Page 68 of Now Comes the Mist

Vlad laughs against my skin. “I asked you before why you think it is yours to decide?”

He presses his brutal face against mine and kisses me. I gasp for air. It is like breathing in winter or feeling the first shock of cold as I dive into the sea. Somehow, he keeps his fangs from cutting me and maneuvers hismouth so that I only feel his lips forcing mine open and his greedy tongue tasting me. It is nothing like my kisses with Arthur. There is an underlying malice, almost hatred, as though he has realized that he has played right into my hands. I can taste the rusty wine of my own blood in his mouth, heady and thick and metallic.

I cling to him for dear life, my arms around his neck, and let his mouth have its way with me. He pulls his face away for a moment, his eyes glinting as I struggle to take in air. And then, without warning, his hand on my thigh slides across the drenched seam between my legs in one hard stroke, rough and slow. Electricity shoots through me and I throw my head back once more, almost weeping for more. He laughs again, pleased, and moves his fingers again in a sweet, savage glide from the back of me to the front. I am shaking uncontrollably, and my arms and legs are wrapped so tightly around him that I do not think even his prodigious strength could dislodge me.

“Do you think Arthur would know how to do this?” he murmurs against my mouth as his long fingers stroke me over and over. “Answer me.”

“No,” I gasp because I know it is what he wants to hear. Somehow, my untrained body knows what to do. I arch my back, my hips moving against his hand. I have lost all my senses. I can no longer see the churchyard around us, smell the soil, or hear the crickets singing. My entire universe has been reduced to this single point of contact between his hand and my body.

But I have never been one to relinquish the upper hand, so I lean forward and claim his mouth with mine, careless of the fangs. One of them pricks the tender underside of my lip and he sucks in the bead of blood that forms. “Give me what you gave to Jonathan,” I breathe again as my hand slides down his chest to the rigid swell I know I will find in his lap.

Vlad shifts beneath me, removing the fabric that remains between us. “Another request?”

“No,” I say. “That was a command this time. Can’t you tell?”

His face tightens. “You have no power over me,” he says through gritted teeth, but his actions disagree. His strong hands move to my bottom and lift me into the air, holding me helplessly crushed against him with my face just an inch above his. “Arthur is nothing. You will not belong to him. I am all you will ever know. Do you understand me?”

My body aches for him. I try, desperately, to lower myself, but he tightens his grip on me.

“Do you understand me, Lucy?” he asks, his voice like steel.

“Yes, I understand,” I whimper.

He smiles, pleased to be torturing me into a frenzy. “To whom do you belong?” he asks. “Tell me or you will not have your reward.”

Even in the heat of my desire, even in the agony of pleasure, I think,I belong to myself.But he is watching me, his blood-ringed eyes relentless and cruel, and I am dying for what he can give me. “I belong to you, Vlad,” I say, panting. “I am yours for the taking.”

In one quick, deliberate movement, he lowers me, and I cry out in relief and surprise as he plunges to the core of me, burstingly hard. There is no great pain, certainly nothing compared to his bite, but the sensation is sharp, foreign, and freezing cold. There is no other word for it but invasion. He holds still, giving me time to adjust to the frigidity of him inside my own burning heat. I shift my hips tentatively, leaning back and then rocking toward him, and feel the satisfaction of hearing him utter a low, pained groan. So much for not having power over him.

He presses his lips to my ear. “I’m going to hold you to those words.”

And then he lifts me off him and brings me back down again, hard and rough. I cry out as my body envelops him, my muscles tense with pleasure. He repeats the movement again and again, controlling the slow and steady rhythm, and as on the night of our harp duet, I feel as though I am climbing a hill with mad eagerness, starving for the thrill of plummeting down the other side. I am there, upon the threshold, about to fall … when he suddenly stops. He has lifted me just high enough to still feel the icy edge of him between my legs. I moan and struggle against his broad chest, raving and wild for completion, but he only looks straight into my eyes.

“I will ask you what I asked you that night on the terrace,” Vlad says, breathing hard, his arms like a vise around me. His cold black eyes rake down my face to my throat and back. “This is what you truly want? You want me to bite you?”

I have no dignity left. No pretension. I have given him what a good girl would save for her husband, offered myself up like a flower to be plucked. I have made my decision and he knows it, too, from the flash of disdain I see in his gaze, still repulsed that I insist upon my right to choose. But he wants to hear my consent to seal our bond like a spell spoken in the night air.

Somewhere in my haze of desire, my rational mind must still be functioning, for I hear myself say, “I want immortality. And I want to feelpleasure, and not to be so ill again as to worry my family. Will you promise me these things?”

He does not promise. He looks at me, waiting.

And I am so far gone, so greedy for everything he has given and can give me, that I hear myself say, “Yes. Yes, Vlad, I want you to bite me.”

He lowers me in one sharp, deliberate movement, joining us together once more. I slide down the length of him to the root, gasping at the intense, delicious cold as he positions his fangs over the wounds in my neck and bites down hard. There is pain—of course there is, searing and red-hot, but not nearly as unbearable as before. I am too focused on where my naked skin meets his and how the jarring shock has risen to a crescendo as I plummet, crying out. His mouth remains on my throat, drinking lazily before he pulls his fangs away. We hold each other, his arms as tightly around me as mine are around him, and stay motionless for a long time.

Slowly, the churchyard comes back into focus around me. I rest my head on Vlad’s shoulder and look, heavy-lidded, at the rows of graves behind him, the silent witnesses to what we have done. WhatIhave done, gladly and greedily. The Westenra mausoleum, too, was watching the destruction of my virtue and my life as I have known it. I stroke the back of Vlad’s head, my fingers tangled in his soft hair. My limbs feel heavy and drowsy and weak.

“Do you hate me for what I’ve chosen?” I whisper.

“Would it matter if I did?”

“No.” I pull away to look at him, dazed. His mouth is stained with my blood.

“You are the only one who has ever demanded this of me,” Vlad says, his face impassive. “Everyone else screams and fights and begs. Everyone else tries to run away. But you, who dare to desire this, expect my approval for that?”

“No. I expect only your understanding.”

He runs his icy fingertips over my cheek. “Lucy,” he says.

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