Surrender the Dark

by Tibby Armstrong

  “Have you realized that if I fuck you”—Tzadkiel’s breath brushed Benjamin’s ear, making him moan—“I might not be able to control my other appetites?”

  One thumb circled over Benjamin’s lip, teasing it away from his teeth. He turned his head, and warm lips, dry and sweet, whispered against his own. Benjamin sighed into Tzadkiel’s mouth and opened for the kiss.

  The button to his tuxedo trousers slid free. His zipper’s jagged release was a gunshot to his nerves. Heat fisted in Benjamin’s belly. Please don’t let him stop. Madness was preferable to this torture. What had seemed unwise before now seemed natural and unavoidable. Benjamin opened wider, deepening the kiss, and Tzadkiel moaned into his mouth. They should just get it over with—bury themselves in each other’s bodies until they couldn’t think about the past anymore. Pushing at fabric, Benjamin bunched his pants down past his hips, exposing himself completely.

  Tzadkiel lifted his head. Breath ragged, he paused, his hand resting against Benjamin’s thigh. A string of heartbeats lengthened the moment. Benjamin’s chest tightened with anticipation. He needed to forget confusion and animosity, if only for a little while.

  “Please,” Benjamin whispered, not above begging if it would gain him what he wanted so badly.

  Inexorably, Tzadkiel’s hand moved up Benjamin’s thigh. Benjamin arched, seeking heat and pressure.

  “I want to milk your body dry of every fluid it possesses…” Tzadkiel murmured, working up a rhythm that threatened to drive Benjamin mad. “I want to tear your throat out.” He knelt alongside the couch and a floorboard creaked. “And bathe in that sweet elixir I smell even now pulsing through your veins.”

  Unfazed by the violence of the words, Benjamin merely groaned. A longing for rhythm compelled his motion until the couch springs squeaked. Fingers at Benjamin’s throat curled, squeezing in unison with the palm that gripped his cock. The vampire increased that blessed friction. Benjamin jerked upward, but Tzadkiel held him immobile. Pleasure spiraled in on itself, and Benjamin gasped, begging for release. To be let go. To be set free. To be thrown off the top of this precipice so that he might fly.

  “I want to drink until you are a lifeless husk…And to use up your sublimely exquisite body…” The hand around his throat tightened and released. “Then to bring you back from the edge. So I can do it again…”

  The pumping along Benjamin’s shaft quickened. Air was briefly denied him. He choked on a dismayed cry. Then the freight train of orgasm bore down, seemingly out of nowhere. His hips surged, and he screamed out his release. The vampire didn’t stop until he had indeed milked every last drop from Benjamin’s shuddering frame.

  “And again.” Tzadkiel delivered the last word with whispered menace, and a lingering kiss to Benjamin’s carotid.

  Ragged breaths tore from Benjamin’s chest. Tremors wracked him, aftershocks of a pleasure too intense to be satisfied with one quake alone. Tzadkiel released him and sat back. Benjamin curled his hands into fists, resisting the urge to stop the vampire’s retreat when he slipped from the room.

  “Holy shit.” Benjamin breathed.

  His thoughts scattered like smoke and ash, dispersed on the wings of his afterglow. Who cared if an entire zombie army driven by power-crazed witches burned Boston to the ground? He pressed questing fingertips to the bruises along his neck. Tzadkiel’s kisses had been a threat and a promise. If the vampire ever did fuck him, Benjamin now had zero doubt the experience very well might kill him. Indeed, it would almost be a shame if it didn’t.

  Death by sex, at least with this man, especially in comparison to every other way he might die, seemed a pretty decent way to go.

  Chapter 18

  The gust of wind up Joy Street held a bite for the first time in a long time, and that was how Tzadkiel knew the man who walked beside him had warmed his blood. Even a week later, the memory of watching Benjamin unravel, of feeling the heat of the man’s orgasm spilling over his hand, threatened to irrevocably unmoor Tzadkiel from sanity. The interlude repeatedly splashed itself over his mind’s canvas, whether he willed it or not, until he struggled to focus on anything else. By the time the evening of the new moon came, lust had supplanted reason, eroding Tzadkiel’s hate and replacing revenge with a different sort of blood-driven fantasy.

