Author: Charlotte Stein
Date: 2016-11-26 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Vampires; Paranormal Romance; Paranormal; Erotic Romance; Contemporary; Romance; Erotica; M M F; Christmas; Novella
Description: Shy nurse Cora both dreads and lives for the moments she sees Zeke, an orderly at the hospital where she works. Zeke is too handsome, too compelling, too much, and seems totally unaware of Cora. But before she can bring herself to his attention, an explosion rips through the hospital Christmas party. Zeke has noticed Cora—in fact, he’s so irresistibly drawn to her that he saves her from the explosion by turning her into a vampire, much to the jealousy and resentment of his partner, Merrick. Zeke hates being a vampire, and now that she’ll live, doesn’t want Cora to suffer his fate. If they can

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

Frostbitten

Copyright © 2016 by Charlotte Stein

Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

Editors: Sarah Lyons; Delphine Dryden, delphinedryden.com/editing

Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

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ISBN: 978-1-62649-190-8

First edition

November, 2016

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Shy nurse Cora both dreads and lives for the moments she sees Zeke, an orderly at the hospital where she works. Zeke is too handsome, too compelling, too much, and seems totally unaware of Cora. But before she can bring herself to his attention, an explosion rips through the hospital Christmas party.

Zeke has noticed Cora—in fact, he’s so irresistibly drawn to her that he saves her from the explosion by turning her into a vampire, much to the jealousy and resentment of his partner, Merrick. Zeke hates being a vampire, and now that she’ll live, doesn’t want Cora to suffer his fate. If they can both resist the overwhelming instinct to bond, joining their bodies as Cora draws her maker’s blood, she might be able to return to her normal human life.

As Merrick uses every erotic trick to keep Zeke distracted from the blood passion, Cora becomes more and more drawn to both of her reluctant captors. And more and more happy to abandon her old life in exchange for an eternity with two hot immortal lovers. All she has to do is convince Merrick and Zeke that being a vampire isn’t all that bad.

About Our Charity

About Frostbitten

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Dear Reader

Acknowledgments

Also by Charlotte Stein

About the Author

More like this

Cora did her best not to stare at his face while he was talking. She forced her gaze downward, away from the bright and brilliant light of his eyes, and found herself gawping at his hands instead. She’d never noticed his hands before that night. They were enormous and somehow fine at the same time, with these heavy-boned knuckles she couldn’t quite look away from. They didn’t seem like a hospital orderly’s hands.

It was impossible to look away from Zeke. The moment she thought she was safe, some other insane thing drew her back in. There were times during her workdays at the hospital that she’d take an entirely circuitous route, merely to avoid the glare of him—even though a circuitous route was practically death for a nurse. No one ever walked more than they had to while on shift, because walking more than you had to meant blisters. It meant exhaustion, and working in a hospital was quite exhausting enough on its own.

But she walked it for him, and had for the past six months since he started working there.

Or rather, she walked it so as to avoid embarrassing situations like this, where he stood in front of her and expected her to engage in a conversation. Any second now he was going to notice her fumbling, her awkwardness, her desperate attempts to look at anything other than his face. It would click in his mind that she’d spent the last five minutes of the staff party staring at the Christmas decorations next to his head, instead of meeting his gaze like a normal person.

And then it would occur to him why.

Of course it would. Men like him probably encountered this issue all the time. Or did other women feel no shame about swooning or fawning? She suspected they didn’t, because she’d seen Caitlin flirting up a storm with Zeke outside cardiology. She’d smiled in that twinkly way and tossed her hair, while Cora had looked on with a mixture of amazement and envy. How did people swallow their fear so easily?

Maybe other people felt no fear. Maybe they stared at men like Zeke and didn’t get that swell of vertigo, as though he was a cliff and she was poised on top of him. All he had to do was move a little to the left and she would fall, she was already falling, couldn’t he see that she was about to smash against the rocks?

She needed him to stop talking to her, before it was too late. She was so overwhelmed she didn’t know what he was saying anyway, so what did it matter? He could easily move on to someone else—someone who could actually answer him, and wasn’t about to throw up. That girl by the sparkling drinks stand looked pretty stable, even if the world around her didn’t. The world around her was swaying and swirling in a kaleidoscope of Christmas glitz, to the point where Cora began to wonder.

Was this really all him? Was this really all nerves?

Tonight seemed particularly bad. She wasn’t just tongue-tied around Zeke, but downright light-headed. It was possible she’d eaten something spoiled. The shrimp had tasted okay, but taste wasn’t always a good indicator.

Though it didn’t feel like nausea exactly. It wasn’t even entirely unpleasant. There was another element to it—a sort of heaviness she’d never experienced before. Zeke’s words seemed to be getting slower and slower, and when Cora moved, her limbs didn’t want to go with her. They dragged, as though the air around them had turned to syrup. Everything was suddenly a monumental effort, and that included staying on her feet.

She sort of wanted to lie down.

She wanted to lie down a lot. So much that Zeke was starting to notice. She could see him leaning toward her out of the corner of her eye, which was bad enough on its own. But then she could also feel his hand very close to her elbow, and hear him asking in that lazy river accent of his if she was okay.

Only he didn’t say it like that, with the ordinary words. He never said it like that, with the ordinary words. She wasn’t sure okay was even in his vocabulary, because he usually went with all of this faintly archaic-sounding stuff that made her melt and want to ask him about it all at the same time.

“Are you well?” he asked, and there it was again. The urge to know him better, to touch his vaguely velvety jacket and inquire as to why a hospital orderly was interested in such ornate stuff, to understand why he was like this. Why he reminded her of chamber music chinking in the background of a musty parlor, and mint juleps, and other things that were probably completely anachronistic when put together.

That night she didn’t get the chance to ask—either about the historically inaccurate period details or about his penchant for them. She was too busy feeling odd, while trying to avoid Zeke’s hand in slow motion. He was almost touching her now. He seemed hesitant to do it, but it was happening anyway. She brought both hands up and tried to wave him off, despite the syrup air and her suddenly limp muscles. And she spoke too—the first words she’d ever offered to him.

By God, she wished they were better ones. She’d always imagined herself saying something cool and casual, once she finally dared to go near him. Something that wouldn’t give away the effect he had on her, even though the effect was so strong it probably qualified as hypnosis. She was definitely close to a trance here, so really she should have known something was amiss.

But she didn’t, until she garbled out a bunch of stuff that didn’t go together.

“Never after all right.”

She wasn’t even sure if it qualified as a sentence. There wasn’t a subject in there—a fact Zeke seemed well aware of.

“Who is never after all right?” he asked, as though there was an actual chance she might answer him. He even leaned forward to better hear her, with all the earnestness she could have wished for. No mockery, no laughter.

But sadly, he also chose that moment to put his hand on her.

He got her by the elbow just like she’d thought he would, only much quicker and more casually than she’d imagined. Like someone righting a cup before it can topple over, she thought, like he barely needs to expend any effort at all. He just snatched her back to standing—but once he had, everything was even more impossible than it had been before.

Now he was touching her. That one slight move had forced her to lock her gaze to his, and the second she did, something happened. It was like someone had snapped their fingers, or a veil had been torn away. All that syrupy fogginess disappeared, and was replaced by a focus so sharp it seemed unreal.

For one frozen moment, she was sure she could see motes of dust dancing around his head. There was a ring of richer dark around the black of his eyes that she’d never noticed before, and his cheekbones didn’t slant the way she’d always thought. They curved heavily into the curl of his mouth—a mouth that was almost smiling at her.

But none of this intense looking bothered her.

The point of connection bothered her.

She could feel his hand burning and burning through her dress—to the degree that she wanted to glance down and check for smoke. The sensation was so raw there had to be something, she could almost smell something, yet she couldn’t seem to break away and see for sure. He could have probably set fire to her entire body and she wouldn’t have been able to glance away—and in truth it kind of felt like that was happening. Everything was burning now. The sensation spread like lava, up through her arm and over her shoulder and then down, down, down to some really inappropriate places.

He was only touching her arm, for God’s sake. Why was this happening? It didn’t often happen for Cora at all, even after seven hours of foreplay and eight hundred clips of people getting it on in really vigorous, interesting ways, so this seemed very odd indeed. She could actually feel her own wetness; the soft lips of her sex were starting to strain against the cotton of her underwear. It was a little too much.

And that was before his friend came over to talk to him.

She expected it to stop then—that was the thing. It was bad enough that this was happening in front of Zeke, but with another person right there? That verged on perverted. She wanted to put a hand over her breasts, because she knew her nipples were making visible points through the material. Or at the very least, she had the urge to apologize. I’m not usually like this, she wanted to say.

Even though she hadn’t technically done anything wrong.

This new guy just looked at her like she’d done something wrong. If Zeke was handsome, this stranger who’d accompanied him to the holiday party was beautiful—but it was a cruel beauty. His face was a knife, lean and sharp-angled, with a mouth that barely seemed to move when he spoke. She couldn’t imagine that mean mouth smiling, or laughing, and if it did she knew the feeling wouldn’t reach his eyes.

Those eyes wouldn’t understand what happiness was. They were practically stones in his face, too hard and cold for anything as petty as emotion. And when they lit on her, she was sure they got worse. The disdain that danced across their surface was a palpable thing. It wasn’t something she could explain away, or attribute to paranoia.

This was as obvious as Zeke’s warmth. It made her wonder why on earth Zeke and the stranger were friends—because they clearly were. As soon as the stone-eyed one had finished assessing her, he hissed something back at Zeke, in that way people have when they’ve known someone for a long time. It spoke of embarrassment and understandings and issues and all kinds of things she wasn’t a party to.

She couldn’t even listen in. They were right next to her, yet somehow they spoke so quietly and quickly she couldn’t quite hear. She heard Stone-eyes snap Enough, however. Oh she heard that all right. And she saw the force he used when he put a hand on Zeke’s shoulder. He was stronger than he looked—much stronger than Zeke, apparently, despite the disparity in their size. The new guy couldn’t have been more than six foot, to Zeke’s eight hundred million and seventy-nine. And he was thinner too, much thinner.

But the pressure made Zeke wince.

It made him let go of her arm.

The loss was almost as bad as the rest of this weirdness. She wanted to grab his hand and haul it back, and only two things stopped her. The first was how absolutely ridiculous that was, and the second was the glare Stone-eyes snapped to her when she came close to reaching for Zeke. She lifted her own hand an inch, but he reacted as if she’d leaped onto Zeke’s shoulders. She wasn’t even sure how the stranger knew she’d moved.

But he did—in truth, he seemed to know before she was even aware. His contempt-riddled gaze darted down to her curled fingers, and then it backhanded her across the face. She nearly stumbled, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for Zeke. He saved her again. He caught her by the arm and set her right.

Of course it only made things worse.

Now Stone-eyes was trying to murder him with a look. It actually seemed like horror in his expression, when he whipped it around on Zeke. Horror with a side order of fury, she thought, even though neither of those things made any sense. What was so terrible about Zeke touching her? Unless . . . unless . . .

Zeke never seemed to have a girlfriend.

He didn’t make advances on anyone.

Oh God, were they . . .?

“I didn’t mean to get in the way,” she started, and then stopped. She sounded like an absolute idiot. She was an idiot, for getting all of this so wrong. She’d been sure something was going on between them, but clearly that had been her imagination working overtime. He was with this guy. He had to be with this guy.

So why did he bark out a bunch of words when she tried to pull away?

“No,” he said. “That’s not what you’re doing.”

And he quite clearly meant it. He held on to her arm, despite her best efforts to extricate herself. He ignored the hand on his shoulder, now pulling him hard enough to turn him sideways. But it was his gaze that really meant the most. It was so full of yearning she actually felt okay about labeling it as such.

This is what it is to be wanted by someone.

To be wanted so much they would do anything to keep you with them—a thought she found dramatic and overblown, until the terrible thing occurred.

It seemed to happen all at once. There was a sound like rolling thunder, so out of place she tried to turn and see what it was. Everyone around her did too. No one really got the chance, however. The fire followed the thunder, too quick to escape from it. It was all around them. It rolled up in a great wave from somewhere close to the windows, taking everyone with it.

It should have taken her with it too. She felt the blast hit her, and knew her feet had left the ground. One side of her face was burning, one arm scorched half away in an instant. She knew she should have been flying or melting or whatever it was that happened when you were in the middle of an explosion. But then somehow, somehow Zeke was holding on to her. That was his hand still hanging on to her unburnt one. She could see his face through the fire, the edges turning to cinders in a way that should have killed him.

It should have hurt him the way it hurt her.

But it didn’t. Of course it didn’t. These were her last thoughts before she disintegrated into nothing, and they wanted something amazing to go out on. There was only one possible explanation, and she clung to it. He’s not human, her mind called out into the void. Oh my God, he’s not human, he’s not human.

And then there was nothing but darkness, and silence.

She woke up crying, even though there was nothing to cry about.

I’m okay, I’m okay, she told herself, but somehow it just wouldn’t sink in. It was only a nightmare.

She could feel her right arm, even though it had burned away in the dream. And she’d lost half the side of her face too, but when she touched it everything was still there. Her skin was still smooth and unburned; her body utterly unbroken. It had to have been a dream. People did not survive enormous explosions, and if they did, they didn’t survive them completely intact. Nothing could have happened—that much was absolutely clear.

It just didn’t feel clear.

It felt like she’d woken up, and the nightmare was still carrying on. Something was really wrong in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on—and then she realized. She realized so hard it kind of made her go all still. She took it in out of the corner of one eye, as though it might go away if she didn’t face it full on. But there it was, all the same: this was not her home. She was not in her home.

She was on the floor of a windowless room in some filthy cabin.

She went to lift her left arm and found it oddly heavy, and for a second thought she actually was hurt. Then she glanced down and there it was—a metal cuff. Not even a cuff, really.

Someone had put a manacle around her wrist. It was an enormous and ancient-looking thing, of the type seen in terrible horror movies about haunted castles. It literally clanked when she moved. The lock seemed like it needed a creepy key guarded by something awful.

Plus there was a chain leading off from it.

She had been chained to the wall. For some ungodly reason, she’d been chained to the wall. The manacle wasn’t just some mistake, or maybe a fancy type of jewelry that the kids were all giving out these days. This was a real thing that was actually happening, no matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise.

She glanced around the room, searching for the punch line.

But there wasn’t a punch line. If anything, her harder look around this place only backed up her first and most frightening assessment. It seemed like she’d accidentally fallen into The Evil Dead. A single, dim, unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling provided the only light. Everything was worn and grimy, including the furniture. The chair and table in the center of the room could have been made in the thirteenth century. Thirteenth-century artisans would probably sneer at the idea of ever making something so crude and unsettling.

Why was it so unsettling?

Why was everything in here so unsettling?

It went beyond her predicament. It was more than a sense that stuff needed a good scrub. Something was really not right about this place. The shadows were too deep and too thick, as though they’d lain here so long they’d started to take on forms of their own. And it was so quiet. Even the sounds she was making seemed muffled somehow.

Apparently, this place did not accept anything other than silence. It rejected noise and movement and normality. Soon it would start to reject her, and then what? That uneven chair will come over here and eat me, she thought, but the idea didn’t make her laugh. She wasn’t certain she’d ever be able to laugh again.

Someone was coming to make sure of that.

They had to be. Why else would anyone have done this, if not to ruin her forever? She was already halfway there, and no one had even hurt her yet. All they’d done was chain her, but she was crying anyway. She was crying in this really weird manner—one she’d never experienced before. Usually she sobbed; she was dramatic; she tore out her hair.

This was something else altogether. The tears just seemed to slide out of her eyes, without any unnecessary fuss. She didn’t call for help or scream, or any of the other things she’d imagined she would do in the event of something like this. All energy went toward one thing and one thing alone: getting out of this situation now.

