On one of the other camera angles, Draco stands next to Iago, who remains seated. Draco pours his glass of blood onto the rug before throwing it into the fireplace and marching from the room. None of the others pay attention.
I’ve rewound the footage to watch Iago from beginning to end. It doesn’t help. He watches Valmont’s performance—no, he watches Caroline—with a disgusted engrossment, expression all negative except for his eyes. His eyes gleam with that same predatory light I saw during our meeting. It’s not lust and it’s not fury. I just wish I could know what the fuck it is.
Valmont continues his endless stream of encouragement. “Take this pleasure as your right. Free yourself from men’s shackles. What are convention, decorum and modesty but a man’s way of teaching a woman to imprison herself? Do you fear to be called a whore, ma chere? Will you timidly accept the moral judgment of the creatures in this room? Surely you know, as I do, that they already call you a whore.”
She gasps, choking off a sob, as he slides a hand between her thighs, lifts her dress to expose her stockings and legs, rubs a nipple through her dress and licks her earlobe. The second and third tears appear and he leans forward to lick one off her cheek before planting a kiss behind her ear. Her whole body trembles now and it’s obvious that her legs are no longer supporting her weight. “Show them your true strength!” he hisses, as the music builds again. “Bask in your body’s pleasure, unashamed and defiant, drink it like sweet, hot blood and do not be stopped until you have had your fill!”
Geoffrey and Julia’s reactions are miles apart, though they sit side by side. Julia sits forward, breathing heavily, her whole body clenching and unclenching as if in response to an invisible tide. Her eyes are bright, clear and voracious. Her tongue darts out every few minutes to moisten her lips. It occurred to me once—had Geoffrey been amorously inclined right then—he might have found a willing partner.
Geoffrey, however, seems anything but amorous. He sits far back in his seat and squirms while maintaining a façade of polite interest. He’s like a man forced to watch a porno with a strange woman in the room, uncertain how to act.
With a lift of his chin, Valmont calls over his female Dhampir. She slinks over with a feline smile and Caroline shakes her head. Valmont licks and kisses the area around her ear while the Dhampir strokes one of her exposed legs and delivers a lingering kiss to Caroline’s quivering lips. Sweating, trembling and nearly hyperventilating, Caroline tries to turn her head away but she’s held in place by the coordination of their efforts. The Dhampir kisses her twice more on the mouth with increasing passion, forcing her tongue into Caroline’s mouth despite the squeals of protest.
The Dhampir eases herself onto her knees as Valmont moves his hands to concentrate on Caroline’s breasts, that strange distortion still visible. Caroline’s struggles increase in intensity as their intention becomes clear to her. Her eyes open and she repeats the word “no” with mounting desperation.
Off to the side, the boy makes one last attempt to demand that they let her go but no one pays him the slightest attention. In a few seconds, when he collapses to his knees, Sebastian, bleeding from where his fangs have bitten his lips, will whisper something to him that wasn’t picked up by the microphones: “Mark you well, boy, that cold harlot who undid us both!”
Valmont, looking poised to tear the dress from Caroline’s body, never does. The tension and energy of the anticipation lends a magnetic quality to this last part of his performance. The Dhampir, likewise, doesn’t remove or push aside Caroline’s panties. She licks and strokes and teases right through the thin white cotton.
Jade Tiger watches the performance, eyes aflame with hunger and desire. She perspires almost as much as Caroline and tosses her head in throes of vicarious passion as the waves crash onto her. When Valmont’s Dhampir goes to work, she mutters a command in Chinese, her voice thick. Flea, her majordomo and fellow Shen, now glances at her mistress with horror. Jade Tiger repeats the command sharply. Flea forces her face free of expression once again and crawls between her mistress’s spread legs, pressing her face up between the thighs.
Caroline’s tears flow, she draws breaths in ragged gulps hitched with sobs but she can no longer stop the occasional moan from escaping her. Valmont returns to his litany: “Beneath your prim and proper shell, I suspect you yearn for a good, filthy fuck once in a while. Isn’t that why, despite your illusions of high standards, your heart always takes you to beasts like Sebastian and urchins like your new plaything over there?”
