Pure Requiem Read online

  All us.

  Her submission and need, vulnerability and pain, awoke a beast inside of me that I never knew existed. Perhaps this beast has always been there, or perhaps it was borne of everything that’s been done to me. I do not know, and I do not care.

  For once, I just want to feel. To take. To master.

  I want to enslave this female to me, hold her in my thrall, the way she used to enslave me. I want to fuck any inkling of any other male that could ever vie for her attention out of her mind, body, heart and soul with the unrelenting, punishing thickness and length of my cock.

  My upper lip curls on a primitive snarl, and I squeeze her throat infinitesimally tighter until she can barely breathe, until the only air she takes in is infused with my essence, and her heartbeat synchronizes with the throb of my cock.

  When I’m done, when I give her what she wants, what she needs, she won’t be able to breathe without missing my scent. She won’t be able to move without craving the fullness of my cock. She won’t be able to hear without the echo of my groans in her ear as I own every last piece of her. And she won’t be able to live, she won’t want to live, without the ecstasy that only I can give her. My body, my blood, my seed.

  My soul.

  Her entire body is shaking uncontrollably now, though I still refuse to tip her over the edge. Her hands, now half-human, half-leopard, tighten on my ass, the dagger-like claws sinking into muscle, digging deep.

  But this is the only way she tries to possess me back. She cannot help it. I can feel her control unraveling. She wants to make me make her come. With the Great White Beast inside her, she’s physically much stronger than me. She can easily take control.

  But she doesn’t. She submits to me the way a lioness crouches beneath a lion as he holds her in place with his teeth at her throat. As he services her needs all day and night, never leaving her side.

  At the final moment, no longer able to withstand the pleasurable agony, I cut off all of her air by sealing our mouths together, uniting our breaths.

  She detonates in my arms, her sex milking mine voraciously, clenching and releasing around my flesh so hard, my agony transmutes into pleasure, blinding me all over again, as I release my life force into her.

  Everything.

  I give her all of me.

  Chapter Five: In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone

  *EREBU*

  Dear brother,

  I have a family. A mother and a father. A sister.

  A son.

  I’m not hideous like I always thought. At least, on the outside.

  Would you think this makes me more lovable if you were here to see me now? If I showed you my true form? The real me? Would you forgive me for everything I’ve done if I promise to redeem myself?

  She brushed my hair, my mother. With a comb she gave me from her shop when I ventured there in disguise. Now I know why I’ve always been drawn to Dark Dreams once I discovered it.

  My mother was there. And now she’s here. She’s been here all this time, and I didn’t even know it.

  She must have spent a whole half hour running that comb through my snarly mane. So gently did she untangle the knots that my eyes filled with unmanly tears. We didn’t talk much all the while; my son, Benjamin, filled the silence with sweet, idle chatter.

  Have you met him? My Benjamin? You’d love him. There’s not a single person in the world who could possibly not love him.

  But my mother did tell me (in one of the only sentences she uttered) that the comb was a gift from my father to her when they were helplessly, hopelessly in love. (They still are, it’s clear as daylight, though it’s no longer “hopelessly”). He carved it with his own hands. No wonder I wanted it the moment I saw it in her shop.

  The comb was my link to both my parents.

  Do you believe in Destiny, brother? Do you believe that everything we go through brings us to where we need to be?

  I never wanted to believe it, because I assumed my destination would be a violent, torturous demise at the hands of either my Mistress or the innumerable enemies I’ve made doing her bidding. In restless dreams I walked alone. Always so alone. Talking to you in my mind has been my only consolation.

  Now…

  I still don’t dare believe in a different future. But I hope for it. I want to reach for it. I want to deserve it.

  Will you give me a second chance, Dalair? Will you let me make amends?

  This is me. Erebu. You can call me Ere. A pleasure to make your acquaintance for the first time. Even though I have always, and always will, love you.

