I tried to find my way to Jodie using my mind’s telepathy. However she was completely lost to me and I had no idea where she was, who she really was, nor if she was even alive. My powers of mind were wholly blocked where she was concerned. I had no doubt Leticia was responsible.
AS night fell, as per usual, Leticia’s house awoke and the evening’s festivities began with a ritual slaying in the Throne Room, where two or three, maybe even more, victims were offered to the masses for a delicious feast. These offerings were sometimes humans from the outlying villages but were more often freshly changed vampires who had crossed Leticia with their naïve, incompetent ways. She was entirely shameless and this was one of the reasons I despised her.
Neighbours must have imagined a serial killer lived nearby, explaining several systematic disappearances, but Leticia’s powers kept Valdoria sheltered from human detection and for that reason her foul deeds had remained uncontested for centuries in just this manner. Her powers also brought vampires to Valdoria like me, drawing us like animals to the scene of a kill, her mind control so powerful I’d always wondered at its reach. Now I knew.
After her usual sunset feast, as per routine, Leticia entered the chamber she was keeping me in. She’d used it for centuries as her sexual domain, though her real bed hid in some dungeon, and I fancied this was some room she had cast a spell on to boost the sexual festivities she enjoyed within these walls, not just with me but perhaps hundreds of other vampires too. I couldn’t explain her enjoyment of me in any other way because I knew without doubt, she did not love me. She loved nobody.
“Fabien, are you tired of me yet?” she shrilled in English as she stalked around the bed in her blood-red robes, her skin pallid but beautiful, her eyes as orange as a dying star—they changed colour often, depending on her mood. She was English-born and I didn’t wonder if that was why she was so warped.
I lied to appease her… “I exist to satisfy you. I know my mistake now.”
I was so determined to escape, I was using every talent I possessed to keep her out of my head so she couldn’t see what I really had planned.
“Fabien,” she said in an accusatory manner, “it took me over three hundred years to find you. It took thirty days of lashings to tame you once more. It still doesn’t matter what I do to prove how much you mean to me, you don’t care for my love, do you?”
Three hundred years was nothing to us immortals yet her change of tack alarmed me.
“You do not love me, Leticia. I am just a minion and I know it. I’m happy to be your servant,” I said, entreating her to cease her maudlin rhetoric, “just tell me what you need and I will provide.”
“Your love,” she said, “it’s all I have ever wanted my darling.”
I had to hide my recoil as she called me her darling. Foul, foul she-beast!
I loved her no more than a polar bear loved the desert!
“Leticia, untie me and I shall show you.”
“Not tonight,” she warned, “I hear we have strange company tonight and I shall not risk losing you, not again. Tonight, you shall remain just like this. Just so. Mine for the taking.”
She shed her clothes with ease, the drawstring of her robe releasing to unfurl swathes of velvet and reveal her exquisite body, unchanged over the centuries.
Naked already, for naked is the state I had been kept in since I had returned three months previously, she licked her lips when she saw me become erect. It wasn’t an affectionate reaction or even a lustful promise, either. The thought of blood from her is what drove me to become excited because I was so hungry and I was so used to sex and blood when it came to her and our ministrations.
“Leticia,” I sighed with yet more false promise, “such a graceful body… such pigments… your ripe sex, as lovely to me as ever.”
Her sex wasn’t like any ordinary female’s, it was always like a virgin’s, every time. Entry was always so stubborn and painful for the both of us but yielded the most awe-inducing pleasure. After all pleasure and pain was what we both enjoyed, so very much.
She was superhuman and more than that, physical perfection. However I just did not love her. She never gave anything to me but her body. She never showed me she could be frail or vulnerable, and I didn’t care for someone so cold. Even if she did claim to love me, I didn’t believe it.
Her breasts never sagged and the nipples always hard, and deep-red, even sometimes purple, she enjoyed being sucked for hours sometimes. She was my perfect mate.
I just could not see myself to love her and this was obviously my tragedy.
If she got tired of trying to win my love, I’d no doubt face the chop.
She stood by my side and offered me her wrist and I chomped into it immediately. As I fed with my eyes closed, our thought processes joined and she communicated to me what she wanted to do with me that night. First she wanted to bite into every bit of my body, sucking and licking the blood as it poured from me. She also wanted to swallow my cock and after that, offer me her sex to feast on as I pleased. She wanted anal sex and so much more, her mind told me, and I became worried because she had never offered me the full array before. She usually drip-fed me her platter of delights but tonight, she was offering me everything at once.
“Famished, are you, Leticia?” I asked as she pulled her wrist away, my strength regaining with the feed she’d just let me have.
“Absolutely starved,” she replied, and she climbed on top of me, her long, long hair coating our bodies like a blanket as she bit into my neck and took my thoughts from me.
I tried to set my mind on her, and her alone, but I didn’t know if I was showing her what she wanted to see. In the back of my mind was always Jodie, or Juniper. I worked as hard as I could to please her with thoughts of how her body aroused mine, but I had no love to give, and I couldn’t conjure loving thoughts from nowhere.
