Her Vampire Master (Midnight Doms)

by Maren Smith

  Unfazed, the woman steps in so close to me we are now toe-to-toe. “Prove it,” she challenges.

  I have no idea how.

  “Give me your hands.”

  I glance at my hands, hesitating only a moment before offering them to her palm up. I don’t know what I expected her to do. Hurt me, I think, but she doesn’t, although I still jump when she clamps my wrists in her iron-like grip. She’s slender, tall, beautiful, and strong as hell. She drags my hands up to her face, her gaze never once leaving mine. Not until her nose is right up against my fingertips. She breathes in, twice.

  The cold anger in her face falters. Her eyebrows buckle as faint traces of moisture gather in her eyes. Releasing me, she abruptly backs away.

  “Selene,” Lucius says, holding out his arm for her.

  She looks at me, and then to her mate, offering two shakes of her head before she turns from us all.

  “I didn’t do it,” I say again, not understanding what’s happening.

  Catching my arm, Aleron pulls me out from between the other vampires. He tucks me behind him, but to me it already feels as if the danger has somehow passed. The woman’s head is bowed, her shoulders slumped as if in defeat. She goes to Lucius, shaking her head. I can barely make out her voice as she whispers, “There’s no trace of shifter on her.”

  “We won’t stop looking until we find out what happened,” the other vampire says, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder. “At this point, however, I think the explanation would serve everyone better if we wait to hear it until we’ve rested.” Looking past her to Aleron and me, the vampire king hikes his chin to indicate behind us. “You can bed down in that room back there, if you like.”

  Regardless of how it’s phrased, it’s not an offer as much as it’s a thinly veiled command. He doesn’t trust us and, frankly, I’m not sure how much we can trust either of them. Not that we have any other option. By now, the sun is certainly up. We simply have no more time.

  Aleron’s hand at the small of my back nudges me into motion and back we go, into one of the adjacent rooms that looks more like cells now that I’m standing inside one. It sounds like one too when Lucius firmly shuts and locks us inside. There’s even a small, barred window at face level in the heavy door, through which the vampire king says, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Aleron guardedly replies. “I wouldn’t want strangers walking around while I sleep either.”

  “We will talk tonight,” Lucius promises, and then he moves away, and I can’t see or hear him anymore. I know he hasn’t gone far and before more than a few minutes pass, I hear whispers. Then a grinding, the sound of a heavy stone vault lid sliding into place. Locks engage there too, sealing them inside their sarcophagus where they are safe.

  Aleron and I are on the wrong side of every single lock down here, I feel anything but safe. Although Lucius was kind enough to leave a light on in the other room, little of it reaches as far back as this small cell. I can make out enough to know this room has no furniture—no chair, no bed, no bucket to piss in, no food or water. Folding my legs under me, I sit down in naked dirt—ah, here it is, the source of the musty smell—with my arms folded around me for warmth. It’s not as cold as Ignacio’s underground tomb, but it’s not exactly toasty warm, either.

  “It’s just one night,” Aleron tells me, but he has no way of knowing that any more than I do. I just suspect he’s wrong.

  Moving behind me, he sighs as he lowers himself to sit with his back tucked up against the wall.

  “Come here,” he says, but I don’t move. Wrapping his arm around my waist, he hauls me back against him. I try to resist him, but it’s like trying to shrug off an octopus, and I’m just so tired. In the end, it’s both easier and more comfortable to give in.

  “I’m hungry,” I mutter, feeling childish just for voicing it.

  Aleron says nothing. He simply adjusts his coat around me so that I am as covered as I can be. Then, leaning back against the wall, he settles in to spend the night being my mattress as I lean sideways up against him. My knees drawn up to my chin, I rest my head against his chest and try to be so damned ungrateful.

  It’s a strange thing to be lying on someone whose heart doesn’t beat and who only takes a breath when he’s talking. He strokes my hair and my back. I love the way his hands feel, strong and calm, in spite of where we are.

