by Cate Corvin
“You’re healing so much faster.” I ran my hands over his shoulders, taut as he held most of his weight off me; the gouges and cuts had become new pink skin.
“Because you are mine.” Càel kissed me, driving his point home with brutal sensuality. Usually I liked knowing I could kick someone else’s ass. In Càel’s case, I liked knowing he could take what he wanted from me. There was something strangely appealing in it. “A gift, from the first Maker.”
He was hardening against me as he spoke, his hips pushing forward to rock against me. My breath caught as every muscle of my body responded to him, trying its damnedest to wrap around him whether I wanted it to or not.
Luckily, I did want it. A lot.
I ran my hands down his back and slid my thumbs under the edges of his pants, making my intentions very clear. Càel didn’t need any further convincing.
I found myself stripped of my jeans in what seemed like record time, and he was gentler in pushing my shirt up and pulling it over my head. When I sat up, all the blood rushed from my head, and dots bloomed in front of my eyes again.
I took a deep breath, bracing my hands on my bare thighs, and Càel picked me up and laid me back across his bed. “I’m supposed to be the one babying you,” I said, more than a little breathless. It hadn’t been a lot, perhaps a little over a pint, but I’d never lost this much blood at once before in my life.
“Oh, look, a miracle. I’m as good as new.” He pushed me back against the pillows.
My body seemed to sing for him as he ran his tongue from my throat to my pussy, leaving a tingling trail between my breasts and over my stomach.
“You can’t be healed enough for this yet,” I gasped as his tongue delved into me. My back arched under the movement of his lips against me, teasing my clit until I was gripping the sheet with white-knuckled fingers.
Càel let out a low sound and lapped at my core. “I’m healed enough to do whatever I want.” He pushed my knees further apart, pinning my legs open for him.
It was like drinking my blood had juiced him up, regardless of how many injuries it went towards healing. He didn’t release me even when my legs started trembling and my hips arched up to meet his mouth, my breath coming in short gasps.
He stopped lavishing attention on my clit when I was teetering on the edge of a climax, waiting until my body had settled- well, settled as much as it could under the circumstances- and then he manhandled me into a new position.
I stretched out across the bed, the side of my face nestled against the soft mattress as Càel nudged my knees apart from behind. When the thick head of his cock brushed against my needy wetness, I pushed back against him, taking him down to the hilt in one smooth motion.
The sound he made was one of the sexiest, most satisfying things I’d ever heard in my life, compounded by my own muffled moans. Càel fell forward, covering me with his body.
Anyone on their hands and knees, filled with another person, should feel vulnerable… but I felt protected, surrounded by a force that would stop at nothing to defend and keep me.
It was past time to eat my words.
He slid himself out and pushed back in with a thrust that shook my entire body and sent pleasure rushing through me. Càel braced his arms on the bed around my head, and I reached up to grip his wrists, holding onto him like an anchor.
The next time he teased me, I wriggled back against him, refusing to let him pull all the way out of me. From this new angle he was so deep he hit places I hadn’t known existed, and my nails dug into his wrists, leaving half-moon marks in his skin.
His teeth grazed my shoulder and goosebumps rose. There was nothing to be afraid of. I was starting to understand what the bond between us was, a call that reached into the marrow of my bones and drew me to him despite all the obstacles that should’ve been between us.
Shock ran through me when I realized what it was that I felt for Càel, and acceptance under it, twisting its way through my heart. “I love you, Càel,” I whispered.
His thrusts slowed, and he came to a halt, his hips pinning me to the bed. “What was that, shíorghrá?” There was a playful lilt in his tone that hadn’t been there when I’d arrived.
I struggled to take a deeper breath, held down by his warm weight. He angled his hips, his cock brushing a sensitive place deep inside me, and I squirmed under him. “I said I love you, Càel,” I growled, my grip on him tightening.
“Louder. I didn’t quite catch that.”
Goddamn lying vampires and their flawless hearing. “I love you, Càel. I fucking love you- oh my god-”
He broke my hold on one of his arms and reached around my hip, his fingers strumming my clit as he started pumping into me. “Keep going, shíorghrá, louder. I’m very old and hard of hearing.”
Haha, very funny. It was impossible to come up with anything snarky when my entire body was threatening to melt into a puddle of bliss.
“I love you!” I shouted into the mattress, the words strangled with gasps and moans as he picked up the pace, pounding into me. “I’m yours, your singer, and I love you more than goddamn anything!”
Càel snarled, nuzzling through my hair to my neck, his words almost indistinguishable from the animalistic sounds he made. “Yes, you are mine, and I am yours,” he was saying. “I love you, Victoria. I love you.”
When I clamped down on him, my body taut and quivering under the onslaught of the climax, he gave a final thrust and let go, teeth grazing the side of my neck. I bit his arm, my teeth sinking into his skin without breaking the flesh.
Afterwards, I snuggled into the bed under him, holding him in place on top of me. Sure, he could’ve gotten up if he’d wanted, since I had all the strength of a melted stick of butter at the moment, but he seemed perfectly happy to let me loll around beneath him.
