“Oh, shit!”
Leo all but curled up on her, core muscles clenching at the sudden feel of another hot cavity surrounding his dick. And these were very active muscles. Her tongue wriggled to clean him, lips dilated around the head with a will of their own. The tang of her orgasm was in her own mouth, under her nose, and November would add his to it. He’d be close. Trembling there.
“Oh my god.” His fingers dug into the cushions, head lolling back on the sofa.
She pulled off and stroked him, enjoying the view.
“Oh my god.”
He looked good in her sliding fist, hips thrust toward the ceiling now. His thighs split around her, and that high, arterial pulse beckoned.
“Leo.”
“Nnn?”
“Can I?”
He must have looked down then, to see what she meant. The vampire’s entire focus centered on muscle and warm brown flesh. Where she wanted to pierce. To feed.
She forced her eyes away to meet his. That gaze came back hot and steady.
“Do it.”
November fell on him. Bit down.
He growled through the pain and she began to jack him again, saliva and her own cream slicking up and down the shaft. Coursing over the head, pumping down to the scrotum and back.
“November.”
Oooh, yeah.
She could feel him. Harder. Straining. Ninety-eight point six degrees of bliss flooding her mouth.
Come for me, Leo.
He was exquisite. Two days in a row, bizarre good fortune on top of bad, sweet salt and iron until her own eyes were about to roll back.
“Mm yeah.” He pressed her face to him, palm on the back of her skull. “Yeah. YeahfffuUCK!”
Eyes closed, she felt him splatter her knuckles. Kept milking while his thigh went taut under her sucking mouth and he rolled her in a stream of expletives. Her gate partner began to babble nonsense and pulsed richer on her tongue. He was so good. So good, and she’d have to cut herself off befo—
Gunfire.
The room spun and she was on her ass.
Streaks of UV whizzed by overhead, and November tried to roll to her side, heart rate lurching in a panic. The vampire shoved herself to hands and knees, head swimming.
There was a gate ahead. Not Leo’s living room.
“Croix!”
The gate exploded with a whump that boomed in her chest. Tons of reinforced steel went zinging like crumbs, and November curled to a ball. Boots were around her. She dared a look and vampires in tactical gear edged along walls, weapons she’d never seen in hand.
Another blast rocked her and there was yelling. Someone shouting commands. She tried to come to her feet, but a distinct, cool palm materialized between her shoulder blades.
Not yet, Kitamura. Not here.
November shouted and spun to land on her backside. To face a voice that made her want to piss down her leg.
A man emerged from shadow, much too far for the hand on her back. The darkness had to surrender him, black coils of negative space peeling back like smoke. An impossible white suit stood out among the filth and chaos of battle, only the deep brown of his hands and bald head visible.
He hefted a heavy cane in one hand, and reached out the other, palm up, like she should take it. The sounds behind her faded, and the man opened his mouth to speak, fangs plain.
“November!”
Someone was shaking her. Sound was fuzz in her ears. She tried to blink.
“November, what the fuck?” Leo was cradling her shoulders. Her eyelids fluttered, wrists limp and grazing carpet.
“Hhnn?” Her head lolled in his direction, the dim lines of his apartment sliding back together around him.
“The fuck happened?” he asked, fingers pressing under her jaw to check her pulse. “You were drinking, and I came, and then you passed the fuck out!”
“Mmhow long?” she slurred.
“I dunno? A minute?”
She dragged a heavy arm up to touch his hand. “Mmokay.”
Feeding. And then … war? Strange vampires talking in her head?
No.
She was too young.
“You sure?” Leo did not sound assured.
“Whadyou gonna do?” November tried to shove herself upright so she could lean against the sofa. “Take me to a doctor?”
Her gate partner fussed, unsatisfied. “I’m gonna get you some water.” He left her slumped against the cushions to head for the kitchen.
November Kitamura might have been bloodline … but she was way too young to be having Visions.
Chapter 4
Leo returned with a glass of water in one hand and a folded rag in the other. When he leaned down to offer the glass, November took it in both shaky hands. She was already easing the cool liquid down her throat while he pressed the rag high against his still nude, still bleeding thigh.
“Did you get dizzy?” he asked, hovering.
She braced the tumbler against the tops of her bent knees and let her eyes be closed for a few breaths.
Just make something up.
“Yeah, sometimes,” she said to the backs of her eyelids, “apparently if we drink too much, too fast, we can get lightheaded. I just … haven’t ever done this two nights in a row.” November managed to tilt her head up to squint at the naked silhouette of a man standing next to her. “I didn’t know what it was gonna feel like.”
“Well … how are you feeling now?”
“I’m coming back.” She nodded self-assessing.
“Will you be okay for maybe the next ten minutes?” he said. “I’m kind of a mess.” Her gate partner flicked his free hand at the smears of blood and other fluids over his thighs.
November tilted the glass at him. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”
Footsteps retreated toward the bathroom. She heard doors open and close. Water running. November leaned to one side and shoved herself up and onto the sofa, careful not to slosh the contents of the glass as she went.
