But before—oh, it was very dangerous before. If he knew, if he understood what was happening to him, then this sweet child of a ruthless vampire hunter would recoil and run, and she would have to kill the most beautiful and important creature on earth.
Leo had told her how the father, Paul Ward, killed Keepers, and how this boy was the son of a lovely Keeper woman and this monster, part Keeper and part man.
Ian was almost pure Keeper. He was to be worshiped, to be adored, to be served, and she had not served a man in so long that she literally could not remember. She loved being at his service, longed to be filled with his child, hoped to flood his life with every happiness she could bestow.
Her love of this brilliant and muscled boy had displaced even her dream-husband, who waited for her in the mists of time and memory. She had left him beside the Fountain of the Hours in his land far away, which maybe existed only in her mind.
Ian, however, was here now. He was making love to Leo—and that was another thing, he was so sexual, so very capable, that the merest thought of him would make her want to go off deep into her cave, down the tunnels and across the black rivers, to a place where she could howl and claw the walls and mourn. The thick scent of Leo’s steaming yuni, the faintly hydraulic sound of their coupling, the faint glow of their rocking bodies—it was too much.
She just had to, had to. “Oh, Leo,” she whispered, “please forgive me.”
“Are you sure?” Leo said, warning in her voice.
She would take Leo with her into the deep cave, and Leo would use her tongue to produce orgasms in her, and she would bellow his name, Ian, Ian, where the boy could not hear. But it wasn’t enough, not the clinical suction of another woman. “We have to get him to feed,” she would say. But Leo never seemed to entirely agree. But obviously they had to! How could he come truly alive without it? As he was now, he was only a ghost. Of course, she wouldn’t know that. She had never seen a male Keeper in his glory, and thus could not know what a real man was actually like. She was satisfied with these narrow human wraiths, because they were all she knew.
Now came a moment that she had been longing for ever since she looked into his blazing, glorious eyes in the lobby of the Music Room. She was going to touch what she had gazed at with such longing when it danced to Leo’s tune. She lifted her hands, poised them above the length of the shaft. She could feel its heat.
And yet, she hesitated. She was lost in time, and the memories that came to her now were flickers only, of a husband she once had treasured, but to whom she had never yet given herself. There had been a wedding, but not yet a wedding night, in the romance of her lost past, or her mind.
Should she remain loyal to a dream?
She drew her hands closer, closer. “Come on,” he said, laughing.
Then he took them and pressed them against him.
Oh, the heat of it, the pulsing of it, the ancient dignity of it, and how lonely she was! She sobbed aloud, and he comforted her, laying a sacred hand on her cheek and saying in his soft, strong male voice, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.” Then, “Are you a virgin, Lily?”
She answered casually, not realizing how strange it must sound: “I don’t know.” Then she crouched between his legs and held it until the end was tight and gleaming in the tiny light, and kissed it, being careful to keep her tongue far back in her mouth. If she could drink him, perhaps the pleasure of giving him pleasure would be enough. But no, the thought made her frantic. She had to feel him in her, no matter the consequences, and she had to do it now.
Then Leo was there, on her from behind, working her soaked lips with that quick and efficient tongue. It felt good enough—abstractly so—and she let it go on while she kissed Ian’s miraculously erect penis and cried and cried.
Frantically, Leo tried to satisfy her. She could not, must not, take him. The second he was in her, he was going to know that something was radically different. Leo had explored Miri’s vagina, and Lilith’s was much stranger, lined with muscles that were almost as hard as cartilage. If Ian didn’t know what he was doing—and that was not in question—then he was going to get hurt in there, or at the very least become aware that it was very odd.
What would happen then was anybody’s guess. Incredibly, the Wards had raised him without giving him any information about vampires, let alone that he was himself a time bomb, wanting only a sip of living human blood to awaken the shadow that slept within him.
Lilith knew exactly what he was, and she was possessed to get him to eat some poor soul’s blood. He could be her lover, make her pregnant, even.
