Incubus Moon (21 page)

I continued to thrash in his grip, half-ripping, half-pushing at his hands and trousers, which had slid as far down as his hips. To my relief, he relented and kicked free of them.

“Now what?” he demanded.

“How do I know!”

I bit down on a fresh kind of pain, one that felt a lot like teeth and claws biting and tearing at my insides. So I wrapped legs around his thighs and squeezed his body tight, our pelvises locked together. The temptation to sink my new fangs into his throat was almost more than I could bear. His skin smelled of every delicious food I’d ever eaten. It hummed with a sexual verve I could feel intensifying within him as well.

“You are aroused,” he said in a ragged voice.

“Back at ya!”

He glanced down at his own budding erection, and then back up at me. Shock and incredulity danced in his incandescent green eyes. If I hadn’t been in a fight for my life, I might have laughed at his almost comical expression, but what we were doing was beginning to work. The battle was shifting inside me. I could feel Blood Thrall losing its foothold to incubus lust.

“Hold me tighter,” I told him.

This time he didn’t resist. Maybe he felt what I did. That whatever was already deeply entrenched within me, my incubus nature, required his total submission in order to heal me.

My power, my essence, seized on this advantage and slammed into him. The shockwave rippled out of me and into Dimitri. Desire had fused into a living thing. I watched it form into a swirling, black mass of crystalline light that radiated a few inches above the surface of our naked bodies, then expanded outward to encompass the stateroom, before growing too large and releasing itself into the world beyond.

His chest rose and fell in rapid succession on top of me, his body slick with perspiration.

“Don’t fight it,” I told him when he started to pull away.

He hesitated, but ultimately let his full weight fall back onto me, pulling up only slightly to look into my eyes with an expression now of equal parts wanting and confusion.

Two unexpected things happened next.

His mouth and teeth clamped onto my neck and he sank fangs deep into the flesh and muscle there, his hips rising and falling as he continued to suck.

I gasped at the stinging sensation of his mouth and teeth sucking and biting in unison, at the hard length of him rubbing against my stomach to generate even more friction, until our bellies pooled with
sweat, creating loud sucking/popping noises from hot, naked skin gliding against hot, naked skin. “Harder,” I told him.

Dimitri groaned his pleasure into the side of my neck, and then reached down and back with blinding speed to grip my upper thighs. Releasing his fangs from my throat, he maneuvered my legs into the air and over his slick shoulders, letting the tip of his excitement press into me.

I wrapped my hands around his neck and stared into his eyes. “Do it!”

He offered a deep, knowing laugh. “Is this what you desire of me, incubus? Have always desired?” He teased himself against my tight opening, tapping it several times, before slowly breaching it. “Tell me.”

Unlike that idiot Texan, the first and only man with whom I’d been intimate, I wanted and needed what was happing between Dimitri Ravello and I right now. I could feel this need in my gut. It was real. And it didn’t matter that he was a monster, because I was one, too. It also didn’t matter to me that he might still pose a significant threat to my safety, because he wasn’t a psychotic rapist. We were connected somehow, our destinies fated to entwine.

So I bit down on the exquisite pain and welcomed him in. “Yessssss!”

Dimitri smiled down at me and guided the rest of his considerable length into me.

Before long, he started to ride me with a fevered pitch, his hips bucking and thrusting, his grunts and groans growing more feral. Then he began to pump faster and harder, the head of his passion rubbing against my pleasure spot and about to push me over the edge.

When I felt him shudder above me, I reached up to grab fistfuls of his thick, dark hair. “I can’t hold back anymore.”

With one final, powerful thrust, we both released ourselves in a rush of throaty groans.

Then Dimitri lifted from me so fast I barely saw him do it.

For several moments, I could do nothing but lie there and bask in one of the best damned orgasms of my life. My vampire captor apparently did not share in my same post-sex bliss haze.

He stood at the bedside, naked and panting, my blood staining his lips and chin as he stared down at me. “Your…skin.”

