B007XKEWAE EBOK

by Lawson, Nicola

  "Coffee?" he offered, clearly flustered.

  She accepted his offer and they returned downstairs. Minutes later they were back in his living room. She sat in one of his chairs and he chose the one opposite her. He drank his coffee in silence as she pretended to sip hers.

  His eyes kept straying to her barely covered body. The material of the nightie was pulled taught over her chest so it was a simple matter for him to discern what it covered. Setting her mug on a table beside the chair Gabriella got to her feet and raised her arms over her head as though stretching. The result of her action was to pull the bottom of the short garment almost up to her navel giving him a full view.

  When Gabriella looked at his trousers she knew he had noticed. Child's play, sometimes it was just too easy.

  In less than ten minutes the pair were in full swing. His trousers and boxer shorts were down around his ankles and several of the buttons on his shirt were missing. Gabriella still wore her borrowed clothing but as she moved on top of him he moved his hands up under the material all over her body.

  He was grunting underneath her, his face bright red and his cheeks puffed when he sucked in the air he needed to sustain himself during this activity. He was deep in the throes of ecstasy, almost at the point of no return, when Gabriella raised her fists above his head. She brought both hands down together into his idiot face crushing his skull. She brought her fists back and unleashed them on him again. And again. Blood spattered up on to the ceiling flung off her fists. And again. And again. In both single and double punches Gabriella continued to pummel his skull. Blood flew across the ceiling and the walls. It hit his sofa and his chairs, there was a crimson stain on the screen of his dormant television set. He was dead after the first blow but Gabriella did not stop until above his neck all that remained was an unrecognisable pulp. A thick red and pink paste.

  Francesca returned to the nest with a single female captive, slung over her shoulder and batting ineffectually at her back. Gabriella recognised it as the woman she had seen her with earlier in the night.

  "I brought you a present." Francesca set her captive down on the ground and gave her a push that sent her stumbling towards Gabriella.

  Wordlessly Gabriella moved across the inner chamber and grabbed hold of the woman on either side of the head. With a vicious twist she lifted her head off her shoulders, trailing severed blood vessels that spurted gore in a fountain. Most of a spinal column was torn from down her back. Tossing the head away into a corner she caught the body and began to feast from the decapitated form.

  Watching from the doorway Francesca gave a quick clap.

  Xavier looked at the ground and shuffled his feet like an obedient little lapdog wondering how to please its master.

  The Mistress's own little bitch watched from a chair in their private sanctum with growing glee at his predicament. But there was something different about the little whore. Something in the way she looked at Francesca.

  Xavier had no time to ponder such things, however. He had to find some way to explain his actions that would keep him in Francesca's favour.

  "I did not seek to disobey you, Mistress," he said. "I chanced upon them while I was out on the hunt. I believed they could make a valuable addition to the nest and invited their group to join us. Of course they will be instructed of your rules and informed of the punishments for not abiding by them."

  For the first time since being called in to see her, Xavier raised his eyes to look on his Mistress.

  "I meant no disrespect. If I erred in my judgement I will accept your punishment," he said contritely.

  Francesca regarded him silently for a long moment. In the background the little slut stared at the back of Francesca's head, as though she were trying to get inside her mind and discover what she was thinking.

  Seconds were stretched to an eternity as Xavier waited to see if she would buy his explanation.

  Eventually she stepped towards him and planted a kiss on his forehead. Xavier had to fight to keep from laughing at her gullibility, and also the look of disappointment and disbelief on Gabriella's face.

  "I am reluctant to accept new members into the protection of the nest, as you are aware. But I will allow you this slip provided you can ensure they will be loyal to me." Francesca said.

  "Thank you, Mistress."

  Francesca stepped back from him and took his hand between hers. She gave him a gentle tug towards the private bedchamber she shared with Gabriella.

  As she pulled him through the door she turned back.

  "Come, Gabriella," she said. "You will join us."

  Lazily the salacious little whore stood up to join them.

  When Francesca turned away a black cloud crossed her face. It was gone in an instant but Xavier filed it away in his memory. Dissension between these two could be turned to his advantage when the time was ripe for him to make his play for power.

  Chapter Eleven

  The raven haired vampire in the slender red dress buried her ivory fangs deep into his sister Katherine's neck. She looked back up at him blood dripping from her mouth down her chin. With a wink and a languid taste of her lips she went back to feeding. Fulton felt the weight of his other sister, Kelly, in his arms. He could smell her blood pumping through her body. It would taste so good.

  They were standing in his sisters' bedroom. It was empty save for the babies’ cots and the bodies of his father and mother. No blood leaked from their corpses but their heads hung at impossible angles, necks broken by the alluring female vampire.

  Fulton stood for a long moment just watching the other as she fed. Lapping up his sister's precious blood.

  In the end he could take it no longer.

  He snarled and used his fangs to tear chunks of flesh from Kelly's throat to free her blood vessels. She remained silent throughout the attack.

  He gulped her blood down like there was no tomorrow.

