Personal Demon (12 page)

He paused, hovering with his weight on his arms. Her thighs were wrapped around his hips, steadying him. No one had every asked him how he perceived sex before. He grinned down at her.

“Green right now,” he said. “Summer grass in hot sunlight.”

It was November, and he was a long time from feeling the sun, but right now, Ivy was a summer day.

“Mmmmm…nice…” She squirmed and lifted her hips against him. Her fingers curled around the base of his cock, then cupped his balls. “Green is good,” she added as he gasped with pleasure.

He thrust into her again, resuming the rhythm broken by her unexpected words. All his perception flew into the colors of primal sensation. He was soaked in grass green, surrounded by her green velvet body. When electric green fire exploded through him and around him, she came with him, adding a blending burst of burning turquoise to their shared orgasm.

“Green,” he said as his spent body dropped heavily onto hers. She made a sound that was half grunt, half laugh. Her skin sparkled with sweat and satisfaction. He kissed her
forehead, her nose; his lips lingered against her soft, sexy mouth. “Next time we’ll try for red.”

“Purple would be nice,” she said.

He shook his head. “Too much melodrama involved in purple.”

“Vampires
never
do melodrama,” she agreed.

“Never.” He bit her nipple, but not hard enough to break the sensitive skin. He looked up to meet Ivy’s gaze as he began to suckle the hardening bud.
But we can add enough excitement to liven up a girl’s night.

Ivy’s laugh was low and dirty. Her hand pressed his head to her breast. Her breath caught as she said, “Go ahead, then. Prove it. Again.”

C
hristopher lay on his side, head propped on one arm, his fingers slowly circling one of Ivy’s fine, round breasts. “Perfect size,” he said. “I reckon they’d fit into a champagne glass.”

“Why would I want my boob in a champagne glass? Some sort of Lady Gaga costume?”

He almost reluctantly lifted his worshipful gaze from her perfect bosom to her pert and pretty face. He was rewarded by the puzzlement in her eyes. “Something you don’t know? Lovely.”

Her puzzlement cleared on a crystal tinkle of memory. She had such a bright mind. “I remember now. Weren’t champagne glasses designed to look like Madame du Barry’s breasts?”

He rested his hand on her stomach. She was curved in all the right places, but the girl was a hard body. Vampire hunters had to work out a lot, he supposed.

“Wasn’t it Madame Pompadour’s breasts?” he asked.

“No. I think it was du Barry, or some other mistress of Louis XV. Pompadour was far too classy to flash her boobs at a glassblower.”

He showed that he was still a man of Victorian sensibilities. “How much of a lady does a king’s mistress need to be?”

“I say she was a lady.”

“She was no better than she ought to be.”

Ivy gave an offended sniff. “She was a grand, intelligent noblewoman, more or less virtuous. I ought to know, I was Pompadour in a former life.”

It was Christopher’s turn to be puzzled. “You don’t look your age.”

“Neither do you. What is your age anyway?”

“A lot older than you. What do you mean
you
were old Louis’s mistress? Trying to make me jealous?”

Ivy blushed a bit, and explained, “I’ve done some past-life regressions—guided self-hypnosis stuff to remember reincarnations. My aunt teaches classes like that to—”

He watched curiously as she chose her next word carefully. Her first choice was
gajo
, but she settled on a more politically correct option.

“—civilians.”

“Dabblers in the occult,” he offered. “Seekers of esoteric truth?”

“Yeah, them. Anyway, I’ve tried reincarnation regressions a time or two. I imagined I was Pompadour of all people in a past life. I never thought I’d have been a famous French aristocrat. But that’s what floated up out of my subconscious.”

“You don’t really believe in reincarnation, do you?”

She shrugged.

He liked the way it made her bare breasts sway. Lovely nipples. He wanted to bite them—in the right way, without
restraint instead of teasing nips that drew no blood. He wanted to bite her in all sorts of places, needle-sharp fangs branding her, bringing blood and pleasure. She’d be a happy pincushion when he was—

Christopher forced his attention back to the conversation. Something about the past-life-memories nonsense they were spouting tickled his senses, told him to let it flow, there was something there.

