I found the off button on the stereo. Blessed silence descended. “Derek,” I said to him in the same pleasant voice I had used with the sheriff not a couple hours ago. His eyes darted from Ellis to me. “So pleased to make your acquaintance. So sorry it will be a short one.”
He struggled. Ellis’s grip on his neck was like steel. Just as well he did not need to breathe. I looked into his face. “Have you been peeping over at the TV shoot?” I inquired.
He frowned, tried to shake his head but Ellis’s hand was holding too tight to his neck to allow for movement. “No,” he spluttered instead.
“I think you have. Now would be a very good time to tell the truth. You see, Derek, word of your antics has reached the ears of your esteemed community leader and she is, well, she is displeased.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong!”
I shook my head, made a quiet tsk-tsk noise. “Voshki so dislikes liars. Isn’t that so, Ellis?” I looked at Ellis and she nodded. Her eyes were glowing red at the pupils. A vampire’s eyes glow whenever they are angry, about to feed, or sexually aroused. It’s like someone lit two fires deep inside their pupils. Sometimes the effect is alluring, hypnotic, but most of the time it’s just fucking scary.
Derek seethed. “Alright,” he snapped. “I’ve been…looking at some of the women over there, yeah.” His eyes dropped. No fires there. Derek was not a strong vampire—that I had already figured out—but this gesture made him weak in more ways than just physically. He licked his lower lip and shot me a pathetic look from under his lashes that did nothing to make me reevaluate his masculinity. “I like human women, okay? But they don’t seem to like me. So I look at them. It’s not a fucking crime!”
He was not a particularly smart vampire either. But I had already figured that out. If he was smart, he wouldn’t be anywhere near Holly Bush Junction. “Actually, Derek, it is a crime,” I explained. His forehead creased in surprise. “But we’ll give you a pass on that if you get out of town. Now. Tonight. And obviously we don’t want you ever coming back.”
Derek McBride’s eyes darted every which way. If he was looking for an escape route, he was wasting his time. Samson was outside, in the event that Derek did manage to slip our grasp, which I seriously doubted he was capable of doing anyway. Derek managed to scowl suspiciously at me. “So you’re gonna just let me leave town? Just like that?”
I nodded. Looked at Ellis. She nodded too. Derek McBride might have just confessed to being our peeper, but he was not our killer, nor was he one of the Children of Judas. This loser could not have convinced a toddler to give up its lollipop, let alone make a full-grown adult give up their life.
“One thing…” I said… “Do you know anything about the Children of Judas?”
His upper lip lifted. The expression was more like the fear snarl you will see on a dog than anything conveying disgust. “I know enough to stay the fuck away from those crazy-ass fuckers,” he spat.
Eloquent. Other vampires really did not like these Children of Judas, not even pathetic specimens like Derek here. I shrugged. “What brought you to Holly Bush Junction anyway?” I asked. I waved a hand vaguely. “It doesn’t seem like…your kind of town.”
He stared at me, darted a look at Ellis, who momentarily tightened her grip on his throat and urged him to answer.
“Some guy in a bar,” he croaked. “We got to talking. He told me there was a TV shoot going on in this town. I figured there’d be lotsa pretty women and maybe so many people they wouldn’t notice me…looking. Okay?”
I sighed. Some guy in a bar. Of course it was. How very much trouble comes a person’s way because they listened to what some guy in a bar told them. Derek was just a dumb loser of a vampire in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Okay. It’s time for you to pack whatever of your belongings you can carry and get the hell out of Dodge,” I told him. I waggled my fingers at him. “Time to go bye-bye, Derek.”
Ellis let him go. He crumpled to the floor, one hand going to his throat.
“Don’t come back,” I reminded him. We departed the shack but we didn’t go far, just sat in the SUV at the end of the road, waiting to see whether Derek really would leave or not.
He did. Around five minutes later he came hurrying down the road on foot, a backpack slung over one shoulder, headed toward the town limits.
