Blood on Silk

by Marie Treanor

  She moved on him like a cat, slow and sensual, taking time for her hands and lips to learn his body, with a shy but obvious delight that aroused him all the more. But this woman he’d released no longer drew back in embarrassment from the sexual heat. She embraced it, craved his pleasure with her own, and set about achieving it with a wild determination that enchanted him.

  In the end, Saloman reached up with his arms and held on to the bedpost, riding the whirlwind as she rode him, to a profound, devastating climax.

  Smiling, he watched her come down once more. Since she sat astride him, and he felt far too comfortable as he was to move and kiss her, he contented himself with tracing the shape of her trembling lips with one finger. She caught his finger in her mouth and kissed it. She looked both decadent and angelic, almost like a Botticelli painting, as her pert, rosy-tipped breasts rose and fell among her tumbling, pale amber hair.

  At last, she gave a breath of almost awed laughter. “You really don’t get any smaller, do you?”

  “I’m still inside you,” he pointed out.

  “What if I . . . ?” Teasing, she began to slide off, but he grabbed her hips to keep her in place.

  “No,” he said. “You’re too desirable. And it’s been a long time.”

  Her half smile paused with uncertainty. “A day or so?”

  “Three hundred and twelve years, give or take a month or so. And nine days, of course.”

  Her eyes searched his. “You never struck me as a celibate being.”

  “I was never known for it,” he confessed. “On the other hand, the three hundred and twelve years were not my choice.”

  “And the nine days?”

  He moved at last, rolling her over and under him. “Not so much abstinence, as the desire to have you.”

  Her mouth opened, as if to say, “Me?” But she closed it again, clearly not sure whether to laugh in disbelief or accept it as a compliment.

  He said, “Are you hungry?”

  Bafflement flashed across her face. “Hungry? No. That is, maybe a little; I haven’t been thinking of food.”

  “We can have sex with the leftovers.”

  Her body shook with laughter but also excitement. She clenched involuntarily around his cock, and he withdrew it slowly, to make her gasp—and to savor the sensation.

  “You really have food?” she asked as he slid off the bed.

  “Humans are always hungry.”

  She began to say something, then broke off, apparently distracted by watching him walk naked across the room. He liked that too, but he had no intention of inuring her to the sight. He picked up the black silk robe from the chair in the corner and went out.

  The kitchen on the ground floor was not a place in which he spent a great deal of time. It had been cleaned with the rest of the house and never used. But the refrigerator—a useful invention for humans, he allowed—contained some excellent cheese and cold meats, salad, and fruit he’d ordered especially for his night with her. He began setting it out on a plate.

  When he heard her soft footsteps on the stairs, it crossed his mind that she was escaping, running for the front door. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t reach the street before he caught her again; yet when she didn’t even pause there, but crossed the hall toward the kitchen, he smiled without meaning to.

  Her shadow, and then her presence, filled the doorway. He glanced up to see her standing with her back to the wall. She wore his torn, discarded shirt, and the sight of it on her, of its parting across her beautiful breasts and of her shapely legs emerging from its hem, sent the blood racing through his veins once more.

  But she looked serious, almost anxious. He wondered if, as the joy of sex faded, she’d come to plead for her life—or to ask for a cooked meal.

  He placed some cherries on the plate and opened the cupboard door to find a glass.

  She said, “The three hundred and twelve years. Were you conscious?”

  He paused, his hand on the stem of the glass, then brought it down and filled it with the fruit juice from the fridge. “Mostly. I slept a lot too.”

  “I can’t even . . .” She walked toward him with quick, agitated steps. “How did you survive the boredom?”

  He glanced at her in surprise, because she’d unerringly found the hardest part. “Determination to survive. I thought a lot.”

  “About what, for God’s sake? For three hundred years?”

  “Everything. You understand I was already more than two thousand years old. I’m used to—er—passing the time.”

  “But you can’t exactly have had many distractions!”

  “Revenge is a good one. Ruling the world another. And, of course, there was the pain.”

