The Green's Hill Novellas (11 page)

They always kissed that way.

“He’s gone?” Charlie asked him between kisses.

Whim had no words for Daniel. “Mmm-hmmm….”

“Good,” Charlie said breathlessly. “Good. Good….” And then he kissed Whim some more. His body was strong and wiry, like it had been his entire adult life, and his hair was thick and a little long, growing over his ears for the first time since he was a teenager.

There was a three-inch tattoo on his naked chest, right over his heart, and had been since the night Whim had healed him. It showed a rose, dropping blood over an acorn and a lime. The blood changed colors according to Charlie’s mood. Charlie knew what it meant now, and Whim liked to touch it quietly while it glowed the colors of cherries and melons and bananas.

Whim held him now, strong and healthy and as gleeful as he’d ever been, and Whim kept holding him, kept falling into his exotic, familiar taste, as he walked unsteadily to where the trees were. They’d come prepared tonight, and their blankets and their picnic were waiting for them. This year, Green had even given them a special basket and had their favorite foods made. He and Cory said that someone should celebrate Litha, since they could no longer take joy in it.

And Litha it was—their Litha—and when they were together, there was always much to celebrate.

ONCE UPON
a time, he’d had a last name and a girlfriend, and he’d been completely straight. He wasn’t sure what happened then. There had been a dark shape swooping in front of his car, a body thunking off the hood, a terrible crunch of metal, and a feeling of unreality. Part of his steering column snapped in half and penetrated his femoral artery, and his soul began to detach from his body as the blood that held the two of them in the same space pumped out.

Things got weird after that.

Absolute cold, the silence of a frozen sea, the faint promise of warmth and light, and then….

Something fiery burning along his veins, pulling him back through that sea, causing it to splinter and scathe, penetrate and scrape, flay the skin from his flesh and bind it back together with a cold so penetrating, so icy, it felt as though his blood vessels were lined with blistering pustules, bursting with scorching, raw pain.

It felt a little like… a lot like… a
whole lot
like….

The need to come when someone wouldn’t let you breathe and had your cock in a vise.

Marcus expelled his last breath on a scream, bit down hard on something that felt an awful lot like cold flesh, and pulled blood into his body in an orgy of carnage until his stomach filled to bursting….

And he came.

He felt like panting then, in the aftermath, and his chest even cooperated for a few tries. But as he blinked hard and looked around him, his chest stopped moving, and he was too distracted to notice.

His clothing was shredded, and his shredded body was
healing
,
knitting up flesh like some sort of reverse time-lapse photo even as he watched. He was covered in blood—not just from the injuries that no longer existed, but spilling from his mouth and over his chest, and there was… a man’s thigh, in tattered jeans, pulling away from his face even as he took stock.

There was also a man’s mouth licking gently at Marcus’s naked thigh, where he’d seen the steering column enter and the blood pump out before the whole frozen-lake-of-silent-fire thing.

The hole where the steering column had been was all gone, and what was left was smooth, rapidly cooling skin.

The man who’d been… suckling on his thigh? Really? The man who had pale white hair turned his head and grinned at him, flashing red, whirling eyes. His mouth and chin were covered in blood, and—

“Where are my pants?” Marcus asked, his voice resounding so loudly in his ears that he almost wept.

“Mr. Desarno! Ohmigod!” Marcus was on the side of the road, naked from the waist down and covered in blood, and there was something wet and white mixed with the blood on his chest, and Marcus watched as the man who’d been… suckling… on his thigh rolled over, tucked his equipment in his jeans, and buttoned up, commando style.

He was lying on the side of the road, naked from the waist down and covered in blood and
come
, and someone he knew was there to see him?

Oh God… he knew that voice. Recently. Where…?

“Mr. Desarno, you’re going to be a little disoriented, okay?”

He knew that voice. Where… where…? He blinked, and his teacher’s brain kicked in.

