I compromised by storming out of the room and going to bed. Only I couldn’t actually go to bed, so I sat cross legged upon it in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Wound tight as a coiled spring, with my sharpened stick clutched in both hands, I tried to wait through the night.
My senses straining for the faintest trace of him, my ears alert for the remotest sound, I listened only to the familiar, unmistakable noises of my mother going to bed, of the usual shouting and laughter in the street at chucking-out time on a Saturday night. Somebody threw up on the corner of our street, much to the amusement of his mates and the ire of his extremely loud girlfriend. In the distance, I heard a police siren. It was Saturday night, but I couldn’t help relating every sign of distress to him.
Tomorrow, Hilda and Frank would be here. I could tell them exactly where to find their vampire—providing he didn’t move in the interim, which I was fairly sure he wouldn’t. And even if he did, I understood with a new confidence that startled even me that I could find him again. In the meantime, since I had failed to kill him, or do anything with him at all except give him another laugh, I could only sit here in constant vigil to protect my mother’s life. And my own.
Weirdly, I trusted him to keep his word. He wouldn’t kill me today. But today ended at midnight and he’d said nothing about my mother.
I was knackered. After two heavy nights’ drinking in a row, I needed a long, peaceful sleep, so it wasn’t surprising that it grew increasingly difficult to keep my eyes open. Twice I caught myself nodding off, coming to again with a jump to grasp my stake more firmly.
* * * * *
I opened my eyes with a feeling of excitement I was too sleepy at first to place. Then I realized it came from the firm but light pressure on my pubic bone. I pushed my hip upward into it and something pushed back. I turned my head and saw him sitting beside me on the bed.
My heart turned over. I was lying down, still in my pajama trousers and t-shirt, and he just sat there, his hand resting on my crotch to wake me.
Wildly, I struggled to sit up, but his hand pressed harder to keep me still. “Sh-sh,” he said. “Don’t panic. I’ve only come for another taste…” His smile was wicked, his eyes gleamed and I thought, he’s stronger than me, there’s no point in even trying to resist him.
I knew I wanted another of those blinding, heart-stopping kisses. I thought that if he just kept his hand where it was while he kissed me I would come, tasting the sweetest, wildest, most intense orgasm ever…
I couldn’t tell him that, of course, and I knew it was wrong of me, more wrong than anything I had ever done, but in that moment I wanted it so badly that when he bent for my mouth I never even thought of refusing him, let alone fighting him.
My lips fell open, my eyes closed in anticipation. Moisture pooled in my pussy before he even touched me. As before, I sensed his breathless mouth above mine, hovering as he said softly, “There are many ways to taste a vampire hunter…”
I bit back a moan, waiting feverishly for the wave of sensual pleasure to wash over me with his kiss. I felt the weight of his hand shift, sliding down between my thighs, making me gasp. My eyes flew open to see that he wasn’t watching my face but his own hand, spreading across my pussy. The fabric of my pajamas felt wet, was no doubt stained dark with my moisture. He smiled. Sliding the side of his hand along the length of my pussy, he turned his head, bringing his eyes back to mine, watching my reaction.
“Bastard,” I whispered. “Bastard.”
“Tell me to stop,” he challenged softly, turning his hand, probing around the wet entrance to my pussy, pushing the cotton inside me with one finger. I swallowed. The best I could manage was to pretend I couldn’t hear him. My clitoris throbbed with such need that I couldn’t have stopped him if my life depended on it. Which it probably did.
His fingers left me. I gasped out with unstoppable frustration and he smiled, both hands on my waistband. Abruptly, they swept upward, pushing my t-shirt up over my breasts and his palms brushed my tight nipples, hardening them unbearably. My head moved helplessly from side to side. He took one of my hands, lifted it to his mouth and there, smiling at me with his decadent, sensual lips, he sucked one finger inside, moving his lips up and down it in deliberate simulation of oral sex. Then he released my finger, placing it on one of my nipples and circling it around and around.
