by Alyssa Day
She cried out again, this time his name, and he tightened his grip on her lovely round ass and licked and sucked on her nipples until she was squirming around his cock and driving him completely insane.
“Now, now, now. Move, I need you to move,” she said breathlessly, and he raised his head to crush his mouth to hers again. Triumphant and triumphed over.
Serai’s entire body was trembling with need. She had never felt so alive, so sensitive, as if every inch of her skin were a nerve center crying out for his touch. For his hands and his mouth and his oh-so-clever tongue.
For his manhood.
“Please. Now,” she repeated, and he kissed her again and then finally started moving, thrusting in and out of her in long, slow strokes that put her in danger of exploding. Heat centered between her thighs traveled up the center of her body to her breasts and her lips and her brain, until she thought the world itself must be shattering off its orbit.
He tightened his grip on her bottom and then reached between them and pressed those wonderful fingers of his against that sensitive spot he’d discovered before, and she cried out again, and then he was pressing rhythmically there, pressing and rubbing while he drove inside her, long, hard wonderful strokes, and something was building and building inside her, swirling and spiraling, and tightening every muscle in her body while her nerves screamed for more, for more, for release, and then he thrust into her so hard and so fast, the muscles in his neck straining as he tried to maintain his control, and she realized she didn’t want him to hold on to his self-control, not now, not ever, so she tightened her inner muscles around his erection and tilted her head, baring her throat to him.
“Bite me. Take my blood while you take me over the edge.”
Daniel stared at her in shock and froze, mid-motion, but she tightened her muscles around his cock again and touched her neck, trailing a finger provocatively down her luscious pale skin, and something inside him broke, his control shattered, and he started fucking her again, so hard and so deep that she would never, ever forget him, never escape him, never ever leave him.
Never.
He sank his fangs into her neck and she screamed, not from pain, he’d made sure not to hurt her, she screamed as she came, shattering around him, convulsing around his cock, over and over until he couldn’t help it, he thrust into her one last time and came himself, his seed pumping into her as her blood pumped into his mouth, a circle of want and need and home and forever.
He licked the tiny wounds in her neck closed and rested his forehead against hers, and they stood, locked in place, while they gulped in deep breaths together.
“I think you should put me down, but I’m not sure my legs will work,” she said, her voice shaky.
He attempted a smile, but his face wasn’t working. All he could do was gasp and try to breathe. He felt as though he’d run a thousand miles in a day, or flown across a continent, and he looked into her eyes while he thought of a way to tell her how much he needed her, but shock rendered him temporarily speechless.
“Your—your eyes,” he managed, and then his tongue got tangled as he stared at the tiny blue-green flames in her eyes.
“Yes? What about my eyes? They’re bluer than the ocean,” she teased.
“They have these little flames in the middle. I know that sounds stupid, but I, they—”
Her eyes widened even farther, until they were enormous in her face. The flames grew even larger, until they were nearly taking over her entire irises.
“The soul-meld? Is it really happening?” Her whisper trailed off, and he realized that he was still holding her up in his arms, against a cave wall, his cock still inside her.
“Maybe we should clean up and talk about your eyes,” he began, but she didn’t let him finish.
She grabbed his head with both hands and kissed him so fiercely that he had no choice but to kiss her back. His body responded with a vigor that belied the long years of disuse and his cock hardened inside her so fast that he wondered dizzily if mage or Atlantean magic were involved, and then she somehow moved, with him still inside her, lowered her legs and pushed him back until he was lying on his back on the pile of their discarded clothes and she was straddling him.
Gloriously naked, she was beautifully and gloriously naked above him, her ripe round breasts begging him to reach up and take them in his hands, and so he did, while she slowly and sensually rose and lowered herself on his cock. Her eyes were still full of those blue-green flames, but it seemed a distant concern, far less important than rising up off the ground so he could suck on her nipples, until she pushed him back down and arched over him, crying out as she convulsed around him again, and he took charge of the tempo, quickening it, thrusting up into her with the speed and force he needed to reach another climax so soon. She reached down behind her and grabbed his balls and gently squeezed, and he arched up off the ground and poured into her again, harder and more powerfully than before.
That’s when the walls of the cave shattered into an explosion of sound and color, and reality shifted as his mind expanded and collapsed and expanded again, and his vision fractured into a prism of sparkling shapes and colors, until he floated gently down to earth in a flash of light, but a different earth, an earth that had vanished thousands of years ago.
Flash.
Somehow he stood in Atlantis, and it was still on the surface of the ocean.
Serai stood in front of him, sheathed in silvery light, talking to a man he knew to be her father, but he was long dead, this was impossible.
“Serai,” he called out, but even as she ignored him as if he didn’t exist, he felt her body warm and pliant against his in another reality.
“I cannot do this thing, Father,” she said, tears streaking down her face. “I won’t. I must find Daniel. He was wounded, and your guards took me away. I need to find him. I need to help him. I won’t be frozen into a box for some future king.”
“Daniel is dead,” her father said, and Serai collapsed into a faint.
Flash.
