Red Grow the Roses Read online

  ‘You pissant little crab-louse,’ Reynauld snarled, wrenching Naylor’s head to the side. Whoa, I thought – he’s not going for the neck, is he?

  ‘Go on,’ Naylor gasped, wriggling frantically and pushing up on to his elbow, trying to impale his behind on the jut of Reynauld’s tool. ‘Go on, you cocksucker, you want it, you want to fuck me bad, you want to fuck my ass, you want to shove that big hard cock up my hole and make me your whore, you dirty fucking shit-shoveller, make me scream, there it is, yes, there, right up there where you want it –’

  Then he roared, because Reynauld did exactly what he was begging for and rammed his cock deep into his anus. I saw three white pennants of ejaculate shoot out of Naylor’s prick and spatter the polished oak. And I saw the look on Naylor’s face.

  Reynauld let go of his hammerlocked arm so he could get purchase on his hip: I was surprised the limb wasn’t dislocated. ‘Clean that up,’ he said hoarsely, pulling him back on to his knees and jabbing deeper into his rear passage. ‘You’re not fit to leave a stain in my house: lick it all up.’ He pushed Naylor face-down across the tabletop. What choice did Naylor have? Groaning, he put out his tongue and lapped the gobbets of his own cum off the wood until Reynauld heaved himself upright, his thighs straddling the younger man’s ass, and began to fuck him.

  I’ve never felt the slightest sympathy for Naylor, but my eyes watered on his behalf then. I’d had that cock up my own backside many a time, but not like that: Reynauld was always so careful with me. With Naylor he was merciless. He thrust like a machine, like he was trying to turn Naylor’s insides to pulp, and Naylor soon gave up any idea of licking anything; eyes staring and fists clenched, he was simply trying to ride the waves of the invasion and not drown.

  ‘Do let me know if this hurts,’ snarled Reynauld, and Naylor groaned.

  Oh, that cock, pounding away in that narrow ass; those hard thighs, braced like steel; the look of implacable retribution on his face. It scared the hell out of me, and it made my pussy run with juice.

  But he was nearly finished: I could tell. This was going to be quick. Pausing in his rut, Reynauld caught Naylor’s long hair and pulled him upright as he knelt back. Naylor, dazed, seemed to sag; it was only Reynauld’s arms holding him in place. But the youth still – astonishingly – had an erection. His cock jerked as Reynauld bent to growl in his ear.

  ‘You’re not going to forget the rules again, are you?’

  Then Reynauld bit him. In the neck. The vampires watching gasped and surged forward. Naylor’s eyes flashed wide and then he came again – not hard, no jets, but frothy spunk spilling out down his cock on to his balls, blobbing in his pubic hair – as Reynauld rammed home and shot his own semen up that abused anal hole, drinking deep from his throat.

  For a moment they held, shuddering, together. Then Reynauld thrust the other man off and dropped him on the table. Blood crawled down Naylor’s neck and chest and the others shifted tensely. The room had a pulse now: I could feel it hammering at my skull. If Reynauld let them off the leash they would drain Naylor dry.

  ‘Get out,’ said Reynauld, standing. Jizz dripped from his cock on to the other man’s buttocks. ‘All of you, get out. Naylor: final warning. There won’t be another.’

  The vampires withdrew in silence, one at a time. Naylor, last of all, had to crawl off the table.

  As soon as they were gone Reynauld stalked from the room, his robe of shadows gathering anew and swirling around him like spilled ink in water. I let out a ragged breath and sagged against the door frame, catching myself trembling. Under my suit I was wet with perspiration. Between my legs I was wet with something else, and though I was horribly ashamed at my response to the violence I couldn’t deny it. I could feel my pulse at my throat and groin: I was lucky none of them had turned on me in the middle of all that and torn me open.

  ‘Double the security detail this week, Colin,’ I said, my voice unsteady, as I returned to the foyer. The man behind the desk stared at me, nervous but unable to ask. Fumbling a little, I bolted the front door and cast salt across the threshold, then went back to draw the velvet over Roisin’s mirror.

  ‘Amanda.’

  Reynauld’s voice, in my head. My heart thumped.

  ‘The bathroom.’

