DeVante's Curse (3 page)

"Oh, so strong," she murmured, letting her
hands drift to his groin. His thighs clenched and strained in
response to the squeeze of her fingers around his cock.

He tried to fight his way out of the daze,
remembering the corpses they'd pulled from this bed and the smell
of the courtyard on burning days.

"Don't fight it," she said. "I'm your
destiny."

She fed him more blood, and did things to him
he could never have learned from the jaguar.

Chapter 2 -- A man

Felix jerked him from the bed, and DeVante
let out a startled shout as he hit the stone floor.

"Sorry. Thought you were dead," Felix said,
shrugging his shoulders.

DeVante looked at the face of his only
friend, and suspected Felix was fighting a grin.

"You did, did you ?"

Felix glared. "Of course I did. It took me
forever to work up the nerve to come for you. The sun is fully
risen in the sky. It's warmer this morning. Come on."

DeVante followed Felix out to the courtyard.
It was midway into autumn, and the air felt crisp and sharp, like
winter. The garden pool would freeze. They would be trapped in the
castle for another long cold season.

They needed to find another way out.

DeVante froze mid-step, remembering all that
Katarina knew.

"She knows we have been leaving, Felix. She
knows about the doughnut girl."

Felix turned, and for a moment his wild
lashes fluttered over his beautiful dark eyes. "Of course she
does," he said. "When she drinks from us, she learns
everything."

Did it work in reverse? DeVante vowed to keep
his wits sharp the next time she offered her blood to him. Perhaps
he could learn about her, discover a weakness.

"She must not care," DeVante said. "If she
cared, she would beat us, or forbid us from leaving."

Felix nodded. "When she gets bored, she will
punish us, have no doubt. "

DeVante shuddered. She had beat him a week
prior because the logs in the library fireplace were askew. He
would never get used to the pain of her kicks and punches, the
sharp jabs to his ribs from the toes of her boots. And his reaction
always been to suffer the pain with silent dignity.

Katarina wanted him to beg, and the very idea
made DeVante cringe.

But.

Felix could not bear it, and had taken to
begging for mercy on DeVante's behalf. And that shamed DeVante to
do his own begging.

The search for words to make her stop was
more painful to him than the physical blows.

Please. Mistress. I'm sorry
.

But he did find the words, and he said them
with all the sincerity he could muster, to appease Felix, who got
crazier the longer a beating continued.

DeVante could care less about a broken rib, a
bruised stomach, or reproductive organs that throbbed and ached.
These were nothing compared to the humiliation of groveling at
Katarina's feet. He did not like pain, but he could endure it.

What DeVante could not endure was Felix's
agitation, his panic that Katarina's malicious slaps and repeated
kicks would cause permanent or fatal injury.

DeVante knew fatal injury would be a blessing
that Katarina would not bestow until she was good and ready.

But when Felix sobbed, DeVante found his
voice. "Please Mistress. I am begging you. Forgive me and be done
with this."

Her eyes saw all. "Look at me," she
commanded. "Look into my eyes and beg."

DeVante looked into her eyes. Trapped. He had
learned in his first weeks at the castle that giving her eye
contact also gave her control.

The eyes were windows to the soul, and a
gateway to the mind. Human-to-vampire interaction rule number one:
Do not make eye contact. And yet she commanded, and so it must be.
Rule number two of human-to-vampire interaction was that the human
should never piss off the vampire. And that translated most well to
rule number three: Do what you are told.

He did not flinch from her gaze.

"I can see your defiance. Now beg, or you'll
be lifting Felix into the furnace in the morning."

DeVante licked his lips. There was a
tightness in his chest, a feeling he might have if the jaguar was
hungry and he the nearest prey. In the rainforest, such moments
called for following the monkeys high into the trees, where the
branches were thin and the jaguar dared not follow.

It was time to test the branch.

"If you kill him, I will find a way out, and
you will have to burn your own corpses or be surrounded by them as
they putrefy. So now, I beg you, stop this madness and leave us
be."

Katarina's eyes glittered.

"When the pond freezes, there is no way out,"
she said.

"Not true," DeVante said, still staring into
her eyes.