Geneticists. Biologists. They were so sure they had every little V-positive trait coded and documented out. Since what? The late twenty-first century? They’d mapped the 22V gene, and vampires had started ‘coming out of the coffin,’ as it were.
All that research. Myths exploded. No more ridiculous garlic and crosses. No more silver and mirrors. The scientific community had laid waste to superstition with glee. They could prove vitamin D deficiency. Cellular regeneration run amok. Secondary pheromones, UV sensitivity, on and on. Look! No mystery here! Rainbows are just refracted light with no meaning, and vampires are just a genetic mutation and not boogeymen of old.
And while all true, it was all very neat and tidy. November sipped the last of her water. All a desire to put on a rictus smile and cram an understanding of The Way Things Worked into uniform, measurable boxes. Humanity preferred things that way.
But science had never been able to explain Visions. They would have had to start research on the subject, first. And that was never going to happen.
The knowledge was older than the collective vampire memory. They knew it to affect the bloodline or, rarer still, very old converts. Deep in the drink, often when sex or heavy emotion came into play, one of her kind might find their consciousness slip-sliding through space-time, if they wanted to phrase it that way. If they wanted to be old-fashioned about it, they could call it ‘seeing the future.’
Word choice aside, it was one of their oldest rules, passed down through millennia from fang to ear. The Moonrise Children did not speak of Visions to those who could walk in the day. The cultural memory of royal seers burned alive, ‘wise counselors’ enslaved, was enough to press the necessity into their bones. Libraries had burned to keep these secrets.
She would not be telling Leonide Croix what she’d seen and heard on the other side of his blood.
Why, though? Why now? The prevailing wisdom told her not to expect anything like this to happen until she was at least a hundred and fifty. Possibly older, and even then,
it was rare.
And what did it even mean? Visions were supposed to be fairly reliable, if often confusing glimpses at truth, but that man she’d seen, in the white suit … He wasn’t a real person. Just a legend, like Paul Bunyan, or the Kitsune, or something.
The water in the bathroom cut out and there was a short interlude of other small sounds, storage compartments opening and closing, before the door slid open and Leo stepped back into the living area. He had a towel around his waist and moved to bend, shirtless, and rummage in a drawer beneath the bed.
Time to deflect. Hard.
Her gate partner stood and turned, some white piece of clothing in hand, and came back to where she sat on the sofa.
“Any better?” he asked.
November raised her glass and downed the last of its contents. “Yeah. Just needed to sit for a minute.”
“Here.” He held out the garment. “Your clothes are done.”
She took the thing and unfolded a fresh one of his undershirts.
“For now, at least,” he said, as though he thought she’d object.
It was clean, though, and plenty big enough. And sitting around with her tits and ass out would only serve to remind him of what had just happened. November leaned down and set the tumbler on the floor, and then pulled the shirt on over her head. It reached halfway down her thighs.
“So, Leo,” she said, tucking her feet under her butt and turning to lean an arm on the back of the sofa, “was yesterday your first day on the job? ‘Cause I’d hate for you to get fired after one whole day.”
He snorted. “No. They pulled me from S-Atlanta. I assume to replace—who was it you were asking me about?”
“Rosales. She was at your post for a few months. We got along. As much as we bothered to talk.”
“Yeah, I never met her. Hang on.” He turned and went back into the bathroom. Water ran for a second, and he came back out with a folded rag. “The amount of blood on your face is super distracting.”
November laughed and took it from him, happy to scrub down her chin and neck. She wasn’t used to worrying about messes like these sipping discount bloodmeal from a coffee mug. “Better?”
“Yes.” He gave her an emphatic raise of eyebrows and then sat on the back of the couch with one leg, the other still supporting him on the floor.
“Why join GateSec at all?” she asked, leading him further from talk of her blacking out. “No offense, you just don’t seem like the type.”
Leo gave her a look. “What’s ‘the type?’ ”
“An asshole.”
It was his turn to laugh, and she would take that over offended. “For real?” he said, and she nodded. “Alright, I know it sounds naive, but … I did it because I want to help vampires.”
Her forehead creased. “With your penis?”
“Fuck you.” He chuckled and bumped her hand off the back of the sofa with his knee. “I’m serious. Positives get treated like shit. And there are crazy people up here. Trying to bomb gates. Trying to raid the Undergrounds with UV weapons.” He shook his head. “Just what you need, more problems.”
November made a face. “We got crazy people down there, too.”
“Yeah, those Goodnighters?” he said. “I thought they were just conspiracy weirdos. I didn’t think they were showing up places with weapons.”
“Yeah, neither did I.” She chewed her lip and her gaze went unfocused.
And UV hadn’t done shit to them. Why?
Leo used the silence to push away from the sofa and head back to the drawer for more clothes. He changed into a new pair of shorts right in front of her, modesty pointless now, and stepped around to collect the other clothes he’d shed earlier. Even though he was an adult by any standard, his movements felt so young to November. As she aged, it would only get worse.
“What did your parents think?” she said, tracking him around the room as he dropped dirty clothing in a bin. “When you joined up?”
