Every Last Bite
by Christine DePetrillo
“Exactly how much effort does it take pretending you don’t find me attractive, Tessa?” He slithered toward me, his bare feet making wavy lines in the moonlit sand.
“I don’t find you attractive at all, Doren.” Okay, so I lied.
“It’s a nice night.” He sat beside me, his arm brushing against mine.
“It was.” I shifted a few inches away from him, though my instincts told me to climb into his lap instead.
How long are we going to play this game? His voice was a mere whisper in my head.
“Don’t do that. I told you to stay out of here.” I tapped my temple.
“Sorry, but it’s not every day a guy wakes up from a coma and can play around in people’s thoughts. Besides, I’d stay out of your head if you’d let me in there.” He pointed to my chest where my beating heart should have been.
I locked my mind down. “Look, Doren, we’ve been over this a million and one times. You and I don’t make sense.”
“We make sense to me.” He was quiet for a moment. “Tessa, look at me.”
“No.” Looking at Doren was never a wise decision. With his ocean blue eyes, jet-black hair, and tall, athletic frame, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. When he first appeared to me in the emergency room, he was bloody and broken, but I knew I had to make him my own. Though I’d been in nursing for a while, none of the patients had ever taken a hold over me like Doren had. He’d slipped into a coma shortly after arriving at the hospital. When no one came to visit him, when the doctor told me he had no family, I couldn’t resist.
Doren placed his hand under my chin and turned my head to face him. “Resist what?”
“I’m warning you. Get out of my head.” My shields used to be better than this. What was wrong with me? Fortunately, I’d managed to protect the one thing I didn’t want him to find in the dark corners of my mind. So far anyway.
I wrenched my chin free of his grip and went back to staring at the water lapping the silvery shore.
“It’s the only way I can be close to you, Tessa. You keep pushing me away.”
“And yet, you refuse to take the hint.”
“Hint?” He laughed, a deep, raspy sound that caressed my insides like no other noise could. “It’s more like a flashing, neon sign.”
When I got up, he grabbed my wrist. I wriggled free, but he caught me again, his abilities already sharpening.
“Just sit with me.” He tugged until I lowered beside him. Was there anywhere else I wanted to be? He released my hand and leaned back on his arms. His body was one long line stretched next to me. Grains of sand sparkled on his dark jeans, and his black T-shirt hugged his chest.
Don’t think he’s beautiful. Don’t think he’s perfect.
The right side of Doren’s mouth turned up, but he didn’t acknowledge my thoughts. Instead, he eased back all the way and rested his head on his folded arms.
“You’re the only thing that feels right to me since I woke up. I want to show you how perfect we could be together.”
It wasn’t everyday a kind, gorgeous man said such words to me. Most of the men I met were egotistical doctors who thought they knew everything. They didn’t. They certainly didn’t know how I’d managed to wake Doren from his coma. How I’d healed his severely injured body after his motorcycle accident. How I’d made him like me.
How, every single day, I regretted what I’d done to him.
Doren rolled to his side and slid his arm around my waist. Instead of shrugging him off as I usually did, I ran my fingers along his smooth forearm. He grew still beside me, the only noise the soft hush of water against sand.
He shivered as I lay back, my hand inching up his arm and over his shoulder until it rested against his cheek. His eyes were huge, blue harbors, promising me safe mooring.
“You surprise me.” His lips formed an uncertain smile as if he were afraid I was toying with him. Perhaps I was.
“You’re so sure we’re supposed to be together. Show me your proof, Doren.”
His smile solidified now, his teeth beaming white in the moonlight. “I have waited for this moment, Tessa. You’ve turned me down for nearly three months. Why have you changed your mind now?” He wanted to believe in this, in me.
“Because it’s time you realize you don’t really want me.” Those words hurt more than the months I’d been keeping him at a distance. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I wasn’t supposed to have a conscience. I was a hunter, a killer, but Doren deserved better. He should have had a choice.
