Blood Ex Libris Page 7

  I came back to reality with his cock still in my mouth, suckling and licking him gently. When I opened my eyes, I saw his death-grip on the chair, and decided to be nice and let him sit down. I sat back, smugly self-satisfied, and he fluidly collapsed on the sofa alongside me. Somehow, he was wrapped around me before I could say or do anything, and I was trapped in a tangle of hot-fleshed arms and legs, being covered with kisses and little nibbles—sharp nibbles! I started laughing with delight, “I feel like I’m Calvin attacked by Hobbes!” This led to me having to explain I did not mean the philosopher. There were some ways I desperately needed to bring Sandu into the modern world.

  He divested me of my clothing (his clothing!) while I talked, and smoothly drew the glasses off my face. He went back to kissing me, and I started getting distracted by the contrasting sensations of delicate kisses and sharp nips. He hadn’t drawn any blood, yet, but I was most certainly getting a taste of vampiric foreplay. Well, I had teased him mercilessly for a while there: turnaround was fair play. And also, I was enjoying the tingly flashes of stinging pain shocking up my nerve endings, followed by his soothing attentions with lips and tongue.

  We had been spooning, but he had worked me ’round to get access to my breasts, and once there, he set-to in earnest. I was moaning and gasping in no time at all. I missed the part where he started drawing drops of blood and licking them up, but it seemed a logical progression, and I was having that whole pain/pleasure confusion thing again, so I just laid back and enjoyed it. Well, perhaps I wriggled a bit, too.

  Everything kept building and building, including, unsurprisingly, a new erection for the Impaler, which kept poking into my thigh. By this point in time I was aching to be penetrated. “Please, Sandu!” I begged. He looked up and grinned.

  “Please what?” He licked a few beads of blood off the skin right above my nipple. I was not usefully coherent: “Please...fuck me...now!”

  Still moving far too deliberately slowly, he climbed on top, his knees separating my legs. I was soaking wet. He lined up his cock at the entrance. And proceeded to do this horrid tease where he lowered himself a micrometer at a time into me. “Ahhhh! More! More!” I kept moaning, almost crying in frustration.

  His grin looked fit to split his face. His fangs were unnervingly prominent, but it didn’t keep him from looking like a boy who’d just gotten the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two Hundred Shot Range Model Air Rifle he’d wanted all his life.

  This was my last thought for a good long while, because he was finally all-the-way inside me, and was making up for his leisurely entry with pounding thrusts, leaving me unable to do more than occasionally gasp for air. It was astoundingly good. Every thrust was better than the last, and I’d have sworn it couldn’t get better with each one, but the next thrust would somehow be better yet.

  There was no way I could have counted orgasms. They just rolled over, through my helpless body. Finally, he sank down onto me, hips still pumping away, and chomped down on my neck like it was a perfectly ripe peach. It was then I realized all the orgasms I’d had before were not actually orgasms, compared to what I was feeling now.

  It’s kind of hard to describe the nirvana you go to during orgasm. I think it’s because your brain gets flooded with a rush of happy chemicals and it just sort of stops doing any of the stuff not quietly controlled by your autonomic nervous system. And for all I’m Ms. Cogito Ergo Sum, at the same time just having your brain shut off is, well, it’s literally the definition of nirvana, isn’t it?

  A nice, quiet period of being held tightly in Sandu’s arms followed, his cock still inside me, his lips nuzzling the tender place on my neck where he’d bitten me. It seemed the right side tasted better. I was the happiest I’d ever been, just lying there.

  Eventually, of course, my brain started working again. Nirvana was snuffed out—at least until the next orgasm. I would become a sex addict at this rate. Although I couldn’t see how being a sex addict was worse than never getting any.

  “Sandu. The break’s over. Tell me more.”

  Chapter Nine

  Sandu chuckled softly. Probably due to centuries more wisdom, he seemed like he would have been perfectly happy not talking for the rest of the night, but I was being me. He liked me being me, so he was willing to indulge me. And I didn’t mind being indulged.

