HuntingtheSiren

by Jeffe Kennedy

  Kasar stood, bringing the curved knife along in the shadow of his leg. Careless, confident even in her wrecked state, the vampire didn’t notice. Even when she’d “captured” him, she’d been blind to the fact that she’d never actually mesmerized him.

  She was a fool. But even a beast demented by rabies can kill.

  He opened his arms and she leapt at him, the starvation driving her to bury her fangs into his flesh with such savagery that he cried out, the agony of it momentarily sapping his will. No seduction this time. No distracting orgasm.

  The vampire fastened to his neck like a giant emaciated leech, audibly sucking his life’s blood. With a howl of rage, he drove the keriss between her ribs and into her heart.

  She growled, sucking harder, ragged nails gouging his flesh. But he had her now, the feel of her heart under his blade. No regrets for her. Using all his muscle power, he yanked the curved blade up and over, severing the arteries at the top of her heart.

  That got her attention.

  Some of her strength and flexibility regained, she wrapped thighs of steel around his waist, constricting him like a snake, placing sideways pressure on his spine. If she got just a bit more leverage, she’d snap his backbone like a twig.

  For good measure, he brought the knife back down in a diagonal, slicing her heart in half.

  None of this would kill her. Not yet. But interrupting the flow of that supernatural blood through their bodies hampered the vampires. Some truth to the stake-through-the-heart stories. Though wood, metal—once the sharpened end of a PVC pipe ripped from the plumbing of an abandoned office—none of that mattered. Stop the pump and the blood lost efficacy.

  That gave you time to cut off their heads.

  She weakened now, no longer gulping his blood. Without her heart pumping it out, her belly filled with the fluid. He just had to hold off the blackness darkening his vision long enough to finish her off.

  And start over with finding a way to get to the queen.

  “Enough.” A smooth baritone ordered and hands seized him. They yanked Mélanie off him, her bite taking shreds of his flesh with them.

  Kasar clapped his hand to the wound and fell to his knees, not daring to look at his captors. Hooves surrounded him. Thirty horses or more. The thunder.

  He had well and truly fucked up. No way could he evade or fight off so many. Especially with so little blood in him. She’d drained him dangerously low, the frantic pounding of his heart warned.

  Despair sank cold claws into his mind.

  To have survived so much and die like this. He wished now he hadn’t killed the little goat. Now her death meant nothing also.

  With bitter regret he slid into blackness.

  Chapter Two

  Sandahr dumped the bloody man at her feet and Imogen surveyed him with interest. He was alive still…barely. Not so much could be said for the ill-starred Mélanie.

  Her body had been shared and all the blood salvaged from it. In celebration, Imogen had accepted a wineglass full of it. She sipped the cool liquid judiciously, letting the vampire and human blood mix soothe her raging hunger. Just a little would do to keep up appearances.

  “So this is the late, unlamented Mélanie’s blood pet?”

  “It would seem so, my Queen.” Domino surveyed the man with more than a little lust gleaming in his eyes. “She went straight to him. Where she found such a fine specimen, I wish I knew. And if he has any brothers at home.”

  The man did look surprisingly good, compared to most humans these days. His muscles showed good bulk and, even drained nearly dry, his heart worked smooth and strong. The sound of it lured her, tempting and sweet.

  She sipped from her glass.

  “Chain him and wake him.”

  “He’s weak as a kitten,” one of Sandahr’s females tittered and fell silent at Imogen’s glance.

  Sandahr pointed her out of the yurt and with a pout, she flounced away. He and Terence clamped the iron manacles around the unconscious man’s wrists, then around his ankles. Sandahr lifted the man into a kneeling position while Terence attached the short chains between wrist and ankle to hold him there.

  Sandahr yanked the man’s head back with a fist in his snarled hair. The beard, equally filthy, changed the look of him, but Imogen felt sure she recognized him.

  Terence brought a basin of icy water and threw it in the man’s face.

  He coughed, sputtered, shaking his head like a dog, unable to do much of that under Sandahr’s grip. Then his chocolate-brown gaze rose and the shock of recognition rippled through him, a visible wrenching in his muscles and ferocious acceleration of his heart.

