Sundown Inc.: She Who Dares Read online

  I felt a prickle of awareness, and saw a human couple standing together. The boy who’d broken into my flat, and the brunette who’d attacked me in the bar. Human followers of a hostile Master. Fabulous.

  I walked toward my Greek warrior, and he held out his arm as I approached. Without missing a step, we continued through the curtain at the far end, and as soon as it was closed Dare kissed me so violently I was sure my bronze paint would be smudged.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said as he drew back from me.

  “How could I resist?” I pulled off his helmet, smiling as his beauty came into view. We kissed again, no metal in the way this time, and as his hands hovered over my bronze-painted body I became aware that only our mouths were touching. Somehow that made it more intense, more erotic, and my breath came faster as his tongue thrust into my mouth, taking charge of me.

  “You are so beautiful,” he breathed, his gaze burning into me. His hands touched my wig, a thick New Kingdom style, heavy with real gold. “I daren’t touch you.”

  Again I felt the heat of an Egyptian night, and saw myself through Dare’s eyes again. The pharaoh’s woman. Not to be touched.

  “I have spare paint,” I told him, and watched a smile curve his mouth. We kissed again, and while his hands skimmed a hair’s breadth over my arms, my back, my bare buttocks, he still never touched me. My nipples tightened. My pussy felt swollen, tender, needy, and still he hadn’t touched me.

  I skimmed my hands up under his kilt and found him bare. Smiling against his mouth, I caressed his tight buttocks, his hips. The soft hair covering his thighs gave way to coarser hair at his groin, and then I felt his cock, already hard, thick, long. Hot, so hot.

  I ran my thumb over the tip of it and felt a drop of moisture there. Dare trembled slightly as I spread it over his cock, gently learning him with my hands.

  “Masika,” he breathed. I loved the way he said my name. Accented, the way it should be; and that voice of his, that deep rich voice that wrapped around me, soft and hot like a glove. Like a cunt.

  “I want you inside me,” I said, and punctuated it by fondling his balls.

  “I -- we can’t, I’ll smudge your --” I squeezed gently, and his breath caught -- “your costume…”

  “Then we’ll have to be very,” I caressed his length, feeling him swell to what must have been painful proportions, “very careful.”

  I glanced around the room, spying a chaise a few feet away. I pushed Dare onto it, lifted the panes of his leather kilt and just looked at his cock for a long while, thinking about feeling it driving into me. Thinking about the heat of it inside me, the slide and the friction and the fullness and the glory of it, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  “Masika?”

  My eyes flickered up to Dare’s, and then in one of those lightning moves I could only do without thinking about it, I’d straddled the chaise, straddled his cock, and taken him inside me.

  Dare groaned. I held my breath at the feeling of him filling me, stretching me, warming me. Carefully I lowered myself until his cock filled me as far as it would go without my thighs touching him. His cock was buried inside me, and we weren’t touching anywhere else.

  Dare’s hands came up and smoothed over my body, so very nearly touching me, and I felt the heat from his skin as he skimmed his palms over my aching, bronze-tipped nipples. I lifted myself up, my feet braced on the floor, and slid back down again.

  Dare’s fingers flexed over my breasts.

  “When this is over,” he said, his voice a low growl, “I’m going to wash that paint off you with my tongue.”

  My cunt tightened involuntarily. “Oh, yes.”

  “Until then…”

  He thrust up into me, and I met him, barely missing the flat of his hips between my thighs. My hands fisted in midair. There was no paint on my palms, but if he couldn’t touch me then it wasn’t fair for me to touch him.

  Faster and faster we moved, eyes locked, perfectly in time, the grace and beauty you only get from a vampire who’s been around a really, really long time. I felt my orgasm building, tightening inside me like a spring. Heat rushed through me. My skin burned.

  “I’m coming,” I gasped, and then I suited action to words, and felt my body convulse around him. Dare came too, an explosion of power inside me, and it took all my strength to keep from collapsing on his chest.

