Dead Soul
RATING:NC-17
WARNINGS:graphic sex and violence, sadomasochism, bloodplay, implied character death, unrelenting cynicism and angst, and just a soupçon of blasphemy
PAIRINGS:Spike/Sunday (BtVS, Season Four, The Freshman), Spike/Drusilla, Spike/Sunday/Drusilla>
SPOILERS:BtVS - none past Season Four
DISCLAIMERS:I own nothing and no one.The story title is a line from the song Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids.Chapter titles are the titles of Elvis Costello songs.
THANKS:to my terrific betas, SpikeMom, juliaabra and Lady Starlight who make me go back and describe things more, who slay the insidious typos, oh, and who make me use more commas (grumble, grumble).And to astraea for the gorgeousness that is her – eyeballs to entrails
FEEDBACK:might make me too happy to write, which may, perhaps, be a consummation greatly to be desired.Worth a try, anyway - deadsoul820@aol.com> or my LiveJournal
SUMMARY:a twenty-year vampiric globetrotting ménage a trois with lots of really twisted sex and yummy gore.Oh, and angst, lotsa angst.Sequel to Sunday Girl
Spike
was leaning against the far wall, trying to look stern and failing utterly. Finally his face cracked into a huge
grin, and he pulled his hands out of his pockets, opening his arms wide. I flew into them, jumping up and
wrapping my arms around his neck, my legs around his
waist.
“Thought I’d gotten rid of you, you silly cow,” he said, pulling me
tighter against him.
“You
never did ask me what my name was,” I replied, grinning back at
him.
“What?” He pulled
his head back to look into my face, thrown by my response.
“Eingeshpahrt McStubborn.
And my middle name’s Chutzpah.
One of those mixed marriages, you know. Nothing good ever comes of
them.”
He
burst out laughing and started spinning us in a circle. I tightened my legs around him and
leaned back, releasing his neck, supported only by his arms around my
waist. I flung my arms out and
laughed out loud with happiness and love.
For this one brief minute, the world was the beautiful, whirling place I
remembered dimly from childhood and the security of my father’s
arms.
Finally getting dizzy, I pulled myself up effortlessly (who knew
sit-ups could be this easy) as his mad spinning slowed and stopped. Arms back around his neck, I kissed him,
smiling against his mouth.
We’re
the same temperature now, I mused.
His lips no longer felt cool to me.
And mine would no longer feel warm to him. I wondered if he would miss that or if
he liked it. I kind of missed the
contrast but only for a second, as his mouth moved on mine, opening my lips for
his searching tongue, his hand tangled in my hair, pressing my face closer to
his. I could wait no longer. I reached between our bodies and
unfastened his jeans, glad that I was wearing a short skirt. I grasped his hard length and used the
end of his cock to push aside the wisp of silk covering my pussy. Groaning into his mouth, I lowered
myself onto him; feeling him stretch me, fill me just right. I stayed still for a long moment, my
inner muscles clutching and releasing, his cock jerking inside me each time I
tightened.
When
he couldn’t stand it anymore, he backed me up against the alley wall and began
slamming into me, the rough brick shredding my shirt, scraping my back, as I
fucked him back as hard as I could.
With me pressed between the wall and his thrusting body, he could free a
hand to rip open my shirt and attach his mouth to one of my nipples, sucking and
biting it roughly. That familiar,
but oh so missed and longed for tugging, the electric charge it sent through me
drove me over the edge and I came hard, biting into my lower lip to muffle my
screams. Groaning against my
breast, triggered by my cunt’s rippling spasms, he came a few seconds later,
shoving into me hard as I milked the last drops of his come from
him.
I
tugged his head up from my breast so I could kiss him; offer him the blood that
had filled my mouth when I had bitten my lip. Still kissing, he slipped out of me, and
I slid down his body to finally stand on my own two feet.
“Want
to go back to my hotel and catch up?”
I asked after I’d twitched my underwear back into place and he’d
refastened his jeans.
“Might as well,” he said with a shrug. “Not like I got anywhere better to
go.”
I
gave him a quizzical glance, puzzled by the abrupt shift in mood, but he didn’t
act like he wanted to explain. “I
don’t think there is anywhere better than my hotel – you’ve never seen any place
so ritzy.”