  “Pain?” She sounded uncertain, as though imagining emo - tional turmoil.

  He let the smile tug at his lips while he made a fist and thumped it against his heart.

  Her eyes widened with shock. Her mouth fell open, and she grabbed the table as if to steady herself. “You felt that? For three hundred years?”

  He shrugged. “The first few were the worst. One’s body learns to cope and adapt. Sometimes, when I was just waking up, it seemed like my best friend. Almost a solid entity.”

  He said it to lighten her horror, to make her laugh. But she didn’t, continuing instead to stare at him with a compassion that seemed to hurt more than his remembered agony.

  He let his hands fall from the plate. “Elizabeth, I can take pain. I can take boredom and hunger. I can even take blinding, meaningless lust that I can’t move to assuage. I can bear betrayal and the kind of fury that should make one’s body explode. But not pity. Not from a woman I’ve just fucked.”

  He meant to shock her with his coarseness, but she didn’t even blink, so he pulled her against him and kissed her, hard. And then, with her almost-naked body in his hold, he no longer knew which of them he was distracting. Although she responded with blind instinct, as if she could do nothing else, she began to ask more questions, unable to leave the subject until he thrust his hand under the shirt, between her thighs, and she gasped, staring into his face with a different kind of shock. She seemed to smolder. And so, predatory and triumphant, he laid her across the kitchen table and brought her to orgasm with his fingers while he rubbed cream cheese into her breasts and drizzled wine over her nipples; then, while she convulsed under him in helpless bliss, he licked it all off with slow, deliberate sensuality.

  After which, he took her and the remaining food back to bed, to let her feast off him instead.

  It was a lifetime of experience crammed into one endless night. The excitement and tension of the Angel seduction, the astonishing flight across Budapest, the roller-coaster emotions that assaulted her throughout the night, swept her up, and threw her onward, learning about him and about herself.

  To say nothing of the wild, intense, gloriously constant sex.

  Elizabeth felt like a stranger in a strange world, yet she welcomed it with open arms. It seemed that this night, which had begun with the near certainty of death, was bringing her to life.

  They talked a lot. He even talked during sex—not crude words designed only for self-arousal, but hot, moving ones that told her how beautiful she was and how much he wanted her, how much he adored what she was doing to him. Beside that, the novelty of their other conversations seemed far less, even snippets of events that had occurred hundreds of years ago. She found herself telling him bits and pieces of her own much duller life, the friends who were important to her, the few men she’d gone out with and trusted and lost. And she found she no longer thought of those men with the mixture of humiliation, self-pity, and self-deprecation that she was used to—it was why she avoided thinking about them as much as she could—but with dispassionate if rueful humor. They were experiences of life; that was all. And none of them came near this one, not even Richard, whom she also mentioned in passing. Richard, who’d never even kissed her, and now she was glad.

  Once, as she sprawled on the floor, examining t
he horde of books she’d found in his bedroom, wearing only his silk shirt against the predawn chill, she said, “Is this how you caught up with the twenty-first century? How many of these have you read?”

  He shrugged and sank naked into the chair beside her. He didn’t feel the cold. “Bits of all of them. I read quickly. And television is wonderful. I have a laptop too—endless information at the touch of a few keys.”

  She smiled as he drew her back against his legs and glanced up at him. “You seem to take it all in your stride.”

  “Three hundred years seems longer to you than to me.”

  “You’ve been around since the world began. . . .”

  “Not quite,” he said wryly. “I don’t remember the dinosaurs. In fact, until this week I’d never even heard of dinosaurs.”

  “Are we really the same race?” It felt good to surprise him, to feel his stroking hand pause on her hair before carrying on.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I read it.” She caught his questing hand sliding inside the shirt, not to prevent it, but to hold it against her breast. “You wrote it.”

  “I probably did, though with little idea of preaching to posterity. Where did you come across it?”

  “In the hunters’ library. It’s extraordinary, the stuff they have there.”

  “I must take a look sometime.”

