“Is that what you want, Tulip?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “I understand Jie and Thom. I don’t quite understand you two. When I’m with either of you…just one of you…well, it isn’t right to say that something is missing, because I enjoy the times when I’m with you alone. But it does feel as if maybe…you should come home to each other. Me and you…together.” Her face was so flushed and I could smell that she was getting just as aroused as she was before. “Am I wrong?”
I moved to her side more quickly than I intended, betraying my eagerness. “I gave you everything I had on the beach and yet, could it be that your body still begs for more?” I whispered in her ear, “This is the wife I remember. A very hungry one.”
“Oh…I…” She shivered a little. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“You don’t need to help it,” Silvus said. “You have four men to please.”
I could smell that she was dripping wet again, the sweet musk of her, and feel her trembling a little, as a certain part of her still tried to pit the things she had been taught against her nature.
“Was I so wicked?” she panted.
I untied the strings of her bikini and pulled her legs open, holding her against me, spreading the glistening folds of her all the way to her entrance. “How wicked still you are, dearest. Your body must still be aching from before but now you’re thinking of Silvus and me, and now look.”
“But then, there isn’t really any such thing as wicked anymore,” Silvus said. “Not if you’re enjoying it.” He glanced at me. “Thom and Jie told me she asked them to kiss each other for her pleasure.”
“I—I wouldn’t say it like that,” she stammered.
“What else would you call it?”
He was teasing her now, and she was getting charmingly flustered.
“Is that true?” I asked. “You asked them to kiss? Out of the blue?”
“It just…popped out.”
I’d heard enough. “I’m glad I had you all to myself on my birthday,” I said. “But past midnight, I suppose we can experiment. Take her, Silvus,” I said.
My hands finished plucking off her thin dress and bikini with a few loosened ties and tugs and Silvus slipped a hand around her waist and pulled her naked body close to him, hastily freeing his erection from his trousers. She leaned her head sideways and he sank his teeth and cock into her at once.
I was not prepared for how I would feel to watch this. To imagine Silvus’ pleasure in this moment after the anticipation of readying her for him…it was almost as good as my own.
She was crying out with pleasure and Silvus let a few trails of blood escape. That was for me. I met them with my tongue and licked up her back. Now that I was closer, Silvus slipped two fingers in the waistband of my pants and pulled me closer still, then freed my own cock expertly and started stroking it.
I heated. For my Tulip to see me taking pleasure from another man’s hand…but Silvus would not let go of me, not even when I jerked a little. I felt like he would tear my cock off rather than let me go. Suddenly he was the one looking at me as if he had caught me, because there was no hiding that I was enjoying his touch, and that Alissa was enjoying all of it. She was still moaning, and I reached up to play with her perfect breasts, encouraging even more delicious sounds from her equally perfect mouth.
This was not where I expected the birthday night to go. It had all escalated very quickly but I couldn’t stop it now.
I felt close to exploding.
He stopped drinking from her and sealed the wound again, and that was when he let me go, as the steady flow of our lovemaking was briefly paused for the concentration of magic.
“Who is your lord, Silvus?” I panted. “Is that any way to toy with me?”
“How do you want to be toyed with?”
“Well, I think I’d like more than a hand.”
By now it was clear to me that Alissa was getting more and more excited as Silvus and I were expressing closeness.
“Well, what do you want?” Silvus asked, with a little teasing in his tone. As if he thought I would say, You, Silvus.
Nice try. I would not go that far.
These things were unspoken.
But I was starting to realize the thrill of such a moment. We hadn’t had a new adventure in the bedroom in…well, several human lifetimes. I pressed fingertips to Silvus’ skin and urged him to shift position a little so I could take him, my own desire spiking the longer I watched him please Alissa. When we found her she seemed like a nervous little mouse and now she was wanton with flushed skin and tangled hair everywhere, her body arching and grinding against him, and it was driving me mad.
We had to pause for a few practicalities, lube and strategically placed pillows. Maybe we hadn’t tried it ourselves, but we had been to enough vampire parties to have stumbled across everything.
Now Silvus groaned with unbidden pleasure as I slid into him, still feeling a slight embarrassment myself that Alissa would see me enjoying anyone but her—or a man.
I hated that she changed with every life, and became someone new and always with some new trouble to manage, and I supposed that I tried to never change, for my part. Even though she didn’t remember me like I remembered her.
And you couldn’t stop change.
Maybe you shouldn’t.
“Ohh…ohh god…” She let out a small giddy laugh when she saw me fuck Silvus and the look he must have on his face. She raked her hand through her hair, biting her lip.
Yes, it was wiped away when I saw that face. I felt as if I had them both at once, the two people I loved most, both of them under my spell and melting with pleasure, and it made me feel like I had the whole world in my grasp.
Why in the world would anyone start some terrible cult when they could just make two people this happy?
Johannes was not just evil, he was missing out on the best thing in life.
“Good lord…” Silvus panted, trying to hold back moans of pleasure, and then he broke entirely, and Alissa dug her fingers into his shoulders, both of them screaming together and then—what the hell. I screamed too as we all started coming together in a decadent mess.
