Give Us a Scream
This story takes place after the events of Blood Lust, but is designed to be a stand-alone.
Originally published as part of the Scribble Nook "Valentine's Day Disaster" anthology. Now republished here, slightly extended.
There was blood on the floor. A lot of it. The claggy scent of iron mixed with a piquant and almost sour undertones of hedgecraft and necromancy. Some of that scent came from the magic in the air, but most of it? Most of it came from the blood.
Daniella gritted her teeth as she dug her fingers into the wound she’d made across the inside of her forearm, trying to coat her fingers with enough blood to draw the last sigil that would complete her circle. It would have been an easier task if the men in the other room hadn’t taken her boline from her. The thin, curved knife was her tool of choice for letting blood for magic, but the men in the room beyond the heavy, locked door had spouted some nonsense about how being a hostage meant she wasn’t allowed to have her knife.
Whatever. She had nails. Long, sharp nails that she purposefully kept just for the occasion where her knife might be taken from her. It wasn’t as efficient, of course, especially when she had to balance blood flow with silly things like not hitting major arteries.
The sigils that made up the circle on the concrete floor were not as precise as she would like, nor as solid. Which meant that the magic she cast was going to ride more on intention than Daniella was normally comfortable with.
But fortune was in her favour today -- well, sort of. If it was fully in her favour, she would not have been kidnapped to begin with; but the point was she had plenty of intention.
Daniella drew the last sigil, making sure that the shape of it was the clearest, because it was the most important sigil in the circle. She’d already made the mistake of messing up that sigil once in her life, and today was not a day where she could afford to make that mistake again.
Her head spun as she stood, but widening her stance steadied her well enough to keep her feet under her.
She had no salt. No bell. No conduit for the magic except her own body and the words that she spoke. But Daniella had walked this path before and she did not hesitate as she plunged into the cold pitch beyond the veil.
Magic and the void whipped at her skin like sleet and ice. She had told her familiar to stay at home, so the safe haven that Mona usually provided as she transitioned from the material realm to the worlds beyond was gone.
The witch almost didn’t mind. The cold cleared her head, and the power of craft and magic filled her almost sensuously as she breathed in that tangible darkness that was the world beyond the worlds. It filled her with the same wild euphoria that the first few moments of that injection those bastards had shoved into her arm had given her. Except this was more. This was timeless and vast in its pleasure.
The echo of her bloody sigils floated in the void, and Daniella used the threads of craft and the sleet and winds of magic to pull power into those sigils.
A bell. Not her crafting bell. This was smaller, more a jingle than a chime. She turned in the direction of the sound, and she felt that she probably smiled as she reached both hands out in the darkness, found the soul she was looking for, and pulled.
Her knees gave out as the darkness of the void flickered back into reality. She reached to brace her hand on one of the rickety metal shelves that lined the room, misjudged, and slipped onto her ass with a small. “Oof!”
“What the sodding hell?”
Daniella’s relief that the voice matched her expectations was undercut spectacularly by the sight of the man standing in the circle.
Gathering herself to her feet, Daniella took a long, appreciative look at her husband.
Standing just over six-foot, with neat golden hair and a sharply angled face, Nicodemus Hargreaves was bone-meltingly attractive. He was almost always dressed in a well-tailored suit, or at least a nice pair of slacks and a shirt. Something crisp and elegant that showed off the shape of his body without making the power and definition overtly obvious.
Today, he wore a black dickie bow. And white button cuffs…
And a frilly pinny.
It was not a charitable thing to snort and giggle at her husband, whom she had just yoinked out of what had clearly been a fascinating task in order to rescue her from certain untimely abduction. It was especially not clever of her to cross the circle that stood between them and to lean against him as her giggles turned into curious and licentious inspection.
Because her husband was a vampire. And while her husband loved her very much, he was not above biting her to put her in her place.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” she said, lifting her elbow to prop atop his shoulder.
“Or you could just not summon me at random?”
Blood and magic and drugs. They hit Nicodemus’ pallet the moment his wife crossed the boundary of her circle and it set his fangs on edge. His response was biting, but distracted as he surveyed the room: small, windowless, and with a reinforced door and shelving to indicate it was a slightly larger than average storage closet.
“What the hell is this, Nellie?”
Tawny eyes looked up at him with blown out pupils. His wife was always pale, but she looked anemic now. Fresh blood still oozed from the clawmarks along her forearm, and given the number of sigils on the ground and the back of the door, he could make an educated guess as to the cause of her lack of colour and her motive behind the self-destructive act. “What’s happened?”
