by Aja James
“Nothing could ever make right the son you lost.”
Ishtar felt the crowd go still, as if everyone was weighed down by sorrow rather than enraged by vengeance.
“I didn’t see a white, spotted cat come this way,” the blacksmith said after a solemn pause. “It probably went up that mountain path. If I were a cat and running from troubles, that’s the way I would go. It’s steep and rocky and hard to climb up, if you only had two legs, that is.”
A few grumbles and mutterings spread through the crowd, interspersed with shuffling feet and awkward coughs.
“It’s pretty late, folks,” the blacksmith said in a gentle voice. “I’d offer you all refreshments in my father’s hut, but he’s not feeling very well tonight. He’s already sleeping.”
Someone murmured condolences, as if they knew the boy-man’s father and esteemed him highly.
“Let’s go,” the first man said gruffly.
Ishtar could hear the crowd moving away. The woman with the rock stayed behind the longest, but in the end, she, too, walked away.
After a while, only one pair of boots remained.
The blacksmith turned to face the shed in which Ishtar still hid, still shivering with pain and fright.
Slowly, he crouched down, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet, and angled his head to the ground so that he could look through the opening beneath the door.
“Would you like to come out now, little one?” he murmured in that gentle voice. “I can give you some food and water before you head home.”
It was in that moment that Ishtar Fell.
Into the most brilliant, beautiful turquoise eyes she’d ever seen.
“How do we know the brilliance of Light if there is no Darkness to remind us? How do we thrive in the night without the sunrise to warm us?”
—From the Ecliptic Prophesies, buried and forgotten
Chapter Two
Ishtar sat on the edge of her bed in darkness.
Almost in the same place he’d sat when she came home.
It had been only minutes since he’d gone, leaving through the back door into the unforgiving deluge outside.
Dry-eyed and numb, she sat in silence and stillness while the heavens unleashed torrents of tears from the sky.
As if it were her heart and soul wailing in anguish, sobbing for the male she’d just destroyed.
With her own two hands. Her fangs. Her claws. The vengeful vise of her body.
What had she done?
Ishtar swallowed the mallet-sized lump in her throat.
Flashes of the past half hour assaulted her unbidden.
Had it been a half hour? A few minutes? A lifetime? How long did it take to exact revenge for a moment’s betrayal and millennia of suffering?
Aside from that one sentence, he hadn’t uttered another word.
Then come and take me, ana Ishtar.
Had he known what she would do to him? Why hadn’t he run when she’d given him the chance?
She flinched as images slashed through her mind like serrated daggers:
Holding him down by the throat as she tore into his jugular with her fangs, all but ripping the flesh apart in her rage.
Her nails enlarging and hardening into a leopard’s crescent claws, raking savagely down his torso, shredding fabric, skin and muscle.
Pushing him flat on his back into the mattress. Roughly shoving the drawstring waistband of his trousers down his hips to bare his sex, hard and thick and long just as her venom in his veins commanded.
And then—
Ishtar’s mind skittered away from the memory as she curled in on herself, drawing up her knees to her chin and wrapping her arms tightly around them.
But no matter how she tried to stop the images from surfacing, they refused to be forgotten, demanded to be known.
She squeezed her eyes shut and saw it all clearly:
And then—when she’d impaled herself upon him, she paused in her frenzied feeding to hiss in his ear: This is how a Blood Slave is Claimed. This is how a whore is made. This is all you have ever been to me, and when I’m finished, there will be nothing left of you.
Her heart pounded loudly in her chest, protesting the terrible words even now. The moment she’d said them, she’d never hated herself more. She could feel a canyon-sized fissure split something within her, deep inside, as if it were her own soul she had rendered apart instead of his as her vengeance intended.
What did he do? What did he say?
A seismic shudder racked her body as if bracing her for the memory.
He’d reached up with both his hands, gently cupping her face between them.
His hands had been shaking, so badly they’d been shaking, as if the pain she’d wrought upon him was too much to bear, but still he bravely held it inside, containing it, transmuting it into something pure and good.
Barely he’d touched her, his fingers infinitesimally grazing her skin. And she’d raised her head to look down into his face of her own volition. Into his opaque blind eyes that shimmered with an inner brightness, an unnamed fragility that ripped her apart.
And then he was arching his body into hers, thrusting his hips against hers, taking himself deeper and deeper within her as he stared sightlessly into her wide eyes.
Oh Dark Goddess!
The feeling of his body stroking hers, how the mouth of his sex kissed that needy, starving bundle of nerves deep inside of her. How the hot, steely length of him surged through the softest, most vulnerable part of her, igniting long-forgotten pleasures, blazing past her hatred and fear.
His eyes held her captive as he made lies of her scathing words, as he showed her what was truly between them.
What had always been between them.
He’d clenched his jaw as his body undulated higher, harder, deeper, faster into hers. She gasped when her orgasm crashed through her without warning, giving in to his tender assault.
He’d let go then. Unleashing his crisis, splintering apart, flooding her womb with his Nourishing cream, wave after wave of hot, soothing seed.