Adult education, last year. She’d been in her twenties, and fragile. He remembered that she’d been so… on the verge of just not showing up, just not earning her GED, just not being a part of the world at all. Twenty-three years old, and she was just ready to disappear.

“Gina?” His voice was still too loud in his ears. “Gina Victorine?”

“Mr. Desarno! Thank the Goddess! You changed! You were dying, right, and I remembered you, right? And Adrian was taking me flying, and… we couldn’t just let you, you know? We couldn’t just let you die.”

The blond-haired man with the whirling eyes who’d been sucking Marcus’s blood sat up and gave them both an insouciant grin. “Well, technically, luv, he
is
dead.”

Marcus stared at him, and the man gently placed Marcus’s hand on his own throat.

Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Nothing pumped, breathed, or twitched.

He was dead. Dead, naked, and covered in blood.

“Mr. Desarno, you’re going to be all right, okay?”

Marcus blinked. He was going to be all right? Or he was going to be dead? One thing was certain.

“All things considered, Gina,” he said slowly, “I think it’s better if you call me Marcus.”

GINA VICTORINE
had apparently found herself—or at least a family to take care of her. It was unfortunate that she’d been found when she was half-dead of an overdose, but Adrian—the blond man who had pulled Marcus over into the vampire world—had helped her out as well.

Gina and Adrian had been the best mentors a newly fledged vampire could have.

It was terrifying, at first. Marcus was a gentle person, a history teacher, a baseball coach for his nephew’s team, a suitor so bashful he’d dated his girlfriend for nearly six months before he’d gotten laid.

The first time he ripped Adrian’s jeans off his body to gobble his cock and suck blood from his thigh was about five minutes after Gina and Adrian got him back to their home, Green’s hill, and got him out of the shower.

He was a naturally curious person, so he should have been worried about the house (dug into the side of the hill, with a wraparound window facing out from three-quarters of the hill and the “darkling”—the vampires’ quarters, which were completely covered in earth—taking the other quarter), but he wasn’t. He should have registered that his room—complete with a shower cubicle with a curtain in the corner and a big sturdy bed in the middle—was almost like a padded vault as opposed to a real guest room, but that wasn’t what he was curious about either.

What he
was
curious about was… flesh. The throbbing of it. The slickness of the skin over it. The blood… glorious blood…
fabulous
blood…
delicious blood…
pumping underneath and through it.

The next thing he knew, he had a mouthful of Adrian’s thigh, and Adrian was coming on his ear.

And Marcus was mortified. He’d stepped out of the shower, had a towel around his hips, and was trying to come to grips with the fact that what should have been a cold shower didn’t really bother him that much, and then Adrian had stuck his head into the bathroom and said, “You okay, mate?” in that lovely cockney accent of his, and then….

Well, Marcus needed another shower. He’d come all over his towel.

Adrian explained it to him a little later because one shower turned to two, and then three, and then Adrian had brought in a young man with a lovely
warm
body, and Adrian explained that he was a shape-shifter, and he didn’t mind being gnawed on or fucked into oblivion because his blood supply replenished quickly. Marcus’s attention wandered, and the young man had looked so lovely, and Adrian handed him a bottle of lube, and suddenly Marcus’s cock completely took over. And only
then
,
after the young man was panting and dilated and laughing in reaction and a little pale from blood loss, did Marcus think he could hold a thought in his befuddled head.

The tall, blond-headed vampire climbed naked into bed with him. Marcus should have been embarrassed but, considering all of the other things that had happened to him and that he had done that night, was not.

“What you have to understand, mate,” the man said soothingly, stroking his hand down Marcus’s back as he clutched his pillow to his chest for comfort, “is that you’re like a big baby with a sex drive. You want to eat, you want to fuck, and not much else is going on up there.” Adrian tapped Marcus’s head through his curly black hair. Italian—everything about him was Italian, from his olive skin to his dark eyes and regularly plucked unibrow.