Daniella shifted her weight, and most of her attention still seemed to be on his complete lack of appropriate attire. Her focus snapped back to his face momentarily. “Oh! Yeah, I got kidnapped.”
Panic shot through him. He opened his mouth, a dozen questions at the ready: had they hurt her? How many were there? What did they want?-- but Daniella plunged blithely onward in her explanation of her own volition:
“Well, actually I didn’t GET kidnapped. I came HERE, because I needed a kidney for a spell, and this guy was like ‘yeah, I have a kidney that you can have.’ Except his email sounded more professional… but anyway, I came here, and he was like, ‘What do you need a kidney for anyway?’ and then one of his lackeys was all, ‘Oh, are you that Lanoue woman?’ And I was like, ’Actually, I’m that Lanoue-Hargreaves woman now. And then some other dude stuck a needle in me and then they chucked me in the closet.”
“Wait, you were buying a kidney? A human kidney?”
She blinked rapidly. “Yes. Sometimes you need them for necromancy.”
“Love, I’m a vampire and the branch manager of New Orleans. If you need a kidney, I have people for that.”
Daniella wrinkled her nose, clearly not appreciative of the idea. “I can get my own black market organs, you know. Being married to you doesn’t give me the excuse to be lazy about organ collection...”
Again her attention wavered, her gaze moving up and down his body and what little blood she had left was making its best attempt to colour her face.
“So, Neon,” she gestured at his lack of outfit. “What kind of look do you call this?”
Any other time, the smile she gave him when she met his eyes again would have been an invitation he’d be hard pressed to say no to. At the moment, all he could feel was a deep seated sense of embarrassment and ill-preparedness.
He rubbed at his temples. “I mean, it’s Valentine’s day, Nell. You said you were going shopping for craft ingredients. I thought I was going to surprise you with dinner and this. I did not expect you to summon me while in mortal danger. So it was a Valentine’s day look. Now it’s my ‘Rescue Nellie from her kidnappers’ look.”
“Well, I like it.” She sounded so pleased it was almost gratifying.
Any other time and in any other situation…
“I don’t even have my gun on me, Nell.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got a gun!”
“That’s hardly applicable here, pet.”
He didn’t know when his wife had started to emulate the gentle purring that vampires made when courting or enticing prey, and he had no idea what kind of magic she might be using to emulate the biological effects of that purr, but that didn’t make the noise any less effective in drawing the heat from his face into his groin. Especially when she pressed her weight into his shoulder and brought her mouth to his ear.
“It could be.”
She was going to be the death of him. He could smell whatever silly juice she had been injected with. He could hear from the sound of her heart that she was lacking the blood to be making decisions. And while dozens of stupid role-play scenarios bounced between them gave him a good indication of what she would say while sober, the fact was that they were in very real danger.
She was in danger.
“No, Nell.”
He ignored her disappointed sound she made, and the pout that puffed out her cheeks and made her porcelain doll face look childish. Instead, he nudged her off to the side, undid the ribbon of his pinny, balling it up and giving it to her as he stepped forward.
He bounced off of the edge of the circle with a spark of static electricity. “Nell, you want to drop the circle?”
“Oh yes!” She used her boot to scrub at one of the sigils until it smeared into something unrecognizable, muttering to herself as she did so.
He felt the magic of the space shift and diminish, allowing him to step forward. “How many are there?”
“Just five,” Daniella was easing herself down to the ground as Nicodemus eyed the door. No handle. Which meant there was a key hole somewhere on the other side.
“Fantastic. Do us a favour, pet, see if you can draw our new friends into the room.”
She lifted her hands, preparing to draw some sort of other sigils in the air, but at the sight of the blood still dripping down her arm, he cut her off with a gesture before reaching up to undo his bowtie.
“No more magic from you at the moment.”
She wilted. “But--”
“Just give us a scream.”
She beamed. Mischief lighting her eyes. “Make me.”
A glare. “Daniella.”
Sulking, but feeling somehow in the wrong for doing so, Daniella obliged with a high, rippling scream. It took three before someone was at the door, banging on it and telling her to be quiet.
So she screamed again, wailed something unintelligible, and persisted through the increasingly aggravated commands to stay quiet.
The men who had kidnapped her had done so in a moment of sheer opportunity, not by a grand master plan. They were not equipped to deal with a woman shrieking and sobbing, and so, eventually, one of them opened the door.
