Hunted: A Vampire Romance (Marked by Night Book 3)

by Sara Thorn

  "Good," Cassius said as he lowered his arm from the mantlepiece and slowly lifted his head to face me. He looked at me with sorrowful, dark eyes. "Now that you have said it aloud, how do you feel about me?"

  I knew what he expected me to say. He expected me to tell him I couldn't ever really love him, not entirely, not as the monster that he knew he was. He expected me to shrink away in disgust, or fear, or perhaps a mixture of both. It would be easier for him, maybe for both of us, if I agreed with him and killed us both now with my inability to love him so it would save us from the tearing of our souls further down the road. But what he didn't expect was how I truly felt.

  “I love you just as much as I did sixty seconds ago or yesterday or last week. New details about you won’t lessen that; they will only enhance it.”

  I reached out to his cheek and cupped his jaw in my palm so that the sharp tip of his fang just barely nipped my skin. He turned his head away, but I didn’t let him go far. I reached my other hand to the opposite side of his face and did the same so that I held him to look at me as I felt the smooth points of his fangs against my thumbs.

  "You don't know what you are saying," he said. His eyes were like blank, black slates that stared back at me with an endlessness I couldn't comprehend. But even within them, I could see his heart breaking.

  "Yes, I do," I said confidently. "I want you to make love to me like the beast that you claim to be."

  Cassius looked at me in a fearful horror that wrinkled his eyebrows against his forehead. "No," he said.

  I dropped my hands from his jaw and reached forward to grab the top of his pants as I pulled him into me. Cassius tensed as he tried not to let any part of his body touch me. He held his shoulders back and his arms down at his sides. If he truly thought he was a beast, I was not going to let him keep it from me any longer. I wasn't afraid of him, and I wasn't afraid of loving him—all of him.

  "Make love to me, Cassius," I urged again. "Now. Like this. Make love to me as a dhampir. Not the way you did before, but the way that you are now, without control and without keeping any of parts of yourself from me. This is a barrier between us, not what you are but who you think you are. You think that being part beast makes you a monster, but it doesn't. Don't hide from me anymore. I want you to fully release yourself to me. I want you to make love to me like a beast."

  Cassius hesitated still. He was afraid, afraid of hurting me or scaring me, or maybe afraid even of himself and what he would do if he let himself be free. I wanted all of him, and I wasn't going to let him pull away anymore.

  I reached my hand into his pants, and he tried to grab my wrist to stop me, but he wasn't fast enough. My fingers felt him, the huge, bestial size of him that engorged itself in a pulsing stiffness as soon as I wrapped around his girth. He couldn't reach my wrist now, and even if he could have, my touch made his body tremble so fiercely that he had to use his hand to steady himself against the mantle. I leaned forward and put my mouth to his, and at first, he tried not to part his lips or kiss me at all.

  "The only thing that you could do to hurt me, Cassius, is not make love to me now as you are. Your fangs will not hurt me. The strength of your bulging body will not crush me, and the darkness in your eyes will not scare me. I love you, and I need you, and I will feed the beast within you until it comes to me without hesitation."

  I put my mouth over his and pushed my tongue between the space of his parted lips, past the smooth length of his fangs, until I reached his tongue and wrapped around it with a sweeping motion that made him moan. Try as he might, he couldn't resist me anymore. Even a beast with a carnal, primal instinct couldn’t resist the thing it loves the most forever.

  Cassius wrapped both of his hands around my waist and tilted his chest toward me to kiss me even deeper still. His arms gripped me against him and suffocated the space between us until it was no more. With every swirl of his tongue and every grasp of his hands, I reacted with as much impassioned ferocity as he wielded. Then he lifted me off the floor and threw my legs over his shoulder, carrying me to the bed as if my body were a sacred thing to be worshipped.