When he’d gotten on her plane, all Leo had been able to think about was Ian’s body. She’d been wild for him. She knew it was the magic of the blood—that he was, in the end, just another slack-jawed seventeen-year-old fan—but God, the blood was good at making her see past what was commonplace about him. This prosaic little bridge-and-tunnel person revealed inner qualities to her that quickly elevated him beyond the status of sex toy to another status entirely, that of lover.
She had never had a real lover. She had never known what it was to be unashamedly wanted by a man. He wanted her, though, wanted her so bad that he’d woo and sweat until he got her. He was sweet and gentle and generous, open-minded and kind and wonderfully, excitingly strong. And he was so in love that he would just fold himself around her and hold on for dear life, and it was so wonderful.
She had to fight to suppress her jealousy when Lilith showed interest. But Lilith was a great vampire, and she was going to get her way. Leo was just an episode. If she interfered, she’d be brushed aside.
Leo did not want to see him living the vampire life. What was it—a chance to outlive everybody you loved? Great. You’d get tired of life and fed up with life and still have to go on. Worse, you had to kill other human beings in order to live, and that was just plain awful, you never got over it. Even the serial killer—the night she’d done him, she was exultant: a guilt-free kill at last.
No damn way. He haunted her now, the same as the others. If he deserved to die for his crimes, that was up to a jury, not some girl who had no idea what he really was or had really done.
Oh, Jesus, she wouldn’t wish the vampire life on a dog.
Lilith was getting restless, trying to come away from her mouth. Leo worked harder. This could all be so beautiful, if Lilith could control herself. This could all work, somehow. Love would do it, it would make them whole, all three of them. But this was not the way.
Now Ian felt Lilith’s body squirming. Leo was—what was she doing? There was a strange sort of struggle going on in the dark down there. Lilith finally wanted to make love, which was great. But was Leo jealous or pissed or something? She kept trying to get down between their legs and sort of put herself between them. It was damned embarrassing. One thing to be watched—that was fun, it made you feel like a star, it was thrilling. But this—with her fooling around down there, her face pushing, her mouth smacking—this was way creepy.
“Take it easy,” he rasped. Then there was a shuffle, and for a moment he felt a very strange sensation, as if he’d been put into some kind of pipe, cold and hard. “Hey, what is that?” They had him in some kind of a tube, and it felt really strange. “What is that, man?”
Suddenly he was afraid. This was a very weird situation out here in the middle of nowhere in a damn cave, for chrissakes, in the middle of a trackless desert they’d had to cross for two days in a Land Rover. And now this strange thing was happening.
His heart started hammering: they were castrating him, they were crazies. He’d known it, felt it, they were crazies and they were castrating him and he was never gonna get out of this hole alive.
When kids disappeared, this must be one of the things that happened to them.
He reared back, struggling to get himself out of whatever it was, grabbing for himself and feeling—whoa. Whoa! He tried to stay cool. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck’s goin’ on with you, Lily?” Man, you sure can squeak, still, l
ittle boy.
There was another shuffle, a muffled cry from Lilith…and suddenly Leo was there in her place. The pain lessened as he was directed into her comfortable hole. Oh, jeez, this was right, this was just exactly right.
She went up and down, up and down, faster and faster, pinching his nipples as she rode him. Three strokes and he was boiling hot, he was contracting into a bright intense light of pure pleasure, and then he was over once, over twice, over and over and over.
“Wow,” he said.
“Wow,” she said. She giggled back in her throat, pumped him a couple more times, and dismounted. “Okay?”
A face came in the darkness, lips kissing lips. He whispered into the kiss, “I love you, I love you so….” Then he realized that the face was Lilith’s, which startled him for a second, but was actually okay. He let it stand. “I love you, Lilith,” he said.
And he decided to prove something to her. What the hell, he could, so he should. He got out of the bed. “Lily?”
Silence.
“Lily?”
A hoarse sound, hardly even a reply.