His dark brows furrowed as he looked at me. “I know what I want. Ever since I saw you in the hospital, you’re all I can think about.”
A nasty side effect. It would have been so much easier if I could have simply told him what I was, what he now was. It didn’t work that way though. He had to be shown, and I’d been avoiding this moment for too long already. Hoping he’d be set free somehow, but that wasn’t going to happen. There were rules, and I was bound by them as my maker had been.
I leaned forward and pressed my lips to Doren’s. A rumble vibrated in his throat as he kissed me back. His arms supported his weight until I encircled him with my own and pulled him down on top of me. He pushed the strap of my tank top aside and trailed hot kisses along my flesh. His movements were slow and gentle at first, but gained a certain passionate wildness within moments. He was hungry, starving, and his lips were skilled.
His tongue swirled over my neck as his arms tightened around my waist. He sniffed along the curve of my chin, and I knew he smelled it.
Blood. But not mine.
“Whose is it then?” Doren pushed up onto his elbows to look at my face, and I didn’t have the heart to yell at him for getting inside my head. After all, it was my fault he could read thoughts in the first place.
“Does it matter whose blood it is? Don’t you want it anyway?” I remembered the woman I’d taken down earlier in the evening. She’d been an easy target. Running along the beach with headphones in her ears, she never heard me coming.
“Why do I want it?” His beautiful eyes held worry and confusion. Maybe some fear.
“Drink it, then you’ll see why. You’ll know.” I angled my neck toward him, pulled my hair aside so as to leave no obstacle in his way.
He pressed his fingers to my neck, feeling for a pulse that didn’t exist.
“Bite me, Doren. Do it.” I arched my body up so it touched his, and he immediately collapsed against me.
Our mouths melded together again, then Doren’s lips traveled down my chin and back to my neck. His lips parted and knife-like fangs pierced my flesh. My own untamed need exploded, and I became the monster that lived inside me.
Doren drank the blood. My victim’s blood. The blood of an innocent, like he used to be. Why had I changed him? He should have died in that hospital bed like hundreds of other humans who left this world when it was their time. I had no right to choose him, but once I’d seen him, I couldn’t let him go.
I’d been so lonely since that fateful night when my maker changed me. I’d sworn never to turn anyone, because immortal life was no life at all. I hadn’t wanted to condemn anyone to this bleak existence, this constant thirst, this struggle to remain civilized when all I wanted to do was wet my throat with human blood, warm and rich.
I hated being a vampire.
Doren pulled his lips off my neck, blood dripping in delicious streams down his pale chin. “Vampire?” He licked the sweet, crimson wine from his lips, and I couldn’t control myself any longer.
I sat up and caught his lips with mine. His own taste combined with the blood of my last meal to create a flavor so intoxicating, I instantly needed more.
But not here. Not on the beach where children would make sandcastles when the sun turned everything golden in the morning.
“Come with me.” I kissed Doren again, mainly to clean the blood off his perfect face.
He was so daz
ed by his consumption that he followed me like a pup on a leash. With no need to hide what I was from him anymore, I grabbed Doren’s hand and ran through the streets at speeds no human could comprehend.
When we arrived at my front door, Doren’s black hair was windswept, strands falling across his forehead. His eyes were sharp and clear, his lips tinged red with blood. He belonged on the pages of a magazine, not on my steps with his hand firmly in mine. I took a moment to memorize his face, the curve of his chin, the shape of his nose, the length of his feathery, black eyelashes.
He backed me against the door, pressed his hips into mine, and my entire body wanted him even though I knew what making love to him would mean. I could push him away no longer. I’d tasted his kiss. No turning back now.
Somehow I managed to unlock my front door and get us inside. The house was dark and humid, like a tomb. Doren picked me up with one sweep of his arm behind my legs and turned us in a quick circle.
“Where?” His perfect face alternated between light and shadow as he stepped around my living room with me still in his arms. His chest was hard against me. Hard and secure.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. This is special, Tessa. Don’t you have a nice bed in your room?”
