She closed the bathroom door behind her, not bothering to look back at Jess. She hadn’t thrown herself at a man like that ever—not even when she’d been so strangely attracted to Saul Benton. She felt like a fool.
She undressed and pulled her clothes out of her bag. She started sliding her pants on when she realized that she was sweaty as hell. The thought of driving home sticky like this made her feel gross. She decided to take a shower after all—just a quick one to get the stickiness and stink off of her—and then she’d go home, sit on the porch, and have a few drinks.
She got into the small standing shower, turned on the water, and stepped in. The little abrasions on her knuckles stung as she lathered her body up with soap but she welcomed the sting.
Kara closed her eyes and let the water and soap slide over her, relishing the feel and trying to calm herself. When she opened them, Jess was standing on the other side of the glass door. He had removed his shirt and was now sliding his workout pants off, all without taking his eyes away from her.
“What are y—,” she started, but Jess interrupted her with a shake of his head.
No talking, he seemed to say with that nod.
He opened the glass door and joined her. He wasted no time and when he pressed himself against her, pushing her hard against the shower’s porcelain wall, she felt like she might melt. His mouth was suddenly on hers and then on her neck and then on her breasts. Her hands found his head, rustling his hair as he bit down softly on her right nipple.
She let out a sigh and arched her back against him as his hands explored her. She pulled his head up and kissed him fiercely. The water from the showerhead trickled into her mouth when she opened it to receive his tongue but she barely noticed. His hand was cupping her between the legs, his thumb rubbing expertly in all the right places.
Again, he lightly used his teeth on her, along her collarbone this time, and she felt herself shivering. This was happening—after nearly a year, she was going to finally allow herself to have sex. And as far as physical specimens went, it would be next to impossible to find a better one than Jess.
Maybe Saul Benton, she thought but then shut it away.
It was easy to push thoughts of Saul away as Jess slid two fingers into her and then slowly, softly pulled them out and reinserted them. She felt a moan escape her mouth, pressed against his. She couldn’t stand it anymore. She reached down, found him hard and waiting, and tried to guide him into her.
It was harder to do standing than she remembered. But Jess had a remedy for that. He hunched down a bit, grabbed her just under her ass, and then lifted her. With her back still pressed against the wall, he shoved himself inside and instantly went to work.
It was perfect, as far as Kara was concerned. There was just enough soap on her body to make her breasts slide sensuously across his sculpted chest. She wrapped her legs around his back as he continued to thrust harder and harder. With the angle they were at, she didn’t think she’d climax and, selfish or not, she felt she deserved some release.
Without saying a word, she pushed against him and tried getting her feet to the shower floor. He took her lead and let her go. She reached down to the small shampoo and soap shelf and cleared it with one swipe of her arm. She then turned her back to him, bent over slightly, and threw her right leg onto the small shelf.
“Hard,” she said.
He obeyed. He grabbed her hips and entered her roughly. Within three strokes, Kara was letting out loud screams of pleasure. She reached back, grabbed his backside, and urged him on. As he continued to thrust harder and harder, their bodies slamming together and making wet shower sounds, he reached around and grabbed both of her breasts in a way that was almost painful but sent a shudder of ecstasy through her.
She gave one final scream and then felt her climax building. She worked with it, pushing back to meet each thrust. Her hair was wet, clinging to her face as she looked back to him. When he saw the determined look on his face the muscles flexing in his arms as he gripped her, it was just too much to stand. When she came, she thought her knees were going to buckle. Jess fed off of her release and climaxed shortly after she was done. The last few thrusts dragged her orgasm out, putting an exclamation point on it.
When they parted, Jess took her face in his hands. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve been needing that for a while now.”
She cut the water off and stepped out where she started to towel off. She caught glimpses of Jess’s naked body in the bathroom mirror. Even after what they had just done, seeing his body made her want to tremble.
“Do we pretend it never happened?” Jess asked. “Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know,” Kara answered.
Jess nodded and joined her, taking the towel and drying himself.
Kara got dressed and when she was done, she found herself wanting to kiss him goodbye. But she held back, not wanting to make what had just happened any more complicated than it had to be.
Back in the gym, Jess walked to her to the door. “Your next appointment is scheduled for Thursday,” he said. “See you then?”
“Yeah, I’ll be here.”
“Good. In the meantime, if you do need to talk—about Sheriff Morel or anything else—don’t hesitate to call.”
“I will,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t.
She left, walking to her car and still not looking back. When she was behind the wheel and Jess was no longer looking, she started to smile for the first time in a very long time.
2
Saul and Nikki watched Jason as he peered into the forest. His chin was inclined slightly upwards and his nostrils were flared. He was picking up a scent…or trying to, at least.
“What can you smell?” Saul asked.
“I don’t know. It’s musky—but it’s also sort of like food. Something raw, like burger or steak maybe.”
“And what can you hear?” Nikki asked. “Anything out of the ordinary?”
