Dark Knights 1: Eternity of Darkness

by Shana Nichols

  “Delicious. All the more so because it came from you.” Stefan expected a vague, passing sense of nausea from the small, careful taste, but somehow he was not surprised when it didn’t happen. It was as though his body knew and accepted this gift from his mortal lover, as if all the gods of vampires were looking down, approving their liaison.

  She licked her lips where his had just touched her, smiled. Her eyes shone with passion, the way they did when they made love. Deliberately, she reached on her plate, lifted the banana, and brought it to her lips. “This doesn’t taste as good as you.”

  His cock swelled as she sucked the sweet-smelling fruit, her gaze fixed on his face. Every swipe of her agile tongue, each delicate bit of pressure she exerted on the banana rushed through his body, had the same effect on his cock. “Is that making you wet?” he asked in a rough whisper. He liked teasing her, sharing a simple, sensual moment free -- for the moment -- of more serious concerns.

  “Mmm.” Her nipples grew, hardened perceptibly beneath his gaze and her light cotton blouse. She drew her legs slightly apart as she slid the banana deeper into her mouth, then withdrew it only to slide it deeper yet. Stefan inhaled, savored the scent of her arousal that fed his own.

  She drew the banana from her mouth, held it to his lips. “I can’t,” he said, though his mouth fell open to taste the moist, smooth sweetness of the forbidden fruit.

  “Sorry.” Setting the rest of the banana on the table, she sank onto her knees and loosened Stefan’s belt. Noodles yelped, as though indignant that Julie had roused her from her resting place.

  He’d worried that she’d find his body odd...repulsive because of its paleness, the lack of hair. Not to mention his fangs. She seemed to like all the things that made him different from her kind, and that kept his arousal at a fever pitch.

  Stefan smoothed the curtain of blonde hair back from Julie’s face, watched her rosy lips encircle his alabaster flesh, her delicate fingers cup his sac, then stroke gently along his inner thighs. When she looked up at him, he saw lust...but more. He saw love. Love that filled him with awe -- and helped him steel his resolve not to let go of his tightly-held control.

  The soft whisper of her breath tickled his belly when she sank lower on his swollen cock. Cooling, yet scorching a path along his body straight to his heart. Pressure built within his balls, tight, insistent.

  Not this way. Not now. Lifting Julie from her spot between his legs, he slid up her skirt, reached for her panties...found warm, damp flesh instead. “Oh, yes. You’re ready. I like that.” He set her astride him, impaling her, sinking once more into her giving, heated flesh. Finding not just warmth...not only the prospect of release, but the promise of unconditional love.

  The colors and sounds and smells of the world -- of mortals -- surrounded them. He grasped the lush flesh of her hips, lifted her almost free, only to slam her down again and again. Felt good. Right, her taking all of him into her, cradling his sac between her swollen outer lips. Every welcoming squeeze of her wet, swollen sex around his cock felt right. Perfect.

  Stefan kept telling himself the feeling was only illusion born of long self-denial. As he held Julie’s trembling body, absorbed her climax into his own body, though, he knew this was different. It wasn’t only sex. Not now. With every fiber of his being, he wanted to crawl into Julie’s mind and stay. Merge their lives as well as their bodies. As his orgasm began, he realized the truth with every spurt of heated life into her womb.

  He had to protect her from Reynard, wanted claim her for himself.

  * * * * *

  Stefan had bathed, shaved, and crawled into bed exhausted, after they’d made love in the kitchen. Even with the drapes drawn, the room seemed bright -- too bright for her lover’s sensitive eyes. Slipping out of bed, being careful not to wake him, she padded down the hall past the living room.

  Suddenly the roses she’d thought so beautiful when the florist’s son had delivered them made her stomach roil. The fragrance of the blossoms, now fully opened, overwhelmed her. Scooping them from their place on the table, she took them to the kitchen and fed them to the garbage disposal. Noodles barked, as though she understood and approved of what Julie was doing.

  “I have to find something to block the light so Stefan can sleep,” she said when Noodles trotted after her into the spare bedroom she used as a studio.

