“Look at her, April,” he said, determination in his voice. “Really look. Don’t you see it? Don’t you recognize her?”
I looked. I looked as hard as I could until, gradually, it came to me. The body, the hair, the face, it really was almost like a photograph.
“It’s… that’s… me…?” I whispered.
His hand on my wrist stretched my arm out towards the painting. My fingers brushed across the surface of the paint and the world dissolved away.
Chapter 6
Smells of good food cooking and rich wood wafted through the air along with the sounds of children laughing and playing. They were my children. Sunlight streamed in through the open window warming my bare skin, and I felt joyously happy. I was head over heels in love.
My eyes began to make out shapes but a haze covered my vision and everything was moving slowly. I could see my own form reflecting back at me from a large wood-framed mirror. My hair was different, a little darker, and I was naked, as though I had just bathed. Thick wooden beams supported the plastered walls. Leaning my head back to brush my long dark hair, I saw similar beams forming rafters in the roof. It didn’t take an architect to figure out this was a very old house.
“Do you have it yet?” I heard a voice say, then realized the voice was mine.
“A moment more, dear one,” it was Sasha’s voice I heard replying. “I swear to you, if Almighty God and his angels were to gaze down upon your beauty at this very moment, they would weep tears enough to require a thousand more Noahs to build a thousand more Arks.”
My heart skipped a beat. I paused, my hairbrush frozen in midstroke, and turned. Sasha’s hair was longer and bound back with a black ribbon. He was naked from the waist up, and wore breeches and square-toed shoes, He was smiling, relaxed, with a sketch pad on his knee and a quill in his hand.
“That’s blasphemy, you realize?” I smiled at him. The more I watched him, the more enraptured I felt. My skin prickled at remembrances of his tender touches, my breath quickened as I re-imagined his passionate kisses, and an aching throbbed at my core as I recalled the thousand ecstasies I’d relished, each time he’d burst his seed inside me.
“Then let me be struck down rather than hold my tongue and fail to tell you how radiant a creature you are,” he laughed. I laughed too, knowing the deep and genuinely passionate union of pure love we shared with one another. That, it occurred to me, was the moment that he’d painted. Everything he’d said was true. We had enjoyed the deepest love centuries ago.
I dragged the brush from my hair and took a step towards him, but the room started spinning again. I lost the hazy shapes altogether, the children’s laughter grew quieter and more distant until the lights dimmed and I was back in the grey gallery, staring at a Dobronravov portrait… of myself.
Tears streaked my cheeks. Tears for the lost joy of a life I could feel but not remember. I turned to look at him. His beautiful, intensely loving face was almost exactly as it had been in the vision. He placed a hand on my cheek, softly brushing away a tear. I shivered at the touch of his fingers against my flesh.
“I’ve been in love with you every day since the day we met, almost three centuries ago,” he whispered, his mouth suddenly only a hair’s width from my lips. “I’ve been waiting since your death to see you again, hold you again.” His lips grazed mine, agonizingly softly. I remembered the feeling of loving him. I realized now why I couldn’t connect with people my own age, and why no man ever seemed to hold my interest for very long. My soul, or something, still belonged to him, still ached for him and, now, so did my body.
His kiss intensified, the touch of his soft, full lips on mine made my knees tremble. His strong arms wrapped around me in a fierce but tender embrace. A sizzling heat coursed through me. My body reacted to this man as though it had found its missing limb and would not accept separation from him again. My hands reached up to his neck, and then my fingers buried themselves in his thick, dark hair. I pulled his mouth harder onto mine. I needed him. I was feeding a deep longing passion; devouring his mouth with an intensity I’d never known before, until we had to break apart to breathe.
His hand grasped the side of my t-shirt and Sasha tore the material clean off me, as easily as though he were ripping a page from a book. My heart was overtaken by the onslaught of physical desire. My breasts tumbled loose and with my hands still tangled in his hair, I pulled his face forward into my exposed chest. I threw my head back as his lips found the delicate skin under my breasts, his tongue stroked my areola, and his teeth gently attacked my pebbled nipples.
