The Beloved, page 19
Until now, feeding had been an inconvenient need that Nalla had serviced in herself with awkward embarrassment or by using the same synthetic stuff Nate had no doubt been taking.
But there was no substitute for the real thing.
Riding up the muscles that fanned out from his spine, she found the nape of his neck, her short nails digging in. The locking-on juiced him further, and he repositioned the seal of his mouth, drawing even harder.
She hadn’t realized how dead she was until she felt this… alive.
And she wanted more.
Retracting her clawed hand, she pushed her arm between them, feeling the hard planes of his abdominals—before going lower still. The waistband of his leathers was a rough barricade that contrasted with the smooth skin under his belly button, and flattening her palm, she went even farther down—
The purr that rumbled through him was almost a growl, and it made her bold. Finding the hard length of his arousal, she stroked him over his leathers and imagined him inside her, filling her… coming as he sucked her blood and swallowed her down deep into his gut. And Nate was right with her. His hips helped her, pumping against her palm, and as the movement got faster with a tighter range, she knew if she kept this up he was going to orgasm.
She wanted that. Even if it wasn’t inside of her. She wanted to know what his face looked like, she wanted the power of giving him the release, she wanted him… to feel good. Because she now knew why he stayed away from people. Why he was covered with tattoos. Why he thought now wasn’t the time.
He suffered underneath the hard face he showed the world.
So yes, she wanted him to feel something else when he was with her—it seemed like the fairest exchange, considering he made her feel something else, too.
As Nate released his lips, she felt the quick rasp of his tongue sealing the puncture wounds. “You gotta stop—”
“Doing what?” She squeezed his length, and as he groaned and jerked against her, she drawled, “This?”
“I’m going to come—”
“Good, because I need to watch you.” As he lifted his head, his glossy eyes were surprised, and she nodded. “Let me see you. Right now.”
With a curse of submission, he flopped over onto his back and arched his spine, his spectacular tattooed torso carving into the duvet, pillows dropping to the floor as he pushed one arm up to grip the iron bars of the headboard.
“Take my pants down,” he grunted. “These are the only ones I have to fight in.”
Rising up on her knees, Nalla straddled his thighs and went to work on the button fly. She didn’t watch what she was doing. She focused on him, the way his other arm went over his head, how his calloused hands held on, what happened as his pecs flexed and the veins popped under his skin…
How those black-and-white tattoos changed shape as his hips twisted and turned with impatience.
The full design only became visible with him as he was now, and she stilled her hands on his fly as she took it in. In the center of his chest was a skull, and snakes, vines, and tendrils that looked like clouds flowed out of the eye sockets and mouth to all over his body, even the palms of his hands and under his arms… even the wedge of skin she revealed as she unbuttoned the top of his fly.
It was artwork that was alive, the design shaded so that it popped out like a 3D hologram, the execution that of an absolute expert.
His heavy lidded eyes focused on her. “What?”
“Your tattoo is… beautiful.” She put her palm on his six-pack, and swept it up over the skull. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Sure, there were other skulls, and a vine was a vine, and clouds were clouds. It was the whole thing, the way it seemed to cover all his skin, that was so arresting. Plus how many hours had it taken?
Is his… erection tattooed? she wondered.
Well, that was something to figure out firsthand, wasn’t it. Getting back to work, she continued with those metal disks, slipping them free of their stitch-finished holes, until—
His erection exploded out at her, long, thick, and hard, extending up his lower abdomen. Dear Lord, he’d even inked his… shaft and head: A single vine wound its way up the arousal, rooted by the others that spooled out from his pelvis.
“It’s not original,” he said in a low, groggy voice.
“What?” she whispered as her eyes memorized what his sex looked like.
“I didn’t care about the design.”
“It’s beautiful… it must have taken hundreds of hours.”
“A human did it.” His words were guttural syllables. “I agreed to be a clean canvas, they agreed to use my special ink. Salt makes everything stick, doesn’t it.”
Tracing one of the vines on his hip across his belly, she liked the way his muscles beneath her touch flickered, as if they were trying to touch her back through the containment of his skin.
She paused just before she got to his swollen head, her eyes seeking his. “You don’t show this to people very often, do you.”
“At all. I’ve only ever fucked with my clothes on.”
Keeping her surprise to herself, she murmured, “Lucky me there was a fire tonight.”
With that, Nalla gripped his shaft, wrapping a hold on it—and his powerful body arched off the mattress. As his head kicked back, his lips peeled off his fangs, the dagger points bright white against the pink of his mouth and tongue.
The idea that his canines had been in her vein made her feel like having her own release. But she didn’t want to stop even if it was to get out of her own clothes or find an orgasm herself. Somewhere deep inside, she knew that what was happening between them was a fleeting thing, his self-protection only letting her in for this brief moment.
“Come for me,” she said as she started to stroke him.
As if he’d been waiting for permission, Nate instantly orgasmed, and with the first ejaculation, he pulled so hard on those wrought iron bars that he bent the headboard forward.
“Nallaaaaaaaaaaaa—”
“More,” she commanded him. “Give me… more.”