“Will you just stay quiet? We were nice and left the lightbulb in, but if you don’t shut your stupid mouth, I’ll--”
But he did not get the opportunity to tell Daniella what he would do, because Nicodemus grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him further into the room, using their combined momentum to slam the man against one of the shelves.
Daniella scrambled out of the way as the vampire balanced his height, weight, and size advantages with the smallness of the room in a short, but startlingly crunchy tussle with the man.
A tussle that ended with the ribbon of Nicodemus’ dickie bow being used as a garrote on Would be Kidnapper Number One. Daniella winced as she felt the man’s soul panic, struggle, and then slip sideways into the flowing stream that existed just beyond human perception.
Her husband licked blood from his knuckles, blue eyes suddenly alight. “Wait. Are these just regular humans?”
The noise of more people coming had Daniella slinking across the small space to put the wall between her and the approaching remainder of the group. “Yes? I mean demons don’t usually sell organs and vampires are all too caught up in the business to bother.”
Nicodemus was all fang and enthusiasm as he turned to the door. “Wicked. That means I can eat them.”
A prospect easier declared than managed once bullets began to bounce off of the doorframe.
The vampire joined her along the wall.
“Why do we always end up getting shot at?” Daniella asked as Nicodemus pulled the body of the man he’d strangled closer to him.
“Because you always do something ridiculous like going to buy black market body parts on your own instead of inviting your loving husband to accompany you.” He studied the small caliber handgun that he pulled from the man’s belt.
“I didn’t think you’d want to go!”
“You didn’t think I’d want to watch my wife’s back while she went into a dangerous situation?”
“I mean, it’s Valentine’s Day, Neon.”
He looked up from the gun, his expression deadpan. “Yes. And yet here we are anyway. So maybe next time, ask me to come with?”
She was spared from answering when the second man of five tried to push into the room. Nicodemus groin-punched the man, caught him by the throat, first with his hand, and then with his fangs.
Another struggle. Another soul. Another empty body.
“Okay, maybe in retrospect, inviting you would have been a good idea.”
Her husband’s dry laughter was punctuated by gunfire, but the vampire had returned to his crouch behind the wall.
“Are you not going to just shoot them and be done with it?”
He arched an eyebrow. “That seems like a waste if they’re going to be stupid and walk through the door one at a time. Besides, I dressed to serve a buffet, so one of us may as well get one.”
The sound of something that Daniella couldn’t hear suddenly caught the vampire’s attention.
“Stay.”
The command was sharp enough that Daniella thought twice about looking beyond the threshold.
She still looked though, in time to see Nicodemus collide with one human who was now holding a much larger caliber gun than the piddly little handguns of their first two attackers. This, he did use, catching the first man in the chest at point blank, the second man in the middle of the head, and the third man behind the knees as he attempted to run. This man, the vampire stalked after, looking no less the predator he was for being incredibly naked.
As much as she wanted to letch at the man, Daniella was starting to feel oddly queasy. So she turned her attention from Nicodemus and the gurgling screams of his snack, looking instead for her boline and the ingredient she had come to collect.
She found the knife on the man that Nicodemus had shot at point blank. The man who had recognized her and changed up his plans because he knew a guy who knew a guy that would apparently pay big money to get a hold of her.
It was a sobering thought.
Nicodemus joined her as she cleaned her knife on the t-shirt the dead-human wore. He handed her an already blood smeared pinny to wipe off her hands.
“Get your kidney?”
She held up a plastic bag as she rocked to her feet. “Yeah. It was right behind that guy’s stomach.”
Nicodemus eyed her carefully. “Who were these guys, Daniella?”
She looked at the bodies, the bag in her hands, and then at her husband. “Humans who thought friends three times removed would become better friends if they traded a witch for a few pieces of silver.”
He did not bare his fangs, but he did growl. “Next time, Nell, bloody ask me.”
She nodded, and as she did so adrenaline seeped out of her body, leaving black spots behind.
Her vampire caught her as she slumped. “Alright, pet. Let me see your arm. We’ll sort that, get me some trousers, and head home.”
“I’m sorry I ruined your plans,” she said as Nicodemus pressed his mouth to the wounds she’d carved into her arm.
He made a sound against her skin and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not the snack I was hoping for, but I can’t complain.” He made a face. “Fentanyl. Leave it to you to cast a bloody summoning circle while trollied out of your head on an opioid. Sit there. No, just sit, please. Let me find something to wear and we can go.”
