by Kaia Bennett
I floundered, kicking, screaming, calling my own name as I inhabited her body in the memory.
I could be yours. Quiet and good and yours.
Evie’s voice wailed in my head. The words she’d whispered as I walked her to the lake vibrated through me like a gong.
My mind screamed with Evie’s voice. My legs and arms slashed through churning water with the weakness of prey. Evie’s hand—my hand—clenched a fragile throat and held me under. I stared up at my own face, feeling none of the pain I’d felt in my own body when I'd done this to her.
None of my tears or my whispered apologies broke through. None of the heartache I’d felt at her loss. No room for my pain, not when hers screeched through my body like a banshee howl. No room for my pain when she begged for life while water shoved past her lips and tore into her lungs. I’d become her now, and her fury rivaled my own.
You killed me. You killed me and any chance of ever tasting me again.
In this life, she’d finally found a way to give pain in kind. She’d never let a drop of blood touch her lips if she could help herself. She’d fight her own bloodlust if I tried to take her by force again, and leave me worse for wear.
“Suffer.” She licked my lips, teasing with the tip of her cursed tongue. In the vision she’d trapped me in, my face transformed into hers above the water. I watched, transfixed, as she leaned down close enough to kiss through the surface, but never breaking through, never pulling me up so I could breathe. The torment simply froze within me.
“Starve. Die, for all I care. I would rather do those things than let you touch me again. I don’t belong to you, I’m not yours. I. Didn’t. Choose. You. And you’re right. I’m not your mate.”
She pushed me once more into the frenzied memory, leaving me locked in the torment of drowning, over and over.
When I finally gasped in a lungful of air, she’d disappeared, probably off again to the inner sanctum and the comforting arms of the priestess. I sat alone. Suffering. Starving. Sweating and shaking with bloodlust and the need for more of her. The winter air sank into my skin like Evie’s teeth, weakness infecting my sluggish blood.
If this kept up, she’d get her wish.
I’d die of hunger after all.
9
“You should’ve called me. I’ll help hold her down next time.”
Vaughn settled into a crouch like a gargoyle on a thick fence post at the outskirts of the communal garden, just outside the inner sanctum. Propped up on the balls of his feet, he flicked cigarette ash into the frost-covered earth. There wasn’t a hint of humor in his tone.
I sat on the ground, leaning against the post beside him and stared up at the sprawling bleached blue of the late afternoon sky. Aside from eating, bathing, and sleeping, there wasn’t much else to do but take in the scenery. At night, raucous Romani music, laughter, and cheers, reached our enclosure. I lay awake, thinking of dancing witches, bonfires, and peals of laughter descending into screams as I hunted.
“Not a good idea. I lost more blood than I got back, and for what?” An involuntary shudder at just what I’d gotten from Evie yesterday rocked me. I dug my heels into the hard-packed earth to keep from thrusting my hips. “That blowjob was insane, though.”
We lounged as far away from our secluded caravans as we could without getting run out of the community by wolves, in or out of human form. The reason for our passive hostility came into view. If I couldn’t fuck the witch, I’d make her as uncomfortable as she could get while we waited for these rites. I returned Evie’s over-the-shoulder sneer with a lopsided grin as she rounded the house. Stark, in human form, leaned in close, drawing her attention away from my stare and into deep conversation.
Very chummy.
Vaughn shot a glance down at me, and I tilted my head up to look at him through a haze of smoke. “I’d suck your dick if I thought it’d help, but we both know it won’t.”
“Such a loyal friend,” I murmured.
“I am. If I thought I could get away with grabbing one of these witches and forcing some blood down Evie’s throat, I’d do that too. You need to eat.”
I’d said as much to Masilda earlier that afternoon. I’d tried again to feed with even less success than before. Starving by degrees, and utterly caught in a curse, for one disgusting moment I wished I could eat human food. Like those pancakes Evie had shared with me at the diner. Her mind had tasted something as sweet as witch blood, and my stomach churned at the memory. At least I could cook those for myself without worrying they’d possess me.
