Immortalis Caris - Chapter 14 - Proof
Immortalis Caris - Chapter 14
They lay together on the futon in the front room of the condo. Carlisle hadn’t said much, trying to process the events of the past few hours, feeling himself slowly come down from the heightened state he had been in since he awakened the evening before.
“I have a pretty harsh history. You haven’t asked me about my past.”
She shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that it doesn’t matter. I pick up bits of it all the time as you think about your father, your old way of life.”
“You don’t even know how old I am.”
“I do. Twenty six.” She smiled indulgently as his thoughts added to the answer. “Oh. And a half.”
He rolled his eyes. “No fair,” he smiled. “How old are you?”
She was silent for so long, he thought she wouldn’t answer. She massaged his arm langorously, brought his hand to her mouth and ran her closed lips across the back of it. “Older than I look.”
He held her chin, turned her face to his. “I don’t want a bullshit answer. I want a real answer.”
She raised her eyes to his, then shifted her focus to his lips. She came so close she could taste his breath. She closed her eyes and inhaled. “You smell soooo good.”
“What does that mean,” he said, leaning away from her with a frown.
“It just means you smell delicious,” she teased, diving at him and licking his lips playfully, “and taste.... even better.”
“You freak me out when you talk like that.”
“Hmmmmm....” she smiled as she palmed his cock through his jeans. “You weren’t too ‘freaked out’ when I tasted you earlier. In fact, you were very happy to oblige.”
“Oh,” he laughed nervously. “That’s different. That’s normal.”
“Normal...” she murmured as she pushed his lips open with her tongue. He opened his mouth and his mind, as shades of rust and turquoise, sand and gray overtook him behind his eyelids.
She was nude, bent over a man in a red rock canyon. Lines like frozen ripples on a lake were etched into the stone around her. Her hair was the same color as the stone. Before her was a large pool of aquamarine water and a white sandy beach. The water reflected the last blues of a dying day; her eyes reflected the color of the water; her skin was paler than the sand. As she rose to a kneeling stance, her luxuriant hair, at odds with the starkness of her surroundings, lifted with her, covering her breasts, unveiling the man. Now he could see the man’s black-bearded face. Dressed in light armor, leather pants and boots, the awkward splay of his limbs was a clear indication he would rise no more from that place. She picked up his discarded helmet, filled it from the pool and poured it over his head again and again, brushing the hair tenderly from his face with her long fingernails.
Carlisle opened his eyes. Dee drew away just enough to rest her head on his shoulder. She gazed at his furrowed brow as he reviewed what he had just witnessed. He studied her face for a moment, trying to formulate something to say.
Statement. “That was you.” Question. “Did you kill that man?”
Her pupils expanded and contracted once. “Yes.”
“He looked like... a soldier or something. What did they call them in school... conquistadors. Why did you show me this? I don’t understand.”
“You asked me how old I am. I was about your age then.”
“Twenty-six.”
“I think so. Something near that.”
“And you’re more than twenty-six now.”
She tilted her head, and tipped her mouth up in an irresistible grin. “Considerably.”
“So how old are you now?” He sat up on his elbow.
“Do the math, puzzle man.” Her eyes twinkled.
“I can’t if I don’t know when...” He frowned. “You want me to think that was, like, the 1400’s?”
“Late 1400’s...”
He was silent for an extended moment, then his frown curved into a reluctant grin. “You’re full of shit.”
“I told you before. I have never lied to you. You believe I drink blood, that I’m very strong and fast, that my senses are superior to yours… but you can’t believe I’m old?”
“Not THAT old. I’m not saying you’re lying. You’re trying to make me say you’re over 500 years old. Please. Now quit screwing around and tell me how old you are.”
“I’m hurt you don’t believe me,” she pouted, but a smile was tickling the corners of her mouth. “What does it matter anyway? I have looked the way I do now since I was changed at age 17. I will always look this way no matter how much time passes.”
“Sorry. Not biting.” He raised his eyebrows and laid back on the futon. “So to speak.”
“You want proof?”
“Sure, convince me.”
