Abbott had come in while she was talking, but Eric hadn’t seen him yet.
“This is my friend, Abbott. I was a little nervous about telling you so soon, so he’s here to help me explain. Normally, we like to wait until we know someone fairly well before we share our secret, but... you’re different. You needed to know sooner, rather than later.”
She couldn’t tell what Eric was thinking, and didn’t want to invade his privacy by reading his mind. However, she could tell he didn’t believe her.
Eric glanced at Abbott and then looked back to Kendra, adjusting himself a little in the chair so he could more easily keep an eye on both. “You said you had proof? I think it’s time to pull some of it out.”
“What would make you believe me? Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“You can fly?”
There wasn’t enough room to fly inside, so she levitated up from the chair and floated across the room and back, sinking gracefully back into her seat. She looked at him the entire time, but he waited until she was seated again before responding.
He didn’t get flustered, just calmly said, “Well, that is a neat trick. I thought vampires had fangs?”
She opened her mouth so he could see her teeth, let her fangs grow and stay out a few seconds, and then shrink back to their normal size.
She saw him grow pale, and smelled his fear.
“Please don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you, and neither will Abbott.”
“I’m not afraid, and I’m not completely convinced yet, either.”
“Eric, every human emotion has a smell. I can smell when you’re afraid, when you’re horny, when you’re angry, when you’re happy.”
She heard Abbott in her mind. That’s not helping, Kendra. Let him get used to the idea of not being able to hide emotions later.
How do I help him not be afraid?
You know how to do this. Sit back in your chair, look relaxed. Drink some wine. I’m going to stay on the other side of the room and be as discrete as I can, for now.
Kendra sat back in her chair, uncrossed her legs and re-crossed them the other direction. Abbott was right, she knew how to make it easier for him. She pulled enough air in to speak, and told Eric, “We don’t have to kill to feed. We take less in a feeding than the Red Cross takes in a blood donation, and our bite is much more fun — if I choose, I can make it orgasmic. However, I’ve already fed tonight, as has Abbott. We aren’t interested in your blood. Very few humans know of our existence, and I’m only telling you because I want to try to have a relationship with you, and, well, this is probably information you need to know, if we’re going to date. I wanted to be honest with you up front.”
“If you were to bite me, would I turn into a vampire?”
“No. You’d need to be bitten on many consecutive days, and then have your blood drained to the point just before death.”
“Then bite me and make me orgasm. Then I’ll believe you’re a vampire.”
Kendra was shocked, this was the last thing she’d expected.
“I’ll step outside for a moment,” Abbott said from across the room.
Eric looked over at Abbott. “But you have super hearing, right? So you’ll hear us from outside, too.”
“Yes, but sometimes the illusion of privacy is better than nothing.”
Kendra needed to talk to Eric about binding him. She’d figured he’d need some convincing for her to bite him in order to bind him, but with him asking for it, she needed to get permission now so she wouldn’t need to bite him twice.
“Eric, we need to talk about something before I bite you. It’s part of the reason Abbott is here. Vampire society has a lot of rules designed to keep our secret and thus keep us safe. The only way we’re allowed to share the information with humans is if we perform a little ritual, so we’ll be alerted the moment a human even thinks about telling our secret. I won’t do it, though, without your permission.”
“But, now that you’ve told me you kind of have to do it, right? So it doesn’t matter if I give permission or not.”
“No, we have two options. I can make you forget I told you, or I can bind you so you can’t tell our secret.”
He was trying hard to appear calm, but his scent gave away his anxiety, fear, and shock as he asked, “You can make me forget?”
Kendra nodded. “Yes. Before blood banks, when we fed on someone who wasn’t a companion, we had to make them forget it happened. It’s an evolutionary thing, I guess, but the point is that you don’t have to go through the binding ritual if you don’t want.”
“You have to drink my blood to do the binding thing. What do you have to do to make me forget?”
“Just look into your eyes.”
“And you’re telling me because you want to have a relationship with me.” His voice was incredulous, disbelieving… and yet he was being forced to believe, as there were no other logical explanations.
“Yes.”
“Would this relationship involve the regular taking of my blood?” He was a rich businessman, after all, so he jumped straight to what she might want from him, how he might be taken advantage of.
“Only if you want me to,” she tried to assure him. “As I told you, now that there are blood banks, I’m no longer dependent on finding human sources for blood. There’s something called a human companion, someone a vampire keeps around as an intimate source of food, and that’s probably how the vampire community will see you — at least at first. However, I’m interested in you, I want to get to know you, spend time with you, and if you don’t want the sharing of blood to be part of our relationship, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a very intimate act, almost more so than sex sometimes, but if you aren’t comfortable with it then it wouldn’t be pleasurable, so I wouldn’t want to do it.”
“After you’ve bitten me and bound me, if I wanted you to make me forget, could you still do it?”
“Yes.”
He took a breath and blew it out. “Okay, then. Abbott, go ahead and do your little illusion of privacy thing. Kendra, how do we do this?”
