Chapter 12
I’d given Jaeden and his men a wide berth. Almost a month had passed with several more attacks by wolves. I no longer needed to head into town, because the Towner’s in hiding who hadn’t been killed had come to the shelter. Even those who had been hiding in the woods trickled into the shelter just to be on the safe side. It just wasn’t an option to live outside anymore. Jaeden had been right, there were monsters here. After that encounter in the forest, I’d decided to include him on that list as well.
No one went out alone or unarmed anymore. It was a safeguard that helped eliminate a lot of problems for me, especially with the possibility of running into Jaeden and turning into a mindless slut. Today, Addy was out with me to forage some of the remote locations for wild fruits and vegetables while most of the able bodied from the shelter were out hunting game or looking for cattle that had been left in the pastures and chickens that had gone a little wild in abandoned farms. With more people showing up, the food was slowly trickling to the basics and the MREs. Winter in the Pacific Northwest—specifically in our little corner of the world, could begin as early as October and were notoriously harsh, so everyone was scrambling to collect what they could.
“My nails are never going to be the same again,’ she grumbled as she dug up a wild patch of strawberries from the roots.
“Use soap,” I said offhandedly.
“Ha-ha,” she snarked. “What was that?” she asked, and I lifted my eyes from my own patch of berries.
“What was what?” I asked pushing my mind away from what had happened with Jaeden. I looked around at the edge of the woods but saw nothing. There was a fifty foot cliff behind us, so there wouldn’t be any surprises coming from that direction. Below the cliff was a fast running river.
“You didn’t hear that?” she asked as she wiped her dirt-covered hands on her jeans and stood up. I hated heights, but she loved them. She looked over, which made my stomach roll. “Wow, is that him?”
“Is that who?” I asked stepping closer. I felt my heart skip a beat as the sight of Jaeden and his men, along with some women playing in the shallow water of the riverbank came into view. “Asshole,” I whispered.
“Which one is he?”
“The one without the shirt on, with the bimbo splashing him,” I sighed as I pointed him out to her.
“Are you serious? You turned that down!? Do you by chance have brain damage?” she asked with wide eyes.
“Obviously—”
I didn’t get to finish as something smashed against the side of my head. I closed my eyes and touched my hand to where I could feel warm blood trickling from. I could just make out Addy screaming, but couldn’t tell if she was a mile away, or further.
Rough hands groped me, and I knew I was being searched for weapons. It was obvious from the hoots of men as they found my three guns and four knives. Addy was behind me, as my hearing came rushing back I knew she was fighting off an assailant. We knew better than to take our eyes off our surroundings even for a second, and now we were going to pay for that lapse.
I turned my head to see her, and tears leaked from my eyes, or maybe it was blood. I struggled to my feet as hands groped and prodded me. I faced Addy and her attacker, and made a choice. He was ripping her clothes off, as if he couldn’t get her naked fast enough so he could rape her. Thoughts of Bonnie skated across my mind. Were these the men who raped her? Dazedly, I wondered where the wolves were. I struggled and broke free from the hands that had tried to hold me down. I launched myself at Addy and her attacker, shoving them both, and watched as my best friend in the world fell to the bottom of the cliff. It was better than what they would do to her. She at least had a chance of escape since she was the best swimmer I knew.
“Fucking whore!” A man from behind me screamed, seconds before I was hit in the back of the head again. I fell to my knees as the world went black and white, and crawled in the direction of the cliff. I wasn’t a strong swimmer, and heights scared the crap out of me, but again, it was better than what they were planning.
My fingers found the edge, and I peered down to see Addy swimming towards Jaeden’s group and smiled knowing she’d be okay now, she was safe. I looked to where he stood, and knew the moment he saw what was happening. He shouted my name, and I smiled with regret. I should have screwed his brains out. I was now going to die a virgin….which sucked.
I was flipped over, and punched in the face. “Fucking bitch killed Jason!”
I grabbed his arms with what I thought was strength, but it wasn’t. He didn’t wince, didn’t blink. I could barely make out his features. He was missing teeth, the rest that remained were rotten. He smelled putrid, as if he hadn’t noticed all the water in Washington State which was readily available to bathe in. He ripped at my pants and I shook my head.
“Fucking whore, I’m gonna have fun with you and then you’ll join Jason on the rocks below.”
I kicked out, and got to my feet unsteadily. I felt his hands latch on to me at the same moment I jumped backwards—off of the cliff.
They say you see all sorts of shit when you are about to die. Like your entire life flashing before your eyes. Not me, I saw the toothless asshole and the fear in his eyes. I pulled him close, laughing briefly before I rolled, turning him below me in the air—and we hit the rocks…hard.
