Her excitement fed mine as we kissed. It was a bad idea.
My kisses moved from her lips across her jaw and down the side of her neck. She tensed slightly when I kissed her throat, afraid perhaps that I was going to dispense with the pleasantries and feed. She needn’t have worried; I knew it wasn’t time for the fangs yet. It hadn’t taken me long to discover that women like it best if I feed right as they climax. The pleasure deadens the pain and the pain enhances the pleasure. Sex with a vampire is a monumentally bad idea, but I try to make sure it has its benefits.
Of course, having sex with Rachel was somewhere around a nine out of ten on the stupid scale, which was actually surprisingly low for me based on the evening’s events.
Maybe, if I had actually broken up with Tabitha, I would have felt better about it, less guilty. I wondered if I really loved Tabitha. If I loved her, then wouldn’t I be faithful? Yet, there I was….
My jacket fell to the floor and I grinned as Rachel tugged at my shirt. Grabbing her by the shoulders, I pushed her down onto the rich red-and-gold carpet of the Pollux and knelt between her legs.
We kissed again, nipping at each other playfully and not so playfully, before she tore my shirt off and ran her hands over my chest. I had been in good shape when I died; I supposed I would remain that way until I died again. Just as she knew I could smell the scent of her excitement, I knew she could feel mine. She undid my belt while I kicked my shoes off onto the floor behind me. For an awkward moment, I was off balance and thought I might fall on top of her, but it didn’t happen. I regained my center, but not my composure, and rolled the top of her bra down. Her piercings were simple but fascinating, two golden hoops. I couldn’t help but think how painful they must have been. Even so, the effect was quite appealing and I lingered there in my affections before continuing downward.
A single diamond stud pierced her belly button, and she giggled involuntarily when I kissed it. “I’m sorry,” she laughed, “but that tickles.”
I moved lower, removing barriers and discovering yet another piercing. There were no giggles accompanying my kisses there. “Does that tickle?” I asked.
“Don’t stop,” was her answer, “that’s amazing.”
Of course it was; I had been doing this for over fifty years. The difference in our ages surfaced briefly in my mind and I did my best to put it aside. Her heartbeat sped up; oddly it did not encourage my bite, but rekindled a lower passion instead.
She rolled me over on my back and straddled me. I could smell her blood; it surprised me that I didn’t feel its pull as strongly as usual. Her body heat flowed over me, strong and vibrant, but it didn’t call to me the way it usually did. I wasn’t ungrateful for the extra restraint, but at the same time, it felt controlled, artificial. Why couldn’t I stop this? It almost felt like magic.
I chalked it up to all the fresh blood I’d been drinking over the last few days, but that didn’t fully explain it. Rachel crawled backward over my legs, pulling my pants with her and forcing me to lift my hips to accommodate her motion.
“Socks, off or on?” she asked.
“Off.”
She pulled them off and kissed her way up my legs. I don’t know why women get their tongues pierced, but why men like it became self-evident. Before I had a chance to think, I was on top of her, our movements urgent and impassioned. I’m not necessarily quiet in bed, but Rachel was very vocal. As we moved together she began a steady stream of soft little nonsense words, a rhythmic chant that sounded almost like another language, and dug her fingernails into my back, drawing blood. Our pace increased and she put both hands on the sides of my head turning it to face hers. We locked eyes and the smell of cinnamon filled my nostrils.
“Bite me!” she commanded. “Bite me, now!”
We both climaxed as I bit into her neck. For the first time in my unlife, the blood had a taste beyond that monotonous sameness to which I had become accustomed. Sweet and bitter all at once, it burned my throat as I swallowed. With each mouthful, the sensation grew. My mind was on fire and my skin was awash with heat. I felt the sun on my face, but there was no sun.
Then, all at once, I was full, completely sated even though I couldn’t have had more than a few ounces of her blood. Inside my chest, my heart stirred once, twice, three times before growing cold and still once more. Collapsing on top of her, I panted like a human, as if I actually had to catch my breath.
