Doing It To Death: Shivers and Sins Volume 2 Read online

  “Very nice.” Vaughn’s gaze slithered over her skin like a blade. “Pilates?”

  “Ha! I take the occasional jog, Damaged.” Masilda balanced her grin with the steel blue of her gaze. “Join me, children. We don’t want to get blood on our clothes. And there will be blood.”

  Vaughn eagerly stripped. I felt every movement like a stab in my guts, but I undressed quickly, too.

  Evie gripped the hem of her shirt like a prized possession. “I don’t care about getting dirty. I want to leave them on.”

  Vaughn opened his mouth, but words didn’t leave his lips when Masilda lifted a finger. He touched his throat and fumed at the priestess. Tension rippled through his body and he leaned into a lunge, but a sharp bark sounded from the tree line before I could lift my hand in the air to halt him. Glowing eyes, and the hulking silhouettes of a few turned wolves surrounded the circle, just out of sight.

  “I understand, Evie. I’m sorry, it was careless of me not to mention how we have to be naked, but it’s complete habit now.” Masilda’s brow furrowed and she darted a glance at Vaughn and me. “Forget them. You’re safe in this circle, I swear it. No one can hurt you or force you to do anything. I just need to ensure your skin is the only thing to touch the circle. Only the sacred is allowed to connect with this earth. Bodies and blood. You can leave your underwear on, if that helps, but you’ll have to be extra vigilant when you come out of your trance, so you don’t faint and let the fabric touch this hallowed ground.”

  Evie hesitated for a moment, then lifted her chin and peeled off her shirt and jeans. Her black bra and panties went next, like ripping off adhesive stuck to the skin. She even winced.

  Once again Vaughn, Evie, and I found ourselves stripped bare together. I openly stared at the curves I’d commanded, molded into my palms, squeezed and slapped and pressed against mine.

  Vaughn couldn’t speak, but he could leer. Evie tried to ignore us, looking only at Masilda at first. I caught her glance over my body, the corner of her dark eye blackening with vampire desire. I straightened my spine and rubbed a hand low on my abs, just above the black hair capping the stiffening flesh of my cock. The younger witch gasped and turned her back on me, but she couldn’t ignore my laughter. Or hide that tight, round ass.

  Masilda folded her clothes in a neat pile by the bowl, then lifted the stone swell into her arms. She took up position outside the north side of the circle and called to me.

  “Don’t enter until I invite you in. Take position at the south side, Jesse. Evie you’ll go on the west, Vaughn, the east.”

  We all nodded. Anticipation stirred in me. I’d be free soon. One rite down.

  I can’t wait to tear you apart for the last time. I stared at Evie, imagining killing her with such clarity she looked up, startled. I relished her fear, then turned my attention to the kneeling master of ceremonies.

  “Enter,” Masilda called.

  I stepped onto pillow-soft grass, fresh earth giving under the soles of my feet. The season of rebirth filled my lungs, forcing me to breathe deep and savor the scent. Dead trees and pine didn’t belong surrounding this isolated spring glade.

  As I approached the center to take my place on the south side of the bowl, I noticed the priestess’s face and breasts shone clear as a mirror reflection in the still water. At the bottom sat a knife. The black stone blade and bone handle looked prehistoric and at home cradled in stone.

  “Come closer, right up to the bowl, and kneel.”

  We obeyed, our legs tucked under us like our guide’s. Masilda dipped both hands in the bowl, splashed her eyes, and whispered under her breath.

  “I pray, Goddess, that you see me.”

  She swept her fingers along the curve of her ears. “I pray, Goddess, that you hear me.”

  She coated her lips with the droplets of sacred water, using the tips of her fingers. “I pray, Goddess, that you give my voice power.”

  With both hands, she swept water over her breasts. “I pray Goddess that you nourish my spell.”

  Finally, she swept her fingertips over her navel.

  “By your will, Lady, I birth great magicks. By your will, I lay old pains to rest.”

  She reached into the bowl and lifted the knife in salute to her deity, then lowered the obsidian blade to the inside of her left forearm. She slashed from elbow to wrist with a sharp grimace and repeated this motion with the right.

