He lay back on his seat, a towel under his thigh in case his wound continued leaking, drank ten more rations of sap, and slept for another two days. When he woke, he programmed his car with Draven’s tracer code and punched in his final destination.
CHAPTER thirty
Draven stopped and let Cali down from his back. She stretched, then bent and rubbed her legs, stepping from one foot to another. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Water is nearby,” he said. “We should refill our bottles.”
“Good, I’m thirsty.”
They made their way through the woods and a stand of smaller edge-growth saplings and emerged on a small bluff overlooking the water. It cut through the hills like a snake drawn in black ink, but it was no river. It lay still, nestled between banks of trees, its glassy surface reflecting the cold half moon and the stars, their concentration forming streaks of star-clouds across the sky.
“It’s beautiful,” Cali breathed. “I never knew so many stars were up there. Back in the city, there weren’t so many.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Shhhh.”
She was quiet for a minute before she whispered, “What is it? I don’t hear it.”
He shook his head and squeezed her fingers gently. After a few moments more, he withdrew his hand from hers.
“I will make a fire,” he said, frowning into the trees.
He did not have to go far for firewood. When he returned and lit the fire, Cali did not join him. She sat at the edge of the outcropping with her back to him.
He wanted to go to her, and he wanted not to go to her. She was only a sap, mutable and breakable and mortal, all warmth and flesh and blood that throbbed. And he was something more—something better. He was evolved, a Superior being with higher thoughts and ideas, whose body did not hold him back or control him entirely. He had one need, for the energy of life, and he wasted nothing. Nothing except his feeling for her.
But leaving her would be unconscionable. He could not do it. His offers to return her had been sincere, but he could no longer let her go. He needed her, wanted her, too much.
If only he could have her without the ultimate violation. If she’d allow it, perhaps he could have enough of her. And he could do things better than any man she’d known, let her have the pleasures his mouth could offer. But that would only make him want more, to come into her. And even a simple kiss was a violation. Her response had told him as much.
He’d kissed her, and not very well, either. He had pulled away without finishing it, without doing it properly. And what had he hoped to gain from it? It did not make him want her any less. It did not make her want him any more. And it did not change the fact that having her would mean the end for her, and in a way, for him. He would starve without her.
After a bit, he left the fire and approached her perch. “Have I offended you?” he asked, lowering himself to sit beside her.
“No.”
“Is it your leg?”
“No,” she said, staring out at the water.
“You’re sad?”
“Of course I’m sad,” she said, unfolding herself from her sitting position and rising to her feet. “I’m sad and I miss home, where everything was easy and simple and didn’t hurt so much.”
He stood and slid an arm around her back. “Is this all?”
“Yes, that’s all. And my leg hurts, and you know I’m bleeding again I’m sure, and my stomach hurts.”
“Come. I will do what I can,” he said. He carried her back to the fire and spread the mummy bag open. She lay upon it, resting her head on her hand and watching the smoke and sparks circling upwards to join the smoke and sparks in the sky. He brought her water, and she drank before lying back again.
“Would you like something to eat?” he asked.
“I’m just tired,” she said, raising her head and freeing her hair from under her shoulder. It spread across the black bedding in a disheveled, caramel-colored tangle that made him mad with desire.
He looked away from her hair, and instead took up her feet, one at a time, and loosened her shoes. Before pushing up the leg of her woolen jumpsuit to examine the remnants of her wound, he slid her shoes off, along with her socks. He pressed his thumb into the muscle and kneaded along it, feeling the tension ebb as she relaxed. When he had finished, he placed her leg gently beside the other. With her eyes closed, she appeared to be sleeping but for the smallest turn of her lips.
He knelt and took the clasp at the neck of the jumpsuit between thumb and forefinger. His eyes never leaving her face, he pressed with his thumb until the clasp released. She lay peaceful and smiling. His fingers slid to the next clasp, and his thumb released the catch. Still he watched her, and still she did not move. He undid another clasp, and another, and another, his breath coming quicker now. At the last clasp, he stopped, leaving that small barrier between himself and his desire.
Still waiting for her protest, he slid his hand inside. Her bare skin was so warm, almost hot, beneath his fingers. He hardly dared touch her. When his eyes returned to her face, he found her eyes open and sleepy.
“Don’t hurt me,” she whispered.
“I won’t,” he said. “I promise I won’t.”
His fingers shook as he began to move them, at first soft as a breath of cold air, then harder, kneading the knotted cord of muscle from her navel to the edge of her underpants. Each time his fingers brushed the elastic band, he drew in a quick breath, tortured by the nearness but not wanting to stop, wanting instead to slide his hand under the band and push it all the way down, and then curl his fingers under and push them up again. For a moment, lost in his blinding desire, he thought perhaps he could pleasure her without taking anything for himself.
He shook himself free of the thought and slipped his hand from inside her jumpsuit. She didn’t want him, not in the way he wanted her. If she knew what perversions he fantasized, she would be horrified. He was horrified, and they were his fantasies. It would be anything but pleasant for her, to have a Superior enact his perversions against her.
“I—I’m sorry,” he said, turning away.
