Neither (The Noctalis Chronicles 3)

His front was pressed to my back, and I tried to move, or gain some leverage or something.

“You've got fight, I'll give you that.”

With another flip of his hands, he had me over his back and was running. No, he wasn't running. He was flying. His feet made no sound as they touched down briefly. Leaves, branches and trees spun past me, and all the blood rushed to my head. I was going to pass out any moment, and then he set me down. My knees buckled and I fell onto a carpet of leaves. We were deep, deep, deep in the woods. I was absolutely screwed.

“I thought this would be more private, don't you think?”

“What do you want?” I hoped he just wanted to rape me and leave me. That would be the best-case scenario. He'd said he didn't know, but he definitely did.

“Mostly your blood. I haven't decided on anything else yet.”

“My blood?” Jesus, this was the end. He was some sort of lunatic that was going to drain my body for some sort of ritual that the people in his head had told him he had to do. Some hiker would find my body in the woods in a few months. My mother would just assume I had run away, and that would be the end of me.

“You see, love, I am a vampire.”

“You're a vampire?” I couldn't help the sarcasm that dripped from my voice. I had no filter, even when my life was on the line.

“It's what you humans have come to think of my kind as. I don't know why I'm telling you this.” He shook his head and looked at the moon that dripped down through the trees. It was full and bright, almost bright enough to read by.

“Please let me go. I won't tell anyone, I swear.” I still hadn't been able to get off the ground.

“Don't worry, love.” He crouched down in front of me and I flinched back. He cupped my face with one hand. “Tell me something about you. Anything.”

“What do you want me to tell you?” What did he want with me? That was what I needed to know.

“Anything.” He tipped his head to the side, as if I was a painting he was studying to try and find the meaning of. I heard somewhere once about a girl who was kidnapped and gained the trust of her captor. Maybe if he had sympathy, or felt like he had something in common with me, he'd let me go.

Just maybe.

I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“I hate my mother. I know you're supposed to love her and all, and I probably do, deep, deep down. But honestly, you'd have to dig really deep to find it. I can't remember the last time she said she loved me. But she meets some random ass**le at a bar and she's in love. They hook up for a while and get drunk and high and whatever, and I have to put up with it because she's my mom. I hate it. I hate it so much, but you can't talk about things like that. You can't say you hate your mother because that makes you a horrible person. So I guess I'm a horrible person.” The words came out in a flood, and I was helpless to stop them.

He stared at me as if I'd ripped off my clothes and danced around naked.

“Sorry.” I wasn't sure why I was apologizing. He was the one who'd dragged me into the middle of the woods to do something crazy with me.

“You remind me of a girl I knew once. Her name was Josie. You look remarkably like her, in fact. Except her hair was a bit longer, and she was a little bit taller. But you have her eyes.” His fingers traced across one of my eyebrows. My eyes were brown. Just plain brown.

“Tell me something else,” he said.

So I did. I talked and talked and talked. I talked because I was scared and lonely, and once I started I couldn't stop. I told him so many things. I told him about my mother and how I didn't know who my father was. Probably some loser she just hooked up with once. I told him about Cara and even about Dillon. I talked until my voice was hoarse and I'd forgotten about the part where he said he wanted my blood. I forgot about everything but him and me and the moon. No one had ever listened to me like he did. The entire time he stayed completely still, barely even blinking. Like he could listen to me talk forever. I finally stopped and realized the early light of dawn was peeking over the horizon. I'd been there all night, and I was exhausted and hungry, and I had to pee. Reality set in and I realized this might be the end for me.

“You think I'm going to kill you now. I can see the wheels turning in that lovely head of yours.”

“Aren't you?”

“I might. But then I might not.” He smiled at me.

“What can I do to change your mind?”

“Ah, now that is the question.” He stood up and walked around me, as if he was evaluating me. “There is one more thing I need to know before I decide.”

“What's that?” I said, my mind reeling with the possibilities.

One moment he was behind me, and the next his face was right in front of mine, our noses touching. His eyes were different colors. He stared into me, as if he was looking for something he'd lost down a well. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to ask a question, but then he dove forward, crushing my lips with his.

I froze for a moment, my brain trying to catch up with the ambush. No one had ever ambush-kissed me before. No one had ever wanted to kiss me that bad. His hands cupped my face, and he kept going, opening his mouth and asking me the question he couldn't say with words. That was the moment I stopped thinking and started kissing. And kissing. And kissing.

It was like all the kisses before this one had been practice. Not even that. Those touches of lips couldn't even be called kisses. They were an embarrassment to kissing. My hands found their way around his back and into his hair and all over him. My lips answered his, telling him more things about myself. About what I'd always wanted and never gotten. About things I never knew I wanted until he gave them to me.

My lips opened and admitted him. Let him in completely and totally. He could have taken whatever he wanted from me. I would have given him anything. Anything at all. Even my life.

He pulled back, and I tried to follow him with my lips.

“That was what I wanted to know.”

I was completely out of breath, and most of the blood had left my brain and redistributed. My lips were sore. He'd ravaged them. He'd ravaged me.

I'd let some creep kidnap me, take me out to the middle of the woods and assault me with his lips. Granted, I hadn't put up a fight when it came to the kissing.

“What was that for?” I asked, but he had wrenched my arm out, baring the skin under the moonlight. “What are you doing?” It took a moment for my kiss-addled brain to understand that he had my arm, and he had a knife.

“Stay still.” Oh hell, no. I tried to move, but he just threw himself on top of me, pinning me with his body. “The more you move, the more it's going to hurt, love. Soon you won't have pain. It will only be a memory.”