Even though I’d always been taught to never turn my back on a predator, never put myself in a position of vulnerability to them, the only vulnerability here was of the emotional sort… but even that felt as secure as an iron cage.
Càel loved me. Instead of shaking me to the core, like I’d thought it would, it felt like a subtext that had already been there and finally been put into words instead.
His head was even with mine while we lay tangled up in each other. I gazed into pale blue eyes, my hands resting on top of his with our fingers laced together. His face was almost entirely healed.
“How are we going to handle this?” I asked, my voice a bare whisper.
He knew what I meant without asking for clarification. “I’ll just have to try my hardest to convince you. Extol the virtues of vampire living, perhaps introduce you to the joys of sleeping in coffins and becoming a cloud of bats.”
“Can you really do that?” I demanded. Everyone knew Dracul could do it, but then, he was a very old, very powerful vampire.
On the other hand, so was Càel.
My Nordic vamp gave me a slow, sexy smirk. “Not bats, no.”
“You’re not a Morrígna, so you’re not just named for an animal… No. Don’t tell me you can actually become a wolf.”
“Woof,” he said, the smirk becoming a grin. He climbed off me, and before he’d even crawled off the bed his body seemed to ripple and shift, fluidly sliding from one form to the next.
I sat up in the tangled sheets, eye to eye with a very large and furry wolf the color of fresh snow. “Get out of town. I mean no, not literally… but seriously, how many vampires can do that?”
He was Càel again in the blink of an eye. “Any of them, if they turn their minds to it. After all, we are only a hairsbreadth away from the moonspawn, our siblings. Lilith and the Nightwalker were consorts for a time. But it takes much effort and pain to learn, unlike the moonspawn, and many choose to retain their mortal visage instead. Those of us who choose to become like our moon-loving kin become the strigoi, in the footsteps of Dracul.”
Instead of coming back to the bed, he strode across the room to a dark table and picked something up out of a gold
dish. Disquiet nudged me as he walked over with the slightest hint of trepidation in his eyes.
Morgrainne had told me he had something for me… and now I had a sudden sense that I knew exactly what it was.
I braced myself as he knelt on the bed next to me.
But instead of disgust, when he unfurled a dainty chain on which two gleaming ivory points hung, I was astonished by my happiness. “You made me a war-chain.”
Those were Eluned’s fangs, all that remained of the first of the Morrígna, on a gleaming gold rope. I reached out and touched them, unable to prevent the image of her last moments on the roof from shimmering across my mind’s eye. The razor-sharp tip of one fang pushed against the pad of my thumb with a sharp spark of pain.
“It is a Fae-forged chain,” he said, the muscles of his shoulders relaxing when I didn’t jump away or shriek in disgust. “It will never break or be removed by enemy hands.”
I scooted in front of him and twisted my hair into a rope, holding it up. Càel slid it around my throat, the fangs warming against my skin as he sealed the necklace, fingers lingering on the nape of my neck.
“Perhaps one day you will have one as long as mine,” he said.
His lips met my bare shoulder, and I felt the breath of his laughter when I said, “No one has one as long as yours, Càel.”
Take that for innuendo, vampire.
“I also took the liberty of tracking your steps to a Pennywick Apothecary,” he said, pulling me back against him. “Which you visited without me.”
“I did.” I touched Eluned’s fangs. The necklace felt weirdly like a part of me. A memento, a living reliquary. Maybe it was a sign of how much I’d changed that it no longer seemed barbaric, but like a great honor to be able to remember her this way. “You were busy, and my personal mission isn’t over yet. I got some good information out of him, though.”
Càel opened his other hand, revealing the tiny vial of glowing yellow Belphegorian ichor, on a much smaller gold chain.
“You didn’t!” I sat bolt-upright, twisting around to look at him. “You can’t just go buying me jewelry and ichor all willy-nilly, Càel! It’s expensive, and I’m a grown-ass woman who can save up for her own demonic body fluids-”
“I can and I did.” He forced me back down and wrapped the chain around my left wrist, looping and sealing it before I could protest again. “Now you can rest easy. No one can take these things from you.”
To my surprise, tears threatened again. “I’m usually not this emotional, I swear,” I said, resting my forehead against his. “I don’t think I could ever thank you enough for this. But what can I do for you, Càel? You give me everything I want and need. All I’ve done is gotten you whipped.”
“You can belong to me,” he said definitively. “Your blood is mine, your body is mine, your heart is mine.” There was nothing shy or hesitant about his words, but then, he came from a different time and place where that ownership was normal. The beast, taming the maiden. Claiming and defending her with tooth and claw.
The primal part of me purred in agreement. He was my beast, and I was his singer.
I pushed back my trepidation over the expectancy that I would become a vampire. I still had years to ponder my impending fate, the irrevocable choice I’d eventually have to make.
“I will never make you do something you do not wish to do,” Càel said, his thumbs smoothing my cheekbones.
“I said I love you and I meant it with all my heart.” I rested my hand over his chest, feeling the hollow drumbeat deep within. “We will always be each other’s. I was wrong about you, and vampires… well, some vampires. Mostly you and your- our- sisters.”