  What she needed was something dark and big enough to drape across the French doors that faced her bed. Certain she’d find something, she began rifling through her supplies. No, the canvases wouldn’t do. Neither would the length of gossamer silk she first dragged from her stash of fabrics. It would let too much light through. There. She finally saw what she’d been looking for, folded neatly in the bottom of a large drawer. She fished out a large, dark-blue linen rectangle she’d bought to paint on and make an Indian sari. It would work perfectly to keep the sunlight at bay.

  As she stuffed the other material back into the drawer, she decided she really ought not to buy any more until she used up all she had. More material than she could use in ten lifetimes, her father always said when he came to visit. Julie smiled at the thought of her dad, imagining how he’d react to Stefan.

  Sam would like him. He’d approve of Stefan’s protectiveness, his determination to take care of her. For a moment she shoved the truth of Stefan’s resistance to letting them be together to a far corner of her mind. They’d travel to New Orleans, meet Sam in the French Quarter townhouse he’d restored and now used as home as well as office for his importing business.

  Hugging the dark-blue linen to her breasts, she let her mind wander. Fantasized about a wedding in Audubon Park. Her father would hand her over to Stefan while her friends and his looked on. Sensual sounds filled her ears, sounds of a blues band playing the mellow music she’d known and loved all her life. Guests would mingle as they dined on jambalaya and etoufee -- and crystal tumblers of fresh blood.

  Julie laughed. Before she planned her wedding, she must first persuade her lover she wanted him beyond all else. Beyond life as she knew it. Beyond mortal concerns like menus and seating arrangements and deciding upon the most flattering shade for her bridal veil.

  Tidying the canvases where she’d rifled through them, she scooped up the linen, looped it over her arm, and turned for the door. It was then her gaze fell on the huge canvas she’d stretched and primed earlier in the week, without a clue as to what she was going to do with it. Inspiration and emotion swelled in her, fueling a desire to create. Much like Stefan’s effect on her since the moment they’d met.

  The canvas stood on its easel, buffed and sandpapered and waiting only for a subject to be portrayed. Now she had it. She’d paint Stefan. The most beautiful male specimen she’d ever seen. If he refused her pleas to take her, she could preserve him with her art.

  Hers forever, a frail image of the man -- the vampire -- she loved. She eyed the digital camera on the counter, but instead picked up a large sketch pad and a tray of colored pencils. She’d capture him on paper while he slept, record his image with her own hand instead of the camera’s eye.

  Chapter Ten

  Back in the bedroom, where sunbeams now filtered gently through her makeshift drape, Julie pulled up a chair and stared at Stefan’s arresting features while her eyes grew accustomed to the muted light. The only flaw she noticed on casual observation of his face was the still angry-looking laceration that marred his left cheek. Louis Reynard’s work. The man who wanted to murder her, the way he’d killed twenty before her.

  While the horror of that thought shivered up her spine, Julie realized an even greater fear. God, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Stefan being hurt again. Couldn’t stand knowing that the serial killer might destroy him while he fought to save her. No. That wouldn’t happen. Stefan would prevail. He had to.

  Julie settled in the chair, her pad on her lap. She sketched his face in half-profile, eyes closed, dark, thick lashes shadowing his cheeks. Upon closer inspection, she saw a tiny scar bisected
one nicely shaped eyebrow, dispelling her earlier impression that vampires had no blemishes or scars. Then her heart beat a little faster when she remembered. Only another vampire could leave scars. Stefan had put himself in harm’s way more than once. He’d do so again. That was the kind of man she’d fallen in love with.

  She looked more closely, noticed an almost imperceptible imperfection in the shape of his aristocratic-looking nose. Had he broken it long ago in some boyhood accident, or was it, too, a souvenir of another vampire fight? She sketched in the tiny details that made him unique, then set the pad beside him on the bed. Glancing at her work so far, she realized he’d inspired her in ways her teachers hadn’t -- her drawing, simple as it was, was coming vibrantly alive.

