She knows he needs her. Needs this. Without shame or embarrassment, she lets him part her labia, watches his dark head move closer. His tongue finds her clitoris and circles it slowly, attentively. Because of the melding of their minds, she can feel his rampant excitement. He knows when she climaxes, she’ll gush. When she gushes, he’ll drink. The blood of a woman, her moon blood, is a delicacy to him.
She is lost now, back arched, eyes closed. Relentlessly, his tongue teases her. The heat builds and expands and wicks a channel to every pulse point. Just the idea of Jaden, forbidden fruit, sipping her in such a forbidden way, makes her drunk. All prohibitions are drowned in pleasure. There is just his unnervingly talented tongue driving her to madness.
He can feel her orgasm mounting. The muscles in his own hips flex and release as he rubs his swollen cock against the sheets. She rakes her fingers through his thick dark hair, marveling at his beauty, at the mere fact of him stretched out between her thighs. I’m close, she thinks, linking with him. In a flash, she transmits all the years of thwarted longing, of touching herself as she fantasized about him, of the moment she knew he burned for her too. She is dizzy with need. Her limbs are electric with it, and still he continues his assault, flicking upward and then driving in, upward and in, and her womb goes molten.
The orgasm hits her like a wall of flame. She is helpless, racked by throe after throe of ecstasy so intense, it breaks her open. And still it lifts her, higher, dizzying. Jaden plunges his tongue deep, drinking, and she thrills to the sensation of it, of knowing he loves every part of her in an almost unbearably intimate way. The sensation is dark, rich, depraved. It seems impossible that she, Delaney Jones, would do such a thing, that she would crave it, just as Jaden craved her.
His tongue circles her again, one last sweep, before he rises up. She sees his cock, which is hugely rampant. When he enters her, it will hurt. She can admit now that she needs it to hurt, that for her, pain is pleasure.
The muscles in his wide shoulders ripple as he moves over her, teasing his swollen head against her clit. She feels his urgency, the power and animal hunger he struggles to control. Any courtesy he shows her is hard won.
“Are you ready,” he whispers, linking.
“I have always been ready.”
“Once we do this…”
“I know. I don’t care what happens.”
He shows her things. She sees them projected onto her mind’s eye like a movie: herself at fourteen, at sixteen, all legs, just a hint of female curves. At nineteen, her hair streaming behind her in the water as she swims. The tiny bikini she wears to drive him mad. And drumming a beat beneath it all, his obsessive desire for her, more than she could have imagined. He shares it with her now, the secrecy and pain, the hours spent watching her from the upstairs window, the songs he writes pouring out his anguish. His own dark secrets.
She gasps when he enters her, feels the muscles of her sex close around him. The fullness is unbearably erotic. She pulls her knees up at his bidding, hears him groan as he penetrates her, inch by inch, a carnal violation. That this is wrong, that this is forbidden, means nothing to her now. The need is too great. Their gazes meet in mutual reckoning. Is this actually happening? Her mind can’t grasp it fully, but her body clamors for him. His eyes bore into hers. His hips begin to move, seeking her depth.
“Are you resisting?”
“A little.”
“I’ll make it so you can’t.”
He grabs her wrists and pins them above her head, holding them with one hand. The moment she’s off guard, he pushes all the way in and stays there, letting her spasm around him. The pain leaves her speechless, helpless, but his size arouses her. She knows he knows. Nothing about this, about him, can be controlled. There is no control.
Slowly, he moves again. With her wrists captured above her, she feels naked and vulnerable. He watches her, his eyes unfathomable in the dim light. The harshness of his breathing tells her how difficult it is for him to control the animal within. It wants out. Wants release. Wants her.
He lengthens his strokes now. When she looks down, she can see the thick shaft pile-driving between her thighs. She pulls her knees up again to accommodate him. It’s easier now, friction building, nearing flashpoint. She loves him, and that love heats her as fiercely as he does. It forces her to surrender.
He gives a low cry and plunges deep, riding the back wall. His ferocity, the mercilessness of his thrusts, pushes her over. She’s caught. A paroxysm of ecstasy spins her higher and higher until she writhes, screaming. And still he pushes inside her. He knows where she lives now.
