Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony (The Order Saga Book 1) (26 page)

“Why this resistance,
mademoiselle
?” His mouth is only an inch from her ear. “I’m not hurting you, am I? Dancing is a pleasant thing,
non
? So dance and be gay.”

They sway and Valmont brings his hands back, stroking the underside of her arms as he does. Sliding down, he brushes the outer edge of her breasts and traces her body with his hands until both rest on her hips. The sway becomes a grind and Caroline turns to Sebastian and pleads with her eyes but the French Vampyr holds her firmly in place.

“You fancy yourself a student of human behavior, yet you repress your own strongest desires. Should you not seek to relieve this contradiction?” He whispers something in French which I’ve never been able to catch but it makes Caroline close her eyes and swallow.

That’s when he takes a moment to give an air kiss and a wink to the shouting, impotent little creature struggling in Sebastian’s grip. He thinks he’s suffering the worst torment imaginable but he has no idea what real suffering is yet.

Valmont’s hands cross over Caroline’s belly, caressing her through the fabric of her dress. In the footage, there’s a slight ripple in the air, like heat from a highway, around his hands. It could be just a glitch in the camera except that it appears nowhere else but his hands and it moves with them.

“Sexuality is power,” he tells her as their grind dissolves into an undulation that travels up and down their bodies. The music is hypnotic, insidious and sexual. “This is most true for women and you know it. She who is desired by all, has power over all. It is in the nature of our souls to seek out and enjoy things which give us pleasure.”

His hands drift—one to her breasts and one to her thigh—and her attempts to brush them away are so weak they could be mistaken for encouragement. She keeps her face expressionless but breathes in quick, shallow gasps. Her eyes remain closed as the first tear slides out from beneath her right lid.

On one of the other camera angles, Draco stands next to Iago, who remains seated. Draco pours his glass of blood onto the rug before throwing it into the fireplace and marching from the room. None of the others pay attention.

I’ve rewound the footage to watch Iago from beginning to end. It doesn’t help. He watches Valmont’s performance—no, he watches Caroline—with a disgusted engrossment, expression all negative except for his eyes. His eyes gleam with that same predatory light I saw during our meeting. It’s not lust and it’s not fury. I just wish I could know what the fuck it
is
.

Valmont continues his endless stream of encouragement. “Take this pleasure as your right. Free yourself from men’s shackles. What are convention, decorum and modesty but a man’s way of teaching a woman to imprison herself? Do you fear to be called a whore,
ma chere
? Will you timidly accept the moral judgment of the creatures in this room? Surely you know, as I do, that they already call you a whore.”

She gasps, choking off a sob, as he slides a hand between her thighs, lifts her dress to expose her stockings and legs, rubs a nipple through her dress and licks her earlobe. The second and third tears appear and he leans forward to lick one off her cheek before planting a kiss behind her ear. Her whole body trembles now and it’s obvious that her legs are no longer supporting her weight. “Show them your true strength!” he hisses, as the music builds again. “Bask in your body’s pleasure, unashamed and defiant, drink it like sweet, hot blood and do not be stopped until you have had your fill!”

Geoffrey and Julia’s reactions are miles apart, though they sit side by side. Julia sits forward, breathing heavily, her whole body clenching and unclenching as if in response to an invisible tide. Her eyes are bright, clear and voracious. Her tongue darts out every few minutes to moisten her lips. It occurred to me once—had Geoffrey been amorously inclined right then—he might have found a willing partner.

Geoffrey, however, seems anything but amorous. He sits far back in his seat and squirms while maintaining a façade of polite interest. He’s like a man forced to watch a porno with a strange woman in the room, uncertain how to act.

With a lift of his chin, Valmont calls over his female Dhampir. She slinks over with a feline smile and Caroline shakes her head. Valmont licks and kisses the area around her ear while the Dhampir strokes one of her exposed legs and delivers a lingering kiss to Caroline’s quivering lips. Sweating, trembling and nearly hyperventilating, Caroline tries to turn her head away but she’s held in place by the coordination of their efforts. The Dhampir kisses her twice more on the mouth with increasing passion, forcing her tongue into Caroline’s mouth despite the squeals of protest.