Each touch, each nibble, and each caress forced me to lean into him farther, the sensations travelling a searing path to my center. My pussy throbbed, its juices overflowing in a desperate cry for its mate. My hands left his hair and fumbled their way to his jeans. I stroked across the front of him feeling his huge, hard bulging desire for me. As I rolled my fingers across his trapped erection, he hissed sucking in air and his member twitched under my touch. I managed, with quivering fingers to unfasten his jeans and release his thick, lengthy erection. It sprang out, stiff and eager. I wrapped my hand around it, and as I gripped him, his face rose from my cleavage.
His eyes rolled back and he emitted a soft moan. He was as desperate for me as I was for him. The realization struck that I had a power over him at least as strong as the one he possessed over me. I pushed him back against the wall, knocking down a famous Gainsborough print. His jeans fell to the floor and I dropped to my knees in front of him.
For a moment, I was mesmerized. Hypnotized by the long, marble-hard perfection of his cock. It pointed straight at me, every bulge and ridge just where it should be and when, looking him straight in the eyes, I took the velvet tip of him past my lips, it pulsed urgently against my tongue, feeling almost as good there as it would elsewhere in my body. Almost.
I drew more of him into my mouth and he cried out. I wanted him inside me so badly, but it was also tempting to have him like that, to drink down every last drop of him, seeing the look on his face as he poured his very life essence into me. I had the power to do that and I knew he wouldn’t be able to stop me. But, no, I decided to do that later. I wanted our bodies to merge, I needed him to fuck me.
I sucked him for a second or two more, reveling in the sounds of pleasure he made, then released him. I grabbed his hands and stood up, then placed them around my waist.
“I need you so badly, Sasha,” I whispered to him.
I didn’t need to say more. I hardly felt it. I just giggled like a schoolgirl as he ripped the jeans right off me, leaving me standing naked before him. We came to each other and he lifted me off the floor as though I weighed nothing. I wrapped my legs around his butt, an ecstatic pulse shooting through me as I suddenly felt the engorged tip of him probing at my slippery entrance. I didn’t have to wait any longer. We pushed our eager sexes together and, in an instant, we were joined completely, the pleasure centers of my brain on total overload as I felt him slide slowly and perfectly inside me, filling me to capacity. I threw my hands around his neck and held on as my body went limp. Each thrust seemed deeper, like he was growing bigger, and each thrust pushed me closer to climax. I felt my orgasm approaching almost as soon as he was inside me, storming relentlessly towards me with each drive of his cock into my tight hole until, like a sudden detonation in my loins, it was on me. I screamed with each penetrating thrust, my nails clawed his neck and back, and my pussy tried desperately to cram as much of him inside me as there was. Wave after wave of ecstasy crashed through me, so strong, so intense, I thought I would die from sheer pleasure.
But still he kept fucking me, his glorious dick pushing me farther and farther into oblivion before finally, as I really believed I could take no more, he froze, gasped, then swore as I felt him explode deep inside me, a shooting pumping releasing volley after volley of hot seed right into my core.
We both let out long, desperate moans as the full, satisfying feeling of him emptying himself into me died
away. Then, we kissed passionately, sweat dripping off our bodies and we tried to remember how to breathe.
Chapter 7
“I died?” I asked softly. My head was resting on his smooth, hard chest, my fingers idly brushing over his firm abs. We had borrowed a white dust sheet from an ugly Pop Art sculpture made by a pretentious hipster in New York, and wrapped it around us. The afternoon sunlight was now peaking in, shining brightly around the edges of the blinds, and, so far, we’d made love from the Renaissance period to the Romantics, through the Impressionists, and right on into the Postmodernist movement. Each time, we took wild and fierce possession of one another until we reached the pinnacle and climaxed in exhaustion. Yet, it was only moments before the brewing passions within bubbled over again we desperately devoured one another once more.
