Taken by The Hunger: A Blood Thirst Novel (Book 1) Paranormal Romance/ Erotica/ Urban Fantasy

by Spade, Harnet

  I’m at an above ground tunnel. The first one I find of its kind. I found it by climbing into an alcove similar to the one we slept in, with the exception that this one kept going- rising until I reached above ground. I’ve been looking at the nearby trees and the moon, pushing at the invisible barrier, hoping to shatter its resistance. I feel him nearing, so I prepare myself, turning… waiting for him.

  “You just don’t know when to quit do you?” He says it sounding more like a warning than a question.

  “Did you really think I could let you keep me here?” I throw back at him.

  “I thought you would be smart enough to realize I’m not the enemy. To realize how in danger you are, that my only intention has been to love you and keep you safe.”

  “Where’s Kimmy is she dead too?” I ask because I think part of my need to escape this cave is because I need to know she’s alright. I also know he just told me he loved me, and if I allowed myself to think of it too much I would fall apart- something I couldn’t afford to do.

  “She’s alive,” He doesn't elaborate, angering me. I give him a scathing glance using the anger to strengthen me while I cross my arms.

  “I had someone I could trust do surveillance while you two were on your outings together.” He concedes.

  “You knew,” I exclaim. “Of course, you knew what I planned all along. Is this why you stayed away some nights… to give me the opportunity…”

  Walking towards me he cuts me off, “I used you as bait, I knew the only way to get Eros and kill him was if I allowed you some freedom. I told Kamila to be very alert, to let you make your plans, but to watch you closely. What she didn’t know was I had someone watching both of you because Kamila became too involved, I anticipated she would try to aid you.”

  “You haven’t harmed her?” I demand thinking of her betrayal because she knew of Eros- knew Darius was using me.

  “No.”

  “Let the barriers down, I want to see her.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to keep fighting you. You have Eros. Why keep me here?”

  “Because I can’t kill him without killing you. Because he knows something he is not telling me, but keeps taunting me with. I need to know what it is.”

  “What makes you think I would know?” I ask him, walking up to him. Letting him know I’m no longer fearful of him.

  “I found you, bled dry… I heard your scream. What did he do to you?”

  “Didn’t you see when you forced yourself in my head, right before you killed me?”

  His hand shot out as he grabbed me by my neck his talons extending. “I’m trying to be civil, but you’re making it extremely difficult. We are running out of time, I can feel it.”

  My hand caresses his bare chest. I think I can distract him like this. “I like being difficult.”

  “Why… did he teach you to enjoy the pain?”

  “I hate you,” I say as I try to knee him in the groin, but he effectively brings his knee up to deflect my strike, lifting me against the wall and placing his thigh between my legs- rubbing me.

  “You hate me so much, you whispered you loved me when you thought I couldn’t hear your confession?” He smiles mocking me.

  “Bastard.” He heard me.

  “You never told Eros you loved him, in fact, you denied your love for him… surprised I know.”

  I gasp as my eyes widen because he’s right, I’ve only whispered it to him- Darius. The love I felt for Eros as a child turned into hate throughout the years, didn’t get to develop into the love a woman feels.

  Feeling the blood running down my neck, I ask, “Is that why you drain me to keep me weak? So that he’s weak too?”

  He nears me kissing the blood on my neck, “He is strongest at night, so I made sure to stay with you. It is why I fed from you every night. I’ve seen so much. I always knew you loved me. But what you showed me a few nights ago, your torture- I’d never been able to see before. Never before did I understand his hold over you.”

  “Why the lies then? Why pretend at the lab… have me think I was dying? Don’t you think it unnecessarily cruel?”

  “Nothing is cruel if it will keep you alive, unharmed, and safe. You didn’t want to know the truth. When you found me, and tried to kill me you begged me to make you forget. You said he found a way to compel you to kill me, that you were somehow under his ench-antment. When I answered I wouldn’t erase your memory because I’d erase us with it, you tried to kill yourself before my eyes.” His voice was hoarse vibrating against my tender skin, fangs pierced my flesh feverishly drinking from me.

