“No, I want what you can never give me.”
“I can give you anything, my rose.”
“Are you capable of love?” She was here because she loved him, and what she wanted more than anything was to be loved. Loved despite that she was plain and her heart alloyed with darkness.
Out came the giant wings with a restless snap. They were only a shadowy blur until they stilled precariously overhead, outstretched like frightening scimitars. “Teach me.”
“I thought you were to be my preceptor tonight,” she whispered, awe-struck again by those wings.
He folded his wings behind him like a black cloak. “Perhaps we may learn from each other.”
“Then I wish to learn something of your dark gifts?”
He made an impatient sound. “What are you driving at?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Tell me, Markus, can you not control minds even a little?”
“Not even a little. Telepathy is not a talent I possess.”
Well, deep down she’d known her darkness was hers alone, not some seed planted by him. She believed him too. Lying seemed to be beneath him, he appeared to relish the truth in all its stark shades. There was no need for lies when truths were unsavory enough. But she was neither relieved nor disappointed by this revelation. Neither option was palatable in the end, for if she was not a victim of mind-control then she was a sickly rose. The latter was an odium she could far better abide than the idea of having her thoughts tampered with. Fortunately, or tragically, he was merely the impetus that awakened her to her own inner daimon.
“Did you come here only to theologize, Emma?”
No, she had come to meet the dawn in his bed, a fact he well knew. She shook her head.
“Some Madeira, my love?” he asked, backing away. He then lifted a silver decanter from the side cabinet, a questioning arch to his black brow.
“I thank you, no. Your…love—” her lips quirked ironically “—chooses to remain abstemious.”
“Your abstinence does not, I hope, extend to the fruits of the flesh?”
Her cheeks flushed with the innuendo. “Well, no, I…that is to say, I did not mean…” She fidgeted with her skirt. Lord, she was making a hash of things! Why was he just staring at her in that devilish manner? And why could she not untie her tongue from her tonsils? “On second thought,” she said, “I will take that glass of Madeira.”
“Excellent.” There was a flash of a fang as the corner of his mouth lifted. He poured the amber liquid into the cut crystal. “It seems that I have a talent for mind-control after all.” He was brave to tease her about that so soon.
She gave a soft snort as he slipped the delicate crystal stem between her waiting fingers. Unsurprisingly, he took none for himself. He was right to fortify her with wine, the night was yet young and her courage required whatever liquid reinforcement was at her disposal. Except blood. That she would not drink. Not ever.
Pressing the crystal to her lips, she luxuriated in the bolstering warmth of the wine as it rushed into her belly. He was barefoot, she noticed, and it occurred to her that she ought to do as the Romans do. She set her crystal on the marble-top commode and stepped out of her satin slippers.
This pleased him, or so his grin communicated. But as his eyes dropped to her crucifix, the smile faded. “Since you will not wear my sigil, perhaps I ought to devise a more permanent solution.”
“Have you no other necklace to spare?” She did not regret transferring his protection to Milli.
“Think you I have them growing rampant on my necklace tree?”
“Then how shall you—”
“Oh, we shall adorn your throat with something…” His wings whispered insidiously over the floor as he approached his bed.
“Do all vampyres have wings?” she asked.
“Not all sanguisuges are made equal. There is a vast difference between those like myself, the Fallen, and those that are merely vampyres; and an even greater disparity exists between vampyres and wights.”
“What are wights?”
“The undead; those that serve us.”
“So Mrs. Skinner—”
“Is a wight, yes.”
“And Victoria? Is she wight or Fallen?”
“Betwixt and between.” He was evidently becoming impatient with her dilly-dallying.
“But you both look alike.” Save the wings, of course.
“I disguise my terrifying splendor behind my aegis the same way I shield my wings.”
“Your aegis?”
“Just another mask, my rose; Victoria and I are not the same animal.”
“So you are not in your true form?”
“No,” he said.
“Am I to give myself to a creature who hides behind his…aegis? Remove the mask, Markus.”
“In the dark, we are truly ourselves, you know. Does it really matter what I look like in the light? Are you so easily enchanted by a pretty face? Or is the man behind the face the true object of your fascination?”
He had her there. “I suppose not.” A handsome face could only beguile for a short while—the character of the soul within was what sustained her ever increasing fascination. “Are you…is your face misshapen?”
“Misshapen?” He ran his tongue over a fang in amusement. “That is for you to say.”
Well, if he was able to see past her plain features, surely she could look past an ugly face. At least she hoped she could. “Does Victoria wear an aegis too?” No woman had any right to such supernatural beauty.
“Victoria and the wights are as you see them; but they cannot walk in the sunlight as I can, they require cloud cover at the very least. There, will that satisfy your curiosity for tonight?”
“Not by half.” Her eyes shifted pointedly to his grandiose bed. “Do vampyres sleep at all?”
“Like the dead,” he said. “How do you like my bed? It once belonged to a famous Wallachian dragon.”
“It’s rather more like a barbaric tabernacle than a bed.”
