by Nola Sarina
“Yet you broke away from him.”
Nycholas nodded. “No choice. I’m displeased to be a slave in any way.”
“You’re a free spirit.” A smile warmed my cheeks and I grimaced at the pain in my lip.
Nycholas’ cold finger stroked my lower lip. “I broke you,” he said.
That earned a full-blown burst of a laugh from my mouth and Nycholas startled at my volume. “Sorry,” I said. “I love the way you talk.”
Nycholas cracked a crooked, half-grin. “I didn’t mean to break you. And I’m sorry I’m a little bit stupid when I talk.”
I shook my head and touched his chin with my fingertips. “You’re not stupid, Nycholas. Not even a little bit. You’re… breathtaking.”
He pulled back just a bit, puzzling at me, his eyes never tearing from my lips. “Breathtaking?”
I rested my palm against his chest and felt the thick thud of his heart, slower and heavier than mine, as though his black blood ran more like glue than water. His fingers roamed over my forehead, picking off bits of grass and dirt. I turned back to the sink and washed my face thoroughly, ignoring the intensity of my throbbing head, even though all my body wanted to do was sleep.
I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to miss a second of this night – this impossible encounter with an immortal, a man-eating snake… I had to be insane.
No part of my body cared if I was insane. I squeezed my thighs together as I toweled my face, feeling Nycholas still behind me, watching me.
His hands never left my hips. I straightened and gazed back at him over my shoulder. “So you don’t want their life. What do you want?”
He hesitated and didn’t make a sound as his thumbs circled along the skin just above the back of my pelvis beneath my shirt. How could soft and cold feel so good together?
“I shouldn’t say.”
“Another rule?”
Nycholas chuckled that breathy sound that made me want to taste his tongue, or lick his face, or any part of him that he wanted me to slurp with my mouth. I shook off the thought of me swallowing him whole as I tried to focus on our conversation.
“Not another rule,” he said.
“Then tell me.”
“You will probably slap me, and then run away,” Nycholas said.
I giggled and reached up with my uninjured hand to touch his cheek and press his chin against my hair. He let a hint of a groan leak out through his sigh, and I wished, with every fiber of my suddenly bat-shit insane-with-hormones body, that he’d tuck his hand between my thighs and squeeze.
“I won’t slap you, or run away. My legs are too tired, and I don’t want to hurt my other hand on your face.”
Nycholas twisted me around to face him again and scooted me up onto the bathroom counter, my legs splayed wide, his hips tucked between them. I gasped. “You can slap me if you wish,” he said, his voice breathless, though he hadn’t panted once when he ran with me clutched to his chest. “Can you make me a promise you won’t run away? I’ll catch you, if you do.”
I smiled at Nycholas, admiring the depth of concern that crinkled the corners of his black-veined temples. “I promise.”
Nycholas took a deep breath and reached up to stroke his hair back from his scalp as he sighed. He let his hands fall to rest on my thighs – again, the perfect mixture of too much pressure and not enough pain.
“I meant to eat you,” he said. “But you know this. Your colors distracted me.”
“Why did you come back for me?”
Nycholas’ chest rose and fell quicker as his nerves visibly increased. “I wanted you.”
“But not to eat,” I said. It wasn’t a question: I didn’t need to ask. The temptation of this forbidden thing hovered in the room between us, and heat lanced through me from my eyes to my core.
He shook his head, his golden cords sweeping slowly over his arms and half-covering his chest. He didn’t blink, just watched my mouth as I spoke.
“Will you poison me, if you touch me that way?”
Nycholas shifted and cleared his throat. “What way?”
Had I misunderstood? No. Nycholas was shy. I refused to lose my nerve. Somehow, his predatory nature – the danger he posed to me – enhanced the feeling brewing between my thighs, made me want it more…
My voice came out stronger than I expected. “My body. Naked. With yours.”
Nycholas sucked in a breath and he slipped his hands beneath my shirt again, cradling my back, pulling me slightly forward in my sit on the counter. “No. If our mouths meet… open… then, yes, you’ll sleep.”