Doren had never been upstairs in my house where he probably assumed a bedroom existed. It didn’t. I didn’t sleep. Neither did he, but the new ones always overlooked that until they came to terms with being a vampire.
“Outside, in the grass,” I said.
“Under the stars.” He smiled and dropped a kiss on my cheek. Even that chaste touch had me yearning for more.
Doren carried me out the French doors at the back of the house. He cleared the patio in four giant steps and lowered me to the ground. The earth was still warm from a day in the summer heat—a day I had missed hiding inside the hospital during my long shift. A day Doren had spent at his own house on the next street because I had commanded him to stay there. He wasn’t good at taking commands, or I wasn’t good at giving them, but the command to stay out of the daylight while I was at work stuck with him.
The command to run from me, however, had no effect at all. Probably because I hadn’t wanted him to run from me. That was why I had put off this moment of lovemaking for so long, why I had left Doren in the dark about both of us being vampires. Why I had kept him like a pet, yet pretended I wanted nothing to do with him.
Looking at him now, with the night sky twinkling behind his head, I wanted everything to do with him.
I bared my fangs and pulled Doren down to me. He closed his eyes and let me sink my teeth into his neck. This bite wasn’t for drinking blood. I was already full. This bite was for marking him again as mine.
Mine for the moment anyway.
He let out a low growl, something feral and seductive, and I released my hold so I could pull off his T-shirt. His pale, muscular chest glowed in the moonlight, and my hands swam over his abs all the way up to his shoulders. He removed my tank top and shorts. I relieved him of his jeans. Within moments, grass caressed our naked bodies and nothing stood between us.
How had I resisted him for this long? I’d seen him every day since I’d changed him, imagined being intimate with him, craved his touch, and yet, I’d succeeded in keeping him at a safe distance. It didn’t seem possible.
Doren leaned down and kissed a line from my stomach up to my breasts. His lips were like silk, slippery and cool. When he closed his mouth around a tight nipple, I let out a gush of air and wrapped my legs around his back.
“Tell me again how you don’t find me attractive.” His lips smiled against the valley between my breasts.
“Shut up.” I cupped my hands around his face and brought his lips up to mine.
We feasted on each other, and when Doren entered me, I let out a cry of pleasure…and of heartache. His movements were slow and precise, each thrust making my body want to surround him more completely, deeper, tighter. My mind, however, knew what would come next.
I would leave him.
The rules made it so. My own maker had done the same to me. He’d been otherworldly striking in his looks and utterly irresistible. I’d been dancing in a club with my girlfriends and through the sea of writhing bodies, I’d seen him. And he’d seen me. The crowd parted when he waved his hand, and I hadn’t been able to move. My girlfriends had fallen still and silent around me, as had the rest of the dancers. The only noise was the thump of the bass-heavy music, mimicking the pounding of my heart—the last pounding it would ever do.
“Your hair is gold,” he’d said to me. “Your eyes sapphires. Dance with me.”
I couldn’t argue. Didn’t want to. So we danced. He escorted me out of the club to an enormous sailboat. While sea breezes carried us across dark water, he dined on me, drank me empty, then had sex with me. I lusted after him, desired more, but a few hours later, I’d found myself alone on the dock watching his boat float ghost-like into the mist.
He’d of course explained it all to me. He’d made me a vampire. My heart would no longer beat. I would thirst for blood. The sun would be my enemy. Life would never end, and he had to go.
“These are the rules, Tessa. One day you will do as I have done to you.”
I’d vowed not to, and yet, here I was. Doren, my vampire progeny, deep inside me, his body giving mine incredible pleasure. I’d stolen his life, and now I’d have to cast him aside.
I peaked when Doren edged a bit deeper, his hands holding my hips as we rode the final wave together. I squeezed him to me, breathed him in, tried to make him part of me for what moments remained.
“That was worth the wait,” he whispered into my ear as he settled beside me, his arm draped possessively around my waist.