I
knelt down next to the guy I’d eaten, lying in a heap right where I’d left
him. I felt in his pockets and
pulled out his wallet. I helped
myself to the few lire in it and tossed it aside after making sure that
he had had no credit cards. I
checked a different pocket and found a set of keys. I dangled them towards Spike. “Do you want to drive or shall
I?”
He
held out an open hand and I tossed the keys to him. Out on the street, I kept watch while he
went to the various cars to see which the keys fit. No luck until he tried a Vespa motor
scooter. “You’ve got to be shitting
me,” he said.
“Oh
come on, it’ll be fun. Wind in our
hair, bugs in our teeth.”
He
just threw me a look over his shoulder as he swung a leg over the bike and
started it up.
“Coming?”
I
hopped on behind him and grabbed him around the waist as he took off in
defiantly the wrong direction on the one-way street.
“Where’s this sodding hotel, then?” he shouted at me over his
shoulder.
I
leaned up to speak into his ear, “Parioli, up by the Villa Borghese. You know how to get
there?”
He
just nodded and turned left at the next intersection we came to. I settled in for the ride, hugging him
tight around his slender middle and burying my nose in the delicious leather and
tobacco smell of his duster.
Something was obviously bothering him, but I didn’t think it had anything
to do with me. And I didn’t care
how bad a mood he was in, I was just happy to finally be with him again. I closed my eyes and continued to take
deep, unnecessary breaths as if trying to prove to myself that he was really
here and that I was back where I belonged.
When
we’d climbed the hill to Parioli he slowed to a stop. I shook myself out of my comfortable
dreaminess. “Where to now?” he
asked.
I
looked around. “Take a right at the
next intersection then turn left on the Via G. de Notaris. It’s the Lord Byron. I half expected that you and Dru’d
already be there, what with her thing for poets.”
He
twitched irritably when I said that but started the Vespa up again and followed
my directions. When we pulled up to
the entrance, the sleepy night parking valet woke up enough to catch the keys
that Spike threw at him as he followed me into the hotel. Stopping at the front desk for the room
key, I told the night concierge to make sure that we weren’t disturbed. He nodded enthusiastically, murmuring
liquid Italian assurances as he reached out for the wad of lire I slid
across the counter to him.
Lire I’d just liberated that night. Spike and I crossed the dimly lit,
flower-filled lobby to the elevator and rode it up to the sixth
floor.
I
opened the door to room 603 and beckoned extravagantly for Spike to enter. He came in and flopped down in one of
the deeply upholstered terracotta red armchairs. He immediately reached into his coat for
his cigarettes and silver Zippo lighter.
He gave the room a jaundiced once-over and said, “You seem to be adaptin’
all right.”
Sitting in the chair across from him, I lit up my own cigarette and
said, “Got lucky with a credit card that hasn’t been cancelled yet. Guess they haven’t found the body yet
behind all the lost luggage. Mommy
and Daddy must just think their little girl is a bad
correspondent.”
He
only grunted in reply and got up to pace the room restlessly.
“Okay, mister. What
bug’s crawled up your ass?”
He
gestured testily with his cigarette, “Darla’s just gettin’ on my tits, is
all. You got anything to drink in
this frilly boudoir?”
“Not
unless you count the bellboys. I
could call down for something. What
do you want?”
‘Whiskey – get a bottle.”
I
called down to the desk and asked them to send up a bottle of their most
expensive scotch and a couple of glasses.
Looking at the scowl on Spike’s face, I changed the order to two
bottles. As we waited for the
liquor, Spike went out to the balcony and amused himself by picking the blooms
off the potted begonias and tossing them over the railing. I stepped into the walk-in closet and
shed my shredded shirt and the rest of my clothes, putting on the dove gray silk
robe that had come with the room.
The room service waiter brought the scotch and, after I’d signed the bill
and he’d gone, I slipped the Non Si Disturbi sign over the outside
doorknob.
I
poured a couple of fingers of scotch into each of the crystal tumblers they’d
sent up with the bottles and took them out to Spike on the balcony. He was totally in his own head as he
stared out into the darkness. I
touched his arm with the hand that was holding the glass and he, reluctantly it
seemed to me, came back. I handed
his scotch to him. He downed it all
at once and tossed the glass out into the night. I heard the faint tinkle of breaking
glass somewhere six stories down.