Serai lying shattered on the ground, bones broken and blood everywhere, resigned to death and screaming a protest against the healers as they converged on her.
Flash.
Serai lying down inside a crystal casket, not dead, not even dying, but resigned to spend centuries asleep, alone, as she would always be alone, because the one man she would ever love was gone.
Flash.
Centuries of waiting, then millennia, time passing in a constant blur, only one annual semi-wakening to feed information into her mind and reassure her she hadn’t crumbled to dust. Every time she woke, his name was the first word on her unmoving lips; his face, the first sight in her unforgiving mind; his love, the only thing in her never-healing heart.
Daniel. Daniel. Daniel.
Flash.
The shock of the Emperor’s stuttering power. Her escape. Running to the portal, only to find her dream of the past eleven thousand years had become reality. The warmth and love in her disbelieving heart when she saw his face.
His face.
Flash.
Daniel slowly came back to himself from the waking dream, only to realize that he still held Serai in his arms. She rested against his chest, arm tucked on his shoulder, eyes wide and staring, but unseeing. Whatever had just happened to him seemed to be happening to her.
No.
No.
If she saw his history—his bloody and monstrous past—she would never forgive him. Never stay with him.
He shook her and called her name, then resorted to shouting at her, but nothing mattered, nothing worked, so he simply gathered her into his arms and waited, silent as the grave he’d soon be seeking out, for the woman he loved to learn who he truly was and order him out of her life forever.
Serai fell, twirling and twisting, tossed through a typhoon of sound and sensation, through an apocalypse of blood and death, fear and fury. Light flashed all around her, and she woke up in the very same shop where she’d firs
t met Daniel, all those years ago.
Flash.
He stood still, staring after a girl who was leaving the shop, and Serai was a tiny bit jealous, until the girl smiled back at him over her shoulder and she realized it was her. Herself, eleven thousand years ago, on the very first day she’d met Daniel.
“Hits you like that sometimes,” a man standing in the shop said, grinning at Daniel’s expression of utter shock. “Been married more than twenty years to a woman who made me feel just like you look right now.”
Daniel blinked and opened and closed his mouth a few times. “But—but—”
The man laughed. “Yep. That’s what I said. You’re done for.”
Flash.
The fight in the shop, that day the invading army attacked Atlantis. Daniel fighting for his life against looting soldiers, protecting the trapdoor, protecting her. Falling, so much blood.
Flash.
Daniel waking, crazed with the bloodlust, calling for her. The old nightwalker telling him she was gone. Atlantis was gone. Gone forever. Daniel screaming her name until he was hoarse, and then falling to the ground, body heaving with great, racking sobs.
Flash.
Murder. Vengeance. The flash of recognition in that village ; the girl who reminded him of Serai. Hibernation. The quest for redemption. The eventual resignation and despair.
Flash.
Walking into the sun, only to look up and see that the sunlight wasn’t killing him. The light came from her face. Her face. Serai. Love. Desire. Need. In his face. For her.
For her.
When she woke from the trance, she gasped and then gulped in great, shuddering breaths, as if she’d been starved of oxygen for hours or days. Daniel held her tightly, so tightly that she wasn’t even cold, although they lay on the floor of the cave, still unclothed.
“Well?” His voice was as hoarse as if he’d been screaming. For all she knew, he had. She’d been deaf to him while the soul-meld took her and showed her his life.
“You’re leaving me now, aren’t you? I understand. I forgive you, and we can just forget all that stuff about ‘mine’ and ‘forever,’” he said, his face so cold and remote that—for a split second—she almost doubted him. Almost.
But she’d seen inside his soul. She said the only thing she could. The only possible words to share at such a time.
“Daniel. We have answered the question the elders have asked for millennia,” she told him, touching his stern face with her hand. “Nightwalkers do have souls. I have just walked in yours, and I want to cry for your pain. Know this, though, my vampire. My love. I will never let you go, and if you mention it again, I may have to hurt you.”
Daniel couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. Could only feel, as a wave of pure warmth and love swept through him. “You’ve seen my soul? Is that even possible? I’d wondered—I’d feared—”
“You cannot reach the soul-meld with someone who has no soul,” she said, smiling, and he realized the blue-green flames in her eyes were still there. “We are bound forever now.”
The ancient words came to her, unbidden, mandating her to recite them:
“I offer my magic, my heart, and my life to protect your own.
From now until the last drop of ocean has vanished from the earth,
You are my soul.”
Shimmering silver threads, clearly visible in the predawn light in the cave, formed and curled around them both, tying them together inescapably. Forever, she’d said.
Daniel couldn’t take it all in. It was too much.
“I have a soul?”
“You do,” she confirmed. “A badly wounded soul, forced to make so many hard choices, still fighting hard to redeem itself from the dark. And now it, as well as you, belong to me.”
“Forever?” he repeated, stupidly.
“Forever.”
“Then we will make damn sure that nothing happens to you. I promise you that. Upon my life, upon my oath as a senior mage of the Nightwalker Guild, and upon my love for you, Serai, I swear to you that I will not let you die. We will find that Emperor and save your sisters, this I swear to you.”