  “I’m sorry I wiped your mind,” he says. When he strokes my hair again, it’s all I can do not to smack his hand. “I know what I have taken from you must leave you feeling violated, but…”

  “It does,” I snap, then add “But I get it.”

  His hand stills on my back and he tips his head, as if he can see my face in the dark. Maybe he can, but all I see is just a ghost of paleness in ink-black air. I can’t even make out his face. “You do?”

  “Humans are panicky animals,” I retort. “We don’t like not knowing we’re not the top of the food chain.”

  It’s the snarkiest answer I can muster, and yet it feels hollow. If forced to be honest, I do kind of understand, and that makes it worse because when this is all over what’s going to happen to me? Either I’ll be dead, or I’m going to get my mind wiped again. How much will I lose this time? My sister’s death? My sister in her entirety? Maybe it will just be everything that’s happened to me since walking through Club Toxic’s front door. Aleron saving my life… being chained in his bedroom… pressed up to the door with my hands bound by nothing but his verbal command not to move. His mouth on my clit, or on my neck as we waited in the dark on Ignacio’s stone steps, with me bared to the cold while his hands brought me to the very edge of orgasm, over and over and over again.

  And now here we are, in the dark once more, and I know I should be furious, but all I can think about is how good it felt with just the tip of his cock inside me, and how desperately I would do anything right now to feel him stroking deeper.

  He tries to put his arms around me.

  I elbow him in the ribs and shove at his hands, but as angry as I am inside, that’s how much I wish he’d just hold me. A vampire. A killer.

  I shiver, closing my mind so I won’t see that by now familiar collage of visions pouring through my head.

  My hands bound up on a bar with cuffs pulling me onto tiptoes while the shadow of him dressed only in pants moves behind me, combing out the tails of his flogger as he prepares to swing…

  Me backed against the wallpaper somewhere in his house, holding his head as he bites and licks and loves between my thighs…

  My whole body pulling taut as I come…

  …as I shout to that first slow invasion of Aleron’s cock forcing its way into my ass…

  …as I writhe to the blows of his paddle, his hand, his flogger…

  …his mouth kissing me, his teeth sinking in on the side of my neck, my wrist, my thighs, my pussy…

  “Don’t be frightened,” he murmurs.

  I’m shaking, but not because I’m scared and certainly not because I’m cold. My nipples are tight, swollen, heavy. Desperate for the attention of his mouth and the scrap of his teeth before he bites me there too, marking his territory.

  “I’m scared; I’m pissed,” I snap back, but if he can smell me half as well as I think he can, then he already knows that isn’t true.

  Are my dreams lying to me? They’ve come close, but nothing they’ve shown me yet has been exact.

  Maybe these aren’t visions at all. Maybe the things I’m seeing are only what I hope for… a weird combination of what he’s already done and what I know he’s capable of. Maybe it’s just daydreams of things I never knew I wanted until the night I met this man. But a part of me wants them now.

  A part of me wants him.

  Pulling out of his arms, I try to push away, but just that fast his hand in my hair seizes hold at the base of my scalp, pulling me sharply back against him.

  “Let go!” I hiss, but he only lets me struggle until I’ve almost pried his fingers out of my hair. And then
, suddenly, it’s as if his patience—or perhaps it’s simply his determination not to react—snaps.

  Catching my ass in his hands, he lifts me all the way up off his lap. The next thing I know, my back is in the dirt and Aleron is above me. I grab his shoulders, but I don’t have the will, much less the time, to push him back off again. Seizing my wrists, he pins them together in the soft earth above my head.

  “Bound,” he says, “by my will.”

  I want to hate him, but I can’t. He tears his shirt in his haste to get his bare skin next to mine. Buttons go everywhere in the dirt and the dark as he rips my shirt straight down the middle. Then my breasts are in his hands, and my hands are still in the dirt where he ordered them to be. As mad as I am, I still want him. His mouth on my skin, hungrily kissing each nipple in turn before pressing a final kiss in between my breasts, as close as his mouth can come to my wildly beating heart. The muscular weight of his body pushing its way between thighs that aren’t anywhere near as unwilling as they pretend to be.

