Frostbitten: The Complete Series

by Bera, Ilia

  The rest of the world was silent, ceasing to exist. Nothing else in that moment mattered in the slightest.

  Connor sat up and moved his fingers down to the base of Hanna’s big sweater. Slowly, he started to pull it up, over Hanna’s soft tummy. Hanna bit her lip as she watched the topless stud remove her top.

  Then, a sudden bout of nervousness crossed her body. Her instinctual reflexes took over, and her hand moved down onto her sweater suddenly, stopping Connor from undressing her. Her eyes were side and her heart was beating aggressively at a mile-a-minute.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  IN LOVE

  “Is everything okay?” Connor asked.

  Hanna looked up into Connor’s eyes.

  “Yeah—Sorry. I’m just—I’m just nervous, I guess.”

  “We don’t have to go any further, if you don’t want to,” Connor said. “We can wait. I’m okay with that.”

  Hanna didn’t know what to say—afraid that the truth of her virginity would scare her athletic lover away. She took a deep breath. “No—I want to,” she said. “But Connor…”

  “Yeah?”

  Hanna closed her eyes and hesitated for a moment. “It’s my first time,” she said softly. Hanna became frozen as she waited for Connor’s reaction.

  Connor smiled. He leaned forward and gave Hanna a little kiss on the lips. “Are you sure you want to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just tell me if you feel weird or uncomfortable—Just try to relax, okay? We can stop whenever.”

  “Okay,” Hanna said, taking another deep breath.

  Connor smiled and he continued to pull Hanna’s sweater up, over her chest revealing the black satin bra, which sat over her breasts. Connor lowered his body down and gently kissed her chest. He slipped his hands carefully underneath Hanna’s body.

  Nervously, Hanna arched her back, giving Connor’s hands access to the clip of her bra. He carefully tinkered with it for a moment before popping it loose. Slowly, he pulled the bra off of Hanna’s body, revealing her soft bare breasts.

  Connor felt a surge of passionate energy render his body weightless as it fluttered in his spine. The nervous Hanna placed her hands over her breasts, covering them.

  “Are they too small?” she asked.

  “No—They’re perfect.” Connor smiled.

  He gently took Hanna’s hands and moved them off of her chest. One of her breasts was slightly larger than the other—a totally normal characteristic. It was obvious that Hanna was self-conscious about her chest, which was unfortunate. The reality was, Hanna’s body was perfect—flawless, even. Every part of the young girl was breathtaking. Her breasts were beautiful, her face was stunning and her body was exquisite.

  Connor leaned down and gently placed his hand around one of Hanna’s breasts. She could feel his lips press around her nipple as he began to stimulate her body with the tip of his tongue.

  Hanna felt exposed and uncomfortable, but she was quickly becoming relaxed. She was happy that she was with Connor, and not somebody else.

  She took a deep breath, feeling the warm pleasure returning to her body. Her muscles began to let go of their tension, and she started to melt into the soft mattress of Connor’s bed.

  Connor let his top lip slide over Hanna’s areola as he began to sink downwards. He gently kissed her soft tummy before being met by the waistline of Hanna’s tights. He looked up at Hanna, who was smiling, relaxed. He smiled, and then began to pull the tights downwards.

  Hanna lifted her pelvis off of the mattress so that her pants could slide easily down her legs. Connor gently pulled the leggings down her thighs, her calves, and then over her feet. He tossed them onto the floor below, leaving Hanna lying in just a pair of white cotton panties. Her legs were perfectly smooth and soft to the touch.

  Before bringing himself back down, Connor removed his belt, and then his own pants.

  Hanna’s heart was racing—beating well over one hundred beats per minute. As Connor brought himself back down on top of the beautiful girl, their passionate lovemaking continued. Their noses rubbed together as their kissing intensified.

  Their bodies were spinning with elation, away from their problems and anxieties. Connor’s soft cedar scent was rapidly overpowering Hanna’s sensual cravings.