Yesterday, after trying and failing to soothe my feverish limbs by swimming in the nearby stream, I’d ventured to the outer edges of the inner sanctum to deliver an ultimatum to Masilda.
“I need to feed—I need you to make Evie feed so I can, too—or I need you to get your ass in gear and start this spell before Vaughn and me take matters into our own hands.”
“I’ve tried getting her to feed and so has Josh. She’s very stubborn. Understandably so, thanks to the stunt you pulled. She knows now that she can hurt you with her desire to be good.”
In my delirium, I’d almost enjoyed the scent of the food Masilda had been cooking. Something runny like blood, but sullied by sharp-scented weeds she called ‘herbs’. The aroma of vegetables and dead meat wafted from her clothes. More of Evie’s influence? Or had I fallen so far I’d sip dirty human water with dead shit floating in the liquid?
“I can see you’re hungry, and she is, too. She approaches the end of her tether. Just be patient for one more day. Preparations are almost complete.” The priestess had looked at the sky and nodded. “We begin tomorrow evening with the first step. I warn you, Jesse. Leave the girl be. I know what you want from her, but you can’t force it anymore. An empathic bond witch isn’t one to be trifled with.”
At least you’re suffering too, Evie. That’s gotta count for something.
I grunted and tried to distract myself from the throb of my erection. The coven bustled with mindless menial labors. Witches snapped wet laundry onto lines, cooked, and toted squalling infants. A group of prepubescent older kids sat in a circle near the rear end of the barn, flipping through a book they passed around for some lesson.
Like a slap to my cock, the distant sounds of a couple fucking with quiet intensity in one of the houses reached my ears. The faint hint of musk and desire lingered in the air to tease me, the merging of wolf and witch. For a second, I envisioned Stark and Evie tangled up together, sneaking away into the woods to fuck and gloat over my weakness. I seethed, my vision shuddering in and out of focus with the need to hunt, and my lack of energy to do so.
These were the side effects of starvation, for my kind. The worse I got, the more my senses would try to find what I needed, and then betray me with hallucinations. Maybe I’d already begun to imagine scents and sounds.
“So after this prayer circle shit, you game? We can cut her a bit, too, now that she heals quick.”
I gave Vaughn a hard look. Hard as the steel I’d used to carve him a wider grin. After a ponderous moment, he averted his gaze.
“I can’t take her like this. Neither can you. Kind of hard to pin her down, fuck her, or force feed her without touching her, and her power comes in part from touch.”
Vaughn huffed. “Bitch is a handful when she has her mind made up. I know that, first hand.”
My stomach twisted with acid and little else. I couldn’t stand the taste of their donor witches. I couldn’t stand sitting in the dirt, gossiping like an old woman to pass the time. Freedom dangled in front of me, the proverbial carrot on the string, and I couldn’t bite.
All I wanted was to fuck and drink blood that didn’t taste like death coating my tongue. I couldn’t understand how Evie’d been able to fight the hunger this long. I couldn’t understand how a creature so susceptible to emotion could be strong in the face of bloodlust. Humans and witches were weak, I’d always been told. I’d always believed, at best, they were like wrangling cats that could bite you
r mind if you weren’t careful. But even then, we were their masters. Even then, they were pets. Yet, she clung so hard to being weak, to humanity. Why? Why would she ever want to return to weakness when the path forward held power and the hunt, violence and mayhem and sex?
“You ever miss it?”
Vaughn gave me a quizzical frown.
“Miss what? Fucking the witch?” He made a noncommittal grunt. She’d slit his throat down to the bone and still he wanted her. I’d seen the way he looked at her, the way he scented the air when she passed. Nothing had changed but the depth of his desire to put the witch under his heel.
I can empathize.
The thought made me chuckle.
“No. I meant being human. You ever miss it?”
A long silence stretched between us. Vaughn landed with silent grace in a standing position and flicked his dying cigarette away.
“Why?”
“Bored. Dying. Curious, I guess.” After a moment, I shrugged. “The witch seems to miss it. She hates me for turning her. I bet that’s part of the reason she won’t eat. She’s clinging to the human side of her that won’t hurt people. Fucking idiot. It’s the best part of being what we are and she’s throwing it away.”