  Can you imagine our kind of love, Eva? The lengths we go to for one another? The sacrifices we make?

  I moaned in ecstasy always wanting him because I could imagine it. I felt it now all through me.

  “I have to make you weak baby, it is why I have to keep hurting you… because I have to see what he did to you. Why he tells me to enjoy my short time with you because he will definitely enjoy making you forget me. He says this time he will have all eternity. This is why I nearly killed him, forgetting what you had just moments earlier shown me- that I could not kill him without killing you.”

  “I found you baby, where he left you; weak but still alive. I smelled your combined desire for one another, and I let my instinct over take me- killed you knowing it was the only way to weaken him and trap him. In those moments, I saw how he found you because your minds were linked from your blood sharing. He found you through Jeffery.”

  I’d been docile, letting him do as he wished because I knew for now it was the only way, but hearing that name… it made me begin to struggle against him.

  “No, wait… I need to know more. Tell me what really happened to Jeffery… please!”

  “I will baby, but first I want you to have some of my blood. Will you drink from me Eva, while I drink from you?”

  He releases my neck, holding me up by my waist, and I wrap my legs around him. Were both dressed, but I still feel his heat through his military pants. He turns us and now he’s the one against the rock wall with his eyes going bright searching mine.

  I wonder about his hold on me, how this one simple request can make me do anything he wishes. I want to be stronger against him. Deep down inside I know he still has the power to control me. All I ever do with him is react.

  “Why?” I ask timidly.

  He laughs, “You’ve done it before, when you can’t control yourself during the nightmares. We drank simultaneously from one another. You enjoyed it, immensely. Don’t you remember?”

  I don’t answer… I can’t he has me trapped with his words. He raises me on his body, and I feel every inch of him. He leaves me wanting him as my hands travel all over him. I bring my hands underneath his pants and feel his erection. He’s so full, too big, and hard for me, and it drives me wild with need. I start stroking him as he grunts shutting his eyes, leaving us in darkness.

  Stroking, I lower my lips on his body, and whisper against his flesh, “Everything has a price baby.”

  I pierce his taut skin, and take him into me savoring his uniquely addictive taste. His taste is smooth, powerful, debilitating, and intoxicating- like a good and very expensive whiskey. I taste myself in his blood realizing the appeal and addiction of my own blood, it’s filled with innocence, it’s pure, refined, and extremely potent. It feels like a healing benediction to a deserted man… it renews, restores life for those who can taste it. He knows he’s one of the few who will ever taste its quality and survive. Making him want it all the more because he knows others will feel only a moment of this… and then they would all too willingly take the strongest poison to exist.

  “Yes Eva,” he exhales falling to his knees, holding me tightly against him. He’s lost, weak, and I take the opportunity to seize his mind.

  “Jeffery, show me Jeffery!”

  I enter his mind… I’m following Jeffery knowing he will lead me to her. I could easily have found her, but I want to see them toge
ther… see what she’s become. Maybe this will be the beginning of the end for us.

  I hear them inside the cabin. She tells him she can’t do it, that it was all a mistake. She says she will try to make it back before I realize she’s missing. I laugh… because she realizes she needs me, knows she can’t leave me.

  But something’s wrong.

  She thinks she is using him, but she’s been mistaken. She’s miscalculated. I hear his thoughts, he’s not willing to wait another second… he wants what is mine. And he thinks to take it, now.

  I hear them struggling, She’s yelling for him to stop when I’m breaking through the front door making my way to them. I’m inside watching them. He doesn’t understand how she’s so strong, how she fights him the way she does. She’s terrified because his eyes have gone black… she knows, she remembers similar black eyes. Her struggle intensifies. She back hands him splitting his lip. I have to act fast before she drinks this fucking idiot to death.

  She will hate herself for it, I can’t allow it.

  She’s fighting the urge to drink him even though he doesn’t realize how lucky he is to still be alive. He’s thrown her on my bed, and just as I’m about to claw through his spinal cord and into his intestines… he grabs his knife and stabs her. She screams in pain, shock reflected in her beautiful eyes… as I throw him from her. A hunting blade is protruding from her stomach, as blood flows staining the sheets.

