The shape-shifter—a comfortable armload of soft woman named Stephanie—sighed and melted into his arms, and a pained, tightly wound something in Marcus’s chest relaxed.
Goddess
, he had never been that hungry, not since his first awakening. He gave a blessing and a thank-you to the Goddess and to Adrian for making sure he wouldn’t have to roam the world so hungry he was almost mad with it.
Then he heard a startled yelp and a growl, and he shook off his feeding torpor because something bad was happening.
Stephanie’s mate was her husband, Joe, and he was a thirtysomething lumberjack-shaped person with an easy disposition. His alternative form was a big Newfoundland dog—and that was the thing currently backed up against the side of their little snow cave, nursing a torn throat and whimpering.
Phillip had apparently gone full-bore scary vampire when he’d awakened, and now the three of them were trapped in the snow cave with him. Fucking
aces
!
A vampire’s feeding face was a more, well, intense version of his or her regular face. Phillip had possessed a narrow-jawed, high-cheekboned sort of aesthetic beauty before he’d changed, and now? Now he looked like Dracula on steroids, with hollow cheeks and an outrageously pointed mouthful of teeth (dammit, it
was
just his canines, right?) and the whirling red eyes that indicated extreme hunger or emotion.
Marcus swallowed his last mouthful of Stephanie and shouted, “You two! Get out now!” and then jumped in front of Phillip to hold him off while the shape-shifters escaped.
Phillip screamed at him, an anguished, confused, enraged scream, and Marcus felt his own feeding face come on.
“Fuck that!” he snarled. “C’mon, man—you’re safe, you’re fed, now back the fuck down and fucking
down
or we’re going to have to take you out right here and now!”
If anyone he’d ever known in either life had ever heard him snarl like that, they would have been shocked—but dammit, he
knew
what would happen if Phillip couldn’t get control of himself. It was why Adrian always picked his people so carefully, and why no one was
ever
supposed to make another vampire without his approval or Green’s.
Marcus had just gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to
save
this guy; he was damned if he was going to have to ask for Adrian’s help to kill him!
“What did you do to me?” Phillip growled, wiping his hand in front of his mouth. It came back caked with old blood and new blood. Marcus swallowed hard, in a particularly human gesture that he’d seen Adrian make but had never felt the urge to make himself.
“I changed you,” Marcus said, and it cost him to say it without apology. “You were young, and you were vital, and you were dying, and I didn’t want to see that happen. You got a problem with that?”
Phillip looked at himself wildly, at his torn clothes, the smooth flesh under the savaged hole in his stomach, the blood, saturated and frozen to almost every stitch of clothing he was wearing.
“I’m
starving
!”
Phillip screeched. Marcus looked down at his pants, and sure enough, Phillip’s body was starving for more than blood. Marcus swallowed again and subtly unbuttoned his torn and bloodied jeans.
This was probably going to be painful.
“What are you doing?” Phillip demanded, distracted. Marcus watched the way Phillip’s eyes zeroed in on Marcus’s fumbling fingers. Some of his wildness eased, and Marcus tried to remember how badly he’d savaged his first lovers.
“You didn’t.”
Adrian’s voice was soothing in his head.
“You were rough but not brutal. You’re going to need to prep yourself, though, because he won’t think to. And you’re going to want to be on your back, so he can feed when he comes.”
“Thanks, Adrian.”
Marcus knew his inner voice was far more nervous than his real voice
,
but that was okay. Adrian wouldn’t mind.
“I’m in his head too, right? I’m keeping him calm. C’mon, mate. It all starts with a kiss.”
“You’re going to want to fuck me silly,” Marcus explained, trying very hard not to feel like prey. This guy was a leader, right? A very, very alpha male, right? Marcus had been unprepared for that urge to just fuck things into the ground. It had been very, very un-Marcus of him. This guy—maybe he could handle it.
“I don’t like guys.” Phillip’s voice lacked conviction, and he watched as Marcus bared the lower half of his body with a distracted fascination. Marcus sighed. He might be tougher than the average human, but it was still cold in their little snow cave now that the shape-shifters were gone. He measured the discomfort of the cold next to the discomfort of the ground and then took off his parka and laid it down so it could cushion his back and bare ass.
