I can only hope that in her dreams they are happy and not apart.
Instead of disturbing her sleep, I sit down on my bed to watch over her. I listen to the light wind outside the cabin, the constant chatter of the night insects, the occasional pop or crackle of the coals in the fireplace. Somewhere in there, Carl’s words come to me, the last conversation we had together when he demanded I forget about Ivy and leave Stokers Mill.
There are only three outcomes for a relationship between a vampire and one of the warm. The vampire turns his lover. The vampire remains beside them remaining forever young while they age and fade. The vampire leaves them when the can no longer hide what they are.
None of these outcomes is good for the lover. I was honest with Ivy when I told her my cold life is not a good one. The wars between the clans, the wars within the clans, the constant weight of the ennui that grows heavier year by year. Knowing what I do now, I wish that Sonia Vătafu had just drained me and left me to die that night. I would have been spared that year on the western front, and the following century of darkness.
I put my hand on my chest, to feel the slow beating of my heart. Usually, I go for days between feedings, days without having a pulse. Since I’ve come to the cabin, I feed a little bit every day so I have some warmth and a heartbeat for the woman sleeping in front of me. In the darkness, I can see one of her veins gently pulsing, a constant reminder that she is warm and alive. I breathe in, and I can smell her. Under the plain soap I keep at the cabin is still that undeniable essence of Ivy. I remember kissing her, losing myself in her scent and the moment. I cannot drink wine, but in those moments when I brush my lips against her neck, I am drunk on something much finer.
How could I take all of that away from her? Her warmth and her heartbeat and her beauty and her scent? How could I even let myself think of inflicting my curse upon her? The only reason to turn her would be to have her forever, to make her mine, my possession, my property. To trap her with me.
No. Ben Wake loves Ivy Sparks too much to treat her that way. The only way to love her in the way she deserves, to thank her for warming this old vampire’s cold heart, is to simply let her live.
It is only when Ivy shifts and pulls the blankets up again, that I stir. I go outside for a couple of fresh logs to put on the fire for her, and go back to my endless walking up and down the slopes. Much like Ivy the stress we’ve been under while hiding out had dampened my physical desire for her, but I suddenly find myself constantly distracted by thoughts of her body again. In the bedroom when she had let the covers fall, I could see the upper curve of her breast, rising and falling as she breathed. With her hair braided, I could see that little, delicious erogenous zone behind her ear that sends a shudder all the way down her spine.
I find myself constantly struggling to keep my thoughts on the mystery of who had approached our escape route. I have to keep focusing my thoughts to the task of looking for more footprints or any other sign that anything had been disturbed.
The arrival of dawn is actually a great relief, because I can finally excuse myself from trying to focus on the woods to go back to the cabin and make Ivy’s breakfast for her. I first get the coffee going, then start assembling what I can from the assorted dried goods and whatever fresh greens she foraged up the day before. Almost on cue, she comes out of the bedroom as I’m setting out her plate. It’s still dreary and gray, drizzling lightly, so we sit at the small kitchen table instead of on camp chairs outside the cabin.
“Did you sleep well?” I ask, putting creamer in her coffee, and handing her the mug. I kiss the top of her head. She reaches back and strokes my cheek as I do so. A very familiar stirring happens just a little bit below my belt. I rest my hand on her shoulder, and am tempted to slip it inside the neck of her sweatshirt, but I don’t. She takes a moment to enjoy my touch, but doesn’t quite turn to make it easy for me to take it to a more personal part of her body.
“I did,” she says. “Thank you for keeping the fire going all night for me.”
“You noticed?” I ask.
“I was up a few times during the night. Including once while you were sitting on your bed.”
I must have been very deep in thought then, because I never noticed her wake up.
“I don’t know how I was able to tell. I certainly didn’t see you. I just knew you were in the room. I actually liked it that you were there. You seemed very at peace with something, and I didn’t want to disturb that.”
This sets me to a new line of thought. It’s not known for the warm to be able to pick up on the thoughts or emotions of vampires. Two vampires that are closely linked to each other somehow, as when one has turned the other, can do it. But I’ve never heard of a vampire being able to broadcast an emotion to a mortal. I wonder if it is the love that I feel for her that she can feel.
I realize I am still standing behind her with my arm on her shoulder. I start to step away to go sit at the table, when she puts her hand on mine, holding me still.
“I love you, Ben,” she says, and I see a little glint in her eye that I have not seen since I was driving her home from the Harker’s Pass Inn, two weeks ago. “You didn’t move that bag with my little gift in it, did you?” she asks. “I might want to get a proper look at it tonight when I get ready for bed.”
Oh, Ivy. What you are doing to me right now!
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ivy Sparks
I really appreciate how respectful Ben is. These past two weeks have been hard on both of us, and I’m sure that it has been even more rough on him that I really haven’t had any physical desire for him during most of that time. I mean, I feel like my body has betrayed me by shutting that down so soon after discovering how glorious it can be. Whenever I do think about a man’s touch, I am as likely to picture Carl’s primal masculinity, or the heat of Nathan.