  He launched himself at her, leaving hair in Sandahr’s empty hand—and landed on his face at her booted foot.

  Nobody laughed. Instead murmurs of interest at his surprising vigor ran through the assembly. Imogen set her glass aside, slid off her chair and, grasping his shoulders, raised him back to his knees. He didn’t look her in the face, much less enough for her to catch his gaze.

  Interesting.

  His flesh felt like fire-warmed silk under her hands. The wound in his neck seeped now, the blood sluggish. She touched the ragged edges of it and he flinched, staring over her shoulder, jaw clenched. Instinctively, she inhaled his scent, warm and rich. A fleeting memory of drinking warm cocoa as a human girl trickled through her mind. She knew better than to try to capture anything more than that one glimpse.

  “Why the choice not to heal him?”

  Sandahr shrugged. “He was Mélanie’s pet. We owe him nothing.”

  Imogen turned the man’s head, though he tried to resist, examining the older wound on the other side. “It appears she took very poor care of her pet too.”

  She brought her wrist to her mouth, ready to open a vein.

  “My Queen!” Terence laid a hand on her shoulder. “You do him too great an honor. Allow me.”

  She nodded and let them drag the man back into place while she sat again. Feeling a little weak, the muscles of her thighs trembling, she sipped from her glass. The blood tasted good, rich. The sudden desire seized her to throw the man on his back and drink, straight from the source, hot and pumping and virile.

  Something she hadn’t done in ages.

  Trying to regain her imperial composure, she crossed her legs and idly tapped the toe of her boot, to give the appearance of her usual insouciance. It was beginning to tell on her, too, not feeding. Not quite as strong as you used to be. The long deprivation, first a sacrifice for her people—after all, at her age, she could withstand quite a bit more starvation—had now become a kind of penance.

  As the world broke apart and her people followed, the slow splintering of her body echoed the inevitable progression. The ache in her bones felt almost erotic. She’d moved beyond wanting to feed. The pleasure of sating herself had been replaced by the also satisfying pain of denial.

  And now, inexplicably, she was hungry.

  She wanted.

  The glass strained under her fierce grip and she gulped down her queen’s share, lest she shatter the vessel and waste the precious liquid. It boiled through her while Terence bit into his own wrist, smearing the blood on the man’s neck and then forcing it against his mouth.

  The man flushed with anger, trying to spit out the blood.

  “I won’t become one of you monsters!” he yelled in defiance.

  “No, you won’t.” Imogen waved a hand for Terence to continue. The human had no ability to resist when the vampire poured more blood in his mouth and then held his jaw clamped shut, stroking his throat to make him swallow. He had a powerful throat, with a prominent Adam’s apple. Corded muscles and tendons rippled in it. “It’s mostly your own blood you’re drinking anyway—courtesy of Mélanie. Tell me, did you love her?”

  Terence released him. Then cuffed the man on the head. “Answer the queen.”

  “I do not recognize her authority over me,” the human growled, gaze fixed on her boots.

  “No?” Imogen pur
red. “Your mistress is dead. You belong to me now. It matters not whether you ‘recognize my authority’. I hold your life in my hands.”

  “Then take it!” His gaze flashed up as high as her lips before he controlled himself and fastened it on her rhythmically tapping toe. “For I vow to take yours if you do not.”

  She laughed, surprising herself. It bubbled up through her, rich and warm, like his scent, like his potent blood.

  “With your little knife?” She held out a hand and Sandahr laid the keriss in her palm. Still covered in Mélanie’s sticky leavings, it sang of old magics. Ones she hadn’t touched in ages.

  “I killed her with it.”

  She flicked a glance at Sandahr and he shrugged. “He’d done a fair amount of damage. He might have succeeded.”

  Impotent rage vibrated off the man. “I have killed others. Everything dies, even your kind. It’s simply a matter of finding the method. Even vampires sleep.”

  “I don’t.” Imogen whispered it. She’d stopped sleeping ages ago. “Why did you kill your lover?”