She had to live. She had to live.

And there had to be a way to do it.

She could not snap the chain—that much was clear. The manacle would never give, no matter how much she pried it or bashed it against the floor. Her only options were somehow wriggling her arm free, picking the immense lock, or levering some of the wall boards loose . . . all of which presented their own problems.

Her hand was too big to squeeze out. She strained and strained until her skin started to bleed, but her captor had judged the size right. Even if she dislocated her thumb, she didn’t think she’d be able to get free, and she definitely wasn’t about to do that. For some reason, just the sight of her split skin was making her feel weird. Her head was spinning, and for a second everything seemed to grow so heavy she was sure she was going to pass out.

She couldn’t pass out.

If she passed out, it would kill any chance she had of getting free. She had to move on to the next option, despite the fact that the next option was even more terrible than the first. She had nothing to pick the lock with for a start. And just to finish it off: touching that dank little hole made her feel as funny as the blood did. She tried to put her finger in to feel around, and this terrible burning cold seemed to shoot up her arm. She actually gasped and yanked her hand away, and no amount of sneering at herself would make her go back to it. There’s probably acid in there, she told herself.

Even though part of her knew that was crazy.

And another part of her knew something was wrong.

People didn’t feel cold like that.

She knew they didn’t—she was a nurse, for God’s sake. She was a nurse who suddenly felt queasy at the sight of blood. Her head was still swimming. Every time she glanced down and saw that red, she wanted to scratch at herself, as though she could make the nausea go away by peeling her own skin off.

Yeah, that was what she wanted.

She wanted to peel her skin off. Then when she was done doing that, maybe she could find something to stuff up her nose—because Lord in heaven the smell of that crimson liquid. It was stronger than every bit of filth in here. She could actually make out that tang in the back of her throat, even though the blood was nowhere near her mouth.

Or at least, she thought it was nowhere near her mouth.

She was sure it hadn’t been a moment ago. But somehow when she wasn’t looking, she’d put her hand to her lips. She could feel the ridge of the cut against her tongue, as though she’d started licking at it. She’d started licking at it, without even knowing what she was doing. Blood coated the back of her throat. It had found its way down her chin and over her cheeks—yet she hadn’t realized.

That did not seem like a good thing.

Not when she still had one option left to try. The boards were there, just waiting to be pried off. But instead of doing that, she was crouched on the floor with her bloody hand in her mouth. And the worst part was: she couldn’t seem to stop. Some kind of terrible compulsion had taken over her body, and no matter what she did she couldn’t fight it.

She even found herself justifying it.

This is what people do when they’re suffering from extreme thirst and hunger—they start drinking and eating weird things out of desperation, she told herself, despite knowing the problem with this theory. She was neither hungry, nor thirsty. The thought of a big pint of crystal-clear water did absolutely nothing for her. Her stomach wasn’t growling.

She just wanted to do this.

She needed to do this.

Nothing would get in her way—not even the man who suddenly opened the only door she’d seen in the room, letting in a blast of cold air. If he tried to take the blood from her, she would kill him. If he made to stop her, she would kill him. She even hissed at him to show him she meant business, but the moment she did, she knew she was in trouble. It would have been okay if her captor was a brutal stranger, it would have been okay then. She was supposed to hiss at him then. She was supposed to think about ripping out his throat with her teeth.

She was not supposed to do it to Zeke.

He was sort of her friend, he was almost definitely her friend. He was probably coming to help her. Why was she doing it to Zeke? She hadn’t even recognized him for a second, as though some new lizard part of her had taken control of her eyes and her senses. And he could see it too—this lizard Cora. It was all around her mouth.

It was all over her hands.

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” she said, even though there were a thousand other things she wanted to say first. Get me out of here was chief amongst them, but somehow it wasn’t what came out. It was probably best that it hadn’t, however. The longer he stood in the doorway, the more it started to dawn on her.

He didn’t look surprised to see her here.

He didn’t seem scared or horrified by her circumstances.

He simply gazed at her and gazed at her with those great, dark eyes—like he knew something so terrible she couldn’t bear to think about it. She couldn’t, yet the thought came on anyway in a rolling wave of bitter realization. It crashed against her, too enormous to take.

He was the one who had brought her here.

Oh God, he was the one who had brought her here.

Him, and that friend of his. She turned her head and there he was, as still and stony-eyed as he’d been at the party. Had he been there all along, in the corner of the room? She didn’t think he could have been, but the thought lodged itself in her head anyway. Maybe that was why the shadows had seemed so thick.

Maybe they’d birthed him, while she’d been busy trying to escape.

Lord in heaven, she wished she’d succeeded now. This was worse, she knew. This was so much worse than if they’d been two strangers. She could tell just by looking at their faces, even though their faces seemed so closed and cold. But then, maybe that was the problem? She’d never seen Zeke without an easy smile on his face. She’d never seen him without warmth in his eyes.

Something terrible was going to happen here.

Something terrible might have already happened here.

“It’s okay, Cora,” he said as he finally closed the door behind him, but she could tell he didn’t really mean it. There was a line between his brows three feet deep. His eyes seemed enormous—like they might swallow her whole at any second.

Then as an extra little clue, Stone-eyes snapped from his corner. “Don’t coddle her. How will you control her later, if you treat her like a spoilt pet now?”

There were many things that disturbed her about this speech. His tone was one of them—so cold it could have made the snow she’d seen falling outside. And so British too, oh the Britishness definitely made it worse. It sharpened that ice to a killer point, then slid that point beneath her skin.

And that was before she considered the content of his words. Had he really said control her? And if he had, then what in God’s name did he mean? Why did he think she shouldn’t be coddled? Maybe this was all some kind of hideous kinky game, where the captive had to be trained into a proper slave. That was how it sounded to her, and there wasn’t a single inch of her body that liked the idea.

It wasn’t the same as some distant and sexy book.

This was the reality, and it was horrendous.

They didn’t even speak properly to her.

They spoke around her.

“I’m not coddling, I’m calming,” Zeke said, as though she wasn’t even in the room.

And of course Stone-eyes carried it on. Of course he did. He’d been that way at the party, so things weren’t likely to be different here. If anything, they were a lot worse.

Now he didn’t have to pretend to be normal.

He could say any crazy thing he wanted to.

“And there is a difference? I hardly think so. Both are pathetic emotional reactions to her predicament. They will not help her. They will only make her believe she has a chance at surviving this intact when quite obviously she does not. Come away, Ezekiel. Come away so that you do not have to look upon her suffering.”

Cora had no idea what to make of at least ninety percent of what he’d said. She only knew that it was all very, very frightening. He’d said surviving and not in the same sentence. He’d mentioned her suffering in a way that probably would have seemed kind, if she’d been an injured animal. But as she wasn’t . . .

“I won’t let you hurt me,” she spat, before she’d even had a chance to think it through. “Hey, do you hear me, you snooty fucker? I won’t let you kill me. You can come here and try, if you want. But I’ll make you pay for it.” The words swelled up through her, most likely irrational and completely off the mark but so satisfying anyway.

Even if this wasn’t what she thought it was, it would teach him not to speak as if she wasn’t there. It would make him accept that she existed and was worth something—though she was surprised as anyone to see that actually happen. He’d turned his head the second she’d spoken, eyes still cold and distant but with something else in there.

A reluctant flicker of interest, she thought.

One that reminded her of a man realizing a monkey could perform simple tasks.

Either way, it wasn’t exactly a comfort. And nor were Zeke’s words.

“Is this what you want? You want her to be angry and violent?”

“She poses no threat to me, for all her . . . bravado.”

“Maybe not—but she poses one to me. If you don’t at least let me explain, there’s no telling what she might do. I might get too close and then suddenly she lunges and—”

Stone-eyes held up a hand before Zeke could finish, and it was obvious why. The idea disturbed him. It made him close his eyes briefly, and when he spoke his voice was far fainter than it had been. Still sneering, she thought, but that was only for appearances. Underneath he was scared of that possibility, and she suspected that was what made him say yes.

Or at least as much of a yes as he was willing to give.

“Very well. Attempt to tell her.” He then waved a hand in her general direction. Anything more and he would have to accept she was a human being, and he clearly didn’t want to do that. He wanted to stare off tightly at something else, while Zeke crouched down in front of her in a way she was probably supposed to find caring.

She was supposed to, but she didn’t.

“You know there’s nothing you can tell me that will make this okay,” she said, just as he was about to speak. She felt it was important he knew where he stood, before he embarrassed himself with platitudes and promises and other such nonsense.

We’re doing this for your own good, she thought.

And she was close to the truth of it, too. She was very close.

“I know that,” he said, in the most earnest voice she had ever heard anyone muster. “Obviously I know that, which is why I’m going to start with ‘I’m so sorry.’ I’m sorry that I felt I had to do this to you. I’m sorry that things can’t be . . . what I would like them to be. I wasn’t supposed to do this, and you’re going to pay the price for that.” His expression was all sad sincerity, and he even put out a hand to her. But no matter how he stated it, the fact remained. They had kidnapped her. They had told her weird and frightening things.

She couldn’t just accept what he was saying.

“Do what, Zeke? Will you just tell me what—or is it too horrifying for my tiny mind to comprehend? I am a pet who should be coddled, after all.”

He closed his eyes briefly, in a way that reminded her of the same reaction from his friend over there. She couldn’t tell why this time, however. What had she said that could have possibly hurt him? She was only repeating the things Stone-eyes had pointed out. If Zeke didn’t like them, then maybe he should let her go.

But he didn’t. He simply kept on with this nonsense.

“There was a gas main explosion. Can you remember?”

“I remember a dream about one,” she said, though the second she’d spoken in that sneering tone she found herself wondering. The wondering felt like someone running a cold finger down the back of her neck. If it was a dream, how did he know about it? And things got worse from there.

“It wasn’t a dream. It really happened, and you were badly injured. You lost your arm, and most of the right side of your face. There wasn’t a single chance that you would have survived—do you understand what I am saying?”

“I understand that you have gone insane. If I lost my arm, what’s this attached to my shoulder? How am I still breathing and talking and moving around?”

She laughed as she said it, but strangely the laugh didn’t seem to take. It came out all hollow through the middle—and so did her gestures. She waved the nonexistent arm around in a way intended to be funny, yet somehow it lacked conviction. After a moment she let it drop back into her lap, and once she had, she didn’t want to look at it.

That cold finger on the back of her neck was getting colder.

“I saved you,” Zeke said. “I saved you in the worst possible way someone can be saved.”

Though she wanted to say something here, she couldn’t. Instead she glanced fearfully from Zeke to Stone-eyes and back again. He seemed to mean it so much, that was the thing. He seemed to really believe it.

His voice actually cracked when he continued. “I felt I had no choice. You would have died, and I couldn’t have borne that.”

By the time he was done, she was on the edge of her metaphorical seat, in spite of herself. What did he mean, dear God what did he mean? Was it possible this was real in some way? Had he done something to her . . . some medical thing to bring her back to life? That sounded crazy, yet she couldn’t help entertaining the notion.

The memory of fire against her face forced her to entertain it.

But just as she started to, Stone-eyes interceded. He stepped forward, all scorn and sharpness, and slowly dismantled all of Zeke’s efforts.

“Oh such noble sentiment, darling boy. How sweet and romantic of you! I’m sure she will thank you once you’ve arrived at the point. Or would you rather I deliver the cruel part of this little love poem? That way she may continue to make dreamy eyes at you, while despising me to the depths of her soul,” he said, and though it sounded bitter rather than truthful, she saw Zeke stiffen. The knife in his words had clearly found their mark. He wanted to be the good guy, while Stone-eyes played the villain.

And he played it well, she had to say.

When he finally turned on her, his gaze was near venomous. If he could have killed her with a look, she felt sure he would have done it. He hated her, he hated her being here, and most of all he hated having to tell her what he then did.

“He has infected your blood with a disease, human. He has poisoned you in the foulest manner possible. Of course I’m sure he was about to dress it up as something else—that is the fashion, these days. We’re supposed to glitter like diamonds and flitter about in flowery fields. But the truth is we are disgusting insects, unable to control our base urges. We are blood-guzzling, lust-driven things, little better than beasts. And you may shake your head, but in a short while you will see. Being a vampire is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

She couldn’t breathe by the time he’d finished. It was like seeing a terrific actor play one of Shakespeare’s characters, if Shakespeare’s characters regularly ranted about nonexistent horror-movie monsters. His last sentence was so fiercely spat she felt it shove against her body. His face contorted into a mask of rage; his revulsion was a physical thing.

She would have applauded if he wasn’t clearly a maniac.

Vampire, had he said vampire? And if he had, then why in God’s name did she want to believe him? His conviction was so thick and rich it actually sucked her in for a second. That last sentence made her hair stand on end, and she was grateful for the respite Zeke then provided.

“We’re not vampires, Merrick,” he said, and she was allowed a moment of relief.

Before Stone-eyes rallied again with another rant.

“All these years, and you’re still trying to pretend. How quaint you are, Ezekiel. Or is it Zeke in front of the semihuman? Wouldn’t want her to think you’ve been alive for five hundred years—better make it something more palatable to the modern ear. Oh and I’m sure you can pretend we don’t have the other qualities too. What are they again? The strength, the speed, the aversion to sunlight . . . I know, tell her that she recently became allergic to the outdoors. It will save her turning to a cinder again.”

“New ones don’t turn to a cinder. She won’t—”

“And that makes it better? That makes it easier to understand? Well, she’ll only burn herself a little. She’ll only like the taste of blood a tiny bit more than she did before. She’ll only be able to leap average buildings in a single bound, she—”

She cut him off then. She had to. “Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

If he kept going, she was going to believe it. She knew she was. She could already feel herself falling down the rabbit hole. His derision was too strong; his passion too obvious beneath it. Zeke only wanted her to believe what he told her. But this man . . . this Merrick . . . he actually believed it. The delusion was there right down to his bones, and it needed destroying.

It needed destroying now.

“I don’t care how you put it,” she went on. “I care that you’re both lunatics. You’ve kidnapped me and brought me to this godforsaken place. You’ve chained me to a wall with poisonous manacles, for God’s sake. And now you’re talking about imaginary creatures? When I get out of this I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to call the nearest mental asylum,” she said, and was pleased with herself for doing so.

Not that it had the slightest effect.

“It isn’t poison,” Zeke said. “It’s just garlic in the keyhole to stop you fiddling with it. And we had to do it—we had to chain you. If we hadn’t, you would have wanted to run away and be back amongst people, and you can’t be. You’ll hurt someone.” At which point she knew.

There was no reasoning with them. She was not going to escape by appealing to their ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy. They were too far gone; they had invested too much into whatever this was. She had to face the facts.

Even if the facts made tears run over her cheeks again.

“The only person I want to hurt is you. I thought you were my almost friend.” Her tone was far too desperate. But then, so was his.

“I am completely your friend, Cora.” He sounded like he was bleeding from the throat.

“It seems like I mean something to you.”

“You mean everything to me,” he said, and oh how she wished those words didn’t make her ache. Even now, in this terrible predicament, the thought of Zeke feeling so strongly about her was unendurably sweet. She had to remind herself that this emotion was merely a memory of all the things she had once wanted.

They couldn’t be hers now, no matter what he said.

“Then why are you doing this? Tell me the truth.”

“You already know what the truth is. By now you’ll be able to feel it—the blood must be singing in your veins. But you can fight it. If we give you time like this, if you don’t taste any blood but your own, if you don’t give in to . . . any urges you have toward me . . . eventually you might overcome what I’ve done to you. The disease will leave your system within a week, and then I swear we’ll set you free.”

“Urges? What sort of urges?”

He sighed and turned away.

