Red Grow the Roses (20 page)

‘Amanda …' His voice was a whisper. He bit his own lip. The ache in his voice persuaded me to meet his gaze. ‘Would you …?'

No completion to that question. No words for what he wanted. Just his glance tentatively indicating his cock. My eyes widened as I understood, my heart kicking against my breastbone. In 27 years he'd never asked this of me, and I'd never seen him ask or permit it of any woman. It wasn't even thinkable.

‘Reynauld?'

He swallowed. ‘Please.'

Slowly, without answering, I slid to my knees, pulling the damp towel under them for padding. My mouth brushed his flat stomach, the damp hollow of his navel, the thickening flare of his treasure-trail of hair. I licked my lips and his cock jerked. A big, blunt glans, glistening with pre-cum already. Slowly, savouring the thickness and heat of his meat, I took him in my mouth and sucked.

It was 26 years since I'd given head. Vampires … Oh, God, for vampires there is no suggestion of submission or pleasure-giving in the act of going down. Just the opposite. The mouth is a weapon, the feeder dominant, the fellated a blood-sacrifice. They might accept it from another of their own kind: they would never submit to a mere human. What I was doing to Reynauld was, in vampire terms, grossly perverted and utterly shameful.

He groaned, a stifled desperate noise, and ran his fingers through my hair.

Get this: there I was on my knees, my lips wrapped about his cock, serving him with my mouth – all so very much what I wanted – and as far as he was concerned he was the one yielding, I was the one in control. And maybe in a way he was right. I swept my tongue in sweet circles over the head of his cock, penetrating the tiny mouth of his glans with the very tip, tasting his seeping eagerness. Then I changed, made my mouth all soft and accommodating as I engulfed him as deep as I could, swallowing him to the back of my throat. Reynauld pressed the root of his cock, angling it all the better for me to take, bracing his legs wider. His length was excessive for my mouth and his girth enough to stretch my jaw, but I slid up and down on that big cock and he responded to every change in pressure, every swirl of my tongue, every little slurp, as if I were plucking notes from his soul. For me it was extraordinary: for once I was calling the shots, I was in charge of the pace, I could give or deny. I felt like a goddess, encompassing this creature of night and dread, but at the same time I was a worshipper, most willing of slaves, his cock my idol on which I would pour out my life.

Why? Why did he want this?

He didn't thrust, not once. The more I sucked the more he pressed himself into that corner, his braced thighs stiff with strain, tiny trembles vibrating through his flesh. I couldn't see his face from this angle but something told me he had his head back, his throat stretched taut. His balls were so tight now; those big overcharged balls that were an unending source of semen and venery, full of seed that would never live, brimming and taut and ready to pump his sticky cream into any pussy or any ass. Or into my mouth: he began to come, taking me by surprise.

‘Amanda!' he gasped.

I pulled back a little, holding him on my tongue so that he could see, if he were looking, the gush of his spunk. That didn't last: I had to grab him and swallow as fast as I could because it was filling my mouth and spilling from my lips. The taste of him exploded in my head, wild and tangy and sweet. And cold. God – so cold. Spasm after spasm, his cock jumping against my tongue, until he'd emptied his balls down my throat and I was still sucking, still wanting more, wanting it never to end. Like a vampire.

Reynauld's legs gave way quite suddenly; he slid down the marble, stared at me wildly, then pulled me into his embrace. I thought he was going to bite me – and bite me hard – as I lay up against him, but he didn't. He just held me, stroking my hair, both of us huddled there on the floor of the shower like fools. Was it comfort he needed of me? I started to cry a little, out of shock I think; out of a sort of joyful terror. He held on to me the way a child alone in the dark clings to a soft toy, and I could only wonder.

