“Cora, just calm down, calm down,” he said, but he might as well have been speaking in another language. She couldn’t process the words properly—either that or she simply wasn’t interested in any of them. They didn’t help her get to the people, so what did it matter what they meant? She had to focus on more important things, like shoving at the bar of his arms.
Not that it helped at all. She shoved until she was sure something should have snapped, but he didn’t let go. And when she tried kicking at him instead, her predicament only got worse. Somehow they wound up sprawled on the ground, amidst the mud and the slushy snow and the too strong scent of forest things.
All of which was bad for a number of reasons.
For a start, she didn’t much care for the mouth full of icy water. It didn’t even taste like water anymore. It tasted like cardboard, if cardboard had somehow been concentrated down for maximum blandness. And then there was the weight of Zeke—had he always been so enormous? She knew he was tall and she’d always thought of him as solid, but this was something else. He seemed to be everywhere all at once, each part of him ten times the size it had been before. His right thigh was a sack of wet cement, so heavy it bordered on smothering. His chest was practically crushing her into the ground, to the point where she could barely breathe.
It was a good thing she didn’t need to do it anymore. Knowing that wasn’t a comfort, however. It made her wonder how long this could go on for, before something terrible happened to her. Could he just lie on her forever, until she went mad? She suspected so. She was already halfway there anyway.
And not only because of the pressure and the weight and the thought of what being this way meant. There was also the heat. God, the heat coming off him was unbearable. She’d always thought vampires were meant to be cold—in fact, that was the way she felt. Her own skin seemed like marble, and the snow was only making it worse.
So where was this impossible fire coming from? It was like being trapped beneath a furnace. She thought of what Merrick had said about sunlight, but it was still way before dawn. It had to be coming from Zeke, even if he barely seemed aware of it. He just kept right on wrestling with her no matter how intense it got.
And they were wrestling by this point. Somehow she’d tangled her leg around his, and was using it to try to throw him over onto his side. His hand was clamped around her wrist, and it was obvious why. If he let go, they both knew she was going to scratch him. All she could think about was the raw, red lines she could make down his perfect face—a thought that seemed a touch insane until she got to the good part of this particular idea.
Once she managed to do it, she was going to lick him. That was what she wanted to do. Just as soon as he let go of her wrist, or moved so she could get her other hand out from beneath their bodies. Yes, yes, she was going to scratch and then lick him . . . and when it became clear that she couldn’t, another urge started to blossom.
He was behind her, but if she bent her head back a little and then twisted, she could just about reach him with her mouth. His jaw was mere inches away, and to her it looked suddenly so tender. It had always seemed solid and masculine before, yet somehow it didn’t now. It was hers, it was hers to bite—no matter what he shouted.
“Don’t, don’t, fight it, fight it or you’ll never be human again,” he snapped, but he was only doing it because he knew he couldn’t get away. He knew she had him, despite the hold he had on her and the heaviness of his body and all the other advantages he seemed to have. She was too wily, too strong, and in a second he was going to lose.
She really, really wanted him to.
He said human, and all she could think of was losing the powers she’d gained. Of him taking them away from her, just because . . . because what? Because he imagined her too good and decent to be whatever this was? It seemed that way, but at that moment it didn’t sound like a convincing argument to her. And in a second, it wasn’t going to matter anyway.
She could feel him starting to cave in under the pressure—though maybe cave in was the wrong term. It implied that he was failing, when really it felt more like he was giving something away. Instead of arching his head back and away from her, she could sense him starting to lean in. Once or twice it almost seemed as though he was trying to rub his cheek over hers, and only the thought of what she was trying to do kept her from fully believing it.
He couldn’t be, could he?
He couldn’t want her to bite. But if he didn’t, then why was he no longer holding her wrist? Why was his hand suddenly on her hip, pulling and pulling her back against his body in a way that couldn’t be mistaken? He wanted her closer, not farther away. He wanted to rub their bodies together, in order to make this terrible fire worse.
And he was succeeding. The heat was now pulsing and pulsing through her, and not just in the innocent parts. Before it had seemed to center in her mouth and lips and gums—almost an ache that urged her to bite. But now it was everywhere, from the suddenly heavy swell of her breasts to the insides of her thighs.
He hadn’t lied when he’d said fever.
If anything, he’d undersold whatever this was. For one long terrible moment, she wanted him so much she would have slit him open just to get inside his skin. Even her lesser instincts were insane, considering the circumstances. They were wrestling in the mud and snow after a series of completely inexplicable and very frightening events, and all she wanted to do was grab his hand and push it between her legs.
She wanted to do more than that, in truth. Her body was buzzing with a thousand different needs, and all of them were far, far lewder than anything she’d ever entertained before. The last time she’d been with a man, she’d barely dared to touch him. She’d settled for a brief pat on the back and an accidental grab of his ass while aiming for his hip. She’d never felt like much of an active participant during sex.
But here she was practically writhing. She arched her back just to get more contact between her backside and his groin, and knew why she was doing it too. It wasn’t purely so she could be closer to him. It was because she could feel what was there. Every time she pressed back, she got a little more evidence of something thick and solid.