  When he laid me on the bed, he gently pulled the dress over my head and removed the clips from my hair. He crouched above me and let me take off his clothes as his unending gaze longingly traced my naked form beneath him. His body was the perfect, predatory machine that rippled with muscles, which looked as if they would burst through the skin. He stayed still when I pulled his pants from his legs and felt the weight of his hulking cock fall against me. This was the part of who he was that he hadn't let me see before. The herculean, vampiric, and monstrous side of Cassius that he had hinted at but had never let me fully experience. I reached down and wrapped both hands around him and his back arched as he pressed against my palms. His eyes rolled upward, but there was no white to them now, only an endless, sultry blackness.

  When I opened my legs for him and pulled him closer, my hands let go as he started to push into me. There was nothing like this feeling in all of existence. My body opened for him and the immensity of his length inside me pressed against the innermost parts of my body that I had never experienced before. I felt him inside of every part of me as if my entire body had parted to make room for him. Cassius leaned down to kiss me, and his tongue pushed mine toward the smooth sides of his fangs. He was letting me in. He was bringing me toward the beast he kept hidden away so that I could feel it and perhaps even embrace it.

  I ran my tongue along his fangs and then even down to their needle-fine tips. We encircled our tongues around each other and around the fangs together. As he moved inside of me, every motion he made felt as if it sent my body into a tremoring quake of pleasure, like I was going to unravel around him with each movement. I tried desperately to hold onto the moment and make it last longer. But Cassius didn't stop, and he didn't slow. He just kept pushing against the floor of my body until I couldn't take any more and convulsed into a fit of intense pleasure like nothing I had ever experienced before.

  The very ground beneath us shook, and as crazy as I knew it sounded, it wasn't my imagination. If we were connected to the land, then the very land of Mystreuce itself sensed the ravaging physical delight that Cassius, in his raw and unleashed dhampir form, had just given to me. His satiated eruption came just after mine, and I felt the warmth of it inside me as he moaned in a cry of rapture. The sounds of his pleasure carried through the castle corridors and echoed into the forests beyond the walls. Our bodies remained joined as he lay against me, and I felt his faint but pounding heartbeat against my chest. His mouth was open as he tried to catch his breath and tucked his head down against my shoulder. I could feel his hard, sleek fangs resting against my skin.

  "Now, will you believe me?" I whispered to him as I wrapped my arms beneath his shoulders and held onto his broad back. "Will you believe that I am so in love with you and that whether you make love to me as a man or beast, you are mine?"

  Cassius lifted his head and looked into my eyes. "Tell me what that felt like for you," he said quietly.

  "It felt like the closest thing to pure ecstasy that I will ever know."

  "Yes," he said as his eyes started to change from black to a charcoal gray, and slivers of white began to appear at the sides of them. "I believe you." Cassius gently pulled out of me and lay beside me as I turned to rest my head on his chest. "I will love you with every part of who I am, always," he said as he ran his fingers through my wildly tangled hair.

  In the forest that night, Quinn had receded back to the dying patch of land that matched what his dying heart felt like. He was all alone since the glamoured humans he had been keeping as puppets, pets, or both, had been sent away. There were no animals in this part of the woods since the space here had been so perverted that life in its midst was waning. The other fae had gone back to their dwellings within the much more brilliant and richly thriving life that flourished in their enclave. They were pleased that the human infestation was gone, and they were also secretly delighte
d that Quinn had been rid of his improperly acquired herd of mortals. The fae respected powerful magic, but they despised corruption and the breaking of magical rules.

  The party may have been successful, but Quinn was now angered to the point of doing something rash. He had been teetering on the edge of impulsivity already, of knocking down Mara with just enough magic to get her safely out of the way and then continuing to kill Cassius where he stood. The only thing that prevented him from going through with it was the thought of how much it would hurt Mara, knowing she would never forgive him. But now, here in the empty and rotting part of the woods, Quinn was thinking less and less about what would upset Mara and more and more about how he would exact his exact brutal revenge.