“What…what was that? How?” Sex had never been that way for me before, and neither had feeding. I’d never experienced the easy fullness, the beating heart, such complete satisfaction.
Rachel kissed my forehead and rolled me onto my back before resting her head on my chest. My heart beat one last time and I could see her smile. “How many times did it beat?”
“Four,” I answered. My panting slowed and my skin began to cool.
Laughing, Rachel bent her neck back and kissed me once more. “How long has it been since you felt your heartbeat?”
“The day I died,” I said softly.
“I can’t believe Tabitha hasn’t done that for you, baby.” Her voice held a note of reproach in it, but she didn’t say anything else. Instead, she laid her head back on my chest and sighed. “You wore me out.”
“How did you do that?” I asked again.
“It’s easy,” she said sleepily. “It’s a thrall thing. The thralls at the Irons Club told me. If I was your thrall…”
I didn’t know how to make a thrall. I only vaguely understood what they were, and from Roger’s explanation, it sounded too much like slavery to me. I used humans for a little while and let them go. Okay, so sometimes I killed them, but I didn’tenslave them, had no interest in even knowing how to do so. In my opinion, thralldom was more high society vampire bullcrap to make the wannabe Dracula types feel like kings and queens of the universe. I pictured Rachel eating insects like Renfield in the movies and shuddered. “No.”
“Maybe I can do better next time, but I’ve never actually done it before and it took more out of me than I thought it would. Can we try again in the morning?”
“Maybe. Let’s get you to bed.”
She muttered a soft assent and slowly started to get up. I stood more quickly, swept her off her feet and carried her into the next room. I’d had the office next to mine converted into a bedroom for when I wanted to spend time away from the club and my employees. It wasn’t much, but the windows had been bricked up and the sound system was excellent. There was no bathroom, but there was a sink in the corner with a towel rack next to it. I laid Rachel down on the bed and walked over to the sink. She fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow.
It took a while for the water to heat up, but once it was warm I wet a washcloth and went over to the bed. There was blood caked on her thighs and I gently wiped it away before drying her off with the towel that had been hanging next to the sink. She didn’t stir.
“What have you gotten yourself into, Eric?” I asked myself aloud.
I watched her sleep for a while then climbed into bed next to her, feeling like one of those old kings in the Bible who’d been given young girls to warm their beds, except that I was making love to my human bed warmer and drinking her blood.
Guilt wasn’t what I was feeling. It was more a sense of profound stupidity. There was more to Rachel than there appeared to be, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I wanted to bite her again, to taste anything other than the coppery taste of blood, to feel my heart beating, to feel alive for even a matter of seconds.
It was selfish and dumb and any number of things, but none of that mattered. I needed her. She made me feel like I was in control, or at least in control of being out of control.
And yet, if I was very still, I could sense an inner conflict. Deep down, I knew that being with Rachel was aloss of control, even if it did seem to bring momentary calming of my inner storm.
A little voice inside me told me otherwise. It argued that if I could maintain control of my emotions, even if I lost
control to Rachel in the process, then I had an advantage. That didn’t make any sense, but the harder I tried to think about it, to analyze it, the murkier it became, as if my thoughts were being deliberately clouded.
The only reason I could come up with for the werewolves spiking the blood supply in the Demon Heart was that they wanted me out of my mind, needed me to go berserk.
If I wanted to stop them, then I not only had to maintain control, I also needed the help of a human who could handle herself when it came to the supernatural, someone who could walk around in the sunshine. Rachel certainly seemed like the best woman for the job. I was going to have to be careful not to feed off of her for the next few days, though. I normally had a once-a-week rule for feeding on my girls, to help them stave off anemia, and I’d already violated that with Rachel.
Before I let myself fall asleep, I checked the time on the wall clock. It was a quarter to four. I shook my head and rolled out of bed. Time was getting away from me and I hadn’t even checked my messages yet.
