Dark Longing: A Novel of the Dark Ones (Pure/ Dark Ones Book 2)

by Aja James

  Why was the pairing between a Dark and Pure One disastrous?

  What happened to the Princess and her Blooded Mate afterwards?

  Could it be inferred that they had actually Mated, for the text did not specifically say so?

  What exactly led to the Great War?

  Simone had given her more information from what she recalled from oral histories. The union between the Princess and her Pure Mate resulted in offspring.

  A boy and a girl. Twins.

  The boy had died, causes unknown, and the girl had been lost, never to be found.

  The Princess had gone mad with grief and anger, for her lover had betrayed her in the most hideous way. Her mother the Queen waged war against the Pure Ones in retaliation, but ultimately lost.

  That was all the Keeper knew. No further answers to all the whys that Inanna wanted to ask but held back, for Simone had seemed distracted and drained, pushed to her limits. But Inanna did learn one shattering truth:

  The Princess’s Pure Mate had been the leader of the Great Rebellion.

  Oh, Papa. Why did you never tell me?

  Fragmented pieces of long-forgotten memories began to weave themselves into clear images in Inanna’s mind.

  Her father’s grim mask of heartbreak and anguish whenever she asked about her mother. His pain had been so great it radiated from his body like a physical force, pushing her innocent questions back until they were bottled, buried and consigned to oblivion.

  The first onset of her Change.

  The horrifying and terrifying realization that she was a stranger and a monster to the very people she grew up with and loved. Even worse, that she was a half-breed, an abomination that neither Dark nor Pure Ones would ever accept.

  The unconditional love of her father’s embrace when she’d run to him, angry, hurt and ashamed.

  And there was something else.

  An awareness, the shadow of a thought, a tingling that spread like electricity through her consciousness.

  There was someone else. Someone who made her truth bearable, someone who kept her secret and protected her. Who…

  A sharp, stabbing pain almost blinded Inanna’s eyes and she swerved to the side of the bridge she had been driving across and slammed on the brakes.

  Oxygen seemed to be in short supply as she gulped shuddering breaths, choking on a flood of tears. Gut-wrenching sobs racked her body as she relived the emotions of her long-distant past, though her mind remained ignorant of the actual memories.

  Her heart remembered. Her soul remembered.

  Alone in her soundproofed vehicle, she released all her pent-up emotions, fears, hopes and desires. Until a voice whispered in the air around her:

  Come home, Libbu. You are always loved. You are never alone.

  Inanna followed the voice, perhaps only in her imagination, but even so it comforted her, calmed her, gave her strength.

  Made her feel safe.

  When she entered the apartment, out of breath and out of tears, Gabriel met her at the door.

  For a moment that was only a heartbeat, yet one that stretched infinitely across time, they regarded each other, frozen with a soul-deep recognition.

  They each took a step toward the other, and then she was in his arms, holding on tightly like a castaway to a life raft in a stormy sea.

  Gabriel did not speak, did not think. He simply felt with all his heart and being.

  He felt her sorrow, pain and fear. Most of all, he felt her deep abiding love for him. It radiated like an inner sun from her every pore. It warmed them both with its uplifting heat. And raised their temperatures with a yearning desire.

  How he longed for her.

  He lifted her in his arms and took them to their room. Deftly, he undressed them both until she lay vulnerable and exposed beneath him, the windows to her soul wide open as her deep blue eyes penetrated his.

  Instinctively, he knew what she wanted from him, what she needed with every fiber of her being.

  It was not blood and sex, though his body was hers to command.

  She wanted his surrender.

  Complete and eternal.

  The past no longer mattered. There was only the future.

  Together.

  Gabriel could not pinpoint when he knew he loved her. Perhaps it was the first time he heard her laughter as she fell in a tangled heap with Benji on the ice rink, bubbling and carefree. Perhaps it was the moment she told him, boldly forthright and unapologetically honest, that she wanted him. Or maybe it was the welcome of her body the instant he entered her, as if he was finally home.

  Perhaps he had loved her all along.

  He gave into love’s demands now, gently kissing her tear-stained cheeks, her swollen lips, her quivering chin, as if she was desperately trying to hold things together when her world had just been shattered.

  He didn’t ask questions, didn’t demand answers. He only gave of himself, showed her through painstaking tenderness that she would never be alone. She would always be loved.

  Slowly, as if every inch of her that he touched required equal attention, respect and care, he kissed a warm, soothing, arousing trail down the long column of her neck, her collar bone, to her desire-swollen breasts, the small, pink nipples distended into hard little beads. The plump mounds fit perfectly in his calloused palms, and he massaged them gently while his tongue bathed and suckled at the aureoles.

  Inanna moaned and arched her spine as passion blazed deliciously throughout her body, chasing away demons from the past. Her mind and heart could hold neither regret, fear nor sorrow when they were full of love for her Blooded Mate.

  Gabriel continued his meticulous journey down her torso, kissing each rib, delving his tongue into her shallow navel, his hands holding her hips steady as his mouth closed upon her clitoris.

