The Last Vampire 3

by R. A. Steffan

  “Shower’s quicker,” he said, before setting me down on the closed toilet lid and peeling off my clothing a piece at a time. Once I was naked, he stripped as well, baring pale skin and smooth muscle. After turning on the water and testing the temperature, he returned and swept me up again.

  “I can walk,” I protested, though it might have been more convincing if I weren’t clinging to him.

  He kissed the top of my head. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, depositing me on the tall stool and positioning me so the warm droplets raining down from above flowed over my body without spraying me directly in the face.

  I let him wash me, marveling at the feeling of someone looking after me like this because he wanted to. Not because he felt he had to, or because it was an act to seduce me, but because he… cared for me. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to say the other word, even inside the privacy of my own head.

  When I was clean and warm and drifting, he turned off the taps and dried us off with a huge, fluffy towel that smelled like lavender. He clearly had no clue about maintaining hair as kinky as mine, and I’d pay for that when it came time to pick it out later. Somehow, though, I couldn’t raise a single care about that. Instead, fresh warmth rose inside me at the idea of showing him how to condition and care for it someday soon.

  It was such a… domestic idea.

  The parts of the cottage I’d seen so far were darkly masculine—full of copper and brass, old wood and leather. By contrast, the upstairs bedroom was surprisingly airy, with light fabrics and a large window looking over the verdant hill beyond. He deposited my naked body on the buttercup yellow coverlet of a queen-sized bed, and took a moment to look down at me as though drinking in the sight.

  “Two months,” he observed with a faint smile tugging at one corner of his lips, “and I finally got you into my bed.”

  An answering smile crinkled the corners of my eyes. “As opposed to someone else’s bed, you mean?”

  “Exactly,” he agreed.

  Then my smile melted away beneath the intensity of his gaze—not so much predatory as possessive. Every square inch of my skin felt like it tightened, yearning for touch.

  “I need you.” The words were wrenched from somewhere deep inside, giving voice to a feeling I’d never dared admit aloud.

  He rested a hand on either side of my head, his presence blocking out everything else as he leaned over me. “Zorah. You already have me, love. You only ever needed to reach out and take what was offered.”

  Since the only alternative to kissing him would be bursting into tears, I pulled his head down to mine, surrendering to his mouth. This must be what it’s like not to be afraid, I thought, letting everything else fall away beneath the weight of those softly demanding lips.

  We kissed for ages, hands roaming to feel skin against skin, rather than to seduce. Rans’ animus was a low hum of warmth flowing into me. I let it come, enjoying its sweetness, but did not pull more from him. Eventually, with the darkening sky outside the window ceding its light to the small lamp next to the bed, I pushed Rans to lie on his back so I could straddle him.

  We were still kissing, but I pulled back so I could watch his face as I positioned his hard length at the entrance to my passage. His eyes flared as I angled my hips and he slid inside. But I was looking too deeply, and what I saw in those depths burned like a hot brand. That, combined with the delicious stretch as he filled me, was too much.

  I closed my eyes, rolling my lower lip between my teeth as I focused on the physical rather than the emotional aspect of our joining. But gentle fingers stroked along the line of my jaw, lifting my chin.

  “No, Zorah,” Rans said softly. “I want you to watch. See what you do to me.”

  I kept my eyes squeezed shut, assaulted on all sides by feelings, but those fingers continued to cup my chin in silent command. Eventually, with a deep breath, I opened them and looked at the man beneath me. Really looked.

  “That’s it, love,” he said, rewarding me with a slow roll of his hips. His eyes flared brighter, and his voice gained a deeper resonance. “Pretend I’m compelling you if it helps, but you will see me while I’m making love to you.”

  My chest hitched. We both knew that I was immune to his gaze, but I could still feel its effects. And he was right—damn him. It helped. I gave myself over to his command, staring deeply into his eyes as our bodies moved together with sinuous, unhurried movements. It was completely different than any sex we’d had with each other before, and at times, I wasn’t sure I would survive it with my soul intact.

  But perhaps that was the point.