  “Eva, it’s fine baby… I’m here, I’ve got you. I won’t let anything happen to you,” I whisper kissing her lips. Tears slide down her eyes as she smiles at me. I bring my hand up to my lips and rupture my wrist uncaring if she sees what I am.

  She vanishes.

  My world has turned crimson; I want to bathe everything in Jeffery’s blood because she’s taken from me again. Bellowing… hopelessly as I shred the cabin apart leaving the laughing fool unharmed. I leave him for when my mind has cleared. I need to find her, and he’s the only way.

  I turn to him and he says, Eros has her- describing everything they’re doing… together. I can’t help myself I claw through his side when his eyes revert back to their natural color, and I see how Eros reached him. Through his dreams… the fucking monster attacks them in their dreams.

  Jeffery pathetically tries to push me off him… it’s too late for him. I hate him… I see how he misled her, making promises. He promised to show her the world- not like me, “He’s kept you in a cage,” he admonishes, “…all you do is suffer.” He tells her there’s so much beauty to be lived, and she’s only too happy to listen.

  In the still of the night, I see how Eros entered his mind and attacked Jeffery’s desire for Eva. He feeds into it by showing him erotic images of Eva with Jeffery. Then when Jeffery is so close to his climax, he tells him in Jeffery’s own voice what he needs to do to have her like that.

  It makes me sick to watch the images Eros has fed Jeffery. I dig into him deeper until I find what I’m looking for. It’s the spell he’s chanted onto the knife. The markings on it enable him to overlap dimensions bringing them together momentarily, so that anything the knife digs into is a part of his dimension. He took her in those moments.

  I take out my knife very similar to Jeffery’s and carve the same markings mixed with my blood, and I realize I need Eva’s blood.

  I drag Jeffery to the bed and suck her blood from the blood stained comforter to mix it in with mine on the characters carved into the knife. I chant the same spell over and over. There’s a thickening around the air surrounding Jeffery’s dying form and I. The walls open and bubble as Eros and Eva take shape inside.

  I see them. He has her trapped, strapped over a wooden sorcerer’s table with herbs, powders, and spices all around. She’s screaming because he’s stripped her, left her only in her lace bra and underwear, and I see bites covering all of her body with blood seeping through the white lace. She sees me and is horrified I’m here seeing this debauchery. Eros is too consumed with her blood, and what he is trying to do to her to realize I’m there.

  I remove the knife from her and impale Eros with it. With so much regret for what I am about to do and the pain it will cause, I quickly place my knife into her as we’re sucked into the cabin. We are on the bed when I quickly remove the knife, and feed her only a drop of my blood. It will be enough to keep her alive and Eros weakened on the other side. I’m crouched above her with my own tears soaking her skin. I hate not giving her more and letting her suffer, but I know it’s the only way to keep her here, safe.

  She is barely alive as I carry her to bathe her. I want to treasure her body, clean it of the sickening bites. I let the water run a few moments, letting the oversized tub fill with warm water. I lay her in it taking the spray nozzle and gently begin to rub off the blood from her body. Then I see it, the mark he branded her with. It’s a half moon right underneath her hip bone. He’s put a tracking spell on her that will unite them at night, when she sleeps. She will cross planes every night and be with him… unless I find a way to keep her here.

  I yell from the agony of knowing she will be with him every night… it drives me insane. I need to find a witch. I will take her home, and I won’t come back until I find one. I can only think of one way of keeping her from him, and I do not have it in me to do it every night.

  I start to undress, dreading what I must do. I enter the tub, lift her against me as she falls numbly over me. She’s going to be my undoing… she will be the end of me.

  I have signed my own death the day I left the castle and went out in search for her. Because I know if the day comes that something should happen to her… I would not survive it.

  I’m smoothing her hair, readying myself to rinse every part of her body. I take my time looking her over even though I know it’s forbidden. She would hate me if she knew I touched her like this because I've made her forget how much she yearns for me.