He was shaking his head as he wandered off, and when he came back, he was still shaking his head and wearing a pair of green sweatpants that did not fit well, but also were not covered in quite as much blood.
“Buncha wankers are selling black market organs and injecting people with Fentanyl and they’re all wearing bloody joggers.”
His wife laughed, but the sound was weaker, letting him know that she had hit a wall and was running out of whatever adrenaline had been pushing through her body to keep her upright.
“C’mon, love. Let’s get you home.”
“What about the bodies?”
“I’ll call Alex and the others to sort it. Don’t worry about that.”
She was a sleepy weight as he drove her bike the few miles between the warehouse and their home. And she didn’t protest when he offered to draw her a bath in exchange for her eating something solid.
He served her the steak dinner that he had planned, but he did so wearing his own pajama bottoms instead of a pinny. After she’d eaten, he dislodged his cat collar from under the silly white cuffs, letting its bell jingle in contentment as he washed her back and her hair as promised. And the kisses that followed her long soak were softer and gentler than he’d originally planned.
Daniella liked her rough-play and edge-kinks, but the events of the day and the heat of the bath had all seeped into the witch’s body and made her pliable.
He might have let her sleep if she hadn’t used her body weight to pull him down onto the bed; if she hadn’t entangled her bare limbs around his own and pressed herself invitingly against him. If she hadn’t managed to nail the pitch of that bloody purr just at the point where it made him hard and aching and desperate to sink into her.
“Where the fuck did you learn to do that?” His voice was rough as he buried his face against the crook of her neck. Her heartbeat was still weak, but the sensation of it fluttering against his tongue as his fangs caught her skin made him sigh with satisfaction.
Her laugh interrupted the sound and she arched into his body and thread her leg between his to feel out the hardness of his erection with her thigh. “Mona taught me.”
Daniella’s laughter redoubled as Nicodemus choked against her shoulder and then sat back on his knees to look down at her. “The cat?”
“Mmh.” His body was warm and heavy on top of hers, and the hand that slid across her side and over her belly made her shiver. “She said that toms like a queen who purrs for them and that I should learn.”
His blue eyes watched with ferocious intensity as Daniella ran her own fingers along her belly, across her breasts, and then settled on the pillow above her head, crossed at the wrists. But it was the heat of his gaze, the way his pupils dilated, and his body grew visibly harder that told Daniella she had her husband’s undivided attention.
She tilted her head, smiling as he echoed the gesture, and she asked, “Do you like it, Neon?”
“I think you can tell that I do.” His hand followed the trail her own had blazed, but where she had simply set down a path, he stoked a fire. And he took his time, even as her skin broke out into goosebumps, and her breathing staggered. The gentle, sweeping pass of palms, fingers, and then nails across her breasts and nipples had her clamouring and squirming under the vampire.
Lightheaded and impatient, she bucked her hips up towards him, and he pressed his hand against her lower belly and pushed her back down to the mattress. His smile was hungry, and almost nasty as he pinned her thighs to the bed with the weight of his knees, and she whimpered softly even as the warmth and wetness that settled between her legs indicated the pain of being pinned down was its own sort of pleasure.
But the cold edges of the vampire’s smile diminished as he settled in to kiss her, and he released the pressure on her thighs the moment the rest of his body settled atop her own. “Not yet, Nell. Let me play with you for a while before we play your kinds of games.”
She huffed softly, wanting to be frustrated, but the truth was that there was something frighteningly exquisite about her vampire being gentle with her.
So she licked her lips and nodded her consent, knowing that she would hate every moment as much as she enjoyed it. Especially when he settled next to her, and a hot mouth found the mound of her breast, and cool fingers found the heat of her body. And he held her in place with teeth and tongue and while fingers caught and teased her and traced the edges of the opening of her body.
She felt like she couldn’t breath by the time that he slipped a finger into her. Her body shivered uncontrollably and her heart stammered in her chest as he kissed his way down the length of her torso. He pressed his free hand firmly against her lower belly, adding pressure from the outside of her body as well as curling his fingers into her. Somehow, it doubled the sensation, but it also kept her from bucking her hips up. So she struggled helplessly against the inhuman pressure of his hand and whimpered softly as his fingers found a rhythm he was happy with.
And he watched her intently as she shivered and moaned and gasped his name.
“Steady, love.” He ignored that she grabbed at the hand that held her down, ignored that the hands and nails that clawed helplessly at him were listless and trembling. He simply watched and murmured, “Not yet.”