At the same time, Ben has been different as well. I’ve been near boys that have wanted a lot more than I’m interested, and they act a lot different than Ben has while we’ve been out here. There’s a part of me that fears, from time to time, if our attraction for each other had been the unknown, and once we got around to knowing it the mystery vanished and we’ve both lost interest. Those seem to be the darkest moments, though, when I find myself doubting everything. The thing is that our one night (and morning!) together surpassed anything I ever imagined sex could be, and there is still plenty of mystery still to be explored. ‘Maybe not with just Ben,’ rises the unbidden thought.
Sitting here, with food and coffee Ben has made for me, but can’t share, I think that most of my changed mood really comes down to one single word.
Vampire.
At first, I had to doubt him. Even with the things Grandma has taught me, the idea that my new boyfriend is such a creature? Not knowing that I’m a witch, how crazy would he have to be to make that claim to someone he thinks is just a young woman, clueless about the other things that live in this world? However, he had given me just enough proof that morning after that I was willing to believe it for a while, and since then, there really is no doubt that he is what he says he is. I have seen the things he can do. I remember the third day we were out here, when I felt how his body was nearly corpse-cold and his pulse was just one or two beats a minute. I’ve seen the fangs come out and go back in.
For all Grandma had warned me to steer well wide of any vampire I might ever meet, I have managed to fall in love with one. How do you love something like that? How do you open your body to it?
Well, as I’m sitting in a small cabin, with food he has made for me that he can’t eat, with coffee he has made for me that he can’t drink, with his ankle gently touching mine under the table, remembering the thousand kindnesses he has shown me since we’ve met, and the countless times he has shown me what I mean to him, I can answer that question now.
I do not love a vampire, and I never opened my body to one.
I love a man named Ben Wake. The person that is inside the body is what is important.
I did not simply open my body to his body. When I walked into that hotel room with him, and he entered me, I opened myself to him.
I realize that I’ve been sitting there, with my fork just an inch from my mouth for a long time as my mind has wandered. I think Ben knows where my mind has been for the past few minutes, judging by the smile on my face. I am very, very curious to see exactly what that little sexy something he bought for me is, to see how it looks on my body.
That’s when I realize there are no mirrors in the cabin. Not a single one. I have a small one in my purse, in my makeup compact, but there’s no way I’d be able to get a proper look at my entire body with it. This sends a sudden little electric jolt down my body. I never had any reason to think this before, but the lack of mirrors means Ben will be able to see my body in a way that I won’t be able to. I’ll never know exactly what that outfit looks like on me. Nobody in the world except Ben ever will. That image will be for his eyes alone. At this moment, I think I’m just one more dirty little thought away from dragging him to the bedroom.
He puts a hand on mine, squeezing it a little bit. “Finish your breakfast,” he says. “I have some things I need to show you.”
I raise an eyebrow at him, give him my most come-hither smile.
“Not that, Dearest Ivy,” he says. “Not yet, at least. Let’s save that for tonight, shall we?”
“Do we have to?” I ask.
“Yes and no,” Ben says.
“How so?”
“The rain has just stopped, so it’s the perfect moment for me to take you around the property and let you know how to tell if another vampire has been here. That’s the yes we have to part.”
“It can’t wait?” I ask him.
“It can,” Ben says. “But now is the ideal time for me to show it to you. It will leave you better prepared than if we put it off long enough for us to do a proper job of making love again.”
“Responsibility,” I say.
“Yes,” Ben says. “And the no, we don’t have to part. Anticipation, my love. Sometimes it’s fun to have to wait for it.”
“We’ve been waiting for it to come back for days. Both of us.”
“Yes. But now that it’s here and the fire is lit, let’s play for a bit, shall we?”
“I don’t think I like that idea,” I say, smiling at Ben.
“I know. That’s why I’m doing it to you,” he says, very clearly teasing me.
Our first time was something spontaneous, something I thought would come much later, until I was offered it right then and there. Maybe he’s right. Maybe some honest anticipation will make it even more fun. I am willing to play along. For a while.
Ten minutes later, breakfast is done and we’re walking out to what Ben calls our inner perimeter. It’s a box about halfway to the property lines to the sides, and about a quarter mile up and downslope from the cabin. “There are sweet spots where you can come up and not be easily seen from the cabin, but the way is clear enough that you won’t make much noise, disturb any trees or bushes, things like that.”
“Just like our escape routes?”
“Exactly like them. And remember, the hunter that was closing in on your house was one of my students. I taught her everything she knows. She’s going to look for spots exactly like this one,” he says, pointing to a gap between a couple of trees. There’s a game trail running through it. “Or that one.” He points to another place that is less clearly a good approach, but as I think about it, I see his wisdom. He walks me up the hill, pointing to places where one who wanted to sneak up on the cabin would cross our inner perimeter.
“Thing is,” Ben says. “I never taught any of my students everything I knew. I learned very quickly to never, ever fully trust another vampire. Never.”
The conviction with which he says this unsettles me a little bit. Is he warning me away from ever fully trusting him?
