Need

by Todd Gregory

  I looked back over my shoulder. The camp was well behind me; I couldn’t even hear it anymore. But to be on the safe side, I left the path and went down the hillside. About twenty yards down, there was a creek, and I climbed down the bank beside it. Once I was down next to the running water, I looked back over my shoulder. I couldn’t see the path anymore. I smiled to myself and pulled my shirt up over my head. I leaned back against the bank as I slid my shorts and underwear down to my ankles. I closed my eyes and started pulling on my dick.

  In my imagination, I was back in the locker room, drying myself off with a towel after taking a shower. There was no one else there; Coach had kept me after practice for some reason that didn’t matter to the fantasy. I heard a cough, and I looked up. Keith Kennedy stood there, smiling at me, stark naked. His dick was hard and he was holding it in his hand. His curls were damp, and there were spots of water on his chest. “I was waiting for you, Cord,” he said, walking toward me. I dropped the towel as he took me into his big strong arms and kissed me on the mouth with his thick, sensual lips, and I shot my load into the fast-moving creek water. I moaned and kept pulling, making sure I got every last drop out, my whole body shuddering with the pleasure. I stood there for a few moments before finally pulling my shorts up and putting my shirt back on. I climbed up the bank and headed back for the trail.

  “I was there, watching you,” Nico whispered, his smile not faltering. The look in his eyes, I’d seen that look before in other people—when they were looking at the person they were in love with.

  I felt nauseated.

  He got up and walked over to the wingback chair where the clothes he’d selected for me were draped. “I was in the woods—my parents always thought it was rather amusing to take Lorenzo and me out into the woods where church camps were being held, to teach us our craft, how to use our powers.” His eyebrows went up. “We used to practice casting spells on the church kids.” His grin turned into a smirk. “My personal favorite spell was to make the kids horny, make them want to have sex.” He laughed. “I always wondered how many babies were conceived at church camps.”

  I would have laughed were I not so disgusted by him. I walked across to the chair and picked up the pants. The velvet felt sensual against my skin. I stepped into them.

  “Those are going to look so hot on you,” he purred.

  “Where were you? I didn’t see you,” I asked, pulling on the pants. The velvet excited my skin as the material slid up my legs, and I could feel myself getting aroused again. I shook my head and tried to remain focused. I put my arms into the shirt sleeves, pulled it up, and started buttoning the shirt.

  “I was actually in the trees, up above your head. You didn’t need a spell, though—you were quite horny enough on your own with no help needed from me. Did you ever get a chance to be with Keith Kennedy?” Nico asked. He cocked his head to one side and grimaced. “Lorenzo’s coming. Your entertainment must be ready.”

  I could hear the footsteps on the staircase as clearly as if it were me making them. When had my hearing become so much more intense? Everything was more intense, I realized. I remembered the way my veins had burned after drinking Nico’s blood. Was I actually becoming a god?

  I could see into Nico’s mind, through his eyes, but was that his power or mine?

  I closed my eyes.

  I sensed . . . something familiar. Something familiar was coming, but it wasn’t from inside the house. It was outside—on the other side of the woods. I could feel it in my bones, in my mind, and I tried to grasp hold of the sensation, make it take shape in my mind.

  But then the doorknob began to turn and that sensation was gone, overpowered by Lorenzo. I could smell him—he still smelled of sex and sweat and to a lesser degree, tobacco. In spite of myself, his scent was intoxicating. I wanted to shove my face into his armpit and breathe deeply. My asshole twinged from the memory of the pounding he’d given it, but I didn’t want a replay of what had gone before.

  No, I wanted to hold Lorenzo down and force myself into him as he struggled and resisted me, as I slapped his face and bit his nipples until they bled . . .

  Blood.

  A cramp ripped through me, almost causing me to double over in agony. I saw Nico look at me, concern in his eyes, just as the door opened and Lorenzo stood there, that nasty, cruel smirk on his face.

  I could see the vein pulsing in his neck.

  I curled my hands into fists.

