8. Bear-Viking
EIGHT
BEAR-VIKING
Jack
M y feet hit stone with a dull thud, and sudden, despairing sadness overwhelmed me.
What the fuck?
I pinched the bridge of my nose, willing my eyes to stop prickling, my throat to stop closing over, as Baxter joined me.
“You’re not freaking out on me, are you, Jack?” Baxter asked in a low voice that seemed to be swallowed by the darkness.
“No,” I grunted, forcing myself to look around, to ignore the weird, emotional outburst that was still lurking. I hadn’t cried in forever. Not when I saw Blaire fucking Roman … not when she told me she loved me like a brother, that she’d never felt the way I felt about her …
But here I was, in a fucking stone cave underneath a European theme park, and I felt like howling in misery that had come on with no warning, for zero fucking reason.
She’s sad … she’s despairing. You should be with her.
I ignored the monster and pushed through the miserable feelings.
Focus.
“What now?” I growled to Baxter. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, which wasn’t really all that dark, after all. A long, narrow tunnel led off in front of us, lit with a dim, greenish light. I turned back to Baxter, finding him blinking frantically, completely disoriented.
He couldn’t see. My monster eyes were a perk he didn’t have.
I imagined slamming his head against the wall while he was blind. That cheered me up more than it should have.
Or maybe not enough.
“The tunnel ends with another door,” Baxter said, his voice thin. His scent was sour again. “Press your hand to the metal panel in the middle, and the guard will open it.”
“Guard?” I asked. “You said nothing about a guard.”
Baxter sniffed. “Don’t worry. Asbj?rn is expecting me.”
What sort of fucking name was Asbj?rn?
Baxter gripped a fistful of the back of my shirt, and with a grunt, I headed off down the tunnel, him trailing helplessly after me. The air warmed the further along we got until sweat beaded on my forehead, and I stood in front of a thick timber door, a circular panel glinting in the center of it.
“Your palm, on the panel,” Baxter hissed, not letting go of my shirt. I pressed my skin against the metal, expecting it to be cold. Instead, it was almost burning to the touch. I wanted to flinch away, but something told me that if I did, I’d fail at Baxter’s little task.
So I gritted my teeth and held still, shocked that I couldn’t hear the sizzle of burning skin or smell cooking flesh as my palm fried against the panel. The pain seared through me enough to shift my claws back into regular human nails. I wondered through the haze of agony, if that was the point, to prevent anyone waiting here from being in anything other than human form before they entered.
The door swung open, golden light streaming out. I tugged my hand back, scanning my palm. No blood, no burn marks. It was completely fine.
I blinked at it in disbelief, then up at the open doorway, my beast eyes rapidly adjusting. A shadow blocked the light, and I glanced up … and up …
At a fucking polar bear.
“What the fuck?” I hissed, stepping back and bumping into Baxter. He tripped, hitting the floor with a thud and a grunt.
“Ah. If it isn’t the Head Honcho gracing us with his presence,” the white monster growled. Its words were difficult to make out through an animal voice box and a thick, Danish accent. It bared its teeth in what looked like a sneer, black, beady eyes trained down on the human, pulling himself up off the floor.
The bear leaned a monstrous paw against the door frame. I eyed the black claws and shivered. My fingers tingled, and I stuffed my hands into my pockets.
The eyes flicked to me, the huge jaw twitching. “And … you brought one of your little experiments with you, I see.” The bear inhaled a long, snuffling breath, and his eyes widened, then turned to Baxter, narrowing once more.
“I suppose you handpicked this one.” The words were low, menacing.
I had no fucking idea what was going on.
“Asbj?rn. Since when do you do doorman duties at your own club?” Baxter asked, flicking dust from the decorated shoulder of his dress uniform.
Jesus fucking Christ. This was Asbj?rn?
The bear chuckled. The sound was chilling.
“Since I was expecting an important guest. Two important guests,” he added with a sidelong glance at me.
What the fuck?
He stepped aside, gesturing with a paw the size of a dinner plate for us to enter. Baxter poked me in the back, and I stepped through the doorway into the light.
The space was small and looked like it had been carved out of the rock. There were little alcoves with red velvet curtains lined up along both sides and another heavy timber door at the far end. This room was empty, except for the giant fucking polar bear, Baxter, and me, but sounds of music and laughter came from beyond the slightly ajar door at the far end of the space.
“Does the … youngster know what lies on the other side of the door?” the bear asked, voice deep and gruff. He glanced at me and then away again. I got a creepy feeling that he both wanted to stare at me and couldn’t stand looking at me.
I laughed nervously.
“I think I can cope with a bit of fucking and blood drinking,” I managed, my voice rough. I cleared my throat.
The polar bear faced me, those eyes boring into mine. “How old are you, youngster?”
I straightened, folding my arms over my chest. “Old enough that seeing people fuck isn’t going to freak me out,” I replied. After climbing through Blaire’s bedroom window to find Roman balls deep in her, his teeth in her neck, I thought I could probably cope with just about anything.
The polar bear chuckled.
“We’ll see,” he rumbled, and before my horrified eyes, he began to shift. His body shrunk, fur pulling back inside his skin, paws becoming hands, snout morphing grotesquely into a human nose. Blond hair sprouted from his scalp, and within less than a minute, he was a fully human Viking dude.
A completely naked Viking dude. A tattoo of a roaring bear covered his chest, swirling patterns filled with weird symbols snaking out from it, down both arms. His long blond hair was a tangled mess, obscuring his face, but the rest of him was … just out there for everyone to see.
My stupid eyes dropped lower, and I quickly squeezed them shut. But of course, the split-second glimpse of his massive swinging dick had seared itself into my brain. The bear-Viking laughed again, his voice human now.