  She glanced at him with sudden unease, but all his attention appeared to be on his hand, which was now caressing her naked breast. His concentration, especially after all the sex they’d already enjoyed, was very gratifying as well as arousing. And God, he was beautiful, with the tangle of black locks falling across his pale cheek, his full, sensual lips parted, his large black eyes more warm now than opaque. She had learned to read some of the expressions there, the signs of lust as well as laughter, teasing, odd instances of sadness and anger.

  He was thousands of years old. It would have been stranger if he wasn’t a complex man. She’d always been prepared for that, and for her own curiosity about the history he’d touched. What she hadn’t expected was the force of her desire to know him. And yet in a lifetime—her lifetime—even if she spent every waking moment with him, she’d never know it all.

  She shied away from that thought. She was living in the moment, because she was still alive when she’d thought she would be dead. Because whatever he was and whatever he’d done or would do, he’d given her the most amazing night of her life—of anybody’s life, surely.

  There was no sign of dawn seeping through the heavy velvet curtains. She was glad, because sunrise would bring the rest of the world and the consequences of this night, whatever they were. Right now, the night stretched forever, and she was happy.

  Happy . . . Had she ever been truly happy before?

  She reached up to touch his cheek with wonder, and his hot eyes moved to hers. Most of his face was in shadow, dark and mysterious—and sexy. Her breath caught. “Were you always like this?”

  He leaned closer, and she lifted her open mouth to receive his kiss. He took her hand, guiding it to the cool hardness of his erection. Heat flamed through her.

  “Randy?” he inquired. “Oh yes.”

  “Undead,” she reproved. “Or did you never die? Were you always immortal?”

  “I died.”

  Fascinated enough to be distracted from the caresses of his hand, and the feel of his throbbing erection in hers, she asked, “When? Where? What were you in life?”

  “You would call me a prince.”

  Of course. Anything less just wouldn’t have been believable. “Here? In Hungary?”

  “Not originally. East of here, Asia. I traveled here with my people when I was a very young man, and I died of the same illness that killed so many of them, including my father.” His thumb flicked her nipple, over and over, spreading warmth and icy tingles of need. “My people preserved a balance in those days. Perhaps originally we sprang from the same race as humans, but by my time we were a distinct and separate race with certain powers over nature—you would call it magic—and over death itself. We could revive our dead. Our undead lived among our living, and we all existed beside humans, even the ones who made us ill.”

  “Why?”

  “It was our duty. To care for them. A council of elders, including the king, decided which of the dead should be revived. Normally, undead were chosen only from alternate generations of each family, but my father’s death happened too quickly, so they revived me instead.”

  “Did you want it?” she asked curiously.

  His gaze lifted from her breast to her face, an arrested expression in his dark, once unreadable eyes. “I didn’t want to die. Yes, I wanted it. I reached for it with both hands.”

  From his appearance, if that was any way to judge his race, he had been younger then than she was now. It was natural to hold on to life, to grab at it any way you could, only . . .

  “A life without light?” she whispered. “A life sustained on the blood, on the death of others?”

  “It’s necessary. And there are compensations for living out of the sun.”

  “What, for God’s sake?”

  He cupped her breast and smiled, presumably by way of illustration. “Heightened senses. I can hear your heart beat from the next room, the blood rushing through your veins. I can feel and identify your presence in a city full of people. Every touch is intense, every pleasure, and ecstasy you can only dream of. Though perhaps I can help that dream along.”

  Her fist tightened on his shaft, and at the instantaneous flash of fire in his eyes, she squeezed and caressed until he lifted her in his arms and strode with her to the bed.

  “Again?” she breathed.

  “Oh yes.”

  “You will so need to change your bedding. . . . Do silk sheets wash well?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. I like the feel of them. Like your skin, Mistress Silk.” He laid her on the bed, kneeling, and took off her shirt before embracing her from behind, one hand over her breast while he turned up her face with the other and kissed her.

