Chapter 11
Thorn
We watch the car drive away, and for a long moment, neither one of us can fucking believe it.
“Did she…”
“He was driving,” Krall says.
We’ve been betrayed over a plate of bacon and eggs. I take another bite, then I wonder if I should have done that. She has, of course, already been stolen.
“We need to get after her. Now.”
“What are we going to do? Are we going to steal a car and chase after them?”
Krall’s fist hits the table, making the dishes jiggle, and other people in the diner look at us with complete confusion. We have got to stop freaking out the locals. We’ve been freaking people out everywhere we’ve been.
“Sorry,” I say to everybody and nobody in particular as Krall storms out. “Lover’s tiff.”
People understand that, even though I’ve explained nothing. I make sure the meal is paid for and follow him out to the parking lot, where he is in tense negotiations with a family of four.
“I’ll buy your car,” he’s saying. “But I need it now. This instant.”
While Krall negotiates with the man of the family, two small boys are staring at the pair of us with absolute fascination. I’m pretty sure kids know that we’re shifters. Adults aren’t as perceptive.
“Mummy, why does that man have such long hair?” The kid is probably around eight, and has his hat on backward. He has a smaller brother who is holding a plastic sword.
“Because he grew it long, darling,” his mother says patiently.
“Can I grow my hair long too?”
“No, you have to cut yours for school.”
“How long would it take me to grow my hair that long?”
“Oh, years,” his mother says. “Hair grows an inch every few months.”
“I might not even want long hair then.”
“No, darling, probably not.”
“Fine,” the father says. “But we’ll need a minute to get all our things…”
Krall has already snatched the keys from the man and is hurling toys out of the back of a suburban vehicle.
Kids rush to catch them, the woman looks thoroughly annoyed about this turn of events, and the man is busy biting a gold nugget over and over while saying, “We’ll go on a longer holiday next year. ”
“You drive,” Krall says, throwing the keys at me. “I’m too angry.”
I take the wheel, glad for the opportunity. I’m a much better and faster driver than the old man. Krall gets in. His seat has a fluffy pink headrest on it. He doesn’t notice. That means he’s truly furious.
“I can’t believe he has done this.” Krall is angrier than I have ever seen him. “Taken her home to try to break that fucking…”
“What’s he done?”
“He thinks he can use her.”
“Sexually?”
“No.”
“Tell me what he wants with her?”
“We don’t talk about it, especially with you, but our family is cursed. The darkness of the pack’s lands is due to a magical,” his face twists up at the word magical, “curse in which female familial blood must be shed in order to appease the sun. That’s why Mother died when she did.”
I wish they’d told me that before. It feels like I need to know things like this, secret curses lurking in backgrounds. I push down that question though, because I know the answer. I’m the youngest male of the family, and I couldn’t have done anything about it anyway even if I’d wanted to.
“Doesn’t seem to have helped much. Weather out that way is shit.”
“Yes. It is. But he thinks that just means more blood is necessary.”
“Sort of like the way we were supposed to die to help Tabby’s pack?”
“Exactly.”
“She didn’t let it happen.”
“No, but he will do it.”
“You think he’d kill her?”
“I think he’d do anything to save the family.”
“But she’s our family. That’s what happened when we all mate bonded the night she saved us.”
Krall snorts. “Must be nice to still be young enough to believe in bonds.”
“The mate bond is real,” I say. “I felt it the moment I saw her. I know she’s going to be okay. And I know Skor’s not going to get her killed. He has a plan, I bet.”
Krall snorts again with real annoyance. “One day you’re going to learn that every man has a plan, and none of them are good for their mates.”
“That’s cynical. We’re going to go rescue ours.”
Krall pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.
“I thought you quit.”
He flips one into his mouth and snaps a flame at the end of it. He breathes in deep, then exhales in a long stream. The car fills with the smell of burning plants. I breathe in too, passively taking in the same poison.
“Where we are going, and what we have to do, this isn’t going to matter. We are all going to die, boy. Make your peace with that now.”
Tabby
I wake bound.
I cannot move.
Magic has been done to me. I know it. I would have woken up otherwise, when the ropes started to go on, when I felt my power being sapped.
I would have fought back. But Skor is able to do things nobody else is capable of doing, and now his cock is at my mouth, and my legs are tied spread, so that someone might very well be able to fuck me there too.
Outside, the moon is high, but I cannot move, and cannot shift, because of the chains wrapped around me. They are silver, and they are sapping my energy, stopping me from shifting.
Skor pushes his cock inside my mouth, the head of his rod pushing relentlessly into my bound frame. His hands cup the side of my face as I try to swallow his length.
What the fuck is he doing? He’s a sick asshole, but I thought he was happy with me. This feels like punishment. Or maybe it’s just something terrible.
“Good girl,” he says. “You’re awake.” He pushes his cock deeper into my mouth. “And you’re being so obedient for me.”
I’m not being obedient. I can’t fucking move, and he knows it.
He pulls out of my mouth, sliding one hand under my chin to keep my face up to him.
“You’re confused,” he says. “You don’t know why you’re tied up.