  Unbeknownst to him, Bree knew Quinn's slipping control over his emotions was at a tipping point, which was why she had decided to follow him into the forest when he had left. She kept at a distance in order just to watch him and keep a close eye on anything that he should recklessly decide to do. Things like summoning an incredulous amount of shadow magic and launching into an affront on the castle while Mara and Cassius slept came into her mind. She stayed hidden within the trees and remained silent as she watched Quinn return to the darkest part of the forest.

  When the tremor that shook the land as Cassius made love to Mara shook through the foundation of the forest, Bree didn't feel a thing. Only the three of them who were tied to the land felt it. Since Quinn was the third of them to be bound to Mystreuce and to feel what Mystreuce and what the other two who were connected to the land felt, he felt the tremor not only come up through the forest floor into his feet; he also felt the world-shattering pronouncement of pleasure radiate throughout his body.

  As if things couldn't have made it any more difficult for him, Quinn felt the tremor that shook Mara to her core while Cassius had made love to her. The intense, intimately pleasurable moment that he could not have with Mara, and that was not his to feel—Quinn had felt it, too. He knew that Cassius was having sex as a dhampir with the woman he too was in love with as he sat suffering alone in the forest. Quinn couldn't even be left alone in deafening silence with his rage and quickly unraveling thoughts. Instead, he had to be made to feel what they felt. He had to be tortured even further. None of the pain that his body was going through now, or that his mind was enduring, could compare to the agony of his heart being pulled through each slit of space between his ribs one tender piece at a time as he was made to feel the union of Cassius and Mara. Being tied to the land and bound to each other was a curse, unlike any other he had known.

  Chapter Six

  Quinn's pain was like no other. There was no salve for it; there was only enduring.

  Bree watched from behind the trees as she saw Quinn crumble to the ground, folding first onto his knees and then letting his body collapse into a heap of pain and mangled limbs. It was disturbing to watch as he shook while he cried.

  Bree hadn't planned to intervene. She had gone just to watch over him and make sure he didn't do anything which would threaten the state of things. But instead, she found that she couldn't bear to witness him like this without doing something to ease his immense suffering. She cared for him. Even when he started to go astray, she still cared for him, perhaps even more so.

  Despite her hesitation, Bree went to comfort him. She stepped out from between the trees and approached him on gentle feet. She knelt down beside him and placed her hand on the side of his temple as he curled against the ground like an injured animal trying to crawl inside the dirt. When his eyes looked up at her, although they were still as black as night, they seemed more fae than shadow magic, almost as if a piece of him were trying to claw through. Pain had brought him to the surface one last time before he just gave in and let the magic consume him as if it were a suffocating wave that would wash over him. This was the result of his uncontrollable rage, his power that had amassed to nothing of value. It had all just come crashing down into a vulnerable sorrow on the forest floor.

  Quinn looked up at her with rage, and fear, and pain, and he still tried to move his shoulder to push her away. "Get away from me," he said. "You shouldn't be here; no one should be around me now."

  "You are suffering," Bree said quietly as she pushed the strand of sticky hair away from his eyes, which was matted with sweat to his forehead. "You need my help."

  "The one thing that I did need is gone. It was never mine to have. All that which is mine to have is pain—pain and power as if the two things were at all different."

  "They are different, and neither is what you need now."

  "Oh?" Quinn said as his sneering laughter made him shake even more furiously than before. "Tell me then, stray fae, what is it that I need?"

  Bree stood up and pulled the laces of her bodice until her dress fell around her ankles. Her chestnut hair draped over her shoulders in a curtain and landed in soft heaps against her breasts. Quinn stared at the beautiful girl as her amber eyes flashed with a beckoning welcome. Quinn was so desperate for affection, so pent-up with angst that bubbled in his blood even more than the shadow magic which coursed through his veins, that he could do nothing but lay on the ground and stare at Bree in awed amazement. She cared for him, and he needed her, and because of that, she would indulge them both. She reached her hand down to help Quinn up to his feet, but he didn't take it.

