“Oh, god, Jack!” cried Katie. “Oh, fuck!”
Her legs wrapped around him tightly. Jack pulled her breasts out of her bra and sucked on one of her nipples. Was this just a result of the intense emotions that his feeding on her stirred within her? Was it something more? Could he and Katie finally grow to be something more?
He let his forehead press against hers as he continued at his punishing pace. She kissed him deeply, sucking on his lower lip as their mouths parted. Jack felt her fingers pressing into his bare shoulders, and then her fingernails scraping skin as she let out a shaky gasp and tensed up, reaching her climax.
Jack didn’t slow down. He pressed his upper body down onto her, letting his hips find the perfect angle for his own enjoyment. Katie was shuddering, and she almost looked as though she was overwhelmed by his continued sexual onslaught. Jack let his pace build until he was going too fast to hold out, and squeezed her tightly against him as he unloaded.
They stayed like that for a minute, sweaty and still draped in the aura of early morning. Katie’s hair was a tangled mess, and Jack brushed a few strands of it back from her forehead. She had recovered enough to recompose her expression, and she had a small, wary smile on her face.
“That was… intense,” she whispered.
“What can I say?” said Jack, with a shrug. “Morning sex brings out the best in me.”
Katie didn’t say anything. She made her way over to her luggage and began pulling out a new set of clothes.
“I wasn’t expecting it to go like this,” she said.
“You came along to play the role of my thrall,” said Jack. “Just pretend that it’s method acting.”
“Fuck you.” Katie threw her dirty panties at them, but Jack swatted them away in midair. “Aren’t you supposed to be dating Ryoko, anyway? How much does she know about this?”
Jack chewed his lower lip, picturing Ryoko back home in the mansion. It made him feel guilty to think about her, even though she’d all but told him that she didn’t mind him straying as long as he came back. Things would be different. Once he got back.
“I’m honest with her,” said Jack. “I’m not keeping any secrets.”
“Do you think she’s being completely honest about how she feels?” asked Katie. “About whether or not she’s jealous? Because if that’s what you think, then you really don’t know how women work.”
Jack scowled, but still found it hard to look away as Katie bent over to finish picking out her outfit, still bottomless.
“Anyway, we should get to work,” said Katie. “No sense in wasting time if it means staying in this godforsaken place any longer than we fucking have to.”
“Agreed,” said Jack. He sat up on the bed and winced, feeling an ache pound through his head that reminded him of a hangover, except worse.
“I’m going to see if I can get friendly with some of the other thralls,” said Katie. “They’re heading into town to purchase food this morning. I’m not sure how much they know, but they let their guard down around each other and speak pretty openly.”
“Alright,” said Jack. “Be careful. I guess I’ll start looking around the keep. See if I can find out which section seems the most likely to be where they’ve stashed Zedekiah’s Scepter.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” said Katie. She started wiggling into a pair of black sweatpants, the movement causing her bra-clad breasts to jiggle with delicious little movements.
“Trust me,” said Jack. “I’m trying not to.”
Katie settled on sweatpants, a white blouse, and a grey zip-up sweatshirt. She hesitated as she approached the door, and Jack could understand why.
“I can go with you,” he said. “Make sure you reach the other thralls safely.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” said Katie.
“Really?” he asked. “Even after last night?”
“It’s daytime,” said Katie. “The vampires will all be asleep.”
“Not all of them,” said Jack. He frowned, considering if he needed to be as concerned about Vyara as Pierce had seemed the night before. If she was the one who’d tried to poison him, perhaps he needed to be even more concerned.
“I’ll be okay,” said Katie. “I’ll have my phone on me with an emergency text queued up and ready to go if I run into trouble.”
“Good,” said Jack. “Be careful.”
Katie nodded, and then slipped out through the door. Jack rested his head back on his pillow, half tempted to sleep in a little later. He was still recovering, but there was also work to be done.
He dressed slowly, feeling through the extent of the leftover effects of the poison on his body. Moving around wasn’t overly difficult, but Jack doubted that he’d be able to fight at full strength in his current condition. His head also felt light, and his thinking was fuzzier and slower than usual.
A cart with various breakfast foods had been left waiting outside the room. Jack grabbed an apple and three linked sausages, wolfing the food down as he realized how hungry he was.
He paused to consider the possibility of the food having been poisoned again before coming to the conclusion that it was a risk he would inevitably have to take. It wasn’t as though he could just forgo eating for the next few days.
Once he was finished, Jack went to Mira’s room and knocked softly, but she didn’t come to the door. He was content to let her rest, given that she’d been active through the night.
The Emerald Keep was much quieter during the day than it had been when he’d arrived the previous night, to an almost unnerving extent. A lot of the torches had been allowed to burn themselves out, but the keep had open window slats along its outer walls, which allowed natural illumination to come through in stripes.