  Vaughn growled in hunger, but didn’t move to attack. My mouth pooled with spit. Evie bit her lip, trying and failing, to hide her bloodlust. Her eyes faded to a cloudy black, unfed and lacking a healthy vampire’s luster. Masilda paid us no heed as she turned her arms over and dripped her blood into the bowl. Four drops from each arm left ripples in the smooth surface. She looked at me when finished, her arms still bleeding.

  Dazed by the crimson rivers flowing from Masilda’s arms, I snapped my gaze to hers, realizing she’d spoken.

  “Your arms, Jesse.” I held out my wrists and watched impassively as she sliced open my veins.

  “Just one drop from each arm.” Vital blood I couldn’t afford to lose sank into the bowl and joined hers. “One to nourish the future. One to open the gates to the past.”

  Done, I folded my bleeding arms in my lap and watched Evie follow, then Vaughn. My veins knitted at a sluggish pace while I struggled to stay conscious.

  The blade, oddly, didn’t drip when Masilda lifted the handle high over the bowl. If I had any illusions about why, the high priestess cured them when she plunged the knife into the water. Obsidian sank into the liquid like fresh, packed earth and went no further than the ivory hilt. Suspended by some unseen force, the blood we’d given to the bowl swirled like mist around the dark conduit. No ordinary blade. No ordinary bowl of water.

  I felt light-headed, my limbs as liquid as the water. My hands slipped out of my lap and rested limp on the ground. Distantly, I felt my wounds tingle. Despite my languor, I studied the way the ground drew the blood running from my cuts, starvation and this strange circle, conspiring against me.

  My neck gave into the boneless sensation sapping me of strength. I looked up to see thousands of unobstructed stars where a fading blue sky and dead limbs had been. Those stars spun, endless lives and deaths flickering in the false twilight while I swayed to a slow rising beat. When I righted myself and stared ahead, I didn’t see Masilda in front of me. The priestess, the witch, and my brother were beside me, and we weren’t in the same clearing.

  We weren’t in the same time.

  10

  Women and men swayed and circled a raging bonfire to an endless drum beat. The sound, as familiar as the bursting heart of prey during the hunt, made me sweat with the dancers. Dark skin in every shade of brown twinkled in the firelight, like moons circling the sun. They lifted their hands in offering to whatever power lurked beyond the stars above, gyrating, shaking, spinning like whirling dervishes.

  My head spun like their bodies. I bore witness to a memory made flesh and inhaled pungent smoke and the sweet scent of blood. The very earth beneath my feet vibrated with the music, their stomps and jumps, with the throb of everything primal and essential.

  I sensed Masilda, Evie, and Vaughn beside me in the stillness beyond the memory, but no one spoke. A man stepped out of the darkness, his hair cascading in long dreads down his shoulder blades, his skin a winking canvas of obsidian. He absorbed the light, right down to his black eyes. One of my kind. One of the first of my kind. I knew without words that I stared at the origins of me, at a light long since faded from the universe. Yet, this vampire lingered in my blood. He’d existed as surely as my true body knelt in a clearing, in another time, on another continent.

  From the other side of the clearing a woman approached, her hair cropped close to her head, brown skin gleaming with health and vital blood. Her heart pounded like the drums, like prey. Under the smoke, I recognized the scent of something powerful, something as primal as fucking and feeding. Life. Fear. Arousal.

  I smelled
Evie’s blood.

  I smelled one of the first of her kind.

  Witch, my mind whispered. The origins of my enemy met the wondrous gaze of my forefather. He greedily drank her in with heightened sight, and my cock lurched with vicarious hunger. I urged him from my silent corner to tear her throat out and let her blood burst against his tongue. If he’d only sink the thick length of his hard cock into her cunt and take his due, maybe I could absorb his strength.

  This is how it all began. This is when the world was new and witches learned their place.

  Instead of lunging, the man knelt at the witch’s feet and lifted his palms.