  “That bitch was never my lover.”

  “No? She didn’t fuck you in return for your lovely blood?” Imogen slid her thighs together suggestively, the whisper of female flesh drawing his eyes higher. “Perhaps she only sucked your cock while she fed?”

  A furious blush rose to his face, giving him away.

  “Ah,” she crooned. “Don’t be ashamed. I imagine you’ve long been away from females of your kind, especially ones whose flesh isn’t falling off from the radiation. It’s only fair, really—for you to have gotten off while she ate.”

  He flinched when she flung the word at him, but didn’t rise to the bait.

  “Tell me, human man.” Imogen stretched out her long legs and tucked the toe of her boot under his chin, raising his face. His dark eyes remained firmly focused down. “That isn’t all, is it? What else did the ravishing Mélanie offer you, hmm? Clearly you weren’t in it for the pussy.”

  “Not from a monster, no,” he growled.

  “Then what? You can tell me.”

  He tugged at his chains, gaze crawling to the keriss in her hands.

  “You.”

  “Me?” The question steamed out of her, her own pussy warming. A vague, long-ago girlish part of her fluttered at the thought of him seeking her out. It had been so very long since she’d had a pet of her own. Long enough that her porous memory couldn’t retrieve a name.

  The man’s face tightened to ice, biceps bulging and hands flexing.

  “I’m here to kill you.”

  Shock flashed across the vampire queen’s face. At least, that’s what it looked like, from Kasar’s peripheral vision. Perhaps a flash of something else. A bit of a wound there, like the death pain in that little goat’s eyes.

  An absurd thought, since this woman—this vampire—was clearly all lithe predator, with nothing fragile in her.

  Had he remembered her as beautiful? Now she seared him, all fire and skin, lounging on her throne, that extraordinary cape of hair spilling over the sides of it. A laced-up black leather vest left her tan, lean arms bare and pushed up the tempting upper curves of her breasts. The lovely line of her throat led to a pointed chin and full lips worthy of prima donna at the Bolshoi.

  Dragging his eyes down from the memory of her compelling golden gaze, he tried to focus on her feet. The leather boots hugged her ankles and calves, showing every curve, then revealed her naked thighs. The short skirt she wore rode high, nearly revealing the shadowed recesses of her sex. Even as she toyed with him, he found himself looking again and yet again, hoping she’d spread her legs just a bit more.

  When she’d lifted his chin with the toe of her boot, he hadn’t resisted, taking the opportunity to see another inch or two. He was lost.

  “It seems, my lovely human man, that your plans are for naught.” Her rich voice poured over him. He couldn’t quite pin the accent. She had an almost European turn of phrase, but that cinnamon-gold skin looked as if she was born to the Steppes. “Now I have captured you.”

  “Then kill me,” he told her for a second time. Truly he’d been surprised to wake up, not to be dead already, along with everyone else. His survival was a mistake. Soon to be rectified. “Drink me dry and have done.”

  She turned the keriss in her hands, the precious blade catching the firelight, even sullied with blood.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Shall I send him to join the—”

  The queen cut off the big vampire with a flick of glossy red nails.

  “No, Sandahr. I believe I shall keep this one for a bit.”

  A murmur of surprise ran through the yurt.

  The big vampire stepped forward, knelt down, close enough to Kasar for his cloak to brush his shoulder, and took her hand. This was the one who had pulled Mélanie off him. Seven feet tall, Kasar guessed, and yet he prostrated himself to this petite woman, leaning his forehead on her hand.

  “My Queen—you’ll take him for your pet?” The vampire’s voice trembled with emotion.

  She brushed a hand over the vampire’s shining thick braid of hair. “This pleases you, Sandahr?”

  “You know it does, my Queen.” Sandahr stared up at her in fervent adoration. “I had been afraid that—”

  “Shh.” The queen laid a crimson nail on the vampire’s lips. “We will talk later. Meanwhile,” she raised her voice, surveying the room, “take my new pet to my yurt. Clean him up, but keep him chained. No one is to speak to him, understood?”