He takes her earlobe between his teeth and chews it roughly. Caroline’s miserable expression is spoiled by the way her eyes roll up in momentary ecstasy. Her body’s squirming makes the Dhampir’s expert manipulations all the more effective. The music is fast, hard and relentless. Wave after wave crash on top of each other as it builds and builds and, impossibly, builds again.
“When we’re done here,” Valmont whispers, so quickly I’ve had to listen several times to understand it all. “I’m going to buy you from Sebastian for a pittance and tie you to a bare spring mattress. My pets and I will tease your cunt to the edge of explosion again and again but you’ll be allowed no climax. Only after you’ve been whipped and branded and tattooed and sodomized and shat upon and you beg to take any cock I can rally into your every salivating orifice, beg me to fuck you like the daddy’s-little-whore you are—only then will you have your release. Then you’ll be ravished until your body rends itself apart from the frequency and intensity of your climaxes as you feast on the blood of babes—”
Caroline’s head whips back, veins and tendons taut, as she weeps and moans a continuous combination of anguish and quickening.
“And it’s my name you’ll shriek in your ecstasy, you cock-hungry little bitch, because I know you as no other does. I know what you crave, I know your secret heart and so your denials are nothing to me. Now, my sweet, we are almost at the end. Remember this in your fevered dreaming until I come for you again.”
The music, heavy and pounding, suddenly stops.
Valmont extends his fangs and bites into the tender network of veins at the base of her neck. Still weeping, Caroline shrieks out a violent, body-wrenching orgasm that forces everyone in the room to close their eyes. Making eye contact with Jade Tiger over Caroline’s shoulder, Valmont drags his tongue across Caroline’s bleeding neck, lapping the blood in sensuous leisure as his victim shudders down from her peak but before she can begin to catch her breath, he turns her face to his and penetrates her mouth with his tongue.
Caroline responds to his kiss with ferocious intensity.
I stop and rewind. He does not force her and she does not resist, I’m certain of this. She clamps her mouth onto his as if she’s trying to devour his face. Stop, rewind. There’s a thoughtless, animal desperation in her eyes as if she’s starving. Again and again I watch and each time I feel a red-hot dagger twisting in my guts. The kiss only lasts for three seconds but for those three seconds, you’d swear they were lovers.
Afterward, Caroline kicks the Dhampir aside and collapses to the floor with a sound that is indescribable in its misery, rage, horror and shame.
Valmont takes a bow.
Caroline scrambles to her feet and runs from the room without looking at anyone.
Flea climbs to her feet and returns to her former position, eyes dead.
Sebastian drags the limp body of the boy out of the room.
The orchestra rises and bows, while Valmont heads toward the eager Jade Tiger but is intercepted by Julia. She takes a seat in the Asian Hegemon’s grouping but makes it clear that the Frenchman will be hers for the remainder of the evening. Jade Tiger accepts the attention of Valmont’s Dhampirs and the blood of a captive human instead.
Just another night in Vampyr high society.
* * * * *
When Sebastian dragged me out to the front of the house, the clash of wind, rain, thunder and lightning above made me feel as if my emotions were reflected in the skies. I kept mysel
f limp, making Sebastian pull me the entire way but I was not about to go down easy.
The front of the house features a large porte-cochere that protects the doorway and drive from the elements. As we came through the front doors, I felt Sebastian prepare to hurl me from the front porch onto the loose gravel below. He held only a handful of my jacket, so I moved my arms until I began sliding out of it. When he threw, I slipped out and leapt onto his back!
I wrapped my arm around his throat in a classic choke hold but slipped my holding hand under his arm to make it harder to dislodge me. I also locked my ankles around his midsection and squeezed with all the Vampyr strength I had in me, screaming, “Gonna fucking kill you, motherfucker! You’re fucking dead, you fucking asshole!”
Or words to that effect.