“Ah, Fabien,” she growled and pulled away with blood dripping from her mouth, “your indifference only makes me want you more. It always has. You’re the antidote to my own cold heartedness. I love you.”
She’d never uttered those exact words before. I did not, nor could I force myself to reciprocate, so I said in a bellowing voice, “I love your candour, my dear.”
She laughed manically, sitting herself across my body, her torso stone cold aside from where she was warm at her sex. My penis was the only warmth I possessed, too, for our blood always gathered so hot right there and only there—and I felt a desperate desire to ask her to merge our bodies at the warm parts. It was purely physical.
She read my urge and lifted so she levitated, then plunged down onto me. I howled with the pain of such tight entry.
I shook my shackles, the bed rocking, and she screamed, “Yes, Fabien! Try to escape. Try to, my love. Fight and suffer to have me! I love the power I hold over you!”
She pulled at fistfuls of her hair and drew herself up and down, still levitating, her lithe and perfect body using my cock and my cock alone.
She took every inch, sliding slowly up and down to enjoy the agony with as much intensity as possible. Her legs went into such a strong spasm as she began to orgasm, she could no longer focus on lifting up and down so she fell deep onto me.
Paralysed by pleasure, an orgasm tearing through her, I had no option but to try to lift my pelvis up and down. As I performed this move, she wrapped her arms around her head—an usual paralysis not just of body but of mind seeming to have taken her.
She struggled with her emotions, her fangs long, her eyes as azure-blue as a human’s—a sign she was very sad and would soon be very angry in exchange.
She grabbed my wrist as I thrust up into her from below and while drinking from me, the bloodlust and fever attached gathered us both into its bosom and we wrapped ourselves up in the delirium. Shutting myself off to thought or feeling, all I could feel was the pulsing, throbbing hot propulsion of ejaculation, almost shooting then not, her almost contracting, then not. We took our minds to a place where we could hide and l
et the euphoria of physical intimacy take over.
It lasted I don’t know how long, but when she could no longer contain it, she squeezed so hard around me I yelled and growled in agony, “LETICIA! STOP!”
She couldn’t. The physical mating was so powerful.
We were the two most powerful vampires on earth, I felt sure of it, and neither one of us had found a physical match except in each other.
If only she was a soulful match but when you don’t have a soul and you’re seeking one, the same of your kind simply will not do. Juniper was my soul, my love, and my only connection to an existence better than this.
The orgasm over, the joining of our bodies like a poker razed in hot fires too long, it was agony to release one another but we quickly healed in the aftermath.
“You still do not believe me, but I do, I love you Fabien,” she said with red eyes and began feasting from my body, biting and lapping the spill.
I occasionally caught a nibble of her when she allowed it.
She swallowed me, too, just as she had said she would.
She also let me feast from her sex as she held onto the headboard behind me.
She untied me after all that and asked I make love to her and I did, slowly and with kisses. When she fell asleep in my arms, I thought that was perhaps my chance to escape.
If only the bell to alert of an intruder hadn’t rang, Leticia might not have pounced upon me and said with guilt, sadness and betrayal mixed in her eyes, “You’re mine. Nobody else shall have you. Now, you must die.”
She dug her fangs into me and drank so strongly, I was taken under to somewhere black, somewhere endless.
JODIE
Two Hours Before
THOUGH OUR LOVE seemed doomed, I couldn’t turn my back on him, it just wasn’t possible. We hadn’t committed so many sacrifices without careful consideration or without the certainty we were meant to be as one—which was why I was risking my life to get to him. I felt sure she had him trapped in Krill Castle or else, why would he have never returned to me? Whatever was to come, surely she would know how to reach him at least? If she didn’t have him or know what had become of him, surely she had the power to find out? Even as I tried to tell myself she cared for Fabien, I knew she really didn’t!
I knew where Krill was hidden because they’d brought me here in my past life to kill me. I was astonished that day to realise her fortress was invisible to the naked eye until passing beyond a perimeter guarded by her vampires. Her magic almost certainly held the shield in place so nobody from outside the vampire world knew her grand, extravagant home was situated conveniently next door to human settlements.
So after flying to Odessa Airport in Ukraine via traditional means i.e. commercial carrier, I hired a car and drove the short distance to Lower Dniester National Park where her foul residence existed in a tiny, little country she’d named Valdoria.
I parked a mile away from where I knew Krill hid and loaded my backpack with supplies in case I got lost. This was highly unlikely though because in my former life, I knew this country like the back of my hand. I once chased through these forests and meadows on horseback, an accomplished rider and yet an even more accomplished tracker. I used to hunt deer for Father and we lived handsomely off my catch. When I was Juniper my father and I lived quietly and in relative seclusion; my mother and twin sister died in childbirth and he had never recovered. The father of Jodie was a different man entirely and yet not unfamiliar either.