I glanced down at my stomach and bare legs to see what he was so adamantly fixating on. Now I understood his fascination. The change was arresting.

Gone were the evil blisters and ruin of charred, cracked skin. The unbearable burning sensation from before had been replaced by a delightful tingle creeping over my scalp from the new strands of hair beginning to sprout from regenerated follicles. The same prickling danced over my legs and forearms. Even more amazing was the shimmering glow emanating from beneath my skin, like countless tiny emeralds winking back at me in sunlight.

I couldn’t help it. I threw my head back and laughed.

Dimitri continued to stare down at me, but his astounded expression had transformed to one of dread. “By the Dark Gods, what have I done?”

CHAPTER 23

“What have you done?” I marveled at both Dimitri’s panicked question and the green, jewel-like shimmer beneath my new skin. “You saved my life!”

Way too excited by and relieved that our unexpected mattress encounter had left me with a stronger, more vital body, I didn’t want whatever was troubling him now to ruin the moment for me. I was alive and whole again! Okay. So my skin hadn’t reverted to its near alabaster state of earlier in the day. Beneath the strange, fading glow, though, I could see that it had lightened to a deep, golden brown, as though I’d spent a week on some sunny, tropical beach.

My stomach tightened.
Sunny
…

“Blood Thrall is retreating,” he said tersely. “In a few days the sun’s rays should no longer have an adverse affect on you.”

I blinked up at him. “Can you do a bit better than
should
?”

“No, Austin, I cannot.” He approached me with lightning speed, his expression heated.

The abrupt transformation to that other Dimitri, the one whose prisoner I’d been—or probably still was—was more than a little unsettling.

“What has happened here this night has never before been attempted on an incubus, at least not to my knowledge. Your supernatural constitution could make the outcome less...predictable.”

Terrific
. Dimitri had sworn to me that I wasn’t a vampire, despite the very real set of baby fangs I could feel growing. Now there was a chance that I might not be able to tolerate sunlight anymore? My newfound relief, along with the curious emerald sparkle beneath my skin, was gone. In their place, incubus anger was on the rise.

“There. That is what I needed to see.”

“So I’m a little pissed off, and not just because of the risks you failed to mention. There’s still Kassandra to worry about, remember? She tried to kill me.”

“Yes, and you wished to kill her. I felt it earlier, and I feel incubus rage in you now that would very much like to attack me.”

About to tell him that wasn’t true, another surge of anger broke the surface. I didn’t like the way he was studying me from the foot of the bed, an almost predatory gleam in his eyes. It made me want to lash out at him. “So who is she?” I demanded.

“My sister.” I certainly hadn’t seen that coming. “And she is right. We are natural enemies, with an ancient hatred for one another.”

I tried to recover from the bomb he’d dropped about Kassandra being his sister, along with shaking off the antagonism I was continuing to feel toward him, but without much success.

We weren’t enemies; at least we didn’t have to be. Trouble was the anger seed of doubt already germinating inside me had other ideas.

“Hatred between us is an intrinsic component of that which makes us who we are,” Dimitri continued, “what drives us. It is survival in its most primal form.”

“But
why
do vampires and incubi hate each other?”

He gave way to agitated pacing, his lack of a shirt revealing the tensing of his shoulder and forearm muscles, his fists balled tightly at his sides. “We hunted your kind to extinction.
I
hunted them to extinction. Over a millennium ago, or so I’d believed at the time. Later, I learned that several females had managed to escape our swords and went into
hiding. Without any males to procreate with, the surviving succubi posed little threat to us. Yet here you are.”

“A living, breathing incubus.”

Dimitri stopped pacing and turned to regard me. “We feared your kind. The arcane magicks of the Incubi were legendary, and far too great to risk letting them live.” His words caused a hot tingle to skitter across my recently healed skin. I found myself instinctively assuming a crouched position, my body coiled and ready to spring into action at the least provocation.

He raised a hand in a bid for patience. “By all rights, I should have eliminated you the moment I discovered what you were.”