The minute her orgasm subsides, she feels another one building. Some part of her that’s still sane wants to catch its breath, but Jaden won’t give her time to recover. His eyes never leave her face. She can hear his sudden intake of breath as her climax rises from the ashes of the first. Her muscles squeeze him like a velvet fist. This climax banks higher, faster, flings her into a pit of angelic fire. She opens her mind to him so he can feel what she feels, the headlong dizzying rush of it. He cries out and throws his head back, pumping savagely, forcing her to ride the knifepoint of pain and pleasure. His cock pulses inside of her. It floods her, one hot lick after another. In just that single ecstatic moment, their souls conjoin, his awash in brooding darkness made clean again by her. She feels his despair, his anger and his love. Feels too that some appetites can never ever be slaked.
An emergency signal on the radio startled Delaney out of sleep. She pressed one hand to her heart, which rabbited madly. The dream again. How many thousands of miles had she put between her and Jaden, and still the dream came to her, made her squirm with shameful desire. She could feel how wet she was. And always the haunting suspicion that these weren’t dreams but visitations, that he had found a way to communicate with her in the land of shadows.
The radio bleated the emergency signal again, and Delaney lent it her attention. “Cronica importante,” the broadcaster said. Emergency report. She sat up and scrubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand, listening. Another tour bus had gone over a mountain. Alta Verde. Her mountain. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. He gave the name of an American tour company before reporting that the authorities said survivors were unlikely.
Val was surely on that bus.
She scrambled to light her Coleman lantern, despite the dwindling fuel. Her first attempt failed because her fingers were shaking, but she succeeded on the second. The tiny room grew brighter. She could hear the soft hiss of the lantern and her own shuddering breaths. Not Val. It couldn’t be. Women like Val grew older and meaner. They shopped from catalogs printed on thick glossy stock. They fed tiny smush-faced dogs tidbits off their plates. The idea of Val dead was inconceivable. Yet who else could it be? Who else was on that bus?
And if Val was dead, who would call Jaden?
Delaney leapt to her feet and began searching for her discarded clothes. As she pounced on her socks and panties, she caught a glimpse of her open pocket watch, her great-great-grandfather’s, that sat on a pile of books. At least two hours until daybreak. Disheartened, she sat back down again. A search party would have to be assembled. But it was harvest time.
Oh, Val, she thought, surprised by her own grief. Why did you come?
* * *
Dawn broke, a blush of pink behind the eastern peaks. The wind, as it came spiraling up the mountain pass, smelled of wood smoke from the morning cooking fires. Two capuchin monkeys dozed in the orchid-laced elbows of an acacia tree. The darting of gaudy-winged dragonflies jarred Delaney from the hypnosis of trudging after Huenu, a mason from the village who knew the lower elevations well. Two other villagers, Imasu and Maiqui, brought up the rear, along with a pack llama. Their combined footfalls sounded a warning to the tree dwellers who squawked, chattered and howled their go-aways.
“Miss,” Huenu said to her in formal Quechua. “This person we travel so far to find. She i
s well known to you?”
Delaney struggled to come up with an Indian equivalent for stepmother, and then finally said, “She is the woman my father married after my mother died. I believe she may have been on that bus.”
Huenu’s forehead crinkled beneath his straight black bangs. “If the Hungering Ones find her—”
“I know.”
They lapsed into silence again, but left unspoken between them was the memory of the withered carcasses of small animals. On nights when the winds blew loudest, the body count was always high. It seemed they waited somehow, she and the villagers, for something to put a stop to it. In her case, she waited for definitive proof that the legends were true, that drinkers of blood actually roamed the Andes. The reasonable, scientific part of her stubbornly refused to chalk it up to anything more serious than marauding predators.
“I appreciate the time you’re taking to do this,” Delaney said. “You and the men.”
“You heal Rayn. You heal Rayn’s baby. Her father is my brother.”
