The Path of Razors (16 page)
Read The Path of Razors Online
Authors: Chris Marie Green
She offered her neck to him, feverish, urgent.
“Feed, Costin,” she said. “Before he gets here.”
Was it jealousy that spurred him? It looked like it as his gaze took on a possessive air and he cupped the side of her neck with a palm.
She shrugged her shirt off both shoulders, ignoring her healing cuts, the material slumping at her elbows and revealing the tight, black sports bra she’d worn for her errand at Queenshill.
He slipped a finger under a strap, and his touch brought primitive heat to her skin, melting her above and below it as the tips of her breasts went hard.
Impatience thudded at her, and she leaned her head back even more while angling closer to him.
“Now,” she said in a strangled whisper.
His eyes went vampy, silver and wild, his fangs emerging as he grabbed her waist and roughly sat her on the sink counter, knocking over a vase.
It crashed to the floor, also breaking apart the lily it’d held.
As Costin yanked up her skirt, bunching it around her waist, Dawn felt the marble, cool and sleek, on the back of her thighs, and she wrapped her legs around him, her shoes digging against his rear.
He lowered his mouth to her breast, nuzzling against it with his lips and a snag of fang. She flinched as it scraped her, her hips arching forward against the rise of his erection.
“Hurry, Costin.”
Just at the feel of his cock between her legs, where she ached and pulsed, she was crazed. Wanting the pierce of his fangs in a vein, needing to feel the pleasure and pain of her blood being sucked out until she crashed down from the high it would bring.
He used his tongue to circle her nipple, tracing her, bringing her to a silent scream. Even through the cotton of her bra, she felt the wetness of his mouth, but she wanted more.
Something rougher, meaner.
Something that would fill.
She shucked the straps of her bra down her arms, going only far enough to bare her breasts. She was pinned by her straps, but the slick feel of his tongue on her peaked nipple made up for any sense of entrapment.
Then he tongued her nipple all the way into his mouth, a fang on each side of her as he flicked the nub.
She slipped her hand between her legs, just to ease the sharp agony of her clit. Rubbing, pressing, massaging, she tried to make it go away, but it didn’t do any good.
“Costin,” she said.
And he understood, skimming his hands under her ass and lifting her as he bent and brought his mouth to the heat between her legs.
There, there ...
He tore at her panties with his fangs and, oddly, she laughed, the sound ragged and just as off balance as everything else in this messed-up world.
But she forgot to think about that when he licked his way up her slit, careful not to nick her, although the thought of his fangs so close, so dangerous, did a lot more carnal damage than he probably meant to.
She was really wet now, pulling at his hair as he used the tip of his tongue to paint her to a building bliss. Her legs fell open even wider, unable to get enough, wishing he’d ...
She went ahead and said it, almost screaming it at the level of a whisper.
“Do it, Costin.”
He stopped, his breath coming in pants against her. She felt his thoughts prodding at her skull to get in, but she was so immersed in a world of black ecstasy—the inside of a bubble that was straining to burst—that she mentally pushed away, even while she physically urged him closer.
“Costin—”
She shifted her hips toward his mouth.
“No,” he said, his voice all but recognizable in its escalating starvation, although she was sure it was still Costin, not Jonah.
Or was it ... ?
No, it was Costin.
“Do it for me,” she said.
She could feel the weight of him giving in to her, mostly because he was probably craving the taste of the most tender flesh, too.
As if testing, he grazed over the swollen inside of one of her lips, and she hissed in a breath.
Hurt.
Good.
Deserved.
She panted for more, maneuvering so she could look him in the face, plead with him if she had to, in order to get what she wanted.
But Costin was staring up at her with those silver eyes, and they seemed to be swirling with as much speed as her mind.
Her mixed-up, fucked-up mind.
When he slowly rose, his eyes a solid silver hue now, Dawn could sense the change in his posture.
The more casual assurance of Jonah.
He tugged her skirt down over her hips, then took her by the lapels of her blouse, pulling her forward until she was flush against him, her open legs bringing her against his cock.
Then, in one of those moves that Dawn could never understand, Jonah eased away, and her body cried out.
She fought to silence it, because she wasn’t going to give anything to him. Not to Jonah, goddamn it.
But she was in sheer agony, splitting from the middle outward.
She didn’t know what was going on with her own body, how she couldn’t just shut it down with Jonah here. Then again, before joining the team, she’d screwed her way through a lot of nights, taking what she could and trying to feel good about it. Sex had been a competition with her beautiful, wonderful, superstar mom, who’d been presumed dead until Dawn found out otherwise.
But now, what the hell was she doing?
Jonah spoke in his amused American accent—except he didn’t seem all that amused right now.
Just famished.
“I’ll guess that you’re done flirting with sure trouble,” he said.
Want, she thought, the need for fulfillment cracking through her, making her hate him and what his body did to her, whether it was Jonah at the helm or Costin.
Yet she knew what the inevitable outcome would be. They both did.
“Just get it over with,” she ground out, turning her face away from him.
Even as she said it, she craved it—the bite.
And Jonah obliged her, lowering his mouth to her neck, where the pop of his fangs into her skin made her press her legs against his sides.
Made her mind into a red blank as he sucked and sated himself, finally soothing her to a numb purgatory.
TEN
DRINK TIME WITH EVA, I
EVA lingered in a hallway, near a stretch of walls that boasted a line of Friends portraits.
Although one of the spirits had been watching her during the team’s meeting, the Friend had left now that there wasn’t much for Eva to eavesdrop on and, as she watched, her invisible bodyguard became visible in a nearby portrait, which featured an idyllic prairie.
