The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires (30 page)

My breath came in a ragged gasp as he loosened his hold and skimmed the length of my throat with his mouth. The scrape of fangs against skin sent a frisson of fear up my spine. The arm behind him tensed to strike. Instead of sinking those teeth into my throat, he caressed it with his tongue.

I stilled, every cell of my being focused on that small patch of skin. He ran that smooth feline tongue along the strained tendons of my neck. His fingers slithered down my rib cage to cup my rear, grinding his hard length against me. He nuzzled his nose against my cheek, purring softly, whispering kisses along my jaw. The stake clattered to the cement floor.

Snagging my right hand, he pressed the fingertips into his cool mouth, sucking the reddened digits lightly, drawing them in. Ripples of pressure, zipping straight to my dampening core, had me clinging to his shoulders. I ground against him, riding out the burning, delightful pressure. Purring, he pulled me closer, nipping my bottom lip. It felt like he was consuming me from the inside, pulling everything I was into his mouth, accepting me as no one ever had.

I freed him from his jeans, running my fingers carefully under his length. He ripped my shirt over my head, turning us toward the potting table.

I whined in protest when he set me on my feet. He tugged my jeans down my thighs, then pulled my leg over his hip and thrust forward, balancing my ass on
the edge of the table. Seedlings hit the floor. I vaguely registered the sound of terra-cotta breaking. Lips curling back into a wicked smile, he rolled his hips, teasing me, rubbing just at the edge but not thrusting home. Whacking the back of my head against the table, I matched his movements, seeking some sort of friction as he slowly inched his way inside me.

His faded shirt gave way under my hands. Dropping the rags to the floor, I dragged my fingernails over his rippling skin. He thrust inside me, and I screamed out. My legs scrambled against his ass, trying to hold on under his thrusts. The rough table bit into my back as it slammed into the wall.

He bent his head, taking my bloodied fingertips between his lips. He looked up at me, eyes boring deep into mine as he licked and sucked at the digits. My orgasm burst through me like a thunderclap, loud, deep, and fierce.

Chuckling darkly, he crawled up my body, running his nose between my breasts, to my throat. The slip of fangs into skin was so quick I barely felt it. I sighed, sinking against the table as his movements sped up with each draw at my skin. I felt limber and happy as Cal shouted out his release and slumped against me. His mouth stayed latched at my throat, taking deep pulls of blood long after the last tremor.

“Cal,” I whispered, nudging at his shoulder.

He growled, clasping my jaw in his palm while he drank from me. My blood ran in a warm line down my chest, soaking into my bra. This was different from the
drainer at Cal’s house. Cal wasn’t hurting me, but he was taking too much. My hands were cold and becoming too weak to push him away.

“Cal!” I yelled in his ear. He didn’t even flinch. I was using the “wake up Gigi on Monday morning” tone, and he was still snacking on my neck like it was a Baptist potluck. My hand fumbled along the table, finding a heavy terra-cotta pot. Using all of the strength left in my arms, I raised it over my head and brought it crashing down on him. He raised his head, his lips red and wet. His mouth drew into a frown before his eyes rolled back and he collapsed on top of me.

I slumped under his weight, unable to summon the strength to sit up. His knees gave way, and he sagged to the floor, pants around his ankles.

“Oh …” I groaned, hissing at the various pains as I sat up. “He is
not
going to be happy about that.”

—

I cleaned up the best I could, using some Wet Wipes in my backpack to erase the evidence of Cal’s nearly draining me dry. By the time he woke up, pants still around his ankles, I’d dressed, rehydrated, and taken samples and pictures of everything I could find. And I’d discovered that whoever designed this outbuilding clearly did not have escape of accidental prisoners in mind. There was no way out of the place, except for the door, which I wasn’t strong enough to yank open and Cal wasn’t able to touch.

This was like one of those
Saw
movies … only a little sexier.

Cal stirred at my feet, groaning softly.

“What happened?” he grumbled as I helped him sit up. He tilted my head gently to examine my bite mark and winced. “The last thing I remember is kissing you …”

“I’m OK.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, checking me over for other wounds. “I remember wanting your blood so badly. Then I got just the smallest taste of it. But I was able to pull myself out of it. I remembered it was you. I could hear your voice, smell your skin. And that seemed so much more important than being angry or hungry.”

“Actually, other than the whole ‘mortal peril’ thing, it wasn’t that bad.” I sighed. He pulled his shirt over my head and covered my blood-soaked bra. “I’m OK.”

“I—”

“Don’t,” I told him, tapping my finger against his lips. “Just get us out of here. I need some juice and a cookie.”

“Blood-donor jokes are not appropriate right now.” He growled.

“It’s my blood loss, and I will joke about it any way I please,” I said, slumping against the wall as Cal tried the door again.

Several failed experiments later, we discovered not only that the handle made it very difficult for Cal to open but also that there was something holding the lock in place from the outside. Cal rolled up the leg of his jeans and ripped a black canvas holster away from his leg. He unsheathed what seemed to be a short bronzish sword, broad and flat, shaped a bit like an oak leaf. It was the
perfect length to wear against his calf, just less than two feet. It looked worn, old, but cared for. It shone in the dim light as he tapped it against the door, looking for a weak point in the lock mechanism.

“What—what the hell is that?” I spluttered.

“It’s my sword.”

“I can see it’s a sword. But how long have you had it?”

“When I tell you these things, they tend to send you on conversational tangents.”

“Cal.”

“A long time,” he admitted. “I carried it into battle as a human. It’s not as impressive as some of the other specimens I’ve collected over the years, but it’s the one I’m most comfortable with.”

“Are you telling me that all this time, you’ve been walking around with a
sword
strapped to your leg?” I yelled.

