Incubus Moon

by Andrew Cheney-Feid

  He offered a deep, knowing laugh. “Is this what you desire of me, incubus? Have always desired?” He teased himself against my tight opening, tapping it several times, before slowly breaching it. “Tell me.”

  Unlike that idiot Texan, the first and only man with whom I’d been intimate, I wanted and needed what was happing between Dimitri Ravello and I right now. I could feel this need in my gut. It was real. And it didn’t matter that he was a monster, because I was one, too. It also didn’t matter to me that he might still pose a significant threat to my safety, because he wasn’t a psychotic rapist. We were connected somehow, our destinies fated to entwine.

  So I bit down on the exquisite pain and welcomed him in. “Yessssss!”

  Dimitri smiled down at me and guided the rest of his considerable length into me.

  Before long, he started to ride me with a fevered pitch, his hips bucking and thrusting, his grunts and groans growing more feral. Then he began to pump faster and harder, the head of his passion rubbing against my pleasure spot and about to push me over the edge.

  When I felt him shudder above me, I reached up to grab fistfuls of his thick, dark hair. “I can’t hold back anymore.”

  With one final, powerful thrust, we both released ourselves in a rush of throaty groans.

  Then Dimitri lifted from me so fast I barely saw him do it.

  For several moments, I could do nothing but lie there and bask in one of the best damned orgasms of my life. My vampire captor apparently did not share in my same post-sex bliss haze.

  He stood at the bedside, naked and panting, my blood staining his lips and chin as he stared down at me. “Your…skin.”

  I glanced down at my stomach and bare legs to see what he was so adamantly fixating on. Now I understood his fascination. The change was arresting.

  Gone were the evil blisters and ruin of charred, cracked skin. The unbearable burning sensation from before had been replaced by a delightful tingle creeping over my scalp from the new strands of hair beginning to sprout from regenerated follicles. The same prickling danced over my legs and forearms. Even more amazing was the shimmering glow emanating from beneath my skin, like countless tiny emeralds winking back at me in sunlight.

  I couldn’t help it. I threw my head back and laughed.

  Dimitri continued to stare down at me, but his astounded expression had transformed to one of dread. “By the Dark Gods, what have I done?”

  CHAPTER 23

  “What have you done?” I marveled at both Dimitri’s panicked question and the green, jewel-like shimmer beneath my new skin. “You saved my life!”

  Way too excited by and relieved that our unexpected mattress encounter had left me with a stronger, more vital body, I didn’t want whatever was troubling him now to ruin the moment for me. I was alive and whole again! Okay. So my skin hadn’t reverted to its near alabaster state of earlier in the day. Beneath the strange, fading glow, though, I could see that it had lightened to a deep, golden brown, as though I’d spent a week on some sunny, tropical beach.

  My stomach tightened. Sunny…

  “Blood Thrall is retreating,” he said tersely. “In a few days the sun’s rays should no longer have an adverse affect on you.”

  I blinked up at him. “Can you do a bit better than should?”

  “No, Austin, I cannot.” He approached me with lightning speed, his expression heated.

  The abrupt transformation to that other Dimitri, the one whose prisoner I’d been—or probably still was—was more than a little unsettling.

  “What has happened here this night has never before been attempted on an incubus, at least not to my knowledge. Your supernatural constitution could make the outcome less...predictable.”

  Terrific. Dimitri had sworn to me that I wasn’t a vampire, despite the very real set of baby fangs I could feel growing. Now there was a chance that I might not be able to tolerate sunlight anymore? My newfound relief, along with the curious emerald sparkle beneath my skin, was gone. In their place, incubus anger was on the rise.

  “There. That is what I needed to see.”

  “So I’m a little pissed off, and not just because of the risks you failed to mention. There’s still Kassandra to worry about, remember? She tried to kill me.”

  “Yes, and you wished to kill her. I felt it earlier, and I feel incubus rage in you now that would very much like to attack me.”