“I can’t see a friggin’ thing, so you gotta come here.” She drew near him, then; he could smell her soft, waxy odor. “Let me ask you girls a question. ’Cause, you know, I mean, it’s no big deal, but it’d help me figure out what I’m supposed to do around here. No offense, Lily, but are you a lesbian?”
There came a choked, inarticulate sound from the dark.
“Because I know—it’s okay—you two go off.” He coughed. “You don’t need to. I mean, I’m totally okay with it, you know? If you have, uh, some kind of a problem down below—like what I felt—was that you?”
He was almost knocked off his feet, Lilith slammed against him so hard. Her arms were like steel cables around his waist—it was odd, the way it felt—and her face was jammed into his crotch, and she was gobbling at him like some kind of—well, he didn’t know. But it was all strange again, and he didn’t like it.
Anyway, he had nothing left. So he had to stand there beside the bed with this poor woman chewing at his bag and crying. He put his hand on her head and stroked her hair, sort of gently pushing at her, trying to give her a message that this was not going to go down.
She didn’t stop. If anything, she got more wild, like a dog that’s getting pushed away from its food bowl. Finally, he lifted her head away from him. “Okay, listen, later I’m gonna go down on you. ’Cause I think you need it in the worst possible way.” She tried to go back, but he pushed her away more firmly. “Nope. You wait an hour, then I’m gonna lie you down and spread your legs and I’m gonna run one more pair of panties up the mast.” If he could—but he didn’t add anything about that. They’d cross that bridge.
“I adore you,” she whispered.
The husky shudder in her voice touched him, because of the tension of need that it revealed. He kissed the top of her head. She was so strange, a blond woman who lived in a cave in Egypt. She’d explained that it had been created by her father, who was kind of eccentric. Which was okay, except it was too bad that he hadn’t thought to include a kitchen. Which got him to a very important issue that had to be brought up.
“Look,” he said into the dark, “if we’re gonna not do anything here for a while, could we order a pizza or something? I ate the last of the wilted crudities from the plane this afternoon, and I’m seventeen, and anorexia isn’t my shtick.”
“Order a pizza,” Lilith said slowly. “A…piazza?”
“We can’t order a pizza,” Leo said.
“And light a damn candle. I’m sick of not being able to see anything.”
There was movement. Then a click of flints, which Lilith used with amazing ease.
When her face appeared in the candlelight, Leo gasped, and Ian saw why. He couldn’t stop staring, there was just no way. Lilith’s eyes were sunken; her cheeks were raw and soaked with tears. Her nose was dribbling, and her mouth described a sorrowing line. But it didn’t only make you think of sadness, this face, it made you think of something else. Because in those eyes there was a real mean gleam, and in the line of those lips a knife’s lethal edge.
“Look,” Ian said, “uh, why are you crying?”
She met his eyes with the glowing pits of her own. A sob racked her. Leo went to her, and she sank into her arms. Ian went, too—hey, why not? He held them both. They rode the dark together, the three of them.
Lilith broke away. This was not going well. Leo was making her absolutely furious. If the girl didn’t follow along, she was going to have to be controlled.
“Hey,” Ian said, “you know, if it’s some kink you’re into, Lily, and you, like—you know, you think I’m just a kid—kids are educated these days. I’m cool with it. I just want us all to be—you know, what we can be.”
“We go to Cairo,” she said.
“Hey, that’s cool. To a very good restaurant, I hope.”
“Cairo—it’s a long drive,” Leo said quickly. “Why don’t I go out to—there must be some little town—I can get us Arab food.”
“Sounds not good.”
“No, it’s lamb and rice and stuff. Really good.”
“Pizza would be really good. You’re talking about edible.”
“Maybe there’s a pizza place. There’s pizza places in Egypt.”
“We go to Cairo.”
“No!”
