Lust Bites

by Kristina Lloyd

  When Darius calls her in, she opens the large polished oak door into a long elegant room with huge floor to ceiling windows. The room should be flooded with light, but – as with everywhere else in the castle – the curtains are drawn and the lamps are lit. At the far end of the room Darius sits at a large desk, looking far more imposing than the impressive decor. Merle feels self-conscious, fiddling with the hem of her T-shirt, as she walks the endless length of the room to stand before him.

  He looks at her for a long moment. ‘About yesterday afternoon. I apologise. I shouldn’t have done that. You’re not here to help me keep Kristina in line.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ She feels herself start to redden. She puts her head down, remembering Darius’s usual reaction to her blushing.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. His voice sounds even. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed? ‘Really, I think it would be best if we could just pretend that it never happened. How would that be?’

  ‘That would be, uh … That would be fine,’ she stammers, still not really looking at him and feeling like a fool. She takes a deep breath and forces herself to look up. ‘I guess then,’ she says lightly, ‘that you’ll just have to hope that you don’t have to make good on your final threat.’ She thought that comment would seem jokey, like she didn’t think anything of the kiss they’d shared. She regrets saying it instantly.

  Darius looks at her. ‘My final …? I don’t understand. What was my final threat?’

  She feels another thrum of blood rushing to her face. She drops his gaze again and looks at the carpet. ‘Oh, sorry, nothing.’

  ‘No, Merle. What was my final threat!’

  She shifts, takes a deep breath and looks up at him again. Her face is practically glowing. ‘You told Kristina that if she misbehaved again you’d, uh, fuck me. In front of her.’

  Darius’s face breaks into a smile. ‘Oh, that. Don’t worry. I really don’t think that will be necessary. Do you?’

  She blinks. ‘If you say so. Um, I mean, no.’

  Darius says, ‘But that’s not why I wanted to see you. You’ve been here for more than half the term I specified. I was wondering if you wanted to go home.’

  ‘Go home?’ she says, still concentrating hard on her breathing and finally feeling her face start to cool.

  ‘Yes,’ says Darius. ‘Just for a visit, you understand. And the terms remain the same, the terms of my, er …’ He scrambles for the word.

  ‘Of your blackmail?’ she says.

  ‘If you like.’ He smiles, clearly amused. ‘OK. The terms of my blackmail remain the same. I have arranged for a car to take you to London to see your parents. You will return here in twenty-four hours.’ Darius looks back down at the paperwork on his desk, shooing her away. Clearly he’s done.

  Merle takes a breath. ‘Thank you,’ she says softly. He shoos her again. Not looking up.

  An hour later, she’s walking through the corridors of Cobalt. It feels like a dream. Everything is so cool and bright – sunlight! – and clean. So different to the sumptuously-threatening dark of the castle. There are a few people in the foyer who nod hello to her. No one thinks it’s odd that she should be there. Cole’s attack on her father has been kept deadly secret. No one knows she’s meant to be somewhere else.

  She uses her swipe card to take the lift to the secure floor. Out of the doors, she finds herself running. She bursts into her father’s room so hard she makes her mother scream out loud and drop the book she’s reading.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ her mother says, turning around, in tears, then rushing to take Merle in her arms. ‘It’s OK. No one expected you to stay the whole time. We knew he’d make it impossible for you. It was just a trick, darling. Thank God he stuck to his word and actually let you go.’

  ‘No, Mum …’

  ‘We’ve got a squad ready to storm the Black Emerald Castle. They don’t know why yet of course, but it’s all under control. Now you’re back we can take in him tonight. Interrogate him.’

  ‘No. You can’t do that. It says in his letter that if we try and take the castle by force he’ll destroy the antidote.’

  ‘Oh darling, what choice do we have?’

  Merle slows her breathing and looks into her mother’s eyes. Appealing for calm. ‘No, you don’t understand, I’m going back. I haven’t given up, Mum. I’m only here because he told me I could come and visit you. I’m going back tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother’s face twists.