If our mouths fucking meet, good God, fuck me now. His constant groping of my skin - hands roaming across my aching body, firm like a massage rather than a caress - wasn’t helping me keep my thoughts sorted and carry on a coherent conversation. All I wanted to do was drink in his voice and melt into his touch. “But I won’t die.”
“Not unless I bite you, and poison your blood.” Nycholas stroked the front of my throat with the backs of his knuckles. “Which I will not do.”
I licked my lips to wet them for speech, but Nycholas ducked his head to get a closer look at them as I did, his breath even more rapid than before, and I couldn’t remember what the hell I wanted to say.
“In three nights,” Nycholas whispered, never taking his eyes off my mouth, “the master will come for me. He so rarely leaves his home, the Pit. He will come this time, because I dared him to.”
“Your brothers will tell him where you are?”
Nycholas nodded. “In three nights, I will let him have me. I will be done running. But… when I saw your colors, I thought… that I want to feel your colors before I die. All of your colors.” His hands slid back down my hips to my upper thighs and he spread his fingers, squeezing me again.
My voice was barely a squeak. “If I say no?”
Nycholas shook his head and pressed his thumbs harder into my inner thighs. “Please don’t say no.”
My heart roared in my ears with lust and panic, wanting and fear, vacillating heat and chill, and the cocktail of furiously warring emotions in my system was enough to put my libido on overdrive. Instinct and arousal battled between my legs – the urge to flee mingled with the urge to pounce. Arousal – hot and liquid and spurred on by this big, muscled, inhuman man – was dangerously close to winning.
I knew he could kill me. I knew he could eat me. I knew his master could find us and rip us apart, and I knew Blair would be looking for me, looking for Freddy, wondering what happened…
But I couldn’t bring myself to say no, not with those thick thumbs pressing deeper into the crevice between my legs, daringly close to my center, where I wanted him to sink every ice-cold velvet inch of steel he possessed while he grabbed me with such possession.
“I will blank your mind and take you home in three days, if you’ll let me,” Nycholas said. “Please.”
The desire in his tone melted any motivation I had to argue with him. The way he said please. Like I was the last thing he wanted, the only thing he had left to look forward to. But… to forget Nycholas… to have never known this gold and pale and dark god who wanted me so badly… “Don’t make me forget,” I whispered. “Let me know you. Let me feel you and remember you, Nycholas.”
Nycholas stepped just a little bit closer – there wasn’t much room to spare – and slid his hands further up, his palms resting on the fold between my hips and my thighs, those seductive thumbs of his on my lower belly, just above my pubic bone, pressing. I lost my breath again.
Nycholas leaned forward, and I tilted, expecting a kiss… but he rose higher than my mouth and touched his lips just barely across the skin of my forehead. The chill of his breath smoothed my eyelids shut and I shivered, leaned into his kiss and let his massive arms envelop me in an embrace. Exhaustion took over my body as I slumped against him, and even though all I wanted was to lift my hips, wrap my legs around his waist and throw my head back with the glory of his pleasure, I couldn’t move.
I shook my head, my nose brushing his bicep. “I’m okay.” I heard the exhaustion overpower the conviction in my voice.
“Are you saying yes to my request?” Nycholas’ voice rushed through my hair, and I shivered.
I nodded and scooted my face closer to his arm. I kissed his bicep with parted lips, tasting his skin, which was so smooth on my tongue I didn’t have a single memory in my battered brain to compare it to. “Yes.”
His arms tightened around me, squeezing my shoulders, hurting just a little bit, but I loved the feeling, the intensity. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Such a gift, you’ve given me.”
I kissed him again, and heat scorched from my heart to my thighs as I snuggled further into his embrace, his breathing quick and his heartbeat pounding against my ear.
“We’ll sleep, first,” Nycholas said. “By nightfall… if your heart still wants what my heart wants… you’re mine, for three nights.”
I nodded against him and couldn’t open my eyes, the low hypnosis of his deep voice lulling me into something close to sleep. “Yours,” I whispered.