  “No, you cannot. You must wait, fight the need,” Nico’s voice whispered into my brain. “Hold out for a little while longer—after the entertainment, you can drink your fill. Resist your hatred of him. I’ve done it as long as I can remember.”

  I pushed the animal, that primal urge, back down inside of me.

  “You’re dressed, good,” Lorenzo growled in that voice that made my anger rise. “Because all is in readiness. Nico, are you ready for tonight’s entertainment?”

  I could feel the hatred radiating off Nico, and I looked over to Lorenzo, confused for a moment. How could Lorenzo not be aware of it?

  Nico had done this to me. He’d turned me into a vampire, had broken all the rules by giving me his blood to drink, turning me into a god. He’d destroyed Jared’s life. And with a pang, I remembered what I’d learned, which hadn’t really made sense to me until that moment. Jared had been on his way to meet his fiancée for dinner. He was in love, had even been thinking this was the girl he was going to marry. He’d never shown up, because Nico had arranged it so that I would encounter him, when my own need was so strong I couldn’t resist the nearest available artery—

  And with a jolt I asked myself, And just why had I waited so long to feed? Why had I let it go so long? It was an insane thing for a vampire to do. Jean-Paul hadn’t taught me much about being a vampire—but he had taught me that much.

  I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Nico. Maybe he had been behind that as well.

  I felt anger begin to bubble up inside of me again. I’d been used, treated as nothing so much as a pawn in whatever game he was playing. Why? What would he gain for me to be so powerful?

  “Come along, then, vampire.” Lorenzo mockingly bowed to me. “I know you need to feed—you were looking for food when we took you last night in New Orleans, and you haven’t fed, so you must be famished.” He gave me that nasty smirk again, the one I longed to wipe off his face with my fists. “Soon enough, you will have someone to feed from. But the honor of who you will drink from has yet to be ascertained. That’s our entertainment for the evening.”

  I glanced at Nico, who was also smiling. “I . . . I am hungry,” I said, and it was true. Another cramp consumed me, pushing everything else out of my mind until it passed. And that didn’t make sense, either. I’d drank from Nico just hours earlier. I shouldn’t be hungry again so soon. But I’d also gotten the hunger much more quickly the night before after feeding from the stripper at Oz. Why? He’d said “last night”; my God, I’ve been here that long? Why hasn’t Nigel or Rachel come looking for me?

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Nothing made any sense.

  I followed Lorenzo out of the room, again feeling like I might drift off into the air with every step that I took. Outside of the room, he went down the staircase. When I reached the top of the stairs, another cramp ripped through me, and I grabbed on to the railing to keep from falling. The railing shattered into splinters in my hand.

  I stared at it, unbelieving.

  Lorenzo was still going down the stairs, and Nico waved his hand and the railing reassembled itself.

  “You’re much stronger now. I told you, you’re becoming a god,” Nico’s voice said in my head, sounding absolutely delighted. “You must be careful. If Lorenzo even suspects . . .”

  “What can he do to a god?” I responded without even stopping to think. I kept walking down the stairs, and in my head I saw myself with my hands around Lorenzo’s neck, squeezing, as his face turned purple, his tongue coming out and turning black as
I kept up the pressure, determined to wipe that nasty smirk off his face for all eternity.

  “Don’t. He might be able to read your mind,” Nico cautioned as we reached the bottom of the staircase. “His seed is inside of you. He might be able—”

  “Come along!” Lorenzo was standing beside a door. It was open, and I could see it led out to the veranda. I could see torches burning, cowled figures standing around the lawn. Lorenzo clapped his hands with an almost childish delight. “We don’t want to keep them waiting any longer!”

  I will show you who is the master here, my pretty dark one, I thought with a sneer of my own as I walked out onto the veranda. I paused to get my bearings. There was a long lawn that sloped gradually down to the riverbank. I could see the moon’s reflection in the little waves and dimples on the surface of the river. Enormous, ancient live oaks and their long twisted branches dripping with long strands of thick Spanish moss cast shadows across the lushness of the thick grass. I could smell the river in the cool breeze lazily drifting up the slope to the house. The air was heavy and damp, yet cool. Despite the cloudlessness of the indigo night sky, it felt like rain was coming. I looked up and saw the stars scattered across the dark blue, and there was a haze around the full moon’s glow. There was power radiating from that moon, and I closed my eyes and turned my head up to it, absorbing and drinking it all in thirstily. The night seemed alive to my heightened senses, and I could have stood there on the veranda for hours, experiencing it all.