He considered this, apparently delighted by the comparison, and seated himself at the edge of his monstrous fourposter. “A tabernacle, eh? How fitting, for I certainly mean to worship here…” He ran his hand over the counterpane, his black wings stark against the silky vermillion. “I worship pleasure, Emma.” With an imperceptible nod, he bade her closer.
Emma’s heart was clamoring like a bird’s as she approached the bed. She tacitly gave him her back so that he might unfasten the dress for her. He took his time popping each nacreous button that lay along her spine. Once her gown was pooled around her feet, the same unhurried method was employed to unfasten her stays, after which the corset was relinquished to the floor. He then plucked the pins from her hair so that the locks fell unbound around her shoulders like dark silk. When she had stepped out of the puddle of silk, pins, and whale bone, she turned around to face him in nothing more than her satin chemise.
It gratified her to see desire ripple within those liquid dark pools as he beheld her. In that moment his eyes said more than his lips. “I want to consume you,” they said. It was a gaze into which she might be lost forever, no more than a phantom derelict adrift in the fog of an eternal desert sea.
Emma stretched out hesitant fingers towards his wings, but she halted just shy of touching them, her stillness questioning. Like a carved god, he remained motionless—answer enough that she had his permission to continue her examination. They ruffled slightly beneath her touch, damask stretched across iron vanes, strangely unyielding, yet soft to the touch.
“They’re beautiful,” she said. “What else can you do besides fly?”
Instead of answering her, his eyes flashed with wicked intent. The next moment the candles in the room were swiftly doused and the night rushed into the room. She could see very little by the light of the crescent moon. It did not follow, however, that he was night-blinded too. She knew he could see her with his otherworldly sight.
“How remarkable,” she whispered, disquieted.
The peculiar demise of her candle earlier was a mystery no longer unsolved. The darkness was such that her remaining senses were intensified, she could actually hear her own heartbeats in the hush. “Will you now bring them back to life?”
“You mistake me for the Nazarene.” His voice was thick with irony. “I kill things, I certainly don’t resurrect them.”
Without warning, he was lifting her in his arms. Before the startled gasp escaped her lips, she was supine atop the silks and feathered pillows. The nuance of questing fingers bold against her flesh affected her tenfold now that she could not rely on her eyes to follow his movements. Another gasp quickened in the dark as her chemise was tugged from her with a brisk ripping sound. Her skin puckered instantly against the startling cold caress of the nighttime air upon her loins. Merciful Heaven! She was now utterly bare and could feel the overwhelming brush of his gaze.
“What is that mark at your navel?” he asked.
Her body jolted at the sudden touch of his fingers as they began gliding over her belly with maddening languor. Her muscles tautened with anticipation of his going lower. Much lower.
“How should I know?” she whispered. “You won’t resurrect a candle for me to see by.”
“But I see you best in the dark.” His voice was thick with shadows and hunger, the intonation of a sensual epicurean. Lower still went his thrilling hand, roving at the vale of her hip before he paused and lowered his canines to press gently, insistently, at her inner thigh. “Here in the darkness, the shameless in you cannot hide from the devil in me.”
“Yes,” she admitted breathily. She had ever been an open book to him, but she could not claim the same of him; she required light to see. “Light a candle, won’t you? I dislike knowing that I am being watched in my blindness.”
“As you wish,” said he, leaning away to do as she asked. “You are to understand, however, that most ladies prefer to make love in the darkness.”
Her lips were parched with desire. “And is that what we’re doing? Making love?”
“As much as can be expected between wolf and lamb.” Shadows shifted across her skin as he brought the candle towards her and placed it atop the nightstand. He made no secret of his thirst for blood and hunger for flesh—it was there in the gaze that traced her contours. The mattress dipped as he brought his knee down beside her hip and leaned over her. His shirt and trousers were long since removed.
“I craved your flesh that night. I crave it still. And your blood most of all.” The memory of those words still resonated in her marrow. “Do you still…” She swallowed audibly. “Do you still want to eat me, Markus?”
“Always,” he growled, and then swiftly captured her mouth in a branding kiss. The time for talk was at an end.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Vampyre Kiss
Emma’s lashes drifted to her cheeks. Her arms were torpid with passion as she lifted them around Markus’s neck. He availed himself of every inch of skin she offered, his lips like hot silk against her throat. Her breath hitched to feel the teasing pressure of long fangs over her collar bone. But he allowed only the smooth, pearly length of them to skim along her skin, never the lethal edge. When at last he pulled them away, her flesh unscathed, she was both relieved and disappointed.
A disappointment short-lived, for he transferred his attentions instead to her heaving chest. Her heart fetched a languorous sigh that stumbled huskily from her lips. Strong hands delved lower, pleasure bound, whilst his mouth possessed itself of a fleshy peak, rigid and pink with anticipation. Eyes glazed with pleasure, she dug her nails into his midnight hair, her fingers stiffening gloriously each time his canines brushed her pebbled flesh. When he had kissed and venerated every inch of her breasts, he pulled her fists out of his hair and secured them above her head with her torn and discarded shift. He then bound them to the gargoyle crouched over his bedpost so that when she lifted her head back it was to see her fettered wrists clasped in the claws of a leering dragon, and she the cruciate prey beneath him. She ought to have been frightened both by her bondage and the sneering dragon, but she was all the more aroused.