“My mom avoids the topic like the plague,” he said. “She wanted me to be a pharmacist so bad.” Now he was coming back around to the couch to grab the empty glass. He carried it into the kitchen.
“And your dad?”
“Don’t know,” he said over his shoulder. “Never met him.”
“Sorry.”
Leo shrugged as he came back. “How about you?” he asked, clearly skilled in evasion himself. “How’d you end up at a gate?”
She didn’t need to press. His life was his business.
“It was that or prison,” she answered honestly. “Used to be an electrician. Worked on the gen grid.”
He looked her up and down. “The fuck did you do?”
November met his eyes. “Killed my supervisor.” And when his brows climbed, added, “He was a neg.”
Leo blinked at her. “Um …”
Vampires couldn’t work on the surface, but there were plenty of negs who had jobs underground. But for her to kill one? Somehow the law seemed to spell ‘murder’ with a capital ‘M’ when one of ‘her kind’ was on trial.
“I … imagine you had a reason?” Her gate partner took no new steps toward the couch.
“He thought spiking my coffee with sunshine would be a hilarious prank.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Among other swear words,” she said. November might have overreacted at the time, but then she also could have died. If she’d taken a larger gulp. But her union rep hadn’t wanted to hear it. “He was one of those eugenics assholes, though. I don’t know why he even got a job working underground in the first place. You don’t like us, why be there?”
“Right.” Leo looked at the floor. “So I guess your parents, um … don’t really get to say anything about it, do they?”
“I mean … they don’t like it, but …” She spread her palms. “I’m grown. They have their own lives. My mom’s in her hundred-twenties, she’s got a whole research lab in U-Tokyo to run. My dad’s there with her, but he’s in his seventies. He didn’t want to convert, so she’s taking care of him.”
“So you’re bloodline, then?” It was kind of a rude question to ask a woman, but they’d done some pretty rude things right here in this room already, so she dipped a nod.
He’d folded an arm over his chest to support his other elbow where he rested his chin on the backs of his knuckles. His gaze had widened to an unfocused place somewhere between her and the lay of the room, and November watched him processing information. She stifled a yawn with her hand.
The motion, though subtle, brought him around. And like always, it was contagious.
“Shit,” he said, “I was gonna be asleep already. You can still have the bed, though.” Leo moved toward the couch, where he’d been before she’d yanked them down another corridor.
“You should sleep in your own bed,” she said.
“I’m not making you sleep on the sofa.”
“Then don’t.” November eyed the bed. “There’s room.”
The corner of his mouth ticked up.
* * *
November tended not to dream, so when the feel of a cool palm and fingers wrapped over her mouth and chin, it didn’t morph in alongside any nebulous images or scenarios already playing out in her head. She popped awake like a soap bubble, eyes wide and heart in her throat.
“Do not wake him.” A familiar voice hovered near in the darkened apartment.
Minimal lights from the few electronics slumbering about the room gave November a hint of a male form. With a glare he might or might not be able to see, she raised a deliberate hand to his wrist and gripped it to grind bone. To pull the silencing touch from her face in a slow way that would not wake her gate partner spooned up behind her, and would also convey to this vampire just where she sat on the spectrum of afraid to pissed off at that moment.
“The fuck do you want?” she hissed.
Radoslav didn’t flinch in her hold. “I need you to come with me. Now.”
November scowled. If they kept up this back and fort
h right there, they would wake up Leo. She let go his wrist and made a shooing motion with her hand. Snaked out of the bed when he’d made room.
He was nearly to the front door when she was on his heels, still only in Leo’s undershirt. “Hey!” Her voice was a fierce whisper. “I’m not going anywhere with you. What is this?”
“Yes, you are.”
He didn’t bribe, threaten or cajole. He had the door open with one hand and jerked her out into the corridor with the other, a grip on her upper arm clamping into place like a gate on lockdown.
November stumbled to keep on her feet, and blue-white light panels in the hallway had her blinking watery eyes. Radoslav was already dragging her along, her own cartwheeling momentum making it easy.
“Goddammit, stop!” She had no shoes, no underwear. There were no windows, but the doors to other apartments marched past while she tried to wrench her arm loose from the grim-faced, striding vampire. “You fucking convert piece of shit, what is this?”
She was strong, but he was stronger—which meant he was likely older—and had no problem keeping his hold. Or his pace.
“I’m supposed to show you this,” he said. “Fucking calm down.”
“Show me what?” She had no problem raising her voice in the corridor. “I’m not gonna be calm when you come dragging me out o—oh fuck no! Fuck you!”
The sign on the antique swing door at the end of the hall read ‘Street Access.’ November twisted her arm in his hold like she’d set cutters to a live ground and sipped a few thousand volts.
“No!”
She jerked free for a wild instant and lunged, but a new fist latched into the back of her shirt and yanked. Her balance tipped and Rado was jerking open the door. Hauling her through it.
There were concrete stairs, going up and turning a corner. He had a grip under her armpit this time, and November dropped to the ground, instincts reverting in her panic.
“I will drag your dead weight up both flights,” he said, moving for the metal handrail.
Bite Me: A Vampire Anthology Page 20