  I burn, despite the coolness of his flesh as he settles into the cradle of my legs. I wrap them both around him, needing him closer, but he’s not leaving me. In jerks and tugs, he frees himself impatiently from his pants, shoving his trousers down far enough to be out of his way. And I keep my hands in the dirt, but I cling to him with both legs, digging my heels into the masculine curves of his ass just as he claps his hand over my mouth. There is no muffling my shout when he spears into me in a single, hard, soul-shattering thrust.

  I’m not prepared, and yet I am so ready.

  It hurts, but nothing has ever felt half as right or half as good as the breadth and the length of him forcibly filling me up.

  He pushes in deep, pausing only when he can go no further, but I can’t stop myself from bucking up to meet him, urging him that much deeper still.

  I am burning for him, pulsing for him. Throbbing, aching, needing, gasping at the silken slide of his flesh slowly dragging back out of me, until I am sobbing his name over the exquisite brutality as his cock pushes deep once more.

  He’s not gentle, but he’s everything I need him to be. I want to feel his ownership of me, not just now but hours from now. This feeling might be all I have left once they’ve wiped my mind.

  I want to wear the bruises his hands leave on me as he grabs my shoulders and my thighs and rides me with vigorous thrusts. I beg him to bite me, and he must like the sound because he makes me plead, and whimper, and moan for it before I feel the blessed, claiming security of his fist seizing hold of my hair. Pulling my head sharply to one side, his thrusts become shorter, shallower, more frenzied as his other hand slides under my back, hooking two fingers deep into my ass at the same moment he bites. I come harder than I ever knew I could, with the pulsing wash of his cum spilling inside me, his fingers in my ass, and his name sobbing from my lips.

  Eventually, the crashing, earth-shaking force of my orgasm dies away, leaving me trembling in his arms. His pumping thrusts dwindle and go still. His fingers retreat back out of me, so do his fangs. He licks, then kisses, then folds his arms around me, rolling me onto my side so he can curl up with me to sleep.

  The last thing I hear before exhaustion and sleep take me is his whisper caressing behind my ear. “For better or worse, for richer or poorer. You belong to me now, Merris. You belong to me.”

  Then again, maybe I just dreamed it.

  Aleron

  I hate sleeping in dirt, not just because it’s filthy and I don’t like not being clean, but because the musty smell of it pervades my senses and gives me nightmares.

  I’m back in the grip of the one who sired me, with the pangs of this new hunger driving me into a frenzy of feeding that doesn’t sate it. Only the blood of my new father can do that, and he gives it sparingly. One must earn the calm return to one’s senses that supping from his veins will bring, but one only earns that through killing. So, out I go again, hunting among the hovels and the Crusader encampments that surround war-torn Antioch.

  There are three of us and we all have the same command ringing in our ears. Only he with the highest body count will be fed on our return. We prove our count by collecting ears—the right one only—and our hunting ground is the armies our Father fears as much as he fears the sunlight he thinks they’ll drag him into the longer this war continues. I kill without discrimination—Muslims, Turks, my own countrymen—it’s a slaughter, and I’m good at it. Because night after night when the dawn forces our return, it’s I who feeds gratefully from the vein our Father opens in his arm.

  My brothers have been starved for weeks. Night after night they gorge on the hunting ground, but the blood they drink isn’t Father’s and makes them sick. Finally, they turn on us and I kill them too.

  Eventually, I also kill Father. It’s a fundamental truth of our kind: we all come to hate the one who makes us. I was still very much in my fledgling vampire youth the night I ripped Father’s throat out. By rights, I never should have survived. They say only the strongest vampires can make others, and only the strongest of those survive the process. I should have died—God knows I screamed, writhed and begged for it in the days after he was dead. In the end, I proved strong enough. I lived.

  All of that was a long time ago. I’m civilized now.