  He knelt behind her, his long, muscular thighs holding her captive as he caressed and kissed. His erection nudged between her cheeks, nestled between her thighs and found its now-familiar way inside. Before tonight, she’d never cared much for penetrative sex. It had never measured up to her vague and possibly naïve romantic desires. Tonight, however, she’d discovered there was no greater joy than Saloman’s shaft in her, working its magic inside while his hands and lips worked their own on the outside.

  She pushed back against him, blissful as he thrust in long, slow strokes. As things grew more heated, his hand slipped down between her legs and she cried out. The sharp intensity of pleasure his fingers brought to her clitoris set her orgasm climbing.

  “Take it all,” he whispered into the skin of her neck, mingling the delight of his thrusts with the joy of his fingers. And God, she’d forgotten the sensitivity of her neck, the weird, cold pleasure of his teeth’s grazing and caressing and biting. . . .

  As the tide crashed over her, his teeth clamped down. Her hands, clinging to his thighs, opened wide with shock and pain. But she couldn’t stop the ecstasy convulsing her; she couldn’t stop the insidious rush of need as he pierced her skin. Then he began to suck, and the force of the new pleasure hit her like a blow, fierce, scary, and overwhelming. Pushing ecstasy into her below, he sucked the life from her veins into his cruel, tender mouth, took her blood with her body, and kept taking.

  Helpless, lost in endless, mindless pleasure, reaching for it with both hands and her entire, greedy body, Elizabeth knew she’d discovered total joy at last. In death.

  Saloman gathered it all to him, her vulnerable body, convulsing on his cock, bringing him joy; her strong, sweet blood, spilling over his teeth and down his throat, strengthening his hungry veins with the power of the Awakener, with the potency of his killer, Tsigana. Two lovers, one bloodline.

  Triumph flowed through him. He never wanted to stop
taking Elizabeth, drinking Elizabeth. . . .

  And it seemed she could take a lot of pleasure on her own account—more, far more than he’d expected. But then, she had the semimystical power Tsigana had taken from him by the act of killing. It was a cycle of power and pleasure, and he longed to keep it going forever. He wanted to feel Elizabeth’s teeth in his throat, piercing the vein and feeding from him—at the instant of her death.

  With a howl that sounded wolflike, even to his own ears, he dragged his mouth away from her and forced himself to be still, because she couldn’t take any more. Her head lolled back against his shoulder, her glazed eyes staring up at him. Shaking like a man with ague, he bent and licked the wound in her throat. He couldn’t help savoring the last taste of her blood as he did, regretting the loss as the punctures began at once to close and heal.

  Her eyes were still open, huge in her white, exhausted, pleasure-blasted face.

  “You drank from me,” she whispered. “You did it after all. . . .” A single tear hovered at the corner of her eye, glistening. Fascinated, curiously stricken, he watched it tremble and fall. “Bastard,” she said with surprising clarity, and collapsed.

  Saloman laid her on the pillow, feeling for her sluggish pulse. He’d taken a lot of blood, but she wouldn’t die. She wouldn’t even need a transfusion since Tsigana’s inherited blood cells would regenerate in her veins while she slept.

  Saloman covered her with his silk sheet and sat back cross-legged to watch her sleep. She was beautiful, pale, lovely, and strong. A smile played about his lips. He was proud of her, and he rather thought she’d just changed all his plans.

  He’d let her live, let her be the temptation to all who sought his downfall through killing her. But they wouldn’t succeed, because she’d be with him, making him not weaker, but stronger.

  Reaching out, he touched a scarlet spot on his white sheet.

  “Blood on silk,” he whispered, and began to laugh. “Elizabeth, you’re mine.”

  He found Mihaela’s flat without difficulty. It was easy to trace Elizabeth’s residence now that her smell, her footsteps, her presence, filled his every sense. It was in a pleasant old house filled with unexpected light. No trace of her dark work littered the vampire hunter’s home, just white walls and bright pictures and curtains that let in the early dawn light. He’d left it late. It was going to be hard to do all he meant to.