by Eve Paludan
While Justine asked for some privacy to take a shower, I surveyed the damage to my kitchen skylight and replied in cryptic fashion to both Sam and Kingsley’s numerous, worried texts:
I found my lost bird.
The other bird is gone.
The coast is clear of sharks.
Will catch up soon.
Chapter 29
After I’d killed Genghis Khan, we mostly slept for the next three days.
Justine’s mortal body had taken a beating and so had my vampire one. Not to mention our emotions were a complete train wreck. But we were alive. Well, she was. I was still undead and I intended to stay that way.
Now, Justine and I stood at the living room window of one of my safe houses, this one in Echo Park. We’d be staying here for a while. We admired the views as the sunset receded into an indigo sky and the city lights began to twinkle on the hillsides.
“You were a vampire gladiator.”
She looked at me in surprise. “When did you know?”
“Dracula and I had a shared inkling when we were freeing them from the dungeon in Koreatown. It was only later that I recognized you on a pay-per-view animation video—I found it in a dark corner of the web where such things exist. Of course, no vampires’ faces should show up on film, but they did.”
“It’s a rotoscope process. They film the live action and then, artists trace the faint lines around the vampires within layers of Adobe Flash. They leave the color layer and combine it with the line tracings into an animated video at about twelve frames per second. Khan contracted out the grunt work to a graphics company in Bangalore.”
“And to think this creative ingenuity came from Khan.”
“I never said he was dumb, just evil.” She paused. “When did you look for the videos?”
“Two hours after you’d gone to Hawaii.”
“Why look for them at all?”
“Because I wanted to know the truth. I watched and saw that it was down to your survival, but I know he had you under a compulsion to kill each other.”
She quickly said, “We weren’t under a compulsion to kill each other. After Khan turned us to vampires, our compulsion was to obey him. But for his own profit and amusement, he reinvented the Greco-Roman gladiator world within a microcosm society of modern female captives where only the fittest would survive. He made the initial conditions extremely spartan and it evolved into a system of reward and punishment. For every match you won, you earned things, such as the notebook computer I had, or a mattress, or extra sleep time.”
I nodded for her to continue.
“During training, our friendships and camaraderie were genuine. But in the ring, we were competitors bent on killing, not wounding.” She turned toward me. “If you went down in a fight and didn’t get up within one minute, then you lost and were removed from the ring. The punishment for losing in the ring but not dying in the ring was that Khan would finish off the losers—and nobody wanted that for themselves, or for a gladiator sister. If you truly loved your opponents, you’d kill them fast to spare them a much-worse fate.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Khan wore out his arms beating the losers with silver-tipped scourges, and it took hours for their deaths. I still hear their screams in my nightmares.”
I shuddered. “I’m so sorry, Justine.”
“When I told you that I wanted to decapitate Khan and take a bath in his blood, that wasn’t for me, Fang—it was for them.”
I put my hands on either side of her face and looked her in the eyes. “If I ever thought I was brave, I was wrong. You were fired in the devil’s furnace and came out a triumphant survivor. Your level of courage is now what I aspire to in my vampire path.”
“You can’t even imagine how much your words mean to me, Fang.”
“And you can’t imagine how much your trust means to me. I know what you risked to tell me the truth.”
“Thank you, Fang. And you are brave. You fought Genghis Khan on your own when you could have called in Samantha, Dracula, and Kingsley—or even the whole blood club.”
“That last option never even occurred to me,” I said.
“It should have.”
She hid her face in my shoulder and the warmth of her skin transferred to my cool skin. “I wanted to tell you so many things before, but I was afraid if you knew the whole truth, you’d think I was too damaged to deserve your—”
I wrapped my arms around her. “Then you thought far too little of me.”
Justine looked up at me, her face grateful. “I want you to go to work tonight. The blood club is important. It keeps vampires off the streets. It prevents murders and turnings and… kidnappings.”
I nodded. “I should go back, but are you ready to be on your own?”
“I need some time alone to do some writing. I need an exorcism of all this on paper to prove to myself that I’m not broken or beaten and that Khan hasn’t won from beyond the grave. Writing is the only way I can move forward. It’s how I rediscover my best self.”
I kissed the top of her head. “I’ll leave you to your writing, but call or text me if you need me.”
“I will.”
We stood together, vampire and mortal, my marble-white arms wrapped around her lightly tanned back and shoulders.
When she raised her head to look in my eyes with her crystal-blue ones, what I saw in them was love and trust… and desire. Her pupils were dilated, her breathing was a bit faster than usual, and her pulse was increasing. Oh, and she was staring at me like I was dinner.
“Justine, do you think you could make me late for work?”
“Is this you being spontaneous, Fang?”