Wordlessly I handed him the drink I’d poured for myself and he knocked
this one back as well but didn’t throw the glass. Instead he thrust it back at me, wiping
the back of his hand across his mouth and said, “More.” I left the glass on the railing and
returned with the bottle. I hoped
that maybe if he got drunk enough he’d start to talk, tell me what was bothering
him.
In
the meantime, I was content just to look at him, silver and blue and black in
the moonlight. His Adam’s apple
moved as he swallowed, and it made my mouth water. The blue hollows under his cheekbones
were dark and inviting; his tongue snaking out to catch the last drop in the
glass made my thighs quiver. The
early spring night was chilly but that wasn’t the reason my nipples were
hard.
Angry
Spike, horny Spike, worried Spike I knew how to deal with. Morose Spike was new to me. I didn’t know what to do, what to
say. Should I talk, try to distract
him? Should I pry and pester him to
tell me what was wrong? Or should I
just let him drink and leave him alone?
The latter, I decided. I
left him by himself on the balcony, just saying, “When you come in, make sure
you close the drapes tight behind you.”
He only nodded curtly and raised the scotch bottle to drink from it
directly.
I got
into bed with a copy of Italian Vogue and flipped through the pages, not
really looking at them, until eventually I was sleepy enough to turn out the
light. Spike was still on the
balcony being uncharacteristically quiet.
I could feel that dawn was coming soon and wondered if I should check on
him. What if he’d passed out? Having him fry on my balcony made for a
piss-poor reunion. I slipped out of
bed and opened the French doors. He
was sitting on the balcony floor, slumped against the stone railing, the empty
bottle hanging from his loose fingers.
I nudged him with my foot and he stirred, muttering
unintelligibly.
“Come
in, Spike,” I said. “The sun’ll be
coming up soon.” His only response
was to drop the bottle, his chin sinking against his chest. I stooped and grabbed his arm, slinging
it over my shoulder. I don’t know
if I’d have been able to lug his dead weight around before I became a vampire, I
doubt it, but it was pretty easy for me now. I dropped him on the edge of the bed and
wrestled his coat off him before kneeling to remove his boots. I swung his legs up onto the bed, and he
flopped down on his back. I took
the rest of his clothes off, wishing that there were more of a point to it than
making him more comfortable to sleep.
It certainly wasn’t unpleasant to see his hard, naked, white body again,
but it was frustrating not to be able to do anything with it. Maybe later, I thought. When he’d had a chance to sleep some of
it off.
I
hunted through the pockets of his duster and retrieved his cigarettes and
lighter. I put them on the
nightstand, figuring he’d want them handy when he eventually woke up. I slipped out of my robe, got back into
bed next to him and pulled the covers over us, resting my cheek on his shoulder,
breathing in his scent. It smelled
like home.
***
When
I woke up the heavy, slate gray drapes were edged with the red of late afternoon
sunlight in keeping with the gray and terracotta color scheme of the room, but
no potentially painful rays were sneaking in to burn the unwary undead. I stretched and rolled over, taking a
deep breath out of habit, and noticed his smell. He was really here. I hadn’t dreamed it. Smiling, I opened my eyes. He was awake and watching me
solemnly.
“What
are you doing here?” he asked, frowning a little. “You weren’t supposed to
come.”
“I
imagine I came lots of times I wasn’t supposed to. Can’t seem to help myself.” Admittedly, it was an appallingly lame
joke, but he didn’t crack even the smallest of smiles.
Awkward silence. I
decided to try a partial truth.
Another one. “I kinda had to
get out of New York. Pissed some
people off. Couldn’t think of
anywhere else to go.” It was true
that I’d probably upset a couple of vampires, but I seriously doubted that all
of New York City was now unsafe.
Just didn’t want him to think I was following him, or anything. So I exaggerated a
little.
“Not
that I have any trouble believing that you could manage to piss off just about
anyone, but what, specifically, did you do?” Mock serious, but
teasing.
“Um,
set a bunch of vamps on fire? But
they started it! Like I was about
to just let them get away with it.”
He rolled his eyes and turned over onto his back, sighing the sigh of the
long-suffering and the hung over.
“Start from the beginning.
What were they trying to get away with?”