(Reynauld)

And this is Reynauld, the Good Shepherd, whose authority over the other five is held by dint of careful planning and the minute application of brute force when necessary. He's not the oldest of them, because that distinction belongs to Roisin, but he's hardly young even by vampire standards. His name is French but he isn't, although should he choose to speak the language his grasp of it is perfect, and – just as in English – he has an aristocratic accent. He speaks Spanish too and Portuguese – Old World style, not American – as well as Arabic, Farsi, Old Syriac, Italian, Latin and Greek, all with equal fluency, along with many others on a less familiar basis. He always did have a facility with languages. He was 34 years old and a translator and scribe in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad when he died, in the year 218 after Hijra, which was the year AD 833 in the Roman reckoning. Both calendars were ones he was quite familiar with, being a man of sublime education.

His name then was not Reynauld, of course; it was Kerim ibn Zarad al-Razi, but he abandoned his Arabic name when he gave up his religion. There is no place in Islam for vampires, whose very sustenance is
harram
: forbidden. The Faithful cannot drink blood. Yet, brought up in that world, he misses the strictures of faith. In 1907 he took up a bare-bones Buddhism and now meditation is as much a part of his nightly routine as feeding. Right speech; right action; right livelihood; right effort; right mindfulness; right meditation; right understanding; right resolve. The spiritual discipline appeals to him, as does its practicality: he carries no theological baggage along the Eightfold Path, no particular hope of reincarnation or redemption.

He adopted a Greek name first, and others after that as he moved about from land to land. There have been so many names now that he hardly remembers them. ‘Reynauld' came quite late on, when he posed as a French Huguenot immigrant in the sixteenth century. He has done well for himself in this, the latest of his adopted homes. His investments have been wise, his habit of building alliances among the living a key to his success. He is a broker in political games, seeking not power but stability and prosperity. Being in every way physically superior to the masses of the living, he sees it as his duty to care for them. He is benign, paternal and restrained in his dealings.

As Naylor says, if Reynauld were a farmer he would insist on keeping his livestock free-range, organic and in the most humane conditions possible. He would even give some of them names.

You'll have to be very, very lucky to meet Reynauld. To attract his attention, you'll have to move in the right circles, go the right parties, make your face known where he – or, more likely, those he entrusts with choosing for him – will find you. It's not that he's a snob about the social calibre of his paramours, but that he simply has no time to absent himself from the echelons of power. Even eternal life is not time enough.

So this is Reynauld's style of feeding: he lies in a bespoke handcrafted bed on an ocean of satin sheets, and there are six women with him. He likes to feel himself surrounded by feminine bodies, accommodating and delighted; to smother himself in soft curves, in warm flesh whose capillaries thrill with life. It's the giggles of pleasure that he appreciates, the soft appreciative moans as he takes a tender nibble, the tangle of smooth limbs which seems to have neither beginning or end, the wriggling press of bodies that seems ultimately to be not many individuals but one all-encompassing Female. He works vigorously at giving her satisfaction; he's not a lazy lover despite being hopelessly outnumbered. So his hard, dark body is in constant active motion in the middle of all that feminine flesh, his cock plunging into pussy after pussy.

The women often play together too, either from genuine desire or from the assumption that it will arouse him as it does other men. And it does arouse him, very much. In particular, watching living humans sucking at one another makes his cock harden and his balls clench. Provoked and rampant he will mount and ride them all, in turn.

You must understand that the women are all there voluntarily, in full knowledge of what he requires, and that not one of them will go away in the morning sexually unsatisfied, and that they are probably not the same ones who will grace his bed tomorrow. Reynauld does not have to hunt: there are more than enough women who are only too eager to follow up on the rumours of this wealthy, handsome man who's kinky for group sex and drinks a little blood, never more than a few mouthfuls from each of his paramours in a night, and in return is the most exquisite, prodigious lover. Most of them are young and every one of them is beautiful. Those that show unhealthy attitudes – too addicted to the bites, too clingy, too jealous – are coolly and firmly deposed from his favoured circle. It's easy enough to fill the gap with another model, another talented actress, another rising TV personality. Thus he keeps a list of select and discreet bedfellows on call, the cream of the City, and treats them with courtesy and generosity.

Not one of them is permitted any delusions of emotional intimacy.

You'll never find a man in that emperor-sized bed. Reynauld has no aversion to feeding from men, but he will not tolerate another cock among his hens. Ben calls them his harem, which Reynauld finds mildly offensive. But it's better than ‘pets'.