As if the details were as hard for him to grasp as they were for her. He had to distract himself with other things—sweeping crumbs that didn’t exist off the rickety table in the center of the room, straightening ancient-looking books on a shelf in the corner—before he could get them out. And when he finally did, he sounded a touch off.

Shaky almost, even though Zeke was never shaky about anything.

He was always as calm and cool as a summer breeze.

It was what she liked about him.

What she had liked about him.

“It’s like a kind of frenzy. All new vampires go through it—but especially when the mystical bond between the person who infects and the person infected is strong to begin with. Then it becomes . . . bad for both. It becomes warped and weird and hard to fight. You’ll want to bite me. You’ll want to be near me, to touch me, to do all kinds of lurid things to me . . . and I’ll want to do the same to—”

“Oh, so that’s what you’re going to tell yourself when you hurt me. You’re going to say I secretly wanted it because of some made-up vampire thing.”

It surprised her, how vicious she sounded. How her lip curled as she spat the words out.

But it didn’t seem to surprise him. He just accepted it, like he’d prepared in advance for this response.

“I’m not going to do anything to you, Cora. No matter how much you beg me to, I will resist with everything I have. Believe me, if I had any other place to stay while we go through this, I would. I want you to be human again, and you will be, you will be, I swear—if you can just resist too.”

“I won’t need to resist. We both know nothing is going to happen.” But by this point the cold finger was practically a whole hand. She could feel it clamped around her heart, as she thought one by one of all the things that proved him right. There was the explosion she only hoped she had dreamt and the conviction of his friend; the blood on her chin and the feel of this terrible ancient place.

Their safe house, she would hear them call it—and she believed them when they said they hadn’t had to use it in years. It looked and smelled like animals had been nesting there in the meantime.

And then there were their names: Merrick and Ezekiel.

They sounded so old. They spoke with old voices and looked at her with eyes that could have crossed a thousand years. And finally, there was the feeling. The one he’d spoken of—the singing inside her. Only it didn’t seem like singing at all, to her. It seemed like a great seething mass rising up steadily through her body, so ready for all the things he’d suggested she might do.

You’ll want to bite, he’d said.

And by God she wanted to bite.

You’ll want to be near me, he’d said.

And she was damned if she didn’t want that too.

You’ll want to touch, he’d said, which was undoubtedly the craziest one of all.

Apart from one highly problematic thing . . .

She had no idea how her hands weren’t on him already.

As near as she could tell, she waited three days. Three days of not being sure what was real or what wasn’t. Three days of almost being convinced by the ache in her gums and the shivering and the heat; three days of never being convinced of anything. She heard her captors arguing distantly in rooms she couldn’t get to, everything so faint she didn’t know if she was imagining things they’d said or not. All she knew was that the tone of Zeke’s voice still soothed, and the glassy sharpness of Merrick’s stabbed, and both of them left her in a tangle.

One she had to get out of.

After three days of this delirium, she was finally ready. She was more than ready. She was desperate, to the point where she could barely make herself wait for their silence. They were talking somewhere . . . below her almost, about how still she had become. It seemed like the best moment to catch them unawares, yet she managed to force herself not to chance it. Not until they were completely quiet and possibly sleeping.

Then she climbed to her feet.

Slowly, so as not to disturb them—but also because of the thing she expected to happen. She hadn’t stood in all the time she’d been here, so her legs were probably going to be shaky. In fact, all of her body should have been shaky, without food or water. Yet somehow, that wasn’t the case at all.

She was as steady as she’d ever been.

And the hand she looped the chain around—that was steady, too. It barely rattled the metal. The action was smooth and silent, as if she’d done it a million times before. This was just an everyday sort of thing, escaping from makeshift prisons after days of starvation. It didn’t mean anything that she did it so effortlessly, or felt so suddenly bright with energy.

It was probably that adrenaline thing people got when they were in danger, she thought, and then yanked.

She heaved. Her body leaned back diagonally; her feet pressed so hard into the bare boards the wood kind of started to buckle. She knew the wood was starting to buckle, but refused to think about it too deeply. If she did, she would have to accept the impossible.

She would not, she could not.

Vampires did not exist. They were a made-up thing that these two weirdos were using as a justification to keep her here—but that wasn’t going to be the case for long. The wood behind the ring was starting to creak and groan. Another second and she’d be free. Just a little more muscle, a little more effort, and then there it was.

The wood cracked and the ring clanked to the floor, so sudden it should have sent her sprawling. Yet somehow it didn’t. Somehow she stayed on her feet. She hardly even staggered or lost a bit of her balance, which seemed unsettling enough on its own. But then there were other things, too. She wasn’t sweating, despite working harder at something than she’d ever worked in her entire life.

And she wasn’t breathing hard.

In fact, she’d suspected for some time that she wasn’t breathing at all. There was a terrifying stillness to her entire body now—a kind of silence that she couldn’t quite figure out. Was it purely the absence of oxygen, going in and out of her lungs? She didn’t think so, but what else could it possibly be?

Nothing, she told herself, nothing, and part of her really believed that.

She believed it enough to wrap the loose chain around her body and run right out the door.

Of course, the problem only followed her. Once she was out there she should have been cold, but she wasn’t. She didn’t have anything on her feet, but the snow-covered ground barely posed an issue. It didn’t even make her slip or stagger, despite how fast she was running. Somehow she wasn’t only impervious to the cold. She was also at least fifty percent less clumsy than she’d been before.

And eight hundred times faster.

The trees whipped by her as though she was in a car instead of on her own two feet. Everything seemed so light, like flying rather than running, and once she realized Zeke and Merrick were onto her that feeling intensified. It came back to her when she heard Merrick’s voice somewhere behind her: strength and speed, he’d said.

She couldn’t deny he’d been right. She was running so fast now she couldn’t see the trees anymore. They formed great walls of green and brown on either side of her, like she’d somehow turned them into a tunnel.

She didn’t even need to dodge around things or watch out for fallen branches. Her body simply reacted to all obstacles on its own. Even in the darkness, with only a sliver of moon in the sky to light the way.

My new body, she thought, only it wasn’t so scary now. How could it be, when whatever power she had was helping her elude them? She could hear them running the way she was running—on feet so light they barely touched the ground—yet still they couldn’t catch her. After a while they were reduced to shouting after her, though she wasn’t sure shouting was the right word.

Somehow she knew they were hardly raising their voices. They warned her to stop, to come back, to listen to them, and they did it all in whispers . . . yet she heard them anyway. It was as though they were talking in her head—a thought that sung through her so strongly she almost stopped. For the first time, it really struck her.

It struck her the way it had when she’d seen him through the fire—humans couldn’t do these things.

She thought of how it felt to run like this, to jump so high, to be so strong. When she whispered in their direction, she actually felt them recoil. “Hullabaloo,” she said under her breath, like she was five again, with all those hopes and dreams about the wonder of the world. One day I will step through a mystical door, she’d always thought, and now somehow she had. It was soaked in blood and weird as fuck, but it was amazing nonetheless. It was so amazing that when she came to a chasm in the woods—fifty feet across and with a wild river at its bottom—she didn’t hesitate. All this new wonder surged in her veins, rising up and up until anything seemed possible.

I can jump this, she told herself, in a voice filled with awe.

And she was right.

She took off from the ground like a rocket, arcing so high she was sure she could see the tops of the trees for a second. Her legs pedaled in the empty air, arms reaching for the mossy bank at the other side. She didn’t need to reach, however. She overshot the edge by a good yard, her feet forming heavy grooves through the mud as she slowed to a stop.

It looked like something had crashed there, when she glanced back on it. Something heavy she thought, but it had only been her. She was the thing that had crashed—even though she hadn’t crashed at all. She was still upright, still unmarked and unhurt. She could have been out for a stroll for all the effect it had on her.

A fact that they seemed just as shocked by as she was.

They stopped at the edge of the chasm on the other side, two dark marks amidst all the white. Eyes wide and staring, in a way she shouldn’t be able to see. She shouldn’t have been able to, but she could. When she squinted, she could make out the line between Zeke’s brows, and the tightness of Merrick’s mouth.

It made her want to wave just to infuriate him further.

You can’t get to me, she thought gleefully.

But she was so very, very wrong about that. Or at least, she was wrong when it came to Zeke. Merrick might not have dared to do it, but Zeke apparently did. She saw him take three steps back, and almost put up a shocked hand, as though some part of her still cared for him. She thought of him saying, “You mean everything to me,” and there it was. The urge to shout no, the way Merrick did.

He practically cried out in anguish, and went to grab Zeke before he could do it. The way a lover would, Cora thought, but didn’t get the chance to truly address that idea. Instead she had to watch with bated breath as Zeke launched himself off the edge of the cliff, not sure if she was more terrified of him falling or making it. If he fell, she would never hear his voice again or look into those liquid eyes.

And if he made it . . .

She would have to return to the chains.

Of course it was true that no longer meant what it had. If they were really vampires, then perhaps their motives were not so terrible. Maybe she could trust him; maybe she could trust both of them. Maybe they were only looking out for her. It certainly seemed like it, when she considered things rationally. But the problem was—she didn’t seem able to look at things rationally. She saw him land on the stretch of mud in front of her, and everything just went haywire. This big glut of terror and panic punched through her, so overwhelming she didn’t know how to fight it.

Her only thought was of escape, even though she wasn’t sure escape was the right word for it anymore. Whenever she thought about fleeing, it wasn’t because of any kind of oppressed feelings. It wasn’t because of the possibility they would recapture her, or the threat of something worse that might happen. It was about getting away to somewhere that had people.

She wasn’t going to hurt those people after all. And if she did happen to hurt them, well she wasn’t going to do it a lot. She just wanted to see them, and maybe touch them with her aching teeth. Was that really so bad? Was that really so awful?

Zeke seemed to think it was awful, but then Zeke was a vampire fiend. A vampire fiend who filled her with strange, visceral urges, but a vampire fiend nonetheless. She couldn’t possibly put much stock in his opinion, no matter how delicious he smelled and how dizzy he made her feel. After all, he was busy trying to haul her back, away from the people all filled with lovely blood. He managed to snag the material of the stupid nightgown they’d put her in, and she could tell he was trying to use it to get purchase on something more solid.

So she yanked, hard enough to tear it.

She let the entire sleeve go and kept running—or at least, it felt like she was trying to run. She moved her arms and legs in the exact same way she had before, when she’d turned the forest into a tunnel, yet somehow it wasn’t working right. Everything felt slower and more sluggish, to the point where he could actually catch up with her.

And when he did it was pretty much game over for her rational side. The second his arms went around her—blocking all her limbs in and damn near squeezing the breath from her body—she turned into someone else altogether. She bared her teeth and bucked hard against him, snarling and spitting in a way that didn’t seem normal.

It seemed near feral, as though she’d forgotten how to be a person.

“Cora, just calm down, calm down,” he said, but he might as well have been speaking in another language. She couldn’t process the words properly—either that or she simply wasn’t interested in any of them. They didn’t help her get to the people, so what did it matter what they meant? She had to focus on more important things, like shoving at the bar of his arms.

Not that it helped at all. She shoved until she was sure something should have snapped, but he didn’t let go. And when she tried kicking at him instead, her predicament only got worse. Somehow they wound up sprawled on the ground, amidst the mud and the slushy snow and the too strong scent of forest things.

All of which was bad for a number of reasons.

For a start, she didn’t much care for the mouth full of icy water. It didn’t even taste like water anymore. It tasted like cardboard, if cardboard had somehow been concentrated down for maximum blandness. And then there was the weight of Zeke—had he always been so enormous? She knew he was tall and she’d always thought of him as solid, but this was something else. He seemed to be everywhere all at once, each part of him ten times the size it had been before. His right thigh was a sack of wet cement, so heavy it bordered on smothering. His chest was practically crushing her into the ground, to the point where she could barely breathe.

It was a good thing she didn’t need to do it anymore. Knowing that wasn’t a comfort, however. It made her wonder how long this could go on for, before something terrible happened to her. Could he just lie on her forever, until she went mad? She suspected so. She was already halfway there anyway.

And not only because of the pressure and the weight and the thought of what being this way meant. There was also the heat. God, the heat coming off him was unbearable. She’d always thought vampires were meant to be cold—in fact, that was the way she felt. Her own skin seemed like marble, and the snow was only making it worse.

So where was this impossible fire coming from? It was like being trapped beneath a furnace. She thought of what Merrick had said about sunlight, but it was still way before dawn. It had to be coming from Zeke, even if he barely seemed aware of it. He just kept right on wrestling with her no matter how intense it got.

And they were wrestling by this point. Somehow she’d tangled her leg around his, and was using it to try to throw him over onto his side. His hand was clamped around her wrist, and it was obvious why. If he let go, they both knew she was going to scratch him. All she could think about was the raw, red lines she could make down his perfect face—a thought that seemed a touch insane until she got to the good part of this particular idea.

Once she managed to do it, she was going to lick him. That was what she wanted to do. Just as soon as he let go of her wrist, or moved so she could get her other hand out from beneath their bodies. Yes, yes, she was going to scratch and then lick him . . . and when it became clear that she couldn’t, another urge started to blossom.

He was behind her, but if she bent her head back a little and then twisted, she could just about reach him with her mouth. His jaw was mere inches away, and to her it looked suddenly so tender. It had always seemed solid and masculine before, yet somehow it didn’t now. It was hers, it was hers to bite—no matter what he shouted.

“Don’t, don’t, fight it, fight it or you’ll never be human again,” he snapped, but he was only doing it because he knew he couldn’t get away. He knew she had him, despite the hold he had on her and the heaviness of his body and all the other advantages he seemed to have. She was too wily, too strong, and in a second he was going to lose.

She really, really wanted him to.

He said human, and all she could think of was losing the powers she’d gained. Of him taking them away from her, just because . . . because what? Because he imagined her too good and decent to be whatever this was? It seemed that way, but at that moment it didn’t sound like a convincing argument to her. And in a second, it wasn’t going to matter anyway.

She could feel him starting to cave in under the pressure—though maybe cave in was the wrong term. It implied that he was failing, when really it felt more like he was giving something away. Instead of arching his head back and away from her, she could sense him starting to lean in. Once or twice it almost seemed as though he was trying to rub his cheek over hers, and only the thought of what she was trying to do kept her from fully believing it.

He couldn’t be, could he?

He couldn’t want her to bite. But if he didn’t, then why was he no longer holding her wrist? Why was his hand suddenly on her hip, pulling and pulling her back against his body in a way that couldn’t be mistaken? He wanted her closer, not farther away. He wanted to rub their bodies together, in order to make this terrible fire worse.

And he was succeeding. The heat was now pulsing and pulsing through her, and not just in the innocent parts. Before it had seemed to center in her mouth and lips and gums—almost an ache that urged her to bite. But now it was everywhere, from the suddenly heavy swell of her breasts to the insides of her thighs.

He hadn’t lied when he’d said fever.

If anything, he’d undersold whatever this was. For one long terrible moment, she wanted him so much she would have slit him open just to get inside his skin. Even her lesser instincts were insane, considering the circumstances. They were wrestling in the mud and snow after a series of completely inexplicable and very frightening events, and all she wanted to do was grab his hand and push it between her legs.

She wanted to do more than that, in truth. Her body was buzzing with a thousand different needs, and all of them were far, far lewder than anything she’d ever entertained before. The last time she’d been with a man, she’d barely dared to touch him. She’d settled for a brief pat on the back and an accidental grab of his ass while aiming for his hip. She’d never felt like much of an active participant during sex.

But here she was practically writhing. She arched her back just to get more contact between her backside and his groin, and knew why she was doing it too. It wasn’t purely so she could be closer to him. It was because she could feel what was there. Every time she pressed back, she got a little more evidence of something thick and solid.

