Chapter 2 #3
I twist in his arms, pulling him down to meet me as I press my lips to his neck, eliciting a heavy growl.
“Wait, baby. Not here.”
He pulls away, but I shake my head, reaching my hands beneath his shirt and dragging my nails across his back. He shudders at my touch, gripping my hips a little tighter.
“Oh, fuck,” he grunts. “You must be starving.”
Yes. I am.
I can feel the emptiness preparing to swallow me as we stand here, swaying to the music. But that’s not why I can’t let go of him.
There’s something else lurking in the pit of my stomach, a gnawing craving I’m not familiar with.
It tastes warm in my mouth, like red wine on the back of my tongue or like honey dripping down my throat.
I close my eyes as it settles in my chest, making it hard to breathe, and when I blink them open, my vision telescopes and my world tilts until all I can see is smooth, midnight skin, long, coarse locs, and a wide, round nose set between eyes of the purest peridot.
Elliot.
“Yes?”
His voice startles me, closer than I anticipated, but the rosy tint to my vision begins to clear as I focus on his face.
“You’re beautiful,” I mutter.
He lifts a single pierced brow.
“Who are you, and what have you done with Iris Ashbourne?” he asks, his glittering canines framed by thick, dark lips as he laughs.
I wonder what it would feel like to kiss them.
“Ha. You’re more than welcome to find out.”
What? Did I say that out loud?
“Yes, you did,” Elliot answers, frowning. “Are you ok…”
I don’t catch the end of his sentence. My ears have started to ring, and the swirling in my stomach is rising. But I nod anyway, pressing my face to his chest and listening to the heavy thump of his heart.
He stiffens for a moment, unsure of my embrace. But I don’t let go. Suddenly, I feel like I can breathe again. And when Elliot’s arms eventually come around me, albeit hesitantly, I’m unsure how I’m meant to let go.
I can’t remember the last time someone held me.
Maybe the day Isaac found him? Or maybe a few days later, when I found her.
Whenever it was, it’s been a while. So long, I almost forgot how good it feels.
As I stand here in his warm embrace, a strange thought crosses my mind.
Maybe he could hold me like this forever.
“Princess.” Elliot’s voice reverberates through his chest, and I look up to find him frowning at me.
“Are you all right?” he asks, his hand stroking down my back.
“Yeah, I’m fine. But I think I—”
“Elliot!”
Dame’s gruff shouting cuts through my words like a whip, and all eyes turn toward the man in question as the sound of arguing trickles in from the upper den.
“Ugh.” Elliot groans, dropping his head onto my shoulder. “Every fuckin’ time. I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
My chest tightens as he releases me, but I don’t get the chance to say anything before he turns to join the crowd now filtering out of the room, all of them excited about the prospect of a fight.
As I watch him disappear, my stomach churns, and bile rises in my throat.
Oh, gods!
I rush toward the back door, pushing past the crush of bodies, and stumbling out into the midnight air.
I don’t make it down the back steps before the contents of my stomach surge up and out of my mouth in a staggering hurl. But I do manage to aim for the bushes as I cling to the porch railing, heaving.
“Oh, fuck.” I groan, wiping my mouth with my sleeve and stumbling down the steps.
There is no boundary around Crescent House. The wolves need too much space to run. So the forest begins where the porch ends, and I barely make it past the treeline before I double over and retch again.
Holding on to an old stump, I wait for the second wave to pass, then spit into the earth to clear the sour taste from my tongue. But my throat still burns, and my heart still pounds in my head as I look up to see the moonlight blotted out by the canopy.
I weave clumsily through the woods, searching for the sky. When I find it, stretched over an empty clearing, all I can do is collapse onto a fallen log and wait for the wave of sickness to pass.
“Fates,” I moan, clutching my stomach as I speak to the stars. “What did I do to deserve that?”
The silence is deafening as I sit, waiting for an answer that will never come. They never answer.
“Iris?”
A voice calls through the dark, and I turn, knowing better than to answer aloud.
“What are you doing out here?” it asks.
Among the trees, there is a set of soft blue eyes looking back at me from a familiar, pale, wide-set face.
“Grey?”
Leaves crunch under his weight as he creeps into the moonlight, but my eyes are still adjusting to the dark, so I have to squint to focus on him.
“Hey,” he says, frowning. “You lost?”
“Nah, I just needed some air.”
I gesture toward the sky, and he nods, shoving his hands into his pockets.
He’s dressed in the same collared shirt and fitted pants as he was the other day.
I wonder if his closet consists only of this one shirt and pants. Or maybe he has a hundred of them in duplicate. A never-ending supply of ultra-crisp, ultra-white collared shirts and ultra-pressed, ultra-tight pants to go with them.
“What about you?” I ask. “Not having fun?”
“Oh, uhhh...” He pauses, glancing around the clearing. “I was just…looking for someone.”
I don’t ask who.
Mostly because I don’t care. But also because if I ask, he’ll answer and expect me to ask another question about that. And frankly, I’m already tired of his voice.
“Oh,” I say, leaning back on my hands and gazing up at the moon, hoping he’ll take the hint.
“Pretty, right?”
Ugggghhh.
My eyes roll before I turn back to face him.
“What?” I ask.
“The moon,” he clarifies. “She’s beautiful.”
I look at her again.
She’s almost full, but not quite. In the next few days, she will be.
Some will spend their evenings utterly unaware, while others will fall victim to the change.
