Lucinda, Darkly

by Sunny

  The sight and sensation was almost too much, making Stefan close his eyes, shudder and tremble against her, his breath stumbling and catching in his throat.

  “Lucinda.” Her name was both a plea for mercy and a cry not to stop. He yearned for her, needed her, lusted after her . . . and was unsettled by her, by what she was telling him, showing him. That these wild emotions, these knee-weakening surges of pleasure were what she gave to all who let her drink of their blood.

  “You don’t need to do this, my lady,” Stefan said, dropping to his knees, baring his neck to her, a silent pale offering before her.

  “Oh, but I do.” She stroked with her hand just above his skin, along the ivory sweep of his throat stretched out before her as if his power, his male essence, was something tangible she could feel. “For it is not just blood I feed upon, you see.” She bent down, deliberately breathing deeply, taking in his scent, smelling his blood. “I also feed on your release . . . and your light. I take that, too, into me, and for a brief moment, it makes me feel almost alive again.”

  “All that you need, all that you would have of me is yours.” Soft words, a quiet pledge of devotion still that brought not pleasure but a sting of tears to Lucinda’s eyes as she hovered over his tantalizing pulse.

  He did not fear her yet. Not as he should.

  She wrapped him suddenly tight in chains invisible, in bonds unbreakable. She felt him tremble beneath her phantom hands as she ran them down the swell of his chest, swept them over his wide shoulders, his muscled arms, both strong and weak and immobile beneath her mental touch.

  “You do not know all that I need, all that I could take from you,” Lucinda said, her eyes suddenly flashing fierce. Her voice became dark and cutting, something that flayed the skin instead of caressing it. “What can please, can also hurt.”

  Stefan could not help his involuntary flinch or the sudden speeding of his heart as he knelt frozen before her, utterly helpless beneath her power.

  “I can feed from pain and suffering, too,” she whispered, each word lancing his skin like a scorpion’s sting, a throbbing tender ache for a moment before easing to just a tiny pain. “I do not have to coax the moon’s light from you in pleasure. I can rip it from you in painful ecstasy. Although the ecstasy would be more on my part, not yours.”

  “Why are you doing this, Lucinda?” Every part of him was frozen but for his voice and his eyes. They looked at her with pleading, with confusion, with hurt. “Why do you want me to fear you?”

  “Because you should,” she said, walking slowly around him in unnerving silence, softly flaying him with her words, each syllable a tiny pinching sting. “Because I am demon dead, and you are alive and living and something we feed upon: your blood, your pleasure, or your tears; your light that we no longer carry in us.” She laid the sharp point of a nail on the back of his shoulder, ran it in a dangerous scraping tease across to the opposite shoulder. Sank it through cloth to prick his skin, feel it quiver beneath her needle-sharp touch.

  “Because if you understood the thirst that we carry with us always, not just to feed upon your blood, but to bathe in it, to wallow in it . . . then you would only just begin to comprehend the danger you foolishly dance with each moment you are with me. You do not truly know what the demon dead are capable of. And your ignorance does not make you safe.” She circled to the front of him in a silent slithering undulation, knelt before him and ran her sharp nails in a fabric-piercing dance across his chest, a lethal prickling tease.

  “So I will show you a little of what I can do. I shall give you a small taste of me, as I take a small taste of you.” A demon oath. Traditional words taught to them to speak during an exchange. A reminder. Not to the supplicant who yielded his life-giving blood, but to the demon that drank it. A reminder to take only a little, so that they did not inadvertently kill their donor. An oath more applicable to a fragile human blood yielder, but oft said when drinking from a Monère contributor, as well, for their richer blood, their more potent power, was a heady temptation.

  Deliberately, Lucinda grazed the tip of her fangs over that smooth, unblemished neck. Over that vibrant, pounding pulse.

  His body tensed against his will.

  She scraped his skin again, a sharp-gentle caress, and he shivered. Would have leaned into her had he been able to, but her bonds held him still, so he was unable to move either toward or away from her.

