Samantha, in so many ways, was Brenna … and yet not. All of the bonds, all of the similarities were there. The history they already shared provided a perfect basis for a relationship. And damned if Sam wasn’t the most well-suited candidate for a High Court vampire she’d ever known in her life – well-composed, articulate, educated, intellectual, cultured, secure in her own identity … and goddamned beautiful, to boot. There was no actual risk involved, no matter how she looked at it. Samantha was willing and able. She had practically groomed herself for this role all along, even if she hadn’t consciously meant to do so (at least until recently). She had the potential, and she genuinely wanted this opportunity. She wanted … no … she needed to be Raina’s bloodspawn. Quite literally, her survival depended upon it. And Raina knew, she just knew, that becoming her Maker and her lover at once would ultimately prove to be the death of Samantha.
It was superstition. It was gut instinct. Raina was convinced through and through that history was doomed to repeat itself here. She would dare to open up again. Raina would dare to think that things would finally be okay, that she could pick up where she had left off before and henceforth live in happiness and contentedness. And in a flash, when she least expected it, the rug would be pulled out from under her once again. Someone would die, and it would be Raina’s fault, and she would be alone once again. Anyone unlucky enough to become the focus of Raina’s utmost love and respect was doomed to die. It was a historically proven fact: anyone sharing a mutual love with Raina would be killed. Probably the only thing keeping Loki alive was the fact that he likely had never truly loved Raina in the first place and, thus, he was spared the … the … what, the curse? Was that was it really was? A curse? Did she really believe in that sort of nonsense? No, she didn’t … well, not really … but her belief in the concept likely was irrelevant, anyway. It was there, it was real, and it was going to kill Samantha.
So, Raina was scared. She knew that what it boiled down to was that Samantha’s fate had already been decided, that her death was inevitable, and that at this point, Raina was simply stalling things. She was putting it off as long as possible, delaying the event that would be the catalyst for Sam’s destruction. Worse still, she liked Samantha, really liked her, and she was sure that in time she would probably fall in love with her, just as she had fallen for Brenna. Or was it more accurate and honest to admit that she had been seduced? Raina hadn’t exactly thrown herself at Brenna right away, after all. She had resisted and resisted and then, after all that struggle, she had finally given in to Brenna’s advances. And if there was one thing she truly regretted most of all about Brenna’s death, and about her relationship with her before then, it was that she hadn’t come to know and truly enjoy Brenna’s love until the very end. All the time they had spent together she could have fully appreciated if only she hadn’t been so damned conservative and closed-minded.
And now, here she was again – not exactly Brenna, nor a reincarnation of her, but in every way the living essence of her. The opportunity was there again, as was the curse. There wasn’t a choice to be made here that would stop the inevitable. The only thing really to do was to either once again try to fight predestination or to simply embrace its certainty and make the most of it while she could. Perhaps this was what life was really all about: recognizing genuine prospects for love and happiness, and enjoying them while they lasted.
Love wasn’t eternal, at least in this world, because life was short. Love could only last as long as life, and death was to love as a car’s windshield was to an insect. If there was an afterlife or reincarnation or whatever, then great, that would be awesome. But from all else that she had seen and experienced, this was it. She could take Serenity’s advice and live by her same coda of “seize the day” – yes, even if all of her New Age rhetoric was as fake as her friendship had been. Or instead, she could foolishly let everything go to waste, along with another life, and wind up having wasted yet another golden opportunity.
Raina blacked out once again. Well, not exactly. She was more or less aware of everything that was happening, but she was so devoid of any form of conscious control that her entire body seemed to be acting on auto-pilot. She may as well have been watching a movie filmed entirely from a first-person perspective. She took Samantha by the hand, leaving the glasses of absinthe behind and escorting her to the master bedroom. They paused before entering the bedroom, as Raina tried to open the other bedroom door to peek in on what was going on. The door was locked, and she could barely hear the sound of Thomas snoring inside. They were still coping with jet lag, apparently, as the time zone change had completely thrown their sleep schedule out of whack. Raina all but dragged a pleasantly smiling Samantha into the master bedroom, closed the door, and engaged the doorknob’s privacy lock.
