Gathering Darkness: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Anna Zaires

  What I had really meant to ask was: Are you making me feel like this? Are you compelling me?

  “No”. Firm hands picked me up effortlessly, and without a second thought I gripped my legs around Ryan’s firm waist.

  This is a bad idea. This is the bad guy! But the voice of reason was swiftly drowned by the blood–red heat of desire. It was exactly the same feeling that I had experienced with the blood in the refrigerator – an all–consuming need that engulfed every sense and silenced any reasonable thought I might have had.

  He dropped me onto the dining table and in one motion slid his jeans and boxers off. I leaned back on my elbows, still kissing that mouth with such hunger, it scared me. It was like I wanted to devour him all at once. Like I wanted him to devour me.

  He gripped the small of my back, pushing into me in one sure movement, his cock stretching me until I gasped. He wasn’t gentle, and I didn’t want him to be. He fucked me hard and fast, and I pulled him into me with each stroke, greedy for more, terrified of what would happen once this ended. By then, it was too late to turn back. I kissed his neck, his mouth, anything I could get close to with my impatient mouth. The rhythmic movement of his bare skin on mine felt impossibly good. Better than anything I’d felt in months and months. I had only ever been with one other guy before – Jared – and I struggled to associate how the same act could be so totally opposite to what I’d experienced in the past. There was no love here, no romance – it was violently physical. Deliciously physical, the way he drove himself inside me so hard, it hurt. I eyed his collarbone, moving my mouth towards his soft skin, imagining how good it would taste if I just bit down and drank.

  But in an instant, everything changed. I gasped as I was beaten to the punch, sharp teeth pinching at my neck. I felt anger as my skin broke open like paper. I tried to protest as warm blood oozed from my jugular. Suddenly, any desire I had felt was washed away by revulsion.

  The room spun as my blood was siphoned off. The pressure of my blood pulsing into his hungry mouth overwhelmed me. It hurt, like someone had taken a blunt razor and scraped it across my skin and then put an industrial vacuum cleaner onto my exposed artery. And it hurt more because he was taking the one thing I wanted; the one thing I didn’t have enough of; the one thing I had been about to take from him.

  My elbows went from under me and I sank backwards, laying rigid on the table, my dark lover bent over me. I pulled my neck to the side, trying to disengage his teeth from my skin, but the pain caused by my movement made me gag. I stopped struggling and laid perfectly still, salt water stinging at the edges of my eyes. A horrible dragging feeling scraped through the middle of me. When Caleb had bitten me, he had taken some part of me along with my blood. It had been like a little piece of my soul, torn off in a messy chunk and yanked through me until it belonged to him. But what Ryan was taking from me – it seemed as if he wanted everything. It felt like he was ripping my entire being out of my body, along with my blood, and claiming my life force for himself. And he was enjoying every minute of it.

  Please stop please stop you’re hurting me …

  He must have taken my stillness as compliance because soon he was sucking harder, until black spots appeared in my vision and I felt myself fading into unconsciousness. Then he shuddered, collapsing on top of me as he came. It hurt almost as much when he pulled his teeth from my neck as it had when he bit into it.

  Thank God. It was over. He had taken everything and left me an empty shell, but at least that dragging feeling had finally ceased. At least that animal part of me had been weakened enough to slither away, dormant, and I could think semi–logically once more.

  “Off,” I wheezed, pushing my palms against the crushing weight on top of me. “Off, off, off!” I started to hyperventilate, taking tiny little puffs of air.

  He apparently wasn’t listening. “Ryan!” I said, this time very forcefully. “I can’t breathe, get off!”

  “Vampires don’t need to breathe,” he murmured, but he slid off of me and went searching for his clothes.

  I sat up and moved to the edge of the table, still catching my apparently non–essential breath. It had all happened so fast, I hadn’t even taken my clothes off. I looked down, horrified to see my white cotton dress stained with fresh blood – my blood.

