The Vampire s Secret Page 5

  Her dark eyes flew open and locked onto mine with an unholy gleam. Her hand reached out with preternatural swiftness and latched onto my wrist. She needed something right then, but I wasn’t the one to give it.

  “Oh,” I muttered. “No. Not me. It’s…”

  “Jack,” I heard William begin in a rumbling half-whisper. “Get away from that coffin or I’ll make you rue the day I ever plucked your sorry arse off that battlefield.”

  William

  Blinded by ownership, I had the irrational urge to kill Jack where he stood. “Take your hands off her,” I demanded. “She’s mine.”

  “It’s not me, it’s her,” Jack said, doing his best to pry Eleanor’s fingers off his arm.

  Once he was free, Eleanor forgot all about Jack. Her gaze riveted to me and she began a slow catlike climb out of her coffin. Even her slight dessication didn’t detract from the beauty of her bone structure. She was of me now, bone to blood, and I wanted her. The invitation to take her was so strong that it felt like smoking friction beneath my clothes. Scratching, arousing.

  “Get out,” I managed to Jack and Melaphia. In the next second, Eleanor had leaped across the distance between us and was tearing at my clothes. I caught both her hands in one of mine and drew them upward, halting her progress of ruining my shirt. She writhed, doing her best to rub against me. This mating ritual was a delicate dance—so much more than mere fucking. Our first consummation would not only assure her immortality; it would set the tone for our entire relationship. I was her vampire sire, yes, but there would be no slavery involved, no mind control, no abuse. I would be her teacher, and it wouldn’t do to let the pupil decide the lessons. The power she craved was mine to give, and although I was already aroused beyond stopping, I could not let her know it. I did my best to remain in control.

  “Let me, let me, let meeeeee,” she whined breathlessly. Her beautiful eyes, her hair, everything about her seemed to be muted except for the artful snake. The color of her skin was a cloudy, iridescent pearl. Quite suddenly, she used the leverage of her arms to swing her legs up and lock them around my waist. Twisting her hips to her own rhythm she rubbed her sex into my belly, too high to do either of us much good. Athletic but unfulfilling.

  “Fuck me now,” she snarled, accustomed, by her line of work, to being obeyed.

  I gave up trying to stop her. I released her arms, clamped one hand on each of her hips, lifted, then tossed her away. She landed on her back on the overstuffed chair next to my coffin. “Stay!” My order was so forceful that it must have penetrated Eleanor’s frenzy. She seemed to catch on to the fact that I would be the one to orchestrate what happened next. But she would do everything in her power to hurry the process. With a look that Eve might have invented after her fall from grace, Eleanor licked her fingers, then plunged her hand down past the tail of the snake and between her legs. Sighing with pleasure, she worked the flesh there without any further assistance from me.

  In the time required to unfasten my shirt and toe off my shoes she’d reached her first orgasm. Her moan of pleasure sent a thrumming demand along my skin, tightening my gut, making my cock pulse. By this time, I’m afraid, I was well past ciphering who was in charge of whom. I let my pants slide to the floor and covered her, pinning her down with the weight of my larger body and my throbbing erection. Shoving her busy hand out of the way, I entered her with a bull-like thrust.

  I’m sure it sounded like I was killing her, but a sweeter death has not yet been invented. I slid into her again and again, while she wailed in unison with each thrust, and I could feel her brand-new vampiric body softening beneath mine. In reaction, my body gathered for the power exchange. Eleanor climaxed two more times before her warm, tight friction sucked me over the edge into a paralyzing orgasm of my own. Locked together as her body milked mine, I didn’t notice she was nuzzling my neck. Without warning, she sank her newly transformed fangs into my skin, wanting it all…everything. With a great deal of effort I pulled out, breaking the suction at each end.

  “Don’t make me hurt you,” I warned.

  Eleanor sighed and stretched, looking pleased, not cowed in the least. “Who knows?” she whispered demurely. “I might like being hurt by you.”

