A Drop of Red

by Chris Marie Green

  Costin, she thought. Stay with me, Costin. . . .

  She opened her mouth, deepening the play of tongue and teeth. Feasting, pulling hair, arching against him so her skin met his—her breasts on his smooth, taut chest.

  He pressed a palm against the small of her back, bringing her hard against his erection, where her bared sex rubbed against the covering cloth. She got the material even wetter by leaning back and grasping at the net again, wrapping a leg around his hips and grinding into him.

  His tip jammed against her clit, working her to a stiff pierce of anguish.

  She pulled at the net, rocking, riding.

  “Bite me,” she said on a groan.

  He took her by the hips and rammed against her even harder. “No . . .”

  Forceful, determined not to lose it to the monster he wouldn’t accept.

  She grabbed him by the hair again and brought them face-to-face. “Yes.”

  He stopped driving against her, but his tip was still between her folds, where she was drenched and slick.

  All she wanted was to feel the needled pop of his fangs, the moment of entry that always seemed to stun her for a second no matter how many times it happened. A bite gave her courage and purpose, filled her with brutal strength even as it floated her into a darkness that felt right at home.

  But every time he bit her, she had another chance to climb out of that blackness, even though she always found herself falling back in. . . .

  As he looked at her, he loosened his hold, no doubt seeing that dark spot in her.

  A tightened knot of panic made her grip his hair all the harder.

  “You want to, Costin,” she said, churning against him. “Come on.”

  His body clutched, wracked with ecstasy, and it forced a streak of unrestrained thoughts from him.

  She hasn’t changed from when we first met . . . still self-medicates by using another body. My body . . .

  But then he spoke out loud, as if his pained voice could make her forget what she’d just heard, make him forget that he knew she’d heard.

  “If I lose the last of my control . . . He’ll come.”

  Jonah.

  “He won’t take advantage of any weakness or openings,” she said, her mind still back on what she’d heard in his mind. It was one of those secrets Jonah had been talking about, one of those buried things Costin had been keeping from her. Now she knew it, and she wished she didn’t. “He knows I don’t want him around.”

  His body jerked, as if he’d been slammed.

  It was Jonah beating against those inner walls that kept him captive.

  Damn him. Damn him for putting more distance between her and Costin. Damn him for wanting to do more damage now.

  She pictured the darkness inside of that body, pictured Jonah trying to get out during a moment that should’ve been just between her and Costin.

  She pictured her mental fist, which she could pound in to that body, not at it.

  And she did.

  Bam.

  Bam!

  With each strike, Costin jerked, but she could still feel he—not Jonah—was still with her.

  Still.

  Costin.

  At the force of the assault, he dropped her, but Dawn only fell back against the net, catching at it.

  Grimacing, Costin pressed his fists to the center of him, as if to keep Jonah in during one last-ditch effort.

  “Costin?” she said.

  He doubled over, hand outstretched, hair covering his face.

  “Costin!”

  He looked up, searching her frantic expression, his own a mask of anguish as he pulled at his robe, then stilled.

  Panting, he felt around his torso.

  “Silent,” Costin said, coming to look at her with edged wonder. “He is silent and accepting that you don’t want him to emerge.”

  Dawn kept breathing hard, her mind shut. The skirmish had excited her, and she wanted to use the sexual energy to drive out the demons, the thoughts she’d heard from Costin.

  To show him that becoming her own self-fulfilling prophecy wouldn’t hurt her.

  In return, Costin looked unbearably drawn to the power she’d exhibited—power that he hungered for, no matter how hard he tried to contain it.

  She eased toward him, touched his cock.

  His eyes drifted closed as she stroked him, undid his fly, then reached inside to coax him out.

  He pulsed in her palm, engorged.

  Cupping her hand, she moved up, down. . . . “Costin,” she whispered, hoping, needing. . . .

  He shuddered, his fangs straining out just past his parted lips.

  Bite.

  The thought shattered open her mind, blasting into his.

  Even in his craving-muddled head, she saw clearly that he couldn’t resist, and he slid his hands under her bare ass and pulled her to him. But he didn’t target her neck—he went for her mouth, his barely emerged fangs scraping her lips as he consumed her with a raw kiss.

  His fingers dug into her cheeks, and Dawn moaned into him, absorbing the scratches and nips as she grappled with the net behind her, trying to get hold of it again. When she did, she gnawed at his lower lip, an animal asking for more.

  He obliged her by reaching back between her legs, where she was throbbing, slippery, ready.

  As he thrust two fingers into her, she opened her mouth on a gasp. They breathed together, mouth to mouth, his fangs stretching to full length as his body shook.

  “Do it,” she said, offering her neck.

  Instead of giving her what she wanted, he rammed his fingers higher into her, lifting her to her tiptoes.

  She grunted, wiggled her hips forward until the tip of his cock was ensconced in her folds again. Then she pulled at the net, flexing, and he growled, his fangs gleaming, his eyes all pale heat, his excitement building until all shared thought bled out to a field of white between them.

  As pressure expanded inside of her, she levered forward and latched her mouth to his neck, biting at him until he groaned and slipped his fingers out of her, then replaced them with one sliding, rough thrust of his cock.

