He couldn’t look Esther in the eye, more like. He had to hide behind big mirrored lenses, about the only place you could hide out here. Whenever Esther looked at him, all she got were reflections.
Bird called across the ice. ‘Hey, looks like a carcass!’
The wind was gathering and snowflakes whirled in the dimness.
Esther stabbed her poles harder, heaving on her sledge, eager to join Bird as he hauled closer to the lump on the ice.
‘Fox,’ he said as Esther approached. ‘What a beauty.’
Snowflakes flitted across the beams of their headtorches as they studied the creature, its white fur stiff with icicles, mouth sagging open, gums and yellow teeth exposed. Drifts of snow slanted against its belly, and its neck was ripped open in a meaty gash, the snow pink and pitted where blood had seeped down.
‘Funny kill,’ said Esther. ‘What did that?’
‘Dunno,’ said Bird. ‘Weird. It’s hardly been touched.’ He toed the fox with his boot. ‘Not much blood either.’
‘Must have been a while ago,’ said Esther. ‘Tracks are all covered.’
‘Hmm. Maybe,’ said Bird.
Johannes approached. ‘My God,’ he said brightly. ‘Precisely in the neck! It is looking like vampire bat.’
Esther laughed, yet even as she did so she felt a sense of unease. She turned to see Doug trekking on his own, his headlamp shining in the snow-filled dusk, a lonely figure bent like a cripple and refusing to be drawn.
And she looked back at the fox, remembering another tale of two stranded explorers who’d survived for weeks by drinking each other’s blood. A man and a boy, she seemed to think, stuck on the coast. Yes, they’d drunk blood from a shoe, that was it.
Halogen light danced over the dead fox. Its throat sparkled like spilt rubies, the stained snow glittering like crushed pink glass. And Esther thought of those two men gazing at a frozen ocean, the blood thick and warm in their mouths.
She screwed her eyes shut, wishing she didn’t think these things. Iciness stippled her cheeks as snowflakes hit. She wished she could clear her mind and escape all the stories. Out here, they always seemed too real.
To the untrained eye, Hope’s End was nothing but a blip on the landscape, a hump of snow in a waste of ice. A Cold War relic modelled on igloo curves, it had fallen into the hands of the vampire community when one or two significant maps had been redrawn, and one or two significant people had been killed, easy things to achieve when there are vampires in high places. Mortals might be surprised by the number of monsters at the Pentagon.
No, you wouldn’t know the camp was there. Its entrance was a crevice in a bank of snow zig-zagging down to the building itself, a huge high-tech dome with comfortable living quarters, two redundant research labs, a gym, a sun room and vast amounts of storage space. Its inner walls were formed of billowing curves that had something to do with tensile architecture and insulated breeze block. Billy didn’t know how it worked. All he knew was that it did; and that was thanks to the billions of dollars invested in military science.
All this sophistication at the vampires’ service, and Suzanne had nearly blown it. Billy was furious. He strode down the corridor, combat boots thumping, in one hand a dead white fox, in the other a dead white hare. His muscles flexed beneath his white T-shirt and dustings of snow melted in his wake.
Why the hell did she have to turn up? For months, he and Simeon had lived alone, everything fine. Suzanne appears and it’s chaos. Fucking chaos.
In the main room of the dome, a sparsely furnished arena where candles cast shadows onto curved white walls, Suzanne lay naked on a polar bear rug. Her honey-pale limbs and honey-blonde curls gleamed in the fake firelight. The polar bear was open-jawed, head fixed in a mute roar. By Suzanne’s side was Renfield, their pet cat, a fluffy vampire pedigree, purring contentedly as Suzanne plucked single strands from its silvery blue fur.
Billy slung the two carcasses across the room. Streaks of blood smeared on the faux stone floor as the bodies skidded towards the rug. The cat scarpered with a yowl and the animals lay there, glassy-eyed, old blood clogging their white fur like damson jelly.
Suzanne recoiled. ‘Ugh,’ she cried, rolling away with her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, that’s rank!’
Billy’s face was impassive, his voice quietly menacing. ‘It’s your kill,’ he said.
‘Oh, take it away,’ complained Suzanne. ‘I’m sorry, OK? Now, take it away.’
She turned to face the fire, presenting Billy with her pert little ass, hand still clamped to her mouth. He wasn’t moved in the slightest, not today.
‘You need to clean up after yourself, Suzanne,’ he warned.