  He did that to her. The first morning she’d awakened with him in her house, she hadn’t wanted to work on restoring that painting. She’d wanted to attack that blank canvas, create something spontaneous, passionate, something that represented her own maelstrom of feelings and emotions. She hadn’t done it then, but the urge was still there, still just as strong, as strong as her desire to spontaneously, passionately commit her eternity to the man before her. The artist she’d longed to become was in her, had always been in her. He had brought it into full blossom.

  He looked so young, so vulnerable as he slept, uncovered but for the top sheet he’d apparently kicked off, now tangled around his feet. Long black lashes shadowed his pale cheeks, unblemished but for the still-angry wound. His sensual mouth was slack, relaxed, yet fully closed as though he were still concealing the only incontrovertible evidence that he was more than mortal.

  Julie shook her head, tried to reconcile in her mind the fact that her lover had experienced childhood not as she had, in the nineteen eighties in New Orleans, but long ago, in another world entirely. “Did you spend your boyhood years playing on the cliffs of Normandy?” she asked softly, visualizing the Allied invasion that had stained the beaches below with blood more than thirty years before her own birth.

  Of course he hadn’t. At least not then. By D-Day, he’d have been a man -- possibly fighting with the French underground against the Nazi invaders, or...

  Julie used her colored pencils to fill in the hills and valleys of Stefan’s face, record the high cheekbones and strong jaw, the most minute details of his elegantly set ear, each laugh line around his soft, sensual lips. His neck was thick and corded with muscle, yet long and elegant, paler than his shadowed jaw. A prominent vein -- no, that was an artery -- lay just under the surface of his skin, its tone darker, blue-red beneath the satiny surface.

  Did vampires feed on each other as a matter of course, or did they restrict their diets to mortals’ blood except during their mating dance?

  There was so much Julie didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the inexplicable, irresistible attraction that had brought her together with Stefan d’Argent. She wanted to survive. Wanted a lifetime to learn about the vampire she loved, to share his triumphs and sorrows. An eternity.

  Stefan had already lived four hundred fifty years. He’d have been a child in the late 1500’s. Standing now, sketching the full length of his magnificent body on a new sheet in the sketchpad, she tried to imagine how it must have been back then, in France. Tumultuous, if she recalled her history correctly.

  Julie concentrated on capturing the power as well as the beauty of him. Admiring the well-developed musculature of his upper body that, even at rest, promised great strength and agility, she noticed once more how he slept yet apparently never let down his guard. He’d have learned young to be cautious, she imagined, for suspicion had most likely been the order of the day during his childhood, fed by the Huguenot uprisings. She couldn’t conceive of the carnage he must have seen, recalling the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The Regent, Catherine de Medici, had authorized that butchery.

  Julie shuddered. Vampires would have been reviled during that time, feared even more than the Protestants whose blood had been spilled in the streets of Paris and throughout the French countryside. Taking a charcoal pencil, she drew in the shadows cast through the linen on the sleek lines of his body, portraying the way his broad chest tapered to a narrow waist. Thank God the fates had spared Stefan to grow to manhood. To touch her life now, more than four hundred years later.

  She admired his magnificent body, caressing him in her mind as she’d stroked him earlier with her hands and mouth. His penis lay at rest against his ridged belly, curving gently to the right, its tip almost nudging the indentation of his navel. Its head, darker than the pale column of his shaft, flared, ending in a perfectly shaped round, apricot-colored crown just a shade lighter than his large, smooth scrotum. Julie took special pains to record every detail...each square inch of Stefan.

  Her art might be all she’d have of him. Her only concrete testimony that for a few wonderful days, a very special vampire had touched her life.

  No. She’d not give him up. Julie closed her eyes, imagined how they’d spend their days -- and nights -- if she could only persuade him to make her like him. Turn her and take her as his mate.

  A beautiful male...hers.

  For hours Julie sketched Stefan, first from one angle and then from another, mixing the colors until she got each tone perfect, each shadow at precisely the right depth. As she did, she imagined herself with him, embracing the darkness, taking her nourishment not from the bounty of the land but from another being like herself. Living in a shadowed world cloaked in centuries of mystery.