And the harder she rubbed, the clearer it became. He was aroused, quite obviously. He was so aroused he was no longer trying to restrain her. She could feel his lips against her cheek, parted in the exact same way hers were. Ready to bite me, so close to biting me, she thought, and found herself thrilling over that idea as much as she did over the other one. The one that said Bite him back, go on, snarl at him and bite back, that’s what this is, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Maybe she would have done it, too.

If it hadn’t been for Merrick.

She didn’t see him coming—though that wasn’t a surprise. She was so wrapped up in the heat and feel of Zeke that someone could have bazooka-ed them from space and she wouldn’t have noticed. But she noticed the sudden absence of the body behind her. She turned just in time to see him arcing off into the darkness, and only managed to process what had happened when Merrick got hold of her face.

He had picked up Zeke and hurled him off into the woods.

And now he was dealing with her. He was really, really dealing with her. The grip he had wasn’t one you might use on a person if you thought that person was a danger to themselves or to others. It was one you might use on a dog. It was a pincer, clamping her mouth shut so tight that pain lanced through her jaw. The whole move pretty much incapacitated her, but even if it hadn’t, he had others at his disposal.

He didn’t mince around the way Zeke had. There was no absurd bout of wrestling here. He straddled her body, knees pinning her arms to the ground. Then when she tried to buck, he did something even more humiliating than all the rest of it.

He shook her.

He used the hand on her face to rattle her head back and forth, in a way she wasn’t even sure you’d do with a dog. She was pretty sure pets warranted more respect and consideration than this, but apparently she did not. She deserved shaking and knees on her arms and a gaze so cold and disdainful it seemed to pass right through her to the soil below.

The soil was more interesting to him than her. She was less than dirt to him, less than the bugs that crawled beneath her—and it wasn’t simply some vampire thing, either. It wasn’t that he feared she would run off and kill someone, or seemed troubled over the idea that she was no longer human the way Zeke did. It was something else, too.

But that something else didn’t quite click, until they dragged her back to the cabin.

They didn’t bother with the chains this time. They didn’t really need to. Merrick simply tossed her into the corner and told her to stay, and she didn’t have the slightest urge to do anything different. Perhaps she might have, if they hadn’t then done some of the things they did, but as it stood she could only watch, paralyzed.

Or was it mesmerized? It felt kind of like the latter. She knew her eyes started off normal-sized, then grew progressively bigger as this little tableau played out. But she couldn’t blame them. It was like watching those Shakespearean characters she’d thought about, only much more terrifying and intense than she’d initially imagined.

“Were you going to fuck her right there on the forest floor?” Merrick started, and everything pretty much unraveled from there. Zeke seemed to actually round on him, eyes flashing and teeth bared—the real teeth, the sharp teeth, the teeth she still didn’t think were possible—all his earlier calm completely gone. He didn’t sigh wearily this time. He roared, like a lion. He came close to hurling something.

Possibly the uneven chair.

“You think I can’t control myself?” he snarled, so full of conviction you could almost believe it. If you hadn’t seen him dry-humping her to death a few minutes ago, and didn’t look at the erection he still quite obviously had.

None of which applied to Merrick, who pretty much saw and heard everything.

“You can’t even control yourself now,” Merrick said, and for a moment it seemed like maybe he was wrong. A silence and stillness came over Zeke once the accusation was out—to the point where Cora thought a really withering comeback was on the horizon. Yeah, I sure do seem like an irrational, chaotic kind of guy, she pictured him saying.

About a second before he lunged at her.

There wasn’t any warning. All his focus seemed to be on Merrick, and maybe also on refuting what he’d just said. His back was practically to her, for God’s sake. Then suddenly it wasn’t anymore. He whipped around and went for her, all teeth and claw-hands and charged desperation. His eyes actually looked red. His mouth was full of razor blades.

But none of that was the worst thing.

The worst thing was the fact that she took a step forward. A smile spread over her face, like he wasn’t currently a half-crazed monster. It was closer to seeing a boyfriend across a crowded bar. Hey, there he is, she thought, and then simply tried to go to him. She even reached her out her arms, ready for his terrible embrace.

It was the first time she was actually glad of Merrick. He was cruel and he was cold, but he didn’t let that fanged thing get her. He knew what Zeke had been about to do, even if she hadn’t, and he got him easily by the back of his coat. Then when Zeke tried to shed said coat so he could carry on lurching toward her, Merrick went one better.

He grabbed hold of him by the chin and throat, as he had with her.

It was almost comforting to see. She’d thought a humiliating thing like that was reserved for someone as gross and contempt-worthy as her, but apparently not. It was for all vampires who didn’t know how to control themselves, of which Zeke was clearly one. Even after Merrick had wrestled him down to the floor, he didn’t seem to want to let up. He kept squirming and fighting and snarling, all that patient calm completely gone.

The fever simply burned it away, as though it had never been there at all. She knew it did, because Merrick told him so over and over—that none of this was real, that it was just her blood calling to his. Not that Zeke listened. He even started begging after a while—a thing she never thought she’d see him do. He was usually so contained and confident. If someone had told her he’d pleaded for something while being violently mugged, she wouldn’t have believed them.

Yet here he was on this filthy floor, hands straining against the legs that had boxed him in, back arched clean off the floor, eyes full of nothing but desperation. Here he was panting out words like please and just and let me. She wasn’t sure what was more shocking: the fact that he was doing this, or the thought of what he wanted Merrick to let him do.

She knew biting was probably involved. But then there was that thickly curved shape beneath the material of his jeans, ready and waiting to do things to her. He’d probably fuck her with it given half the chance, like Merrick had said. In fact, fucking was really the least of the things she could imagine. The most was this sudden and startling image she couldn’t quite shake, of him standing over her with his cock in his hand.

He would be dripping, she thought. He would be all slippery and slick and on the verge of coming. Then once he’d forced her to open her mouth, he’d give it to her in long, thick ribbons. All over her tongue, all over her face, all down her front, until she was absolutely and disgustingly coated in it.

And once he was done, he’d want her to lick it up. Of course he would. Why else would she be thinking about him doing such a thing? It couldn’t possibly be that this was what she wanted to happen. She wasn’t drooling at the thought of tasting his come. The thirst in her was for blood, not for anything else.

Certainly it wasn’t for that.

She’d never wanted anything of the kind in her entire life, and no amount of possible vampirism was going to make her start now. She just had to force the thoughts down, down to a place no one could ever find them—and for one relief-filled moment she succeeded. She managed to control the shakes. The heat lowered from a boil to a mild simmer. All ideas of anything remotely sexual went out of the window.

But sadly, they couldn’t stay outside the window. They might have, if everything had stopped there. If Merrick had chastised Zeke into silence and stillness, and all of this had returned to how it was before. She even found herself welcoming the notion, despite the torment she’d been through over the last few days. After all, she was exactly what they had claimed. She couldn’t deny it now.

And chains would have been so much better than watching Merrick lean down to lick Zeke’s open mouth. At least with chains, she knew where she was. She could tell herself she was really suffering and so oppressed by their evil ways—or even imagine that it was for her own good. Yeah, she was more than willing to admit it might be for her own good.

But this . . . this was not for any good that she could think of. The second he did it, all those alarms inside her leaped directly to eleven. That heat immediately reached some critical mass, and no amount of thinking of other things would make it go away. It was impossible to think of other things, with this going on in front of her.

Though God knew she tried to look away. She thought of how rude it probably was to keep watching, considering the direction this was definitely going in. She imagined Merrick sneering at her for staring, or maybe sniping at her for being a pervert. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to stop.

It was far too compelling, in so many different ways. There was the fact that it was Merrick doing this—Merrick who seemed so icy and restrained. He hadn’t appeared to have a sexual bone in his entire body before, yet there was no denying his intent. She couldn’t dismiss the light in his eyes, or the louche way he went about his business.

And then there were the actual things he was doing.

Once he was done licking, he sat back to admire his handiwork. He looked at all the things she couldn’t help looking at, like the glossiness of Zeke’s lips and the way Zeke parted them a little more. It was practically an invitation, and Merrick seemed to take it as such. He ran one elegant finger over that wanton mouth, and just when she was sure he wouldn’t dare, he dipped it inside.

Of course she immediately thought of Zeke snapping those sharp teeth around it. But the funny thing was . . . the idea only seemed to ratchet things up a notch. A pulse of strange pleasure actually went through her sex, as soon as it occurred to her. The way Merrick went about it was a bonus really, to the thought of blood and flesh and sinew.

Though she had to admit, it was a truly excellent one.

He didn’t simply slide his finger inside. He fucked that mouth over and over—and all the while he watched, with a look of something like triumph all over his face. Triumph because Zeke obeyed him, she thought, because Zeke didn’t bite even when it would have been so easy to do it. But also triumph for one other reason.

It was the same thing that made him angry in the forest.

The thing that made him sneer and spit at her.

He wasn’t angry that Zeke had changed her. He was angry that Zeke had forsaken him for some stupid girl. They were lovers, they were in love, and now she was in the way. She knew she was, because once it was clear that Zeke’s focus was back where it belonged, Merrick turned and looked at her.

He fucked the mouth that belonged to him, and looked at her with eyes that were no longer stones. Now, they gleamed with his victory. He is mine, they said, and Cora had to agree. In that moment, there seemed to be no one else for Zeke apart from the man above him. He writhed beneath Merrick; he gasped his name.

He licked that intruding finger like it was something else entirely. She watched his tongue flicker out and coil around one knuckle and almost wept, though over what she couldn’t tell. Part of it was knowing that he would never belong to her now, true enough. But there was another part she couldn’t so easily explain.

It was like the idea of him cutting that finger in two.

It shouldn’t have aroused her.

Yet somehow it did.

Even the victory in Merrick’s eyes excited her. Her head filled with thoughts of fighting him for her prize, and none of these thoughts were normal. She and Zeke and Merrick were all sweaty and naked in most of them, and there was lots of biting on the nape of each other’s neck. It reminded her of wildlife videos about animals wrestling for control of the pride, and it left her a tad shocked and shaken.

But it also made her bare her teeth at Merrick.

Teeth that no longer felt small and blunt.

And in return, he did the same thing. He showed off fangs, and eyes now a different color from the shade they’d been before. It wasn’t a red like Zeke’s, but there was a shift. The cool blue was now a hazy gray—almost as though someone had drawn a veil over them.

It only made him more beautiful, however. No matter what she thought of him—or indeed any of this—she couldn’t deny that he made a gorgeous vampire. Feral and mean like he’d said, but with another quality he clearly couldn’t see in himself.

A lovely quality, buried deep beneath the bitter frost.

He didn’t just want to win, she thought. He wanted to soothe Zeke. He wanted to stop him feeling this terrible ache, in a way that made her nearly moan with longing. What would it be like to feel someone’s hand on her now? She thought she might die if someone so much as glanced against her elbow with their foot, never mind all the things Merrick was doing to Zeke.

He started slowly, oh so slowly. But somehow slowly was worse than if he’d gone far quicker. She kept having this unsettling urge to tell him to speed things up, even though they were supposed to be rivals and he was supposed to be her captor and this was not supposed to be in any way electric to see. She shouldn’t have wanted a vote on how things went down.

Yet she did, God she did.

It was as though he was touching her, instead of touching Zeke. When he parted the wings of Zeke’s shirt, she practically felt the material shiver over her own skin. She got that little tingle she usually did when something passed over the stiff tips of her breasts, and if Zeke’s reaction was any indication, he knew that exact feeling.

He arched his back the second the shirt brushed over his own tight nipples, one hand flying up to do exactly what she wanted to. The need to chase that pleasure—to pinch herself there—was so strong she almost went ahead, no matter who was watching or what was happening now. Only the thought of Merrick sneering at her kept her from it, but of course Zeke didn’t have to worry about anything of the kind.

He was supposed to touch himself. He was supposed to moan and writhe and run a hand down to the thick shape in his jeans. And if he didn’t feel like it, well—Merrick was there to do it for him. In fact, after a second of watching him rub himself there and toy with his nipples, Merrick did exactly that. He batted the hand away and replaced it with his own, then proceeded to tease Zeke so exquisitely she could have cried.

She did cry when he used something other than his fingers. He leaned down to lick the place he’d just been teasing, and a sound escaped her mouth. The sound she’d been trying to hold in for what felt like hours. The sound she had sworn she wouldn’t make. Now it was loose—and yet another victory for Merrick.

She even saw him turn his head a little, so he could look at her while he tormented Zeke. Though it wasn’t really Zeke he was tormenting at all. It was her, it was her, oh God, it was her. She watched him mouth a wet path down over that perfect chest and perfect stomach—every tiny move designed for maximum lewdness, so slippery and wet and always punctuated by breathy sounds that set her hair on end—and knew he wanted her to suffer. She was sure he wanted her to suffer.

Why else would he do things like this?

When he bit, she knew it was for her benefit. He trailed his way back up and made a bloody mess of Zeke’s shoulder, so she could see it all glossy and red and want it with every beat of her nonexistent heart. She had to actually put a hand in her mouth to stop her from doing something stupid—though she did something stupid anyway.

She could taste the meaty tang in her mouth. She knew she’d pierced the skin.

Yet she kept going all the same. She had to, because now he was unbuttoning Zeke’s jeans. He was pulling them down, one slow inch at a time. And that would have been bad enough back when she was a human—seeing someone reveal Zeke’s thick thighs and his hard-boned hips and his other things.

But as a vampire suffering through some ridiculous fever, it was unbearable. She saw his cock bounce free, as glorious and glossy and swollen as she’d ever imagined in her weaker moments, and her head flooded with all of those lewd thoughts and fantasies she’d had a moment before.

She imagined herself creeping forward to take the heavy, slippery head of his cock in her mouth—or maybe just so she could touch it a little. Surely Merrick would let her touch it a little? Then once he’d accepted her hand he might actually like her to do more. He might want to put a hand in her hair and hold her still so when Zeke finally came she was ready to take the first spurts of his delicious come and oh God what was she thinking?

Why was she thinking things like that? Her own mind had turned into a treacherous place, full of crazy things that would never ever happen. Merrick didn’t want her to taste Zeke’s come. He didn’t want her to suck Zeke’s cock. No, no, no—that wasn’t the thing.

No, he wanted to do all of that himself.

He wanted to do all of that right in front of her, while he watched and Zeke watched and everyone in the whole world watched her writhing in frustrated agony. And the thing was, she couldn’t even be angry about it. He wasn’t really being cruel, once she looked at things from an objective and non-vampiristic standpoint.

Zeke did belong to him and only him.

The bite he’d given her was a mistake.

She was a mistake.

And now she had to watch Merrick proving it, in the most exquisitely torturous way.

He took that cock in his mouth in one long, slow slide, everything designed for maximum impact. She saw the flicker of his tongue around the swollen head; saw the strain it put on his jaw to take him all. But the real kicker came when he worked his way back up, cheeks hollowing as he went. Just so she would know how hard he was sucking, how much effort he was putting in, how good he was making it.

Not that she really needed any visual clues to work that out. She could tell by Zeke’s reaction. She could tell by the way his spine arched up off the bare boards, and his head went all the way back. And then there were the sounds he made, oh dear God, the sounds. Did he know he was making those sounds? She wasn’t sure he would have carried on if he did.

His moan wasn’t just long and deep and dark. It was punctuated by all of these panting, brutal-seeming gasps—as though he could barely believe this was happening, despite the fact that it must have happened a thousand times before. She could tell it had happened a thousand times before.

He kept saying stuff like, “Yeah, do the thing,” and Merrick always knew exactly what he meant. He meant stroke my asshole and squeeze my cock and all kinds of stuff she could hardly stand to watch. She wanted to close her eyes, but her eyes were afraid of missing something. She tried to turn her head, but her head refused to obey.

And the worst part was: she didn’t know why.

