Lust Bites (19 page)

Merle wakes up on a blanket on the floor and get stiffly to her feet. Her mother is stirring in the chair. Her father is still unconscious in the bed, ashen and sheened with sweat.

'I should go,' she says to her mother – thinking of the file and how she wants to get back to the castle and study it.

'Won't you stay for breakfast?'

'I'd better not. I'm only allowed to be away twenty-four hours. And you know Cole'll be trying to find any loophole he can not to give me the antidote at the end of this.'

'OK,' says her mother, smiling ruefully. 'Take some money from my handbag though. Buy yourself something nice to eat on the way.'

The castle door is answered by a welcoming party of Kristina and Oberon. Merle looks from one creepy smiling face to another. 'Where's Darius?'

Kristina shakes her head. 'Not sure. Like I told you before, he's a busy man.'

Merle feels her heart flip over. There's something disturbing about the way the two of them are looking at her. 'He can't expect me to ... Not you two again. Not after
you
tried to kill me–' she points accusingly at Kristina, then turns to Oberon '– and you tried to, God, I don't even know what you tried to do but it was damn creepy.'

Oberon runs his tongue over his top lip.

She swallows hard, taking a step backwards, further into the sunshine. 'You can't come out here, can you?'

'Out there? Into the daylight? No, Merle, we can't,' Kristina says nastily, 'but you have to come in here, I believe, or the terms of your deal with Darius are broken.'

'What are you going to do with me? When I come in, I mean.'

Kristina smiles. 'What Darius told us to do, of course. Take you back to the dungeon, lock you up, give you some food ...'

'The dungeon, not my room?'

'Do you know, I don't believe he was specific about that. He did say I was to lock you in though ...' Kristina's smiling face turns hard as stone.

The smallest of mercies is that Merle has been spared the manacles this time.

Neither Oberon or Kristina has done anything in particular to
disturb
her (as her mother would say) but she still feels uneasy. Feels that at any moment Oberon might appear with another twisted bargain.

She doesn't have the file she took from Cobalt. Oberon grabbed the bag from her as she stepped over the threshold. The fact it had been taken from her only made her more desperate to discover its contents.

The next day Kristina comes in with the food instead of shoving it through the hatch in the door. She seems quite chatty. More like her usual self. Merle decides to ask her something that she was brooding about the day before. Being back in the dungeon had made her remember.

'Back when I was first brought down here, Darius came down a couple of times and one of those times he said something about this being about me. About how he could leave them alone, meaning my parents, but he could never leave me alone. What do you think he meant by that?' As she's speaking she thinks of Kristina greeting her at the castle door that first evening. I
know who you are, dear.

Kristina shrugs. 'That just sounds like Darius being Darius to me. Anyway, I don't think I'm really meant to talk to you about that kind of thing.' And she taps her forehead and winks.

'What's that supposed to mean? Darius is in your head. He's using his psych-powers to spy on us?'

'Great,' says Kristina. 'Now you've said that he knows we know. Hi, Darius,' she says. 'Merle, say hi to Darius.'

Merle actually finds herself waving a hand and mouthing 'Hi,' before she stops herself. 'So,' she says to Kristina. 'He does know I'm here then? Locked in the dungeon.'

'Yeah,' says Kristina. 'In fact, I'm meant to move you back to your room right now. It seems there was a misunderstanding about that.'

Merle's starting to lose track of time. When she first arrived, counting off the days to 25 had been so important, but now she's starting to drift.

She dreams of Darius again. He's lying next to her on the bed, twirling a razor blade through his fingers and smiling.

When she jolts awake she feels sure someone has been in the room again. And the bedroom door is open.

She pulls on her jeans over her nightshirt and slips out into the silent castle. Thinking she can hear sounds on the stairs, she creeps down into the entrance hall to find one of the doors leading off it standing ajar.

She finds herself in an enormous library. There are books on every vast wall – floor to ceiling and yet more in a gallery above. On a table in the middle of the room a single candle burns.

Next to the candle is the file she took from Cobalt.

She rushes over and opens it. Far too eager to take the file back upstairs, she begins to read it right there.

The first sheaf of papers deals with things she already knows. Background. The story so far. The rise of Darius Cole and Righteous Power. How Cobalt was formed with vampire money to attack the problem with human advantages.