“When I first bite you, I’ll need you to say, ‘I will tell no one of the existence of vampires or the supernatural world. I will keep your secrets.’ Once you’ve said the necessary words, I’ll inject the feel-good stuff. I’m sorry, but I can’t make it pleasant from the very beginning this time. I can keep it from hurting more than a few microseconds, but I have to wait until the ritual completes before I can put the feel-good stuff in. Now, repeat back to me what you need to say.”
“I will tell no one of the existence of vampires. I won’t tell anyone your secret.”
“No, the end is ‘I will keep your secrets.’ The wording is such so that you aren’t just promising not to tell with your mouth, but not to give away the secret in any way. Not in writing, not by playing twenty questions until someone guesses, not by leaving hints.”
She repeated it again, he said it correctly this time, and she nodded and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile as she said, “Very good. Abbott will stay in the room until you’ve said the words, and then he’ll leave. If you don’t say it right, he’ll correct you and you can say it again, repeating after him.”
Kendra walked to the sofa and sat down. “Come sit with me, please?” She wasn’t submitting to him just yet, but knew he didn’t like to be told what to do.
As he got up and walked to her, she realized why he was doing this. “You’re in this for the experience, aren’t you? A life experience few get to have?”
He smiled. “Maybe a little. I’m still not completely convinced, but I’m willing to see where this leads.”
She grinned back at him. “Adrenaline junkie.”
Still smiling, he used the same affectionate tone of voice she’d just used to retort, “Bloodsucking vampire.”
He was sitting beside her now, and she leaned forward to kiss him, but changed her mind. She wanted him to kiss her, so she sat back up and asked, “Kiss me?”
He did
n’t make her say please, and his eyes went dark as he angled his face and lowered his lips to hers, the kiss more demanding than sensual, though it didn’t lack passion. Dominating her, even for those few seconds, took away the smell of fear and seemed to lift his mood.
When he released her from the kiss, she zeroed in on his neck, smelled and felt and heard his pulse, knew exactly where the sweetest spot would be, and bit, suppressing a groan as her teeth sank into his skin and she got her first taste of him — all sunshine and forest, with a hint of evergreen, as if his pores had soaked in the forest and made him part of it.
He jerked at the impact, but she quickly numbed her entry, and then put the binding agent in as he said the words, “I will tell no one of the existence of vampires or the supernatural. I will keep your secrets.”
Two heartbeats after the final word left his mouth, she injected the right combination to make it pleasurable, gave it a second to be carried away from the bite, then added the orgasm cocktail, waited a few heartbeats, and then, finally, she stopped sipping and drank him into her.
As he climaxed, she took on a little of his life force as she felt their auras swirl together. They didn’t join, there wasn’t enough of a connection, yet, but their energies still danced and twirled in a way that doesn’t happen with a stranger.
When she finally pulled back, she ran her tongue across the bite marks to heal them, and then reached to hold him to her. However, instead, he pulled her head to his chest, holding her instead of the way it usually worked after a feeding. Yes, indeed, if they managed to make this work, it would be different than anything she’d ever had before.
Kendra heard Abbott returning and warned Eric, “Abbott’s on his way back in.”
“Why is he really here?”
“Two reasons, the first is because the binding had to be witnessed and will have to be tested, which he’ll do in a little bit. The second is, well, consider Abbott kind of like a big brother figure in my life, and you’re the new boyfriend he wants to meet.”
Abbott was back by then, and added, “I also want to explain a little bit about our society. If you’re going to be in and out of our coterie house, there are things you need to know. First, let’s test the binding. Kendra will step outside for a moment for this part.”
Eric stood. “Hang on, I need to, ummm, I’ll be right back.”
* * * *
He’d come in his fucking pants, without anyone touching his cock. Not even through the damned pants.
He cleaned himself in the bathroom, changed into different underwear and jeans, and looked at himself in the mirror. He could barely see where she’d bitten him, and it didn’t hurt at all. Shit, he hadn’t imagined it, though.
Two vampires were upstairs in his yacht, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t crazy. Fuck.
Kendra lived in a nice house on a golf course, she’d worn expensive clothes and shoes, and she drove a limited edition luxury vehicle. Unless this was an elaborate scam, she wasn’t after his money.
He tried to put together what he’d known last night, before the whole vampire thing. She was attractive, seemed well off financially, had an adventurous streak, and had an icy exterior that challenged him to see if he could thaw her out. She’d responded to his dominance, but also seemed to have a dominant streak of her own.
And he’d thought she was decades more mature than most women her age.
Damn.
He climbed the steps and stopped in the doorway to look at them — Kendra in white flowing crop pants with a pink clingy t-shirt and a matching pink blouse over the top and unbuttoned. Abbott in a high dollar, probably custom made suit. They looked perfectly normal, and yet… not. Too perfect, and both with the same icy exterior, though Kendra’s seemed thicker, harsher.
As he stepped in the room, Kendra gave him a peck on the cheek before walking outside, and Eric turned to Abbott, who removed a small notepad and a pen from his inside jacket pocket.
Eric accepted the pad and pen, and read the page opened to him.