Jack made his way through the ground floor slowly, stopping at each door to get a sense of what was on the other side. It didn’t seem as though any members of the Jade Circle actually slept on the first floor. There were the guest rooms where he and Mira were currently staying, along with the dining hall, several dark and musty storage rooms, and a large training room filled with mannequins and ancient-looking weapon displays.
He found the stairs in the center of the hallway furthest from the entrance leading to both the upper and lower floors. Jack expected the lower level to be where the vampires slept, as it seemed to flow logically, but a quick canvass of the upper floor revealed the main sleeping quarters.
Jack cracked open one of the doors, peering into a surprisingly normal-looking room on the other side. The Valerian vampires didn’t sleep in coffins, or on top of stone slabs, or in another fashion that would have fit with the old cliché. They slept in beds, like everyone else. Jack only risked watching the vampire in the room he was spying on for a couple of seconds before returning to the stairs.
He headed to the lower level next. At a glance, it seemed more active during the day than the rest of the keep, with a few of the hallway torches still burning and providing some much needed illumination.
There were fewer intersections and offshoot rooms than there had been in the upper keep. The first doorway that Jack came to had a foul smell behind it, even with the door firmly shut. He hoped that whatever he was looking for wasn’t in that direction and continued on.
The soft sound of a girl’s humming reached him from one of the rooms ahead. Jack slowed to a sneaking pace as he came upon an open doorway. Carefully, without revealing more of himself than he needed to, he peered around the edge of the door and into the chamber on the other side.
Vyara was standing next to a large stone table, with wide eyes and a smile on her face. Her arms were covered in blood up to the elbows, with streaks of another disgusting, yellow fluid mixed in. She was in the middle of dissecting a corpse, though Jack couldn’t begin to guess what the monstrosity in front of her had once looked like during its time alive.
It had a dozen or so long arms, but Jack could also see the shape of a human torso. The front of its face was covered in dozens of tiny eyes. At
least a few of them appeared to still be moving.
“What is this…?” muttered Vyara, in a childish, singsong voice. “Oh… and what is this?”
Jack saw the creature contort slightly as Vyara slid the scalpel up the length of one of its arms, flaying off part of his skin. He had to look away.
There didn’t appear to be any doors leading elsewhere from within Vyara’s lab, so Jack didn’t feel that bad about moving on. He could see an open archway at the end of the hallway in front of him, though whatever lay inside had not been lit by torches, which gave the appearance of an awaiting abyss of true darkness.
Jack plucked one of the lit torches off the wall from where he was in the hall and carried it toward the mysterious archway. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up straight as he passed beyond it. He swung the torch in a wide arch, only then discovering that he was in a large, open chamber with two rows of pillars running parallel with the door.
He walked forward slowly, frowning as he tried to determine what the chamber was used for. It was relatively clean, and he didn’t get the impression that it was an old storage room or an abandoned space.
Jack extended the torch in front of him, spotting the far wall as his circle of illumination reached out to include it. There was a large, circular engraving on it, as wide in diameter as he was tall, if not a few inches more. The engraving consisted of three concentric circles, each one decorated with strange patterns and writing in a language Jack didn’t understand. At the very center of the engraving was a small indentation.
He got the distinct sense that the edges of the engraving weren’t just carved lines but the edges of an opening on which the circle might slide forward and back. Jack took another step forward and heard the sound of a metal chain scraping across stone.
He spun toward the source of the noise, holding his torch out as far as he could without taking a step in that direction. The silence held for long enough to make him aware of his pounding heartbeat. The sound came again, but from another direction, followed by a low, raspy moan.
Jack didn’t need to move closer to discover what was making it this time. A vaguely humanoid figure stumbled into the range of his torch’s illumination. A chain ran from the nearest pillar to the figure’s leg, and noticing that made his breath catch in his throat.
Several other forms appeared from the darkness, stumbling toward him. It was easier for him to hear where they were than see them, given how the chains restricting them to the chamber rattled against the stone. They looked almost human, and their odd proportions and staggering gaits matched with an example he could pull from his own memory.
He was in a room guarded by ghouls.
CHAPTER 19
Jack still remembered his first encounter with a ghoul, the undead monsters created through a process of necromancy that most vampires were capable of. He’d fought and killed the ghoul that had once been Bert, not once, but twice, each time requiring him to inflict grievous injuries on the monster to make it go down.
He could see at least six ghouls stumbling toward him now. Each one was shackled to a pillar, but the chain left enough leeway to allow them to move freely within the chamber. The one nearest to him was already reaching out with its grotesque arms, trying to grasp at whatever had created the disturbance which had awoken them.
Jack resisted the urge to conjure his Spectral Sword. Fighting the ghouls would risk alerting Vyara to his presence. Even if he managed to be completely silent, the evidence left behind by the mess would remain for Volandar or one of his clan to find later.
Three of the ghouls were headed toward him now, and two of those three moved eagerly, stomping and swinging their arms as they approached. Jack couldn’t run back by them without veering too close. They’d moved to fill the center of the room, and one on either side cut him off from being able to hug the outer wall.
