by Kaia Bennett
Still shivering and groaning in the aftermath, I reached between us, between her legs and over my slick thigh. I painted my palm with our come and licked the mixture like blood, savoring the taste of us. Kneeling, I licked every curve clean. The vibrating flesh between her thighs tasted like promise. A rising tide of blood approached soon. Maybe a few days away, but the flavor of her cunt made me dig my tongue in deeper. Pulsing heat greeted me, teasing the coming shift in her womb. I wanted to be here when the flood surged inside her again. I wanted to catch every flavor of Evie on my tongue, for as long as I had the ability to taste.
When I finished, and she could no longer stand without sliding down the shower wall, I stood and cleaned her with soap and water. She swayed in my arms, exhausted and exposed, while I moved her and scrubbed her with a cloth. The heat of her skin put the hot water to shame and every brush of her sweet spots produced a wiggle or moan that vibrated through me. I could’ve fucked her all night, but I rinsed her off instead, thinking this would be the end of the sweet impasse between us. Something I’d never felt before prickled over my skin. Self-consciousness. She’d seen and heard more vulnerability from me in a few weeks than I’d shown in a lifetime, even in front of my father. I didn’t want to be seen anymore.
“Go on, go to sleep.”
She opened her eyes, the sleepy eyes of a human, and looked at me with an elusive expression.
I thought she’d leave, but instead she took my cloth and soap and washed me. I eyed the last remnants of blood swirling down the drain. The scent of come faded, but the heat of arousal lingered, grew. When I wasn’t staring at her, I closed my eyes and let her soft hands, coupled with the glide of soap and the scratch of rough terrycloth, lull me.
She rinsed me, swept her fingers down the length of my hair and traced angles on my face and body with gentle fingers. I’d never experience a touch like this coupled with blood and lust. Only when I placed my forehead to Vaughn’s and let him weep had I felt this kind of softness. Only when I’d run my hand over Liam’s curly head had I returned a touch so gentle. Evie made me think of a woman’s fingers in my hair under a wide-open sky. She quieted all my fondest memories of hunting, of killing, and of teasing my prey with touches like this when they begged for mercy.
We got out and dried off. Evie wrapped a towel around her body, that ridiculous human modesty peeking around the edges of the wanton creature I’d fucked tonight. She picked up our clothes off the floor in a strange domestic twist.
I watched her leave the bathroom as I wrung my hair free of excess moisture. The apartment creaked and howled, but otherwise remained quiet. Stark and Vaughn probably wouldn’t return until morning. At least when the wolf snored, he drowned the sound of Evie’s heart slowing to a sleepy rhythm.
I sighed, left my towel on the sink. Evie waited in the hallway.
She didn’t speak, though she opened her mouth. She looked down at the bundle in her arms for a moment, my black coat resting on top. Her chin scrubbed the fabric once, then she turned and entered her room, with all my clothes in tow.
I smiled. Exhausted suddenly, weary to the marrow of my bones, I followed her. Standing in the doorway, I watched her blend into the darkness of her room. She rifled through my pockets to set my wallet and phone on the dresser before setting our decadent clothes in a chair.
I watched her braid and tie up her hair with a scarf. She opened a jar and softened her skin with cream next. Her hasty swipes under my intent gaze made my fingertips tingle with jealousy. Truthfully she wouldn’t need the cream. A well-fed vampire never need worry about dry skin or hair. Health is the price the bloodlust pays us back, but her human habits were cute, another feisty defiance of her true nature.
She dropped her towel over a chair. Her small body snuggled into a ball against the wall, facing away from me. The covers were turned down, inviting me to fill in the other side of the bed.
The floor creaked under my footsteps. The sheets swished against my body as I slid in behind her. I traced her spine with the backs of my fingers, marveling over how each vertebra bowed into my touch. She melted against me when I wrapped an arm around her and pulled her hips against mine.
She hated me. She’d said so over and over. I listened to her heartbeat spike at my touch, then slow to the rhythm I’d grown accustomed to when she’d been my pet. Her contented sigh as she fell into deep sleep felt wrong.