“That part was easy, but why do I get the feeling the whole Children of Judas thing is going to be a hell of lot harder?” I remarked.
Ellis nodded agreement. “They won’t go so quietly,” she said.
Vampires and their fucking problems. Give me a whole army of actors and directors and writers any day. I nodded to Samson. “Let’s get out of here. Suddenly I’m feeling very tired. And I could do with a drink too.”
“The hotel has a very nice bar,” Ellis said brightly. “They have a piano and a guy who comes in every evening to play old honky-tonk tunes on it. I was talking to Mike, the proprietor.”
I gave her enthusiasm the fish-eye. “Does he hire women to dress up as whores and drape themselves over the furniture too?”
Ellis smirked. “No, but I bet that’d be something to see!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Let me share another little tidbit with you about vampires: if they want something, they usually end up getting it. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Ferrari, or a particular human being. Ellis wanted me. That much was obvious. Voshki wanted me too. I had told both of them no and, to be fair to myself, I thought I meant no.
My resolve to not sleep with Ellis washed away on three bourbon shots and two beers. I spent the evening at the bar in the horrible brothel-like hotel, in the company of Ellis, Samson and Mike the proprietor, all four of us listening to a guy named Willie play honky-tonk on the piano. Mike the proprietor regaled us with tales of the hotel’s actual days as a brothel-cum-saloon. Apparently his great-great-granddaddy owned the place then. In the midst of one of Mike’s bawdy tales, I felt Ellis’s hand come to rest on my knee and squeeze there. Little electric sparks of desire traveled the length of my inner thigh.
I gave her a glare meant to warn her to back off, but it was lame sauce. She knew it. Her hand moved higher. The room immediately became several degrees warmer.
Less than an hour later we were back in the room and I was hanging by my last fingernail to any resolve whilst Ellis kissed me everywhere in ways that were intimate and erotic and frightening, and about the most thrilling thing I had ever known. My skin erupted into fire wherever her lips landed. I had no knees and my brain was gushing out of my ears. I felt my last fingernail-grip loosen, and then I no longer gave a damn whether Voshki or anyone else found out what we were doing, nor what the consequences of that might be.
We all but tore each other’s clothes off. I think my shirt lost a few buttons but I didn’t care about that either. I was way too busy getting drunk on the sight of Ellis without clothes. Three hundred-odd years old or not, she has a smoking hot body. When she backed me against a wall in one of those hungry, fingers-in-the-hair, who-needs-oxygen-anyway kisses, it felt to me like she had six hands, all of them able to work independently on different parts of me at once. I let her guide me to the double bed (which she had undoubtedly known all along we would end up using for exactly this purpose, damn her and bless her), and then I also let her go to work on my southern districts with the same talented lips, tongue and teeth that had just turned an ordinary kiss into something that makes you wonder if you’ve ever really been kissed before in your life. I could vouch that I’d never had that done before in the way Ellis did it.
I suppose I had always figured Ellis for one of those wild rides that you get on not because you know you are big enough and strong enough to take it, but because you are driven to get on it, and which you don’t come off without being changed in some major ways by it. In part, she enthralled me for much the same reason Voshki Kevorkian did, because I knew either of them could, in the words of Nietzsche, equally deftly wield a dagger against me. Or maybe, in th
eir case, a set of fangs. The lure of a dangerous woman. So it’s corny, so shoot me. Hell yes, she also annoys me, drives me fucking crazy, but since when has that been a reason not to want to have sex with someone?
As for not wanting to get involved with all that possessiveness nonsense that earmarks a vampire relationship, well, that was a bridge I’d decided to cross later. Maybe around the same time I got to crossing the bridge of Voshki’s thinking she had any prior claim on me.
As I may have mentioned, vampires tend to bite when they are having sex. They usually bite on the neck, although if their human prefers someplace less conspicuous there are main arteries in other areas of the body that will suffice just as well. There is the femoral artery, for one. Having a pair of deft fangs sunk into you here is often even more pleasurable than getting it in the neck. It was to this southern artery that Ellis went, and I did nothing to even try to stop her. Actually, I just spread my legs wider for her, like the shameless hussy I had lately turned into. Maybe it was the effect of staying in a hotel that used to be a brothel.
