Karhi Emelyn

NSFW chapter

She jerked away before they could touch, cursing and wringing her hand out.  The cigarette she’d been holding lay in the snow next to her boots, a thick chunk of ash next to it.

“Burn yourself?” he asked, not even bothering to hide the small huff of laughter that came out of his nose.

“Should’ve stubbed it out.”  She wrinkled her nose, grinding it down with her foot.  She shook her head, but there was a twitch of a smile on her lips.  She put one elbow on one knee and rested her head on her hand, tilting her head to look at him.

It was like a jolt of lightning—her green eyes and the curve of her mouth.  She looked so much like Elizabeth. 

But the way she had shoved a broken bottle into a shifter’s neck and then sprayed him with aconite was decidedly not like Elizabeth at all.  Elizabeth had been what the 40s would view as a “proper lady”.  This woman was not that.  Her elegance was a different animal altogether.

“Your work with that bottle was impressive,” he said. 

She winked at him.  “I know,” she said.  “The nice thing about being human in there is that everyone assumes you can’t do shit.  But I sure as hell can break a bottle over an asshole’s head.”

He chuckled.

“So,” she said.  “Are we doing this or what?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her.  “Doing what?”

“You didn’t follow me out of a bar after watching me spectacularly wreck someone’s shit just to check on me.  And we were on to something else here before I burned myself.”  A light danced behind her eyes, half of a smile tilting one side of her mouth.

He shrugged.  “I mean, one, that would be incredibly creepy for me to follow you out of the bar.  And also, wouldn’t it be strange for me to pursue someone after watching them spectacularly wreck someone’s shit?”  He put his hand to his chest.  “I should be concerned for my safety.”

“Didn’t you follow me out because Bart got jealous?”

He shook his head.  “Nah, I just knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him tonight.  I was going to walk by the river on my way home.”  He gestured towards her.  “And here you were.”  He wasn’t lying.  He had been bummed when he’d walked out of the bathroom and she was gone, but he wasn’t going to try to follow her.  He had smelled her lavender scent as he walked but he hadn’t set out to find her.

She raised a sceptical eyebrow before shrugging one shoulder.  “Here I was.  And you came over even though you should be concerned for your safety.”

“Call me a glutton for punishment.”  He flashed her a wolfish smile before looking towards the river.  “I—”

She grabbed the lapels of his coat and jerked him towards her.  They crashed together, open mouths and teeth and tongues.

When he first went to kiss her, before she’d burned herself, he had just wanted to see if something was there.  He hadn’t planned on pushing any passion so quickly.

She had no such compunction, and there was definitely something there.

He buried one hand into the front of her coat, holding her close.  His other hand found the back of her head, just above her neck.  Sitting down, they were close in height to each other.  She barely had to tilt her head to meet him.

She tasted like cognac and smoke and cigarettes and something sour that was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.  It was faint, like a bitter taste on the edge of his tongue.  It was almost like the cigarettes but not quite . . .

Any thought of it disappeared as Sloane let go of his coat with one hand and tangled her fingers into his hair.  She pulled his hair just enough to hurt but not enough to make it unpleasant.  Desire like hot lightning struck through his core and his breath hitched.

He pulled her in tighter, letting go of her coat to put his hand at the small of her back.  She exhaled sharply into his mouth, and he swallowed it greedily.  She was so warm and alive against him.  Nothing at all like what Ilona . . .

The hand still fisted in his coat crept up until her fingers rested on his neck, just below his ear.  Her thumb rubbed along his jawline.  It was a gentle movement, one that banished thoughts of Ilona.  Ilona was never gentle.

They separated, Sloane breathing heavily.  Karhi wasn’t, but only because he was already dead. 

“I live three blocks over,” he murmured, leaning forward to brush his lips along her jaw. 

“Perfect,” she rasped.

He smiled before getting down from the back of the bench.  Before he could turn to her, she jumped on his back, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips.  Her grip was surprisingly strong for an inebriated human, each hand holding the opposite wrist.

She pointed northeast, along the river.  It was surprisingly accurate towards his apartment.  “Onward.”   She grasped her wrists again.

He resisted the urge to look back at her in annoyance.  “Am I a mount?”

“Play your cards right, and I’ll be riding you in more ways than one tonight.”

That went straight to his dick and all outrage and offense disappeared.  He hooked his arms under her legs and started towards his apartment.

They were maybe ten steps on, past the water fountain, when Sloane said, “What are we doing?  You’re a vampire, right?  I am not getting any younger.”

The horny and the irritation warred again.  “I didn’t want to catch you off guard—”

“I shanked a guy with a bottle tonight.  Catch me off guard.”

