Carnal Sacrifice (7 page)

* * *

Delaney jolted awake when she felt the llama struggle to its feet. Gasping, she looked around. The fog had lifted, which was a relief, but judging by the light, it must have been late afternoon already. She had to get back to see if Jaden was okay.

The llama regarded her with its dark, long-lashed eyes, and then ambled off. She set out, still bruised and achy, but glad to be alive. Only a few tattered wisps of fog remained from this morning. The drop-off lay within five meters. It made her sick to think how close she’d come to an ugly death.

Someone called to her. Surprised, she whirled around. It was Amaru, followed by four other women from the village. All wore the same tense expression.

In Quechua, Amaru said, “This was your doing.”

“Why do you say that?” Delaney said, caught off guard.

“You brought him.” She pointed in the direction of Delaney’s hut. “You brought a Hungering One to the village, one you claim as kin.”

“How did you know what he was?” she asked in amazement.

“Its eyes. I see its eyes. I see also the desire it bears you, this brother of your family. It is
millakuna
.”
An abomination.

Delaney didn’t need to look at the other women to know they stood in solidarity with Amaru. No quarter given? So be it.

“Jaden is my brother by marriage, not blood. Yes, he is a Hungering One, but he’s here to lift the curse of his people. And to save this village from destruction.”

Amaru gazed at her with the cold inscrutability that Delaney had come to know so well. “Save. B’oh! He saves nothing but his place at our throats. He is an animal, like all the rest.”

“For months now, the Hungering Ones have fed off animals, not people. You know this. How can you doubt their sincerity when they’ve come here to help?”

“They come here to
feed
. Love has blinded you.”

“Oh, because there’s no one to feed on elsewhere? Think about what you’re saying.”

Delaney could sense her arrow had found its mark. She waited, nerves pulled thin by fear, cold, hunger. But she knew firsthand that the bedrock of Quechua society was communal beliefs, communal thinking. New ideas were not only unwelcome, they were dangerous. You didn’t scrape out an existence by flying off in different ideological directions. One mind, one fist. And now Delaney was trying to pry that fist open.

“There are others like him,” Amaru said. “And now they will come. If he joins them, they will destroy us. He will not be able to stop so many.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You are wrong. I understand quite well. You have brought evil to this village. We may not have the power to throw you out, but we do have the power to ask you to leave.”

Delaney’s heart gave a sideways lurch. After everything she’d done for the village, the lives she’d helped to mend, patch and save. The water filtration system she’d implemented, the latrines she’d dug, the typhoid she’d eliminated. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It felt as though the last two years of her life had been for nothing, meant nothing.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Delaney said. “If we leave, you no longer have our protection.”

Amaru said nothing, but the proud set of her shoulders, grim mouth and furrowed brow spoke volumes. The women behind her appeared only a little less certain.

Delaney turned away in humiliation. She trudged up the hill toward her house. Tears of hurt and frustration clogged her throat. Later, she thought. I’ll make sense of this later. She wondered what Amaru would say if she knew about the ritual, what she herself was preparing to undergo in order to guarantee their protection. She reminded herself what her dad used to say:
“Don’t do the right thing because you expect gratitude. Do the right thing because it is right.”

Still, her nerves were raw when she pushed aside the blanket and entered her door. Jaden lay sleeping, but it must have been a restless sleep, because his clothes had been flung in all directions, and one muscled arm lay across his forehead. What would he do once he heard that Val had tried to kill her again?

They would return to the temple, she supposed, she and Jaden, and prepare for the ritual.

All so she could save a village that didn’t want her, redeem a man who did, and defy a woman who sought her death.

Chapter Eight

Jaden stirred as soon as the last molten fingers of sunlight streamed across the valley floor and disappeared behind the peaks. Delaney saw him sit up in bed, disheveled and sexy, before his gaze zeroed in on her.