Her wheaten curls came into focus, her blue eyes, her face, her chemise flapping in a still wind that couldn’t be felt outside the painting.
Ultimately, the Friend closed her eyes, at rest. Within the paint’s textures, she would prepare herself for when she was needed, just like all these other spirits who lined the hallway.
Eva started walking, trailing her fingertips below the portraits, just under the frames.
She knew Dawn was on the next floor with Costin, alone with him, feeding him, and Eva fended off the maternal instincts that shouted for her to go up there, knock on the door, and tell her daughter to keep it open while her boyfriend was over.
But Eva had forfeited the years when that would’ve been acceptable. She’d abandoned Dawn and Frank.
On the way past a portrait of an Egyptian Friend, she touched its wooden frame. At least, since Hollywood, Eva and her daughter’s relationship had gotten better, but she knew she’d never really be Dawn’s mom, just a “mother.” One who‘d, for all intents and purposes, been absent and then suddenly, shockingly reappeared.
Hi, I’m here. Love me.
Yet she didn’t expect any more than an attempt at reconciliation from Dawn now, and she was lucky to get even that. Eva owned what she had done—selling her soul to the Hollywood Underground and faking her own murder so that she would rise again as a plastic-surgery-enhanced “other” superstar.
She deserved all those unsure glances she caught Dawn sneaking at her. Actually, she even deserved Frank choosing Breisi’s affections over hers, although Eva would sell the soul Dawn had won back for her by the Master’s death if Frank would just give her one more try.
Near the end of the hallway, she stopped, her pulse jiggering at the sight of a half-open door.
Ironic, she thought. All she’d ever wanted was her family. She’d become a vampire because she’d believed her Hollywood handlers when they’d told her that going Underground would be the best thing for her loved ones’ futures, her stratospheric legacy ensuring they’d never lack for money. At least, she’d thought that’s why she’d wanted to go Underground—not because of the never-ending adulation of the fans and society.
Eva contained a shiver of self-awareness, then reset herself.
No, no. She really
had
gone Underground for Dawn and Frank. That’s right. But while she’d been staging a return to life Above, Frank and even Dawn had started to create their own versions of families.
had
gone Underground for Dawn and Frank. That’s right. But while she’d been staging a return to life Above, Frank and even Dawn had started to create their own versions of families.
Dawn, Frank, Breisi, Kiko ... They’d developed into a tight-knit unit, and all Eva could do was watch from the fringes.
She’d tried to become a part of them by volunteering to donate blood for the bags that Frank drank from, parceling them out so they’d last. She owed him at least that much for making him a vampire in the first place, but most of the time she only felt like more of a burden, someone to be watched over.
And she’d earned the spot she was in.
From inside the room down the hall, she heard his voice saying good night to someone—Breisi—and Eva knew that the spirit had gone to bed in her own portrait, now that the team was getting its bearings.
Eva hesitated, telling herself to leave, to go back to the guest room Limpet and Associates had given her, just until it was safe to return to her own nearby flat.
But then she heard Frank moving around, turning some late fifties music on at low volume, and her throat tightened.
Oldies but goodies. Their kind of tunes back when they’d both been human.
She found herself closing the distance to his door, knocking softly, then listening for his voice so it would wash over her, just like it used to, alone on the couch, snuggled together, them against the world.
He paused, then said, “Come in, Eva.”
He’d vampire-sensed her, she thought, laying her hand on the door.
But just before she pushed it open, “I Only Have Eyes for You” began to play, and a twisting sorrow made her dig her nails hard into the palm of her hand by her side.
Blood, whether she’d meant to draw it or not, barely started to creep out of the sting.
She wondered if she should leave, because the scent would get to Frank. It might scramble his mind and make him break the promise he’d made to Breisi to only drink Eva’s blood secondhand, not from her. It might ...
Eva hung her head, waited, almost rushed away.
Then, unable to help it, she pushed the door open.
As he looked up from one of the gizmos he was working on—all Eva could see were wires and metal—his green eyes lit with something so familiar that she smiled at him, hopeful.
Never losing the faith that he did still love her deep inside.
Then his gaze flicked to the side, to Breisi’s portrait, where the Latina with Louise Brooks-bobbed hair rested against the painted backdrop of the lab she’d kept in the L.A. house.
A weight, like a sharp rock with a death note attached, sank through Eva, dividing her.
But then a cajoling voice from the back of her mind—instincts that’d always looked out for her, instincts that had advised her to go Underground—whispered that she had what Breisi could never give Frank.
Blood.
So use it.
A second passed. Another.
Then Eva opened her palm.
It felt damp from the blood she’d drawn from her long, manicured nails.
She could see when the hint of her blood consumed Frank, because he pushed the bundle of wires and metal he was working on onto the table, where it moaned across the surface as he kept pushing, his head down.
“Frank?” she asked, afraid. Excited. Because she recalled what it was like to want blood, too. How irresistible the temptation could be.
His voice was like a thousand raw welts. “I already fed, Eva. From one of the bags in the fridge downstairs. Go away.”
But the sustenance hadn’t done much for him, she knew. It kept him functioning, those bags, yet it couldn’t be the same as drinking from Eva, whose blood stimulated him more than anyone else’s.
Other books
Dune: House Atreides by Frank Herbert
The Shepherd File by Conrad Voss Bark
Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set by Howard G. Hendricks, William D. Hendricks
Queen of Swords by Katee Robert
Dangerously Big by Cleo Peitsche
The Maiden and Her Knight by Margaret Moore
Alien Blues by Lynn Hightower
The Outrageous Debutante by Anne O'Brien
No Mercy by L. Divine