My entire body tensed, “Not the confidence-inspiring words I was hoping for.”

Dimitri Ravello was a striking example of male virility, and I was definitely drawn to him, but I wasn’t willing to die for another taste. “How?”

“Which would you have me address first?” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “Why I didn’t kill you or how I knew you were an incubus?”

“Let’s start with the less life-threatening question,” I told him.

“Your scent.”

“My…
scent
. Is it bad?”

“Quite the contrary,” he pointed out in that same straightforward manner. “It is a powerful aphrodisiac to those of my kind.”

“Is that what you feel around me? What you felt when you were with Francesca?”

A storm of emotions crossed his face. “Not entirely.” He was lying. “And I do not wish to discuss Francesca with you. Our relationship is a private matter and does not concern you.”

I begged to differ. The woman had appeared to me in multiple dreams over the past few months. I’d even physically been her in one of them. Not to mention the fact that we shared similar facial features and
she had once referred to me as Brother. Was this merely an allusion to our being from the same demon species, or was it perhaps more literal?

“Fine.” Given the harsh glare he was launching in my direction, I decided it was best not to press my luck—for the time being. One way or another, though, I would get my answers.

Dimitri Ravello might not want to discuss Francesca with me, but he was not above cheating in order to get a sneak peek at those test questions. I could feel him probing my mind and instinctively brought down my psychic shields around me.

We were going to have to have a nice chat about personal boundaries. That was, if a prisoner, which I technically still was, could demand such a thing from his jailor.

“At our first meeting your scent was barely perceptible,” he resumed, pretending that he wasn’t playing games. “By our last, it was unmistakable. I cannot offer an explanation as to why this was so. That my sister didn’t detect it right away must have been due to the damage to your body from the fire.”

“And my other question?”

“Why I didn’t kill you?” I nodded, playing along, but also ready to react to the slightest hint of danger. “I find I have no taste for it,” he surprised me by saying. “I swear to you, Austin, I have no intention of harming you.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“For starters, you can stay the heck out of my head.” How was that for subtle?

“It is a self-defense mechanism. Asking me to shut it off in the face of potential danger to myself would be like asking a sighted person to ignore the cliff ahead of him. It is automatic, instinctual,” he said, palms open and raised to underscore his point.

So, Dimitri Ravello thinks I’m dangerous
.

Interesting
.

Clearly I possessed this same convenient gift. “Fair enough. I’ll put a chill on the incubus stuff, as long as you promise not to go all Hannibal on my ass. Deal?”

“The great military strategist?” Dimitri nodded. “A flattering comparison. Though I’d have chosen Alexander. There was a general upon whom you would be unwise to turn your back.”

I gave an incredulous chuckle. “You say that like you knew them.” He regarded me with the faintest hint of a smile. “A total impossibility because those men lived over two thousand years ago. If you’d actually known them, it would make you—”

“Very old indeed.”

I stared back at him in continued disbelief. Then my bare ass went from a crouched position to hitting the cool, rumpled sheets on which I’d just had sex with a millennia-old vampire!

I needed a drink.

“Two thousand three hundred and sixty-one, to be precise.”

Make that the entire bottle!

Dimitri put both hands on his hips and laughed. The sound was so human, so male, and utterly devoid of any pretense or threat that all I could do was sit there on my dumbstruck ass.

Then a fragment of conversation between him and his sister filtered back to me. She’d threatened him with some supreme vampire court, to which his response had been—

“That I do not answer to the High Council.”

“No,” I corrected him, uncaring that he’d plucked the thought from my head this time. “That you are the one true vampire elder.”

All trace of his amusement vanished and he turned away from me to approach the curved bank of windows making up the far wall of the stateroom. He paused there to stare out at the darkness beyond and opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it.

Handsome, enigmatic, and seemingly me-friendly for the moment, Dimitri Ravello still posed a very real threat. His sister was the poster child for instability and hell-bent on seeing me dead. Both of us, for that matter. But watching him stand there like that, tall and commanding, it would be easy to ignore my better judgment and go to him.