Blood Sacraments (8 page)

And even though Jared had been one of my best friends, one of my fraternity brothers, I knew if Jean-Paul knew what was happening, he would order me to kill Jared. Kill him and make sure the body was never found.

If you don’t kill him, you risk exposing yourself. And everyone else in the vampire world—is that what you want, Cord? To prove to them vampires DO exist? They would hunt us all down and kill us. It’s either him or us, Cord. You know what you have to do.

“I feel funny,” Jared said, shifting around on the couch and his eyes opened even further. They weren’t as glassy and unfocused as they had been earlier; that was a step in the right direction.

Maybe he would recover normally.

I placed my fingers back on his wrist. His pulse felt stronger.

The wounds on his neck were scabbing over.

That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still not normal. My blood should have healed the damned things! What’s wrong? Maybe Jared is somehow different than other humans?

But that doesn’t make any sense.

“Kiss me,” Jared whispered, smiling at me.

“What?” I stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I want you,” he whispered. His lips spread in a smile. “I’ve always wanted you, Cord. Always.”

I gulped. In the three years at Ole Miss I’d known Jared, I’d never once gotten the slightest inkling he was gay, or even the least bit curious. We’d pledged together, shared a room at the house, and been as close as brothers. Jared was the only person in the house I’d come out to—and he’d been supportive, even going with me to Memphis to a gay bar. It had been Jared’s idea to come stay with his parents for Mardi Gras, and he’d helped me break away from the other fraternity brothers who’d also come down so I could go to the gay bars. Neither of us had any way of knowing the trip would result in my becoming a vampire—well, Jared just thought I’d been killed, burned to death in the fire. I’d always been attracted to Jared, but never considered acting on it—no matter how drunk or high either one of us might have been.

And it was very tempting.

“Jared—”

“I mean it.” He licked his lips. “I was too much of a coward to ever do anything. That time we went to the bar in Memphis…I wanted to kiss you that night. It broke my heart when you died, Cord. And now you’re alive. I’m not going to miss this chance. I’ve been sorry ever since you died I never had the courage to do anything with you.” He smiled again. “But now you aren’t dead.” He reached out and touched my hair. “Somehow, I knew you weren’t. I knew that wasn’t you in that house.”

Tears filled my eyes. Oh, how I’d longed to hear those words from him! How I’d longed to kiss him, to put my arms around him, to put my mouth on his cock, to let him fill me up with his. But this didn’t feel right somehow, it was wrong, like somehow my biting him and sucking his blood had done this to him—was making him think and react in a way that wasn’t natural to him.

But his wounds hadn’t healed. That wasn’t natural, either.

He leaned up and kissed me.

It felt like an electrical current ran through my body.

Not even kissing Jean-Paul had felt like this.

I felt my cock growing hard inside my jeans, and as Jared’s tongue slipped between my lips and inside my mouth, I could see in my head that he was getting hard too. I reached down and caressed the thick hardness beneath the denim, and he moaned, never removing his tongue from inside my mouth. He stroked my chest, pulling and tweaking at my erect and sensitive nipples, and I pushed him back down on the couch, climbing on top of him, our hips beginning to move back and forth as we ground our crotches into each other.

I pulled my mouth away from his lips. He smiled up at me. “I love you, Cord,” he breathed, “I always have.”

Jean-Paul never said that to me.

I wanted to believe him.

But still, in spite of how badly I wanted him, the animalistic need driving me, I couldn’t shake the sense that something, somehow, was not right about this.

His hands came up, caressing my hardness through my pants, and my desire pushed all other thoughts out of my mind.

I reached down and undid my pants, freeing my cock. He smiled up at me and licked his thumb. He started running it over the head of my cock.

“Ooooooh,” I moaned.

I pushed my pants down as he kept rubbing away. Unable to stand it anymore, I grabbed the front of his pants and pulled, the riveted buttons holding his fly closed popping and flying away. I got to my knees and yanked his pants down, freeing his long, beautiful cock. As I yanked I heard the denim tearing and once they were free I tossed them aside like torn rags. I reached for the bottle of lube and squirted it onto his erection.

“I want to be inside you,” he breathed as I mounted him, spreading my butt cheeks and lowering myself on top of his cock.

The pressure against my anus was sharp and painful, then my muscles relaxed and I slid down, feeling his urgency filling me. I gasped and moaned as I continued to slide, settling down onto him when I felt his thick balls pressing against my cheeks.

His entire body began to tremble, his eyes closing partway as I started moving up and down. He tried to push up into me as I went upward, but I held his hips down with my hands. He struggled against my strength at first, to no avail. I was much stronger than he—he had no idea how strong, nor did I want him to find out. I was still not completely used to how much power my muscles now contained, and I was afraid if we started struggling I might accidentally hurt him.

“Your ass is amazing,” he whispered, tugging on my nipples and sending electricity through my body. “It feels so good, please don’t stop.”

I smiled. The pleasure was so intense I couldn’t stop had I wanted to. I reached down and stroked his chest, and his entire body convulsed, bucking upward. The thrusts were strong, intense, and it felt as though I was being split in two.

I cried out, my head going back as he continued driving up into me. My entire mind was consumed with the pleasure from his cock, which felt as though it were burning inside me. No one had ever fucked me this way, not Jean-Paul, not any of the others in our little fraternity of vampires. The passion, the power—my eyes began to lose focus, and everything in front of me seemed to be seared with white, and I was vaguely aware that he was forcing me backward, never stopping with the thrusting, not once relenting, and the pleasure, my God, the pleasure, and I was on my back and he was on top of me, and in the mirror behind him I could see his powerful back, the fleur-de-lis tattoo on his right shoulder blade, his beautiful round white ass clenching and unclenching as he drove into me, as though he were trying to get his cock so deep inside me it might never come out, and I wanted him inside me, I wanted to feel his entire body consumed inside of mine, and the thrusting and driving to never stop…

And his lips were at my throat, moving from the base of my chin to the hollow where my neck met my chest, his tongue darting out and dancing against my skin.

