The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set

by R. A. Steffan

  “This sucks,” I complained against the bloody ruin of a throat I’d been worrying with teeth and tongue. The pun registered a moment later, but by then I was too far-gone to laugh at my own joke.

  * * *

  Okay. Now this was better. It was dark again... or dark-ish, at least. Dusk. That’s what it was called, right? I didn’t have any real memory of what had led up to this moment, but as moments went, it was a really nice one.

  I was on my back. My wrists were still cuffed to something reassuringly solid, stretched out above my head. For some people, that might have been a problem. For me, it was a bonus. More so, since my legs were currently wrapped around my companion’s lower back, a position that angled his cock just right inside me. My hips undulated in time with his slow thrusts, grinding my clit against his pelvis.

  The points of my nipples rubbed against a smooth chest as we moved together. The points of my fangs grazed his throat, sliding in to open new wounds whenever the old ones healed. I could feel the swell of orgasm on a slow build in the background, lazy and unhurried. The smell of blood was everywhere, heady and rich like wine.

  Wisps of delicious warmth slid down my throat and teased against my magical core, feeding power and strength into me from two directions. Feeding sanity into me, or so it felt. Every nerve was awake. Every sense, hyper-alert. The only madness threatening was the temporary madness of sexual release.

  I swallowed another mouthful of luscious blood, and laved at the fast-healing skin beneath my lips. “Rans,” I moaned against his throat, following it up with another decadent lick.

  “Zorah,” he rasped, his breath tickling my cheek. “Stay with me, love. Stay with me this time...”

  A shudder wracked me as my orgasm crested and broke over me like a wave. My knees tightened around my companion, my pussy clenching and fluttering around his cock, pulling him with me. His release poured into me at the same time his sexual energy did, filling me up in a different way than his blood had done earlier.

  I collapsed into the embrace of a comfortable mattress, spent, but not completely insensible for a change. Rans’ weight sagged above me, a reassuring pressure against my body. Energy tingled through me, leaving behind a pleasant buzz. A hum of contentment rumbled through my chest, even as the context of where I was and what we’d just been doing grew oddly hazy.

  Rans rallied himself enough to roll onto an elbow beside me. He frowned down at me, assessing, and I blinked back up at him as I took in the gauntness of his features... the dark circles beneath his eyes.

  My lips felt sticky. I licked them, a tremor slipping down the length of my spine as the smell and taste of blood exploded across my senses. The aroma seemed more intense than what could be accounted for by running my tongue over my lips. Something made me look down at myself. That I was naked wasn’t too alarming, since I was with Rans. That I looked like something straight out of a horror movie... kind of was.

  “Uh...” I said.

  My skin was dyed in shades ranging from rust to crimson. I looked like I’d been wallowing in an abattoir, or maybe bathing in the blood of my enemies.

  At least, I really, really hoped they’d been enemies. My eyes flew to Rans’ exhausted face. He was still watching me closely. I made a concerted attempt to think back, trying to piece together how I’d come to be here, chained to a bed and covered in blood, with waves crashing against the sand outside.

  “Welcome back, love,” he said, palming my cheek and rubbing a thumb softly over the skin beneath my eye. His troubled expression didn’t ease. “Now. Tell me... what’s the last thing you remember?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I TRIED TO THINK. I couldn’t think. Instead, I swallowed with a dry click in my throat, and licked my lips again. “Can you... let my wrists loose, please?”

  Rans nodded cautiously and reached for something on the table next to the bed. A moment later, the handcuffs popped free of first one wrist, and then the other. I sat up and stretched, rolling my shoulders. To my surprise, I didn’t feel stiff or sore. I looked at my right wrist. Aside from the blood spatters painted across it like some sort of bizarre modern art, there were no marks. No bruising.

  “Zorah?” Rans asked, still with that same strange reticence coloring his tone. “Talk to me love. What do you remember?”

  I blinked several times, struck once again by how clearly I could see the contents of the room, despite how dark it was. “We... were... running from the Fae?” I said, the words pitching upward until the sentence became a question.

