Chapter Thirty-Four
Am I a fiend?
John didn’t know, couldn’t think about it, because right now he felt like a pharaoh on high, exultant, godlike, arms spread wide with rays of divine sunshine beaming out from his chest.
He was alive, truly alive.
He filled his lungs with a gigantic breath of air—new air, in a new world, where… He paused and cocked his head, as if listening. Something was missing. All was quiet. Complaints silenced. The constant, horrific, nails-on-a-chalkboard whine vanished. The damnedest thing. It was…
Satiation.
That’s what this was. His hunger was gone.
No. Not exactly. He was hungry, but in the normal way. For food. He let out a whoop. “I can eat!” Swiftly sidestepping Shaston, he bolted from the bathroom and raced into the kitchen, skidding to a stop in front of the refrigerator. Flinging open the door, he went down on his knees in front of the deli drawer and tore it open. Yes! There was a salivating variety of lunchmeat and cheeses—black forest ham, roast turkey, Havarti cheese, Swiss, cheddar. He ripped open packages and shoved the contents into his mouth. He couldn’t chew and swallow fast enough. He was eating. Fuck me, I’m eating!
Shaston moved to hover over him. “Careful, John,” she warned. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
Orange juice? Yes! Side door. He chugged it, head back, juice streaming down the sides of his mouth onto his neck. He came to the end of the carton on a gasp and tossed the container aside. He pointed at the pantry cupboard. “What’s in there?” Chips, maybe? Cookies…wait, there were tortillas in the fridge. He could make himself a quesadilla or a taco.
“John.” Shaston hunkered beside him. “Take it easy, okay?” She took him by the wrist.
He glanced sharply at her, prepared to wrench free, then…didn’t. There was something about her now. The shape of her eyes was so…and the thickness of her hair like… Had she always been this pretty? He zeroed in on her chest, where the simple cotton T-shirt she’d worn to bed clung to the firmness of her breasts. He undressed her with his eyes, and—
He grew erect so fast he toppled over backward onto his ass.
Chuffing a breath, he sprawled on the floor in ungainly shock, gaping at the huge swelling at the front of his sweatpants…his dick. My dick! It was no longer an unresponsive tube of loose flesh. No longer the half-flab-half-firm thing it’d been even when he was in remission from his “illness.” This was a man’s cock, fully erect and ready to conquer.
Scrabbling onto all fours, he sprang at Shaston.
She threw her arms and legs around him in a death-lock embrace, and they tumbled onto the linoleum together. He came down hard on top of her, landing solidly within the cradle of her spread thighs. Grunting, he hooked a thumb into the back of his elastic waistband and tugged his sweatpants down. Her cotton shorts came off in one hasty, seam-tearing yank. God, yes. Naked on naked, cock to crotch. He moaned and ground against her, his rigid sex sliding along her soft thigh. His brain waves shorted out.
“Wait,” she panted. “I have to bite you first.”
He caught only a glimpse of her elongated fangs and the vitreous brightness of her eyes before she roughly twisted a hand in his hair and cranked his head to one side, then—
OW! Whore-ass-bitch-sleazewad-cumsucker. He fought to get away from her, away from the agony searing his throat in half.
He couldn’t.
His current muscle mass equaled the exoskeleton of a cockroach, and Shaston was unnaturally strong. The only thing he managed to do was cycle his legs through the litter of Boar’s Head wrappers on the floor. He barked at her in his authoritative police voice. “Stop!”
She didn’t.
Fucking fuck. He was going to—
“AH!” His world super-novaed into an explosion of sharper scents and brighter colors, rainbow lights zipping around behind his eyes. “Holy crap, don’t stop!” The length of his spine convulsed in ecstasy, his hips juddered, and—he ejaculated everything he had onto the floor between Shaston’s legs. Aw, shit.
