by Aja James
“That’s not what you said when we first met,” Olivia reminded her.
“It was not merely your life at stake at the time,” Inanna replied evenly.
“You were right about that,” the patient agreed. “Benji was by far the best decision I’ve ever made.”
Abruptly, she turned away, facing the ceiling instead of her visitor.
The trembling in her body began again as she flashed hot and cold. The venom was starting to wear off.
“You’ll make sure he doesn’t suspect the arrangement?” Olivia asked for what was probably the hundredth time, her voice starting to fade.
“He will not suspect.”
“He hates to be manipulated. He has so much pride.”
Inanna didn’t answer.
Yes, she knew. Gabriel’s code of honor reminded Inanna of the most ancient Dark Ones.
Steadfast. Fiercely protective. Self-sacrificing. Nurturing.
Intensely loving.
“Will you be good to him?” Olivia asked.
Inanna cocked her head a bit. Didn’t she already ask this? Nevertheless she answered, “He will lack for nothing.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Olivia sighed and closed her eyes.
Her shaking had intensified. She was idly scratching herself again.
“I want you to be kind to him. I don’t want him to be lonely. I want you to lo—”
She broke off as her panting got stronger, as she struggled to draw enough oxygen into her failing lungs, arching off the bed in a twist of pain.
“It is time,” Inanna said quietly, knowing that the patient no longer heard her.
With a gust of wind, the windows slammed shut, the lights in the hospice room blacked out. In the heavy darkness there was a flash of white fangs.
And then—silence.
*** *** *** ***
Gabriel slid into the studio soundlessly just as the first rays of dawn filtered through the crack in the window drapes.
Benji slept peacefully in the bed, his breathing even and deep, a small warm mound under the covers topped by unruly pale blond curls.
Gabriel paused over his son’s innocent form and gently smoothed a thumb down one plump cheek.
Though he was solidly into his boyhood, Benji retained the cherubic sweetness of his toddler days. Perhaps it was the riotous blond curls. Perhaps the rosy cheeks and mouth. Just looking upon his little angel made Gabriel smile, though it was followed almost immediately by a grimace as his split lip split even deeper.
He straightened and, in one smooth motion, pulled the bloodied hoodie over his head, shucking his torn joggers a second later, and made his way, naked, to the tiny bathroom with an even tinier shower stall.
At least the water pressure in the apartment was blessedly strong.
As the blast of hot water drenched him from head to toe, Gabriel closed his eyes and raised his face into the cleansing deluge.
After two gruesome hours in Hell’s belly, and six matches later, he was ten grand richer. Enough to pay off three months of over-due rent, which Mrs. Sergeyev had been kind enough to forgive thus far without interest or eviction, plus one month advance, as well as Olivia’s hospice bills. He even had a nice little cushion left over for food and emergencies.
And all it took was three bruised ribs, bloody knuckles, a few nasty scratches, a split lip and let’s not forget—beating six men into unconscious putty with his bare hands and feet.
His shifu would be appalled.
Gabriel clenched his jaw.
He did what he had to do. He would do everything in his power to protect those he loved. As long as he could live with his conscience afterwards.
He’d made sure those men were merely unconscious, a few broken bones and concussions, perhaps, but no debilitating injuries for the long term. They would recover quickly enough to fight another day.
In truth, it didn’t have to take as long as it did to dispatch his opponents. A few well-placed jabs and kicks would have knocked them out faster. But he needed to play to the spectators. He had to look like he was struggling, on the verge of losing for a while so that the bets were stacked against him, so that his winnings in the end would be that much greater.
Dragging a fight out to look like he was weaker, taking hits without taking proportional damage, was a tricky tightrope Gabriel had to balance upon. He wondered whether he should have allowed a black eye or two and a bloodied nose to appeal more to the audience’s bloodlust. But he had to weigh that against the blood and swollen flesh disorienting his vision, which would have made the fights more dangerous, less predictable.
He couldn’t afford to lose his matches.
Absent-mindedly, Gabriel ran the bar of Dial soap over his bruised skin and aching muscles, diligently ignoring his cock stand as he quickly scrubbed the coarse hair around and the heavy sacs beneath. He must be still too pumped full of adrenaline from the fights, he reasoned, his body was simply reacting to the testosterone overload.
Never mind that it had been a long, long time since he’d had an erection this hard, this insistent.
Maybe never.
Twenty-six year-old male virgins in today’s society were as rare as dragons. Probably even more mythical.
Married virgins were likely nonexistent.
Gabriel didn’t choose this path intentionally; it simply was.
His boyhood upbringing by the Shaolin monks on Song Mountain in Henan Province, China, after his missionary parents had died in the Great Earthquake, taught him abstinence, self-control and discipline. Since his grandparents found him and brought him back to the States to live with them, he’d only ever felt a deep connection to one girl.
Olivia.
And despite that she never truly reciprocated his feelings, not even in the end, he’d been intensely faithful. He’d never so much as sought release by his own hand since Olivia’s illness. There was something inherently wrong with him seeking his own pleasure while his wife was wasting away in pain.