‘I forgot,’ said Suzanne.
‘People are trekking out there. All it takes is one stupid –’
‘I know, I know,’ said Suzanne. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘I know it won’t,’ said Billy. ‘Because, if it does, I will chain you up in the play room. I will deny you sex and blood. And you will be so tormented you’ll start wishing you were mortal.’
Billy ran his hand over his head, palm skimming his beige-blond mohawk. Broad-chested and lightly tanned, he cut a punkish military figure in khakis, tight T-shirt and scuffed army boots. Some vampires found him scary. Suzanne, damn her, wasn’t one of them.
She rolled onto her back, knees flopping wide. ‘Do you want to fuck?’ she cooed, splaying herself with her fingers. Shadows danced on her skin, and beneath her trimmed golden pubes, her scarlet slit glinted.
‘No.’ Billy meant it. She was too obvious. He was already bored of her.
‘Oh, c’mon, Billy Boy. There’s nothing to do around here. Just a little fuck.’ Suzanne squashed her breasts together and waggled a pointy, lascivious tongue at him.
Billy ignored her and went to retrieve the carcasses just as Simeon wandered into the room, three large phials in his hand. A pallid lanky figure with bony features and long black hair, he had that air of Transylvanian nobility Billy really went for.
When Simeon spotted the carcasses, he drawled, ‘Oh, must we make the place untidy?’
He flicked his head, making his black hair swing, a theatrical gesture that today irked Billy. The two men had been together centuries (though it was a bit on-off) and, having no reflections, were more familiar with each other’s face than their own. ‘I don’t know where you end and I begin,’ Simeon used to say in the nineteenth century when they were tragically in love, as was the fashion.
In some ways, those blurred boundaries would always hold true. Billy often felt he could only see himself through Simeon’s eyes. ‘You have the most perfect straight nose,’ Simeon would say. Or, ‘Your eyes are palest green with black rings around them. Weirdly bright, so intense. And yet, wow, almost translucent.’ Recently, he’d declared that Billy’s eyes were as wild and luminous as a husky dog’s. They were always trying to describe each other’s eyes. ‘Violets,’ Billy would say to Simeon, tonguing his eyelids closed. ‘And amethysts. So fucking dangerous.’
Billy grabbed the carcasses by their hind legs. ‘Your cousin’s a disgrace,’ he said.
‘He’s bullying me,’ simpered Suzanne. ‘Make him stop.’
The fox’s tongue lolled as Billy slung it over his shoulder, carrying it with the dead hare to the snow pit outside. On his return, he found Renfield licking streaks of blood from the floor and Suzanne and Simeon each with a phial of Blud. The pool balls had been racked up on the table.
‘Blud?’ Simeon threw a phial to Billy. He caught it deftly. Along its length, etched white lettering stood out against the red liquid contents. BLUD™: FOR VAMPIRES WITH A HEART.
Billy had a heart. He hadn’t tasted human blood for 26 years (except once), animal blood for ten. He’d gone cold turkey the moment Esther had been reborn because he wanted to devour her. He wanted her warm blood pulsing down his throat, her heartbeat filling him with life as she expired, just as it had done the first time in a courtyard in Constantinople. She’d ta
sted so good then, her blood flowing so sweetly, her neck as soft as a peach.
Almost 300 years later, and her death was still the most beautiful experience he’d known. Unless he quit human feeding, she’d either be dead again in no time or he’d make her a vampire. Either way, she’d be lost to him, and neither was an act of love.
He snapped off the top of his Blud and downed it in one. He tried to repress a shudder as the liquid slipped down his throat then he dashed the phial into the fire. The flames blazed green for a brief roaring moment.
‘Hmm, well,’ said Simeon, offended. ‘Cheers everybody.’ He and Suzanne raised their phials, Suzanne taking three sugar cubes from a pewter bowl on the hearth, adding them to her Blud before drinking it through a straw.
Simeon and Suzanne drank Blud to supplement their real feeding. Pickings were slim on the ice. Sometimes Simeon went to the coast and returned with tales of polar bears and all the blubber he had to bite through. But Billy knew he fed on the Inuit. He could see the flush in his cheeks and it made him so hot. When Simeon had tasted mortals, Billy wanted to fuck his brains out.
‘Yuck,’ said Simeon.
‘Bleurgh,’ said Suzanne. ‘I vote we kill those trekkers. Tonight.’