Jason thought about this for a minute and smiled. “Yes. I can hear too much. I hear everything. I can hear branches creaking. And there’s something chattering. Like a squirrel or something.”
They were standing at the edge of Saul’s back yard, looking into the same forests that Nikki had used to get accustomed to her talents. In a very weird way, she was glad that Jason was getting to experience the same thing. To have spent so much of his life obsessed with the supernatural, she thought this was almost like his reward. And the fact that they were more or less sharing it in the same fashion was pretty cool, she thought.
“That’s very good,” Saul said. “But now here we have something of a problem. We need to test your abilities and find what traits you took from Leibald when he bit you. The speed, the power, and the keen senses are all easy to judge. But if we let you run loose through the woods of Red Creek and you have some seed of bloodlust within you, that could be bad.”
“Why?” Jason asked.
“Honestly?”
Jason nodded. He looked to Nikki with a scared expression.
“Well,” Saul explained, “If we let you test your abilities and you are overcome with bloodlust, there is a good chance you will go to humans to fill that need. If you do that, you not only expose what you are and, in turn, potentially us as well, but…well, I’d have to kill you. We simply can’t run that sort of risk.”
“Oh,” Jason said flatly. “But why would my powers be any different than Nikki’s? She got bit by Leibald, too.”
“Yeah,” Nikki said. “But he barely nicked me. He got the whole buffet on you. If I hadn’t killed him, you’d be obediently at his heel right now.”
“And there is one other thing that we need to be certain of,” Saul went on. “This is something I have never really had to deal with myself. But I have heard of it.”
“What’s that?”
Saul and Nikki exchanged an awkward glance. They had discussed this in private before coming out here. They needed to test J
ason and there was really only one surefire way to do it. Saul didn’t want to do it, but Nikki had insisted.
“Ready?” Saul asked Nikki.
She smiled and nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”
“What do you mean?” Jason asked.
Saul didn’t answer him. He let out a shaky sigh and took a deep breath. He then raised his right arm and slapped Nikki hard across the face. She stumbled a bit but righted herself immediately.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jason asked. He looked shocked and even a little scared.
Saul and Nikki had another of their weird glances at one another. Nikki began to look profoundly sad and turned away for a minute. The right side of her face was red but it was already starting to diminish. She seemed to be fighting off tears. Saul also looked very much at odds with himself.
“We need to know where your loyalties lie,” Saul explained. “As we’ve already discussed, if Nikki had not killed Leibald before you rose, you’d be his servant. But because Nikki killed him, you became unaccounted for. It’s what vampire tribes call a Rogue. Yet, when we were fighting the Greelys, you were incredibly protective of Nikki. That made us assume that by Nikki having killed Leibald, your loyalties then went to her.
“But then you had your period of hibernation. That’s a time when your new system starts to orient itself. Most vampires have a period of just a few days where their bodies get used to the new powers. But yours was much longer because of the odd circumstances around your change. It seemed as if your body was not sure what it was supposed to be doing. And ever since you have come out of that state, your allegiance to Nikki doesn’t seem quite as strong.”
“So I’m back to being what you called a Rogue?”
“It seems that way,” Saul stated. “If your allegiance was to Nikki, your instincts would have caused you to instantly attack me when I slapped her.”
“Oh,” he said again. He looked very uneasy, as if he might be getting sick.
“And here’s where my position gets even trickier,” Saul continued. “I could easily go to The Guard and ask them how we can tell what sort of vampire you’re going to be. They are an endless supply on information on matters like this. But I can’t do that because if you are indeed a Rogue, I feel that they would destroy you.”
“Why?” Jason asked.
“Yeah, why?” Nikki echoed, sounding surprised.
“Rogues are a tricky lot,” Saul said. “They are the one kind of vampire that The Guard can’t keep tabs on. For some reason—perhaps because their allegiances can’t be linked to any of the existing tribes—The Guard can’t see Rogues the way they can see other vampires. Rogues essentially fly under the radar and can live as they please. They don’t adhere to the rules of the other tribes. There are several ways to create them, but the Guard only knows of a single one—and that’s the way you were created.”
“So they’d see me as a threat?”
“Yes,” Saul answered. “Can you imagine the trouble the vampire race might potentially fall under if the population of Rogues grew to a large number?”
“Shit,” Jason muttered. “So what do we do?”
“For now, nothing,” Saul said. “I am hoping to use my connections with The Guard to our advantage. Sooner or later, they’ll realize you are here with us—if you’re not a Rogue, that is. They already know you are here, but they remain in the dark as to what has happened to you these last few months. Basically, it will be their ability to either sense you or not sense you that will give us our answer.”
“So,” Nikki put in. “In the meantime, we just need to keep a really close eye on you.”
Jason thought about this for a moment. He clearly didn’t like the news he’d just been dealt, but there was something else as well.