  Images of the long line of Benjamin’s neck, the taste of salt and scent of elderflower sweetness, assailed him as he and Benjamin walked to the rendezvous with the mora. Terrible impulses, to rip into virgin flesh and bathe in the hot flood of blood while he brought Benjamin to screaming climax, overrode any ability for him to plan his approach to the meeting ahead.

  Tension mounted, knotting Tzadkiel’s shoulder muscles as he and Benjamin walked. Warmer air had rolled across Boston, melting most of the snow so that patchy brown places showed between moguls of dirty white. Wisps of fog eddied on unseen air currents that haloed each of Beacon Hill’s gaslights. They walked in silence for several minutes. Benjamin, hands tucked into his jacket pockets, hunched forward, seeming lost in thought—an expression he’d been wearing much of the time over the past week as he and Tzadkiel had danced around the subject of their intimacy, avoiding each other as much as possible and keeping their interactions monosyllabic.

  Tzadkiel clenched his fists against the urge to soothe the worry lines from Benjamin’s brow. Tender feelings had no place in their relations. He’d made a mistake in indulging in his passion for the hunter. Doing so had weakened his resolve to do what needed to be done. Honor required him to protect his mora. In letting his guard down with Benjamin, Tzadkiel knew he’d allowed room for doubt, hesitation, and weakness to take root. He was surprised to find that the stalk of the budding shoot had thorns and would cause him discomfort to pull, but pull it he must. With firm resolve, he had ripped that tender plant from the tainted soil in which it could never survive, putting it out of its misery. To make certain it did not sprout anew, Tzadkiel addressed the subject now.

  “It was a mistake to allow you to believe yourself my intimate and equal.” Tzadkiel stared straight ahead, ignoring the bitter taste in his mouth.

  Benjamin’s upper lip curled into its habitual sneer. “Well, darling, if you wanted me on my knees, you only had to say so.”

  Tzadkiel rounded on him, bringing them both to a halt. “You know very well what I meant.”

  Benjamin’s jaw worked. “We’ll see who’s kneeling by the time the night is over.”

  “Betray me and die.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a broken record,” Benjamin snapped. “You know what they say about pride and falls? Well, I hope you packed a parachute, because that first step of yours is going to be a doozy.”

  Anger with himself, the situation, and Benjamin boiled over. How had his life come to this? When had things become so complicated? The matter was simple. The man who stood before him was his enemy. No room for compromise between them existed. The end.

  “Stupid hunter. Always fighting demons you have no chance of winning against. You are just as sure to lose now as when you were a boy.”

  The hunter’s flinch said Tzadkiel had scored a point against his opponent.

  Tzadkiel’s brothers had always known better than to approach him when he was in this mood. They had said his temper had been honed to an edge so sharp a man could bleed out from its cut before the sting was felt. It had been a long time since anyone had dared to provoke him thus.

  “Fuck you, vampire.” Benjamin stalked past, jostling Tzadkiel with an aggressive shoulder bump.

  Tzadkiel grabbed the collar of the hunter’s leather jacket, bunched it in his fingers and yanked backward. Benjamin spun, fist lifted to strike. Tzadkiel neatly blocked the blow and wrenched the hunter’s arm at an unnatural angle behind his back. Benjamin hissed at the pain, but ceased his struggle.

  Chest to chest, they stood in the open street, locked in a battle of wills. Tzadkiel saw his own snarl in the mirror of Benjamin’s sunglasses, the red neon of shop signs and the trees of Boston Co
mmon a distant blur. For a moment he thought the hunter would try to fight the hold.

  Their breaths mingled in frosty curls, mimicking the twining sinews of two dragons in battle…or locked together in sexual congress. A plastic cup rolled over the pavement, clattering before it stuck in a grate. Silence that had been tense morphed into something else between one pulse and the next.

  Elderflower and spring rain caressed the air. Eyes searching the hunter’s sublime features, Tzadkiel wondered what it would be like to be able to truly savor this man. At the errant thought, his groin ate up the blood supply his brain so desperately needed, and he groaned.

