Wounds, page 13
part #2 of Voice of Blood Series
The bachelorettes were more subdued now. The brunette in the sweater gave a heavy sigh and urged her friends to move. “I’m going to get going home,” she explained, which was followed by her hugging every single one of them, and sitting hugs would not do; they all got up out of the booth and hugged her as if they knew something. “I don’t want to be hung over tomorrow; I’ll see you there, and don’t forget to pick up your corsages, everybody!”
The bride gave her an extra-long hug. “Honey, are you OK to drive? Oh, you’re getting a taxi home, aren’t you? Oh, good. . . .”
He gave the table a subtle jerk, just enough. Tilt. Third ball. He cursed peremptorily, hitched his coat over his shoulders, and left the bar. All right, a taxi, not quite something in his plan, but somehow they’d manage. . . .
But no, she wasn’t going to take a taxi; the silly drunk walked up a side street, veering from a straight line by several degrees in both directions and fumbling out a set of car keys from her pocket. Ariane was already waiting on the passenger side of a pale-colored, painfully new Korean-import car. Daniel swiftly caught up, pleased at her strategy.
“Unlock all four doors,” Ariane said.
The woman pressed a button on her keychain. Her car replied with a subtle chirp.
The three of them slid into a womb of petrochemical perfume and nubbly-soft upholstery. The woman reached over to her seat belt, but it was too much effort, and she flopped back in her seat. “Way too drunk to drive,” she mumbled. “Should prob’ly take a nap first . . .”
“Yeah, just a little one,” Ariane said. “You’ll be much better.”
“Yeah,” said the woman.
“Quickly,” Daniel whispered from the back seat, his eyes scanning the empty street. The leaves on the trees drooped under the weight of ice. No one, just the freezing mist and the midnight bells lowing from a nearby church.
Ariane rolled up the woman’s coat and sweater sleeves, exposing a forearm glossed with an unseasonable tan, waxed smooth and gleaming. Ariane almost winced with hunger looking at it before she lowered her head and took a bite.
And then a deeper one.
The bachelorette’s head wobbled. Daniel reached around the seat and worked the plastic latch to lower it back, toward him; her body stretched and relaxed. He wanted to mention the woman’s excellent breasts, but then remembered the rule and the hurting. Right now it wasn’t worth it, watching Ariane suck down blood and knowing that if he didn’t hop to it, there’d be nothing left for him. After letting her drag him all around town so she could have champagne, he needed a little something to keep him going. He felt like he’d been awake for days.
And it was Teri and she wanted some sleep right now. She felt unconsciousness floating her away, thinking, Finally, thank God.
Ariane lifted her head and gulped the air. “I’m hot,” she said in a small voice. Her teeth glistened red between reddened lips.
“She’s not dead yet,” said Daniel, holding his thumb over the new wound under her chin. “Finish her. Don’t waste it.”
“No,” she whispered. “I’m done. Go for it.”
“You’re too kind.”
There wasn’t much left. Her lips and fingernails were colorless. Daniel sat back, too; pointless to be desperate, he’d gotten his swallows, and it would be enough until tomorrow, if he got some sleep. Across the infinity of the car interior, across the finite slack body of Teri Haddock, Ariane smirked, eyes glimmering. “I always forget how good it is. And a bottle of champagne . . . my God.”
“Let’s go,” Daniel whispered.
They ran back together, both much sloppier now from the alcohol, but still fast enough to keep them from too much trouble. Daniel ran smack into a man walking out of a pub or restaurant that poured out the scent of spiced wine and hot toddy whiskey with its human flotsam; Ariane caught up, spun the drunk guy around so that he was facing the opposite direction, and by the time he came to his senses, they had both vanished.
The standing jump to Daniel’s window was impossible, even for him, but there was a fire escape on the opposite side of the hotel that went all the way to the roof. And from there climbing down was unpleasant but possible. Daniel had to tie the loose flaps of his coat, so pretty jumping down, around his waist to keep them out of the way, and was very glad that she was wearing incredibly sensible, ultra-modern light-gray sneakers with her glamour-girl dress. But then, that was Ariane.