Centuries had passed and yet as I began my climb towards modern-day Krill Castle, I noticed trails and trees hadn’t altogether changed and felt sure I could navigate effectively. I almost cried in fact as I appreciated the lush greenery and expanse of natural habitat. The smell of my former home transported me to another time—such fresh, clean air. I was reminded of a childhood spent free of fear and threat, when as Juniper, I’d lived as I pleased.
I wished I had more time to reflect but I had to move quickly.
MORE than an hour of climbing later (for it was uphill to Krill), I reached a sentry—a vampire sitting on a rock, sharpening his incisors with a dangerous knife. He seemed happy, hiding in the shadows beneath some tall, overgrown spruce and I watched sparks fly from the metal with every eye-watering stroke against his fangs. Bored no doubt, the enamel almost wore away completely before growing back again. Maybe he was hungry.
A huntress, I was careful to go quietly, to shadow myself behind trees and boulders as I neared him. I’d tried to mask my human scent by rubbing mud and leaves of the forest on my skin but it was no guarantee I’d go undetected.
I had no idea how to get past this male vampire. I knew he’d no doubt be much stronger than I and not only that, he could feed from me and kill me before I ever knew anything about it. Vampire venom had the power to anaesthetise even the strongest man on earth and incapacitate him while giving the blood-thief chance to feed heartily.
What to do, what to do?
I was over-thinking this, I knew it.
I had to seduce him, it would be simple. I was beautiful, I knew it, because I had ensnared the most handsome vampire there was. This one would be a walk in the park, I told myself.
Behind my boulder, I shook off my backpack and the hiking jacket I wore. I pulled my hair from its band and shook it out. In my bag, I took out some red lipstick and applied liberally the colour of blood. I felt I was so close to getting Fabien back, I had to do what I had to do.
I kept only my most important possessions in my pockets and left my backpack and jacket behind, walking toward the vampire in jeans, hiking boots and a thin sweater—the cool of early spring in those hills ever-present.
I pushed my boobs out as I walked, sweeping my hair over one shoulder. He didn’t flinch as I neared him so obviously he knew I had been skulking around.
In Russian he said, “Madam, how do you come to be out here?”
“I want to be like you,” I told him in our language, “I heard a rumour and here I am.”
He was at my side within the blink of an eye, smelling my throat. “The stink of you is engrossing. I cannot get you out of my nostrils. You think you can come and outwit a vampire? Stupid girl.”
“I don’t think,” I said, grabbing his hands and pushing them to my breasts, “I know.”
His eyes became feral, the pupils entirely eclipsing any of the natural colour left in them. He pulled away sharply, nervously combing his hair back behind his ears. It was as though he had orders. His fangs grew long and he hissed at me, like a cat, trying to ward away unwanted attention.
“I’m so fresh and untouched. I’m young and nubile. I’ll make a good mate,” I tried to argue, wrapping long strands of blonde hair around my fingers.
He rushed at me and began feeding and the sensation was almost debilitating, pleasure and pain wrapped in one, tidy, neatly intoxicating package. As he fed, he too was somewhat unconscious with pleasure, but I was thinking only of my Fabien and I couldn’t get him out of my head. He was on my mind and I had to save him. The instinct to get to my love was so powerful, that despite the power this vampire possessed as he fed, I managed to find some strength to reach into the back pocket of his slacks and steal the knife he was previously playing with.
A simple, retractable weapon, it released easily, and I swiftly brought the knife round to his chest and stabbed him in the dead heart he’d had clattering around in there for who knows how long.
Blood spewing from his mouth, his eyes turned entirely white, shocked beyond comprehension.
“I am Fabien’s,” I warned him, “now to hell with you!”
He fell on his back, irrevocably felled, and gradually his mass faded to dust and he became a part of the forest—his matter floating up into the air, drifting like dandelion pollen—the ashes evaporating as they hit shards of sunlight breaking through the thick canopy of trees overhead.
He was gone but his impact not undone. I held my throbbing, painful neck and instinctively knew if he’d fed much longer, I wouldn
’t have survived—not naturally, anyway. He was getting carried away and I was lucky to escape when I did.
I ran back behind my boulder and collected my things, heading off on my way again. I walked only 20 yards more before the sight of Krill suddenly flashed into life right before my eyes—the invisible shield behind me finally. I’ve made it through the barrier, but I don’t know how, I told myself wearily.
Made entirely of black marble, the sight of Krill was still as astonishing as when I first beheld it some three centuries before.
The sky directly above me was blue, a cloud or two at most. It was a cool but beautiful day and birds chirruped, water flowed from crevices all around, like little streams from rock faces. A gentle breeze filled my nostrils with the scents of wild flowers and fast-growing grass.
The most amazing thing was that an umber-orange sort of gloom hung directly above Krill but to get there to the castle, one had to pass by all this beauty on the way! All these streams and springs full of colourful wildlife and thick, green hills! I let myself absorb the beauty I had to walk by before I got to where she lived, which in comparison, was devoid of life entirely.
Her poison chalice beyond this contradictory surround awaited me and I couldn’t be complacent.
I began jogging my way up the last of the climb, dodging the darker, more shadowy areas as I ran between trees, keeping to the light of day to protect myself.
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