A tear of blood rolled from the corner of my eye, and I fought to keep the others from spilling.
Doren rose to his elbow and wiped the tear away. “What’s wrong? Did I not please you?”
“You’ve pleased me like no other ever has, Doren.” I sat up and kissed him. “I will never forget you.”
I slipped out of his hold and stood. With a final look at him sitting wonderfully naked in the grass under the watchful eye of the moon, I walked away, something in my chest burning as if my dead heart had caught fire.
“Where are you going?” Doren was a blur as he ran to my side.
“It’s time for me to go.” I rubbed my chest, but the pain there only grew.
“Don’t vampires have all the time in the world?” He grinned. “We can spend several lifetimes making love like that.” He gestured back to the grass flattened by our bodies, to our pile of clothes.
“The rules say once maker and progeny make love, the maker must leave.” I buckled to the ground at Doren’s feet, the pain in my chest overwhelming.
When Doren touched me to help me up, the ache subsided. “Screw the rules, Tessa. If you made me a vampire and I’m going to live forever, I’m not doing it without you.”
He pulled me against him and kissed me until that hurt in my chest disappeared. In its place was a cooling flood of contentment. Perfect serenity. Completeness.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.” Could I let myself believe I could keep Doren?
“Says who?” Doren used his fangs to nibble on my bare shoulder. “We’re vampires. We can do whatever we want.”
“But the rules say…”
“Love is stronger than any vampire rules.” Doren grabbed me by the shoulders and stared deep into my eyes as if he were looking into my soul. A soul I’d thought I’d lost.
“Do you love me, Doren?” My maker hadn’t, and I hadn’t loved him.
“I love you now. I’ll love you always. I want to enjoy every last bite with you and only you.” He scooped me up and flew to the roof of my house where the moon was almost touchable.
“I love you too.” I bit him lightly on the chest, and he kissed the blood off my lips. “Forever is ours.”
Orig
inal Sin
by Rosalie Stanton
From the desk of
Lucifer, King of Hell
Will Also Answer To The Following:
The Head Honcho
The Big Cheese
The Boss
Jedi Master
One Scary Ass Motherfucker
In the beginning…
Well, there was no real beginning. That’s something most can’t grasp, seeing as the human mind isn’t structured to think of concepts such as eternity. We weren’t created so much as we just were. A group of celestial bodies floating around in a grand endless nothing, doing little more than exist. It was dull as fuck, and I’m not sorry it’s behind me. There was quite literally nothing to do, as nothing was precisely what was. Paradise itself wasn’t built until it was deemed necessary, therefore the luxury apartments, swimming pools, nightclubs, and other fancy amenities for which it’s known today weren’t available for our use.
There was also no Hell, of course. But that’s neither here nor there.
One day, Jev decided the same old same old was boring. It was a novel notion, really. We didn’t know what monotony was, and in order to be bored one must know how to be entertained. Another thing most humans don’t understand, simply because Jev didn’t wire them that way. To appreciate the value of one thing, one must have some knowledge of the opposite. The lot of us didn’t realize we were bored out of our cosmic minds until there was something there to keep us captivated. Jev always boasted the most power, and that might have been true. The man deserves credit insofar as thinking of something the rest of us had no chance of coming up with on our own. And perhaps that was our folly, but unlike the other sniveling ass-kissers, I took to the new creation skeptically. It was interesting, of course. Anything is interesting when contrasted with nothing. But it wasn’t without its flaws, and for whatever reason, I have an eye for spotting flaws.
The First Man (let’s call him Adam, for posterity sake) was a blithering idiot. The First Woman, Lilith, was quite the opposite. She had sass, and she knew how to use it. She refused to kowtow to Adam’s absurd requests, and when he asked her to get on her knees and…well, pay tribute to his manhood, she, quite appropriately, kicked him where men have since discovered they least enjoy being kicked.
Just One Bite Volume 5 Page 10