Life was still too short to hold back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Alissa
“So…I talked to Alice for a while. Yesterday. And now…I thought we should talk.” Waldemar was sitting across from me at a shave ice place, the candy-colored pink and blue ice a stark contrast to Waldemar’s washed out complexion. However, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that Jie had suggested for blending in with the tourists. He looked miserable in it.
“You are my witch,” he said. “I shouldn’t talk to a stranger more than I talk to my own witch.”
“Is she a stranger?” I asked. “Still?”
“Ah—well—I mean, she was, when it began. As were you, but you are—as I said—my witch. I have not been treating you as I should.”
“You’re fine.”
“It is my duty in life to help you to be a stronger witch and support you in all things,” he said. “A grumpy, critical familiar is certainly not unusual, but if I’m being honest, I just didn’t want to meet you, and I didn’t want to get close to your mother either.”
“Why not?”
“Well…when the family died…your family, the Walvis clan…I should have died too. I didn’t. Clearly I had this purpose, to wait for you, but for me it has meant hundreds of years without any witch to serve. A familiar without any wizard. What is my purpose, during all that time? I have become a hermit. When your mother made a connection to me, I hadn’t spent time in the Fixed Plane in centuries, and I’d never spoken English before.”
“I guess I understand. Even though you look young right now, you’re an old man and—“
“I’m an ageless man,” he interrupted. “If I am a man at all.”
“My mother said your true form is an older man.”
“I don’t have a ‘true’ form. I’m whatever suits you,
” he said. “Ordinary familiars might have a true form, but clan familiars, we have to be able to change. It wouldn’t serve my clan best to appear the same way for an old warlock as for a very young witch. I know that in your heart, you like younger people best, and you trust them more than adults.”
“Well…young people are still innocent,” I said. “In the Order, the children still ask questions and break the rules, but once they’re out of school and married, almost no one does anymore.”
“Yes,” Waldemar said. “Children are not just innocent, they are trying to figure out how the world works. If I’m going to appear so young to you, I should learn from them. I’m also trying to figure out how this world works. All over again! Alice is still open to new ideas. She’s an interesting woman. I’m not sure I can give her what she wants, but…”
“Why not?” Then I caught myself. “I’m sorry. It isn’t really any of my business.”
“Too many reasons,” Waldemar said, but I still wondered what they were and why his pale skin was taking on some color.
“Oh—well—just be friends, at least! She needs friends.”
“She only wants to be my friend because I look young,” he said. “And I’m really not.”
“But she really isn’t either,” I said.
“I don’t think my company will do her any good, but…don’t worry. I’ll stick around. For a little while. Just to get you on your feet. You know what will happen if you decide to become a vampire. And…I don’t want you to hold back that decision on my account, just so you know.”
“I don’t want anyone else to die!” I said. “It seems like every person who shows me even a little bit of kindness dies! Not just my parents, but Paola…and Ulf…and then Alice nearly died herself! I know that was Ulf’s own decision, and maybe that’s true for you and Alice too, but I don’t want any more of it right now. If you can do one thing for me, it’s to not die. You can give up your magic instead, right?”
“What sort of life is that?” he snapped. “When did Alice nearly die?”
“She took—faery drugs.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t know if she wants me to talk about it.”
“So it was an accident? Or on purpose?”
“Maybe…between the two?” I bit my lip. “Don’t tell her I told you.”
“I won’t. It’s normal for you to tell me things. It isn’t normal for me to talk to all these other people.”
“I’m glad you are talking to me now.” I looked at his cup and laughed. “Your ice is turning into purple water, so maybe we should just eat.”
“Is ‘eat’ the right word for a bowl of ice?” He scooped out a spoonful. “What a world, when you can sit in the warm sunshine and have all the ice you want without using any magic at all. We used to have to cast spells to make icy treats in the summer.”
“I think that sounds much more interesting!”
“I guess we’ll learn from each other,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Alissa
I was whisked, unfortunately, from warm sunshine in Hawaii to thirty degree weather in Minsk, where we flew into Belarus.
“This has to be the most jarring trip on the planet,” Silvus said, as we drove under gray skies past huge concrete apartment buildings. “It’s as if former Soviet countries don’t know how to be cheerful, while Hawaii doesn’t know how to be sad.”
This seemed like a good assessment to me, although I felt that maybe the gray sky and cold just reminded me too much of the Order and I might have liked it otherwise. Some of the architecture, outside of the concrete apartments, seemed very grand and fairy tale-like, and the city was situated on a river—two rivers, actually.
My stomach was full of nerves.
For the first and only time, I was going to meet an ordinary human from another life I had lived, a life I had no memory of—my father, Ivan Kravchenko. “Ooh, sounds like an Olympian!” Alice said before she wished me well. It was just the five of us, as Alice had not been able to get a ticket to Minsk, so we parted ways at the airport in Hawaii.
