by Tami Lund
“I thought you were going to bite me,” I said, looking down at him while he smacked his lips.
“I am. I’m going to eat you.”
“Er...”
“Come here.”
Grabbing my ass again, he positioned me as I was before. I felt his hand on my pussy, spreading the outer lips. And then his tongue was on me again, lapping at me, licking my seam, nibbling at my nub. I whimpered. It was almost painful, and so damn good.
And then he moved one of his hands and stroked me, sliding his fingers through my wetness while he suckled my clit. I squirmed and whimpered and made ridiculous noises as I struggled to absorb the impossible pleasure he gave me.
One finger slid inside me, curling up and stroking along the most sensitive spot in my body. He inserted another, and the two pushed in and out, while his mouth continued to work my clit, and I was lost, unable to focus on anything but the tingling sensations roiling through my body, the orgasm that was so close I wouldn’t be able to stop if Hollis had burst through the door at that moment.
And then I was exploding, or that’s what it felt like as my body let go, the coiled spring of pleasure bursting through my limbs, surging through my blood. I hardly noticed when he took his mouth away from my nub, because his fingers were still pumping, still carrying me through an orgasm that seemed to have no end.
The pinprick wasn’t even painful at that point. It was no more than an added sensation to the overall experience. And when he started drinking my blood, I felt the rush of another orgasm slam into me, aided by his fingers, which hadn’t given up their stroking. I cried out, clung to the headboard, and reveled in this feeling, this ultimate of all sexual experiences.
No wonder my sister had wanted to be a blood courtesan.
Chapter 8
“Time to go, Anya.”
She rolled onto her back and blinked up at me, her lips curling into a satisfied smile. She looked almost drunk and absolutely fucked. So incredibly beautiful. I had drunk my fill, but I wanted her again. I wanted to surge into her, to couple the way humans did. The way vampires did, except without the need to feed. I could probably go another week before I needed to feed again, but I wasn’t sure I could go another minute without plunging into her, connecting with her, giving us both orgasm after orgasm until we collapsed from too much pleasure.
If we weren’t currently in a basement underneath Macy’s, with Hollis and his goons all too near, I’d damn well take advantage of her sated state.
“Are you hungry again?” She lifted her arms, beckoning me. She was like a cat with a bellyful of cream. So pleased, so utterly satisfied. My male self surged with pride at having done this to her; my coven leader self needed to get the hell out of Dodge.
“Yes. For you. But I’d much rather resume our activities in a safer location. Come, we need to leave.”
Grasping her arms, I pulled her into a seated position. She looked down at herself. “I’m not wearing pants.”
Snagging them from the floor, I handed them to her.
“You seem different,” she said while she struggled to pull them up over her hips. I caught a glimpse of the marks on her inner thigh. Those were mine. The only time she’d been touched by a vampire. Not only were we bonded by blood, but I’d drunk from her as well. She was practically mine, in every sense of the word, and she had no idea.
“You’ve fortified me. Saved me.”
“Does this mean you can fight Hollis and win?”
Frowning, I said, “No, not necessarily. He is several decades older than me and therefore physically stronger. Not to mention he taught me everything I know about vampire combat. It would be difficult to beat him all on my own. This is why I want to leave, return to the surface and gather my lieutenants.”
“He taught you? What’s the deal with you two?”
I sighed. This was not a story I enjoyed telling. It caused too many suppressed memories to bubble to the surface. Memories I’d rather never think about again. But this was Anya, and I wanted her trust. Plus, I was confident she would badger me until I told her anyway.
“He was my trainer when I was first turned roughly a hundred years ago. My maker chose me deliberately, with the intention that I would take over running Chicago. Except he didn’t tell Hollis, who thought he was due to receive the honor. And when he found out it was going to me, he was ... less than pleased.”
“What does that mean?”
“Hollis is a sneaky bastard. He never challenged me outright, never even told my maker he wanted the position. Instead, he made my life a living hell for four decades, until I finally grew brave enough to banish him. And even then, I didn’t do it the way I would now. I lured him out to LA, used some contacts I’d made with a brothel out there. He spent the first few weeks indulging in orgy after orgy after orgy until he was so hooked on what he considered the LA life, he had no interest in leaving. Or so I thought.”
“It’s awfully sunny in LA. Doesn’t seem like it would be a place vampires would like to spend time.”
I shrugged. “The sun goes down there, same as it does here.”
“What did he do to you that was so horrible?”
I saw the faces in my mind. Tara, Bea, Karen, Vanessa … how many others had there been?
“It took me a long time to think like a vampire. Probably because I hadn’t expected to be turned, and then my maker immediately thrust me into this position in which I would eventually lead a bunch of incredibly powerful vampires who were all older and stronger than me. I never had an acclimation period.
“As a result, I continued to indulge in humanlike relationships. Usually with humans. And you all tend to carry your emotions much closer to the surface, but so did I, back then. I developed attachments to each woman with whom I had a relationship. And Hollis destroyed each and every one of them.”
“How?” She practically breathed the word, clearly enthralled with my story. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Pleased? Leery?
