Chapter 327 - Utah, One Week Ago part 12

"You're still warm," Miranda said, snuggling up against his body. "It feels nice."

The blood of his victim was rapidly cooling, but its warmth had not yet fully fled his flesh. He would be cold marble again soon, but for now his skin was still somewhat warm, still slightly flush and soft.

"Does it ever bother you?" Sydney asked, looking up at the stars.

Out here, away from the cities with all their smog and artificial lights, the heavens were limitless. Sydney knew that he could see far more deeply into the heavens than a mortal man or woman could see. To his enhanced vision, the sky was brighter, more densely packed with stars. Mortals saw a dark plane glinting with diamond dust when they looked up at the night sky. Sydney looked up and saw a universal fireworks show.

"Does what ever bother me?" Miranda asked. Her hand was on his belly, her cheek on his chest. He could tell by her scent that his proximity was arousing her. She slid her thigh up his leg, unbuttoned his shirt and slipped her hand inside to stroke his bare chest.

"That I kill other human beings," he said. "That I feed on their blood. That I… enjoy it."

"Bad people," she said. "Killers. Rapists."

Sydney considered such killings a service to the species, but he was never quite sure how Miranda felt about it. Her scent was always very strange when he returned from the hunt: excitement, fear, curiosity, disgust. It was the excitement that nagged at him the most. She always wanted to make love when he returned from the hunt, and he knew when she was kissing him that she was tasting the blood in his mouth.

She had cried tonight after he finished with his victim. She had wept into her hands, body trembling, as Sydney rose up from the killer, licking the blood from his lips. The tears were reassuring. He sometimes wept himself. But now she was hot for him. She had moved her hand from his chest to the crotch of his trousers. Her warm little fingers worked feverishly at his cock, kneading his organ through the fabric of his jeans.

"If it was a good person I would enjoy it just the same," Sydney said. "That's what's so terrible about what I am. I only hunt the wicked, like my maker taught me to do, but I would enjoy it every bit as much if it was a good person. Maybe even more. The depravity of it would make it more exciting for me."

Miranda's hand was at the buckle of his belt now. Moving with more urgency, she unbuckled his belt and loosened it.

"I fantasize about it sometimes," Sydney confessed, staring up at the heavens with his strangely luminous eyes. "Feeding on the innocent. Sneaking into their bedrooms at night, just like some horror movie monster. Throwing myself on them. Tearing their flesh open with my fangs. Drinking their blood as they struggle with me."

Now his cock was in her hand, rigidly erect but cool. The veins running up the shaft pulsed rapidly beneath her palm. She tugged the supple hood back from the glans, exposing the sensitive crown of his organ, her breath coming quick and harsh.

"It's a sort of rape," Sydney said as Miranda dipped her head down to his groin and took him in her mouth. He gasped as her lips, moist and soft and fiery hot, enveloped his sex. "What I do to them… it is a terrible, violent thing. It is unnatural, feeding on their blood. Vampirism is a form of cannibalism you know. But it feels so good to take their lives, to exert my will upon them, to hurt them. It feels like vengeance when I kill the innocent in my fantasies. Like I am taking my revenge on the world. Sometimes… sometimes I think about doing that to you, Miranda."

Miranda moaned around his cock, a whimper of intense sexual arousal. She took him as deeply as she could, gagging a little but determined to subvert her own discomfort for his pleasure, an offering of sorts, her pain for his sexual gratification, like a sacrifice of blood. She pressed forward, feeling the bulbous tip of his prick slip into her throat, and his hand came down on the back of her head, pushing her even further. She pressed her free hand between her legs and squeezed her thighs together.

"I will be killing you when I give you the Living Blood," he said. "I'll be killing the human, mortal, part of you. Your heart will stop beating. Your flesh will turn cold and white. You won't be you anymore. You'll become a predator, a cold and vicious predator, another being altogether with the memories of the person you once were."

He looked down, saw that he was completely inside of her, saw the tears standing in her bulging eyes, her face purpling from lack of oxygen, the veins in her temples standing out. Frightened, he pulled her away.

"No!" she gasped. "I want it!

"It could change you," he said. "You know that. My body doesn't produce semen anymore. When I ejaculate, it is the Living Blood that issues from my organ, not the seed of a living man."

"I know!" she said. "That's how I want you to change me, Syd. That's how I want it to be. Don't put it off any longer. I can't bear it. I want it now! I want it tonight!"

He looked down at his manhood. It lay against his belly, stiff and white. He could give her what she wanted. He wanted to do it. But would it be enough? The fluid that issued from his organ was indeed the Living Blood, but it was a negligible amount in comparison to what his maker had given to him when he had transformed Sydney into an immortal. The ancient blood drinker had put his mouth over Sydney's and brought the Strix up from his stomach in a great torrent, but he had also told Sydney that the change could be wrought by feeding a mortal directly from the veins, or even, rarely, through the act of sex.

He released Miranda's hair, acquiescing to her desires, and she bent back eagerly to the task.

Perhaps if he concentrated, willed the seed to issue forth more profusely, he could provide her with enough of the Blood to trigger the transformation.

He closed his eyes and let his head fall back, enjoying the sensations, relinquishing all control to the woman, giving himself over to her.

"Do you love me?" he asked.

In answer, she redoubled her efforts.

"The end is nigh," he warned her, smiling faintly. His eyes roamed behind their lids as ecstasy approached. Stars, even in that darkness. Twinkling. Pulsating. When you looked into the sky, you were looking back in time.

And then…

And then…

!!!SYDNEY!!!

The voice battered its way inside his head, piercing his skull as if the bone was as thin as eggshell. Sydney yelped and arched his back, clutching his temples in his hands. Miranda, thinking him in the throes of passion, battened onto him, grasping his trembling thighs to better hold onto him.