“Yeah. How am I doing so far?”
Chapter 30
I loved her soft pink mortal lips as much as I’d loved her vampire lips that had reminded me of lush black cherries.
Her minty breath was sweet and hot. And I loved the way she kissed me as if I were her oxygen. I kissed her back the same way because I always give as good as I get. The harder she kissed me, the harder I kissed her back.
Our lips dueled until she seemed breathless so I backed off a bit.
“More,” she said.
As I lifted her against me, she wrapped her legs around my waist and put her arms over my shoulders and around my neck. The heat emanating from her inner thighs was nearly searing my cool flesh through my clothes. She riled me further by softly biting my neck, which turned me on even more.
I chuckled at her naughty little love bites. “What’s this about?”
“I’m trying to compel you while in my mortal form,” she joked. “How am I doing?”
“You’re slaying me.”
She began to tear at my shirt and when buttons went flying, she went for my belt buckle.
I didn’t resist. I knew I was going to give in and bury myself in her. At full throttle.
“Let go, Fang. Let go of all the fear of my mortality—”
I pressed a kiss to her throat. I could feel her pulse hammering under her skin and against my lips. It was a wondrous sensation: Life.
“Love me so much that it hurts,” she whispered.
“I already do.”
My confession unleashed something raw and primal in her. She ramped up her seduction by moving her body against me in ways that would have made me explode if I’d been mortal. But I wasn’t. As a vampire, I could go for a long, long time.
“Please, please!” she begged.
I kissed Justine harder until she moaned into my mouth and gasped for air. I let her breathe, though. She was, after all, only human.
As she unleashed her passion on me like a hungry vampiress in a mortal body, I remembered that Archibald Maximus had used my blood to make her a much stronger mortal so I quit treating her like she was fragile. She wasn’t.
After a few minutes of this, things got too wild for standing, so I moved the party to the living room’s plush carpet where there was plenty of room to roll around, change positions, and make love lik
e wildcats.
Her clothes came off, piece by piece, and when I tore off her panties with my teeth, she laughed in delight. She almost knocked over a Tiffany lamp in her race to get my jeans off. Our kisses grew more urgent, more intimate. Desperate.
When we finally came together as one flesh with her riding me, her long hair created a shimmering blue-black curtain of night around us as she leaned forward and took her pleasure with wild abandon. I made sure she knew that I was enjoying her, too. In a moment of extreme passion, she accidentally raked a fingernail over my chest and scratched me.
A drop of blood welled to the surface of my white skin and she abruptly stopped moving on top of me, her blue eyes wide and scared. “I’m so sorry, Fang.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t mean to do it.”
Justine’s lower lip trembled as she watched me bleed. One blood drop became two and then three. I thought she might cry when it became a slender rivulet that dripped down my chest, ran down my side and tapped on the carpet. She stared at it in horror and open-mouthed disbelief that she had accidentally caused this.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Justine.”
“As a mortal, I’m not supposed to want this anymore.”
“It’s not a physical necessity for you to drink blood. But no one understands more than I do what you’re feeling right now.” I paused. “That bonding with a consensual giver. That rush of power and strength. That taste of eternity. Most of all, you miss what you were.”
“Yes. Yes!” she said excitedly.
“Go ahead then. I won’t judge you.”
“Really?”
“Please,” I said and closed my eyes.
She bent her head to lick and suck the blood droplets from my chest and side with trembling lips that were utterly gentle and warm and soft. And when my skin sealed up again, and there was no more blood, she moaned and fed the faint taste of my own blood back to me in her kisses. It was hot as hell that she was mortal and doing that.
With her eyes closed and her body arching, she moved again, with me and against me, slowly at first and then, urgently, as if it were the last days on Earth. She was filled with joy and power and happiness. Her wild movements and cries of my name were both shocking and redemptive. Her sexual energy and lack of inhibitions closed the gap between mortal and vampire and made us equals… as lovers.
All I could think about was how much I wanted to sate her. Make her happy. Love her unconditionally.
I matched her reckless abandon and her passion with a strength and endurance that would have collapsed me as a mortal.
When, at last, she rested on me—hot, slick and exhausted—I rolled her under me and took her slowly and tenderly, until she hoarsely cried out my name as if her heart was breaking.
I kissed and touched her everywhere, memorizing every soft place of her warm, quivering flesh with my lips and fingertips. As she released her breath in little shudders, closed her eyes tightly and arched her back like a bow, I found my own peak, too.
I held her close until she stopped panting and fell asleep in my arms. Her body slowly relaxed and her breathing became deep and regular.
She was totally conked out in her mortal skin.
And I was totally awake in my vampire skin, and eager to go out into the night.
