by J H Spade
Pulling the girl after me, I flash into the waiting area of the suite. I take a grip of the girl’s shoulders, needing to hurry now, so I can go out and find Emma. A cold resolve falls over me because I know Darius is the only way to save my mate from Eros, so I’ll pay in my own way tonight.
I don’t think any of us will ever stop paying.
Chapter_: Paying for What’s Mine
Marcus
Quickly setting the troubled witch down on a cream upholstered bench, she immediately speeds through the events of what’s occurred here tonight and the spell used to keep the portal on the roof open. Shaking my head, I silence her. That portal won’t be of any use to anyone soon. I’ve already seen it, all that’s transpired through the girl’s eyes, so I ask that she wait for me until I deal with Darius.
“Oh and one last thing. Don’t return to the castle. You won’t be safe there. You’ll wait in the lobby for me, so I can take you to your new home. A coven where you will feel right at home among your sisters.”
She’s very grateful, trying to clasp my hands and no longer looking at me as fearfully as she did moments earlier. She breathes a sigh of relief when I stand to leave. I see she still thinks me a monster through the relief made apparent on her features, which only makes me wonder at the things my brother did or said in front of her.
How he may have hurt Emma, to prove his love to her. Because through pain is the only way he knows how to love.
Striding into the room, I take in Darius’s struggles. He’s out of his mind with worry for Emma. At her worst, Emma can be as much of a monster as my brother, so for as long as she’s kept away from him, she’s safe. It’s Darius and I that should be worried. It’s comical, a travesty really how he wants to be her knight in shining armor. The more Darius tries, the more he gets caught in my brother’s web. I can see it clearly because I’m always on the outside looking in.
Not tonight.
He expects for me to release him, so he might save her, but it is the last thing I plan on doing.
The whole bed shakes with his fury at not being able to break free.
“I should fucking kill you, brother. If it weren’t for what you mean to her, I would forget what you mean to me and let my rage win. This is the second time you’ve cheated me when it comes to her, so I shall have my vengeance on you tonight.”
“This isn’t a competition, Marcus. She isn’t some kingdom to be conquered!” A rare lucid moment has him shouting those words at me, like I wouldn’t know what she means to me. But just like my brother, it is better he doesn’t know the truth behind my feelings for her. What he doesn’t know can never be used against him. By Emma or Eros.
“Isn’t she? Wasn’t that the reason you left camp that night when your king, her father, bequeathed her to me?”
His gaze turns up to the ceiling. There’s a long silence. He doesn’t want to do this now.
Finally, his gaze finds me, and there’s blame in the steel of his eyes, “You wanted riches and power, I wanted her. The choice was not a difficult one to make,” Darius grates through his fangs.
The choice he took and speaks so lightly of, was the second hardest betrayal I’ve ever known. I should have killed him when he surfaced after my brother took Emma for himself, but I stayed my hand and did the hardest thing at the time, spared him for her, so I say, “What the fuck did you know back then, or now, for that matter? Look at where you both have ended up. Your loyalty to your king should have stopped you, Darius. He gave you his whole kingdom, made you commander of his vast army. But I suppose it wasn’t enough for you. You wanted the one thing you couldn’t have.”
“I love–” he winces at the sudden pain he feels, “loved that man as a father, never saw him as anything else . . . but he was wrong to give you a daughter he hadn’t seen for fourteen years. He was more concerned about the enemy than his own daughter he had been searching for day and night, when he drafted that blood contract, giving her to you. I realized it and acted. I don’t expect you to understand, but I was following what the gods wanted . . . what she wanted. So, get off your fucking high horse because she would have hated you and my father, if you had succeeded.” He mutters something about tonight and how Emma doesn’t ever leave him much of any choice and a list, but I’m past caring about Darius and his hang-ups.
I plant my knee on his turning stomach, and find he’s angling his body to spring should I speak the spell. Instead, I take a grip of his cropped golden-blond hair, feeling his muscles clench underneath me. His fangs lengthen because the fucker knows what’s coming and what’s good for him. We both live for the fight we can give each other. “If it wasn’t for all the times we saved each other out on the field of battle you’d already be smearing the walls. Do not come between me and what is mine again.”
Shame and anger redden his tan features. I know it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with his shortcomings on keeping Emma safe. His fisted hands tell me he would be punching my face into the ground if he wasn’t tied, so . . . I don’t go gently into my quest for his blood, the fears that grip him, and the experiences I’m dying to steal from him when I rip into his neck. He strains, trying to fight me off without making a sound, but his pain is evident in his muffled groan. I viciously dive in, delving through what seems like underwater meters of memories that can drag even the strongest under to be buried forever in their crimson current. The vivid memories feel addictively like my own. My hand covers his mouth to silence him, so I can pretend I’m the one standing in his shoes. There’s a part of me that will forever hate him because she has chosen him.
Not Fate.
Not Bonds.
She chose him.
My brother and I are her mates, and she laughs at the gods and their fickleness for using fate and bonds as weapons against her.
She cares for nothing other than Darius.