I embraced the wrongness the way I embraced her, and followed her into a dream.
21
I sighed and craned my neck to stare up. The bluest sky, unencumbered by power lines or clouds, absorbed my field of vision. The teasing nip of autumn touched my warm cheeks. Wind swept my hair like a flag over my face, whipping the strands across my naked torso. I had the strange sensation of seeing myself from afar, even as I lived and breathed in my body.
I gazed down scowling at breechcloth and leggings made of tan buckskin. Leather, damp earth, pine, and sweat filled my nostrils. The mineral rush of a cool river lapped the earth a few feet in front of me. I’d never want to drink this water, but I remembered how it felt rushing over my toes, on my body, the droplets beading on the skin of my prey where I licked and bit. I remembered the way cool, clean water mingled with the sharp tang of blood.
Inside the dream, I didn’t know the exact year, but knew this dream was of something that had happened in the Seventeen-eighties. I clenched my toes in the grass. The cries of an eagle overhead drew my gaze to feathers gilded by sunlight.
“Canada, again?” I tossed my question in Evie’s direction, sensing her presence before I looked her way. She sat at the edge of the river a few feet away, dipping her bare toes into the current. The fringed hem of a Cree woman’s dress dangled against her calves, but her hair wasn’t braided. She didn’t belong in that dress, in this time. She looked up at me then braced her temple on one knee. She gave me a shrug while I tried to process why we’d ventured so far back in time.
“Pretty sure you chose this place, Jesse, and the dress. I doubt I was born yet.”
“No, you weren’t.” I approached the edge of the river, dropped to the balls of my feet and stared at my own wavering reflection.
Again, the startling clarity of the dream hit me. Like falling asleep in the crackle of VHS and waking up in high definition. I knew we were in a dream, and yet, I knew Evie really spoke to me. We were both trapped in the same landscape I’d called home during the beginning of my life.
My face split in two and stared up at me. A boy on the edge of manhood, a man who looked like my father. I had the strange feeling I’d inhabited someone else’s skin.
Life father. Like son.
Evie straightened her spine and inspected our surroundings. “Manitoba is beautiful though. I see why you came here, to this time.”
I didn’t. Truth be told, this place didn’t register in my memories as one of any meaning. But I nodded absently at Evie’s cryptic thought and looked up. In the distance, on the other side of the river, a lynx loped through the forest. He met my eyes. He watched me, licked his chops, then disappeared into the brush. I sensed eyes everywhere, like the eyes of history, like the secret codes in my blood that Masilda revealed.
“This had to be not long before we started hunting in the States.” I laughed. “Democracy had come to America and dad had business plans to undermine it.”
Evie nodded, kicked a foot, and teased me with the beauty of her form. The splash of thick, red fluid caught my eye. Blood dripped down her calf, then swished around her foot as she splashed the water again. I tilted my head and stared at the river of blood with my reflection still shining clearly on the mirrored surface.
I saw a boy, a toddler. A version of me I couldn’t possibly remember.
I love you, my sweet boy. My sweet, sweet boy. You won’t remember, but I’ll love you beyond remembering.
I saw the wisps of hair in a woman’s face, a face hidden from me, like my own true reflection was hidden in this dream. I wasn’t a boy. I’d never
been sweet. Who spoke to me? Evie moved without moving, knelt by me and touched my hair with a gentleness I’d only ever dreamed before. She kissed my temple.
I recoiled at the touch of pure love. “No!”
But that didn’t stop Evie’s lips from lighting my mind on fire.
When sight returned, a fire raged through a campsite. Evie and I stood naked in the middle of the fray.
Screaming, fleeing women and children passed us. Streaks of copper skin, tan hides, and black hair surrounded us. I tasted tears and blood in the smoky air. Teepees burned like bonfires, thick gray plumes and soot blotting out the sky. Evie coughed and huddled against me. I held her close and squinted through the fog at my father. He stomped through the carnage, dressed in the same breechcloth and leggings I’d worn by the river. Golden feathers laced his hair.