The Dhampir eases herself onto her knees as Valmont moves his hands to concentrate on Caroline’s breasts, that strange distortion still visible. Caroline’s struggles increase in intensity as their intention becomes clear to her. Her eyes open and she repeats the word “no” with mounting desperation.

Off to the side, the boy makes one last attempt to demand that they let her go but no one pays him the slightest attention. In a few seconds, when he collapses to his knees, Sebastian, bleeding from where his fangs have bitten his lips, will whisper something to him that wasn’t picked up by the microphones: “Mark you well, boy, that cold harlot who undid us both!”

Valmont, looking poised to tear the dress from Caroline’s body, never does. The tension and energy of the anticipation lends a magnetic quality to this last part of his performance. The Dhampir, likewise, doesn’t remove or push aside Caroline’s panties. She licks and strokes and teases right through the thin white cotton.

Jade Tiger watches the performance, eyes aflame with hunger and desire. She perspires almost as much as Caroline and tosses her head in throes of vicarious passion as the waves crash onto her. When Valmont’s Dhampir goes to work, she mutters a command in Chinese, her voice thick. Flea, her majordomo and fellow Shen, now glances at her mistress with horror. Jade Tiger repeats the command sharply. Flea forces her face free of expression once again and crawls between her mistress’s spread legs, pressing her face up between the thighs.

Caroline’s tears flow, she draws breaths in ragged gulps hitched with sobs but she can no longer stop the occasional moan from escaping her. Valmont returns to his litany: “Beneath your prim and proper shell, I suspect you yearn for a good, filthy fuck once in a while. Isn’t that why, despite your illusions of high standards, your heart always takes you to beasts like Sebastian and urchins like your new plaything over there?”

He takes her earlobe between his teeth and chews it roughly. Caroline’s miserable expression is spoiled by the way her eyes roll up in momentary ecstasy. Her body’s squirming makes the Dhampir’s expert manipulations all the more effective. The music is fast, hard and relentless. Wave after wave crash on top of each other as it builds and builds and, impossibly, builds again.

“When we’re done here,” Valmont whispers, so quickly I’ve had to listen several times to understand it all. “I’m going to buy you from Sebastian for a pittance and tie you to a bare spring mattress. My pets and I will tease your cunt to the edge of explosion again and again but you’ll be allowed no climax. Only after you’ve been whipped and branded and tattooed and sodomized and shat upon and you beg to take any cock I can rally into your every salivating orifice, beg me to fuck you like the daddy’s-little-whore you are—only then will you have your release. Then you’ll be ravished until your body rends itself apart from the frequency and intensity of your climaxes as you feast on the blood of babes—”

Caroline’s head whips back, veins and tendons taut, as she weeps and moans a continuous combination of anguish and quickening.

“And it’s my name you’ll shriek in your ecstasy, you cock-hungry little bitch, because I know you as no other does. I know what you crave, I know your secret heart and so your denials are nothing to me. Now, my sweet, we are almost at the end. Remember this in your fevered dreaming until I come for you again.”

The music, heavy and pounding, suddenly stops.

Valmont extends his fangs and bites into the tender network of veins at the base of her neck. Still weeping, Caroline shrieks out a violent, body-wrenching orgasm that forces everyone in the room to close their eyes. Making eye contact with Jade Tiger over Caroline’s shoulder, Valmont drags his tongue across Caroline’s bleeding neck, lapping the blood in sensuous leisure as his victim shudders down from her peak but before she can begin to catch her breath, he turns her face to his and penetrates her mouth with his tongue.

Caroline responds to his kiss with ferocious intensity.

I stop and rewind. He does not force her and she does not resist, I’m certain of this. She clamps her mouth onto his as if she’s trying to devour his face. Stop, rewind. There’s a thoughtless, animal desperation in her eyes as if she’s starving. Again and again I watch and each time I feel a red-hot dagger twisting in my guts. The kiss only lasts for three seconds but for those three seconds, you’d swear they were lovers.