But most will feel a sudden urge to look up at the sky and marvel at her beauty, then ask themselves, as if they are not the very reason, why something so beautiful hides herself away in the dark.
“Yes, she is,” I say, looking away.
Grey takes a seat beside me, and I do my best not to bristle.
He is staring at me. I cannot see it, but I can feel it.
I can always feel it like a curse branded on my back.
As his eyes bore into me, I absently wonder if she is as tired as I am.
I count down.
Three…
Two…
One.
A sweaty palm rests on my knee.
“She’s not the only one,” Grey adds, a small smile in his voice.
My gods. Can’t they ever think of something original to say?
“Stop touching me,” I say pointedly.
Grey lets out something like a laugh before squeezing my knee.
“Oh, come on. Smile a little, Ashbourne. It won’t—”
“Kill me?”
I finish the phrase for him, turning to look at his vacant expression.
With no light to highlight the hollows of his features, he looks rather ordinary. Generic. Like someone pulled a set of desired traits from a hat.
Tall, strong, handsome.
It’s enough to entice until you realize pushy and pathetic were also in the mix.
I lean away from him, putting as much distance between us as I can.
“You have three seconds to remove your hand from my leg,” I warn.
He smirks.
“Or what? You gonna make me get on my knees again?”
“Or I tell everybody you fuck like a fifteen-year-old boy fumbling for his dick in the dark.”
Grey jerks as if I’ve slapped him, hand falling away at last.
“Gods, you’re an ungrateful bitch,” he hisses.
My lip curls.
“What is there to be grateful for?”
“I fed you,” he snaps, as if that were some great gift to my kind rather than his singular purpose.
“Oh, you want me to say thank you?” I ask. “Is that it? You want me to thank you for your aimless stroking? For that bullshit feed you gave me? I had to call another man to finish your job for you. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not the picture of gratitude.”
My arms cross, and he stares at me, gears grinding as he tries to make sense of what I’m saying. I can’t be the first woman to tell him this. But if, by some chance, I am, I’m more than happy to deliver the message and save who knows how many women from his feckless fingers.
“Go back inside, Grey. There are plenty of unwitting girls for you to impress, but I’m not one of ‘em.”
I twist in my seat, dismissing him and excusing myself from the conversation, but he isn’t satisfied with its conclusion.
He stands abruptly.
“You know, Ashbourne. You’re not as hot as you think you are. The only reason anyone pays you any attention is that you’re easy. You think any guy gives a fuck about feeding you?”
He steps forward, leaning over me, blotting out the moonlight.
“I don’t care if I gave you crumbs. Because you know what I still got?” He pushes his fat finger at me. “You. And the best part is, we don’t even have to care what you want, because you’re guaranteed to like it. Like every other succ-slu—”
The echo of a smack fills the clearing as my hand comes across his face. He clutches his cheek, shocked. But only for a moment.
His expression quickly shifts, surprise morphing into insecurity, insecurity turning to rage, and before I can think to move, his hands rope around my throat.
“You greedy bitch!”
He spits the words in my face, his grip tight as he lifts me from my seat.
The air in my lungs seizes as he yanks me into the dirt, slamming me against the hard-packed earth. A loud crack sounds as my head comes down on a rock, not once, not twice, but three times. Until my ears are ringing once again and my vision blurs.
“You’re so fucking hungry?” he snaps, pressing me into the ground with his weight. “I’ll feed you!”
His hands squeeze, and my lips tingle as I claw at him.
“All of you!” Grey barks, spittle flying into my face. “Greedy bitches! Never satisfied!”
Blood vessels burst around my eyes as his hands constrict, and when my lids slide shut, and my breath leaves my lungs, he begins to laugh.
In that moment, I realize that Grey has made the very grave mistake of believing he can just kill me if he cannot have me.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Tales of succubi are steeped so heavily in desire and fantasy. They almost always forget how our legends end.
They almost always forget that our kiss is deadly.
I fist my hands in the dirt, grounding myself as I call upon my magic, and it answers without hesitation.
My teeth narrow in my mouth, another row sprouting from my gums, my nails sharpening into claws, and the strength in my muscles expands.
Like a dark urge made manifest by his arrogance, the change takes hold. All of it so I can more easily tear the flesh from his bones. But Grey is too busy laughing to notice.
It is a little funny, I suppose—how stupid he is.
The grating noise of his cackling is abruptly cut off as I rake my right hand over his face, digging my claws down to the bone. He screams as his blood sprays across my body, and I take the momentary distraction to bite through his jugular.
It comes away clean, one giant chunk of tendon and sinew.
For a moment, in the brief time between my tearing out his throat and the last breath leaving his body, he panics.
He tries desperately to stem the bleeding, clamping his hands over his neck as I shove him off me, scrambling to my feet.
There’s still hope in his eyes as I look down at him.
But I don’t tell him it’s too late. That my venom has already worked its way through his body, stunting his wolf’s ability to heal.
I don’t tell him he will die here in this clearing.
And I don’t tell him his pleas are nothing but gurgling, squelching sobs.
I merely watch as he shudders and twitches, waiting for the moment he goes limp.
And when he does, all I can do is stare at his mutilated body.
He looks ugly.
Eyes bloodshot. Face pale. As if he’s been strangled.
But the gaping hole in his neck is evidence to the contrary, along with the pieces of him now smothering me.
I can taste his blood in my mouth, feel it sticking between my fingers, and I cringe as I look down at my hands.
“Fucking boys.”