Dark Destiny (Principatus) (7 page)

Sliding her fingertips up her torso, the sound of Kings Cross’s nightlife wafting through her open window like background music, she traced a slow line over the swell of her bare breasts, circling the nipple on each until they puckered into hard tips.

A shot of heat stabbed into her pussy and she closed her eyes, releasing a soft, hitching sigh. She wanted to feel Ven’s fangs on her nipples. He’d never drawn blood from her there, no matter how often she’d suggested he could. He’d bitten her once or twice, but never with his fangs. Never to feed. What would it feel like for him to do so? To suckle her blood from the tiny wounds he made as he massaged and cupped and squeezed each heavy curve of flesh?

Her pussy fluttered at the thought and she whimpered, arching her back a little to press her thighs together.

Opening her eyes again, she studied the small black cracks marring the white plaster of her ceiling. They looked like tiny varicose veins.

The comparison made her think of her own blood and she lifted her hand to her neck, fingering the pulse beating just below her ear. Ven’s preferred spot to bite.

For three years, she’d been his primary feed source. Almost every night he came to her, made love to her, drank from her. Not just her blood, but her juices as well. He made her come with his mouth and his teeth and his cock and fed on the product of each. Her blood
and
her cream.

The burn of his penetration—both fangs and cock—was something she didn’t want to live without. It consumed her. The nights he didn’t come to her, she lay waiting, her body on fire, trembling, aching for the pain and the pleasure he brought upon her.

She was a good feed. She knew that. Always there for the vampire when he needed her, never saying no to anything he suggested—and when the mood took him, he suggested some pretty kinky things—offering herself to his every whim and desire. Just as a loyal and loving pet should.

Amy released another sigh, this one not so ragged. Loving. What a hideously dangerous word. A word fraught with pain and complications. How had she let herself fall in love with a vampire? A vampire who’d once been a surfboard-riding journalist, of all things. A smoothie both with his body
and
his words.

If she’d known what he was when she’d first met him—during a nighttime beach volleyball game at Bondi where he and his brother were wiping the sand with their opponents—she wouldn’t have asked him out for a beer.

Who are you kidding, Amy? The idea of vampires has turned you on since you first saw Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac.

A shiver rippled through Amy and she rolled her eyes. Ven made Brad Pitt’s vampire look like a reject from a bad TV show. That he hadn’t revealed to her he
was
a vamp for close to a month after that first post-beach-volleyball beer only made his appeal all the more intoxicating. She’d been well on her way to falling for him as a human, his dry sarcasm making her laugh, his smoldering green eyes making her burn and his tender, attentive lovemaking making her melt. When he’d finally revealed her fangs to him, his eyes almost nervous, she’d wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, bowed her neck and whispered
yes, oh, Lord, yes
, without hesitation or fear.

Three years later and here she was—in lust, in love and intoxicated.

Pressing her fingertips harder to her neck, she licked her lips. She’d asked Ven to “turn” her the last time he’d come to her. She’d practically begged him. The rapture she felt whenever his fangs punctured her neck, the deep, steady burning sensation through her body as he drank from the twin holes… Fuck, she couldn’t go without that. Even twenty-four hours was almost impossible to bear. If she were a vampire too…

A shudder wracked Amy’s petite frame and she let out a gasp. An eternity of that drawing burn was too exquisite to ponder. The idea almost made her come there and then.

Rolling her head to the side, mouth dry, sex throbbing and wet, Amy looked at the clock beside her bed. She frowned.

Nine-sixteen p.m.

Ven should have been here by now.

Her gut clenched and she licked her parched lips, closing her eyes for a moment. She ached for him. A desperate ache low in the pit of her belly.

Rolling from her bed, she stood and crossed to the window, parting the flimsy gauze curtains to stare out into the night. He rarely entered her home that way anymore. Her open invitation allowed him much more freedom to come and go. But every now and again when he was in a playful mood, she’d hear her name whispered and there he’d be, perched on her windowsill, four stories above the ground, grinning at her with that cheeky, sarcastic glint in his pale eyes.

Tonight didn’t seem to be one of those nights.

Amy gazed at the busy street below, watching tourists and locals alike move about the Cross’s main drag, some pausing to listen to the strip-club hawkers, some popping in and out of the various twenty-four-hour stores, some giggling at the hookers teetering along the sidewalk in stiletto boots and leather thongs.

There was no sign of Ven at all.

Her sex constricted with denied need and she frowned. Two nights, now. Two nights that he hadn’t come to her.

She gnawed on her bottom lip, rubbing her palms up and down her bare arms as she did so. The ache in her core grew stronger and her pussy constricted again. God, he wasn’t coming.

Maybe he’s hurt?

The chilling thought shot through Amy’s distraught mind and she sucked in a sharp breath. The paranormal world in Sydney existed in shrouded secrecy, only known to those within it. Territorial demons, vampire hunters, weres, dark elves, shit, even other vampires—all existed side by side in a tenuous concord, all presenting a very real threat to that concord and each other. And from what she could gather, most either targeted Ven or avoided him like the plague.

“That’s it,” she muttered, turning from the Ven-less windowsill. She crossed back to her bed, grabbed the cordless phone on the nightstand and punched in his cell phone number, hands trembling, pussy constricting. She needed to know he was okay almost as much as she needed to feel the burn of his feed.

“G’day, you’ve reached Steven Watkins. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

Amy quickly punched a key on the phone, cutting the connection. She could leave a message, but she didn’t want Ven to think she was desperate.

But you
are
desperate, girlie girl. Your whole body aches, your cunt feels thick and heavy, your muscles weak and trembly. You
know
what you want. You
know
what you need.