  Suddenly, in her mouth, she felt a sharp pain…

  Her sharp fangs began to penetrate through her gums as they started to extend out. She knew that her irises were turning dark red, as her blood began to heat up, and her spine began to pulsate and tingle. Within moments, she could see Connor’s hot blood pumping hard through his thick veins.

  She wanted it badly—and the deeper she became lost in her powerful lust, the more she craved it.

  With all of her willpower, she fought the thirst back. She closed her eyes tight and let her head fall back, away from the warm blood in Connor’s luscious veins. She reached her hands down and slipped her fingers around the sides of her panties. She raised her butt off of the mattress, and slid her undergarment down.

  “Ready?” Connor asked.

  Hanna, keeping her blood-thirsty red eyes closed, smiled. “Yeah,” she said.

  This was it—The moment that she lost her virginity—The first time she ever made love.

  Suddenly, she let out a sharp gasp and her body tensed up. Connor moved gently and slowly, making sure Hanna was comfortable. After a moment, she started to release her tension. Connor pushed in deeper and deeper.

  Hanna’s body was quick to surrender to the well-endowed Connor. She reached up and placed her hands on his muscular sides, feeling the ridges of his sharp defined lateral muscles with her fingertips.

  Connor was the perfect lover. He started out gently, easing his inexperienced partner into the act. As her body became more and more relaxed, he increased his speed and intensity. As Hanna became more and more comfortable, she started to push herself up, enjoying and intensifying every swift thrust.

  Along with her sexual passion, her thirst was growing stronger. She kept her eyes closed tightly, but nothing she could do could block out the delicious smell of Connor’s blood. She could even hear the sound of his blood flowing through his thick veins, like a flowing waterfall. Still, she resisted the urge to feed.

  Connor readjusted his body, and he pinned down Hanna’s arms over her head. Hanna’s head jolted back farther and her mouth opened wide. The perfect angle, the increase of speed and Connor’s insatiable intensity rendered her body limp. She screamed out loud as the elation through her body and in her spine began to centralize. Never in her life had she felt anything like it. Never had she felt anything so incredible.

  Her nails dug into Connor’s hands as Connor made his final push. Connor’s grasp tightened around Hanna’s wrists, and he let out a powerful battle cry.

  After a perfect moment, Connor’s body collapsed on top of Hanna’s. He nestled his face into the pillow next to Hanna’s face as he caught his breath.

  As Hanna opened her eyes wide, the world appeared different—elegant, vibrant and beautiful. The walls glowed with a strange supernatural energy. The room was filled with a magical warming moonlight.

  Hanna could feel her fangs retracting as her bloodlust returned to its dormant state. Strangely, her thirst was temporarily nonexistent.

  Connor rolled over, next to the beautiful pale-skinned beauty. He smiled as he looked over into Hanna’s dark brown eyes.

  “That was amazing,” Hanna said with a smile. Her eyes were still wide, shocked by the strange lack of thirst.

  “It was incredible,” Connor agreed. He reached his arm over and wrapped it around Hanna. Hanna moved her body closer to Connor, snuggling up against his manly warmth.

  The two continued to lie together—the happiest they’d ever been in their complicated young lives.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE ULTIMATUM

  Brittany was frantically trying to hide all of the evidence in her house. She’d used all of the blankets in the house to cover
up the markings on her floors. With pins, she hung sheets over the marked walls—but it was still bluntly obvious that she was hiding something, especially to someone who had spent years tracking and hunting vampires.

  She had managed to hide her jars of rat blood, but she wasn’t able to scrub out the bloodstains on the edges of the doors and counters. Not to mention, the garbage bags covering the windows were an obvious giveaway.

  She wiped the tears off of her cheeks, along with her dark mascara and eye shadow. She needed another plan...

  Knock! Knock! Knock!

  She was too late. Kane was already at the door. She couldn’t possibly let him in—but she had to answer, otherwise the determined hunter would let himself in.

  Life was quickly crashing down around her, and she was completely out of options. She thought about running, and not looking back—but she knew that the experienced vampire hunter would find her. She thought about admitting her secret to Kane, hoping that he would look the other way—but that was a serious gamble.