Sometimes it seemed like the fever was forcing her, and other times she was sure it was just her. This was Zeke, after all. It was the man she had longed for from afar for God knew how long, and here he was half-naked with his stiff cock in a man’s mouth and all of these lewd words coming out of him and then, dear Lord, then he turned to look at her and . . .

There was nothing she could do after that. She couldn’t even pretend she wanted to turn away in some respectful manner—or in any manner at all. Whatever the relationship between him and Merrick, he still gazed at her with eyes that seemed on fire. They reached out for her, in the exact way she wanted to reach out for him.

She simply couldn’t go to him, that was the thing. She couldn’t go to him because of what might happen to her and because of the infection and all of that other nonsense. But there was another reason now. It was there the second she thought again of throwing caution to the wind. It had been there a moment ago, but now it really took on some shape and form.

If she went to him, she would hurt Merrick. Merrick, who didn’t understand who he was beneath the frost. Merrick, who had most likely lived with this man for hundreds of years and now quite clearly didn’t know what to do about any of this. She knew he could see Zeke looking at her. It was obvious that it bothered him beyond reason.

But he didn’t stop what he was doing. He didn’t demand Zeke look at him. He just carried on licking and sucking and doing his best to soothe that fire, until finally Zeke groaned a name as he climaxed messily in Merrick’s mouth.

It wasn’t Merrick’s name he called out.

It was hers.

They put her in their bedroom-basement after that—the room they’d been in when she heard them speaking below her those first few days—as though doing so would help. Both of them had to know it wouldn’t, however. It was like lifting some forbidden thing from the bottom shelf to the top one so that some kid can’t get it. The kid still knows the forbidden thing is there. The kid is aware that a simple stepladder can get her what she wants.

Or in this case—a padlocked trapdoor and a rickety staircase up from this musty hellhole could get her what she wanted. And judging by the sounds from above, Zeke was more than aware of that fact. During the first hellish night she could hear him rattling that padlock. She could hear him trying to convince Merrick that it was safe now to go near her, and failing hopelessly. Even he couldn’t really believe that at all, considering it had been less than the allotted week.

And her shouting to them that it was fine, that being a vampire seemed cool, didn’t appear to make any difference. Merrick just referred to her as delirious or mad, and after a while Zeke would seem to come to his senses and agree.

Though it was never long until he was trying to get to her again. It was like he had two people inside him—one who wanted her to go back to her normal life, and another who didn’t care about anything but reaching her. And she could understand, because there were times when she didn’t care about anything else, either. She still didn’t know if she honestly did want to be a vampire, but that didn’t seem to matter when the fever rose up inside her.

On more than one occasion she found herself straining at the chain Merrick had attached at her ankle, with no idea when she’d even gotten to her feet. Other times the urge to touch herself or bite herself was so strong she had to physically fight it. She had to fight it, because if she didn’t, something really bad would happen—something far worse than being a vampire forever and ever.

Merrick might see her doing those things.

He would see her and he would sneer at her, and even if he didn’t, she doubted his reaction would be any kind of comfort. He seemed to get heavier and heavier every time he came down to her, to the point where he started to bother her more than the pain of separation. Every argument with Zeke seemed to take a toll on him, and of course all the arguments were about her.

“Just let me go to her and hold her,” she heard Zeke say, and even she winced to hear it. He didn’t really mean it—but what did that matter? He was still telling his boyfriend that he wanted to go hold someone else. He was still calling out her name whenever Merrick did whatever he could to take the fever down. She heard him moaning deliriously while Merrick fucked him, but none of these moans were directed at the man above him.

They were all for her, always for her.

It was really no wonder that she said the things she did, on the second day of this absolute nightmare. He came down the stairs with the usual slop, expression as tight as ever she’d seen it, always refusing to meet her eyes, and the words simply blurted out of her.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m putting you through this.”

He went very still the second she spoke—a feat that seemed impossible considering how still he already was. Sometimes she wasn’t sure he was actually moving while walking across a room, so this was really something to see.

And then there was his voice when he finally answered . . .

“What do you mean by that?” His tone almost touched accusatory. It made her wonder if she’d accidentally done something other than apologize, but when she checked back she felt pretty sure she had. Unless sorry meant something else in a secret vampire language she didn’t know about, that was.

And if it did, what was she supposed to do now?

Apologize again, she thought, but that seemed stupid. If sorry was actually some kind of curse word, saying it a second time would only make things worse. No, no, she had to come up with something else—like a really good explanation. She even had a reasonable one all lined up and ready to go, which made the actual words she spoke all the more disappointing. She simply panicked and blurted out: “I feel as though I’m trying to steal your boyfriend.”

Then considered running through the nearest wall. Why had she said boyfriend? That was absolutely not the right word to use. Now she’d made everything sound like some teen drama, instead of the relentless insane nightmare it actually was.

And he agreed, apparently.

“I am appalled that you would use such a word to describe our relationship.”

“Well then, what do you want me to say? How . . . how should I put it?”

“I am not obliged to provide you with definitions or explanations.”

“That’s usually what people say when they don’t really want to be gay,” she said, and immediately regretted it. She regretted it almost as much as the whole boyfriend thing. But it was too late—the sentence had slipped out and now she was going to have to deal with the fallout. Starting with the slightest cock of Merrick’s head, and the barest raising of one eyebrow, and the sense that he was laughing at her and her puny human ways.

“Of course you realize that such labels mean absolutely nothing to me. I am older than the pyramids. I’ve seen civilizations rise and fall. But please continue in your efforts to comprehend what you clearly fail to. Perhaps you might next describe me as ‘cool’ and ‘awesome.’”

“That . . . that isn’t really how people talk in this decade.”

“No, but I believe they did talk that way this century. And that is how I understand such matters—in centuries, not something as fleeting as decades.”

For the first time she found herself glad that she didn’t breathe anymore. If she had, it would have been obvious that he’d made her breath catch in her throat. At the very least she was clutching a fistful of her nightdress, out of either terror or amazement.

Had he said pyramids and centuries?

She’d heard things like that from him before, in passing. But to have it described in such frightening terms—to be forced to think about him seeing some kind of dawn of time—that was another kind of thing altogether. How was she supposed to talk to someone like that?

How was she supposed to be in the same room as someone like that? She felt like she should bow, and only the idea that he knew it stopped her. There was a gleam in his eye that said he understood completely how small she was currently feeling, and that forced her to swallow her awe.

If she ever managed to be friends with him, then she could be awestruck.

Right now, she had to carry on trying to set this straight.

“Well, however you view things . . . I’m sorry it’s happening. I’m sorry that I’ve kind of taken him away from you, if that’s really what I’ve done.” She hoped against hope that he would find her sincere this time, and at least understand. And he did, in one way.

But that wasn’t a positive.

“You cannot steal what is already yours,” he said, as though the whole thing was a given. She had played some game without knowing it and won without meaning to, and now here she was probably lording it over him. How could she seem like she didn’t want to lord it over him? How could she make him see that this was all nonsense?

She didn’t know—but she was going to keep trying.

“He isn’t mine, though. It was just a stupid accident and now you’re paying for it. But I want you to know—I don’t care about resisting because of the vampire thing. I will resist because I don’t want to get in the way. I don’t want to hurt you.”

There, that would do the trick. He’d surely get the picture now—and for a moment it even seemed he did. He turned his head over the word paying and a flicker of something crossed his features over the word hurt. Some of that stiffness left him, in a way that suggested relief. Or at least, it did until he answered.

“Clearly you misunderstand the situation. Do you not wonder why he came to you at the party? He came because he could not help it. He has been unable to help it for months, though he has tried. But your blood would have continued to call to him no matter what, just as his called to me. We only have one fever for someone, and it is irrelevant to whether we bite them or not.”

She saw it plainly.

He wasn’t relieved at all. He was so jam-packed with despair and resignation it was starting to make him sag. He was coming apart at the seams right before her very eyes, and she hadn’t the first clue what to do about it. It was hard enough processing what he’d said, for all kinds of reasons.

The first of which was this:

Zeke had wanted her before any of this happened. He really had. The weird feeling and the sense of connection she’d experienced between them at the party had actually existed, outside the wildly fantasizing confines of her imagination. She hadn’t made any of it up, and that was good, it was very good, oh it was.

She just wished that goodness didn’t come at someone else’s expense.

Merrick needed to know she didn’t want it to come at his expense—only when she tried to explain, it came out all wrong again. It always came out wrong with him. He was too cold and alien and ancient. Every time she spoke, she felt like a child attempting conversation with the CEO of some incredibly important company, and this was no different.

“But he . . . he obviously loves you.” She could almost hear the fumbling littleness in the back of her throat. Not to mention that terrible tang of patronization—God, the look on his face when he registered that. He looked like he wanted to throw up something corrosive all over her, and even when he’d gotten that feeling under control, there was another awful one to take its place.

“Not as he loves you,” he said, with so much bitter desperation she almost couldn’t answer. The words were an ice storm, pushing her back and back.

But she fought her way through.

“You can’t know that for sure. You can’t just rely on some mystical vampire bullshit. I won’t rely on some mystical vampire bullshit. If you want me gone, I will go away.”

“Then you will most likely die. Or kill everyone you ever cared for, before you can stop yourself. There was a chance at first that you might get over this and carry on, but I see now that the fever is probably too deep. The infection is too great. If you leave, the bond between you and Ezekiel will turn you mad, whether you fully become what we are or not. Even I cannot leave you to such a fate.”

He seemed to struggle with the last words, but that was understandable.

She struggled with them too. The situation was difficult enough without the sudden sparking realization that sentiment produced. He cared about her. Maybe not in a normal way, with hearts and flowers and kind gestures—but it was there nonetheless. A kernel of concern, buried deep beneath layers of ancient frost and frigid feelings, as terrifying and amazing as true love would have been in anyone else.

And he seemed to know it. He seemed to want to take it back once he saw her expression—probably as soft as pudding and twice as pathetic. His lips parted; his cold eyes flashed with understanding of his mistake. Then she jumped in, with the only thing that would silence him.

“Then we’ll find a way to work through this, for all of us.” She thrilled to see it have the desired effect. In particular, the word all seemed to really strike him, confusion and doubt immediately warring over his usually so composed features. Maybe we could, that expression seemed to say. Maybe that is the way.

He even questioned her in a wondering, near-hopeful sort of voice—so much smaller and less certain than his usual one, and so much more heartening.

“Why would you want to do such a thing? Do you not hate me?” He spoke as though her opinion actually mattered. More than that, in fact—her opinion mattered so much he almost sounded afraid to hear her answer. His brows nearly met in the middle, and for a moment those eyes were not the eyes of an ancient and cold creature.

They were full of a kind of anxiety.

One she was happy to assuage in any way she could.

“I don’t think you’re half as awful as you would have people believe,” she said, sure and certain it was the right sentiment. He didn’t want her to hate him. He wanted to be something else in her eyes—she could see it.

But that only made his reaction all the more confusing.

He took a step back, as though she’d lashed out at him. And the step itself wasn’t as graceful as he usually was. He almost seemed to stumble—a fact that appeared as shocking to him as it did to her. He actually looked down at his right leg in horror, as if the thing no longer belonged to him.

And when he finally spoke he sounded distressed.

Distressed, she thought, and also possibly crazy.

“I have just realized I must leave,” he said, which was very odd for a number of reasons. To start, Merrick was not the kind of vampire to make excuses before he left a room. The room usually had to make excuses for not being up to his standards. And then there was how weird the excuse itself actually was.

What on earth did he have to leave for?

Was there another chained-up vampire somewhere, waiting to challenge his self-perception? Maybe he had love rivals secreted all over the place, and that was the real reason he looked so perturbed. It couldn’t be her alone. It couldn’t possibly be her alone.

She suspected it was her alone.

“Merrick, maybe we should talk—”

“No, I have to go. Good day, madam.”

She could see he wished he hadn’t said madam. Or possibly even good day.

But that was okay. She wished she hadn’t said anything either—though maybe not for the reasons she would have thought. She should have felt bad about making him rush back up the stairs, or maybe awkward about this or that. Instead a rush of weird warmth went through her to see him be like this and hear him say such odd things, and the second it did she knew her mistake. She knew she shouldn’t have pushed.

Now she didn’t just want to help him.

Now she had feelings for him.

Now she liked him, God help her.

She vowed to talk to him again the next day, but he didn’t come. He didn’t come for a good deal of time after that, to the point where she started to wonder how long it would take for a vampire to die of starvation or thirst. She wasn’t hungry for anything other than blood, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe without any food at all her body would simply start to mummify, until she looked like the big doll that stood in the corner of the basement.

The one she kind of wanted to examine, in case that was the last person Merrick had gotten upset with. She didn’t think it was, considering the glass eyes and the straw hands. But somehow the presence of glass eyes and straw hands were not a comfort. Nothing was a comfort anymore, and not only because of the blood sizzling in her veins and the pain and the constant oppressive ache for Zeke.

Now she had this other thing to deal with.

This other thing that somehow seemed even more difficult than weird vampire problems and lust so intense she often woke to find herself humping the nearest random object. One day it was almost definitely going to be the doll, yet still the Merrick problem trumped it. The Merrick problem was worse than the idea of humping a creepy doll.

She could hardly fathom that, yet it remained true. Even after he finally decided to come down and see her again, she couldn’t say any of the things she had planned. He looked too raw—as though someone had flayed a layer of skin off him while he slept. Now he had woken into a world where people could just do that stuff to him, and he quite clearly didn’t like it. He didn’t like it to such an extent she could have sworn his hands were shaking as he laid out a clean nightdress on the table by the wall.

But that was impossible, wasn’t it? She doubted he flinched over a stab wound. Mobs of villagers had probably threatened to behead him before today, and the most he’d managed in response was a faint lip curl. Why was this such a problem? She didn’t even know what this was. At best she would have described their last meeting as mildly embarrassing, with a side of sudden unintentional liking.

What was bad about that?

So she liked him, so what. Most people would probably like a vampire with self-perception issues and cheekbones up to Jesus. It wasn’t such an odd thing—not even if he liked her back. Even coldhearted vampires liked people back when they unexpectedly said nice things to him, and she wasn’t sure why he found that so odd. It didn’t mean they were married or anything. She wasn’t going to attack him in the night with her vagina.

The whole thing was ridiculous really—so ridiculous that she grew impatient with him. She grew impatient, and then did a very silly thing. Of course she knew it was silly before she did it, but not to the extent it actually turned out to be. She thought he would maybe be mad that she had dared to reach out and snag his arm. She imagined him snarling at her for demanding his attention. She was even prepared for all of those things.

She was not prepared for the thing that actually happened.

Her bare skin just barely brushed his bare skin, and some kind of nuclear blast went through her. For a second she thought he had hit her in the gut, but realizing he hadn’t wasn’t any better. She was still doubled over. Her body carried right on buzzing in this horrendous and unbearable manner. The only way she could describe it was like biting down on tinfoil, only everywhere, and that wasn’t even the most horrifying part.

The same thing was happening to him.

She could tell it was, despite how hard he was trying to deal with it in a more dignified manner. He clenched his jaw so tight she could practically hear the bones squeaking. Every muscle in his face worked toward keeping his eyes at a reasonable size, and his hands made the most desperate-looking fists. But no matter what he did, she knew the feeling was there.

She knew because she had felt it before.

She felt it all the time now, to varying degrees. The only difference really was in the size of the sensation, which had previously seemed pretty enormous. But now she saw how mistaken she had been. That piddling paltry fever was nothing compared to this. This was a tsunami. This was putting the lights on only to discover the monster was real all along—and not just because she was practically on the floor in some kind agonized ecstasy.

She didn’t care that she was on the floor in agonized ecstasy.

She cared that this was happening because of Merrick.

And he definitely cared that it was happening because of her. After a moment of admirable restraint, he actually moaned the word no. He took three steps back, as though three steps would make it magically go away. Then when it didn’t, he tried a different tactic.