“Wouldn’t have been a problem if there hadn’t been five of them. I was out for a bite, pretending, you
know, to be all helpless and vulnerable, when they jumped me.” He snorted, I guess at the idea of me
being helpless and vulnerable. I
poked him in the side. “If I’m not
helpless and vulnerable anymore whose fault do you think that is? Besides, it works – well, most of the
time.”
“I’m
sure you were the perfect delicate flower.
Go on.”
“Well, I figured it was just a little gang of your run of the mill
thugs until I couldn’t break free.
I vamped out, they vamped out, and they didn’t seem to understand that
they should just let me go my way and they should go theirs. They seemed to think that I was, like,
trespassing on their turf or something.
Like I was such a threat to them.
What was I going to do - eat all the humans in the area all by
myself?”
“Most
nests don’t take kindly to poaching.”
“And
you couldn’t have told me that before sticking me in a coffin and
shoveling dirt over me?”
“Knew
you’d be okay, didn’t want to spoil your fun.”
“Right, it was so fun being sized up for the big gang
bang.”
“They
didn’t, did they?” He rolled back
over to face me, looking mildly alarmed.
I
turned my face away from him and shuddered, remembering the way they’d discussed
it among themselves while I was still trapped in the steel jaw grasp of the
biggest of them. If they had
decided to do it then and there, there probably wouldn’t have been much I could
have done about it. Spike touched
my chin, pulling my face back towards him.
“Did they?” he asked again, more urgently.
Suddenly I was pissed off.
“And what if they had? You
did it to me first – raped me in an alley.” That sounded all fine and indignant, but
I couldn’t lie to him. “Well, it
would have been rape if I hadn’t liked it.
You’d have gone right ahead even if I’d screamed and
struggled.”
“That’s different. You
were human then, not a vampire I’d made.
Besides, there was only one of me.”
“And
I’d have been just as dead.”
“A
little late in the day to be regretting things now, don’t you think? D’you really wish none of it had
happened? You had your chances to
leave. Even left and came back, I
seem to recall.”
I
looked up at the ceiling. This had
turned into a far more serious conversation than I’d wanted to have with him
first thing in the evening. I’d
just wanted to justify my turning up in Rome and, maybe even impress him with
the way I’d gotten myself out of a particularly ugly jam.
I
tried to put into words the conflicting thoughts and feelings I’d been having
since being turned. “I still get
all mixed up about what I feel and what I think I ought to feel. I mean, I don’t feel bad about what
happened with you and Dru or about being a vampire, although I am still pissed
off as hell about you leaving me, but sometimes I forget that I’m not human
anymore. It’s like the demon
is sometimes just that little bit slower on the uptake than the rest of my
brain.” I chewed on a ragged
cuticle for a minute, thinking.
“Or
it’s like a bad habit or something, you know? The silly first impulse I sometimes have
is to do the ‘human’ thing. Like
being good is a habit I need to break.
And you know the habit that’s the fucking hardest to break? Being polite. God, I can be guzzling blood like there
aren’t five billion other warm bodies out there full of it, and if I burp, I
cover my mouth.”
Spike
chuckled at that but didn’t speak, so I continued, “I mean, besides the
occasional throat-ripping-out and the cool new powers, I guess I just don’t feel
that different. I’m fully aware
that it’s just habit keeping me from really acting out on all this evil I’m
supposed to be feeling. God, none
of this is making sense. Maybe what
it is is that my morals were never screwed on too tight in the first place and
that’s why I’m not all one with some evil plan to destroy the world or
something. Like if the pendulum
wasn’t swinging too high in the direction of good in the first place, the
corresponding swing to evil just isn’t going to be that high either. ‘Course, if I’m hungry, all bets are
off.”
“S’what I always liked best about you,” he purred, his voice a low
rumble of amusement and arousal.
“You were an amoral little baggage from the very start. Didn’t feature making you a vampire
would change you that much. Just
make you less breakable.” He slid
his hand under the sheet and over my bare stomach, barely touching it with
whisper-light fingertips.
“Know
what your problem is? You think too
much. Little human habits buggin’
you so much right now? They’ll fade
soon enough, you won’t even remember you ever had ‘em,” he soothed, his mouth
against my shoulder before nibbling the point of it. “And I’m thinkin’ I just need to show
you how to really let loose with the evil.