  I sensed Lorenzo move across to the stairs and opened my eyes. Nico nudged me, indicating I should follow him. My head felt light, my skin sensitive, and again I felt like I could simply float up into the sky if I just willed myself to do so. There was another power surge from inside me, a wave of heat blasting through me, and I rode that wave as I walked down the steps. The grass felt damp and cool beneath my bare feet, and I could feel its energy, its life force caressing the soles of my feet as I walked across it. There was a well-trod path leading down to where a circle of people stood in the flickering light cast by torches mounted on tall rods. They were in the approximate center of the back lawn, halfway between the back veranda of the house and the banks of the river. Their circle was also centered between two enormous live oaks, their long gnarled roots almost reaching the spot where the circle of witches stood.

  As I followed Lorenzo, I became aware of colors swirling around each of the people, who were all wearing cowls that concealed their faces. I stared at the colors in wonder.

  “You’re seeing their energy, their auras.” Nico’s voice sounded delighted inside my head. “And you can actually control their auras if you want. You can send them different energy and affect their moods.”

  I didn’t respond, merely nodding as I kept walking. I focused on keeping my thoughts shielded from him. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see his own energy, which was a pale red, so pale it was almost nonexistent, and somehow I knew he was drained, that somehow whenever we touched, I drained energy from him, storing it inside of me, like a weird vampiric battery.

  And it was making me even stronger.

  The colors I could see around the witches deepened as we drew nearer, and I closed my eyes, willing the colors to go away. When I opened my eyes again, the colors were gone.

  I smiled to myself.

  They parted to let us through, and I saw they were standing around a pit.

  There were two men in the pit, and I recognized one as the stripper from Oz. The other I didn’t know, but he was equally as beautiful as the stripper.

  “What is the meaning of this?” I asked.

  “One of them will be your dinner,” Lorenzo replied with a nasty smile. “But first he has to earn that right. They will fight to the death, and the winner will be your dinner.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I wanted nothing more than to wipe the smile from Lorenzo’s face. I felt the power within me surge, anxious to be released. “It would be so easy to destroy him,” a voice whispered in my brain. I glanced over at Nico, but it wasn’t his voice, and he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring down into the pit, his eyes alight with excitement, his mouth open. He licked his lips, and I was repulsed.

  I stared down at the stripper and saw details about him I hadn’t noticed in the poorly lit bar. His eyes seemed a little glassy, as though he were disoriented and didn’t know where he was, but they were a beautiful, vibrant blue. His skin almost glowed in the torchlight, like it was lightly oiled. I could see veins in his arms and in his lower abdomen leading down into the white jockstrap, which was all he was wearing. It was bright in the light and emphasized the big bulge it contained. His cock was semihard, pulling the fabric away from his skin. His legs were just as thickly muscled as I remembered, and his skin was shaved smooth, though I could make out stubble forming on his strong pecs and on his legs.

  He looked up, and our eyes met, and I went inside his head.

  His name was Blaine and he was in his early twenties, from a little town in the part of Louisiana called Acadiana. He wasn’t pure Cajun—his mother was from Texas, but his father’s family went all the way back to the time when the French were driven out of what is now called Nova Scotia by the English. He was proud of his Cajun heritage, even if his parents had kicked him out of their house when he was seventeen because they caught him with another boy. With no money or food or anywhere to live, he had made his way to Baton Rouge, where he got a job working as a dancer in gay bars, living in a homeless shelter until he managed to befriend some other dancers and moved into their house. He got his GED and then met a nice older man one night named Tom who practically adopted him and took care of him. It was this man who got him to become a personal trainer to make more money, gave him a home and love, introduced the boy to his friends, and Blaine’s body began to grow bigger and stronger as he flourished with his newfound family. Pictures of him on a muscle Web site led to an offer to make gay porn, and with his daddy’s permission, he flew out to Palm Springs to do his first shoot, and he became extremely popular. But even as he kept building his body, doing more porn shoots and posing for photographers, building up his personal training business, he wanted more out of life. He wanted to go to college, like he had always wanted to, and become a medical technician. With his daddy’s support, he got into LSU and now was very close to completing his degree. He was happy, he had a good life, and he had worked very hard for it. He still danced every once in a while because the money was good, but he was looking forward to the day when he could finally just work in a hospital and leave the porn and the money from his body behind. Daddy was still Daddy, but their sexual relationship was over—but he would always love Tom.