  The female vampire, Francesca Fulton remembered her calling herself, took a break form feasting on his other sister.

  "Slow down," she instructed him. "Savour it. Family blood is always the sweetest."

  He did as she said and let the liquid slip leisurely down. He smiled with pleasure.

  "See," Francesca smiled and Fulton's pleasure increased at being able to please her.

  She slinked up to him and used her hand under his chin to guide his mouth to hers. They kissed and the blood of their respective kills mingled together and leaked out at the edges of their mouths.

  They finished draining the twin babies and cast the lifeless husks on top of the bodies of their parents.

  As soon as the shells touched down the vampires turned on each other. With total abandon they made love in full view of the dead eyes of Fulton's family.

  Fulton toured the city streets on the back of his motorcycle. Clad in black leather trousers and a black leather jacket he blended into the darkness. He wore a black helmet as well, not because of the risk of injury if he fell off -as a vampire that was not a problem- he wore it to avoid hassles with the human police.

  Fulton drove around in a random pattern but all his turns took him in the same direction. Towards the edge of the city. His memory was triggered as he reached the edge of the city. If he carried on along that road and made a couple of turns he would be back where he grew up.

  He just wanted a brief look. After all he had been through, recently in particular, he needed some sort of touchstone back to reality. A reason for him to keep fighting.

  If he could think that even with all he had done he was still himself, that he was somebody’s son and not just a monster. If he could see the loving family that he had once been a part of, maybe that love could give him the strength to go on.

  **********

  Katy Hawke sat downstairs flicking through the channels on the T.V. There was nothing on that looked like it was worth watching. That seemed to be the norm nowadays, she thought. Her husband, Colin, was upstairs trying to put the twins to bed. Ordinarily they would h
ave been in bed already for over an hour but had been allowed to stay up to see their uncle Nick.

  Besides it wasn't a school night. The twins had been going to the local nursery school for a couple of months now and had got into a routine with regards bedtime accordingly.

  Now that they were at nursery Katy could think about going back to work again. She knew that Colin thought she resented him because he kept his job when she had to leave hers in order to look after the twins.

  That hadn't been the plan. With three adults in the house the plan had been for their son to help with the twins during a couple of gap years so that she could continue to work part-time. Then Colin and Katy were going to pay for him to see the world.

  She looked across the room at his picture that still hung there. Her son, Fulton, had gone missing a couple of years before. The last time she had seen him was New Years Eve nineteen ninety-nine. Then nothing.

  For a long time Colin and Katy had tried to search for him but then other commitments got in the way. Colin had work and they both had to look after the twins. Every so often Katy would fall into a great pit of depression, but each time she hauled herself back out of it. The twins needed her to be their mother still. Sometimes it felt harsh, but she couldn't neglect her remaining children because of the one she had lost.

  She heard Colin coming back down the stairs and focused back on the television screen. She dried her eyes on her sleeve.

  Lurking in the shadows outside his old home Fulton saw his father return to the living room and sit beside his mother. Fulton had watched his Uncle Nick drive away twenty minutes earlier. There was no Aunt Maris but that hadn't looked likely since before Fulton was taken away from them.

  Approaching carefully across the lawn, avoiding the light of the nearby street lamp and the illumination cast from the living room window, Fulton made it to the house. Silently he climbed the wall that separated their garden from the neighbour's. Reaching up to the window ledge of the bathroom window he pulled himself up. With catlike agility he walked the ledge and stepped across onto the ledge of the window that had once been his bedroom. The twins had been put to sleep in the larger room decorated for them so Fulton guessed this would be empty.

  Using skills that were almost instinctive to him now, he jimmied the window open and slipped inside. With his enhanced senses he needed no extra light to see around his room.

  But it was not his room any more. There was no bed. None of his old posters were on the walls. None of his other stuff was anywhere to be seen. Instead his room was now basically two rooms.

  Half the room was a study with a desk and a computer. A handful of text books were on a single shelf. Pieces of paper too deep in the gloom even for him to read covered a notice board on the wall where his stereo system had once sat on some white swivel-brackets.

  The other half of the room looked like it was being used for storage for some of the twins’ clothes and toys. Brown boxes were stacked behind an old doorless wardrobe. Girls stuffed toys were jumbled on top. Fulton remembered how the first toy his parents had bought him, a scraggly brown bear with one eye missing, had once had pride of place on top of his T.V set. He had tried to throw it out when he hit his teens, it was a macho thing, but his mother had kept it and presented it to him upon his eighteenth birthday.

  Next to the wardrobe a pair of blue open-topped plastic tubs were overflowing with toys. Fulton had to be careful where he stepped on his way out of the room to negotiate them all without making noise.

  He opened the door as quietly as he could and held his breath at the soft shush it made from brushing over the carpet. There was no indication that anyone had heard him. He padded out into the equally dark upstairs landing. He walked past the door to his parents’ bedroom. He glanced down the stairs at his side. A little bar of light showed under the door to the lounge and he could hear his parents breathing and smell their blood in their veins.