  ‘I know, Mum. But I’m past halfway already.’

  Her mother swallows. When she speaks her voice is taut with emotion. ‘Is he – is he treating you well? You look thin. They don’t understand food. Is he feeding you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum, it’s fine,’ she says. ‘I have my own room. A very nice room. They bring me good food and magazines and other stuff to read. It’s fine. Just a bit boring sometimes. It’s like being in a hotel.’

  ‘And he hasn’t …’ Merle’s mother looks away from her, almost as if she can’t bring herself to say the words. ‘He hasn’t bothered you? He hasn’t done anything to disturb you?’

  Merle shakes her head, trying not to think about the way she felt when Darius kissed her – that memory suddenly flaring hotly. She bites at her lips and feels those two hot pink spots appear on her cheeks. ‘No.’

  Her mother pulls her close into an embrace again. ‘Oh, darling. I’ve been sick with worry. I thought we’d never see you alive again.’

  Merle nuzzles up close to the smell of her mother and tries to make herself believe that she can stay forever.

  Late that evening, Merle watches as her mother falls asleep in her chair. Then she takes her security swipe card from around her neck and goes walking.

  She’s not sure where she’s headed. But when she gets into the lift and sticks her mother’s card into the slot a second secure floor appears on the control panel that she’s never ever seen before and she knows that has to be the place.

  The lift goes down. Down and into the ground. The secret level must be below the basement. When the doors slide open she gets a weird shivery flashback to the castle dungeon, but she steels herself and steps out into the gloom.

  Feeling on the walls with flat hands she finds a light switch and flips it. Fluorescent strips flick on, sprinkling the light out to the furthest reaches of the huge room. All the room contains are filing cabinets.

  The entire history of Cobalt.

  Darius Cole has his own aisle. There’s so much information. But she finds a likely looking file about his interrogation – so thick it takes up half a drawer on its own.

  In the empty foyer she finds a carrier bag behind the reception desk and slips the file into it. Then, because she doesn’t know where else to stash it, she goes out onto the pavement where the blacked-out car Darius provided is still parked and leaves the file with the driver.

  Day 15

  Merle wakes up on a blanket on the floor and get stiffly to her feet. Her mother is stirring in the chair. Her father is still unconscious in the bed, ashen and sheened with sweat.

  ‘I should go,’ she says to her mother – thinking of the file and how she wants to get back to the castle and study it.

  ‘Won’t you stay for breakfast?’

  ‘I’d better not. I’m only allowed to be away twenty-four hours. And you know Cole’ll be trying to find any loophole he can not to give me the antidote at the end of this.’

  ‘OK,’ says her mother, smiling ruefully. ‘Take some money from my handbag though. Buy yourself something nice to eat on the way.’

  The castle door is answered by a welcoming party of Kristina and Oberon. Merle looks from one creepy smiling face to another. ‘Where’s Darius?’

  Kristina shakes her head. ‘Not sure. Like I told you before, he’s a busy man.’

  Merle feels her heart flip over. There’s something disturbing about the way the two of them are looking at her. ‘He can’t expect me to … Not you two again. Not after you tried to kill me–’ she points accusingly at Krist
ina, then turns to Oberon ‘– and you tried to, God, I don’t even know what you tried to do but it was damn creepy.’

  Oberon runs his tongue over his top lip.

  She swallows hard, taking a step backwards, further into the sunshine. ‘You can’t come out here, can you?’

  ‘Out there? Into the daylight? No, Merle, we can’t,’ Kristina says nastily, ‘but you have to come in here, I believe, or the terms of your deal with Darius are broken.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me? When I come in, I mean.’

  Kristina smiles. ‘What Darius told us to do, of course. Take you back to the dungeon, lock you up, give you some food …’

  ‘The dungeon, not my room?’

  ‘Do you know, I don’t believe he was specific about that. He did say I was to lock you in though …’ Kristina’s smiling face turns hard as stone.