I winced, aware that I was garbling everything I wanted to say, but Càel gave me his crooked grin, the expression I’d found so appealing back when vampires still gave me the heebie-jeebies. Now I wondered how I could’ve been so daft the first time I’d met Càel that I hadn’t just ripped off my clothes and announced I was available for ravishment.
Maybe it was his thirteen hundred years of experience, but he was a damn fine ravisher.
“You are like us, Victoria,” he said. “But of course my singer would be. We adapt or die. We change our ways or allow time to crush us underfoot.” He kissed me, tongue darting between my lips. “You are not the Victoria of yesterday. When you are Made, you will not be the Victoria of today. But for me, you will be perfect.”
14
Tori
The next few weeks slid by like quicksilver. I was actually able to sleep at night, the indestructible chain of demon ichor around my wrist promising me a cure if Will and Sura were to pull another stupid stunt with me.
I hadn’t even understood how deeply they’d fucked with my head until I woke up to the chimes of another school day, feeling well-rested for once.
Before I buttoned my shirt, I touched the four gleaming fangs resting on my chest, limned white against my olive skin. Eluned’s were long and straight, almost flawless pieces of ivory, while the fangs of the vamp who’d whipped Càel weren’t quite as perfect. Still, it was worth having the memory of my first deliberately hunted kill in my head.
Now I got what Càel meant by remembering each one. Even if I lived forever, I’d never forget what it felt like. His last moments were burned into my mind, and there was a black teardrop inscribed in the soft skin of my inner arm, courtesy of Mater Bellum.
I smiled at my own reflection, but there was no humor in it. Two from my list had gone down in flames: Beatrice was dead, and Lydia Hurst had been pulled from Libra Academy overnight following the video I’d sent to both the faculty and her parents from a burner phone. Aislin Liddell had found the phone numbers for me, without asking what purpose I was going to put them to.
The Guardianship Gala was in three days, and I knew for a goddamn fact that Will still had only one tattoo and no war-chain at all.
Three days, and the last vestiges of his conceit would be crushed underfoot like so much dust.
Fuck you, Will.
He thought warning me off Percival was going to scare me? Hell, no. Sure, his dad was a creep of the highest magnitude, but the fact remained that wealth and the family name was all Will had left.
He wouldn’t have that either by the time I was finished.
Aislin patted the seat next to her as I strolled into Knightley’s classroom. The big man was already writing on the board, and except for the quick smile she flashed my way, Aislin’s attention was entirely focused on him… and not entirely academically-minded, unless I totally missed my mark.
“If you stare at his ass any harder it might catch on fire,” I whispered, leaning in close to Aislin. She nodded fervently, then caught herself, blinking and tearing her gaze away from Knightley.
“Have you put in your study time?” she asked, all business, but the faint flush in her cheeks gave her away.
I nodded, arraying my own notes in front of me. The next two days were written exams in the morning, practical exams in the evening. Then the Gala, where our grades would be announced and awards given. I had every intention of being on top.
Knightley turned around, looking over the stack of exams on his desk, and Aislin ducked her head. Poor girl. I knew all too well what that felt like.
Will sat directly across from me, alongside Sura. The big guy refused to look my way, but his voice rang in my ears: hypocrite.
Well, fuck you too, Sura.
I smiled at Will, but there was nothing nice in it. He hadn’t tried to talk to me again since the morning he’d apologized to the girl who’d almost been eaten by Thraustila’s hellhound. Good. Apologies weren’t enough.
Knightley distributed the tests. “This is the written portion of your exams, covering the first semester. Tomorrow will cover the second semester’s classwork thus far.”
The room fell into a tense silence as the remainders of Lux and Tenebris bent over their tests, brows furrowed and pencils scratching paper.
My nerves had been all jangly at
first, but after the first twenty or so questions, I relaxed and fell into steady pace. For every night this semester I’d spent trawling the city for apothecaries or in Càel’s arms, I’d spent three more bunkered in my room, poring over the Diyadin bestiary and Matsuyo’s tactical memoir with a fanaticism for academia I’d never possessed before.
Three hours later, some of the students looked pale with nerves, but I was feeling pretty damn breezy, myself.
Knightley silently released us to Professor Ermengol’s training grounds, where the first portion of the practical exam involved basic grappling and maneuvering.
The next day was harder. The questions were worded to trip us up, and I barely squeaked out the last of the exam before the allotted time expired.
Ermengol set up a bare-bones obstacle course to examine our flexibility, strength, and inventiveness, and then paired us off.
I got Gilcrist, who was so ill with test anxiety he didn’t even taunt me before I thoroughly beat his ass his hand-to-hand combat.
After putting away my staff, I watched the last pairs of students finish their sparring. Will had been paired with Juno Endelyn. For a moment, I thought he might actually be losing, his movements colorless and uninspired, but when she circled him, he was forced to face me.
There was no point in winning against such a pathetic sad-sack. I smiled and waved, and a stormy scowl crossed his face.
He finished Juno with minutes to spare, the scowl never leaving his face. I took my time in cleaning up after myself, waiting until even Sura had left.
Will crossed his arms over his chest. The pouty, spoiled, rich-boy look was back… for now. “You’re still planning on going through with this, Victoria?”