Plenty of crises still loomed over our heads, but for once, none of them were imminent. I felt better about Edward’s credentials as a bodyguard for my father now that I knew about the powerful magic he could wield. Myrial shouldn’t be able to find us anytime soon. I didn’t even have to worry about Nigellus juicing Rans like a cut grapefruit for the next few days.
True, we still had things we needed to do. Rans drove us into Stockton so we could pick up a new round of fetishwear and sex toys at the local version of Kinks-R-Us. I gave him a flat stare after seeing the clothing he’d picked out for me, and received a dangerous smile in return. Then I directed him to the nearest arts and crafts store.
If I’d had a bucket list, parking an outrageously expensive sports car at a Hobby Lobby with bags containing whips, leather corsets, and tasseled nipple pasties stowed in the back would probably have been on it somewhere. Rans followed me inside with the air of someone going on an exotic expedition, and to say that my smokin’ hot vampire lover looked out of place among the aisles of glue guns and yarn was... putting it mildly.
He looked around at the endless shelves of kitsch with a bemused air. “Do you have a knitting addiction I should know about?” he asked. “If so, the first step to getting help is admitting that you have a problem. Or so I hear, anyway.”
“Ha,” I said flatly, turning down the aisle containing different kinds of epoxy resin. “Look. Cut me some slack. I want to try something, and I have no idea if it’ll work or not. Which reminds me, I also need to swing by a grocery store. I need some of those Himalayan salt crystals. The big ones that come in their own grinder.”
“Hmm,” he mused. “Well, now I’m truly intrigued, but I won’t press.”
“Are there any daggers at the house?” I asked, aware on some level that this probably wasn’t appropriate Hobby Lobby conversation.
“Certainly,” he said. “Though I suppose I have rather been letting your training lapse, haven’t I?”
That wasn’t why I’d asked about the daggers, but he was right. “I tried to keep up with running and combat practice in Hell, though I didn’t have a partner to spar with,” I told him. “But, yeah, we should take advantage of the lull and get back into it.”
I dumped a block of modeling clay and some foam board in the cart with the other items I’d collected, and finalized my purchases with the rather wide-eyed checkout girl using some of the cash Rans handed me.
“H-have a nice day,” she stammered as she tentatively proffered the receipt.
“You too, hon,” I said with my sweetest smile, and headed out to the parking lot to dump the craft supplies next to the shackles and floggers in the convertible’s minuscule trunk.
* * *
Over the next couple of days, I went jogging through the stunning Vallecito wine country with Rans. I sparred with Rans, visited another seedy bar in a different nearby town with Rans, and collaborated on a new piece of quasi-sexual performance art with him, ready to unveil in the notorious San Francisco kink scene. I also played around with marine-grade epoxy resin and salt crystals in spare moments, testing various ratios for my secret project.
Rans was doing a decent job of singlehandedly causing a countywide iron deficiency among the population, and I’d been benefiting from that surfeit of life-force secondhand, in the most enjoyable ways imaginable. But we still wanted to push my power capacity further, if we could.
Which is how I found myself the center of attention at Twisted Mission, one of the largest sex clubs in the country. The place made SL2 in St. Louis look like an Amish quilting circle, and I couldn’t say I’d ever expected to bare this much skin to this many people in my life.
Fun fact—nipple pasties itch like hell. True, I might have found it mildly amusing for the first five minutes to make the tassels whirl around like windmills by shaking my boobs. But after that, the novelty value quickly wore off.
“You could always go without,” Rans suggested innocently, running an appreciative gaze over the black leather corset that bared the aforementioned boobs to the world.
“Yeah... no. I’m good, thanks,” I’d said through gritted teeth, cursing whoever invented spirit gum as a method for attaching things to human skin.
So here I was, be-tasseled and fish-netted in the middle of a crowd containing easily a hundred people, with more wandering up all the time. On the positive side, if I’d wanted revenge on Rans for his choice of my kink couture tonight, I was getting it in spades. He was shackled to an upright rectangular frame made of heavy wooden beams, his body splayed into an X-shape—wrists stretched above his head and legs spread wide, bare from the waist up except for a spiked leather collar around his throat.
And I was flogging him.
Honestly, this shit was way more difficult than it looked. Not only was there an art to making each stroke look as vicious as possible without actually flaying a submissive’s skin off—but after a while, your arm got really tired.
I had, however, gained a new appreciation of vampire blood control. I’d been worried that the audience might notice the fact that the whip-marks I was inflicting were healing as fast as I could make new ones. Rans only scoffed at my concerns. And, true to his word, he’d consciously routed blood to the areas I was working over, leaving first his back and then his chest flushed an angry red.
As he had in St. Louis, he was also playing to the crowd, grunting and groaning in exquisite agony as the lash struck. The onlookers, unsurprisingly, were lapping it up with a spoon. I got the impression that when it came to