“I think reincarnation is certainly a possibility,” Ivy said. “But was I Madame de Pompadour? I seriously doubt it. I’ve absorbed a lot of information from history books and movies and LARPs to trust any
memory
from a hypnosis session.”

“Not to mention what you might have picked up from wandering around in other people’s dreams.”

I
vy tensed and rolled away from the pleasant questing of Christopher’s hands. She sat up on the opposite side of the bed from him, her back to him. Back turned to a vampire, how stupid was that? “I don’t dream walk,” she said. “I can’t do that.”

“Some mortals can. Surely you know about astral projection.”

“Never tried it.”

“Controlled dreaming.”

“Heard about it. Never tried it.”

She looked over her shoulder at him. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed. One of his bony knees touched the base of her spine. There was something too cozy and comfortable in that simple touch.

“Remote sensing?” he asked.

Ivy shook her head. “What’s that?”

He flashed that wide grin at her. “Could there be something I know about that you don’t?”

“You are an ancient and learned strigoi lord,” she intoned.

“Not that ancient. Not a lord.”

“But what are you? Who are you?”

He nudged her with a knee. “Naughty girl, sleeping with a stranger.” He reached for her, pulled her onto his naked lap. She squirmed against his hardening penis.

“What’s remote sensing?” she asked.

He turned her to face him. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Her moving got a groan out of him. “More sex, less talking, woman.”

She put her hand around the base of his cock, ran her thumb delicately up and down. “Well?”

“Just astral projection, but governments call secret espionage programs using it remote sensing.”

“More green, less talk.”

She guided him inside her, rocked back and forth. Goddess, but he filled her so perfectly!

“No biting,” she said, when he pulled her tighter against him.

“Don’t you want to be a vampire?” Christopher whispered in her ear. He teased her earlobe with his lips.

She didn’t want him to know the truth.

“No,” she answered.

She leaned backwards onto the mattress, and he went with her.

Ivy went to sleep after they had sex. It was just as well, as Christopher didn’t want to drag her along on his own vampire-hunting expedition. There was no doubt that the mortal girl knew far more about the city’s magical inhabitants than he did, and he’d drain every drop of that information from her. But she needed her rest right now.

Besides, he wasn’t going to carry out his assignment under the eyes of any mortal—even one he was probably keeping as his own. Or he might yet kill her if she proved too troublesome, too duplicitous.

He watched her as he put his clothes on. He saw her breath as a satin cloud, her scent was stormy music—something by Saint-Saëns, perhaps. No,
Night on Bald Mountain
by Mussorgsky. What an odd way to sense a perky Midwestern American girl, but his brain didn’t work right, did it?

He allowed his freakish nature to roam over her in the few minutes it took him to get ready. In over a century as a strigoi, he’d learned ways to pull his synesthesia back, make it a minor part of the more important psychic senses so necessary for hunting. Normally, the freak senses only added a bit of spice. Sometimes they told him the truth, but only in such an encoded, subconscious way that it was too much work to try to figure out. A light would go off months after an event, and he’d think,
Oh, that’s what that meant.
Useless.

Ivy brought these senses out full force. If that kept up, he was going to have to kill her. An Enforcer couldn’t afford any weakness. Especially not if his Council masters’ suspicions proved correct.

From what he’d learned from Ivy about psychic mortals trying to take their fates into their own hands, he feared that the world was on the brink of disaster.

He was glad he’d tracked Ivy down that first night in Chicago, but it was time he went about his mission a bit more straightforwardly.

He needed to go alone but was reluctant to leave her when she was anything but safe in her own home. She was being stalked, threatened, and there was magic involved. But she was the one after vampires; he didn’t sense a vampire was the one seeking her.

He went to the living-room window and checked the street
outside the apartment building. It only took him a moment to register the impatient smoldering fire smoking in the being of someone in one of the autos parked outside.

Christopher grinned. Then went back to the bedroom to fasten Ivy’s wrist to the decorative iron headboard before leaving the apartment.

W
ould you prefer me to use a bolt cutter or pick the lock?”

Ivy woke to her cousin Selena’s sarcasm, and the realization that she had a whole lot of stupid behavior to answer for. She started to sit up, but her left arm was numb from being held above her head.