His eyes glowed almost completely gold as he sucked his own finger, watching me all the time. Pulling it free with a satisfying slurp, he yanked down the waistband of my pajamas with his free hand and plunged his wet finger straight inside me.
I couldn’t help it. I cried out and he laughed softly. His finger caressed the inside of my pussy, pushing insistently into the throbbing depths, stroking places I hadn’t even been aware of possessing. Then, slowly, it spiraled its way out, spreading my juices all around the labia, rubbing tenderly across my clitoris until I moaned aloud. He smiled again, so that I could see his teeth, the long, pointed incisors of the vampire, and instead of being afraid, instead of wrenching myself free and grabbing for the lost stake, I felt a pang of lust so strong that a flood of moisture broke free and ran down between my bum cheeks. I wanted those teeth on my neck, nibbling, biting. I wanted to feel them stroke the lips of my pussy, I wanted…I wanted…
Jesus, I wanted this.
He shifted position to the foot of the bed, moving with fluid grace until he sat between my legs. Deliberately, his fingers spread me open, his eyes drank me in. My pussy pulsed so hard I thought it would come without any further help from him. Slowly, his head lowered, just as it had this afternoon, only this time his mouth captured my lower lips and my own ecstatic noises rumbled in my throat. I thought I would die of that pleasure.
I didn’t. His silky lips caressed me, his tongue probed among my labia, flickering across my clit. And God, yes, his teeth slid along the length of my slit, brushing my clitoris until I moaned aloud. Then his whole mouth closed on me, pulling, while his tongue swirled and pushed inside me with sexy little thrusts. His teeth nibbled and grazed on my labia, on my desperately swollen clitoris. I was sure I could even feel them at my entrance. He held my bottom to keep me still, his hands kneading my buttocks, his fingers occasionally delving into the wetness of my pussy and then exploring around my anus until it too seemed to open for him and he slid the tip of one finger in and wiggled it. This was a new pleasure for me, never even thought of, and the shock of it sent me over the edge.
The orgasm seemed to soar from my toes, spiraling upward, gathering strength and power on its way, filling my pussy, my womb and flushing my whole body with the hugest climax of my life, one that went on and on because as soon as it began to roll back, his mouth sucked me again, his fingers slid inside me, stirred and kept the waves of joy crashing over me.
My fingers clamped around my breast, pressing into my nipple as I came and came, and still he fucked me with his mouth, sucking more pleasure from my clitoris, pushing more joy into my pussy until I was no more than a heaving, writhing mess of sexual pleasure, pushing into his hand, his mouth, knowing nothing outside what he was doing to me and caring for nothing else.
Slowly, he began to release me, withdrawing his fingers and his mouth, wiping his sopping face on my leg. I felt a growl begin deep in my throat, one that managed to combine extreme sexual satisfaction with equally extreme sexual desire—I could not get enough of this evil…
Reaching down, I caught his beautiful, degenerate face between my hands.
“Fuck me,” I whispered. “Please, fuck me.”
He smiled. “Next time,” he whispered back. “Next time, a different taste…”
He stood up, actually turned away from me toward the closed window—how had he got in? A minor mystery. The greater matter was that he could not leave me yet.
“Come back here!” I said furiously, trying to sit up. “Come back!” And landed with a thump back on my pillow, my eyes open and staring with bewildered disorientation at the closed curtains, my heart thundering like
a drum.
Apart from me, the room was empty, the house quiet save for my own ragged breathing, my own wildly beating heart. The after-tingle of massive orgasm filled my body and weighed down my limbs. Hot dampness slicked my thighs. My t-shirt had got scrunched up above my breasts, my trousers pooled around my knees, which splayed with abandon.
I had been dreaming. A sexual dream with the sort of power I had never felt before. And masturbating.
At least I hoped that was what happened.
Terrified, I tugged my trousers back up and pulled myself into a sitting position, dragging my knees up under my chin and hugging them convulsively. Had he been here? Or, more likely, had I been dreaming, living out in the safety—ha!—of my unconscious mind the sexual desire he had aroused in me with his kiss this afternoon?