  "Why would you want to allow my body into yours?" he asked. "This darkened and distorted form that I have now become."

  "There is nothing ugly about you," Bree smiled as she continued to hold her hand steadily out to him. "Why would darkness be any less beautiful than light? Yes, you look different now, changed. But you are no less stunning than you have always been."

  Quinn reached up to grab Bree's hand, but instead of letting her pull him up to his feet, he tugged her down onto the ground with him instead. He pulled her beneath his body as he crawled onto her and gingerly put his lips to hers. As soon as his tongue tasted Bree’s, it seemed to wash his pain away. The aching and steady soreness that pulsed through every hollow space in his body was suddenly replaced by a feeling of calm contentment.

  "How are you doing that?" he whispered against her cheek as she tried to keep kissing him. "Why is my pain gone?"

  Quinn knew of no fae magic that could erase the painful symptoms of shadow magic. Whatever Bree was doing, it was impossible for a fae to do. She didn't answer him; she simply worked with nimble fingers to remove his clothes until he matched her nakedness. Bree wrapped her arms behind his back and her legs around his waist, and for a moment, he let himself forget about everything else. As Quinn pushed into her, the pain he had been suffering for so long was pushed out, at least temporarily. He felt nothing now except for the warm slide inside her body that eased his suffering and numbed his mind. He didn't feel the shadow magic anymore, and the gut-wrenching thoughts of Mara and Cassius as they shook the very ground beneath them suddenly seemed like distant memories that floated away like fishtails in water.

  Bree kissed him and traced her fingers along with his sinewy muscles as they flexed and tightened while he made love to her. He had needed this, a physical release and a mental moment of quiet from all that was trying to overtake him. When their moment of peak was reached, there was no ground-shaking movement that could be felt by the others, but there was something Quinn welcomed even more…peace.

  He lay beside Bree as she ran her fingers through his hair and kept her body next to his. She was working magic, a kind of magic of which he hadn't seen in the fae realm before. Whatever it was, it helped him, and before long, he was in a peaceful and unfettered sleep that had been elusive to him for more days than he could count. After a while, Bree fell asleep beside him, too. She was tired from the exertion, both physical and magical, and she was content with the result of his peace.

  When she woke up in the morning, she found that Quinn was gone.

  Bree stood up and slipped her dress back over her body, tying the laces of the bodice together as she walked throug
h the woods to find him. Quinn sat shirtless at the edge of a small stream that began near the fae enclave and trickled its way through the woods and into the diseased portion of the land. His head rested against one knee propped up next to his shoulder, and he dangled his fingers into the quietly moving water. Bree sat down beside him and waited for him to speak.

  "I don't know why it is that I cannot seem to get over her," he said. "It twists my very guts around my core, but as much as I try to let Mara go, I can’t. Even the shadow magic, which is slowly strangling the life out of me, has not caused me this much misery. Do you know why this is? Do you know why this human girl has such a hold over me? You are certainly more magical than I thought. You did something that even now continues to numb some of the discomforts that I am in. What you have done is impossible for any fae to do, so I think that you might know something about the rest of it, too?"

  Bree looked sadly at Quinn as he stared into the water with his blank, indigo eyes now glossed with a dark-bluish luster. She wasn't sad that Quinn was still in love with Mara, as most women might be after having sex and then hearing their lover profess affections for another. She was unhappy about his sadness.

  "Love is not built like sensible things," she said. "Love is built without any type of rules or boundaries at all. It is built out of madness and mercy and malevolence as it spins around its contradictions endlessly in search of a way to make sense."

  "Will it ever make sense?" he asked her as he looked up from the water to see her answer keenly.

  "No."

  Quinn went back to dipping his crooked fingers into the stream. The pain was starting to return, and the stiffness in his joints was hardening again. Soon, the teasing indigo in his eyes would once again be usurped by darkness, and the shadow magic would claim its dominion over his body once more. The reprieve that Bree had been able to give him wouldn't last.