  Moving quickly, I walked through the house. The marble-clad master bathroom was warm with steam as I entered, and the lights low. He stood with his back to me behind the layered arms of the glass screens, his head bowed and shoulders set angrily, outstretched fingertips on the polished black marble and the water running full-blast at the back of his neck. I watched the water swirl around his dark feet, running into the drain between them and carrying away the grime and the tension and the lust. I saw the way he rolled his shoulders under the flow, working each stubborn muscle. Inside me something clenched with an exquisite, tender pain.

  How could my heart not melt for a man who craved a long hot shower?

  I didn’t say anything. He knew I was there, and he would instruct me if he wished to. Instead I withdrew a fresh white towel from the cupboard and waited, watching him. I could follow the ebb of his anger by the way his shoulders slowly sagged, the way he finally moved to rub his neck and scalp, playing the water through his dark hair and then across his chest and down his torso. He soaped himself and I wished they were my hands massaging that body, my fingers chasing the suds cascading down his skin.

  At last he turned off the water and stood there dripping, still facing the wall. I kicked off my heels and stepped between the arms of glass to hand him the towel, my eyes lingering on the water drops clinging to his skin, on the wet curls at the back of his head, on the runnels licking their way down his back and thighs. Reynauld wrapped the towel about his hips and tucked it in, then turned and set his back to the corner of the shower, leaning against the angled marble. His expression was haunted; he looked so weary and despairing that my heart felt like it would crack.

  ‘I handled that badly, didn’t I?’

  What? I wanted to ask. You mean humiliating Naylor in front of everyone like that? Yes, I’d call that badly handled.

  I shrugged one shoulder.

  ‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper. He just makes me so angry. Why won’t he listen? Is it so difficult to understand, what I’m trying to say?’

  ‘I think you should have killed him, to be honest. He’s a psychopath.’

  Reynauld’s mouth tugged into an unhappy smile as he admitted, ‘He’s a little short on empathy, certainly.’ Then, with a sudden change of tack, he was ruefully defending the man he’d just beaten down. ‘But that doesn’t come naturally to haemivores. We have to learn it.’

  Why couldn’t Reynauld be as cynical as me? I had the distinct feeling that empathy was something the others had learned to fake. ‘He’s a killer.’

  ‘We’re all killers.’ His voice was ragged.

  That wasn’t what I’d meant, but I couldn’t argue with him. How can you possibly make a man twelve centuries older than you listen to a word you say? It’s bad enough with ordinary men – can you imagine a forty-year-old taking advice from a teenager of sixteen? Now try and grasp the gap between Reynauld and me. If I were like him, if I were knit of strength and night and savage need, then he might hear me. But I wasn’t, and never would be. I just looked at the water beaded on his bare chest and wanted in my frustration to strike him, to bruise him, to pin him to the wall and kiss him until he realised how much I loved him.

  I think he saw the pain in my eyes, mirroring his own. With a curl of his fingers he gestured me closer and I dared to lay a hand on his bare chest. The feet of my stockings were soaked from the shower tray.

  ‘Oh, Amanda,’ he whispered. He took my face tenderly in both hands, brushing his knuckles across my cheek, using his thumbs to stroke the paths of my bones. His eyes narrowed, his lips parting. I trembled, knowing that he could sense my desire: he’d be able to feel the race of my blood beneath his fingertips, hear my painfully pounding heart – and to smell the
heat of my sex.

  Oh, to hell with it: why try to pretend? After all these years he still made me as wildly horny as an eighteen-year-old, as desperate as a smackhead craving a fix. Try as I might there was nothing I could do to hide it, not from him. Reynauld dipped his face to mine and I felt the brush of his lashes on my temple, the caress of his breath on my cheek as he nuzzled me. It was almost like he was searching for something. It was almost like he was scared to tell me what it was. How crazy was I, imagining that? But I could read something in his eyes as he lifted his face from mine: something wrong, something new and uncertain of itself, even as he acknowledged my lust. Gently he reached a hand down to the heat between my legs. My wraparound skirt was secured by a row of poppers angled across my right thigh – formal propriety combined with ease of access – and the serial click of their surrender sounded loud in the shower chamber. He had to stoop a little to reach between my legs in their dove-grey hold-up stockings. My knickers were grey gauze too, the shaved mound of my sex overlaid with appliquéd white lace flowers like a moonlit garden. Panties so beautiful I’d been almost nervous to put them on, wondering if I really deserved anything so lovely at my age.