Fine.  He tightened his grip on her legs and bolted.

He had half-expected her to lose her grip on his neck and had been prepared if she did.  But she didn’t.  The sudden movement meant that her clasped hands jerked against his neck uncomfortably, but her hands on her wrists were apparently iron.

It was a snowy night, past midnight.  Reflections of the streetlights on the snow illuminated everything and cast heavy shadows.  The streets were empty except for the occasional car or person walking out of a bar. 

He bounded down the sidewalk.  He was used to the way things blurred as he moved, but he never lost track of the things around him. 

He was surprised when Sloane screamed in delight.  After the initial acceleration, she braced her legs against his arms and her forearms against his shoulders and lifted herself up.  She whooped.

He considered for a split second before he leapt across the street.  It was a controlled jump, but Sloane yelped in surprise.  She sat back down, tightening her legs and arms around him again

“Dickhead,” he heard her mutter.  But there wasn’t any anger in it.  Just breathless joy.

He grinned and sped up.  “I’m going to jump!” he called over the wind.  “Hold on tight!”

Her grip on him tightened and when he jumped, she cursed.  But again, there wasn’t anger.  He had never come across a human who melded so easily with vampire speed and strength.  She was rolling with it and enjoying it.  Her shouts weren’t fear but unbridled delight.

He leapt on top of a single-story building and continued, jumping from building to building, getting higher and higher until he was soaring through the night two hundred feet in the air.  Normally he would climb up a building, but he couldn’t take his arms out from under her legs.  It meant he had to take a bit of a roundabout way to his apartment to do that, but it was worth it. 

Hearing Sloane’s gasps of surprise and shouts of joy made his heart swell in his chest.  He couldn’t think of a time where he had done something that made someone sound this happy.  Even the night before, he had just been satisfying Ilona.  Pleasing her.  There had been no happiness in it.  Not from her, and definitely not from him.

They finally arrived at the terrace of his penthouse.  The terrace took up half of the square footage of the footprint of the building. It was a flat expanse of tiled floor broken by a pergola with seating, garden boxes with hibernating plants and bushes, and a closed-up pool in one corner. 

His penthouse took up the rest of the space.

Karhi let Sloane down and had to steady her when she faltered.  Her hair was wild, her face flushed, and lips chapped.  Her eyes were starry and wide, looking up at him with the biggest grin.

“Okay?” he asked.

She nodded, taking the arm he offered her and leaning heavily on him.

“Still want to come in?”

She nodded.  “Yeah,” she rasped, throat dry from the wind.  The grin didn’t disappear.  She looked around the roof.  “Fancy as fuck.”

There were four doors leading out onto the terrace from his penthouse.  One was to his bedroom.  He knew where the night was going to end, but he didn’t want to cut to the chase and bring her in through his bedroom.  He found he was having way more fun that he had anticipated.

He led her into a hallway opposite from his bedroom, unlocking it with a code entered into a keypad instead of a key.  The hallway was dark, and it wasn’t until Sloane bumped her shoulder against the wall and cursed that Karhi realized that the darkness could be a problem.  Right.  Humans.

He reached back behind them to hit the light next to the door to the terrace.  The hallway lit up into the living room.

They moved into the living room, and Karhi turned the light on here.  He had a TV mounted on one wall with suede furniture grouped around a coffee table across from it.  He moved toward the hooks mounted on the wall next to the front door.  He took off his coat and hung it up there. 

He turned back to Sloane, who was looking around his living room with raised eyebrows.  He cocked his head.  “Your coat?” he asked.

She nodded, unzipping her coat and passing it to him.  She looked around his apartment as she did. 

He hung it up, trying to figure out how to advance things.  He realized he had halted the flow of their tryst by taking the time to hang up his coat.  He hadn’t meant to, but he had been so buzzed by the fun of running with her on his back, he realized that he had lost the horny in the process.  Not completely—it was still lurking like a leviathan in the depths—but it had flagged enough to force him to think.

It turned out, as he faced her, that she wasn’t overthinking it like he was.  She put both of her hands on his chest and pushed him into the wall, just past the coat hooks, and pressed against him.  She kissed him.

He only hesitated for a moment.

He hauled her onto his hips in direct juxtaposition to how she’d been situated on him not five minutes earlier.  She wrapped her legs around his waist and looped her arms around his neck.

She smelled like lavender—a deep, clean scent that made his head buzz.  Or maybe it was the residual alcohol.  He had drunk a lot of the cognac in one go.

He wished he had just cut to the chase and gone into his bedroom.  It would have saved them some time.