Please turn to the next page and write about what you’ve just learned. Start the sentence with, “The woman I am dating is a...”
Eric’s hand and fingers worked against him as he wrote the V, but his entire arm went numb and hurt as he set the pen down to write the A. He persevered and managed to make the first line of the M, but it was a full minute before he could drag the pen down to make the second line. His arm, hand, and fingers simply would not do his bidding. As he tried to push the pen back up the paper, his entire arm jerked away, leaving a shaky scrawl across the page.
He looked up to Abbott. “I can’t. There’s this vibration inside me, and it hurts when I intend to write it, plus I can’t control my arm — it won’t do what I tell it.”
Kendra stepped back inside and said, “Yes, and I felt the same vibration from outside. I’ll know if you try to tell, no matter where in the world you are.”
Eric was simultaneously freaked out, fascinated, and disbelieving, though he’d just experienced it. “How? How is this possible? To make an oath... real! No matter how hard I tried, I could not write the word. How is this possible?”
“It used to be called magic,” Abbott told him, his voice gentle. “Nowadays it would probably be called metaphysics. If some of the physicists out there knew about it, they’d probably use it to try to prove their nice little string theories.” He sat in a chair, regal and proper as if he were king. “Now that you’ve seen a taste of our abilities, you need to understand vampire society is set up on a sort of magical hierarchy, with the more powerful vampires having rank over the less powerful of our kind.”
Abbott looked to Kendra, back to Eric. “I’m telling you this because Kendra won’t. She doesn’t like to think of herself as being powerful, but she’s probably one of the ten or so most powerful vampires in the United States. She isn’t Master of her own territory only because she has no interest in it at this time.”
“So, Kendra has some sort of Master Vampire over her? What kind of hold does he have on her?”
Eric had no idea how vampire society worked, but he didn’t like the idea of Kendra being at someone else’s mercy. He’d only known her a short time, but she’d gone out of her way to be truthful with him at the first chance, and he respected honesty, bravery, and a zest for life — all three of which Kendra seemed to have in spades.
* * * *
Abbott smiled. Eric had gone straight to worrying about how this affected Kendra instead of how it might affect Eric. Abbott liked this man.
“I am Master of this territory, and Kendra is my third in command,” Abbott told him with a smile. “She’s also my friend, but even if she weren’t, I’m not in the habit of forcing the vampires in my territory to do things they do not wish. I have rules I require my people follow, but they’re rules Kendra lives by anyway. Things like not killing humans, not kidnapping humans for use as companions, not turning a human into a vampire unless it’s their decision, and bringing humans to me for extra counseling so we can all be sure of their decision before they’re turned. There are some vampires who choose not to live in my territory because they don’t like my rules, which is fine by me.”
“So, being her Vampire Master doesn’t mean being her... Master?”
“Yes, it does, though in our case, not in the sexual manner you’re implying, and I rarely pull rank on her. If it becomes necessary, I won’ t hesitate, but she and I are in agreement on most everything, and we respect each other enough we can work around the things we don’t agree on. However, while we’re on the subject, this is another part of Vampire society you need to understand.”
Once again, Abbott looked to Kendra before he continued with his explanation for Eric. She wasn’t using their mind connection to stop him, but he could sense her trepidation and fear as she worried about Eric’s reaction.
Abbott chose his words carefully, determined to do his best to explain it in a way to keep Eric from freaking out. Kendra hadn’t expressed interest in
someone for decades, and Abbott wanted to see her happy. He’d grown concerned about her as she’d withdrawn from the human world except for what was needed to help Abbott with his business interests. She seemed to have grown bored with living, and he’d seen too many old vampires degenerate from melancholy to depression to malevolence. Kendra had been feral when he’d found her, and he’d found the spark of humanity in her, showed her how to live in the light, even if she could never see the sun again. Now, Eric seemed to be doing the job this time — he’d awakened her, reminded her life could be fun, and Abbott would do what he could to keep this human in her life.
“When humans go into a power exchange relationship,” he told Eric, “they do so based on preference, the way they’re wired, so to speak. Someone who’s aroused by submitting looks for someone who enjoys dominating. It isn’t about who’s stronger, because big, strong men submit to small women all the time in human society. However, in vampire society, the power exchange isn’t decided by preference, but by hierarchy. Just as you felt the magical pull when you tried to write about our secret, it’s impossible for a stronger vampire to submit in any way to a weaker vampire. It’s possible for them to have vanilla sex in any form they choose, but if there is to be a power exchange, their position in our society makes the choices for them.”
“And Kendra is powerful,” said Eric, thinking aloud, “so she’s used to being the one in control. But, I’m not powerful, so how is it that she....” Eric wasn’t sure he should tell the Master Vampire Kendra had submitted to him, even if it was only for a few kisses. Once again, Abbott was pleased with Kendra’s choice.
“You aren’t a magical being, so the rules are different. She can submit to you if she wants, though you need to understand it’ll cause a bit of an issue amongst the hierarchy if the other vampires find out. This isn’t to say you can’t go forward, but I want you to understand what it will mean in our world.”
Riding the Storm Page 4