Bloodline by Joel Abernathy
6
The creakof the door opening made my spine tense, but I saw no reason to rise from the bed. It surprised me I was deemed worthy of such comfort, but perhaps that was how Jonas justified what he was doing, assuming he needed to at all. That keeping me as a pet wasn’t really so bad as long as he kept me in a nicer cage than the one I’d kept myself isolated within for years.
Jonas’s scent filled the room, and while the fading remnants of it on the shirt he’d left behind at the cabin had once been my surest passage into the sanctuary of slumber, I resented the way it made me feel, even now.
His weight sank the bed in, and his hand came to rest on my shoulder. “I know you’re awake.”
“Then you must know that I have nothing to say.”
He sighed wearily. “I know you hate me, but at least let me explain.”
“You explained perfectly earlier. You may have played me for a fool, but I assure you, I am not so deficient in logic that you have to spell it out even further.”
“I didn’t betray you, Marcellus, I saved you,” he whispered impatiently into the darkness.
The indignation was too great to bear lying down. I sat up to face him, his every feature clear to me, and the fact that I knew his eyes couldn’t have yet adjusted to the darkness was the only thing giving me the strength to look into them.
“Saved me?” I seethed. “From what, exactly? Because death is a fate I’d much prefer to being kept as a lab rat for your family’s edification.”
“You don’t understand. I tried to get away sooner, but I couldn’t. We’re at war, and our side isn’t winning.” There was distress in his voice, and for the first time since he’d come for me, he sounded like himself. “I told them I had killed you, and I planned on coming back for you once things died down, but they figured out the truth. The only way I could stop them from hunting you down and putting a noose around my neck was convincing them to study you.”
“And what fruits is that supposed to yield?” I challenged. “What makes me different from other vampires is what makes me weak in comparison.”
“That’s why you’re so important,” he said earnestly. “You’re a vampire who’s overcome the thirst. One who can’t sense the others or be killed any of the usual ways. Do you know what that means?”
“That I won’t be invited into their covens anytime soon?” I quipped.
“It means you have a soul,” he said without a trace of humor. He reached out, cupping my unmarred cheek in his palm, but the touch was too much to bear and I turned away. “If you were to feed on human blood, you’d be just as powerful as they are, but with none of the vices. For all we know, so would the children you sired.”
My heart gave over as I realized what he was getting at. “No. I will not turn another. Not for you, not for anyone.”
“Marcellus,” he pleaded, clasping my hand. “The vampires are turning armies at record rates. It’s not the way it was hundreds of years ago, when our ancestors fought them off one at a time. They attack in droves, and there’s only so long the papers will be able to pass it off as serial killers and riots. The world is changing, and the only thing we have on our side is that we outnumber them. When that’s no longer true, we’ll have nothing. We’re only human, but if we weren’t…”
“Then you would be the very monsters you were made to kill,” I hissed. “Does that mean nothing to you?”
Jonas frowned. “Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to stop even worse things from happening. If you made me like you—”
“No!”
“If you turned me,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard me at all, “I could fight them. We all could, and we’d actually stand a chance instead of just shoveling shit uphill.”
“I already have a ‘child,’ and I assure you that Enoch is as insidious as any of the beasts you are trying to be rid of.”
“Enoch?” he echoed, blanching. His shocked reaction to the mention of my progeny startled me, but it wasn’t a surprise.
“I take it you know of him?”
“Every hunter does,” he said darkly. “Enoch is the one who’s sired half the damn vampires on the eastern seaboard at this point. Other vampires have followed in his footsteps, even clear out here. The thin veneer of civilization and ‘family’ is the one thing that held them off before, and now that he’s broken it, all bets are off. The vampire world is anarchy, and Enoch is the new king of chaos.”
I struggled to take in his words, but my heart refused. It was one thing to know he was out there, that my blood was responsible for animating him eternally, but to know that he’d made more? It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but isolation was a ripe soil for denial.
“If Enoch has turned others, then surely you know your plan will not work. That we’re all the same.”
“But you’re not. Enoch’s line is more powerful than the others. About ten percent of them are daywalkers like you, and they’re invulnerable to the usual modes of execution and holy icons, just like you are. Guess if you’re his sire, that explains where they got that from.”
“And the ones who aren’t?”
“He uses some as slaves and guards. The others he just kills. It’s a numbers game and he can’t be choosy when he’s amassing an army. If he keeps going, there won’t be a mortal soul left on the east coast.”