The moment lengthened. In the dark corner where he sat, his eyes flashed silver like an ocelot’s. There was an almost lazy, predatory quality to them that made her breath catch.

The air between them seemed to shimmer and go electric, a frequency of sexual vibration that, despite the fears that had preyed on her while he slept, she was exquisitely attuned to. Her body’s own blood seemed to pulse in concert with his. She could almost hear it heating, thickening, and knew that he too was thickening. His desire for her was a palpable force, and one she did not take lightly.

With the grace of the lithe and powerful, he got to his feet and strode over to her. His enormous cock, already jutting and heavy, sought her lips. Moaning, she sank to her knees and welcomed him. Her tongue slid over its rigid contours, focusing on the knot beneath the taut, plum-shaped head. His harsh breathing guided her, and for a minute, she thought maybe he would finish in her mouth, and grew wetter imagining it. But he said, “Get in the hammock.”

Slung between two beams, the hammock kept her cool during broiling summers and kept supplies off the floor in the winter, but she rarely slept in it. How thrilling to think what he might do with her in such a thing. Fumbling in her excitement, she peeled off her clothes and stood before him, naked.

His eyes darkened. He reached out to cup one breast and then passed his thumb over her aching nipple. “You need another lesson.”

He said it in a way that sounded like an odd, regretful tenderness. It surprised her how fiercely her sex clenched in response to those words—easy-going, egalitarian Jaden Seavers became dark and commanding in bed. Until now, she had no idea how much it turned her on.

“Last night, you learned how to navigate through pain, how to flip it. You learned that the more something hurts, the more pleasure it can give you, if you let it.”

She remembered. God, yes, she would always remember.

“Now, I will give you a lesson in submission.”

That puzzled her at first. Submission to what? He grabbed her rappelling ropes in the corner, slung one around the first beam and bound it around her right wrist. She watched him, growing more aroused, as he concentrated on his work.

He took the other rope, appended it to the beam and lashed it to her left wrist. The rough fibers bit into the soft skin there, but she found it strangely intoxicating. Her knees went weak. Her head swam. But her sex was so engorged and wet, she could feel it pushing apart her labia. He saw it too, as he watched her body for signs of responsiveness: her quickening pulse, uneven breathing, ripening nipples. Jaden noted them without comment, but his penis gave a visible jerk.

Effortlessly, he picked her up. Her breasts bobbed inches from his mouth. He teased one, and pleasure sparked through her in electric shocks. The other one he rolled between his teeth and tongue. She felt so helpless, lashed to the beams, her arms outstretched. Helpless and so wildly turned on.

Jaden positioned her bottom on the hammock so she sat on it like a swing, her legs around his and his cock straining toward her. With her head and back supported, he let go and picked up the last rope. Slowly, he tied her legs together, and then threw the end of the rope over the ceiling beam before securing it to one of the supports.

Delaney groaned with unexpected pleasure. The chill air bit her nipples just like the ropes bit her wrists and ankles. Jaden had obviously angled her high so he could penetrate whatever orifice he cared to. There was nothing she could do about it. The profound eroticism of submission made her throb with need. If he were to touch her right now, she would explode into a thousand burning novas.

“I knew you needed this,” Jaden said in a silken voice. “You need to be tied up and made to come. Do you understand why I must do this?”

She murmured something unintelligible, even to her.

“
Do you understand?
”

He positioned himself, grabbed her hips and then impaled her on his thick shaft. Delaney cried out at the fullness, and her head rolled to one side. In this position, he penetrated depths she never knew existed. He pulled out, then teased the first two or three inches with his swollen head before going deep again, using the swing of the hammock to ease her on and off his cock. The sensation was startling in its intensity, too much, and at first she tried to arch away from it. He gentled her by wetting his thumb and passing it over her clit. Instantly, she went still, fixated on what he was doing.

“That’s it,” he said. “But you have to take me deep if you want to come. Otherwise, I take my hand away.”

“It’s too big.”