In the next room, my mother snored. But I couldn’t rest until I tiptoed in to look at her, to make sure there were no puncture wounds in her neck. There weren’t. Softly, I closed her door and slid my back down it to sit there in her room and wait for the dawn.
* * * * *
“So this is Glasgow,” sniffed Hilda, looking vaguely surprised as I slid into the seat between her and Frank. She was an older woman, around fifty, probably, very thin with severe, dyed-black hair tied up on her head. She always wore smart, neutral-colored skirt suits that made her look like a stick. Frank was young, good-looking and considered himself charming. To give him his due, many young women found him charming too. I wasn’t one of them. I found him slimy.
I had arranged to meet them in this café located in a pedestrian area off Buchanan Street, largely because it was close to their hotel and open on a Sunday. And since the sun had chosen this morning to shine hazily on my fair city, we sat at one of the outside tables, near the ornate Victorian stone arch that led into the square beyond. A scattering of better-off shoppers milled around us in leather coats and expensive perfume, their bags of designer goodies hanging carelessly from their manicured fingers. And that was only the men. The women were something else. Here and there among them roamed the inevitable bands of kids, looking for amusement arcades or shop windows to gawp in.
After a curt nod of greeting to my colleagues, I watched the most recent shower of rain drying on the pavement.
This was as close as you got to Paris.
“And this is Jenny, in her Sunday best,” said Frank, eyeing my comfortable old cotton skirt with that air of superior amusement that always made me want to smack him one. For the first time I wondered why I never had.
“With observational skills like those,” I remarked dryly, “you’ll have that vampire sniffed out in no time.” They exchanged glances while I ordered coffee from the pretty, young and possibly under-age waitress.
“New skirt?” Frank asked me sarcastically, showing off to her.
“No,” I said. “But if you like it, you can have it when I’m finished with it.”
The waitress, already tuned into his accent, grinned openly at me. It was nice to have the boot on the other foot for a change. In fact, I could finally put the subconscious idea into proper form, that Frank was an arsehole in anybody’s country and anybody’s accent. But at least he had picked up on something, for his face flushed slightly as the girl went off to get my coffee.
Leaning back in his chair, he said, “Glad to be on your own turf, Jennifer?”
“Always.”
He smiled, like a cat ready to pounce. “Excellent. So have you narrowed our friend’s location down to one side of the river?”
“South.”
“Really? Well done, Jenny! So, Hilda, we’ll only have half the city to scour.”
“What are you planning on scouring it with?” I asked, interrupting him without compunction. He looked more surprised than annoyed.
“We have instruments,” Hilda replied, “that can, sometimes, pick the unusual out of the everyday, shall we say…”
“Round here it’ll go off like a smoke alarm in a chip shop. I thought you two were meant to be psychic?”
It’s true, I was enjoying this.
“Your point being?” Frank said, for the first time with an edge to his voice. Usually I was too far beneath his contempt to merit any edges.
“Can’t you just track him by feeling his presence?” I said innocently.
“Can’t you?” mocked Frank.
I smiled, lifting one hand to take my coffee tray from the waitress. Thank you, God. Thank you, Karoly, you beautiful, beautiful bastard.
“Of course,” I said.
They both stared at me. But it was Hilda who caught my eye with the genuine hope suddenly growing in hers.
“Jenny…?” she breathed.
“She’s kidding you,” Frank explained, while I dealt with the caffetiere and began to pour out my coffee. “Ask her if she’s found our friend. Ask her if she knows where he is to within a quarter of this bloody city…!”
“Why don’t you ask me, Frank?” I interrupted, laying the jug down on the table. “But then again, no, why don’t I save everyone time and trouble by saying at the outset that I know exactly where he is, down to the very building. Or at least,” I added honestly, “I know where he was yesterday.”
Frank grinned. “Nice cop out, Jenny.”
I picked up my cup and drank. The coffee was still hot, but not scalding, so I drank it in one, like a pint of heavy on a Saturday night, and stood up.