  “Yes, we were. And then?”

  I tried to pump my recalcitrant brain for more information. “And... there was a boat?”

  “We stole a bloke’s powerboat in Basseterre, on St. Kitts, yes.”

  Try as I might, no more information seemed to be forthcoming. Instead of memories, there was a great big gap stuffed full of bad and wrong. Nothing more.

  “I can’t remember,” I admitted, trying not to let panic overtake me at that fact.

  Rans cupped my face between his hands, heedless of the gore covering us both. I could detect a fine tremor running through his fingers, and that realization tipped me closer to panic than even my lost memories had managed to do.

  “What is it?” I begged, a vaguely formed suspicion beginning to coalesce in the depths of my mind. “Rans, tell me what’s happening!”

  Anguish touched his blue eyes before he hid it behind a poker face seven hundred years in the making. “After stealing the boat, we made for Antigua in hopes of outpacing the Fae that were chasing us, so we could try to lose ourselves in the capital city. They were too fast, though. They caught up with us while we were still some distance offshore, and our boat stalled when their magic disrupted the electronic components in the engine.” He paused, his gaze boring into mine. “Is any of this ringing a bell?”

  I tried to picture the scene he described. Flashes of... something... played out behind my closed eyelids. I saw a blond figure standing in a boat behind us, arm outstretched. I saw an explosion of red. A familiar form, slumping sideways and rolling into the water.

  My eyes flew open. “They shot you—”

  “Apparently so,” Rans said dryly. “At any rate, I woke up in the ocean. By the time I pulled myself together enough to transform into mist and fly after you, they’d already tethered their boats to ours. You and Guthrie were fighting six of them on your own.”

  Again, I tried to picture it. “I don’t remember that part.” My right hand came up, fingertips worrying at the skin across my breastbone.

  “You fought the way you always fight when lives are on the line,” he said in an odd tone.

  I frowned, scratching absently at the place over my heart. “What do you mean?”

  Rans sighed. “I mean that you somehow managed to seduce a bunch of straight-laced Fae into wanting you, and then you pulled animus from them until two of them collapsed dead at your feet. The others must have twigged onto what you were doing and cut the magical connection before you could kill them, too.”

  Again, I tried to picture it without success.

  “Oh,” I said stupidly.

  “Guthrie succeeded in taking out three more of them, and I took down the fourth. You’d already been shot in the gut by that time, mind you.”

  My mouth worked for a couple of seconds before words came out. “Is... Guthrie okay?”

  He drew breath and held it for a moment before replying, “Guthrie is... more or less recovered. Physically, at least. I wouldn’t care to speculate about any potential mental scarring he might have suffered after draining eight or nine pints of succubus blood from his own granddaughter.”

  “Um... he did what, now?” I asked.

  Rans gave his head a tiny, sharp shake. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I tried to feed you my blood to heal you—”

  At the mention of blood, my stomach gave a sudden clench of need—the reaction so visceral and unexpected that I glanced down at my belly button like some kind of dunce.
>
  “—but you couldn’t keep it down. I managed to close the bullet wound by dripping my blood directly into it. Even so, you were weakening. I have a theory that pulling so much Fae animus at once poisoned you. Fatally.” I looked up, startled, and Rans’ piercing gaze trapped mine. “It poisoned you fatally, Zorah.”

  My hand pressed flat against the space between my breasts, where I’d been mindlessly worrying at the skin with my fingers. No heartbeat pulsed through the cage of flesh and ribs. Understanding dawned.

  “Oh,” I said again.

  He was still staring at me as though he expected me to, I dunno... curse at him, or hit him or something. To rail at him...

  Like Guthrie had railed at him.

  I dragged my hand away from my unbeating heart and cupped his jaw. It was sticky with blood.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  His chest gave a sharp lurch as though he’d gulped a breath in reaction to my quiet words. He leaned forward and I met him halfway, our foreheads resting together. I could feel him shaking.