But it was not passion that contorted his body, that moved him to thrash on the blanket they had spread beneath the desert sky. It was pain, and a sudden foreign presence in his thoughts, an intruding mind whose invasion of his psyche was very much like being raped.

As Sydney fought to repel the alien presence, another series of words formed in his consciousness. They were very carefully enunciated, as if spoken to a simpleton, and yet even as he heard them he understood that they were not really being spoken aloud. They were being thought. The presence in his mind, the words ringing in his ears, was some form of telepathic communication. He had a sense that the speaker was female, and that she was very far away, and that was the reason she was thinking the words so loudly. She had never sent a message to someone so far away before (though how he knew this he could not have explained) and because of this she was overcompensating. That was why it felt like his head was exploding. She was transmitting much too forcefully.

!!!WE MUST GO TO GERMANY!!!

Germany? What's in Germany? he thought, baring his teeth in pain.

!!!IT IS GON! OUR FATHER! HE MEANS TO DESTROY HIMSELF!!!

!!!YOU MUST COME AND HELP US STOP HIM!!!

With the words came knowledge of time and place and circumstance, conveyed in imagery. Where he must go and how soon he must be there. His elder brother, Justus, had foreseen their maker's end, and conspired now with several of their siblings, including the Mother herself, to foil his maker's schemes. Gon meant to destroy himself. He planned to do it with the aid of a newly blooded vampire, a soulless beast named Lukas Jaeger, and he would succeed without the intervention of those who loved him. Very little time remained to stop him. His plot had been discovered too late. Even now, he drew near to the place where he intended to destroy himself.

Sydney gave no thought to how they would convince his maker to turn aside from his plans, or even if they should try to stop him at all. It was Gon! He must be saved!

All right, Sydney thought, directing the words at the terrible booming voice in his skull. I'll come. Fast as I can. I'll leave tonight. Just stop screaming in my head!

A name came to him then. A sense of identity. Nora. A blood drinker from England. Not a child of his maker. A former lover, and one who loved Gon still. Like Justus and Zenzele, she was one of those rare immortals who possessed psychic talents. Justus was a precog. Zenzele had her Eye. This Nora was a telepath, able to send and receive thoughts and mental images. And a very powerful one at that. She'd nearly scrambled his brains.

Sydney caught a fleeting impression of a large library, a gray and drizzly morning at the windows, and a massive oak table at which several other vampires sat, including the legendary Zenzele.

The Mother was dressed in a flowing white gown with a mustard yellow hijab, her flesh as black as obsidian stone. Sitting on her right was a heavyset man with a waxed handlebar mustache. Behind her, a beautiful young man with a shining pompadour paced restlessly to and fro. They were all looking at him—no, not at him, at the telepath, Nora—their faces taut with anxiety.

Nora received his thoughts, his promise to join them as soon as possible, and nodded.

"He will come," he heard her say to the others, and then the images, the presence, the booming voice inside his skull, faded.

For a moment he just laid there, a strange tingling sensation in his skull, almost a ringing, as will happen to the ears of mortals when they have been exposed to a loud noise. Finally, he became aware of a cold moistness below his waist, and glanced down. He had ejaculated while Nora was blasting his brains with her summons. Miranda lay on her back beside his legs, jaws agape, her body trembling as the Strix wormed its way through her veins. Their act of oral copulation had triggered the transformation, but she had ingested too little of the Living Blood to finish it. She was in agony. The Strix was consuming her from within.

With a yell of consternation, Sydney leapt up.

"Hang on, my love," he said, moving to his hands and knees above her.

At the sound of his voice, Miranda's eyes rolled toward his face, and she uttered a strangled choking sound.

"It wasn't enough," he said. "You need more."

She nodded, the muscles in her face and shoulders twitching.

Sydney lowered his mouth over hers, forming a seal with their lips, and brought forth the Strix. The pain was terrible, a tearing sensation in his guts, but he paid no more attention to the pain than he did the moon and stars wheeling slowly overhead. All that mattered now was Miranda. Saving Miranda.

Her throat convulsed as she swallowed the Living Blood. Her nails raked his shoulders as she flailed in panic at his body.

Again! More!

He retched, pouring the blackness into her.

Dizzy, he fell back from her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Was it enough? Had he given her the Blood in time?

She shrieked, arching her back, then collapsed onto the blanket. Her breath hissed out, a sibilant exhalation. Her eyes fixed, staring blankly at the heavens.

"Miranda?"

Sydney scurried forward, calling out to her again.

"Miranda!"

Her eyelids fluttered and she looked at him. Her mouth quirked into a smile as all the color fled from her cheeks. When her lips parted, he saw that her eyeteeth were elongating, sprouting into fangs. He saw the Living Blood wash through the capillaries of her eyes, the sclera darkening for a moment before turning bright and white and flawless. Her hazel eyes shimmered and became jewel-like. The irises dilated and began to shine with captured starlight.

"Syd," she whispered, "it's working. It's happening."

She held her right hand up before her eyes, curling the fingers open and closed. Already, the flesh of her hands had gone pale and lustrous as moonstone.

"It hurts," she said, looking back at him with a grimace.

"Yes, it will," Sydney said, relief making his voice rough, more of a growl than human speech. He felt like weeping. He blinked his eyes rapidly. "It's going to hurt like hell. The worst pain you've ever felt. But it will be over soon."

"Make love to me, Syd," she said. "Once more while I'm still a mortal woman."

"There's no time," he said. "We have to go. I'm sorry, but you'll have to go through the change while we travel."

"Travel?" Miranda asked, looking alarmed. "Where are we going? What's wrong? What's happening?"

She moaned as he lifted her into his arms. He started toward his Harley, carrying her like a child. "We're going to Germany," he said. "We have to stop my creator from making a terrible mistake."