  He wasn’t too aware of where he was; all he knew was there were people watching—there were always people watching him. That didn’t bother him; he was used to it. There was a man eight feet away from him in a black jockstrap who wanted to kill him, so he had to kill him first.

  And looking up into my eyes, he knew that I would be his reward, and that was making his dick get even harder.

  I looked away and hated Lorenzo with a passion I’d never felt before. I felt the power surging down inside of me, but it wasn’t time, not yet—somehow I knew that.

  But I also knew I wasn’t going to let this end in death.

  I looked back down into the pit, at the other side from where Blaine stood.

  The other man was also beautiful but not as ruggedly masculine as Blaine. He was taller—Blaine was maybe five seven at most; this man was easily around six feet tall. His hair was thick and dark, and he, too, had beautiful blue eyes. And while he was muscular and defined, his muscles weren’t nearly as thick as Blaine’s. His legs were long, and I knew he had a beautiful ass at the top of them. He was wearing a black jockstrap, and his bulge wasn’t nearly as big as Blaine’s, but there was also a stirring there. He didn’t look up at me. His eyes were focused on Blaine across the pit from him.

  Look at me!

  His head turned upwa
rd, and he found me. His face was model pretty, with thick black brows over deeply chiseled cheekbones, a strong square jaw, and a wide mouth that seemed ready to curve into a smile as he looked up at me.

  I lost myself in the blue of his eyes.

  His name was Robert, and he was twenty-two years old. He wasn’t from Louisiana; he was actually from up north—Pennsylvania or Pittsburgh? Somewhere like that, and he was going to Tulane, where he was almost finished with his own degree. He, too, was gay, but his parents were actually fine with it. He was a good student, a good person, and had lots of friends and a good life. He liked wrestling—it was arousing for him—and he often wrestled with his boyfriend, who was named Chip, who was also a student at Tulane. Robert wasn’t sure what he was doing here, either, or how he got here. The last thing he remembered was going into Good Friends Bar in the French Quarter with a group of his friends, and everything somehow went green, and the next thing he knew he was in this pit, staring at a man with a godlike body, both of them wearing jockstraps, and he was excited. He loved Chip, but this other guy was a fantasy for him. He’d always dreamed of wrestling with someone with that kind of thickly muscled body, and he wanted to be dominated by him, and—

  I looked away, unable to take any more.

  The boy had no idea he was in a fight to the death—but Blaine knew.

  The unfairness of it all filled me with a righteous fury.

  My fingers itched to go around Lorenzo’s throat.

  The idea of a fight to the death, and that it would be for my entertainment, my pleasure, was sickening to me. The idea that this pretty young boy was just tossed into the pit as nothing more than meat for Blaine, something for him to destroy—and this was supposed to entertain me—infuriated me, and the fury was making that power, that thing, inside of me stir, wanting to be let out. It made me want to give Lorenzo a taste of his own medicine. Blaine was a good person, who’d worked hard and overcome difficulties that would have destroyed most people to make something out of himself. He was better than this, didn’t deserve to be treated like this. I wanted Lorenzo to suffer. I wanted to feel his bones crack in my hands, crush them into powder while he screamed in agony. I wanted to leap down into the pit, toss Robert over my shoulder, and fly up into the night and away from this place. He had friends, people who loved him, who were probably even at this moment wondering what had happened to him, worried about him—