Blood Legacy by Vanessa Redmoon

I’d never been with anyone quite like him. Well—that statement was true in a number of ways, I had to concede. He cupped one side of my rump in his clawed hand and kneaded it as he began with slow, deep thrusts. At this angle, with my legs wrapped around his waist, the friction against my node was nearly too much to take.
    “Let’s have number two,” he whispered in my ear. “ Vorona .”
    My climax poured out of me like an overturned glass. I contracted wildly around his shaft, dimly aware that I was screaming. Screaming his name. There was something wet on my fingertips—I’d drawn blood from my palms with my nails.
    “Very good,” Victor said, nodding, then nipped at my throat. “You are a true agonie , my dear. Don’t you feel it even now, the power flowing through you? Through us both?”
    “I feel a lot of things right now.” I laughed, then gave him another sultry squeeze with my walls. “And I like all of them.”
    “If only you could feel what this power is like, for a Vampyr.” He withdrew almost completely from me, hands firm on my hipbones, then slammed back into me with startling strength. “We aren’t meant to be political animals. We’re certainly not meant to be house pets, napping in the shade and waddling around half-drunk on blood half the time and alcohol the rest. We’re predators. My brethren have forgotten that. But I will show them again.”
    That tendril of fear raced through me again. He’d spoken of freedom for us humans, but if Vampyrs were predators, there was only really one kind of prey worthy of their hunt. What exactly did he have in mind?
    He rocked against me, faster now, the iron cross creaking with the force of his penetrations. “But you shall have power, too. I wonder.” He sucked at my earlobe. “How do you mean to use it?”
    “I mean . . .” I stammered, as the rising tide of orgasm built within me once more. I didn’t even think it would possible for me. I’m lucky to manage a single one, and that usually alone, in the darkness of my compartment in Undertown. Sexual release is pretty low on the hierarchy of needs, with the kind of life we lead. “I mean to use it . . .”
    “Three.” He dug the claws into my ass as he pummeled me to the core. “ Vorona. ”
    Something shifted inside me, like two halves of a broken glass. I was screaming, I was squeezing him, I was feeling him unleash his load deep inside of me—but I was also somewhere else. I had left myself, and fallen back into the vivid hallucination—a strange space not quite a dream and not quite a memory.
    The hooded figures circled around me, each cupping a ceramic bowl in their upturned palms. Though I was spread before them, naked, I did not feel fear. The scent of the lapping pool and the scented candles nearby overwhelmed me with calm. There was a weight lifting off me with each verse of their chants—relief that this had come to pass.
    “The blood shall not run cold.”
    “We shall rise, and rise again.”
    Something winked at me in the dank air—the honed edge of a dagger. Five slashes. One ankle, then the next. Each wrist. And then, lovingly, like a necklace being laid across my throat, it slit my throat from end to end.
    I smiled, overwhelmed with gratitude, as dozens of arms raised the bowls upward to catch my blood, gurgling out of me at a luxurious pace.
    Slowly, each candle in the room winked out, and I surrendered to darkness.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Victor loomed over me with a dark expression on his face. He was fully dressed again, and smelled of rich soap and cologne. I tried to sit up but found my limbs suddenly weighed a ton each. I slumped back into the soft mattress he’d sprawled me upon.
    “How are you feeling, little bird?” he asked, stroking the side of my face with one finger.
    I closed my eyes and turned my head so I could kiss his hand in response. We appeared to be in a bedroom—a more normal-looking one, with rain-streaked windows looking out on New