  “You fucking idiot!” I said, clutching my neck with my hands. “Did you have to bite me?” I looked around, noticing my blood splattered on the floor and smeared across the dining table. I had seen so much blood in the past weeks, it no longer affected me very much. But that didn’t change the fact that my neck was burning as it continued to weep.

  Ryan ignored me, buttoning his jeans at a leisurely pace. I was about to yell at him again when I realized he wasn’t paying attention. He looked … stricken; with rage or confusion, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Hey!” I said loudly, kicking the oak dining chair in front of me so it crashed onto the floor in front of where he stood. “Earth to Ryan? I’m kind of bleeding here.”

  The chair smashing into pieces at his feet snapped Ryan out of whatever daydream he was apparently in the middle of. “What?”

  I gritted my teeth as my neck continued to burn hotter. “When will this stop?” I pulled my hand away and showed him the damage he’d inflicted.

  He went very quiet as he studied my neck. Only a few days earlier, his expression would have looked perfectly composed to me, but now, I could read further than just blank looks. It was like our connection allowed me to see a glimmer of what Ryan was feeling, and he was bewildered as he reached up and touched his thumb to my neck ever so gently.

  I did this? he asked inside my mind.

  “Yes,” I replied slowly. I declined to mention the fact that I had been about to do the same thing to him.

  I’m so sorry. I – I don’t know what happened.

  “That makes two of us,” I said blithely.

  You’re a vampire, he spoke silently. It will heal in a matter of minutes.

  He fled from the room with speed only a vampire could possess.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “I can’t fucking believe this,” I muttered, fighting back tears. I slid off the table and trudged sticky red footprints all the way down the hall and through my bedroom to the adjoining bathroom.

  The first thing I did was stumble over to the bath and turn the hot water on full, fumbling around until I finally got the plug to stay in the drain hole. I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. I purposely left the exhaust fan off, and the mirror fogged up instantly. I had to peel my dress from my skin, it was so sticky with my blood. I balled it up and threw it in the hamper in the corner, refusing to acknowledge the self–hatred that was screaming inside my mind.

  Autopilot. One foot in front of the other. That was easier than the truth.

  Don’t think. Don’t think. Just breathe.

  Thick steam swirled through the room as I hauled myself over the edge and into the scalding hot water. It burned, but not as much as my neck had burned when Ryan bit me. I started gently washing the wound at my neck, wincing as the water aggravated the smouldering sensation. I stopped and leaned back as a wave of dizziness hit me, and I realized how foolish I had been to wander off, drunk, bleeding and out of my goddamn mind. Silly me wasn’t nearly as worried about my ravaged neck as I was about Jared – and something told me what I had just done could cast me two steps back in my struggle to get back to my human boyfriend.

  I fucking hate you, I thought bitterly, hoping Ryan could hear me mentally abusing him through our bond. If screwing him had inadvertently screwed my chance at getting back to Jared, I would stake him again, only this time I would get him square in his cold, dead heart.

  I really had no idea what had just happened. And I didn’t want to think about it, let alone start analysing it in my over–imaginative brain. I had the tendency to overthink things – relationships, grades, sex – and becoming a vampire had obviously not quelled that nasty habit. If anything, it had made it worse. I didn�
�t want to think. I didn’t want to throb with the pain of invisible bruises where Ryan’s fingers had pressed into my flesh. I just wanted to be clean, to wash the blood and the vampire scent off my skin and pretend the last hour had never happened.

  Mostly, I never wanted to feel that unrelenting hunger again. It terrified me.

  I gasped as another rolling wave of vertigo slammed into me, and I stopped being able to hear my surroundings. I breathed out in a choking little sob, my fingers losing their grip on the high sides of the tub. My vision turned to twin tunnels that were being rapidly eaten away by blackness. Soon, there was no light at all, only darkness.

  I think I hit the back of my skull on the rim of the bathtub as I slipped under the water.

