“Black and Blonde” (Part 5)

He woke at dusk. She was all over him again, voracious with teeth and nails, playing him like the fool he was. His body responded as if its need for her outweighed its need for blood, and maybe it did. For a blissful, thoughtless moment, he let himself enjoy the rasp of her tongue on his belly, willing her further south. Reading his mind—or had he mumbled under his breath?—she obliged.

She bit him and he came in a shower of blood and fruitless semen, arching with a mangled cry off the worn mattress while she gulped once and grimaced. “God, I hate that stuff you call blood,” she spat, tossing her hair like a filly in the winner’s circle. “How can you drink it night after night? It might as well be bilge water.”

He lay, panting, on his back, gazing at her through the stars that danced before his eyes. He had no answer. Becoming a vampire had not made him a duke or an earl. He was still a peasant boy spread out for her amusement. He hadn’t decided how he felt about it, yet. Maybe he didn’t want to know.

“I’m taking you out of here tonight,” she declared, rolling off the bed in a glorious tangle of arms and legs. “I’ve got a suite at the Four Seasons; I’d have taken you there this morning, but …” She flashed him a naughty smile “Are you still happy to see me?”

He nodded, following her with his eyes as she collected her clothes. He was hungry but didn’t want to lose sight of her. She wouldn’t hunt with him, anyway, and he couldn’t hunt with her. They were from different worlds. The gift of immortality had not altered that.

“Then you’ll come with me,” she said.

“No,” he croaked.

She slid into her shirt but left it open. “Why not?”

“This is my home.”

She snorted. “Get over it, Ariel. You’re a god now; you don’t have to live like this.”

“I’m no god,” he answered. “I’m a predator like you, and they’re catching onto us, Clare. They’re starting to figure out what we are and how to stop us. I don’t want to die. Do you?”

She didn’t understand the question. “I am death. So are you. There hasn’t been a mortal yet who could cheat either of us. You give them too much credit.”

“You give them too little,” he said, and as he spoke, an awful possibility dawned on him. She held mortals in as much contempt now as she had done at the beginning, when Raymond had taken her from her father’s castle and raped her for her blood. Black knew she preferred to kill. She loved it, revelled in it. Raymond had taught her well—but even Raymond had tempered his appetite with the passage of time.

She grabbed his hands and pulled him upright. “Come with me, my love. I will show you pleasure beyond your wildest imagining.”

“Have you been killing?” Black asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How long have you been in town?”

“A few days. Long enough to set myself up at the hotel. Why?”

“Clare, if you’re lying to me—”

“What? You don’t believe me? Ask Raymond. He’ll be as shocked to see me as you were.”

“Raymond is a liar. I’d be a fool to believe anything he says.”

She smiled, sidling close. “You are a fool, though, aren’t you, my beloved? Look at the way you live, scraping out an existence by the grace of inferiors. They don’t love you, Ariel. They’re afraid of you, so they pretend to be allies. Any one of them would turn you in for the price of a mickey.”

He got out of bed, convinced that his hunger was making her make sense. She didn’t know what she was talking about. She didn’t know his people. She had never known his people. She came from a world frosted with illusion. What did she know of the hideous truth?

“I’ve made you angry,” she said.

He pulled his t-shirt on over his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sure you are.”

“I can’t bear to see you living this way. You’re so much better than this.”

He turned to face her. She was sitting on the rumpled bed, hands dangling between her knees. Her nails were painted pearl white, curved like claws. He wanted them to scrape him raw so she could lap up the blood that oozed from the wounds. “I can’t come with you, Clare. Not tonight.”

She nodded. “You want time to think.”

“Yeah.”

“You do want something better, don’t you?”

“Don’t we all?”

She smiled. “I just want you.”

He laughed softly, a reflex aimed at deflecting the usual hope that she wasn’t jerking him around this time. She was so beautiful, so desirable. He had loved her from the first moment and been grateful to her for saving him when Raymond would have let him die. How ironic that she who had spared him was the one who killed him every time she left.

He wanted to say, “I’m yours.” It was smarter to say nothing. 

* * * 

He dealt for blood with one of the warehouse squatters, a man in his forties whose engineering career had been snuffed by a drug problem that eventually cost him his house and his family. “I want to die,” he told Black. “Can you do it for me?”

“It’s not my place,” Black said, “nor yours, either. Have we got a deal?”

The fellow thought for a minute, then nodded. “Give me the dope.”

Black hesitated.

“What is it?”

“When did you last eat?”

“What’s it to you? Just give me the dope, man, then you can have as much blood as you want.”

He didn’t want tainted blood. He was tired of it. It was sour and left him slightly disoriented, the way scotch burned his throat but didn’t make him drunk. This guy was hardly a pure specimen on either end of the syringe, but he wouldn’t be so harsh on the tongue if Black drank before handing over the goods.

“Forget it,” the man said. “If you’re not going to kill me, you give me the dope first or walk away now.”

He conceded victory with a grim face. When the fellow was pleasantly glazed, Black bent his head and pierced the quivering jugular with his fangs. The blood spouted, surprised, into his mouth. It ran cold over his tongue, heating up as it hit the back of his throat. He swallowed, conjuring the flavour of Clare to mask the bitterness. She had expensive taste and fed from the best—the rich proceeds of greed and avarice in the upper classes. Last night, he had scented caviar and champagne in her blood and been hurt when she refused to drink from him. Little wonder, he thought now, sucking back the sting of despair; this was the hemoglobic equivalent of Aqua Velva. He drank the fellow to unconsciousness, then settled him as comfortably as he could beneath his newspaper blanket. It might be more merciful to kill him, but Black doubted he could stomach the job. It was getting harder to take what little he was offered.

He met up with Aurora on his way to the bar; she had paused to light another in a long chain of Marlboros when he spotted her at the corner. She grinned at him. “Hey, Black, that was some serious combat happening over my head last night. You get lucky with another girl?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘lucky’,” he answered. “Have you got a quarter? I need to make a phone call.”

“This from a guy with a pocketful of fifties,” she grumbled around her smoke. She dug through her bag for change. “I swear I don’t know why I let you use me this way. You sure you can’t hypnotize people through your shades?”

He took the quarter. “I’ll make it up to you, honey.”

“Go a round with me like you did with your mystery chick last night and I’ll call us even.”

“Sweetheart, you don’t want to go a round with ol’ Black.”

“Says you,” she retorted, accepting his kiss on her cheek. She blew a lungful of smoke into his face. “Not gonna tell, are you?”

“Nope.”

She studied him through hooded eyes. “Old girlfriend,” she decided.

“I wouldn’t say that, either. Any luck with the search for Travis?”

She shook her head. “If your boy did fall off the wagon, he didn’t do it down at our level. Cokeheads are upper crust junkies, Black. You’re fishing too low in the pond.” She gave him a sympathetic look. “Sorry, honey.”

He waved her off. “Didn’t hurt to try. You’d better get back to work.”

“Sure you don’t want a quickie on the house?”

He laughed at her. “I’ll take a raincheck. Go on, get lost. I’ll catch you later.”

“Promises, promises,” she sighed, wandering off in a cloud of blue smoke.

He went to the bar and called Tess at the number she had given him. It turned out to be a cellular phone, and he was instantly angry about it. Cell phones were glorified radios that anyone could tap into; he had her hang up and call him from a land line so they could arrange to meet without fear of being ambushed. Black was not naive. Clare was in town for a reason—and Raymond was well aware of it.

to be continued ...