She smiled and kissed him, and this time the world didn’t shatter and the walls didn’t fall in and the floor didn’t disappear from under him. It was just a kiss, only a kiss.
The kiss that began the rest of his life.
Chapter 27
Midday, in a cave only two miles away from Serai and Daniel
Ivy sat on her pallet of blankets in the cave where she’d recently seen a man die horribly, and wondered if she’d brought this all on herself. She hugged her knees and watched her son sleep, knowing that it was futile to waste time on the how and the why of the past. All that mattered was how they’d get out of this situation. A fierce wave of pride and fury swept through her, leaving nothing but icy cold resolve in its wake. Nobody was going to hurt her son.
Nobody.
Dusk was a few hours away, and she needed to figure out her escape plans before the vampire rose from his day sleep.
“I have no intention of hurting him,” Nicholas said from behind her, making her jump a little. She hadn’t even heard him approach. Damn sneaky vampires. He could have ripped her guts out, too, and she wouldn’t have heard it coming.
Although, was that something you’d want to hear coming?
“Can you read my mind? If so, I can’t imagine you’re very flattered right now.” She didn’t bother to turn around and look at him. He was the last person in the world she wanted to see, now or ever. “Also, shouldn’t you be asleep? Evil vampire, and all that?”
“It doesn’t take a mind reader to see a mother’s protectiveness for her child,” he said, surprising her. “Also, I’m old enough to be awake whenever I like. Just because I can’t walk in the sun doesn’t mean I’m a slave to its passage through the sky.”
She smoothed an errant strand of hair from Ian’s face, and he stirred but didn’t wake up. She filed away the information about the vampire’s lack of need for day sleep. Just one more obstacle. She was good at overcoming obstacles.
“If you see my protectiveness, you understand why I would never let you turn him into a vampire.”
“I have no intention of turning him into a vampire,” he said. “But I thought it was easier to say yes and deal with the topic again when he actually turns twenty-one, in the unlikely event he even remembers asking or still wants it then.”
“Kids remember everything. Or at least my kid does. I can’t speak to any others. Ian, though, he’s special. Always has been. So much like his father.”
“Where is the boy’s father?” Nicholas’s voice had the slightest touch of frost in it, as if he planned to go attack Ian’s dad next. He was too late on that one.
“He’s dead. He died when Ian was very young. Murdered by vampires. Some of your kind who didn’t like the coming out parties, and wanted vampires to be the feared creatures who went bump in the night instead of the neighbor next door who could vote and pay taxes. They killed him and laughed about it. Some of your buddies?” She told the story without any anger. It had been far too long ago for anger. All she had left was cold hatred and the need for revenge.
The need to protect her son, no matter what the cost.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Nicholas said, and he was so good—so smooth—that he put actual regret in his voice.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “You don’t need to warm me up or pretend you care about the death of some random human ten years ago. You have me, you have my son. I have to do what you ask, so don’t waste both of our time by pretending otherwise.”
He stepped forward, into her line of sight, and leaned against the wall, and she was struck again by how incredibly handsome he was, at least when his eyes weren’t glowing red or somebody’s intestines weren’t draped over his arm. So many of them were attractive. Vampires. Beauty disguising evil, or designed to seduce its prey.
A flash of some indefinable emotion crossed his eyes bu
t was gone so fast she’d probably imagined it. Or else he was trying compulsion on her, in which case he was out of luck.
“I was a random human once,” he said softly. “As were my wife and son. The memory of my family was not burned out of me by the bloodlust, even in the beginning. I know full well what you would do to protect your son from vampires, because my wife protected my son from me.”
She looked up at him, caught in spite of herself by the pain in his voice. Or the illusion of it, she reminded herself. Vampires were masters of illusion. And yet, she knew full well that she was immune to compulsion.
“How did it happen? Why did you choose to become a vampire, then, if you lost your family over it?”
He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Choose? Did your husband choose to be murdered? There was no choosing involved. I was happy and wealthy, and there were ones who wanted what I had. When I was lost to the bloodlust, they murdered my wife and child, too. Apparently they only wanted my land and fortune, not my family.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I know how you felt.”
“No, you don’t,” he replied, just as quietly. “I had the luxury of killing those who took my family. I doubt you had that.”
“No. No, I didn’t. Not that I didn’t try. Someday, though. Someday they will look up, and it will be me they see, and then they will see nothing forever after.” She shoved her hair out of her face and took a deep breath. “On the other hand, I haven’t had to mourn for centuries. How long has it been?”
His face changed, and she almost wished she hadn’t seen it. The hard lines and angles softened, and he stared at her as if she’d shocked him. He looked almost . . . human.
“No one has ever asked me that, or even spared a thought for my centuries of pain,” he said, bowing his head. “Your son is who he is because of you; your soul and spirit. His father would be very proud of him.”
She fought the burning sensation of tears, steeling herself with the absurdity of it all. Comforted by kind words from a vampire. Ridiculous. And yet—and yet he had never lifted a hand to harm her, and he’d protected Ian.