I didn’t feel him lift me from the counter and I didn’t see where he laid me down as my head fell against something soft and silken, but I breathed deeply of the aroma of a steel man and let sleep have my weary soul.
Levi
The chugging of the train on the rails wasn’t enough of a distraction for Levi’s frustrated mind. He paced in the engine for miles, Festus glaring at him, and then he had had enough of the rhythm of steel on steel, and climbed smoothly to the roof. Levi dismounted into the air and landed on his heels in the dirt of the ditch, skidding through the loose mud with the force of his momentum. He broke into an even stride east, headed home, still nearly the pace of the train but not quite.
Not like I’m in a hurry to get home anyway.
Levi ducked into the trees to compensate for his height within the branches and grabbed onto the trunk of an old, thick poplar. He wound his hand around the bark and hoisted his weight up into the thick branches, and began to climb.
The noises of the nighttime symphony soothed his frustration where the unnatural chugging of the train could not, and Levi wound up the tree in a spiral, climbing as a snake would climb if it had limbs with which to pull his weight, his ascent so smooth the leaves refused to rustle as he moved.
In the highest branches that could sustain the weight of a Vesper, a literal steel man, Levi reached out to grab a branch of the next tree, and slid over into it, still not disturbing the leaves, though birds abandoned their homes in the tree long before Levi approached, so predatory was his presence and so dark were the shadows. He slipped from tree to tree, the pull of his muscles a comfort and a distraction, and allowed his mind to silence of worry and fear.
Levi reached the edge of the line of trees and gazed out at the landscape – familiar northern America, just south of his usual Canadian border travel. The mountains were ahead, and the exhilaration of scaling the Rockies was a challenge Levi always enjoyed, another chance to revel in the sheer perfection of his immortal form. Distractions, distractions.
A throat cleared below him and Levi peered down. He heaved his weight up once in the air to dramatize the descent, and then dropped straight down, parallel with the tree he dismounted, never breaking or disturbing a single branch. He landed with a thick thud of boots in Earth, and Festus grinned at him.
“Stressed out, little brother?” the elder Vesper – pupils silvered by age in his obsidian eyes – asked with a chuckle, his arms folded across his chest.
Levi mirrored his brother’s stance. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”
Festus grimaced. “I know. But at least Nycholas is stupid enough to challenge Levitiqas outright… that way he’s likely to come kill him personally, rather than issue a kill order for one of us.”
Levi growled, his frustration bleeding into his tone. “How long has Nycholas been with us? Four hundred years, maybe five? He came into this legion only shortly after I did, and I don’t want to see him dismissed.”
Festus shrugged. “He’s a useless fucking idiot. No one can deny that.”
“He’s not a fucking idiot!” Levi snapped, advancing on Festus, who raised his eyebrows with shock at Levi’s vehemence. “He taught me the constellations. Every single one of them. He was a writer before Levitiqas ruined him! Just like he’ll ruin us all! He might not have had the most eloquent of speech, as you and I have, but he was more useful than half the other moronic muscle Levitiqas recruits. Nycholas has strength and brains, and he has something neither you nor I have anymore, Festus… a pair of balls.”
Festus snarled and jabbed a finger into Levi’s shoulder at the insult. “Fuck you! You might be a castrated pussy, Levi, but I’m not.”
Levi rolled his eyes. “You’re the first of us to cave every single time Levitiqas gets into an interrogation mood. He doesn’t even have to beat you and you fold.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, because I’m smarter than you and I know what will spare me the pain after two fucking thousand years of listening to the rest of you scream when he gets in the mood, I’ve got no balls? Fuck you.”
“All I’m saying is it takes a seriously big pair to do what he’s doing… challenge Levitiqas, taunt and provoke him, knowing what will happen in the end.”
Festus’ jaw twitched with restraint and he leered up into Levi’s face. “And don’t you forget, little brother, exactly what will happen to him now that he’s done this. Do you want him to wipe away your ability to read, too? Or perhaps your ability to speak all those languages you cherish?”
