In the Garden of Sin (21 page)

“My name for the first couple hundred years of my life was Thanchvil Vestarcnies,” she’d said, “and it was a butt-ugly name even back then. Most people have to take what they get when it comes to names. At least you got to choose your
last
name.”

Small comfort, especially four years later, when a new anti-depressant hit the market, and “Prazak” morphed overnight into “Prozac,” always uttered with at least a hint of a snicker.

Because it was just so fucking funny.

“Yeah, Oxy, that’s the way,” Galiana said in a shuddery voice. “Get some fingers up there. More, bitch. Fill me up. Both holes. Good boy…”

When she finally came, it was with a low, voluptuous moan that drew giggly whispers from a pair of hipster chicks in sloppy sweaters passing by on the sidewalk with their cigarettes. They glanced into the alley, but it was too dark for them to see much.

“Stand up,” Galiana commanded, as imperious as before, if a bit more breathless. “Get those pants down.”

Oxy unbuckled his belt and shoved the pants down to the knees. His ass was small and muscular. Not bad, if you ignored the testosterone-poisoned dickhead it was attached to.

“Now make yourself nice and hard. Good boy,” she praised as Oxy masturbated with brisk strokes, ass flexing.

Reaching overhead, Galiana grabbed a high crossbar of the iron window grille, pulled herself up, and wrapped her vinyl-booted legs around his hips. “You know what to do.”

He fumbled between them.

“Come on,
push,”
she said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”

He grabbed the bars and flexed his hips, groaning.

“Deeper,” she said.
“Deeper
. Now stop. Don’t move. That’s right,” she said, the diamond strands glinting as she undulated in a slow, serpentine rhythm. “You just stand there nice and still and let me pump that cock.”

Still gripping the bars, Oxy closed his eyes and let out a quavering moan, his head falling back. Galiana’s internal muscles were amazingly strong, the most powerful Turek had ever experienced, and she had complete control over them. Fucking her was like sticking your dick in a milking machine.

“Not so bad
now
, are you, bad boy?” With one hand still gripping the iron bar, Galiana slid out the partial denture that mimicked lateral incisors to either side of her front teeth, whereupon her fangs—curved, sharply pointed, and longer than Turek’s, because of her age—sprang down from their grooves in the roof of her mouth.

Setting the denture carefully on the windowsill, she yanked Oxy’s head forward by the hair and glided her tongue up the side of his neck from collarbone to jaw.

T’S ABOUT TIME
.

Turek stepped out from behind his blind as he removed his own two-tooth denture, which he tucked into a pocket of his lambskin blazer. His hollow fangs snapped down, sparking electric tingles that buzzed along the conduits in the roof of his mouth all the way to his cock, which grew half erect in anticipation.

Galiana tightened her legs around Oxy, giving Turek a feral smile. She moistened her lips with her tongue before positioning the tips of her fangs on the chosen “sweet spot” along Oxy’s carotid artery.

And then she pierced it.

There came a moment of utter stillness while Oxy processed what was happening. He began to flail then, as they almost always did, unless they were well and truly hammered.

Dislocating her lower jaw, Galiana bit hard to keep his head still. She renewed her two-handed grip on the window bar so as to keep him upright with his erection, or what remained of it, trapped inside her despite his efforts to pry her off. His guttural moans of distress, muffled by her muting spell, sounded like nothing a human throat could produce.

She opened her long legs as Turek came up behind their quarry, wrapping them tight around both men. Oxy let out a grunt of distress when he felt Turek pressed up against him. Galiana just kept on feeding, her hips moving in slow, shallow thrusts.

Turek ran his fingers along the other side of Oxy’s neck, feeling for the thrumming beneath the flesh. Having located the spot where the carotid was closest to the surface, he dipped his head and sank his fangs deep, through skin and muscle and arterial sheathing to the sweet, hot river of blood.

Oxy began thrashing in earnest when he realized that he was being fed upon by not one but two beings of a type he’d always considered to be monstrous figments of the imagination. Turek used a firm massage of his tongue to start the blood drawing up through his fangs. After a few seconds, he felt the rhythmic pulses in his palate that indicated a successful tapping of the artery.

Oxy’s frenzied efforts to dislodge himself through punching and pushing wouldn’t last much longer, Turek knew, but in the meantime, it was pretty tiresome. Grabbing the other man’s hands, Turek curled them around the window bars and held them there while he suckled. Oxy still struggled, but that was all right. Turek rather liked to feel the agitation of his prey at the front end of a feeding. It only amped up the primal gratification.

The influx of blood—one surge with every beat of this human’s
heart—sent prickles up into Turek’s brain and down his spine. Then came the euphoria, a vertiginous flood of it.
Yes, oh, yes, yes, yes…
It was this transcendent intoxication, not unlike that heart-stopping moment right before orgasm, that Turek lived for, hunted for, killed for.

The sensation quickened every nerve in his body, making his balls swell, his cock stiffen. The lust that accompanied a feeding was excruciatingly intense. Not all vampires experienced it, but Turek and Galiana’s subrace, the Upír, almost always did—as did their prey, who tended to absorb this carnal blood-haze, entering a state of hypnotic arousal as their blood trickled away.

Turek rubbed himself against Oxy’s tight, squirming ass, not caring that it belonged to a man. In the normal course of events, he preferred women. Ah, but when he was feeding, when he was hard and hungry and quivering, all he needed was a body, any body.

Oxy’s writhing became less erratic and more rhythmic, the muscles of his ass clenching hard and slow as he matched Galiana’s unhurried thrusts. Galiana growled in pleasure, doubtless because the cock inside her was growing thick and hard once again, filling up that voracious pussy. Oxy continued to grip the iron bars when Turek removed his hands.