I gently parted my flesh from hers and got up. I threw a couch blanket over her, sneaked a pillow under her head and kissed her forehead. I left her inelegantly sprawled on the carpet in her impressive after-sex coma.
Gazing down at her flushed and dewy face, I said, “You’re my daylight.”
Epilogue
I quietly dressed and got ready to go open Fang’s Place for the night. After I double-checked all the locks and re-set the alarm, I left.
By the time my SUV crossed the intersection of Sunset and Alvarado, I was in my work mindset. I sent out a group text to my blood club members and my staff: The blood is back on tap at Fang’s Place! Two-for-one happy hour from 10 to midnight. Hope to see you there!
Samantha Moon texted back first: I’ll be by later for that free drink ;)
I received text replies from other members, too. I was going to have a full house.
Tonight, I’d hang with my regulars—and my club would serve up the finest blood in Los Angeles County. I had a three-day-old stinking corpse to work around, thanks to Kingsley’s dumbass werewolf client, but that was mi vida loca. My crazy life.
Even with all of that insanity to look forward to, as I drove through Echo Park toward my blood club, I couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off my face, the one that proved I was ridiculously happy.
I knew why, too.
I recognized a turning point, the one that Sam had said would come after a trauma. Even at the peak of passion, I’d never once thought of draining Justine’s lifeblood. It had finally happened: I was comfortable in my vampire skin and the safety of the mortal I loved was now automatic.
It was in that very moment that I began to trust myself. Love myself. And celebrate my greater purpose.
And when the time was right, it would give me great joy to create Justine, the vampire.
The End
***
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BOOKS BY EVE PALUDAN in J. R. RAIN’S VAMPIRE FOR HIRE WORLD
BROTHERHOOD OF THE BLADE series
BURNING
AFTERGLOW
RADIANCE
CRESCENT MOON MYSTERY series
DEAD AHEAD
FANG IN THE CITY series
VAMPIRES SHE WROTE
KINGSLEY FULCRUM, WEREWOLF FOR HIRE series
WOLF MOON
TAMMY MOON, DAUGHTER OF THE VAMPIRE series
DRAGON LESSONS
Other Books by Eve Paludan
STANDALONE NOVELS AND NOVELLAS
COOPER’S GOLD
FULL OF STARS
HAPPILY EVER AFTERS: THREE ROMANCE NOVELS
HEARTS OF HANUKKAH
SANTA’S LITTLE HEIST
THREE CHRISTMAS WISHES
VEIN GLORIOUS
ANGEL DETECTIVES series
THE MAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY
THE MAN WHO ROSE FROM THE SEA (with Suzanne Wilson)
DEARLY DEPARTED series
LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE
WHILE THE CAT’S AWAY
GHOST FILES series
GHOST FIRE
MEDIUM MYSTERIES series
HOLLYWOOD HILLS
POLICE CHIEF JACK LEE CREATURE ISLAND MYSTERY series
BIGFOOT ISLAND
RANCH LOVERS ROMANCE series
TAKING BACK TARA
TARA TAKES CHRISTMAS
WEREWOLF DETECTIVES series (with Suzanne Wilson)
WEREWOLF INTERRUPTED
WEREWOLF RISING
WEREWOLF UNLEASHED
WEREWOLF LEGACY
WEREWOLF DETECTIVES THE COMPLETE SERIES BOOKS 1, 2, 3 and 4 (Boxset)
WITCH DETECTIVES series (Books 1-3 with Stuart Sharp)
WITCHY BUSINESS
WITCH AND FAMOUS
WITCH WAY OUT
WITCH BONES
WITCH DIARIES series
WITCH POTION
NONFICTION
ROMANCE WRITER'S PINK PAGES: The Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Romance Novel Published (1993)
ROMANCE WRITER'S PINK PAGES: The Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Romance Novel Published (1995-1996)
ROMANCE WRITER'S PINK PAGES: The Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Romance Novel Published (1996-1997)
SCREENPLAYS
THREE CHRISTMAS WISHES Novella and Screenplay
(Novella by Eve Paludan, Screenplay by David Wyllie)
TRANSLATIONS
RECUPERANDO A TARA (Spanish version translated by Maria Riega
from TAKING BACK TARA by Eve Paludan)
ANTHOLOGIES
VAMPIRE, ZOMBIES, AND GHOSTS, OH MY! (Anthology #1) (not currently available)
About the Author
Eve Paludan is a bestselling
author of dozens of books. She lives in Arizona, where she enjoys reading paranormal fiction, urban fantasy, romance and mysteries. She also enjoys taking scenic photos and swimming. Her books are available on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Eve-Paludan/e/B004VXHP6O/
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