  “I feel like Scheherazade, draga mea, who must tell you a story to stave off your wrath! O my King, let your lowly handmaid tell her tale! But what shall I tell you?”

  “Well, if you don’t want me to cut off your head tomorrow, you’d better tell me more about being a vampire!” I teased. He got such an expression on his face, he almost looked his age. Whoops.

  “If you wish to kill me, dragă Anushka, that is the way to it. That and destroying my heart.” He said it gently, and it tore at my heart.

  “Of course, I don’t plan to decapitate you tomorrow, Sandu. You started the joke! But, um, so the myths are true? A stake to the heart, cut off the head, and put garlic in the mouth.? And some holy water and a cross?”

  His eyes gleamed again; the painful moment had passed. “You know not a small amount about the mythological methods of dispatching vampires, Noosh. Do you carry a vampire-slaying kit?”

  “No! It’s just, you know, you pick this stuff up.” Here was the hardest thing to say. “Especially if you spend your formative years reading everything about vampires you can lay your hands on.” There, it was out in the open. I was the girl in high school who’d sat in the corner reading every vampire novel ever published. It was humiliating. Up ‘til now, I’d tried to play it cool, like it was a casual thing. Like any thorough researcher would know this stuff. I’m OK with being a geek. Hell, being a geek has become the ultimate cool, but being a teenage girl who’d fantasized about vampires is still pathetic. And how much worse that I’d somehow ended up as Dracula’s girlfriend? In any decent story, it’d be the person who’d never paid the least attention to silly horror-movie creatures who’d end up dating a vampire. Then the author would have lots of excuses to have to explain things to the readers as the ignorant character found out about them for the first time.

  Just my luck. I’ll probably have to unlearn everything.

  Sandu went through the checklist. “No garlic needed, and the sign of the Order of the Dragon—which gave my family the name Drăculea—has a cross, a red cross like the flag of St. George. O Quam Misericors est Deus, Pius et Justus, it says. I could not have survived all these years if I did not have my seal. It, ei bine, it holds me to my ideals. It keeps my spirit human in a way that some of my kind have lost. Likewise with holy water. I could bathe in it if I liked.”

  “Or use it as cologne?” I grinned.

  He grinned back, “Da, Dior’s ‘The Scent of Sanctity.’”

  “Or ‘Holy H2O by Calvin Klein.’”

  “Nu, it would be by Gucci.”

  At least five hundred years of some sort of life had not killed his enjoyment of witty banter. That was good since it made dealing with the details of this bizarre situation much more manageable. “So I could empty a bottle of ‘Bapstisme by Chanel’ over your head and all would be well, except you’d reek of righteous odor. But what, brains and circulatory systems are vital to a vamp? Does that explain the head and heart thing?”

  “We do not call ourselves ‘vamps.’ A vamp is an actress from the early years of cinema. As I have told you, we do not even call ourselves ‘vampires.’ That is a kee term.” He saw me start to interrupt to peruse that fascinating line of discussion and headed me off. “It might well be because the head and heart contain vital systems, but I have always seen it simply as the damage factor. We heal from a great deal of injury, but annihilate the head and the heart, and we are too damaged. It is unlikely we could recover, even with just the one destroyed. But with am’r, it pays to be thorough. It is never regretted, taking time to pull out an enemy’s heart after cutting off his head or vice versa. More preferable is burning it all.”

  “I
ck” was my cool, unflappable response.

  “This is my world, draga mea. You wanted to know about it.”

  “Yes, I did. I do. It’s just that I’m used to it being fiction, not reality. But now, hearing you talk about it? It’s all too real, too close.”

  “But you need to hear it. You will be entering this world.” No one mentioned the option of me walking away. It didn’t seem to occur to him, and no matter how weird things got, this was my first chance at a life even vaguely resembling my fantasies, in which—let’s face it—I’d been living all this time. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I’d ever get another chance like this again.

  “But for now, enough of death, final or otherwise,” Sandu continued, “Since you know all the myths, let me...”

