The Hunt (Of Blood and Magic Book 2) Page 5

  Her eyes narrowed, and she adjusted in her seating position. “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I’m staring in another direction,” Timou gulped guiltily at these words, suddenly finding it impossible to hold her gaze, “You’re not bad yourself, you know?”

  Timou couldn’t believe his ears. Had Elena struck her head against a tree while he was gone? Maybe while she hunted the snake? Had she just flirted with him, or had he been imagining things? He tried to swallow, as he always did when he was nervous, but a stone had formed in his throat, blocking the passageway.

  Elena smiled a thin, confident smile. “I know what my mother wants, and while I don’t want to give it to her, I also don’t want to remain stuck in this hole.” Her voice was hardening like steel again, and then, almost as suddenly, her features softened, taking on an alien expression that looked like a cross between adventure and mischief. “Before I take the leap, let’s do something crazy.”

  She winked at him conspiratorially; a wink that could only mean one thing. Though he had looked forward to this grand moment all these years, he still felt his insides turn to rubber at her gaze.

  “Come here.” She instructed, her eyes blazing with the kind of fire only desire can light up. He didn’t know how, but his body, working on its own accord, connived with his legs to drag him over where she was, even before his brain could decide whether or not to.

  When he reaches her she is undoing the clasp behind her head, letting her hair fall across her shoulders like a waterfall. He was fidgety, and she could sense it, but Elena knew he wanted this, that he had always wanted this. And now, she did, too. She dragged him toward her by the feet and soon his pants were tugged off his long legs, to reveal golden-brown skin that shone like a polished banister.

  His cock bulged behind his tight boxer shorts, standing like a lone tower in the desert. Elena’s eyes were alive as they beheld it, like she was staring at the Holy Grail itself. Her fingers led the way, stroking it, working their way up and down the length of it mechanically, feeling the bulge twitch and enlarge, responding to her every touch. And then her lips followed. She nibbled at his cock without unraveling it, sending electric sparks to Timou’s brain. And then she pulled down his boxers, revealing the full length of it, and ran her tongue in circles around it, stimulating his cock until it became like a living organism in itself; growing, breathing and tightening all on its own accord. She nibbled the head of his cock with just enough teeth to make him feel like he was about to explode. He had never before felt like she was making him feel.

  She worked on his cock with her hands and her mouth so mechanically that he subconsciously wondered from where she had derived such potent experience. She positioned her arms across his bare thighs, resting her elbows on his knees, her hair falling over her face she worked his cock with skill and poise. Timou groaned and grunted, finding a use for his hands by grabbing her ass.

  She took his balls sack in her mouth and popped his balls, one each after the other, sending a sharp, lingering sensation up his spine. She licked him all over, relishing the taste of his essence, while he groaned beneath her. Then she straddled him, her hair hanging over her eyes, shielding her face save for her right eye, and making her look like the sexiest thing on the planet. She bent over him and bit his shoulder lightly, sending shock waves across his body.

  She brushed her plump boobs across his face, then dragged her hair over his eyes, until her boobs hung over his chest, her nipples resting directly on his nipples, both nipples hardening like stone. He reached out his hands and clasped them around both nipples, bunching them together and fondling them with his hands and producing heavy moans from her. With firm hands, he dragged her back forward until her boobs hung right above his face. He took her right nipple, feeling its tough tenderness, and suckled on it like a baby while she moaned above him like mad. He ran his tongue in circles around her areolas, causing her to grunt in ecstasy. He blew bubbles in the ridge between her boobs and she chuckled, loving the playful pleasure. Her boobs were like a sack of nectar, they were killing him, yet he wanted to get as much of either boob as he could into his mouth.

  She aligned their nipples again and rubbed, sending them both giddy with pleasure. They didn’t speak, but between them, silent words passed as their souls worked in tandem. The next thing, she slid his cock effortlessly into herself, having enough juice gushing from her pussy to take his cock in without inconvenience. As if listening to invisible instructions, he gripped her hips as she jerked above him, sliding up his cock and back down, up, then down, and back up again.

