Bloodrush Read online

  Damn that bitch.

  He wanted it. Needed it more than ever. The compulsion to drink blood filled his brain like a fever, just as it had in those first frenzied moments of his undeath. The gnawing, churning ache of the need was already nearly intense enough to drive him mad should he be unable to slake the thirst.

  He wanted to scream.

  He opened his mouth to do just that.

  But before he could give voice to the howling need consuming him, a weak sound from somewhere to his left stilled his rage, if only for a moment. His willed his body to stop shaking and turned his head toward the source of the sound. The sound came again as he got his first glimpse of his nearest comrade in torment. An emaciated middle-aged woman was chained and bolted to the stone wall less than six feet away from him. Well, he assumed she was middle-aged, but her actual chronological age was difficult to gauge, so advanced was her state of physical deterioration. She was little more than paper-thin gray skin and bones. David knew at once she’d been hanging there a long time. The muscles in her legs and arms had atrophied. Her breasts were saggy little nubs. Never in his life had he set eyes on a less physically attractive female. He was nevertheless enthralled by the sight of her. Droplets of drool welled at the corners of his mouth as his gaze locked on the weak throb of her pulse visible at the side of her neck, the place where her jugular vein lurked beneath that fragile gray skin. He pictured himself tearing the vein open and drinking deeply from it. His penis stiffened at the thought. He could even feel a bit of warmth pushing against the awful cold gripping him.

  Her eyes fluttered open as she began to perceive his scrutiny. Her head lolled toward him and her mouth dropped open to emit a single hoarse word: “…helllppp…”

  David didn’t bother responding. She was beyond help. He made a snorting sound deep in his throat as he continued to stare at her neck. He licked his lips and yanked at the chains binding his wrists. There was a scrape of iron against stone as one of the bracket bolts gave way another infinitesimal amount. He could feel her heart beating and savored the way it sped up as she sensed his hunger.

  She shook her head weakly. “Nooooooo…”

  The part of him that was still human, some withering remnant of his conscience, was repulsed by the thoughts swirling in his head. But this voice of dissent was no match for his deepening hunger. If he could get to this woman, he would kill her without hesitation and drink every last sweet drop of her blood. He yanked at the chains again, this time putting more strength into the effort than ever. Shiny tears were spilling down the woman’s gaunt cheeks. Her terror excited him, added fuel to his exertions. He bellowed his rage and yanked mightily at the chains again and again. But he soon realized there was a limit to how far he could pull the bolts out of the stone. They were anchored pretty effectively, despite the slight amount of give he’d initially experienced.

  He opened his mouth wide and screamed out his frustration until his lungs were burning.

  And then he screamed some more.

  He only stopped screaming when he sensed something rushing toward him from below. He glanced down and saw a sleek, pale shape coming straight at him. It was her. It could only be her. She was coming to punish him in some new way, to maybe rip out his throat to silence his screams. He realized he was wrong an instant later. The sleek white blur solidified as it alighted upon the emaciated woman to his left, hanging onto the bound hag as easily as a bird grips a tree branch. He had been right. It was the vampire. She held his gaze for a moment, a ghoulish grin etched across the pale, angular planes of her beautiful face.

  David shook his head. “No. No. She’s mine.”

  The vampire laughed, but said nothing.

  She raked the nails of her left hand down the front of the gray-skinned woman’s torso, opening five angled horizontal gashes from just above her right breast down to her waist. Dark blood leaked from the rents in her flesh. The vampire dipped her fingers in the blood. Thick globs of crimson dripped from her fingertips as she raised her hand to her mouth. David’s heart shot into overdrive as he watched her slowly lick the blood from her fingers. He was already painfully aroused, so there was no need to overtly sexualize the blood-drinking, but she did so anyway, drawing the full length of each finger slowly in and out of her mouth, groaning and curling her lips in a parody of fellatio. David moaned and bucked against the chains binding him to the wall. He cried out and strained toward her with all his might, but both the vampire and the bleeding woman remained frustratingly out of reach.

  The vampire laughed.

  Then she let go of the gray-skinned woman and fell away from her, speeding back to the blood-stained ground far below. David watched her sleek form slice through the air, knowing she’d land as lightly and easily as she’d alighted upon the bound woman. He wondered if he could do the same thing. It wasn’t something he sensed innately, the way he knew he’d recover from most any grievous injury. His brow furrowed as he gave it deeper consideration. He was a new vampire, but she’d been this way a very long time, centuries, perhaps even longer. Maybe the flying thing was an ability he could develop over time. Being bound, however, flight experimentation wasn’t an option anyway, so his attention soon shifted back to the bleeding woman.

  Her glassy eyes stared at him, bespeaking a silent, anguished plea.

  Help me…help me…

  He didn’t care about helping her. The realization should have disturbed him, but it did not. He understood now the true reason for his current shackled state. He was being forced to accept the truth of what he had become. Well, the lesson had been driven home with insidious effectiveness. He no longer cared about right or wrong. Any sense of repulsion had vanished. There was only…attraction. Need. All-consuming thirst. The angled slashes across the woman’s torso were deep and blood continued to spill out of them. He watched as a thick stream of crimson slid down her inner thigh, then into the crook behind her knee and down the back of her atrophied calf. He kept watching in helpless fascination as the life continued to leak out of her, his frustration growing with each wasted droplet of precious blood. This was torture of a most exquisitely cruel variety. The thing he desired most—needed most—was so tantalizingly close…and yet so completely beyond his reach.