  “Bust them?”

  “Yes. And I know of your reference.”

  “OK.”

  “Remember, I live in this time with you.”

  “I do. But sometimes you’ll need to bring me up to date about something in the past I’ve missed, and you’ll need me to update you about something in the present you’ve not been paying any attention to.”

  “Very well. Now, ask me about whatever vampire myth you like.”

  “Um. Animals. Transformation? Special affinity? Tasty snack?”

  “Nu, da, and not really. We do not have transformative powers. I cannot become a wolf, a colony of bats, or a pack of rats. And before you ask, not a vampire bat, either. Nor a vampire squid.”

  “Damn. I was hoping for tentacles.”

  “I’m afraid I must disappoint you there, my perverse lover. I must also disappoint in regards to any other transformation. No green fog for you. Also, my shadow does not act independently of me.”

  “You really are a buzz-kill, Sandu! Mirrors? Photographs?”

  “Shall we go look in the mirror now? Your hair is a little messy. I think we shall see that mine is, too.” I grinned and mussed his hair up further, to which he submitted with good grace. “But the matter of photographs is from ghost myths, not vampires. I can show you pictures of me over the centuries. I enjoyed the invention of camera obscura and its evolution over the ages. Ah, and the silver collodion process of early photography was no concern to me since silver is werewolves. Or would be, were there such things. However, being am’r meant I did not need to worry about the toxicity of the chemicals used in early photography.

  “There are many benefits to being am’r or am’r-nafsh. We who have passed over into being fully am’r indeed have the superhuman strength of the myths, and increased agility and reflexes. We can see perfectly in the dark, and our vision in the light is greater than the kee 20/20 vision. Well, it would be if the light did not give us such bad headaches. We can see excellently, yes, but we prefer not to.

  “We have a profoundly increased sense of smell, and taste, even touch.” He paused. “And then there is the mind. The myth of our powers of persuasion is essentially correct. From the moment one becomes an am’r, one has the benefit of the powers you might call mesmerism, although it is only a greater understanding of how to influence thought and impel action. It is a raw talent, so you need to learn how to use it. Am’r get more powerful as they survive the years, decades, centuries. All of our abilities become more controlled and formidable. It is as if we have the inverse of kee aging.”

  I’d been listening patiently, but I had to interrupt. “Tell me more about the mesmerism. You said you did not use it on me, but I’ve acted strangely since I met you. I have done things I’d’ve never thought I’d do.”

  “Ah, Noosh, you cannot blame me for your actions. Things will not go well for us if you distrust me and distrust your feelings for me. I have said I did not mesmerize you, and if you go around thinking I did, it will destroy our love.”

  That distracted me. Did I love Sandu? I was happy calling him my lover since it was an accurate description of our relationship so far, but love?

  How could he have fallen in love with me this quickly? From all he’d said, it was a case of love at first sight, in which I did not believe. Shouldn’t half a millennium of life in this cold, hard world have knocked such a romantic notion from his head?

  Maybe some people just worked like that. I’ve had friends who claimed love at first sight with their partners, although those relationships didn’t seem to have any greater chance of working out in the long run. But this was different. Sandu and I had drunk each other’s blood. We had shared the deepest intimacies. Maybe blood was the fast track to love?

  But wait! One had to assume Sandu had drunk lots of people’s blood, so the whole blood-drinking thing didn’t automatically confer intimacy on the act. Although thinking about it, he’d also given me his blood. Was that the normal way to do the deed?

  He could see I was thinking, and he let me be. I was glad. After he had opened himself up to me as he had done, given me that much of himself, I didn’t want to hurt him. I’d hate myself if I did. Also, these were my stupid issues. It was my problem, and I didn’t have to make it his.

  Vamp…uh, am’r were good at patience. I guess anyone could learn it eventually, and it probably helped to know you had all the time in the world. Wait, was that a myth too? “Sandu, are am’r immortal?”