But the next file is very different. It contains minutes of every Cobalt meeting to discuss Darius Cole, detailing the essential problem that Cole was so good at psychic and psychological manipulation that it was dangerous to even be in a room with him. His capture might be relatively simple, but his interrogation appeared impossible. After some searching, Cobalt discovered his vulnerability. Darius Cole had a lover. A human lover. A woman called Magdalena Wright. Magdalena was traced and captured by Cobalt. Darius Cole was told the price of her life was simple. His total surrender.

The next set of minutes is supplemented by a full transcript of Cole's subsequent interrogation. Threatening him with Magdalena's torture, Cobalt forced Cole to reveal the location of his army. The paper gave long and detailed descriptions of the tortures they threatened. How Magdalena's increasingly grisly potential fates were outlined to Cole. It wasn't clear whether any of these were actually carried out or whether Magdalena was even present during Cole's interrogation.

Cole had tried to resist them, claiming to betray his entire army to save one life was wrong. Even the life of his lover. But they promised him his soldiers would die clean and sweet if he co-operated – staked in their sleep. If he didn't Magdalena would suffer for as long as they could make it last.

And then Cole – finally broken – had showed them the locations on the map.

Merle puts down the piece of paper she's reading. She's crying and she senses him behind her. Darius presses his lips to her earlobe and kisses her. She turns around slowly in his arms. He reaches up and touches the place above her cheekbone that is a little damp from her tears. 'Are those for me?' he says.

'Yes.'

'You don't need to cry for me, Merle,' he whispers. 'Not now. Not if you'll come to my bed.'

He leads her back up the stairs. Up past the first floor, along the second floor corridor, past his office and into the very last room. His
bedroom.

She stops in the doorway. The room is very similar to her own. The ceiling is a little lower, the decor is dove-grey instead of turquoise. The froufrou is rather more under control. But it has a similar layout with a large table set in the tightly curtained bay window and a huge four poster bed. She stares at the bed. At Darius standing right by it.

Not if you'll come to my bed.

'It's OK, Merle,' he says softly. 'You can come in. Nothing will happen to you if you cross my threshold. Nothing bad.'

She holds his eyes. They always looked black before, but now, in the candlelight they seem to be very deep brown. She walks into the room.

Darius says, 'Merle, I am really sorry I haven't been around all that much while you've been here. I don't want you to think it's that I didn't want to be with you. I did. So very much. But I held myself back. I didn't want to rush things.'

'What things?'

'These things.' He crosses the room to her, takes her face in his hands and touches his lips to hers.

The kiss that follows is even slower than before. Tender and reverent. He uses his tongue to edge her mouth open little by little. She finds her head full of strange images. He's in her mind. She's thinking of him opening her mouth like a flower. And she knows that this isn't really about her mouth at all. The way he is using his tongue and his lips and his teeth to caress and coax her wider and wider open for him is purely a demonstration of a skill that he wants to use on other parts of her body.

When he pulls back from the slow kiss to look at her, she says, 'You really don't like to rush things, do you?' And that comment is enough for her to feel herself colouring.

He's still holding her face. He moans when he sees her start to blush and moves in to lick her warm cheek. He does that very slowly too. Tracing his cool tongue against her flesh. Making lazy swirls.

'But we can't have sex, can we?' she says softly.

He stops moving his tongue on her face and pulls back. 'What? Don't you want to?'

'You can't, though, can you? You can't ... with a human.' She feels her face get even hotter. 'How did you, though, with Magdalena? How could you have had a human lover? How can we ...? Why did you bring me here if we can't?'

He silences her with a single finger to her lips. 'Merle, please, stop. Of course I lay with Magdalena. We were lovers. I gave her pleasure. Giving human women pleasure is a pleasure in itself. I asked you here because I would like very much to give you pleasure, Merle. I feel I have asked so much of you already. And you have borne it all so well.'

She nods her head. He twists her around in his arms, and guides her across the room to the bed. The sheets smell like him, a scent that is exciting and familiar. He climbs on top of her, positions himself astride her waist and pulls off his shirt.

As she had thought before, his upper body isn't as slight as his slender physique suggests. There is a power in his body. His skin is very pale. But his paleness seems unearthly and exotic. Not a disturbing pastiness of skin that has not seen sun for too long, but a shimmering silveriness that suggests something fantastical. There's just a little dark hair in the upper part of his chest, tapering away to a thin line which disappears into his waistband. She finds her eyes following the little trail, her breath hitching when she looks down at Darius's groin.

He moves over her – the muscles in his arms flexing a little as they take his weight – and ducks into another kiss. His mouth moves faster this time, more strongly. Penetrating. Again making her think of other things.