He tried a really insane tactic.

“How have you done this, witch?” he asked, but she could hardly fault him for it. She was wondering the same thing. Hadn’t he said that there is only ever one fever? And even if he was a complete idiot, the clichés were definitely on his side. Every book about fated vampire love said almost the exact same thing.

You could only have one true love, or one true mate, or one magical blood bond.

If you had two, your vagina exploded—or so it seemed. Something terrible was definitely going on down there, at the very least. Now that the initial brutal shock wave had died down, the ache between her legs was pretty much all she could feel. It thrummed away over the top of more reasonable thoughts like This is really awful and Maybe we should apologize and pushed her toward actions she absolutely did not want to do.

She did not want to reach out for him again. That would have been the height of insanity, considering his anger and her many misgivings about the whole thing. Yet somehow, she was doing it anyway. It was like blanking on her own sense of self. She knew what her self looked like and could remember how it usually behaved, but in that fevered moment she couldn’t place it. All she could think was how much she wanted him and needed to be near him, and most of all by God, she craved his hand between her legs.

Anything would have done in fact. His mouth, dear Lord his mouth, that mean mouth, that wicked tongue, oh yes if he could just use it to lick her, to lick her unbearably swollen clit and her wet and wanting hole yes, yes, surely he could. Surely he understood.

Of course he didn’t at all.

He took one look at her reaching hand and writhing, wretched body, and ran.

She wasn’t above begging, by this point. It seemed foolish to carry on thinking she was, considering the circumstances. Last time Merrick had seen her she’d hypnotized him with her magical vagina and then crawled on the floor to him with her arms outstretched, while probably moaning. You couldn’t get much lower than that.

So who really cared if he heard her pleading for mercy? What did it matter if she spent all day writhing around on the floor with her nightdress around her waist? She would have licked his bootheel for a bit of relief. In her head she did lick his bootheel.

She thought of every lewd thing she could to try to get at that final, blissful orgasm, and when she exhausted all the normal stuff she simply moved on to the darkest dirtiest stuff that she’d never dared to entertain. She thought of one of them fucking her ass and the other fucking her pussy, and when even that wasn’t enough she tried going weirder.

She imagined Merrick forcing her to lick his ass while Zeke watched, everyone upside down and back to front, people fucking mouths with all kinds of body parts, cocks spurting come almost everywhere, but none of it helped in the slightest. It only seemed to get her hotter, and wetter, and more frustrated. Several times she came close to snapping the chain—because really what did it matter now?

Why did she have to resist anything? She was never going to be human again. She was no longer standing in the way of true love. They were all apparently the true love of each other, so absolutely nothing was preventing her from doing whatever she wanted. It should have been the easiest thing in the world.

But if it was, then why didn’t they come to her? She was sure Merrick must have said something to Zeke—though if he had, her fine hearing hadn’t picked it up. All she could make out now was silence, ominous and unending silence. In her more lucid moments, she wondered if they’d killed each other in the wake of this new revelation, but there hadn’t been any sign of that either.

Maybe they just left, she often found herself feverishly thinking, even though she knew it was irrational. She knew it was; she knew they couldn’t just leave, yet still her exhausted, lust-addled mind fixed on the idea. She fixed on the idea so hard that when she felt a hand against the side of her face, she almost wept.

The touch was so tender, so soothing, so fully of mercy. It broke her in two, and that was before she opened her eyes and saw who was giving it to her. It would have been sweet enough if it was Zeke—after all this time her lovely Zeke, come at last—but it wasn’t.

She turned her head, and there was that cold blue gaze, seemingly softened by feelings for her he barely knew how to have. There was that face, so typically severe, now collapsing beneath the weight of whatever this was. Merrick was the one who had come, and oh that finished her off completely, completely.

Then his words did the rest.

“I want to say I came because I could not stand your pain a moment longer, but that would not be true. I came because I could not stop myself.”

That was it. Every bone in her body turned to butter. Every muscle ran right out of her and headed for pastures anew. He couldn’t stop himself. Zeke had lasted weeks, but Merrick had barely made it a few days before he simply could not stop himself.

And he meant it, too. He didn’t hesitate once the idea was out. There was no holding back after that. He fisted his hand in her hair—like some far less refined sort of man—and brought her throat to his lips.

Almost as though he wanted to kiss it, she thought, about a second before the pain. Oh the pain was bright and sharp, and so much worse than it seemed in the movies. In the movies there was always swooning, and two delicate streamers of blood. Here the blood ran thick and frightening, and she couldn’t have swooned if she’d tried.

She was too busy trying to do the same thing to him. She needed to do the same thing to him. Her incisors ached to do the same thing to him. They wanted to sink into something, anything, and when they finally found their mark it was like nothing else. She thought of long drinks of water after a thirst, and finishing five thousand mile races on one foot, but neither of those analogies seemed adequate.

They didn’t really cover how arousing the whole thing was. The best she could come up with was how a man must feel when he sinks his cock into a warm, wet cunt, but even that wasn’t good enough. Nothing would ever be good enough to describe the sense of his skin giving beneath the prick of her new teeth, the sense of him stiffening in shock, then letting her have it, and finally the flood of that rich, wonderful liquid.

She didn’t know if his blood was superior somehow, being a vampire’s, or if human blood was better. She only knew how glorious it was on her tongue, how much it sang through every fiber of her bursting body, as it sank down and down to the tips of her toes. It was like being warmed from the inside. Everything was suddenly loose and lax—or at least it was in one way. In another she was still waiting, aching, and in truth the taste only made that need even more intense.

By the time he pulled away—in one long sigh of pleasure, throat as bared and bloody as hers, teeth like shards of glass winking in the light, eyes like fire—her hand was back between her spread legs, working and working her slick little clit in a way that should have made her blush. It should have, but it didn’t—not even when he turned his head to look. He did it slowly too and with just a hint of accusation, like someone discovering a naughty girl in a room she shouldn’t have entered. Yet still she hardly cared.

If anything, it only deepened the thrill. She watched him watching her with kind of uncertain eyes, and almost came right then and there. She shuddered when he curled his tongue up to touch one curved fang and moaned when he cocked his head in some sort of assessing manner, so really it was no surprise that she reacted the way she did when she realized what he was going to do.

She could see him looking at her spread pussy, with intensely curious eyes. Like he hasn’t seen anything like it for a long time, she thought, or maybe never at all. He had pretty much shown her he leaned neither one way or the other, but he’d clearly stayed faithful to Zeke. How many years did that cover? How many years without knowing a woman?

She couldn’t know.

All she knew was how it felt when he bent down and breathed her in. When he looked and looked and looked at her until it seemed as though his eyes were hands, touching her before he’d even actually done it. She couldn’t blame herself for the sound of shocked delight she made.

Or the words she then used.

“Mmm, yes, taste my pussy, lick me there,” she said, and only wanted to take it back for the barest moment. Then he licked, just as she’d demanded, and the moment was gone. It was like it had never been. The person she was had never been. There was only Merrick lapping at her slippery folds until her back arched and her cunt clenched around nothing.

He was tasting her wetness, the way he had tasted her blood. He was satisfying that craving with a far ruder thing—just as she had thought of doing.

And it worked. She knew it worked. She knew because after a while she found herself tearing at his clothes, desperate for that exact same thing, and the second she worked them free and got to him—the moment she took him in her mouth—that satisfaction went through her too. Her whole body went warm again, and that tingling feverish feeling intensified.

It wasn’t long before she was taking him deeper, licking and rubbing and pulling in a way she never thought she would with someone like Merrick. He was so cold and restrained, and yet here she was digging her nails into his ass and touching him in all kinds of private places. There was absolutely nowhere her greedy fingers didn’t want to go—though he never seemed inclined to stop her.

No matter what she did, he hardly flinched, not even when she grazed the length of his swollen shaft with her tiny new teeth. He simply let it happen, and by God that was one hell of a turn-on. He didn’t care about his cool façade anymore. He just wanted her to devour him and him to devour her to the detriment of everything else, and for a while she did too.

And then she saw Zeke out of the corner of her eye.

She had no idea how long he’d been standing over there, by the stairs. She only knew he was there now, watching and watching in this strange silent way she couldn’t quite place on the emotional spectrum. Was he angry? She supposed he should be angry. Merrick had kept him from her for so long, only to take her for his own. It had to look bad.

But he didn’t exactly seem like he thought so. He wasn’t frowning. His gaze hardly looked accusatory. If anything, she would have labeled his expression relieved, and only didn’t because of how weird and convenient that sounded. Why would he be relieved? His lover was fucking his other lover in the mouth. Only an automaton from her deepest, darkest fantasies wouldn’t mind something like that.

She knew it, she knew it, and yet she couldn’t shake that impression.

It got stronger the longer he stared. He tilted his head just as Merrick had, as though looking at something strange but oh so compelling. And when she slipped and let herself feel the sensations coursing through her body—when she let her head go back for one tiny moment, hand still working over Merrick’s cock, every muscle tensing under the onslaught from his mouth—she could see that curiosity deepening.

It wasn’t even curiosity, really. She could name it for all the things it seemed to be: desire and longing and relief. He didn’t care how this came about, she could tell. He only cared that the obstacle was now removed. He didn’t have to worry about Merrick disapproving or vampire issues or a single other thing. He could finally act on his desires. He strode forward and sank to his knees, kissing the place that Merrick had bitten.

He kissed it long and deep and desperately, moaning with a kind of abandon she could really relate to. She almost melted through the floor when he did it. All these weeks of resistance and agony and now finally, finally this orgy of giving in—it was like nothing else she’d ever experienced. She felt his teeth skimming the surface of her skin and his hands roaming and roaming over her body, and didn’t know what to thrill over first. The teeth made her think of that taste and that warmth and that craving, still sharp in her. But the hands, Lord the hands . . .

He wasn’t rough exactly, but she wouldn’t have called him gentle either. He seemed too far gone for gentle. Waiting had turned him into an impatient animal, so ready to feel all the things it had been denied. And when anything got in the way—like her nightdress, or the tangle of their bodies—he simply shoved it out of the way.

She heard material tear and felt the air on her bare breasts, but she didn’t mind in the slightest. She had one man licking her clit and the other fondling her naked body, and both were more eager about it than any man she’d been with prior. Merrick was almost pressing his face into her spread cunt, just to get at more of her. And when Zeke cupped her breasts, he moaned against her throat. He moaned to feel those soft curves and her stiff little nipples—the ones that tightened further when he started pinching them.

He couldn’t seem to help himself. Each step he took led him to something even filthier, until finally those teasing fingers were between her legs. They were between her legs while Merrick was still there, licking and kissing.

Of course she had to open her eyes for that—if only to see how the two of them were achieving this Rubik’s Cube of contact. It felt like five tongues and twelve hands were touching her all at once, and as it turned out that assessment wasn’t far off. All she could see were slippery fingers and soft lips sliding and squirming through her folds. Her wetness glistened on Merrick’s cheeks and coated the back of Zeke’s hands . . . all of which was arresting enough on its own. She could hardly think just from watching it happen. Her body was so stuffed with sensation she wasn’t sure how she hadn’t come.

But then she thought of what they were doing, she really thought about it, and the pleasure thickened, and ripened. They were working together. They weren’t fighting each other for space. Indeed, after a moment Merrick pulled back briefly, and let Zeke do what she knew he was dying to.

Merrick let Zeke kiss her too. He even helped—parting her soft lips with too-clever fingers, so that Zeke might get better access. So that he could easily find her clit, and lick and lick its swollen tip. It was unbelievable. It made her sob.

Everything made her sob. The slow slide of his tongue finally making contact; the bristle of fever between them, now so strong it seemed to sting. The manner in which Merrick stroked Zeke’s hair as he went at it . . . Oh, that was really something to see. Not only were they both allowing this, not only was that rivalry gone, but Merrick was actually encouraging Zeke to lick her—with his touch and with his words, oh God his words.

“Yes that’s it,” he said, as every nerve in her body stood on end. “Lick her like that, like that, make her come.”

Somehow she had expected him to be more invested in what Zeke might like—namely that warming taste of her. Only he wasn’t, he wasn’t. He wanted her to feel good. And he wanted it all to happen while he gazed at everything with eyes that reminded her of melted frost, of mist, of a million things unsaid.

None of which she understood. How could she, with the pleasure rising and rising like this? All she could think about was the sounds and sights and sensations, every other consideration shoved to the side just so she could feel it all. Merrick was saying more things now, hotter things, and she had to listen. She had to take in what he was saying, right now and right here. She didn’t have a choice, when the words were fuck her. If he’d gone with something tamer, or suggested a less arousing activity, she might have been able to focus. If Zeke hadn’t asked if it was okay, maybe she could have discussed the finer points of having a ménage with two vampires who had been lovers for however many hundred years.

But once he had, all the strength and sense in her went toward saying one word.

“Yes,” she said, “yes.” And then, in case he’d changed his mind in the last three seconds, she added a “please.” She would have added seventeen pleases and a gift basket if it meant he got to her faster—but thankfully he didn’t need any such encouragement. He already had half his clothes off. Both of them had half their clothes off.

It was like suddenly being in the middle of an underwear commercial for Hunks in Trunks, only with more blood and hunger and lascivious licking of things. Merrick’s tongue curled out to slide over his upper lip, and Zeke was almost urgently sucking on his fingers. Both of them were shaking and shaking as though just being away from her body for the five seconds it took to arrange things was too much.

But she couldn’t fault either of them. It was too much for her too. She couldn’t lie still and let Zeke fumble his way between her spread legs, cock curved and slick with pre-come, ready to ease into her willing cunt. She couldn’t even settle for stroking him and tugging him toward her—though she did both.

She had to keep reaching for Merrick at the same time. She needed Merrick back in her mouth immediately, no matter what the prudish part of her brain said about that. The prudish part of her brain could shut the fuck up, because really if it had wanted to stage an intervention, it should have done it hours ago, days ago, weeks ago. At this point it was far too late.

Right now she wanted to suck his cock while Zeke fucked her pussy, and nothing was going to stop her—not even her own inflexible body and Merrick’s refusal to come any closer. He seemed reluctant to do anything that meant he had to stop touching Zeke, but that was fine by her. All she had to do was bend and twist a bit, and said reluctance was no longer an issue. He could stay right there, and she could get what she needed.

Everybody happy, she thought, and though the sentiment was sort of flippant, it really rang true. They made a circle like this, a close-knit and unbreakable circle, each one giving the other what they hadn’t even known they wanted. Merrick’s head went back when she touched him, as though he wasn’t sure that sort of pleasure was possible until she did it.

And it wasn’t the feel of Zeke sliding inside her that really sparked her off. It was when he reflexively grabbed and squeezed her hand, in reaction to whatever he was experiencing. It was the sense of being surrounded and devoured by them, in a way that really made her see to the bones of what was happening here. She was shedding her old skin, and taking on some other self. My vampire self, she thought, but it was more than that.

She was becoming the kind of person who could take hold of Merrick’s shoulder, and pull him down for a kiss. The kind of person who could tell Zeke to do it harder, harder, faster, and not feel the slightest bit of shame. She didn’t look at their faces and wonder what they were thinking, so full of doubt she could hardly do anything at all. Instead she saw their expressions for what they were: open and eager and desirous.

Merrick might have stiffened when her mouth touched his, but she could see his eyes fluttering closed in complete and utter delight when he let himself feel it rather than think on it. And Zeke did frown to see it, but there was something beyond that frown. There was that relief; there was that excitement. She could practically see it dancing behind his eyes: the unfolding possibilities, each more outrageous than the last.