Sebastian thrashed beneath me and slammed me back into one of the porch’s gray stone arches but I’d expected that and clutched even tighter. My thoughts flickered back to an image of Caroline and Valmont in the library but I forced them out as soon as they appeared and focused my mind on squeezing for the five or six minutes that it would take to choke the life out of Sebastian.
“Motherfucking shit-bag sonofabitch! Die you motherfucker! Just! Fucking! Die!”
Sebastian twisted and writhed, bucking me like a mechanical bull and still I squeezed. I stopped screaming, however, to conserve my energy for killing. He tried to slide himself out from my arms but I managed to hold my lock.
He clawed at me with his free arm and smashed me back against the wall a few more times, sending shock waves through my whole body but I continued to hold. He put his full strength into bringing down the arm I’d pinned up with my choke hold, using it as a lever to pry my clasped hands apart!
I shifted and tried to reassert my hold but I knew I was too late. His other arm came around and one of those huge, meaty hands grabbed hold of my neck. Despite my best effort to hang on, Sebastian flipped me over his shoulder—
Thunder boomed a half-second before a flash of lightning lit the sky and I smacked into the wet gravel of the driveway. The rain soaked me to the skin in the time it took me to look up. Sebastian shook off the effects of my choking and leapt past the porch steps, his wolf-skin coat billowing like a cape as he landed in a crouch. Standing, he cast it aside before stomping out to join me in the rain.
“Ah, `tis good to see thou still have passion in thee!” he shouted over the wind. “I swore I’d punish thou and so I shall but as a man of my line, I’d rather thou give back what thou can!”
I’m amazed at how clear my thoughts were, how focused I was. I climbed to a crouch, planning my actions to the last detail. I pushed away the wet gravel beneath my feet so I wouldn’t slip on it when I charged.
As I expected, Sebastian went into a wrestler’s crouch and waited for my move. I pushed off the ground and ran at him, as if I was going to leap or lock my arms with those two tree-trunks attached to his shoulders and slam my lesser weight into him like a Sumo. I let him go on thinking that until the last second, when I half-skidded to slow myself, ducked under his huge arms as they closed above me and swung my fist into his groin with all the force I could.
Sebastian grunted and staggered back a step but I followed, staying inside his arms and threw another set of punches into his kidney before finishing with an awkward uppercut that only nicked his chin. I got no time to appreciate my performance, because Sebastian’s hands clapped the sides of my head.
My head exploded in a flash of pain every bit as bright as the lightning that shattered the sky. I staggered and he followed, breaking a few ribs with those club fists and knocking me into a nearby puddle. The sky shuddered under another boom of thunder.
Before I caught my breath, he yanked me up off the ground again. “Thou still cling to me as base and false, while she is fair and true!” He was screaming now. “Did thou not behold how she cozened to that foul snake, just as she betrayed me with thou? All the horrors in this house, she has wrought them!”
He threw me into the wet gravel again. My head throbbed, my skin was torn from where a hundred little sharp rocks stuck me and my ribs stabbed me as they grated together but I waited for Sebastian to present an opportunity and willed myself to heal faster.
“She turned from me at my hour of greatest need, she with her cold, scientist heart!” he screamed to the heavens. An answer came in the form of a wicked crack of lightning that split the sky and made the night into day for a moment. He shifted his attention to me and charged, claws poised and fangs extended. “Could not see as I saw and tried to take it from me in envy!”
As he reached for me, I put my weight on my hands and kicked his shins—the wet, slippery gravel helped Sebastian lose his footing and spill onto his side. Fangs out, fingers tensed into eye-gouging claws and killing rage in my veins, I leapt to straddle him and pin his arms. He turned before I could accomplish the latter but I lunged forward to stab my thumbs into his eyes and sink my teeth into his throat!
I used the top of my head to push his chin up out of the way and bit at the soft skin of his neck. A small trickle of hot, delicious blood trickled onto my tongue but before I could tear open the small cut I’d made, Sebastian pushed me away from him with a snarl.