“You’re going to be doubly penetrated soon. That means one cock in your pussy and one in your ass.”

She moaned.

“It might drive you out of your mind.”

He slid her halfway down on top of him again and resumed teasing her clit. Sometimes he went shallow, other times deep, but it was easier to handle the fullness now. The only thing she could think about was the mounting pressure of his thumb sliding over her slick nub. Warmth bloomed, expanding in tongues of fire. She cried out.

Jaden forced her all the way down and held her there. The pain fueled her orgasm, and her cries rose to a fever pitch. The climax seemed to last forever. It clawed its way up, pleasure and pain a double helix, spiraling. And then, with no warning, another, and then another. Jaden continued studying her reactions, mapping out her sexual signposts with the absorption of a cartographer while he drove her from one climax to the next, barely moving her at all now, but rock-hard inside her.

She was powerless to stop his assault on her senses. In the breathless suspension between climaxes, she feared that she might break somehow, her mind might burst open like a hot desert fruit. Then he sent her spinning again, a racking, terrifying ecstasy, and her fear was drowned in honey.

Dimly, she heard him growl deep in his throat. With every orgasm, her sex clenched him and pushed him closer to his own climax. He started to move the hammock faster now, easing her up and down on his swollen shaft, his gaze fixed on the dark beauty of their union. Even without the dexterity of his fingers, she came again. This orgasm was visceral. A sledgehammer.

Jaden wrenched himself out of her slick hole. His cock glistened with her wetness. He slowly penetrated her ass, just the entrance, and released a flood of cream. The shock of it gave her a jolt, but another orgasm came roaring up as though it had waited in ambush. Never in her life had she felt anything so depraved or so delicious. It shook her until she couldn’t breathe, and still Jaden pumped her full of hot juice. Their cries mingled, grew and then quieted.

He remained lodged in her tight channel while they both plummeted down to earth. She couldn’t speak. Nothing, not even his previous initiations, had prepared her for what had just happened. It was as though the molecules in her body had been rearranged. She was different now. Rarer. An angel both of darkness and light.

“You will be my death before you are my deliverance,” Jaden said softly. “I will drown in you.”

* * *

A thousand times, Jaden had to stop himself from forbidding Delaney to go outside. Once he’d learned what had happened to her, how she’d almost plunged to her death blinded by fog, he never wanted her out of his sight. That his own mother was capable of such evil was a knife to his heart.

“I don’t know why you insist on turning your back on your own people,”
she used to say.
“A vampire is a vampire, not a tree hugger. A conscience is nothing more than a leash, flimsy at best, hardly worth the trouble of keeping.”

But Jaden had never been keen on being a vampire. Sitting in Delaney’s hut and watching her pack a few things for the trip back to the temple, he thought he knew why. Being a vampire afforded him many advantages—psychic intuition at times, perhaps a certain charisma that had catapulted him to stardom—but it kept him in a state of suspended animation. For every ten human years, it took him a hundred to reach roughly the same age. Vampires did die after a millennium. And that kind of immortality kept vampires from fully giving their hearts to any human they loved, because some part of them knew humans grew old and died so much sooner. Jaden wanted to take that journey with Delaney, not watching from the sidelines. He wanted an expiry date. Otherwise, he was looking at centuries of despair without her. Or, if turned fully demon, he would no doubt suffer the same fate as his father, feeding on the wrong girl and then being staked through the heart by her angry, grieving family.

All he had to do now was keep Delaney alive until the ritual. After that, she would be safe, and he would be free of his demon. No matter how much Val might have envied and hated Delaney, she would be unlikely to seek revenge. Jaden believed that to be true.

Keeping Delaney alive wasn’t all he had to do.

Despite the lessons and sexual indoctrinations he’d given Delaney, there was one lesson he’d failed to give himself. He had to learn how to share her. To share her without losing his mind.

