Macho Sluts (45 page)

Now it was her turn to be laughed at. After all her casual conversation about other people's blood, it was horrid to feel her own turn to cold sludge, stop running through her veins, then freeze solid, liable to break like glass and cut her to pieces inside if she moved.

Well, but … Iduna had been in some very dangerous places, and she always spoke to the people she met there. Otherwise, life would turn into an ordeal instead of an adventure. Now, she spoke as if to her lover, which of course is the most dangerous audience of all.

“Wouldn't you like to know how I figured it out?” The question was a caress. She made herself wait for the curt, reluctant nod before she continued. “To begin with, there is your name. It means ‘son of the dark one'.” She paused for that to sink in, then said politely, “You have not asked, but my name is Iduna. In ancient Norse mythology, Iduna guarded the golden apples of immortality.” ‘But in our case, my love, the apples are the brightest, truest red imaginable,' she thought, but did not say.

Kerry twitched. But Iduna felt like being a little ruthless. It was rude, forcing someone to make their own introduction. “You have trouble remembering your age and birthday. You've told some people you're twenty-two and other people you're thirty-five. There are certain historic periods you are very fond of, and when you speak about them, you occasionally lapse into the first person and the present tense. You speak several languages; however, none of them (with the exception of your American English) is contemporary. I am enough of a linguist to recognize nineteenth-century French when I hear it, and your German is full of colloquialisms from the 1930s. You say you were born here, but there is no birth certificate on file for you in any of the five boroughs of New York City.” In the process of investigating Kerry, Iduna had figured out how to dummy up this basic I.D. for herself. ‘You need some help,' she thought. ‘It's dangerous to fall behind the times.'

“You are photophobic. You don't even like the brightly lit area of the bar where all the other S&M dominants stand and model. You wait for your prey in shadows. You have an unusual strength, you are preternaturally quick, and you have an ability to see in the dark and hear things no one else can hear. Your sense of smell is also very keen. I've traced some of your employment, and much of it is at places where you can handle blood or blood products. All of these jobs have been abruptly terminated for mysterious reasons, and you have not had one for quite some time. You not have sex, ever, with anyone that I've been able to locate and, given your reputation, I would imagine that someone who had come close enough to even lie about it would have claimed they had made love to you by now.”

Kerry shuddered delicately. “Sex with a victim,” she said with great distaste, “is out of the question.”

Iduna ignored this aside. “All of this could simply mean you are an adventurer, a liar, a psychopath, a soldier of fortune, or a celibate, amateur hematologist, but I don't think any of these explanations are logical. So many of the stories about … your people are idle fantasy or vicious gossip motivated by religious bigotry, but I know enough not to expect you to run away from crosses. Your kind is far older than Christianity. You love garlic, and you have a perfectly good reflection in a mirror. But I don't need evidence as crude as that to recognize you for what you are. You are a predator, and human beings are your natural prey. Humans like to believe that they are the ultimate predators, at the top of the food chain. They sleep secure in the belief that nobody stalks them. It is only their deep need for this illusion that keeps people from recognizing you, running away from you, and screaming their fool heads off.”

A grin matched the skull on Kerry's cap. “Ah, but people do run from me, screaming.”

“When you are partially unveiled, yes. During the epiphany, then they scream and escape if they can.”

“But you have not screamed. Or tried to run. You came after me, Iduna.”

Her own name spoken in Kerry's cold voice made her shiver. “Perhaps it's because, despite all my circumstantial evidence, I'm still not sure just who or what you are. And there is only one way for me to be sure, isn't there?” She put her hands to her bodice and touched the ruby skull. “This dress has a built-in corset, a very old-fashioned one, of a seventeenth-century pattern,” she said. “The jacket covers the laces so most people don't notice. It has a busk in the front. That was the earliest form of stay, you know. Only my busk is rather special.” From between her breasts she pulled a very slim blade. The grinning jewel was its pommel.