  I hope, one day, I will deserve your love in return.

  E.

  What to do with this damn hair?

  I couldn’t sleep last night because I didn’t want to lie down and tangle the long, shiny, wavy tresses my m—Ishtar—painstakingly brushed (wrestled, more like) into a smooth, well-behaving waterfall that flows down my back and over my shoulders.

  Lordy, I’ve never seen hair so pretty.

  Well, maybe Cloud Drako’s straight-as-satin black mane nudges me out of first-place for the Mr-Universe-Best-Hair prize of the year award, but I hold no grudges. After all, the Valiant has Asian blood in him. Everyone knows Asian hair, especially those with Han heritage, is hard to beat. Bet he’s never had a bad hair day in his life. Nor does he have to deal with the knots and tangles that finer Caucasian hair with waves or curls are inherently cursed with.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to scrunch and mess up the hair that Ishtar brushed out for me. Only after hours of agonizing over what to do did it finally occur to me that tangling my hair again would be the perfect excuse to have Ishtar come over to brush it out again.

  I can even make this a daily ritual. What a brilliant idea!

  Of course, it begs the question why an almost five millennia-old vampire doesn’t know how to comb his own hair, or why he wouldn’t be able to simply figure it out on his own. But then, I think, everybody knows I’m a weird, unstable headcase anyway. Hair-brushing is simply not in my repertoire.

  I stand in front of the bathroom mirror admiring the gorgeousness that sprouts from my scalp. I think it’s my best feature. After all, I got it from Ishtar Anshar, Heaven’s Brightest Star.

  I cock my head a little in consideration.

  On second thought, maybe I like my eyes best. Because they’re from Tal-Telal, the General of the Pure Ones.

  Everything else about my body is probably my own, so I don’t like that as much. But the features that are from…them I absolutely adore.

  It’s highly possible that in addition to being a nihilistic psychopath with multiple-personality-disorder, I may also become a narcissist in the near future as well.

  I am the angry fruit salad that keeps on giving.

  My apartment doorbell chimes at that moment to cut short my escalating self-admiration. I rush to open the door, thinking it could be Benjamin or Ishtar again. Or even Tal. Or maybe Inanna. My mind is boggled with all the potential people who might actually want to see me.

  “Hello, E—Wow! What disguise are you wearing today? I’ve never seen this version of you before.”

  It’s not any of the people I imagined, but someone who’s still a favorite.

  “Come in, lovely Sophia,” I invite, trying to curl my lips into my signature squirk but faltering because she’s looking at my real face for the first time.

  I feel naked and flayed without my disguises.

  She enters my apartment, never taking her rounded eyes off me. They meticulously scrutinize my face first, then roll unblinkingly over the rest of me.

  It must have been a full two minutes before she speaks again.

  “You’re…you’re…” she clears her throat, apparently too overcome by the sight of me to form coherent thought.

  “That’s some amazing hair you have there,” she finally ekes out.

  “It’s my real hair,” I say with pride.

  “Wow,” she breathes. “And…the rest of you?”

&nb
sp; “The real me,” I say more tentatively.

  “Wow,” she repeats on a breathless whisper.

  We regard each other in pregnant silence, standing in my living room.

  I want to ask her if she likes what she sees, but I don’t. I may be needy and insecure in my own mind, but I try my best not to open that kimono to the world at large. Sophia’s opinion matters to me; hers is one of the handful of opinions that does.

  “You’ve never shown me your true self,” she murmurs, staring up at me, tilting her head back, as I am quite a bit taller than her. “Not in all the incarnations that I’ve known you.”

  I frown a little at her words.

  I know her now as Sophia. I knew her before as Kira during the Persian Empire. But it sounds almost as if there’s more.

  Fragments of images flitter in my mind, elusive like tendrils of smoke scattering in the wind.

