by Eris Adderly
“Do me a favor,” she said once her body had settled.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t come.”
He met her eyes, lost. “Wh—I’ll fuckin’ try, I guess.”
She leaned low and tilted her hips, ready. “I want to suck it out of you when I’m done.”
“Oh, ffffuck.”
And she did.
November put her body to work. She oozed and rolled in his lap, knees anchored in the cushions. Her ass flexed and dragged her up, her thighs controlled her descent, again and again, to open herself on his cock. He was straining by the time she could take him with ease, and the vampire let her aggression simmer. Splayed her palms on his bare chest, while she sat, impaled.
“Go.”
He didn’t need more. Fingers dug into the meat of her hips, and Leo barreled into her. Drew back and slammed home again. She put her weight on her bracing arms and let him fuck how he wanted.
Hard, male length pummeled her from below. November tried to float over him, her shoulders and locked elbows a suspension system so he could clap their hips together. So the sticky mess could smack in a loud kiss every time he bottomed out, and she could hear the foreign, high sounds he was jarring from her throat when there was too much of him, and nowhere else for her to go.
Initial burst of energy spent, Leo growled and began to grind up into her, instead. It was slow enough she could move her supporting hands to the cushions and drop down to ease her tongue into his mouth. He latched on, eager, and their breath steamed in and out through their noses as they pushed and rutted on his living room sofa.
November was full, wet, and that short patch of curls at the root of his cock was scrubbing amazing patterns into her clit. She tilted her hips and began to jerk her mound against him in just the right way on each pass. Sharper. Rougher. She ducked her head alongside his and had to breathe through her mouth.
Just … right …
“November, wait.” The flat of his palm was tapping her thigh. “Wait!”
“Nnnh?”
“Stopstopstop!” He palmed her ass from both sides and forced her down to halt the movements. “I’m too close.”
Her pussy throbbed around him, helpless, and her orgasm scampered off, uncaught. “Fuck,” she muttered into his neck.
But you told him not to come.
“Just gimme a sec,” he said, stroking hands down her back. Soft lips pressed to her shoulder and, in the still moment, the gesture was more than November could process.
He twitched inside her a few more times, sweat and fluids cooling between them, and she tried to just be in it. To savor and not analyze.
“I think I’m okay.” He gave a cursory push between her legs.
“Yeah?” She rolled her hips and rose up to look him in the eyes.
“Yeah.”
November bit her lip and started moving on him again. Chasing that pleasure that teased her, just out of reach. Leo let her ride, his hands sliding in warm, moving contact over her arms, her belly and breasts. He pushed fingers up the column of her throat, over the jut of her chin and into her open mouth. She closed around him to suck, fangs bracketing his knuckles and the taste of herself still on his skin.
The pressure built, and she worked for it, large muscle groups beginning to burn. November cradled her forehead in the crook of his neck and began to grunt in time with her efforts. Wanting it. Needing it.
Wet fingers trailed her shoulder to her ribs. Her tailbone. Between her cheeks to graze her pucker. Whatever breathy noise she made told the man what he needed to know.
Leo pushed a fingertip into her asshole.
She fell on him, overwhelmed, clinging. “Yesyes.” All she could do was gyrate there in his lap, like nothing on her worked but her hips and her cunt.
He screwed the finger deeper and began to tease it in and out past fluttering nerves. Her other hole stretched and squirmed around thick, anchoring cock. November could only wallow in it, like a person trying to swim while hogtied.
“Leo, yeah.”
Something perked up in her gate partner. Muscles in his chest tightened. “Yeah?”
November stepped up her ungainly humping and whined. Her clit was becoming a scalding little pinpoint.
“Goddamn, get it.” He stuffed her ass to the last knuckle and fucked the tight ring with it.
Her pussy flooded with rushing heat. She lost control.
“Fucking come, yes.”
Her clit blared with sensation. November made some feral noise into the back of the couch and bit down on fabric instead of a throat. Her holes clutched at him, and she rode it, pleasure screaming from every nerve. Like a fucking angel, he carried her through it, changing nothing he did, neither speed nor enthusiasm, until she was limp and had to tap out.
“Oh god,” she said, draped on him. “Stop. Can’t take it.”
His body relaxed at her words, hand pulling back, slow, and he let her lie there, catching her breath. Inside her, hard and ready pulses reminded November she wasn’t done. She swallowed to wet her throat and began to lift her body on shaky arms.
“Wait”—he tried to catch her around the waist—“wh—”
“Your turn.”
She slithered between his knees, gravity doing a welcome portion of the work, and his wet dick dragging a trail up past her navel. Between her breasts. November knelt on the floor and had him in hand before he could ask. Took him in her mouth.
“Oh, shit!”
Leo all but curled up on her, core muscles clenching at the sudden feel of another hot cavity surrounding his dick. And these were very active muscles. Her tongue wriggled to clean him, lips dilated around the head with a will of their own. The tang of her orgasm was in her own mouth, under her nose, and November would add his to it. He’d be close. Trembling there.
“Oh my god.” His fingers dug into the cushions, head lolling back on the sofa.
She pulled off and stroked him, enjoying the view.
“Oh my god.”
