I suck on the spout and draw blood from the bag. When it’s empty he gives me another and another. It’s cold but I don’t care. When I swallow it, heat spreads through my body and the rumbling hunger in my tummy fades. There’s four or five of them on the floor by the time I drain the last one and curl up in his arms, burying my face in the crook of his neck, and fall asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
“Chris? Can I come in?”
“Get in here.”
He throws the curtain open, steps inside, and pulls it shut. Even under the scalding water, the blast of chilly air from the other side makes my teeth chatter. I stand under it until my hair is soaked to my neck, and he immediately starts playing with it, first running it through his fingers and then working shampoo into it. The familiar scent tickles something deep in my mind.
“Did you dream?”
I take a deep breath and tell him what I saw.
“You know that wasn’t a dream,” he says, and slips his arms around me from behind.
I run my tongue over my teeth. My incisors are sharp little points that scratch my tongue.
Am I part snake now?
Mike takes my hips and spins me around, presses me to the cold tile wall and tips the showerhead to spray on me.
Then he falls to his knees, and I shudder at the touch of his fingertips on my thighs as he presses my legs open and brings his lips to the soft skin of my inner thigh. It makes my knees buckle and I knot a fistful of his hair in my hand. Was it like this before? Was I taking something so simple, yet so intense, for granted? The touch of his lips is electric. He gets on his knees, and runs his hands up the outside of my legs as he trails soft, wet, warm kisses towards my throbbing sex.
When he puts his mouth on my pussy, I cry out and rake my fingers over his scalp. His tongue teases my entrance, his hot breath plays on my skin, and my legs begin to quiver. His finger slides up inside me, easily. I’m so wet I can feel it on my legs, and it’s not the water. My toes curl and my legs shake harder as his finger slides inside me and he sucks lightly on my clit. I almost double over, afraid I’m going to skid my feet out from under me and fall. I feel lightheaded, swimmy, and it feels like my toes have left the ground.
Wait, my toes have left the ground. He picks me up off the floor of the tub like I weigh nothing at all, holding my hips in his hands as he stands. I reach up and put my hands on the ceiling, trembling. He takes his mouth away from my sex and I feel a sudden weightless drop and shriek as he lets go of me, only to catch me before my feet touch the floor. He pulls me close, my legs dangling under me as he holds me in the air by the waist. He’s so strong. I throw my arms around his neck and tuck up against him.
I blink a few times. I’m strong, too. I can hold myself up easily with just my arms. I slip down a little bit and he pushes me into the wall and enters me, his erection filling me in a single swift, slick stroke, buried to the root. I moan in his ear and it drives him on, harder, harder, driving into me. It should hurt, but it feels good. He growls in my ear when I run my sharp little teeth over the skin of his shoulder, and thrusts harder when I bite down and taste his salty blood on my tongue. It’s intoxicating, like an elixir. It doubles, triples the sensation as he grinds against me. He knots his hand in my hair and tips my head back, and bends to kiss me, the taste of his blood shared on our tongues. My legs clamp around his hips, my feet waving in the air behind him.
The world flickers. I see motes of dust floating around us but they’re not dust, they’re little points of golden light. The heat spreads from between my legs with every thrust, and I see something inside us, swirling around between us. Inside a pool of molten gold a pair of jade serpents intertwine, sliding against each other. I cry out as an explosive burst of pleasure rocks my body, then another, each more than the last. My toes curl, my nails rake his back and I grit my teeth, then give in and cry out as I arch back against the wall and go limp in his arms.
Mike grunts as he finishes in me, his lips and tongue all over my throat. He kisses me as he slows and gently lowers me to the floor, reaches over and shuts off the water. It takes me a while before I can stand up on my own. My legs are like jelly, aftershocks still rippling down to curl my toes.
Wow.
He won’t let go of me. It’s maybe half an hour we stand there, shivering as he pets and fondles and kisses me, and I let him.