Endlessly he released into her as he continued to hold her gaze with those fathomless turquoise orbs.
She’d watched transfixed as two tears of blood gathered in the corners of his eyes and leaked down his cheeks.
And finally he closed them, those haunting eyes. As if the pain within him was ultimately too much.
Inexorably yet gently he’d pulled her face closer, his hands shaking harder, his whole body shuddering.
Until his mouth pressed against hers so lightly she might have imagined it. And his breath sifted out in a long exhale.
She’d heard him swallow. Once. Twice. But that was all.
His hands had fallen away, then, back to his sides.
Shell-shocked and numb, she’d gracelessly clambered off of him, standing to the side.
He slowly rose from the bed and straightened his clothes as best he could, his hands barely able to do his bidding they’d still been shaking so badly.
After he’d pulled his pants back up and over his still pulsing, rigid erection, gleaming with their fluids, weeping from its reddened eye, he left her alone without a word or a sound.
And, now, she began to shake uncontrollably.
As if the memories had infected her body with a ravaging disease. Her blood, strengthened by his, surged through her veins, pushing back a roiling poison she never knew was there.
She fell back onto the bed still curled tightly in a ball as a blinding, debilitating agony paralyzed her from head to toe.
Somehow her hand grasped an object he’d left behind.
A wooden object wrapped in ribbon that radiated a comforting, solid warmth. She squeezed it in her fist with all her strength as her body seemed to die from the inside out.
After an interminable period of time, the pain started to ebb out of her, as if someone had pulled the plug in an overflowing tub.
And with the pain receded, a clarity the likes of which she h
adn’t experienced in four thousand years descended upon her consciousness.
Tal.
Without another thought she leapt into motion, dashing out the back door and into the pouring rain.
Heedless of the zigzagging lightning and earthshaking thunder, she ran, unconsciously taking leopard form in the deserted pre-dawn streets.
His blood called out to her. She could feel it in her veins. He hadn’t gone far.
She had to find him!
A few blocks and some twists and turns later, Ishtar came upon Tal’s crumpled body in a dead-end alley near a stack of crates.
Shifting into vampire form, she approached him quickly and knelt down beside him to check his condition.
Dark Goddess forbid!
His skin was ashen from loss of blood, his wounds gaping.
With a whimper, she tried to lick the tear at his throat closed, but it wouldn’t work. His body wouldn’t heal.
Desperate, she gathered his limp form in her arms and blindly walked away from the alley.
What could she do? How could she make this right?
He was dying!
Humans in general she’d never trust, not after everything they’d done to her and her Kind. Other vampires she didn’t know and couldn’t reach. She had no vehicle of her own, no friends to call on.
Think, Ishtar, think!
Tal was dying!
With a surge of power, she began to run again, cradling him closely to her torso as her long legs ate up ground.
Unconsciously, she headed toward Inanna’s apartment in Manhattan. Though miles away, she knew at her current pace she could make it within half an hour.
She just hoped it wouldn’t be too late.
*** *** *** ***
Third millennium BC. Outskirts of Akkad.
Ishtar hesitated only for a moment before she trustingly crawled out from under the gap of the old shed’s door.
Still crouched low, her belly to the ground, ready to spring at the slightest threat, she looked up with flattened ears at the young blacksmith with the arresting turquoise eyes.
A warm smile spread his lips and crinkled the corners of his eyes as he took in her shivering, be-furred self.
“You really do have a long, fluffy, curling tail,” he mused in that soothing voice. “I am quaking in my boots with fright.”
Ishtar tried to growl with confidence and strength, slightly miffed that he didn’t seem to take her lethal leopard form seriously.
Instead, it emerged as a sputtering, pitiful meow.
He extended a hand towards her, palm up.
But she was still frightened from the horde and her reflex was to strike at the first thing that came close to her.
Before she realized what she’d done, she’d swiped at his extended forearm with her paw, the crescent claws slashing long gashes into his skin.
And then she cowered back and growled some more, worried that he’d retaliate against her unprovoked assault.
Yet all he did was slightly grimace from the pain. He didn’t shout, didn’t raise his fist at her in anger. And he kept his arm and hand extended, holding his relaxed crouch in front of her.
“See,” he said gently, “I’m not going to hurt you. You can trust me, little one.”
She didn’t know how long they stayed there—she, poised for attack while cowering with fear; he, resting easily on his haunches as if his legs weren’t going to sleep from the position he held, one arm extended, hand palm up.
Gradually, her ears rotated toward the front again, flicking in his direction with curiosity. Her body unclenched from its defensive crouch and she stretched carefully on her hind legs, then the front, elongating and relaxing her torso, flexing her paws.
“You’re a pretty little cat, aren’t you,” he said with a smile, admiring her feline display, for that was what she’d intended—for him to admire her adorable kitten self.
“Come here, then, little cat,” he coaxed. “I think you need a good rub behind the ears.”
He didn’t have to make the invitation twice.
Ishtar tentatively placed her paw in his hand, patted it twice with the rough pad as if testing him. He simply held still and let her get used to his nearness, his fingers curling slightly to tickle the bottom of her paw.
