When Blood Runs Cold - Chapter 244

“It seems like the bathhouse is not the only place you have been wandering too, hmm? Azrael coo’s, running a bony finger under my chin to raise my head to him. It is all I can do to keep that dizzy smile across my face, to maintain that dull look of a pleasurable trance and not a girl brimming with fear.

But I will not let him get the better of me. This is not where I will crumble.

Azrael glamoured me only to serve him, but he did not make me a mindless shell like the others. And so an element of free will would have remained in me, even if I had been glamoured for real. It is this that I decide to play on.

This will be my loop hole.

To the point that it almost becomes toxic, I force myself to smile, giving an airy sigh that is reminiscent of pleasure and not my inward and largely growing despair. Running my fingers up Azrael’s arm, I recline against his chest dotingly, my hands upon him like a lover, not a sworn enemy.

Maybe I would even make Soren proud of my skills in deception.

“I went to bask in the palace gardens, and pick a bouquet of flowers for you, Master,” I murmur breezily, but then force my face to fall, confused. “But the sun never blooms here, only the stars. The flowers they had were so small they seemed hardly worth picking. So I went looking for more, but I became lost in the forest,” I lie seamlessly, leaning in towards him so that my body presses closer towards his, distracting him with skin and flesh so that he might not look too far into my lies.

Fortunately, he does not seem to.

“If I had you with me,” I say, running my fingers adoringly over his chest, but in my mind, my thoughts are heaving with disgust. “Then I would not get so lost. Will you come with me next time?”

“You need only ask. I would never turn down an opportunity to spend some… quality time with you,” he smiles deviously, but the meaning behind those words is clear. For in Azrael’s mind, the meaning of quality time is not some fanciful walk in the gardens, no, it’s meaning is singular. Sex.

For a few seconds, he begins to run his hands up and down my body: playing with my waist, the groves on my back, my face, and occasionally, to some point so daringly low on my body that I have to hold back a choke. Must he be so revolting?

But I already have my answer to that.  Yes, of course he can be.

But then Azrael begins speaking once more, jolting me out of my daze.

“But my pet,” he reminds me, running his fingers down the side of my face, sending tremors of disgust rocketing down my body. But fortunately for me, those very tremors can be played off as pleasure. So that is exactly the illusion I create for him, moaning slightly as I lean my cheek into his palm. To this he looks remarkably pleased. “The night time is the best time for a vampire. A time for eternal reverly, and,” he adds, turning me around roughly to sit facing away from him, my eyes now permanently glued to the scene before me.

A scene of naked bodies and seductive cries, hot breath steaming up the room as the whole place seems to groan in ecstacy.

Well, I think with a bitter grimace, at least I am not looking at Azrael any more.

“The night is a time for this,” he prompts, letting his fingers glide down a little further, skipping low over my abdomen, but strangely not daring to go any further. Perhaps my experience with taking his blood has left him wondering what other anomalies I might react strangely too, and if perhaps sex is one of them. Not that I would know, for that matter. I am just as largely clueless on the matter as he is, and the one that he would need to ask about it is currently thousands of miles away and is public enemy number one here.

But then I remember- the way Soren had brought those markings that douse my body to life under his fingers. The way my body had seemed to pulse with power as he assured me that his blood, his markings, would grant me the element of protection that I would need against Azrael’s advances.

But the only worry is, to what extent do I trust that? How far do Soren’s powers truly extend to? Can they really protect me against…

I do not allow myself to finish my sentence. I must trust Soren on this, but I suppose if I really need to, then I might have to risk implementing some of my own protective measures.

Azrael’s fingers sinking lower against my body brings me sharply back to attention.

“Do you wish to join them, Serena?” Azrael coos as his long fingers glide further down, down, down near unholy places where his scheming hands should never hope to touch. I bite my lip. There is no way in hell I ever want to join these creatures in their public orgy, one to save myself the embarrassment, and two because it feels utterly, completely wrong. I had promised myself to Soren and only Soren, to let him take care of me and treat my body as his alone, but to undo those promises here would be sacrilegious at best. And yet as Azrael’s hand glides lower against my clothes, I begin to wonder whether I have any choice in the matter at all. My will here is worthless.

Will Soren’s markings really work? Will they be able to stop Azrael getting too far?

So instead I find another way to keep Azrael distracted.

“What is the point of all this?” I ask curiously, keeping my voice light enough to prevent any serious tone from befalling it, and one that might betray my unease, even disgust with the whole situation. “Do the faeries have festivities like this, or is this something you have introduced, Master?” I query curiously, pressing myself back against him as he presses his hands into my skin. A gorge rises in my throat after feeling he is already hard beneath me.

A small desperate part of my mind tells me that is only due to the sheer amount of arousal and naked bodies in the room, and that it would be enough to send anyones head spinning with pleasure. But then I wonder if I am merely just telling myself that, after all, he certainly wasn’t as hard as this when I walked into the room.

“A good question, my little pet,” he murmurs, tilting my head around to lock his lips with mine, kissing me with an intoxicated passion, his tongue sliding against my lower lip, begging me to open up. With a feigned enthusiasm, I do so, allowing his tongue to slip into my mouth as he moans against me, the hardness beneath me throbbing with a clear and obvious wanton.

At last he pulls away, our breaths steaming between us.

Disgusting.

“Here in the faeries land there is an annual tradition for those who are willing to join under the stars for a night of passion and sex and love. It is a shame we never had a similar one in Sezeria,” he says, punctuating each word with another movement of his hand as it slips lower and lower against my skin. Roughly, his lips move against my jawline, biting, hungry.

Nothing like Soren.

“And is that today, then?” I ask, desperate to be distracted from those prying hands and hungry lips on my body, anger and shame beginning to boil in my blood. Anything would be better than this. Anything. Even death.

Gradually, Azrael’s hands move up to play with my clothed breasts, his fingers searching, toying, smoothing over the sensitive flesh.

“That is not today, no. In fact, the event passed a few moons ago, so I decided to hold another one, after all,” Azrael says, and all at once my body is no longer sat on the chair, but crashing against a long bed-like stretch of elevated couch in the centre of the room. “It is quite the experience…”

Fear gushes through my veins like a waterfall, my mind buzzing to be free of this room, of these people, of this event. A half ditched call for help echoes through my mind as Azrael kneels beside me, resting his arms onto the soft pillow fabric as he leans over to place his mouth against mine.

“Don’t you want to feel it, my Queen of Souls?” he coos, his fingers working to unpop the buttons lining my blouse, exposing my creamy flesh that lies beneath. At this point I don’t even care if he notices the heaving of my chest. Fear flutters in my heart like a disease, strickening my breath and causing my mind to melt with the irrational touch of terror.

For whatever reason, Soren’s magic has not yet worked. Azrael is still able to touch me, and likely will continue to do so.

I am going to have to endure this, or put an end to this some other way.