  Choking on a tight moan, Dawn took up his rhythm, matching him drive for drive, white, hot, melting down to coat him.

  An endless blank consumed them as they worked toward a climax, swipes of red jabbing through the white of their minds with each hammering pound.

  Another slice—

  Another cut—

  Another—

  Then, with a gush, their minds joined in one flowing wound as they slid to the ground, clamoring for breath, sweat connecting their flesh.

  Bleeding into each other, out of each other . . .

  Bit by bit, they came down from their linked crash, their minds turning white again, his come—as lifeless as cleansed water—dripping down her thighs.

  She angled her neck to him one more time.

  In what felt like a final swipe, he thought, Love doesn’t hurt like this—

  I think it probably would, Costin.

  She’d cut him off before he could injure the peace she’d found in the white. But as he began to pull away, she brought him against her, holding to him even though she knew he wouldn’t bite her, wouldn’t give her what she’d wanted more than anything.

  Darkness over the blankness, a taste of something she shouldn’t want at all.

  Mostly though, she wrapped her arms around him because she was going out to poke at a vampire nest and see what came out from below the ground tonight, and she wanted to give him as much as she could before she might be gone permanently.

  It wasn’t much, but she tried.

  And when she did go, his eyes were topaz. Sorrowful, maybe even a little angry that the two of them weren’t able to function in any other way.

  But they were topaz.

  She would remember that later when they turned blue again.

  TWENTY

  . . . YOU SURELY PAY

  WHILE night shrouded the outside world, the gray ca
t licked its paws in a buried room far, far from the girls’ regular meeting area, which they had left empty in favor of their house beds for the time being.

  Well removed from the other tunnels, the cat’s small domain was dotted by lanterns that seethed light over the rock walls, where the bent shadows of hooks and blades hung from the ceiling. Although the cat could see quite nicely in the dark, light bred the abominable silhouettes that made the coming ritual all the more exciting.

  The creature rolled to its side, rubbing its face against the porcelain claw-footed bathtub. Lethargically, it gazed across the room at the drowsing Blanche, who rested in the depths of a silken cuddle chair. She had been charmed into sleep for over a day now, her black hair spread like darkness, her skin pale against the pink silk.

  So young, the cat thought. So pretty.

  Then it recalled the night before last, when Blanche’s limbs had entangled with “Wolfie”’s while they’d tumbled over the floor, playing. . . .

  And playing.

  The cat hissed, bolting to its feet.

  Too young. Too pretty.

  Yet when the creature looked once more at the shadowed blades, it was able to shake the envy off its fur. It arched its back, hissing again in preparation to will itself into a more human shape—the one the cat left behind whenever it came under the ground to watch over the much lovelier girls.

  As a cat, the vampire didn’t cast such an appallingly drab image in the mirror. As a cat, it could actually fool itself into forgetting the beauty it kept losing month after month.

  But the ritual was at hand, and it was finally time to shed this animal appearance. . . .

  The creature slipped and slid—elongated bones, elastic skin—into its humanlike form, stretching and adapting to a faded disguise that it used aboveground.

  When it caught its reflection in the oval, gilt-edged mirror across the room, it shied away.

  Yet then, ever vain, the vampire crept closer to the looking glass.

  It turned its face this way and that, then leaned closer, even while the glass announced every imperfection that had settled upon the cat-vampire since the last ritual.

  Not even the sustaining blood it took twice weekly from the human schoolgirls could keep it from withering into this dry thing. But that blood was merely for survival, and the cat-vampire required so much more.

  Touching its sapless skin, it bemoaned how these modern times, with the pollution and cancerous technology poisoning the air, took more of a toll than in centuries past, thus accelerating the need for rituals. Even constant healing could not battle the aging, and although the cat-vampire used much energy to appear as a young woman during the assumption of this “human” identity, the true destruction of its freshness—so hard earned, so nearly impossible to keep—saddened it. When it had first exchanged blood to become this vampire at twenty-eight years of age, it had been long past the budding beauty these Queenshill students possessed. Even so, the cat-vampire had enthralled many an admirer with its elegant pulchritude.

  That is, before that pulchritude inevitably wilted.

  Its fingers dragged down a face ravaged by day-to-day existence, by lack of the elixir it had begun to require twice a year.

  But as it faced the slumbering Blanche again, blood sighed through its veins.

  Skin dewed with youth and smoothness. Body lithe and graceful.

  Just what the cat-vampire needed to claim Mihas’s attentions again.

  “Wolfie”—what a name Mihas loved to be called, “Wolfie”—often delighted in repeating how the cat could never be genuinely young again. He had even accused it of hating these girls because they would be at their freshest for years to come, on the perpetual verge of womanhood, while the cat had been far from it for centuries. Mihas occasionally even mocked the cat-vampire because of how the Underground—his own personal paradise—contained a near army of the cat’s biggest rivals for his affection.

  Rivals who would not degenerate until centuries had passed . . .

  On the other side of the room, Blanche stirred in her sleep, just as Briana and Sharon had once done, as well as others before them.