“For what?” She didn’t know. She was so wonderfully innocent, so unlike the brazen women he’d been with, women who had been toying with men for a hundred years. Cali knew nothing compared with them. He treasured that quality, loved that she hadn’t been spoiled by love yet, and spoiled for it. Likely, she could still love with trust and innocence, and probably without calculation.
“For…not…asking you.”
“That’s okay,” she said, doing up her jumpsuit. “It felt good. The cold of your hands made my stomach feel better.” When she finished her clasps, she zipped the mummy bag and turned to the fire, her hand under her face and her eyes closed.
Draven sat, ablaze with desire and nothing to do with it. She slept in contentment and relaxation while every part of him quickened with maddening desire at the smallest touch of her skin. After a time, he retrieved a small branch from a tree and began to whittle away at it, expending his energy on making a new knife for Cali. This one would be good enough to kill Byron. Or Draven, if he could not control himself.
CHAPTER thirty-one
Cali woke in a fog so thick that nothing else seemed to exist. It covered the river and the bank and the trees, everything that had surrounded them that morning. She made out Draven’s shape in the fog, his head down, his knife moving in a blur. When he heard her move, he stood and moved into the circle of firelight where the fire had burned out a clear space in the fog that had eaten up the rest of the world. They were all that was left, just the two of them and the flames between them.
“I’ve made you a knife,” Draven said.
A wave of gratitude washed through her when she saw the long, thick blade, sharp on two edges as well as the tip. It was a killing knife.
“I love it,” she said.
As he brought it around the fire to her, he smiled wide so she could see his teeth, white and gleaming. Even when she co
uld see his biting teeth, their needle-sharp points the barest bit longer than the others, he didn’t scare her anymore. He was too good to her, too protective. He was only scary to other people, the ones who threatened her.
“You’re awake and armed,” he said. “I will look for food.”
Before she could protest, he stepped away, and the fog reached out and pulled him in, swallowing him like the rest of the world.
Now only she and a knife and a fire remained. She smiled and snuggled into the sleep sack. He wouldn’t leave. He’d never leave.
But what if Byron found her alone again? What if he found Draven first, and killed him before coming for her? On her own, she’d never be able to finish him, not even with the beautiful knife.
To block out her silly thoughts, she forced herself from her warm nest and busied herself with preparations for the day. She relieved herself and cleaned up as well as she could. She hated her woman’s days now that she’d lost her woman’s cup. They were messy and inconvenient, and she never felt clean. Most of her life, she’d been taken care of by real Superiors, and everything had been provided. If she lost or ran out of supplies, she could get more from the supply closet. She could have asked Draven to get her exactly what she needed, but when she’d tried, he said he knew and rushed away. His embarrassment embarrassed her, and she hadn’t corrected him. Now it was an endless hassle, and it seemed like every time the days ended, they started again, though like always, they only came as often as the moon rounded.
Afraid she wouldn’t be able to find her way back in the fog, she didn’t venture far from the fire. She tried not to worry that he hadn’t returned as she dressed in a pair of his jeans and one of his t-shirts, all made of the softest cotton she’d ever felt. She brushed her cheek across the fabric on her shoulder until she heard a sound, muffled by the fog. Straightening, she held her breath and listened. The fog blinded her as completely as darkness.
The sound came again, scraping noises followed by the sound of small rocks tumbling down a slope. He was very near. She readied herself and turned to face him, kneeling with the knife angled upwards, so she could thrust it up under his ribs and into his heart, like Draven had taught her.
He came into the world carrying a small deer with spots on its sides and laid it beside the fire. “It’s a good thing I don’t lose my balance often,” he said. “I’d have landed on the end of your skewer.”
“Oh, sorry,” Cali said, tucking the knife into the sleep sack beside her. “I didn’t think of that. What’s a skewer?”
“Something to cook meat on.”
“Well, I guess if you fell on it and I killed you, I’d have to eat you or I’d starve.”
He chuckled low in his throat. “I imagine you would. I hope you’d be as gentle as I try to be when I eat you.”
“Oh, surely not that gentle,” she said, laughing too. “After all, you’d already be dead.”
“Indeed.”
Cali stepped around the fire to sit beside him. She stroked the deer’s warm, tan fur. “I hate that you have to kill them for me,” she said. “It’s so pretty.”
“We have to do what is necessary to live. We can change what we want, not what we need.”
“I guess I’ll have to change the way I think about it,” she said, still stroking the body with her fingertips.
“That is why Superiors are so distant from the emotions of humans. We don’t like to make you suffer, but we have to. If we think of you like animals, dumb brutes without feelings, it is easier. We forget we were once like you, that we are the same people now that we were as humans.”
“It’s hard to believe you used to be a person. I mean, a human. What were you like?”
“Much as I am now. Not everything changes after evolution. Over time, I imagine, we forget some things and learn others.”
“If you used to be a human, does that mean humans can turn into Superiors?”
“Yes.”
“So I could be a Superior?”
“Yes. But it’s quite illegal to evolve a human. The punishment is death for both the new Superior and the one responsible for the evolution.”
“Why is it so bad?”