  “I figured out fairly quickly that you were craving sex as well as blood,” Rans said into the space between us, the words spilling out as though they’d been dammed up, waiting to tumble free. “Guthrie had to be the one to turn you, Zorah. It was the only way, because I will always die in the same instant that you do. I couldn’t have finished the job on my own. But since then, I’ve been the only one to feed you. We’re in a rental villa south of St. John’s right now. He’s been mesmerizing random tourists and bringing them back here to keep me topped off.”

  I took a moment to process all that. Guthrie had turned me. Rans had died when I did, and presumably come back to life when I rose again as a vampire.

  Fuck.

  “We’ll have to get you weaned onto bagged blood now that you’re over the worst of the madness,” he was saying. “And from there, to humans. I see no reason why you can’t pull animus the same way you were doing before, once you’re recovered a bit more—”

  I interrupted him. “So... wait. I’ve been handcuffed to a bed, fucking you and drinking your blood for... how long, now?”

  “About twenty-eight hours.”

  My eyes roved over first his body, then mine. “Okay. Wow. I guess that explains the whole ‘horror movie chic’ thing we’ve got going on, at least.”

  Rans let out a tiny puff of air. It might conceivably have been amusement. “Let’s just say that it’s too bad I don’t smoke. Because I could really use a fucking cigarette at this point.”

  “It sounds like you’ve earned one,” I agreed. “I feel like I should apologize for being such a high-maintenance baby vamp, but... when have I ever taken the easy route for anything, right?”

  Half a smile hooked one corner of his lips, but it was strained. “I can’t argue.”

  “Could I get cleaned up now, do you think?” I asked, resisting the urge to scratch at the flaking blood on my skin.

  He nodded. “Of course, love. Shower or ocean? It’s a private cove, and Guthrie just left a few minutes ago to raid the hospital in St. John’s for bagged blood, so we’re alone. He won’t be back for a couple of hours yet.”

  I sat still for a moment, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the seacoast with senses more acute than I’d ever imagined was possible. “Both,” I decided.

  Under the cloak of darkness, I let Rans take me by the hand and lead me outside, padding naked with him across the short stretch of beach to where the waves caressed the sand in a measured dance. There were a million important questions clamoring for my attention, but I set everything aside for just a little while longer.

  Frowning, I pressed my hand to my heart again, still caught out by the incredible strangeness of its silence inside me. I ran my tongue over my teeth—human flat, though I was sure that was only because I’d just fed. Rans led me into the surf, turning me to face him once the water washed up around our hips.

  “You’re taking this better than I expected,” he told me, his brows drawing together beneath the moonlight.

  I rolled my lower lip between my teeth, thinking that I’d have to be more careful about that habit in the future if I didn’t want to constantly be sporting puncture wounds.

  “You don’t know how many times I’ve come close to asking you for it,” I said. “Especially after Guthrie. But you seemed so torn up over the idea of turning him... so I didn’t.”

  “I’ve made you both into pawns,” he said, barely audible over the wash of waves. “You’ll never be free of this war now.”

  But I shook my head. “We were already pawns—both of us. That had nothing to do with you. And I’m not Guthrie. The way I see it, my chances of not killing you by dying of old age just went up significantly.”

  “Right,” he said dryly. “Because your old age was definitely top of the list when it came to things likely to take us out of the game.”

  I splashed him. “Shut up. Let me have my illusions.”

  He picked me up by the waist and tossed me into the waves, effectively ending the discussion. I took the hint, and started scrubbing the blood off my skin.

  EPILOGUE

  AFTER A SWIM in the cove followed by a long, hot shower, I stood staring at myself in the mirror with Rans behind my shoulder. Had I looked any different two months ago, before all this started? I suppose I must have done. I’d always been slender, but the sleek, well-defined muscles of hard exercise were new. So were some of the fine lines at the corners of my eyes and between my eyebrows... but apparently I wouldn’t ever be getting any more of those, now that I was a vampire.

  Trapped in metaphorical amber at the age of twenty-six. Could be worse, I supposed.