Don’t know why you’re here. Don’t know why I came for you in those mountains, why I made them go all the way there for you.
It’s because you’re special, Tabby. You have something in you I’ll never have, something that I need.
And it’s not a cock, and it’s not a baby. ”
He walks around me slowly and spreads my legs. I’m wet, for some sick reason. My body has been responding to him like it belongs to him, like he owns me and can do whatever he wants to me. He’s a very bad man, and a worse wolf. But my pussy grips his cock like he’s all I have ever wanted.
He pushes in slowly, then starts to fuck me roughly. His cock is deep inside me, a vicious thrusting thing.
“What are you doing? What did I do wrong?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, baby,” he says, running his hand up my torso and pressing me further down against the bed. “This is a reward, or a thank you.”
He pushes deeper inside my pussy, fucking me with an insistence that is clearly more about mating than it is about sensual connection.
“I want you to have this one last time,” he says. “An orgasm suited to you. I want to knot in you. I want to come in you. I want life to be inside you when we face death.”
My stomach clenches, and my pussy tingles.
This is fucked up. This is deeply wrong.
And I am about to come. Skor reaches down to pinch my clit, forcing me to orgasm as his knot inflates inside me.
He’s coming inside me. He’s filling me up.
Again. He’s been so insistent from the beginning about breeding me.
I come just as he commands me to. I take his knot and his seed, my pussy walls milking every bit of seed deep inside me. The bonds around me hold me in place further, making movement impossible. In this moment I am nothing but a vessel for his seed.
When he is satisfied that there is nothing further left to push inside me, he slides free and leaves me there for what feels like an indeterminate period of time. I feel completely filled, utterly used, and entirely controlled.
“This is the last night you will be as you are,” Skor says, walking around me slowly.
“You’ve been an innocent little brat, running about the mountains, killing the odd monster, and slaying the occasional vampire.
But those powers you have were not bestowed on you because you were made to run wild.
They were given because they needed to be used. ”
He is dressed head to toe in black, and when he looks at me there is a particular intensity in his gaze that makes my stomach quiver. He wants something from me. More than mating. More than breeding. He wants me to do something for him.
“Will they be used while I’m silvered?”
“No,” he chuckles. “The chains were just for fun. I started wondering if you might be resistant to silver, but of course you’re not.”
I haven’t even tried to get out, but that’s not the point. He was testing me, and I’ve passed.
He lifts the silver from my bound form and draws me up to stand in front of him. I feel a hot rush between my legs as his seed starts sliding out of me.
“I am sorry.” He strokes the hair back from my head. There’s something in his tone I don’t like, cruel and sad at the same time. Like he has to hurt me, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge he enjoys the idea.
“What is going on, Skor?” My voice is shaking.
My head feels light. The darkness I always felt from him is starting to extend out of his body and wrap around me.
I feel a sense of destiny in this moment, as if it were somehow unavoidable.
This had to happen, the same way the night in the mountains had to happen.
Looking into his eyes, I wonder if I have ever made a choice at all.
“There’s a curse,” he says. “It relates to the weather, to the vampires, to the magic inside me. A long time ago, one of my great-great-grandmothers made a bid for power. It was granted, but at a great price.”
“The weather?”
“My grandmother got the power she wanted, but the sky became overcast and the vampires started to walk the land, and they took each and every one of the females of my family besides her. From then on, the women of my bloodline were promised to the vampire horde. The vampires take them once they have bred a female heir, to ensure a constant supply of our blood. My mother died after my sister was born. I want to end the curse. I have to. This can’t happen to Sali. ”
“You want me to die to save your little sister?”
“I don’t think you’ll die,” he says. “I don’t know what it is about you, but there’s something that just refuses to submit to anything, including fate.”
“So how does the curse get broken? Someone made a deal with a devil decades ago and now the vampires have an endless supply of your family’s blood?”
“If you’re here, in the house, if you can call down sunlight whenever you want, then you can keep her safe.”
I look at him long and hard. “There is another option.”
“Oh?”
“You could just… move. Nobody is making you keep inhabiting a cursed house in the middle of a cursed horde of vampires in a place where it rains all the time forever. I can barely call down a sunbeam here. But back in the mountains? I might be able to protect her there.”
“My father would never allow it. We have to honor the curse. We have to break it. It can’t be tricked. It can’t be escaped. It’s in me, Tabby. It would come after me. It has to be defeated. They have to be defeated.”
He picks me up and carries me to the window.
Outside, there are more vampires than I’ve ever seen in my life.
They are gathered in the village square like an army, though that implies too much thought and planning.
They are here because I am here. They’ve been attracted to the gravity of the fate that binds all of us, dead and alive.
“This is what you are here for,” he says. “This is what is coming for me. For you. For all of us.”
I see an insurmountable obstacle, a force of twisted, fetid hunger.
A sense of calm washes over me as that old sense of destiny surges back into me.
He’s right. This is what I’m here for. He may have stolen me, violated me, betrayed me, but none of that changes a single thing about what is going to happen here.
I say the only thing that can be said in a moment like this, where the inevitable cannot be avoided, only experienced.
“Let’s go.”