I didn’t know what an Olympian was. There were still endless things I didn’t know. Jie explained on the flight that every four years, the whole world got together to play a bunch of sports, and there were a lot of names like that, “especially in the only sports Alice cares about—ice skating and gymnastics.”
“But your father was definitely not an Olympian,” Silvus told me, laughing a little. “He worked in an office and I think before that, he was a shopkeeper, but we didn’t speak Belarusian. I hope he’ll understand us when we ask about your grave.”
“It seemed like his English has gotten better on the phone,” Jie said.
We reached the very plain door in a very plain, windowless hall. Silvus knocked and the door immediately flung open. A grinning old man looked at me and his grin changed to near-tears. “Is this Alissa? My Svetlana?”
I nodded, immediately saddened by how old he was because he had a very kind face. He reached out his arms to hug me.
“You don’t remember me, I know. Now I know how you feel.” He looked at the vampires. “But you brought me my daughter to see one more time before I die. I see you. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I see you.”
“His English is great,” Jie said.
“Yes, I’ve been working on it all the time since Masha died.”
“And you look very well,” Rayner said. “I’m glad to see it.”
He invited us in to his small, lived-in apartment, that smelled like beef broth and dog. He had a small, old-looking white dog that looked at us with sweet, melancholy eyes from a pillow so covered in hair that the original color was lost to the ages. It definitely felt like the apartment of an old man whose wife had died, but this man who had been my father seemed like a happy man and the apartment also had pleasant paintings on the walls and handmade bits of knitting, crocheting and embroidery around for decor that made it seem like his wife’s presence was still keeping him cozy.
And yet—there was something odd and off at the same time that made my hair stand on end. I didn’t think it came from the old man himself. I kept feeling as if there was some danger I couldn’t pinpoint.
“I was making soup,” he said, explaining the smell and the pot on the stove. “In case you are hungry, Alissa. And the dog likes it too. I spoil her.”
My eyes—and Rayner’s—were on the photographs on the mantel of the young woman in turtlenecks, sweaters and 1980s bangs, who resembled another woman in a black and white photograph wearing a white lace blouse. Masha, I guessed.
It wasn’t hard for me to put the two together. “Is that me?” I asked, pointing at the turtleneck girl.
“Yes, yes, that’s you!” My father, or Svetlana’s father—I didn’t know how to think of him—rushed back over, abandoning the soup. He held up the picture, comparing it to my face. “See, I think there is a—a likeness, yes?”
“I think there is always a likeness,” Rayner said.
“I died young again…” I was starting to get used to this strange whirlwind of a life where I was always confronting old pieces of myself, but it was hard to reconcile my memories of a spirited Li Mei with her early death from tuberculosis, or that this grinning 1980s teenager had to die young enough to allow me time to become myself. I had the weird feeling that I had robbed her of her life.
Maybe this is why I feel odd, I thought. I kept looking around, as if for clues, but maybe it was simply that I was surrounded by memories of another life cut short.
“We lived in a little village,” the old man said. “That is now part of the Exclusion Zone.”
“The Exclusion Zone?”
“From Chernobyl,” Jie said. “It was a nuclear power plant that had a terrible incident, and sent radiation all over the place. It’s toxic to humans, at varying levels, so it might kill you fast, or it might kill you slow, or it might not kill you at all, but now all the land where the radioactivity went is an abandoned wastel
and.”
“How horrible! So it’s like poison in the air?”
“It gets into everything. The ground. The stuff people left behind. I’m going to guess you don’t know the first thing about nuclear power plants. That’s okay, Thom doesn’t either.”
“I’m just here to look pretty,” Thom said, shrugging.
“Many people got cancer,” my father said. “Your mother eventually died of it too, although it seemed to affect young people more. I always said I came from strong stock. Too strong, maybe. I’m eighty-five now. But, I like living, as long as it lasts. When I am gone, you can come here and take anything you want, if there is anything worth having.”
“You have some very pretty things!” I said. “I like the paintings.”
“I did those!” he said. “I paint to keep busy. I’m not too bad, eh?” He looked like the compliment made him antsy and went up to stir the soup again. “But you came for business.”
“Well…yes,” Silvus said. “It might be tricky business. I’m not sure how to say it delicately. We need something of Svetlana’s…remains.”
“Remains?”
“It’s the only way to protect Alissa.” Silvus explained the spell as the old man seemed so unflappable that they must have told him everything on some earlier visit.
“You want to exhume Svetlana? She’s buried right here in the city! I’m not sure how this could be done.”
“I was afraid of that…” Silvus started murmuring to himself about spells.
“You never visited my grave before?” I asked.
“I never visit your graves,” Rayner said, so fiercely that I wondered if he was feeling something strange too. “There is nothing of your soul there in those gloomy places. I don’t dwell on your death when I could be thinking of where you’re living next.”
“What about hair?” asked my father. “I have a lock of her hair!”
“Yes, yes, that will do nicely,” Silvus said, looking relieved. “That’s what we’re using, mostly. Thank god. I should have asked for that first.”
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