Unbitten

by Valerie du Sange

  Jo nearly passed out when she heard that.

  David took her up to her tower room and laid her on her bed, neatly made by the Château staff. She was rather grimy from the long ride and tumbling around in the forest, but to David, that only added to her wonderful earthy perfume–and he especially appreciated that she was so hot for him that she was not stopping to fuss about her hair or a little mud.

  He grabbed one boot and pulled while Jo stared at his massive erection. Then the other. Then David kneeled beside the bed and peeled off her jodhpurs, her socks, her shirt, and her bra. And he kissed all that skin he had uncovered, he went over her body kissing and nipping as though he wanted to consume her, and with every kiss, Jo felt herself closer to the edge, to losing control completely.

  He lay beside her and with his big hands he stroked her all over, petting her really, getting to know her body, his eyes taking in every detail of her nakedness.

  Jo’s cell phone rang, making them jump, but of course their attention stayed right on each other, David nuzzling, tongue tasting now, looking up at Jo and then tasting some more, licking, and all the while their hands were all over each other, trying to cover every millimeter.

  Eventually, the waiting, the prolonging, had gone as far as it could go. David stood up on Jo’s bed and unbuttoned his jeans. He wrenched off his shirt and dove down beside her, wriggling out of his underwear.

  Jo grabbed his cock and felt it spring into her hand. She gripped him firmly with both hands, making David moan, and then he flipped onto his back and pulled her on top of him, sliding his cock inside her, thrusting, thrusting, Jo calling his name, then kissing him, and their hands were everywhere so that they knew nothing except an intensity of pleasure in which every touch was equally surging them on to climax, whether it was on a nipple or the ass or a tongue or a neck or a lip.

  David suddenly brought his hands up on either side of her face and looked into her eyes, said her name, and they came together in floods of tears and juiciness and sounds they had never made before.

  It was, all in all, an epic fuck.

  16

  The Marquis de la Motte walked briskly out of the Montparnasse train station, glad for once to be in Paris, looking forward to dinner and his meeting with Claudine and the crew at Polylabs. Henri had a lithe, muscular grace, and moved nimbly through the crowds despite the light rain and umbrellas and people stopping suddenly to consult maps and dragging suitcases on wheels and shouting in languages other than French while gesticulating at eye-level.

  He did not mind the rain. Vampire skin, though it feels to the touch just like human skin, has some special qualities–extremely fast healing, for one, and water resistance, for another. They carry umbrellas only to keep their clothing dry.

  Henri had forgotten to bring one, as he usually did, and he almost bought a cheap one from a vendor by the taxi stand. But Henri abhorred the cheap, the throwaway, the one-use-only. Even though Polylabs was quite a ways away, he decided to walk, and let his clothes get wet, and enjoy the night.

  He pictured a map of Paris in his mind, and stabbed an imaginary pin into the address, and let his legs follow. He did his best to blend in with the crowd, which did not work especially well because his looks were so striking. Parisians and tourists saw a tall, very well-built man, with a mane of sandy hair curling down, nearly to his shoulders. Full lips, a strong nose, the planes in his face sharp and masculine.

  But unlike his brother, when Henri was around people, he had no particular wish for attention. His thoughts and words had no edge of demand to them, no urge for domination just for domination’s sake. Usually, he was thinking about one of his projects, turning a problem over and upside down in his mind, and then got a little jolt of surprise when he realized that he was not alone, and possibly someone was expecting him to say something.

  Sometimes, the people we are the most easily attracted to are the ones who flatter us, one way or another, and Henri was too honest to be capable of flattery.

  Because it was Paris, where he had been many times but was still not home, not his everyday routine, he was paying more attention to what was in front of him than to thoughts of his work. He watched human mothers with their children in strollers, adjusting vinyl rain-covers over them. He watched twenty year olds working very hard at nonchalance. He saw a young girl in her apartment, reading a book in a window seat. Nothing very big-city, he thought. I might as well be in Mourency, for all the thrill on the streets.