Emerald flames surged twice.
‘Can’t you for once drink it without complaint?’ said Billy.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, chill,’ snapped Simeon, crossing to the CDs. ‘I’m sick of this, absolutely sick of it. Some little whore from your past turns up and you –’
Billy was onto him instantly, moving with preternatural speed, a blur trailing behind him. Simeon’s jet black bob sliced the air, his expression stunned as Billy slammed him against a wall, forcing him into an armlock.
‘Jesus!’
Simeon’s right cheek was squashed to the wall and Billy whispered in his other ear, his words slow and threatening. ‘Don’t you ever say anything like that again. Ever.’ The two vampires stayed still, breathing heavily. Nostrils flared in Simeon’s big aristocratic nose and candlelight cast a silvery patch on his black hair.
‘Her name’s Esther,’ murmured Billy. ‘Say it. Say Esther.’
Simeon remained silent until he was prompted by an extra twist of his arm. ‘Esther, Esther,’ he said.
Billy gave him a hard shove then stalked off.
‘Esther,’ repeated Simeon, wriggling his shoulders and stepping away. ‘Remind me why you guys never hit it off. Oh, that’s right. You accidentally killed her. How could I forget?’
Billy had him up against the wall in a flash, arm twisting high again. Simeon yelped in pain.
‘You’ve never loved,’ accused Billy.
Simeon gasped in outrage. ‘Hah!’ he said. ‘Hah! And I’m here because … because what? Fancied a change? Got bored of humans so thought I’d up-sticks and go feed on … on Arctic fucking lemmings? And synthetic fucking blood?’
Billy twisted his arm even higher. ‘Never loved!’ continued Simeon. ‘Well, what am I doing in this dump? Is it because … because I think you’re kind of OK? Kinda cute? Or because I … Ouch! God knows why … You get off on coming here. But, you know what? I find it a pretty big deal. I hate it, hate it. I’m only doing it for you because I care. And I am actually suffering quite majorly.’
‘You enjoy suffering,’ hissed Billy.
‘Jesus Christ, man, you are such a cunt.’
Billy slammed Simeon’s body to the wall once more. His erection was thickening and he pressed it against Simeon’s butt.
‘It’s not even the same woman,’ accused Simeon. ‘It was centuries ago. Ever heard the phrase time to move on?’
‘It’s the same soul,’ breathed Billy.
‘And that gets you hard, does it?’
Billy grasped a handful of Simeon’s hair, pulling his head back so his throat arched. His Adam’s apple made a voluptuous jut in that long stubble-flecked neck, a sight that flooded Billy with memories. ‘Oh, if you were mortal.’
‘And what?’ challenged Simeon in a stretched, reedy voice. ‘You’d do what you did to her? Love me to death? Or what you did to me? Make me a vampire, possess me and make me yours?’
Billy tugged Simeon’s head back still further, his grip tightening on his hair.
‘You don’t give a person room to breathe,’ wheezed Simeon. ‘That’s not love, that’s suffocation.’
Billy jerked Simeon away from the wall, clasping arm and hair to frogmarch him across the room. He forced him over the pool table, pressing his head onto the turquoise baize. The white ball span away and bounced off the side cushion.
‘You’re jealous,’ murmured Billy. He tugged Simeon’s flies open, pushing down his clothes to bare his pale slender ass, wisps of dark hair fringing his crack. Simeon’s erection bounced free and Billy leant over him, wrapping his fingers around that big sturdy shaft. He wanked him gently. ‘Jealous,’ mocked Billy, his lips behind Simeon’s ear.
Simeon lay still, breathing hard and saying nothing as Billy’s fist shunted along his cock, and Billy’s crotch dug into his buttocks. After a while, in a tender mannered voice, Simeon whispered, ‘Yes. I’m jealous. What of it?’
A surge of respect and lust nearly knocked Billy for six. Hurriedly, he unzipped and let his pants drop to his knees. ‘Get your top off,’ he said in a quiet command and Simeon obliged. He groaned as Billy rubbed saliva into the puckered bud of his asshole, and worked his fingers in to open him up. Billy pumped his fingers, gazing at the shifting sinew of Simeon’s back, at the wings of his shoulder blades and the way candleflame and shadow rippled over his ivory skin.