She closed her eyes, chewing on her bottom lip before snatching up her jeans and a skimpy black shirt from the end of the bed. Damn it. Damn him. She yanked them over her naked legs and torso, muttering senseless sounds of contempt the whole time.

She
did
know what she needed, what she craved and hungered for. She needed to feel the burn so fucking much it hurt. And she knew where to go to get it.

She just hoped to God Ven never found out.

Ven stepped out of St Vincent’s Hospital ER and stormed along the crowded passageway toward the exit, the glaring fluorescent bulbs above him bleaching his already pale skin to a ghastly white. He weaved his way through waiting patients, worried family members and exhausted interns alike, shutting the potent, tantalizing stench of fresh blood permeating the air from his mind. He was hungry, bloody hungry, but feeding wasn’t the priority at the moment. Finding Death was.

He’d been to just about every hospital, morgue and seedy twenty-four-hour pub he could in the last two hours, hoping to catch her scent. She wasn’t at any of them and nor had she been, not even the Tudor Hotel, inner Sydney’s most dangerous, high-mortality-rate pub, despite the fact a drunk Irish tourist had been stabbed in the neck and died during a brawl over a spilt bottle of Guinness no less than fifty minutes ago.

Wherever Death was, she wasn’t lending a hand to the expiration of the newly dead within a twenty-mile radius.

Meters from the hospital’s exit, he stopped and pulled in a deep breath, tasting the three-a.m. air, hoping to detect even the faintest trace of the Grim Reaper.

The rich, cloying stench of blood filtered through his nose, over his highly tuned olfactory nerves and his mouth flooded with hot saliva. Christ, he was hungry.

He ground his teeth, forcing his fangs to retract and the demon within to back off.

His stomach growled, a wholly human physical reaction to denied sustenance and he bit back a curse. This wouldn’t do. He would need all his strength when he found Death—the dismaying memory of how easily she’d thrown him off back in Patrick’s bedroom was still too fresh to ignore—and unless he fed soon, he’d be weaker than an asthmatic kindergartener.

He pulled his cell from his back pocket, flipped it open and then snapped it shut. Amy would be more than willing to accommodate his hunger right at that moment, but what he needed was a quick, sharp, no-questions-asked feed. In and out in less than ten minutes.

He had two options.

One, he could “charm” his way into the local cop shop and take his pick of any of the scum incarcerated in lock-up. Two, he could hit the Pleasure Pussy Nightclub on Kings Cross’s main drag and take his pick of any of the human females willing and wanting to give themselves to one of Sydney’s underground “creatures”.

His saliva glands exploded again at the thought.

Growling with frustrated impatience—he
really
didn’t have time for this—he sprinted into the shadows of the hospital’s dimly lit car park and folded space.

There really was no other way to describe the process by which he moved around when in a hurry. He thought of where he wanted to be, pictured it, pictured an impossible fold in reality bringing his current location and his desired location together and then—with a blurring of his surroundings and a white-hot surge of energy through his body—he was there. He knew he physically traveled the distance between the two spots, but
how
still eluded him. Sometimes he had recollections of flying, the night air kissing his face as the lights of the city streaked beneath him, other times he recalled sensations of sprinting across the ground on what seemed like four feet, each covered in glossy black fur and tipped with sharp, hooked claws. He never questioned the mode of transportation. What mattered was that he got where he wanted to be fast. It had saved Patrick’s life more than once from some unexplained “accident”.

And hopefully it would again tonight, although he had to admit, Death in the flesh could never be called an accident.

A vivid and all-too-clear image of Death in the flesh popped uninvited into Ven’s head. The very naked flesh. A dark tension coiled through the pit of his stomach and a twinge of unexpected hunger that had nothing to do with blood shot through his cock.

He growled. He most definitely didn’t have time for
that
. Besides, the bitch had taken his soul. What the bloody hell was he doing being turned on by her?

Forcing the way-too-enticing image of a naked Grim Reaper from his mind, he replaced it with an image of the filthy but hardly used alley behind the Pleasure Pussy Nightclub.

His cold skin began to tingle, his blood began to burn. He pictured the hospital car park and the alley coming together, like a piece of paper being folded in two. He drew the image into his mind and then he was moving, his hair rippling back from his temples and forehead, lashing behind him as he ripped through the black night sky.

The lights of Sydney blurred to a kaleidoscope of glowing lines below him, the scents of the city assaulting him as he passed through them. He increased his speed until, with an abrupt jolt, he stood in the alley.

Immediately, he was attacked by the stench of stale beer, vomit, old blood and even older semen. The alley, it seemed, was the perfect place to finish an act of carnal sin started within the nightclub, whether that act be murder or sex.

Raking his fingers through his windswept hair, he walked out of the filthy alley onto the infamous Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross’s main drag and Australia’s premier home of sex, drugs, hookers, pimps and five-star restaurants.

Strip-club hawkers, curious tourists, harried locals, barely dressed whores and overly dressed businessmen moved past him, most of the women and quite a few of the men giving him decidedly interested glances. Even while human he’d been considered good looking, but since his transformation…suffice to say, he had
no
problems finding companionship whenever he wanted it.

Funnily enough, since meeting Amy Mathieson, he hadn’t needed or wanted to go looking for it. The petite photographer satisfied all his desires. That didn’t stop his allure to the living however, and tonight was no exception. More than one human sized him up as he pushed past them. One tall, willowy blonde in skintight black latex pants and a blood-red bustier disengaged herself from the arms of a man dressed in a U.S. naval officer’s uniform and sashayed her way up to him, her smoldering blue eyes promising all sorts of fun. She stopped directly in his path and, without hesitation, placed her palm completely on his groin. “I’m yours if you want me.”

“Hey!” the sailor barked behind her.

Ven gently closed his fingers around her slender wrist and lifted her hand from his dick. “Not tonight, love. I’m in a hurry.”