Bloodlands (25 page)

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Authors: Christine Cody

BOOK: Bloodlands
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I scooted nearer to him, gently pushing until he lay on his back as I balanced myself on an elbow, then bent down to impetuously brush my lips over his. He shivered at the softness, the care of my actions, clearly not knowing how to react.
I kissed him again, experimenting in how far I might go without causing him to rage for another bite. I also wanted to know how things worked between a man and woman, and the peace made it seem okay to find out.
He was looking into me again, and my surface thoughts seemed to meld with his. He was picturing a man and a woman, too, but not in a regular way. Sex without a bite, he was thinking. He hadn’t experienced it in a long time, not since he was human. Nowadays, he didn’t get his pleasure like they did, although he was capable of bringing it to a human he was biting.
Was a bite
his
means to satiation?
“Mariah—you know what you’re asking for. These aren’t garden-variety . . . relations . . . you’re inviting.”
“I’ve read my dad’s medical books. I know the difference.”
As I hovered over him, I could feel the moistness of my breath bathing his mouth.
“I dipped into your blood last night,” he said, almost as if talking to himself, “and it should’ve been enough to keep me.”
“Maybe you want something more.”
And then I saw it in his eyes: how devastating it’d been to lose any semblance he’d created of his humanity out here.
Emboldened, I kissed him again, lingering this time, spreading warmth through his coolness. I touched hicheek, his chin, his neck—a vein that was bulging because of the push of blood.
I asked a question against his lips. “How old are you?”
“Not very.”
I skimmed my fingers over his collarbones, and he jerked.
“What you do to me . . .” he said, then laughed a little, just as I had after receiving the peace. “My skin isn’t sensitive like a human’s, but . . .”
I waited him out, not sure what else to do as my body pounded. It felt like my heartbeat had been pushed under the water, muffled, taking up every inch of space round me.
He sighed, bringing my hand to where his heart should’ve been beating, had he been truly alive. “Your touch brings these rays of energy. Like . . . like a living imprint.”
He didn’t have to say that he’d never experienced this before with a blood victim. I got a perverse thrill out of knowing he hadn’t felt it with Abby.
“How old are you?” I repeated, wanting to figure out how many bites there’d been before me.
“Mariah—”
“A century?”
He gave in. “Only just over a couple years in vampire terms.”
I was unbuttoning his shirt now, rather proud of myself to be doing so. I finally had courage. I could finally forget.
“Mariah . . . ?”
I parted his shirt so I could trace his pale skin, and when I did, my hand seemed to warm on him, the rays he’d talked about apparently spreading as he jolted again.
It must’ve been the shock of it that sent him into action, and he lifted me, setting me on top of him. I gasped, his sex against mine. What was left of my sanity peeked through the fog in my head.
No more,
it said.
Stop now.
But under his thrall, it didn’t seem so dangerous to continue, and I rested my palms against his chest. This time, I could feel a thrust of pressure molding the shape of my hands.
Imprint?
“I can feel it in you,” I said. “The blood. Or maybe that’s just my own pulse in my hands.”
“It is you. Your pulse is mine.”
Something—happiness, the ecstasy of finally knowing someone—washed over me. He hesitated, as if hardly grasping that he had the power to cause such a shift of intimate emotion in anyone.
He’s feeling even closer to human,
I thought.
And I made it happen.
He latched his fingers to the hem of my top, then undid the tiny buttons. Heat licked over my face when he eased the material off my shoulders, down my arms. And when he palmed my breasts, his thumbs circling my nipples, I lowered my head.
But it wasn’t because of any chiding mother voices in me. My pulse was flailing, springing and taking off, and I was trying to get it back.
He slid a finger under my chin, tilted my head up, caught my gaze and opened himself, offering the peace I’d come here for. I breathed easier, although my heartbeat still rammed the blood through me. Through us. I could feel it in him.
I guided him to the ground, leaning forward, my bare breasts against his chest now. What a feeling . . . What I’ missed out on all these years . . .
The fringes of his irises were ringed with a famished red, his fangs edging past his lips, but he didn’t seem feral. Maybe he was still feeling the peace, too.
I coasted upward, my nipples combing over him. My short, chopped hair wisped against his throat as I turned my face so that my lips were against the underside of his jaw.
“You’re so cold, Gabriel. Hard underneath the skin.”
“That’s what you get.”
“I know what comes with you. At least, I think I know.”
“If you’re asking if I react like a human guy during all this, then the answer’s yes. And no.”
What did he mean by that?
“The only way I can have children,” he said, “is through a blood exchange. I can’t impregnate because vampires are sterile that way.”
“But you can . . . do other things.”
In answer, he took my hand and rested it over his sex, where the blood rushed, making it harder.
I sucked in a breath, taking my hand away. I’d imagined what it might feel like, but . . .
Then a rush of his vampire sway overcame me again, and I put my hand on his belly.
Relaxed again. I was fine.
“I was raised by my mom to think that you shouldn’t share yourself freely,” I said. “Not with all the STDs and the movement to purify young women round the country.”
Cults had sprung up—“purity enforcers.” They were as crazy as the people who’d made a religion of worshipping pop stars.
“But you’re not like others,” I said.
I skimmed down, over his stiffness, wanting to undo his pants. But he took care of that for me, his expression showing that he was curious about how far I’d go.
When he was bared to me, I hesitated. He looked different from the sketches I’d seen in the mild erotica that had flashed at Dallas intersections via the TV-channel collages that drive-by artists showed in their transport windows.
This was flesh, swollen to hardness. I took him in my hand, my temperature rising even higher.
He groaned, closing his eyes, his fangs needling his gums. But then he seemed to recover, quickly helping me out of my pants, settling me to my back. Then he lay against me, my entire body imprinting him, seething energy buzzing back into me, too.
I was wet, and when he slipped inside me, I wiggled my hips to get him past my tightness. I held to him, one of my legs wrapping round the back of his. It was uncomfortable at first, because he filled me all the way. But his body felt like it was my own.
I could sense his appetite climbing, up, up as he drove into me. Harder, faster, I moved with him, my fingers clawed against his back, my nails biting into him again as I heated up, my blood simmering, my bones going to a melt, tempered only by the peace he gave me as he looked into my eyes, balancing everything.
For what seemed like endless hours, I saw in him the red of blood cells scrambling round. Felt it, too, as crimson blinded me, banged at me, stretched me and fought the peace until it expanded, bubble-like, warped, pushing, near to breaking—
I tensed round him, my muscles convulsing. His body rhythms copied mine as we strained, my nails ripping into his skin, while a low, warped cry shuddered out of me.
There was no bite, no blood, but he took something from me as I came—a blast of fluid heat, running inside us, coating us.
Afterward, we didn’t move for a minute, but it seemed like forever as we panted, coming down into that body of water that held me up in my floating place of peace. But then I glanced at my fingers, and I saw his blood on them.
I was too mellow and content to scream as I would have any other time.
He took my hands in one of his, then folded his fingers over mine, shielding me from the red as he sank down to the blankets, bringing me on my side to face him. Without thinking, I cozied my leg between both of his while he kept soothing me with more of his gaze.
Soon, I was under that imagined water, looking at the wavering surface until everything went as blank as slumber.
 