And the harder she rubbed, the clearer it became. He was aroused, quite obviously. He was so aroused he was no longer trying to restrain her. She could feel his lips against her cheek, parted in the exact same way hers were. Ready to bite me, so close to biting me, she thought, and found herself thrilling over that idea as much as she did over the other one. The one that said Bite him back, go on, snarl at him and bite back, that’s what this is, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Maybe she would have done it, too.
If it hadn’t been for Merrick.
She didn’t see him coming—though that wasn’t a surprise. She was so wrapped up in the heat and feel of Zeke that someone could have bazooka-ed them from space and she wouldn’t have noticed. But she noticed the sudden absence of the body behind her. She turned just in time to see him arcing off into the darkness, and only managed to process what had happened when Merrick got hold of her face.
He had picked up Zeke and hurled him off into the woods.
And now he was dealing with her. He was really, really dealing with her. The grip he had wasn’t one you might use on a person if you thought that person was a danger to themselves or to others. It was one you might use on a dog. It was a pincer, clamping her mouth shut so tight that pain lanced through her jaw. The whole move pretty much incapacitated her, but even if it hadn’t, he had others at his disposal.
He didn’t mince around the way Zeke had. There was no absurd bout of wrestling here. He straddled her body, knees pinning her arms to the ground. Then when she tried to buck, he did something even more humiliating than all the rest of it.
He shook her.
He used the hand on her face to rattle her head back and forth, in a way she wasn’t even sure you’d do with a dog. She was pretty sure pets warranted more respect and consideration
than this, but apparently she did not. She deserved shaking and knees on her arms and a gaze so cold and disdainful it seemed to pass right through her to the soil below.
The soil was more interesting to him than her. She was less than dirt to him, less than the bugs that crawled beneath her—and it wasn’t simply some vampire thing, either. It wasn’t that he feared she would run off and kill someone, or seemed troubled over the idea that she was no longer human the way Zeke did. It was something else, too.
But that something else didn’t quite click, until they dragged her back to the cabin.
They didn’t bother with the chains this time. They didn’t really need to. Merrick simply tossed her into the corner and told her to stay, and she didn’t have the slightest urge to do anything different. Perhaps she might have, if they hadn’t then done some of the things they did, but as it stood she could only watch, paralyzed.
Or was it mesmerized? It felt kind of like the latter. She knew her eyes started off normal-sized, then grew progressively bigger as this little tableau played out. But she couldn’t blame them. It was like watching those Shakespearean characters she’d thought about, only much more terrifying and intense than she’d initially imagined.
“Were you going to fuck her right there on the forest floor?” Merrick started, and everything pretty much unraveled from there. Zeke seemed to actually round on him, eyes flashing and teeth bared—the real teeth, the sharp teeth, the teeth she still didn’t think were possible—all his earlier calm completely gone. He didn’t sigh wearily this time. He roared, like a lion. He came close to hurling something.
Possibly the uneven chair.
“You think I can’t control myself?” he snarled, so full of conviction you could almost believe it. If you hadn’t seen him dry-humping her to death a few minutes ago, and didn’t look at the erection he still quite obviously had.
None of which applied to Merrick, who pretty much saw and heard everything.
“You can’t even control yourself now,” Merrick said, and for a moment it seemed like maybe he was wrong. A silence and stillness came over Zeke once the accusation was out—to the point where Cora thought a really withering comeback was on the horizon. Yeah, I sure do seem like an irrational, chaotic kind of guy, she pictured him saying.
About a second before he lunged at her.
There wasn’t any warning. All his focus seemed to be on Merrick, and maybe also on refuting what he’d just said. His back was practically to her, for God’s sake. Then suddenly it wasn’t anymore. He whipped around and went for her, all teeth and claw-hands and charged desperation. His eyes actually looked red. His mouth was full of razor blades.
But none of that was the worst thing.
The worst thing was the fact that she took a step forward. A smile spread over her face, like he wasn’t currently a half-crazed monster. It was closer to seeing a boyfriend across a crowded bar. Hey, there he is, she thought, and then simply tried to go to him. She even reached her out her arms, ready for his terrible embrace.
It was the first time she was actually glad of Merrick. He was cruel and he was cold, but he didn’t let that fanged thing get her. He knew what Zeke had been about to do, even if she hadn’t, and he got him easily by the back of his coat. Then when Zeke tried to shed said coat so he could carry on lurching toward her, Merrick went one better.
He grabbed hold of him by the chin and throat, as he had with her.
It was almost comforting to see. She’d thought a humiliating thing like that was reserved for someone as gross and contempt-worthy as her, but apparently not. It was for all vampires who didn’t know how to control themselves, of which Zeke was clearly one. Even after Merrick had wrestled him down to the floor, he didn’t seem to want to let up. He kept squirming and fighting and snarling, all that patient calm completely gone.
The fever simply burned it away, as though it had never been there at all. She knew it did, because Merrick told him so over and over—that none of this was real, that it was just her blood calling to his. Not that Zeke listened. He even started begging after a while—a thing she never thought she’d see him do. He was usually so contained and confident. If someone had told her he’d pleaded for something while being violently mugged, she wouldn’t have believed them.