Apparently, the whole “what the hell” sentiment was mutual. As soon as she turned around to face Samantha, Raina found herself pinned up against the door by her wrists. Sam began kissing her passionately, every bit as fierce as the last kiss and then some. Almost right away, as Raina opened her mouth to meet Sam’s tongue with her own, the intensity of the kiss resulted in the inevitable careless scratch of her fangs against her own tongue and lips. The taste of blood soon met her taste buds, and Raina reacted with a muffled groan and an almost full-body spasm of delight. Samantha moaned back in reply as she pressed their bodies together, either reacting to Raina’s sounds or simply in outright desire, and she ran her fingers messily through Raina’s hair.
Raina wanted more, and now. She forced her wrists away from the door where Samantha had pinned them, and she grabbed her by the shoulders, guiding her backward to the bed. Practically shoving her back onto the bed, Raina turned the tide of dominance and straddled her waist as she resumed their kiss. She soon moved away from Sam’s lips and began to kiss her way across her cheek and down the side of her neck, lingering at the pit of her throat for a long while as she fumbled with the few buttons of Samantha’s blouse that had been re-fastened. As soon as the last button was undone, Raina swept open the silk blouse and immediately cupped those full, firm mounds of pale flesh contained within the cups of an expensive, lacy black bra.
Though she nibbled and very lightly bit at the soft skin of Samantha’s neck, it took every ounce of her self-control not to actually bite down into her flesh and draw blood. She restrained herself, perhaps the only actual conscious decision she made in all of that, and she savored the sweet, floral scent of her perfume and the delicious taste of her skin as she ran her tongue across her throat.
“Do it,” she heard Samantha say breathlessly. “Take me. Make me yours.”
Raina didn’t know whether it was just mindless passion-talk or if she sincerely meant what she said. She took it by her own meaning, or rather her body reacted to those words on its own agenda. Raina slid down a bit more, nuzzled her face between Samantha’s breasts for awhile in all of that warmth and softness and sweet scent, and then opened her mouth as she laid her lips over the top of Samantha’s right breast, directly over her heart. She sucked the flesh slightly into her mouth and then bit down ever so slightly, just enough to let the tips of her fangs sink in. Samantha reacted with a sharp gasp as she arched her back. It couldn’t have felt good – rather, it should have hurt quite a bit – but Sam’s reaction seemed to indicate an almost masochistic groan of approval, made softly and stifled through her clenched teeth.
There was no real way to make a bite feel pleasant, not really, and so the act caused her to feel a bit of guilt. Raina figured that she could at least distract her enough not to focus on the pain and, if nothing else, make it quite tolerable. As such, Raina’s left hand reached back and found its way to the hemline of her skirt, slid up, and brazenly caressed Samantha through the mesh-like material that covered her innermost intimacy.
It actually took a few moments for the blood to surface, and when it did … it was like nothing else before. The taste was sharp, bitter, and coppery, just the way blood was supposed to taste –
none of the strange sweetness and smoothness to which she was accustomed to finding in the veins of fellow vampires. Even though the taste was somewhat familiar, her reaction to it was anything but that. Raina moaned loudly in response, her whole body seemed to spasm, and the world became very, very small all of a sudden, reduced to nothing more than herself and the human underneath her.
She sucked hard at the tiny wounds she’d made, hard enough to make Samantha cry out again, trying to draw everything that she could from them. It was not the taste, really, but the physiological reaction that it brought about which told Raina with frightening certainty that this was exactly why she had avoided human blood in the first place. What now graced her tongue in tiny, thin rivulets as she suckled upon those little wounds was a substance for which she would do more than simply kill. She would become a monster for this, a real monster in every sense of the word. She would do anything to anyone at anytime if it meant having this. She was made for this. Blood, real blood, human blood was her destiny through and through. And now she had it, finally, after all this wondering and deliberate chastity … and, God, how she hated herself for loving it so much.