I could read the sarcasm in his words, but there was an element of truth to them, and the implications were staggering. “But they are bloodthirsty all the same. As was I for the first thousand years of my life.”
“But you changed. You changed with no guidance and nothing to keep you grounded. If you turn me, I have you.”
His hand tightened around mine, but it was the passion in his words that bound me against my better judgment. “You make too much of me, Jonas. I am not the angel you think me to be.”
“You’re mine,” he said, sending a shiver down my spine with his earnestness. “You’re good. You have a soul, and from what you’ve told me, Enoch’s was corrupted from the very beginning. All my life, I was so sure there was this solid line between our kinds. That no vampire had the potential to be good, but you… you’ve proved me wrong in so many ways, and I know it’s a long shot, but at this point, it’s the only one we’ve got.”
Even as his words battered away at my resolve, the memory of the agony that separation from Enoch had brought me kept me strong, if only in the way it had broken me. “I can’t, Jonas. The bond between sire and child is such that you could never understand. It is the only thing that has ever come close to killing me, and I will not suffer it again.”
“It’ll be different this time,” he insisted. “I’m not him.”
“You will leave,” I whispered, afraid to let my weakness escape at full volume.
His hand cradled the back of my head, his rough cheek pressed to mine in a gesture far more tender than any kiss we’d shared. “I love you. He didn’t.”
My heart filled with joy at the sound of those three little words I had never hoped another would say to me in this life or any other, but that rapid expansion only left more room for pain when reality set in.
“Don’t say such things,” I pleaded.
“And if I mean them?”
“All the more reason you shouldn’t.”
His lips pressed against mine, and my weakness overcame me. My hands tangled in his hair, and I forgot entirely that I was meant to be his prisoner when he was so intent on making me his eternal warden.
I had seduced enough men in my mortal days to know when such power was being used against me, and yet, awareness did not grant me the wisdom to pull away. He drew me to the very precipice of my self-control, and then he was the one who pulled back, his eyes meeting mine in the dark.
“Feed from me, Marcellus.”
It was both a plea and a command, and as his hands ran down my chest, I had to struggle to remind myself of why I was resisting at all. It was a plea to my very nature, and I wanted his blood more than I had ever wanted another’s. It was more than a fleshly craving for sustenance. It was a spiritual hunger I felt deep enough within me to lend credence to his theory that I truly did have a soul.
“You will never have to be alone again,” he murmured.
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so dry. My fangs lengthened, aching for the temptation he was dangling in front of me, forbidden fruit ripe for the taking. My trembling hands rested on his shoulders, and my entire body ached with need. With hunger.
“You do not know what you are asking,” I whispered.
He bent his head to kiss my neck, peeling my shirt open so he could travel down, his mouth caressing every part of me he exposed. When at last he’d left no barrier between us, he gave me the union I had craved ever since he’d left me, and with our bodies joined, the idea of making him part of me in this way did not seem so very blasphemous…
It seemed natural. As his powerful form surged on top of me, his fingers laced firmly with mine, the thirst for him overwhelmed all else. All reason, all virtue, and the oath I had taken to never end another human life, even if it was only to create another.
The moan that escaped him as I bit his neck was an amalgam of pleasure and pain, and as his blood filled my mouth, it fulfilled every fantasy I had indulged of what this moment might be. Jonas thrust into me with greater urgency, and I forced myself to break away from his throat.
The agony of the last nine months without him filled me anew, and I shuddered as he buried his face in my neck. His teeth were dull as they bit into me, but I welcomed the pain. I thirsted for it. The moment he broke the skin, I cried out, too enraptured in the wonder of this damnable act to care who heard it.
Jonas seemed equally distracted, a growl that was anything but human echoing through my bones as he fed from me. I felt the shift in him, the same invisible change that had taken place in Enoch before his claws lengthened and his eyes turned crimson. Jonas’ nails bit into my flesh as if he’d not plundered me relentlessly enough for his liking and sought to drive himself—his fangs and the very core of the heat I craved—even deeper.
I moaned in ecstasy as his nails became claws, digging in and spilling more blood on the sheets. My life force flowed into him and I felt the bond I had only known by its painful absence wrap me firmly in its eternal embrace. As the waves of our pleasure crested and coiled, we became one in every way, and for the first time in my life, mortal or damned, I was whole.
I was home.