He wore their clothes, but my father wasn’t Cree. An outsider might not’ve been able to tell the difference between him and the people he terrorized, but I knew. He had no love for these people. They were for feeding and fucking. We wore the clothes of our prey to slip easily in and out of their ranks.
So then. Why the feathers? Why wear the markings of a warrior or chief when our fangs and our speed were all we needed to show our rank?
Something’s wrong.
Beside me, Evie flashed in and out, like a hologram. One minute wearing the dress and leggings of a Cree woman, the next, naked as she’d been when we huddled into bed. One minute she had her curly hair floating against her shoulders, the next, the strands were in twin braids down her shoulders.
My father’s young, pained face drew me away from Evie’s transformation. He searched frantically through the dying and the dead. Dear old Dad, the sphinx, all knowing and all seeing. Now, he looked almost innocent. Panicked, like he had when he watched his younger brother usurp him in my earlier vision.
In the distance, where my father had finally focused his attention, a woman rode a sorrel stallion, pushing her mount into a hard gallop away from the campsite. Her black braids snapped like whips behind her, like the stallion’s blond mane, as she raced for the tree line several miles from the hunt.
I understood at last. A raid raged. Vampires slaughtered children, fed on men and women right in the midst of the fires, or tugged them onto horses to take to their own camp. Blood flowed, bodies burned, and the sound rose like the smoke. Only the boom of my father’s voice, screaming the fleeing woman’s name, rivaled the thunder of a massacre.
I watched the ruler of all of North America kick up chunks of ground as he gained traction, running at speeds to rival my own. He roared a name I couldn’t hear, a name I wanted to hear.
Mother.
I had no mother, but the queen who bore me. Still, the word conjured a face. A woman looking over her shoulder in fear. A woman cooing over my tiny form, sweeping smoke over my body with a golden feather. She whispered against my plump cheek that she loved me. Sweetness wafted over me. I nibbled at her throat with baby fangs, and tasted witch, and home.
Not my true mother, no. Just a witch who loved a vampire’s son as her own.
“I don’t remember you.”
The woman turned, and Evie and I found ourselves in the dark interior of a teepee. The fire flickered and cast shadows against the hides covering the walls. Her blood, like mother’s milk, called to me. The woman’s beautiful smile and teary eyes said she recognized me. She wore the dress Evie had worn when this madness of a dream began, by the river.
Evie whispered as if the dream might shatter. “This woman. Your father. They were lovers?”
The woman caressed my face with warm hands.
“I made sure you wouldn’t remember. I knew he’d blame me for any hint of weakness in you. I knew he’d kill you and make another in his image if I didn’t erase my memory.”
She pulled me closer, kissed my forehead and swept a loving hand through my hair. Her scent lulled me even as I fought her, like the berry-fresh bitterness of juniper, like clean sweat and worn leathers, and simmering stew. Her dead and human food made me wrinkle my nose. But there was also fresh, cold wind and freedom. She smelled like witch and home.
“My sweet boy, all grown up. You look like him, but with eyes that see. Metis is blind, so blind. Are you like him, Jesse? Does the son carry on the sins of the father?”
“I’m my father’s son. I’m his true born heir.”
The woman looked at Evie. “Does the son carry the sins of the father?”
The witch showed me flashes of tenderness. She showed me lovers, talking by the river, lovers rolling in the firelight, and the taste of witch blood on my father’s tongue. She also showed me cruelty, the perfect symmetry of murderers hiding in plain sight. My father’s father terrorizing indigenous peoples and settlers alike. My father’s father teaching his son to subjugate and hate witches, even as his son lay with one in the dead of night like a lover instead of a master. We were made to hunt prey and fuck, not to love. Witches weren’t to be trusted.
“You were my father’s mate?”
“No.” She looked over my shoulder and stared with a twisted grimace and blazing eyes beyond me, as if any moment someone would burst through the flap covering her home, her perfect illusion. I recognized the look. That hatred shone in Evie’s eyes when she looked at me, a hatred straddling the lines of desire and love.
