“I can walk,” I protested, though it might have been more convincing if I weren’t clinging to him.
He kissed the top of my head. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, depositing me on the tall stool and positioning me so the warm droplets raining down from above flowed over my body without spraying me directly in the face.
I let him wash me, marveling at the feeling of someone looking after me like this because he wanted to. Not because he felt he had to, or because it was an act to seduce me, but because he... cared for me. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to say the other word, even inside the privacy of my own head.
When I was clean and warm and drifting, he turned off the taps and dried us off with a huge, fluffy towel that smelled like lavender. He clearly had no clue about maintaining hair as kinky as mine, and I’d pay for that when it came time to pick it out later. Somehow, though, I couldn’t raise a single care about that. Instead, fresh warmth rose inside me at the idea of showing him how to condition and care for it someday soon.
It was such a... domestic idea.
The parts of the cottage I’d seen so far were darkly masculine—full of copper and brass, old wood and leather. By contrast, the upstairs bedroom was surprisingly airy, with light fabrics and a large window looking over the verdant hill beyond. He deposited my naked body on the buttercup yellow coverlet of a queen-sized bed, and took a moment to look down at me as though drinking in the sight.
“Two months,” he observed with a faint smile tugging at one corner of his lips, “and I finally got you into my bed.”
An answering smile crinkled the corners of my eyes. “As opposed to someone else’s bed, you mean?”
“Exactly,” he agreed.
Then my smile melted away beneath the intensity of his gaze—not so much predatory as possessive. Every square inch of my skin felt like it tightened, yearning for touch.
“I need you.” The words were wrenched from somewhere deep inside, giving voice to a feeling I’d never dared admit aloud.
He rested a hand on either side of my head, his presence blocking out everything else as he leaned over me. “Zorah. You already have me, love. You only ever needed to reach out and take what was offered.”
Since the only alternative to kissing him would be bursting into tears, I pulled his head down to mine, surrendering to his mouth. This must be what it’s like not to be afraid, I thought, letting everything else fall away beneath the weight of those softly demanding lips.
We kissed for ages, hands roaming to feel skin against skin, rather than to seduce. Rans’ animus was a low hum of warmth flowing into me. I let it come, enjoying its sweetness, but did not pull more from him. Eventually, with the darkening sky outside the window ceding its light to the small lamp next to the bed, I pushed Rans to lie on his back so I could straddle him.
We were still kissing, but I pulled back so I could watch his face as I positioned his hard length at the entrance to my passage. His eyes flared as I angled my hips and he slid inside. But I was looking too deeply, and what I saw in those depths burned like a hot brand. That, combined with the delicious stretch as he filled me, was too much.
I closed my eyes, rolling my lower lip between my teeth as I focused on the physical rather than the emotional aspect of our joining. But gentle fingers stroked along the line of my jaw, lifting my chin.
“No, Zorah,” Rans said softly. “I want you to watch. See what you do to me.”
I kept my eyes squeezed shut, assaulted on all sides by feelings, but those fingers continued to cup my chin in silent command. Eventually, with a deep breath, I opened them and looked at the man beneath me. Really looked.
“That’s it, love,” he said, rewarding me with a slow roll of his hips. His eyes flared brighter, and his voice gained a deeper resonance. “Pretend I’m compelling you if it helps, but you will see me while I’m making love to you.”
My chest hitched. We both knew that I was immune to his gaze, but I could still feel its effects. And he was right—damn him. It helped. I gave myself over to his command, staring deeply into his eyes as our bodies moved together with sinuous, unhurried movements. It was completely different than any sex we’d had with each other before, and at times, I wasn’t sure I would survive it with my soul intact.
But perhaps that was the point.
Rans had fed from me, and I fed from him in return, but mostly, we just existed with each other. Every so often, one or the other of us would shiver beneath the force of an orgasm, but I was part succubus, and Rans had drunk my blood, and just because our bodies climaxed, that wasn’t a pressing reason to stop what we were doing.
I think I must have spent hours just draped over Rans’ body with his arms wrapped around me and his cock nestled hard and heavy inside me, soaking in the way his skin felt against mine and tracing the wispy curls of his animus brushing against my magical core.
We fell asleep at about the same time, still joined together. When I woke up hours later from blessedly dreamless blankness, the sun was high in the sky outside. I was tucked against Rans’ side, his fingers tracing the knobs along the back of my neck with soothing pressure.
“Morning,” he said gently. “Or... possibly afternoon.”
I smiled against his chest. “So, vampire morning, then,” I suggested.
He huffed a breath of amusement. “Something like that, yes.” Then he sobered, though his fingertips continued their slow massage. “I hope you’ll agree that our new goal in life should be to spend every single night exactly like this,” he said, his voice growing serious. “But... for now, maybe you should tell me what it was you learned in Hell about Nigellus and the Tithe.”
EPILOGUE
MY FEELINGS OF peaceful belonging faded slowly into sadness as I contemplated what I still needed to tell Rans about his mentor. I rolled onto an elbow so I could look down at him, noting that the clear blue eyes whose depths I’d drowned in last night had closed off. Not necessarily closed off from my presence, I knew—but closed off against what was coming. I wondered if Rans had harbored his own suspicions about Nigellus, or if this would come as a complete shock to him.