He looked good in her sliding fist, hips thrust toward the ceiling now. His thighs split around her, and that high, arterial pulse beckoned.
“Leo.”
“Nnn?”
“Can I?”
He must have looked down then, to see what she meant. The vampire’s entire focus centered on muscle and warm brown flesh. Where she wanted to pierce. To feed.
She forced her eyes away to meet his. That gaze came back hot and steady.
“Do it.”
November fell on him. Bit down.
He growled through the pain and she began to jack him again, saliva and her own cream slicking up and down the shaft. Coursing over the head, pumping down to the scrotum and back.
“November.”
Oooh, yeah.
She could feel him. Harder. Straining. Ninety-eight point six degrees of bliss flooding her mouth.
Come for me, Leo.
He was exquisite. Two days in a row, bizarre good fortune on top of bad, sweet salt and iron until her own eyes were about to roll back.
“Mm yeah.” He pressed her face to him, palm on the back of her skull. “Yeah. Yeahfffuuck!”
Eyes closed, she felt him splatter her knuckles. Kept milking while his thigh went taut under her sucking mouth and he rolled her in a stream of expletives. Her gate partner began to babble nonsense and pulsed richer on her tongue. He was so good. So good, and she’d have to cut herself off befo—
Gunfire.
The room spun and she was on her ass.
Streaks of uv whizzed by overhead, and November tried to roll to her side, heart rate lurching in a panic. The vampire shoved herself to hands and knees, head swimming.
There was a gate ahead. Not Leo’s living room.
“Croix!”
The gate exploded with a whump that boomed in her chest. Tons of reinforced steel went zinging like crumbs, and November curled to a ball. Boots were around her. She dared a look and vampires in tactical gear edged along walls, weapons
she’d never seen in hand.
Another blast rocked her and there was yelling. Someone shouting commands. She tried to come to her feet, but a distinct, cool palm materialized between her shoulder blades.
Not yet, Kitamura. Not here.
November shouted and spun to land on her backside. To face a voice that made her want to piss down her leg.
A man emerged from shadow, much too far for the hand on her back. The darkness had to surrender him, black coils of negative space peeling back like smoke. An impossible white suit stood out among the filth and chaos of battle, only the deep brown of his hands and bald head visible.
He hefted a heavy cane in one hand, and reached out the other, palm up, like she should take it. The sounds behind her faded, and the man opened his mouth to speak, fangs plain.
“November!”
Someone was shaking her. Sound was fuzz in her ears. She tried to blink.
“November, what the fuck?” Leo was cradling her shoulders. Her eyelids fluttered, wrists limp and grazing carpet.
“Hhnn?” Her head lolled in his direction, the dim lines of his apartment sliding back together around him.
“The fuck happened?” he asked, fingers pressing under her jaw to check her pulse. “You were drinking, and I came, and then you passed the fuck out!”
“Mmhow long?” she slurred.
“I dunno? A minute?”
She dragged a heavy arm up to touch his hand. “Mmokay.”
Feeding. And then … war? Strange vampires talking in her head?
No.
She was too young.
“You sure?” Leo did not sound assured.
“Whadyou gonna do?” November tried to shove herself upright so she could lean against the sofa. “Take me to a doctor?”
Her gate partner fussed, unsatisfied. “I’m gonna get you some water.” He left her slumped against the cushions to head for the kitchen.
November Kitamura might have been bloodline … but she was way too young to be having Visions.
Leo returned with a glass of water in one hand and a folded rag in the other. When he leaned down to offer the glass, November took it in both shaky hands. She was already easing the cool liquid down her throat while he pressed the rag high against his still nude, still bleeding thigh.
“Did you get dizzy?” he asked, hovering.
She braced the tumbler against the tops of her bent knees and let her eyes be closed for a few breaths.
Just make something up.
“Yeah, sometimes,” she said to the backs of her eyelids, “apparently if we drink too much, too fast, we can get lightheaded. I just … haven’t ever done this two nights in a row.” November managed to tilt her head up to squint at the naked silhouette of a man standing next to her. “I didn’t know what it was gonna feel like.”
“Well … how are you feeling now?”
“I’m coming back.” She nodded self-assessing.
“Will you be okay for maybe the next ten minutes?” he said. “I’m kind of a mess.” Her gate partner flicked his free hand at the smears of blood and other fluids over his thighs.
November tilted the glass at him. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”
Footsteps retreated toward the bathroom. She heard doors open and close. Water running. November leaned to one side and shoved herself up and onto the sofa, careful not to slosh the contents of the glass as she went.
Geneticists. Biologists. They were so sure they had every little V-positive trait coded and documented out. Since what? The late twenty-first century? They’d mapped the 22v gene, and vampires had started ‘coming out of the coffin,’ as it were.
All that research. Myths exploded. No more ridiculous garlic and crosses. No more silver and mirrors. The scientific community had laid waste to superstition with glee. They could prove vitamin d deficiency. Cellular regeneration run amok. Secondary pheromones, uv sensitivity, on and on. Look! No mystery here! Rainbows are just refracted light with no meaning, and vampires are just a genetic mutation and not boogeymen of old.