I went into my office, took the paper out of my pocket, and followed Talbot’s instructions. I had five voice mails. The first was from Talbot and dealt with the Mustang. There was a message from Carl that told me how long fixing the Mustang would take and how much it would cost. He wanted me to call him on Monday and let him know what to do. I fast-forwarded through the details. The cost didn’t matter. Fixing the Mustang was imperative.
Message number three was from Roger. “Hey, pal. Sorry about ditching you back at the game, but I’m betting you had it handled. I dropped Rachel off at the Pollux, but listen: a pack of werewolves jumped Veruca and she’s all freaked out. I’m going over there now to see if she’s okay. She’s a slow healer, so I’m going to give her another few nights off. She can’t dance with claw marks all over her. I’ll catch you tomorrow.”
The last two messages took me by surprise. I listened to them one after the other and then sat down at my desk and listened to them again. The first one was from Kyle.
“No one answered at the club, Pops, so I guess something is going down. Just had a weird feeling and thought I should check in. You didn’t close the club, did you? I think Greta would have let me know, but you know how she is when she’s mad, so if it happened, you know, recently or something, then I understand why she wouldn’t tell me, because you know, she’s busy and everything, being mad and all, but if it isn’t that maybe you could call me back, because I’ve been getting these freaky phone calls from a guy named William. He said he’s coming for me and I kinda want to know what it’s about because—”
Crashing sounds and shattering glass interrupted him; I could hear a scuffle and growling. Werewolves. Kyle never screamed, but I heard him die. It was a whooshing rush of air. Drones always turn to dust when they die. It sounds just like that. Soldiers usually turn to dust as well, but beyond that it’s all based on power level, as if a vamp’s extra power bought better special effects. Kyle had been a Drone; no special effects for him.
As I listened to the recording, I could tell when one of the werewolves picked up the phone. “You and your vampire whore have a lot to answer for, dead boy,” he said. “You killed my son. You and your bitch killed eight more out at the lake. Did you think I wouldn’t be able to smell your stench through hers? I was willing to negotiate, but you don’t get that chance anymore. I’m coming for you. I’m going to tear down your unholy family and wipe your allies from the face of the earth. You, your unholy spawn, your den of immorality, even the humans that you’ve tainted with your presence will be wiped clean. Amen.” Damn werewolves.
The last message was from Greta wanting to know why she’d just had to kill three werewolves. She gave me her new cell number and asked me to call her soon. Greta was a Vlad, like me. Three werewolves were no problem for her.
Kyle’s death was more of a relief than anything else. Just because I hadn’t killed him myself didn’t mean that I was a big fan. He had just been too stupid to bother killing. What irked me was the part about my “bitch” killing people out at the lake. It couldn’t have been Greta because she’d said three werewolves, not eight; and anyway, she’d have let me out of the sleeping bag. It couldn’t have been Tabitha, because she had been with Talbot, and, well, the werewolves would’ve won that fight.
I slapped my palm into my forehead. “I am so fucking stupid!”
Froggy. Veruca didn’t have an alibi for last night or for the night before. She had constant access to the break room fridge, and could easily have spiked my blood supply. Veruca wouldn’t have been fast enough to unstake me and run, but—an image of a frog hopping away from the driver’s side door of the truck flashed up in my mind’s eye—she was definitely fast enough to unstake me, turn into a frog, and slowly hop away while I wandered around like a jackass trying to figure out what the hell was going on. It had to be her, but how had she managed to kill eight werewolves by herself?
The silver bullets. They certainly would have evened the odds. If Magbidion had been right (and I had no reason to doubt him) all it took was a single bullet to kill a normal werewolf, to steal its soul. With six bullets, she could have killed six werewolves and only had to fight the other two. I may make fun of her for only being able to turn into a frog, but she’s a mean little fighter. She’s fast for a Soldier, and she has claws. She could believably have taken on two werewolves.