  The mere words made my cock twitch and harden again. As much as I would resist the admission, even as I abhorred violence among offspring, I could still be turned on by the sadistic and forbidden.

  “I find pleasure a worthy goal. And I’m all for variety being the spice of life.” With that I pushed to my feet, dragging her up with me and around the back of the chair. She slid her arms to encircle my neck and stepped into me, but I kept her at a distance. Turning her to face the chair I used my hands to arouse her again, sliding over her breasts, rubbing, kneading, pinching. As her breath quickened I moved lower, fondling her sex, sliding fingers into the slippery wetness there and circling her most sensitive center. When she began to whimper and squirm for more, I stopped. Shifting my arm around her waist, I lifted her from the floor so I could whisper against her ear.

  “This is the sum total of what you’ll get from me in the future if you ever again try to bite me without permission.”

  I shoved her forward until her face rested on the cushioned seat, her lovely derriere raised to the perfect level and open to my whim. I clamped a hand on the back of her neck like a stallion might use his teeth to hold a mare, then pumped into her, employing her body as nothing more than a tool to satisfy my cock.

  The satisfaction was of the hair-raising variety.

  Eleanor screamed once and the choking, fearful sound of it set off a nearly cataclysmic chain reaction in my body. I plunged into her faster and faster, coming with a newly discovered vengeance so different, and so intense, that a shimmer of unease arrived along with the greedy pleasure.

  I felt empty but oh so satisfied. I’d expected the sense of emptiness, as I’d just given Eleanor a sustaining dose of my power. I’d assured her immortality. But the other wicked pleasure that came along with the ride was a first for me. A crack in a door that I had never noticed before.

  Certainly in the past I’d been cruel—hunting, killing humans. But it had been the anger I was courting—the sweet among the meat. And yes, my prey had been afraid of me and of the certain death they found in my eyes.

  Eleanor was different. When she was human, she had trusted me not to go too far. She only dreamed the fantasy of what I could do if I wished. But now, she who must be obeyed was no longer human, mortal, or weak. She had no reason to fear death anymore. Yet for this one instant she’d feared me. She knew what I was, and loved me still, but now I’d shown her that I could hurt her at my whim. It had surprised us both.

  “You need to feed,” I said, recovering. I retrieved my ripped shirt from the floor, drew her up, and helped her into it. She rubbed her neck where I had gripped, her eyes holding questions I wasn’t ready to answer. Settling her on a stool near the bar, I sorted through the bags of blood in the refrigerator and brought out one of the larger ones. She watched me with a baleful gaze as I bit into the bag and brought it to her mouth. “Drink: you’ll feel better.”

  She covered the tear in the bag with her lips and drank greedily, eyes closed in concentration. The blood oozed out, dripping down her chin, making wet red splotches on her breasts, soaking into the linen of my shirt. She downed half of the contents before coming up for air.

  Her eyes were regaining their sparkle, her skin plumping and smoothing—her mouth…wet with blood. Unable to resist, I leaned down and kissed her lightly, then deeper, sucking blood. She responded with lips and tongue before pulling back slightly. Holding my gaze, she tipped the IV bag up and squeezed more of the contents into her mouth. The overflow spilled down her chin like a slow-moving lava flow. At least it looked that way to me—sinuous and mesmerizing. I took the lure and set to work licking and sucking it from her skin. When my teeth grazed her neck she moaned. I heard her desire as clearly as if she’d spoken it.

  Bite me…
/>
  Not yet, sweet, I answered silently. Not in the first seven days of your making. But soon…

  Jack

  Turns out, fear makes me hungry. I opened the refrigerator and foraged for blood. I found a plastic package, checked the expiration date, and closed the fridge door. “I don’t even want to know what happened down there before we came in.”

  “Yes,” Melaphia said, seating herself before the computer once more. “And I don’t want to think about what’s going on down there now.”

  We both laughed and the tension was gone. I reached into the liquor cabinet for something with more of a kick and brought a bottle of mescal, the poor man’s tequila, to the table. “Where are the twins?” Deylaud and Reyha were William’s part-canine, part-human companions. They would be in their two-footed format since it was still dark out.