“Of course,” replied Sasha, only a hint of regret in his voice. He had his arm around me and was absently stroking my bare back. “I painted that in 1729, in St Petersburg. Your name was Anna. You lived a long life with me, dying in your eighties. We had five children, twenty grandchildren, and more great grandchildren than I can remember.” He looked down at me and grinned widely at the memory.
“You were a vampire? Why did you stay?” I whispered, still looking up into his eyes.
“We were together nearly sixty years. Our love never faltered. Why did I stay? It was the happiest time of my existence. We both knew from the start that you would die and I would live on. We’d made our peace with it, but I always hoped…”
“Hoped what?”
“I transferred a little of my soul into this painting as I captured that moment. I knew you would be born again, that’s just the way things work, and I hoped that in time, the piece of me in this painting would find its way back to you. The dreams that you were having were our souls reconnecting. Those dreams called me to you, they let me know where you were. You may not remember, but I’ve been in your dreams since the painting came to your gallery.”
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” I giggled, punching him lightly in the stomach.
“It’s been over two hundred years,” he smiled. “It was tough to work up the courage to talk to you after that long. But when you got into trouble last night I had to do something.”
I laughed and threw my leg over him, sitting up to straddle his hips. I let the sheet fall away and watched his eyes travel over my breasts, down my stomach, and lower, to the soft skin between my thighs. That look of desire crept onto his face again and I felt his insatiable cock begin to grow hot and hard once more, nudging its way along the curve of my ass as he firmed up.
“Two hundred years, huh?” I teased him, reaching back and delicately stroking the underside of his growing member. “And there’s been no one besides me?”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied, then took in a sharp breath and closed his eyes as I wrapped my fist around the head of him. “But, yes, there’s been no one but you.”
I stopped teasing him. “For real?” I almost squeaked.
“I loved you. With all my heart. I still love you. I’ve always been in love with you,” he whispered, looking me right in the eyes. “I never wanted anyone else.”
I was shocked. Elated, but shocked, and a little sad for the suffering he must have endured. Two centuries with no one? I couldn’t begin to imagine the loneliness, the heartache. From a purely primal point of view, I can go crazy after about six months without sex, never mind two hundred years without feeling another’s touch. I bent down and kissed him passionately. I never wanted him to go through anything like that again. If I had to kiss and make love to him every minute of every day, I would.
“How did you survive?” I whispered breathlessly into his mouth when we finally came up for air.
“I had my memories,” he replied softly, his hands caressing my breasts once more. I leaned into him and felt him twitch against my butt. The dull numbness and fatigue my poor, abused pussy was feeling disappeared, instantly replaced by a need to have him inside me again.
“It still must have been… difficult,” I said, reaching back, placing the tip of him at my slick, waiting hole, then pushing down to have him slide up into me.
“Time moves differently for a vampire…” he groaned as his long, hard rod penetrated the deepest parts of me. “If there’s nothing important in our lives, decades can pass like minutes.”
I drew myself up on him, then slowly inched back down, each ridge and vein of him sending out tiny electric pulses that drew ecstatic gasps and soft moans from both of us. “What other myths are true about vampires?” I sighed, his cock slowly reaching in as deep as it could go.
“Practically nothing,” he breathed. Enclosing him, totally filled by him, I squeezed with my velvet walls, sending shivers of pleasure through both of us.
“You don’t explode in sunlight?” I asked, then bit my lip and closed my eyes as his teeth grazed my nipple.
“If we did you wouldn’t find many of us in Texas,” his voice was muffled by my chest. “We just choose to work more at night. The darkness hides us better and there are fewer humans around.”
“You’re not killed by a stake in the… heart?” I managed. There was a look of mischief on his face as he disrupted my sentence with a slight, unexpected thrust.
“Of course,” he answered, “the same way you would be.”