In the room, she tore off her coat and threw it onto the floor, took off her shoes with her toes, and flung herself into a chair. Daniel didn’t stop with his coat; all of his clothes ended up on the floor or tossed onto the other chair. Very slowly, she stood up and slid her dress up over her torso and arms and shoulders, baring herself, the quivering hem skimming over her nipples.
See what I can do, Daddy.
She stood there for a moment in her white fishnet panty hose, staring at him, her body full and warm and glistening slightly with sweat, and Daniel came closer and pushed her savagely onto the bed. She almost smiled then, but managed to keep a straight face; she had not stopped trembling. He stood at the foot of the bed and pulled off the fishnets, sliding them off, ripping them slightly with his black fingernails, then pulled her legs until she slid on her behind across the gray-blue-and-dusty-rose bedspread. When her lower legs hung far enough over the edge, he pushed her knees apart and stared at her. She then fully smiled, and cupped her breasts with her hands. Her fingernails had been painted with pearl-colored polish; her nipples gleamed like soft flesh jewels in a setting of mother-of-pearl. Fiercely she clenched her fingers, then let them relax, showing him the dark pink welts she left on her skin.
“I’m going to eat you,” said Daniel.
“I’d like to see you try,” said Ariane.
Extraordinary creature! And as many dozens of times as he’d made love to her human body, he had never experienced her like this, and wanting him. It had been so long since Daniel had made love to another vampire—decades in fact—and again he had forgotten what it was like, from the rich flavor of her burning-hot cunt to the fact that he could, actually, stab his fingers deep inside her, slashing her tissues and making her bleed, and though she cried out in pain, she made no move to stop him. He sucked eagerly at it, and held up one of his fingers for her to lick, but by the time his fingertip reached her mouth, the blood had already dried hard and tight and dark to his flesh. She licked it anyway, but pulled his shoulder with her extraordinary strength, something that would have torn a human’s arm from its socket and reduced the muscles to shredded ribbons, and gripped his penis with her right hand to rub it against her pubic hair, already slick with her juices and his saliva and her blood mixed together.
He pulled her upright and balanced her thighs across his hips before he began to fuck her. With his fingers and the head of his penis he found her opening and shoved himself all the way in, all at once, up to the sweat-moist tendons that held his balls on. Once upon a time, she had nearly howled with pain when he did this, but now she just closed her eyes and rocked herself hard against him, riding him, rubbing her nipples across his chest. The transformed pain coursed through her to him, vertiginous, crunching and then melting through her nerves. He grew dizzy and pulled her over so that his back was to the bedspread and her legs went in impossible directions, knees settling in his armpits. She was beyond waking thought.
“Look at me,” he said. “Look at me when you’re fucking me. Look into my eyes.”
“I can’t,” she mumbled.
He pumped his hips up, holding her steady. “Liar. Look at me. Let’s go. Let’s go there.”
He almost regretted it when she did look at him; he felt falling and spinning, his stomach actually spasmed, motion-panicked, as his selfhood dissolved into hers through the portal of her pupils. Barely visible in the dark brown irises, her pupils were huge and drinking, and he could see his soul disappearing—and though he doubted the existence of souls, he knew what it felt like when his was lost, sucked right out of him. But not really gone, just transformed beyond his ability to comprehend. He laughed the giddy, hysterical giggle of a madman confronting the reality of his actions. He had made her. He was responsible for making her into this, for giving her these powers, for changing them both forever, making it impossible for either of them to feel truly alive except in this embrace. And he felt for a panicked second that they had lost contact with each other—he felt nothing from her—but he realized that their thoughts mirrored perfectly, no longer separate minds, not thee and me, only this: all thoughts and sensations pooled.
Let me be just myself for a little while. Before forever goes by and I’m still in you.