“Sometimes, he simply stole them from me and flaunted it in my face. The first time, I walked into my own home, my own bedroom, to find my ... courtesan, for lack of a better word—”
“I think the word you’re looking for is girlfriend. At least, in human terms.”
“Yes. You’re right. At any rate, he was in my bed, propped against the headboard, his arms crossed behind his head, smirking at me, while my girlfriend crouched between his knees, sucking his cock.”
She winced as if the memory hurt her, too.
“The next time, I had thrown another girlfriend a ball for her birthday. I found them tucked into a secluded alcove, fucking up against the wall. And on and on, girlfriend after girlfriend, until the one he could not convince to cheat on me.”
“Uh-oh.”
I turned away from the sight of her sitting on the bed, looking up at me with a mixture of fascination and pity on her face. “I can tell you know what happened.”
“He killed her.”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that against the law? Even in the vampire world, deliberately murdering someone for no other reason except to get back at the one you’re jealous of deserves some sort of punishment.”
Hollis, jealous of me? He was angry he hadn’t been assigned to rule Chicago, but that had nothing to do with jealousy.
“I could never prove it. She was a courtesan. He claimed she approached him, expressed interest in ... an alternative type of lifestyle. He got carried away, said he forgot she was human and therefore unable to handle him. I took it all the way to the grand counsel, but they said the same thing. There wasn’t any evidence. It was my word against his, and I hadn’t been there in the room when it happened. That was when I took the coward’s way out and lured him out to LA. I couldn’t take him living in my city anymore.”
“I don’t blame you. Although twisting off his head seems like it would have been an appropriate retaliation.”
I barked out a laugh. “My bloodthirsty Anya. My life held littl
e meaning until you entered it.”
She lifted a hand as if to stop me from saying something I might regret. “You’re getting a little deep there, even for a human. How about we get the hell out of here, and then we can discuss, uh … maybe we should stick to expressing ourselves physically for a while.”
I laughed again and grasped her hand, pulling it to my mouth for a kiss before leading her to the door. “I like the way you think.”
I could tell night had fallen, even though we were underground and without the ability to see the sky. Vampires were waking. Soon, even the youngest would be out of their beds, preparing for the day. Hollis had told them to gather at dusk. I presumed that meant there would be some sort of meeting, to prepare for the evening, possibly for my demise. And, logically, it made sense the meeting would be held in the giant room where Hollis had been sitting on a throne when we’d first exited the elevator this morning.
Which meant we had to find a different way out.
“There must be a staircase. They had to have a way here while they were digging out this area, before the electricity was put in,” I said as we made our way down an uninhibited hallway. I could hear voices, sounds of movement, but so far none was near to us.
“I wonder if it’s on the other side of that room where we came in,” Anya speculated. “I assume it would still lead to the back of the building, so along the same wall as the elevator but maybe on the far side?”
I lifted her hand and kissed it again, flicking my tongue along the ridges of her knuckles and taking pleasure in the way her pupils dilated. “Between the two of us, we may just get out of this place with our lives intact.”
Several minutes later, we ran into our first adversary. “Stay out of the way,” I ordered Anya, and I made quick work of grabbing the vampire from behind, taking his head between my hands and twisting sharply until I heard the sound of his neck cracking. When he dropped to the ground, I pressed my booted foot to his back and tugged with all my strength, ripping his head from his body. It was quick, but messy. Even Anya was coated with blood by the time he stopped twitching.
“There would be less blood if I had a stake,” I explained to her while she wiped the goo from her face.
“I’ll take being disgusting as long as he’s dead and we aren’t. Although at the first available opportunity, I’d like a nice, long, steaming-hot shower.”
Since banishing Hollis from the city, I’d rarely felt the urge to couple without needing to feed as well. The constant betrayals had given my heart one too many beatings, so I’d stopped allowing it to become involved in my relationships. And yet I found myself envisioning what it would be like to join Anya in that shower. The desire had nothing to do with hunger, at least not the kind that sustained me.
“It’s a deal.” I grabbed her hand, and we again hurried along the corridor, hoping against hope we were headed toward an alternate exit.
We were. Except it was blocked by a contingency of Hollis’s men.
“I think Hollis has realized you are missing,” I whispered as I peered around a corner and took stock of what I was up against. “How’d you escape, anyway?”
“He was distracted.”
I didn’t know what the hell she meant by that, but now wasn’t the time to get into a lengthy discussion, so I let it pass.
“If we can come up with a stake, I can help,” she whispered from behind me.
I whipped around and glared at her. “No. Absolutely not. You are human. They are not. And now that you’ve escaped, I wouldn’t put it past Hollis to tell his men to subdue you first and ask questions later. And by subdue, I mean kill you.”
Scaring women into submission wasn’t my forte, but I swear I could practically hear Anya screaming while a bunch of Hollis’s asshole vamps ripped her arms out of her sockets. Not happening on my watch.
She crossed her arms and glared at me. “Fine. Then go destroy them all so we can get the hell out of here.”
Damn, this woman was enchanting. I wouldn’t mind hanging out with her for a lot longer than her human life would allow. Pushing the thought aside, I nodded and rushed toward the crowd of vampires hovering near the base of the staircase.