And while all true, it was all very neat and tidy. November sipped the last of her water. All a desire to put on a rictus smile and cram an understanding of The Way Things Worked into uniform, measurable boxes. Humanity preferred things that way.
But science had never been able to explain Visions. They would have had to start research on the subject, first. And that was never going to happen.
The knowledge was older than the collective vampire memory. They knew it to affect the bloodline or, rarer still, very old converts. Deep in the drink, often when sex or heavy emotion came into play, one of her kind might find their consciousness slip-sliding through space-time, if they wanted to phrase it that way. If they wanted to be old-fashioned about it, they could call it ‘seeing the future.’
Word choice aside, it was one of their oldest rules, passed down through millennia from fang to ear. The Moonrise Children did not speak of Visions to those who could walk in the day. The cultural memory of royal seers burned alive, ‘wise counselors’ enslaved, was enough to press the necessity into their bones. Libraries had burned to keep these secrets.
She would not be telling Leonide Croix what she’d seen and heard on the other side of his blood.
Why, though? Why now? The prevailing wisdom told her not to expect anything like this to happen until she was at least a hundred and fifty. Possibly older, and even then, it was rare.
And what did it even mean? Visions were supposed to be fairly reliable, if often confusing glimpses at truth, but that man she’d seen, in the white suit … He wasn’t a real person. Just a legend, like Paul Bunyan, or the Kitsune, or something.
The water in the bathroom cut out and there was a short interlude of other small sounds, storage compartments opening and closing, before the door slid open and Leo stepped back into the living area. He had a towel around his waist and moved to bend, shirtless, and rummage in a drawer beneath the bed.
Time to deflect. Hard.
Her gate partner stood and turned, some white piece of clothing in hand, and came back to where she sat on the sofa.
“Any better?” he asked.
November raised her glass and downed the last of its contents. “Yeah. Just needed to sit for a minute.”
“Here.” He held out the garment. “Your clothes are done.”
She took the thing and unfolded a fresh one of his undershirts.
“For now, at least,” he said, as though he thought she’d object.
It was clean, though, and plenty big enough. And sitting around with her tits and ass out would only serve to remind him of what had just happened. November leaned down and set the tumbler on the floor, and then pulled the shirt on over her head. It reached halfway down her thighs.
“So, Leo,” she said, tucking her feet under her butt and turning to lean an arm on the back of the sofa, “was yesterday your first day on the job? ‘Cause I’d hate for you to get fired after one whole day.”
He snorted. “No. They pulled me from S-Atlanta. I assume to replace—who was it you were asking me about?”
“Rosales. She was at your post for a few months. We got along. As much as we bothered to talk.”
“Yeah, I never met her. Hang on.” He turned and went back into the bathroom. Water ran for a second, and he came back out with a folded rag. “The amount of blood on your face is super distracting.”
November laughed and took it from him, happy to scrub down her chin and neck. She wasn’t used to worrying about messes like these sipping discount bloodmeal from a coffee mug. “Better?”
“Yes.” He gave her an emphatic raise of eyebrows and then sat on the back of the couch with one leg, the other still supporting him on the floor.
“Why join GateSec at all?” she asked, leading him further from talk of her blacking out. “No offense, you just don’t seem like the type.”
Leo gave her a look. “What’s ‘the type?’ ”
“An asshole.”
It was h
is turn to laugh, and she would take that over offended. “For real?” he said, and she nodded. “Alright, I know it sounds naive, but … I did it because I want to help vampires.”
Her forehead creased. “With your penis?”
“Fuck you.” He chuckled and bumped her hand off the back of the sofa with his knee. “I’m serious. Positives get treated like shit. And there are crazy people up here. Trying to bomb gates. Trying to raid the Undergrounds with uv weapons.” He shook his head. “Just what you need, more problems.”
November made a face. “We got crazy people down there, too.”
“Yeah, those Goodnighters?” he said. “I thought they were just conspiracy weirdos. I didn’t think they were showing up places with weapons.”
“Yeah, neither did I.” She chewed her lip and her gaze went unfocused.
And uv hadn’t done shit to them. Why?
Leo used the silence to push away from the sofa and head back to the drawer for more clothes. He changed into a new pair of shorts right in front of her, modesty pointless now, and stepped around to collect the other clothes he’d shed earlier. Even though he was an adult by any standard, his movements felt so young to November. As she aged, it would only get worse.
“What did your parents think?” she said, tracking him around the room as he dropped dirty clothing in a bin. “When you joined up?”
“My mom avoids the topic like the plague,” he said. “She wanted me to be a pharmacist so bad.” Now he was coming back around to the couch to grab the empty glass. He carried it into the kitchen.
“And your dad?”
“Don’t know,” he said over his shoulder. “Never met him.”
“Sorry.”
Leo shrugged as he came back. “How about you?” he asked, clearly skilled in evasion himself. “How’d you end up at a gate?”
She didn’t need to press. His life was his business.
“It was that or prison,” she answered honestly. “Used to be an electrician. Worked on the gen grid.”
He looked her up and down. “The fuck did you do?”
November met his eyes. “Killed my supervisor.” And when his brows climbed, added, “He was a neg.”