“Thought so,” he murmured. “Although it might be helpful if you continued breathing.”
Air exited my lungs in an ugly rasp. I dragged in a fresh lungful to replace it and swallowed hard. “You... felt that?” I asked, my voice a croak.
“Of course I did.” His hand slid up to rest between my breasts, over my pounding heartbeat. “Now we’ll just have to work on triggering the mechanism without triggering a panic attack at the same time.”
“This isn’t a panic attack,” I whispered, as I focused on my heart rate and breathing, willing them back to normal. Unfortunately, as soon as the spike of adrenaline faded, I felt the connection between us open again. It was reduced, true—but that seemed to be more a case of Rans’ sexual desire having waned in the face of my mini-freakout session than by any control I was exerting on the process.
“Not to worry, luv,” he said easily. “It’s clear you can control it. You’ll just need more practice to separate the mechanism of that control from the emotion surrounding it.”
“Hmph. Sounds like almost as much fun as letting you repeatedly kick my ass while trying to teach me self-defense,” I managed.
“Oh, I expect we can make it marginally more enjoyable than that,” he promised in low tones, his hand never moving from its reassuring place over my heart.
Above us, fireworks painted the sky in a red, white, and blue grand finale.
SIX
THE NEXT SEVERAL days fell into a sort of pattern, though it wasn’t one I ever expected to experience in my life. No... rather than dragging myself out of bed to go work a waitressing shift and put in my volunteer hours, I was now splitting my time between cleaning up the ruin of my house, having increasingly kinky sex with a vampire while lounging around a gazillionaire’s penthouse suite, and training to become Buffy the Freakin’ Faerie Slayer.
It was safe to say I was making forward progress in three of those four arenas. For now, though, Buffy appeared to be safe from any meaningful competition on my end.
Rans hadn’t let up in his obsession to teach me to control the flow of animus I drew from him, and that was his excuse for the extent to which the two of us had been getting our freak on during the past few days. I hadn’t been warned ahead of time, but today was apparently finals day for my unofficial ‘Animus Control 101’ course.
All of which explained why I was currently drooling into Rans’ pubic hair, trying to get him all the way down my throat while simultaneously rubbing two fingers over his prostate in a steady rhythm. And, yeah, okay—it might not have been the most dignified position to be in. But, damn. It had taken me less than twenty-four hours to become the prostate gland’s number-one fangirl.
“Really?” I’d asked yesterday, not exactly repulsed by the idea—just... unsure.
But Rans only smirked, one eyebrow arched in challenge. “I did mention that vampires don’t harbor microbes, yes? If squeamishness is the issue, I can assure you that those pipes haven’t been used for their intended purpose in centuries, Zorah.” His lips twitched. “And for the record, you can thank me later.”
In actuality, I’d had to wait until much later to thank him. At his insistence, I’d been making no attempt to stop myself siphoning sexual energy from him, and the goddamned inconsiderate bastard passed out on me after climaxing six times over the course of forty-five minutes.
I spent a panicked few seconds convinced I’d just killed the last surviving vampire with sex, thereby committing unintentional murder-suicide via the life bond. Fortunately, it then occurred to me to grab a knife from the kitchen and slash it across my palm, prying his mouth open to let some of my blood drip onto his tongue. I cursed him up one side and down the other until he eventually came around with a groan.
“You could have warned me!” I’d yelled, shoving him in the shoulder and leaving a smear of blood on his pale skin.
He just blinked up at me with unfocused blue eyes. “Blimey, luv. Sorry about that. Are you sure that was your first time? Seven hundred years, and I’m fairly certain that was a new record.”
Caught between relief and fury, I’d made an incoherent noise of frustration and stormed out of the room, leaving him to sleep it off. That was the moment I realized that I was practically buzzing with stolen energy. My palm tingled, and when I looked down at it, I found the ugly cut scabbed over as though the injury had happened days before, rather than minutes.
I was overcome with the need to move... to do something. I ended up running five miles on the treadmill, and when that wasn’t enough, I swam another two miles in the swim spa. In both cases, I knocked more than thirty percent off my previous best speed, yet the exertion had barely taken the edge off. In the end, I liberated a bottle of something dusty and expensive-looking from Guthrie’s wine rack and drank until I no longer felt like I had live voltage running through my veins instead of blood.
Rans stumbled into the living room some considerable amount of time later to find me passive-aggressively engaged in a Twilight movie marathon—mostly as a way to distract myself from my burning urge to alphabetize Guthrie’s sock drawers by color in a fit of raging, animus-driven OCD.
“The second film was always my favorite,” he’d said, and then utterly failed to deflect the couch cushion I hurled at his head.
I was still pissed at him, but the incident had driven home a few different points. Firstly, I had no friggin’ clue what my real power capacity was. Secondly, Rans hadn’t been wrong about the kind of advantage my succubus abilities could potentially be in a fight with a more