Drying is almost redundant but it feels good to rub a towel on my skin, to use a blow dryer on my hair. I put on one of his shirts, practically swimming in it, and a pair of sweats and walk around barefoot, feeling the carpet in the bedroom under my toes. When he’s dressed Mike follows me out.
“Hungry?”
I nod.
It’s not like that. I’m really hungry. For food.
A familiar scent wafts up from the kitchen.
Pancakes!
I take the stairs two at a time and rush into the dining room. Mom sets a stack of five buttermilk pancakes at my place at the table and I hug her and begin eating without a word, uncaring of anything but stuffing my face with pancakes. Food, food, food, I can eat whatever I want.
It’s like she’s reading my mind. A big glass of milk, blueberry syrup, a plate of eggs, bacon, English muffins. I eat a week’s worth of food, until I’m so full I feel like I’m going to crawl back to the bed and go to sleep.
During all of this, Mike just watches me and eats a normal portion.
“Slow down,” he finally says.
I look over at him, narrow my eyes and roll my stomach. A nice heavy belch bursts out, and we both start laughing.
My mother rolls her eyes.
I look over at her and almost knock the table off its feet in a rush to throw my arms around her and sob into her shoulder.
There’s so much I need to do. A whole world passed me by while I was frozen in time. It’s like waking up from a nightmare.
I look over Mom’s shoulder.
Andi’s dead eyes stare back at me, full of sorrow and fury. How dare you.
I gasp and swallow a scream and step back.
My mother blinks a few times. “Chris, what is it?”
“She’s here,” I hiss. “Right there.”
I point, and Mom doesn’t see.
Mike does.
I see a flash, between his eyes but a little higher, and I swear another eye opens in the middle of his head, but it’s not really there, it’s made of shadow and light. Bright green and slitted like a snake’s eye, it moves with him.
“I see her too,” he says, softly.
Then Andi is gone again.
“What’s happening?” I turn to him. “Was that a ghost?”
“Not a ghost, a shade. There’s a difference.”
“Here we go,” Mom sighs.
“Christine, come with me. I need to show you something.”
It’s as if Mom knows what he means. She shies away as he takes my hand and leads me through the kitchen. I remember this. Through the pantry is the doorway to the basement, a low-ceiling cellar under this half of the house. Down the rickety wooden steps, we head into the dark, but I don’t feel that pang of fear I used to whenever I came down here as a kid. There can’t be anything in the dark worse than what I’ve already been through, can there? When we reach the bottom, Mike flips a switch and the lights are too bright, too harsh.
This isn’t the basement I remember. The old shelves are gone, the canned goods and boxes and bins are all missing. Newly installed fluorescent lights burn my eyes, until I blink them away and my vision adjusts. I gasp when I see it.
There’s a circle in the middle of the room, like the one Mike put in the library. Sitting inside, cross-legged, is a shape. It’s dressed in ragged clothes, and leans forward, long white hair pitched over its face. It doesn’t move, it’s not breathing. The unnatural stillness unnerves me. Then, it moves. Its head lifts and it blinks a few times, rust-red eyes pinched in confusion. It sweeps its hair back and I gasp, covering my mouth.
“Victoria?”
“You brought me a visitor,” she says, her voice a dry rasp. “Are you going to let her poke me with a stick?”
She’s wearing a collar like the one I wore, but much heavier, incised with strange runes that make my eyes hurt when I try to follow their lines. She’s gaunt and pale, her skin waxy, pulled tight against the bones of her face, but there’s a disturbing, aquiline beauty to her features. She stares at me hard, and blinks a few times, a totally conscious gesture. A look of naked surprise stills on her face and her mouth falls open.
Finally, she murmurs, “What did you do?”
“Mike,” I say, glancing at him.
“You’re not nosferatu anymore,” she says, rising to her feet. “What did you do?”
Mike swallows.
Victoria hurls herself at the edge of the circle. She hits the invisible wall and throws herself at it again, and again.
“What did you do? What did you do?”
I swallow, hard. “Victoria…”
She scratches the invisible wall and I wince as one of her nails bends back, tearing from the bed. She doesn’t even notice.
