“That’s correct.”
Shooter looked at Matt and saw the pain in his eyes. “Then let’s get on with it,” he said.
TJ blushed and looked around the room. “I can’t—I just can’t do it in front of everyone,” she said, her embarrassment evident.
“Matt, why don’t you go into your room, and, Shooter, you go into yours? While TJ does what she has to do, I’ll stay out here and go through the journal to find some clues. I’ll probably bunk here.”
Matt and Shooter looked at each other, shrugged, and went into their separate rooms, leaving TJ and Albert alone.
She glanced at him, apprehension on her face. “Albert, remember what you said about feeding releasing our hormones?”
“Yes.”
“What if . . . what if I can’t control myself and something happens with Matt?”
“You must feel no shame, TJ. It is all part of the process we must go through to save Sam, and it will be out of your control.”
“But I could never face Matt again,” she protested.
“Then, if bad does come to worse, use your mental powers to cause him to forget. It is what we do when we engage in nonlethal feedings with others.”
TJ got to her feet, straightened her back, and walked into the room Matt and Sam shared.
She found Matt pacing, obviously frightened and apprehensive. He looked at her with fear in his eyes. “Will it be very painful?” he asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “No, Matt. In fact, I’m going to use some psychic commands to make you relax.”
He gave a weak grin. “Like mental Xanax?” he asked, referring to a popular tranquilizer.
“Why don’t you take off your shirt and lie on the bed?” she asked.
He unbuttoned his shirt and removed it, laying it on a chair before he lay on the bed on his back and closed his eyes. TJ stood next to the bed and concentrated her mind, commanding him to relax and feel no fear.
His face became soft and peaceful and he smiled slightly. “Um, this is nice,” he mumbled. “Kinda like the gas the dentist gives.”
TJ eased down on the bed next to him and turned his face away slightly so she could get to his neck. She felt herself begin to change as she lowered her face and gently bared her growing fangs.
When she bit into his skin over his jugular vein, he moaned softly once and stiffened slightly, then went limp as her mental commands caused him to relax once again.
As his warm, salty blood flowed into her mouth, TJ drank, feeling her face coarsen and begin to coalesce into her Vampyre persona.
Within minutes, her skin began to feel hot, then burned and itched under the influence of the hormones the feeding released into her bloodstream. Her breasts swelled and her nipples became hard; she felt her sex become wet and start to throb.
She fought the feelings, resisting the urges she was experiencing, and tried to think of Sam.
As the hormones in TJ’s saliva went into Matt’s body, he groaned and began to breathe heavily under their influence. His chest heaved and he moved his head back and forth, his hands moving over his chest.
Matt’s eyes opened and he moved his head to look at TJ’s body, pressing against him as she sucked his blood. He shifted his body slightly to the side and reached down to put his hand on her left breast, feeling the nipple press into his palm.
TJ, in spite of all her resistance, pressed her breast against his hand as her arms went around his shoulders and she pulled his neck tighter against her mouth.
They were lying on their sides now, facing each other as she fed, the length of their bodies touching. She felt him become hard as he pushed his pelvis against hers, his eyes blank and staring as he panted in desire.
When his hand slipped inside her blouse and under her bra to cup her breast, she couldn’t help herself. She slid her hand down Matt’s stomach and under his belt to grasp his hardness, never taking her lips off his neck.
Unaware of what he was doing, Matt released her breast and grabbed her pants, undoing the button and pushing them down onto her thighs along with her panties.
His fingers moved into her pubic hair and they both groaned as he felt her warm wetness.
She was on fire, fighting with all her might not to go any further, gasping as her hormones grew stronger.
Before she knew it, she had his pants open and his manhood exposed to her view. She held it out and was pushing her groin toward it when she finally realized what she was about to do.
With every bit of her willpower, she took her mouth off his neck and moved away from him on the bed, breathing heavily as she fought to regain control.
Matt sighed and his eyes closed when she released his neck. She gently moved his hand from inside her and placed it on his chest. With a final glance, she pulled his pants up and rearranged his clothing back to normal, trying to ignore the bulge in the front of his trousers.
Commanding him to sleep and not to remember, she refastened her bra and fixed her clothes. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and tried to get her breathing under control. As she slowly changed back into her human form, the lust for sex abated somewhat as his blood was assimilated into hers.
She stood up and sighed, stretching her arms out and smiling. She felt wonderful, refreshed and rejuvenated, as if she’d just partaken of the elixir of life itself. Jesus, she thought, no wonder Morpheus and the others don’t want this to end. This could become very addictive!
She glanced at the wall between the two bedrooms, knowing Shooter was in there waiting for her. Thank God I won’t have to resist my lust with him, she thought as she moved toward the door.
Shooter, she mused as she entered their bedroom and saw him lying on the bed, you are in for one hell of a night!