  Henri did not see–or feel, or sense–any vampire presence at all. This was curious. Paris is home not only to a large population of vampires and their not-quite-human friends, but part of that population is exceedingly rich, unsurprising since vampires often are quite talented when it comes to making and holding on to money. The Paris group was well-known for its fondness for hard partying, shape-shifting, drug-taking, and all kinds of things in that line that did not interest Henri very much.

  He was sort of a reactionary, when you got right down to it. He liked things the way they had been when he was a child, in the early 1800s. As much as he worked tirelessly to make products and inventions that would improve the vampires’ lot, at the same time, he was sorry anyone had ever thought of the automobile. Much, much better to still be riding in carriages, he thought.

  He felt his cell phone buzzing in his pocket. It was Claudine.

  “Just checking your whereabouts, Henri,” she said. “We’re very excited to see your presentation. Will you be here soon?”

  “I don’t know,” Henri said. “Not sure where I am, I’m coming by foot. Still in the 14th, I believe.”

  “I’d be happy to send a car for you, if you’d like,” she said.

  “Oh no, not–oh!”

  “Change your mind?”

  “Quite a coincidence,” said Henri in a low voice. “I’m walking down a street, not a very crowded one, you see,” he said, “and coming the other way is the gendarme from my village!”

  “And…what sort is he?” asked Claudine. Meaning, the sort who knows your status, or the sort we don’t have to bother about?

  “I don’t exactly know,” said Henri.

  “You don’t get out much, do you, chéri?” said Claudine.

  “See you soon, I need to go,” said Henri, and slipped the phone back in his pocket.

  Tristan and Henri had seen other at the same moment. Tristan tightened his grip around Jessica’s waist. They had left her hotel to take a walk, having been in bed for a very long time. Tristan did not know what to make of Henri. On the one hand, he seemed like a circumspect enough fellow, always polite, never any trouble. On the other…he was David de la Motte’s brother. And there was no doubt at all in Tristan’s mind what David de la Motte was.

  “Question,” Tristan whispered into Jessica’s ear, as they and Henri got closer and closer, “does being a vampire ever get passed down from father to son, automatically, like a genetic thing?”

  “Oh no,” said Jessica. “I mean, there are many vampire families, especially among the aristocracy. But in each case the son is…inducted, for lack of a better word, by the father. The father –”

  “Sshshh!” said Tristan, bringing his hand up as though to deflect the sound of her words in the opposite direction from Henri.

  Jessica looked at him quizzically. Since they had just spent a languorous and exceedingly pleasurable time together in bed, she did not snap at him, but you could still see by the expression on her face that being shushed was not something she had much tolerance for.

  “I’ll explain in a minute,” he said, kissing her in the spot just in front of her ear that he was inordinately fond of.

  Henri nodded to Tristan as they passed. He wondered how the local gendarme had managed to get himself a Parisian girlfriend. Although, he thought, turning around to take a look, she didn’t look quite Parisian. Dutch maybe?

  Tristan turned to get a last glimpse of Henri as well, as though hoping to see some evidence, one way or another, even though he
knew that was ridiculous.

  They caught each other’s eye and quickly turned back around, embarrassed.

  If we could only develop a way to know by sight, thought Tristan.

  Maybe Swedish, thought Henri.

  Yes, he had wanted more excitement, but so far this new enterprise has been nothing but a pain in the ass, Pierre said to himself, crouching under a shrub. For a few days he had been living in the woods right by the Château, watching, trying to get a feel for the routine of the place, and waiting for an opportunity.

  In the meantime, he snacked on rabbits, which were plentiful and fat. He could suck six rabbits dry and feel reasonably well-fed. I could use some variety, he thought, and usually by about the fourth rabbit he was having hunger pangs for women. Human women.

  Those idiots Dominic and Maloney had told him they had removed a section of the wall to Henri’s lab, and all he had to do was slide it out and enter.