  I know she hasn’t completely forgotten how much I once meant to her. I see it in the way she looks at me. I see longing in her eyes. I know I have to taste her again. Pretend she is mine, even if it is for a moment.

  I lift her long luscious hair and bite into the tender skin on her shoulder… she shudders, moans her desire for me, and her nipples tighten. I know she recognizes it's me, even if she is dying. I drink her dry as I come between her inner thighs. She dies after she too has had a very long and powerful climax.

  I want to treasure you baby, not kill you every night to keep you from him. “I will find another way, I promise you,” I tell her broken hearted because I know she cannot hear me.

  ___________________

  I let go of my hold on Darius’s neck. Readying myself to walk away and absorb the knowledge I’ve just taken from him. I’ve blamed him for Jeffery, blamed myself- hated the both of us… when it was Eros all along.

  I realize I have to set the three of us free. I need to find a way to escape them both.

  I’ve taken three steps away from him, when I feel him behind me and within seconds I realize we’re back in the alcove.

  He’s pushed me inside blocking the exit again.

  “I’m not letting you run.” He yells at me.

  I don’t turn around to face him. “How many more times are you going to keep pushing me around?”

  “As many times as you keep using sex, your blood… the heady combination of the two to get in my head.”

  “Don’t like it do you? Well it’s a little trick I picked up from you.” I said- my voice sounding rough, patronizing him.

  “Look at me, Eva… you didn’t need to see what he did to you. You know that I’m right.”

  “So you rather let me believe you killed him out of jealousy and spite, you let me believe you capable of that?”

  “Do you feel better now, knowing he’s dead because he tried to kill you, rape you? Damn it, face me!”

  I turned as tears fell down my face, and asked him, “Do I look any better to you? Don’t you see everything’s my fault? And it will never end, until he has
me. I now know how he’s leaving this place… how we’re leaving together.”

  His fangs and talons elongated making him look capable of slicing my legs from me, just as long as I couldn’t run away from him. He was intent on killing me as many times as it took. “You’re such an unreasonable ass sometimes, how you think you can control everything!”

  “You’re not leaving me! You’re not offering yourself to that parasite because of your fear. Irrationally thinking to protect me, again. Don’t you see, it’s what he wants you to think? He uses your fear as entrapment?”

  “Oh, believe me the last thing I will want to do is go, but make no mistake, go I will.”

  He lunges for me, grabs my hair, and twines it against his hand- over and over again until he’s reached my neck and pulls. “Is it pain that you want Eva, is it a hard, savage fuck you’re begging me for, is it what you need now after all the torture, Angel?”

  I bite his neck because he’s completely lost it. I’ve completely broken this man. He’s brutal, letting go to whatever rages inside of him, and this I do fear. I drink him to save myself as he moans and cries… and lets me.

  He doesn’t fight me as I drink. Right before I can drink him to death, he pushes me away- finding myself sprawled against the dirt floor. Dazed looking to where we last stood together I search for him, but don’t find him. I don’t have the strength to sit up because his blood is warming me, driving me to orgasm. My hand travels underneath my jeans as I search for the spot he so meticulously touched. I find it, close my eyes, and touch myself like he did before.

  I know he watches me. I feel the heat of his eyes on me and hear him stripping out of his pants right before he nears me.

  “Fuck baby, you want me this bad,” he asserts hoarsely. He quickly pulls and rips my jeans cleanly off me. I scream unable to contain my desire for him.

  “Yes baby, show me Eva! I love when you show me just how much you want me.”

  I want him so bad, his voice telling me just how good I smell, taste… just as he devours my breasts- going from one to the other. He’s breathing me in and sucking me so good while his hand covers mine, replaces it, bring me to swift orgasm. He quickly picks me up by my hips and turns me. I’m crouching on the ground feeling my orgasm move through me. Lowering my upper body and lifting, pushing my butt in the air as I feel him throbbing at my entrance… “Please,” I beg him, “please don’t deny us,” I groan.