“Give it to me. I want it. Give it to me.”
“Victoria,” Mike says, in warning.
“You,” she snarls, “Let me out of here. Look at me…” she looks at nothing, as if searching for my name, “Christine. Yes. That was it. Christine. Look at me. You have to help me.”
Her eyes lock on mine.
I feel it, like a push. It’s like rubbing pencil erasers together, or trying to jam the wrong sides of a magnet against another. Nothing happens and she winces like something hit her face.
She was trying to use the mind whammy on me. My hands tighten into fists.
“Please,” she pleads, her voice trembling. “Please help me. He won’t feed me. It hurts, Christine. You know it hurts. I feel myself drying out inside. I can’t sleep. He used some… some spell. If you won’t help me, burn me. Kill me. I can’t do this anymore,” her voice rises to a shriek, “I can’t.”
Mike grabs my arm. “It’s playing you,” he says.
“It?” I snap back.
“That’s not a person in there. It’s a thing that looks like a person. If we let her out, she’ll attack us.”
I shake my hand loose from his grip and turn to face him.
“A few days ago someone could have said the same thing about me.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because… because you’re you…”
“Mike,” I say, softly. “Have you been keeping her locked up in here and… what? Experimenting on her?”
“I had to make sure the collar would work. I did this for you.”
When he sees my face he wilts. “Chris…”
“Give her some blood.”
“My blood? No, I won’t. I can’t.”
“Fine, then.”
There’s an altar table nearby. There’s a bowl, and a knife. An athame, that would be called, now that I think about it. I grab it and before Mike can stop me I slice open my palm and let the blood drip into the bowl. Victoria stares at it, utterly silent.
I take a deep breath and walk to the edge of the circle.
“Christine, listen to me,” Mike says, gripping my arm. “She’s dangerous.”
“I know,” I say, softly. “So am I.” I turn to Victoria. “You want this?”
She nods, slightly, staring at the pooled blood in the shallow bowl.
“There’s not much time. It’s going to congeal.”
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
“Please.”
She blinks, her eyes pleading.
“I don’t have time to argue with you, so promise me now. I’ll let you drink. Then you answer my questions.”
“Anything you want. Please.”
I hand the bowl over the edge of the circle. I feel a subtle pressure on my arm as the barrier reacts against me, like it’s not sure what to do. Victoria snatches the bowl from my hand and tips it back, slowly drinking every drop, her throat bobbing. She does everything but lick up the dregs, then tosses the bowl aside. She twists in pain and clutches her throat. I know she’s not faking it.
She’s trying not to throw up from swallowing the blood, struggling to keep it down even as the heat infuses her body.
I watch her relax a little. When she looks up her features aren’t so severe, her face not so gaunt.
She touches her chest and blinks. Her whole body trembles.
“What did you do?”
She hurls the bowl at me and I duck aside, on pure instinct. It shatters on the wall behind me.
“What did you do? What did you do to me?”
“I don’t… it was just blood…”
Mike says, very softly, “it’s never just blood, Christine.”
“My heart is beating,” Victoria moans, then her face goes slack. “It’s not stopping. My heart is beating. It… it hurts,” she murmurs.
She looks at me.
I see, like looking through cracked, hazy glass. Her eyes lock on mine and she goes as still as a statue, and murmurs only no.
All at once I’m not me anymore. I’m still me but I’m not me, I’m her. I can feel it, feel her behind my eyes, screaming. I don’t know where I am except it’s a dark room, an old room. It’s the odd details that hit me. No electrical outlets on the walls, candles in the chandelier over my head, oil burning in lamps on the sideboard. I move, but it’s not me moving, it’s her, her legs, her body.
“Vincent?” my mouth works, and her voice comes out.
A terrible, grinding sense of dread settles heavy in my stomach. I call out his name again but the house is empty, and dark. Something moves behind me but when I turn to glimpse the motion from the corner of my eye, nothing is there. A presence behind me makes me turn.