It was as if the carnal side of his nature had never truly awakened.
Now he looked upon the jutting staff as if it were separate from his body, something of an oddity, something he didn’t know quite what to do with.
Of its own volition, one large, long-fingered hand smoothed down his pecs to his tight abdomen, stopping near his navel, where the head of his engorged member bobbed insistently. He stared at it for long moments before carefully, loosely cradling the steely length within his wide palm.
He gasped at the startling sensation, and his penis jumped in reaction. Mind blank of coherent thoughts, eyes closed against the shower that had long since turned cold, Gabriel wrapped his hand tighter around the hot, velvety column, testing himself with a gentle squeeze.
And groaned deeply in response, the shocks of pleasure shooting through his body like lightning rods, making him physically stagger off balance.
Leaning his back against the stall wall, his long, muscular legs braced apart, slightly bent at the knees, he pushed himself further with a few tentative fist pumps.
But it was too much.
He felt too much.
His chest heaving with shortened breath, his jaw clenched tightly against the animalistic sounds that threatened to escape, his penis throbbing, his testicles hurting, Gabriel stood helpless as his long-revered control began to unwind like the fibers of a rope stretched too taut.
Until finally it snapped.
On a sharp intake of breath, Gabriel’s eyes flew open.
Someone was watching him.
*** *** *** ***
Inanna stared back at the intensely beautiful warrior through the thin wall that separated them.
How did he know she was there? Could he see her as well?
But that was impossible for the human. Wasn’t it?
And yet Inanna could see him as clearly as if no sheet rock and wood beams separated them, as if she were right in front of him, a mere four feet away.
As if she were in that sho
wer stall with him, her blood heated to steaming by his passionate display.
She had not intended to come here after her visit to the hospice. She felt wrong about seeing Gabriel and Benji after collecting on her Blood-Contract with Olivia. But it was as if her body had a will of its own, even as her conscience rebelled.
She needed to see them.
She told herself it was only briefly, just a few moments to ensure that they were well and safe.
But then he’d stripped bare right before her, exposing the long, sinuous, leanly muscular body she’d battled her own powers not to look upon up to this point.
She couldn’t have moved from her spot in the hallway outside his apartment if her life depended upon it. She could only look back, powerless, mesmerized, and so turned on her fangs elongated involuntarily in her mouth, even as molten lava pooled between her thighs.
Dark Goddess, she beseeched in her own mind, let him finish it. I need to see him come.
Inanna did not think she exaggerated. Right then, she needed to see Gabriel climax as much as she required breathing.
Absently, she wet her lips, barely noticing the salty tang of her own blood as the tips of her fangs broke through her bottom lip.
Do it, she chanted in her mind, finish it.
He seemed to hear her request, for he braced his long legs slightly farther apart, as if to steady himself.
His hand grasped his penis tighter, moving up the rod to hide the plump head within his fist, while the other hand idly cupped his sacs, the thumb kneading in a circular motion.
All the while, he stared intensely back at her.
She could see clearly how his pupils dilated behind the curtain of wet, spiky lashes. She could see his nostrils flaring as his breath came quicker. The edges of his teeth as his mouth opened slightly. The rise and fall of his muscular chest. The contraction of his steely abdominals.
Involuntarily, Inanna leaned forward against the wall that separated them, flattening her palms against it at shoulder level.
Goddess, how she wanted to touch him!
And then he began to move the hand that grasped his penis slowly up and down the long, thick column, squeezing harder at the base and at the head.
Inanna broke her eyes from his as his lids swooped down to half-mast, as the sensations seemed to overcome him.
Her gaze unerringly riveted on his groin and zoomed in precisely until his male member enclosed in that large, long-fingered hand was immediately before her covetous eyes. So close, she could see the painfully swollen glans, the milky fluid that seeped out of its weeping eye, each and every ridge along the blood filled column, the tantalizing veins that stood out against the satiny skin, begging for her attention.
Her fangs ached so badly they quivered in her mouth, enflaming her gums.
Finish it!
His hand began to pump in earnest at her silent command.
Up and down. Up and down. Faster. Stronger. Harder.
The rhythm of his fist around his penis mimicked the pulse of the muscles of her core clenching.
She envied his hand. She wanted desperately to be that fist around him. Instead, her womb felt achingly hollow, her vagina weeping for that hot, hard, velvety organ to fill her.
Inanna moaned soundlessly in distress, dangerously close to the edge of her passion.
But Gabriel was right there with her.
He clenched his teeth together as his testicles drew tight to his body. The plump head throbbed and quivered. Inanna’s mouth opened involuntarily. And—
He came on a bone-deep groan in a powerful surge, his hips bucking, his muscles locking, his throat exposed as his head fell back against the wall.
Seemingly endless waves of semen erupted from his tortured sex, flowing like cream down to the root.
Inanna’s core contracted sharply in response, and she lost her breath on an almost painful, empty orgasm. It was pleasure, yet it was also agony without his flesh and seed and blood to fill her.
When she regained her composure after long moments, she looked into the eyes of the male who so effortlessly ignited her, as no male in all the millennia of her existence had ever done before.
