Blood Song Read online

  He was sitting by the currently-deserted bar off to the side of the venue, reading a novel on his phone. He might not have ever gotten the knack of cars, but phones were one piece of technology he’d embraced absolutely. They were light years from his human days, when he’d had to leave his home province behind and go to the city in order to get his hands on books.

  Now he could carry all the tomes of the world in his pocket. It was beyond miraculous.

  “I just had an interview.” Finn said beside him, by way of announcing his presence.

  Elijah resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Do I want to know what you said about me? Is it even worth my time to attempt to save you from yourself, when you insist on doing such reckless—”

  “I didn’t say anything about you. I was a good boy and kept my mouth shut.” Finn moved closer, movements almost predatory. “Which I think means that you owe me. I kept my promise. So you should keep yours. I want to go onstage still feeling the high of a bite.”

  “More blood loss before another show would be dangerous,” Elijah warned.

  Finn chuckled. It was a bitter, humorless sound. “You have no fucking clue about just how dangerous our concerts get.”

  Elijah pressed his mouth into a thin line, then gave Finn a single nod. “Fine.”

  They found an unused backstage room, the air inside smelling dusty and forgotten. Elijah could tell they wouldn’t be disturbed in there.

  Finn pressed in close to him immediately, the front of his jeans pressing against Elijah’s with delicious friction.

  A good person would have restrained themselves, would have pulled back and tried to end this mess of a… whatever it was. But Elijah wasn’t a good person, he was a vampire and half-hard already, and so that kind of self-control was completely beyond his capability. Instead he cupped Finn’s face with his hands and kissed him hard, licking inside his mouth with a greedy groan.

  He decided the best way to minimize the harm to Finn before the show would be to take only a small amount of blood and concentrate on sex instead. Elijah had always considered blood to be secondary to sex anyway, and hated how Finn made his wires all crossed about that.

  Finn made them feel like they were all equally important parts of the same thing, sex and blood and music. Elijah felt like some vital control over himself was slipping out of his hands.

  Before biting Finn’s throat, Elijah licked his own palm, unzipping Finn’s jeans and reaching inside, his hand wrapping around Finn’s dick as his teeth sank into Finn’s throat.

  He jerked Finn efficiently, without much of the way of romance or even eroticism in his actions. But there was a particular intimacy in that, too, in two people comfortable enough with one another to do this without any kind of hearts or flowers or anything. Just getting it done.

  They quickly hit a rhythm, with Finn thrusting up to meet each of the pulls and strokes administered by Elijah’s hand. When the pump of Finn’s hips began to grow erratic, signaling that he was getting closer to climax, Elijah pulled away from Finn’s dick and slipped his hand down lower, caressing Finn’s balls instead.

  Finn gave a high whine, his dick pushing greedily against Elijah’s wrist, desperate for friction, his own hand reaching to take hold. Elijah stroked back up from fondling Finn’s balls to wrap around Finn’s hand, so that both of them were working together to bring Finn to the brink.

  The arousal in Finn’s blood made him taste so good that Elijah felt like he was losing himself in it. He couldn’t keep letting himself get into situations like this. He felt as if the person he’d always been was rapidly coming unraveled. He was supposed to be getting things under control but he kept just making it worse and more complicated.

  He knew Emelie wouldn’t kill him, or even harm him, for his failure. But she would be disappointed in him and that, in its own way, would be just as terrible. She was one of the few beings whom Elijah let close enough to really talk to, truly care about.

  He couldn’t let something as messy and ridiculous as a temporary sexual addiction to a depressed rock star come between them.

  But nor did he know how to give this up, now that he’d found it. He couldn’t give up something so singular, not for anything. Nothing had ever made him feel like Finn’s blood did, like Finn’s body.

  Finn arched against him, breath coming in broken, gasping moans, his grip on Elijah’s arm with his free hand hard enough that if Elijah were human he’d be finding bruises there in the future.

  Both of them were so caught up in the intensity of the moment that Elijah’s instincts told him to run, to back away from something so overwhelming.

  Instead he pressed closer, drawing a deep draught of Finn’s blood into his mouth, letting the feeling carry him away. It was like floating.

  Finn came with a choked cry, body jerking in Elijah’s sure and steady grip. When Elijah pulled away from his neck, Finn’s eyes were glittering fever-bright, his skin a shade paler than before.

  Before either of them could say anything, a loud banging pounded on the door.

  “Wrap it up, assholes!” Jessica called. “Finn’s due onstage soon.”

  11

  FINN

  The weird feeling of unreality that came from going onstage and performing after the bite was good. Great, even. It made it all seem like a dream, like paper cut-outs instead of real people.

  All the anxiety that plagued Finn every day now, the dark depression that enshrouded him like a wet heavy cloud, was replaced with the spacey, sparky feeling that everything was fine.

  After the show, before they even made it all the way offstage, it was obvious to Finn that the rest of the band were going to try to whisk him off for another round of lecturing about his unsafe choices or whatever. They’d be all full of faux concern and proselytizing about how he should stop doing stuff with Elijah, and it would be a total drag.

  To avoid going through all that, Finn hurried away quickly and went to find the source of their concerns instead. Elijah was in his habitual spot near the bar, but Finn quickly grabbed his hand and dragged him back to the same unused room they’d used before and locked the door behind them.

  “Take more. I want another bite. The glow’s wearing off,” Finn urged, keyed up and on-edge.

  “No,” Elijah immediately answered flatly. “It’d be dangerous if I took more from you right now.”

