, but I’m no fool.” I hear no deceit in her mind, either, not an ounce of hate, furious as she is at Markula’s accusation. She blinks at me from Draynor’s arms … she loves him. She loves me too. I’m not sure she even knows it yet, but she’d die for us the same as we would for her.
Markula snatches his black T-shirt off the floor and slips it over his head. “She lied to you,” Markula sneers at me. “She was out on that bridge to murder Mikael — she knew what he was, she had to. She already admitted she was there to catch a killer.”
“That isn’t what she meant.” I shake my head, his thoughts slippery, racing through my brain, most too fast to understand. But I hear enough to know he is not as angry as he’s letting on. I’ve never seen him frightened before. But he’s terrified now.
I try again: “If she was a hunter, if she’d trained as a hunter — ”
“She’s clearly trained, Silas. She was on her way to killing two vampires in that bedroom when I showed up. And she’s immune to us — to our blood. Who else besides a hunter could be immune like that?” His gaze darts her way, and the corners of his eyes tighten — grief? Panic. “I didn’t think it was possible for all the reasons you mentioned, which is why we didn’t entertain the possibility before. Yes, a hunter should be repulsed by us, she should have vomited up your blood when she took it in her mouth. But it’s true. And either she knows she’s a hunter, here for a reason, or she’s a pawn — someone else has bewitched her to dampen that side of her. But if that’s true, they can turn her on us any time they want.”
Draynor strokes her hair, but despite his efforts to calm her, Dawn’s muscles have gone rigid, her eyes bright with blue fire.
“If she’s a pawn, she’s a weapon,” I say. “We’re safer if she’s with us. Can you imagine if Mikael’s goons get their hands on her?”
“They’re going to, and soon,” Markula says. “I can sense them now, and we might only have ten minutes to — ”
“They’re not here,” I shake my head. “Not even close.”
Markula’s head snaps to the window; his nostrils flare. “I can smell them, Silas!”
“And I can hear them, but they aren’t as close as you think — it took me a few hours to get used to it. She … amplifies things.” I step closer to Markula, his craggy face all the more vicious-looking in the candlelight. I put a hand on his arm. “We can’t do it without her.”
“We can’t do it with her either, not like this.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Draynor says. His hand remains on her hair. “I guarantee none of them can hear as well as we can. They can’t sense us the way we can sense them. And if Dawn’s with us, she’ll likely dampen their senses as she did ours before we bonded, leaving our powers all the more finely honed. Our best option is — ”
“A sneak attack,” I say.
Draynor nods. “If we sit here, we’ll die. And they want more than her — they didn’t build an army of vampires overnight just to kill a human, regardless of Mikael’s death. She’s their excuse, but Mikael’s hive has wanted to kill us for years. They want to exterminate the last of our kind who see humans as equals.”
Dawn pushes herself to standing, drawing the bloodstained sheet tighter around her. “Whether they blame me for Mikael’s death or I’m just an excuse, they don’t know what I am — even we don’t know what I am. All they know is that they want me dead.” Use me as bait.
I hear the last part as if she’s spoken it. I know the others can’t hear her, but as she walks toward Markula dragging the sheet like a bloody wedding gown, I know he understands her intentions. She touches his arm, tracing his scars, and he flinches away, something I’ve never once seen Markula do. She reaches for him again, and this time, he allows her to stroke his craggy chest. “Use me to end this,” she whispers.
“Do you want to die?” he asks her.
No, Markula, don’t let her do this.
She shakes her head. “No. I’m not sure life has ever felt more precious. But I’ve come to realize that maybe I’ve always had something special about me. When they killed my mother, I felt them coming. But I didn’t save her. And now she’s dead — the only other person in this life that I ever loved until now. I can’t let you die too.”
The room goes still as Markula lowers his face to hers and cups her chin, hand so large it makes her look like a doll. And when he brushes his lips against hers, I know there’s no going back.
She is ours. We are hers.
Either we’ll all get out of this alive, or none of us will.
28
Draynor
I stand just outside the halo of light from the back door, staring out over the property, Dawn at my side — her hand is warm. Her muscles are tight as violin strings. Her belly is tied in knots.
I hate this with every ounce of my being, but we have no choice, not anymore. I can feel Mikael’s hive in the roots of my teeth — they are coming, fangs bared, ready to tear us all apart.
We can’t wait for them to figure out what Dawn is and come after us with greater numbers. It’s only been two days, and they’ve already doubled their original clan. And leaving here would be futile; they’ll find us again, and there are few locations where this plan will work — few places where the landscape and hidden crannies can be used to our advantage. Now is our best chance at success.
But we have to lead them where we want them. Or we’ll die.
The moonlit yard is a breathtaking palate of silver and black as if the world’s been painted with a single pot of metallic ink. The walk between the house and the pond is bathed in grey. The pond at the end of the path is an inky, shuddering black, cattails waving in the breeze. Beyond the reeds, enormous trees root in the shadowed grass on either side of the pond, and the pastures beyond seem larger, brighter, in comparison. But we are the ones who are exposed — woods glower from either side of the property. Our enemies can come from anywhere.
Silas has already taken his place at the tree to the right of the pond, between the water and the edge of the drive, his weapon and his body cloaked by the shadows. They are likely to have a mind-reader among them, but even Silas’s powers were stunted around Dawn — until we touched her. Until we made her ours … or perhaps until she made us hers. Semantics, perhaps. A
nd irrelevant if the rule does not hold.
We can only hope she will dampen the powers of the enemy vampires. We have no proof that she will — the vampires last night were able to find her, though they may have gotten lucky despite lowered sensitivity. But we’ve spent a good portion of the last centuries on the side of moral good. It seems the universe should be on our side as opposed to that of chaotic evil. I tell myself this, though I know that evil often wins.
I look upon her face, her cheeks kissed with gray as if she has already been drained of life. But her lips are a brilliant ruby in the moon like the ring I once gave to a woman — she died before we married. I turned shortly after. And though I knew the touch of many a woman before I turned, I’ve never once yearned for a woman’s touch the way I yearn for hers. It is the way one hungers for food — the way we need blood. If we lose her tonight …
I cannot even think it. I draw my gaze past her, ignoring the way the scent of her hair wafts into my nose and seems to reach the darkest recesses of my brain, lighting up places I did not realize were still alive.
Human. Vampire. Hunter. I do not care. If she chooses to hunt me, if she kills me, I’ll leave this world knowing I followed my heart at least once — damn the consequences. The water of the coy pond is a shining black hole in the earth, alight with the reflection of stars. Most vampires do not like water; it is a slow crawl toward death if we are trapped beneath the surface, so that should work to our advantage.
I inhale, trying to scent our attackers the way Markula does, but that is not my strong suit.
I do feel them. Close. My spine bristles. My ears prick.
It’s almost time.
Kain will remain here, at Dawn’s back. He feels useless, I know he does, but he has no abilities that will be a match for even the weakest of Mikael’s hoard. They are vicious, they are fighters, but they are not organized, and we intend to use that to our advantage. As for Dawn … we can only hope if one of them gets to her that a taste of her blood will force them off the way it did Markula; that it will stun them long enough for us to help. But while her hunter’s blood may make them stop biting her, it won’t stop them from killing her.