He tore away from the gaze to hold her body tightly to his, and he was back at Daniel, back at what he alone felt, back to the feeling of his cock jerking into her, her claws tearing at the skin of his back. The bedcover beneath them was damp in the middle and crunchy on the edges. Both of their bodies ran with sweat; how long since he first penetrated her? Autonomous for a moment, she changed the position to the one they had before, both of them sitting up, one of her legs across his hip and the other forcing his leg open, neither with the advantage of balance, neither able to relax. She threw back her head and drew in her breath, as if it were her last on her deathbed. He thrusted his best and last, then pulled away from her. He jerked her upright and slid again into her eyes.
A rat will happily die for such ecstasy in a drug.
Falling.
Like brain being ripped apart, cell by cell. Very much like how it felt to be made into a vampire in the first place—when the whole body literally fell to pieces and was rebuilt in the same pattern of tissues—but instead of the agony of the nerve cells shattering, it was the helpless terror of pleasure, the simultaneous collapsing and transcending. If one could harness this energy—if one could only hang on to it forever—
They held each other, locked, coming.
Time stopped.
Nothing else had ever existed.
Only
this.
Scene Thirteen: Coming down
Daniel broke them apart.
He had gotten only the last taste of Teri; and he first felt the pangs of hunger in his body and the desire for more blood that superseded everything else, even the madness of bliss, holy joy, perfect communion. He remembered again why he didn’t believe in God—if God’s benevolence was real, He would have taken Daniel’s soul at the perfect moment of ecstasy and gotten him off the accursed wheel of meat, but hunger was stronger than any religion. If God existed, He would sweep Daniel’s brow clear of fatigue and not chain him to this steadily mounting exhaustion. The pleasure of the orgasm faded away almost instantly—there was no afterglow here, not when his body felt like the husk of a coconut. He pushed Ariane onto her back and withdrew his shrunken and wrinkled penis.
She blinked at him in confusion, and he swept his arm to indicate the window, dawn rising sickly gray over the now-bland concrete of the wet city. “Oh, hell,” she said, and rubbed her temples. “I didn’t know about this part. I should have known about this part. It’s the bad come-down section. Oh, I see. Now I get it.”
Daniel scrubbed his hands over his face. “I feel like shit,” he muttered.
“I’m sure you do.” She relaxed and curled up and smiled. “My God, I bet it’s fucking addictive, isn’t it? That was hours, just hours . . .” She blinked at him. “I’m surprised you don’t fuck other vampires more often. You’re the one always trying to make your orgasm more freaky or more intense. This was . . . That was . . .” She gestured emptily.
“It’s not like that with everyone,” Daniel said. “Only the ones to whom you are linked by blood. Your progenitor, or your offspring. And you have to come at the same time.”
“Oh. That would explain it,” she said. “No wonder Ricari only made you,” said Ariane. “I can’t imagine he likes getting that close to God without prayer. And I’m not surprised that you’re always trying. But how could you let Ricari go, knowing this—doing this?”
“It’s so hard on me.” He sighed. “If you had any idea.”
“Of course it’s hard. Dumbass. I just said I know how you feel. I’m going through the same thing. You’ll live.”
“My whole body hurts. I’m gonna have to do something unreasonable.” His glittering eyes glanced madly around the room.
“I’d rather you didn’t. I have some blood at the lab. I want to go back home and check on something first.” She slid off the bed, put her ripped tights back on, and reached for her dress on the floor. “Geez, you’ve got a hangover. When was the last time you had a hangover?” she muttered.
Daniel curled his lip. “What’s it, cold? Out of the fridge? Or animal blood? I don’t want to drink dog blood again, Ariane, I’ve come too far for that.”
“Oh, really? Then go inconvenience yourself. Go get caught and crucified. It’s not dog blood, it’s human blood. It’s actually OK—I put this anticoagulant in it. It kind of tastes like aspirin, but you get used to it, and it’s great in a pinch. Besides, it was me that drank the dog blood, remember?” She stood before him dressed, smoothing her curls hopelessly.
“I’ve drunk dog blood, and I drank a lot of it, trying to recover from you. Don’t forget, my dearest, you destroyed my life, too.”