  “Last I saw them, they were in the den watching a dog show on Animal Planet.”

  “I’m sure they were rooting for the sighthounds,” I chuckled. “I thought I’d hang out until I have to get home. In case anything, you know, goes wrong.”

  “You worry me,” Mel remarked, a crease furrowing her smooth, coffee-with-cream-colored brow.

  “How’s that?”

  “You cut it too close going home. You’re going to flame out one of these days when the sun comes up over the marshes and catches you on the road. I have nightmares that Connie will call me from the police station and tell me the police found your convertible in a ditch with nothing but ashes inside.”

  “Don’t get your dreads in a knot,” I said. “I’ll be more careful. I promise.” I reached over the table and patted her hand as it rested on the computer mouse. Melaphia was like a mother hen, worrying about William and me like she’d raised us instead of the other way around. I tore into the blood packet with my teeth, poured it into a highball glass, then reached for the salt and Tabasco in the middle of the table. After giving the cocktail a few shakes of each, I finished filling the glass with imported Mexican mescal. Bloody Mary, McShane style.

  Mel grinned. “Want a celery stick with that?”

  “Nah,” I said, stirring the drink with my finger. “I’m not the veggie type, you know. I’d rather eat the worm.”

  Melaphia laughed while I took a long sip of my cocktail. “You know—” I paused “—speaking of Connie, I’ve been meaning to ask you about something that happened back at the costume party.”

  “Lawsy. What didn’t happen at the costume party?” Melaphia launched into a soliloquy about the showdown with Reedrek and other goings-on at the shindig. She wasn’t meeting my eyes.

  “Yeah, I was there,” I reminded her. “Are you trying to change the subject? Which was Connie, by the way.”

  She twirled a dreadlock around her index finger, something she did only when she was nervous, and stared at my shirt. “Why are your clothes damp?”

  “Because I can fly…well, sort of. I’ll explain later. What about Connie? Why don’t you want to talk about her?”

  Melaphia sighed and looked at me closely, lips pressed together, thinking, trying to decide what to say.

  “Whatever it is, you can tell me.” I was getting worried. Melaphia and I had always been able to talk about anything and everything, ever since she was a little girl. It seemed only yesterday that she’d stopped calling me “Uncle Jack.” I drained my drink. “I seem to remember you and Renee acting kind of weird when you saw Connie at the party. It was like you were awestruck or something.”

  Melaphia let go of the dread and it spiraled off of her long, slender finger. “I was…It’s hard to explain.”

  “Listen. I know she’s different. I mean I know she’s not a hundred percent genuine human. I can feel it. And I figure you can feel it, too. Or maybe see it, who knows? But Mel, you’ve got to tell me if you recognized what she is. I need to know.”

  She sighed. “It’s like this, Jack. I don’t know exactly. I’m still working on it.”

  “What do you mean, working on it?”

  “I’m doing research, trying to confirm what I think Connie might be. What her role is, you know, in the wider world. Whatever kind of being Connie is, it’s something really big.”

  I felt a dull pain in my stomach, and it wasn’t from the mescal. “How big?”

  “Don’t push me, Jack.”

  “Listen here, young lady,” I began, falling into the same language I used when she was a girl and misbehaved. “I’m not the boy in the dark anymore, remember? Tell me what you know.” William’s silence “for my own good” had lasted more than a century, and I wasn’t about to take the same treatment from Melaphia.

  “Don’t try and draw me into your troubles with William. That had nothing to do with me.”

  “The hell it didn’t. You were his accomplice. I know for a fact that you lied to me more than once.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Jack? Defy William? I’m a mortal. I can’t go toe-to-toe with him like you can.”

  If I hadn’t been so cranky, I’d have laughed at the idea of William ever laying a fang on Melaphia. “That’s a copout and you know it.”

  “Look. All that is in the past. This thing with Connie is serious. You’re not dealing with some silly mortal girl here.”