They made it to his bed, almost without incident.  But she was doing this thing with her tongue on his ear while pulling his hair and it made his knees buckle and they almost fell.  She chuckled, moving down his neck, alternating between bites and kisses.

She unlocked her legs from his waist as he lowered her to the bed, laying back and pulling him down with her.

For the first time, he realized his boots were still on.  At some point, Sloane had apparently gotten rid of hers without him noticing.  Impressive when they were snow boots.

He pulled away, growling in annoyance to pull the laces and kick them off.  He reached over to turn on the table lamp next to his bed.  He could see fine, but he knew she couldn’t. 

He turned to meet her, his chin colliding with her head as she sat up.

They both cursed, Karhi jerking back; Sloane doubling over, hand to her mouth.

He sat down next to her, a hand on her shoulder.  “You okay?”

She nodded, hand over her mouth.  “Bit my lip.”

Even if she hadn’t said anything, he would have known.  The scent of copper hit him when she’d turned to look at him.  A combination of desire and disgust welled in his stomach, as it often did when he smelled blood while aroused.

He realized with a start that this was the first time in years he was going to sleep with a human without being fucked up on heroin.  The realization left the taste of bile in the back of his throat.  Was he going to be able to stomach this?

“You okay?”

His own question reflected back at him.

He looked up to see Sloane had her lip tucked behind her teeth.  The scent of blood had thinned in the air.  She had one hand balled in a fist, the other covering it.

He swallowed.  “Uh . . .”

She held her hands up, fingers spread out, palms facing him in the universal display of Very Obviously Not Touching.  “We can stop.”

The bitterness in the back of his throat disappeared.  Choice.  She was giving him a choice.  This woman—this human—who was no threat to him whatsoever, was telling him, the vampire with all the power, that they could stop.  That she wouldn’t hurt him.  That she wouldn’t force him.

He would have laughed at that—this frail human telling him that he had power—if it didn’t make him want to cry.  Not a single person he had been with before had ever given him the option to say no.

He captured her mouth in a deep kiss. 

She made a noise of surprise, her splayed hands coming to rest on his chest.  He ran his hands up her spine to rest on her shoulder blades.  She breathed out heavily through her nose.

The taste of blood was still faint in her mouth.  It was heady and intoxicating in a way he couldn’t remember blood ever being before.  Fuck, when was that last time he drank fresh blood without heroin?

She pushed against his chest with both hands, and he froze, pulling back from her.  “Sorry,” he said uncertainly.

She shook her head.  “No.  Just want to make sure—we’re okay here?”

He squeezed his eyes shut to try to ignore the way her question made his heart twist.  “Yes.  Really okay.”

“Can you say that while actually looking me in the eye?”

He opened his eyes, pushing down the emotion that threatened to bubble up.  He was not going to cry in front of this woman.  Not when he so wholeheartedly wanted to continue things with her.  He nodded.  “Yes.  I would like to continue.  If you would also like to continue.”

She searched his face for a moment before finally nodding.  “Remove your clothes.”  She was already pulling her sweater and camisole over her head.

By the time her shirts had cleared her head, he already had his shirt and pants off.  She paused when she saw him working on his boxers.  She frowned, but it was an impressed frowned.  “Love me a man who can take orders.”

He resisted the urge to tell her that he would take any orders she gave him.  They had literally only just met, and he was not yet that desperate.

Karhi fully naked, she looked him up and down with an appreciative smile.  Her bra was gone, underwear still on.  But he wasn’t going to complain.

“Nice,” she grinned.  She moved back on the bed, letting him climb on next to her.

Almost before he knew what was happening, she had him on his back and was straddling him, her hips on his thighs.

She licked her hand before wrapping it around his cock.  The gesture was so obscene that he jumped in her hand.  Sparks shot through him, and he groaned as she slowly pumped up and down.

He brought one hand to the small of her back, the other to the centre of her shoulders, and brought her down to him.  He groaned against the flesh between her neck and shoulder, sucking a bruise into the skin there.

She let go of him.  He resisted the urge to whine when she did and was rewarded for it when she dug her nails into the flesh of his biceps.   She panted as he continued leaving bruises along her neck and collar bone.

She reached up his body to fist her hand into his hair.  He gasped at the sudden pressure.  He wanted to sink his teeth in her, but he wouldn’t.  It wasn’t right—

“You can bite.”  Her voice was harsh and ragged in his ear.  She pressed his mouth into her throat, as if to tell him what she meant.  As if he hadn’t known the moment that she said it.

She hissed through her teeth when his fangs pierced her neck.  But she returned her hand to his aching cock, continuing those same slow, firm strokes.

