VA 2 - Blood Jewel (16 page)

I felt my incisor accidentally
prick her skin when she pulled me down against her and I smelled
her Agápe scent stronger when her blood came to the surface. “I’m
sorry, Chansey. I have to stop because I’m going to bite you if I
don’t.”

She lifted her head and tilted to
the side, giving me full access to her neck. “That’s what I want,
Curry. It’s what I need so we can be closer.”

I shook my head, but knew it was
useless to keep saying it. I couldn’t stop any of this from
happening because I was feeling the point of no return as it
erupted.

I didn’t think it was possible, but
I felt Chansey tighten her grip with her arms and legs as she said,
“Do it now. Please, do it now and make this
unforgettable.”

I looked at the artery in her neck
and without hesitation, I quickly pierced it. I covered the wound
with my mouth and greedily drank with zero control from the woman I
adored.

Drinking from Chansey was an
experience I’d never encountered. The guilt I felt from the ecstasy
of drinking my Agápe’s blood made me imagine she was actually
enjoying it. I imagined feeling her intense love for me as I took
part of her body inside myself. Instead of hating me for what I was
doing, I imagined I felt her love for me grow because of
it.

I was a sick bastard and this had
to stop before I hurt her.

“Don’t stop yet. You’re not
hurting me and being this close feels so amazing,” I heard Chansey
whisper.

Drinking from Chansey while I made
love to her was amazing and then I felt this eruption of love from
my heart, my mind and my body that left me dumbfounded.

I came to my senses and realized
what I had just done to Chansey, so I injected a coagulant from my
incisors where I pierced her skin and artery and I jerked my mouth
away from her neck. I scooted away from her and slid off of the
edge of the bed before I stumbled across the floor in shock of what
I did to my wife.

I stood across the room and started
at her on the bed. “I can’t believe I did that. I’m so sorry I hurt
you, Chansey.” I didn’t know anything else to say as I balled my
fists with anger at myself. I wanted to put them through the
wall.

She sat up and slid across the bed
so she could come to me. “You didn’t hurt me, Curry. I wanted you
do it. I was rather determined to make you, in case you don’t
remember.”

“You can’t blame yourself for my
dangerous mistake,” I argued.

She reached up and grabbed my face,
forcing me to look at her. “It was amazing and it was not wrong and
you’d see that I’m right if you’d stop and think about it. We
connected in a completely different kind of way. I felt every ounce
of your love for me and you felt mine too, didn’t you?”

She was right and I couldn’t stop
the smile that spread across my face. “I felt your love for me and
I feel how happy you are right now.”

She was still holding my face.
“We’ve been joined in a way we don’t understand yet, but I’m
anxious to see what happens next.”

This was no random bite and our new
bond meant something, but I had no idea what. The lunar eclipse was
a possible precipitator, but knowing what possibly brought it on
didn’t tell me what it meant.

I needed to talk to Sebastian, but
I couldn’t in front of Chansey. I would have to wait until she was
asleep, so I didn’t decline when she asked me to come back to bed
with her. The sooner she went to sleep, the better, but I knew my
little vixen didn’t have sleeping on her mind when she asked me to
come back to bed with her. To think otherwise, would have been
foolish on my part, but sleeping wasn’t what was on my mind either;
it was my fear of biting Chansey, again.

It took some work on Chansey’s part
to convince me to make love to her again, but she succeeded, and I
seriously doubted I would ever be able to refuse her again after
the astonishing experiences we had. My urge to bite her and her
urge to be bitten didn’t resurface the second time, or the third,
but the unknown of what happened between us scared the hell out of
me.

Our new bond was mind-blowing and
it brought a whole new experience to the surface when we made love
again. Not only did I experience my own feelings, but I felt
Chansey’s as well, and it made everything double the
pleasure.

After I convinced Chansey she
needed to rest because we would need an early start to catch our
morning flight, she turned on her side and nuzzled into me to
sleep. When I was certain she was asleep, I eased out from under
her and grabbed my phone from my jacket pocket and went to the
kitchen to call Sebastian.

He answered on the first ring,
“Don’t freak out, Curry.”

“Don’t tell me to not freak out,
Sebastian,” I said a little too loudly. I lowered my voice and
continued, “You have no idea what I just did to my
wife.”

“I know what you just did to
Chansey,” he argued.

“I’m not talking about that.
Something besides that happened,” I informed him.

“I know that you bit Chansey and
you drank her blood. Now you share the most phenomenal bond anyone
has ever experienced and it can’t be broken, even by
death.”

“How the hell did you know that?”
I asked.

“That was the final stage of
completing your Agápe bond with Chansey,” he explained.

He knew. He knew all along and
didn’t warn me. I felt myself begin to shake with anger. “Why the
hell would you not tell me that?” I yelled furiously.

“Curry, what would you have done
if I told you? Honestly?” Sebastian proposed.

“There would have been no way that
I would have gone through with it. I would have been too scared of
hurting Chansey,” I admitted.

He laughed and said, “And it would
have been the biggest mistake of your existence. Look at what you
would have missed with your wife. Only vampires with Agápes get to
experience intimacy from the human and vampire perspective
simultaneously. Now you both will have that experience every time
without the necessity of drinking from her.”

“It will be like that every time?”
I asked.

Please say that it will be. “Yes,
every time. And the bond isn’t limited to intimacy only. You’ll
always be able to feel her and know her emotions.”

