by Shirl Anders
Beth didn't know how she stayed upright, but the vicious and snarling voice kept howling at her to, "Run!"
It came from her left side, and then it stalked her from the right side. Suddenly it snapped right behind her and she could feel scalding hot breath wash over her bare buttocks. She knew the beast was playing with her. It meant to kill her. Its intentions loomed over her like its black shape. The more she screamed and panted, the more the monster howled and she was running out of breath and strength.
She could barely see through the wildness of her long hair to keep from running head long into trees. Branches jabbed her flesh. The fact her gown was torn from her body, along with her petticoats, leaving only a half corset covering her waist, mortified her as much as terror gripped her.
She was going to die.
Trinity caught the flashes of alabaster skin off to the left and in front of where he ran through the brambles. The woman's screaming had stopped many minutes ago, and he had to guess the foul beast hunting her had nearly run her to ground.
He veered his headlong sprint towards the glimpses of pale flesh he kept catching sight of through thickly-grouped trees surrounded by scattered bushes. His timing to reach the young woman before the vile monster leapt to kill her was too close to think he'd make it. The threatening roar he released was of a maddened vampire reverberating through the night air. The abhorrence would recognize his thundering challenge.
He heard the woman cry out … in pain this time. Instantly he smelled blood, as he bellowed, "No!" Then his large body crashed through a small opening in the foliage.
He realized too late he was moving much too fast to halt his forward motion, when suddenly the woman was there … as if pushed forward toward his unchecked momentum. He only had seconds to react and he grasped her against his body. Her long black hair whipped around them as he turned to take the brunt of an inevitable fall. He landed on his back with the woman piled on top of him. Then he heard the triumphant howl of escape from the foul beast fading into the distance.
Trinity held tight to the voluptuous young woman as he arched his back and shouted his anger at losing his chance to kill the abhorrence. "I will find you!" he bellowed.
He became aware of the woman screaming as she thrashed on top of him. More powerful than her ineffectual attempts at breaking his hold, while she screamed shrilly into his ear, were the scents of her fresh blood, choking him. It was a quality of blood scent he'd never inhaled before.
His savage and barely-controlled inner hunter snarled to life. Fangs punched past his lips as twin weapons, gluttonous for the smell of pure virgin’s blood pumping from cuts on the woman's struggling body. Ravenous hunger clogged his throat as he'd not felt since he was a young and uncontrolled vampire. Then, before he had any hope of exerting his willpower over the sudden monstrous cravings, his body turned, flipping the woman onto her back. He landed, pouncing over her. His fangs ready to strike, while the veins in his body throbbed for the blood he could smell.
Why was her blood so fucking potent?
The animalistic snarl that lunged from his throat clashed with the woman's frightened sobs, and her wide eyes gazed up at him with horror polished in their depths. Her small hands pounded against his upper chest as her bare hips and legs thrashed, trying to push his body off. His hard erection beneath his britches pounded for her submission, ordering his hips forward to press the rigid length down into her soft center, crushing her lower body's struggle to a halt.
The woman whimpered in fear. Then she cried, "Oh no! No!"
The strangled animalistic sound he made choked the woman's cried words into panting silence, as if she believed halting any motion would make the vicious animal set to strike her miss.
Beth couldn't stand the predator's gaze of yellow eyes with red glints slashed in the centers. She whimpered with sheer terror, jerking her gaze to the side, clenching her eyelids. She'd seen the long white fangs and she'd heard the animalistic snarls that came from the beast surely set to kill her. First, a monster hunted her and now another apparition held her captive. Yet the powerful menace against her felt like a man with hands, arms, legs, and a heavy chest. She felt men's trousers along her bare legs, and she felt a jacket fallen open over her breasts. Was it a man?
Why didn't it strike? her mind wailed, as her breath heaved. Was this the beast that chased her? She thought not. But her questions and abject terror paled in comparison when she felt a hardened length pressing into her core … and what that foretold, nearly caused her to fall into hysteria.
"Don't move!" The commanding voice was a tense baritone with the aftereffects of a growl.
The appearance of human words so surprised her panicked state, she jerked her gaze toward the sound as her body quaked in reaction. Had someone come to save her?
"Don't," the beast above her commanded, "Move."
To hear the semblance of a human's voice in the world gone so mad made her hopes flare unrealistically. Yet they did all the same. She wanted to live.
"Trinity!" a man's voice shouted from the forest surrounding them.
The beast's head jerked upward to look over her head and away from stalking her with its blazing and vulturous, yellow eyes.
"Stop, brother! Don't bite her, Trinity!" the voice rang out from the distance.
Beth felt the air she held suspended leave her lungs as her hands flattened on the chest above her. Bite her? She cringed.
"Virgin's blood," the beast-man above her snarled viciously. "So potent you can smell it. Never felt this hunger before!" His voice growled, making her whimper and squirm against him with the intense need to run.
"Trinity! Brother!"
"I will fight it, Church," her beast-man vowed, half snarled, half shouted as his chest heaved into her chest. "Move away!" he yelled.
"For our mother!" the voice, called Church, returned.
Beth didn't understand anything that had happened that night. How could she end up nearly naked beneath a primal man-beast? So many things were beyond the comprehension of her innocent life. However, she did understand — or perhaps she wanted it so badly to be true — that the man called Trinity, imprisoning her, was trying to fight the urge to strike her. He couldn't be the one that had chased her through the night forest because that presence held a livid and evil malevolence toward her.
"I will rise upward and give you my jacket," the creature called Trinity said. His voice held strange inflections through the large fangs extending from his mouth. It also seemed he promised the action as though to convince himself.
