Without another word, Greyvian turned and walked away, leaving Jacob to the intimate business of licking her wounds closed.
Kneeling down beside the blonde, he smiled half-heartedly at her and then turned his attention to the sluggishly bleeding three-inch slit marring the perfect skin of her abdomen.
“Ah, hold still, I guess.”
She nodded and braced herself as he bent down to inspect the wound closer. It was fairly deep. Would licking the surface penetrate to the deeper layers to heal the entire thing, or was he just going to be turning it into an internal wound that would bleed her out and kill her just as effectively as if the blood were pouring out into the world? He really wished Greyvian had stuck around to provide some instruction. Healing Sienna had been easy—those had just been two little puncture wounds. This was a three-inch deep gash.
Well, no use just staring at it. Maybe a glob of spit would help?
“This might be a bit weird,” he warned, gathering spit in his mouth.
She watched in fascination as he dribbled spit into her wound, his thoughts on healing the entire time. The woman hissed in pain as the fluid oozed down into the wound, going deeper and deeper until he could see the clear shine of it at the very bottom. When nothing happened, he felt at a loss.
Looking up, he searched for Greyvian, wanting to ask what exactly he was supposed to do.
“He say lick, no?” the woman suggested, surprisingly calm given the strangeness of the situation.
“Ah, yeah. I guess.”
Bending down, he crossed his fingers for luck and then ran his tongue over the surface and around the edges of the wound. He had only a moment to feel awkward about the situation, as the thirst gripped him within moments of tasting her blood like an iron fist around the throat, squeezing and demanding that he take more.
Keeping his thoughts focused on healing was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, and probably not the first truly hard thing he was going to have to do in his life now that he was an immortal vampire. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the wound to heal, for the long slit in her skin to become nothing but a thin scar, the only evidence that she had ever been stabbed by a perpetrator of evil.
Staring at the mark, he shook his head at the miracle that was vampire spit.
“Amazing,” the woman breathed, running a hand over the mark and wincing slightly as she pressed on it. “A little tender still.”
Smiling at the blonde, he opened and closed his mouth a few times as he tried to work out what to say to her and then finally got to his feet and turned, relaxing his hold on his Awareness shield as he did so, leaving her to her fate. He felt like he should say something to her, but what more was there to say, really? She was human. It was now up to her to continue on with her life, to work out whether she wanted to continue to remember this as it had truly happened, or to allow sanity to take over and make her believe it was all a hallucination. He didn’t envy her the memory, but at least she was alive—and she didn’t have the broader picture of what that bastard had done with his life stuck in her head.
Healing her had distracted him for a moment from the vile images, but now they came crawling back like so many repulsive insects, biting at his brain. The blood stuck with him the most. Blood splashed across the floor after dealing a beating to someone deemed to have wronged the man. Blood on his hands after having knifed someone because they had tried to get away from him. Thick and red, it pleased him—the man—it pleased the man…
Shit. Shaking his head, he forced the images and the alien thoughts from his mind, replacing them, instead, with the colour red. No. That was too much like blood. Black. He focused on the colour black—like the end of a bad movie that was never to be watched again.
What the fuck was he supposed to do now? How the hell did someone cope with this kind of fucked up shit flashing through their mind’s eye at any given moment?
Catching up to Greyvian, who was waiting by the entrance of the alley, he now had a newfound respect and empathy for the guy. Now he really got it. The killing, the Poker Face, the ability to switch his emotions off whenever he needed to. It was probably the only way the guy could deal with this unnatural second sight.
“How do you stand it?” Jacob asked, his voice weak with the horror of it all. “The evil? How do you stand to have those images and thoughts inside of your head as if they were your own?”
Greyvian looked at him sharply, eyes searching his face with an intensity that reminded Jacob that his father was utterly lethal.
“You saw it?” It didn’t really sound like a question, but he nodded anyway.
“Damn it,” Greyvian cursed and started walking back down the street the way they had come.
Jacob followed because he didn’t know what else to do right now.
“I’m sorry I ever cursed you with this,” his father said, looking across at him, his emotions showing on his face for once. Remorse and self-loathing was the expression of the day so far.
Oddly enough, he took strength from Greyvian’s reaction and smiled. Not the happy-happy joy-joys, but a lightening of the mood nonetheless.
“Hey, if I have to choose between that and never being alive to begin with… I’ll take what I can get. I mean, it can’t be that bad, right? You’ve lived with it for centuries and you’re still sane.”
Greyvian raised an eyebrow at him. “That all depends on your definition of sane.”
Jacob laughed. “Well, you’re not a raving lunatic and you don’t string fluffy bunnies up just for the fun of it as far as I’ve seen, so I’m going to go with a little fucked up, but relatively normal.”
One corner of the male’s mouth lifted slightly in as much of a smile as you would ever get from him.
“Okay, a lot fucked up, but at least you still know which your memories are and which aren’t. Right?”
The no-comment reaction he received from his father was not encouraging. Thankfully though, Greyvian was just being Greyvian and thinking about his response for a long fucking time before he finally answered.