Forty
Jacques Chatdenuit was hungrier than he’d been in months. He’d been trying to be careful since the attempt on his life by the other Vampyre, and he’d been so careful he hadn’t been able to find any suitable prey in his last three outings. Each time, just as he was about to pick someone, he’d sensed the presence of another of his kind nearby. It was almost as if they were looking for him, and he’d left without satisfying his Hunger.
Now he could feel the Hunger gnawing at him like a rat in his stomach, making him think crazy thoughts about just going up to the first woman he saw on the street and taking her right there in front of everyone.
He had to find prey and he had to find it quick. He dressed in his dark clothes and left his apartment, heading for the first nightclub he could find.
He sat at the bar, as usual, and scanned the crowd. There were several possible victims and he was about to go over to a table and try to get one to leave with him when he again thought he felt someone in his mind. Damn, he thought, not again. He was about to leave the club when two of the girls he’d been watching got up to leave.
Good, he thought. He’d just follow them out, and if the Vampyres who were trying to get into his mind followed and tried to interfere with his feeding, he’d just have to kill them, too.
He trailed the two girls for six blocks through the dark streets and was just about to make his move when they came to a parking lot. He stood in the shadows and watched as the two girls hugged each other and said good-bye.
When one of them got in her car and left, he eased toward the other one, who was sitting in her car, pawing through her purse. He leaned down and looked in.
She looked up and saw him through the window and screamed, punching the lock on the door, as if that could keep him out.
He grinned, already beginning to change, and smashed the window with his fist. He wrapped his claw around her hair, jerked her through the window, and threw her on the ground, pouncing on her like a jungle cat.
His Hunger out of control now, he slobbered, drool dripping off his fangs as he lowered his face toward the yelling girl.
Unable to stop and enjoy his conquest, he ripped her throat open and almost fainted at the delicious taste of her blood. He sucked and
gulped and swallowed as it pumped in a stream into his mouth.
She was still moving feebly as he grabbed the front of her dress and prepared to rip it off and take her sexually, when he got the feeling of being watched. He felt a prickle in the back of his mind and knew there was another of his kind nearby.
“Shit,” he mumbled, desire for sex momentarily replacing his Hunger for blood. He looked around, scanning the darkness, but could see no one. Still, he could feel their presence in his brain.
The girl beneath him sighed, blood bubbling from her lips as she died, going limp in his arms. Coupling with a dead body wasn’t nearly as satisfying as when they were alive and terrified. He released her and let her fall to the cement as he jumped to his feet and ran into the darkness.
Forty-one
Sam awoke with the early-morning sun shining in the window to find herself lying in Michael Morpheus’s arms. They were both naked.
Her mouth had a vile aftertaste and she blushed with disgust at what she’d done the night before under the influence of feeding lust, as Morpheus called it.
He was still asleep, lying on his side with one arm under her neck and the other draped across her with his hand cupping her breast. He was softly snoring through an open mouth.
Moving as slowly as she could, she moved his hand off her breast and gently disengaged herself from his arm. She eased off the bed and tiptoed across the room to the pile of his clothes still lying on the floor where he’d thrown them.
She squatted and felt in his pockets until she found his car keys. Slipping them out of his pocket, she stood up and moved silently toward the door.
Just as she reached it, a hand with a grip like steel closed on her shoulder, making her jump and drop the keys.
“Going somewhere, Sam?” Michael asked, covering a wide yawn with his other hand.
“Uh, no,” she stammered, her face flushing as she turned and found him standing right behind her, still naked. “I was just going out to the kitchen to fix us something to eat. I’m famished.”
He smiled and shook his head, showing he didn’t believe her for an instant. He glanced down at his car keys on the floor. “And, of course, you needed my keys for that?”
“I thought I might have to unlock the door,” she said unconvincingly, for Sam was never a good liar.
“Yeah, right,” he said as he brushed by her toward the kitchen. “Well, feeding like you did last night does work up an appetite. That is a good sign that your Transformation is proceeding as it should.”
“Uh, aren’t you going to get dressed?” she asked, unconsciously covering her breasts with her arms.
“Why, Sam?” he asked with a wide grin. “I think we’ve both seen everything already, haven’t we?”
She blushed again at his reference to the previous night’s activities.
As he prepared the coffee, he turned and asked, “How is the pain, by the way? Better this morning?”
She followed him into the kitchen, flexing her arms. “Yes, now that you mention it. Just a slight ache in my muscles, but nothing like yesterday,” she answered, not quite believing she was able to carry on a normal conversation with both of them naked as jaybirds.
He turned back to the counter and got them both coffee cups out of the cupboard. “It’ll come back. By this afternoon, you’ll be hurting almost as bad as yesterday. You’ll need to feed again tonight.”
She grimaced. “Will the side effects be the same?”
He looked at her, his eyes traveling up and down her body, and she could see the conversation was having an effect on him, for he was starting to become hard. “Oh, yes, I’m afraid so, Sam. That will happen every time you feed.”
She groaned. “And how long will I have to endure this torture?”
“Only a few more days, perhaps a week. The Transformation should be complete by then.”
“But TJ was in a coma for weeks during her Transformation.”