She went to the curio cabinet and took out a small book with a stamped tin cover. Photo album? She opened it to the last third and lay back down beside him. There was a picture of Dee on a motorcycle posing with a twenty-something black-haired man in a leather jacket, jeans and boots. There was a rough handsomeness about him. Cheekbones for days. He was holding Dee possessively, his arm around her hip, his hand resting well below that as if to claim his territory more fully. Dee looked exactly as she did now, except she was wearing clothes that would be considered ‘retro’ today. It was taken after sunset when the sky is at the height of color. The camera flash and some slight movement of her head in the low light gave her glorious hair the appearance of flames.
Carlisle studied the picture thoroughly before he spoke.
“Year?”
“Seventy-nine.”
“Jess, I presume?”
“Jess. I was with him 32 years.”
“This isn’t proof.”
“Look at the previous picture.”
Nighttime again. Flash again. This time, a convertible Thunderbird and a cleaner cut guy with a vintage swing shirt, black jeans and greased hair.
“Nice car.”
“Tommy. I take good care of my men.”
He glanced up at her face before he continued.
He went back through the years, the parade of men like illustrations of costume and culture through the twentieth century. In each photo, Dee’s face was almost unchanged except for her manner of dress -- sometimes wearing women’s clothing, sometimes men’s. She looked amazing in the period tailored suits, her lack of overt femininity translating seamlessly to an elegant masculinity. She always wore her hair long, though sometimes tied back or tucked into a jacket or under a hat. When she let her hair spill over the shoulders of the masculine costumes, she looked startlingly sexy, androgynous, and out of place in time.
The last photo he looked at was the first in the book, a daguerreotype labeled “Charles, 1840.” Dee was in a period hoop skirt and bonnet, standing stiffly behind the staring man, who was seated in a straight-back chair dressed in a black frock coat, string tie and western-style hat. It was a post-mortem photo, the body arranged to appear life-like as was the practice then at the dawn of the art of photography. Dee posed as the surviving spouse.
Carlisle shuddered. He shut the album, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to confront hers. Damn.
“These can all be elaborate fakes,” he said finally.
“This is my life, Carlisle, it isn’t faked.”
“I can’t take any more… all these men... tell me this is it.”
“There were many before that, there just aren’t any photographs… ”
“It’s late,” he said dismissively. “I probably need to sleep.”
“We’ll sleep together. As the blood wears off, you’ll feel weaker.”
“Blood.” He sighed with exasperation. “That’s something else I just have to accept… isn’t it?”
“Sooner or later, you have to acknowledge that it DID happen. I gave you my blood. It made you well, but it also made you… different… better than normal. The healing stays, but the other effects wear off.”
“So…. When it wears off, I feel like crap - worse than normal?”
“There’s a solution, you know.” She opened the collar of her shirt, ran her fingers seductively down her throat. “You always can have more.”
He swallowed hard, watching her stroke her exquisite skin with her nails. “You’ve got to be kidding…” he said brusquely, but as he kept watching, the want grew… and if he realized it, she knew it too.
“I need to be in the inner room before the sun comes up in an hour,” she coaxed, her nails now scratching over the fabric of his jeans, the sound just as erotic as the feeling they produced. “Come with me. Get out of these heavy clothes...”
She rose and walked to the window. She pulled the heavy drapes, adjusting them carefully to block as much outside light as possible. She walked into the bedroom in the blind darkness, lighting a candle by the bed to bring her moth to the flame.
He rose with a groan, not only because his body was starting to feel the edge of weariness that had been so conspicuously absent, but because she had teased him hard again and he was uncomfortable in his jeans.
She had already undressed, changed into her Japanese robe and was lying on her side on the mattress, her hair gathered to one side, draped over a seductively half-uncovered shoulder. He peeled off layers, acutely aware of her attention, feeling self-conscious at her intensity. Finally naked, he was about to throw himself on the bed, but she stopped him with one hand, reaching out for his calf with the other, scratching along it lightly from ankle to knee, then pulling forward, forcing one knee to bend. He dropped to his knees beside her.
She continued to trace the contours of his body with her nails, palms, knuckles and fingers, following her own movements through half-closed eyes. She made a low rumbling sound from within her chest. At first he thought she was humming, but as he focused on the sound, he could swear it was more like a purr. He closed his eyes, pushing away the uncanny feeling he was being assessed, surveyed, and tried to just appreciate the odd but stimulating sensation. When her hand moved to his lower back, then grazed his buttocks, his knees unconsciously spread for her as he knelt, his erection moving in anticipation of her touch.