"Just one thing," she said. "Bow to me, as
your Mistress. Just that."

And because her eyes compelled him, DeVante
executed a perfect, courtly bow.

Katarina nodded her head, satisfied. "I was
getting bored with the two of you, anyway. I think I'll go
dancing."

When she left, even the castle walls seemed
to breathe a sigh of relief.

"I hate when you provoke her," Felix said
now. "What would I do if she killed you?"

"Whatever you did before."

"It was a dark time," Felix said, and closed
his eyes.

And DeVante knew this: if Katarina killed
Felix, then DeVante would be gone, no matter what she would do when
she retrieved him. He had grown into a man here in Katarina's lair.
He was strong, and he was fearless.

As autumn progressed toward winter, Katarina
forced DeVante to her bed more frequently. There seemed no rhyme or
reason for her choice of him over Felix, or vice versa. She
chastised one for some exaggerated mishap, then rewarded that one
later. A tongue-lashing didn't mean anything except the one chosen
might be treated less gently, might wake with darker bruises.

Jealousies cropped up, but only when the
cravings were strong and she was able to tease them into
competition.

Felix had the worse temper, but DeVante took
pains now and then to pretend he lost control. He had no real wish
to outperform Felix, but if he never won a round, Felix would
figure it out.

Felix was the key to everything.

The leaves drifted to the ground, and it was
too cold to swim under the wall. Felix paced and growled and
exhibited signs of cabin fever, although the cold season had just
begun. DeVante had never seen him so restless.

"It is the girl, yes?" DeVante guessed.

Felix stopped pacing and slumped against the
library hearth. "Must be. It's a hundred times worse this year.
I've forgotten her smile, but not how it warmed me."

DeVante tried to imagine being in love,
aching and pining for the touch of another, but it was beyond him.
Katarina's touch turned cruel without reason or warning, so DeVante
was always on guard, dreading what she would do next.

When she paired a seductive smile with gentle
hands that knew a man's body, and fingers that found secret places,
she was impossible to resist. Her bedroom games broke the monotony,
even the ones that pitted DeVante and Felix against one another to
win her favor.

It did not matter that he and Felix had
decided she needed both of them to take care of things, and
therefore she would not deny either of them the blood they craved.
In truth, she denied DeVante more often and for longer periods than
she ever denied Felix. At first DeVante assumed she cared for Felix
more, or perhaps even that Felix outperformed DeVante in her bed,
but he came to believe there was a purpose to her denial. That
perhaps he was more adept at prying information out of her when she
fed him her blood. And he was learning to keep her out of his own
head.

He wanted to experiment with this, to test
whether he was able to feed her false thoughts along with his
blood, or learn things she wanted kept secret while her blood
trickled into his mouth.

It made him impatient for the blood-letting,
and frustrated when she chose Felix day after blessed day.

And yet… when she finally did choose DeVante,
Felix went a little bit crazy, sobbing and pouting and attempting,
literally, to climb the walls.

It was not behavior normal to Felix, and it
was more than cabin fever and wanting to see the baker's daughter.
It worried DeVante. He took a risk and asked Katarina why Felix was
going haywire.

Katarina flitted her fingers in the air, a
gesture of dismissal. "Oh, darling, take your pick of ailments.
He's in love with some simpering village girl. He's jealous that
I've finally taken a shine to you. He's consumed enough vampire
blood that it's starting to kill him, and yet he can't stop wanting
more."

DeVante reached out and grabbed her wrist and
pulled her around to face him. "Drinking your blood will kill us?"
he asked, his tone sharper than he intended.

It took ages for her to answer. And when she
did, she said, "Well. Not immediately. And you don't have anything
to worry about, because you never take much."

It was true. Her blood was a drug, and he
wanted it, craved it, but he hated the feeling that his innermost
thoughts were vulnerable to her if he succumbed, so he always
denied himself any more than a taste. "If you stop giving it to
him, will the symptoms reverse?"

Her laugh was genuine, and yet sadistic. "Ah,
DeVante. You don't understand anything. If I stop giving it to him,
he will become completely unhinged. The blood binds him to this
place, and to me. But as my blood is his prison, so it will
eventually be his release."