“Stop… playing with me,” I demanded, trying and failing to ignore his attempt to distract with small movements inside me. “Get me up to speed.” I took his wrists and pinned his arms above his head. He grinned, enjoying my assertiveness. I forced my hips down too, trapping him beneath me. It was a token move, of course. With his great strength he could probably have thrown me through the gallery wall with a wrist flick. He could do anything he chose to me, and I would be powerless to stop him. The thought sent a perverse shiver of excitement through me.
“Or what?” he grinned up at me.
“Or I’ll get off of you,” I laughed back.
“You win,” he said. “I’m immortal. I won’t age or die. To sustain this immortality, I feed on human blood, which also happens to make me strong, fast, and difficult to hurt, but not invincible. It also heightens my senses: sight, sound, smell, all to help me hunt. I’m over 400 years old, so as vampire standards go, I’m pretty strong, but there are still many who are older and stronger. A few of us, myself included, like to restrict ourselves to hunting criminals; murderers, rapists, child molesters, assholes like that. We think of ourselves as ‘Robin Hoods’ to the human race. We take what we need from them, but in doing so, we also give back by ridding them of their own undesirables. Okay?”
“What about the magic? The dreams and the warding and stuff?”
“Tricks picked up through the centuries from wizards, necromancers, shaman, people like that. You don’t have to be a vampire to do those things. It’s just knowledge that’s been lost or forgotten over time. Take Valentina.”
“Really?” I snorted. “You’re going to bring up your ex while you’re still inside me?”
“My bad. But she knew we were getting hot and heavy in that dream. Magic. And the intensity of that passion made it easy for her to zero in on you, which meant she could also get to me.”
“What about the sex we just had?” I was suddenly overtaken by fright. I slithered off him and scooted down beside him, pulling the sheet back over our nudity.
“In the dream it was magic, here it’s just natural. Don’t take that personally,” he gave a weak smile. He sensed my fear and was trying to put me at ease with his somewhat feeble attempt at humor. “The warding won’t keep anyone out; it just makes us invisible to anyone using magic to search for us.”
He sat up quickly. I was no expert, but he looked to me like a cat that suddenly heard a sound it didn’t like. “Of course,” he continued, almost to himself, “if a vampire were to just stroll by, the warding couldn’t stop him from hearing or smelling us, either.”
He leaped up fast.
; “What is it?” I whispered, too scared even to appreciate his toned body in the half-light, naked and glistening with our mingled sweat and juices. He didn’t look at me. He seemed to be monitoring the air around us for any sound or smell out of place. Without warning, he took off toward one of the gallery’s east windows. An instant later, the window exploded in a shower of glass as another biker dove in through it.
Without pausing, and so fast I could barely follow him, Sasha ran at the guy like a linebacker. He grabbed the biker’s head and kept running, twisting it off as he passed. The decapitated corpse dropped to its knees, spraying dark arterial blood across several important Expressionist works, then slumped to the ground lifeless.
Sasha stopped by the smashed window, holding the head like a football. He turned, tossed it away, and then charged back in my direction, moving in a blur of speed. Thinking the worst was over, a smile of relief crept slowly over my lips. That’s when I felt cold metal at my throat.
“Stay very still, kitten,” I heard Valentina’s playful voice at the same time I smelled Miss Cherie.
Sasha stopped five paces from us, frozen in his tracks. I squirmed but a sliver of sharp pain, followed by a trickle of warm blood running down my neck forced me to be still.
“Hurt her and I’ll rip you into pieces,” Sasha snarled, his face contorted like a wild animal.
“Hush, sexy,” I could hear the smile on Valentina’s lips. “You have more important things to worry about.”
“Look out!” I screamed as a huge biker with long, stringy black hair appeared behind Sasha and clubbed him to the ground. Two more arrived, a man and a woman, and they started kicking Sasha’s prone body as Valentina hauled me backwards.
I cried his name, tears running down my face, but the last thing I saw, before a bag was yanked over my head, was Sasha struggling, his panicked eyes watching me get dragged away. As they were beating him, he mouthed “I love you” to me. I didn’t get the chance to say it back.
Bears of Burden: THORN Page 98