He felt her fingers on his lips. He let her part them and run the pads over his tongue. He embraced them with his mouth, tasted salt, and realized there was also a taste of... rust. His eyes flew open to meet hers, looking up at him intently. She took the fingers from his mouth, touching her wrist then bringing it back to his lips wet and red. He realized, while his eyes were closed, she had scratched a line in the vein at her wrist. He drew back out of her reach, frowning, but she calmly held the offering in place, refusing to release him from her gaze. She leaned farther forward, pursuing his retreat, rubbing the fingers slickly over his lips. He did not recoil, but closed his eyes again and licked the blood clean. She smiled.
“Hold me, caris,” she intoned and he came to her, weaving one leg between her two, resting his cheek on the pale skin of her shoulder exposed by the displaced kimono. “Let me care for you,” she continued. “I want you to take what you need from me.” She brought her wrist to his mouth, and he kissed the dark liquid line, smearing her essence across his lips. Again he licked them, this time his tongue less hesitant. He closed his mouth on the gash, pulling from it, then swallowing. He looked up at her beseechingly as she cradled his head, her fingers stroking his hair in encouragement.
The vibration resumed in her chest as he lost himself in her taste and the exhilaration of taking raw energy from another body into his own.
He remembered now the first time he had felt this. He had thought it was a only a dream, but he was clear now that he had fed from her without inhibition that night -- in a semi-conscious state of shock after Jess had attacked him. He did not remember the pain, but he did remember the rush.
He remembered the hunger that had been born in him that night. Only one thing soothed it, a thing his mind knew to be taboo, a thing survival dictated no creature should offer to another. But she was giving him what he dared not ask for, and giving it freely. That couldn’t be wrong. How could such bliss be wrong? How quickly one is tempted to embrace prohibition when the reward is pleasure...
At some point he fell away from the font, like a baby fully sated at its mother’s breast. She lay beside him, fitting his limbs around her, as he plunged into the bottomless darkness of his own unconscious.
…..ll x ll x ll x ll…..
Chapter 15
They lay together on the futon in the front room of the condo. Carlisle hadn’t said much, trying to process the events of the past few hours, feeling himself slowly come down from the heightened state he had been in since he awakened the evening before.
“I have a pretty harsh history. You haven’t asked me about my past.”
She shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that it doesn’t matter. I pick up bits of it all the time as you think about your father, your old way of life.”
“You don’t even know how old I am.”
“I do. Twenty six.” She smiled indulgently as his thoughts added to the answer. “Oh. And a half.”
He rolled his eyes. “No fair,” he smiled. “How old are you?”
She was silent for so long, he thought she wouldn’t answer. She massaged his arm langorously, brought his hand to her mouth and ran her closed lips across the back of it. “Older than I look.”
He held her chin, turned her face to his. “I don’t want a bullshit answer. I want a real answer.”
She raised her eyes to his, then shifted her focus to his lips. She came so close she could taste his breath. She closed her eyes and inhaled. “You smell soooo good.”
“What does that mean,” he said, leaning away from her with a frown.
“It just means you smell delicious,” she teased, diving at him and licking his lips playfully, “and taste.... even better.”
“You freak me out when you talk like that.”
“Hmmmmm....” she smiled as she palmed his cock through his jeans. “You weren’t too ‘freaked out’ when I tasted you earlier. In fact, you were very happy to oblige.”
“Oh,” he laughed nervously. “That’s different. That’s normal.”
“Normal...” she murmured as she pushed his lips open with her tongue. He opened his mouth and his mind, as shades of rust and turquoise, sand and gray overtook him behind his eyelids.
She was nude, bent over a man in a red rock canyon. Lines like frozen ripples on a lake were etched into the stone around her. Her hair was the same color as the stone. Before her was a large pool of aquamarine water and a white sandy beach. The water reflected the last blues of a dying day; her eyes reflected the color of the water; her skin was paler than the sand. As she rose to a kneeling stance, her luxuriant hair, at odds with the starkness of her surroundings, lifted with her, covering her breasts, unveiling the man. Now he could see the man’s black-bearded face. Dressed in light armor, leather pants and boots, the awkward splay of his limbs was a clear indication he would rise no more from that place. She picked up his discarded helmet, filled it from the pool and poured it over his head again and again, brushing the hair tenderly from his face with her long fingernails.