I smashed my head against his, and went blind with pain as something cracked in my arms and stomach. Landing on top of toothless only lessened some of the impact. I could hear Jaeden shouting and Addy’s screams, and knew I was dying. Or I thought I was. Bullets rained down from the cliff the moment I raised my head. I pushed myself from the bloody corpse and felt the cool water as I slid into it, and sank quickly.
I didn’t want to die, but my chances of living were getting slimmer with every passing moment. Every inch of my body seemed to scream with pain. I pushed off the bottom knowing I had to get air, but I had nothing left. I felt arms as they wrapped around my waist and took me to the surface.
I leaned my head against the last person I’d expected to save me. I couldn’t speak, and my lungs felt as if they were on fire. I pulled in huge gulps of air, as he laid me down on the riverbank and spoke. “Damn, lass, ye look like hell.”
I looked into Lachlan’s eyes and tried for a laugh, which only came out as a sob.
“Och nae, lass, none of that now,” his voice was a gentle croon as he began to look over my many injuries.
“Emma!” Jaeden shouted as he rounded the bend, with Addy close behind him.
Addy fell to the ground beside me bawling. “Emma, get up!” she cried as she fisted her hair in her hands as she stared in despair at me. She was about to lose it, and I couldn’t fix it. I didn’t have enough in me to reassure her that it would be okay because it wasn’t.
“No,” I whispered even though it hurt like hell to say it. “Something’s not right,” I whispered.
I felt broken, as in everything was on fire. I was pretty sure I was knocking on heaven’s door, and there wasn’t going to be any do-over’s. “You know what to do if it happens,” I rasped to Addy as I started to cough up blood.
“No, get the fuck up bitch! You don’t get to leave me! I can’t do what you can, I can’t, Emma. I need you! Grayson needs you! Get up! You don’t get to die! We have to grow old together, you promised. I’m not as strong as you are.” She was sobbing, and pulling on my useless arm. “You’re all I have left, you can’t leave me here alone, Emma, please get up!” she wailed.
“That hurts,” I whimpered.
“Lachlan, take her friend,” Jaeden ordered and I lifted my eyes to him.
“No,” I answered for Lachlan. “Home,” I said sternly. “They need me,” I said before trying to move my useless limbs.
“Emma, don’t do this to me, you have to get up. Let them help you, you don’t look good. Grayson can’t see you like this. They’re right. You look really bad,” Addy sobbed the words out.
“Not…dying, just—a scratch. Walk…it…off,” I struggled to continue. Addy’s eyes were wide with horror as she looked at me. It wasn’t a scratch; even I could hear the death rattle in my chest.
*~*Jaeden*~*
She’d been lucky to survive the fall; her body was a mass of broken bones and damaged flesh. I picked her up, listening to the faint beating of her heart as she lost the fight to stay conscious. I watched her eyes grow slack, as her life threatened to leave her. “Take her,” I snapped at Lachlan who was allowing the thin wisp of a woman struggling in his arms to win against him.
“Ye cannae do what I ken yer aboot tae do without her consent….dinnae do it. She doesna deserve tae become what ye are, Jaeden,” Lachlan’s voice was an angry demand.
“You owe me this much,” I spat out.
“Jaeden, that was long ago and I dinnae know. Ye ken I didnae plan on what happened.” He sounded reasonable, maybe he didn’t plan on it, but it changes nothing. I already had Shamus riding my ass to let it go. He isn’t exactly free of betrayal either. It still burns and festers to think of it even after all this time.
He waited for me to respond for a few moments and when it became clear I had nothing further to say, he bit out a curse, and picked up the small struggling woman and carried her away. Her grief stricken wails faded with Lachlan’s departure and the noise of the river.
I kneeled to the cold ground and ripped my wrist open with a sharp fang. I placed my wrist over her lips and pulled her mouth open, forcing her to drink my blood. “Drink, Emma,” I begged her, I couldn’t allow someone with so much fucking life to give up. Bringing her back as something like I am, well, it beat watching her die in my arms.
“Are you sure you wish to sire her? We are at war, and a neophyte is something we don’t have time for,” Bjorn grumbled as he kneeled beside us. “She’s losing this battle, old friend. Maybe it’s best to let her go.”
“That’s what they said about you, Bjorn, and I refused to leave you bleeding out on the battle field. I’ve never regretted bringing you over, yet,” I responded grimly.
I massaged her throat, working my tainted blood into her system. Her organs were damaged, her heartbeat was faint, and fading faster than my blood could repair it. I knew the moment it reached her organs, because she jerked in my arms. I remembered the fire, the burning of every cell as it was reborn. Her eyes grew wide with the pain. Her body convulsed, as she tried to push my wrist away. Her arms were shattered in the fall, and unable to do much of anything.