  But he didn’t let me. Scooting down under me until his mouth was level with my pussy, he whispered, “You’re all wet,” and proceeded to clean me up with his tongue. He circled my clit, licked the length of my labia, then plunged his tongue deep inside my cunt. I came again, violently, my hands fisted in his hair, and when I came back to earth I heard someone clapping.

  We both snapped to toward the sound, and when I saw who it was, my tenuous control evaporated and I fell to the floor in a disgracefully ungainly heap.

  My Master stood on the far side of the room, away from the ballroom, so that we were trapped between her and hundreds of unfriendly vamps. She looked just as I remembered her the last time I saw her, two thousand years ago. Like myself and Dare, and a lot of the vampires at the party, she’d dressed in the style of the time when she died.

  Thick stripes of paint on her face and body, and a wrap of fur around her waist. Her body was covered with fine dark hair all over, her legs were bowed, her brow was heavy and her dark eyes were full of intelligence. I didn’t know, but based on archaeological research my guess was that she’d last seen the sun thirty thousand years ago.

  I sprawled gracelessly on the floor, smudging bronze paint everywhere, and stared at her. Dimly, I was aware of Dare pulling me to my feet, but I didn’t take my eyes from her. Nor she from me.

  “Masika,” she said, and a chill went through me. “You look surprised, child.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” someone said, and I realized in horror that it was me.

  My Master smiled, that baring of teeth that looked feral if you didn’t know what it meant.

  “You remember my name,” I covered.

  “Of course, child. Do you remember mine?”

  I nodded, hating the way she called me ‘child.’ It was a reminder of what I wasn’t. “Uda.”

  Her gaze moved to Dare. She had to look up a long way to see him; she was less than four feet tall and he was way over six.

  “Sekani.” She spoke with a strange gutteral accent that made you remember her vocal cords hadn’t been designed for vowels. I guess Sekani was easier for her to say than Darien.

  What he said in reply to her scared the shit out of me. If he hadn’t been holding me up I was sure I’d have slithered to the floor.

  He bowed his head and said, “Master.”

  I stared at him. Then at her. Then back at him again. “You’re -- she’s -- you’re --”

  “She still does not know?” Uda made it a question. Dare shook his head. “Sekani is my Childe.”

  I gaped at both of them. I know I’d come in dressed as a cat goddess, but I was now doing a pretty good imitation of a bloody goldfish.

  “Does your edict still stand after twenty-three centuries?” Dare asked her.

  She looked at us both for a long while, and I used the time to wonder what the fuck was going on. When Uda spoke again, it was not with words, but with the sign language she had used with her vampires so long ago. Human speech was always difficult for her.

  “A Master vampire cannot control what becomes of any fledgling she sires,” she said. “Until the vampire wakes for the first time and feeds, I can never know if it will be just another drone, or something more special. A Childe. In all my years I have only created two.”

  “Dare,” I said, and she nodded.

  “And you, Masika.”

  I stared at her. I really couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “When Dare arose, I was as pleased as any mother with my Childe. Look on him. A lieutenant to be proud of. But I knew… I always knew that he would not be mine for eternity
. Only a Childe has the power to become a Master.”

  I cleared my throat. “You commissioned Sundown to kill him.”

  She nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I knew it was a vampire because of the Renfield who came to us. A subordinate vampire wouldn’t have a Renfield, and a stronger Master would have done it himself. The only person in the whole world who would have to get someone else to do the job would be Dare’s own Master. I just didn’t know who that was.”

  His hand tightened on my arm.

  “Did you really need to have him killed?” I asked.

  Her big dark eyes looked sad. “He was less than five years out of the grave when I realized his potential,” she said. “I could never harm him myself.”

  “I’ve always wondered,” I said, “is that a rule between Sire and Childe, or is it actually impossible?”

  “Impossible,” Dare said. It was about the second word he’d said since Uda appeared in the room.

  “Yet I could not allow him to overthrow me. When he made his request of me to save you, I took a promise from him in return that he would leave, and never return to the same lands as me and my court.”