“I never leave home without it,” he said.

“How do you get through airport security?”

He grinned, shoving the blade through the mechanism holding the door shut and twisting it viciously. The innards of the lock tinkled to the cement pad like broken toys. He wrapped his shirt around the handle and yanked the door open.

Cal burst out of the building in full vamp mode, expecting whoever had shut us inside to be waiting for us. But the clearing was empty, quiet, oddly removed from the blood scene inside the shed.

I took deep lungfuls of the clean, cool air, feeling suddenly dizzy. I’d come very close to dying. Again. It was a
habit I seemed to have picked up since meeting Cal. And the idea that I could have been killed in some bizarre vampire sex accident scared me. The idea that I could have left Gigi alone, to fend for herself, scared me. But none of these things scared me nearly as much as the fact that some dark, perverse side of my nature was screaming at me to drag Cal back into the shed and do it all over again.

I was going to need serious therapy if I survived this.

I looked up to find that Cal was watching my every move and expression, as if he expected me to burst into hysterics at any moment. I wasn’t 100 percent sure that he was off base with that. I reached into my backpack and pulled out a pack of Skittles. I needed blood sugar, and I needed it quick.

“You feeling OK?” I asked, deflecting.

“Oddly enough, yes,” he said, stretching his arms over his head. “I feel energized, better than I have in weeks.”

Now would not be the time to mention that the energy most likely came from snacking on live, human me. Instead, I chewed my fruity candy, slumped against his bare chest, and leaned my head against his collarbone.

“Good.” I sighed as he lifted me. “You can carry me home.”

If you choose to let your vampire guest feed from you, keep a heavy silver object handy. Also, remember to take vitamin and iron supplements.

—
The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

I
managed to get back to the house before collapsing completely. Cal propped me up on the couch, forcing as much orange juice into my system as possible and covering me with a soft blue fleece blanket. He tried to make me some toast but nearly set my kitchen on fire. So I settled for valerian tea and lemon drops.

I was going to need serious therapy
and
a new toaster.

As far as we could tell, whoever was running the grow operation had returned to the site and seen us rooting around in the shed. But their decision to eliminate the problem “naturally” by dosing Cal with pollen from the fangwort plants left us with even more questions. Did they know what we were looking for? Did they know that one of us was a vampire, or had they just assumed and hoped for the best? Did they know that they’d dosed Cal, specifically? I guessed that they probably didn’t. If
so, I said, they probably would have stuck around to see the job finished.

Cal seemed to find that insulting.

I hadn’t quite processed the whole thing. I was tired and weak and really wanted the “mortal peril” business to stop. I had wanted Cal, wanted him desperately. But that sort of encounter was very different for me. It didn’t feel wrong, but the idea that I had that sort of passion in me, that sort of violence, scared me.

There was no reason for fangwort to have this effect on vampires. I couldn’t find any chemical or physiological reason for the plant to make Cal all bloodthirsty. I found that frustrating to the point of throwing one of Jane’s books across the room. Unfortunately, Cal was in the way at the time and took my books away for the rest of the night.

He also said, for the safety of his cranium, that I should just chalk the strange vampire reactions up to “general mystical forces” for now.

Another irritating mystery was Cal’s ability to pull back from bloodlust and settle for plain old lust. From what we’d read, the vampires affected by the poisonings were so overwhelmed by thirst that they tore their victims apart indiscriminately, even if those people were close friends or lovers. And if I tried to ask him about it, he found creative ways to leave the room.

It was doubly upsetting to Cal, knowing that a vampire of his age had lost control so quickly and that the substance was capable of affecting vampires in airborne
form. He’d been lost, he said, to the call of my blood, even though he knew it was wrong and he didn’t want to hurt me. The possibility of it being used as some sort of aerosol weapon against vampires, and therefore the humans around them, seriously concerned him. But considering Cal’s ability to “pull himself out” of his bloodthirsty state, we assumed that the inhaled pollen was less potent than the ingested version. That made sense, as much as any of this made sense. A vampire’s digestive system was a bit more active than his respiratory system.

Once I’d convinced Cal that tearing through the Council offices like a wrecking ball, searching for the person who’d locked us in, wasn’t a good idea, he finally settled down enough to sit still and drink a bottle of clean donor blood. Cal had worked too hard to get the answers he needed to risk exposure through a bloody, destructive tantrum. Besides, if anyone was going to have the stakey hissy fit all over Mr. Evil Pollen, it was me. The courts were more lenient regarding human-on-vampire violence. I could get away with it.

I was afraid that Cal would distance himself from me, either because I was pushing him or because he was afraid he’d hurt me. But rather than shutting down and shutting me out, Cal seemed afraid to let me out of his sight. From the moment I walked through the door, Cal was with me. He helped Gigi cook before I arrived home, to make sure I would eat. When I got into the shower, he joined me and scrubbed my back.

It felt like home. It felt like having a family. It felt … a little claustrophobic.

OK, the shower thing I didn’t mind so much.

But when he tried getting up before sunset so he could “have dinner” with us, I blew up.

“What is going on with you? What if we didn’t happen to have the kitchen blinds closed? Is this because you’re trying to make up for the, uh—” I looked toward Gigi, who was applying herself to her last-minute math homework with too much earnestness to be genuine. “The incident? I told you, I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”

Cal put his reading aside and cast a sidelong glance at my sister. “Gigi, would you mind going into the office and getting a file marked ‘Blue Moon Financials’?” he asked.

“I know when I’m being sent out of the room, you know,” she said, frowning into her salad.

“Good, then you know I’m doing it to avoid being rude to you, which is a mark of respect,” he countered.