Loving the Vampire

by Marie Treanor

  Well, sex with a vampire wasn’t exactly safe. You’d most certainly suffer a spot of anemia, and more likely than not turn up your toes altogether. But you sure as hell didn’t get pregnant -- because the vampire had no semen.

  Or so Max had always believed. His sexual encounters throughout the last decades had given his body pleasure enough, but it was inextricably associated now with the blood. Or was. Until tonight, he had all but forgotten about the joyous release of ejaculation.

  Pausing by the window, Max looked down through the darkness over the ruined city. It was night. You could tell because the dusk of day became black, lit up sporadically by bursts of flame as something else was set alight for warmth or malice. Through the unbroken glass of his window, the streets seemed a long way down.

  Below this flat, the building was wrecked. Most of the stairs had gone, and the lift hadn’t worked for twenty years. Most of the doors and floorboards had long ago been taken and burned for fuel. It didn’t bother Max.

  Inevitable shadows skulked among the surrounding ruins and rubbish, scavenging for food, searching for victims. Max made a pretty scary shadow himself. It was rare that anyone even troubled to fight him any more. Even other vampires, during the odd clash over territory or victims, no longer took him on. A long time ago, this power would have made him feel triumphant. Now it just bored him. Everything bored him. Except that girl.

  He wondered if he were changing again. Not back to what he was, that was impossible. But onward, into something, someone else. Maybe someone who didn’t need blood to survive. Maybe someone whose survival meant something.

  Annoyed at himself, because his thoughts were hovering perilously close to Will’s overheard discussions, Max thudded his forehead against the glass.

  Bloody Will. Max had told April the truth -- mostly. He had taken her through annoyance with Will, not just because the lupi was trying to civilize the city, but because Will was trying to manipulate Max.

  Max wasn’t stupid. He knew he’d been tied up and left to listen to the discussions. Although it was why he had let April capture him in the first place, Will had meant him to hear. There was no other reason for Max to have been there. He should have been killed or seen off lupi territory. Instead, he’d been privy to the discussions of the newly formed Council, and he’d been allowed to escape so that he would pass the word to other vampires. Or so that he would think about it and come around on his own. They needed the cooperation of the vampires, because no one was strong enough to overcome them, not even the lupi.

  And so from spite, Max had taken April when he chose to leave. Because she was nearest.

  Crap! He’d willed her to look at him, deliberately let her see him burst his bonds, so that she’d do exactly what she did -- try to recapture him. If he’d really wanted to hurt Will, he’d have taken the woman, Lara. But it was April he’d wanted to hold, April whose blood he’d wanted to drink, whose hot sexy body he’d wanted to sink his hungry cock into…

  Max’s breathing quickened again with the memory. He’d done it. He’d fucked the little wolf, and drunk from her. And given her so much pleasure she’d demanded more.

  Her lovely, piquant face swam before his eyes again, clouded and flushed by passion, her eyes smoldering with heat, her lips, swollen from his kiss, parted and pleading like some kind of lustful angel.

  “Again.”

  More than anything that filled him with ferocious pride. He’d wanted her again. He’d wanted -- still wanted -- to explore lots more possibilities with her, and to know he’d won that right from the girl who began as his enemy. And yet he’d walked away.

  Because he couldn’t deal with what she’d done to him. He, who had overcome all the pain flung at him over the decades, physical, spiritual and emotional, could not deal now with a normal orgasm.

  What he needed to do was go out and find some other woman. Fuck her and feed from her, and experience the release again. Then he could forget her.

  So why did he still see her face, hurt and lost as he’d bolted from her?

  Abruptly, Max swung away from the window. At the last moment, something caught his eye and he glanced back down at the street.

  One man weaved an erratic path toward the building, occasionally drinking from the bottle that dangled precariously from his clumsy fingers. Totally inebriated. He’d have to be, to be walking alone around here. Just beyond Max’s building was the ruined wall of another, lower building. Two shadows crouched on top of it. A third detached itself from the darkness of the ground and came up to the drunk.