Yet for all his authority and his confidence in the way he has chosen for his kin, Reynauld lives with a creeping fear. It looks him in the face every dawn, when he surges gasping from sleep like a man struggling from deep water. He does sleep now, whereas in the past he never needed to. He is growing older: not weakening, but drifting inexorably to the shadows. For decades he has struggled to remain conscious during daylight hours, even for as little as a few minutes, but these days he knows the battle is lost. As the sun rises he slides into a blackness so complete that even physical damage can't wake him, so he must be sure to be somewhere safe when the dawn strikes. ‘Safe', in the old days, used to mean a shuttered room. These days it is a basement beneath The Bonding, behind a steel security door that would shame most bank vaults, with a lock that depends on fingerprint recognition and a manual seven-digit backup key known only to himself and Amanda. He trusts no one but her, and mistrusts his peers outright. If they knew how constrained he was it would make him terribly vulnerable.

For the first time he is beginning to feel anxious about the others.

Inside the vault is an airtight steel box with heavy bolts on the inside of the lid. It is, he recognises sourly, a sarcophagus in all but name. Reynauld despises the gothic accoutrements of the vampire condition. He doesn't even like the word ‘vampire', so redolent of Technicolor B-movie kitsch – medieval/Victorian wenches in 70s makeup and cheesecake heroes strutting through faux Romanian villages – and he uses other synonyms instead, but practicality has led him to this pass: he must be safe while he rests. Worse still, he has found that he can no longer pass out painlessly upon even the softest of mattresses within. He must have newly-dug earth beneath him to make the transition bearable; something about the scent, he admits, is soothing. Again, no one but Amanda knows. She's the one in charge of ordering in bags of topsoil along with The Bonding's other supplies.

His worst nightmare is coming to pass: he is turning into something less than human, instead of more. Reynauld is following the same path that Roisin treads before him, and he dreads it. He will become in time as she is now: a thing of shadow and nightmare, an insubstantial haunting without true form or individuality. It is inevitable. And Reynauld, who has fought more than any other vampire to retain his humanity, rails with all his heart against this. He who has had so many names and homes now makes sure to hoard mementoes of each one. He takes out his souvenirs when he is alone – a broken cup, a lace handkerchief, a calling card, a hundred different pieces of inconsequential tat – and turns them over in his hands, reliving the memories, making sure that they are still strong.

He'd died in the spring, when the mountain crocuses were just opening …

He'd been sent out from the House of Wisdom to find a book. Such journeys were far from uncommon because the Caliph had ordered that a copy of every book of human knowledge, in whatsoever language it was written, be brought to the House and copied there into Arabic, to make the building an unequalled treasury of the understanding of man. Agents of the House were dispatched, so often as news came to them of a particularly valuable tome, as far as Constantinople and Alexandria and Ethiopia to make purchases. Kerim, as he had been called then, had been translating a torn scroll when he'd come across a reference to a heathen astronomer – a woman, to his surprise – who had been buried with her books in the Zagros Mountains to the east, many years ago. He'd made application to be allowed to search out these volumes, and had set out from Baghdad with an entourage of two trained warriors and three servants; they aimed to travel fast and provoke as little notice as possible.

High in the Zagros they'd found the little village indicated in the fragment, and heard that the cliff face at the head of the valley was known as Umm Hol, which had excited Kerim greatly because that was the name of the dead astronomer herself, or perhaps her title, since it meant Mother of Terror. They'd made their way to the cliff face and there, high over the valley floor, had spotted a slit-shaped opening in the bare rock that seemed to have been backfilled with rubble. Faint carvings suggested an inscription below that opening, but they were weathered beyond legibility. Constructing ladders of ropes pinned to the rock-face and working in turns, they'd unloaded the rock infill into the stream bed below, working quickly because the villagers had turned hostile and often came to throw stones at them. By the end of the first day they'd got inside the cave chiselled into the cliff, and in the middle of that night they'd uncovered a stone sarcophagus cut from the rock itself. It had taken three men to slide back the slab that covered it, and then Kerim had bent over to see what had been hidden beneath for untold years.