  With a sudden lunging strike, she bit him with a force that reverberated like a blow throughout his body. A sharp hard burst of pain, a moment of inherent fear, and his primal survival instinct kicked in, too late, gripping him as she drank the first mouthful of his blood.

  Then his need to struggle, to escape, subsided. And in place of panic, a sweet lassitude drifted over Stefan, through him, took him over. An easing of the limbs, a relaxing of the will. The fear faded and pleasure took its place, seeping in like a potent drug. Aided by invisible phantom touches along his skin, and deeper caresses within him, as if she had reached down, deep inside, and plucked the chord of desire, twanging it through him.

  With the second gulp of hot blood, it changed. The chord of desire was plucked again, this time not so gently. With a deliberate jarring force, so that pleasure vibrated more strongly through him. The invisible bonds holding him eased as if she knew she no longer had to hold him; that the pleasure singing through him like a hot fierce song would keep him bound to her more forcibly than chains ever could.

  His body arched against her like a bow pulled back, drawn taut, and she accommodated his body’s natural response with but the barest incremental adjustment of her own body. With an ease and knowledge that could have only come from experiencing a thousand countless other such reactions.

  With the third swallow of his blood, Lucinda ramped up the sensation like a screw suddenly turned tight. She gathered desire and pleasure like an invisible force and shoved it down Stefan. Rammed it inside him like a sharp, piercing arrow.

  A storm of bliss broke inside him.

  His light shot from him, illuminating Stefan with blinding brilliance. His desire crested like a wave smashed against the shore, and he fractured, splintered, came apart in her arms, heaving and shuddering against her as she pressed her weight against him from above, his sex pulsing and ejaculating down below. In a haze of lassitude and floating release, he felt her teeth disengage. Felt her mouth leave him. Felt her arms lower him down to the ground where he lay as helpless now, utterly relaxed, as he had been arched up against her, drawn tight with desire.

  Even drifting in the lethargy of passion ignited and released, Stefan was aware of how quickly and effortlessly she had built up that pleasure and spilled him over into release. Of how easily she had called forth his light and his climax from him . . . with an almost impersonal detachment.

  Even caught up as he was in the post-climatic languor, a part of Stefan was outraged. Not because it had been detached and impersonal, but because she had tried to make it seem so.

  Some of what he was feeling must have shown in his eyes, because hers fell away from his.

  He sat up with a great concentrated effort. “It will not work,” he said.

  “What will not work?”

  “Whatever you were trying to do, to show me, tell me. That I am just one of the thousands of men you have fed upon before, the thousands of men you will feed upon in the future. That won’t work.” His hand reached out and touched her face with rough tenderness. “I know you care for me.”

  Lucinda flinched, the tiniest movement beneath his hand, before she withdrew from his touch. “Have you not learned yet?”

  “What?”

  “That you cannot trust a demon, much less their emotions.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE LESSON DELIVERED, I dissolved the sound barrier I had erected around us.

  A voice pierced the air. My name “Lucinda!” called loudly with urgency. Jonnie’s voice.

  And then Talon’s cry. Softer, weaker, but just as desperate, joinin
g the youth’s. “Princess! We need you quickly.”

  I felt it then, what I had not felt with the sound barrier around us. The pull of the other two caught in our bond, one of them weak and strained, the other alarmingly faint.

  “Nico.” His name was a soft prayer on my lips as I leaped toward the lodging where I had thought them safe—in Halcyon’s private abode, in the protection of High Court. Of all possible places on Earth, I had thought they would be safe here.

  I crashed through the door, and the sight that met me was not the battle I had envisioned. No others were in the room but those I cared for. Nico lay collapsed on the floor, a pale transparent shimmer of himself, his eyes dazed and unaware. Ghosting.

  Talon lay a tangle of utter blackness beside him, shivering, arms and legs wrapped around the fading Monère, trying to keep him from fading more with his physical touch, with the bond they shared. Jonnie knelt beside them.