I took a deep breath to steel myself, and brushed my knuckles over Rans’ temple and cheek.
“I really didn’t want to have to tell you this,” I said, “but once the human tithelings in Hell reach adulthood, they’re given the option of imbibing a special kind of wine that heals them and slows their aging process to almost nothing. The demons use magic to produce enough of this drink that everyone who wants it can have some, because it relies on an ingredient of incredible rarity.”
Rans remained silent and still. I swallowed hard, and continued.
“It’s an ingredient... with only one surviving source in all of the three realms,” I said as evenly as I could. “Rans... Nigellus has been harvesting your blood without your knowledge. And he’s almost certainly been doing it since shortly after the end of the war.”
Blue eyes slipped closed before I could see the pain in them, though the face they were set in might have been carved from alabaster.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But there’s more. I think Myrial is trying to destroy the treaty and restart the war. She... he... is the incubus that got my grandmother pregnant. And I’m pretty sure she was also behind the attack at the club—an attack with silver knives and bullets. If she could kill you and make it look like the Fae did it, the peace would fall apart.”
He nodded, to show he was still listening.
“The one thing I really don’t get is why the demons would want a village full of humans with really long life spans,” I went on. “It might make sense if we’d been right about them trying to breed more hybrids like me, but that’s not what’s happening. I don’t understand what they could be after.”
Eyes still closed, Rans pulled himself into a sitting position, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I think I might,” he said. “The demons have a source of human beings infused with Fae magic. They have a
way to stockpile them, so to speak, rather than having the older ones constantly die off after seventy or eighty years. And they’ve ensured that the one fucking vampire that they managed to salvage from a magical Fae weapon during the war is protected—for a given definition of the word.”
Something clicked into place inside my mind, and my stomach flipped over.
“Oh my god,” I said, feeling suddenly nauseated. “Rans. You think they want to raise a new army of vampires... but this time, using humans that could be immune to the Fae weapon, because they already have Fae magic?”
Rans opened his eyes, staring into the distance with the look of someone who thought he’d awakened from one nightmare only to find himself trapped in another.
“I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But I do know that this war cannot be allowed start up again. You’ve seen how deadly it is when it’s supposedly been over for two hundred years. But believe me when I say—things can still get much, much worse.”
End of Book Three
The Last Vampire: Book Four
By R. A. Steffan & Jaelynn Woolf
ONE
ONE THING ABOUT living out of a suitcase—it made moving from one place to another on short notice a fairly efficient process. Before the latest crisis, I’d felt like I was getting the hang of my new nomadic lifestyle, even considering the few weeks I’d spent staying at Dad’s hut in the titheling village in Hell.
That little jaunt had been akin to some sort of bizarre summer camp, only for humans who’d been kidnapped and replaced by Fae changelings before being bartered to the Fae’s demonic enemies as political chattel.
Before my brief walk on the Damned side, though, I’d been on the run with Ransley Thorpe, seven-hundred-year-old vampire war survivor and part-time white knight. I still didn’t know for certain what had first brought me to Rans’ attention, but for reasons of his own, he’d taken pity on a clueless demon hybrid being hunted by Unseelie Fae. If he hadn’t whisked me away from city to city, providing a false identity and a series of safe harbors for hiding out, I had little doubt that I’d be dead by now.
This particular move felt different, though. Somewhere along the way, I’d fallen for my rescuer, despite the fact that it was a total cliché. I’d done my best to hide the fact, of course. Because what would a powerful supernatural creature like him possibly want with a twenty-something waitress, whose only claim to fame was some seriously unfortunate parentage?
Answer—quite a bit... to my considerable shock. Frankly, I was still pinching myself over that one.
At any rate, now that my secret weakness for Rans was no longer a secret, everything had changed. Everything... and nothing. I was in love with the last vampire on Earth. The difference now was that I’d finally caved and told him so. I was still reeling from the fact that he hadn’t thrown it back in my face.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Rather than the polite rejection I’d expected, we’d spent a soul-searingly emotional night in his remote cottage near York, in England. By letting our guard down in such a way, we’d risked discovery and attack by the many forces that wanted to capture or kill me. But in exchange for that risk, we’d experienced the exquisite rapture of lying wrapped in each other’s arms, with no more lies between us.
And then, once the afterglow had faded, I’d looked Rans in the eye and told him that the demon he’d trusted as a friend and a mentor for centuries had been using him for his own self-serving ends.
Nigellus might have protected Rans after the genocide of the rest of the vampire race, but it now appeared he’d done so for selfish reasons, rather than out of any sense of altruism. For two hundred years, the demons had been collecting a tithe of souls from their Fae enemies in the form of human babies who’d been exchanged for Fae changelings on Earth. It had always seemed an odd form of tribute, to me—especially in the aftermath of the centuries-long conflict that Nigellus had once described as having come to a messy draw.