  I’ve always known, deep down, that Sophia and I had a connection even before the Persian Empire. In fact, I’ve resented Dalair’s claiming of my wife because of this prior connection. But… I can’t recall exactly how I knew her. Those are part of the memories I know I have but can’t access.

  “What should I call you?” she asks gently, as if coaxing a wild, woodland creature, maybe even a shy, magical faerie.

  “Erebu,” I respond, “It means—”

  “My favorite time of the day,” she completes my sentence (though that definitely wasn’t what I was about to say), her dark eyes glittering with a watery sheen.

  “The gorgeous sunset right before a star-filled night. Darkness can be beautiful too.”

  Blood suddenly rushes into my head, pounding against my eardrums, and an incessant buzzing swarms through my skull.

  I’ve heard those words before. She has said them to me before. But when? When would she have said them?

  I gasp in pain as lightning splits through my brain, rendering me breathless and nearly blind. I stagger back, clutching my head in my hands, and collapse into the nearest chair.

  The fragments in my mind stab like serrated daggers into my brain, as if long-forgotten memories are fighting to surface but also trying to stay hidden. I’m tearing myself apart inside. My consciousness trying to pull apart while also merging together.

  Cambyses. Binu. Creature… all the roles I’ve played. All the faces I pretended to be.

  And…Ere.

  Erebu.

  I barely feel Sophia’s hand on my shoulder, her words like a distant echo.

  Your nose is bleeding profusely, Erebu…Stay there. Let me get some paper towels. Let me call for Rain—

  I blindly reach out and grab onto her wrist, keeping her with me.

  “No,” I croak, fighting back nausea from the agony in my head.

  “Stay.”

  At least let me get some towels. I won’t call for the others. Let me go, Erebu. I’ll be right back.

  Her voice comes to me in garbled sounds, as if I’m submerged deep beneath a lake and she’s shouting from a life raft on the surface. But I hear her.

  I nod, letting her go.

  I don’t know how long I sit there with Sophia kneeling by my side, changing the towels every so often to staunch the blood flow from my nose. It might have been minutes. It could have been hours. It feels like days, the way my body slumps with exhaustion and my brain melts into mush.

  But finally, the agony in my head subsides into a dull throb. My nose stops bleeding, and I can breathe freely again, instead of desperately fighting the sensation of drowning.

  Vaguely, I feel the soft, soothing strokes of Sophia’s hand in my hair, the press of her cheek against my temple, and a brief, affectionate kiss upon my brow.

  She’s touched me like this before. Even if I can’t fully call up the memories, I retain the feelings she evoked—the sense of being comforted, taken care of.

  Cherished.

  “You used to be my wife,” I blurt, then promptly clamp my mouth shut again.

  What is the point of dredging up those awful memories? I was an embarrassment of a husband. And she never loved me. Why did I ever expect her to?

  “Yes,” she agrees softly. “You were Cambyses. My wonderful Cam.”

  “And you were Kira, my light in the darkness,” I say.

  Gods, I’m unbelievably sappy. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  And yet, now that the floodgates have opened, I can’t dam them back up again.

  “Why couldn’t you love me?” I whisper. “I loved you.”

  Sophia inhales deeply and shifts so that she’s kneeling right in front of me.

  I keep my head bowed, hiding behind the thick curtain of my hair.

  But she won’t let me hide. Gently, she brushes a few locks from my face and tucks them behind my ear, sweeping the collective heavy mass over my other shoulder to keep it from falling back.

  “I did love you, sweetheart,” she says in that low, soothing voice, like a mother comforting a child. “If you look within yourself, I think you know that I did. And by that same token, I think you would find that while you loved me too, neither of us loved each other in all the ways that a husband or wife should love one another.”

  I take a shuddering breath and bite the bullet.

  “You mean sex. I couldn’t…make it good for you. I couldn’t…”

  Fuck. I couldn’t even get it up, was what I couldn’t do. The wedding night had been a complete fiasco and I never attempted penetration with her again in the ten years that we were together.

