Blood Sin (42 page)

“Mihaela knows. I don’t think the others are very sure what the hell’s going on. Neither am I.”

She raised her gaze from the river, turned up her face to look at him. Her eyes were clear and beautiful and heartbreakingly tragic. “I didn’t mean to do this, Saloman. I couldn’t help the love, but I didn’t mean to deepen it; I didn’t mean to understand you and care for your every thought and dream and . . .” She drew another shaky breath. “I didn’t mean any of this, whatever it is.”

He stirred, as if that would shift the pain. “Do you regret it?”

And her whole face softened into a smile that melted him. “I can’t even do that. I can’t stop and I don’t want to.”

He listened to the quick, strong beat of her heart, comparing it with the slower, steadier rhythm of his own. “Then don’t. There is no need to make black-and-white choices. You have a life, a good life that you’ve made for yourself, a home that you care for. Just make yourself another home that is always welcoming.”

A deeper gladness, of anticipation and excitement, made her eyes, her whole face, glow. “Where?” she asked.

“Wherever I am.”

She lifted her arms around his neck, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him. Her breath in his mouth was sweet, almost like the blood of life as he crushed her to him. “Saloman, Saloman,” she whispered against his lips, interspersing the words with wild, sensual kisses. “I am so far in love, it’s out of control. . . .”

“That’s the way I like you,” he said huskily, and jumped. At any moment, the sun could singe him, and it would not be hotter than the desire burning inside him now. He wanted to take her as he ran, pausing against chimney stacks and balconies to caress her wildly eager little body, to kiss her and fuck her and hear her scream with joy before he jumped to the next stable surface and did it all again. But there was no time. He had to get out of the sun. And then to bed.

Immortality. She could see the charm of it as she fell naked on his silkcovered bed. Spending eternity like this, with Saloman. The thought made her smile, welcoming him as he loomed above her, fitting his pale, hard body over hers. She was wet for him already, had been since they’d stood embracing on the bridge, and the exhilaration of the race against the sun hadn’t dampened the fire. He entered her immediately, as if he couldn’t wait another instant, and only then, as she gasped at the familiar mingling of shock and pleasure, did he pause with a groan of satisfaction.

“At last,” he whispered. “I have missed you, missed this.”

“So have I.”

The characteristic half smile formed and faded on his sensual lips before he kissed her. From instinct, she arched up into him, hugging him with her internal muscles, but still he didn’t move inside her.

“Did you know that vampires experience more intense sexual pleasure than humans?”

“I believe you mentioned it,” she said shakily, although right now, with him, she couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible.

His hand trailed down the side of her breast, then moved inward. One finger traced the dark circle around her nipple, teasing. “This is because all our physical senses are enhanced. And also because, telepathically, we can enjoy the pleasure of our partners and add it to our own. Would you like to feel my pleasure, Elizabeth?”

She stared into his profound, burning dark eyes, clouded with a fierce lust that was all the more exciting for being temporarily controlled. She swallowed. “Would it kill me?” she asked, not entirely joking.

“You have no faith,” he said, bending his mouth to the nipple his finger was teasing, “in your body’s capacity for pleasure.” As he kissed her nipple, flicking it with his sensual, wicked tongue, he continued to trace arcs around it with his fingertip, and again her internal muscles contracted around him, urging him to thrust.

“What do I do?” she whispered with difficulty.

He lifted his head. “Open your mind to mine. As if you were talking to me. I’ll let you in. And if you want to, you can allow me to feel with you.”

“Don’t you already?”

“Up to a point. I want it all.”

She gasped. “I can’t concentrate like this. . . .”

“Yes, you can. Concentrate on the pleasure.” He moved once inside her, a long, caressing stroke that sent delight coursing through her whole body.
See?

She smiled.
I see.

The sensation opened like a flower. She could feel the tightness of her own wet, velvety warmth around him, feel what it did to him.
Oh, my. Oh, God . . .

He began to move inside her, blasting her with his pleasure, which grew all the greater as he lowered his head and began to suck on her breast. She couldn’t hold back. She’d told it all, everything that mattered, so she let him see it too, her body’s abject enslavement as well as its unbearable joy in him, every spark of bliss, every wicked fantasy, because once her mind opened the box, she couldn’t close it again, and didn’t want to, because it fed her own pleasure like a rushing spring.

She saw which of her caresses affected him the most, as well as what he wanted to do to her, and it made her moan and cry out as she writhed frantically in the grip of a passion so fierce it was almost savage. But she couldn’t stop. His lust, his ecstasy rampaged through her, dragging her body in its wake, and she hung on to him, glorying in it all, straining to give even more, to absorb everything that was flung at her.

It couldn’t last at that pace, not for her, although she saw through him how it might be possible, how he made it go on and on and then began again. One day, perhaps. For now, there was only this wild, shattering orgasm spinning her violently over the precipice, dragging her with him in a writhing, straining heap. She no longer knew which pleasure was hers and which his, nor even which body belonged to whom, only that there had never been anything like this.

There was an instant when she thought she would lose consciousness, and was furious that she would miss any of this astounding experience. But as if he saw it, he let her come down slowly, withdrawing part of himself without breaking the connection entirely.

When she could see, she smiled, because he did and because she couldn’t do anything else. She imagined she could still see herself through his eyes, familiar and yet not—an oddly beautiful and exciting stranger with her hair, her eyes, beads of perspiration on her forehead, purring, satisfied passion on her sensual lips.

“Is that how you see me?” she whispered.

“Some of how I see you. You’re constantly new, constantly surprising me.”