Reckon you haven’t had fun enough with it yet. Haven’t really let go and enjoyed
it. More to it ‘n just getting
somethin’ to eat.” His tongue
trailed up my shoulder to my neck, tickling the place where they
met.
“So
don’…don’t you want to hear what happened with those vampires?” I asked,
swallowing, distracted by his tickling fingers and swirling tongue, but still
wanting to impress him with my bravery and ingenuity before the subject was
completely dropped.
“Later,” he breathed, as he leaned over me to touch my mouth with the
lightest of kisses, feathering lower then upper lip with tiny touches, sighs of
air, a snaking tease of tongue then another puff of breath to make the moisture
cool, to make me shiver. His hand
on my belly moved up to brush my nipple just as lightly, just as teasingly. My eyelids were fluttering, my needless
breath quickening, my heightened senses pricking. I darted my tongue out and fleetingly
caught the tip of his. He stilled,
our tongues just touching. We
stared at each other for a few long seconds before his eyes closed, long black
lashes hiding the vivid blue, and he pushed my tongue back into my mouth with
his, deepening the kiss into something tender yet desperate. His hand tightened around my breast,
fingers digging into the soft flesh.
I knew, vampire healing or not, I would have the best kind of bruises
there later.
I
reached up to stroke his rumpled hair, but he caught my hand and lowered it back
to the bed. “Don’t do anything,” he
whispered against my mouth. “Just
lie still.” He held my wrists
loosely over my head with one hand – not squeezing, not forceful, as he kissed
down my neck, licking the line of my collarbone to the edge of the sheet, taking
it between his teeth and drawing it down to my waist before making a gentle, yet
thorough exploration of my breasts with his mouth.
Since
he had never managed, quite, to break me with rough fucking when I was alive,
unless you count the night I was turned, I think he was trying to see if he
could break the vampire me with tenderness. Or maybe taking that step up the food
chain had made me worthy of a kind of respect and consideration not generally
afforded to humans. Or he just
wanted a change of mood. A change
from Drusilla and her need for pain.
Maybe I was some sort of surrogate for the tender feelings and caresses
he could never give to her.
But,
as he teased my hard nipple with licks and nibbles and more cool puffs of air, I
lost the ability to think, to try to reason out why he was doing what he was
doing. I could only feel it and
melt as he finally closed his lips around my nipple, sucking it gently, nursing
it sweetly, as his free hand traced circles and curves and lines, hieroglyphs of
sensation on the skin of my belly and lower to the newly re-grown hair between
my legs, stroking it, twining his fingers in the short curls. He nudged my thighs just a little apart
so he could run a finger tantalizingly along the closed slit.
My
knees fell out to the sides, opening me to his insinuating finger as it slid
deeper into my wetness. He released
my hands with a warning pat, silently telling me that I should keep them there,
and rose over me, stripping the terracotta-colored sheet completely off our
bodies and straddling me, switching his hungry suckling to the other, so far
neglected, nipple.
I
gasped reflexively, as he slid one finger inside me, sliding his thumb up my
slick folds to softly brush my clit.
When he released my nipple to kiss his way down my stomach, I sighed in
momentary disappointment, but as a second finger joined the first and his tongue
replaced his thumb with wet velvet, rose petal licks, I had to clench my hands
into fists to keep from reaching down to press his face deeper into me.
He
turned his fingers inside me so he could rub the spot on the upper wall that
corresponded with the hypersensitive piece of flesh he was now sucking into his
mouth, lashing it with a firmer tongue, tormenting it with tiny nips. My hips were arching up off the bed, my
nails digging into my palms, my head rolling on the pillow as the deep waves of
my orgasm began to surge through me.
He sucked me harder, scraping his teeth lightly up and down my clit,
bringing me to greater and greater heights; moans, groans, sighs and squeals
escaping unbidden from my throat.
Eventually he eased off a little, bringing me down slowly. I was gasping from some atavistic,
limbic instinct and felt as if I should be gleaming with sweat, but, of course,
I wasn’t.