Next thing I knew, there was barking, and I bolted up at the same time Gabriel did.
Chaplin?
Had he realized that Gabriel was in here with me?
Then my dog barked again and I heard his true message.
“No,” I said.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
I was already putting on my nightclothes. “Chaplin’s saying that Stamp’s on my main outside visz screen.” My voice was unsteady, but it would’ve been worse without Gabriel’s remaining sway. “Stamp’s telling us that all’s forgiven, and he’d like to explain just why that is if we’ll all gather up top, outside, in twenty minutes.”
He started to get dressed, too. “I want to be the one to go out there and have a word with him.”
I stopped cold.
“Are you all right, Mariah?” he asked.
I still had some peace in me, but now that Stamp was here, I didn’t know if I’d be able to get through it. Not unless . . .
Would Gabriel give me more of his vampire tranquility? Or would I be a coward forever without it?
He seemed to turn the decision over in his mind for only an instant—one in which I supposed he felt torn between the vampire he’d been trying to leave behind and the man he’d just been.
Still, he came to me, cupping my face and looking into my eyes, offering the only peace I knew.
19
 
Gabriel
 
A
fter Gabriel finished soothing Mariah, he wrapped her in one of the blankets she’d brought downstairs. She was in her nightclothes, and even if matters were hectic, Chaplin, who was still barking, would surely notice her state, then come after Gabriel. The dog had told him to stay outside, and the vampire hadn’t obeyed.
Besides, what had gone on between Gabriel and Mariah was just . . . private. None of anyone else’s business. Not even Chaplin’s.
As Gabriel finished tucking Mariah up, then grabbing the lantern she’d brought with her, he found her peering up at him. Becausa w the peace that still filtered through her gaze, there was something in her eyes that he could almost identify. Even when he’d been all the way inside her, she’d never truly let him in.
“Thank you, Gabriel,” she said, and the emotion behind her words spoke to him more than the actual syllables did.
She reached up to take the bandages from his head, slowly unwinding them, unveiling what he knew to be all the healed injuries from when Stamp’s men had roughed him up outside several nights ago.
When Mariah finished, she dropped the bandages to the ground, then pulled the blanket around her so that it swallowed her from neck to ankle. Then, with a small smile—the last one he thought he might see for a while—she took the stairway.
Gabriel didn’t follow at first. He just loitered under what might turn out to be the final moments of a good thing.
She’d been grateful for what he’d brought her tonight, and he realized that he’d come out here to the New Badlands for Abby, but he’d instead found someone—or something—else entirely.
He followed her up the stairs, noting that Chaplin wasn’t barking any longer. When he got to the top of the landing, Mariah was waiting, sans lantern, her hand on the door, which she’d already opened to a slit. He didn’t know why she was hesitating, but he had his own reasons for doing the same.
The smells, the sounds beyond the door . . .
Gabriel put his hand on Mariah’s shoulder and opened the door the rest of the way, revealing the crowd of Badlanders gathered in her home.
Zel, the oldster, Sammy, Chaplin . . . even Hana and Pucci, all in front of Mariah’s bank of glowing visz monitors.
And they didn’t look happy. In fact, they seemed stunned at the sight of Gabriel with Mariah. . . .
Head down, she bustled out from behind Gabriel in her blanket and went straight to her quarters, where he guessed she was going to change into real clothes.
Everyone’s gazes followed her. But when she disappeared, that left Gabriel to take the remainder of their scrutiny. Luckily, he was used to it by now.
Chaplin, who seemed to scent what had transpired between Gabriel and Mariah, had his head cocked, as if he were stunned to realize that his mistress had survived being near Gabriel and his vampire hunger.

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