  At the first pressure of his full lips sucking upon the tiny pearl, she began to saw her arms and legs with mindless lust, her hands fisting in the bed sheets, her heels trying vainly to gain purchase. She settled with wrapping her legs around his shoulders, holding his head prisoner against the juncture of her thighs.

  Gabriel had no plans to escape, however. He continued to hold her hips down while he bathed her swollen nubbin with saliva, interspersing the deep sucks and draws with licks and flicks.

  Inanna’s orgasm hit her hard and painfully, the pleasure muted by the emptiness of her core, her contracting muscles drawing on nothing, her womb parched for his seed. She now thrashed in earnest, desperate for his completion of her, clawing to feel the strength of him inside her.

  Gabriel answered her silent plea by covering her still shaking body with his much heavier one, trapping her beneath him, stilling her quakes with his soothing heat.

  Slowly, inexorably, he pushed his hardness inch by voluptuous inch inside of her.

  All sensation focused on their joining. All the blood, energy and nerve endings in their bodies coalesced in the place where his steel plundered her silk, the friction and pressure so exquisite, so consuming, they were enslaved to feeling. The world could have imploded around them and they would not have noticed.

  They knew only of the force and depth of his possession. The pressure and pull of her claiming.

  When the penetration was full and complete, the most intimate part of him coming flush against the most intimate part of her deep inside, an organism the likes of which Inanna had never experienced started a chain reaction from her swollen core to her clitoris, through her vaginal canal, her limbs, her torso, to explode in blinding bursts throughout her body until even the tips of her eyelashes felt singed.

  Gabriel groaned deeply as her inner muscles tightly fisted and pumped and squeezed his tortured cock, drawing upon him with enough pressure to make stars flash behind his eyelids. The rush of his seed from his scrotum to his staff, to gush through the mouth at the tumescent crown, brought delayed but satisfying relief to them both.

  When the last shivers ebbed out, and their hearts returned to a more normal cadence, Gabr
iel rolled them to their sides, keeping himself inside her as if he intuitively knew that she needed the connection and was bereft without it.

  She rested her head on one of her arms, the other curled around his waist, her hand absently kneading the muscles of his backside. Her leg hitched over his thigh, her foot hooked around his calf.

  As if she couldn’t stop touching him, making up for lost time, her hand wandered around to his hip, one finger tracing the jut of his hipbone, the tight band of muscle directly above it, and inwards across his lower abdomen toward the base of his penis.

  There her hand stayed, her thumb brushing back and forth, back and forth along the root of his sex, plumping absent-mindedly the vein that throbbed against his hyper-sensitive skin.

  I have not had enough of you, those wayward fingers seemed to say. I will never have enough of you.

  Tenderly, he smoothed a few tangled golden strands from her cheeks so that he could gaze unobstructed into her dark blue eyes.

  “Better?” he asked, a small knowing smile on his lips.

  Shyly, she smiled in return and nodded.

  “Will you tell me what’s wrong?” he inquired softly. It was not a demand, not even a request. Simply a suggestion, to do with as she chose.

  She opened the floodgates and shared all of herself. Her origin, her birth, her history. She entrusted everything to him.

  Hours later, as the first rays of dawn peeked through their bedroom curtains, Inanna’s words finally slowed their procession through her lips, having unburdened all of her truths, save one.

  She was warming up to that last piece, but she would not hide from him. There would be no secrets between them.

  “A vampire’s venom is different from person to person,” she explained, now lying bonelessly on his chest, still holding him captive inside her.

  Their conversation, or rather her monologue, had been interspersed with lovemaking, sometimes slow and languorous, other times needy and ravenous. Always intense, always consuming.

  “It depends on the vampire’s chemistry, the subject’s chemistry and how they combine. In most situations, the venom is like a tranquilizer, numbing the subject from fear, pain and preventing mobility. Other times, it could be an aphrodisiac, or the opposite, an injection of debilitating agony.”

  Gabriel nodded. He could attest to both extremes.

  “When a subject Consents or forms a Blood Contract,” Inanna continued, her fingers idly taking a stroll down the smooth, satiny skin of her Mate’s side, “the feeding is painless, usually enjoyable for the subject. Otherwise, it can be a form of punishment or torture.”

  “You collected Blood Contracts before me,” Gabriel stated rather than asked, having deduced that much.

  “Yes,” she answered, her fingers stilling.

  Despite the instinct to avoid, she made herself raise her eyes and look directly into his. “I am known as the Angel of Death among my Kind. My chosen role is to help lost souls find their peace, either to be reborn with a second chance or to be taken out of the cycle of life.”

  Gabriel’s gaze probed hers for long, solemn moments, moments in which Inanna did not blink nor breathe.

  “Olivia was one of your Contracts, wasn’t she.” Another statement, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  Inanna said nothing to explain herself.

  If he blamed her for hastening his wife’s death, even if it was a few minutes or at most hours, she would accept the blame without rationalization.

  She owed it to him, whatever retribution he demanded of her for cheating him of those precious moments. If it had been Gabriel on death’s door and someone had opened it to usher him through, she would have hunted the person down after she jumped through the door herself to bring him back.

  Finally, he sighed and raised a hand to cup her cheek, his thumb smoothing over her skin.