The blood was good – no, wait, it was beyond that, way beyond – but even then, there was a part of her that craved more. Roughly, she grabbed the top edge of Samantha’s right bra cup and tugged it down to expose her. Dimly, before she took it readily into her mouth, she experienced a moment déjà vu in that the flesh was nearly the same color and texture, the nipple of almost exactly the same color, size, and shape. The sound that Sam made when Raina’s lips wrapped around it was so very much the same as Brenna, the one and only time they had made love. This was not her, of course, and she knew this, but she gave herself to this moment with the same sense of reckless abandon that she would have if it truly had been Brenna again in her embrace.
Samantha cooed with approval, cradling her head in her hands as Raina licked and suckled upon her. Even when her fang inadvertently made a scratch across the outer edge of her areola, drawing just a light bit of blood, it was met with little more than a flinch and a brief hiss of discomfort before immediately being followed by sounds of approval and encouragement. Samantha had no inhibitions in the bedroom, no fear of being heard, and she was every bit as verbal and vocal as Brenna had been – perhaps even a bit more. It didn’t matter. In fact, it was something of a plus. It was good to know that this was as ecstatically righteous for Samantha as it was for Raina.
This continued for awhile until finally Raina became aware of the manner by which Samantha appeared to be pushing down upon her head. Raina pushed herself up and paused for a moment to look down upon the stunningly beautiful … no, impossibly gorgeous dark angel beneath her, and she saw the utter passion, the absolute rapture in her eyes, those emerald green jewels. She saw, and she knew, she understood what was being asked in that look, and Raina agreed to it. She had only done this with Duvessa and Brenna, an intoxication-blurred memory that seemed a lifetime ago, so this was somewhat new to her. Still, she acted without hesitation or second thoughts. She swung her leg over Sam, slid off the edge of the bed until she was kneeling upon the floor beside the bed, and then she practically dove underneath Samantha’s skirt. She moved aside that lacy mesh to immediately seek out that which her apparent instinctive urges craved.
The feelings – the scent, the taste, the texture, all so strange, both familiar and yet completely foreign – were nonetheless delightful in their own right. The features, even in the darkness, were like nothing else she had experienced before in that this was the first human female with whom she had ever done anything like this. The sweet musk filled her attention as fully as the impossible heat and softness that met her lips and tongue, and she fed upon the delectable intimacy that was Samantha with earnest but cautious zeal – a stray fang here would almost surely ruin the mood and the moment entirely. A free hand found its way under her own skirt and she attended to her own needs as she awkwardly but eagerly indulged in pleasing the focus of her ardor.
Samantha all but came unglued at the seams. Raina was by no means an expert at giving in this sense, but physical skill was not so much the determining factor as Sam’s outright desire and the emotional context of it all. Within moments, surely not even a few minutes, the cries and writhing and spasms and gasps and thrashing reached a zenith, and Raina ascended with her, carried by the lingering tastes of blood on her tongue, the sticky sweetness and musk of sex, and the sounds of Samantha’s peaking enthusiasm. For Raina, passing over the precipice was a small thing by comparison, a reactionary compliment in response to the virtual tidal wave that was Samantha’s climax. It was all very sudden, very sodden, and very surprising, nothing like she’d expected or ever before experienced. It only served to complete the experience and cement the totality of its significance. Mistress Monsoon, indeed, she thought dimly.
Though not a learned technique by any means, Raina somehow knew to bring Samantha back down gradually and when to stop touching her before the resultant hypersensitivity became less than pleasant for Sam. Raina nuzzled her face against her inner thighs for awhile as she caught her breath, both to delight in the soft warmth of that area and to wipe her face off a bit. She finally emerged from under the stiflingly hot cover of Samantha’s skirt to crawl up beside her upon the bed.