He
slithered back up my body, sliding every possible inch of his smooth skin
against me until his face was even with mine. Holding my face between his hands and
staring into my eyes as if to gauge my reaction, he slid his cock along my wet
slit, further awakening nerve endings that were still gasping and zinging. Carefully he pulled back far enough to
position the head of his cock at my opening and after a long pause, as if
waiting for me to give him permission, he slowly pushed into me, inch by
hesitant inch, until he was completely buried inside me. He didn’t start pumping right away, but
rather, stayed perfectly still, giving me time to get used to the feel of
him. He gently brushed the hair out
of my eyes.
I
didn’t need it, that moment of stillness, but it was nice, exquisite even, to
have the time to truly appreciate the size of him and how he seemed to fill me
so completely. I could still feel
the aftershocks of my previous orgasm making me spasm irregularly around him and
each time it happened I could feel his cock jump just a little bit. Purposefully, I tightened my muscles
around him and was rewarded with a stronger jerk. Slowly, slowly he started to slide out
of my clenching cunt and just as slowly pushed back in.
On
and on it went, this slow, gentle fucking, his eyes on mine, neither of us so
much as blinking. I’d never felt so
fragile, so cherished, so, I mistakenly dared to think,
loved.
I
could have stayed that way forever, but passion, hormones, blood, demons, will
have their way and the force and speed of his thrusts increased. Unable to stay still another instant
longer, I finally moved my hands to pull Spike’s mouth down to mine, as I
wrapped my legs around the backs of his thighs, pulling him harder into me,
slamming my hips up to meet his as a different kind of orgasm, fiery, violent
and explosive erupted through me, my fierce spasms triggering his own as he bit
the side of my neck with blunt teeth.
I wanted him to really bite me, but it was over before I could express
the need, both of us shuddering. He
gently kissed and licked the livid marks his human teeth had left on my
neck.
Still
inside me, he rolled to the side, pulling me with him. I draped a leg over his hip to help keep
us joined and raised my head so he could put his arm underneath it. I had closed my eyes and snuggled even
closer to him when I noticed that he was murmuring over and over, “It’s all
right. You’re all right. I’ll take care of you. Nothing like that will ever happen to
you again.”
“Nothing like what?” I asked sleepily. “That could happen to me any old
time and I wouldn’t complain.”
“You
liked it? With them?” He jerked his head up to stare at me
disbelievingly and somewhat accusingly.
“Of
course I liked…. What do you mean, them?”
I was beginning to suspect that we were talking about two different
things. Duh.
“What
they did to you?” His voice
sharpened, got that crisp, diamond-hard edge that meant he was angry past the
point of shouting. He pulled away
from me like he couldn’t get far enough, fast enough, his cock slipping out of
me, leaving a trail of our combined juices down the length of my thigh. “Bloody hell! You let a bunch of dirty minions have
you, do things to you then come here and expect me to take their
leavings?”
“What? No! They never, I never…. You never let me finish. I got away from them before they could
do anything. I promise!” I bolted upright, stretching an
arm out towards him as he shot out the far side of the
bed.
He
was reaching for his jeans but he paused and turned around with a look on his
face as if to say, ‘This had better be good.’ He waited, yanking up his jeans, a
muscle in his cheek twitching as he clenched his jaw over more angry
words.
I
pulled the sheet from my lap up to my chin, looking at him beseechingly, then
looking down as I began to speak.
“I-I really did think that they were going to do it…me…in that
alley. I was angry and that’s what
I showed them, but really I was so scared.
I was thinking of you – I didn’t want them touching what you had
touched. As long as you were the
last person to touch me I could still feel like we were somehow, I don’t know,
connected or something.” I stole a
swift glance at him. He was
frowning but no longer looked quite so angry and hadn’t reached for his shirt or
boots.
“I
kept struggling to get free. My
god, that asshole was strong. They
started arguing with each other about what to do with me. They had this leader
that they were afraid to go against and he had first dibs on any female – human
or vamp – that they captured. In
the end, I guess they were more afraid of him than…well, you know.”
He
nodded once, slowly, as if that made sense to him, as if that was the usual
order of things. “Go on,” he said,
jaw relaxing infinitesimally, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans,
shifting his weight to one hip.
“They
took me to this abandoned building not too far from where you and Dru
lived. I stayed there after you
left, you know. Wanted you to be
able to find me if you decided to come back. The grand pooh-bah wasn’t there so we
all sat around waiting for him to show.