  He drove his cock harder into her pussy. He could tell he was hitting the right places as her moans changed, becoming graver, deeper, more protracted. She whined in pleasure as his cock scraped her clit over and over until her head ached with pleasure. Then she came for the first time, shivering as she did so like a leaf in the wind. Timou kept pounding, he couldn’t stop, the knot at the root of his cock melted away, burning in the flames of desire, and he felt the closest sensation to heaven form at the head of his cock.

  He was about to come, and somehow he could tell that she was about to come again. Head floating with pleasure, but also shivering with nerves, he told her.

  “Come in my mouth.” She responded, shocking him even harder. They disengaged, and then she took his nipples in her mouth, sending up hairsplitting moans of pleasure as she sucked and licked. At the same time, her hand massaged his cock in all the right places, and she felt it spasm at her touch as it had caught on fire. And then he began to groan like crazy.

  And then, grabbing her silky hair in his hands and drawing it back as his life depended on it, he came, disappearing into her. She took his cum in her mouth as he let it out in powerful, jerky motions. She looked satisfied, sizing him up with her eyes. And then, with fingers crooked, she motioned him toward her. Receiving the message, he leaned it. Their lips met. He tasted his seed in her mouth, as they slowly passed it in each other’s mouth as it vanished into nothingness as an alcoholic drink spilled on the floor.

  Timou grunted and crashed on his back, not believing anything that had just happened but basking in the awesomeness of it nonetheless. Elena was just so perfect. She had the most awesome combat skills, and now he had just found out that her skills at fucking were just as prodigious. Just what wasn’t she good at?

  Elena pulled away, a contented smile lingering on her face for some seconds as she stared at the roasting snake on the fire, and then her characteristic scowl somehow found its way back to her features.

  “This never happened.” She intoned through closed teeth, her voice sounding decidedly ominous.

  Timou nodded, restraining the laughter that was building inside him. Trust Elena to always control everything to suit her personal constructions. Sure, if she said it never happened, then it never did, but the sting of pain and pleasure lingering in his half-erect cock told him otherwise.

  ∞∞∞

  Chapter 4

  THE TUNNEL

  A thick, green gelatinous substance dripped slowly from the domed ceiling above, hitting the ground with a crackle and a hiss. It was clearly some form of acid which had leaked through several meters of rock somehow to find itself in Transylvania’s underbelly. The marching men avoided it without special consideration, as they dragged the defaulter toward the sanctum.

  The defaulter was a young vampire who had been caught stealing rations. Now, he was to face judgment for compromising the survival of their clan and also for not knowing his place in the scheme of things. Before his arraignment before the central council, the men had taken it upon themselves to beat the daylight (if there was any) out of him. The average non-vampire would very easily conclude it pointless to beat a vampire the way they had beaten the lad—breaking his arms, whipping his back until it exploded with welts, and smashing his face with objects until it swelled into an ugly puce with a crushed nose—since he would merely regenerate and undo all the damage. There was no lasting consequence for
such an action. But they would prove themselves shortsighted to champion such an opinion. Vampires possessed the most potent regenerative abilities, but vampires also felt pain. For a vampire, unlike Lykae, the process of regeneration was almost as painful as the battering that had created the wounds in the first place. The only thing was that as vampires grew older they learned to better handle this pain. So, though they knew that he would be fine within the hour if they refrained from pummeling him further, they beat him to stupor anyways, wanting him to drown in a pool of severe pain at least twice. Funny enough, the lad’s uncle had led the charge of the beatings and had inflicted the strongest blows. The others guessed that he had simply been too disappointed by his conduct.

  The vampires hadn’t always been like this. They hadn’t always lived like this. Yes, maybe they had always been in a state of darkness, but certainly not one this gross, and their living quarters hadn’t been leftover mattresses on wooden pillars. Their rations hadn’t been tiny ounces of powdered nuts and desiccated meats. Their environment hadn’t stunk like the worst of dunghills.