  He began another furious, flailing assault on the chains. Maddeningly, they gave no more than they had before. But this failure only further inflamed him. He screamed and flailed and raged until both his wrists snapped and his voice was reduced to an inaudible rasp. His broken bones knitted back together within minutes, but he was unable to maintain the intensity of the struggle.

  The bleeding woman’s head drooped forward. The blood had ceased spilling from the wounds because her heart was no longer pumping. She was dead.

  David sobbed quietly for hours.

  He was so hungry.

  So thirsty.

  Would there ever be any relief?

  The answer came a few long hours later. He sensed something rushing up at him again and knew the vampire was returning. She unlocked the chains, cradled him in her arms, and swooped back toward the ground. David felt dazed as she landed smoothly and set him down on his feet.

  On the ground in front of him was another bound woman. This one was much younger and infinitely more attractive than the pitiful, gray-skinned thing the vampire had used to taunt him. She’d been stripped naked. Unlike most of the pathetic things chained to the walls here, she retained most of her vitality, so much so David suspected she’d been freshly captured. She had long, midnight-black hair that fell lushly about her narrow shoulders. She was slender but curvy, with large breasts and long, exquisitely toned and tapered legs.

  She looked…delicious.

  That screaming, agonizing, overwhelming hunger returned with a vengeance and he strained toward her, but the vampire kept a firm lock on his wrist, holding him easily in place. “Look at me.”

  David looked at her.

  She smiled. “Yes. You are much more compliant now. Good. Do you want her
, David?”

  He groaned. “Yes. More than anything.”

  “More than you want me?”

  David hesitated. He didn’t know how to answer that one. He only knew he didn’t want to piss her off again. “I…”

  “You said something about not knowing my name before. Would you like to know it?”

  David blinked at the abrupt shift of topic. He wanted the focus to remain on the apparent sacrificial offering chained up on the ground in front of him, but this was a tricky mental game the vampire was playing. He didn’t want to make any more missteps. “Um…sure. I’d like that.”

  “My name is Narcisa Vulpes.”

  She watched him with a strange glitter of expectation in her eyes.

  David coughed. “Okay. Cool.”

  “Do you like?”

  David summoned a smile. “It’s a fucking awesome name. Maybe the coolest ever.”

  “It’s Romanian.”

  David nodded eagerly, as if no one had ever said anything so astonishing. “Wow. Romanian. That’s super fantastic.”

  She relinquished her grip on his wrist. “Look at her, David. I selected her just for you. Are you pleased with my choice?”

  David nodded again. “Pleased. Yeah. That’s one word for it.”

  “Then take her. Drain the life from her. Complete your transformation.”

  David didn’t need to be told twice, even as her choice of words carved a niggling slice of doubt in what little remained of his conscience. Was she saying he wouldn’t fully be a vampire until he consumed the blood of an innocent? It seemed an obvious conclusion, but the fierceness of the ache churning in his belly rendered the question irrelevant. He was no longer capable of holding back.

  He snarled and leapt upon the bound woman. Her eyes fluttered open as he shoved her legs apart and shoved his rigid cock deep inside her. She moaned as he moved inside her, becoming helplessly aroused by the invasion. David knew she’d be screaming and flailing at him if he was still a normal man. But he wasn’t normal. He wasn’t even really a man anymore. She sighed and strained toward him. He leered at her and opened his mouth wide. He felt a popping of jawbones as his mouth distended, felt his gums bulge as his teeth grew sharper and longer. His cheeks felt strangely elastic as his jaw dropped lower than humanly possible. He kept staring into the woman’s eyes, expecting to see terror bloom there any moment. But she seemed numb to the reality of what was happening to her. She looked drugged. Perhaps the effect of some vampiric pheromone. He had no way of knowing.

  He slapped her. Hard. “Look at me.”

  Her pupils remained dilated. Her smile was beatific. She moaned. “Yes. Yes. I see you.”

  He slapped her again, much harder than before. Her eyes began to focus more sharply on him. Good. That was what he wanted. “I’m going to kill you.”

  There it was. The terror.

  It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  He ejaculated deep inside her as he snarled again and ripped out her throat. A jet of hot blood hit his face. The feel of it against his flesh was wonderfully warm. The bone-deep cold began to leach from his body. He clamped his mouth around the ragged wound, perfectly sealing it, and drank deeply from her. She moaned and writhed slowly against him, still aroused despite what was happening to her. He drank greedily, his throat bulging as he quickly suctioned every drop of blood from her body.

  He rolled away from the corpse and sat up, grinning at Narcisa, who stood nearby with her arms folded beneath her breasts. She wasn’t smiling now. The coldly appraising expression he remembered from the shopping mall was back.

  “Enjoy yourself?”

  The grin wouldn’t leave his face. “Yes. God, yes.”

