by Joey W. Hill
Kel, there may come a time when a Templar Knight will make himself known to you. Help him however he needs help, for his cause is just and vital…
He’d assumed the plea was moot when the Templars were disbanded in the 1300s. Still, his curiosity about a vampire who had been a Templar had drawn him, whether or not it connected to Reghan’s final words. And curiosity had become something more.
Despite his occupied thoughts, Kel continued to change vantage points at the cave point, watching for trouble. Still nothing. He glanced over his shoulder, checking on Uthe. Vampire males were handsome, but the wisdom and character in Uthe’s dark eyes made him even more appealing to Keldwyn. Though he’d had male lovers who were far prettier, Uthe’s body was a perfect sculpture of smooth muscle, long limbs, tight arse and impressive cock. He was a gift of mind and matter both.
Keldwyn stared back into the night. As he did, he recalled his first awareness of his attraction. Uthe had been waiting on his next chess move. The vampire had laid his head back on his chair, one hand loose on the arm, the other resting on his thigh as he closed his eyes. Keldwyn’s gaze had been drawn to the exposed throat, the set of his mouth in repose, the way his fingers traced the carved arm of the chair without impatience. Kel could take a minute or an hour to decide his move, and Uthe would not demonstrate any urgency, not during leisure time like this.
They had both lived enough years, experienced the necessary trials. Neither of them were susceptible to excess drama. Every matter of significance was given careful consideration from many angles. Decisions were made in a timely but not rushed manner. Nothing was expedited by competition, pride or ego.
“You’re settled in your head,” Catriona, his ward, had once told him. “You understand so much, you don’t even think about most of it anymore. But you don’t really feel it, either, because you’ve felt it so much, you don’t think about it as a new feeling. But every story can be told a different way, and you can fall in love with it all over again.”
Thanks to her twenty years trapped in a tree in the human world, her way of communicating could be garbled like that, but when he was studying Uthe’s face that night, he’d understood what she’d meant, enough to feel startled to the core by the truth of it. When the male’s lips moved, a simple motion to moisten them, and his fingers on the chair moved to rest on his thigh, the muscles in Keldwyn’s own leg bunched. He forgot to concentrate on his chess move. His whole focus was on what Uthe would do next.
At length, the dark eyes opened, a brow rising at Keldwyn’s regard, then his lashes swept down to examine Keldwyn’s move. Seeing he hadn’t made one, he looked up. Keldwyn said nothing, unsure of everything that was in his expression and lacking his usual compulsion to mask it. Uthe closed his eyes and tilted his head back again. “If you’re considering how a mere vampire is beating you at chess, my lord, you will be chewing on that for some time. The only answer is the one you won’t accept. I’m better than you at the game.”
Something scraped against dirt and rock, and Keldwyn instantly returned to the present. Uthe’s head turned like a raptor’s, suggesting he wasn’t as absorbed in his task as he’d indicated he would be.
“I will hail you if I need aid,” Keldwyn said gruffly. “Though if I need it against a few humans, I deserve to be cut down.”
“That may be true. But since I can’t complete my task if you get cut down, avoid sacrificing yourself merely for pride. They may be augmented with more than human abilities. Be careful, my lord. I would not like to see your blood. Not for those reasons.”
Keldwyn stiffened, shooting the vampire a glance. Uthe was staring at those symbols, but Keldwyn noticed his fingers uncurled and recurled at his side, something he did when emotion or arousal was affecting him. When he next spoke, his voice was somewhat thicker. “If you can toss one of them in here alive, I can feed.”
“Kill your enemies and provide you dinner? I will expect sex.”
Uthe chuckled. The way he moistened his lips sent Keldwyn’s thoughts in a dark and pleasurable direction. “You would demand that if you did none of those things.”
“Varick, look at me.”
Hearing the raw command in Kel’s voice, Uthe looked up, surprised. Keldwyn held his gaze. He knew fierceness and honesty was in his expression. He didn’t fear that he would fall before the wrath of a few puny mortals, no matter how demon-enchanted they were. This wasn’t a confession. It was something he simply wanted to say and had decided he wouldn’t wait any longer to do so.
