Page 7 of The Tainted and the Tamed
Haruki
Unease blanketed Haruki’s thoughts as the late-rising moon crept higher in the night sky. Deep in the ravine, Chiyo’s cold body lay beneath the rocks. He counted on the scent of sulfur to hide the smell of decay.
So he could hide his monstrous nature once again.
He’d never meant to hurt Chiyo. But after he’d fucked her into oblivion, she just lay there, a moaning, tantalizing mess, her body still tight from her peak.
Again, she’d begged him.
He was furious now at how eager he’d been to oblige. Even as the sun rose, she was still begging him for more.Do it until I can’t breathe. Until it hurts.
He’d gotten too excited, was all. When she’d screamed in ecstasy, his body ached for release.
Then she’d said the words she never should have. Not to him.Hurt me,Chiyo whined.Give me pleasure and pain.
Before he could even think to stop himself, he replied with the most exquisite pain imaginable: a life-consuming bite into her pulsing neck.
Even then, she screamed—first in pain, then in pleasure.Again, she’d bid him,harder. It was like he could hear her sultry taunts even now.
He bit her again, this time on her pert breast. And the third time—well, she had such a long, pretty neck.
Haruki was out of his mind with both pleasure and hunger by then. He could’ve fucked a hundred women and not been sated. For that was not what he craved. His sire had made it clear.
No matter how many of your old lordly trapping you don, no matter what power or prestige you rise to, you will still be only a monster. A monster who is afraid of himself.
And when that monstrous hunger struck, only one thing would do.
So he drank from her—not in the way he had earlier, when she’d invited his mouth between her legs. In the way of the vampire.
It was only their seventh night together. On their first, she’d broken into his quarters and found him hunched over his second empty bottle of sake, alone as always in his private garden. He’d refused and told her to get out; she had seen his face, and was treading where she ought not to go. But then she’d removed her cotton robe, and slid her fingers down her belly, lower and lower—
I know what I want,she said.I want you to know what I want, too.
Well. He was a vampire, not dead.
It was foolish that after so many centuries, he still bore this weakness. He was too prone to flattery, and all too happy to find a woman interested and willing to sleep with him.
This can’t happen unless you resign, he’d warned Chiyo.
You’ll have my letter then, she said,first thing.
But she’d never given it, and he’d accepted her empty promises all too quickly.
Was he your grandfather?she’d asked him one night.The first Chairman Asami.
For the mind would find a dozen unlikely explanations before ever landing onvampire.
If only he’d been bold enough to tell her. None of this would’ve happened.
As he paced his quarters, he suddenly couldn’t stop imagining Chiyo crawling her way out from between those sulfur-stained rocks where he’d buried her, stretching her punctured neck and walking beneath this same moon. It was knowing what he might have caused her to become:
A wraith.
Wraiths were the worst of their kind. To become a vampire, a person could not be fully drained. Something needed to remain to keep the body functioning, and it required an exchange of blood with the sire. His attempts to give Chiyo some of his blood to save her had failed—too little too late, after he’d sucked her dry.
A bloodless body could rise as a wraith.Chiyocould. And she wouldn’t think twice about killing anyone in her path. Wraiths were a far cry from the person they had been.
They were the sources of the worst of vampire lore. They did not care who their blood came from, and their hunger could not be sated until hundreds were dead. All vampires were sworn to destroy any wraiths they created or discovered. If left unchecked, a single wraith could wipe a town off the planet in one night.