“You broke your new toy?” Sven’s bright blue eyes narrowed at the sight of her broken body as he moved closer. “Shit,” he whispered as he looked over the extensive damage.
Her skull was cracked and blood oozed from her scalp and dribbled from her nose. There were deep cuts and scratches all over her face; one showed the damage to her facial bones. Her heart had taken too much damage from the impact of the rock’s unforgiving surface, and the sound of it trying to push the blood was sickening. Her insides were a fucking mess.
“She took a leap off a cliff to escape being raped,” I replied as I felt her lips finally latch on. Good girl. I closed my eyes as the sensation of her feeding from my wrist made my cock stand up at attention. Feeding led to fucking, and she was a fucking mess. I moaned, uncaring of the men standing close to me. They knew what it was like, because they’d each made their own fair share of toys, as they called them.
My balls stretched taut as blood pulsed in my erection. Easy boy, she’s not available for you yet. She would be a hard turn, normally they weren’t this close to death. She was barely breathing, and even as I fed her, everything in her body was either bleeding out or shutting down.
“Get the truck; she needs more blood than this and we’re too exposed out here.”
“You got it,” Sven said as he turned and walked back through the thick brush to where the SUVs awaited us.
I continued to force the blood down her throat, even as she thrashed against my efforts. “Come on, sweet girl, you can do it.”
The sound of the engine as it turned over and headed this direction was a relief. She needed more blood than I alone could give her, and she needed sleep. Tonight she would sleep with me, and when her body turned cold, I would place her in the ground for the change.
“Shamus should be here tonight; you think he’s going to approve of your new toy?” Bjorn asked as he helped me secure her in the backseat.
“You think I give a fuck? He may be in charge of the Northwest, but he isn’t my maker. I’ve lived by the rules, Bjorn. It’s been over a thousand years since I’ve changed a female over to our world. He’s made several, including Cayla. I have only brought one female over, and she’s currently stuck on his dick.”
“Astrid was your wife,” Bjorn said calmly. “What she did to you was unforgivable.”
Unforgivable? I’d married her while I’d been human still. She’d been the pampered daughter of nobility, and my obsession. I’d earned the right to claim her in marriage, and I had to leave her with my seed just barely swelling in her body to serve my king. Not to go Viking like my father—and his before him—but to hold and defend a God-forsaken shit hole an ocean away. I had plenty of land and wealth from my family, but serving my king was paramount, so with promises to her of chastity and abstinence that would have made me a laughingstock to my forefathers, I left her to do my duty.
When I had been left for dead after the battle for control of York in Northumbria, and changed, I’d gone back for her. It was only after I had changed her that I discovered that while I had been serving king and country, she had been seeking the favors of every male with titles, land, or both that would pay her attention. My child wasn’t lost to miscarriage as I’d been led to believe, but deliberately killed in her womb as no man would look at her with my seed growing there.
She’d taken many men to our bed, fucked them, and took great delight in telling me after. It wasn’t enough for her to attempt to seduce any man I called friend; she would try and kill any female I showed affection to. She wanted my attention and she wanted my jealousy and would do anything to obtain it. The bitch was psychotic, spoiled, and unstoppable, and yet she’d found protection with Shamus. Wisely, he tried whenever possible to keep her away from me.
“Help me secure her, and open your vein,” I told Bjorn before climbing in the back with them. “Anything from Lucas?”
“They captured the four men that were with the one she cliff dived with. They have been taken care of.” He reported quietly as he helped me situate her over my lap. Sven began the drive back to the estate, the rest of our convoy following behind us.
“Good,” I whispered as I cradled her head to his open wrist. The sight of his eyes as they grew round with lust from her lips touching his skin made anger radiate through me. I knew the moment his cock grew hard, because he shifted in the seat. His hand moved to grope her breasts, but the inhuman growl that tore from my throat stopped him.
“Habit,” he said as he reached in his pants to fix his own growing erection. Mine was hard as a rock, pulsing with the need to pillage her sweet, pink flesh.
Knowing a woman was coming over, and drinking of blood was an aphrodisiac to our kind. The sound of sucking mixed with blood, rich in the air, had every male in the car hard and ready to fuck. Her heartbeat was sputtering, and her temperature was already dropping. I pulled her away from Bjorn’s wrist as he moaned at the sensation of her mouth against his flesh.
Possessiveness wasn’t a trait I had felt in a long time, and yet I felt it with her. She had an innocence to her that women lacked these days. The fire in her eyes when she was angered was seductive. The fierceness of her dedication to protect and help those she loved was unique in this day and age.