Now, I knew the reasoning behind it. Just before the end of the war between the Fae and the demons, all of the demon-allied vampires fell to a magical Fae weapon. Or rather... all of the vampires fell except for Rans. My vampire lover had no memory of the war or its immediate aftermath, but Nigellus had seen to it that Rans’ continued survival was a provision of the peace treaty between the two warring sides.
The Tithe to Hell was also a mandate of that treaty. In return for the souls the Fae sent them, the demons ceded control of the human realm to their enemies. It seemed a rather one-sided agreement on the surface. But I thought I understood it, now. The human tithelings were imbued with Fae magic after their time spent living in the Faerie realm of Dhuinne. Meanwhile, Nigellus had been periodically draining Rans of his blood, and erasing his memory after each violation.
That stolen vampire blood formed the basis of a drink that slowed the human tithelings’ ageing to nearly imperceptible levels, allowing them to live for centuries rather than mere decades. And now, Rans and I were reasonably sure that Nigellus and his fellow demons were ‘stockpiling’ those Fae-infused humans for the purpose of raising a new race of vampires... one that would be immune to the magic of the Fae’s vampire-killing weapon.
Nigellus had basically said as much—that the peace between the Fae and the demons wouldn’t last forever. The question was whether he intended to be the person responsible for restarting the war with the help of a Fae-resistant vampire army. And if that was, in fact, Nigellus’ intention, then what sort of timetable was he on?
The worst part of it was, Nigellus wasn’t even our biggest concern right now. Because I was apparently incapable of having fewer than three separate crises going on in my life at any given time these days, there was also the small matter of my incubus grandfather being after us.
Myrial—the gender-swapping sex demon who’d impregnated my grandmother—also appeared to be hell-bent on trashing the peace treaty. Unlike Nigellus’ approach to restarting the war, however, Myrial’s approach involved killing Rans—and thereby breaking the treaty—rather than using him to raise new vampires. I’d managed to escape from Hell to warn Rans about what was happening. But in order to do so, I’d had to leave my father behind with very little protection. To say I was worried about what Myrial might do to him in my absence was putting it mildly.
And as if that wasn’t enough, we had yet another thing to worry about, as well...
I paused in my rushed packing job, looking up as I remembered a message from Rans’ former Fae informant that I’d been supposed to pass on. Albigard had agreed to bring me here to York after I escaped Hell, but he’d asked me to tell Rans something in return. I’d completely forgotten about it until now. “Well, shit.”
Rans looked up, meeting my eyes. “As reassuring conversational gambits go, that ranks fairly low on the list, love.”
I shook my head, as though I might somehow be able to settle all the broken pieces back into place. “Sorry. I just remembered—I was supposed to tell you something, and I almost forgot,” I said. “Albigard asked me to let you know that someone in the Unseelie Court is colluding with a demon. A high-up one, he said.”
Rans’ expression closed off at the mention of Albigard’s name. “Tinkerbell should worry about keeping his own house in order.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he’s trying to do,” I said pointedly. “Maybe it’s about time you got over the fact that Albigard helped get me into Dhuinne when I asked him to, and stopped trying to skewer him with pointy iron weapons on sight?”
Once upon a time, Albigard and Rans had been allies—of a sort, at least. I wasn’t pleased with the fact that I’d unintentionally driven a wedge between them by seeking Albigard’s help to go behind Rans’ back, but I still thought Rans was the one who was overreacting.
The vampire raised a stubborn eyebrow to match me. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll get over the fact that the backstabbing arsehole dragged you off to Dhuinne to be tortured... right after you ge
t over the method I used to save you afterward.”
I pursed my lips, sensing a possible avenue to victory. “Oh, will you? That’s good—because I’ve been thinking a lot about the life-bond recently, as it happens.”
I’d traveled to Dhuinne in hopes of freeing my father after he was kidnapped by the Fae. And I’d done it with the full knowledge that by doing so, I’d be putting my life at serious risk. At my request, Albigard had gotten me into the Fae realm. He’d also arranged for my dad to be shipped off to Hell with the Tithe—which had seemed at the time to be a safer place for him.
But it was Rans who’d gotten me out of Dhuinne in one piece afterward. Unfortunately, the only way he’d been able to do so was by binding our souls together so tightly that the death of either of us would cause the death of both. Now, the moment my mortal life ended, so would his centuries-long one. But last night I’d realized something important.
He continued to watch me, frowning. “As I’ve stated numerous times, you’re the only one here who’s bothered by the end of my life. Personally, I’ll be relieved to have done with it... especially when the alternative would be living in a world where you no longer existed.”
I sucked in a breath, taken by surprise at the sudden onslaught of emotion I felt in reaction to his words—as visceral as a kick to the chest. He must have seen something in my eyes, because he straightened from his luggage and crossed to stand in front of me, gathering my hands in his.
“Zorah,” he said quietly. “You need to know, love, that the demons guard their bonding crystals jealously. There’s only one reason vampires or humans ever risk a demon’s wrath by trying to acquire them.”
The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set Page 53