Did you think he meant to desecrate you?

But she is beyond listening to Oberon's voice in her head. She's in bed with her most delicious nightmare. She struggles out of her T-shirt and bra and Darius's head moves to her small breasts. His sharp teeth graze over them, tweaking and teasing until she can see nothing but sparkling lights behind her tight-squeezed eyes.

He moves further down her body. His slender fingers are on her jeans, unfastening, whisking them away. His mouth is cool, almost cold between her legs, sweeping fizzing sensation into every last sensitive fold.

She bucks in his hands. Her head rolls against the pillows. As he works on her she come achingly close to orgasm time and again, gasping as Darius whisks each potential climax away with a stilling of his tongue. She wonders for a second how he's able to taunt and tantalise her so precisely. Hold her on her rising edge with such precise skill.

Because I'm here with you.

His mind reading doesn't feel like a violation so much as another level of intimacy. Darius moves then, comes up to kiss her. He presses his mouth to hers and she tastes the sweet-stickiness that clings to his stubbled skin. She reaches down to tries to get his fly undone, but she finds herself fumbling. One of his hands takes over, flipping the buttons open while he holds himself over her, supported by one taut arm and a kiss.

When he moves inside her the feel of his cool smoothness sends her spinning, spiralling into overload. She barely feels, barely registers what is happening, even before the walls of her consciousness comes crashing down and she loses herself to the feel of him.

A few small moments of recovery later, she is limp against the pillows. More sated than she thinks she has ever been. Darius is lying beside her.

'Did you feel it too?' she says softly.

'The edges. It is hard to stay in your mind when the sensations are that strong. Perhaps with practice.' He reaches over and places his hand on the flat part of her chest, just below her collar bone. 'All of this part of you flushes when you come. Did you know that? As well as your face.' It's when he says that, with a thickness and a hitch to his voice that she realises – though her haze of satiety – that Darius is still tense. Tight with arousal and desire

'Darius. Do you need ...? What do you need?' Deep inside her a traitorous voice says another vampire is what he needs.

'Blood. You.' Darius swallows visibly. 'Will you bleed for me?'

'What? Me?'

'You can say no, of course. Your free choice. Always. But will you? Or, at least, will you consider it? I don't have to bite you. I have some razor blades. I can cut you or you can cut yourself. I don't want to drink, just taste you. Just the tiniest drop would ...' He stops talking – he's panting heavily – and looks away.

She looks at him. He's still so aroused, clearly frustrated by it. His hips are rocking slightly. His cock is still hard between his thighs. 'Do you need to? Um, do you
need
the blood, I mean?'

Darius nods. 'To finish? Yes, I do. Just a drop on my tongue, Merle.'

'I really can't do that.'

Darius inhales. 'OK. I understand. I know what you were brought up to think of me.'

'It's not that. It ... I can't let a vampire drink from me. It was bad enough that Kristina tried to ... You can't release any other way?'

Darius shakes his head. His voice is sharp, almost sulky, 'No.'

'What do you normally do?'

'You know. Blood Rites. With Kristina. Or Oberon if she's being really pissy with me.'

'Right, so do you need to go and see Kristina now?'

'What I'd most like to do is to taste you. But if I can't have that then Kristina ... I won't if you don't want me to. But it would be nice not to have to sleep like this.' He looks down at his jutting erection.

'But if it were me. If I did let you use my blood, that would still work? The same as Kristina? She told me it had to be another vampire.'

'Well, they do say that. The vampires. The
other
vampires. Maybe it is true for them. I really don't know. But I know I can be aroused to completion with human blood. I would very much like to prove that to you.'

She looks at him. Naked and hard and so beautiful. Half an hour ago she wouldn't have thought she would be able to refuse him anything. But this? This is ... 'Darius, I ...'

'You
can
say no,' Darius says again.

She holds his gaze. 'No,' she says. 'I can't do that. It's too strange.'
Too vampire.
'I'm sorry.'

He nods. 'That's fine. It's OK.'

She bites her lip. 'I think you should go to Kristina now.'

He moves to slip off the bed. Then pauses. 'Would you like to watch me with her? See how it works. It might help you understand.'

Her imagination pulses. Darius in ecstasy. The thought of watching his face as he scales that peak and comes achingly close, his face contorting with need and greed. The thought of hearing him cry out in that shattering moment. Of watching every last one of his barriers come down.

She wants to see that. She wants to give him that. And to do that she has to bleed for him.

She watches him go to Kristina.