Forcefully, I muffle his yells because the greedy bastard thinks he can keep the images from me. Pushing his head hard against the black leather headboard, I force them from him. Those images belong to me, too. His tan neck lengthens with every corded muscles stretching when he relives those scorching moments so recently savored with her, while I see them through his eyes as mine and soak them in through every pore of my fucking being. Forever making them as much a part of me as they are his. I groan over his neck, clutching the miracle he gives me when he and I thrust into her for the first time. In a rush of breath, I feel my life is ripped out of me for an instant. The feeling is . . . like nothing I can describe. Nirvana of the soul. A feeling of exuberant glory and sinful pleasure combined as bodies mesh desperate to become one, flames scorching every inch of our skin. The thick tendons of his neck stretch impossibly tight filled with strain, when he tips his head back, his mouth slack, the closer he gets to coming for her. I can’t help from lowering my slacks with a spell and fisting my cock as I massage and twist my skin quick, hard. Darius is too far gone, we both are. All we feel is Emma wrapped around our cocks, fucking us blind. He’s already soaking the sheets the witch placed over his hips right before I took her into the next room. The blood turns more addictive in those ecstasy-filled moments with the scenes of Emma relishing in her wanton abandonment, moaning open-mouthed while she rides our body, pushing her hips up harder against us. His fear for hurting her somehow helps him keep a hold of his wavering control. And I can’t help but agree with him, I want to spend all eternity making her mine.
My breaths turn hollow and fast, and I all but choke out what I say to him in my mind.
It is why you needed me here. I would have shown her what you both needed,
I’m quick to remind him through our bloodlink.
I look down at her full breasts quivering for his touch, Look at her breasts how they begged, swaying right under you. I would have worshipped them with my mouth while you fed on me and we both would have experienced her trembling as she begged for us to come.
Darius comes . . . roaring for me to bring her back.
I follow him, jerking harder and spurting all over the sheets on the mattress.
She will scent his release and will walk into my trap all too eagerly for him. I smile and bite him deeper and harder, weakening him, so next time, he will have no choice but to listen.
He is her weakness, and she is mine. So, the bastard must live.
I tear away and bite again with more rage, going lower on his neck. He knows not to bite back, but he claws his way through the wall, whispering her name like a madman.
As I drink the scenes that led Darius to being tied here tonight . . . I know he claws at the walls because he is protecting me from what his instincts beg he do to me instead. Small fires are starting in his palms as he jerks them closed.
I wonder what he tells himself to let me live, but I don’t push to uncover his answer. We all keep our secrets, and that one isn’t one I care to know.
He wants to burn this building to the ground, possibly even himself, so he can rise above the embers with a clear mind and begin his search for her.
I release him, punching his face one blow after the other. Splitting his lip and slicing his chin to leave him bleeding for her. The wounds on his neck are savagely torn and leaking blood. He will soon lose consciousness from the bloodloss. And I leave him like that, so she will find him and beg me to help her.
He roars for me to cut him loose, so he can search for Emma.
“I’m not letting you off so easy. I’ll be hearing a lot of begging from the both of you tonight.”
“But first, don’t mind if I take one last drink from you.” I lower my face over his stomach because it is where her release coats him. I need to taste her before I go, so I do, licking her slowly over his hard stomach. With her taste in my mouth, my cravings for her take on a life of their own. Tonight, I want it all.
I grab the witch and go out into the hallway killing anyone who may be a threat to him. The power in his blood allows me to stand before all five of the guards out in the hallway at once. At least it seems I can overtake them in one single strike from how fast I move to deliver their bloody deaths.
The hallway lights break and begin flashing as the girl’s power unfurls from her in shocked reaction, but she manages not to scream, barely.
I lead her to the lobby, letting her know to clear the hotel because things might get messy when Emma returns. She does as I ask. A swift command has the hotel emergency sprinklers and exit lights come on as the fire alarm sirens blast.
I rush out into the night ahead of the growing crowd not wanting to waste another second.
She’ll kill Darius, if my brother’s poison has anything to do with it. And it will.
Chapter_: On The Edge of Poisoned Desires
Emma
My mood is dark, and everything I see is shaded red. How long had I been playing at being hunted? It was difficult to say. I’d been fully consumed with my role of hysterical victim to pay much attention to anything else. The only marker of time were the piling bodies I dragged to the farthest corner of the alley or better yet, what remained of them. It was still anyone’s guess how long it had been when I was last with Darius because I moved too swiftly when I scented new prey.
Moving the bodies under a veil of magic is one trick I picked up from Eros. It is much harder to accomplish with forms in motion, so now that they are dead, I easily manage. Eros had done it to me during the time I spent undergoing his torture. He would call these torture sessions, ‘my coming of age’. I’d been running from him towards my freedom when he’d easily pick me up with his mind, to effortlessly dump me back in his torture room. I can still smell the leather whip, my blood running in rivulets down my back, and the cold stink of my fear from the memory alone. It was after I had escaped twice that I woke up, hanging from my wrists chained to the wall.
The memory shocks me back into my reality. As the glistening veil covers the last of the bodies, I see they aren’t all in one piece.