“It helps to apply a red haze to the images when they come to you. When I first realised what they were, and why they were coming to me, I began to associate the red haze that I see surrounding the human with the flashes of insight. It helps to keep them separate.”
“Thanks,” he said, meaning it. It had to be hard for Greyvian to talk about it after having kept it a secret for so long. “I’ll have to give that a try.”
A red haze. That would probably work better than a solid blood red, and probably better than plain black. A red haze to suit the red aura that denoted evil in the first place.
Jacob was so glad he had someone to talk to about this, someone to guide him. Greyvian must have thought himself insane in the beginning. But he had to wonder—was it really possible to keep that kind of evil from leaching into your psyche? With as many of the psychos as Greyvian must have killed over the centuries, didn’t it get hard to distinguish between what was you and what was them? When did that line get crossed? When did you become more about their thoughts than your own?
“And, of course,” Greyvian added, completely deadpan, “killing the evil fuckers helps to deal with it too.”
Hearing the words evil fuckers come out of Greyvian’s mouth just seemed wrong. He was far too used to the male being all proper English and everything.
“The best thing to do, however,” Greyvian continued, seemingly oblivious to the impact of his curse, “is not to look for that red haze to begin with. If you can learn to control your feeding you won’t have to rely on that to pick your prey.”
“You never learnt.” He hadn’t meant it to come out so accusatory, but the guy didn’t seem to mind.
“No. I never learnt,” he said, voice back to being neutral, inflectionless. Which, with Greyvian, probably meant that he had switched off because it was too painful. “But that’s not to say that you can’t. In fact, I highly recommend never feeding from evil. It makes the memori
es ten times harder to deal with.”
“Fuck.” That was definitely something he wanted to avoid at all costs.
At this point, Jacob would try anything and everything to avoid that second sight and the possibility that he would one day be as cut off from emotion as his father—or worse, as evil as the sons of bitches whose memories became his. That meant not picking a victim based on their evil red glow, which in turn meant that anyone would do. Coming to a stop, he looked at the people sporadically walking past, looking for… what? A bad mood? A surly expression?
Stop procrastinating and just pick one, he chastised himself. Time was wasting. Kobus might find them at any moment, so the sooner they got back, the better.
Without another thought, he reached out and took hold of the arm of the next person that went to walk around him. It was a woman, possibly in her mid-fifties, rather plain in appearance. She stopped dead when his hand wrapped around her upper arm and stared straight ahead. He wondered for a moment why she wasn’t squawking at him to let her go and then remembered that he hadn’t lowered his Awareness shield. Probably for the best, anyway.
Pulling her closer, he got a whiff of perfume and eyed her neck doubtfully. Women sprayed their necks and wrists, didn’t they? He didn’t particularly want to taste the stuff and tried to remember his anatomy lessons to pick another artery. Greyvian must have known why he hesitated, because, after a moment, he stepped forward and lifted the woman’s arm, placing two fingers on the upper inside, tapping once before stepping back once more.
Keeping his eyes on the spot, Jacob stepped forward, lowered his head, sniffed once to make sure she wasn’t coated in deodorant and then applied his teeth and bit.
Trying to keep your head while a rush of pleasure threatened to send you down a stream of happy was really frickin’ difficult. As had happened before, the pleasant tingles spread out from his stomach and he lost focus on everything but the taste and feel. Struggling against the tide of the sensation was a monumental effort, but he thought he was beginning to make some headway when he felt Greyvian’s fingers in that magical little spot that had dropped him to his knees a number of times before. The fact that he felt the fingers before the drop told him that given a few extra seconds, he might have pulled back by himself. Unfortunately, Greyvian didn’t give him those extra seconds before putting the squeeze on, sending him to his knees.
“I almost had it,” he complained, rubbing his shoulder and wincing.
“Really,” Greyvian said, looking at him doubtfully.
“Almost. I wasn’t totally gone this time. I felt your fingers before you dropped me, at least. A little more practice and I might be able to stop myself.” After all, he had stopped of his own volition with Sienna, so he knew it could be done.
Greyvian looked at him for a long moment, expression unreadable, and then started walking back towards the car.
“Don’t forget to heal her,” he threw back over his shoulder.
19
Fully sated, but in no way relaxed, Greyvian checked in briefly with Knox to make sure all was well and then headed for the sanctuary of his bedroom. Too many thoughts were filling his mind for sleep, but the solitude would do him good, would give him the time and space to try to come to grips with the fact that Jacob could see evil, that his son had inherited not just his need for human blood, but also his curse. Most galling of all, and perhaps the most damning of his character flaws, was the thought that perhaps Jacob would learn to control his thirst.
He hated that the last thought nagged at him so much. That it seemed the most frequent and badly received of them all. But, ever since he had found that he required human blood and was unable to control the amount that he took, that had been the one thing above all else that he had aimed to achieve. Needing human blood might not have seemed so much of a curse had he been able to control the feeding as other vampires did. He could control his emotions, lock them away in a small part of his mind when he really needed to, but he couldn’t control the amount of blood that he took.