  “The final answers are not in, dragă Noosh. We have ancient ones among us, and those have not died yet of any ‘natural causes.’ When am’r die, so far, it has only been from violence or stupidity. Often a combination of both, but we do not seem to deteriorate as kee do through their lives. All evidence points to us getting better and stronger as the years go by. If that is not immortality, it is something just as good, or better.”

  “Is it comforting that you’ll basically live forever and keep getting better?” It didn’t seem unattractive to me. What I had was the certainty I would get old and wrinkly and infirm and addlepated and then die, possibly painfully or with a terrible lack of dignity. No other option available. Until now.

  Sandu replied, “When one first becomes an am’r, the knowledge one has beaten death is intoxicating. That is, incidentally, the time when the most am’r are killed. Changing from being kee to am’r, or the ‘vistarascha’ as it is called, is complex. If one can manage to have a long period of being am’r-nafsh it helps, but it is still hard. If one makes it through that period, one settles down into a sense of satisfaction that one can plan long-term projects and will live to see them completed, or one has the time to visit all the places, read all the books, do everything one desires.

  “After the usual recklessness and enthusiastic risk-taking of an am’r’s early years, generally one settles down to a period of, how do you say…ah, ‘going to ground.’ Being secretive and secluded. We do less of this in these modern times since building new identities is made trivial by modern electronics, by being able to be on the other side of the world after a plane flight.”

  “Wait, what? Identity theft is easier now than it was when you could just pick a new name and show up in a new town where they had almost no way to check up on you? Oh, hey, that must mean you can travel over water, right?”

  Sandu sighed but not unhappily. As much as he was complaining about having to talk instead of fuck, I think he was enjoying explaining am’r to such an eager audience.

  I don’t think I can do any harm to his ego with all this attention. Either Dracula’s already the world’s biggest egotist, or he’s long ago given up on such things.

  “You could travel through life incognito if you wanted to be a peasant, draga mea. I did a few times when it seemed like the best way to escape a...a situation. However, I am royalty, and I am unwilling to become accustomed to a lesser existence. When there were few people in the world and even fewer upper-class people, you could arrive at a castle and announce yourself. If you had made yourself good letters of introduction, your rȏle could be played for a while. You just needed to move on before someone who should have known of you, be it a fellow military officer or a family member, arrived to put shame to your tale—and possibly
assist in your imprisonment and execution.

  “Now, if one needs to, one can borrow or build from whole cloth an almost entirely foolproof identity, even to open a bank account or purchase a house.” He swept his arm around, indicating his home.

  “Crossing moving water is as quickly proven false as mirrors or holy water. It is pure myth, perhaps to make people feel safer in their beds at night. In the dark. When I roam.” He gave a rather unholy chuckle there.

  That led to a burning question, which I’d put off asking for too long. “Ah. Um. Yes. I guess the first thing is, are we, um, dating? And I guess the next question is, are we going to be…monogamous? Can you get enough, well, sustenance from just me, or are you going to need, er, to dine out sometimes?” How awkward was that? Especially since I’m not sure how OK I’ll be with any of the possible answers.

  “Dragă Noosh, you ask such questions! I have never ‘dated’ anyone, but you can call this ‘dating’ if you like. I do not wish to frighten you off.” He looked away. “What I hope for is something much, much longer term. I love—when I love—immediately and true, and I have learned my life may be long, but love needs to be grasped tightly when it comes and every moment treated as all-too-fleeting.”

  I thought about the stories I’d read about his wife, who’d supposedly thrown herself off a castle tower when she heard rumors he’d been killed in battle. I wondered how many times he’d “grasped” love since but decided this wasn’t a good time to discuss exes. One important question had been left unanswered, and it was a big one.

  “How much blood do you need to drink? You seem to be giving quite a lot back to me. Can you sustain that? If you do need blood from others...” I finished the sentence in my head: how will I be able to cope?

  “Those are serious questions, draga mea, and I will answer you genuinely.” He paused, and his thoughtful expression had me seriously worried.

  “To start, I do not give you as much back as you give me. You would find that...excessive.”