  Benjamin leaned into Tzadkiel. Lips, warm and dry, brushed his. Tzadkiel opened his mouth to the kiss, and for a moment the world dropped away. Using the pressure of his arm, he forced Benjamin against his hardening length. The hunter groaned, his heated tongue making plundering forays in a pattern of thrust, parry, retreat. Stinging bites followed soothing caresses. It all felt so good—too good—in a way nothing had in a long, long time. And that was precisely the problem.

  Tzadkiel dropped his arms and stepped back. Benjamin stumbled. Pale cheeks bloomed with color to match equally red lips. The hunter bent, hands on his knees, and raised his head.

  “Your entire personality is like a hand job in a cold shower,” Benjamin said, clearly catching his breath.

  Keeping his expression deliberately schooled, not trusting himself to speak, Tzadkiel flipped one palm up in mute demand for an explanation.

  Benjamin straightened. “Fucking frustrating.”

  Irritation buzzed through Tzadkiel, but he let the emotion pass and merely resumed their journey. In the older parts of downtown, stone façades climbed upward in Art Deco and classical splendor, their fortress-like structures standing silent sentinel to eras past. In the Financial District, modern skyscrapers formed wind tunnels that channeled the ocean breeze into a repelling force. The hunter repeatedly pushed at his heavy curls, until finally he gave up and dug in his pocket to produce a hair tie with which he held back the unruly mass.

  As they passed each mammoth building Tzadkiel recalled its smaller predecessors. The streets were the same, but layer upon layer of archaeological strata formed his memories of the path they traversed. Here, a timber frame shop once stood, its diamond panes distorting flickering candlelight. Hadn’t that been the place where he’d purchased a top hat? Inside, he’d whiled away a winter evening discussing politics with long-dead men whose names he no longer recalled.

  As he and Benjamin progressed up Summer Street, across Fort Point Channel, they neared the more deserted parking areas by the convention center. Lights glinted in varying shades of white and gray from the ice-dotted channel. They crossed the short bridge with its low railing, and Tzadkiel stared back at the silhouette of the city that had been the stage for the past four hundred years of his existence. It felt as if the place that had once welcomed him in its embrace was expelling him now—an impatient parent eager to see its offspring leave the nest. Well, he wouldn’t allow her to reject him. His mora and Boston would reconcile somehow, and life would go on, perhaps better than before.

  Benjamin’s footsteps slowed as they neared the car park. Trailer trucks hulked along the periphery of an otherwise barren parking area, the perfect hiding spot for the mora. Tzadkiel could imagine the hunter’s trepidation at being led into a gathering of vampires. There would be some who would like to kill him on the spot, without trial or ceremony. It had to be only the threat to Benjamin’s friends and to the city itself that compelled the hunter to follow Tzadkiel’s command to accompany him to the meeting that evening.

  Anticipating him now, Benjamin hopped the chain-link fence first, and Tzadkiel followed. They stopped feet apart at the lot’s center. Features drawn and pale, Benjamin appeared part-wraith in the shifting shadows, his sunglasses sparkling with reflected lights from the city beyond.

  “Kneel. Bow your head,” Tzadkiel commanded.

  Benjamin balled his fists and tightened his jaw, but after a moment’s hesitation he stiffly obeyed. Tzadkiel placed a hand on Benjamin’s shoulder as insurance against sudden movement.

  “I have come as promised,” Tzadkiel said. “Show yourselves to your War King.”

  The scents of bergamot and spice, clay and loamy dampness, lifted on a quiet breeze. A tremor traveled from Benjamin’s torso into Tzadkiel’s arm. Clearly the hunter detected the change in the air too. Shadows collided and separated, until the sinister flickers coalesced to form one man, then another, and another, until seven in all stood before them.

  None of the faces peering at Tzadkiel from the darkness, however, were of the mora members that had greeted him in Post Office Square. Of course, there would have been additions to their number in the past decades, but to recognize none of them—and for there to be so few—set Tzadkiel on edge.

  Hand itching for his sword, he asked, “Where is our strategoi?”

  “He’ll be along,” answered one, a swaggering and skinny fellow who looked to have been no more than seventeen when he’d been brought over.

  None of the men were all that old, Tzadkiel noted. It was the mora’s law not to share its gifts with anyone too young to wisely choose his own fate. Yes, something was indeed wrong. Every single one of these men, knowing his identity, should have felt connected with his power and knelt to their War King.