The taste of her blood before hadn’t been a fluke.  It really was just as intoxicating and potent from her neck.  He had never tasted blood like this.  Or, at least, he hadn’t in years.  Decades, even.  Did he even remember what fresh blood tasted like when he wasn’t fucked up on heroin?

He pulled away, licking her neck to help the wound coagulate.  He rolled her over so that he was on top, kissing her and grinding against her.  She moaned against his mouth, one hand in his hair, the other fumbling with her underwear.  He reached down and got them off her legs in one quick movement.

He reached down, ready to finger her but she stopped him before he could.  She pulled away just enough to whisper, “Inside.”

The request was so desperate and so, so sexy.  His erection was almost painful at this point.

She bent her knees to lift her abdomen up just a little.  He took himself in hand, brushing the tip of his dick against her.  She was so wet.

She hiccupped in surprise, and he stopped before pushing in. But before he could make sure she was okay she was wrapping her legs around him and pulling inside of her.  The wet warmth of her enveloped him, and they moaned in unison into each other’s shoulders.

He pulled out just a bit, and she pulled his hair so hard it made him see stars.  But the pain combined with how she felt around him just made him groan in pleasure.  He pushed back in, and she whimpered into his shoulder, her hips rising to meet him. She grabbed his shoulders.

As he gained a steady rhythm, Sloane rising up to meet him with every push, an agonizing, delicious tension built in his abdomen.  He reached down to cup one breast, grazing her nipple with his teeth.  She arched her back, shouting out in surprised pleasure.

He only let himself think about it for a split second before he bit the skin there.  Blood, sharp and strong, filled his mouth, and he swallowed it down.  One of Sloane’s hands came to rest against the back of his head, almost crushing his mouth to her.  She whimpered with every swallow.

Her blood made his head spin.  With every push into her, he pulled blood out from her, letting it fill his mouth.  The tension inside of him was building, like a spring winding up.

He pulled away and Sloane whined.  She pushed him to her other nipple.  He got the hint and repeated the same thing.  Her blood sang inside of him, filling him with warmth and feeling that threatened to overwhelm him.

She pulled him up, tangling her hand in his hair and crushing their mouths together.  She met each thrust with reckless abandon, kissing him so hard that he almost bit her lip.

His orgasm was threatening to overtake him, and he slowed.  “Are you close?” he whispered in her ear.

“You first, me later,” she replied, squeezing her legs around him and bucking forward so hard that they both shouted at the sensation. 

He was okay with that.  He pulled out again, regaining the same rhythm he’d had before.

She pressed him against her neck again, whispering, “Come on, babe.”

He bit her again, her blood rushing to fill him.  The heady taste of her blood and the tension building inside of him had him on the edge.  He thrust into her, the spring in his gut on the verge of snapping.  Warmth enveloped him, both inside and out.  Blood and pleasure threatened to overwhelm him.

His orgasm crashed over him, and his hips stuttered, blood flooding his mouth.  Her breath was ragged in his ear, and he pumped a few more times, chasing his orgasm before he finally stopped.

Only then did he realize that the grip of her legs had loosened.

He looked down, and terror erased all of his pleasure. 

She was so pale she was almost blue.  How much had he drunk?

“Sloane,” he said, pulling out.  He tapped her cheek.

She moaned weakly.  It wasn’t pleasure.  It was pain and exhaustion.

“Fuck,” he cursed.  “Sloane, come back to me.”

Her eyes fluttered, and her head fell to the side.  Her breathing was ragged, and her heart was beating too fast.

She had lost too much blood.

Regret and terror gripped him.  But he couldn’t let it take root.  He couldn’t let her die.

And suddenly, with clarity that he hadn’t expected, he finally understood what he had tasted on her breath earlier.

Cancer.  Late, late stage cancer.  In her lungs.  It would kill her soon.  Probably not even a few months.

In any other case, he was certain he would have made a different decision.  He may have tried to get her to a hospital.  He may have called someone to help him. 

But regardless of if she got enough blood in her body through normal, human routes like a transfusion, she was going to die soon from the cancer.  With, or without him, she was going to die.  And with him, he could at least give her a second chance.

He leaned down and bit her again.  Her blood was no longer the same intoxicating taste.  It was desperate now.  Her body was trying to fix her. 

And just as her breathing got so shallow, he almost thought it had stopped, he pulled away.  He bit his own wrist, tearing the skin away from it, and pressed it against her mouth, squeezing the blood out with his other hand.  It hurt, but he was far, far away from the pain, the horror and panic numbing it.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out if it was working.  The reaction was almost immediate.  Her mouth closed around his wrist, and she sucked the blood down, swallowing hungrily.