“Bring your instruments and your pointy sticks,” I advised. “We can walk.”
The walk did me good. My anger still boiled below the surface, but at least it began to feel manageable again and I knew I had to manage it. Karoly had inspired my rage yesterday afternoon, the vivid dream and my own desires had finished it off and I was aware I took it out now on my colleagues. Of course, as I did so, things became suddenly much clearer.
I had first gone to the Centre with a chip on my shoulder and a song in my heart because I thought I had finally landed the cushiest job on Earth and escaped the awfulness and the boredom of the school library. I had despised many of my new colleagues while acknowledging their right to superiority over me in all matters psychic.
But something had changed with my recognition of Karoly. For one thing, I was less a fake and a fraud than Frank, or even Nigel. For another, they had no business to hold me in contempt for anything and I had no business to let them. So I answered Frank back as I should have done months ago and I tried to do my job with what powers I had.
I reached out with all my senses, searching for the smallest trace of him. And as we crossed the footbridge over the River Clyde, I felt again that familiar tingle. I knew he’d been there last night. His essence seemed to hang in the increasingly heavy air. I wondered what the local lager louts had made of his costume. Nothing, if they’d had any sense.
But of course, he didn’t care for the flavor of drunks. I wondered who he had fed from last night, if they had struggled, if they remembered… If he had killed.
“You’re looking well, Jenny,” Hilda said awkwardly, taking me by surprise.
“I don’t see how,” I muttered. “I’ve been on a bender for two nights and had damn-all sleep for three.”
“Being home, I suspect.” She hesitated, then, “I’ve been talking to Nigel and apparently the Board are quite keen for us to…diversify.”
I looked at her. “In what way?”
“In a decentralizing way. Too much is concentrated in the Centre, with nothing anywhere else in the country. In a crisis, like this, it takes us a day to get here. Which is silly. So, they’re thinking about locating other centers around the country, smaller places, more attuned locally. You should talk to Nigel about the Scottish one.”
Ridiculously, I was touched. I actually smiled at her. “Thanks, Hilda. But I doubt I’ll be around that long.”
Lowering her voice, she said, “You are a strong psychic, you know, strong enough in the tests to make others jealous. You just have to learn to channel it, as you did here. What was the trigger?”<
br />
A pair of corrupt, golden-green eyes gleaming at me over the prone body of the man I was desperate to bed.
“Luck,” I said hastily. “He gatecrashed the wedding I was at. I just knew what he was. And the next day, I was able to follow his tracks.”
But Hilda was still on the previous point. “He gatecrashed a wedding? That is very unusual behavior!”
Hysterical laughter bubbled up now. I didn’t think I’d be able to stop it. “He does it all the time. He has a kilt you see, so he imagines he blends in…he just hangs around wedding parties, biting the guests when they’re too drunk to notice or care.”
“And you find that funny?” Hilda exclaimed, inclined to be more outraged than amused. “My dear, it’s not your abilities but your levity that lets you down.”
“Sorry,” I gasped, swallowing down the laughter that was scarily close to tears.
By this time we were on the south side of the river and I led them west, past the hotel and round the corner to the church.
“In the basement,” I said. “You can get in through a trapdoor in the ground, down there.”
Naturally, Frank took charge. “Jenny, you wait here, make sure no one follows us in.”
Hilda, in reality more senior, regarded him with raised eyebrows. She opened her mouth to object to this plan, so I said hastily, “OK. He knows the smell of me anyway, you have more chance of surprising him.”
Frank laughed unkindly. “Jenny, a herd of mad elephants has more chance of surprising him! If he’s there at all, which I don’t for a moment believe.”
Hilda said more gently, “Have you got your mobile phone?” And when I nodded, she went on, “If we flush him out, follow. Just keep us informed and we’ll catch you up. He’ll stick to shadows and undergrowth, but the light’s very poor and if it gets any darker I suspect he’s strong enough to withstand what daylight there is.”
Hunting Karoly Page 5