It was a perfect back. Billy withdrew and clasped his own cock, blood-hard in his fist. He loved Simeon like this: submissive after a row, horny, sluttish and spread. He spat onto his fingers, moistening himself before pushing at Simeon’s ring with his fat, flushed glans.
‘You fucker,’ said Billy tenderly. Slowly he eased forwards, meeting the circlet of muscle, forcing himself past its resistance as Simeon exulted and cursed, fingernails clawing the turquoise cloth. Both vampires groaned deeply as Billy slid his meat into the snug silky depths of his lover’s ass.
Billy held his breath, his hand against the small of Simeon’s back, relishing the hot squeeze around his swollen cock.
‘Oh, man,’ groaned Simeon. ‘You complete me.’
Billy started to fuck him with slow easy lengths. The men breathed with heavy concentration until Billy drew a sharp thumbnail across his lover’s back, making Simeon groan. Blood rose to the surface and spread onto Simeon’s alabaster skin. God, it was a beautiful sight. Billy slammed harder and faster.
‘Oh, man,’ said Simeon, jerking himself wildly.
‘Jealous,’ panted Billy.
‘I fucking love you,’ gasped Simeon and then he shot his load.
‘Ah, fuck,’ muttered Billy, going at him like a jackhammer.
The sprawled cat rubbed its belly on the hearth rug, frotting itself to climax. Suzanne, legs wide, masturbated with both hands. ‘I love it when you two get off with each other,’ she said. ‘Makes me want to feed.’
2
In the lantern-lit log cabin, Margret grinned at the camera, her flushed face dimpling. The ear flaps and tassels of her blue woollen hat hung by her cheeks, giving her the appearance of a jolly medieval Dutch woman.
‘If I could have anything in this moment,’ she said, ‘I would be having a hot bath with bubbles.’
‘A glass of beer,’ said Johannes as Esther panned to him. ‘And some kisses from my young and beautiful girlfriend who I am very much missing.’
Margret acted scandalised and everyone laughed, Bird squeezing his toy accordion to add to the noise.
‘And some superior music,’ added Johannes, wagging his finger in the air.
‘He wants Wagner,’ yelled Adrian.
‘Hey, you want Wagner?’ asked Bird. ‘I could give it a go.’
‘Ogh!’ laughed Johannes. ‘Please spare us this attempt. It is too terrible.’
Esther panned to the head of the table, the camcorder recording the coffee mugs and glasses of brandy schnapps to focus briefly on the playing cards laid out in a patience game in front of Doug.
‘Dougie?’ she said cheerily. ‘If you could have anything right now?’
Doug glanced at the camera, brown eyes pinched, and turned quickly away. ‘No,’ he croaked, raising his hand to shield his face. ‘Please.’
Esther flinched. Oh, what a clumsy thing to do.
Johannes clapped Doug on the back. ‘Tomorrow will be better, my good man,’ he said. ‘But now you must rest your foot and your throat and your mind also.’
Esther panned away, recognising how awful it must be to have a bunch of people trying to coerce you into bonhomie when you were feeling low.
‘Seems Doug’s a little camera shy,’ she said lightly. ‘Losing his voice too. Unlike Bird here, our entertainment for the evening.’ Bird, a thin balding man with a big hooked nose, winked to camera. ‘Bird’s ambition is to make it into Heat magazine.’
‘Ah, heat,’ said Margret. ‘How I would like some heat.’
Bird hoicked his foot up onto the bench. ‘You hum it and I’ll play it, shweetheart.’
The cabin looked similar to a sauna with its slatted log walls, bunks and benches but the temperature was only just warming up. Propane lanterns hung from the ceiling, their mantles glowing and casting glints onto saucepans and utensils hanging above the cooking area. Three small windows looked out onto the dark icecap, making the interior feel extra cosy. A couple of stoves burned steadily, the smells of coffee, food and fuel lingering in the air. They’d eaten well, a meal of mushroom and chicken pasta followed by a batch of biscuits knocked up by Bird, all topped off with glasses of brandy schnapps in honour of Margret’s 32nd birthday.
‘Who’s for checking out the skidoos?’ asked Bird. ‘Take ‘em for a little whiz across the ice. Make sure everything’s shipshape.’
‘Oh, yes,’ enthused Margret. ‘I would like to celebrate my birthday with a small race perhaps.’
‘Cool,’ said Adrian. ‘Wouldn’t mind doing a few long exposures as well. That sky’s something else tonight.’
Lust Bites Page 2