It angers me further to see them dismembered, and worse still is when I can’t use Darius’s face as my anchor—to pull back on the rage or my need for more death. If I went ahead and tried to picture him, before I knew it, I’ll find myself in my suite killing him.
I tsk, asking myself, Emma, what’s the plan? You can’t put off the inevitable forever? In a few days, Eros will be strong and here to collect. Besides, how many bodies will it take?
I can’t argue with myself that the reason I killed was simply self defense because, I led them here purposely. All of them, a wasteland of broken bodies in a stupid effort to save Darius. And I can’t help but question, what if they were about to turn their life around, when the veil disappears to take them to The Lake of Lost Souls, bordering Eros’s lands. The water there is almost pure acid, so toxic that it dissolves everything it touches, including the bodies.
There’s no use in trying to glue back the thousand pieces of my shattered heart. I won’t dwell on the what if’s with the little time for rationality I have before I scent my next victim.
I sweep the alley clean with my mind and search for a more remote area, farther away from Darius.
In my most desolate time, alone in the dark, it is then when I first feel his company. His nearness is achingly haunting . . . comforting.
At first, I attribute it to the venom, similar in symptoms to an end of days virus. It’s clouding my mind, possibly shifting my reality. I blame it for the unreasonable way it makes me crave him . . . sex, whatever he wishes for most. When I can’t have those things, then the need to kill overpowers everything. I know I have to kill my victims, tearing their limbs because if they should survive, it would be the closest thing to a zombie virus the worlds have ever known. The contagion period is now. When it is running rampant in my blood.
Only Eros is immune. Possibly his bloodline, or those he’s turned. I don’t know of any, so unfortunately for me, and Darius, I’m a lost cause. My knees knock together when I consider how truly vile it is to carry that part of Eros inside me, and suddenly, I can’t help but feel too weak to manage the simple task of just standing.
With trembling hands, I scrape my palm on a building trying to maintain my balance. I don’t go back to clean my blood, knowing fully well I’m being reckless leaving markers all over the city. It is probably the overwhelming fear trampling me, causing me to act this way because his scent is so near and potent that I’m terrified he’s discovered my plan.
I shake my head in a useless effort for clarity and pull the lapels of my cloak tighter around me, to hide my scent once I decide to head in the opposite direction.
What’s left of my clothes have grown stiff from all the dried blood, and I know I must smell of the dead. Slowly, I begin my walk, trying to think things through before I let my fear for him control my next move.
I close my eyes and inhale the stifling air. I’m reminded of being in the dark, in my bedroom, waiting for Eros to come lay beside me. I was so young, too impressionable for someone as skilled in seduction and deceit, so I know I shouldn’t blame myself for the things I wanted then. He’s been keeping me company since the age of six. He was my only father figure, so it definitely messed with my mind those years of adolescent discovery when I developed feelings for him.
Eros was all I knew, up until Darius.
Exhausted . . . I’m so exhausted, and still I can’t suppress the need to kill. Eros has thought of everything, so I have no hope for a cure, until I return to him.
Turning a dark corner, I decide scenting him close tonight is most likely wishful thinking on my part, hoping against all the obstacles that I can get to the cure. My need for it has me scenting the air, turning around, closing the distance between Eros’s scent and where I come to stand. I know a trap when I see one, but still, I can’t help but feel like I’m diving into the river Styx—one of the five main rivers of the underworld, where I’m sure I’ve traveled to and made unbreakable bonds—for him. Those bonds must be responsible for tying my soul a thousand irreversible ways that always bring
me back to Eros. He smells of sex and sin, leather, something raw with spice like agarwood and vanilla, and then there’s the hint of pine tonight. Upon further thought, I find that strange because it doesn’t belong. Instead of pine, it would be minty licorice when I’ve scented Eros. The scent is new, therefore even more compelling adding that special something that I’ve never smelled before tonight.
After a few steps in a secluded alley, I no longer care to hunt for others. My hackles rise, and my breaths break out from my lips at the same agitated tune of my heart. It’s my body’s way of warning me, because it has come to learn the difference when the hunter has suddenly become the hunted. Cold awareness slides in a slow drop of sweat down my spine, when I find myself running towards Eros’s scent–all rationality left scattered on the wind in the wake of its sublime control. The smell of him has become like a deadly mirage. Inevitably, I draw closer to what will surely end me, now that I can also find Darius in the intoxicating scent. Darius like never before. On fire. A cozy campfire by the sea smell, and the unmistakably masculine, heady, salty scent of his release.
I throw the hood of my cloak off of my head. My hair is whirling around, taken up by the vicious wind as it begins beating at my face. It’s like an impossibly hot breeze is trying to steer me from what I can’t for the life of me draw away from, not even in rebellion. When I’ve cleared the buildings, I’m facing open space over a glass barrier. It is a half dome about twenty stories high, offering protection to the city, overlooking a canvas of sloping red sand dunes.
This is absurd, I try to reason. I can’t run with heels over those dunes, especially over an illusion that is all in my head. It’s impossible that Eros is out there expecting me. He’s weak and secure, waiting for my return, so when we are together again, I’ll drink the antidote from his blood.