“I’m not his mate.” My witch mother’s eyes glistened with unshed tears. “Though I love him like one, he can’t love me. Not enough to defy his father. A fire is starting, danger crackling on the wind. My sisters say they can smell the smoke, but all I can smell is him. All I want is him. I want to love him enough to stop what’s coming.”
I took a step away from the woman who pinned me with dark, pained eyes. I didn’t want to see.
She’s been dead for centuries. That’s if she ever lived at all.
“This is just a dream. This isn’t real. You’re not real. This is you playing some fucking mind game on me.” I swiveled to face Evie and stumbled, but my mate steadied me. Her smaller body propped me up when my legs threatened to fail me.
Above us, the roof to this sanctuary split open in my mind and an impending storm crackled in the air.
I wanted to be blind like my father, but this woman, this long-dead mother I’d never known, demanded I see.
“This is no dream. This is the storm. The storm is here.”
My mother looked up and the sky stretched blue and endless as the sea. No storm. No rain, or snow, nor the crack of thunder. Yet, I knew what she meant. I shivered like I could feel the winds of change lick my spine.
The golden orb of the sun drew my stare. I couldn’t look away as the globe brightened into a blinding white light.
“Let her come, then. Let her come and burn all of the lies away. Let her come and set me free.”
My retinas were seared by the glow. I didn’t want to see, but I couldn’t look away. I could only grip Evie’s hand in mine and scream.
I snapped awake, sweating and heaving and knew at once Evie and I were in bed, in a secret attic apartment in New York. A wintery morning took the place of autumn in Canada. The dream faded into another life, another century, but the smell of juniper and the stench of fiery death lingered. Only the sound of my phone ringing broke the spell.
I unraveled my fingers from Evie’s and reached behind me for my phone. My hand shook from the white knuckled grip I’d had on her hand. My stomach dropped long before I registered Cai’s name on the screen.
“Yeah?”
“Your father’s in town and wants to meet at the SoHo safehouse in an hour. Where are you? I’ll send a driver.”
I swallowed and glanced at Evie as she rose to a sitting position with a sheet tucked around her. The gray light of morning backlit her pensive features. She had enhanced hearing now. She knew the voice on the other end of the line.
“No need. I can make it there on my own.” I checked the clock on my phone. “I’ll be there by nine-thirty.”
“Alright. An hour then.”
Cai hung up. I rubbed my face, and I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My feet hit the floor like stone.
“This is it then? You meet with him, he lets you finish your free run, and….”
I nodded when the silence had stretched too long between us. “Then, we end this. You go back to your family and I go back to mine.”
The words came out as easy as breathing, but up until that moment, neither of us knew what I would do to Evie when the bond had been severed. I’d been convinced I’d kill her, but now—
“You sure about that? Seems your family has a habit of ending just about every kind of bond with death. There’s an uncle and an adoptive mother you never knew about. What chance does an accidental mate have?”
I stood and stretched my arms overhead, rolling out the kinks in my neck and shoulders. Discreetly, I swiped the sweat of nightmares off my upper lip and marched to the chair with more vigor than I felt, to grab last night’s clothes.
“I know you witches are fond of symbols, but a dream is just a dream. I seldom have them and never with that kind of intensity. That’s your doing, Evie.”
“I’m empathic, Jesse. I don’t just pull things I’ve never seen out of my head to hurt people. I use what’s there. I feel real emotions. Sometimes my dreams are strange, but it’s not me manipulating them. This was your mind, your memories, we were in. I couldn’t possibly know that terrain or that campsite—”
I folded my coat and clothes over my arm and spun on her with a growl.
“Whatever you saw came from you digging around in my mind again and putting pieces together that don’t fit. I’ve seen hundreds of Cree lodges and bands, from the plains, to the swamp, to the woods, and back. By the time my father and I left to hunt in the States again, I could’ve filled a museum with all the things in my head, so don’t try and pull that witch shit.”
“I’ve had vivid dreams all my life, and I know when they’re trying to tell me something. I’ve had dreams about the shadowy figure haunting you and that woman who called herself your mother, but only after I met you. Something’s not right here. And, if it’s a choice between trusting what you say, and trusting what I’ve seen, I’m gonna bet on me.”