  Then, she had another idea…

  The man at her door may have been a vampire hunter, but he wasn’t there to hunt—he was there as a confused lover. He wasn’t armed, or prepared to kill. Brittany, on the other hand, had everything she needed—her vampiric strength and her razor sharp fangs—she had the leg up.

  She took a deep breath, trying desperately to organize her thoughts in her head.

  She’d fallen hard for Kane, but that was nothing new. She’d always moved on in the past—what was one more failed love? What was one more victim? Kane was, after all, just a drifter, moving from town to town, robbing ATM machines. His family didn’t care about him, and he didn’t have any friends. Kane Patrick probably wasn’t even his real name. No one would notice him gone.

  Knock! Knock! Knock!

  “Brittany! Open up! I need to talk to you!” Kane yelled.

  Brittany was out of time. She had to make a decision.

  “Open up, or I’m coming in!”

  Brittany quietly moved across her living room to a window. She carefully peered out, to make sure Kane wasn’t armed.

  Kane looked around the quiet Snowbrooke street to make sure no one was watching him while he pounded on Brittany’s door.

  He calmed himself down suddenly when he noticed he wasn’t alone. There was a pretty young woman, wearing a patterned shawl over her blonde hair walking by the house—presumably headed towards her morning shift at work. As the aggressive Kane looked at the stranger, she turned her head quickly—afraid to make eye contact with the possibly deranged lunatic.

  Kane pulled his pea coat tight to his body as the winter air bit into his skin. “Brittany, are you in there?” he called out in a much more gentle, controlled tone. “I’d like to talk to you,” he called out. “Please?”

  Brittany took a deep breath and looked down at the door handle.

  It’s easy to forget that every red blur from a passing taillight, every orange glow from an apartment window, and every indifferent face on a busy city street is a complex life—a person with their own complicated problems, relationships and secrets.

  Indeed, that girl sipping coffee in the library window may be a stranger, and you may never see her again after that quick glance —but that’s not to say that her actions and decisions can’t completely change the course of your life.

  That sullen short man wandering the streets with his hands stuffed in his pockets?

  That young woman sitting in that upstairs window?

  What about the man sleeping on a chair in the hospital hallway?

  Or the longhaired man standing at the bank machine?

  What about that beautiful young woman, seemingly walking to work?

  All are characters on life’s stage. All of their collective lives come together to form the most complex narrative—not any one person’s individual life.

  And believe me—When the moment hits and you finally open your eyes to it, everything will change. No matter how unambitious or uninteresting you think you may be, your actions and choices are contributing to the most amazing tale, yet to be told.

  “How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”

  —KURT VONNEGUT, CAT’S CRADLE

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  A CUNNING AND MOST BEAUTIFUL SIREN

  It was a cold morning. Every morning was a cold morning in Snowbrooke, but that dark early morning was particularly so. The way the wind whirled the frigid frost against your sensitive skin; the way the freshly fallen powder lodged itself inside the tongue of your boot—mother nature had a particular grudge that icy winter morning—a certain omnipresent nemesis.

  It was that night, during that insufferably cold winter wind that you could almost hear the ethereal whispering of some evocative, invisible banshee. Her words were elaborate yet elusive; mellifluous yet tortuous. Every unheard syllable resonated deep under your skin, causing every hair on your cold body to stand up straight.

  It was a rare morning—an anxious morning; the kind or morning where you feel the unusual and pressing need to call your loved ones, for no other reason than to ensure everything is okay.

  It was a quiet morning.

  I still stay inside on mornings like those, opting to stay near the warmth of my inglenook—still getting chills each time that violently cold, whispering wind blows against my window. Listen, and you can hear her again—that ephemeral chilling sound that is only audible inside of your heart, eliciting a peculiar sense of mourning—a mourning for a soul yet to pass; a mourning for a lost piece of yourself.

  I still remember that particular morning, as a ghastly gale roared through the monolithic mountainscape, eliciting a distant rumble as the alpine snow thundered down the rocky bluffs. A deep, subterranean grumble could be heard as the endless pounding snow settled momentarily, in wait for the next glacial gust. And between the tacit howling through that ubiquitous snowfall...