  After the capture of the King of Vampires three hundred years ago, the other clans had raided their kingdom in northernmost Transylvania and sacked it. A ton of them had been killed while fighting to defend their homeland, while certain others had been taken away as war prisoners. They would later hear that the newly formed body of vampire oppression masquerading as the bureau of magical balance, the Transylvania High Commission, had used these comrades as test subjects in hazardous experiments aimed at unlocking the secrets of eternal regeneration, in which their essences had been extracted until what was left was dry husks where there used to be vampires.

  The rest of them had melted into the shadows, seeking ways to survive and the space to mourn their family and friends who had fallen in battle or had been captured, even as the High Commission’s watchdogs hunted them down in the hundreds, killing them off without provocation, indubitably intent on wiping the vampire race off the slate of history. At the turn of the second century after the war, vampires were already down to their last one hundred and forty-four. What used to be a sprawling kingdom with thousands of soldiers had become like a little hamlet in the center of a rampaging tornado, waiting to be sucked in by the last swooshes of the vortex. They had found a way to contact themselves, all living one hundred and forty-four of them, and had resolved to camp together in the plains of Transylvania, feasting with the dregs left of their meager resources, making merry, and having a jolly time pending their inevitable eradication, and that, when the High Commission’s soldiers arrived, they wouldn’t fight, but they also wouldn’t give in, that they would all drive enchanted metals through their hearts and die, resisting regeneration. There it was, their best-kept secret, a secret that the vampires held dear and that was central to the very definition of their existence; a secret that was the final ingredient to unlock the full awareness of the power of infinite regeneration—it wasn’t automatic. Vampires willed regeneration to happen, and this will come with its costs. The more times they regenerated in quick succession, the more painful the healing process became. A vampire could decide that they weren’t ready for the pain at that point in time and postpone it; a Lykae couldn’t. This was why vampires could die.

  The vampire clan had accepted its fate, taking what they had regarded as the most honorable stance, until Tyrone, consumed with anger and hatred for the coalition, had risen to his feet.

  “We cannot let them win!” He had begun, his voice carrying the force of a truck, and then he had gone on to give a lengthy speech about their ancestry, about the kingdom they had once had, about their birthright as custodians of the darkest realms of magic. They could not give up now, he had proclaimed, as that was exactly what the enemy wanted.

  They had been pushed to the wall, they had replied, and many of them didn’t have much fight left on the inside. Each of the vampires presents there had lost at least one person who was dear to them, with others losing their entire families and all the friends they had ever known. How were they supposed to find a new will to live, they had asked? Even if they wanted to, how would they?

  To these questions, Tyrone had smiled a knowing smile. He had found a safe space, deep in the underbelly of Transylvania, where even the most insane Lykae would never reach. And he had made some friends who were witches and Lykae, who could help provide support and protection for the remainder of the clan. And for supplies, they would have to steal, but he had figured out how they would do so without attracting too much of the High Commission’s attention.

  The ruckus of many tongues talking at once had ensued. A number of vampires, who seemed to believe that Tyrone had played a role in the downfall of their kingdom and the capturing of King Lukai, had refused to follow his lead. They would rather die honorably than follow the lead of a bloody, disgusting traitor. Tyrone had had no words for these folk. Indeed, in the end, all forty-four of them were found dead a fortnight later, slaughtered by the creeks of Transylvania in a mass execution.

  The remaining hundred had followed Tyrone’s lead, undertaking a treacherous and tasking journey into the depths of Transylvania’s underground, into holes that the High Commission didn’t know existed. It was then that they had found the tunnel which they now called home. It held a stark similarity to the sinkholes in the vampire kingdom, where they would store corpses and whatnot. The tunnel reeked of death, darkness, and dankness, and it smelled of foul sickness. But it was safe and unknown, which was exactly what they needed at the time. Plus, there had been a colony of bats in the tunnel, watching them with eyes like dark orbs. For the first few weeks, they had found delight in transforming into bats and mingling with the indigenous bats, learning their language, and learning to feel at home within the fold. To honor them, Tyrone had christened them ‘Royal Bats’ and kept them in the safety of his chambers, entertained with mice for days.