“What you asked me earlier, about motives? You are my only motive for being here, Varick. You can trust me on that.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. There was none he could accept, since the succinct admission made him think he’d lost his mind. A Fae didn’t say things straight out like a school primer. A Fae used clever words to tangle meaning, leaving himself graceful retreats from the truth whenever necessary.
He’d given Uthe honesty, just as Uthe had demanded.
Thank the gods, there was finally enough happening outside the cave to keep him occupied. He detected three more of the Saracen raiders coming up the incline, with several more following behind, reinforcements. He could have handled all of the earlier attacks with magic, but he’d mixed it up with hand-to-hand because Uthe said he’d never seen Keldwyn fight. Apparently, whether fifteen or fifteen-hundred, he wasn’t above wanting to show off for a paramour.
This time, though, he chose expediency and practicality. Suddenly they were pale-faced beneath their swarthy coloring, stumbling into retreat before the dragon they believed had appeared before them. A roar and a blast of heat had them spinning to face its twin. In the resulting confusion, he took them down in quick succession, though he knocked one insensible rather than taking his life. Carting him back up to the cave entrance, he tossed him inside with a quick incantation to keep him from being incinerated, then left Uthe to his meal.
He searched the other bodies for any useful clues about the demon who had sent them, but just as the vampire had indicated, there was nothing. They were merely pawns. As he’d done to the ones in the cave, he disintegrated them with earth magic. A quick perimeter check didn’t result in any other incursions. This had been a test run, and his actions had told them they’d need to send greater numbers next time.
“The quantity will not matter,” he muttered. “You will all die just the same.”
He re-entered the cave. “Your demon did not expect you to have a Fae in your company, or his magical reach didn’t give him that much influence. Else he would have prepared them for the glamor.”
“Hopefully he doesn’t have the energy or reach to do so,” Uthe responded. “I am done with him if you want to handle the body as you did the others.”
Keldwyn had been absent only a few moments, but he saw the unconscious male had two puncture wounds in his neck, tidily sealed so no blood was dripping from them. He also was no longer alive, the dead eyes staring. Uthe was back to studying his wall.
“Kill your enemies, provide you dinner and do the dishes,” the Fae grumbled. “You are pushing it. I think you are forgetting who is in charge.”
Uthe’s lips tugged into a smile. “I’m sure you will find an opportunity to remind me of it, my lord.”
“I will. Count on it.”
That intriguing curl and uncurl of his hands again. It made Keldwyn want to take hold of one of them, press the roughened palm to his mouth and bite it, before he drew it behind Uthe’s back, or above his head. The idea of the vampire bound and at his mercy was an intensely pleasurable one, and he embellished the image as he disposed of the other body.
Moving to Uthe’s side, standing behind his left shoulder, Kel studied the symbols with him. Understanding Uthe had a complicated puzzle to solve, he knew he shouldn’t disrupt the other male’s flow of thought, but the vibration coming from Uthe suggested Keldwyn’s compulsion now wasn’t unwelcome. It had been a day full of unpleasantness, after all.
He laid his hand
on Uthe’s shoulder, fingertips sliding along the base of his neck. He could feel the strength of Uthe’s feeding fueling him, and Kel wondered what it would be like, to be the one who nourished the vampire, helped keep him strong.
The thought was so unexpected he almost jerked his hand back. Instead he flexed it, strongly enough Uthe sent him a sidelong glance. “You are going to leave bruises, my lord.”
“You say that only to tease me.”
Keldwyn shifted his hand to the front of the tunic and leaned in toward Uthe’s parted lips. He had a firm, pleasurable mouth to kiss, and Keldwyn enjoyed caressing the fangs with his tongue, knowing Uthe had to exercise particular restraint not to draw blood. That day on the stairs, Keldwyn had made it clear such behavior was unacceptable and would end a kiss. Since Uthe knew that, scoring Kel wouldn’t honor the oath he’d made to willingly submit to him. Keldwyn fed off that sense of self-restraint. Behind that wall, Kel could feel the bloodlust rise in Uthe and his own body responded in kind.