Carlisle opened his eyes. Dee drew away just enough to rest her head on his shoulder. She gazed at his furrowed brow as he reviewed what he had just witnessed. He studied her face for a moment, trying to formulate something to say.
Statement. “That was you.” Question. “Did you kill that man?”
Her pupils expanded and contracted once. “Yes.”
“He looked like... a soldier or something. What did they call them in school... conquistadors. Why did you show me this? I don’t understand.”
“You asked me how old I am. I was about your age then.”
“Twenty-six.”
“I think so. Something near that.”
“And you’re more than twenty-six now.”
She tilted her head, and tipped her mouth up in an irresistible grin. “Considerably.”
“So how old are you now?” He sat up on his elbow.
“Do the math, puzzle man.” Her eyes twinkled.
“I can’t if I don’t know when...” He frowned. “You want me to think that was, like, the 1400’s?”
“Late 1400’s...”
He was silent for an extended moment, then his frown curved into a reluctant grin. “You’re full of shit.”
“I told you before. I have never lied to you. You believe I drink blood, that I’m very strong and fast, that my senses are superior to yours… but you can’t believe I’m old?”
“Not THAT old. I’m not saying you’re lying. You’re trying to make me say you’re over 500 years old. Please. Now quit screwing around and tell me how old you are.”
“I’m hurt you don’t believe me,” she pouted, but a smile was tickling the corners of her mouth. “What does it matter anyway? I have looked the way I do now since I was changed at age 17. I will always look this way no matter how much time passes.”
“Sorry. Not biting.” He raised his eyebrows and laid back on the futon. “So to speak.”
“You want proof?”
“Sure, convince me.”
She went to the curio cabinet and took out a small book with a stamped tin cover. Photo album? She opened it to the last third and lay back down beside him. There was a picture of Dee on a motorcycle posing with a twenty-something black-haired man in a leather jacket, jeans and boots. There was a rough handsomeness about him. Cheekbones for days. He was holding Dee possessively, his arm around her hip, his hand resting well below that as if to claim his territory more fully. Dee looked exactly as she did now, except she was wearing clothes that would be considered ‘retro’ today. It was taken after sunset when the sky is at the height of color. The camera flash and some slight movement of her head in the low light gave her glorious hair the appearance of flames.
Carlisle studied the picture thoroughly before he spoke.
“Year?”
“Seventy-nine.”
“Jess, I presume?”
“Jess. I was with him 32 years.”
“This isn’t proof.”
“Look at the previous picture.”
Nighttime again. Flash again. This time, a convertible Thunderbird and a cleaner cut guy with a vintage swing shirt, black jeans and greased hair.
“Nice car.”
“Tommy. I take good care of my men.”
He glanced up at her face before he continued.
He went back through the years, the parade of men like illustrations of costume and culture through the twentieth century. In each photo, Dee’s face was almost unchanged except for her manner of dress -- sometimes wearing women’s clothing, sometimes men’s. She looked amazing in the period tailored suits, her lack of overt femininity translating seamlessly to an elegant masculinity. She always wore her hair long, though sometimes tied back or tucked into a jacket or under a hat. When she let her hair spill over the shoulders of the masculine costumes, she looked startlingly sexy, androgynous, and out of place in time.
The last photo he looked at was the first in the book, a daguerreotype labeled “Charles, 1840.” Dee was in a period hoop skirt and bonnet, standing stiffly behind the staring man, who was seated in a straight-back chair dressed in a black frock coat, string tie and western-style hat. It was a post-mortem photo, the body arranged to appear life-like as was the practice then at the dawn of the art of photography. Dee posed as the surviving spouse.
Carlisle shuddered. He shut the album, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to confront hers. Damn.
“These can all be elaborate fakes,” he said finally.
“This is my life, Carlisle, it isn’t faked.”
“I can’t take any more… all these men... tell me this is it.”
“There were many before that, there just aren’t any photographs… ”
“It’s late,” he said dismissively. “I probably need to sleep.”