“Oh God … oh, Raina,” Samantha gasped breathlessly, “I’ve never … I’ve never had it like that. I’ve never … in my life … had it that intense. Oh God…”
Raina only smiled and rolled upon her back, turning her head to look at her. Samantha’s eyes fluttered for a moment and she shuddered briefly with some small kind of aftershock before her breathing began to relax a bit. She finally let out a heavy sigh of relief as she returned to a sane, controlled state of breathing. With a soft, intimate laugh, she turned her face toward Raina’s and opened her eyes.
“Was it good for you?” Sam asked with a grin.
Raina couldn’t even speak. She was still too overcome with the realization of what she had just done, as well as the afterglow of what she had just experienced and the mind-numbing desire of what she still wanted. She reached over and caressed Sam’s face gently but clumsily, her motor skills dulled by the inebriating effects of bloodlust and orgasm.
“Are you okay?” Samantha asked, still smiling.
Raina responded by reaching over a bit more and pulling Samantha toward her, urging her into another soul-searching kiss and allowing her to taste herself. Samantha, in turn, reacted by once again feeding off the delight of that kiss and stepping things up once again. She reached down to Raina’s belly, slipped a hand under the bottom edge of her shirt, and slid it up until her slender hand with those long, polished black nails was squeezing around her left breast and soon tweaking her nipple through the material of her bra. Samantha didn’t wait for an invitation; she simply accepted Raina’s groan of appreciation as a green light for more and proceeded to roll over upon her stomach, crawl a bit closer, and pin Raina’s right wrist overhead once again as she kissed her with unrelenting vigor.
After a few moments, Samantha broke the kiss and asked her, “Are you ready for this?”
Raina stared at her for a moment, gave it one brief moment’s final consideration, smiled, and then nodded at last before their lips met once more. And so, here it would begin, the beginning of the end … and Raina couldn’t have been happier about it.
* * * *
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jasmine awoke when he began to unload her from the back of the Cadillac, scooping her up and slinging her over his shoulder roughly. He had thrown her into the cargo area of the SUV with about as much care as he had for the three cement blocks, rope, and blue tarp that he had tossed in there with her. Her memory of the events preceding her unconsciousness were vague, as she had been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past … well … however long it had been since the beating had begun. The pain of her injuries – some dull and throbbing, others sharp and tormenting – was enough t
o explain the general idea of what had happened to her during that time. Knowing that she had been repeatedly beaten and raped, she was glad to be ignorant of all the fine details, having been blissfully dead to the world during most of those events.
She could see nothing of where they were going. Hanging upside-down with her left eye nearly swollen shut, she could only see the back of his shirt as he carried her along. The sound of hollow, wooden footfalls and water softly lapping against a floating pier, and the drum-like thuds of a boat or boats nudging against it told her enough about their location to terrify her. She knew this place only because of what she had been told about it. This was where women like her came to “disappear.”
It would be over soon. She was going to die now. This was how it was going to be. She was more or less willing to accept the inevitability of her impending demise, but she couldn’t help feeling scared by the prospect of what other horrors might lie ahead. Her only reassurance was that it would only be temporary, that whatever pains or unpleasant experiences awaited her in the next few minutes would be inevitably followed by peace. She only had to hold on for just a little while longer, and then it would all be okay. Just a little bit more agony was necessary, and she would finally be rewarded with the eternal ecstasy of death.
Mister Giovanni had a modestly-sized but expensive boat that he kept moored at one of the piers of Canyon Lake. She had never seen it before, but she had heard him talking about it now and then. It had become something of a sick inside joke between Mister Giovanni and his cohorts whenever they had intentions of killing someone – a rival vampire, a former mistress, or whomever else. He would “go fishing” with them. It was rather amazing to her that bodies weren’t washing up on the shores or popping to the surface of the lake on a regular basis, given the number of times she’d heard about him going “fishing” with his associates.
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 55