  Day 16

  The smallest of mercies is that Merle has been spared the manacles this time.

  Neither Oberon or Kristina has done anything in particular to disturb her (as her mother would say) but she still feels uneasy. Feels that at any moment Oberon might appear with another twisted bargain.

  She doesn’t have the file she took from Cobalt. Oberon grabbed the bag from her as she stepped over the threshold. The fact it had been taken from her only made her more desperate to discover its contents.

  Day 17

  The next day Kristina comes in with the food instead of shoving it through the hatch in the door. She seems quite chatty. More like her usual self. Merle decides to ask her something that she was brooding about the day before. Being back in the dungeon had made her remember.

  ‘Back when I was first brought down here, Darius came down a couple of times and one of those times he said something about this being about me. About how he could leave them alone, meaning my parents, but he could never leave me alone. What do you think he meant by that?’ As she’s speaking she thinks of Kristina greeting her at the castle door that first evening. I know who you are, dear.

  Kristina shrugs. ‘That just sounds like Darius being Darius to me. Anyway, I don’t think I’m really meant to talk to you about that kind of thing.’ And she taps her forehead and winks.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Darius is in your head. He’s using his psych-powers to spy on us?’

  ‘Great,’ says Kristina. ‘Now you’ve said that he knows we know. Hi, Darius,’ she says. ‘Merle, say hi to Darius.’

  Merle actually finds herself waving a hand and mouthing ‘Hi,’ before she stops herself. ‘So,’ she says to Kristina. ‘He does know I’m here then? Locked in the dungeon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Kristina. ‘In fact, I’m meant to move you back to your room right now. It seems there was a misunderstanding about that.’

  Day 18

  Merle’s starting to lose track of time. When she first arrived, counting off the days to 25 had been so important, but now she’s starting to drift.

  She dreams of Darius again. He’s lying next to her on the bed, twirling a razor blade through his fingers and smiling.

  When she jolts awake she feels sure someone has been in the room again. And the bedroom door is open.

  She pulls on her jeans over her nightshirt and slips out into the silent castle. Thinking she can hear sounds on the stairs, she creeps down into the entrance hall to find one of the doors leading off it standing ajar.

  She finds herself in an enormous library. There are books on every vast wall – floor to ceiling and yet more in a gallery above. On a table in the middle of the room a single candle burns.

  Next to the candle is the file she took from Cobalt.

  She rushes over and opens it. Far too eager to take the file back upstairs, she begins to read it right there.

  The first sheaf of papers deals with things she already knows. Background. The story so far. The rise of Darius Cole and Righteous Power. How Cobalt was formed with vampire money to attack the problem with human advantages.

  But the next file is very different. It contains minutes of every Cobalt meeting to discuss Darius Cole, detailing the essential problem that Cole was so good at psychic and psychological manipulation that it was dangerous to even be in a room with him. His capture might be relatively simple, but his interrogation appeared impossible. After some searching, Cobalt discovered his vulnerability. Darius Cole had a lover. A human lover. A woman called Magdalena Wright. Magdalena was traced and captured by Cobalt. Darius Cole was told the price of her life was simple. His total surrender.

  The next set of minutes is supplemented by a full transcript of Cole’s subsequent interrogation. Threatening him with Magdalena’s torture, Cobalt forced Cole to reveal the location of his army. The paper gave long and detailed descriptions of the tortures they threatened. How Magdalena’s increasingly grisly potential fates were outlined to Cole. It wasn’t clear whether any of these were actually carried out or whether Magdalena was even present during Cole’s interrogation.

  Cole had tried to resist them, claiming to betray his entire army to save one life was wrong. Even the life of his lover. But they promised him his soldiers would die clean and sweet if he co-operated – staked in their sleep. If he didn’t Magdalena would suffer for as long as they could make it last.

  And then Cole – finally broken – had showed them the locations on the map.