Really, he couldn’t have been that great of a leader; they started
drinking right away and had done a piss-poor job of tying me up. Dru’d never have put up with that.” I saw again the tension in his body
language that I’d already noticed whenever Drusilla was mentioned. I hastened past the reference. “So anyway, while I waited for them to
fall asleep I worked on the ropes.
And may I say, I’m really impressed with the way being a vampire makes
your nails stronger and sharper.”
He
lowered his head and gave me an impatient look from under his eyebrows and I
said, “Okay, not digressing here. I
had the ropes nearly scratched through by the time they’d all passed out and
when they did, I broke the last strand and grabbed the gas can they had to run
their generator. I splashed it
around, dropped a match and hauled ass out of there all the way to JFK. I lurked around there until I found what
I needed to come here. And so here
I am,” I finished in a rush, breathlessly.
We don’t need to breathe for the oxygen, but air moving across the vocal
chords is necessary to speak which explains why we so often find ourselves
unable to break the breathing habit.
Except when we’re asleep, it takes conscious effort not to
breathe.
He
looked somewhat mollified, no longer like he was in a disgusted rush to leave,
but I had a thought. An indignant
thought. “But what if it had
happened and I had enjoyed it?
And
yet another point of offense, “And what was that that you did to me just
now? Some kind of pity fuck? Is rape still a fate worse than death to
you? Maybe I would have
liked it.”
The
emotional tilt-a-whirl I’d been riding swung to anger, spun into rage. “Maybe since you threw me away like a
toy you were bored with, you don’t get to make any judgments about what I do or
don’t do with my own body! In case
you hadn’t noticed, Queen Victoria’s been dead for a good goddamned long
time.” I let go of the sheet. It dropped unheeded to my lap then
slipped down my thighs as I got up on my knees. I was just getting warmed up, building
up a righteous head of wrathful steam.
Too
many contradictory accusations, too swift a u-turn from placating to berating –
he looked flummoxed, as though a normally placid house pet had just turned on
him, all claws and teeth.
But I
had a valid point, I thought, so I kept pressing, moving towards him on hands
and knees across the width of the large bed. I hissed, “I don’t ask you who you’ve
slept with; you don’t get to ask me who I’ve slept with. Maybe I lied. Maybe I fucked every bum and drunk on
the Bowery. Maybe after you left I
just didn’t care.”
Rising again, I ran my hand up my body to my breasts, cupping them,
squeezing them, lowering my voice to a sultry tease, “Maybe I rode with a
motorcycle gang, a-a vampire motorcycle gang and they all passed me
around, and I was their bitch, and I loved every greasy, beer-bellied one of
them and the nasty things they did to me – I couldn’t get enough, and they’d
loan me out to other gangs, and they’d, they’d…”
As I
exhausted my somewhat limited repertoire of vile things I could imagine off the
cuff - evil I may have been, experienced I wasn’t - the rage subsided as quickly
as it had come on, leaving me deflated, my voice sputtering quiet as I sat back
on my heels, and, besides, I finally noticed that he was silently laughing. Laughing so hard tears were streaming
down his cheeks. He toppled over
onto the bed and began to shake with deep belly laughs, still largely silent,
but shaking the bed.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me,” I said pettishly. “I’m evil. I’m bad. I’m a whore and I’m not ashamed of
it. So there!” Granted, the ‘so there’ sounded pretty
childish, but honestly, how adult was it of him to be laughing like a peroxided
hyena. A peroxided hyena with dark
roots. There was really nothing
more to be done but have a good old-fashioned sulk.
I sat
back against the padded headboard, settled the sheet under my arms and studied
my nails, waiting for him to get it out of his system and take me seriously
again. Eventually his laughter
subsided enough for him to talk and he said, between hiccups, “Bugger me, you don’t know how much I
needed that.”
“Yup,
that’s me, ready and able, if not always so willing, to be the butt of someone
else’s joke. Because, heaven knows, nothing I say could ever be taken
seriously.” I was still nursing a
serious mad-on, but I might, just might, have been willing to be cozened out of
it.
He
propped his head up on his hand and looked at me, eyes still smiling, the lines
of his face still in the pattern of merriment. “Oh Sunday, Sunday, you really don’t
know anything about vampires, do you?”
