The Good, The Bad, And The Undead

touched the corner of her mouth.

My stomach clenched as her fingertip came away colored in blood. Her eyes met mine as she rubbed the blood between her fingers and smiled. I shuddered at the sight of her sharp canines. 'First blood, Rachel?'

'Ivy, no!' I shouted as she lunged.

She caught me before I had moved a step. Gripping my shoulder, she flung me to the front of the church. I hit the wall where the altar had once stood, slipping down to the floor. I struggled for air as she paced to me. Everything hurt. Her eyes were black pits. Her movements were smooth with power. I tried to roll away. She caught me, yanking me up.

'Come on, witch,' Ivy said gently, her black, owl-feather voice in stark contrast to her painful grip on my shoulder. 'I taught you better. You're not even trying.'

'I don't want to hurt you,' I panted, one arm clutched around my middle.

She held me to the wall under the shadow of a long gone cross. The blood from her lip made a red jewel caught at the corner of her mouth. 'You can't,' she whispered.

Heart pounding, I jerked to get away, failing. 'Let me go, Ivy,' I panted. 'You don't want to do this.' A cloying scent of incense pulled the memory of her pinning me to her chair last spring. 'If you do this,' I said frantically, 'I'll leave. You'll be alone.'

She leaned close, putting the flat of her free forearm against the wall by my head. 'If I do this, you won't leave.' A heated smile curved over her—showing a hint of teeth—and she pressed closer. 'But you could get away if you really wanted to. What do you think I've been teaching you the last three months? Do you want to get away— Rachel?'

Panic lanced deep into me. My heart beat wildly, and Ivy sucked her breath in as if I had slapped her. Fear was an aphrodisiac, and I'd just given her a jolt. Lost in the blackness of instinct and need, her muscles went tension-wire tight. 'Do you want to get away, little witch?' she murmured, her breath against my demon scar sending a surge of tingling through me.

My intake of breath went to my core, seeming to turn my blood to liquid metal as it conducted a pulse through me. 'Get off,' I panted, the delicious feeling coursing from my neck to fill me. It was my scar. She was playing on my demon scar as Piscary had done.

She licked her lips. 'Make me.' She hesitated, the hard hunger shifting to something more playful and insidious. 'Tell me it doesn't feel good when I do this.' Breath easing from her in a sigh, she watched my eyes as her finger ran a trail from my ear, across my neck, and down my collarbone.

I almost buckled at the sensation of her nail finding the faint bumps of scar tissue, stimulating the scar back into full play. My eyes closed as I remembered that the demon had taken Ivy's face when it ripped out my throat, filling the wound with a dangerous cocktail of neurotransmitters to make pain into pleasure. 'Yes,' I breathed, almost moaning. 'God help me. It does. Please…stop.'

Her body shifted against mine. 'I know how it feels,' she said. 'The hunger racing from it to fill your body, the need it stirs, until the only thought burning in you is to touch the craving to fulfill it.'

'Ivy?' I whimpered. 'Stop. I can't. I don't want to.'

My eyes flashed open at her silence. The drop of blood at the corner of her mouth was gone. I could feel the blood pounding through me. I knew my reactions were tied to the demon scar, that she was sending out pheromones to restimulate the pseudovamp saliva that remained in me to make pain into pleasure. I knew it was one of the survival adaptations vamps relied upon to bind people to them, ensuring that they had a willing supply of blood. I knew all of this, but it was getting harder to remember. Harder to care. It wasn't sexual. It was need. Hunger. Heat.

Ivy put her forehead against the wall beside mine as if to gather her resolve. Her hair made a silk curtain between us. I felt the warmth from her through her body stocking. I couldn't move, wire-tight with fear and want, wondering if she would sate it or if I would be strong enough of will to push her away.