“But…,” Marcus muttered. “But…
men,
Adrian. I’ve never in my life….”

He’d just fed—a
lot—
and he would learn that the full-body blush that coated him would only happen when he was full of other people’s blood.

“Shhhh…,” Adrian whispered, soothing his shoulders and generally showing Marcus physical kindness. “I get it, mate. The thing is, Gina tells me you’re a gentleman. A good guy. A nice man. I’ll be honest. Until you’re over this blood-madness thing, you’re only going to see men in this room, and I’ll tell you why.”

Marcus pulled out of his misery and the strange lethargy that was hitting him as dawn approached, and he turned his head. He noted—in a purely objective way—that Adrian had the most blessedly blue, sky-spangled eyes Marcus had ever seen.

“Why?” Marcus asked somnolently, wondering what those eyes would look like behind him as Adrian buried himself in Marcus’s flesh. His cock stirred, interested, and for a moment his body was paralyzed with indecision—the approaching sleep or one more bout of… of…
lust.

“Because you
are
a gentleman,” Adrian told him, his eyes going from blue to that alert red Marcus had first seen. “You’re a nice guy, and the guilt for what you would do to a woman—even if she’s willing—I’ve seen it drive some blokes mad.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Marcus mumbled, and Adrian nodded.

“Oh yes. And the women here are mostly shape-shifters or vampires—they’re tough. But
you
—” Adrian tapped his bare chest. “You’re a kind man, Marcus. You’ve got that thing in your head that wouldn’t forgive yourself for fucking a girl bloody. No—your body is on high alert, and all it wants is to feed and to fuck, mostly at the same time. You’ll be more comfortable if you’re with someone you feel could fight back or hold his own. Don’t worry, mate. We’ve done this drill before. We’ll keep you supplied. But get ready for a bumpy ride. It’ll be weeks before you’re civilized enough to be in the room with a live body and not be tempted to eat its throat and fuck the corpse. I won’t lie—for a gentle man, it will be damned uncomfortable. But you’ll learn. You’ll be a gentle man again. Just trust me, right?”

Marcus felt the lethargy take over, dulling the bloodlust, dulling the regular fuck-me lust, and he had enough wherewithal to ask, “Why am I so….”

“Sunrise.” Adrian embraced him gently, and then the sun did, and he wasn’t sure what happened for the next eighteen hours.

Adrian was right, of course. Marcus would learn that, in spite of his reluctance to lead like a general, Adrian was very good at leading a person to be the best version of himself. The next day, after Marcus had fed from Adrian himself—and the wounds had healed, and Adrian had fed from someone else out of Marcus’s sight—Adrian brought in a young-looking man, naked, as they all seemed to be in this room. Marcus had to admit it cut down on cleaning.

Adrian told Marcus to think about feeding, and suddenly his canines lengthened alarmingly. Adrian showed the same face to Marcus, and then, after asking the young man’s permission, he took hold of a tender wrist and delicately punctured a vein. The blood ran freely, and Marcus felt hunger stir in his belly.

Adrian told Marcus to do the same, and because he wasn’t voracious and desperate with it, he managed. The tooth poked, the blood spilled richly out, and Marcus clamped his mouth over the vein, suckling eagerly. The young man’s head fell back, and he sat naked between the two of them, writhing, groaning even when Adrian lapped at his wrist to close his own wound and Marcus continued to feed.

Marcus’s hunger wasn’t overriding anymore… or at least his hunger for food. Now that he wasn’t out of his head, the hard-on was a surprise.

But it wasn’t to his dinner. The boy—Marcus would find out later that he was older than Marcus; he’d been turned into a shape-shifter while still in his teens—took one look at Marcus’s arousal, took his healing wrist from Marcus’s dazed grasp, and bent his head, opened his mouth, and proceeded with a blow job so exquisite, Marcus was pretty sure he wouldn’t need sex for at least….