  “We couldn’t feel you,” Talon cried, his black eyes wide and panicked. “You were just suddenly gone.”

  I realized then that the barrier I had erected had not only blocked out sound, it had cut off my link with the other two. A crucial mistake, almost fatal.

  I dropped to the ground and wrapped my arms around them. So cold. How cold they both were! Especially Nico. Gone beyond the point of shivering anymore.

  With my touch, with all three of us in contact, the connection flowed strong and undiluted between us, and the power I had freshly harnessed from my recent feeding poured from me into Nico and Talon. Talon’s shivering subsided, and Nico’s shivering started up as their temperatures quickly warmed.

  “Oh,” Talon breathed. “That feels wonderful.”

  “For you, maybe,” Nico muttered, teeth chattering. “I feel . . . like I’m going to break apart . . . from all this damn shaking.”

  We wrapped ourselves around him. Jonnie left the room, returned with blankets, and piled them on top of us.

  A sound, a movement, drew my eyes to the door.

  Stefan stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him, my fresh bite mark loud and glaring against the whiteness of his neck. The scent of passion spent and seed spilled permeated the air, making the wet stain on the front of his pants almost redundant.

  “What happened?” Stefan asked.

  I shook my head, the only part of me not covered by the layers of blanket. “Later.” I dared not waste energy erecting a shield of privacy around us now, afraid that it might take away from the power flowing into Nico. “Don’t worry. We’re okay now,” I said, reassuring him. Reassuring all of us.

  Stefan went into the bedroom. A moment later, the sound of running water drifted to my ear, almost drowning out the footsteps coming up our path. But the heartbeat that floated—sang—in my ears, and the approaching presence tingled my senses. A Monère. And not a warrior, but a woman. How could I tell? Perhaps the lightness of her footsteps . . . women walked differently than men. And she felt like a woman somehow to my senses. It could only be the healer.

  The three of us huddled here like this, weak and shivering, was not something I wished her to see and whisper of to the other Monères. The sight might not have been so remarkable had it been just Talon and I, a demon and a strange creature, black as night, entwined together on the floor beneath a pile of blankets. That could have been explained away. But not the Monère sandwiched between us. Heat was not something cold-blooded Monères normally needed. It was something they avoided, actually. Too much of it could kill them, and the thick pile of blankets covering us definitely counted as too much.

  I burrowed my way out of the cocoon of covers. Reaching down, I scooped up everything into my arms—the two men, the nest of blankets—and brought them into the bedroom, laying them on the bed.

  “Shut the door behind us, Jonnie,” I said, and caught the brief glimpse of surprise in the Mixed Blood’s eyes before he closed the door. I crawled beneath the covers, connecting the three of us together once more, and thought of how it must look in Jonnie’s human eyes . . . a small woman carrying two men, one much larger than her, with apparent ease.

  Stefan came out of the shower, dressed in clean clothes.

  “The healer is here,” I said, my gaze skittering away from his. A polite knock sounded on the front door.

  Stefan nodded and closed the bedroom door behind him as he stepped out into the other room. “Let me get it, Jonnie,” I heard Stefan say.

  Nico’s body temp had warmed enough so that he stopped shivering. He relaxed against me now in warmth. The crisis over, tiredness rolled over me, and my lids grew heavy.

  “Wake me up after she leaves,” I murmured and let sleep cradle me briefly in its comforting embrace.

  THE SOUND OF the front door closing woke me up. I found myself in a tangle of bodies and limbs. Nico’s sleepy eyes blinked drowsily open inches away from my face. My left leg and arm were thrown over the stocky Monère, and my breasts nestled against the warm, muscled swells of his arm and chest. His hands were wrapped around my waist, and Talon’s arm and leg thrown over mine, with Nico sandwiched between us.

  My movement, as I tried to untangle myself, roused Talon as well. Not that I could see him; I saw only the black darkness of his hair tucked up against Nico, across from me. But the sudden tension in the slender limbs that had been relaxed a moment before, and their discreet withdrawal from me, let me know that he was awake.