This is what we can be now, she thought at him, and knew he understood. It was there in the tightening of his hand in hers, and the suddenly erratic jerk of his hips. He was fumbling and falling into every filthy idea he’d ever had, and he was doing it so fiercely it was going to make him come. It was going to make her come—and then she did and there was nothing but that. Nothing but the feel of him going over and the surge of sensation as orgasm seized control of her whole body.

She wanted to scream, but couldn’t make a sound. She couldn’t even grab something and hold on—though God knew she needed to. It was like being flung at some great rock face of pleasure. Every time she tried to get a secure grip on something—such as her ability to reason or right herself—another steep drop suddenly presented itself. She found herself scrabbling at nothing, every muscle so tense she was sure she would never be able to unwind any of them.

And quite clearly Merrick and Zeke felt the same. She could actually see the tension in Merrick’s throat and along the length of him. His hand had made a fist in Zeke’s hair, and she could tell he didn’t want to let go. It didn’t matter though. Zeke didn’t seem to want him to let go either. His back was arched to accommodate that painful grip, in a way that said only one thing: do it to me harder.

I need it, do it to me harder.

Of course she understood why. The pleasure was just too much; the great waves of it too high and hard. He needed something to focus him, to keep him grounded, and that tight hand in his hair was it. She knew it was, because she felt almost exactly the same. When Merrick stiffened and jerked and flooded her mouth, his hand went to her hair.

It tightened there, reflexively.

And it was divine, oh God, it was divine. It made her mind reel to even more possibilities—ones filled with biting and prickling pain and all kinds of perverted things. Was that what he was like? Would he do that sort of stuff for her, if she asked him to? She suspected he would even if she didn’t, and somehow that was as sweet as every other thought of their possible future.

It wasn’t just the idea of being a vampire, of being with them, of love and other glorious things. It was the sense that she could discard her old sexual self. She didn’t have to have any limitations after this. They had already gone as far as she had ever previously imagined going. Now there was more, there was further.

There was freedom, total freedom.

Or at least, she thought so in that one brief moment of bliss. How could she do anything but? They both kissed her in the aftermath, with the same sort of relief and gratitude she felt toward them. They both held her so tenderly, as though everything was open to them now. She couldn’t possibly have known what would happen when she awoke, some hours later. She couldn’t have.

And yet it happened, all the same.

She knew something was wrong before she opened her eyes. The spaces beside her were too cold; someone was going about their business too quietly. It reminded her of the time Michael Golightly had tried to escape their one-night stand while she was still sleeping—an idea that made her stomach sink.

That couldn’t be the case, could it? Things were probably going to be awkward between them, but not awkward in that way. It was the one good thing about having a crazy vampire bond. You couldn’t suddenly realize you’d made a terrible mistake and actually hated the person you’d just fucked.

Every feeling was right there all the time, whether you wanted it to be or not. You could try to pretend it wasn’t, or act like you hated the other person, but the truth was always obvious. One touch and it spilled out all over the place. One look and it burned through you.

She could see it in Zeke’s eyes without even asking. She turned her head and looked at him and there it was: that unquenchable fire. He was clearly panicked and not particularly happy, but it burned out of him nonetheless. It burned in her too, around her more reasonable instincts. It beat behind her every urge to ask him, like a second heart.

She had to fight to make herself heard over its thunder.

“Is everything okay?”

He stopped pacing midstep the second she spoke. The hand he was obsessively shoving through his hair stilled where it was, and she could see him thinking thinking thinking of a good answer. The right answer, she thought.

But even when he couched it in comforting terms, it didn’t lessen the impact. “Merrick is upset,” he said, which only made things worse. Upset seemed like such a loaded word when applied to him. He was too large for such a small feeling. Trying to fit him into that one tiny adjective made parts of him start to spill out.

It made her afraid to ask for more—mainly because she already knew the answer.

And she was right to be afraid.

“He feels guilty about . . . how things happened.”

Of course it was guilt, of course it was. He’d come down here and done all the things Zeke had been wanting to without so much as a by your leave. She’d been a fool to think it wouldn’t eventually be a problem. Zeke was probably seething beneath his concern. She’d probably torn them both asunder.

She had to make it right.

Somehow she had to make it right.

“It was mostly my fault though. I touched his arm and then the fever happened and when he kissed me . . . I didn’t stop him and I sort of let him lick me and—”

It was almost a relief when he cut her off. She was babbling like a maniac, after all.

But then he explained why he was cutting her off, and it was suddenly much less of a good thing. His tone was too impatient, his dark gaze too fraught, his words too confusing.

“That’s not what he feels guilty about, Cora. Nobody cares about who fucked who first. I don’t care about who fucked who first—I wanted him to want you. I was relieved the fever got hold of him. None of that is the problem.”

All of which should have been quite comforting really. Only it wasn’t, it wasn’t.

Now the real issue was hanging over her, like some terrible approaching object half-obscured by clouds. She could just about see its edges, if she squinted and put her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. If they shifted a bit to the left, the whole thing would come into view—though if she was being honest, she didn’t really want it to.

She wanted to play dumb for just a little while longer.

“Then what? Why is he upset? He should be happy—we can all be together now, forever,” she said, and knew before he replied how silly she sounded.

Things were never really that easy.

Unpredictable stuff always got in the way.

“Cora, he vowed to never create another vampire. He swore he would never let anyone suffer again the way I did, the way he did. And now not only did he fail to prevent me from turning you . . . he is the one responsible for sealing your fate. He let you drink from him. That’s the final step, that prevents you from ever going back to being human. You are fully a vampire because of him, doomed to roam the earth forever, never truly at home. Never truly a part of society. Always in the shadows, forever struggling to feed without killing. He won’t forgive himself.”

She shook her head, even though she could see by his expression how grave this situation was. Clearly he didn’t believe it could be fixed—but damn it, she was going to try.

“He can. He must. I’ll talk to him—I’ll tell him what I just told you. I want forever like this. I’m not in any pain, I’m not suffering. I’m happy, Zeke. I’m happy.”

“It doesn’t matter, darling. It won’t matter what you say. I tried to tell him all those years ago that I was glad, eventually. That the suffering was worth it. That he has made me a life I never thought I could have, even if it wasn’t one I wanted for you—but he doesn’t understand. For him, this is and always has been a curse. His life was taken from him in a way ours wasn’t. There was no love or desire in the thing that turned him, and it colors everything he does or says or feels.”

“Then we can explain!”

“How? By talking about emotions that he thinks are nothing but a product of some fever? He finds it so hard to believe beyond that. He doesn’t think anyone could ever choose to want him, no matter how you put it. He doesn’t get how . . . how . . .”

“How amazing and bright and brilliant he is?”

“Exactly, exactly. He thinks he’s cold and cruel, and he is . . .”

“But he’s more than that too. And we can show him, Zeke. I know how to show him—the fever isn’t what he thinks it is. He’s certain it’s this one mystical bond between two people, but I know now that it isn’t. That feeling between us happened because of my desire, not the other way around. I wanted him long before it happened, and I think he wanted me too. All the fever does is reveal what is already there,” she said, in a rush of excited realization.

Now Zeke would see, she thought.

But the problem was—he already did.

“I know,” he said, so sadly she almost guessed the truth of what had happened. She could feel it breaking through the clouds now. She could feel it, but still she persisted. She suggested more things they could do and say, from forcing Merrick to hear all the way around to hugging him into understanding. And when he told her it was too late, that Merrick was already gone, she responded with hopeful words about fetching him and bringing back.

It was only after Zeke had shaken his head that she finally started to see clearly. How could she not? His eyes were too wide and dark when he did it. His mouth made a trembling line. It was the silent shake of someone responding to a wife asking if her husband had made it. There was too much grief in that one movement, for a happy ending.

She knew, she knew.

“You can’t,” he said. “It was already too late when I woke. And it will be worse for him, because he’s so much older. The sun is coming up.”

She waited until his attention was elsewhere to do it, then snapped up a blanket and ran out of the door before he knew she was moving. She could hear him screaming after her, however. She could hear him, and knew why he sounded so desperate.

The sun hadn’t even cleared the horizon, but its touch was broken glass against her skin. Even after she’d covered her face and her hands with the blanket, she could feel it slicing into the slightest gap in the material. She could feel it through the material, like an impossible weight bearing down on her back and head and shoulders.

She’d barely taken ten steps before exhaustion started setting in—and that was bad on a number of levels. For a start, it made moving quickly an almost insurmountable ordeal. She could hardly get up to that speed she’d achieved before, which made finding Merrick before the sun rose fully more difficult. And then there was the thought of what Zeke had told her.

It was worse for older vampires.

It was worse than this absolute hell.

God only knew what state Merrick was going to be in, if that was the case. Most likely he was already a cinder—though she refused to let that thought settle. There was a chance, she was sure there was. There had to be one. If there wasn’t, then how could she ever tell him what she now knew to be true?

She hadn’t realized before, but she did now. Speaking to Zeke had sealed it, it had shown her. And more than anything, she wanted the chance to show Merrick too. She wanted him to feel differently about himself, to have a chance to live free of feeling cursed, to come out from beneath the frost, and if he was dead . . .

She wouldn’t be able to bear it if he was dead. She could hardly bear it now, not knowing. Sometimes she was sure she could make out his scent, but then it would fade into the general must of the forest, and disappointment would flood in again. He is lost, he is lost, she thought. She felt no better once he was found.

He was on the ground, half in shadow and half in light. The shadow was hardly helping him, however. Smoke rose up from various places—like his right hand, curled helplessly against his leg, and the curve of his jaw, now almost bloody with the burn of it. He looked about done for, but she didn’t care.

She covered him anyway. She covered him with her body and with the blanket, and when that wasn’t enough, she packed snow around him. She made a little wall to shield him, even though her fingers burned and bled. But then, what did it matter if they did? Her only thought was of his safety. The only thing she cared about was his life. The sun could have melted her hands clean off and she would have found a way to continue.

So it was a good thing that it didn’t come to that.

Or at least, it was a good thing in relation to her hands.

It was less good in terms of his first words.

“Just leave me to rot.” His voice was so low and dark she almost didn’t realize he’d spoken. For one heart-thumping second she was sure some other supernatural creature had come across them, and decided to have a vampire meal. Her sore hand went to her chest. She bared her teeth without thinking.

Then she realized.

She realized, and came close to losing it all over again. He was alive, thank God, he was alive. He was being a complete asshole, but he was alive.

Now all she had to do was convince him to stay that way.

“If you think I came all the way out here with that death ray burning down on me only to be told to turn around and leave you here, you’ve got another think coming. Now get up, Merrick, we’re going back to the cabin.”

“And if I refuse?”

“If you refuse I’ll drag you up. I’ll get hold of your ankles, and I will bodily drag you through the forest and then hurl you into our home.”

“You will do no such thing.”

She could hardly believe him. Somehow he managed to maintain his clipped, condescending tone even in the most dire of circumstances. It made her want to scream, but other urges came first. Like grabbing hold of him by his left leg to show him she really meant business.

“Unhand me immediately or I will be forced—”

“You will be forced to what? You’re half-melted. I doubt you could raise your right arm,” she snapped, only now he had something to prove. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d given him something to prove.

And he proved it all right.

The grip he got on her wrist was firm.

In fact, it was pretty close to painful.

“I can raise my limbs without any trouble at all. It is simply that I do not wish to. I wish to lie here and die and you will not stop me.”

“So nothing I say will make a difference.”

“Indeed it will not.”

“There isn’t a single sentence I can use to change your mind.”

“I cannot imagine what sentence you think there could be.”

She meant to make a frustrated sound at that—one that conveyed just how ridiculous he was being and how angry he made her. But unfortunately something else came out instead. “I love you.”

Of course he looked at her for that. During the entire conversation he’d kept his face away, and now he looked. He looked so long and hard her skin started crawling off her body. Apparently she didn’t need the sun. She simply needed to say a stupid thing to Merrick and it happened all on its own.

And his words made her condition even worse.

“So then—you have gone mad.”

She hated him. She hated him.

She didn’t hate him at all.

“I’m perfectly sane.”

“How can you be?”

“I just . . . I just am, I just—” she tried, but nothing would come.

It was only after he’d delivered this punch to the heart: “How can anyone love a thing like me?”

That everything burst out of her in a rush.

“How could I not? You think you’re cruel, even though you’re kind. You think you’re evil, even though you’re good. Anyone in the world would love a man like that. Women wait their whole lives for a man like that. You know what we usually get? The fucking opposite,” she said, and was so thrilled with herself for doing it.

For around three seconds.

“But I am not a man, am I?” he spat. He turned in such a way that some of his arm emerged into the sunlight, and she could immediately smell it burning. Not that he gave a single fuck. “What I have done to you is not what any man would do. They might be as evil as they please and never do what I have done. I have cursed you forever, and I did it purely because I had no self-control.”

The loathing in his voice was so thick and rich it almost swallowed her whole.

She could feel herself drowning in it, and she wasn’t even its target.

He was his own target—though not for long, oh, not for long.

“Why is it always talked about like a curse? Why is that always the first thing every vampire says—even here in fucking reality where you must be able to see what is really going on. You must know what it actually is.”

“Oh, and what might it actually be?”

“A goddamn gift, Merrick,” she said—much to his shock. He drew back to hear the words and then didn’t seem to know what to make of them, but that was absolutely fine. She could use his confusion. She could use it to grab his entire world and turn it on its fucking head. “Do you have any idea what my life was like before this? Have you lived so long and suffered so much that you’ve forgotten how dull it is to be human? You’ve made me able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. You’ve made me fast, and strong, and most of all something magical. Something honestly supernatural. Do you understand what that means?”

She could see he didn’t—not completely.

But he was definitely starting to bend. He had drawn his hand back into the shadows, and his frown was less withering than it had been a moment ago. Now there was a hint of something else in it—and in his eyes too. They had a kind of shine to them that sort of hurt her heart. There was too much fear in it.

And too much hope.

“I understand that you are currently burning alive because of me,” he said.

“And I would endure that fate a thousand times over for one scrap of proof that there was more in this world than meaningless, endless mundanity. I would rather burn to death knowing that such fantastical things exist, than live painlessly for another hundred years thinking humans are the only thing there is.”

“You do not mean that. You cannot mean that—how else to explain why you kept to the rules we set for you? If you truly loved the thought of being a monster, you would have broken your chains again. But you did not.”

“Do you honestly think I stayed like that all this time because I hoped I would become human again? The minute I knew what I could do—the second I knew it was real—I stopped caring whether I ever went back. The only reason I stayed chained was because you both seemed to need me to so badly. But if I could have convinced you, I would have. I understand that, now. Why don’t you?”

“I . . . I . . . That is not . . .”

“Come back with me, Merrick. Please, come back with me. Nothing need stand between us now. We can live together—you and Zeke and I. We have found each other at last. Come back, come back,” she said, and for one brief moment she really thought he might do it. That hope was in his eyes again, far deeper than it had ever been before, and when she dared to reach out and touch him, he touched her back.

She felt his fingers shift against hers, just a little.

Just enough, she thought.

Only it wasn’t, it wasn’t.

“I swore I would not do again what was done to me,” he said, in a voice that reminded her of the wind rolling down into nothing. It should have been easy to talk over, to push down, yet somehow it wasn’t. If anything, it was worse, to hear him speak so quietly. To hear all the force go out of him. “I cannot go back on my promise.”

“But you know that you didn’t hurt me. You know that, right?”

“I was cruel to you. I did not mean to be so cruel, but I was.”

“You were trying to protect me.”

“I will always protect you,” he said, and suddenly she was crying. She hadn’t cried when she thought he was dead or over his eyes that seemed to reach for her, even as he tried to back away. But she wept now, and once he’d repeated the words she understood why. Had anyone ever told her anything like that to her before?

Had they told her it, and made her believe it?