  Anger surged in him, but Kasar also saw opportunity. He might yet have the chance to kill her. Perhaps his resistance tempted her. The best hunters could rarely resist the trophy of the most elusive prey.

  “I will not belong to you.”

  “But you already do, my— What is your name?”

  “Isn’t it customary to rename a new pet?” he taunted her.

  “True.” She leaned over, her hair following in a silky slide, and cupped his face in her hands. “What shall I call you, my sweet kitty cat with such sharp tiny claws? I think…Lapushka. My little paw. We’ll just see if you can scratch me.”

  Her breath feathered over his cheek, her proximity blocking the light. He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath. Instead of flowery perfume, or the chemically calculated musks modern women had worn, she smelled of leather and horses, and the salt of blood as she exhaled.

  His cock, already hard for her, throbbed. The terror of imminent death, rage at his easy capture, the desperate hope that he might yet have the opportunity to succeed in his revenge—all of it faded at the hot brush of those lush lips against his cheek.

  “What thoughts stir you so, Lapushka?” Her whiskey voice murmured in his ear and her nails scraped lightly down his chest. “I hear your heart pounding and smell your lust. Perhaps being mine sounds not so awful to you, hmm?”

  Her tongue flicked into his ear, catlike, and he clenched down on the moan of raging desire. Her pleased chuckle rolled over him.

  “Oh yes. I shall have fun breaking you to ride, my fine stallion.” Her teeth closed on his earlobe, sending a pang of sharp pleasure straight to his cock. The feral craving to part her lovely thighs and see her gasping under him twined with shame that he could crave his enemy so. Abruptly she left him, standing and striding away. “Take him. Feed him too. He’ll need his strength later.”

  The cat-in-cream roll of her jibe made the room full of predators laugh in pleasure. Viselike hands on either side lifted him to his feet and he caught a glimpse of his bloodstained keriss, carelessly tossed aside on the table next to her chair. He didn’t dare ask for it. That would give the blade too much importance. His vampire queen was no fool.

  He hung his head as they led him away, shuffling his feet as if defeated. Easy enough with the chains, but still.

  Two could play this game.

  Outside, full dark had fallen, the heavy clouds obscuring the moon and stars. Wind tore through the tall grasses, sounding like surf
on some distant shore. He stumbled on a rock and his escort giggled.

  After they pushed him through a sheepskin flap into a brightly torch-lit yurt, Kasar saw his lighthearted clean-up crew included two teenaged, fair-skinned girls with the nearly platinum hair of Scandinavia. And vampire strength.

  They chattered happily with each other in a tongue he didn’t know, but thought could be Danish or Norwegian. A steaming tub of water heated by low fires stood in the center of the tent. One girl began stripping him, easily tearing the fabric of his shirt and jeans with her fingers, while the other looped a chain over a center beam.

  “Hey—I can do that myself,” he protested to the girl shredding his clothes, but she ignored him. Instead she took a piece of his bloodstained shirt and sucked on it. Then sighing in apparent disappointment, tossed it into one of the fires. When she had him naked except for his hiking boots, she flicked a tip of her finger against his unfortunately still very hard cock, licked her lips and said something to her twin.

  The other glanced over and reprimanded her. No sampling the queen’s merchandise, apparently.

  Working quickly, she knelt down and unlaced his boots, pulling them and the wool socks he’d scavenged in Znamenka off his feet. She pushed him toward the tub and, thinking it easier to comply, Kasar climbed in, letting them attach the overhead chain to his manacled wrists and stretch his arms overhead.

  With the same happy chatter, the twins stripped off their clothes and climbed in too, setting to scrubbing him with soap and loofah pads. It should have been a Penthouse fantasy come true, but the bouncing breasts and girlish hips did nothing to stir him.

  His thoughts were full of her.

  He’d counted easily thirty vampires in the assembly, all abjectly obedient to the queen. No king in sight. Not easy to discern, however, how their politics worked. Did she rule through might? His revenge had been so narrowly focused until now. Destroying her might do nothing to halt the relentless scouring of villages for human blood. It was possible, even, that she exerted a control that might result in worse violence.