He pushed out of her hold and slump-rolled off her, panting, tingles of warm still racing all over his body.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, staring at the ceiling, before he glanced down at himself. Jesus. He looked like he should be passed out in a gutter after a bachelor party gone wrong, food crumbs trapped in some of his belly hairs, his sweatpants bunched around his knees, and his naked cock flopped across his hip. His shirt, for all appearances, had been used to clean up a murder scene.
He sagged his head back down. “Not one of my finer moments.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” Shaston caressed the backs of her fingers across his arm, a tender gesture that made him flinch away.
He covered the movement by tugging up his sweats. Not to be rude about it, but Shaston wasn’t the woman he wanted, and now that sexual tension had been fully—if embarrassingly—relieved, he just wanted to move onto other things.
“I can get you erect again,” she said.
Nice of her to think it of him—and herself—but that would way overestimate the capabilities of his exoskeleton and additionally fail to recall he’d been hovering near death for months.
And yet…
Weirdest thing.
As they cleaned up, changed clothes, and waited for a transport to arrive to take them back to the community—and, presumably, to the donor Toni had mentioned—he kept eyeballing Shaston. A compulsion of some sort seemed to be driving him beyond the utter neutrality he felt for her and on to wanting to screw her. Needing to. It was an itchy, antsy feeling steadily growing inside him, as if he no longer was the cockroach but was inhabited by millions of them, their prickly leg spines scraping under his skin as they scurried about. What was it about Shaston calling to him as the answering scratch to that itch?
His jaw was clenched to the throbbing point by the time a Lincoln Town Car pulled up to the safe house. He climbed into the back and hunkered down sideways in his seat, staring at Shaston with ultra-clear vision. An iron band of tension wrapped his chest. His mind kept trying to figure out what was going on. Then there was no figuring. Just doing.
Either fight or fuck…
He jumped her.
Once again, she hugged him fiercely to her, as if she were as itchy and needy for some grind as he was. Leaning back on the car seat, she aimed her crotch at his, making things easy for him. Her skirt bunched around her waist, also paving the way. He fumbled his flaccid dick out of his pants. Once things got going, the appendage would hopefully—She bit his neck, and… Hell, he did get erect again.
Snorting air down his nose, he jerked Shaston’s panties aside and pushed inside her. He bit her too—a move requiring Upper Level Advanced Vampire Neck-Maneuvering skills to do at the same time she was biting him, and, hah, newbie that he was, he did it. Sucking, grunting, panting, he pounded into Shaston’s body, and then his world super-novaed again, rapture spurting from the top of his dick like a Roman candle. Unbelievable.
Lungs working, he sank back on the floorboards between Shaston’s legs.
Christ, he’d never orgasmed like that before. Ever.
Shaston flipped her skirt down.
He reclaimed the seat beside her, hiked up his jeans and buttoned them, then lounged back, eyes half-shut, marveling at how good he felt. Healthy and fine couldn’t even begin to describe the rebirth he was going through right now.
When the Lincoln finally came to a stop and the car door swung open, GQ Roth and Toni were waiting for them.
As John exited the car, he gave Toni a smoldering look, one that hopefully projected plenty of I’m not impotent anymore. It probably made him the un-coronated king of DicksVille to give Toni a look like that minutes after balling Shaston. But Shaston was—for lack of a better term—a transition girl. Sorry for how crass it sounded, but it was true. She was nothing, and Toni was the substance making up his heart.
A suited-up woman with blond hair cut short started forward, aiming to take their place in the Town Car. “Congratulations again,” she was saying over her shoulder to Toni, “on Jacken being in hibernation. I’m glad you two finally worked out the kid situation.”
The suit was talking about Teeth-Tattooed Asshole, but John had no idea what it meant for the guy to be in “hibernation.”
“Thanks,” Toni said, although her smile was strained.
The suited-up woman continued forward, intending to pass him… Hell, he knew her. Her name was Kimberly Stănescu, and she was the fierce lawyer lady who’d showed up at Scripps Hospital to release Nichita from John’s clutches.