'You don't know what it's been like living beside you, Rachel,' she said, her whisper coming from behind her hair as if from a confessional grate. 'I knew you'd be frightened if you knew how vulnerable your scar makes you. You've been marked for pleasure, and unless you have a vampire to claim and protect you, they all will take advantage of it, taking what they want and passing you to the next until you're nothing but a puppet begging to be bled. I was hoping you might be able to say no. That if I taught you enough, you would be able to drive a hungry vampire away. But you can't, dear heart. The neurotoxins have soaked in too far. It's not your fault. I'm sorry….'

My breath came in small pants, each one sending the promise of coming pleasure through me, flowing back to renew that which ebbed, building on those that came before. I held my breath, trying to find the will to tell her to get off me. Oh God, I was failing.

Ivy's voice went soft, persuasive. 'Piscary said this is the only way to keep you. To keep you alive. I would be kind, Rachel. I wouldn't ask anything you didn't want to give. You wouldn't be like those pathetic shadows at Piscary's, but strong, an equal. He showed me when he bespelled you that it wouldn't hurt.' Her voice went little girl soft. 'The demon already broke you. The pain is over. It will never hurt again. He said you would respond, and my God, Rachel, you did. It's as if a master broke you. And you're mine.'

Fear flashed through me at her hard, possessive tone. She turned her head, her hair falling back to show her face. Her black eyes were an ancient hunger, faultless in their innocence. 'I saw what happened under Piscary, what you felt with no more than a finger touching your skin.'

I was too frightened and enraptured by the waves of feeling coming off my neck in time with my pulse to move. 'Imagine,' she whispered, 'what it's like when it's not your finger but my teeth—slicing clean and pure through you.'

The thought sent a pulse of heat through me. I went slack in her grip, my body rebelling against my railing thoughts. Tears slipped down my face, warm on my cheeks to fall on my collarbone. I couldn't tell if they were tears of fear or need.

'Don't cry, Rachel,' she said, tilting her head to brush her lips upon my neck in time with her words. I almost passed out from the ache of desire. 'I didn't want it to be like this, either. But for you,' she whispered, 'I'd break my fast.'

Her teeth grazed my neck, taunting. I heard a soft moan, shocked to realize it came from me. My body cried out for it, but my soul screamed no. The eager, pliant faces at Piscary's intruded. Lost dreams. Wasted lives. Existence turned to serve someone else's need. I tried to push her away, but failed. My will was a ribbon of cotton, falling apart with the slightest tug. 'Ivy,' I protested, hearing my whisper. 'Wait.' I couldn't say no. But I could say wait.

She heard, pulling away to look at me. She was lost in a haze of anticipation and rapture. Numb terror struck through me. 'No,' I said, panting as I fought the pheromone-induced high. I had said it. Somehow I had said it.

Wonder and hurt crossed her face, a breath of awareness returning to her black eyes. 'No?' She sounded like a hurt child.

My eyes closed in the ripples of ecstasy that flowed from my neck as her fingernails continued to trace the scars where her lips had let off. 'No…' I managed, feeling unreal and disconnected as I weakly tried to push her away. 'No.'

My eyes flashed open as her grip on my shoulder tightened. 'I don't think you mean that,' she snarled.

'Ivy!' I shrieked as she pulled me against her. Adrenaline scoured my veins. Pain followed it, punishing me for my defiance. Terrified, I found the strength to keep her from my neck. She pulled me with an increasing power. Her lips drew back from her teeth. My muscles began to shake. Slowly she pulled me closer. Her soul was lost from her eyes. Her hunger shone like a god. My arms trembled, ready to give out.

God save me, I thought desperately, my eyes finding the cross incorporated into the ceiling.

Ivy jerked as a metallic bong reverberated through the air.

She stiffened. The need in her flickered. Her eyebrows rose in bewilderment and her focus wavered. Breath held, I felt her grip slacken. Fingers slipping from me, she collapsed at my feet with a sigh.

Behind her stood Nick with my largest copper spell pot.

'Nick,' I whispered, tears blurring my vision. I took a breath and reached out for him, passing out as he touched my hand.