  “I guessed that much. Now, out with it. What do you know?”

  Melaphia held up a slender hand, palm out as if ready to take the Boy Scout oath. “I swear to you. I don’t yet know anything for absolutely sure. When I do you’ll be the first one I’ll tell.”

  “Damn it all, tell me what you think you know!”

  “Please, Jack—”

  “You’ve got to give me something here.”

  Mel sighed and looked at the floor. “I think Connie might be a—a—goddess.”

  I laughed: I couldn’t help it. But it wasn’t a funny, ha-ha laugh. It was a God-help-me kind of laugh. I slapped my hand over my mouth and spoke between my fingers. “What kind of goddess?”

  “A Mayan goddess. Now that’s all I can tell you.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Listen, I know you care about her, probably more than you’ve cared about a woman in a long time, in my lifetime anyway, but be careful. Now I’m going to ask you a question that you may think is none of my business, but it’s important that you tell me the truth. Have you and Connie consummated your relationship yet?”

  I didn’t like the direction this was going. Not one little bit. But I knew it was serious business or Mel would never have asked me. “No. It’s hard for us to get together since she works the night shift. We go out sometimes when she gets a night off. There’s a couple of clubs that she likes, so we have some beers and some laughs, dance a little to the jukebox, that sort of stuff.”

  Connie worked a lot of overtime and sometimes didn’t even take a night off in the course of a week, so we seldom got to meet at her apartment. Still, I could tell that Connie was wondering why I hadn’t pressed her to “take our relationship to the next level” as they describe it nowadays. It’s not like I could tell her that just as we’d started getting really close, I’d found out the hard way I had the power to harm nonhuman women. I wasn’t sure Connie even knew she wasn’t entirely human.

  Crap. I had no idea what to do about the situation. I just knew that I couldn’t stand the thought of being without her now that she was on my mind and in my dreams.

  “Okay. Good,” Mel interrupted my thoughts. “Until I figure this out, it could be downright dangerous for you to make love to this woman.”

  I heard myself issue a growl of frustration. As usual, my first thought was to rebel, to tell Melaphia to mind her own business and stay out of my life. But in true wise-woman style, she’d only brought up fears that I already had. “To tell you the truth, that’s the real reason I haven’t tried to—you know—seduce Connie yet. After Shari, I’m afraid I might be poison to a woman who isn’t completely human.”

  Melaphia squeezed my hand over the table hard enough to get my full attention and shoo
k her head, causing her dreadlocks to sway. “No. You don’t get it. Jack, if I’m right and Connie is descended from the kind of being I think she is, you would pose no danger to her.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What do you mean? Connie and I can—we can be together—”

  “You’re getting ahead of me; now settle down.” Mel came to stand beside me and took my face in her hands. “Pay very good attention, Jack, and hear me on this. Do not sleep with Connie. Because if she’s what I think she is, and if her powers are what I think they are, it’s not you who would be a danger to her. It’s a matter of her being a danger—or worse—to you.” She paused to let the words sink in. “I have never been as serious with you as I am right now. Promise me you’ll break it off with this woman—at least until I know more. No woman likes to be strung along. Break it off for her sake and for yours as well. If I find out something to prove me wrong, you’ll be the second one to know.”

  “But Mel,” I protested, “I’m fairly kick-ass invincible now with my new voodoo blood. Even William says so. For cripes sake, I can almost fly. If it’s a matter of her being able to hurt me, don’t worry about it. I’m not.”

  Melaphia closed her eyes tightly and shook her head. “None of that matters. I’m telling you the danger is very real.”

  I stared at her as her warm hands cradled my face. She was serious. Oh yes, she was.

  “Promise, Jack.”

  “I promise,” I said reluctantly.

  Mel relaxed and patted my cheek before dropping her hands to the sides of her colorful cotton skirt. “When you go to break up with her, tell her to come and see me. Soon. I need to talk to her as well. There are many questions I must ask her. And there are things that I must tell her.”