“This new power,” he said. “It’s getting too strong to keep ignoring. I need to get out, get to running or something.”
“Ah, I remember that well,” Nikki recalled. “What do you say, Saul?”
Saul considered it for a moment. “Fine,” he finally said. “But we do it together. Jason, I hope you understand…it’s just not a risk that we can afford to take right now. If you wish to roam and get used to your new body and your new powers, someone else will have to escort you.”
“I understand.”
“So we’re going to have to be your escorts,” Nikki teased with a playful smile.
Jason nodded. It was impossible to tell if he was sad, disappointed….or what. He looked out into the woods and a thin smile etched itself across his face.
“But you have to catch me first,” he said slyly.
And before Nikki or Saul could catch on, Jason was off. He took off at a speed that reminded Nikki of something out of a cartoon. She was fully expecting him to leave a little poof cloud of dust in his wake.
Am I that fast? She wondered this in awe, and was overcome with just how much she loved this new life.
She smiled at the thought, remembering what it was like when she first tested out her new abilities. She gave Saul a smile which he returned hesitantly, and then started off into the woods after her friend.
3
Saul had been pleased with the little test-run in the woods. Jason seemed to be handling his new powers well and from what Saul could tell, there didn’t seem to be any ill intent lurking in his head. Jason had seemed to race through the woods with the same sort of clarity that Nikki had showed when she had taken her first romp alone.
Jason had seemed happy the entire time, not once doubting himself or stopping to question what it all meant. Saul thought that once the unanswered questions concerning his allegiance were cleared up, he was going to make a remarkable vampire.
Still, there were questions to contend with. Saul had never known any Turn that had taken the dramatic shifts that Jason had gone through. The last stage – the one that had Jason sleeping for several weeks – is what concerned Saul the most. It was almost as if Jason’s body could not decide what it was supposed to do. Generally, when a human turned, there was an instant click inside that set them on their new course.
Another thing that concerned Saul was the fact that Jason’s sense of allegiance to any one of his potential masters—Leibald, his creator, or Nikki, his savior—had vanished a little too easily. Saul had seen instances of the worst sort of betrayals that had not so much as dented a vampire’s allegiance to their clan, family, or creator.
It was that sort of allegiance that had Saul walking back out into the forests not two hours after they had returned from Jason’s experimental trek. Saul’s allegiance had always been to his father. Saul and Jill had both been born as vampires naturally, so their allegiance was strictly a family-based one. According to The Guard, it was the strongest link among vampire races. There were details around his birth that he still did not understand; he knew that the privilege of having children was a tricky subject for vampire clans. The Guard didn’t want the population to grow so only those clans with the strongest of morals and strict adherence to the laws were able to have children.
Saul had not been the victim of a “turning.” He had been the result of the actual union of a male and female vampire. Jill, on the other hand, had been turned in the early 1700s. Sometimes he envied her for her mortal existence but that was something that had stopped after she had left Red Creek following their father’s death.
Walking in these forests always brought back memories and internalized feelings about the past. It was more than just thoughts about his father; it was his entire history, from eating at his mother’s breast to going on his first hunt with his father.
Saul had walked this route before, winding through the backwoods of Red Creek. He knew it well enough to have memorized the scents. He could no longer smell his father’s blood out here, and he was glad of that. Saul stopped walking and stood in the center of a very small clearing. There was a perfect circle of trees all around him but nothing seemed to touch the ground on which he stood—the ground where his father had been
killed nearly thirty years ago.
He sat down and placed his palms flat against the earth. He tried to call his father’s last day to memory but it came in and out like a bad reception on a TV. What he did remember clearly was not making it out here in time and not getting a clear look at the person or creature or entity that had taken his father’s life. That haunted him more than anything.
He had hoped that working for The Guard would open some new doors into the mystery of his father’s death, but so far they seemed to not want to discuss it. Saul wondered what would happen if he pressed the issue further. He thought that it might cause unnecessary conflict with The Guard. He didn’t know which was more important at this juncture: more information about the true reasons behind his father’s death, or being in The Guard’s good graces.
Saul heard a noise behind him, a slight shifting along the ground. Hearing any movement in this area was eerie. It always made him feel as if his father was still there, trying to urge him to stop dredging up the past. It certainly would be true to his father’s nature to do something like that—both the haunting and argument.
But of course it wasn’t his father’s ghost.
Nikki was walking cautiously through the forest towards him. He could tell that she was afraid that she was crossing some sort of unspoken boundary between them. He was pretty sure she knew why he came out here, but she had never come out and asked him. He wondered if Jill had told her anything about their father’s death.
“You okay?” Nikki asked.
“Yes.”
She came over to him but did not sit down. “Is this where it happened? With your dad, I mean?”
“Yes. This very spot.”
She was quiet for a while, looking around into the trees. Finally, she spoke and when she did, Saul could tell that she was nervous.
“Are you ever going to talk to me about it?” she asked. “Like really talk about it?”
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