Before it was fully exposed, Kerry had a knife in her hand, poised for use. Iduna ignored this, put the thin steel between her teeth, and removed her black jacket. The long sleeves were quite tight, and she had to turn the damn thing inside out to get it off.

“Have you ever noticed my veins? Probably not. You haven't been watching me the way I've been watching you, and anyway, I don't expose a lot of skin in the clubs. I like to show cleavage and nothing else, not even my forearms or my calves.” Kerry was staring at her décolletage. Iduna knew that her breasts were very prominent and was always amused by men and women who were so attracted to them that they talked to her tits rather than to her face. It was appropriate, in a way, because breasts were symbolic of nurturing. ‘But the nourishment I provide,' she thought, ‘is not milk, but a different humor.'

She continued her pedantic, distracting speech. “My skin is very pale, almost transparent. It looks fragile, but I heal very quickly. My veins are close to the surface, easy to get to. See how thick and blue they are? I never have any trouble giving blood. The needle just pops right in, and out it spurts. Easy as sin.”

She was picking at her wrist with the point of the blade, then caressing the inside of her elbow. “All it would take is a little more pressure, and we'd have a fountain here. A scarlet fountain, pouring onto the dirty ground, completely wasted, unless … unless someone had a use for it. Unless someone caught it in their mouth before it hit the ground. Caught it and drank it, took life from it, rolled it around their tongue and palate and described the vintage to me, swallowed and swallowed as if they would never get enough. Look, my pulse is beating right here.”

The arm was held out steady, not shaking. A glinting edge pressed against old scars along the vein, hard enough to make an indentation but not to break the skin. The sight made Kerry's leather-clad hips jerk, just once, but Iduna saw it and was immediately excited. How interesting, to see a reflexive response there, in the crotch, instead of just the jaws and hands. What possibilities it opened up … but the words the leatherwoman spoke next shattered her erotic fantasies.

“You will bleed to death if you cut yourself there, that way,” said she. It might have been a report on the temperature and time of day.

“Don't you want it? Need it? Wouldn't you like to smell it, falling through the air? The wind is behind me. It would bring the scent to you at once, fresh and abundant.”

The other shook her head. “No.”

“No?”

“No. Why are you surprised? Even if this mad story you've concocted is true, you yourself said I've already gone without it for months.”

Iduna made the mistake of arguing. “Then the need must be intense right now. You must be hungry. I don't think you'll die without blood, but it must make you feel a little sick to be deprived. A little less powerful than usual, a little less energetic. Distracted. Frustrated. Off.”

Iduna had never had someone pay so much attention to her with such a look of utter indifference on their face. She had not anticipated this much resistance. This was even more difficult than locating her quarry in the first place. Clearly, the offer of her wrist was not enough. Perhaps scars annoyed them. She thought they had a heat-seeking sense, like rattlesnakes. She imagined that scars would be like cold streaks in the hot aura that radiated through the skin, making the marked person less appealing than someone with a smooth body. Perhaps this one was just fastidious about unzipping an old scar, thought of it as drinking from a glass someone else had already used.

She probed again, looking for the weak spot, the turning point, the breaking point. “Do you prefer men, is that it? Is it because women are weaker, smaller, and too quickly drained? But then, I've never heard of you leaving anyone bloodless and dead. So why should it matter? I know most of you don't need as much blood as the stories say you do. Too many of those legends are about stupid and greedy ones, the ones so unrelentingly selfish they got caught. Or the ones who unfortunately can't live on anything other than human blood. Why are you denying yourself this much pleasure?” She dared to allow compassion to creep into her voice. “You must have had to develop an enormous amount of self-control and get awfully good at living in a constant state of deprivation. Is that why you stopped going after James, to prove that you could do without it if you had to? But it's not necessary now. I want you to have me.”

The stony face of the other said, “Don't try to cozen me. In a thousand years, you could never understand what I am, where I have been, what living has done to me.”