  “It must have been hard for you,” he said softly, “to witness so much suffering and hopelessness.”

  Inanna gasped at his innate understanding and compassion. She had not dared to hope for this much.

  “For Olivia, in particular, you invested so much of yourself, trying to resuscitate a woman who was already dead inside,” he continued in that low, husky baritone, deepened with emotion. “At times the despair must have threatened to strangle your hope, snuff out your joy. It is a slow death to watch someone you care for wither away. It hurts to know that she would rather embrace nothingness rather than life with you.”

  She knew that he now spoke for both of them. It was all true, every word. And she knew that he’d suffered far more than she in this instance.

  His thumb continued to stroke her cheek, his eyes full of love and a bittersweet grief. “You helped her find peace in the end,” he said, “eased her from a world of pain. She must have been grateful to have you beside her in the last moments, grateful to have known you and been loved by you.”

  Tears welled unbidden in Inanna’s eyes.

  She knew that he wasn’t only speaking of Olivia any more.

  There was something else, frustrating her to no end with its elusiveness, like trying to capture tendrils of smoke in her hands.

  But if not specific memories, feelings overwhelmed her, splintered her apart.

  Desperate and lost, she moved upon him, taking his mouth with hers, plunging her tongue deep inside as her hips began to undulate against his, her inner muscles squeezing his sex tightly, possessively, almost savagely.

  He met her thrust for thrust as she rode him hard and deep, as if she wanted to absorb him into herself, consume him whole within her inferno.

  All the while she plundered his mouth, staking ownership, surrendering herself.

  And then, as her body seized upon her climax, she pulled away enough to sink her fangs into his throat, his blood filling her mouth at the same moment his semen flooded her womb.

  Exhausted and deeply content, Inanna lay still on top of his chest, her face turned into the crook of his neck. She licked the bite wound closed and murmured before slumber overtook her in a muffled litany, more fervent than a prayer, “I love you… I love you… I love you…”

  She did not hear his answering vow, “And I, you, Libbu mine.”

  *** *** *** ***

  The vampire turned round and round in her head, like Boading balls rotating methodically in a zen master’s palm, the interesting new things she had learned, as well as the fascinating secrets she suspected.

  What to do with all this tantalizing information?

  The Pure One had delivered a message that the human fighter, ex-military, likely Navy Seal, she had bet on to replace Gabriel D’Angelo as the spectators’ favorite could no longer be used.

  They had no concrete evidence, but there were hints of his duplicity.

  Too many coincidences not to proceed with caution. So they set up a death match between him and the other potential infiltrator, a Brazilian jujitsu mixed-martial artist, to take each other out and save them the trouble.

  The Seal must have nine lives, for he not only won the death match but survived a bloody execution by four of the creature’s finest vampire assassins. He was the rat within their network then, in all likelihood.

  As with the Salem witch trials toward the end of the seventeenth century, if the accused died, he was probably innocent. If he lived, however, well… he was most certainly guilty to the depth of his eternal soul.

  Pity he got away. She could have used the entertainment value of torturing, bleeding, and killing him by slow, excruciating degrees. The consolation was that either way, they’d rid themselves of the mole they suspected within their ranks.

  “You have the look of one who is thinking much too hard,” a languorous voice floated her way through the darkness. “Let the game play out of its own accord. We have already set the pieces in motion.”

  The vampire narrowed her red-centered eyes, seeing into the blackness that surrounded her.

  The creature sat idly at a small round table for two,
sipping wine and fingering the chess pieces that were laid out on a marble board before it, positioned as if a match was already in progress.

  Today, it was in its usual form, looking both female and male, and neither at the same time. But even in this ambivalent state, the vampire knew that it was ten times more beautiful than herself.

  It was more than just exquisite features arranged together on a flawless form. There was an aura of irresistible attraction all around the creature. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and everyone had their own opinion, yet the vampire knew that it was beautiful to all who beheld it.

  Momentarily distracted from her plotting, she regarded the creature thoughtfully, perhaps for the first time with a clear mind.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Whoever you want me to be,” was its usual answer, the same one it gave the first time they had met and aligned their paths.

  “Who are you really?” she insisted this time, not satisfied with the brushoff.

  There were times in their “partnership” that she felt a powerful mistrust of it, for she never knew what it wanted, what its motives were. But then the pleasures it gave her trumped her misgivings. And besides, she told herself she didn’t really care as long as it furthered her own goals.

  But she was suddenly curious. Soon she would be betting everything on the line. There would be no turning back.

  Failure meant death.

  Her death.

  What about the creature? What was its skin in the game? What did it have to lose when all was said and done?

  The creature sighed deep and long, as if trying to find patience with a slow-witted child.

  “An abomination,” it finally answered. “Neither one nor the other. Neither here nor there. A freak of nature that wouldn’t even be accepted in the Circus. A mutation in the gene pool that hails the end of civilization.”

  The vampire frowned slightly. It spoke in riddles that made no sense.

  “Are you vampire?”

  “Yes.”

  Just as she inhaled a breath at finally getting somewhere, it said after a pause, “And no.”

  Frustration was building in an ugly black tide within her. “Are you a Pure One then?”