“You can’t even look upon a naked male without blushing like a virgin. I cannot wait to see your face when you step through this door.”
I opened my eyes, hating how hot my face had gotten when he’d said ‘virgin’.
Sure, I might not have actually done the deed. But I knew how to make a girl moan. I’d honed my talents over four years at high school. One of them had even nicknamed me ‘The Tongue’. She’d been the closest thing I’d had to a girlfriend all through high school.
Stupidly, I’d been saving the main event for when Blaire finally realized that she wanted me. Except she never had wanted me. Everything I’d felt … that had been completely one-sided.
“Does he need to leave a … deposit, to get inside?” Baxter asked, his head jerking in my direction. I narrowed my eyes.
“A fucking what ?” I asked. Asbj?rn the Viking, who had ducked into one of the curtained spaces, reappeared, wearing a pair of black jeans and a white shirt, unbuttoned over his massive chest. He pulled his long, blond hair back off his face, tying it into an untidy man-bun.
For the first time, I got a proper look at his face. I gaped.
I could have been staring in a fucking mirror. His face … it was my fucking face. Well, my face if I was maybe a decade older. He looked like he was in his mid-thirties. I’d thought that Strangers didn’t age once they were immortal.
But this guy definitely looked like a Viking, so he was probably thousands of years old, and life was fucking hard back then.
Still … it was like staring at future me. And it was fucked up.
Asbj?rn watched me carefully. His eyes were the only part of his face that didn’t match mine. They were pale blue to my hazel.
“Not tonight,” was all the giant Viking said. He turned and swung the door wide and moved aside, ushering me past him with a smirk.
I scowled and barged past him into a massive amphitheater. And I choked on my own saliva.
I coughed violently, sucking in a shocked breath at what greeted me. The sights … and the smells . The air was thick with a salty, musky odor. It stuck to the inside of my nostrils. And there was no mistaking what that smell was.
It was sweaty, dirty sex.
“And there is the money shot,” Asbj?rn said with a grin, coming to stand beside me.
“Can we please take this to your office, Asbj?rn,” Baxter said, his voice disgusted.
But I couldn’t look away.
In the center of the cavernous space, lit with spotlights, was a stage. A stage that rotated.
A naked man— definitely human , the monster within me informed me gleefully—was strapped to a table, legs spread wide. Two females—also naked—were sharing his ragingly hard cock. With their mouths. Tongues sliding up and down that length. The human was moaning, his hips jerking every time their tongues darted up him.
As I watched, frozen, the two females pulled away from his dick and kissed one another deeply, their tongues tangling. One gripped the human’s cock, stroking him slowly.
“Fuck, bite me, please!” the human begged. I gaped. He … he actually wanted to be bitten? To be drunk from?
The females giggled, their perky tits bouncing as they turned back to him. One of them climbed his body, planting her pussy on his face. He moaned, his cock jerking, his jaw working as he ate her. She rocked on him, head thrown back, panting as she rode his mouth.
The other female bent to his cock, licking it once from root to tip. Then she widened her mouth, and even from a distance, I could see her teeth lengthen, sharpen. I couldn’t breathe.
She tilted her head, sinking her teeth into the length of him, moaning low in her throat. I hissed, imagining the pain of those teeth in that sensitive spot.
But the man roared, and it wasn’t in pain. Fuck, he was coming . It splashed all over his stomach. And it didn’t stop. He kept groaning into the pussy of the female on top of him, who cried out as she found her own climax. More and more cum jetted onto his stomach as he spasmed.
The female finally let go of his cock, licking a little trickle of blood from him, and the other climbed off his face. Together, they began cleaning up the mess on his stomach with their tongues. The human watched, his eyes greedy as they slurped at his cum soaked abs. He’d fucking loved it.
I turned away, gritting my teeth against the hot spear of arousal that shot straight through my abdomen to my dick.
This was fucking insane. He’d been begging her to drink his blood. He’d come … longer and harder than I’d thought it was possible for a dude to come … from her drinking blood from his dick.
Remember what it felt like when Blaire drank from your wrist? the monster sneered. It’s like that but so much better. And when it’s with YOUR female …
I ignored the voice, letting my eyes rove around the rest of the enormous room. But there was no reprieve from the fucking … fucking.
Tables surrounded the stage, filled with Strangers. Some watched the stage avidly. Some chatted and sipped from glasses of blood or alcohol.
But a lot of them were openly boning. Women—human and immortal, the monster informed me as I inhaled—riding males. Necks being offered up as cocks were stroked, as fingers dipped inside exposed pussies. Fucking fanged freaks nicking veins in the groins of human women and drinking frantically as the women writhed and cried out. They were coming. From being fed from.
And none of them looked like they were upset about being there. Baxter had said these places existed so humans could be safely fed from with their consent.
But I’d never imagined they would actually enjoy it. I never imagined they’d fucking come like a geyser over it.
“Close your mouth, youngster,” Asbj?rn murmured. “If you think this is extreme, you should see what goes on in the private rooms.”
“What sort of fucking world is this?” I muttered, my fists firmly in my pockets, which was fooling literally no one.
Asbj?rn’s eyes flicked to my crotch, his smirk widening.
“It’s your world, young Shifter,” he replied, clapping me on the shoulder. “Embrace it. We like to fuck. And we like to feed. No one is breaking any laws in here. Everyone is adult. Everyone is consenting—Candies, Drinkers and Shifters. Which is more than I can say for …” His words trailed off, and suddenly he strode off to the right, and into a corridor. Baxter shot me a murderous look, jerked his head in the direction Asbj?rn had taken, and stalked after him.
I slouched along behind Baxter, feeling like whatever I’d gotten myself into, I was in a mile over my head.