  It was a quiet morning.

  Even the most learned man can’t dispute that there is a strange phenomenon that exists in this world—one that can’t be explained by any science, or proved with any test. But we know that it exists because we’ve all experienced it at one point or another. We’ve all heard her fleeting voice in the pit of our souls, warning us and moving us in a different direction.

  We love her voice; we hate her voice. Its the voice of reason—at times it is our own voice, and other times it is a voice so foreign, we can’t possibly attempt to understand it. It’s a teasing voice; the voice of the most beautiful siren, whispering the password to Pandora’s Box just quietly enough that we can’t quite make it out, but loud enough we know that it is close.

  Throughout history, we’ve given this peculiar sensation names; names that lose their meaning thanks to shameful misuse. Epic, a word once used sparingly to describe something of legendary proportions—too incredible to even fathom. The epic scale of the pyramids of Giza; Columbus’ epic voyage across the Pacific Ocean. The last time you probably used the word was to describe a mediocre burrito from the nearby Taco-Bell, crafted by some teenager who probably isn’t even remotely related to a Mexican. But I digress...

  Similarly, words like Chi, Prana, Qi, Mana, Lung, Ruah, or as it’s been called in the west, Life Force or Energy Flow—are all words to describe the same phenomenon. You feel it when an important moment is about to happen in your life—a sense of dread you feel the moment something bad happens to a loved one. It’s the force that stops the experienced flight attendant from getting on the plane; the same plane that ends up crashing violently into the ground because of an unpredictable storm that no human, and no technology could have foreseen.

  “I had a bad feeling about it,” the attendant says when asked by the media. It gets written off as a coincidence. Science doesn’t dare face the issue.

  It’s something we feel inside of our bodies, but it has no physical shape or form. It lays dormant at the bottom of our spine and then it’s released at curious
moments in our lives. They say that you feel it in your body when you wake up, on the day you will meet your future soul mate. Likewise, they say you feel it the morning you wake up, before a terrible event in your life.

  The day that Derek Enderby was stabbed by the homeless Philip Riley—I felt it inside of me, but I didn’t know what it was—not until it had happened.

  Some people think it’s the same force that binds lovers together—the same force that connects a mother and her child.

  Some Eastern cultures believe that this power can be controlled, harnessed and manipulated. Some Buddhists believe in a phenomenon called a Kundalini Awakening, where someone learns to awaken the life force dwelling inside of their body, using meditation. They think that Life Force—that Chi; that Prana; that Ruah holds the power of wisdom. Some even think that it can be used to induce Astral Projection—leaving your own body and exploring the universe, and other dimensions. After a Kundalini Awakening, you start to see the world through different eyes—things begin to make sense. You begin to observe life objectively, and you begin to understand the interconnectedness of every person, every animal and every thing in the universe. As you begin to understand the mystical Life Force, you begin to understand that it is not unique to you—that you have the same Prana inside of you that every single other person has inside of them. Every time you are upset, it can be felt subconsciously through every living thing on the planet. Likewise, when you are happy, there’s an invisible energy lifting up the rest of the world.

  Believe what you will. While I’ve never considered myself a mystical person, or a spiritual person, or even a religious person—It’s hard to dispute that there is something inexplicable that exists within our bodies—something that is, for lack of a better term, psychic.

  I remember reading about this study in school, where thousands of people got together. They all sat peacefully and meditated—visualizing happy things, and pushing negative things out of their minds. Perhaps it was a coincidence, or perhaps it wasn’t—but the next week, the city saw record low crime rates—down a whopping twenty-five percent. Another study showed magnified images of frozen water crystals that had been next to different people, in very different moods. The calmer and happier the person was, the more symmetrical and perfect the molecular structures were—like beautiful snowflakes on a still winter morning. When the water was exposed to someone who was angry, anxious or frustrated, the crystals were a scattered mess—with no definable patterns. They say our bodies are over seventy percent water...