Chapter Six

Fletch

When had the moon started gleaming as brightly as the sun? When had snowfall given way to the fire under his skin? When had one of the dead started rising, walking and kissing him as though she were drinking from him?

When had he given in?

And when had his father’s voice gone miraculously silent?

Fletch didn’t know exactly when any of those things had happened, only that the last one had occurred sometime around the point Ivory had pierced his neck with her fangs. Her vampire kiss was the most intense, arousing experience he’d ever had, bar none—not even those wonderful, terrible mornings after the dreams, nor the rushed pulls in the bath that he still gasped through in shame and pleasure even though his father couldn’t catch him anymore.

Her bite had been everything his father had warned him about, with her over him and inside him, drawing him into her mouth. In spite of her injuries, she’d rendered him weak, utterly helpless, even violated his mouth, and Fletch had practically begged.

He would have gone happily to his death.

But she hadn’t killed him. When she’d unsheathed herself from his neck, he’d simply been hazy, and his neck had truly felt like some beast had bitten into it once the spell of the bite had worn off.

Yet she hadn’t drained him dry. Nor had she snapped his neck while he’d been pliant and prostrate beneath her. Ivory had let him up and stared at him with those black eyes, fangs dripping blood—his blood—over her lips and chin and down to her succulent breasts.

She was a monster. A killer. And yet she hadn’t killed him. There she was, hiding behind none of the camouflage of the predatory monster she was, not even pretending to be human for him.

Ivory was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

He wanted nothing more than to rip her clothes off, drag her to his bed and offer her his body to do with as she pleased.

But now he was truly confused. His father might have stopped speaking in Fletch’s head, but Fletch experienced his absence even more keenly than his presence.

Had his father abandoned him because Ivory wasn’t the monster that Warner had said she was? Or had his father turned away because Fletch had sacrificed his purity for momentary pleasure from a particularly cunning devil?

She was a snake of the devil’s pit. She was trying to draw him away from what was right and good and pure, and he’d told himself he was going to fight it, fight her, even if he had to die—for she was already stronger than him. He would rather die for the Lord than willingly offer his soul to Ivory.

He’d tried. He really had tried. He’d tried to rekindle the fervor, the certainty, the power of conviction. But Ivory’s loveliness in her monstrosity hadn’t changed. Instead of Fletch felling her with his strength, she’d thrown her head back against the door and whimpered with a woman’s pleasure. He’d defeated her in a way that defeated himself as well.

It all swirled around him—her bare breasts, his blood soaking through his shirt and setting off her loveliness, her pale skin flush with his life, the blood on his hands… She’d called them her mates… ‘You kill more of God’s creatures for food than I do… I’m no more evil than you… Does that mean the good Lord simply hates men less?… No. Please.’

So much blood on his hands, but that was all right, because she’d taken most of it into her. He was inside her, suffusing her, filling her—and he’d been kissing her before he’d even realized what he’d been doing. He needed to kill her, but he’d never wanted to kiss someone as much as he had right at that moment, on the brink of an even deeper desire than the kind she conjured from his veins.

There had been no way to convince himself he kissed a human woman. Her fangs hadn’t impeded him, but they were always there, caressing him as sharply as her nails over his scalp. And for every frisson those fangs gave him, he had tasted the harsh, salty, metal draft of his own blood.

“This is wrong,” he’d groaned.

But he didn’t know anymore.

She’d mouthed and sucked at the places she’d rubbed his blood, over his jaw and neck, and Fletch couldn’t help but bare his throat to her.

“No,” she’d purred. “No, this is good. So good.”

He blindly searched for the rest of the bodice buttons. Her heart beat slowly under his hands, just enough to keep her blood moving through the vessels. Her breasts weighed heavy and ripe, as soft as they looked and slightly sticky from his blood.

She shoved his jacket down his arms, then worked the buttons of his shirt one-handed, with the deftness of experience. She growled with impatience when there wasn’t enough room for her to get her hand between them. Fletch, too, had that problem undoing the rest of her bodice.

Ivory unwrapped her legs from around his hips and flew up to the rafters. Fletch thought she was taking advantage of his infatuation to escape, but she only wanted to put space between them so that she could undo her dress as fast as she could. She crawled out of it as though it was snakeskin, then became a creeping feline among the beams and shadow, the full expanse of her skin like moonlight.

Fletch realized that he could run for the weapons now. She would probably reach him before he could get to them, but it might be worth the effort. Maybe she wouldn’t rip off his entire back before he could repel her with his cross, still around his neck—for all the good it had done him. His holy water was outside freezing in the snow. The rest of the bottles were in a box under the bed, but he definitely wouldn’t be able to get to those in time.

“You want me, Fletch?” Ivory asked. She tantalized him with careful use of the darkness to hide the places he most wanted revealed. Smiling like a cat, she pulled the pins out of her hair and dropped them with a clatter on the floor.

He thought about lying, but there was no point to it. He was defeated. He had fallen, and damn, but he’d never felt better. Every inch of his body was awake and aware, when usually he tried to ignore it as much as possible. It got too many people into too much trouble, and he supposed he could include himself in that number now.

He tried to dredge up the deep-rooted shame he thought he ought to feel, the kind that his father would have compelled from him. But he couldn’t. He was simply weary. Too weary, and horny as a satyr.

“You know I do, Miss Ivory,” Fletch said.

“Then take off your clothes and get on that bed, gravedigger,” Ivory said. Her hair framed her face like dark silken curtains, making her look even more feral. “I’m going to lick the sweat from your skin, suck down your seed and drink deep from the chalice of your neck when I take you inside me. I’ll have you everywhere on me and within me, over and over until your legs buckle. And then I’ll let you ride me.” She tilted her head at him. “I said get on the bed.”

Fletch had unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged it off his shoulders. The cross was cold in the cradle below his ribs.

“No,” he said, tossing his shirt to the floor. He was usually so fastidious, but his blood made the shirt unsalvageable.

“What did you say to me, boy?” Ivory asked, lowering her head between the slats. At that angle, her bare breasts looked unbearably full, and Fletch wanted nothing more than to suck on that stained nipple, to nuzzle those lush breasts and feel their heaviness on his cheeks.

“No,” he said simply.

She had won the war, but with God as his witness, he still had a few battles left in him, and if they were anywhere close to as fiery as the last one, they were battles worth fighting. Win or lose, both of them might still achieve some kind of victory. At least if he made it to the pearly gates by the end of the night, he could say he’d tried.

He unfastened his trousers. “If you want me in that bed, Miss Ivory, you’re going to have to make me.”