She wasn’t sure she’d ever believed anyone the way that she did him. When he spoke, the world shifted on its axis. His every word was a weight on her soul, to the point where she couldn’t imagine never hearing him again. All the things he had inside him—all the things she could learn and understand through his eyes.

She couldn’t let him go because of a foolish promise based on nothing.

She didn’t even know why he would make such a promise, when neither her nor Zeke were suffering monsters. It just seemed like masochism, like punishing himself for things he hadn’t done and couldn’t fully express.

“Then you have to come back. If you really want to protect me, you don’t have a choice, because if you stay here and die, then I’ll stay too, and die with you. I won’t go unless you come with me. I swear I won’t go.”

“You cannot mean that.”

“I do mean it. I won’t leave without you.”

“In a little while you will have no choice. These shadows will not keep me forever—eventually I will burn, and long before you. What else can you do then but return?”

“I can lie on your bones until I am burnt to nothing too.”

His eyes flashed with something other than softness now.

They were back to that flint, and all the better for it.

“I do not believe you. You would not.”

“I can tell by your expression that you know I would. But in case, maybe I should stand up now,” she said, and did just that. She left him beneath the shelter of the blanket, and allowed the sun to hit her full force.

It was like being smacked by a giant, red-hot hand.

“Cora, come back here immediately.”

“Maybe I should burn now, so you know I’m serious.”

“Cora, you cannot do this. You cannot threaten me in this manner. Please—return to the shadows at least, so that we might talk further.”

“Isn’t that what I’m asking of you? A little more time to talk?”

“It is hardly the same—please, for the love of God, stop this. I cannot stand it, I cannot stand it, I beg you to just—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he seemed to reach some terrible limit inside himself—one that didn’t allow for any kind of calm or measured reaction. It also didn’t let him carry on lying there while her skin started to turn an alarming shade of red. He jumped up so quickly she hardly saw it happen, and grabbed her with such force she didn’t have a chance to stop him.

Not that she needed to.

He wasn’t trying to get her back to the shadows. He was scooping her up, into his arms. He was holding her and holding her and then he was running. The sun didn’t keep him back. The blackening of his skin didn’t stop him. He just ran and ran until they were safe again, all of them together in what was once her prison.

Now her home, her home.

She was sure he would be angry, once he woke. He had a lot to be angry about—or at least, she thought so. Zeke was of another mind altogether. As they watched over him and cared for him and soothed his rapidly healing wounds, he whispered words to her like you and are and amazing. He told her she had made him see sense.

And she could understand what he meant. It was true that Merrick’s promise was based on concerns he didn’t need to have and torment he only believed he had visited on someone else. Yet somehow, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d done something really wrong. She had forced him to come back, hadn’t she?

What choice had she really given him?

He was bound to be furious about it.

Only he wasn’t. He wasn’t in the slightest. He first opened his eyes when she was on her knees by the rough-hewn bed he shared with Zeke, clasping one of his almost healed hands in hers. But he did it so calmly and quietly she didn’t even notice, until she happened to glance in his direction.

Then she saw him just looking and looking at her.

“We were wondering when you would wake up,” she said, but only to fill the silence.

It was one thing she was learning very quickly—even when you weren’t locked up in a basement, things were very still here. It was like being in a bubble. A little bubble outside time and so far from the world she’d lived in before. Some days she couldn’t even remember what that world looked like. The mundane patterns of the everyday eluded her.

They had been replaced by Zeke’s kisses—awkward at first but now less so.

They had been replaced with Merrick’s eyes, like winter fire.

“For a moment I thought I had not. You seem so much like a dream I once had, when I was still human and whole.”

“You’re whole now,” she said, and this time, blissfully, there was a flicker of something other than doubt in his eyes. That gleam of hope was back, and it was reaching toward her. All she had to do was reach back and take hold.

“I am odd. I know that I have grown odd.”

“Yeah, you are. Yeah, you have.”

“And I am cold. I cannot help it.”

“You don’t have to. I can see beneath it. Zeke can see beneath it. That’s why we love you, right? Because we know that you’re not all frost and fierceness.”

“How do you know? How though?”

She reached out to stroke his face then.

She had to, she had to.

“If you were, you wouldn’t have saved me in so many different ways. You wouldn’t make a promise to never hurt someone like someone hurt you. Would you?”

“Any person might make such a promise, with memories like those haunting them. I still see his face behind my eyes, whenever I taste blood at the back of my throat. I can still see them sobbing—the ones he brought to me when I was too hungry to stand it anymore. No one would ever want to hurt another person, after that.”

“But you know that you haven’t hurt me.”

He closed his eyes, briefly.

“I hope I have not hurt you.”

“No, love. No, no.”

“I hated every cruel word I had to say to you.”

“I know that.”

“I hated having to keep you like that; I hated letting you go.”

“I know that too.”

“I love you.”

She had to pause then.

Just long enough to catch her breath.

“That was . . . slightly less clear.”

“But the fever, the fever—”

“I don’t think the fever really means automatic love, Merrick. I think it happens because . . . you’ve developed feelings for someone.”

“So you developed feelings for me?”

“I did, I do, I have.”

“Explain to me. Tell me why,” he asked, as though it would be hard.

For a second, she even thought so too. Then it simply . . . poured out of her.

“It’s the little things, you know? The way someone looks at you across a hallway; the hint of something deeper underneath. The slow swing of their words or the clipped cold way they keep them in, their smell like something sharp in the middle of a winter forest, their small kindnesses, their great sacrifices, their willingness to welcome you in even when they’re sure they can’t.”

“Or their ability to stay by your side even when you are sure you are lost,” he said, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he meant her. She was the one who stayed by his side, by Zeke’s side, no matter what. She was the one who kept going, even when things looked lost. She wouldn’t have believed the compliment before, but she believed it now.

They gave her no reason to doubt.

She was beyond doubting, now.

She was a creature who hardly cared to stop herself kissing him, in case it wasn’t what he wanted. And when Zeke came in and touched her hair, she thought nothing of touching him back. She wound a hand in his, and he wound his hand in hers, and then suddenly it was no longer just affectionate touching and kissing.

She felt him reach down inside her nightdress to play with her breasts. That was Merrick’s tongue in her mouth, all hot and wet and desperate for deeper. Those were her little moans of delight and eagerness—getting higher and louder the further they allowed this to go. One of them stripped her naked in one long rip of material, and she made a sound like a startled cat. Followed by garbled words at the feel of Zeke’s hands on her tits, squeezing and pinching her nipples into unbearably tight points.

“Yes, more now,” she told him, and he obeyed. Both of them obeyed. They couldn’t seem to help it. Whenever they paused over one particular thing, perhaps wondering if they should do it or not, some baser instinct simply took the wheel. They didn’t wait for her to say okay. Part of them probably knew they didn’t need to wait for her to say okay.

They could lick her between her legs, if they wanted to. They could touch her and then taste her on each other’s fingers—why on earth not? She did the same to them. When Merrick held out his palm, slick with Zeke’s pre-come. When Zeke murmured, “Here, here,” and turned Merrick’s head so she could lap at the bite marks he’d just left. She went after it all with the same eagerness and abandon that they did.

There was no reason to do anything else.

It was clear there wasn’t, because in the middle of it all she was sure she caught Merrick smiling. Just for a second and not broadly enough to be called normal, but it was there and she knew it. He was as happy as he could be—and she would work to make him happier. He seemed to like it best when she kissed him, as Zeke slowly eased in and out of her pussy. And when she said his name as he stroked her clit . . . yeah, he liked that too.

He liked it when anyone said his name, in fact.

Though maybe not as much as he liked it when they sucked his cock. That was when he really expressed his appreciation. His head went back, as hers had for him, hands fisting in the sheets before they’d even done anything. She almost licked one side of his stiff shaft and Zeke almost licked the other, and that was it. That was all it took to completely undo him—just the idea of it, hovering there in front of him.

She understood, however. She remembered how it felt for her, to have two people touching and stroking and licking her, all their attention purely on her. It was like taking a warm bath in sex and love and other good stuff, and apparently even Merrick wasn’t immune to it. He wasn’t immune to anything when it came to sex—which only made it more fun.

There were no haughty comments about his long life here. He reacted the same as anyone else, when both of them actually licked him. He groaned and tore things to shreds. He begged for more even after they’d given him everything—long wet kisses around the head of his cock, hands stroking and touching him from head to toe, fingers in the lewdest of places.

But it didn’t matter. It was never enough.

Or was it that she didn’t know what enough was?

It certainly seemed so, when Zeke started to open up. “He likes it hard,” he told her. “He likes it when you bite as you suck him”—all of which was thrilling enough on its own. But as they plunged ever deeper into whatever this was, the suggestions turned darker and more revelatory until finally he said something that made her hair stand on end.

“Fuck him,” he gasped at her, around that thick and swollen cock.

And then just in case she’d heard wrong, he repeated it: “Fuck him.”

Of course her immediate urge was to blurt out, But I don’t have a cock, and only Zeke’s speed saved her. He seemed to realize that she hadn’t the faintest fucking clue what he was asking her to do, and took her hand in his. He took it, and then he sucked on her forefinger from knuckle to tip, in a way that made things really clear.

He meant fuck him with her finger, obviously. Christ, why hadn’t she understood that? She wasn’t some blushing virgin who barely grasped sex things, even if she completely was in every way possible, oh God oh God, why had she thought she was some new sexual being, she had absolutely no idea how to do this.

What if she hurt him?

“You won’t hurt him.”

Lord she wished Zeke would stop reading her mind. Earlier that day she’d been fretting that he might think she loved Merrick more than him, and he’d rolled his eyes at her before she’d even said a word. You ran out into the burning sunlight rather than let me catch a tan—but sure I’m going to think you love one of us more than the other, he’d told her, and he had a point. He had a point right now, too.

The thing about being a vampire was: you couldn’t really do a lot of damage.

Plus, he kind of seemed to like it when someone did damage to him. Both of them did, in fact. And if she was being honest—she felt exactly the same way. She wanted to bite and be bitten, and scratch and be scratched, and most of all she wanted to fuck him. She wanted to fuck him so hard the headboard rattled.

So she did.

It wasn’t even that hard, really. There was no resistance when she slid her slippery finger over his tightly clenched hole. He let her all the way in, without so much as a hiss of complaint. There were some moans and his back arched, but she didn’t think that counted as any kind of discontent. Both things looked much more like the overexcited reaction of a teenager just discovering sex for the first time—a response that would have been arousing if anyone had given it.

But was doubly so with someone like Merrick.

He didn’t seem to care about his composure. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in who was doing the fucking and who was being fucked. He wanted her to do it, to the point where he actually said as much. “Go on, go on, take me,” he said, which was more than good enough on its own. Oh God, it made her wet to hear him talk like that.

And then he added “use me,” and suddenly the swell of pleasure rolling through her stomach was too much to take. Magical vampire stamina be damned—it was all so new to her that sometimes it was still entirely overwhelming, all this freedom. All this possibility. She needed to lie down. She needed to stop watching what Zeke was doing—only she couldn’t, she couldn’t. He was sucking Merrick’s cock while she fucked his ass with one slippery finger and, good God, was it any wonder she was close to passing out? Had anyone ever legitimately been in this situation—having frantic, messy sex with two hot vampires—and managed to remain conscious?

She was sure that couldn’t be the case. The only thing that kept her from collapsing were the nails Zeke dug into her thigh. They were drawing blood, and that was good. That helped her focus long enough to put on a good show. She fucked Merrick until Zeke wanted to take over, and then at last she was able to lie down.

Of course the lying down came with an excellent view of one gorgeous man fucking another one, but that was fine. She could take that okay. As long as no one did anything to her or said anything in particular, she would be all right.

Shame really that both of them were talkers. They were talkers, and they were doers. They weren’t content with just fucking each other while she watched. They had to describe what they were feeling in great and varied detail. “Oh man, you’re so tight,” Zeke said, as he sank into that slick hole. And then Merrick . . . no, God, she didn’t want to think about what Merrick said. It was arousing enough just knowing he was doing all of this, without his insanely colorful commentary.

“Do you like my hot little quim, boy?” he asked, and it shouldn’t have been a turn-on, it shouldn’t have been. It should have been utterly ridiculous, yet somehow it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. Who knew she had a kink for olde worlde words for body parts? Or men calling their body parts by names usually applied to women?

She certainly hadn’t. But it was there all the same. She could actually feel her pussy swell and grow slicker at the sound of that word. The urge to put a hand between her legs sprang up, so hot and sudden she couldn’t really fight it. However, as it turned out she didn’t need to. Merrick’s hand was already there, before she’d even finished the thought.

And he had even more things to say about that.

“I think your efforts are making her cream herself,” he said, because he was awful, he was a bastard, oh fuck why had she imagined he wouldn’t be? Why had she thought he would always be as he was that first time—a touch stiff and not quite sure and utterly silent?

That clearly wasn’t the real him. The real him had a sharp tongue and a mocking manner, and now that all the cards were on the table he was going to use both.

She could have wept with happiness at the idea of him using both.

He is himself with us, he is himself. Her heart sang with joy even as her body tried to collapse in on itself under the pressure of too much pleasure. He didn’t even look as he stroked her clit. He didn’t even look, and Lord in heaven that felt good. She wasn’t sure why—but it did. It felt like being played by a master of the craft. He was so skillful he didn’t even need to see what he was doing.

He stroked her and stroked her until she couldn’t hold it in another second more. Her back arched; her clit swelled against his busy fingers. Pleasure tried to punch her in the stomach—or at the very least it got her around the throat. She wanted to say his name and let him know that it was him who had done this to her, but all that came out was a rather embarrassing grunt.

Plus she was scrabbling at the sheets with her feet like she’d somehow started riding a bike without the actual equipment. It must have looked insane. It felt insane. Every muscle seemed jammed up with thick and unending orgasmic sensation, and she knew it was making parts of her all weird and rigid. But neither of them appeared to care. In truth, she rather thought they preferred things that way. When she finally managed to squeeze her eyes open, they were looking at her like they couldn’t get enough. Zeke was actually failing at fucking Merrick, because he’d started to lean and lean toward her and couldn’t quite get the angle to thrust anymore. He was just sort of rocking a little, as he sagged over her.

And Merrick could hardly complain.

He was just as bad. He was supposed to be urging his hips up to meet Zeke, and was licking his fingers instead. Then when he was done with that, he kissed her. He kissed her with her taste still on his tongue—something that shouldn’t have made her crazy but did, all the same. It was as bad as her own blood. It was as bad as their blood.

It was worse when it came with kisses—first Merrick and then Zeke, each one hotter and wetter than the last, each one sweeter than the last. When Zeke finally came, she heard her own name, poured into her open and oh so hungry mouth. She felt Merrick press his lips hard against the side of her face the second he knew he was going over.

And both things made the blood sing in her veins, so high and hot she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to contain it. She would always be desperate for the taste of them, the feel of them, the sense of their bodies tangled around hers. No matter what she did or what they said, it was the way things were now—she was a fever for them.

And thank God for that, thank God for that.

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I’d like to thank Del, for getting me out of a jam.

Never Loved (Dark Obsession, #1)

Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession, #2)

Never Better (Dark Obsession, #3)

The Professor

Sweet Agony

Run to You

Control

Sheltered

Deep Desires

Addicted

Intrusion (Under the Skin, #1)

Forbidden (Under the Skin, #2)

Taken (Under the Skin, #3)

Curveball

Restraint

Charlotte Stein is the RT- and DABWAHA-nominated author of over fifty short stories, novellas, and novels. When not writing deeply emotional and intensely sexy books, she can be found eating jelly turtles, watching terrible sitcoms, and occasionally lusting after hunks. For more on Charlotte, visit: www.charlottestein.net.

Twitter: twitter.com/Charlotte_Stein

Facebook: facebook.com/AuthorCharlotteStein

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