  Amiably, the drunk offered him a drink. The third shadow took the bottle and promptly swung it at the drunk. Max smiled sourly. He realized he was hungry. He’d hardly fed from April at all, and he had been particularly abstemious the day before in order to appear pale and hungry to the lupi. Annoying to think he needn’t have bothered, that Will would have sent him an invitation if he’d imagined he would come.

  The drunk fell like a stone under the bottle, just as the two shadows on the wall jumped down to join their mate in robbing him.

  “Home delivery,” Max murmured, reaching up to open the window.

  As he’d done a thousand times before, he simply leapt off his twentieth floor, and dropped, landing a couple of seconds later on the grimy ground. Despite the recent energy he’d expended evading the lupi, his body rejoiced in the exertion, instantly springing up from the landing crouch and sprinting forward.

  They didn’t even see him coming. The first, he plucked off the unconscious drunk and threw across the road. Vaguely surprised by the unexpected movement, the other two glanced up from their sporadic searching and torturing of their victim. Their eyes looked blank with shock in the darkness. Their mouths fell open in perfect synchronicity.

  One tried to rise, as if he actually meant to fight. Max slammed him against the wall and held him there with one hand around his throat. With his free hand, he jerked the other man’s arm behind his back and reeled him in. He bit into the man’s neck and drained him almost instantly, ignoring the fingers that scratched and scrabbled uselessly on his hand, his chest and face.

  Dropping him with deliberate distaste, he turned his attention to the man pinned to the wall. Max disregarded his terrified gurgling. Without hesitation, he wrenched the man’s head aside and bit into his throat, and drank.

  Despite the semi-sexual pleasure of the feed, his senses were well aware of the sound behind him. The third thug was escaping. With a last, strong pull on the second man’s wound, Max let him fall, and turned.

  He caught the third man on the run. The flailing fists on his chest were less than nothing to him as he again drank his fill.

  That done, he heaved all three bodies as far as the broken bridge and threw them off into the toxic river below. The drunk, he ignored. He would remember nothing in the morning anyway.

  In Will’s world, he thought savagely, there would be no more victims. Where was a vampire without victims?

  * * *

  Will said slowly, “He barely touched you.”

  April swallowed the rising hysteria. “It didn’t feel like barely,” she managed, pushing Will’s hands away from her throat. They were back in the old school and the relief and curiosity of the others was no help to her desperate confusion. She was held together by a very thin thread. “But then I’m not used to being bitten.”

  “Perhaps we scared him off,” Craig suggested.

  “He didn’t strike me as an easily scared off sort of a man,” Will said drily. “He deliberately put himself in our power to find out what he wanted to know, and then simply left, cool as you please. Quite an exit too,” he added, thoughtfully, with an upward glance at the damaged ceiling.

  April, feeling Lara’s gaze uncomfortably sharp on her, moved away from the others and sat down on a distant cushion. She was shaking.

  “Why did he take you then?” Lara demanded. “If he only wanted to frighten you, why bother? It seems sort of -- beneath him.”

 
“Revenge?” Craig suggested. “Because April captured him earlier? Must have hurt his self-esteem…”

  “Hardly,” April interrupted. “He let me capture him. He wanted to be brought here because he wanted to find out what was going on. He said he wanted to annoy Will.”

  She flickered an almost apologetic glance at Lara as she spoke. The older girl was frowning.

  “He said something else,” Lara remembered. “Earlier, when Will was discussing morals with him. He said he’d seen Will mating with you.”

  “He knows I’m not Will’s mate, and you know that’s all in the past,” April muttered. She didn’t feel strong enough for tantrums -- from Lara of all unlikely people.

  “But why did he say it? Why did he remember it? Has he got a thing for you, April?”

  April laughed harshly. “A thing? Christ, he despises me -- is that enough of a thing? Will, I’m going home.” She sprang up, heading without further ado for the door of the school.