He did have a way to get by them, but he disliked what it involved. Lacking any other options, Jack dropped his torch to the stone and snuffed it out, leaving him in the darkness with half a dozen hungry monsters. A small, orange-red afterimage from the torch pulsed in his field of view as he tried to relax and focus on what came next.
Entering Shadow Form was still a new sensation for Jack. It required him to relax and be aware both of his body and his surroundings, and that was something that he found difficult to do under pressure, especially in his current condition. He had the required blood essence for the spell, but his body was still fatigued from the poison.
It almost felt like trying to find a word on the tip of his tongue. The scratching of the chains against stone only served to distract him further, and as it drew closer, he felt his heart beating faster and his muscles tensing up. The pressure of needing to cast the spell immediately only made it harder to do.
Jack heard one of the ghouls let out a wet snarl, and an instant later, something collided with him. He was on the ground, fighting to hold back the monster’s snapping jaws as it attempted to take a bite out of him. He could hear the others moving in the direction of the struggle. If they all piled onto him, he would be dead in seconds.
He took a few quick breaths and leaned his head forward slightly, pouring his attention inward. He needed this spell. Life or death. Either he made it happen, or he died in that chamber, breaking the promise he’d made to Ryoko to return home.
That was what did it. Jack let go of his body, letting his physical form dissolve into shadows and darkness, expending some of his blood essence to lubricate the passage. The ghoul that had been on top of him let out a small, surprised grunt. Jack was everywhere and nowhere at once, flowing through the pitch-black shadows of the room.
He took his time instead of rushing to safety, inspecting the circular doorway once more. There was a mechanism that needed to be triggered for it to unlock, and it seemed to have something to do with the indentation in the center. Jack flowed into it, committing every intricate groove of its shape to memory.
He finally coalesced near the chamber’s entrance and stepped back out into the torchlit hallway, breathing heavily. His head felt like it was about to explode. Jack had survived the poison, but its effects still hampered him and probably would continue to for days to come. He’d need to be careful when it came to relying on his blood magic.
Vyara wasn’t in her laboratory when Jack snuck past, and he worried for a moment that she might have caught on to some of the disturbance between him and the ghouls. Jack headed back upstairs and returned to his room. As soon as he was back inside and within its relative safety, he pulled out his phone and typed out a text to send to Katie.
JACK: Found a strange door guarded by ghouls in the keep’s basement. Think it has to do with artifact.
A minute went by before his phone vibrated with her response.
KATIE: Sounds likely. Pierce is with me now. He says to avoid it until we have more information.
Jack frowned, wondering if he should ask Katie if it was safe for them to be meeting. The more he thought about it, the more anxious it made him, though he knew he was being ridiculous. Katie wasn’t a child, and she was probably smart enough to avoid risking their cover. Probably.
He stretched out on his bed, feeling his exhaustion catching up with him so quickly that it felt like it had never left in the first place. It only took him a couple of minutes for sleep to seduce him completely.
***
“You make the cutest faces when you’re napping, my sweet,” whispered Mira.
Jack mumbled a few words that even he couldn’t understand in response.
“I’m glad that I caught you alone, though I must say,” whispered Mira, “you get so stifled when you’re around your thrall. It ruins all of my fun.”
She had climbed into his bed and embraced him from behind. Jack felt his heart beat a little faster as Mira’s hands slid across his chest, under his shirt, and then into his boxers.
“Oh, what’s this?” whispered Mira. “It’s as though you were expecting me. Or perhaps I ca
ught you in the middle of a pleasant dream.”
She hugged him tightly, kissing him on the neck as her hand began to make wonderful, soft movements. Jack rolled over, trying to find her lips with his. Mira was more than willing to close the distance. She kissed him passionately and shifted herself on top of him. She was wearing her white nightgown, and a quick brush of his fingers across her butt revealed that it was all she had on.
“It’s been too long,” said Mira. “Our trysts through the Blood Sight have been nice, but there is something about embracing you in person that really takes me over the edge.”
She gave him a deep kiss, and Jack felt his desires neatly sliding in to take the place of his drowsiness. He groped at one of Mira’s breasts and flipped her underneath him, which elicited a beautiful, girlish squeal from her lips. He had his boxers down and was rushing to pull her thighs to the side when the room’s door opened, and Katie walked in.
“One of the thralls mentioned…” Katie trailed off in mid-sentence as she took in the scene. Her expression shifted from surprise to irritation as her eyes flicked back and forth between Jack and Mira.
“I do believe you need to learn how to knock,” said Mira.
Jack reluctantly extricated himself from between Mira’s legs and tried to look respectable as he sat on the edge of the bed.
“Mira,” said Katie, in an annoyed voice. “I would appreciate it if you let me speak with Jack alone for a couple of minutes.”
“I would appreciate the same from you, as it happens,” said Mira. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting in the hallway while we finish up?”
Both women looked at Jack, who winced at the situation they’d somehow forced him into. He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled through his teeth.
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