Oh well. As my mother, the legendary addict, always says: If you’re gonna be bad, you may as well be bad to the best of your ability. Amen.
Ellis drank her fill of my blood, the warm viscous feel of it trickling down my inner thigh acting as an aphrodisiac on me as well as her. She returned to administering to me with her tongue, and soon I was clinging to the ceiling with my fingernails and eyebrows, on the brink of an orgasm that I just knew was going to be so shattering it would be a wonder if it didn’t cause a goddamn earthquake all the way back in LA. But instead of allowing me to tumble over the brink, she conspired to leave me on a plateau, gasping and shaking, while she slid up my body and kissed me on the mouth. I could taste my own sex and my own blood on her lips. Rather than being turned off by the latter, I liked it. I wished she would just devour me whole. As she kissed me, she played her hands over every inch of my flesh, leaving trails of fiery tingling everywhere she touched, my shoulders, neck, the little hollow at my throat, down between my breasts, across my ribs…my stomach muscles fluttered as she trailed her fingertips across there, moving south in no great hurry. Finally she slipped her hand between my legs and brought me to orgasm with her fingers, and it was without a shred of doubt the best orgasm I’d ever had. I think I may have passed out briefly from pleasure. There were bright colors and loud noise inside of my head, and there was a sensation like falling off a cliff into a velvet-lined abyss, tumbling and spinning downward, only to bounce back up and go soaring into air that was as soft and sweet as marshmallow.
Shattering. Like I said.
In the aftermath of this devastating encounter I lay breathing heavily and streaming sweat, sticking to the rumpled sheets, just trying to get my brain back from the outer stratosphere, whilst Ellis lay on her side, looking down at me, one hand still stroking my inner thigh. She was not even winded. Her eyes were still glowing red, like a sunset. And there was blood at each corner of her mouth. My blood. Now that she had drunk from me, she would form a sort of connection with me on the emotional and psychic level. It would have been stronger had she invited me to drink her blood. That she had refrained from doing this told me she was being at least a little cautious with regard to Voshki’s claims upon me. I was not quite sure how to feel about that.
“What happens now?” I asked once I had my breath back.
Ellis smiled, shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never stolen a human from Voshki before.”
I was irked suddenly. I glared at her. “You didn’t steal me from anyone because I don’t belong to anyone. Least of all to Voshki Kevorkian.”
“Vosh laid a claim to you. We’re supposed to respect that.”
“And I told Vosh that I didn’t want to be her human.”
“It doesn’t matter…” Ellis’s smile was both wistful and amused… “I should still have respected her wishes. I should have at least asked her permission before I made a play for you.”
“For fuck’s sake…” I was getting properly annoyed now… “I’m not a fucking car that you have to ask your mom’s permission to take for a ride!”
The analogy amused her. It didn’t amuse me. I swatted her on the arm. “This is not fucking funny!” I carped. I turned away from her, sulking. Christ, but I hate women who sulk! Ellis apparently found my sulking amusing too. She snuggled up to me, wrapped her arms around me, sent exploratory fingers south again. I moaned.
“Oh God, not again. Not yet,” I begged her.
“Mmm…then when?”
“Gimme a while to recover.”
Ellis paused in her explorations, withdrew her hand from between my legs. I heard her fangs glide out, then, unexpectedly, the dull crunch of those fangs sinking into her own flesh. Warm blood dripped onto my upturned side. I whipped my head back to look at her. She held her bleeding wrist over my face. Blood dripped onto my cheeks, onto my chin and my lips. Instinctively I stuck out my tongue to lick it away. It tasted oddly sweet, not like regular blood should taste, and as soon as it touched my tongue I got a hit that would have sent any crack addict running for cover. It was like seeing every color of the spectrum all at once, like feeling every part of your entire body caressed by silken feathers, like being spun in a spider web of velvet and sugar, and washed clean by holy water. It was unlike anything I had ever known could exist in this world or any other. All I wanted to do was drink Ellis’s blood until I choked on it. I grabbed her wrist, pulled it down and fastened my mouth to the wound.