  “Wait, I’ll come with you,” Will said at once.

  “I don’t want company,” April said rudely. “I’d rather go alone.”

  “Then wait one more moment, April. If you have some rapport with the vampire, I need to know it. We can use it. We need his people on our side, or at least acquiescent, and for that, we need to know them. We need to understand how -- or if -- they can live without harming others.”

  “Send him a letter,” April advised. “Trust me, there is no rapport.” With one trembling hand, she pushed the fallen hair out of her eyes. Then, glancing at Will, she hesitated. “Except perhaps with you. He may not like you or what you’re doing, but I’ve a feeling he respects you.”

  “And yet he took you,” Lara pointed out.

  April’s lips twisted. “That wasn’t respect. I’m not even a worthy meal to him, am I?”

  Lara opened her mouth to say something, then, uncharacteristically, she closed it again on silence.

  Will said, “Do you know where to find him?”

  Turning for the door, April shook her head.

  “If you see him again, speak to him, April.”

  “I won’t.”

  “April!”

  She laughed harshly. “I won’t see him again.” He’d made that very plain, and the most lowering thing of all, worse even than that she’d begged him for more sex and been rejected, was that beyond anything in the world, she wanted to see him again.

  * * *

  Lara scored out one of the names on her list, frowned, then wrote it back in again. Hell, she wasn’t in the Dome now. Here, they needed all the officers they could get. It would be time enough to ditch any of the volunteers if and when they proved themselves unsuitable.

  Throwing down her pen, she glanced for the umpteenth time at the closed door. For a little over two weeks now, this room had been her home -- bedroom, study and haven from the alien yet wondrous world outside. A bare classroom in the old school, repaired and secured, softened by a few items Lara had introduced -- things she had brought from the Dome or been given by some of the friendly lupi women -- a bright, warm blanket for the mattress, two colored glass dishes for candles, a photograph of her long dead parents, a lace cover for the repaired school desk that was their only furniture.

  It was a world away from her old life, and yet it was home, because she shared it with Will. And without Will, as now, it was curiously empty. Not for the first time, Lara wished Jack, her brother, had stayed. But he had felt his position too untenable here. Arriving as leader of the hunters’ crusade against the lupi, whom he’d regarded as a mutant menace, he couldn’t now throw in his lot with them as Lara had. And yet his public defection from the hunters at Will’s persuasion had done much to win Will back into favor with the lupi. He was on his way home now, without her, and she’d heard nothing since he’d left.

  But Will went from strength to strength. He had led the battle against Jack’s remaining die-hards, and his own brand of charisma had done the rest. Now he was undisputed leader of the pack, accepted on the Council, his work and his views respected, as Lara and her trainees began their fight against the city’s incessant crime.

  Without warning, the door opened silently and a silver-grey wolf padded into the room. Lara smiled, jumping up and going at once to lay her hand on the creature’s head.

  In her embrace, he changed, as painfully as others of his kind, and yet more quickly, she now knew. When he lay calm and naked in her arms, his cheek against one breast, his hand possessively caressing the other, Lara said, “Did you find him?”

  “Max? No. Nor any other vampires. It doesn’t help that we can’t scent them! Has April been in?”

  Lara shook her head. “I’m worried about her,” she admitted. “She’s being very odd. When I went to see her at Henry’s, she clearly wanted to throw me out. She seemed very restless -- and in my opinion, not entirely well.”

  Will nodded. “That’s what I got too… Do you think it’s something to do with Max?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been more than two weeks… Unless there’s something going on there we don’t know about, I don’t see how it could be.”

  Will said, “I think there’s something we don’t know about.”

  Lara sighed. “So do I.”