The animal sounds he made deep in his throat were something he tried to keep a lid on, and good idea on that. The bedroom wasn’t insulated for that kind of noise. What a cheat, though. She wanted to hear him loud and clear, hear her name again, hear all the moans. But she made do with what she got because there was also a perverse pleasure in witnessing him try to control himself.
And Nate’s tattooed body was so magnificent, from the sheer size of it, with his thicker bones and muscles, to the veins that were like ropes under his smooth skin. Sure she was a physically strong female, and he was right, she was good in a fight. But the power in him fascinated her, especially as he kicked out a knee and nearly punctured the mattress as he drove his heel into it.
Kneeling over his sex, she kept going, stroking him up and down, feeling the hot jets that came out of him slick things up, watching the ink in his skin undulate under the gloss until it looked like the tattoo was growing in size, the ivy twining, the snakes spooling, the clouds coming in like a weather front, all emanating from the skull at his sternum that was not evil, not fierce or horrific… but a memento mori that all living things die.
Or should.
And as that occurred to her, he stilled, the last of the pulses leaving his arousal and landing on his stomach.
His lids, which had been squeezed tight, lifted and he focused on her.
Taking her hand from him, Nalla put her fingers to her lips. Extending her tongue, she licked up the lengths, then slipped them into her mouth. With slow, easy penetrations, she mimicked what she knew he wanted to do with her sex, what she wanted him to do with it—
Another hoarse sound of need rippled out of him.
She glanced down at his erection. The swollen length kicked of its own volition—and she discovered that the more she fucked her own mouth, the more he came again. Without realizing what she was doing, she rocked her hips against his thigh, the one that wasn’t out to the side, the seam of the pants she had on hitting her just right—
“Nate…” she groaned as she let her head fall back.
Her orgasm slammed into her, tackling her so hard, she had to throw out her free hand and catch herself to keep from falling on him—
In a rush, Nate sat up on his hips, righted her easily, and replaced her fingers with his tongue as he kissed her deep and hard. With a rough hand, he yanked out the tie in her hair, and the dull pain sharpened her pleasure, especially as he grabbed a fistful of the tangling waves.
More orgasms were had.
Before the stillness finally came back.
Their faces were so close together, she saw each of his lashes and the flecks of dark blue in his eyes and the beard growth that was coming in on his jaw. For no good reason, she wondered what he looked like shaving as he stood in front of his own reflection, at a bathroom sink. Or maybe he did it in the shower, without a mirror, his practice-made-perfect such that he didn’t require guidance, but knew all the angles of his face, his head?
For a moment, she lied to herself and imagined these intimate details were the promise of their future, things to discover and cherish, tendrils to entangle them in the best of ways because they were private secrets only a partner knew, vulnerability witnessed and shared as personal habits were performed.
Like his orgasms, she wanted them all—
Knock-knock-knock.
“Hey, Nalla,” came a familiar female voice. “I am about to make cookies. Would you like to help?”
With a jerk, Nalla looked to the door. She hadn’t locked it.
“Um, hi, Rahvyn,” she said roughly. “Gimme a minute and I’ll come right down.”
There was a pause. “Are you okay? You sound… odd.”
Flushing, she tried to stay cool. In spite of the fact that she had a very naked male all up close and personal. “I’m fine, just fine, yup. Two secs.”
“Great, I will get everything out.”
Nalla bugged her eyes and went to look at Nate—
Her silly expression instantly faded. Her lover was staring at the panels of the door like he’d seen a ghost.
Or maybe someone he couldn’t forget.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It went in through here.”
At the induction site downtown, Zsadist pounded on a steel vault door as he spoke. He’d called in his location as soon as the lesser had gotten in the elevator, and Phury and Xcor had come right over. But it had been too late by the time he’d blown the basement’s fire exit in the far corner.
All he’d gotten was a quick look at the scrawny slayer and a name. Evan.
“The fucker entered something on the keypad,” Z continued over the dim ringing of the elevator’s my-door-is-open! alarm, “and sprung this vault. I got a quick view of the tunnel on the far side. Smart move using steel so we can’t dematerialize in or out of it.”
“You called V, yes?” his twin asked. “Maybe he can spring the lock electronically.”
“Yeah, he’s coming as soon as he can. I told him it was a numerical thing, but I don’t know enough to give him any more information than that.”
Z glanced around the basement again, not that anything had changed in the last five minutes. The place looked like it had been ridden hard and put up wet, all the bucking fuckets—
Fucking buckets, that was.
“I need a vacation,” he muttered as he went over and checked out one of the Home Depot drywall specials.
The thing was filled with the oily black blood that coursed through Lash’s veins, and Z had a feeling it was because the slayers threw up after they were turned. Always buckets at the induction scenes. There were also smudges of the nasty shit all over the floor, and articles of stained clothing lying around like dead soldiers on a nuclear battlefield.
Phury nodded to the stairwell that had been blown open. “I think we need to relocate until reinforcements come. This site is beyond not secure. For all we know, the slayer wasn’t leaving, but going for backup, and we’re about to get ambushed.”
