He reached for her, but she outmanoeuvred him again, pinning his hands to his sides and swinging her leg over his hips to straddle him. She rocked over his cock, tightly encased beneath his trousers and desperate to be released.
“Now, now, I never promised you the reins, lawman,” Ivory said, clicking her tongue in playful disapproval.
“I paid—” Wynn began, but Ivory rocked harder against him, and a strangled sound escaped his throat.
“Yes, you paid. You paid for what I give you, not what you take. Believe me, I’ll make it worth your while. You going to behave?”
Wynn nodded, and she guided his hands up to her breasts. He squeezed them roughly.
She made short work of his shirt, yanking it to the sides to nuzzle his furred chest. His breath hitched when she took his nipple in her mouth, worrying it with teeth that broke through the skin.
“Ow! Ohhh…” He groaned as she swirled her tongue around the tight piece of flesh. If she did indeed bite him hard enough to draw blood, he clearly didn’t give a horse’s ass as long as she kept doing what she was doing. In fact, the feeling of her tongue and teeth, the sucking and soothing of the small nub must have felt particularly good, as she managed to unfasten his trousers and push them over his hips without him even seeming to notice.
His ignorance didn’t last long. As soon as she pulled his cock free, she swooped to take it all with no preparation or warning.
Whoever walked the streets outside the brothel at this time of night was serenaded by Franklin’s music and the swell of groans that Ivory sucked out of Wynn.
Her teeth grazed the sensitive head, making him double over from the intense enjoyment. If any little stabs of pain stung through his pleasure, he quite clearly forget about them seconds later in the wake of the greatest pleasure he had ever received from a woman’s tongue.
“That was sweeter than sugar, darlin’,” Wynn said, falling back against the pillows with a heavy, satisfied exhalation.
“You think I’m finished with you?” Ivory asked. “Hardly five dollars-worth, I think. Hang on to your hat, lawman. We’re going for a ride.”
Ivory covered him with her lithe body, cool against his heated skin, her breasts pressed to his chest, and she latched her lips to his neck. His groans and her sighs as she mounted him and rode him harder than he’d ridden all day echoed across the dust-swept streets.
* * * *
In the quiet hours of the early morning before dawn, Ivory leant out of her window and watched Wynn stumble from Ruby Rue’s. He had blacked out after that third orgasm, as incredible as it should have been impossible. He wouldn’t have remembered much after Ivory had bitten down on the juncture of his neck and shoulder in the throes of her own orgasm.
Of course, when he told the story, it would probably be her third orgasm that made her pass out.
The evening was cold. The stars from earlier in the evening had been obscured by thick cloud cover, and it smelt like it might snow.
Wynn undoubtedly tried to hurry, but his feet tangled with each other as if he were seven-pint drunk, although he hadn’t drank that much—just a half a tumbler before Ivory had taken him to her bed.
Before letting him leave, she’d whispered to him that he was to head on foot towards the inn for a room. She’d left out the explanation for why he had to leave Ivory’s room when he’d paid for the night, or why he couldn’t just swing up on his horse to get to the inn that much faster.
In the last quiet pangs of the night before the birth of the day, Wynn’s head filled with her mist, his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed onto the street.
Ivory’s heels crunched in the dirt as she approached him. She flipped Wynn’s dead weight over onto his back. Wynn got a glimpse of a Bowie knife gleaming in her hand as she crouched down, fully dressed in scarlet once more and her lips stained red, with the redness dripping down her chin.
Ivory stroked his scruffy cheek. “You’ll do,” she said, her husky voice an intentional balm for his confusion. She played him like a finely tuned piano, and if she kept stroking him like that, her voice whispering in his mind and reminding him of the pleasures of their night together, his sparkling eyes told her he might just fall Stetson-over-spurs in love.
“I think we’ll have a fine time together,” Ivory said. Then she brought the knife to her wrist and opened a line across the veins. She poised her now-bleeding wrist over his slack mouth. The hot, thick drops fell in. The moment they hit his tongue, he suddenly became thirstier than he’d ever been, thirstier than riding days in the searing heat without water.
He groaned, his voice cracking with thirst. Ivory had mercy on him as she recalled her own first taste, and lowered her wrist for him to drink from until he lost the rest of his strength, succumbing to the exsanguination and the numbing poison of her blood.
As soon as his heart stopped beating its sultry percussion in her ears, Ivory viciously slashed Wynn’s neck and shoulders, rendering any marks she’d left there during their lovemaking nothing but a bloody, ripped mess. The other places she’d drawn blood from him, she’d only used her teeth and nails to whet her thirst with naught but thin wells of blood, but she had learned years ago to obliterate any marks identifying the attacker as a vampire.