  It was an information overload. I felt like my computer when faced with a huge download. I just couldn’t process it all.

  “You -- save -- what?”

  Dare cleared his throat, and the silk of his voice sounded a little rusty. “I saw how Djoser dropped you when the pharaoh discovered your infidelity. I killed him but I couldn’t save you from the death he’d brought you to. I wasn’t strong enough by myself to bring you over, but I knew Uda could do it.” He looked right at her. “And I knew she’d demand something for it, too.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why did you do it? You didn’t even know me.”

  “Know you?” Dare choked. “I spent my life watching you. I was a boy of twelve when you came to the court.”

  “I was eight.” Raised with the pharaoh’s children, and taken as his lesser wife when I was thirteen. “You were tall for your age.”

  He gave the faintest smile at that. “I knew even then you were special. Knew the pharaoh would never marry you to anyone else. I watched you grow and every day I fell a little more in love with you. Masika,” his blue eyes hit mine, “I knew you could never be mine. But I couldn’t let you die like that. Better eternal life away from you than knowing your light was darkened forever.”

  “Light?” I said. “I’m a vampire. Light is a distant memory.”

  “Not for you,” he said fiercely. “You glow, Masika. I look at you and I see the sun, I smell the desert, I remember what it was to be alive. You make me feel alive,” he said, and for a long moment we just gazed at each other.

  Then Uda spoke, with words this time, to get our attention. “His loyalty to you was always greater than it was to me. When you awoke as my Childe, I knew I had to send him away, before he grew too strong to resist me. Before you learned from him what you really were, and eventually betrayed me.”

  It was all too much. My legs gave way and Dare kept me from falling to the floor. He lowered me to the chaise where we’d just made love, and knelt before me, his hands in mine. Uda had commanded his death because she feared his rebellion. A Childe was the only vampire who could defy his Master. And all this time I’d been a Childe, I could have been a Master if I’d only known.

  “How do you think you lived through those scars, child?” Uda said softly, and I realized what she was really saying. Not child, but Childe.

  And through it all the persistent knowledge that it was Dare who’d begun all this. Dare who’d loved me as a child, a human child. Dare who’d traded his own family -- for a Master’s pack was that, a family -- for my life. For my safety. Dare who was kneeling before me, telling me he’d loved me since before the Bible began.

  And it seemed to me I was being offered a choice. Either I could go back to my Master, be her Childe, and eventually the target of another assassin -- just as Dare would be, or I could be with Dare, this strong man who loved me. And who I loved, truth be told.

  My choice?

  I drew Dare’s sword, stood, and faced Uda. She watched me with those intelligent eyes.

  “I could never control you, Childe,” she said, and I swung the sword.

  * * *

  The ball sort of lost its swing after I’d beheaded the Master of everyone there. A lot of them pledged allegiance to me and Dare, the only Childer of their old Master, but I don’t think either of us were really paying attention. Dare picked me up in his arms, lifted me into the air, and flew me into the flickering stars over Paris, where he made good on his promise to lick all the paint from my body. Every last inch of it. I wasn’t sure there was such an excess of paint on my mouth, my breasts, and my pussy, but hey, I wasn’t complaining.

  Cat Marsters

  Cat lives in a village in south east England, which, while not quite a fairytale setting, is nonetheless very pretty and was mentioned in the Domesday Book of AD 1087. She shares a house with only slightly batty parents who hardly ever tell her to get a real job, and a musician brother who knows there’s no chance she’ll ever get one if he doesn’t. Life is kept from being boring by the often hilarious antics of three geriatric cats and a dog who thinks she’s Marilyn Monroe.

  Cat has been writing all her life, but in order to keep herself rich in shoes and chocolate, she’s also worked as an airline check-in agent, video rental clerk, stationary shop assistant, and laboratory technician. She’s aiming for a fairytale cottage, and asks all potential Prince Charmings to apply in writing with pictures of themselves and their Aston Martins.

  Visit Cat’s web site at http://www.catmarsters.com.