I’d never asked Vaughn about his former life. I knew how he’d been turned, though. My brother made clear when I found him that he’d only been bitten because of his looks. He’d been abandoned not long after, as if his maker had only gotten off on the torture, on leaving a mark all the way down to Vaughn’s blood.
Light blond hair, blue eyes, pale and pretty. I probably looked like an old fuck toy to the sonofabitch and he got all nostalgic, Vaughn had grumbled the first time he left New York City. So long, motherfucker.
That had been the last time he’d mentioned his maker and the end of his human life, until Evie pulled the truth from his mind in the shower damn near thirty years later.
You didn’t tell me she could do that shit, Jesse. She fucking saw.
Kill her. We don’t need her….
I should’ve listened to you then, Vaughn, but I thought I could toy with her. I thought I could tame her.
“Sometimes. Maybe.” His stare darted over humanity’s cousins—the witches. I’d seldom seen him so deep in thought. “I was weak when I was human. Doesn’t compare to bloodlust, but heroin can fuck you up pretty good and there’s no upside. No strength, no speed, no healing ability. Can’t tell if I was in love, or if I thought I was, but I was getting my heart curb-stomped by a girl and making ends meet slinging dope.”
He slid to a sitting position beside me and pointed at my hollow stomach. “How you feel right now? That’s how it feels to be human. Hungry all the time, but never, ever full. Unless you’re rich, someone else tells you when you get to feed, when you get to fuck. Shit like money controls you. Someone else can tell you ‘no’ and you have to live with the answer like a bitch. It’s nothing like what we are now. Now, I’ve got power.”
A child’s scream pierced the air. I turned to see a father loping off a porch to lift a crying boy into his arms. Large hands rubbed at the child’s raw knee, and the father tilted his son so he could plant a kiss on the scrape. I cringed.
So goddamn weak. The day I cried over a bruise would’ve been the day my father snapped my brain stem and bred another son.
“Wasn’t all horrible, though.”
The softness in Vaughn’s voice made me look at him. I traced his distant stare to father and son, puzzled.
“Being a child was kinda nice, short as it lasted. My dad was—” He swallowed audibly and furrow his brow. “He was a good dude. Not all the time, maybe, but he loved me. He said so a couple of times. Shit, I forget sometimes I even had a dad. He might still be alive.”
I nodded, though I didn’t understand. I could sum Father up easily and none of the words I’d use included ‘loving’ or ‘good’. Powerful, yes. Intimidating? Absolutely. I looked like him, with longer hair. As far as I knew, the rulers of our territory had always had the prototypical look of the first man to wander these lands. Native American, indigenous. We’re made to blend in with our prey, to appear just human enough to bait the trap.
We’d hunted the first men to settle here and the immigrants who came later. Every tribe, every nationality. I’d take my father’s place soon, and after hundreds of years, all I could say about the man was I looked like him, and his father before him. He’d been a hard taskmaster, but fair, like all the Oldmans to come before. No coddling, but he let me indulge my bloodlust. Love, for my kind, is pretty straightforward. He’d kept me alive and made me his heir.
“What about you? I mean, you can’t miss something you’ve never been, but…. Do true borns have childhoods?”
I swiped sweat from my brow, smoothing clinging hair off my forehead and the nape of my neck. Irritation surged. I wanted to douse myself under an eternal shower. I wanted to be silent. Instead, I meandered through my sparse memories of early life.
“Yeah, we have childhoods. It doesn’t last long. Predators like us have to be able to hunt and care for ourselves because the queens don’t linger. They nurse a child and then leave us with the father to breed with another ruler. But I remember… I remember a woman holding me once. Long hair. Beautiful smile. I remember wide open fields in Manitoba, and knowing how to ride a horse when I was young, even for a human. I don’t know for sure who she was. Everything fades and gets fuzzy after that, and my father never mentioned her, so she couldn’t have been the queen who bore me. Could’ve been a caretaker, but even that sounds wrong. He raised me from the time I was old enough to walk, and he said as much when I asked. So, I never brought it up again.”