  Starting a new life in the tunnel had been excruciatingly hard. Vampires had always been creatures of darkness, but their previous darkness had been more magical than anything else. It had merely been an absence of sunlight. They could still gaze at the clouds and feel the pitter-patter of rain as it hit the rooftops of their living quarters. They could still tend gardens of night lilies and dark dandelions. They could still lie back at night on a carpet of bleached blue nzeri grass and stare at beautiful constellations in the sky. But the darkness in the tunnel was a different kind of darkness. It was depressing and bleak and draining.

  As the one hundred mated amongst themselves, the colony expanded. They burrowed deeper into the tunnel, seeking new space and fabricating more storage lockers. Elite squads were created, which would undertake the long, uncertain journey to the surface, infiltrating the High Commission’s command depots and making away with food and weapons. When they weren’t out hunting for supplies, they would be found in the heart of the underbelly, testing weapons and training against fellow squad men and friendly Wiccans and Lykae who had joined their ranks and had been christened ‘Honorary Vampires’ by King Tyrone.

  As their ranks expanded and their numbers consolidated, Tyrone had a fresh idea. He called a town hall meeting, and in this meeting spoke of his pride at the progress the renewed clan had made.

  “We were down to one hundred,” he had begun, his voice booming in the darkness and echoing off the walls, “Yet here we are, at the threshold of two thousand. The High Commission thought they had gotten the best of us, that their plans to exterminate us had finally pulled through, but we have proven to them that we have just as much a right of existence as every other clan.” To this, the entire hall had sounded a loud cry of pride and conviction. Tyrone had glanced at Deidara, his beautiful queen, who sat in a chair of cast bronze at the right side of him.

  “True, things could be better. There will always exist the prospects of better. But we cannot deny that our people have resurged. We are back, stronger than ever. And now, we must begin to live for a higher purpose.” At this point, his eyes had
narrowed. “We must become more than just a clan that was driven to the point of extinction and found a way to bounce back. We have to be more than this, and now is our time. Now is our time to make ourselves into the biggest political statement in the history of the magical realm; into the resistance.”

  The entire hall had convulsed with cries of solidarity and power. People, tired of the centuries of blatant persecution, were now ready to fight back. This was forty years ago.

  The clan’s operations change, and so did its configuration. The Elite squads no longer broached the surface simply to steal supplies, they did it to cripple the High Commission. They cut supply lines, killed lieutenants of the High Commission, and stole things that the clan didn’t even need. Anything to bring the High Commission to its knees.

  They didn’t overtly recruit, but soon the resistance began to gather disgruntled Wiccans and Lykae, and some Vampire Hunters. Many of these folk were regular individuals who found the High Commission’s activities oppressive and toxic and were interested in bringing it down for the sake of restoring sanity to the magical realm. Others were ex-High Commission lieutenants who felt cheated and lied to, and so heavily disgusted by the rationale behind the End Vampires campaign that they decided to join the victimized and fight back. These individuals were branded with the emblem of the resistance; a bat with claws the size of eagle talons, enclosed in a circle with sun rays inverted toward the inside. The insignia was made from a dye the color of iodine and could only be washed off with a tub of blood.

  So, the resistance had grown, enlarging so much that they already filled more than half of Transylvania’s underbelly. While the tunnel remained the administrative headquarters, they had expanded way beyond it to make up for the new bulge in the areas of accommodation, training, supply storage, and nurseries for the younglings. They had to allow the use of fire lanterns and torches in the passageways and common areas, as the Wiccans and Vampire Hunters who had joined the resistance couldn’t see very clearly in the dark like the vampires naturally could. Because of their new bulging size, having already crossed the threshold of twenty-five thousand clan members, they needed special protection. So, the witches of the resistance had combined their powers to cast a magical bubble all around the resistance, creating a potent mirage of perpetual nothingness. The effect was like a maze on the outside, causing external aggressors who ventured into these parts to lose their way instantly, walking round in circles and not finding anything, until they left disappointed.