I thought of how I imagined reading
her thoughts while I was biting her. Maybe it wasn’t my
imagination. “You mean like reading her mind? I almost thought I
could read her thoughts when I was drinking from her.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to read
Chansey’s thoughts. She could be quite the little spitfire, so that
might cause some problems. “You can’t read her mind, per say. If
her emotions are really strong about something, you can figure out
what she is thinking because of that strength. You were probably
picking up on her thoughts when you drank from her because they
were so intense and you had a direct line to her through her
blood.”

What did the bond mean for
Sebastian and Ella? “You said that the bond couldn’t be broken by
death.”

Sebastian answered, “The bond
between a vampire and his Agápe can never be broken. My bond with
Ella is different than when she was living, but I still feel her
all of the time. She is never apart from me.”

I wasn’t sure that didn’t make
things harder. “Doesn’t that make it worse for you? To feel her
without having her? Without touching her?” I asked.

“It was at first, but I have come
to cherish our connection. I live for it. I live for her because
she asks it of me.”

“I’m sorry I yelled at you. I felt
betrayed, but I see now how right you were for not telling me,” I
apologized.

“I understand and I completely
expected your anger, so I was prepared,” he explained. “Don’t you
have a wife you need to be getting back to?”

“I absolutely do,” I agreed.
“Thank you, Sebastian.”

“My pleasure, Curry. Enjoy the
rest of your honeymoon.”

Oh, I planned to enjoy the rest of
it, starting right now.

≈ ≈ ≈

We got an early start the next
morning so we could make our eight o’clock flight for Nassau. As we
sat waiting in the airport for our boarding call, she looked at me
and smiled. Curiosity got the best of me so I asked, “What? What
has you smiling so big?”

She nibbled her bottom lip. “I was
just thinking about last night and you were so right for wanting to
wait. It was so special and perfect. Thank you.”

I leaned over and kissed her nose.
“I’m glad we waited, but if the wedding hadn’t been moved up, I was
going to give in soon. Despite what you may think, my will isn’t
ironclad.”

She stared astounded and looked
like she might say something, but our boarding call was announced
overhead. “That’s us.”

Her eyes grew large.
“Nassau?”

“You’ve got it, Love. You said you
wanted a tropical beach with clear blue water. This was the best I
could do on such short notice.”

“It’s perfect. Just like you, just
like last night, just like our lives are going to
be...Always.

13 Disruption In Paradise

The next five days of our honeymoon
in The Bahamas were the most wonderful days of my existence.
Chansey and I were still exploring our newly discovered bond and
learning so much about one another and the love we
shared.

This week had been full of changes
for both of us, my sleep cycle in particular. Our bond had it doing
bizarre things, but when I woke up I kept my eyes closed in hopes
of going back to sleep because it was probably still the middle of
the night.

I could feel that Chansey was still
asleep because she was dreaming about something that made her very
happy. It made me curious to know what would make her feel that
level of joy, so I decided I would quiz her about it
later.

After a few minutes, I gave in and
opened my eyes to see the time on the clock when I noticed the
early morning light barely peaking through the blinds and realized
that I had slept all night. I had grown accustomed over the last
several nights to lay awake for hours listening to Chansey breathe,
so it was a little shocking to have slept so long because that had
not happened since I was human.

With the exception of my new
supernatural bond with Chansey, my body was becoming more and more
human with each passing day. I seemed to be in some type of quantum
leap this week because I was constantly finding new mundane
characteristics each day.

I cut myself shaving on our second
day of our honeymoon and I was amazed when it didn’t heal
instantly. It only took an hour, but it was still surprising. And
yesterday...I got sunburned. I looked like a beet next to Chansey’s
beautifully tanned body. Perfectly pale was better than fire engine
red any day and luckily it only lasted half a day.

I peeked down and saw that Chansey
was on her stomach with the sheet covering her from the waist down.
Her bare back was exposed and I couldn’t see her completely without
lifting my head, but I could feel that her arm and leg were thrown
across me. Her face was nestled into my shoulder and I could feel
her warm breath against my neck as she softly breathed against my
skin.

I didn’t want to risk waking her,
so I closed my eyes and decided to see if my increasingly human
body would allow me to go back to sleep. I think I was close to
successfully falling back to sleep and then I heard my phone
vibrating on the nightstand.

My vampire agility allowed me to
successfully slip out from under Chansey without waking her, but
the soft sound of my voice woke her when I whispered, “I’m on my
honeymoon. Leave me alone, Sol.”

I waited to hear his reason for
bothering me so early in the morning. This had better be
good.

“We have a problem, Curry.” His
voice was serious and I knew in that moment that something was
really wrong.

My heart began to race and I sat up
on the edge of the bed, saying the first thing that popped in my
mind without regard to how it would sound to Chansey. “It’s
Marsala?”

Chansey immediately shot up in the
bed with the sheet tucked under her arms.

“It’s not Marsala,” Sol replied.
“A very recently turned fledgeling came to the Savannah compound
last night.”

I didn’t understand. Sol could
singlehandedly reform a fledgling. He had been doing that on his
own for years. The older vampires with a taste for killing is where
you ran into trouble. “Why is this fledgeling a problem? You can
handle him by yourself.”

He was quick to correct me. “You
mean her, but she’s not the problem. Where she came from is the
problem.”

“The sire has never been an issue
before.” Unless it was Marsala.

“Her name is Jennifer Ferrand and
she was recently sired by a vampire named Vincent Godfrey. He is
the leader, or rather the vampire dictator, of a sinister coven
here in Savannah. Since she has only just begun her transition, she
was able to escape from them early this morning after they were
down for the day.”