He nodded. “Yes, but according to the story I got from Carmilla, you and your friends rescued her after only a couple of feedings with her mate.”
“Yes,” Sam said, “that’s true.”
“Well, if he had been allowed to let her feed on him nightly, as you are going to do, the entire process would have taken only a week or slightly more.”
She could see by the way his body was responding, that all of this talk of feeding was making Michael more and more excited. She looked away, trying to think of a way to change the subject, when she saw an object lying outside on the balcony. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing and walking toward the sliding glass door.
He put the coffee cups down and frowned, his face becoming severe. “That, my dear, is an object lesson for you.”
“Oh?” she asked.
“Yes.” He opened the door to the balcony and walked outside, with her following him.
Using his foot, he pushed at the rug and it began to unroll, revealing the dead body with its head between its thighs.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sam said, gagging slightly and almost throwing up at the grisly sight. “Who is that?”
“That, my dear Sam, is Carmilla de la Fontaine,” Michael answered. “And now I’ll show you what will happen to you if you try to escape or go against my wishes ever again.”
He bent and effortlessly picked up the body, casually tossing it over the rail into the bayou below. Before the splash had died down, several ominous-looking shapes glided off the far bank and made their way toward the body. Within seconds, three alligators were tearing at the corpse, ripping it into bite-size chunks, and disappearing under the water with them in their mouths.
What was left of Carmilla slowly sank beneath the scum-covered ripples the gators had caused. Michael stepped over and kicked the head off the balcony to land next to the body. It floated there for a few moments, its sightless eyes staring up at eternity before it, too, sank out of sight.
“Christ,” Sam said, even more disgusted with Michael than she was before. “Did you have to do that? Couldn’t you have buried her someplace where no one would find her?”
“And you think that would be a kindness, Sam?” he asked, leaning back against the rail and folding his arms across his chest.
“Certainly better than this,” she replied hotly, and stormed back into the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee to ease the taste of bile in her mouth.
He stepped in beside her. “No, you’re wrong, Sam. You see, there is only one way we can be killed. That is for our head to be severed from our body, and then the body destroyed completely.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide.
“It’s true. If the head is merely cut off and the body left alone, it will not die and decay but will go on in some sort of weird suspended animation for decades.” He reached across her and took the cup of coffee she’d just poured. “In fact, I heard of one case many years ago where just such a thing happened. A Vampyre cut off the head of one of his mate’s lovers and buried the poor man in a coffin with his head under his arm. His mate snuck back and dug up the body fifteen years later and it was still lying as it had been, although I’m told the clothes were not in the best of shape.”
“What happened?” Sam asked, fascinated.
He shrugged. “The story goes, the head was put back on the neck and the poor creature soon revived and was as good as new, except his mind was never quite right after that. It seems he regained some semblance of consciousness the entire fifteen years and lay there in the dark with nothing to do but dream and think.”
“I don’t believe it,” Sam said, shaking her head.
He smiled. “I don’t know if I do, either, quite, but that’s the way it was told to me.”
When Sam turned to fix her coffee, his smile vanished. “In any case, Sam, I meant what I said. No more escape attempts or you’ll follow Carmilla into the bayou.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said sarcastically through tight lips as she raised the cup and took a drink.
When the phone rang, and Michael wen
t into the living room to answer it, Sam took another quick peek at the bayou below. Two more alligators had arrived and were fighting over the scraps left by the first three. It was a nauseating sight and she turned away and walked back into her bedroom.
Michael picked up the phone. “Yeah?” he said.
“Michael, this is Sarah. Adeline and I got lucky.”
“Oh?” Michael asked.
“Yeah. Last night we were at this club, just fooling around, when I got the feeling someone was scanning the room mentally. Being real careful, I scanned back and picked up on this guy who was checking out all the ladies in the place.”
“Was it the Ripper?” Michael asked, beginning to get excited.
“Oh, yeah,” Sandra answered. “Finally, this guy follows these two girls out of the club and I can sense his blood lust from across the room. He was definitely on the trail, all right.”
“What happened then?”
“He follows these two chicks until they get to where they parked their cars. They must’ve met up to go clubbing and came in separate cars. One of the girls gets in her car and takes off, and just as the other one is fixing to leave, the guy smashes his hand through the window and pulls her right out, without bothering to open the door.”
“No one else was around?” Michael asked.
“Naw, it was early yet and the parking lot was deserted.”
“What did he do?”
Sarah laughed. “What do you think he did? He took her right there on the cement. He must’ve been awfully hungry ’cause he didn’t bother to play with her at all, just ripped her open and drank his fill. Hell, he didn’t even stop to fuck her, just ripped, drank, and left.”
“Did you follow him?”
“Of course. That’s what you told us to do, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. So you found out where he lives?”
“Yes. Matter of fact, I’m parked right down the street from his place now. I took Adeline home to get some sleep and I came back here. What do you want me to do?”
“Go get him and bring him to me at the bayou house.”
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