FIFTY
The opulent room was so far removed from
the cheap motel Cade and Zach used as to be on another planet. The
bellman saw they had no luggage, saw the difference between Tania’s
designer clothes and Cade’s rags, and gave them a knowing wink and
smile.
Tania paid for all of it with a black AmEx card in
someone else’s name. The desk clerk was perfectly obsequious as he
handed over their keys.
Tania pulled the blackout drapes, sealing the room
completely. It could have been high noon or midnight outside. There
was no way to tell.
Cade felt better instantly, out of the light.
So did Tania, clearly. A layer of tension and
irritability dropped off her like a cheap coat. The approaching
daylight had been getting to them both.
She stretched back on the
fifteen-hundred-thread-count sheets of the bed, revealing the tight
band of pale, flat skin at her navel.
There was an inevitability gathering in the air,
like smoke. Hanging there between them.
She rolled to one side, her hair hanging slightly
over her face. “You want to sleep? Or shower?”
Cade thought about it. “No,” he said.
MOST VAMPIRES do not have sex. They consider it
human and therefore degrading. But Cade and Tania weren’t like most
vampires. They still remembered some of the good parts of being
alive.
He pulled off his cheap T-shirt and went to her.
She peeled off her top and arched her back up. He pinned her arms
above her head.
She locked her legs around him and bit him, hard,
on the neck. He pulled free, his blood spilling over her breasts.
He lapped it up, licking the salty taste from her nipples, her
skin. She latched again, sucked hard, pulled more blood from the
wound, let it run out the sides of her mouth and down her
neck.
She pulled him down closer to her and then flipped
him over onto his back, yanking away his pants.
Then she clasped her legs around him again, hips
rocking back and forth, riding him down to the bed.
Cade’s body tensed and shook like he was plugged
into high-tension wires. He ran his hands over her, greedy for her
feel, her touch. His fingers traced their way down, began working
there.
She rode him harder. Her back arched. She tossed
her head forward, her hair flying.
Cade’s hand moved faster, thrusting upward, lifting
her off the bed. Tania sat on top of him, still sticky with his
blood, writhing like the sacrifice on an altar from some long-dead
religion.
Their nerves, exquisitely tuned, thrummed and
burned, back and forth between them, the moment stretching out,
seeming like it would never end—
Until she sang, like a flock of birds moving
swiftly by in flight.
Cade shuddered and bucked, and then they both
stopped moving, suddenly as still as the grave. They lay there,
piled on each other, instantly in the comalike state that passed
for their sleep, dead to the sunlit world outside.