He had never turned anyone, but he knew the general steps.  She had to drink blood from him until he could feel his own thirst.  To turn a brand-new vampire, they needed just as much blood as had been removed from their body.

It was hard to differentiate the feeling of adrenaline from what he had done from the feeling of adrenaline from when his body was losing too much blood.

When his vision started to spot, he knew that was enough.  Human or vampire—massive blood loss resulted in unconsciousness.

He pulled his hand away from her with little difficulty.  She whined but she already looked better.  The pale blue of death had disappeared, replaced with the pale pink of health.  Or, at least, non-death.

He didn’t have the chance to wallow in guilt before his vision started to spot again.  He shook his head, trying to get up, to go get blood from the fridge to replenish himself.  He had let her drink too much.

He stumbled getting out of bed.  He didn’t even reach the door before collapsing.

Panic rose in his throat as his vision went dark. 

No no no no—

Everything disappeared.

Waking up was like a comedown but ten times worse.  He had lost so much blood that his hands shook, and his head felt like someone had split it open with a pickaxe.

He looked to the side, dreading what he knew he would see.

There she was.  Dead.

Of course, she was breathing, and he could hear the slow beat of her heart; but the scab surrounded by angry purple skin on her neck said everything.  She was turning into a vampire. 

I turned someone.

If he could have, he would have thrown up.  But nausea was a familiar feeling that he could do nothing about.  It wasn’t like he could vomit his guilt and anxiety.  Vampires didn’t vomit.

He climbed out of bed, shaking so hard that he missed the doorknob when he tried to leave the room.  He slammed into the door, pain ringing like a gong through his shoulders.  He reached blindly, finally finding the doorknob and turning it.

He almost fell as the door opened away from him.  He stumbled, catching himself on a wall before starting towards the kitchen.

He made it through the hallway.  The lights were still on from when they had come in.

It took every ounce of strength he had to skirt around the dining room table.  He cursed himself.  Why had he gotten such a big fucking table?

He tripped on nothing just before the fridge, grabbing onto the handle of the fridge door. 

It didn’t save him from falling.  The door made an awful grinding and squealing noise, and the top hinge broke away from the fridge.  He let it go and the door crashed to the floor, the other hinge breaking away as it went down.  He heard tile shatter.  Great.

The fridge had French doors on top and a chest freezer below.  Karhi could see into half of the fridge, and there wasn’t much in there besides drinks and blood.  He reached in and grabbed a bag of blood.

He sank to the ground, his fangs running out, and tore into the bag.  Blood spilled over his hands and onto his legs and the floor.  He sucked down as much as he could before the bag was empty, half on the floor, half in his body. 

The relief was instantaneous.  His hands weren’t shaking so badly and now he only felt like someone had taken an ice pick to his head instead of a pickaxe.  He was able to get to his knees to reach for another bag.

He punctured this bag with his teeth again but didn’t tear it.  He only lost a few drops to his hands and the floor this time.

The consistency of the blood was awful.  It was thick on his tongue and swallowing it was like swallowing straight molasses. Five hundred years, and he still couldn’t stand cold blood by itself.

He went through three more bags after that before he had finally stopped shaking and his head didn’t hurt.  It took him almost five pints of blood to feel normal again.  He had let the dead woman take far more blood than he should have. 

For the first time, he looked up at the microwave to see what time it was.

Four AM?  His brow furrowed.  It had been almost two when he got home with the woman.  There was no way he had only been asleep for an hour.  He finally dragged himself to standing.

His phone was in the pocket of his pants, but he didn’t want to go back into that room.

He went into his study, on the opposite side of the apartment from his bedroom.  His computer monitor glowed blue with the login screen.  He entered his password and looked down at the clock to see that it was indeed 4 AM, the morning of December 21^st.  He had lost a day.

Which meant that the woman in his bed would be waking up soon. 

“Fuuuuck,” he whispered, sitting down in his leather desk chair.  What the fuck was he supposed to do?

He knew what Luna’s response would be.  She would tell him to just kill her now.  She wasn’t fully a vampire yet.  Luna had accidentally turned enough people over the years that her go-to was always to kill them.

The woman in his bed was in the turning coma.  There was no connection between the two of them yet.  He could kill her.  She would just be another dead human.  He would have to find out who she was to make the reparations to her family, but then he wouldn’t have a fledgling.

But he wasn’t fooling anyone with that.  Least of all himself.  He couldn’t kill her.  It wasn’t her fault that he fucked up.  She had just been a cute girl in a bar who hadn’t been worried about hooking up with a vampire.

She should have been worried.

Fuck.