For Huenu, that explained everything. In the Andes, relationships were the thread that bound together hundreds of fragile lives. They saved you from certain death. Funny how the kind of money Delaney had grown up with didn’t bind, it severed.
She breathed deeply to clear her head, but thoughts came rapid-fire now, like commuters rushing to a train. The dream she’d had of Jaden, one of a thousand variations of the same dream, haunted her. Mixed in with those shameful feelings was mortified pride. The last time she’d gone to Cusco, she’d seen a magazine cover of him at some tony LA eatery with his arm around a sultry brunette.
They pushed on till noon, descending out of the rocky arid region of the highlands and into the cloud forest—ceja de selva, the locals called it, “eyebrow of the jungle”. Huenu rummaged through the llama’s saddlebags for the traditional lunch of corn and wild radishes. While they ate, the sun broke through, dappling the ground at their feet. The air grew steamy and thick. A dung beetle delicately rolled a ball of fresh spoor.
Three hours later, on a crumbling one-lane road that ribboned around the mountain, Delaney heard the squawking of handheld radios. Despite her dread of what she might find, her pace quickened. She rounded the bend and saw rescue workers in varying stages of progress rappelling down the steepest part of Alta Verde, dwarfed by the panorama of trees and sky and soaring peaks. How could anyone locate that bus, let alone survivors? Two careening rubber skid marks indicated where the bus had fought, and failed, to stay on the road. Even if the bus had a GPS tracker, how could they recover either the bus or the bodies? She couldn’t see where they had landed. No broken trees or circling buzzards. On these roads, buses did sometimes go over and rescue workers never found them.
She approached a man who seemed to be in charge. Taller than the average Andean, he wore a police-issue, military-style uniform, and his hair was combed in a shiny pompadour.
In Spanish, she asked if he knew the nationality of the tour company.
He shrugged. “Americano.”
“When did the bus crash?”
“Two days ago.”
Two days. She felt curiously light-headed. Part of her wanted to yell at the rescue team for not having gotten here faster. She forced herself to remember that in Peru, two days was fast. It took time to assemble a crew, since no professional crews existed. The drive up Alta Verde took hours and made huge demands on their machinery. About five hundred feet away, a modified wrecker idled, wheezing, all rust and primer, a reminder that money and resources were almost nonexistent.
Yet frustration continued to churn as she stared out over the sloping hills, sudden drop-offs and hard blue sky. Of all the times Val had mocked her in public, shamed her in front of her friends, badmouthed her to her father, Delaney had never imagined her stepmother at the bottom of a ravine. Getting a dose of her own medicine, sure, but never this.
Then, in the distance, she spotted a jeep traveling fast. Huenu saw it too, because he muttered, “Reporteros,” with withering contempt.
Hugging the serpentine sides of the mountain, the jeep disappeared from view for a moment, and then reappeared much closer, followed by a plume of blue exhaust. Delaney counted only one occupant, the driver, who was clearly Peruvian. The jeep lurched to a halt in front of her, and the driver got out.
“You are Delaney Jones?” he asked her in Spanish.
She stared at him, speechless, expecting him to officially notify her of Val’s death. Instead, he walked around the front of the Jeep and opened the passenger door. When he gestured for her, she followed, dreading what she might find. Val, mangled beyond recognition, already stiff. Perhaps her body, but missing limbs or fed upon by eaters of the dead. Delaney had seen it all at one point or another. Seen it and been profoundly moved by how insubstantial life could be, spores of a dandelion that had been cast to the wind.
“Signora,” the driver said, moving aside so she could step around the door. Heart pounding, she forced herself to look. The passenger seat had been angled back. Lying beneath a thin cotton blanket was the outline of a body. She peeled the blanket back, steeling herself. Realization came with a gut punch.
Jaden.
“Altitude sickness,” the driver said. “He insisted we drive straight through.”