  Gaze scanning the area, Tzadkiel took in possible ambush and egress points. “What has delayed him?”

  Benjamin lifted his head, and Tzadkiel tightened his fingers.

  “Tzadkiel,” the hunter said, a note of warning in his voice.

  Several more men stepped from behind the trailer. The one at their apex brought his arms wide in a megalomaniac’s stance Tzadkiel knew all too well.

  “I have.”

  Though Tzadkiel couldn’t see the man’s face, cloaked as it was in shadow, he would have known that voice—its sharp resonance and lethal menace—anywhere. No longer staying his hand from his xiphos, Tzadkiel withdrew his sword. Blade met air with an incongruously bright note, its heft becoming an extension of his arm.

  More shapes separated themselves from the tractor-trailers at the back of the lot. The breeze shifted, bringing with it the cloying sweetness of rot and death. As the man separated himself from the darkness and came forward into the light, vindication of his worries reverberated like steel striking steel through Tzadkiel’s heart. Benjamin’s family was together, intact, and would annihilate his people. The hunter had betrayed him.

  Benjamin stood. Expression disbelieving, steps halting, he moved toward Tzadkiel’s enemies. “Uncle?”

  Tzadkiel’s stomach turned as he realized that despite his earlier words, he’d actually clung to the illusion that he and Benjamin had reached some manner of accord. Certainly not friendship, and perhaps only based in a need for comfort in the midst of so much that was terrifying, but whatever it was that had been between them had been tinged with hope.

  Until this moment, Tzadkiel hadn’t realized he’d so desperately needed to believe in Benjamin. Now that the possibility had been torn from him, he was left with only the hard, dark kernel of his hate. The hunter’s family was returned to him, and this time Tzadkiel would kill them both.

  Chapter 19

  Abandonment’s lonely well filled with a rapidity that threatened to drown Benjamin with a deluge of conflicting emotion. Uncle waited for him, watching his approach. A charcoal greatcoat billowed about the man’s calves, its woolen collar pulled up about meaty jowls. Abundantly bushy brows, lowered in a glower Benjamin knew only too well, made up for the lack of hair on the man’s head.

  Hunter born.

  Broken fragments of remembered childhood inadequacies pierced Benjamin’s sense of self. He was going to be in so much trouble for not killing the War King when he’d had the chance. The wind snatched at his hair, whipping loosened curls about his face. His scalp burned with the memory of how much it hurt when Uncle tugged his hair, and he wished h
e’d gotten it cut.

  Hunter bred.

  To Benjamin as a child, the nursery rhyme had seemed one part war cry and one part cautionary tale. As an adult, the mantra had formed a stone fortress around his heart. He’d built it of words he’d thought constructed of granite and steel, their turrets a jagged touchstone behind which he hid as he brought death raining down upon those deserving his justice.

  Kill the vampires.

  There had been those vampires who had pled for their lives. Others had fought with all the blood and brimstone at their disposal. Inexplicably, each time Benjamin had won a fight, he’d walked away feeling not as if he’d vanquished a foe but rather as if he’d killed a piece of himself. With each death, he recalled the ethereal beauty of the vampire his family had dragged into his uncle’s home, and the ravaged, broken creature that vampire had then become. The only thing that seemed to cobble Benjamin back together afterward was the alcohol that drowned the notion that the adults whose memories still guarded his internal battlements hadn’t known what the fuck they’d been talking about.

  Or you’ll be dead.

  And yet, here he was. Tzadkiel hadn’t killed him. Even though he deserved the man’s retribution. Tzadkiel might loathe him, but he’d had ample opportunity to kill, and as far as Benjamin could tell the War King had never once struck out in anything other than self-defense. Sure, he talked a lot about killing Benjamin, but in Benjamin’s experience there was a big difference between a man’s words and his actions. Even the first sword blow in the mora’s tunnels had been Benjamin’s. With a vampire, he had known if not tenderness, a modicum of care and self-respect. With his family, he’d only known fear and a desperate need to do anything not in order to be loved, but to stay alive.

  Uncle opened his arms, inviting Benjamin to step into his embrace. “Benjamin.”

  Arrested by the uncharacteristic affection, Benjamin took a closer look at the man’s green-black aura. Understanding clicked. “You’re not my uncle.”