  About to tell him that wasn’t true, another surge of anger broke the surface. I didn’t like the way he was studying me from the foot of the bed, an almost predatory gleam in his eyes. It made me want to lash out at him. “So who is she?” I demanded.

  “My sister.” I certainly hadn’t seen that coming. “And she is right. We are natural enemies, with an ancient hatred for one another.”

  I tried to recover from the bomb he’d dropped about Kassandra being his sister, along with shaking off the antagonism I was continuing to feel toward him, but without much success.

  We weren’t enemies; at least we didn’t have to be. Trouble was the anger seed of doubt already germinating inside me had other ideas.

  “Hatred between us is an intrinsic component of that which makes us who we are,” Dimitri continued, “what drives us. It is survival in its most primal form.”

  “But why do vampires and incubi hate each other?”

  He gave way to agitated pacing, his lack of a shirt revealing the tensing of his shoulder and forearm muscles, his fists balled tightly at his sides. “We hunted your kind to extinction. I hunted them to extinction. Over a millennium ago, or so I’d believed at the time. Later, I learned that several females had managed to escape our swords and went into hiding. Without any males to procreate with, the surviving succubi posed little threat to us. Yet here you are.”

  “A living, breathing incubus.”

  Dimitri stopped pacing and turned to regard me. “We feared your kind. The arcane magicks of the Incubi were legendary, and far too great to risk letting them live.” His words caused a hot tingle to skitter across my recently healed skin. I found myself instinctively assuming a crouched position, my body coiled and ready to spring into action at the least provocation.

  He raised a hand in a bid for patience. “By all rights, I should have eliminated you the moment I discovered what you were.”

  My entire body tensed, “Not the confidence-inspiring words I was hoping for.”

  Dimitri Ravello was a striking example of male virility, and I was definitely drawn to him, but I wasn’t willing to die for another taste. “How?”

  “Which would you have me address first?” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “Why I didn’t kill you or how I knew you were an incubus?”

  “Let’s start with the less life-threatening question,” I told him.

  “Your scent.”

  “My…scent. Is it bad?”

  “Quite the contrary,” he pointed out in that same straightforward manner. “It is a powerful aphrodisiac to those of my kind.”

  “Is that what you feel around me? What you felt when you were with Francesca?”

  A storm of emotions crossed his face. “Not entirely.” He was lying. “And I do not wish to discuss Francesca with you. Our relationship is a private matter and does not concern you.”

  I begged to differ. The woman had appeared to me in multiple dreams over the past few months. I’d even physically been her in one of them. Not to mention the fact that we shared similar facial features and she had once referred to me as Brother. Was this merely an allusion to our being from the same demon species, or was it perhaps more literal?

  “Fine.” Given the harsh glare he was launching in my direction, I decided it was best not to press my luck—for the time being. One way or another, though, I would get my answers.

  Dimitri Ravello might not want to discuss Francesca with me, but he was not above cheating in order to get a sneak peek at those test questions. I could feel him probing my mind and instinctively brought down my psychic shields around me.
>
  We were going to have to have a nice chat about personal boundaries. That was, if a prisoner, which I technically still was, could demand such a thing from his jailor.

  “At our first meeting your scent was barely perceptible,” he resumed, pretending that he wasn’t playing games. “By our last, it was unmistakable. I cannot offer an explanation as to why this was so. That my sister didn’t detect it right away must have been due to the damage to your body from the fire.”

  “And my other question?”

  “Why I didn’t kill you?” I nodded, playing along, but also ready to react to the slightest hint of danger. “I find I have no taste for it,” he surprised me by saying. “I swear to you, Austin, I have no intention of harming you.”

  “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “For starters, you can stay the heck out of my head.” How was that for subtle?

  “It is a self-defense mechanism. Asking me to shut it off in the face of potential danger to myself would be like asking a sighted person to ignore the cliff ahead of him. It is automatic, instinctual,” he said, palms open and raised to underscore his point.