“Son of a bitch!”

She was handcuffed again.

Hence, Selena’s comment about locks and bolt cutters.

Ivy looked up at her cousin from her totally humiliating sprawled, naked-on-the-wrinkled-sheets, she’d-obviously-been-fucking position. “Please tell me you ripped his heart out,” she said.

“I waited until he left, then came in to make sure you were okay.” Selena leaned closer to Ivy. She gave her a visual lookover. “Did he bite you anywhere I don’t want to have a look at?”

Her police-officer cousin might as well have asked Ivy if she needed a rape kit. The humiliation burned, even while Ivy was grateful for her concern.

“He’d have spit out the blood and run screaming for the door,” she reminded Selena.

And likely killed her, too, in his rage and shame.

Selena pulled the sheet up around Ivy’s chest. The fall of the soft cloth on her sensitized skin sent an erotic rush through Ivy. What had that strigoi done to her? She tried not to smile like a contented wanton—what a lovely old-fashioned word—at the sensation.

“I don’t like the look of those bruises on your shoulders,” Selena said. “Does anything feel broken?”

The question brought Ivy back to earth. She was suddenly aware of sore hips and aching thighs. “Not that I intend to tell you about.”

A faint blush stained Selena’s pale, freckled cheeks. Ivy had to smile at embarrassing this tough homicide detective who’d seen it all. And certainly done quite a bit of it herself. Family was different, Ivy supposed. And the knowledge that little innocent cousin Ivy had been having vampire sex—well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Ivy certainly didn’t want to know details of Selena’s relationship with her vampire lover. And what about Aunt Cate and Lawrence? Oh, no, sweet aunties didn’t do that sort of thing, and it was beyond the pale to think about it if they did.

“Move over,” Selena said. “Let’s get you out of this bondage gear.”

She sat down beside Ivy and opened a case of picklocks. Not standard-issue police equipment, this gear. Members of their Traveler familia were taught interesting skills and were presented with useful hardware as they grew up. It wasn’t all memorizing grimoires, practicing magical rituals, and learning about herbs for their education.

“Why’d he leave you trussed up?” Selena asked.

Ivy looked away, and said, very softly, “He says I belong to him.”

“Poor bastard. Wait until you bring him home to meet the family.”

“Not happening. He’s English, by the way. Lawrence says that there are no English vampires, so I don’t know who or what he really is. Except he carries a pair of handcuffs.”

“Maybe he’s a cop.”

“Maybe a killer,” Ivy said. She was reluctant to speak the words, as if she owed some loyalty to Christopher. Her real loyalty had to be to the psychic members of the human race. “Of course, he’s a killer. You don’t get to be a vampire without killing someone. Oh, my Goddess!”

Ivy sat up straight with a sudden shock of realization. Her heart pounded hard at the grim possibility. The sheet fell down around her waist. Her bruised shoulder protested when she snatched the covering back over her bare breasts.

Selena finished unfastening the cuff and stood up. She looked thoughtfully at Ivy, the narrow-eyed, hardbitten cop all of a sudden. “I think I know what idea just occurred to you. There’s a strange vampire in town. He arrives at the same time a couple of people from our community have been murdered. The last stage in turning a mortal into a vampire involves a ritual murder by the companion to be turned using black magic, with the assistance of a vampire. There aren’t any companions in the local nests ready to be turned. If there were, the Enforcer of the City would have picked out some scumbag human in need of killing and overseen the ritual himself, and he would probably ask my advice about who got picked as vampire baby food.”

Three strikes and you’re vamp fodder was the Chicago way. Other Enforcers in other cities might not be so civic-minded about who got taken off the streets for use in Changes
and Hunts as Ariel of Chicago. But he and Selena had worked out a compromise acceptable for his people and hers. Nobody died who didn’t deserve to.

“Ariel wouldn’t allow a psychic mortal’s life to be wasted on making a baby vampire,” Ivy said. “If the Enforcer of the City picked the sacrifice, there wouldn’t be any media coverage of disappearances, no evidence left to find, such as a hand found by local cops. But maybe that isn’t how they do it where the foreign vampire comes from.”