  As his fingers explored the garden a sigh escaped my lips and he caught it in his own. His eyes threatened to drown me in their darkness. Delicately he slipped the lace aside and I lifted my hips to grant him access to my sex, placing both hands on his ribs as I shifted my balance. He was hot from the shower and thrillingly wet. Pearls of water burst at my fingertips as he found my own wetness, my own pearl, and rolled his finger delicately around that tiny mound, finding it engorged.

  I nearly fell to the floor.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I whispered, losing my all sense of danger, rubbing my hands over his flanks and arching my spine. My heart was racing. Lust and joy: I had him to myself for the moment, I had his complete attention. He threatened me with little biting kisses, on my face, my lips, my ear – his teeth never brought into play but every touch sending a jolt through me – yet he kept pulling away to try and look me in the face, watching the flow of my reactions as he fingered my clit, stealing my sex juices to roll it slippery between two fingers. I couldn’t do it: I couldn’t look him in the eye. I rubbed against him like a cat and writhed and then it became almost a game of chase, him trying to catch my gaze, kiss my lips, force me to acknowledge what he was doing to me as his fingers drove me further and further along the road of my arousal.

  I could resist only so long, and then I surrendered.

  I was almost dancing against him now, thrusting my hips and making dark damp patches on my top as I pressed my breasts against his wet chest. Abandoning caution I reached to his crotch, to the layers of thick soft towelling and the unmistakable bulge of his hardening cock beneath. As I grabbed it he vented a groan, stopped merely massaging my clit and began to flick with that staccato vibration that he knew worked so well for me. The towel began to slip from about his hips as I lost all self-control, all dignity: panting and blaspheming I fell against him and came on his hand, my legs nearly falling from under me, Reynauld catching me round the waist with his other arm to hold me up.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I mumbled into his skin. ‘Oh, God.’

  When I lifted my burning face from his chest, the towel was no longer wrapped around his bare hips but hung from the erect baton of his cock, held there by my tight right hand. We both looked down at it, and I gave it a slow hard squeeze through the heavy towelling before letting the fabric slip to the floor. That turgid flesh didn’t yield at all. His cock was stiff once more, his balls riding high in a scrotum no longer soft and velvety but now tight and bulging. I brushed cock and balls with unsteady fingertips: he would take me now, before I had time to come down from the afterglow of my climax. He would take me and fuck me and bite me and that was exactly what I wanted.

  ‘Amanda …’ His voice was a whisper. He bit his own lip. The ache in his voice persuaded me to meet his gaze. ‘Would you …?’

  No completion to that question. No words for what he wanted. Just his glance tentatively indicating his cock. My eyes widened as I understood, my heart kicking against my breastbone. In 27 years he’d never asked this of me, and I’d never seen him ask or permit it of any woman. It wasn’t even thinkable.

  ‘Reynauld?’

  He swallowed. ‘Please.’

  Slowly, without answering, I slid to my knees, pulling the damp towel under them for padding. My mouth brushed his flat stomach, the damp hollow of his navel, the thickening flare of his treasure-trail of hair. I licked my lips and his cock jerked. A big, blunt glans, glistening with pre-cum already. Slowly, savouring the thickness and heat of his meat, I took him in my mouth and sucked.

  It was 26 years since I’d given head. Vampires … Oh, God, for vampires there is no suggestion of submission or pleasure-giving in the act of going down. Just the opposite. The mouth is a weapon, the feeder dominant, the fellated a blood-sacrifice. They might accept it from another of their own kind: they would never submit to a mere human. What I was doing to Reynauld was, in vampire terms, grossly perverted and utterly shameful.

  He groaned, a stifled desperate noise, and ran his fingers through my hair.