“Brother,” I say to a grinning Vincent. “Is this a game? Where are the servants? Why have you doused all the lights?”
He reaches over and snuffs out one of the remaining candles between his fingers. I feel another presence behind me.
I turn and see my father. There’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with both of them. Vincent’s hands clamp on my arms like iron, and I scream and struggle and kick my legs but it doesn’t matter and then I’m on the floor, and he’s holding me down while father kneels beside me. He bends down on all fours and Vincent forces my chin back, his grip so strong I think he’s going to break my jaw, pushing so hard I feel bones grinding in my neck. With my free hand I try to push my father away but his lips are on my throat like a kiss.
Then his teeth. It hurts, it hurts, the pressure builds and builds and then his teeth sink into my flesh and the skin bursts…
Victoria shudders and tears her eyes away from mine. She curls into a ball, tucked up against the invisible barrier, and weeps softly to herself, but there’s nothing for her to make tears.
“No more,” she pleads.
“Let her out.”
“Christine,” Mike says, insistent. “She’s playing you. You don’t know what this thing is capable of.”
“Yes I do,” I say, very quietly. “She’s not going to hurt us.”
He swallows hard, and stoops, murmurs a word and the barrier just blinks away. When I kneel in front of Victoria and slip my hands around her neck, the clasp on the collar is easy to find. It snaps apart in my hands, and I drop it on the floor like a dead snake. She doesn’t attack me or leap away. She sits there and hugs her knees and rocks forward and back.
“It wasn’t the pain that was the worst,” she says, so softly. “He was my father, and my brother.”
I put my arms around her and pull her to me, and she sags into my shoulder.
“Christine,” Mike says, his voice heavy with warning. “She’ll bite you the first chance she gets.”
“She can’t. I made her my thrall.”
I take a deep breath as I hear Mike suck in his.
“I’m n
ot like you,” I say. I feel it in my hands, creaking between my bones when I make a fist. “I’m not like her, either. I’m something different. I’m new.”
I lower Victoria to the floor, rest her head on my hand, and lightly touch her eyelids closed with my fingers.
“Somnari vampiris,” I whisper.
Something in me crackles and she goes limp under my touch, still and lifeless as a corpse, but when I take her wrist in my hand I can feel the faintest hint of a struggling, irregular pulse.
“I didn’t hurt her,” Mike insists. “I needed to know it would work…”
He doesn’t look at me as I stand up. He shakes his head.
“You could have killed her but you didn’t. Even when you didn’t need her anymore.”
“No, I didn’t.”
I slip my arms around him. “You’re not a monster.”
“Yes, I am. We all are.”
He hugs me back and lets me go.
“It’s time,” I say. “I want to go outside, and you, we, me answers. Quid pro quo, Mike. I have questions.”
He nods. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Sixteen
The sun. The sun. I want to stare at it but I can’t, it burns my eyes. I keep looking back anyway. The sunglasses help. I’m still sensitive to it, still feel it burning into my skin, but it feels good, a welcome sensation. I breathe deep and taste the shivering cold air. I should be cold. I feel like I need to be cold, but I’m so warm I slip out of my jacket and stand shivering in the chill and look out into the woods. The sun on my skin, a breeze in my hair and the stiff fingers of the cold gripping my arms.
When I look Mike in the eyes it’s all there. There is nothing in the world for me but him. My hero, my savior, the love of my life.
It’s all here now, all of it. I just have to look in his eyes and remember the first time we met. I came from money, he was at the school on charity. I was fourteen years old, he was fifteen, just barely. A girl named Sally Sackweather of all things mocked my baggy sweater, my buck teeth and limp, oily hair and pimples. It was Mike who stepped in and saved me. Mike who noticed I had a battered copy of The Lesser Chronicles of Conan in my locker. I remember the time I talked Andi into playing a tedious and boring game of Dungeons and Dragons with us, just the three of us. We needed more people, eventually found them. Andi might have still had the sheet for her character tucked away somewhere when she…
Thrall (A Vampire Romance) Page 14