  The cat slipped into a satin robe and then went to her. “Wake up, darling,” it said while caressing Blanche’s temple.

  It would not tell the girl about “Wolfie”’s visit to her careless, absentee parents in Paris. It would not relay the news about their subsequent deaths. All the girls—and the rest of society—would continue believing that Blanche’s mum and dad were still traveling the globe, yet with Blanche accompanying them now. They would never even know how their precious Wolfie had posed as her father and seen to the details of removing her from Queenshill.

  It would do no good to have parents sniffing around, ambivalent or not, so the Underground did what must be done.

  Blanche blinked out of sleep once, twice, smiling when she saw the cat. Her back remained turned on the implements that cast such demented shadows over the far wall.

  The cat-vampire helped Blanche to sit, then reached for an empty rounded glass from a nearby table. Slashing its wrist with a long nail, it let blood into the vessel.

  Blanche hungrily watched the flow. “Have my parents arrived yet?”

  “Not yet,” the cat said in a tone that it had adjusted era by era so as not to stand out as an ancient creature. Soft conversation always made the elixir-girls simpler to handle, easing them into the ritual. “They should be along soon. You just drink up, because it might be a night or two before you find a way to take blood without your parents knowing.”

  The cat healed its wrist while handing the warm glass to Blanche, who took it in her palms like round, ripe fruit.

  Still sleepy, Blanche closed her eyes as she drank, her long lashes sweeping over her pale cheeks, her red lips a splash of color against her raven-dark hair.

  The cat envied the girl once again, almost tasting her purity upon its tongue because the elixir was so close.

  Blanche drank until the glass was empty, her eyelids growing heavy because the creature had charmed its blood so it might put the girl into a deeper sleep than the one before.

  A sleep of no pain.

  As Blanche drifted off, sweetly dreaming of the reunion with her parents, the cat-vampire rescued the glass from the girl’s falling hands and caught her as she dipped backward.

  “Thank you,” it whispered, easing the girl to the cushions once again. “I do greatly appreciate all that you’re about to give me.”

  It stood, placing the glass on the table and allowing enough time for the blood to infiltrate Blanche’s. Then it moved to the hanging blades, a forest of scythes and surgical tools.

  It selected the shiniest of them all. A scalpel.

  As the creature’s pulse pumped, it walked to the bathtub, then tested the ankle harnesses dangling above the porcelain. It also made certain that the icebox behind the tub was at a decent temperature so it might hold all the treats that went along with the blood.

  A pure heart, a clean liver, fresh lungs . . . Sweets it would eat at its leisure throughout the night that would restore vitality and youth.

  Saliva flooded the cat’s mouth as it imagined the delicacies, as it laid the scalpel near the tub and stripped the robe off its body.

  Then it went to Blanche, scooping her into its arms.

  It brought her to the bathtub, where it peeled the uniform from the girl then shackled her ankles so she hung over the receptacle like something delicious to be plucked off a tree.

  Only then did the creature step into the tub, its skin throbbing as it allowed its pores to open like tiny mouths mewling and ready to suck in the blood and beauty.

  While lovingly pressing its mouth to the girl’s fragrant, warm neck—careful, so careful, not to kill her until it had dined on what it needed while the girl’s body fruitlessly self-healed until the cat sliced off her head—it saw the dried-up reflection of itself in the looking glass across the room.

  But when it tore out the girl’s t
hroat and allowed the freshness to rain down, its mirror image went as red as a poppy blooming in the new sunshine.

  TWENTY - ONE

  THE EMERGENCE

  The Same Night

  AS Dawn drove Kiko and Frank—the reconnaissance team—to Queenshill, she got her head into the zone.

  In the zone, she didn’t have to think about Costin. She didn’t have to dwell on any worst-case scenarios—only what she needed to do to track these vampires, to determine if they were part of an Underground, and to pack them away if they were.

  Then she could move on to the next freakish bloodsucking community.

  Kiko and Frank didn’t talk, either, maybe because they knew Dawn wasn’t up for a chat. Or maybe they were in their own zones.

  She steered onto the tiny lane leading to the school. The weather had cleared, and the moon stared down, glowing over the burnished green landscape on the one night it would’ve been nice to have full darkness. Then again, the illumination would help Dawn and Kiko see without the use of their headlights, so she wouldn’t complain.

  She pulled the SUV off the road a quarter mile from campus, hiding their vehicle among a nook of foliage. Then, knowing from the Friends that the property was gated at night and Queenshill had surveillance cameras that the spirits could cloud, the trio packed light weapons while getting an update from the Friends about the location of the Queen Bee girls.

  Afterward, Dawn relayed the content to Costin since he was back at headquarters and too far away for a Friend to efficiently communicate with, or to fly down there and give him the scoop herself. It was even too far to communicate using his and Dawn’s shared Awareness.

  “Those Queen Bees haven’t moved from the dorms since they finished activities for the day and met with house tutors to do schoolwork,” she said. “Sounds like our subjects decided to relax in the dorm’s common room after that and, interestingly enough, when they entered, the human students left, just like they couldn’t handle being in the same space. Right now, the girls are actually napping in front of the TV.”