Again, as if drawn by an invisible force, he was staring heatedly back at her.
But as the fog of passion lifted, his eyes held torment and confusion.
He looked lost.
Haunted.
As if she were the one who’d torn from him something he had not been prepared to surrender.
Inanna could look no longer.
She pivoted on her heels and dashed out of the narrow corridor, down two flights of stairs and out into the bitingly cold winter dawn.
Instead of going directly to her Lamborghini parked in a nearby covered garage, she headed down familiar alleys on foot, her body moving by rote, even as her mind had frozen in a confounded haze.
She knew that her continued absence at the Cove would raise no alarm. Jade was familiar with her habit of staying out well past dawn and did not worry. Other members of the Chosen did not ask questions, perhaps more concerned with keeping their own secrets.
Her feet stopped in front of a small jewel of a shop, nestled between two larger brick townhouses deep in the Eastern European hoods of Brooklyn.
It was painted in bright, cheerful colors, trimmed with twinkling white lights, and reminded Inanna of the gingerbread house in the children’s fairytale “Hansel and Gretel.”
She’d come across it only a few weeks ago on one of her long nightly strolls. It had been built on the shell of what used to be a locksmith-cum-handyman store.
Over a worn green canopy in cursive block letters, the shop heralded “Dark Dreams.”
“Come inside before you catch a chill, my dear,” an old, ruddy-faced, well-rounded woman greeted her at the door with warm familiarity. The tantalizing scent of freshly baked goods drifted out to enfold her in its sweet mist.
“Come, come,” the old lady said as she shooed Inanna unceremoniously into the shop. “I was expecting you this early morning.”
She gently pushed Inanna through the shop toward a private corner. There were no windows for prying eyes to peer inside, and it was softly lit with an array of one-of-a-kind antique lamps from around the world.
“Sit, sit,” the woman urged in her liltingly accented voice, its foreign origins difficult to trace. It somehow reminded Inanna of a heterogeneous mix of Middle Eastern, Greek and the deep American South, of all places.
While the Chosen sat obediently in a small, ornate, velvet-backed chair, Mama Bear (as Inanna affectionately thought of her) bustled about, ducking behind a curtain of beads into the back room and returning with a teapot, taking out two intricate china cups and saucers from a glass cabinet, plopping bulbs of dried flowers into each cup and pouring hot water over them.
“Sugar is in the bowl,” she said to Inanna, gesturing to the crystal lidded bowl shaped like the genie’s lamp in the Arabian Nights in the middle of the sturdy tea table carved from an ancient Cyprus cedar root.
“Help yourself. I’ll be right back with the croissants. You arrived just in time to sample my first batch.”
Humming as she went, the old lady disappeared once again behind the curtain of beads, leaving Inanna alone with her thoughts.
She came here when she needed comfort and guidance, Inanna realized with a flash of self-knowledge. Or simply when she needed someone who listened, who nodded with understanding even if she did not, in fact, understand. Jade was the only other person Inanna felt comfortable confiding in, though she did so very rarely.
The other Chosen were different. They used to be either Pure Ones or human. They were not like Inanna.
They were vampires made.
Inanna often felt like an outsider looking in.
Alone and unique in her existence.
True, she once had a father and a mother. But they had long since been lost to her. As far as she knew, her father had perished toward the end of the Great War, though in her he
art of hearts she refused to believe it, and her mother…
Inanna wanted to believe that her mother was still in this world. She didn’t remember the female at all, having been separated from her since birth. But her father had always assured her that her mother was alive. He’d seemed unwilling to believe otherwise.
And so Inanna nursed the corner of her heart that still pulsed with hope. Even after four millennia of searching, she had not given up.
Surely one day… someday… she would find them both.
“Here we are,” Mama Bear said as she laid down a tray of freshly baked croissants on the table.
She took the seat across from Inanna and folded her hands under her chin, elbows on the table.
“Now tell me what’s troubling you, my dear. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Not a ghost at all, Inane thought wryly, but a flesh and bone full-blooded male.
Out loud, she said, “I saw something I want, but it is not something I should have.”
“Ah,” the old woman murmured, the one word resonating with immeasurable ancient wisdom to Inanna’s ears.
She nodded with understanding. “I know how that feels. Now tell me, is this guilty feeling you have akin to a child consuming too many sweets before supper or…”
She pushed a croissant toward Inanna and gestured for her to take a bite.
As the Chosen did so, her eyes drooping with pleasure as she savored the hot, buttery treat, the old woman continued, “Or is it akin to stealing a lover from another woman?”
Suddenly, Inanna was overcome by a coughing fit, choking on the flaky layers of her croissant.
The old woman patted her back, unconcerned, and offered her a drink of tea.
“There, there,” she soothed, “it can’t be as bad as all that.”
She waited until Inanna regained her composure and sat back, regarding the seemingly younger woman with empathy and affection.
“You know, my sweet girl, there is no such thing as stealing another’s lover,” she stated softly with a knowing smile. “Love cannot be stolen. It can only be given. And it always takes two to make it happen.”