“You need novelty. Dmitriu told me.”

“What else did Dmitriu tell you?”

She shied away from that. The connection was too close and another quarrel too far from what either of them wanted or needed. Instead, she said, “I thought you’d be angry because I stopped you from killing Dante.”

His black, sculpted eyebrows twitched. “You couldn’t have stopped me if I’d chosen to do it. For the rest, we are different. You insist on illogically preserving deeply flawed and dangerous humans. I drink blood to exist.”

He rolled suddenly onto his back, and she moved her legs to straddle him.

“But then again, we are not so different,” he said softly.

“What do you mean?” She thought of the fight in Travis’s club, of the one in the castle tunnel, the reluctant yet undeniable joy of battle that was so shamefully close to the vampire love of killing, and realized finally that she could live with that too.

The smile in Saloman’s eyes, hovering on his lips, was wicked, and so exciting that despite the unprecedented bliss he’d just given her, desire surged once more.

“I mean I’ve seen some of your fantasies,” he said huskily. “And I’m hungry.”

Her breath caught as he moved suggestively inside her. Then, without warning, he sat up and shifted across the bed to stand with her still held in his arms. He didn’t break eye contact as he walked across the room with her. Then she realized a leather armchair was traveling toward them, and her lips parted in shock.

The chair stopped in front of a mahogany chest of drawers with a large, ornately framed mirror above it. Saloman shifted the position of her leg and sat down in the chair with her in his lap, so that they both faced the mirror. Nudging her hair out of the way, he touched the vein at the side of her neck.

The brief, almost forgotten fantasy sprang back into her mind. She’d wondered how sexy it would be to watch him as he drank from her. Moisture flooded from between her legs, soaking him as he moved lethargically inside her.

“It was a wicked thought,” she whispered, twisting to look into his face rather than the mirror. “I was lonely.”

“No excuses. Watch and enjoy. As I will.”

He bent his head and his hair brushed her naked shoulder, spreading down her arm. His lips touched her skin, his tongue flickered over her vein, and she tensed, waiting for the pain. But he coaxed her, caressing her throat with his silken tongue, distracting her with his hands on her breasts, moving inside her. Only when she relaxed against him, lost again in the blinding desire, did he pierce her skin.

She cried out. Her closed eyes flew open and as he began to suck her blood, she watched the ecstasy replace the agony in her mirrored face. With a moan of bliss, she moved on him, relishing the rhythmic flow of her blood into his hungry mouth, and watched avidly to catch every movement of his lips on her skin. God, it was ultrasexy and wicked and weirdly, almost frighteningly beautiful to watch this being draw her lifeblood into himself while making love to her. It was like an endless cycle of life and pleasure, and when his eyelids lifted to meet her gaze in the mirror, she came in a long, drawn-out cry of bliss.

Still, she couldn’t look away, saw his teeth detach from her bleeding skin and his tongue lick the wounds. When he lifted his head to kiss her mouth, the skin was already healing and she could taste her blood on his lips.

“Where is the evil in that?” he whispered. “There is only joy and life.”

Curled into his shoulder with his arms around her, the silk sheets cool against her hot, sated body, she was almost asleep when her eyes sprang back open.

Dmitriu was wrong.

He hadn’t offered her immortality.

The knowledge sliced through her haze of happiness like a knife. It didn’t change anything. He still lay at her side, her lover, her companion. And she lay in his arms, like many who’d passed through his life before her. Like Tsigana.

No more than Tsigana.

Selfish, treacherous Tsigana, who might have been dazzled by him, might even have loved him in her own way, despite her faithlessness, but who had certainly tried to use him for her own ends. Tsigana, unworthy of immortality.

“Just like me,” she whispered.

He moved, turning to see her face, which she hid in his shoulder, though she couldn’t cover the wetness seeping from her eyes into his skin.

It didn’t matter. She could no more become a vampire than she could kill herself or him. She’d already acknowledged that, and it remained the truth. But only now, when she realized the offer would never come, did she understand how much it meant to her to be asked. To be more to him than Tsigana.

For this moment, this night, Elizabeth, I love you
, he’d said. Just this moment. Just this night, and a few more.

He said, “There is no one like you.”

Slowly, she took her face away from his shoulder, ignoring her tears that he wiped with his fingertips, and stared at him.

He was right. There
was
no one like her. Somehow, she’d gotten uniquely under his skin. It crept upon her, not quite like a blinding light on the road to Damascus, but a revelation all the same. Whatever she was to him, or wasn’t, he wanted her as his companion, for however many nights and days there were for them. Because of that, she had the opportunity to do something for the world. What that might be was very hazy and might even be very distant, but that was all right too. She had time.

And he was worth fighting for, this wonderful, mysterious, unpredictable being. However long or however difficult the struggle might be, she
could
make him hers in the end, as she was his.

Epilogue

D
ante sat slumped in his hotel room’s uncomfortable chair, watching the sun come up on a new day. From his window, he could still see the castle, the scene of his final defeat. His gambit for immortality had failed spectacularly, and with it, he knew, had gone his valuable position as Grand Master of the American Order of Vampire Hunters.

In an agony of loss and fury, Dante plucked at his shirt, pulling it loose from his neck. The bloodstain in the shape of Saloman’s hand caught his eye, the symbol of everything that had gone wrong with his life. Saloman had crushed him and taken the sword in which he’d placed all his spurious, stupid hopes. The meaningless, pointless sword that turned out to have only sentimental value to the most powerful vampire of all time.

Because it was given to me by my cousin Luk, whom I later killed.