  So, Dimitri Ravello thinks I’m dangerous.

  Interesting.

  Clearly I possessed this same convenient gift. “Fair enough. I’ll put a chill on the incubus stuff, as long as you promise not to go all Hannibal on my ass. Deal?”

  “The great military strategist?” Dimitri nodded. “A flattering comparison. Though I’d have chosen Alexander. There was a general upon whom you would be unwise to turn your back.”

  I gave an incredulous chuckle. “You say that like you knew them.” He regarded me with the faintest hint of a smile. “A total impossibility because those men lived over two thousand years ago. If you’d actually known them, it would make you—”

  “Very old indeed.”

  I stared back at him in continued disbelief. Then my bare ass went from a crouched position to hitting the cool, rumpled sheets on which I’d just had sex with a millennia-old vampire!

  I needed a drink.

  “Two thousand three hundred and sixty-one, to be precise.”

  Make that the entire bottle!

  Dimitri put both hands on his hips and laughed. The sound was so human, so male, and utterly devoid of any pretense or threat that all I could do was sit there on my dumbstruck ass.

  Then a fragment of conversation between him and his sister filtered back to me. She’d threatened him with some supreme vampire court, to which his response had been—

  “That I do not answer to the High Council.”

  “No,” I corrected him, uncaring that he’d plucked the thought from my head this time. “That you are the one true vampire elder.”

  All trace of his amusement vanished and he turned away from me to approach the curved bank of windows making up the far wall of the stateroom. He paused there to stare out at the darkness beyond and opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it.

  Handsome, enigmatic, and seemingly me-friendly for the moment, Dimitri Ravello still posed a very real threat. His sister was the poster child for instability and hell-bent on seeing me dead. Both of us, for that matter. But watching him stand there like that, tall and commanding, it would be easy to ignore my better judgment and go to him.

  He looked over his shoulder at me on the bed, a hint of that former smile returning. “You are the strangest creature, Austin Iverson.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “They were beautiful, you know,” he said, turning to scrutinizing some distant point out on the dark sea. “Though only the males carried enough magic to effectively seduce a vampire.”

  I left the bed to bridge the gap separating us. There was so much I wanted to ask him, about who and what I was, so much pertaining to his long life.

  “Even the strongest willed among us eventually succumbed to their call. Like the fabled Sirens of Greek Mythology, they sang to us in sleep, visited us in dreams, and we welcomed their carnal attacks. For that is what we experienced under incubus enchantment.” He paused, still focused on the sea. “Popular fiction may paint vampires as sexually free beings. In truth, we are not unlike humans, in that most prefer members of the opposite sex. We are also guilty of harboring many of the same fears and prejudices against that which is different.”

  “So much for the whole Anne Rice spin, I take it.” I’d said it with a chuckle.

  Dimitri spared me a wistful smile. “The author’s fiction is not with charm. I rather like her tales.” Then his expression grew solemn again. “You are not safe here. I sense that you are aware of this. My sister will return with Council assassins.”

  He hadn’t begun to scratch the surface of what I wanted and needed to know about incubi and succubi, but I also knew that he’d spoken the truth. Danger was coming for us. I could feel it in every fiber of my being.

  “Kassandra was right to admonish my complicity in keeping you a secret. There can be no ambiguity for us. No deviation from our ancient code.”

  It was a dicey move, but I stood next to him now and offered up my bare neck. “Go ahead. Uphold your ancient code to kill your enemy.”

  Dimitri seized me by the arms and fixed me with those mesmerizing green eyes. “Part of me wants to.”

  Instead of being afraid, the intense contact sent a cool thrill through me, rekindling something primal, something low in my body. I wanted his hands on me, wanted them to explore more of my skin, to travel every inch of my naked body. “And the other part?”