Grabbing the first one within reach, I slammed his head into the cement wall. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would indispose him long enough for me to deal with the rest of them and get Anya upstairs.
Sensing someone approaching from behind me, I turned and kicked out, catching the guy in the thigh. He crumpled to the floor and I kicked out again, smashing my foot against the back of his skull. I decapitated the next one, praising Anya for the strength her blood provided to allow me to do so. The fourth came at me with a butterfly knife. I managed to disarm him and stab the thing into his chest. It wasn’t wood or silver, so it wouldn’t kill him, but, again, all I needed was to clear the area so Anya and I could escape.
After I took down the fifth guy, I decided I owed it to Anya to express my appreciation for her insistence upon my feeding from her.
When we were aboveground.
“Come on,” I called out, and she came running, leaping over the prone bodies littering the floor.
“Are they all dead, er, truly dead?” she asked when I held open the door to the stairwell.
“Most likely not. All the more reason to hurry.”
She knew when to follow directions. I watched her ass cheeks lift up and down as she climbed the stairs, and my cock hardened. While I’d gotten my life- sustaining blood out of our earlier interaction, I hadn’t gotten a bit of relief for the blue balls I’ve had since we’d sat down to drink wine at the pub yesterday. It felt like a lifetime ago, and watching her in those ass-hugging jeans wasn’t helping. Not a goddamn bit.
“Holy shit, I’m out of shape,” she complained halfway up the first flight of stairs.
“I promise a steady regime of energetic sex, just as soon as you’re safe and Hollis has been taken care of.”
She let out a breathless laugh. “That’s a tempting offer.”
Endless minutes later, we reached the top of the stairs. I pressed Anya against the wall next to the door and then slowly opened it, anticipating an attack.
“Ah, there you are,” Hollis said.
Chapter 9
Cam tensed, preparing to fight. He tried to pull the door closed and leave me in the stairwell, but Hollis said, “I don’t think so. Invite your lovely courtesan to the party, Camden. The other option is leaving her in there with my goons, and unless you’ve drastically changed, I doubt you want to do that.”
There was a long pause, and then Cam held the door wide, waiting for me to step through. We weren’t in the warehouse like I’d expected but rather in the formalwear section of the store. The contrast between the ball gowns and tuxedos and Cam’s oversized T-shirt I was wearing, covered in blood and gore from the vampire he’d killed in the hallway, should have been laughable. If the situation were a tad less dire.
“Well, hello, sweetness,” Hollis said, his voice loaded with fake cheer. “Did you enjoy the shows? Two for one, and you didn’t even have to ask.”
Cam gave me a swift look, but I wasn’t about to tell him I’d watched Hollis jerk himself off and then get blown by a wisp of a courtesan. Did it really matter, in the grand scheme of things?
“I’d have let you join in, you know. You didn’t even need to ask. I had planned to see to you after Marni tended to me anyway.”
“Okay, I can’t take it,” Cam said, throwing his arms in the air. “What the hell is he talking about?”
“I stayed in his room last night—er, today. Not with him, though. I slept in the chair. When I woke up, this woman came in—a courtesan, I think. She, er...”
“Blew him,” Cam guessed. “His favorite pastime.”
“It isn’t yours?” Hollis asked, feigning shock.
Cam didn’t acknowledge his question. “So that was the distraction.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Smart girl,” Hollis said. “But not
smart enough.”
A mannequin wearing a blue sequined gown stood next to me, enticing shoppers to convince themselves they’d look as good as her in that sparkling, form-fitting dress. Quick as lightning, a man leaped out from behind the plastic, poseable doll and reached for me. I stumbled backward, fell into a carousal of discounted clothing, and scrambled to the other side.
“Anya!”
That was Cam’s voice, but at this point, I had to assume he could hold his own. I was the weak link in this chain, so if I managed to get away, maybe Cam could focus on killing Hollis and regaining order in his hometown.
I ran, flapping my arms and knocking loose clothing off me as I did so. It hadn’t occurred to me that even though the sun had gone down, it was only around seven in the evening. There were probably still people in the store, a suspicion confirmed when I came across a woman wearing a Macy’s nametag, who stared at me as if I’d just woken from the dead. Given the amount of blood splattered on my clothing, it was a reasonable assumption.
“Er… Halloween?” I said weakly. When she continued to stare without making a sound or movement, I added, “Play. Practice. I’m in a production. Er… Bride of Dracula?”
“Funny,” a male voice said as an arm hooked around my waist and turned me away from the gawking woman.
“Cam?”
“Yes. Let’s go. I need to find a phone and call Peadar.”
I let him grasp my hand and lead the way. Thank God for someone who seemed to know what the hell he was doing. Me, I had no clue. I’d come to Chicago to try to find my sister, but I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen when I was forced to deal with bloodsucking, immortal beings who all seemed to have their own damn agendas. I certainly hadn’t expected to be covered in some dead guy’s blood, rushing through a half-empty Macy’s, trying to outrun a vampire I was pretty sure would bite first and ask questions later.