Daniella keened and arched. Breath had lost its meaning. A steady heart had lost meaning. But the emptiness he left behind as he removed his fingers from her body as he kissed her? For that, she might have died.
“Please--” but he swallowed the word with a kiss.
“Steady, Nell.” His voice in her ear lacked the purr it would hold if he planned to feed from her, but the command took hold of her nonetheless, and she did her best to slow her breathing and to keep tight control of her body, even as everything in her screamed to let go.
He found her pulse, sucked gently, his hand trailed the center of her body. “How are you doing, pet?”
A hard swallow and a whimper. He caught her face, gave it a little shake until she opened her eyes to look at him.
“Do you want me to take you?”
He was asking because of the drug she had been given. Because playing with her while on the edges of its influence was one thing, but without drawing blood again, he wouldn’t be able to tell how much of it was still in her system.
So as much as he wanted her, as heavy and hot as the body was that pressed against her hip, he would let her say no. He would guide her to her own release and settle for that.
She nodded her consent, even as he held her jaw between his fingers.
A kiss, too gentle and chaste. It made her want to scream. “Say it, Daniella. Tell me what you want me to do to you.”
“Take me,” she could barely say the words because she could barely draw breath, but she knew that he heard her, because she could see everything in him sharpen at the words. “Take me, and fuck me, and love me.”
He started by drawing her in for a kiss. And while he kissed her, he pinned her hands over her head, stretching her body out for his pleasure, even as she took the initiative to create space for him between her legs.
He would never get tired of the sound his witch made when he slipped into her. He would never bore of the way she held her breath, how she caught her bottom lip between her teeth and crease formed between her eyebrows as she concentrated on breathing.
He felt her body convulse involuntarily around his own, and he kissed her soft, desperate mouth and murmured again, “Stay steady, pet.”
He pulled back, as far as he could without leaving her body, and he tortured himself as much as he tortured her with a slow, steady return.
“Nic, please.”
There it was. His name like an expletive, her tell that she was done and she wouldn’t be able to hold on any longer.
“Alright, love.” He rocked harder into her now, still slowly, but with enough force that the momentum set the bed’s headboard into the wall. “When you’re ready.”
Her climax had not been one of her blinding, scrabbling, back arching ordeals that always seemed to blindside her in rougher play.
This had been slowly cultivated and built up and had consumed her from the inside out and Nicodemus watched with utter fascination as the woman melted into a vulnerable puddle of pleasure before turning into the soft, clinging witch that he only got to see in the rare instances where he could push his wife into the more intimate nature of intercourse.
It was as her body started to relax that he picked up a slow, heady rhythm that again paced the pulses of her first climax. She shivered against him, keened quietly into his shoulder, and the rolling waves of her continued orgasm were almost as gratifying as being swallowed up by his own.
When the undulating tides of their bodies turned into a still and glassy sea, and his witch was curled against his side, Nicodemus decided the day had been good, despite deviating from his plans.
“You know I love you?” But it was Daniella’s voice that asked the question he so often asked her.
“Know it and feel it, love. Even on the crazy days like today.” He nuzzled her temple and amended, “Especially on the crazy days like today.”
Daniella’s expressions were rarely soft or warm, but when she smiled up at him, he found both hidden just in the corners of her lips. “Good. Because I got you a thing.”
She rolled away from him, opened the top drawer of her nightstand, and then presented him with a small, flat box. Not quite big enough to be a ring box, and yet not too small for a ring to fit.
Intrigued, he took the offering, waited for her to settle against him again, and then opened it.
On a tiny cotton pad was a small silver tag in the shape of a heart.
Amusement grew as the word “NEON” caught the light when he picked up the charm. He flipped it over, and on the back was inscribed:
“If found, call Daniella” followed by the woman’s mobile number.
He was chuckling, even as she asked, “Do you like it?” with the slightest edge of anxiety trimming her scent.
“I love it. And I love you.” He kissed her temple and gave the tag to her to put on the collar on his wrist. The tag now fastened in place, Nicodemus shook his hand, making the bell jingle and the tag clatter. He grinned in satisfaction, caught her face between his hands and kissed her gently. “Thank you.” And he kissed her again, deeper, stealing her breath before thanking her again. And a third time, pulling her under him.
She was more awake now, and her body was more her own as she grabbed him with her long legs and pulled him into her. So he grinned his fangs at her, and let his own deep purr rumble through his body and into her own. He watched in satisfaction as her eyes dilated and her breath became shallow.
“Go on then, Nell. Give us a scream.”
A smile. “Make me.”
So he did.