Afterward, Caroline kicks the Dhampir aside and collapses to the floor with a sound that is indescribable in its misery, rage, horror and shame.

Valmont takes a bow.

Caroline scrambles to her feet and runs from the room without looking at anyone.

Flea climbs to her feet and returns to her former position, eyes dead.

Sebastian drags the limp body of the boy out of the room.

The orchestra rises and bows, while Valmont heads toward the eager Jade Tiger but is intercepted by Julia. She takes a seat in the Asian Hegemon’s grouping but makes it clear that the Frenchman will be hers for the remainder of the evening. Jade Tiger accepts the attention of Valmont’s Dhampirs and the blood of a captive human instead.

Just another night in Vampyr high society.

* * * * *

When Sebastian dragged me out to the front of the house, the clash of wind, rain, thunder and lightning above made me feel as if my emotions were reflected in the skies. I kept myself limp, making Sebastian pull me the entire way but I was not about to go down easy.

The front of the house features a large porte-cochere that protects the doorway and drive from the elements. As we came through the front doors, I felt Sebastian prepare to hurl me from the front porch onto the loose gravel below. He held only a handful of my jacket, so I moved my arms until I began sliding out of it. When he threw, I slipped out and leapt onto his back!

I wrapped my arm around his throat in a classic choke hold but slipped my holding hand under his arm to make it harder to dislodge me. I also locked my ankles around his midsection and squeezed with all the Vampyr strength I had in me, screaming, “Gonna fucking kill you, motherfucker! You’re fucking dead, you fucking asshole!”

Or words to that effect.

Sebastian thrashed beneath me and slammed me back into one of the porch’s gray stone arches but I’d expected that and clutched even tighter. My thoughts flickered back to an image of Caroline and Valmont in the library but I forced them out as soon as they appeared and focused my mind on squeezing for the five or six minutes that it would take to choke the life out of Sebastian.

“Motherfucking shit-bag sonofabitch! Die you motherfucker! Just! Fucking! Die!”

Sebastian twisted and writhed, bucking me like a mechanical bull and still I squeezed. I stopped screaming, however, to conserve my energy for killing. He tried to slide himself out from my arms but I managed to hold my lock.

He clawed at me with his free arm and smashed me back against the wall a few more times, sending shock waves through my whole body but I continued to hold. He put his full strength into bringing down the arm I’d pinned up with my choke hold, using it as a lever to pry my clasped hands apart!

I shifted and tried to reassert my hold but I knew I was too late. His other arm came around and one of those huge, meaty hands grabbed hold of my neck. Despite my best effort to hang on, Sebastian flipped me over his shoulder—

Thunder boomed a half-second before a flash of lightning lit the sky and I smacked into the wet gravel of the driveway. The rain soaked me to the skin in the time it took me to look up. Sebastian shook off the effects of my choking and leapt past the porch steps, his wolf-skin coat billowing like a cape as he landed in a crouch. Standing, he cast it aside before stomping out to join me in the rain.

“Ah, `tis good to see thou still have passion in thee!” he shouted over the wind. “I swore I’d punish thou and so I shall but as a man of my line, I’d rather thou give back what thou can!”

I’m amazed at how clear my thoughts were, how focused I was. I climbed to a crouch, planning my actions to the last detail. I pushed away the wet gravel beneath my feet so I wouldn’t slip on it when I charged.

As I expected, Sebastian went into a wrestler’s crouch and waited for my move. I pushed off the ground and ran at him, as if I was going to leap or lock my arms with those two tree-trunks attached to his shoulders and slam my lesser weight into him like a Sumo. I let him go on thinking that until the last second, when I half-skidded to slow myself, ducked under his huge arms as they closed above me and swung my fist into his groin with all the force I could.

Sebastian grunted and staggered back a step but I followed, staying inside his arms and threw another set of punches into his kidney before finishing with an awkward uppercut that only nicked his chin. I got no time to appreciate my performance, because Sebastian’s hands clapped the sides of my head.