Turek unzipped his jeans and freed his own erection, which curved toward his belly, tapering at the tip like the tusk of a boar. With his fangs still seated firmly in Oxy’s neck, he withdrew the little plastic packet he’d tucked into his jeans pocket next to the stag-handled Sheffield switchblade that had been his constant urban companion for over a century and a half. He opened the packet and rolled on the super-lubricated condom. Galiana ridiculed him for using them with their male prey.
You want your blood-fucking to be smooth and
fastidious, just like you, when a bit of nastiness and pain can add so much to the experience
.

Easy for her to say. When it came to pain, “Mistress G,” as she was known in BDSM circles the world over, preferred to be on the dispensing end rather than the receiving.

Oxy hitched in a breath, his sphincter tightening reflexively when he felt the sheathed tip of Turek’s cock against it. Turek grabbed Oxy’s hips and snapped his own, breeching the little aperture with a grunt. Oxy let out a shuddery moan. Turek pushed again, driving in deep. One more thrust, and he was buried to the root.

Still shaking from the abrupt impalement, but lost in the blood-haze, Oxy began to thrust again, faster than before. It felt to Turek like a strong, greased fist gripping and pulling, the sensation enhanced by the rapture of fresh blood pumping through his body. Blood-fucking was always blissful, but especially so when he knew that he wouldn’t have to cut it short, that he would get to feel a human’s lifeblood draining slowly away, pulse after gradually diminishing pulse, as his pleasure spiraled up, up, up…

The lure of a death feed was dark, beastly, seductive. It was a penchant that Galiana didn’t share. She would rather take just enough to satisfy her appetites and leave the human alive, if a bit groggy. It was safer, she insisted, and certainly less troublesome. And, too, she felt that fixating on killing during a feeding was akin to fixating on coming during sex, rather than on the exhilarating journey. Yes, Turek would reply, but if there were no orgasm to look forward to, how exhilarating would the journey really be?

When Galiana did consent to bleed their prey dry, it was usually as a sort of reward to Turek for having pleased her somehow—a way of throwing him a bone. From time to time,
however—tonight, for instance—the impulse to “thin the flock,” as she liked to call it, came from her.

Galiana Solsa, as Turek knew all too well, was not a woman to be fucked with. Oxy should never have spoken to her as he did, and he certainly should not have raised his hand to her. This was to have been a harmless little midnight snack, with this “bad boy” coming to around dawn on a bench in Washington Square Park. When Turek hunted alone and planned to leave the pigeon alive, he targeted prey that was already drunk or stoned, and therefore forgetful, and he made sure to do enough physical damage to the neck to disguise the fang marks. Such measures were unnecessary with Galiana, whose physiology had had three millennia to adapt to her vampiric needs. Her saliva not only encouraged speedy healing of the fang wounds, it induced a mild amnesia. Had Oxy not acted like such a dick, he would have awakened on that bench tomorrow woozy from blood loss, but with no evidence that he’d been fed upon.

But there would be no more sunrises for this “bad boy” after tonight. Already—it happened fast when he and Galiana shared a feed—Oxy’s blood pressure was dropping, causing the flow of blood to grow weaker and slower. His skin was pallid; his heart raced. Yet Turek could tell, from his sharp panting and jackhammer thrusts, that he was riding that pre-orgasmic wave. So was Galiana, judging from her quivering legs and the way she bucked against Oxy as she gripped the iron bars, her jaw still closed tight around his neck.

Turek fucked and suckled, consuming this human’s body as it squeezed and squeezed and squeezed his cock, the pleasure gathering in his veins, in his balls, slamming hard against the ass he was fucking, slamming, slamming…

Over the thundering in his ears—Oxy’s heart, not his
own—Turek heard footsteps on the sidewalk as a small group passed the alley. Amid their chatter, he heard a name he hadn’t heard in over two and a half centuries: “Ilutu-Lili.”

He turned toward the entrance to the alley, his teeth tearing from Oxy’s neck in a spray of blood.

“Ilooloo-what? What kind of name is that?” It was a slightly drunk male voice, unrecognizable to Turek. “You sound foreign. Where’re you from?”

“I was born in the valley of the Euphrates River.”

That voice
. That throaty, velveteen, darkly seductive voice…

It’s her. It’s really her. It’s Lili!
Turek pulled out of Oxy, ripped off the condom, and tossed it onto the zip-cape.

“Tony?” Galiana had withdrawn her fangs from the ravaged neck of her prey to frown at Turek as he zipped up his jeans. “What’s wrong,
marish?
. Where are you—?”

“I’ll meet you back at the apartment,” he said as he turned and sprinted out of the alley and down the street.

They were standing at the corner of West Third, spotlit by a streetlamp as they waved away a cab that had started pulling over. There were four of them, two men and two women.

Turek ducked into a doorway, dragged in a breath, and peered out. One of the women, a delicate blonde with pixie-cut hair who looked to be in her mid-twenties, was rocking the schoolgirl thing: plaid skirt, knee socks, crested blazer over prim white blouse. And saddle shoes; they still sold those? Her only accessory was a pink dog collar attached to a matching pink leash, which was wrapped around the fist of a well-groomed banker type in a chalk-striped suit and tie—nice quality, Armani, or maybe Brioni.

The tall guy with the long blond pony tail was Elic, who lived at the French château where Turek had spent two weeks in bawdy revelry with Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club in the spring of 1749. Turek had always suspected that Elic was
some type of Follet; how many humans have it in them to prevail over a vampire in a physical confrontation? The fact that he was still alive and youthful after all these years confirmed that suspicion. From the looks of him, especially his height, he was almost certainly a member of one of the Nordic
álfr
sub-races, probably two to four thousand years old. Those Neolithic elves, the ones from Northern Europe, all stood well over six feet.