  What, are they high? thought Pierre. First of all, those stones weigh a fucking ton. He couldn’t believe Maloney managed to lift that chunk out of there. And second of all, did they really think Henri would never figure out what had happened? Why hadn’t they taken everything they wanted, if they’d already been inside? Anyway, the section was all patched up now with super-tight mortar.

  He would have to get in another way.

  And this was the moment. Henri had taken off earlier in the day in some kind of crazy get-up, who knew what that dude was into, and he had had an overnight bag with him. Pierre felt pretty sure he had the night to himself, alone with the lab, and he was going to make the most of it.

  He crept out of the underbrush at the edge of the pasture. No lights at the stables. No lights at the lab. Château Gagnon, in its magnificence, was still bathed in an evening glow, the turrets spiking up into the dark sky. Occasionally he saw guests wandering around the paths in the garden. He would have to be careful.

  With vampire speed he covered the open ground between the woods and the lab in an instant. Keeping to the far side, out of sight of the Château, he went up to the building and began to study it, running his hands over the stone, checking out the roof, the foundation, the windows. He had seen Henri fiddling with some kind of fancy contraption at the front door so he ignored that completely.

  However, there was a side door, fortuitously on a side of the building out of view; in fact, this second entrance was hidden by bushes, now leafless, but still providing some cover. Pierre started by trying the latch, not that he thought that would get him anywhere. It was frozen shut. He threw his weight against it. It didn’t budge. He stepped back and hurled himself at it. Not so much as a squeak. He checked the hinges–they were on the inside. He inspected the doorway all around–nothing he could see that would allow a forced entry. The door was very old and very thick, the wood practically petrified.

  He figured an axe or a chainsaw would invite attention he did not want.

  There were only three windows; the rest had been sealed up. Henri’s not a fan of the sunshine, Pierre thought with a smile. All three of the windows had wrought iron cages covering them. The cages were beautifully ornate, works of art really, and impenetrable.

  Pierre felt an old, bad feeling come over him. The feeling that whatever he did, no matter how hard he tried, nothing was going to change. The feeling that he might as well give up.

  It would be bad enough for a human to have those feelings, he thought, but a vampire can get stuck in a funk that lasts for decades, even hundreds of years. Long life is not all upside.

  He slid down with his back against the door and his knees in the bushes, moping.

  I want a woman, he thought. I need a woman. Slender. He liked them almost bony, because he had the idea that this made their blood extra-concentrated, extra-flavorful. He liked to bite their breasts sometimes before biting the neck–on the side of the breast, then the other, making identical bite-marks, appreciating the symmetry. Tasting, before he settled in to suck.

  Dominic had promised to introduce him to a labri if he got this job done. He didn’t allow himself to believe it would really happen. But he liked, he very much liked thinking about it. He was curious about how it would feel, being bitten. But more than that, although he did not admit this to himself, not in words anyway, he hoped this labri–whom he honestly and truly believed Dominic was making up–would be someone to befriend, someone to talk to, someone who would understand how completely weird it is to be over two hundred years old.

  I’ve got to focus, he told himself, standing up and brushing dead leaves off his pants. I wonder if those ADHD meds all the kids are taking would work on me? he thought.

  Looking through one of the windows of the lab, he had seen a small room that had shelves filled with vials and what looked like pill bottles. Maybe Henri has got a drug business cooking in there, he thought.

  Focus, he said out loud. He stepped out of the bushes, going for a second trip around the building. He looked up to catch a glimpse of the moon, and that was when he noticed them. A set of three windows, not caged, high up near the roofline. These windows must have been made long after the building had been built; they had a modern design feel to them–no mullions, just large single panes of glass, with a rectangular shape that was much longer than wide. They were on the north side, and Pierre figured they were there to provide indirect daylight, after so many of the original windows had been blocked up. No doubt Henri didn’t bother putting cages on them because they were, after all, about twenty feet up.

  Why Henri did not consider the leaping abilities of a vampire, Pierre could not say.