“You’re going to like sex,” Marcus told him, keeping his voice soft and confident. He walked forward slowly, as though hunger was not even now
raging
through Phillip’s body and threatening to consume them both. He got close and stopped, pretended to breathe, because he knew the rhythm was soothing. Phillip’s eyes were whirling a little less frantically now, and Marcus nodded. While he was nodding, he stuck two fingers into his mouth and suckled, wetting them with saliva, before reaching around to his backside.
He gasped when the first one penetrated without a hello or how-are-you, and Phillip’s eyes started to whirl a little more quickly. The second one helped the first one to stretch, and his cock, which had been a shriveled thing afraid of the cold, began to wake up and generate its own heat. Marcus leaned forward and put his tongue out, slowly licking Phillip’s bottom lip, tasting the remains of the blood—and Phillip’s fear.
“You’re going to like sex with me,” Marcus said softly. He pulled his fingers out and hoped that had been enough prep—Phillip wasn’t going to stay this calm for long. “I’m your friend, and I’m almost indestructible, and I can take anything you need to dish out. C’mon, Phillip—you’re one of the few creatures on the planet who get to live twice. Let’s live.”
Their fangs clashed as Phillip growled in his throat and bore Marcus to the ground, and Marcus just kept opening his mouth and letting Phillip plunder it, delving deeper and deeper. Marcus spread his legs wide and laughed a little when Phillip ripped his leather pants in half without even thinking about it, just to be able to grind his cock into the crease of Marcus’s thigh.
Phillip kept grinding, hard and harder—hard enough to bruise viciously if Marcus had been a human—and Marcus rocked his body to help. It happened so quickly, Marcus was surprised. He hazily remembered the first time he’d taken another man. He’d remembered the fingers and the stretching, but the intent to fuck—to thrust into another human body—that had been there. Marcus had
needed
that. As Phillip ground up against him, grunting and whining, rutting frantically, Marcus realized that this man was different.
Marcus kissed him back a little harder, swallowing Phillip’s whimper of confusion, swallowing his fear and his hunger and his savagery. Marcus would make it better—he would. Marcus framed that lean face with both hands, remembering the playful human, the shy competitor, the little boy in what looked to be a corporate shark’s body. That man
would
survive. Marcus would make sure if it.
“
Jesus
God….” Phillip pulled back a little, and his eyes were whirling faster.
“It’s okay, brother. Just let it come.”
Phillip howled into the cradle of Marcus’s neck and shoulder as his cock spat come between their bodies. Marcus tilted his head, thrust his neck against those thrusting canines, and gasped with the pain. Phillip wasn’t gentle—he
couldn’t
be gentle—and Marcus wasn’t aroused enough to find the pain sweet. It was okay. It was okay. Phillip was okay, so this would be too.
Stephanie and Joe wriggled back in through the opening above their little ice cave in their human forms almost as soon as Phillip came. Marcus wasn’t surprised—they had probably been listening in along with Gina, Adrian, and the other people in their party, waiting to see if he was going to need any help. Stephanie offered her wrist to Marcus immediately, and Joe, after a moment of steeling himself, gave a bare arm to an almost somnolent Phillip as he lay sprawled over Marcus’s half-naked body.
Phillip ate automatically, like a baby, and Marcus was grateful for what Stephanie gave him, because he was drained and tired from the sex and the blood loss and using his will with Adrian to bring Phillip back to life. The thought of getting Phillip out of this cave and to Green’s hill seemed almost impossible.
It wasn’t.
Adrian hopped in after Steph and Joe with a wool blanket for Phillip and some new clothes and a jacket for Marcus. After Steph and Joe changed back to their dog forms, they got a boost out of the hole. Adrian took Phillip in his arms and lifted him out the roof of their little cave, and Marcus followed him.
“We’re doing the distance home,”
Adrian said as they flew. “
You up for the trip?”
“Damned well better be.”
Because he promised he could, in spite of the fatigue and the worry and the cold, Marcus was.
WHEN PHILLIP’S
first month was over and he had been installed semicomfortably (and a little bit symbolically) in Marcus’s room as his new roommate, Adrian told Marcus that he’d never come so close to killing a newborn vampire in his entire second life.