  * * *

  In most of her life’s crises, April had simply run away from them. Discovering she was a lupi, she had refused to acknowledge it for months, and for months more had hidden it from her family and friends. Later, uncomfortable with the lupi, she ran home to her parents’ house every night she didn’t change -- and even some that she did. And when Will had become too much -- when she knew they shouldn’t be together -- rather than discuss it with him, she had simply left the city. Again, after taking up with Jack in the Dome City, she had run away when he got too intense and she couldn’t return his feelings. It had never entered her head that Jack might follow. But then, that had brought Lara here to Will, and they were meant to be together, so running away had some uses.

  But Max… Max was one crisis that had run away from her.

  For nearly three weeks, she avoided the lupi. While the full Council began to take control and the first safe food distribution centers and official water filters were set up in the inner city, April barely went out, just sat in her room alone, brooding. Then, when she felt the stirrings of change, and knew she had one more night only before the wolf took over, she opted for the greatest escapism the city had to offer. The club.

  In her bedroom mirror, her reflection gazed back at her provocatively. A slight girl with long, blond hair falling loose around her naked shoulders, slender body encased in a short, tubular white dress that clung to her every curve. Long, white gloves that covered her elbows would prevent her having to touch some of the filth one found in the club, and added to the angelic impression.

  Lara once said she looked like a fallen angel. Well, tonight she felt like one. And she was hunting. Not prey, but a man to make it all go away. To make Max go away.

  Swinging a short shawl around her shoulders, she slipped quietly out of the house. She had no desire to be seen by her parents. Worrying them was not part of her plan and despite everything, there was still a thrill in stepping out like this, in walking alone through the city’s dangerous streets. She was armed with her knife and sling in the silly little bag that dangled casually from her wrist, and she was lupi. It had always been enough.

  It was a long walk to the inner city and the club. The security on the suburb’s edges was stronger now, but they all knew her. Warily, they let her pass without even a warning to take care out on her own. They knew what she was, and she could smell their fear as much as see it in their eyes. Will had his work cut out to wipe out prejudice against their kind in these ordinary, decent people.

  April walked away from them, smiling. She was always polite to such people. She never allowed herself even to tease them -- except for the odd time she couldn’t resist wrapping herself around their petrified legs when she encountered them after a
change.

  During her brisk, cold walk, she sensed the inevitable watching shadows, but no one approached her. She had long ago worked out that when she dressed like this and walked alone, the many predators of the city took her for a decoy and left her well alone. She couldn’t rely on that, of course, and never had. But the risk was part of her escape, part of the thrill.

  As she finally walked up the crumbling steps to the club entrance, the door opened for her, slamming her into a wall of rhythmic noise. The bouncer nodded his recognition and held out his hand for her weapons. Provocatively, April lifted her arms to be searched. He took his time about it until April began to consider him as a prospective partner for the night. He was a strong, brutal sort of a man -- she had seen him in action against trouble makers -- but in his silent way he had always treated her with respect.

  Well, maybe. Let’s see what’s inside first…

  She slid out of his hold, already swaying her body to the thudding beat. Casually, she opened the silly little bag he had ignored, and tossed him the folded knife and sling squashed in there. He caught them deftly, his mouth twisting into a smile. April laughed and walked into the sea of bodies.

  Her immediate goal was the bar and a drink. Like Pavlov’s dog trained to salivate for ringing bells, this place and this music made her crave the bad, mind-numbing alcohol made on the premises. It was slow progress through the heaving, writhing dancers, but it wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, it all made her hot and sexy, ripe for all the club’s experiences. April gathered the heat of the bodies around her like a comfortable cloak, reveling in the fierce, blaring music that came from the stage and the freedom that she found only here.

  Recognizing her, a few people grinned as she passed. A man she’d met here many times grabbed her by the waist and kissed her mouth before she slid away, laughing. As she turned back in the direction of the bar, something caught her eye off to the right -- the swinging of a coat behind a concrete pillar. It might have been a freak parting of dancers allowing the light from the braziers above to strike it at an odd angle. It might have been her memory playing tricks. But in that brief glimpse, it looked like Max’s coat. It was long enough and it was the right color.