  Living for centuries. She shuddered at the alien thought, then smiled at the sleeping vampire in her bed. If he turned her, she’d be living for centuries, not decades. Living with him. Loving him. Bringing up a vampire child if they were blessed. Concepts she’d have found incredibly bizarre before he’d come into her life now seemed very possible...desirable.

  “What has you looking so serious?” Stefan’s sleepy, husky voice drew Julie out of her daydreams, back to the here and now.

  She closed her sketch pad and set it on the edge of the bed. Standing and stretching out the kinks in her shoulders and arms first, she returned the pencil she’d been holding to the box with all the others, and then looked at him. The curve of his back drew her eye as he sat in the middle of the bed, legs apart, one knee bent slightly more than the other. The dimmed light filtering through her makeshift shade shadowed the hollow of his throat, his injured cheek. He looked incredibly sexy.

  He also looked as though he belonged there, on her bed, gloriously naked...deliciously aroused. Julie couldn’t resist. Sitting beside him and stroking the strong line of his jaw, she returned his smile with one of her own. “I was thinking...thinking of painting you. I’ve been making sketches of you while you slept.”

  With greater interest than she’d imagined he’d display toward her efforts -- he’d never struck her as being vain, though he certainly exuded self-assurance -- he picked up the sketch pad. When he flipped it open it to the first page, he gasped. And stared, apparently taking in each detail, scrutinizing every pencil stroke of what Julie had thought a highly accurate rendition of his handsome features. “I know it’s rough, but -- “

  “No. You’re incredibly talented. I’ve noticed and admired your paintings, including the one here above the bed. It’s just...” He hesitated, his emerald gaze still focused on the colored sketch as though he couldn’t tear it away. “It’s just that I’ve never seen a likeness of my own face until now.”

  “I -- I don’t understand. Surely -- “

  “I’m a vampire, not a mortal. As I told you before, my eyes are extremely sensitive to light. Looking at light reflecting off a mirror blinds me.”

  “But you shave. Brush your hair. How can you, if you can’t see what you’re doing?”

  “I can see shadows but not details when I look at my reflection on polished furniture, so I can tell if my hair’s too badly askew or in need of trimming. As for brushing it and shaving, I’ve had years of practice. And I’m eternally grateful to wh
oever invented the electric razor. It’s saved me many a time from spilling my own blood.” He smiled, then looked again at the sketch. “I had no idea I looked so much like Alexandre.”

  Julie was struck by Stefan’s obvious feelings of wonder, now that she realized he was looking for the first time on his own image. How would it feel, seeing yourself only through others’ eyes? If you persuade him to take you, make you one of his kind, you’ll learn. The voice in her head spoke softly. Not as a warning, but as a bemused reminder of the many consequences that would result if Stefan changed her.

  “Your cousin?” she asked, dragging her thoughts back to Stefan’s comment. “The one you told me nearly got tried for that murder in Montana?”

  “Yes. Alex’s reckless streak will be the death of him, his mother always says.” With one finger, he traced the length of the half-healed wound on his cheek as if he expected to feel discomfort from touching the same wound on the paper. “Vampires’ wounds usually heal quickly. Unless they’re inflicted by other vampires. This one looks pretty rough. No wonder seeing it upset Alina when I met with her last week.”

  “It doesn’t look as though it’s infected, but it might be a good idea if I cleaned it and applied some antibiotic cream. Because you can’t see it for yourself,” Julie amended when he shot her a questioning look.

  “I don’t respond to mortals’ remedies, any more than I fall victim to their illnesses. From the look of this, though, I think it would benefit from another thorough cleansing.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The sap from the aloe plant on Julie’s bathroom window felt surprisingly soothing when she applied it to Stefan’s injured cheek. Cool and slick, it seemed to form a barrier he hoped would facilitate the healing process. Even if it didn’t, it wouldn’t hurt, and it seemed to please Julie to believe she was taking care of him.