  Are you okay? I heard Ryan’s voice in my mind. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. No thoughts or images formed in my still mind. No emotions tugged at my heart. For those precious moments I was under water in the tub, for all intents and purposes, I ceased to exist.

  “Hey!” A hand reached into the water and pulled me upright.

  I opened my eyes slowly, taking a moment to focus. “Don’t,” I snapped, pushing Ryan’s hand away. He didn’t answer, just grabbed a towel and held it out impatiently.

  “Can you, like, turn around or something?” I asked, irritated.

  You didn’t mind me seeing it all hang out before.

  “Excuse me,” I said, my tone like acid. “Jesus Christ. Nothing hangs out over here, thank you very much.”

  Bad choice of words. Sorry.

  “You’re talkative,” I said caustically, still entirely more comfortable with using my mouth to speak rather than my freaky mind. “You always make a girl feel this special afterwards?” I was being a sarcastic bitch, but in reality I was crushed. I had only had sex with one other person before. Someone I had loved. Someone who I thought might be The One.

  I really felt like a major slut.

  “I think I passed out,” I said, taking the towel.

  “No shit,” Ryan replied, turning around to give me some privacy. “You’ve been dead to the world for almost an hour.”

  I stood up in the tub, goosebumps immediately erupting on my cool skin. I wrapped the towel around myself and tucked it in tightly, stepping out of the tub onto a thick white bathmat that was spattered with my blood. “I hope Ivy has bleach,” I said weakly, studying the stained mat. It took me a few seconds to realize what Ryan had said.

  “Wait, I was sleeping underwater for that long?” I looked at the pink bathwater incredulously.

  Ryan nodded. “I came in to check that you were okay.” He looked at my neck sheepishly. “And to say sorry about that.”

  I covered the bite with my hand, suddenly self–conscious. Ryan looked pained.

  “You got any sleeping pills?” I asked abruptly, changing the subject. I was sick of talking about blood and I sure as hell didn’t want to reminisce about the disturbing sex we’d just had.

  “Sure,” he said, clearly relieved to talk about something else. He left the room with vampiric speed and I used the pause in conversation to wrap my dripping hair up in a towel.

  Ryan returned to the room with a bottle full of bright blue capsules that smelled a little like marijuana. “I don’t want to get high,” I said hesitantly. I couldn’t look him in the eye, so I settled for the ground.

  “You’ll be fine,” Ryan said impatiently, pressing the bottle of pills into my palm.

  “What are they?”

  “Asphodel. Ground down from the roots of the flower.”

  I wanted to ask about the pills but couldn’t be bothered spending any more time with Ryan. “Okay,” I said quickly. “You can go now.”

  “They’re like vampire heroin,” Ryan warned. “Don’t take any more than two at a time. You can easily overdose on these. And these will kill a vampire”

  Suddenly, I was intrigued. “Really? Why?”

  Ryan’s face got all serious, like he always got when he was about to ‘teach me something’.

  “It’s from The Underworld,” he said. “The fields of asphodel flowers are what keep demons from leaving The Underworld. It’s like poison to them.”

  “And vampires were made by demons,” I added suddenly.

  Ryan smiled. “You have been listening.”

  I snorted. “I’ve been listening. I never said I believed any of it.”

  But I did believe it, all of it.

  I cried for half an hour after we did, well, it. At least, for the thirty minutes after Ryan had roused me from my sleep underneath the water in the bathtub. Turns out I really didn’t need to breathe after all. While a human would have drowned, I was perfectly fine after spending forty–five minutes unconscious under a foot of water and lavender–scented bubble bath.

  I made a mental note to ask again about my alive versus dead status.

  I would have cried for longer, but I was so exhausted I just cried myself to sleep. I hid the sleeping pills in my nightstand. I could definitely see vampire poison coming in handy one of these days.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I had nightmares that night. It wasn’t surprising. I blamed the bloodlust, for awakening something in me that hadn’t surfaced before. It threatened to consume me. Part of me thought it would be easier to let it.