  I didn’t—couldn’t—move, or utter a sound. I hadn’t been born yet. I could only watch, but inside I howled in protest at his surrender.

  We bow to no one. Especially not a witch!

  The upward glance my ancestor gave the witch seemed a silent plea. Please, his eyes seemed to beg. The enemy touched his face gently, nodding. Her dark eyes were full of the vampire who leaned in and drank from between her quivering thighs. A blood tide rose and fell like the beat of the drums, and when her knees buckled with weakness, the vampire held her up. The caress she laid on his bowed head made me shudder. She whispered words I’d only heard once before, as if in a dream when I drank from Evie in just this way.

  I am the fount, the bearer of life. Drink of life, as I drink of death. Drink of me. Drop by drop.

  She climaxed with a cry that vibrated in my bones. He growled into the plump flesh of her offering and the fire raged. All around them, women and men kneeled before the exaltation. Their leader, their priestess, had given the beast her offering and he didn’t hunt them down, not when the witch weaved such a powerful spell with her womb.

  The man looked up, thankful and satisfied. Full of love. But instead of leaving, he kissed her navel, stood and spoke words that made my ears ring. I wanted to run, but the spell held me captive, bearing witness to a vampire’s surrender. As if prey were his equal. His beloved.

  I am the flame, the fang of death. Fill me with life, and I will shelter you from death. Drink of me. Drop by drop.

  He bared fangs dripping with amber venom. She pulled him close, kissed him deeply, as deeply as if she were a vampire suckling a vein. Her throat worked, swallowing the seeds of change, until she pulled away and let him bite her, let him drive his venom deep into her bloodstream. He lifted her into his arms, slid deep inside her welcoming core and joined with her. Completely. My stomach churned, terror licking my spine.

  She became his mate. He became her willing slave.

  The light of the fire consumed the clearing. The stars drew my sight and a black sky spiraled. We hurtled forward in time the way Vaughn and I drove down hidden roads and highways. Whole civilizations and centuries passed me by, like trees and guardrails bracketing those highways.

  Land masses transformed and split, and so did witches and vampires. Fewer and fewer coupled like that first mated pair. Wolves and humans spun in the periphery like moons, aligning with either side of the battle. Witches curbed the power of my kind with their numbers, bonfires alight all over the world.

  Witches drew slaves out of the darkness to serve them. They placed wards up on territories that were once shared, corralling my kind, subduing the beast in wolves, and turning a blind eye to the dangers of human ignorance. After all, humans were weak. Humans were prey, the distant, powerless cousin of witches.

  My spirit halted in its travels with an abruptness that stole my phantom breath. I looked down and found myself staring at a child who could’ve been me when I was young. Hair down his waist, with braids playing throughout, his bronze skin gleaming with exertion as he ran to the shoreline. I sensed the presence of other children around him, but this one remained separated from the rest. His mother came up behind him, a basket of fish at her hip, and touched his shoulder. He didn’t look away, hadn’t looked away since he first caught sight of the sails flapping with his superior sight.

  An elder witch predicted this scene. The heir to the continent would greet the wave that drowned the old world.

  I sensed a shift, a separation. Witch and vampire didn’t blend here. The woman at the boy’s side reminded me of a queen, if queens were affectionate and domestic. She beamed at her son, at the heir that had been predicted.

  This boy isn’t my father. He couldn’t have been the heir.

  When I turned around, I stared into the sea, at settlers leaping from their boats and stomping through the knee-high water onto the sand. The boy frowned. His eyes bled black. Thousands of years’ worth of life and death flowed in this child’s blood. I saw his origins, saw deaths and migrations. I saw births, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t see his future. Instead, I saw the day his time ran out.

  I saw his older brother and father approach.

  The beginnings of me shone in the eyes of the oldest son. He stared through me, at the settlers, then at the boy who usurped his rule by mere moments, thanks to the prophecy of some witch. My grandfather laid his hands on my father’s shoulders, the heir he’d chosen now relegated to second brother.

  What would’ve changed had this boy lived and been ruler instead?