Iduna despaired. Her head drooped, and Kerry almost felt sorry for her. Then inspiration struck. “Or could it be that you would rather drink your life from a woman, hold her in your arms, slit her throat with your teeth, then eagerly gulp down what wells up around your mouth—yet you refuse to let yourself have me because you would enjoy it too much and then want it and need it again? Are you afraid you would lose control if you got what you really want?”

There was no change in the other's fighting stance and icy expression. The air between them simply became busier, hummed like a high-voltage wire, stank of ozone, seemed to turn an even darker shade of midnight blue.

Now or never. It was the moment that would decide the outcome of the hunt. Iduna stared into Kerry's eyes, covered with the reflecting aviators, and used the tiny portrait in them to guide her hand while she made two slashes at the place where her breasts came together, a little ‘v' that fit into her cleavage. The blood immediately started to rill, and she cupped her hands under her breasts to help her corset push them close enough together to gather it and keep it in a pool.

She knew that she was as beautiful then as she ever would be— her head tossed back, her mass of curly, blonde hair being rearranged by a breeze, her white throat, shoulders, and breasts exposed, and the red color of the thread of blood just barely distinguishable from the ebony of her dress in the darkness.

She thought for a moment that her adversary had disappeared, because she suddenly was not where she had been. But then muscular hands dug into her back, claws bent and held her. There was a tongue lapping between her breasts, but what was there was quickly consumed, and there were sharp teeth biting, and warm, soft, strong lips pressing around them, sucking. The pain disappeared as soon as her blood mingled with the fluids in the other's mouth. Of course there's no pain while they're feeding, she thought sleepily. It's their adaptive trait, evolutionarily speaking … The hands moved to her breasts and began to knead them, like nursing kittens, and she writhed from the sudden pleasure it brought her. Apparently she moved too much, because one of the hands left her breast and took her by the hair. Steel fingers kept her bent back in a perfect bow, the bleeding part of her uppermost, taut, an available feast.

She could smell her own blood. It was sickening and yet very satisfying, familiar, comforting. The scent of fresh blood was nicer than menstrual fluid, though it was always pleasant to bleed. The body over her moved convulsively, paying heed only to what it was drawing in from her, taking care only that she would not escape until she had given satisfaction, satiation, quieted all hunger. She was painfully aware of her heart beating in her left bosom, and realized that was the breast that the brutal hand kept milking and bruising, as if to keep the heart pumping, as if to squeeze its contents directly into the waiting mouth full of razors.

Iduna slipped on the gravel, and immediately the hand left her breast and a strong arm was wedged between her legs, the hand clasping the small of the back, holding her the way a mother holds an infant. She realized by the mushy feel of her panties against Kerry's leather sleeve that she was wet down there, as wet as the mouth that fed on her. Her assailant realized it too, because she ripped at her panties, literally clawed them to pieces, and then she was being crammed full, opened terribly, spread far too wide, almost lifted off her feet by the force of the fucking, and it hurt so much for so long that she came, came even as the canines sank another notch into her cuts and drank fresh blood from the deepened wound. Which penetration made her come? She did not know.

Then she was being picked up, cradled. Adults are usually not lucky enough to re-experience this infantile pleasure. Even she had not guessed just how strong Kerry really was. A face was close to hers, familiar for its wolfish features, unfamiliar for its look of peace. The teeth in that smile were stained, and the tongue was cupped. The mouth came toward hers, and she opened her mouth, and the tongue slid into her and fed her a mouthful of her own blood. They kissed around it, neither one swallowing, keeping the blood between them to taste, play with, and savor for as long as possible, until their mouths were so full of saliva they had to swallow or let it run down their chins. Then Kerry bent down and took more, and offered it to her again, and this time Iduna leaped for it, bit at it, then worried the mouth that spit blood into hers. Now there were words being spoken in between the kisses, words that said, “Be careful. Are you really sure you want some of
my
blood?”

Iduna almost wept with gladness. So there was love here, or at least need—a need to keep her available for another feeding. It is only when they become indifferent or vengeful that the undead make their victims like themselves, immortal predators and thus useless and untouchable. When passion returned, she was careful not to bite the other's lips or tongue.