“You’re awfully quiet.” Delaney coaxed the zipper on her duffel bag closed. “You’re not thinking of other ways to tie me up, are you? Because Amaru made it pretty clear she wanted us gone as soon as possible.”

“No. I’m doing my… What did you used to call it?”

“Your brooding Heathcliff?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“It was sexy then too.”

Jaden smiled. “You played it pretty close to the vest. I never knew.”

“You know now.” She knelt down and pressed her warm lips to his. “Are you sure you want to go through with the ritual?”

He deepened the kiss, let the heat of it wash over him.
Down, boy
. “Now that you’re mine again, I have no intention of letting you go. More people than just me depend on that.”

“Am I to become a Hollywood tabloid-fodder girlfriend, then? ‘Jaden Seavers shags stepsister.’ The press should have a field day with that one.”

“Let’s just get you through the ritual first,” he said. “Then we can worry about the rest.”

But he did worry. Trekking through the silent village alongside Delaney, he could sense the fear and hostility, all the eyes peering at them in the dark. What hard-won diplomatic relations had his coming here ruined for her? How could he help her repair them? There was every possibility that they could never be repaired.

Yet something about the vastness of that wild land forbade speech as they picked their way up rocky slopes and followed narrow footpaths. Words were insubstantial. The unspeakable beauty of the Andes was too great. The hard clean smell of snow from the peaks was a broom to the worries that had spun cobwebs in his brain. He breathed in the sharp air and focused on his own doors of perception: the pale luminescence cast on every rock and every wind-crippled tree. A welcome sense of his own insignificance compared to the immensity of space. Even the power of his own muscles as he walked.

Walking made him remember. Images from the past whirred through his head like film from a projector. The night Val found him and Delaney in the boathouse, the night that had changed everything, had blown their lives apart. The night that he’d left for Hollywood and Delaney had fled here, to this, the remotest corner on earth.

Val had raved. She’d accused him of incest and denounced Delaney as a whore. But desire for Delaney had always owned him. It had taken up residence inside his skin, his muscles, his loins. In one way or another, it had informed every decision, every thought, every woman he touched trying to erase her. It had never let go. Instead, it led him again and again to the boathouse, with the mossy smell of the river and the damp boards creaking and the liquid smoothness of her skin. He’d gone delirious with her scent, with seeing the masses of her dark hair that lay spread out on the blanket he’d put down for her.

How he had arrived at that moment of feeling Delaney naked beneath him… He still thought of that with burning shame. Even now.

He’d followed Delaney to the boathouse that night after witnessing a particularly nasty altercation between her and Val. He’d come with the intention to console her, but when he saw Delaney standing with her back turned, her face pressed to the window overlooking the river, words died in his throat.

Moonlight cast a ghostly nimbus around her silhouette. She seemed almost fragile in her aloneness. He wanted to touch her but couldn’t, and stood rooted to the floor.

She saw his reflection in the window and spun around. Her black eyes flickered as though she had read his thoughts. She closed the distance between them without hesitation or shyness, without apparent shame. She came to him like a mirage made real to the nomad who has crossed a desert to find her.

By the time she’d reached him, he was already hard. She raised her lips to his, and he devoured them. Now she was trembling and warm and alive in his arms. Now she was naked. Now he was naked too, moving over her, on top of her, inside of her. All he could see was her. All he could feel was her. All he could hear was Delaney whimpering, “Jaden, please. Jaden…”

He was crazy with love and desire, driving his cock between her thighs. The scent of her intoxicated him. It was the same one she left in her wake when she darted past him down the hall, the one that emanated from her sheets, her pillows, the one that compelled him to spill buckets of seed thinking about her. She came. He could feel it. Release came for him too. He bucked and twisted while she cried out. The intensity of his orgasm shocked him. Sexually, he’d never been this high, and still he continued to stream into her.

“I love you,” he gasped. “Delaney, I love you.”

There was a noise, and he looked up. Val stood in the doorway, her lips compressed in rage. “Get your clothes on, you little fools.”