  Merle puts down the piece of paper she’s reading. She’s crying and she senses him behind her. Darius presses his lips to her earlobe and kisses her. She turns around slowly in his arms. He reaches up and touches the place above her cheekbone that is a little damp from her tears. ‘Are those for me?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t need to cry for me, Merle,’ he whispers. ‘Not now. Not if you’ll come to my bed.’

  He leads her back up the stairs. Up past the first floor, along the second floor corridor, past his office and into the very last room. His bedroom.

  She stops in the doorway. The room is very similar to her own. The ceiling is a little lower, the decor is dove-grey instead of turquoise. The froufrou is rather more under control. But it has a similar layout with a large table set in the tightly curtained bay window and a huge four poster bed. She stares at the bed. At Darius standing right by it.

  Not if you’ll come to my bed.

  ‘It’s OK, Merle,’ he says softly. ‘You can come in. Nothing will happen to you if you cross my threshold. Nothing bad.’

  She holds his eyes. They always looked black before, but now, in the candlelight they seem to be very deep brown. She walks into the room.

  Darius says, ‘Merle, I am really sorry I haven’t been around all that much while you’ve been here. I don’t want you to think it’s that I didn’t want to be with you. I did. So very much. But I held myself back. I didn’t want to rush things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘These things.’ He crosses the room to her, takes her face in his hands and touches his lips to hers.

  The kiss that follows is even slower than before. Tender and reverent. He uses his tongue to edge her mouth open little by little. She finds her head full of strange images. He’s in her mind. She’s thinking of him opening her mouth like a flower. And she knows that this isn’t really about her mouth at all. The way he is using his tongue and his lips and his teeth to caress and coax her wider and wider open for him is purely a demonstration of a skill that he wants to use on other parts of her body.

  When he pulls back from the slow kiss to look at her, she says, ‘You really don’t like to rush things, do you?’ And that comment is enough for her to feel herself colouring.

  He’s still holding her face. He moans when he sees her start to blush and moves in to lick her warm cheek. He does that very slowly too. Tracing his cool tongue against her flesh. Making lazy swirls.

  ‘But we can’t have sex, can we?’ she says softly.

  He stops moving his tongue on her face and pulls back. ‘What? Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Yo
u can’t, though, can you? You can’t … with a human.’ She feels her face get even hotter. ‘How did you, though, with Magdalena? How could you have had a human lover? How can we …? Why did you bring me here if we can’t?’

  He silences her with a single finger to her lips. ‘Merle, please, stop. Of course I lay with Magdalena. We were lovers. I gave her pleasure. Giving human women pleasure is a pleasure in itself. I asked you here because I would like very much to give you pleasure, Merle. I feel I have asked so much of you already. And you have borne it all so well.’

  She nods her head. He twists her around in his arms, and guides her across the room to the bed. The sheets smell like him, a scent that is exciting and familiar. He climbs on top of her, positions himself astride her waist and pulls off his shirt.

  As she had thought before, his upper body isn’t as slight as his slender physique suggests. There is a power in his body. His skin is very pale. But his paleness seems unearthly and exotic. Not a disturbing pastiness of skin that has not seen sun for too long, but a shimmering silveriness that suggests something fantastical. There’s just a little dark hair in the upper part of his chest, tapering away to a thin line which disappears into his waistband. She finds her eyes following the little trail, her breath hitching when she looks down at Darius’s groin.

  He moves over her – the muscles in his arms flexing a little as they take his weight – and ducks into another kiss. His mouth moves faster this time, more strongly. Penetrating. Again making her think of other things.

  Did you think he meant to desecrate you?

  But she is beyond listening to Oberon’s voice in her head. She’s in bed with her most delicious nightmare. She struggles out of her T-shirt and bra and Darius’s head moves to her small breasts. His sharp teeth graze over them, tweaking and teasing until she can see nothing but sparkling lights behind her tight-squeezed eyes.

  He moves further down her body. His slender fingers are on her jeans, unfastening, whisking them away. His mouth is cool, almost cold between her legs, sweeping fizzing sensation into every last sensitive fold.