  He crouched and sprang, easily grabbing on to the small ledge and holding there, like a tree frog, and then laughing out loud when he realized that the window worked on a tilt, and all he had to do was push the top and slide in through the bottom.

  What a sucker, Pierre thought, dizzy with visions of labrim curled up next to him, asking for a bite.

  17

  When Jo awoke, sunlight was streaming across her bed and David was gone. She sat up and looked around. It looked like a tornado had touched down in her bedroom. She fell back on the pillows with a gigantic grin on her face.

  Last night had been unbelievable. She and David had made love for hours, prolonging until they couldn’t bear to wait another second to come, resting, and then starting all over again. They could not get enough of touching each other and looking into each other’s eyes. The night had seemed to fall into a bottomless hole that existed outside of the normal rules of the world, outside of time, of gravity, of any kind of physics at all.

  In the past, romance and relationships had not been her best subject.

  She had had an unerring ability to pick the loser, the cad, the broken. Hugo, her fiancé, had seemed so wonderful on the outside–he was a banker, so responsible, so upright, everything her father was not. And it was true, Hugo did hold down a good job. He got to work on time, he got promotions, he took her out to good restaurants and sometimes brought her flowers. As far as she knew, he did not cheat on her or secretly want to be with men or have dead bodies buried in his basement.

  But the month of their engagement felt like being drugged–not with psychedelics or anything euphoric, but with something that numbed her, inside and out. Her libido shrank until it disappeared entirely. She began turning the ringer off on her phone because she didn’t want to hear his voice. Finally, thanks to Marianne–where would she be without Marianne?–Jo did the difficult thing of facing that the relationship was not working, and the additional difficult thing of telling Hugo that, and not allowing herself to be convinced to give it another chance.

  When she had began to feel numb, she kept saying to herself that Hugo is a good man, a responsible man, as though nothing else was required for marrying someone. As though she didn’t deserve to be loved, to love back, and to share desire for each other.

  Last night with David was the best sex she had ever had, only by about ten million miles.

  Jo ha
d never felt a man want her that badly. Had never had a man so intent on pleasing her, on exploring her, on surprising her and delighting her. She rolled over onto her belly and slid her hand down to her thighs and began caressing herself, feeling a burst of wetness just from thinking of David, his coiled power, his strangely hypnotic eyes, his penetrating attention.

  A very quiet, almost muffled voice way in the back of her mind was wondering where David had gone and wishing she had been able to wake up with him and see him lying in her bed with the sunlight playing over his body. But Jo, who was so good at horses, good at friendship, good at physical danger and making omelets and tying knots and a long list of other things, was not good at listening to that inner voice. Not unless it was yelling, which is generally not how inner voices work.

  She rolled onto her back, still touching herself but idly, not trying to get herself more excited. For the first time ever, it felt lonely to have sexual stirrings when she was in bed alone. She wanted David back in her bed. Her body craved his touch.

  She got up and took a long hot shower, soaping herself in every nook and cranny, washing and conditioning her hair, and shaving her underarms and legs, making an effort to look good for the second time in months. She desperately wanted to call Marianne but it was the middle of the night back home.

  Jo put her riding boots in the bottom of the armoire, first brushing the mud off in the trashcan. She put on a swishy skirt, a lacy bra, and a tight sweater. What she wanted to do more than anything was run madly around the Château searching until she found David, and drag him straight to her bed. But she had enough self-control to know that was not a good idea. Yes, romantic relationships had not been her best thing, but she was not a complete idiot.

  Let him find me, she thought, twisting her hair into a chignon, dabbing on some perfume, and preparing to walk into the village and explore.

  David should have been asleep. For all their strength, vampires need their eight solid hours in the sack or they get very cranky. But David was ignoring his beautiful bed, possibly the most comfortable, luxurious bed on the planet, and instead was pacing in his bedroom, Henri’s shades in place to keep out the nasty blazing sun.