Yet here he was on this filthy floor, hands straining against the legs that had boxed him in, back arched clean off the floor, eyes full of nothing but desperation. Here he was panting out words like please and just and let me. She wasn’t sure what was more shocking: the fact that he was doing this, or the thought of what he wanted Merrick to let him do.
She knew biting was probably involved. But then there was that thickly curved shape beneath the material of his jeans, ready and waiting to do things to her. He’d probably fuck her with it given half the chance, like Merrick had said. In fact, fucking was really the least of the things she could imagine. The most was this sudden and startling image she couldn’t quite shake, of him standing over her with his cock in his hand.
He would be dripping, she thought. He would be all slippery and slick and on the verge of coming. Then once he’d forced her to open her mouth, he’d give it to her in long, thick ribbons. All over her tongue, all over her face, all down her front, until she was absolutely and disgustingly coated in it.
And once he was done, he’d want her to lick it up. Of course he would. Why else would she be thinking about him doing such a thing? It couldn’t possibly be that this was what she wanted to happen. She wasn’t drooling at the thought of tasting his come. The thirst in her was for blood, not for anything else.
Certainly it wasn’t for that.
She’d never wanted anything of the kind in her entire life, and no amount of possible vampirism was going to make her start now. She just had to force the thoughts down, down to a place no one could ever find them—and for one relief-filled moment she succeeded. She managed to control the shakes. The heat lowered from a boil to a mild simmer. All ideas of anything remotely sexual went out of the window.
But sadly, they couldn’t stay outside the window. They might have, if everything had stopped there. If Merrick had chastised Zeke into silence and stillness, and all of this had returned to how it was before. She even found herself welcoming the notion, despite the torment she’d been through over the last few days. After all, she was exactly what they had claimed. She couldn’t deny it now.
And chains would have been so much better than watching Merrick lean down to lick Zeke’s open mouth. At least with chains, she knew where she was. She could tell herself she was really suffering and so oppressed by their evil ways—or even imagine that it was for her own good. Yeah, she was more than willing to admit it might be for her own good.
But this . . . this was not for any good that she could think of. The second he did it, all those alarms inside her leaped directly to eleven. That heat immediately reached some critical mass, and no amount of thinking of other things would make it go away. It was impossible to think of other things, with this going on in front of her.
Though God knew she tried to look away. She thought of how rude it probably was to keep watching, considering the direction this was definitely going in. She imagined Merrick sneering at her for staring, or maybe sniping at her for being a pervert. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to stop.
It was far too compelling, in so many different ways. There was the fact that it was Merrick doing this—Merrick who seemed so icy and restrained. He hadn’t appeared to have a sexual bone in his entire body before, yet there was no denying his intent. She couldn’t dismiss the light in his eyes, or the louche way he went about his business.
And then there were the actual things he was doing.
Once he was done licking, he sat back to admire his handiwork. He looked at all the things she couldn’t help looking at, like the glossiness of Zeke’s lips and the way Zeke parted them a little more. It was practically an invitation, and Merrick seemed to take it as such. He ran one elegan
t finger over that wanton mouth, and just when she was sure he wouldn’t dare, he dipped it inside.
Of course she immediately thought of Zeke snapping those sharp teeth around it. But the funny thing was . . . the idea only seemed to ratchet things up a notch. A pulse of strange pleasure actually went through her sex, as soon as it occurred to her. The way Merrick went about it was a bonus really, to the thought of blood and flesh and sinew.
Though she had to admit, it was a truly excellent one.
He didn’t simply slide his finger inside. He fucked that mouth over and over—and all the while he watched, with a look of something like triumph all over his face. Triumph because Zeke obeyed him, she thought, because Zeke didn’t bite even when it would have been so easy to do it. But also triumph for one other reason.
It was the same thing that made him angry in the forest.
The thing that made him sneer and spit at her.
He wasn’t angry that Zeke had changed her. He was angry that Zeke had forsaken him for some stupid girl. They were lovers, they were in love, and now she was in the way. She knew she was, because once it was clear that Zeke’s focus was back where it belonged, Merrick turned and looked at her.
He fucked the mouth that belonged to him, and looked at her with eyes that were no longer stones. Now, they gleamed with his victory. He is mine, they said, and Cora had to agree. In that moment, there seemed to be no one else for Zeke apart from the man above him. He writhed beneath Merrick; he gasped his name.
He licked that intruding finger like it was something else entirely. She watched his tongue flicker out and coil around one knuckle and almost wept, though over what she couldn’t tell. Part of it was knowing that he would never belong to her now, true enough. But there was another part she couldn’t so easily explain.
It was like the idea of him cutting that finger in two.
It shouldn’t have aroused her.
Yet somehow it did.
Even the victory in Merrick’s eyes excited her. Her head filled with thoughts of fighting him for her prize, and none of these thoughts were normal. She and Zeke and Merrick were all sweaty and naked in most of them, and there was lots of biting on the nape of each other’s neck. It reminded her of wildlife videos about animals wrestling for control of the pride, and it left her a tad shocked and shaken.
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