Levi stared him down, fighting a wave of fury at the suggestion. But Festus wasn’t wrong: if Levitiqas chose to make Levi a completely helpless invalid, he could as easily wipe any of the intelligence he cherished from his brain, as he did to Nycholas’ ability to read and write.
“Stay within your boundaries, if you don’t want to face the master head-on,” Festus said, jabbing an authoritative finger into Levi’s chest.
Levi lifted an eyebrow and regarded Festus with a smirk. “Is that concern, I hear?”
Festus spun away and strode along the train tracks. “Shut up.”
Levi laughed and resumed a stride alongside Festus. “Oh, come on. Six hundred years of running together, Festus, I imagine you’d be quite concerned if I pulled a stunt like Nycholas did. After all, you’d get blamed for letting me do it.”
Festus didn’t break his stride but grinned at Levi over his shoulder, the tension between them easily abandoned after so many centuries of comradeship. “That’s true. Did you really cross six hundred already?”
Levi shrugged and slinked into the shadows as the hills rolled more thickly through the landscape. “Something like it, yeah. Not sure how many.”
“I wish you’d quit talking back to Levitiqas when he gets pissed off. You might think me castrated, but at least I get to keep my memories, because I keep my goddamn mouth shut.”
“Losing my memories is better than what Nycholas’ gonna get.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Festus said. “Because getting caught with one woman wasn’t enough – he had to go and get another, and then run.”
Levi tilted his head, conflicted. “I get what he’s doing… I do. It’s a lonesome life, we live… he longs for companionship.”
“Shut your fucking mouth.” Festus crashed Levi with his shoulder, a disciplinary contact. “Don’t even think about it. You even suggest you’re gonna do such a thing, I’ve gotta turn you in.”
“I’m not thinking about it!” Levi protested. “Not even close. I’m just… I understand it, that’s all.”
Festus snagged Levi’s trench coat and jerked him down to meet his accusing glare. “Well, un-understand it! Of all the dismissals I’ve fucking done, Levi, the last thing I wanna do is rip your head off… and you know
he’d make me be the one to do it, since it would amuse him to watch me suffer.”
“I’m not going to do anything!” Levi put his hands in the air. “I don’t even imagine such things. To break the rules like that… to make another Vesper…”
“Shut the fuck up!” Festus’ voice tore between the hills, venom seeping from his fangs with anger, visibly enhancing the rage in his face. “Don’t even say it! Don’t hint at it, don’t talk about it… seriously, Levi, just shut the fuck up before I rip your head off here and save Levitiqas the trouble.”
“Okay, okay! I won’t speak of it.”
The elder Vesper released Levi with a shove, furious fear radiating from his eyes and stance. “Good. Don’t think of it, either.”
“I won’t.”
“And for the love of all that’s holy, Levi, don’t ever, ever do it.”
“I won’t!” Levi threw his hands up in the air. “What, you want me to sign it in blood?”
Festus chewed his lip. “Maybe, yeah.”
Laughter trickled into Levi’s senses from a dark road ahead, and he flashed Festus a grin. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” Festus said.
Down the road and around the corner lurked a young couple, seated on a bench on the outskirts of a small town. The road was deserted, illuminated by a small lamppost above the bench, and the two were kissing and sighing with the prelude to passion.
The Vespers flipped up their hoods and ducked their heads, hiding their immortal appearance from the humans. As they approached, the couple cooled their groping slightly, and Levi stopped in front of them, his head still down. Festus circled around to the back of the bench.
“Problem?” the young man – surely no older than twenty, Levi assumed – said.
Levi chuckled darkly, and then shot his arm out from beneath his trench coat so fast the man didn’t even have time to scream before Levi sank his fangs into flesh - the flow of poison from his sinuses a welcome release to the pressure of anger and hunger – and his victim began to shrivel and dehydrate. A moment later, Levi swallowed with satisfaction and shuddered, letting out a growl of satisfaction as the corpse in his torso dissolved and fueled his veins with energy and nourishment, the man’s body evaporated into digestive mist.