If Ruby Rue had noted Wynn’s exit, she would doubtlessly attribute his winding path to drunkenness and an exceptional session with Ivory—such a sight was not uncommon in the bordello. She hadn’t seen Ivory leap from her second-storey window to pursue Wynn down the street. Her alibi was secured.
‘It’s that outlaw’, the townsfolk would say, ‘the one that’s been killing these last six weeks’. They’d put deputies out to patrol the streets, but deputies and sheriffs couldn’t be everywhere at once, and many deputies got distracted near Ruby Rue’s.
Behind the clouds, Ivory sensed the impending dawn. She ran to her open window before flying up and closing the shutters tightly until no light could make it through. Then she pulled the pine box from under her bed, shucked out of her dress again, and crawled in, shutting it closed over her. Her door was locked three times, and all the girls knew not to disturb her during the day. Ivory had lived in this dusty little town for ten whole years, ascribing her agelessness to flattering lamplight, makeup and staying out of the sun. Because of her unchanging delicate features, the girls figured she was doing something right, just something they weren’t willing to do themselves, especially considering everything they already had to do.
Ivory didn’t blame them. She wouldn’t have chosen this life either.
Ivory was no killer. She was just lonely.
Maybe this one would take.
* * * *
At the end of sunset, Ivory awoke, opened her coffin and stepped out, her face flushed with last night’s feed and its renewing effects. When she opened her window, not caring that she was naked, she breathed in the crisp, cold air. A thin layer of snow covered the rooftops undisturbed, but the street below was a mix of snow, dirt, horse manure and human urine. Down the street was a single dark bloodstain where lawmen would have retrieved Wynn in the morning, frozen solid and bled to death, his throat slashed like all the others.
Ivory clothed herself in her street dress—still rich and showing her fallen station, but not quite as bright red, a humble maroon instead—and a brown cloak, then exited Ruby Rue’s through the front door. She used pure snow from the railings to clean off the dirt on her exposed skin from her coffin bed and headed to the cemetery.
She didn’t like the cemetery. Her fiancé had buried her under a stone cross, and that had kept her under for almost three days before she’d risked its burn just to quench her thirst. Many vampires made homes of their burial sites, but Ivory preferred sleeping aboveground.
Trailing the low iron fence like a mourner, she searched for new earth and found Wynn’s makeshift marker at the head of a mound of tilled dirt. The gravestone would have been commissioned upon his death, but it would take a few days to complete the stone etching
.
There was no sign of anything that would deter a vampire from arising his first night, but there was also no sign that anyone had climbed out of the coffin.
She waited for approximately thirty minutes in the cold and dark, neither of which bothered her. Instead, it was the refusal of the last of her long line of chosen mates to rise that upset her. Blood slid from her eyes, the closest to tears she could get, and painful.
She didn’t know what she was doing wrong—she remembered the process of her own turning quite well, although she hadn’t known what it was at the time. The vampire who had turned her had drunk from her, and when she’d been about to die, he’d given her his blood. Then she’d risen the next night.
But that vampire had died in a shootout with a silver bullet in his heart, and Ivory had had to go on alone. She was tired of being alone. She had company every night, but she could never get too close, lest they see her strangeness too well in the light. She wanted more than company—she wanted a companion. And something wasn’t working.
With a strangled growl, Ivory leapt over the fence and ran to Wynn’s grave to dig him out herself.
She cried out as her hands burned, hissing steam into the cold air. She held her hands up to inspect the blistering. Then she looked down at the grave. Without another sound, she flew to the grave of her previous choice, Red Lanyard, and passed her hand through the snow to the earth beneath. The soil burned her skin once more.
She went from potential mate to potential mate, eight men in all. All of them had been buried in consecrated ground. None of the other new graves had been sprinkled with holy water.
Peering around the cemetery, her gaze paused on the church next to the graveyard.
It wasn’t something she’d done wrong. Someone else was interfering and kept her vampires from rising. Her men were probably nothing but dust and bone in their coffins by now.
“Well, shit,” Ivory said.
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About the Author
Aurelia T. Evans is an erotic writer with a fondness for horror and the supernatural. In addition to writing, Aurelia enjoys baking, taking late night walks, and listening to almost every genre of music.
Email: [email protected]
Aurelia loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.totallybound.com.
Also by Aurelia T. Evans
Calling the Dragons Home
Sanctuary: Winter Howl
Frost Bite: Gravedigger
Totally Bound Publishing
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