Lilith felt anger flare. There could be only one reason that Leo didn’t want to go to Cairo. She had to be famished herself. Lilith wanted food, that was certain. So Leo did not want Ian to feed. She was trying to “save” him from the great life that awaited him. There was a foolish and sentimental side to this human girl.
“Leo,” she said, “come with me.” She took her hand, very firmly.
“Hey, what about Cairo? Two for and one against, Leo. If you don’t want to go, that’s cool, you can stay here. Lilith and I are going, am I right, Lily?”
“In a short time,” Lilith said. “We must have a private moment.”
“You never stop,” Ian said.
Lilith would change Leo Patterson’s attitude. She would change it completely. But she needed privacy to do it, a place so far from here that not even the loudest, most awful of screams would echo back.
Leo whimpered as she was taken down first one flight of steps and then another, down into the depths of this horrible place. They came into a small room with thick, stinking air. Lilith shut the ancient wooden door. Leo was alone with her now, in the bowels of the earth. No scream, no matter how loud, would penetrate to the dreaming boy upstairs—as if he, in his pitiful state, would even hear it for what it was.
Lilith shoved her against the wall. “How dare you, you stupid creature! I ought to kill you.”
“I’m ready.”
“I thought you were so beautiful. And look at you, blooded by a Keeper! You should be grateful.”
“Grateful? You must be insane!”
“A grand life, power, wealth—it all comes from the blood, my blood. And you should be grateful.”
“What are you people, anyway? Where are you from?”
“The shores of the Red Sea.”
“Whatever the truth is, that’s not it.”
Lilith slapped Leo across the face so hard that she was momentarily in another world of flashing lights and sounds like cannons.
“Do it! Do it! My life’s not worth anything anyway! It’s hell! It’s been hell ever since—” She remembered Miri and gentle Sarah, and the love and trust she had found in their arms. She tried to go on, but she could not, she broke down and wept bitterly.
Lilith grabbed her and thrust her to the floor so hard it felt as if her knees had exploded. “Kneel when you speak to your betters,” she said mildly. “You should not seek to prevent him from discovering his true nature. It is his right to be an overlord to man.”
“Yeah, look what happened to all the other overlords.”
“He will be greater than either man or Keeper. He’s a new kind
of being.”
“He’ll have to slink around in the night killing people just like the rest of us. It’s no life, Lilith.”
“He is the work of God!”
“God has nothing to do with you or your unholy species or anything about you.”
“Be quiet and don’t display your ignorance. We do the work of God.”
“Then why are you getting killed off? God must not think a whole hell of a lot of you. In fact, God must think you’re real crappy workers.”
Lilith’s eyes became stone.
“Paul Ward is going to kill you. I give you a week.”
“Why is this, that he kills us, the father of a man who is mostly of my kind? Paul Ward bears my blood also.”
“He’ll kill you, and my guess is, he’ll do it so that you don’t quite die. That’s the way they do it—they leave you bloodless and dismembered.”
“I know what they do! Do you think I didn’t see? I have seen it, all of it—the horror of it, by all that’s holy!” She sprang at Leo. “Listen to me! You will cooperate. You will stop trying to turn him against me. Or you will suffer. I know how to torture like you would not believe. I can place you in unspeakable agony and leave you like that for a thousand years. Oh, don’t smirk at me, you wretched creature.”
“I’m not smirking at you, I’m scared of you! Please, let’s try to make an accommodation. We can live our way, and he can live his way, and we can all be lovers. Please, it’ll be wonderful.”
Leo felt herself lifted up, then penetrated from below by a steel fist. Something inside her was grabbed and squeezed, and the pain was so total and so amazing that her legs thrust out and her head flew back and her arms flailed wildly and she screamed and screamed and screamed.
When it finally ended, she was lying in a heap, gasping.
“I can leave you like that for a hundred ages, suffering just like that.”
“Oh, Jesus, Jesus…”
“You obey me in everything, and I will leave you alone. Otherwise—well, I have worse than what you felt, and I have no mercy. Remember that, I have no mercy!”
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 29