“That’s weird. Don’t memories usually work the other way around? All the stuff that happens when you’re a baby and your brain is still forming is unclear for us—when we’re human I mean. You can usually remember things from when you’re three or four, something like that, but no further.”
I sat silent, unease settling around my shoulders like a cloak, like when my father would lay his hands on my shoulders and push me into the training ring with a stronger man.
You win this fight, son, or you fight me next. Losers don’t walk away from me in the ring. They crawl. For days.
I shook my head clear of memories of shattered bones and days without blood to help the healing. All that weakness he’d beaten out of me, and here I was, smacked down by one little turned witch.
“I didn’t know that. About the memories for humans.”
Vaughn shrugged. “Not like we sit around chatting about our childhoods, dude. A human wouldn’t have a chance to tell you with a mouthful of dick, either. This place is boring as fuck! If we start talking about our feelings I’m gonna commit suicide by wolf, I swear to Christ.”
“Poor baby. Remind me to pencil in feeling pity for you.” I scented wolf on the wind, the sweet musk of freedom and speed. Formidable foes, but if they were out of the way, how much of a fight could the witches put up? “I doubt any vampire on the outside would call the inside of a coven boring. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet. We’d just need to figure out how to pick the lock.”
“Speaking of tasty treats. That choice piece over there is the only bright spot in my day. I wanna make her cry so bad it hurts, man.”
I didn’t need to look, but I did. Hannah’s golden curls mostly obscured her potent stare, but not enough. She walked alongside a pretty girl with tan skin and long dark hair. This other witch wore the suspicion any prey should, when confronting a vampire. Hannah by contrast, looked scared, but intrigued.
The perfect idiot.
“Just a few little cuts and I bet she screams like a dream.”
He sounded as wistful as I felt. I could distantly recall the urge, but in the here and now, bleeding any other witch but Evie held zero allure. She’d made hunger my curse and the taste of blood made me sick to my stomach even as I craved the liquid. What I wouldn’t give to be dealing with a simple case of blue balls and dry fan
g like Vaughn.
As if the devil heard my thoughts, Masilda and Evie came into view, strolling around the side of the farmhouse. The priestess met my eyes and motioned to us with a tilt of the chin before they disappeared between the caravans and tiny homes lining the path. Vaughn hopped to his feet. I stood with much less grace, gripping my stomach against a sharp pang of nausea. In the distance a wolf howled, his brothers and sisters joining in.
Vaughn and I met them at the entrance to the forest. I leaned against a tree for support when I got there, straining to mask my fatigue as the two witches approached. Through strands of my sweat-dampened hair I spied Evie smiling at my pain, her gaze distant and rapturous.
“’Bout fucking time.”
Masilda ignored me, concentrating on the large stone bowl she balanced carefully against her forearms. She’d filled the bowl with water, which I half expected to douse her jeans and sweater. I stole a glance at Evie’s body, encased in worn jeans and a dark blue T-shirt. Sweat beaded her brow despite the chill.
She bore the same signs of struggle I was enduring, to a lesser degree. The scent of sweat mingled with crisp soap and temptation, and as bad as I felt, that’s how beautiful she looked. Even the scowl she gave Vaughn couldn’t mar her features. I wanted to bite and bleed those frowning lips, the desire intensifying when she sucked them into her mouth and nibbled.
“Shall we get started?” Masilda tossed over her shoulder. I hadn’t noticed she and Vaughn had left Evie and I behind. The priestess returned to appraising the water levels in the stone bowl and I shoved off the tree to follow.
Evie matched the priestess’s stride, leaving Vaughn and I to trail behind. We walked for ten minutes before our destination, and a few tendrils of mist, greeted us.
A perfect circle, fifty feet in diameter, had been cleared. Fist-sized stones surrounded the space. Not a single leaf or twig penetrated the manicured grass within, glowing green despite December being mere days away. A faint hint of spring rippled the cold air like smoke. Masilda set the stone bowl beside the stones circling the enclosure, and stripped off her jeans and sweater without a hint of hesitation. She revealed her naked body, displaying a form with the fine balance between maturity and the lithe curves of her youth.