  My father had never mentioned a brother. Ever. I looked at a boy and saw smoke swiped through with a clawed hand, a fire snuffed out. No competition. No weaknesses. I looked at my father and saw stone harden around the edges of his predator’s eyes. The future sprawled out before him. No woman by his side, no house teeming with sons and daughters. My father had traded all of those things in for power in the face of the relentless wave of settlers. Power shared with wealthy humans.

  Time stretched, spread, warped. I landed, twisted inside out. The infiltration of several covens spanned centuries, continents, races. White, brown, black. Children snatched away with their tiny fangs bared, witches fighting, vampires dying trying to protect their mates. I felt a mass exodus of souls all over the world, blood flowing into ancestral ground from screaming lips. The fangs of death ripping the world to shreds cut me bone deep and I didn’t know why. I’d benefitted from every death. I’d rule the offspring of the survivors soon.

  Vampires who looked like me and Vaughn shoved witches and bond witches into the dirt and pierced their bodies, raping unwelcoming vessels.

  No. This isn’t rape. They’re taking what’s theirs. This is the reward of the strong.

  The sights before me wouldn’t align with my predator’s mind. My kind were raping the world, erasing all this history that whispered in my blood, but couldn’t be heard. All the things I didn’t know. All the men and women I hadn’t known existed. Witches screamed for men who looked like me to stop. The distant wails of a mother—something I’d never known—pleaded for vampires not to kill the children, not to drink them dry or dash their heads against rocks. Men and women tore tiny spines from young necks and silenced those mothers forever.

  Traitors they were called. Weak. They’d sided with witches and this was the price.

  Long before the settlers, there were rifts between the species, but these newcomers heralded a fresh, bloody order in North America.

  Evie had become the first bond witch with a vampire mate in hundreds of years. Along the way, the sweet awe-filled union I’d witnessed had gone from powerful, ancestral, to dangerous and forbidden, to the bastardized joining we’d stumbled into at Lake Austin.

  Greed had brought humans and vampires desiring power to these covens. Fear had made my kind annihilate these unnatural unions that made them lesser beings. We no longer shared the top of the food chain with witches. We no longer supplied their bodies with healing blood and their spells with power. We ripped them out of the ground by the roots, sent them retreating when I’d thought most were long since dead.

  For a time, witches fought my kind with the same weapons. Force. Violence. They drained vampires of their blood for magick. They toppled kings and dignitaries that were propped up by vampire money. Some committed atrocities against the vampires they captured. Rape. Mu
rder. Torturing men and women with vicious memories, the way Evie had done when she drowned my bloodthirsty mind with visions of her death.

  Their blood and their nature couldn’t sustain the cruelty, however. They were servants of life, only playing at being beasts.

  We’re born to this. We’re monsters and we make no apologies.

  We won.

  Witch blood overflowed sterling cups. Witch bodies were devoured for pleasure, mined for pain. Bond witches, who were a fairytale by the time my father’s father rose to power, died out. Only turned humans remained and they were no threat except in large numbers. The plagues took care of them. Man-made diseases spilled like drops of blood on the white blanket of time, scattered like stars on a black sky.

  The human elite used the human poor to curb the power of vampire numbers.

  The witches hid.

  The wolves, thankful to have their beasts tamed, followed their witch charges into the mists.

  And my kind sat on a precarious throne with shadows closing in behind us.

  I snapped into my body, gasping, tears streaming down my face. I’d died and raged, I’d been raped and severed from my children millions upon millions of times. I saw the origins of the slave market for witches. I saw the first witch to tame a vampire’s bloodlust. I saw the galaxy birthed into being like the sparks of a fire catching kindling.

  What I’d stolen from Evie again and again and again, not just from her body, but from her mind, became clear as Masilda’s reflection had been before we stained the bowl with blood. I saw what I’d forced her to become, what I’d perverted in the lake in Austin.

  I’d come to drain and kill my mate so I could set myself free. All I’d done was feed a curse cast hundreds of years ago. Maybe thousands. I would never be free with this debt flowing in my veins unpaid. I’d stolen everything. My whole line had stolen everything from hers.