Keldwyn drew back, brushed a thumb over Uthe’s mouth. “I can taste his scent on your lips.”
“Not the most pleasurable of meals. Not as sweet as Mariela, but enough to nourish. That’s all that matters.”
Keldwyn returned to the cave opening. Late afternoon was giving way to evening. “Next wave coming,” he said absently. He touched his mouth, capturing Uthe’s sensation in his fingertips. “I’ll be back.”
He slipped out before Uthe could suggest coming with him, which Keldwyn had already anticipated. The male chafed at not being able to be in both places at once, but Kel knew he needed to decipher those symbols. The quicker Keldwyn handled these threats, the less distracting they would be to the vampire.
This time, though, he set aside magic and indulged in some brutal hand-to-hand combat, no magic involved. Duck, swing, kick, break, snap. Grunt, punch. The physical effort, minor though it was, helped ease the sexual energy building inside him. Yet when he was done, one thought of Uthe staring at those symbols with that intent, bookish look brought it back in full force. It would have amused Keldwyn if he hadn’t also thought of the challenging way Uthe had looked at him as he suggested Keldwyn might leave bruises on his skin. He’d like to leave bruises on him. Teeth marks, a few stripes. He wanted to be rough with the vampire and give them both pleasure.
This time he didn’t decay his victims back into the earth. As twilight closed in, he saw the slinking shadows of coyotes, the glint off their red eyes. He tossed a couple bodies down the slope, and offered them the benefit of his labors. The sounds of their snarls, whines and snapping as they began to feed was familiar. Nature was brutal, efficient and predictable. Beautiful in a savage way, demonstrating the root of all desires in its methods of survival and order.
Dominance, submission, need, want.
One of the coyotes left the feeding, coming up the incline toward Keldwyn. The Fae Lord frowned as the creature stumbled, saliva dripping in long strings from his mouth. While Keldwyn watched, he keeled over, the brown eyes starting to glaze over in death.
No. How foolish they had been, thinking a demon would be that simplistic in his attack. Sending a quick blast of sealing magic down to the bodies to drive off the coyotes and prevent further harm, Keldwyn pivoted and shot back up the incline. “Uthe.”
Bursting into the cave, he found Uthe sitting on one of Fatima’s few chairs. He was bent over, rubbing his forehead. “The answer is there. It’s just…elusive, hard to…” he tried to straighten, and Keldwyn saw his face had an unhealthy gray tinge. “Ah, bloody hell,” the vampire snarled, recognizing the same thing Keldwyn had. “I’m an idiot.”
Falling to his knees, he jammed his fingers down his throat, trying to expel the blood.
* * *
Heat. Unrelenting heat, the endless stretches of desert like the ripples of undyed sheets. The patterns were sculpted by the wind and limned by sparkling grains of sand. Uthe imagined those patterns as a writhing body with long fine limbs. Vulnerable, elegant fingers reached out to him. The sheets would be cool, whereas the folds of sand burned against flesh.
Flesh could burn against sheets, bringing release and relief in a way that the burn of hot sand could not.
Sand was always in everything. Heat, sand, desert. These were things one grew accustomed to enduring, accepting. That acceptance was proof of obedience to the Lord's Will. The discomfort was to be welcomed, a gift of the Lord, a way to prove devotion. Tangled sheets and burning flesh indulged the self, desires and longings. But each way brought a type of peace, so he wondered if they weren't both ways to God, in the end.
Uthe lifted his head. He was not alone. His sacred mission, the one that Hugh had given him, was attended in solitude. Understanding the wisdom of it, he’d obeyed. Which meant this being had to be a demon come to taunt him. No man was this beautiful and mortal. Not here in the stark desert, where fellow travelers almost always stank of perspiration and unwashed clothing.
"You say nothing?" the beautiful male asked.
"Idle words generate sin. You have asked no question, and you are too fair to be anything but temptation."
"But I am male. I thought only women could provide temptation in your Order.” The voice of the beautiful creature changed, became smooth. Too smooth. “There is a reason your Rule requires you to leave a candle lit through the night, to stave off the temptations that a man sleeping nearby might provoke. Especially for one like you. Sodomite."