All at once she butted her head against his legs with such affectionate strength, he almost lost his footing.
A gorgeous chuckle rumbled from his boy-man chest, the sound stroking along Ishtar’s spine like a gentle hand.
True to his promise, he scratched her behind both ears and along her back and under her chin.
Oh, the sensations those graceful, long fingers evoked. They were glorious to Ishtar’s kitten self. Rarely did she allow anyone to pet her in her leopard form, for the instinct of the solitary, predatory cat was to shy away from physical touch, except when hunting down prey.
Or mating.
But Ishtar was too young to give that rubbish any thought.
“Do you want to stay as you are now or change into something more...bipedal?” the blacksmith asked quietly, interrupting her long series of vibrating purrs.
“My father is indeed resting, but if he awakens, he might welcome a young girl more than a wild mountain cat, adorable though you are.”
Although, since the death of his mother, his father probably wouldn’t care who came into his home in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t even eat and drink unless his son reminded him to do it.
Ishtar backed away a few steps and did her shimmer and shimmy, transforming into her vampire form. Shyly, she ducked her head and tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ear.
The boy-man smiled warmly and extended his hand again.
“I’m Tal,” he said, “What’s your name?”
“Ishtar,” she murmured, eyeing his hand, both afraid of taking it, yet at the same time wanting to grab onto it and never let go.
“Come, Ishtar, and take a rest in my home. I made a hearty stew tonight with the last of our lamb. It’s not much, but it will warm your belly and make you full. I think I heard your stomach growling a few moments ago.”
As if on cue, said stomach gurgled and burbled loudly again.
“Thank you,” Ishtar replied, and took his hand.
*** *** *** ***
When the apartment was within her sights, Ishtar slowed to catch her breath. She’d run at maximum speed carrying a two-hundred pound male. Even at full strength her sides clenched with stabbing pain in protest.
Inanna was just making her way toward the apartment from a few yards away, having left her SUV in the parking deck.
Ishtar carefully laid Tal’s body on the cold, wet ground and backed away into the shadows of the apartment’s tree-lined courtyard.
Inanna saw him immediately and rushed over.
“Papa? Papa!”
Ishtar heard her call out in a voice full of frantic urgency. Then she lifted her father in her arms and carried him hurriedly toward the parking deck.
Not three minutes later, Ishtar watched Inanna pull up her SUV in the circular drive, dash inside with the engine still running. Shortly, her Mate Gabriel, her son Benji, and a young woman named Sophia burst out of the apartment’s main entrance close on her heels and piled into the awaiting vehicle.
They would take him somewhere safe, Ishtar told herself, watching with unblinking eyes in the pouring rain as they drove away with screeching wheels.
Inanna would know what to do.
Her daughter had the support of the New England vampire Hive, after all, even if she no longer belonged to it. She’d know how to heal Tal, or had friends and comrades who would.
And if she couldn’t…
Ishtar sank to her knees in the swampy grass of the courtyard and raised her face to the vehement heavens.
She no longer knew whether it was the skies that cried or whether it was her. Everything blended together, and nothing mattered anymore.
Not his betrayal so long ago. Not the millennia of
vengeance she’d fed like a voracious beast that would never be satisfied. Not everything she’d lost and everything she’d suffered.
Nothing would ever matter again if he died.
*** *** *** ***
Third millennium BC. Capital City of Akkad. The Ivory Palace.
“Mother is extremely wroth with you,” her sister said as she came into Ishtar’s chamber without knocking.
It was their way, slipping into each other’s rooms at will. Their chambers adjoined one another and could be accessed through an inner door.
They often chatted and giggled and dreamed together late into the days when they were supposed to be sound asleep in their own beds. Their handmaidens usually found them nestled together in the same bed come sundown when they would be roused awake for their breakfast.
“Next time, warn me if you’re planning to stay out so late. I thought you were only skipping the history lessons. But you missed the whole night, including your appointment with the Maganian Princeling and his son. Mother was most displeased.”
Ishtar licked closed the wounds she made in the female slave’s throat, having taken her fill of thick and powerful Pure blood. Already, she could feel her ribs mending their breaks; she should be good as new by the next nightfall.
She dismissed the slave and turned to her twin.
“Why have I not received a summons yet,” Ishtar asked, morbidly curious, “she must know I have returned.”
Anunit flopped down on Ishtar’s bed and lay back comfortably amongst the reed-stuffed pillows.
“She sent me to check in on you. I suspect she wants you to stew over your transgression all day and let your imagination run amuck on the endless possibilities of punishments she might devise,” Anunit replied with some relish, as if she enjoyed the thought of Ishtar receiving her just desserts for skipping lessons.
Ishtar shrugged and changed into her nightshift by herself, having dismissed her handmaiden the moment she snuck into her chamber when she got back to the palace.
“I never think about what-ifs,” she said firmly. “It’s pointless to imagine. Whatever happens will happen. If it’s something good, you’ll be happily surprised. If it’s something bad, you won’t have expectations to disappoint. I will be sleeping like the dead all day, not dreaming of potential punishments Mother might or might not enforce.”