  He released me. “From the day we met, I knew you were different. Curiosity blinded me to what a millennia of instinct had trained me to see and act upon.”

  “What’s stopping you from acting on that right now?” But I already knew the answer.

  Dimitri Ravello had no taste for killing me, because the man had developed genuine (albeit confused) feelings for me. He wasn’t alone in his confusion. Not that long ago, I would have laughed at someone asking me if I were bisexual, or decked them good and proper.

  Everything had changed now, would continue to change. How was anyone’s guess.

  Dimitri left my question unanswered and turned back to the bank of windows, pressing his palms against the dark glass, the muscles in his arms tensing. “When the last incubus fell—or so we believed—vast numbers of my brethren had also perished. The Incubi had turned their magics on us. Seasoned vampire warriors lowered their swords and shields to stare into the enemy’s face as though gazing into a lover’s. They were cut down without mercy, the battlefield drenched in preternatural blood. Only the Elders amongst us survived, for we had learned to defend ourselves against such enchantment. I am one such Elder. The first Elder.”

  I reached out to place a hand on his shoulder but let it drop. Dimitri was shutting down, had wrapped himself in his own psychic shields.

  “The Council’s retaliation will be swift,” he announced.

  Then, in a movement that would have fooled the human eye into believing that he had disappeared and reappeared at the nightstand, Dimitri picked up the telephone receiver and barked out a series of orders in Greek. Within seconds, the yacht’s engines roared to life and we began to move through the darkened sea, the floor gently rising and dipping beneath our feet.

  When he took in my nakedness, his expression was no longer impassive. “Council assassins will be dispatched. We must see to it that they do not find us here.”

  I approached him again, stopping so close that our bodies almost touched.

  Dimitri visibly stiffened.

  “We’re in this together now. Tell me what I can do to help, and I’ll do it.”

  He gave me that wistful smile again. “Putting some clothes on would be a good start.”

  I must have dozed off.

  Dimitri was sleeping beside me, his bare chest rising and falling. Did vampires breathe? And why was he sleeping? It was still dark outside. Perhaps healing me had taken more out of him than he’d let on. It had certainly take
n a helluva lot out of me.

  The last thing I remembered was his wanting to stay close. Kassandra might return. He also wanted to ensure that there were no additional side-effects from the blood exchange.

  I was just relieved to have him lying peacefully next to me like this. It gave me the chance to study his strong Roman nose and sensual mouth, his powerful arms and torso with its dusting of dark chest hair that converged into a single, narrow trail that disappeared into the waistband of his trousers. To think he’d looked like this for over two thousand years, that he’d actually lived that long. It was mind-boggling.

  As a newbie supernatural being, would I age normally or not at all? Was I an immortal now, too? Dimitri and I definitely had a great deal to discuss.

  But first, we had to get past the fact that Kassandra and her High Council of Vampires were out there somewhere gunning for us. We needed to reach safety—and fast.

  I could tell from the gentle vibration in the hull and the lifting and dipping movement that the yacht was still in motion and headed toward whatever destination Dimitri had instructed the bridge to take us. But why do this? Why risk his own life to save a mortal enemy’s?

  It had to run deeper than our blood-sharing. He was also immune to incubus seduction, or so he’d claimed. Not that I would use my gift against his will. I knew firsthand what it was like to be on the receiving end of someone else’s violent desires.

  So, either my handsome vampire was more attached to me than even I imagined or he was hiding something. Maybe both.

  I glanced over at him again and exhaled softly.

  Something else Dimitri shared with me earlier was that several females, succubi, escaped the massacre a thousand years ago, but that no males had made it out alive. If this were true, succubi had to be able to procreate with human males, which would explain why I looked so much like my father, Joshua. This hypothesis only deepened the mystery surrounding my birth, because if I was in fact Joshua Iverson’s legitimate son, why the whole adoption ruse?

  In the middle of that thought, Kassandra materialized at the foot of the bed!