“Jesus fucking Christ and his entire manly kit, mate!” Adrian complained in Phillip’s second week. “That wank git has the sex drive of… of… I don’t even
know
if there’s an animal that fucks that much! And he’s a
bossy
fucker for a guy who won’t stick his dick anywhere but the crease in your thigh. ‘Up, down, sideways, goddammit, get your cock out of my stomach!’ Are you
sure
he was worth saving?”
One of the reasons Marcus had liked teaching school was the same reason Marcus got along so well at Green’s hill: he liked having a natural order of things and a hierarchy and an obvious chain of command and everything in its place. It was extremely difficult for him to contradict Adrian in anything—except this.
“Absolutely,” he said without any hesitation at all. “Look, Adrian, I know you don’t usually… you know, let us have the same dinner twice when we’re like this, but… do you think I could give it a go? He might trust me.”
Adrian frowned—and on Adrian, with that amazingly pretty playboy face, the expression looked good.
“You know there’s a reason we do that, right? Rotate people out of there?”
Marcus hadn’t wondered when he’d been going through it, but now, facing the idea of going back in there again with Phillip after he’d been helpless, rutting, and feeding in Marcus’s arms the last time, he had an idea.
“So we don’t get attached,” he replied softly.
Adrian nodded, that ever-present gentleness at the fore. “It happened with you, you know. That first bloke, Joshua? He had it bad.”
Marcus closed his eyes painfully. Joshua had been killed by hunters two years before in his wolf form, but Marcus remembered him as a laughing man with a wicked sense of humor, and as the fragile-seeming boy in his bed that first time Adrian had taught him to feed without savagery.
“I didn’t know.” God, he hadn’t. And he imagined Adrian had only told him in order for him to see how painful it could be. Well, lesson learned, he thought with a quaver to his jaw.
“There was nothing you could do,” Adrian told him now. “You weren’t interested in blokes after your change. Sensual and consensual, mate—you know that’s our only rule.”
Marcus nodded and gave the kind of grin he liked to think he’d learned from Adrian. “Well, I can’t promise it’ll be sensual, buddy, but I can promise that we’ll both be willing.”
Marcus went in to feed Phillip next.
“Oh joy!” Phillip snarled, his feeding face very much in evidence. “You again. God knows, I owe you so goddamned much, I just need you to rub my face in—”
“Jesus, shut up!” Marcus never told people to shut up, not even fractious students. “Do you want to be dead? Because I’m telling you, we can change your state right fucking quick, asshole!”
“Well, don’t expect me to be grateful!” Phillip snapped. “I’m locked up here like a prisoner—”
“Well, you
were
a
corpse
!” Marcus couldn’t help but remember him, eyes not even closed but glazing over quickly with death as he vomited blood. That gave him fear and a little bit of anger, and a determination not to take any of the guy’s shit until he saw reason. “Do you want to be one again?”
“I want to be
free
!”
“Then you need to learn to feed like a person and not like a savage!”
“I’m not a person anymore—”
“You’re not
human
,
asshole. That doesn’t mean you can’t be a person. Those people who’ve been coming in here and taking your shit, you think they haven’t been through this? You think becoming a shape-shifter or a vampire is a picnic for
anybody
?
They picked this life because it was better than the alternative—”
“Yeah, well, lucky them, to get a choice!”
“You think I got a choice?” Marcus yelled. By now they were both yelling and circling the room, feeding faces on, claws flexed, fangs extended. The vault, which had been nicely furnished when Marcus had lived there, was now a litter of broken chairs from Phillip’s rages when he was left alone, and the bed frame was cracked and splintered, leaving a bare mattress in the middle. The two of them kept the mattress between them as they faced off, and Marcus scented the air.
He could smell Phillip’s arousal from across the room.
Green often said that a creature’s two instincts when they turned were to fight it or fuck it. Good. At least Phillip was showing some interest in option B.
“You didn’t?” Phillip was suddenly still. For the first time in two weeks, his eyes stopped glowing, and Marcus saw them in the light from the bare bulb in the ceiling.