  My nightmare was a rehash of a story Ryan had briefly told me, when we had first arrived at Ivy’s house. The story of the first vampire.

  Once upon a time there was a girl. Her name was Talitha. She was an earth witch, the most powerful witch in the world. She only practiced white magic – magic that would not harm, that would only bring light to the world.

  Hades, ruler of The Underworld, was on the lookout for a wife, someone to restore the balance in The Underworld and be his equal. The light to his darkness.

  One day, a servant told Hades about this powerful witch whose light shone as bright as the sun. Hades was intrigued. He wanted her light for himself.

  Hades visited the fair maiden and made her an offer. She could rule the world, he said, so long as it was a world of his choosing. She, having heard a great many terrible things about Hades, refused.

  It didn’t matter. He took her anyway.

  Once a being enters The Underworld, they can never leave. Once Death has claimed them, they belong to Hades for all of eternity. When a soul enters The Underworld, they must immediately drink from the River Lethe, and they forget their sorrows, and their sufferings, and they live in peaceful oblivion.

  But Hades was angry that a mere mortal had turned him down – after all, he was one of the most powerful beings in all of creation. She had enraged him. He ferried her to The Underworld, but he did not let her drink from the River Lethe. And so her sorrows and sufferings were not vanquished, and she began her stretch of eternal imprisonment with the full knowledge of the injustices she had suffered.

  And so it was, that Hades hid his prized witch, tucked away beneath the world of the living for thousands upon thousands of years. Time passes at a different speed under the world we know, and far too soon Talitha was not the innocent girl she had been when she was taken. Her hatred and rage were so much that even her blood turned black, along with her soul.

  So goes the story of the first demon.

  There are a ring of fields that encircle The Underworld. They are beautiful, bursting with asphodel flowers. Hades, not wanting to lose any of his prized dead souls, cast a spell that caused the flowers to burn any who touched them.

  And so, there is a beautiful young woman who burns her hands on pretty flowers as she weeps, at the edge of the fields for all eternity, trying to free herself from a world she never wanted, trying to get back to the light.

  I hadn’t thought about the story until it invaded my dreams that night. It was horrible, truly awful, watching in vivid detail as the girl was taken, and imprisoned, and left to rot until she became a true demon. The most horrifying part of the nightmare, though, was right at the end, when the girls blood turned black. She bit into the soft f
lesh of her wrist and forced her black blood upon a helpless human, chained in a dungeon not unlike the one I had been locked in in Mexico. As she looked up, her features changed slightly so that I was staring at a bloody caricature of myself. And the young man on the floor beneath her, choking down her blood, looked just like Jared.

  I wanted to wake screaming; but something had stolen my voice. As if I were unconscious underwater, I stayed trapped in my nightmare until Ryan shook me awake the next morning. When I looked into his eyes, I knew, inexplicably, that he had shared the same nightmare with me.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “You can’t tell anyone about last night,” I addressed Ryan the next morning as I walked into the kitchen. He stood at the kitchen bench, dressed in black satin boxers and pouring coffee from the drip machine pot into a mug that said ‘I LOVE NY’. I raised my eyebrows in amusement as I read the writing on the mug.

  “Tell us what?” Ivy asked from her spot at the kitchen table, biting into a piece of raisin toast. I could practically taste the toast in my own mouth, complete with melted butter, the smell was so overpowering.

  I jumped, turning to look at Ivy in frustration. “How do you keep doing that?”

  Ivy smiled, not looking up from her newspaper. “It’s what I do, pumpkin.”

  You’re the pumpkin, I thought to myself.

  Only after midnight, Ryan’s voice responded in my head.

  I smiled, even after what had happened the night before. Sometime before I finally fell asleep, I had come to the realization that Ryan probably wouldn’t give our encounter another thought. I mean, the guy was a professional. He probably did girls like me all the time.

  At our private joke, Ivy scowled and got up from the table. I looked at her plate to see she had eaten all of her bread and left four perfectly square crusts behind.