She’d covered up her scent or maybe I’d missed it, but werewolves have a better sense of smell than vampires. William’s phone call meant that he hadn’t been fooled, which put him one up on me. The only thing that bothered me was why she’d left one of the bullets behind for me to find. Had she been in a hurry? Had trouble finding the last bullet? It didn’t seem that way. It felt purposeful.
I picked up the phone and called Talbot on his cell. When I told him about Veruca, he agreed that it was possible, even likely. I told him about Kyle, too.
“Sure sounds like he’s dead,” Talbot allowed.
“Par for the course, I guess.”
“Are you going to call Roger?” Talbot asked the question carefully, not wanting to imply anything. He knew how long we’d been friends. Just because Roger’s girlfriend was mixed up in all this didn’t mean Roger’d been in on it too. He’d been with me at the hockey rink when the werewolves had attacked. Sure, he had run away, but he’d just been taking care of Rachel. I still hadn’t told him about Brian…how was I going to tell him my suspicions about Froggy?
“Not yet. Look, I gotta go. Be careful, Talbot.”
Grunting his assent, he hung up.
I still needed to call Greta, but couldn’t think of what to say. She hadn’t done anything wrong, exactly, but I had sent her away. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, even though she thought of me as her father. She also called me Dad; one more reason I had come to find her presence disturbing. Greta looked up to me and genuinely cared about me, which always makes me want to push people away. There was also her eating problem. Compulsive eaters make bad vampires.
I played back her message and scribbled the number down on a piece of paper. The number stared at me. I stared back. My finger finally punched in the digits and to my relief, my call went straight to voice mail. “This is…this is Dad. Head over to the Pollux. I’ll explain about the werewolves and then we can go kill their boss…or talk things over with him…or whatever. Oh, and you may know about your brother already, but they got him. Fuck. I don’t know. Just come to the Pollux.” I carried the handset into the bedroom and set it on the floor by the bed before climbing under the covers and snuggling up with Rachel.
Maybe Tabitha and Talbot would end Froggy, tell Roger about Brian, and make peace with William while I slept. That would be nice.
17
TABITHA:
FINDING FROGGY
Moving on four legs had been uncomfortable at first, but now that I was getting used to it, the warmth and the heartbeat were addictive. I changed into a cat as soon as we got into Talbot’s Jag XKR a
nd stayed that way for the whole trip to West Side.
West Side is all high-end apartment buildings and high-rise businesses. Roger’s apartment was in the Highland Towers. You couldn’t even get near the parking garage without an ID and a pass card. Talbot parked on the street and I forced myself to get out of the car, abandoning the comfort of the soft leather seats.
“This is it,” Talbot said. “The trail leads right to the front door.”
“How can you tell?” I meowed.
“The eyes of a cat see things the eyes of a human can’t,” he answered mysteriously. “Can’t you see it? It’ll be easier to spot when we get closer.”
With Talbot leading the way, we walked over to the security gate. Actually, I sauntered. If I squinted and held my head just right, I could see the thin blue line from the bullet, brighter now that we were close to the source.
The Highland Towers loomed before us. I’d never been to the high-rise before, never even driven past it. Close up, it looked huge and imposing, a building that would have been more at home in Gotham City, very noir.
“Somebody’s compensating,” I meowed.
“Most of these people don’t need to compensate. It’s a status symbol to live here. That’s probably one of the reasons Roger picked this place. Roger is conscious of appearances; it’s why he keeps trying to get Eric to close the Demon Heart. His pals in the upper crust probably bust his balls on a regular basis about being a partner in a strip club.”
I could smell the security guard even before we reached his booth. A few steps later, I paused in the street. Three faces leapt into my brain, and I yowled, hackles rising. No one had warned me about seeing things in my head. At least, I think they were in my head. They hovered like phantoms, or effects in a 3-D movie, right in front of my nose, but when I swatted at the images, my paw passed through them.
Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires Page 50