NYC VAMPS (The Italians): Vampire Romance (Book Book 2)

by Sky Winters

  Orgasm pulled at her, and Simone was ready to succumb. Vincent’s thrusting was more insistent, and Simone could tell from his grunts that his own orgasm was just about to happen. He pulled his fangs from her, and the feeling of her blood dripping from his fangs was just the thing that pushed Simone from the edge of that sweet precipice. Her body tightened, and Vincent grabbed her, holding her into place, as though she were an unruly, wild mare. Her orgasm erupted through her body, buckling her knees and forcing her to bury her face into the couch cushions in front of her.

  Vincent’s orgasm came like a rolling boulder. He grabbed onto Simone’s, burying his fingers into the soft flesh of her haunches as he came. Simone felt him as he erupted, sensing his thrusts grow slower and more firm. She closed her eyes and imagined his cock shooting thick cords of cum into her, taking pleasure at the thought of him filling her full of himself. As Vincent’s orgasm subsided, he loosed his grip on her hair and hip, squeezing her one last time before bringing his thrusting to a rest. He stayed inside of her as he caught his breath, and Simone breathed in, her face pressed against the pillow under her.

  When he pulled out, Simone could feel his cum as it dripped out of her, and she allowed herself to stay like that, warm with pleasure, filled, and satisfied.

  Chapter 10

  “If someone would’ve told me before today that the best sex of my life would be surrounded by piles of dead vampire dust, uh, well, I’m not sure what I’d say to that.”

  “Welcome to my world,” said Vincent, running locks of Simone’s black hair through his fingers. “A few months from now you’ll probably look back on this as one of the least strange things that have happened to you.

  The two lovers were lying on the leather couch that, only minutes earlier, they had been having sex on. Their clothes were strewn here and there, and the black ash from the bodies of the dead vampires was spread around the floor of the study in wild sprays.

  “One of these messed was a close friend of mine. Or, at least, so I thought,” said Vincent.

  “Really?” asked Simone.

  “Yeah. But this sort of thing is just what you have to be used to when you live this life. But the whole point of this thing, this society that we have, is to avoid shit like this.” He gestured to the mess around them. “This was supposed to be a peaceful solution, away from the constant scheming of the old world. So much for that, I suppose; nice run while it lasted.”

  Simone rolled onto her side and propped her head upon her hand.

  “So now what? These people in your, group, or whatever, just get to take things over? How are they even going to do that? You said there were other societies, right? Won’t they fight them?”

  Vincent’s face turned grim.

  “Yes, they will. They’ll all fight. But first, they’ll pair up. Polish with the Ukrainians, probably. The Irish usually do their own thing. Then someone will betray someone else, then one group will get big enough to beat one of them, then someone will come out on top. Or, the fighting will get so out of control that we’ll get exposed in the process, and the city will do something about us. Who knows.”

  “And what’re you going to do? Just hide here? Wait it all out?”

  Vincent looked away, as though in thought. Simone regarded his profile, admiring his handsome features, his thick, long hair, his well-defined jaw.

  “To be honest, the thought crossed my mind. Just take what I need from here and high-tail it back to the old country. I don’t speak much Italian, but how hard could it be?” A small smirk played on his mouth. “But you, I hadn’t counted on you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean?” he asked, his voice incredulous. “You lifted a vampire off of the ground with your mind! You knocked Chaz -Chaz was, ah, that guy, somewhere over there, by the way- ten feet across the floor!”

  A moment passed.

  “And there are other girls like you. I know it. Always women; don’t know why. Some girl fell in with one of the Irish not too long ago, which is part of why this whole thing’s getting set off now. I heard the Ukrainians are gathering up girls, too, trying to form some death squad or something insane like that.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Simone, holding up her hand and closing her eyes. “What do you mean ‘girls like me?’”

  “Girls with the gift. The gift to read minds, to move things, to kill. They always find us vampires, and they always upset the balance of things. Some group will find one or two of you and they’ll think they have the edge to knock off some rival or take some part of some city that they’d never been able to hold on to. Back in the old world, that is. There hadn’t been any sightings of…girls like you since we made the move to New York. Until these last few months, that is.”

  “Why?” asked Simone, now feeling like shew was in over her head. “Why now?”

  Vincent shook his head.

  “Who can say? Some think that the gifted girls are drawn to our kind, drawn to us without even knowing that they are. People are drawn to this city by the thousands, it stands to reason that some would be drawn here through some kind of power.”

  Simone sat up, the weight of the words she was hearing now sinking in.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Vincent stood up the moonlight that poured in through the swaying, heavy drapes of the study, casting his body in an ivory, waxen sheen. Simone studied the contours of his physique, her eyes drifting down from his tight, broad shoulders draped in oil-colored hair, to his defined, hard pectorals, and found herself thinking the same thoughts that crossed her mind before he took her…

  “Something. Anything,” he said, striding over to his slacks and swiping them up from where they lay on the ground. “They’ll know within the hour that the men they dispatched to get you have been killed. They’ll just keep sending more and more, and as powerful as you are, or could be, you couldn’t take a dozen well-trained vampires at once. Sorry.”