  “Darling Cam,” she says, using the name I had when she was Kira, “you mustn’t blame yourself. I never have, and I never will, blame you. We didn’t want each other that way. I—”

  “You were in love with someone else,” I accuse, a flare of that old rage burning through me.

  “My brother. Dalair.”

  She is silent for a while, one of her hands settling over my clenched fist on top of my knee.

  “Yes. I was in love with Dalair. I love him still. I love him always.”

  It should have hurt more, her staunch, fervent words. But then, I know how she feels. Because I feel the same for Dalair. Even though it’s a different kind of love. It’s nevertheless just as strong.

  “It was never meant to be a betrayal to you. We three…we could have been the best of friends. You were my best friend, Cam. You kept me sane while Dalair was away at war. You and Vashti made Persia my home. You gave me joy when all I wanted to do was wallow in pain and despair.”

  “But I wasn’t ever enough,” I whisper.

  “That’s not true,” Sophia says this just as staunchly and as fervently as she declared her undying love for Dalair.

  “I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I’m sorry I betrayed our marriage vows. Since getting my memories back and making sense of them after my Awakening, I’ve thought long and hard about this part of my past incarnations. I wondered what I could have done differently. Should I have refused to marry you? Should I have invited war upon our two empires, Egypt and Persia? Should I have resisted when Dalair came to me, and I knew it was him? But you sent him to me, didn’t you, Cam?”

  I nod slightly, shaking.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I’m evil,” I immediately answer. “My Mistress commanded me, and I did as I was told.”

  “Your Mistress?”

  “Medusa. Back then, she was the Priestess of Neith.”

  Sophia rocks back on her heels, her hand falling from mine. I miss the warmth of her touch already.

  “Goddess above! So that’s who the Priestess was. Those parts of my memory were so blurry, as if her face was purposely being obscured from me. She planned this all along? Dalair’s death, what I…”

  She swallows hard.

  “The destruction I unleashed.”

  She looks at me again, her dark eyes burning.

  “And you. You were planted there all along. You were always her pawn.”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t bot
her to explain that I didn’t know what Medusa planned. Nor the fact that my love for Dalair and Kira were all my own stupidity. I invite her to hate me for my part in her heartbreak, though I no longer hate her for her part in mine.

  Sophia looks at me longer, her expression unreadable. Why doesn’t she slap me or rail at me for working for the devil? For putting in motion so much chaos and destruction? For making her lose her beloved Dalair?

  “I’m sorry, Cam,” she murmurs, her hand clasping over mine again.

  Just so, I think, without processing her words, as she should b—wait, what? She’s sorry?

  “I’m sorry you were used that way. It must have been awful, to find yourself in a lie. But I know you loved us. Dalair, Vashti and I. I know it. We loved you too. Don’t ever doubt it. Everything else might have been a lie, but that is the truth. I think it’s why I’ve always felt close to you, no matter what incarnation or skin you’re wearing. I think it’s why I was so drawn to Ere. You were my best friend. And also, as a woman with seeing eyes, it’s really not my fault that I find you extremely beautiful.”

  Here she gives me a teasing smile, while my face heats up like a schoolgirl’s after the coolest guy in class glances her way.

  “I just don’t want to jump your bones,” she adds somewhat apologetically.

  “Ditto,” I mutter, hiding behind my mane, not quite meeting her eyes.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” she says. “Our wedding night was a disaster.”

  My face is in flames now, the heat borne of acute embarrassment instead of the shy pleasure from a moment before.

  “Must you remind me?” I punch her playfully on the shoulder.

  “I felt like I was getting stuffed with an elephant trunk,” she complains dramatically. “For heaven’s sake, I was a virgin, and I had a high tolerance for pain, but it just went on—”

  “Sophia!”

  “—and on—”

  “Shut up!”

  I clamp a palm over her mouth, but she shoves it away.

  “And on!”