There was also the fact that I wanted to bury my cock deep inside of her perfect body and fuck it until she couldn’t walk. I wanted to kiss her swollen flesh, knowing it was sore from what I had done to her. To kiss it and watch as she squirmed against me from the pain as it mingled with pleasure.
The first time she came for me, with my lips sucking her succulent juices, it took every ounce of strength to prevent my fangs from piercing her flesh. I could sense when she was nervous, embarrassed, turned on, and better than that, when her sweet pussy grew moist with the need to be fucked. I could smell her sweet little bud as it grew slick with the need to be plucked.
The first time I’d smelled her arousal had been unnerving. I’d wanted nothing more than to strip her bare and fuck her flesh until she knew she wanted no other. The only thing that prevented it was her. The fear I’d smelled at her body’s reaction to me. She had been shocked by her response, as if she hadn’t felt anything like it before.
Hopefully she lived, to allow me to explore her body and mind. Her heart slowed to a final stop and restarted within a few minutes. Bjorn noticed it and looked at her curiously. He shrugged his wide shoulders, as Sven did the same. Once we were back at the estate and in my room, I stripped her bare, and covered her up with a sheet as I worked to putting her body back together, setting her limbs so that her bones when she finally woke, would be healed correctly.
She was quite the temptress, even as she lay dying. Her legs were parted, and the smell of her pussy made my cock stand up erect for the fifth time since I found her broken and battered. I had Sven pull up a chair to be her next donor and within moments of setting his wrist to her lips, she latched on and sucked dreamily at it as I set her body to rights. He’s not shy about looking at her beauty, even with the amount of damage that had ravaged her.
“She’s not dying,” he points out as her nipples grew erect against my touch.
“She has internal damage. Her heart stopped in the truck, but it started again…it should stop soon. Can you ready the crypt after you feed her?”
“As soon as I find some willing flesh and fuck this need out of my cock. She’s a greedy little wench, with lips I’d like to—”
“I’d think really fucking carefully about how you finish that sentence, my friend,” I warned with a fierceness that surprised even me.
“And if she has needs to match Astrid’s? Will you control her and allow her to fuck us, or chance history repeating itself?” Sven asked, as he replaced his wrist with his thumb to keep her mouth working. “Fucking hell,” he groaned as she latched on and moved her mouth on it.
Yeah, okay, it was hot. She was moving her head as if it was his cock instead of his thick thumb. “If she wishes to be fucked by more than just me, she will have to earn it and I will be present for it. I don’t like sharing, and I need full control in the bedroom. Besides, there are other ways to fill each hole these days.”
“There were other ways when your wife took those men to her bed, Jaeden. Astrid likes to be worshiped by men. She likes to control them with her body. She still tries to control you with it.”
“Yes, well that wore off long ago and I have seen her for what she is. Astrid I want nothing to do with, but Emma is a different story. Emma is different. She was raised in this town. She’s unskilled, and I become more certain each time I am around her, that she is untried by a man. I’m sure one cock will be enough for now. If later she decides she wants more, I’m sure I can find enough men to scratch that itch. For now though, she’s my toy, my plaything, Sven. When the time of her hunger comes, I’ll make sure to invite those who helped sire her.”
“Good, because if she sucks cock like she sucks fingers, I want in,” he mused as he worked her pretty little mouth with his thumb.
“I can take over now, her bones have been set,” I snapped. The idea of having to share her pissed me off. I hated that they knew of Astrid’s hunger for male attention. That they knew of the cunning deceit that hid behind her beautiful face. It had driven me mad with rage in the beginning. It was one of the reasons I demanded control in the bedroom. It had fed my need to withhold, and give pleasure. I’d become a fucking master of seduction, and a control freak in the process. The pictures in my mind—which included Emma—made my cock twitch.
Her sweet legs held open by ropes, showing me what was mine. Her hands bound behind her head, with her subtle movement opening her legs more...I’d have it. Soon. I placed my fingers in her mouth, two at first, and felt her sucking them off. No bloody wonder the others had been hard. I moaned at the sensation of her tongue as it curled around them, caressing them. Her head moved in the seductive dance, pulling them deeper, and then letting up.
My mind wandered to how many men had felt her sweet mouth curve around their cock? How many had pounded her pink flesh, and made her scream? None could do it as I could, and I would. It would be so easy to take her sweetness right now, but for the first time she’s with me, I want her completely lucid and aware of everything we do.
“Soon my sweet girl, I will make you beg to come. I will tie you up and fuck you until the need to climax is so overpowering that you’re wild from the need of it. When I’m finished with you, you will beg me to use you often, and I will.”