She stopped abruptly and stared at him, gaped, really, but not at him, as in, at his face. She gawked at his throat.
John was sporting an ugly bruise there from Shaston’s bite, Shaston the same, and for some reason—he saw when he glanced around—these bruises held everyone’s frozen interest.
For a moment John felt like he’d just stepped into the middle of a wax museum.
Toni tipped her chin up, inhaled a breath, then gave Shaston a solemn look. “Did you have sex too?”
“Yes.”
Dammit! Don’t admit that to Toni. “Look,” John began, “it was…” He stopped, stumped over how to tell Toni it was nothing and not come across sounding like a total lowlife. Women didn’t like to hear that a man could screw someone and have it mean nothing, even when it was another woman. It probably pecked at the back of their minds that if he could be robotic with one, what would stop him from someday reducing her to a nothing lay? As if, with Toni. But he needed time to explain it.
And right now Toni was wholly focused on Shaston. “Does John understand what’s between you two now?”
Dammit, there’s nothing between us! He wanted to shout it.
“No.” The cords in Shaston’s throat stretched into tense, stringy lines.
“You didn’t explain it beforehand?”
“No. I didn’t.”
Roth’s complexion turned a choleric shade of crimson.
“Why?” Toni asked, although she looked like a person who didn’t expect to receive an answer she would understand.
A single bubble of moisture formed on Shaston’s tear duct. “I want a baby.”
A…? John’s lungs shut down for two strangled seconds. A baby! Holy shit! That’s right, they hadn’t used a condom. He’d been too single-minded-of-purpose in the back of the Lincoln, but, but…dammit, wasn’t the woman supposed to see to birth control when the man became a sex-crazed dunce? Sure she was… Unless, of course, she was trying to get pregnant.
He just might throw up all the awesome food he’d eaten.
Toni spread her hands, because, yeah, Shaston’s answer clearly went beyond her comprehension. “I don’t get it, Shaston. Vârcolac can’t procreate with other Vârcolac.”
“But John’s not Vârcolac, not a full one yet, anyway. Dr. Jess said it would take time.”
“Shaston.” Sharp now. “John still isn’t someone you can breed with. His human side isn’t Dragon, it’s regular.”
“But…no,” Shaston argued. “There’s something more to him. I’ve sensed it. I mean, look at all the years he suffered in pain, but he survived.”
Toni shook her head.
A tear splashed down. “I-I just…I can’t wait any longer to have a—”
A low growl overrode her. It reverberated behind John, and then he was being shoved aside as Roth crashed by his shoulder.
Shaston squeaked and scurried away, but Roth wasn’t aiming for her.
He marched in a straight line for the lawyer lady and stopped mere inches from her. His eyes were icy steel, and his voice a tight snarl. “What do you say about this, Mrs. Stănescu? Shall we make a note in the record that yet another Unauthorized Bite has been committed in this community? Yes!” His voice was rising. “Let us indeed write it down, along with how shocked you surely must be. Whereas I,” he was outright shouting now, “most definitely, am not.” These last two words where bellowed directly into the lawyer’s red face.
Stănescu inhaled a huge, fire-in-the-hole breath, but Toni cut in before the lawyer could retaliate.
“Why don’t we convene later to discuss the ramifications of this infraction? For now, John needs to be made aware of the drastic turn his life has just taken.”
Drastic? Come on. What just happened didn’t have to be seen as drastic. If Shaston wanted to go off and have a baby, let her. It didn’t have to interfere with Toni and him finally getting their shot, the shot John had been waiting years to have. If Toni would just give him a minute, he’d explain it all to her.
Toni finally did look at him. “Why don’t you come upstairs with me to one of the mansion’s parlors.” She swept some hair off her forehead with her fingers, slender, elegant fingers that damn well would be his soon. He was going to figure out the right thing to say.
“You’re going to want to sit down for this, John.”