  “What color are my eyes now?” I asked suddenly, meeting Rans’ glacier-blue gaze in the mirror.

  He wrapped an arm around me from behind and raised his wrist to the height of my chin. “See for yourself. It’s probably time you started practicing with drinking a bit of blood and then stopping before you’re sated.”

  At the mention of blood, a copper glow like molten metal kindled in the depths of my brown irises, and I sucked in a surprised breath. “Whoa.” Sharp points rasped against the inside of my cheeks as I spoke, and I bared my teeth, exposing fangs.

  Rans leaned forward. “Congratulations. You’ve just gone from being the first Fae-demon-human hybrid to being the first Fae-demon-vampire hybrid. And you’re stunning.” This last part was murmured against the shell of my ear. A different kind of hunger flared in response.

  I swallowed, trying to keep a lid on all the heady sensations competing for my attention. “You, uh, might want to stop talking like that, if having me keep control of my appetites is the goal,” I warned.

  He chuckled, the sound not helping with my current predicament at all—but at least he also straightened away from my ear and offered his wrist again. I recalled everything I could remember about the instructions he’d given Guthrie regarding feeding safely from a human. With only a minimal amount of struggling to keep my desires in check, I was able to take a few sips from his wrist and stop. Afterward, I pretended to close the wound with a couple drops of my own blood, though of course it had already healed on its own.

  “Well done,” he approved. “Now, I’ll wager that commotion outside is Guthrie returning from the city. Shall we go meet him?”

  With a last look at my reflection, I nodded. “Yes. Let’s.”

  * * *

  “Hmm. From shadowy financier to the rich and immoral, to hospital blood bank thief,” Guthrie groused, shoving bags of red liquid into the villa’s refrigerator. He straightened, eyeing me warily. “Feeling better then, I take it?”

  “Much,” I said. “I gather I’ve got you to thank for that. Thank you, Guthrie. Thank you for saving us.”

  I could see his discomfort with my words, and I tried not let it affect me. He stood poised for a beat, weighing his reply.

  “Zorah...” he began.

  “It’s okay,” I said hastily. “
You don’t have to—”

  “You’re my granddaughter,” Guthrie continued, cutting across me. “The only grandchild I’ll ever have. And while it’s true I missed my chance to buy you extravagant birthday presents and warn you about guys like this asshole when you were growing up—” He jerked his chin toward Rans. “—that doesn’t mean I won’t tackle an armed gunman for you when the situation calls for it.”

  I choked on something halfway between a laugh and a sob, pierced directly through my unbeating heart by his simple acknowledgement of familial connection.

  “Oh, just go on and hug the crotchety old bastard,” Rans said, amusement coloring his tone. “He won’t bite.”

  Guthrie shot him a flat look. “Ha. Ha. Bite. You’re a real comedian, buddy.”

  Unable to help myself, I did as Rans had suggested. Guthrie allowed the embrace awkwardly, patting my back with one hand.

  Rans smiled at us, lips twitching. “There you go. Told you, didn’t I? Just don’t ask him about his—”

  Guthrie glared daggers over my head. “If the words ‘grandpa boner’ pass your lips, I’m walking out that door and catching the first plane back to St. Louis.”

  I pulled away from him as my brain made the relevant connection, sorely testing the theory of whether or not vampires could blush. Apparently, we couldn’t—or I definitely would have been at that point. “Yeah, I’m... uh... really sorry about the succubus blood thing. Maybe we should...”

  “Pretend it didn’t happen and never mention it again?” he suggested.

  “Yes, that,” I agreed. Casting around for a change of subject, I asked, “So. What now? I imagine Nigellus isn’t going to know what to do with himself, once he finds out that he’s got three vampires to choose from. Aside from that tiny new wrinkle, though, aren’t we pretty much in the same catch-22 as before?”

  Rans rested a hip against the edge of the kitchen counter and crossed his arms. “We’re still in the middle of an ocean of saltwater. None of the Fae escaped alive to spread the word of our location... though that does still leave Albigard.”