  “Feel any guilt for the life you’ve taken?”

  “None.”

  She nodded. “Good. It’s finished, then. There’s nothing human left in you.”

  “Good fucking riddance.”

  Another nod. “Do you feel satisfied, as if you couldn’t possibly drink another drop?”

  He shook his head again. “Not even close.”

  Now she allowed herself a smile, a small one that slightly dimpled the corners of her mouth. “Care to join me in a hunting expedition?”

  He surged to his feet and approached to within inches of her. He felt her cool breath on his cheeks, an indicator that she hadn’t imbibed since partaking of the gray-skinned woman. And that had only been a taste. She was ravenous. He could smell the need on her. Sniffing it reignited his own thirst.

  “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

  Her smile broadened. “Good.”

  She clasped hands with him. A white radiance began to fill the cavern as the tactile world started to fade. This he remembered from those last moments on the bench at the shopping mall. He felt a little twinge of nervous anticipation as he realized what would happen next. The moments of fading consciousness, that strange sensation of ceasing to exist. He experienced a moment of the starkest terror as the process began, then relaxed as it continued, a numbness overtaking him as the world and consciousness itself faded…

  7: INITIATION

  He came out of the light and into the dark. There was a jarring sense of displacement, followed by a wave of disorientation. For a long, heart-pounding moment, he wasn’t sure who he was or what he was. He was just a thing in the darkness, possessed of a rudimentary consciousness but no deeper sense of self. There was something oddly comforting in that. Then it came to him. His name was David Rucker. He was a man. Or formerly a man. He was something else now. Something stronger. Something better.

  Something hungry.

  Always fucking hungry.

  The darkness puzzled him. It was dark and someone was screaming. There was an obvious conclusion. She had been toying with him. There would be no hunt. No rampaging exercise in wanton, unrestrained slaughter. He was still in Narcisa’s secret place. He’d wind up chained to that cold cavern wall again, where he’d spend the rest of his miserable existence, gasping and starving from lack of—

  The paranoia deserted him as his newly sharpened senses began to detect distinct differences between this place and that filthy cavern. They were in a house. A bedroom. Two figures writhed atop a dimly visible bed, covered by a single silk sheet. One of the figures, a woman, was screaming, but it was a sound of intense pleasure rather than pain. The air in the room was rich with an array of pungent odors, chiefly sweat and the musky scent of sex. He listened for a while as the couple on the bed fucked with admirable enthusiasm, both of them perfectly oblivious to his presence, at least for the moment.

  He felt something touch his elbow.

  Narcisa.

  She smiled. “Kill them.”

  The woman on the bed made another high-pitched sound, but this time there was a note of surprise mingled with the passion. The man atop her grunted and chuckled softly, the smugly satisfied sound of a man who believes he has just taken his woman to previously unattained erotic heights.

  David took a step toward the bed. He could see better in the dark now. There was no artificial light in the room and only the dimmest diffused moonlight filtered through the closed window shades. Seeing anything should have been next to impossible. Yet the shape of the bed was now crisply defined within the gloom, as were the shapes writhing on the bed. The man and woman were both young and athletic. The man’s upper torso was heavily muscled, yet lean, likely the result of a balanced mix of cardio and strength training. The knowledge should have given him pause, but he felt no fear. Not the slightest flicker. This man would be a formidable opponent for any human assailant. But because David was no longer human, all he felt was a sense of heightened anticipation. In life, he would have been no match at all for this man. Now, though…now he would revel in tearing the smug son of a bitch to pieces.

  The woman made a sharper, even higher-pitched sound of surprise. She was staring straight at him now, straining to make out the shape moving toward her in the darkness. David kept coming closer. The w
oman started pounding on her man’s back when he reached the edge of the bed.

  “STOP! STOP!”

  She was screaming yet again, but this time in sheer terror. Her lover stopped in mid-thrust and craned his head around to squint at the darkness. He let out a startled gasp that made David smile. The shape of his body would be visible now against the faint backdrop of the moonglow seeping in at the edges of the large window directly behind him. The man disengaged himself from his woman and spun around on the bed, priming his body for attack. The woman scrambled away from him, going for a nightstand next to the bed.

  A light snapped on. A lamp with a heavy brass base. The woman was still in motion. She was a tall blonde, maybe an inch or two shy of six feet, lean and muscled like her lover. She also had enormous tits. Real ones, too. He could tell from the way they moved and jiggled as she strained and reached for the handle of a nightstand drawer. The drawer came open and out came a handgun. Some kind of automatic. David didn’t know much about guns, but he knew that

  The man glared at him. “You people need to get out of here before we call the police.”

  Narcisa approached the bed, propped a bare knee on the edge of the mattress. “No one’s calling the police tonight, dear.”

  The blonde waved the automatic at her. “Off the bed or I’ll fucking shoot you both.” Her lithe, toned body glimmered in a sheen of sweat, a result of the interrupted erotic exertions with her husband, boyfriend, whoever the fuck he was. The sight of her glistening skin stirred something in David, almost to the point of distraction. His eyes narrowed to slits as they traced the lines of her luscious curves. Drool collected at the corners of his mouth.