  A stronger scent came from within his little sisters' room. He could hear the rhythmic sounds of breathing that came with sleep so Fulton risked opening the door to their room to have a quick look, to see how they had grown. Fulton walked inside between their beds. On either side of him his identical twin sisters, now over three years old, slept peacefully, beatific expressions on their faces. He just stood there watching them sleep. Listening to them breathe. Watching the shallow rise and fall of their chests under the thick sheets. Hearing the beat of their hearts as it pumped blood around their bodies.

  His head was filled with the intoxicating scent of it. A voice from his dreams seemed to speak to him.

  "Savour it. Family blood is the sweetest."

  He felt the change wash over him as his vampire nature asserted itself. He gazed longingly at his little sisters. He could virtually see the blood coursing through them.

  He bent down towards one of the girls. The name painted on the headboard indicated that this was Kelly.

  As he reached his hands down to grasp her a gust of wind blew in through the window he had opened, it slammed the door to his old room shut.

  Before his sisters could waken at the noise Fulton was out of their room. He opened the door to his old room and was climbing out of the window even as the door to the living room was opened.

  By the sounds of the footsteps it was his father who was coming up the stairs. Fulton closed the window and dropped off the ledge. He landed on the path. Face to face with his mother. Only a pane of double glazed glass separated them.

  A look of shock crossed her face and Fulton fled quickly, vanishing in the dark night.

  This had been a bad idea. Even his parents seemed to have moved on without him. He had to do the same, accept what he was and do what he had to do.

  Colin Hawke checked first on the girls. The noise didn't seem to have woken them. Although their door was ajar he could have sworn that he had closed it earlier. A gust of frigid air came from the combined study and store room that had been his son’s room.

  Colin went in and closed the window which had been opened a crack. He could also have sworn that that had been closed. Never mind.

  He turned on the lights. He could never forget that this room should have been his son's. In the back all his sons stuff was packed away in brown boxes waiting for him to return to claim it. On the wall behind his desk was a notice board with cut-outs of the reports of his son's disappearance or copies of the adverts he and Katy had placed in that agonising time after he vanished. There next to the computer was . . .

  Colin walked over. It had been blown from it's place by the wind and he bent to retrieve it from the floor. The scruffy little bear with an eye missing. The first toy his parents had bought for Fulton. He remembered Fulton's embarrassment when Katy presented it to him again in front of all his friends on his eighteenth birthday. Colin cradled the old bear then set it back in its place.

  "I saw him," Katy dashed into the room.

  "Hush, you'll wake the girls. Who did you see?" Colin asked.

  Katy rushed into his arms. "I was looking out of the window and he just appeared in front of me," she said in a hurry. "I saw Fulton. When I blinked he was gone, but I swear it was him."

  Colin held her close and waited for the inevitable gush of tears when she realised that it was just another false hope.

  He did not have to wait long.

  Chapter Twelve

  Gabriella pulled the black knee-length boots on to her feet and zipped them up over her calves. She was pulling them on over a pair of skin-tight painted-on trousers. On top she was already dressed in a burgundy red halter top. A delicate silver chain circled her neck and plunged down across the top of her chest. With her boots in place she checked herself out in the only full length mirror they owned. It was an antique Francesca had picked up somewhere or other.

  Gabriella gave herself an appraising look. She looked hot even if she did say so herself. She had cut her hair to shoulder length and had bleached it to a bone white. Francesca preferred her natural colour but she felt li
ke she needed a change. She had black makeup around her eyes and black lipstick accentuated her mouth. Not that anyone outside the nest would get a look at it any time soon, she thought bitterly. She could always sneak out again, she supposed, but given what happened last time she would rather just wait here for Francesca to return. She wasn't really feeling up to witnessing a repeat performance.

  Gabriella left their private chambers and sauntered down the metal steps to the main floor. A handful of regular vampires hung around down there. The others were out hunting. Xavier had placed the new group of vampires on sentry duty as a symbol of their pledge of loyalty to Francesca and the nest. Gabriella had argued that it made no sense to put them in charge of the nest's security if there were doubts about if they could be trusted. But Francesca had taken Xavier's side. So Gabriella capitulated and again she was left behind while Francesca got up to who knew what.

  To the edge of the main chamber, near to the area of the steel works that hadn't been refurbished before the project was relocated, Xavier stood beside one of the new joiners who had been very close to Xavier since they rejoined the nest. The pair of them were as thick as thieves. Often she would spy them conspiring quietly together. Jacques, another vampire who Gabriella judged to be more loyal to Xavier than Francesca, had just left them, wandering over to another small group of stay-behinds.

  It was no secret to Francesca that Gabriella was distrustful of Xavier. She doubted that Xavier thought she trusted him either. Nor did he try to hide the fact that he disliked her mutually. Gabriella got the impression that Francesca gained a perverse, as well as sexual, pleasure from having both Gabriella and Xavier sleep with her. She enjoyed that they had to put aside their personal feelings to be with her. It was all very well for her to treat him that way, but Gabriella was supposed to mean more to her than that.