"And then what?" DeVante asked. "I am left to
serve you alone?"

She looked at him, and her eyes glittered.
"Of course not. I'll replace him with a new boy. And you will teach
the new boy what must be done. That's the way it has always
been."

DeVante shook his head. "No. I will throw
myself into the pit before I watch an innocent learn the horror of
this place."

She laughed again, and it was a merry,
tinkling sound. "You won't. You are meant to survive." She patted
the empty space on the bed beside her. "Now take your clothes off,
darling. Feed me and love me."

You are meant to survive.
She
knew.

He tried to envision jumping into the fire,
burning with the logs, his bones crumbling into the fine dust that
heaped at the bottom of the pit.

She was right. It was a coward's escape, and
he would never do it.

Something in her demeanor changed this time
when he joined her on the bed. Her requests were different and her
games more elaborate. She tied his wrists behind his back with a
silk cloth, then bade him to kneel prone and kiss and lick her
between her legs. It was not unpleasant, and the scent of her
aroused him, as did the feel of her guiding hands against the back
of his head. She pulled him up and nipped into his throat, drinking
from him in tiny sips.

"Now that you tricked me into telling you
what will happen to Felix, don't you want to know what will happen
to you?"

DeVante shook his head. There had been no
trick. He had asked, and she had answered.

"Of course you do," she said, petting him and
smiling. "He will die, and you will not. You will throw him in the
pit, an empty shell, like all the others. And you will serve me.
Perhaps I shall make of you a nighttime companion, and you shall
accompany me outside the walls of this castle, dance with me, help
me choose my next meal."

"No," DeVante said. "I will not."

She bit into her wrist and made it bleed,
then pressed it to his mouth. "Ah, but you will, my darling. Drink
now."

He let the blood flow into his mouth, but
swallowed only once, and let the rest of what she would give him
trickle onto the bed.

"More," she commanded, caressing his shoulder
with her free hand, then letting it drop to draw lazy circles on
his back. "More."

Had she hit him, he would have refused, but
both her touch and her tone were gentle, and he was undone.

He swallowed again, and again, and instead of
allowing himself to get lost in the swoon, he tried to find out if
her blood had anything to tell him. And the moment he opened
himself up to that possibility, images rushed in, of Katarina
screaming, reeling back when the flat of a hand hit her across the
side of her head, the words
'insufferable bastard,'
at her
lips as she raised her hands to defend herself. A person, a man,
was before her, grabbing a handful of her hair and wrenching her
head back, and his face came closer, closer, and she wailed, 'No,
no, no, no,' and then the image was gone because the real Katarina,
the now Katarina, yanked her arm away, and slapped DeVante's
mouth.

"Bastard," she said. "You're trying to steal
my secrets."

DeVante rolled to his side, wrists still tied
behind his back. "But not an insufferable bastard. If we are to be
companions, what need shall we have for secrets?"

"It's for me to decide what you should know
and when," she said, and her eyes changed, no longer seductive, but
calculating. "I will punish you twofold for the arrogance of
thinking you have any right to invade my head."

She did punish him, though in the oddest way.
She worked him with her mouth to the brink of orgasm, then crushed
his ball sack between her hands until he broke out in a sweat and
went soft. Then she smoothed her hands over his skin, said pretty
things, and took his blood. And again coaxed him to drink more from
her.

Next she had him kneel at the head of the
bed, and lean forward to grasp between his teeth an iron ring set
into the wall. She knelt behind him and pushed his thighs apart,
then took a jar from the bedside table. He couldn't see what she
was doing with the jar, but felt her hands, slick and cool, sliding
along his cock. She brought him nearly to orgasm again, then pulled
him back with another unique form of shattering pain; the invasion
of his rectum by an unknown object. The pain was at first so sharp
that he clenched his jaws tight against the iron ring until he
thought his teeth would shatter. She fucked him with the object
until pain thrummed up his spine and became a grating noise inside
his head, and his manhood went soft. And then she suddenly thrust
the object harder and deeper, and inexplicably he came erect again.
Another deep thrust forced the fluid from him, completely without
pleasure.