Uthe blinked. "Taunt me not, demon."
“But I must taunt you. Defeat you. It will not be as difficult now. Perhaps that is why my time has come at last.” The beauty of that face disappeared. Instead Uthe stared into the face of a disembodied head floating in front of him. The skin was pale, the eyes staring, empty. “You are turning into a child again,” the voice said. “You will be weak, easy to command. In the end, you will take my place in this prison, and I will be the free one, because you have lost the part of your mind that knew what to do, how to do it. You should have attended this a decade ago, when you had a chance. Now you have none.”
He surged up to strike at the head with his mailed fist, but it jerked out of range like a balloon caught on a wind current, the mouth stretching outward in an obscene laugh. “Varick, you cur. You know now what true power is, and you lack the courage to capture it.”
He fumbled for his sword, drew it, slashed at the head. “Yes, pierce me through. The innocent no longer matter. Only ending it does. It has gone on long enough, hasn’t it? This prison, your life…”
He leaped, thrust. The head disappeared and became a beautiful black-haired child. Blood dripped from his throat, his sorrowful, accusing blue eyes on Uthe. “You are damned forever.”
He struggled to reach out and help, to staunch the blood, but the child was gone. The world spun, rock and stone surrounding him, and suddenly he was on the floor of a cave, once again gasping for air he didn’t need.
“It is all right, Varick. You’re with me. You expelled the poison.”
“Don’t call me that. Not right now.”
As Uthe's mind cleared, he realized his upper body was propped against Keldwyn, who sat behind him, holding him. But what made him wonder if he was still caught in illusion was he had Keldwyn’s wrist grasped in both hands, the pulsing vein near his mouth. Keldwyn wasn’t pulling away. He was stroking Uthe’s hair.
“You have my permission to take the blood you need, my lord. I expect it is better than what you just had.”
Uthe squeezed his eyes shut. Pushing away from Keldwyn, refusing that vein, was like removing one of his internal organs with a rusty knife, but he was no stranger to severe deprivation. He rolled to his hands and knees. He couldn’t get to his feet, but snarled at Keldwyn when he tried to help. He accomplished it after two stumbles, and propped against a wall full of symbols. “Don’t touch me. Stay away for a few moments.” He had to get the bloodlust under control.
“I offered you nourishment, Lord Uthe. Is Fae blood not good enough for you
now?” The expression on Keldwyn’s face was ominous. In it he saw the formidable opponent Uthe had always known him to be.
“You consider a Fae feeding a vampire…like humans fucking animals,” Uthe rasped. “I won’t…I won’t take your blood when you feel that way. Even if I have to starve.”
To not take what was offered, even if to do so risked the success of his quest—that was nothing but pride. Which invited the taunt of that hated voice. You are already halfway mine, Lord Uthe. Cling not to your illusion of God. For that was all it ever was. A way to save you from the darkness that is inevitable, because it was born inside you. You will never be rid of it, no matter how you deceive those around you.
Shit. He’d fallen to one knee again. He should take it as a mandate to pray. To focus, to sacrifice his pride. No, not a sacrifice. It wasn’t a sacrifice to give away something worthless, and his pride was certainly that. To decipher those symbols, he needed clarity of mind. That was far more important.
“Varick.” Keldwyn’s voice was quiet, firm. He was kneeling next to Uthe, his hand curved over his shoulder, fingertips once again resting on the back of his neck.
“I told you not to call me that.”
“You will have to become used to it. It fits you far better, and there is something in your eyes when I say it that makes me want to keep doing so. Your expression says you are listening to me, focusing on me, in a way I quite prefer. Look at me, Varick.”
Uthe lifted his head. Keldwyn touched his face. “Find that calm you do so well. Shut out everything else.” Drawing the dagger from Uthe’s belt, Keldwyn lifted his arm before Uthe’s face, showing his intent to open a vein.
Uthe seized his wrist, startling the Fae. “Not that dagger,” he said hoarsely. “Except for that one time, to save my squire’s life, I have never used it for harm. It seemed…a sacrilege.”