His only saving grace had been the fact that he was the only vampire in existence that needed human blood. Nobody could point to him and say that he was the only human-blood-drinking vampire in existence that couldn’t control his thirst because he was the only human-blood-drinking vampire in existence. He set the precedent. He was able to say that it was because he had to drink human blood that he lost control, killing his donor. If Jacob did eventually learn to control the amount that he took, Greyvian would have no excuse for his weakness but weakness alone. The thousands of human lives that he had taken and would continue to take would all come down to the fact that he wasn’t strong enough to stop himself from taking everything they had. Or perhaps, that deep down inside, he didn’t want to stop. Maybe he wanted to kill all of those people. After all, he felt no remorse for killing evil, so maybe that too was just a cover for his murderous nature. Maybe he should just accept the inevitable—that he enjoyed the kill, that he liked to inflict suffering, that he—
Shaking his head, he stopped the train of thought in its tracks. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t how his thought patterns worked. He had come to grips with his past and his inability to control his thirst a long time ago. Why was he revisiting it in this manner?
A red haze of depraved images flashed through his mind, a verbal stream of thoughts filling his mind along with it, the tone of those thoughts similar to the ones that had been circling his mind like a pack of hungry dogs.
Of course. The unwanted side effects of his little affliction. Sometimes it took days to contain the taint that evil left inside of his mind, to get his thoughts to realign, to find their groove once again. The track that was his and not somebody else’s.
He couldn’t afford the distraction right now, but he could afford the hunger even less so he would just have to be mindful of it. The sooner he got to his bedroom and meditated to clear his mind, the better.
Looking around himself, he suddenly realised that he was not in the hallway that led to his bedroom. Instead, he was on the other side of the house, standing in front of a door that led into one of the guestrooms. A door that held the lingering scent of a certain human female who had no right to smell as delightful as she did.
Had his subconscious led him here? For what purpose?
Staring at the door handle, he realised that this would be a defining moment in his life. If he reached down and opened the door, it would be with intent. He could not put it down to a loss of willpower, a loss of control. He would not allow his life to be defined that way.
Not any longer.
Whatever he did next, it was all on him.
It was dark inside her room, but that didn’t matter because of his night vision. He was able to pick out every object as if it were lit like day. Not that he cared about every object in the room. The only one that his eyes were focused on lay on the bed, covered by a thin blanket, breathing softly and slowly.
The air felt warm against his skin and was sweetly spiced with her scent, the richness of it invading his nostrils, threatening to take away his control if he gave into it. But that wasn’t what he was here for. This was not about losing control; it was about maintaining it.
Sienna was the greatest threat to his willpower, so he was going to prove once and for all that he was not a slave to his thirst.
A sudden disturbing thought entered his mind, given wings for only a moment before it was swamped under once again by the strength of an alien determination. Perhaps I am not myself right now.
Moving towards the bed, he reached down and tugged at his t-shirt, pulling the material free of his leathers. In one fluid move, he rid himself of the confining item and tossed it aside, his eyes never once leaving the still form beneath the covers. She stirred as he reached down and removed his boots and rolled over towards him as his fingers found the button of his pants.
As if she sensed his presence, Sienna’s eyes snapped open, finding his as he twisted, releasing the button from its c
atch. Her gaze travelled the length of him, taking in his state of undress and then rose back to meet his once more.
He didn’t wait for consent as he rid himself of the last barrier between them, tossing the leathers aside with little care for where they fell. Naked and proud, he stood before her, allowing her a short moment to take in the full length and width of his arousal before stalking the remaining few feet to her bedside.
She stared up at him, eyes wide, lips parted. She made no move to welcome him, but neither did she tell him to go away. He was about to reach down and lift the covers aside when her eyes fell to his erection, followed closely by her hand. Her touch was light, hesitant at first and then bolder as he hissed with pleasure. She stroked him a few times in a way that he had allowed no other and then circled the tip with her index finger. Finding a bead of moisture, she then began to coat the head, her finger going around and around.
Red-hazed images flashed through his mind, strong hands grabbing hold of a woman’s head, hips thrusting back and forth, the pleasant sensation of warm wetness surrounding his cock, the even more pleasant awareness that it was against the woman’s will. Squeezing his eyes shut, he willed the memories away, trying to push them back down into the recesses of his mind where they belonged.
Why were these memories so hard to control? What was so different about that last male that this taint seemed to stick to him so much more than normal?
Opening his eyes, he tried to focus on what Sienna was doing to him, to let the pleasure of her touch burn away the evil. It even worked for a while, especially when the warm wetness of her mouth closed around the tip, but then his hands clasped the sides of her head and it was as if he were about to re-enact the depravity of what that bastard had done to some poor unsuspecting woman.
Pushing Sienna’s head back, he stared down at her innocent face as she returned his gaze with a questioning look. He shook his head once, unable to trust his voice and eased her back onto the bed.
Lifting the covers, he caught sight of her camisole and couldn’t look away. The last time they had done this, he hadn’t had the chance to truly appreciate all that her body had to offer. He wasn’t going to waste another opportunity.
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