  Heat radiated from Talon, and Nico was that odd temperature of in between. He no longer had the coolness of a Monère, but neither was he as hot as the demon dead.

  I shoved off the blankets and crawled out, leaving Nico still drowsing lazily on the bed.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Comfy,” Nico said with a sleepy smile.

  The sweetness and ease of that smile told me he had not realized yet the significance of what had occurred. What it meant for him and his chances of survival. Of ours as well, Talon and I.

  “Talon?” I said to the dark shadow half-hidden behind Nico.

  “I am well, mistress.”

  “Lucinda. Call me Lucinda.”

  A brief hesitation before he softly repeated my name. “Lucinda,” he said.

  I wondered if Talon had grasped the situation, but I couldn’t see his face and read his expression.

  The door opened and Stefan entered, Jonnie behind him. The Mixed Blood moved slowly, but less gingerly.

  “Was the healer able to do anything for you, Jonnie?” I asked.

  “Not much actual healing, but she took away almost all the discomfort. Which is a wonderful thing,” Jonnie said, grinning.

  Stefan questioned me with his eyes. What happened?

  I motioned Stefan and Jonnie closer to the bed. When they were near enough to the others, I enclosed us all in a cone of silence and spoke.

  “I’ve thrown a temporary shielding around us, a sound barrier. No one can hear what we say, but neither can we hear anything from outside. The barrier apparently severed my bond with the other two when I erected it before when feeding.”

  “Which is when Nico began to ghost,” Stefan observed. And in his eyes, I saw that he understood the complexity of the situation.

  “Yes.”

  The unease in Nico’s eyes showed he was beginning to realize some of the complications as well.

  “You are their power source,” Stefan said.

  “Nico’s most definitely. I’m not sure about Talon. He may simply have drained himself by trying to sustain Nico. He was certainly the less affected of the two.”

  “We have to know for certain,” Stefan said.

  “How do we do that?” Nico asked cautiously.

  “Talon,” I said, turning to the Floradëur. “Would you be kind enough to walk to the door?”

  Obediently, Talon slid out of bed and walked across the room. The encircling energy field rippled slightly as he passed through it.

  Is this far enough? he asked when he stood by the door. Only Talon wasn’t speaking words th
at we could hear. His lips moved but no sound reached our ears. Only by reading his lips did I know what he said.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” I replied, nodding. And watched as startlement crossed Talon’s dark face. He knew it was a sound barrier, but the knowledge hadn’t really sunk in until that moment, when he found the sound of my voice blocked from him.

  We watched him.

  A full minute passed by in ticking silence before I gestured Talon to return. He stepped back into the cone of silence with a little ripple.

  “Now you, Nico,” I said.

  “Somehow, I know I’m not going to like this,” Nico said grimly as he left the comfortable refuge of the bed and moved toward where Talon had stood. He never made it that far.

  As soon as he stepped outside the barrier, he began to falter. One step, two, and then he could walk no farther. He turned, and with eyes that were both fierce and despairing, his body began to teeter as if drunk. Abruptly, he dropped to his knees.

  I dissolved the barrier and went to him.

  “Not good,” Nico said, shaking. My hands grasped his, and energy flowed between us with the contact. Talon joined us, laying his hands on top of ours, adding his energy.

  “No,” I replied. “It’s not good.”

  “It’s easy enough to prevent it from happening again,” Jonnie said. “Just don’t cut yourself off from Nico anymore.”

  “Lucinda will have to when she returns to her realm,” Stefan explained. “Which is something she will have to do very soon.”

  “How soon, Lucinda?” Nico asked.

  “As soon as we see the Queen Mother,” I replied.

  “Oh. That soon,” Nico said softly.

  “So Nico just goes with her,” Jonnie said.

  A sudden awkward silence fell.

  “Yes, he shall have to go with me,” I said grimly, eyes mournful, my throat bitter with apologies I made myself swallow down.

  “So why is that so bad?” Jonnie asked, discerning from my expression that it was.