  My eyes snap awake in the dark of a cell in Lucius’s basement crypt. I’ve got visions of Father and his hunting ground still in my head, a familiar scent of danger and shifters in my nose, and Merris curled warm in my arms. I don’t care how angry she is at me, I come up over the top of her feral as only one of my kind cornered can be just as the door to our cell rips open and shifters come pouring in.

  There are more than a dozen of them, in both human as well as their massive wolf and smaller coyote forms. Merris screams as they tear into me in a full-on frenzy meant to overpower if not to kill.

  The sun is still up. After almost nine hundred years, I don’t need to see it to know night is not yet upon us. How they got to us, I don’t know, but they’ve brought stakes. For me, and for Merris.

  This is why you should never love someone.

  Her scream is shrill and her small hands clutch at me in panic just before the coyote shifters rip her away. I grab after her, but they drag her from our prison cell by her arms and her hair. The bigger wolves tear at me, and I can’t get out from under them to save her.

  Her scream cuts off abruptly, and then the scent of her blood hits my nose.

  I come up out of the middle of those ravening, mindless, fucking animals—kicking, punching, fighting my way out of the cell in time to see her lying face down on the floor. That white bitch, Selene is braced over the top of her, and I go mad.

  I only thought I was civilized.

  Now I’m going to kill them all.

  And I’m going to start with her.

  Chapter 12

  Aleron

  “Stop!” someone shouts, but I barely hear it.

  The shifter wolves attack with a vengeance, their teeth tearing into my arms and legs, but I barely feel it. I’m punching them, throwing them, fighting my way to the vampire-shifter abomination. She holds her ground, every hackle raised, snarling now right at me, but if I could have gotten my hands on her, I would have ripped the bitch apart.

  It’s Lucius in the end who stops me.

  His rise to power did not happen by accident. He is far older than I am, by more than twice my years. He has the strength and the speed that only time can give my kind, but still I am intent. He has my throat and I have his. Our fangs are out. So are our claws. His blood is on my nails before the realization seeps in through my rage that both packs of shifters have pulled back and he is trying now to subdue me, not kill me.

  “Stop!” Selene shouts. The white bitch has shifted back into her human form. I can barely make out the tiniest fumbling of motion from Merris underneath her.

  She’s protecting Merris. She’s not trying to kill her. That knowledge seeps into me even more slowly, but still my fight is to
get to her and I am trying.

  Lucius is on my back now, his arm around my neck, using all his weight to hold on to me. The shifters are trying to hold me back too now. They grab my arms and legs, and the combined weight of them is stronger than I am. They force me to the floor, pinning me against the stones. But still I see only Merris, slowly pushing onto her hands and knees. When she touches the back of her head, her fingers come away bloody.

  I would have killed every one of them all over again, if only I could get free.

  “Do not,” Lucius growls behind my ear, “make me kill you. Because I will.”

  But he won’t be the first king I’ve killed. And so the battle lines are drawn.

  Not that I can vocalize as much. Every thought I have, every fiber of my being, is locked on Merris as she pushes away from Selene. She could have run. She wouldn’t get very far, but she doesn’t even try. Instead, it’s me that she comes crawling back to, and she does it punching and swearing, and tearing at shifters with her horribly ineffective, blunt human claws.

  The shifters release me and scramble back. Lucius is more abrupt. He shoves off me, and we are two of kind. Old warriors both, with no thought but for the women we quickly snatch out of danger’s way. Our movements both are blurred. He puts himself between me and his cautious queen—she is deadly in her own right, I can tell by her glare.

  I grab Merris, kicking backwards across the floor until solid wall is at my back and all my enemies are now before me. She is trying to protect me, every bit as much as I strive to protect her.

  “What. The fuck!” Lucius spits, casting the scope of his glare now out beyond just me. He scowls at the shifters now too, and I only know the alpha when the king locks eyes on him. “Garrett, get out of my house!”

  “The house might be yours,” the Alpha of the Tucson pack growls back, “but this city is ours.”

  “We had a truce—”

  “Which you broke,” another male shouts. The smaller coyote-shifter advances only until Garrett catches his shoulder. “You broke it the minute one of your kind killed my grandmother!”