I shoved my arms forward, fingers seeking the vulnerability of his eyes but he rolled under me. After that, I remember the two of us rolling and clawing and biting at each other like wild animals as the pouring rain made it difficult for either of us to keep a good grip on the other. Finally, he was above me, his claws ripping open my chest and face, his teeth gouging chunks out of my shoulder, his fists smashing my nose and pulverizing my cheekbones.
“So, it’s blood thou crave, eh?” he asked, sounding almost conversational as he rose to his feet and stomped my stomach. “Come to me after I’ve finished this damned Game and, perchance, thou shall have it.”
I just lie there, convulsing and trying to remember how to breathe.
“‘Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh out the violence of your hands upon the earth,’” he quoted. “No more! With brave intent and cunning preparation, it shall be undone!”
Then he kicked me in the side, shattering whatever ribs weren’t already broken. I cried out, coughing blood and faded away.
* * * * *
A cry and the sound of something crunching onto the gravel pulled me from my trance. The rain drummed onto my face and down my throat but the rumble of thunder had subsided for the moment.
“Here,” Sebastian’s voice said, above me. “Feast well, for thou shall need strength in the coming nights.”
The smell of fresh, live blood nearby captured my attention. I heard a sob and a whispered “please” to my right. My hunger returned, demanding and I turned my smashed face toward the sound, peeking from the eye that was only swollen half shut.
Beside me lay a male victim from the cellar.
Sebastian must have gone inside and grabbed him from the library antechamber while I’d been out. I heard my stomach rumble and felt my canines push down from my gums. I didn’t see a man beside me, I saw food. Sebastian tore a gash in the man’s neck with one of his nails. Blood welled up from the wound and began to run, mixing with the rain.
I crawled over to him, thoughtless of what I was doing and unmindful of the agony of my bones scraping together with every movement. I don’t remember if he tried to say anything or not, because I couldn’t hear him. All I heard was his beating heart and the circulation of blood through his body. I lunged at the last second and bit down into his skin with every ounce of strength I had left.
I was rewarded with a flood of ecstasy and satisfaction beyond anything I’d ever known before. It wasn’t like sharing blood with Caroline, since there’s no comparison in flavor between human blood and the richness of Vampyr blood but there was a selfish, greedy pleasure here you didn’t get from sharing. I felt it soak into the tissues of my body and energize my cells. I felt my body’s regenerative processes working! I drank and drank, barely pausing to
breathe.
The worst part of all this is that, even now, days go by when I don’t even remember doing it. I’ve tried to feel guilt but the best I can do is a kind of shallow embarrassment. I know the man must have struggled but it didn’t even register. All I knew and all I felt was the need to keep drinking until I’d squeezed out every last drop of him.
So I did.
Sometime later, I heard Sebastian chuckle and say something to someone else and then strong arms pulled me off my victim, despite my best efforts to continue sucking at the wound. Then, he carried me inside and upstairs to my room on the third floor.
I’d killed a man, a human being with a family and dreams and I barely remember him. A murderer should remember his kills, shouldn’t he?
* * * * *
I have no idea how long I lay there on the bed, just as he put me but it felt like hours before I even shifted position. I drifted in and out of consciousness and I healed but my rage didn’t leave me. It hovered and colored the few thoughts I had, thoughts of Valmont and Caroline, thoughts of violence, destruction and death.
I would kill Valmont shortly after sunrise. I would be healed by then and I could force myself to stay up long enough to do it. In fact, if I could get to Caroline first, she might have some of that serum she’d developed that helped combat the Vampyr hibernation instinct, one of the benefits of having me to study and test. I could stay up and he’d be asleep. Suck the fucker dry. Why not? Even his Dhampirs had to sleep sometime. Could I get a gun from the security office? Probably not. I’d have to improvise a weapon, grab some knives or something from the kitchen. Sneak down the servants’ stairs. It didn’t matter if I got caught afterwards, Sebastian couldn’t talk his way out of the fact that his Uninitiated Pupil had killed a Hegemon. His plans, whatever they were, wouldn’t matter. Caroline would be avenged and Iago would probably be able to keep himself alive.