  “Then what?”

  “We go back to the gallery. We’ll be bound to find some clue there that’ll lead us to whatever the elders are doing next.”

  “Go back to the gallery? It’s an art gallery? What exactly are we going to find there? Probably a bunch of angry co-workers wondering why I left in the middle of a show.”

  Vincent’s face turned grim.

  “I forgot- you haven’t heard. You’ve been out for a while.”

  “Heard what?” Simone asked, a sliver of fear wedging itself into her stomach.

  Vincent walked to a side table at the corner of the room, took a tablet from it, and swiped at it as he walked back over the Simone. Finding what he was looking for, he handed it to Simone.

  VILLAGE GALLERY TEMPORARILY CLOSED.

  Simone read the article at a quick pace. It informed her that after the show last night, the Millennium Gallery would be closed indefinitely due to what the paper called a “private disturbance.” The picture with the article was of the front of the gallery; its glass front was covered by what looked like heavy cloth sheets. Stunned, she handed the tablet back to Vincent, who tossed it onto the couch.

  “What does it mean?”

  He shrugged.

  “No idea. Maybe the after-party got a little out of hand, maybe something else. Something worse.”

  “Something worse? Like what?”

  “One way to find out. But I’m going to guess that it’s not a coincidence that something would happen at the place where a vampire society pledged themselves to the old ways.”

  “We have to go there,” Simone said, her voice worried.

  “You’re right; we do. We’re sure to find some clue as to what’s going on. But it might not be pretty.”

  He began walking out of the study but beckoned Simone to follow him as he exited. Taking Vincent’s dress shirt to cover herself, she followed. They walked through the expanse of Vincent’s apartment, and Simone was in awe of the old-world sophistication of the place- walls of dark wood, soft, orange lighting, and taste
ful landscape paintings decorated the place. It was a contrast to the black-and-white minimalism that she was used to among the New York moneyed.

  They arrived at a guest bedroom, and Vincent gestured to a walk-in closet.

  “I don’t have much in the way of women’s clothing, but take whatever you like. I recommend something functional- no heels.”

  With that, he left her there. The bedroom was smaller than the wide open spaces of the study and the entryway, but cozy. Simone stepped into the walk-in closet at looked in awe at the array of clothes. There were dressed for every level of sophistication, dozens of pairs of shoes, jeans from every designer brand she could imagine, and dress shirts of the finest materials and most dazzling colors.

  It took as much restraint as she could muster to not snatch up the most glamorous heels and evening dress she could find. But after sifting through what was there to find something in her size, she settled on a pair of black, slim-cut jeans, a simple, white t-shirt and a pair of black flats.

  Functional, she thought, turning away from the bounty of clothes and ducking into the bathroom to wipe the smears of black ash off of her face and to tie her hair up in a simple ponytail. She wanted to shower, to wash the sweat and overall feeling of malaise from her body, but she knew that they didn’t have the time. And she needed to know just what, exactly, was going on at the gallery.

  She met Vincent, who was dressed in a pair of simple, but well-fitted slacks and a black, v-neck t-shirt. He threw her a black coat and put one on himself.

  “You clean up nice in ten minutes,” he said, looking her over with a lascivious and approving glance.

  “You should see what I can do when I’m not covered in vampire dust.”

  “I’d love to,” he said, gesturing towards a silver door in the corner of the room.

  Vincent, with a few deft pokes, typed a number into a keypad next to the door. The door then opened, revealing the small interior of an elevator. They stepped in, and as soon as the doors slid shut, the elevator went down in a whoosh, opening to reveal a small garage with a silver Mercedes, a black Mustang, and a dark green Land Cruiser. Vincent appeared to hesitate for a minute before deciding on the Mustang.

  “You vampires really know how to live.”

  “Well,” said Vincent, taking a key from a rack behind them and unlocking the doors of the Mustang with a press of the fob, “when you live forever, you find that accumulating wealth isn’t all that difficult.”

  The doors clicked open, and the two of them slid into the interior of the car, with Vincent taking the driver’s seat. Vincent pressed another button in the car, which opened the garage door. The door rose into the ceiling of the garage in a slow, fluid motion, not like the clanging, lurching garage doors she was used to from the small ranch homes in the Midwest.

  “Personal garage, huh?” asked Simone looking back at the small collection of cars that they were pulling away from.

  “Like I said, we have a lot of time and money on our hands,” said Vincent, his eyes on the road ahead.

  Vincent drove the few blocks to the gallery, which, as with the picture in the paper, was obscured with heavy sheets and yellow-and-black police tape. The car slid into an open space on the other side of the street, and the pair stepped out of the car and into the cool evening air, the snow that covered the ground like a dusting of confectioner’s sugar the previous night now making its metamorphosis into a dingy black sludge piled along the curbs. Simone looked up as she walked the street, at the roiling clouds backlit by the full moon behind them, and felt that another, heavier snow was coming.

  They approached the gallery, and the two of them inspected the cloth that blocked off the view of the inside and the police tape.