  Get this: there I was on my knees, my lips wrapped about his cock, serving him with my mouth – all so very much what I wanted – and as far as he was concerned he was the one yielding, I was the one in control. And maybe in a way he was right. I swept my tongue in sweet circles over the head of his cock, penetrating the tiny mouth of his glans with the very tip, tasting his seeping eagerness. Then I changed, made my mouth all soft and accommodating as I engulfed him as deep as I could, swallowing him to the back of my throat. Reynauld pressed the root of his cock, angling it all the better for me to take, bracing his legs wider. His length was excessive for my mouth and his girth enough to stretch my jaw, but I slid up and down on that big cock and he responded to every change in pressure, every swirl of my tongue, every little slurp, as if I were plucking notes from his soul. For me it was extraordinary: for once I was calling the shots, I was in charge of the pace, I could give or deny. I felt like a goddess, encompassing this creature of night and dread, but at the same time I was a worshipper, most willing of slaves, his cock my idol on which I would pour out my life.

  Why? Why did he want this?

  He didn’t thrust, not once. The more I sucked the more he pressed himself into that corner, his braced thighs stiff with strain, tiny trembles vibrating through his flesh. I couldn’t see his face from this angle but something told me he had his head back, his throat stretched taut. His balls were so tight now; those big overcharged balls that were an unending source of semen and venery, full of seed that would never live, brimming and taut and ready to pump his sticky cream into any pussy or any ass. Or into my mouth: he began to come, taking me by surprise.

  ‘Amanda!’ he gasped.

  I pulled back a little, holding him on my tongue so that he could see, if he were looking, the gush of his spunk. That didn’t last: I had to grab him and swallow as fast as I could because it was filling my mouth and spilling from my lips. The taste of him exploded in my head, wild and tangy and sweet. And cold. God – so cold. Spasm after spasm, his cock jumping against my tongue, until he’d emptied his balls down my throat and I was still sucking, still wanting more, wanting it never to end. Like a vampire.

  Reynauld’s legs gave way quite suddenly; he slid down the marble, stared at me wildly, then pulled me into his embrace. I thought he was going to bite me – and bite me hard – as I lay up against him, but he didn’t. He just held me, stroking my hair, both of us huddled there on the floor of the shower like fools. Was it comfort he needed of me? I started to cry a little, out of shock I think; out of a sort of joyful terror. He held on to me the way a child alone in the dark clings to a soft toy, and I could only wonder.

  (Reynauld)

  And this is Reynauld, the Good Shepherd, whose authority over the other five is held by dint of careful planning and the minute ap
plication of brute force when necessary. He’s not the oldest of them, because that distinction belongs to Roisin, but he’s hardly young even by vampire standards. His name is French but he isn’t, although should he choose to speak the language his grasp of it is perfect, and – just as in English – he has an aristocratic accent. He speaks Spanish too and Portuguese – Old World style, not American – as well as Arabic, Farsi, Old Syriac, Italian, Latin and Greek, all with equal fluency, along with many others on a less familiar basis. He always did have a facility with languages. He was 34 years old and a translator and scribe in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad when he died, in the year 218 after Hijra, which was the year AD 833 in the Roman reckoning. Both calendars were ones he was quite familiar with, being a man of sublime education.

  His name then was not Reynauld, of course; it was Kerim ibn Zarad al-Razi, but he abandoned his Arabic name when he gave up his religion. There is no place in Islam for vampires, whose very sustenance is harram: forbidden. The Faithful cannot drink blood. Yet, brought up in that world, he misses the strictures of faith. In 1907 he took up a bare-bones Buddhism and now meditation is as much a part of his nightly routine as feeding. Right speech; right action; right livelihood; right effort; right mindfulness; right meditation; right understanding; right resolve. The spiritual discipline appeals to him, as does its practicality: he carries no theological baggage along the Eightfold Path, no particular hope of reincarnation or redemption.

  He adopted a Greek name first, and others after that as he moved about from land to land. There have been so many names now that he hardly remembers them. ‘Reynauld’ came quite late on, when he posed as a French Huguenot immigrant in the sixteenth century. He has done well for himself in this, the latest of his adopted homes. His investments have been wise, his habit of building alliances among the living a key to his success. He is a broker in political games, seeking not power but stability and prosperity. Being in every way physically superior to the masses of the living, he sees it as his duty to care for them. He is benign, paternal and restrained in his dealings.