I
figured the glare I leveled at him saved me from having to reiterate my Johnny
one-note whine of abandonment.
He
sat up and scooted next to me, reaching for his cigarettes and lighter from
where I’d left them on the nightstand before leaning back. He fired one up and passed it to me
before lighting one for himself.
Mentally, I settled in for a cozy story while still only giving him my
coldest profile. Truth be told,
watching him laugh had made me feel kind of funny and warm inside, but it
wouldn’t do to let him know that.
Not yet.
***
“One
does try to keep up with the times, love,” he said, exhaling a dense cloud of
smoke. “Eaten a feminist or three
these last couple of decades – tasted just like any other woman, like women’ve
always tasted. Like people have
always tasted. Y chromosome ain’t
got any kind of flavor I been able to identify. ‘Sides, comin’ up with Darla, learned
early that petticoats can be just as powerful as trousers. Until the silly bugger went and got
hisself cursed, Darla’d only to raise an eyebrow to stop him in his tracks. Point is, it ain’t about gender; it’s
about sires and, for want of a less poncey word, childer.
“Like
everything else, it’s all about power,” he continued. “And control. Never had much reason to think about it
before, the way things were was just how they were, but what I think it all
comes down to is making sure that there are never too many vampires for the food
supply. Sires keep control over
their get for decades. Long enough
to pound some sense into them and, believe it or not,” he looked over at me with
a quirked eyebrow, “in my case it
took a right load of pounding.”
Given the eyebrow cue, I snorted the quick laugh he was angling
for.
“And
controlling sex is an important part of it,” he said, getting back on topic,
“otherwise you’d have every demon-come-lately running around turning every
pretty boy or girl he fancied, and, before too long, even the most gormless of
humans would get an inkling and the Slayer’d be the least of our worries.” He frowned down at the smoldering butt
of his cigarette for a moment before crushing it out in the ashtray on the
nightstand.
“So
in a way,” he went on, climbing out of bed to get the remaining bottle of scotch
from the coffee table between the two armchairs, “Dru paid you a compliment by
leaving you to raise yourself, trusting that you’d have the sense to avoid the
traps most of those other silly wazzucks go stampedin’
into.”
I
watched him with cool disbelief.
Did he really believe that garbage?
The reason Dru’d made him leave me behind was because she had felt
threatened. I guess she
hadn’t figured I’d have the gumption to follow, but then, I’d always been on my
best, meekest behavior around her.
But
even as young as I was, I was wise enough not to tell him what was what. He’d never believe it of her, and the
last thing I wanted to do was to start demanding, like the typical ‘other
woman,’ that he leave his princess for me.
There’d be no contest.
Yet.
Well,
anyway, that’s what I thought at the time.
I know better now. There
never was any contest. She won in
the end, but I’m vain enough to think that I gave her a run for her mad
money. Actually enough to make you
feel sorry for the poor guy. He was
the only one of us without an agenda.
But
back to that night. Spike took a
healthy swig straight from the bottle and flopped back onto the bed, handing the
bottle to me. Getting drunk sounded
like a fine idea, so I tipped it back, trying to ignore the harsh,
tonsil-scouring taste of it, focusing on the warm glow it started in my
belly. My empty belly. Damn, I was hungry. I hadn’t had more than a few swallows of
last night’s dinner before Spike had shown up. I wondered when he’d last eaten.
I
belted back another couple of gulps of the scotch, returned the bottle to Spike
and got out of bed. The sun had
gone down, so I went over to the French doors and drew back the drapes, opening
the doors wide to let some fresh air in, to let out some of the smoke, scotch,
and sex fug. Naked, I walked out
onto the balcony and leaned my braced arms on the railing, drawing in deep
breaths filled with all the aromas, floral and faunal, of the spring
evening.
Spike
came out to stand behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and drawing me
back against him. “You’re being
awfully quiet,” he said. “Whatcha
thinkin’?”
“Too
many things, nothing at all. I
don’t know. I’m just hungry, a
little restless.”
“There’s a whole city out there waiting for us,” he murmured low in
my ear, his voice smooth and dark as espresso. “Waiting for us to show it what evil is,
what evil does.”
“Let’s go then,” I said. “Show
me some of that evil. Teach me.”