Beth tensed more, trying to slow her panting breath, halfway certain he wouldn't win the battle as he began to rise upward. Then, with his arms locked on either side of her, he stopped moving, but his other worldly eyes didn't stop traveling. He looked over her face, and then he looked downward toward her bare chest. She gasped a squeal of embarrassment chasing her fear, as caution be damned, she jerked her arms between them to cover her breasts.
"You are very beautiful," his tense voice emitted lowly. His hand rose and she would have flinched away, but his gaze held her immobile. His fingers touched her cheek and they felt cold as he curled them and he stroked over the curve of her cheek with the back of his knuckles.
"Please," she begged for her life, and the red glints in his eyes seemed to dull within the yellow. His hand lifted to her temple and he did the most extraordinary thing. He wrote a cross upon her temple with his fingers.
"For my mother," he growled lowly.
Beth could feel the incredible tautness in his body above her. He nearly quivered with tenseness, and then he continued to rise off her lower body, until the cold night air flashed across her nakedness.
It was the most unheard of position she'd ever been in. She'd never so much as shown her ankle to a gentleman. To be nude was horrifying as she laid there shaking with mortification. Then a warm jacket fell on top of her and she snatched it against her body … overwhelmed.
"Put it on," the man's hoarse voice ordered fro
m the darkness above her.
"I-I," she mewled, her body quaking.
"Don't make me touch your skin again," his voice demanded.
Then it seemed to Beth as if her body was held by strings he pulled. She sat upright even though she thought she couldn't. Next, her arms jerkily lifted to turn the coat behind her and put her hands through the sleeves.
Her hair was a rampant mess around her and half was caught beneath the jacket, but she didn't care. She hurriedly buttoned it, to cover herself, buttoning from the bottom to the top, but the last two buttons wouldn't close over her bosom. It seemed extremely important to her that they should close and tears burned her eyes again that she couldn't get them shut.
Trinity held himself rigid against striking and taking the virgin's blood, even as it pounded in his veins with the demand to do so. Never had the demand for a human's blood been so strong. He'd never experienced a test as severe and he knew it was about to get worse as he sensed the rapidly beating heart in the tender, nude virgin at his feet.
He wanted to howl as he lifted his face, flipping back heavy wedges of his long hair. He breathed in the cold night air as his mind went through a mantra he used when he trained his body to fight. A minute later, some of the tenseness left him as he silently intoned the mantra. He was stronger than his urges. He willed his fangs back and his fingernails to recede. He knew the yellow predator in his eyes cooled.
"I will not be a foul beast that hunts without morality," he rumbled from deep inside.
He had to get the woman out of the woods to safety. There were many problems with all that had happened within the hollow hours of morning and the consequences of it all touched his thoughts. Nevertheless, he focused on the immediate need, and he wondered once he picked the woman up into his arms and he started to carry her from the woods, where the hell was he going to take her?
Something about it angered him and when he bent down there was fiercer growling in his voice than he intended. "Grasp my shoulders. I will take you out of these woods."
The woman made a feminine yelp of fright and she scooted away from him with pale, shapely legs showing and his hunting jacket losing the battle to cover her large, plump breasts. At that moment, it seemed as though scattered moonlight through the lifting fog chose her naked breasts to gleam upon. He could feel the hot blood pumping through her veins, the virgin cove between her thighs, and his erection's interested lust for her ripe, curving body. It posed a three-way attack against his willpower. Why this virgin? This had never happened before.
"I do not have the prudent time to hold out and calm your sensibilities, maiden," Trinity snarled as he strode to the girl, and then he grasped her arms with his superior strength.
"Just let me go!" she cried, and then she squealed as he swung her upward and planted her struggling body over his shoulder.
"And just where would you go in these dark woods with that foul monster trying to kill you, maiden?" Trinity mocked her ridiculous pleas as his wide hand clamped over the creamy-textured flesh of her outer thigh.
His eyeteeth pricked as the cloud of her temptations worked to overpower his resolve again, and she responded with crying accusations. "You are the monster!"
Incensed with more than fury, he growled like the beast he could be as he started forward swiftly through the woods. "I've not hurt you, have I?"
The girl was frantically trying to hold down his jacket over her bare ass upended over his shoulder, while her other hand was clutched like a claw of nails through his shirt and into his back.
Pain was good, he thought. It could make the un-dead feel alive. But as he rushed through the forest carrying his bleeding, nubile virgin, a thought relentlessly scratched at him. Why was the woman not affected by his bloodlust and his carnally aroused allure? Normally, when a male vampire's lust became fixated with a woman in close proximity, he exuded an appeal that enslaved and mesmerized the woman he lusted for. It couldn't be stopped. If a vampire's shaft was hard, the unwilling became willing.
He despised it.
Beth couldn't believe the strength of the man that carried her. She wanted him to be a man. He spoke like a man, so she made him a man. Not a beast. It felt better when she decided he was a man named Trinity, and he was trying to help her. Not eat her.
Besides, all the blood in her body had pooled into her head from the position she was being carried in. It made her feel lightheaded as her long hair trailed down to the back of Trinity's calves. His pants were lighter colored than her hair and on different bounces of her body, she could see the black ends whipping against the material as he strode forward.
It came to her in snatches that she'd read a romantic tale once about a great warrior saving a damsel and carrying her away over his shoulder. It had sounded so enthralling at the time. However, in reality it was horrid and jarring and completely breath-snatching as she moaned and felt a black curtain of unconsciousness fall over her.
Chapter Six