“We’ll sleep together. As the blood wears off, you’ll feel weaker.”
“Blood.” He sighed with exasperation. “That’s something else I just have to accept… isn’t it?”
“Sooner or later, you have to acknowledge that it DID happen. I gave you my blood. It made you well, but it also made you… different… better than normal. The healing stays, but the other effects wear off.”
“So…. When it wears off, I feel like crap - worse than normal?”
“There’s a solution, you know.” She opened the collar of her shirt, ran her fingers seductively down her throat. “You always can have more.”
He swallowed hard, watching her stroke her exquisite skin with her nails. “You’ve got to be kidding…” he said brusquely, but as he kept watching, the want grew… and if he realized it, she knew it too.
“I need to be in the inner room before the sun comes up in an hour,” she coaxed, her nails now scratching over the fabric of his jeans, the sound just as erotic as the feeling they produced. “Come with me. Get out of these heavy clothes...”
She rose and walked to the window. She pulled the heavy drapes, adjusting them carefully to block as much outside light as possible. She walked into the bedroom in the blind darkness, lighting a candle by the bed to bring her moth to the flame.
He rose with a groan, not only because his body was starting to feel the edge of weariness that had been so conspicuously absent, but because she had teased him hard again and he was uncomfortable in his jeans.
She had already undressed, changed into her Japanese robe and was lying on her side on the mattress, her hair gathered to one side, draped over a seductively half-uncovered shoulder. He peeled off layers, acutely aware of her attention, feeling self-conscious at her intensity. Finally naked, he was about to throw himself on the bed, but she stopped him with one hand, reaching out for his calf with the other, scratching along it lightly from ankle to knee, then pulling forward, forcing one knee to bend. He dropped to his knees beside her.
She continued to trace the contours of his body with her nails, palms, knuckles and fingers, following her own movements through half-closed eyes. She made a low rumbling sound from within her chest. At first he thought she was humming, but as he focused on the sound, he could swear it was more like a purr. He closed his eyes, pushing away the uncanny feeling he was being assessed, surveyed, and tried to just appreciate the odd but stimulating sensation. When her hand moved to his lower back, then grazed his buttocks, his knees unconsciously spread for her as he knelt, his erection moving in anticipation of her touch.
He felt her fingers on his lips. He let her part them and run the pads over his tongue. He embraced them with his mouth, tasted salt, and realized there was also a taste of... rust. His eyes flew open to meet hers, looking up at him intently. She took the fingers from his mouth, touching her wrist then bringing it back to his lips wet and red. He realized, while his eyes were closed, she had scratched a line in the vein at her wrist. He drew back out of her reach, frowning, but she calmly held the offering in place, refusing to release him from her gaze. She leaned farther forward, pursuing his retreat, rubbing the fingers slickly over his lips. He did not recoil, but closed his eyes again and licked the blood clean. She smiled.
“Hold me, caris,” she intoned and he came to her, weaving one leg between her two, resting his cheek on the pale skin of her shoulder exposed by the displaced kimono. “Let me care for you,” she continued. “I want you to take what you need from me.” She brought her wrist to his mouth, and he kissed the dark liquid line, smearing her essence across his lips. Again he licked them, this time his tongue less hesitant. He closed his mouth on the gash, pulling from it, then swallowing. He looked up at her beseechingly as she cradled his head, her fingers stroking his hair in encouragement.
The vibration resumed in her chest as he lost himself in her taste and the exhilaration of taking raw energy from another body into his own.
He remembered now the first time he had felt this. He had thought it was a only a dream, but he was clear now that he had fed from her without inhibition that night -- in a semi-conscious state of shock after Jess had attacked him. He did not remember the pain, but he did remember the rush.
He remembered the hunger that had been born in him that night. Only one thing soothed it, a thing his mind knew to be taboo, a thing survival dictated no creature should offer to another. But she was giving him what he dared not ask for, and giving it freely. That couldn’t be wrong. How could such bliss be wrong? How quickly one is tempted to embrace prohibition when the reward is pleasure...
At some point he fell away from the font, like a baby fully sated at its mother’s breast. She lay beside him, fitting his limbs around her, as he plunged into the bottomless darkness of his own unconscious.
…..ll x ll x ll x ll…..
Chapter 15