“Superiors far outnumber humans already. Superiors live as efficiently as possible, but humans require excessive energy to survive. Evolving a human removes one more source of food while creating the need for a lifetime supply of food for the new Superior.”
“Okay.” She didn’t see why it was so terrible, but Superiors must think it was awfully bad. She still couldn’t comprehend that he’d been like her once, that she had whatever magic caused Superiors to evolve already inside her. She had the potential to be a Superior. At first, she’d been shocked—they seemed so different. But after some thought, it made sense. They were awfully alike, too. Especially in the looks and the talking.
Draven began butchering the animal, cutting meat and skin and gathering blood in their pan. He drank it quickly, grimacing in disgust afterwards and leaning over to put his head between his knees for several minutes like he was breathing through a bout of nausea. When he sat back up, he was as composed as usual. But a line of blood curved up from the corners of his mouth like a hideous smile.
He wiped his cheeks with the back of his wrist, smearing the blood. Cali looked away. He was covered in blood—his hands drenched, his knife dripping, his pants splattered with it. When he asked if she’d fetch a few pieces of firewood, she hurried away and began breaking branches from a small tree he’d dragged near their camp. The tree broke easily, unlike the ones that were still living, but dead in winter. The thick trunk of this one flaked apart, already disintegrating with rot. Cali couldn’t break the thickest branches, but she could get anything thinner than her arm.
When she’d gathered an armload, she carried the wood back and fed the fire, piling it up into a peak at the middle like a mountain. Draven didn’t look up from his kill, so Cali could study him openly. Now that she knew he used to be human, she was even more fascinated.
“How come you can do all this stuff you learned when you were human?” she asked after a while. “I never learned anything like this.”
“You never had to,” he said. “Now you’re learning, because you have to.”
“So you had to?”
“Yes.”
“What was the world like then?”
“Not so different.”
“Well, what was different?” she pressed.
He paused a moment and then spoke without slowing in his butchering process. “Sapiens did more. We didn’t sit in a Confinement waiting to be drawn from or making our own gardens. We worked in fields, but also in factories, making guns, ammunition, and supplies for Superior wars.”
“Everyone did that? What did you eat if no one made gardens?”
“Some made sapien food, packaged sapien food, grew sapien food…”
“What was your job? Catching animals to be sent to factories?”
He chuckled and stood, peeling off his shirt, the front soaked with blood. “It wasn’t a job, Cali. We didn’t get paid. We were slaves.”
“Oh,” she said, though of course that made sense. He’d been human, like her. She just had trouble imagining him as anything but impossibly strong and powerful.
He dropped his bloody pants and turned to her. “I’m going to the lake. You should, too, if you want to bathe. I don’t know when we’ll find water again.”
She followed him towards the edge. The fog was drifting away in big heaps like snow banks, and they could see the water, a white mirror in the early morning light. Draven stopped a ways back from the edge, bent down in one swift movement that stripped him of his shorts, and ran for the edge. He leapt into the air, hanging for a moment in a perfect arch before falling. Cali ran to the edge in time to see him slip through the mirror and disappear under the water. He’d broken the surface stillness, and a small circle of ripples stretched out from his entry point to bigger and bigger circles that reached all the way to the shor
e.
Cali laughed and clapped her hands together when his head appeared again. “Jump,” he said, smiling and motioning for her to join him. “It’s not too high.” He dove back under the water, disappearing beneath the wavy the reflection of the sky and trees.
Delighted by this new, playful side of him she hadn’t seen, she undressed slowly, leaving her underpants on. Though he was awfully unashamed, she still felt strange and embarrassed around him when either of them went without clothes.
She didn’t hear him behind her, didn’t know he was there until his cold, wet arms gathered her up and dropped over the edge with her. Shock and fear exploded in her chest, and she clawed at him, screaming in protest. He released her just as they hit the water. The raw cold ripped her breath away, and she fought its invasion, choking and gasping as she sank into it and then under it.
CHAPTER thirty-two
Draven came up laughing, but instead of sharing his mirth, Cali thrashed about in the water. He dove for her and dragged her up. Drawing hiccupping gasps of breath, she began coughing and slapping at the water, grasping it between fingers that couldn’t hold.
“Cali,” he said, alarmed. “Cali, Aspen. What is it?” Perhaps her head had hit the edge of outcropping, though he hadn’t felt it.
When he wrestled her around to see her face, all reason had gone from her eyes. She had slipped beyond the reach of words and explanations. Her nails raked over his shoulders until blood swirled away in the frigid water. He held her at arm’s length until he saw that she wasn’t fighting him but trying to hold onto him. As he pulled her into his arms, she clutched at him, then grasped his shoulders and pushed his head down, climbing onto him.
“Cali, Cali, stop,” he said, surfacing. Her belly, its inner warmth hidden beneath the coldness of her skin, was soft against his face. While he held her around the waist, she kept her hands on his head and her legs tight around his chest. He swam to shore, cursing himself as she cried through ragged breaths. In the shallow water at the edge of the lake, he stood stroking her shivering back while she clung to him.
Blood Sport: A New Adult Urban Fantasy Vampire Novel (The Superiors Book 4) Page 17