When she shifted her gaze from that fearsome dragon, it was to see Markus watching her from where he knelt between her parted thighs, bold and proud as the Greek warriors of old.
Emma forced her gaze up to his face, blood quickening at her cheeks, and met his knowing eyes. He released her gaze to follow his finger as it circled the crescent moon below her navel. His touch excited ripples along her flesh.
So it was her birthmark that had interested him earlier when he’d doused the flames. She herself hardly ever gave it a thought. Yet he appeared fascinated by the mark, and transfixed by her hips and thighs. His eyes continued following his hand over her flesh, taut across veins and bone and sinew.
Where his fingers moved his lips soon followed. And then his teeth. He bit her gently where the skin over her hip was most sensitive, albeit not hard enough to draw blood. Again, she was torn between relief and keen frustration.
Wherever his kisses roved, she felt worshipped. He was reverent, teasing, and fearsome in his lovemaking. Without warning, he dipped lower and was suddenly kissing her where she ached the most! A sinful kiss at the very gates of Heaven. Her whimper of surprise transmuted instantly to a groan of agonizing rapture. She wanted desperately to push his head away—and that only for a brief moment—but her hands were not hers to control. Feverishly, she writhed, desperate for that elusive freedom in the undulating shadows of that fearsome tabernacle. But the release she craved was always out of reach no matter how she strained to follow. Each time she closed in, she thought she might shatter like a porcelain cup against the flags. But Markus would pause his sweet assault again and again, and that divine frustration mounted ever higher and higher. She was sure she might weep or rage or claw the feathers clean from his pillows (perhaps even his wings) if he continued these torturous caresses.
He seemed to revel in her mindless abandon. Just when she was sure she could take no more of his rapturous brand of torture, she was delivered of her meed at long last. At that most euphoric crest of her ruinous cries, one of his wings shot out like a blade and severed her binding from the watchful black dragon, and she collapsed like a splintered ship as wave after wave rushed through her. Had her gaze not been so befogged by her climactic undoing, she might have witnessed the action as more than just a dark blur overhead. The next instant, she was lifted upright onto his lap, his fingers vice-like at her thighs. Her legs were boneless, folded around his hips, her chest flush with his.
In this position she was at liberty to bury her fingers in his wings, savoring each luxuriant blade. She was soon lost to another maelstrom of deep and fervid kisses, his arms and torso were locked around her like unyielding marble.
The painful sting of white hot heat snatched the breath from her lungs. It ripped her from the celestial beauty of his embrace. She gave a hiss of surprise, her fingers becoming claws.
Markus brushed her damp hair out of her face and soothed her with soft kisses. “And now,” he said against her throat, “I make you mine…” And then he struck like an adder.
Emma made no sound—it was that swift—as his fangs plunged deep. Near as deep, she was sure, as that painful shaft embedded below. But as he drew from her vein, the pain of the bite seemed to flow out of her through that sharp, dark kiss. With it the throbbing between her thighs subsided.
That she could find even a drop of ecstasy in such savagery was unexpected. She clung to him, reveling in the intimacy. Perhaps she would have drawn blood also, but her nails, long and honed as they were, indented his flesh not even a little. They were no match for granite. Still, he gave an appreciative growl as she raked his back with hearty, feline sighs and rhapsodies.
He began guiding her hips back and forth in long strokes that only indurated his flesh all the more and spiked her own fever to ever higher peaks. The lusty rhythm of her heart, neither exhausted nor depleted by his ravening vampyre k
iss, seemed only to arouse his formidable appetence still more. In that moment she would have died the happiest of women if he’d drank every last drop of blood gushing hotly from her vein. A ferocious and forbidden coupling it was.
She was glutted on pleasure, her flesh once more coiling like a spring. The thunderous beats of her heart, the sound of his greedy breaths, and the fervent gale of his wings served as a beatific concert of their earthly union. Not even the storm that had battered the castle earlier had raged with such passion as passed betwixt she and her vampyre.
With a mighty roar, the denouement came. He snapped his head back, releasing her throat. She fell against him, violently unraveled. Obliteration shook her so fiercely it shattered her very soul.
Trembling with after-ripples, she felt herself lowered back down to the mattress, her body wonderfully and indescribably limp as his weight settled beside her. Beneath closed lids, she felt him nuzzle her neck from behind with lapping kisses. So tender was her inamorato that she uttered a contented sigh, enjoying the feel of his finger gently tracing her grimalkin smile. To have surrendered that which can be lost only once, that most sanguinary of jewels, Emma ought to have felt bereft. But she didn’t. Not in the least. Her virtue was gladly cast aside forever. There was a sort of freedom here in his arms and she relished it.
“There is no question now to whom you belong,” he said.
She opened one scowling eye at him, but his wolfish grin was too catching. “I should be outraged at your audacity, but I find I cannot summon the will just now.”
“Then I ought to keep you always naked in my bed.”
She yawned. “I fear I do not have enough essence in my heart to sustain that whim, vampyre.”
Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1) Page 30