and sleek and dark; a panther, slipping through the night that was her life and ready to ambush its quarry.
'Please,' she heard herself say. She wanted to cry but her eyes were as dry as her mouth. 'Don't touch me.'
'You don't mean that,' Walters murmured against her neck as he grasped her upper arms and pulled her from the bathroom and into the cramped kitchen. Sondra tried to turn her head and made the monumental mistake of locking gazes with him. Immediately she felt like she was dropping through space, an exhilarating dive from a hundred-storey building and no concern about the unyielding earth rushing up to crash into her; she would have tilted sideways except that he was pressed fully against her now, holding her, the temperature of his skin bleeding through both his clothes and hers.
'Open yourself to me, Sondra.'
His voice had deepened and twisted and sounded so much like the other's that a moan of dread made it past her lips. Shivering violently, she could be lying face down on a blanket of finished leather for all the heat she felt from his muscular chest, the hard plane of his stomach, the firm pressure of his thighs. Her heart was slamming in her chest long before his fingers hooked around the collar of her blouse and tore it open.
' You can do this for me, make a miracle. Let me be inside you . . .'
'I am not a fucking breeding farm!' Sondra wailed. 'Get away from me!' She tried to beat at him but she was pinned against the wall, the refrigerator, against something that made it impossible to escape. When his hands slid over her breasts and cupped them, then began to massage away the chill of his own touch, she wanted to screech as she unwillingly pressed her hips against his and her fingers tangled in the heavy locks of his hair to yank him closer.
' I can make you warm again, my sweet. I can fulfil you. With blood . . .'
His teeth, so sharp and wet, scratched along the line of her neck and sent a spike of pleasure into the deepest pit of her stomach.
' and fire .'
In response, damning herself the entire time, she started tearing at his clothes, desperate to feel his wintry flesh against her heat, shuddering with the need to cool the fire he'd started inside her. Sondra screamed as he took her standing against a kitchen cabinet, then screamed again when she came and remembered she didn't even know his first name.
'Nicholas will come for you,' Sondra said woodenly. It was the first time she'd spoken the other's name aloud since the night sixteen months before when he had first possessed her mind and body in a basement bedroom more than 500 miles away. Perhaps she deserved all of this for letting him bewitch her so easily back then, allowing him to pick her up in a bar and enchant her into following him docilely into his loft apartment with the huge windows and black-sheeted, oversized bed. But how well she had suffered for her weakness! She should have been stronger then; she should have been stronger tonight. But she was nothing to Nicholas, or to Walters, a poorly used and ragged feather, blown crazily about by the wind of their cravings. 'He might even kill you.'
Her words were slurred with cold, her legs still sticky with the testimony of their mating. The dull tiles of the kitchen floor beneath her bare skin were freezing, the unseasonable cold outside seeping through the concrete foundation and crawling up her limbs and lower back. She wanted to move, get up and huddle within something warm until she could feel her blood pulse once again in her veins, but Walters had wrapped his legs and arms around her from behind like a giant spider sucking the essence out of its juiciest kill. Even the cockroaches had gone, fled from this oh-so-superior hunter.
'Nicholas only wants to see his children,' Walters said against her hair. His lips nuzzled the strands, tongue flicking out now and then to taste. 'If you allow him a meagre visit every so often, everyone will be happier. His mind is younger, more fickle. His life has lacked experience and the babies will prove overwhelming — I doubt he'll even stay. Instead you run from place to place like a terrified jackrabbit with her offspring, forcing him to follow and calling the police every time he comes too close. But I am not so foolish or irresponsible as brother Nicholas, my love.'
'What do you mean, brother? What are you talking about?' Panicked by the realization that he knew their pursuer was actually the twins' father, Sondra tried to twist out of Walters's grasp and face him, but the arm across her ribcage was like a tight steel band. She started kicking at his feet in frustration and his free hand dipped between her legs and stroked; behind her spine he began to harden again and he ground his hipbones against her and started to rock. Gasping with shame and pleasure, her hands gripped his knees as her legs parted and she arched to meet his fingers. She forgot the icy kitchen floor and the disappearing cockroaches and most of everything else as Walters probed and readied her, finally raised her whole body effortlessly and settled it on his. Beyond the orgasm pounding through her senses, Sondra still managed her strangled question. 'What did you mean ?'
' I thought it was clear ,' Walters said. His voice had deepened to the familiar sexual growl and he rolled forward with her, still joined, until Sondra was on her knees beneath him. One of his large hands slipped beneath her left arm and encircled her throat; he didn't squeeze — never that — simply held tight enough to feel the hot rush of her pulse through the artery so close to his killing fingers. The feel of her blood excited him more and he drove deeper into her, making her cry out in surprise and spiralling ecstasy. His other arm snaked across her hipbones and lifted until her knees were clear of the floor and she dangled from his body with only her fisted hands to keep her face from banging against the tiles. Flopping loosely in the air while he fucked her like she was some kind of whore doll, Sondra would have been furious except for the tenderness in his dark voice and the convulsions of rapture that were enveloping her. The words in her ear were like ice-crusted velvet as his mouth grazed the soft juncture of her throat and shoulder and left another barely bloody scratch for him to suckle like an infant.
'Remember what I said, Sondra? You're one among millions, able to do something that should be treasured. And I will do just that. I will exalt you and place you above all else, for ever.'
Sondra didn't know if it was his next words and the way his hand moved from her throat to caress her waiting belly, her rippling, final orgasm, or her sanity giving way that made her begin to shriek as he came and filled her with a blazing, blood-streaked icy liquid and passion.
'Unlike my twin brother Nicholas, I will be with you at every moment as you carry my precious sons and bear them into this world.'
Luella Miller
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
Mary Eleanor Wilkins (1852-1930) was born in Randolph, Massachusetts. Her husband, Dr Charles Freeman, was an alcoholic who was committed to the state hospital for the insane in 1920, where he died three years later.