  “I don’t get it, this looks like a crime scene or something,” said Simone, taking a sweeping look at the façade of the gallery.

  Vincent walked along the gallery front as if looking for something.

  “It is, in a manner of speaking,” he said, not turning to face Simone. “Our society has deeper roots into this city that you know. Something happened here, and my people called in favors with the police to cover it up.”

  He continued walking, now away from the façade.

  “Is there another entrance to this place?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Simone said, her pace turning brisk as she walked towards, then past Vincent. “Back alley door.”

  Vincent followed Simone as she turned the corner that led into the alley behind the building. She continued her pace until she reached the metal door that led into the back staircase of the gallery. No police tape or barrier of any other kind was on the door, though when Vincent jerked the handle, it moved not an inch.

  “Locked,” he said, stepping away from the door.

  “Here, let me,” said Simone slipping a pin out of her hair and sliding it into the circular, metal lock above the door handle. After a few moments of working it in the keyhole, a click sounded, and the door moved an inch or so open from its frame.

  “Pretty weak lock for a door like that,” said Vincent, watching Simone slip the pin back into her hair.

  “That’s what I’m always telling them,” she said while wrapping her hand around the door handle.

  “No,” said Vincent, stopping her. “Let me go first; who knows what we’ll find in there.”

  Simone complied, releasing her hand from the door and stepping back. Vincent opened the door and stepped in.

  The lights in the hallway were low, and flickering at an uneven, erratic rhythm, casting a Vincent and Simone’s faces with an eerie, strobe light effect. They ascended the stairs, barely able make out the sight of their feet on the ground and their hands in front of them. Simone walked with care, placing one hand in front of the other on the cool metal of the railing. She continued forward in this fashion until she felt the unmistakable sensation of something wet on her skin. By instinct, she pulled her hands back, and looked at them, bringing them inches away from her face.

  “Oh my God,” she said, realizing at what she was looking.

  “What is it?” asked Vincent.

  “It’s…blood.”

  She wiped her hands with frantic smears against the denim of her jeans, trying to get every last trace of the blood off of her hands. Simone scrambled backward as she did so until she collided against Vincent’s chest.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she asked, her voice quivering with panic.

  “Nothing good,” said Vincent, wrapping his arm around the small of Simone’s back as they returned to going up the stairs.

  After a few moments, they reached the door that led to the main gallery space. Simone shot one final look at Vincent before they entered, both of them steeling themselves for whatever they would find. Taking the handle of the door, Vincent pulled it open.

  “Oh my God.”

  Chapter 11

  Simone’s face was painted in horror as her eyes darted back on forth from one spray of blood to another. Ceilings, walls, the floor- nothing was free from the crimson brushstrokes of gore. The light of the gallery space was dim and steady, and Simone could only look at the scene for moments before turning in shock to Vincent and burying her face into his chest.

  “What the hell happened here?” she said, her voice a soft plaint muffled against the fabric of Vincent’s shirt.

  “It’s what I feared would happen. The ceremony that you saw was a sign, a declaration, that it was time to return to the old ways. And what happened next was a celebration of that.”

  They walked through the gallery space, stepping around slick puddles of blood, surrounded by art toppled over and crushed, paintings streaked with red, and a deep, empty silence.

  After a few moments, Simone was able to turn away from Vincent and regard the scene. And what struck her immediately was even though the rooms of the gallery were littered with the evidence of people, not a soul, living or otherwise, could be found.

  “Where is everyone?” Simone asked. “Ther
e should at least be bodies, right?”

  “Yes, some. Though it’s possible that many of whoever was here were taken someplace else, for feeding, and maybe even turning. “

  Simone’s stomach turned at the thought. All of her coworkers, Amanda, everyone.

  “How to we know they’re dead?” she asked, continuing to walk through the gallery space, looking for clues while turning her head away from the splatters of blood that seemed to cover everything.

  “They’ll be here somewhere if they are. This place has probably been closed until my people get it cleaned out.”

  “And the police just go along with it? How can just…stand aside and let them kill people who live in the city? Isn’t it their job to protect people?”

  “This goes further than you know, young lady. You put enough money in front of people’s faces, you’d be surprised at what they’ll turn a blind eye towards.”

  After checking the first floor of the gallery and seeing nothing that would give them any clue as to what the vampires had planned next, they went upstairs, to the hallways that not a day ago Vincent had chased Simone through. More blood streaked these hallways, and on the floor were red-tracked footprints paced at long distances from one another.

  “Looks like some people got chased down up here,” said Vincent, noticing the signs of a struggle.

  They arrived at the meeting room that had been used for the ceremony that Simone witnessed and Vincent had taken part in.

  “Ugh, I can’t look,” said Simone, turning away from the door.

  Vincent pulled the door open, an inch at the time. Peering into the crack, he noticed something strange.

  “Huh,” he said, opening the door all the way.”

  “What is it?” asked Simone, still facing away from the door, her face buried in her hands for fear of catching even a single, gory image.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  Simone took a deep breath and turned. And when she opened her eyes, she saw that Vincent was right- there was nothing there. The room was spotless, so though nothing had happened there at all.