And it went on, the pleasure building inside me until I could barely stand it any longer—

And his head went back and he screamed as his body went rigid, and I could feel him squirting inside me, his body convulsing and racking with the pleasure with each spurt—

And my own splashed out of me, raining onto my chest and my face and into my hair.

He convulsed a few more times, then collapsed on top of me, his energy spent.

I lay there panting for a moment or two, enjoying his weight and warmth on top of me.

His breathing shallowed and became even, and I gently pushed him aside, feeling his softening penis slide out of me. I slid out and gently rolled him over onto his back, staring at his beauty as he lay there in the soft glow of moonlight coming through the stained glass just above the front door of the house.

Blood still oozed from the wounds on his neck.

I grabbed a towel and wiped myself off, then spit onto my fingers. I rubbed them over the wounds, but again, the wounds did not close.

I don’t understand, it has always worked, what is wrong, what is so different about this time that the wounds will not close?

He started murmuring in his sleep, tossing a bit on the couch.

I walked over to the front windows and opened the red velvet curtains a bit, looking at the house across the street—the house where I’d almost died, a victim of the desires of the mixed-race witch, Sebastian, and his thirst to combine the power of the vampire with his own witchcraft. I closed my eyes and remembered being tied to the bed while Sebastian violated my body and went through the mysterious ritual I had not understood until Jean-Paul and the others had come to my rescue. I remembered the feeling of dying, of my body going cold as Jean-Paul wrapped me in a blanket and carried me out of the house and back across the street, and the metallic taste of his blood as he fed me in order to save me.

I tried to remember if my own initial wounds from him had closed that first night he had fed from me, that night when I’d run into him and his friends at Oz while the madness of Carnival raged in the streets of the French Quarter.

Perhaps I took too much from him. Maybe that’s why the wounds wouldn’t heal. Jean-Paul and the others always warned me about taking too much—but they never said why.

I started to turn away from the window when something flickered in one of the windows across the street. I spun my head back, but whatever it was, was no longer there.

Now you’re imagining things. There’s no one there, the house isn’t habitable yet.

Jared moaned in his sleep, and I walked back over to the couch. I knelt down beside him and marveled again at just how beautiful he was.

I’d always had a bit of a crush on him back at the fraternity house, but he was straight—he’d made that very clear to me.

Then why did he—it doesn’t make any sense. Was it the connection forged when I took his blood? His life force? There’s so much you still don’t know about all of this, Jean-Paul was right, you should have stayed in Palm Springs with him and the others.

I reached over and stroked his brow. He shifted again, and his eyes opened. I recoiled—they were no longer blue, but rather brown.

He smiled at me. “Sebastian does not rest, Cord.”

My hand froze on his forehead. “You don’t know that, Jared, you couldn’t possibly know that.”
How does he even know about Sebastian in the first place? And what is wrong with his eyes?

His eyes closed and he moaned. When they reopened, they were clearly blue. I must have imagined what I’d seen. Besides, it didn’t make any sense. Eyes couldn’t change color like that, could they?

“I don’t feel so good,” he barely whispered as I started stroking his forehead again. “What—what have you done to me, Cord?” He shifted again on the couch. “So cold, so very very cold.”

I allowed my other hand to come up and press on the jugular vein in his throat. The heartbeat was weak and faint.

I’ve killed him.

I felt tears rising in my eyes.

I raised my wrist to my mouth and bit into the artery there. As my own blood began to flow over my skin, I lowered my wrist to his mouth.

I heard Jean-Paul’s voice in my head.
You are too young to this life to create another such as ourselves. Your heart isn’t strong enough yet, so you must never ever try to turn a human until such time as I tell you that you can.

But he would die unless…

“Drink,” I whispered, parting his lips and allowing my blood to run onto his tongue.

Jared’s eyes opened at the first taste of my blood, and color began to return to his cheeks. He closed his mouth around the holes in my wrist and began to suckle.

I closed my eyes and allowed my head to fall backward.

Whatever the risks, I had to take them.

How fast must I run to defeat my flagging nerve? How to assure not halting before I plunged off the seaside cliff and soared into the endless Aegean sky? How to ensure I arrived at my ultimate end?

Damn that screaming seagull! It needed to shut up. The sent-from-Hell bird couldn’t comprehend how I concentrated on serious matters like the ratio of proper leg acceleration in regard to dying. I considered tossing my wineglass skyward but my numb fingers denied completing the simple motion. Instead I sucked down another mouthful and carefully poured a fresh glassful from the nearly empty bottle. When I settled into my Agapios island empire, my concerned housekeeper Korina offered me what she called superior Greek medicine via various rare Greek wines. The former nurse hoped I grooved on the wine instead of depending on nasty modern drugs or illegal concoctions. Hmm. What a sweet, well-intentioned woman. Enough wine provided me the proper mental kick. This strong, silky Robola definitely enchanted my tastebuds. What a surprise, it was atypical and expensive, just like me. Ha.

Still, this selfish man needed to apologize. When Korina brought me a healthy salad, I snapped like a turtle, told her to leave me alone, told her to stop fussing, stop caring about me! What a discourteous jackass. Mental note: apologize to Korina before she laced my food with baby laxative. No, the concerned woman would never resort to such petty cruelty. Instead I should apologize out of remorse. Good, my corroded soul still felt remorse. Something shining winked under the soul shit.