“I’ve told you about the clan wars and our constant conflicts with each other. At any moment, a vampire might change their allegiance, or be maneuvered into a position where it’s either kill you, or be killed. So, I’ve always reserved a few tricks for myself alone. What I’m about to share with you, nobody else knows.”
I see a sudden vulnerability in him. It’s almost as if this secret is something he’s held closer to him than the secret that he is a vampire. I nod to let him know I understand the gravity of the situation.
“What I’ve done all along the inner perimeter is find all of these places a vampire would normally look to approach from. I’ve identified every single one of them.” We walk back from the perimeter and he crouches down. Ben points out two of those sweet spots. “There and there. Can you spot the difference between them?”
I spend some time looking at where he’s pointing, but can’t find anything obvious.
“You remember there are silver bullets in the emergency guns, right?” he asks me.
“Yes.”
“Silver is very toxic to us. Deadly. So what I’ve done is seed most of these sweet spots with silver iodide. It’s a metallic salt, used to be used to make camera film, because it is very sensitive to light.”
“Like you are?” Ivy asks.
“Yes. That energetic sensitivity to light is similar to ours. I could spend weeks explaining the laws of sympathy and antipathy to you and you’d still only barely understand it, but it’s that same sensitivity to light we share that makes silver so toxic to us.”
If only he know how well I am versed in those laws. If he weren’t so old, I’m sure I could teach him a few things about sympathetic and antipathic magic, about apotropaism… Still, I think a bit about what he’s said. “So most of the easy routes are now poisonous for a vampire to pass through?” I ask.
“Not quite. The amount of silver iodide I’d need to make the ground actively poisonous to a vampire would literally cost me millions of dollars. But we can feel the threat. When a vampire comes up and is looking for a safe approach to a target, they are thinking exactly that – safety. They will be able to feel the presence of the silver on the ground, though, and that makes the approach they’re eying seem somehow unsafe. They’ll look elsewhere, see a few more approaches that also don’t seem like a good idea. Then, there’s that one approach.” Ben points to the leftmost of the two spots he had me looking at. “There’s no little, quiet sense of dread there. That’s the route they’ll take.”
“Hmmm,” I say. “Clever.”
“Thank you.” Ben stands up and offers me his hand. I take it and he lifts me up to stand beside him. Neither of us lets go of the other as we walk to the safe passage, the one without the silver. We come up to a clear spot between two trees. “Look there,” he points to a spot on one of the trees, about six feet up. A strip of bark about a foot long and two inches wide has been peeled away. “There are ten of these spots along the perimeter. I’ll walk you along and show you all of them, so you’re familiar with them.”
He finally lets go of my hand to walk over to the clear spot and take a knee. My hand feels so chilly, without the touch of his hand, as cold is it is. “If I ever have to go somewhere for more than a couple of hours, I want you to know these spots, and come visit them a few times every day. Here is where you’ll find a snapped branch, or a crushed plant, or a footprint, if a hunter will leave any,” Ben says.
I follow his eyes as he takes his hand and draws it side-to-side, like I should notice something in a straight line. I get closer, and instead of focusing my eyes on the ground in front of him, I focus right where his hand is.
A strand of spider silk crossing the path, with tiny dots of water on it. Now that I know what I’m looking for, I can pick out the full web, very lightly misted. Stepping back, it doesn’t take me long to find the spider itself, looking like it’s hovering in midair as it rests in the center of its fine web. “Stepping carefully so you don’t leave a trace is easy if you practice it enough,” Ben says. “These fine ladies will give you away every time.”
I’ve spent the la
st several minutes watching Ben move through the woods as if he was born to them, seeing how he lets himself sink into them, find their secrets, the little things most people never, ever notice. It’s like watching a dancer completely surrender themselves to the music. This is the Ben I fell in love with, right in front of me, his eyes focused on the sublime beauty of spider silk decorated by a million miniscule drops of water. This Ben is much more alive than he ever gives himself credit for, and it makes it so easy for me to forget he is a vampire.
I lean in real close to him. The foolish boy thinks I’m coming up to look closer at what he is seeing. I bring my lips right up to his ear, almost close enough to kiss his earlobe. “This fine lady thinks you should leave that fine lady alone for a while.” Ben starts to turn his head, and my lips are on his. I press into him, not enough to unbalance myself, but more than enough to push him toward the tipping point. As he starts to return my kiss, he shifts the position of his legs and puts a hand behind him so he can gracefully lower himself to the ground.
I follow him down, straddling him in a luscious mirror of our first time together, when I lay on my back while he straddled me. Now, I am the one on top of him. I get to choose whether our lips touch or not. It takes no time at all for me to feel the rush of power that comes from this. I kiss him deeply, to the point where I’m almost afraid our lips will bruise if I keep it up to long. Then I pull back and feel him try to follow, his greedy mouth and tongue not wanting to lose contact with me. But the truth is, I can raise myself up farther than he can follow, especially since I have one hand on either of his shoulders, holding him down.
A Witch's Fate_A Reverse Harem Romance Page 20