For a split second, Z saw his twin properly, in the way he always did when there might be a threat coming, a final snapshot in case something went badly: Phury was standing under one of the ceiling lights, and with his long, multi-colored hair pulled back in a tie and all that black leather, the similarities between the two of them were even more clear—and as the center of Z’s chest got tight, the shot of fear was a reminder that having his blooded brother by his side in the field was always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, because they were twins, there was no one better to fight with. They had a sixth sense on what to do and when with each other, and that coordination, whether there were weapons involved or it was a hand-to-hand combat ground game, was deadly.
Really handy when you’d infiltrated one of Lash’s lairs, tipped your hand to your presence by chasing off a lesser, and were rolling the dice on maybe becoming the target of a coordinated attack.
But their closeness was also a weakness. The flip side to their connection was that he and his twin were not objective when it came to each other. Not only did they have families of their own to return to, but because of their history? There was an enmeshment that didn’t promote the kind of objectivity required by war.
“Well, I think we should stay,” Z said. “Butch and Rhage are up on the street, monitoring the entrance, and more of us are on their way.”
Except Phury was right, the street access wasn’t the real problem. If the slayers pulled a reverse Uno and swarmed through the tunnel seal with their Ken-doll-looking evil master?
“Has Lash never heard of a mop,” Xcor announced as he drew his shitkicker through the ooze on the floor.
The stocky Band of Bastards leader lifted his foot and glared at the tread on his boot, his distorted upper lip curling off his canines.
“I don’t think that male’s worried about any Yelp reviews,” Phury tossed back. “The intel was right, though. This is a lesser factory—”
The scent of Turkish tobacco preceded the arrival of the resident computer genius, and as V bottomed out at the lower level through the busted fire door, the brother took a last inhale and flicked the butt off to the side like the whole building was his ashtray.
“Gentlemen,” he said as he came forward. “What we got.”
“You tell us,” Z said as he went back over and Vanna White’d the vault door. “And fair warning, we might have company soon.”
“When do we not, true? And could someone turn off that fucking elevator alarm?”
There was a ringing pop! as a bullet was discharged into the Otis. Then Xcor glanced over his shoulder and lowered his gun. “Fixed it for you.”
“I love you, man. I mean”—V put his gloved hand over the black daggers strapped to his chest—“I really love you.”
With that out of the way, the brother went to the keypad and took out a black box the size of his hand. As he hovered whatever the hell the device was over the square of numbers, Zsadist palmed up both his guns—and Phury and Xcor did the same, the three of them establishing a guard perimeter around Vishous while he worked. The good news: In this corner, there were no ceiling lights, no doubt to conceal the tunnel entrance, so there was a little coverage here—assuming those stairs all the way across the induction scene were the only other way down to the basement.
Assuming a flood of slayers didn’t flush out of the vault door.
“Goddamn it.” Vishous straightened. “Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. I’m not getting in with the usual hacks. It’s encoded that well.”
Zsadist eyed the steel oval. “If I try to blast this open, I could end up bringing the entire building down. But if that’s where we’re at… that’s what I’m going to do. Lash is using this tunnel to move through the city—and I wonder how many others he has.”
Vishous took out a hand-rolled and nodded. “Set the charge and blow it. We can watch the show from a block away.”
As the others covered him now, Z took out the rest of the C-4 he’d brought with him. Just as he was considering whether he needed to dematerialize back to the off-site garage to grab some more, he stopped. Looked around. Measured the distance to the stairwell, the elevator… and the contours of the tunnel’s steel portal.
“I have a better idea,” he said softly.
* * *
Under the bridge. Of course.
As Evan stepped out of the tidal wave of men and women, he looked up at a rumbling sound overhead. A semi was going across the suspended strip of asphalt above him, and he measured the reinforced beams and pylons that held the Northway up. Then he refocused on the homeless camp that had taken over the two-block area underneath. In between the tents and the shopping trolleys full of dirty clothes and sleeping bags, there were people standing bent in half, their addled bodies drifting like seagrass in the still, stinky air. Others were wandering with restless compulsion, their withdrawals animating them even through their malnutrition and illnesses.
It was bleak. It was sad.
It was the perfect cover for an army of darkness to funnel through because nobody was paying attention to anybody else’s business.
And while the soldiers wove around an obstacle course of humans they didn’t acknowledge, they headed toward the row of crumbling, vacant brick buildings that had been built in the early nineteen hundreds for manufacturing businesses. The fighters seemed to make a point of keeping their paths uncoordinated and crisscrossing, and they filed into various entrances along the waterfront’s collapsing facilities.
Like they were attempting to escape notice.
Evan’s body wanted to go with the others, like any herd animal corralled through a gate with its kind.
He fought the pull, however, backing off until he tripped over something and landed on a rotted-out wooden pallet. As a rusty nail pierced his palm, he lifted up his hand.
That godforsaken black blood gleamed in the ambient light and he thought of the scarred man who had promised to kill him for reasons he did not understand.