The glow in her eyes flared bright and hot. No longer was I looking at a sunset—I was looking into the heart of a conflagration could burn both of us to death. I sucked greedily. Blood washed down my throat. I swear there were angels singing, a whole blissed-out chorus of them, and maybe a couple minor gods playing in the orchestra.
At length Ellis gently but firmly tugged her wrist free of my greedy mouth. She licked the wound herself until it healed over. Then she looked down at me. No red glow now, just those dark eyes of hers that would not quit. “We’re bound now,” she told me, “and Voshki will sense that as soon as she sees us. I don’t know how she’s going to react.”
I shook my head. I knew there had to be a big, stupid, sloppy, happy-ass grin on my face. I felt filled up with light and wellbeing. “I don’t care,” I said.
Ellis rolled me toward her, kissed me for a moment. Then she told me; “You might care if Vosh is really, really angry about this. That can be an ugly, frightening thing.”
“So why did you do it?” I asked her.
Ellis didn’t answer. She just kept looking at me. She didn’t have to say anything out loud. I knew why she took the risk. It had nothing to do with power. She really did think I was worth it. I was flattered, pleased and scared all at once.
I slipped my hand between her legs, felt her wetness. I wanted to stay there, in that bed, in that hotel, for the next decade or so. To hell with Voshki, and with Hollywood, and with all that drama. Some part of me knew it was just the drug-like effect of Ellis’s blood making me think this way. But hey, it felt good. I slid a finger inside of Ellis, felt her respond immediately. “I don’t want to talk about Voshki. Not now. I want you to do to me what you did before.”
“As you wish,” Ellis murmured.
* * *
Something was ringing somewhere. At first I thought the sound emanated from inside my own head, maybe another of the crazy after-effects of drinking a vampire’s blood, or just the mind-blowingly great sex. Whatever, I tried to ignore the irritating sound. But it wouldn’t go away. That’s when I realized the ringing was a cell phone. Not mine though.
“Yes, Voshki?” I heard Ellis’s voice, hushed and respectful.
I came awake pretty quick. Everything about the past few hours came flooding back, in Technicolor, widescreen with Dolby Surround Sound. I fancied my thoughts must be vivid enough, and loud enough, for Voshki to catch them all the way on the other end of the line in Hollywood. That made me paranoid.
Beside me, Ellis sat up in bed, naked, cell phone at her ear. She gave me a quick meaningful look and I nodded. “Yes, Voshki,” she repeated. Her expression was grim in a way that I was liking less and less. “We’ll see to it,” she assured her leader. She snapped the phone closed.
“That was Voshki,” she said needlessly. I nodded equally without need. “There has been…a development.”
A serious one if Voshki was calling in the middle of the night. “What kind of development?” I asked.
Ellis was already throwing the sheets aside and swinging her long legs out of bed. I had to look away as she stood up. The rush of desire for her nearly knocked me out, and it panicked me a little, too, because this seemed like a very bad time to want to get jiggy again. Ellis gave me a smile over one shoulder that very nearly turned me inside out. “Oh, there’s never a bad time for that,” she cooed. She began picking her clothes off the floor.
Heat rushed into my face. “Oh Christ,” I groaned. “Tell me you can’t read my fucking mind now that we…now that… Can you read my mind?”
Ellis shook her head. “You’re still blocking me out for the most part, Dante, although I’ve got to say I wish you wouldn’t. I can pick up on some of your thoughts, just little hints here and there. But I can read your emotions rather better now. Desire is a particularly easy one to pick up on.”
Great. I wondered if Voshki would be able to pick up on it just as easily. Ellis shrugged and said, “She might” as though I had actually spoken the thought aloud.
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