Delaney couldn’t catch her breath. The dream of last night that had dogged her every step of the way here had suddenly been made flesh. There he was, Jaden Seavers, unconscious beneath the blanket, everything she had worked so hard to forget. He’d tried to get to Peru as quickly as he could because he thought, perhaps, that his mother was injured but not dead. Where had he been when the news arrived? Everything she’d read described the poshness of his celebrity lifestyle—the cars, the yacht, the house overlooking the Pacific. Maybe he’d been performing on one of his endless tours, sweating beneath a blaze of lights, 30,000 screaming fans surging like a human ocean in front of him. Now he was here, and she knew with perfect certainty that nothing in her life would be the same again.
She jerked her head up when she realized that the driver was still speaking. “I must begin the journey home,” he said. He pulled a duffel bag and a guitar case out of the back while she stood frozen. “Will you move him to a higher elevation?”
She swallowed hard. How had this happened? How was it possible that Val was dead and Jaden was in Peru? Her mind just wouldn’t process it. Now, his life was in her hands. She would have to make difficult decisions, potentially life-threatening ones. And there were a thousand other ghosts she would be forced to contend with too. Delaney shoved those thoughts aside. Later. She could think about it all later.
“Help me move him,” she said to Huenu and the men.
Strong as he was, Huenu couldn’t throw Jaden over his shoulder. Jaden was six-two and none of the Peruvians was taller than five-six. Delaney took point by holding Jaden under the armpits and hauling him out. With the men, she staggered away from the road and toward an embankment where, possibly miles below, the tour bus lay in a pile of twisted metal.
Despite the pallor, his face was the same one she remembered, the strong jaw and prominent chin, but his dark hair had grown a little past his shoulders. She felt overwhelmed and helpless. Altitude sickness sometimes progressed far beyond headache and drunken fatigue. His brain could swell. He could suffer permanent damage, even death. She would have to move him to a lower elevation, especially since her village lay another 3,000 feet higher. But how could she participate in the rescue operation he would insist upon, and save his life at the same time?
She spotted the handful of rescue workers climbing back up their rappelling ropes. For all she knew, the rescue had been given up as hopeless.
With terrible uncertainty, she gazed down at him. The wind stirred a few strands of his hair, only a shade or two lighter than her own. In repose, his face looked both unholy and angelic. She caught the warm scent that reminded her of
the rum-infused pipe tobacco her father kept in a humidor on his desk. She’d forgotten how scent could affect a person so intimately.
There was a rumbling in the distance. The men stood. Then the sound got closer, turning into a deafening roar that sent birds screeching into flight. Delaney stood too, heart pounding.
Earthquake.
The ground became a trampoline beneath her feet. One violent up-thrust sent her sprawling. She lay stunned and in pain, trying to make sense of the surreal: a fifty-foot Peruvian peppercorn tree bent nearly sideways, an evergreen, split in two, tumbling over the drop-off, a hundred tree limbs groaning, cracking, raining down leafy spears. Nature had gone on a murderous rampage.
In a strangled voice, she cried, “Help me carry him!”
Huenu grabbed Jaden under the shoulders while she and Imasu carried his legs. The llama squalled in protest. Maiqui herded it across their narrow swath of earth, maybe 200 feet wide, the overhang on one side, an abyss on the other. Where could they go? With eerie calm, Delaney thought, we’re all going to be dead—me, Jaden, Val, my mom, my dad. She could trace by memory her mother’s hands, translucent from chemotherapy, folded gracefully on her blue duvet. Her father, lurking around the stables with a forbidden cigarette. And the awful moment when Val must have realized her time was up, the breathless suspension of the bus teetering and then hurtling down the fast, roadless highway to whatever hell awaited her.
Another cataclysm knocked Delaney to her knees. Imasu pulled her up again, and their eyes met in a flash of mutual terror that the earth could no longer be trusted. Together, they headed toward the cliff, away from the drop-off, but Delaney halted. Earthquakes triggered avalanches. Already, pebbles rattled down the cliff face, harbingers of bigger rocks to come.
A twenty-foot tree branch crashed in front of her. She stifled a scream. Her legs shook. She could barely move. Summoning the last of her strength, she kept her hold on Jaden. Then above her came a sharp report, followed by the rumble of something moving fast.
Carnal Sacrifice Page 2