She scrunched her eyes tightly and rubbed her fingertips over a tender forehead. “Please. Don’t. Come on. I can help you. And I have a lot of really interesting stuff to tell you, stuff that I’ve found out.”
“Shit,” said Daniel after a pause, and it was as good as an agreement. He got dressed, trying to ignore the pain in his limbs and his face, and they went out through the kitchen service entrance, around a sleepy teenage chef prepping onions for breakfast who never even glanced up.
Last night’s sleet had transformed into a chilly drizzle. Ariane’s car, a jaunty little Japanese thing about twelve years old with old towels on the seats, waited on the street three blocks from the hotel, tiny puddles of rain in every rusted dent. She watched him fold himself in agonizingly slow stages into the small passenger seat and collapse there, breathing hard and fluttering the muscles in his eyelids. He glanced at her, then away, his mouth sinking into a thin line of bitterness. She twisted her hair into a bun and skewered it with one of the pens on the dashboard, then asked with raspy, forced cheer, “Do you like the towels? The nice thing about them is that I can pull ‘em up and throw them into the washing machine. I’ve had many a struggle in this car.”
“Smart idea,” grunted Daniel. “I might have to use that. Maybe you could make little towel slipcovers, easy on”—here he paused to yawn—“easy off.”
“I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a mail-order company for vampire conveniences,” she continued, gunning the little car’s engine to proceed up a steep, slick hill. “You know, stuff to make our lives easier. Like full-sized incinerators for bodies and evidence. Anticoagulant that doesn’t taste like aspirin—tastes like, oh, I don’t know, a stiff gin, maybe. Bulk discounts on protein-dissolving laundry soap. Stuff like that. I’d make a bucketload of money.”
He couldn’t help laughing, albeit halfheartedly. “You’re such an American.”
“Except of course that I know that there isn’t much of a market for that sort of thing. . . . I mean, how many vampires are there in the world? How many do you reckon? Are there a lot of vampires in New York?”
“If there are, they haven’t introduced themselves to me,” said Daniel miserably. He looked at his emaciated hands with dismay. All this trouble, just for the best orgasm in the world? He supposed he should try to look at it as a hangover, since it wouldn’t last long; but then again, he had whined about hangovers even when he had them every day, when he was young and drinking terrible homemade wine in cellars and schoolyards.
“That’s odd . . . you’re such a public figure.”
“In New York? Whatever. The place is lousy with public figures. And I’m not, really. No more than any other wealthy but not very successful dilettante artist. There are thousands of them in the Hamptons every summer.”
“Pity party. It could be worse. You could be famous, and then you’d have a hell of a time getting rid of bodies.”
“Are there many vampires in Portland?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
“Besides John?”
Daniel shrugged and stared out the window.
She twitched her nose, focusing straight ahead on the road. “They haven’t exactly given me a big debutante ball,” she said. “I’m pretty sure they’re here. I’ve just never seen them. Or felt them. Or heard them . . .”
They said nothing for a little while, not talking about John, avoiding the subject of John altogether. Ariane turned on the radio, set to a jazz station playing a jittery piece by Herbie Hancock, completely inappropriate to a hangover at seven on a Saturday morning, and rolled down the window. These Portland people seemed to be some strain of bizarre masochists.
“So tell me about this Sybil,” she said. “You kind of didn’t want to go there when we were . . . um . . . you know.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you about her.” He sighed. “She’s difficult as hell. She’s an artist—she used to be a stripper, but I made her stop. She wasn’t dancing because she liked it. I don’t think. Except that it’s obvious that she really loves to dance, it’s just the getting paid aspect of it that she doesn’t like. Except, of course, that’s why she does it. I can’t figure out almost anything about her, actually. When I think of her . . . I don’t know what to think.”
“I think you’re in love with her,” said Ariane.
“I’d say that’s obvious,” he replied. He laughed shortly. “It’s shitty.”
“You fucked her,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, whatever. It doesn’t seem to mean anything. She’s angry at me because of it. I’m the only—she’s never fucked before. She hadn’t. Anyway, that’s what she told me.”