  Rans had fed from me, and I fed from him in return, but mostly, we just existed with each other. Every so often, one or the other of us would shiver beneath the force of an orgasm, but I was part succubus, and Rans had drunk my blood, and just because our bodies climaxed, that wasn’t a pressing reason to stop what we were doing.

  I think I must have spent hours just draped over Rans’ body with his arms wrapped around me and his cock nestled hard and heavy inside me, soaking in the way his skin felt against mine and tracing the wispy curls of his animus brushing against my magical core.

  We fell asleep at about the same time, still joined together. When I woke up hours later from blessedly dreamless blankness, the sun was high in the sky outside. I was tucked against Rans’ side, his fingers tracing the knobs along the back of my neck with soothing pressure.

  “Morning,” he said gently. “Or… possibly afternoon.”

  I smiled against his chest. “So, vampire morning, then,” I suggested.

  He huffed a breath of amusement. “Something like that, yes.” Then he sobered, though his fingertips continued their slow massage. “I hope you’ll agree that our new goal in life should be to spend every single night exactly like this,” he said, his voice growing serious. “But… for now, maybe you should tell me what it was you learned in Hell about Nigellus and the Tithe.”

  EPILOGUE

  MY FEELINGS OF peaceful belonging faded slowly into sadness as I contemplated what I still needed to tell Rans about his mentor. I rolled onto an elbow so I could look down at him, noting that the clear blue eyes whose depths I’d drowned in last night had closed off. Not necessarily closed off from my presence, I knew—but closed off against what was coming. I wondered if Rans had harbored his own suspicions about Nigellus, or if this would come as a complete shock to him.

  I took a deep breath to steel myself, and brushed my knuckles over Rans’ temple and cheek.

  “I really didn’t want to have to tell you this,” I said, “but once the human tithelings in Hell reach adulthood, they’re given the option of imbibing a special kind of wine that heals them and slows their aging process to almost nothing. The demons use magic to produce enough of this drink that everyone who wants it can have some, because it relies on an ingredient of incredible rarity.”

  Rans remained silent and still. I swallowed hard, and continued.

  “It’s an ingredient… with only one surviving source in all of the three realms,” I said as evenly as I could. “Rans… Nigellus has been harvesting your blood without your knowledge. And he’s almost certainly been doing it since shortly after the end of the war.”

  Blue eyes slipped closed before I could see the pain in them, though the face they were set in might have been carved from alabaster.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “But there’s more. I think Myrial is trying to destroy the treaty and restart the war. She… he… is the incubus that got my grandmother pregnant. And I’m pretty sure she was also behind the attack at the club—an attack with silver knives and bullets. If she could kill you and make it look like the Fae did it, the peace would fall apart.”

  He nodded, to show he was still listening.

  “The one thing I really don’t get is why the demons would want a village full of humans with really long life spans,” I went on. “It might make sense if we’d been right about them trying to breed more hybrids like me,
but that’s not what’s happening. I don’t understand what they could be after.”

  Eyes still closed, Rans pulled himself into a sitting position, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I think I might,” he said. “The demons have a source of human beings infused with Fae magic. They have a way to stockpile them, so to speak, rather than having the older ones constantly die off after seventy or eighty years. And they’ve ensured that the one fucking vampire that they managed to salvage from a magical Fae weapon during the war is protected—for a given definition of the word.”

  Something clicked into place inside my mind, and my stomach flipped over.

  “Oh my god,” I said, feeling suddenly nauseated. “Rans. You think they want to raise a new army of vampires… but this time, using humans that could be immune to the Fae weapon, because they already have Fae magic?”

  Rans opened his eyes, staring into the distance with the look of someone who thought he’d awakened from one nightmare only to find himself trapped in another.

  “I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But I do know that this war cannot be allowed start up again. You’ve seen how deadly it is when it’s supposedly been over for two hundred years. But believe me when I say—things can still get much, much worse.”

  * * *

  Zorah’s story continues in The Last Vampire: Book Four.

  If you enjoyed this book, you might also like R. A. Steffan and Jaelynn Woolf’s other vampire series, Circle of Blood.