  The room was lit from an old neon beer logo hanging on one wall, and Elijah looked even more beautiful than usual under the splashes of colored light, his sharp jawline painted with the glow of it.

  “I need to get out of my head again. I don’t want to crash right now,” Finn said, feeling dangerously close to begging.

  “Why don’t you go find a human groupie, then?” Elijah suggested in a reasonable, slightly amused voice. “I’m not going to bite you again tonight.”

  “You will. You’ll cave. You always cave.”

  “Being blackmailed isn’t quite the same as ‘caving,’” Elijah retorted, but he still sounded more entertained than annoyed, like he thought it was funny to see Finn in such a desperate state. “I’m not going to risk doing genuine lasting harm to you. Please just go find a groupie. Isn’t that what you’re notorious for? Don’t you want to live up to your reputation?”

  “Fuck my reputation. Fuck groupies.”

  “Yes,” Elijah agreed in a dry voice. “That’s exactly the suggestion I’m making.”

  “I don’t want a human groupie. I want you,” Finn snapped, and kissed him.

  Their bodies pressed together like they’d been made to connect exactly like that, each limb and hollow slotting together perfectly. Finn licked deeper into Elijah’s mouth, earning a soft gasp for his trouble.

  He liked the way he could feel his stubble rasping against Elijah’s smoother jaw.

  They made out for long, luxurious minutes, Finn’s mind thrumming with the last remnants of his high. But he needed more, so much more. Something, anything.

  He could feel
that Elijah was hard, and it was the easiest thing in the world to slide down until he was kneeling in front of him. Finn opened Elijah’s jeans and shoved them down, then looked up with a quirked eyebrow.

  “Vampires go commando, huh?”

  “I wish you’d stop assuming that every aspect of my personality, however minor, is because I’m a vampire,” Elijah complained while Finn’s mouth watered at the sight of his elegant dick, thicker and slightly more curved than Finn’s own. “It’s pretty reductive of me as a person.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Finn answered, licking the head before going down far enough to meet his curled fist with his lips. He couldn’t deep-throat all that well, but he always did his best to make it good for his partners anyway, and he’d never had any complaints from anyone.

  Elijah’s taste was more muted than that of a human, his temperature slightly cooler. The slight differences were enough to make Finn feel like he should be able do this forever without stopping, because the things that usually drove him crazy and feel frantic weren’t there, the intensity of the taste and heat.

  But it was no good, he still felt absolutely crazy and frantic even without the intensity of experience. It was too much. He was so hard it hurt, and the place where Elijah had bitten him before the concert was throbbing too. It felt as if Finn’s whole body had become an erogenous zone.

  Elijah put a hand on Finn’s head, stroking through the sweaty tangles of his post-show hair. The touch sparked straight down to Finn’s dick like a live current and he came with a broken groan, sucking hard at Elijah’s length.

  It didn’t take long before Elijah was coming too. He was quiet as he did so, giving a soft grunt, and it made Finn wonder if everything about sex was muted for him. If taste and reaction sounds were, was feeling as well? Was blood more important than sex for vampires?

  If Finn asked, would Elijah even tell him the truth?

  12

  ELIJAH

  A day passed, and then another, without further significant incident. Elijah knew he was in way over his head, that this was far past the point where Emelie would have wanted him to call for her help. But he also knew that he couldn’t give this up, not so easily.

  Nothing had made him feel like Finn did. Elijah had lived a long time but none of his varied experiences, none of the ages he’d lived through or the sights he’d seen, had ever pierced him so deeply and so quickly.

  It was as if he was truly feeling for the first time, as if riotous splashes color had suddenly been thrown across a heretofore drab world around him.

  It would have taken a far nobler soul than Elijah’s selfish little heart to give up something as magnificent and intoxicating as that.

  After two nights spent on the bus it was time for another stopover at a hotel. It seemed that the rest of the band and the tour entourage had accepted that Finn would be sharing a room with Elijah, and the tour manager handed over a card key to Finn without comment.

  There was a furrow of concern between Jessica’s delicate eyebrows, a frown on her doll-like lips, but she didn’t say anything to them as Elijah followed Finn down the hall to their assigned room.

  The room was pleasant enough, a little more downbeat than the ones Elijah had typically spent time in before this misadventure began — Emelie preferred top-of-the-line accommodations, of course, and in the days before she’d been in Elijah’s life he’d mostly stuck close enough to home the he hadn’t needed to travel very much. His house might feel more like a cage than a home most of the time, but it was a nicely furnished cage at least.

  It wasn’t that Elijah was a snob, about hotel rooms or about anything else, but money was abundant in the vampire underworld and he’d become accustomed to that abundance over time.

  But this room, if somewhat utilitarian, was nice enough. A nondescript backdrop where Elijah and Finn could indulge in this dangerous new addiction for each other’s bodies.

  “Strip off,” Finn told him when they were alone. “I want to watch.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting any kind of flashy show,” Elijah smirked.

  “Less talking, more naked.”

  Elijah wasn’t body-shy by any means, but he wasn’t especially body-positive either, feeling neither strong vanity nor embarrassment about his body. It simply existed, a vessel for his consciousness and his senses, and he paid it little attention beyond keeping it clean and uninjured.

  But being observed in the act of disrobing proved to have an unfamiliar heat to it. The fact he knew Finn was taking pleasure in looking at him made Elijah’s skin feel oversensitive as he removed his shoes, socks, shirt and jeans.

  “Now undress me, too,” Finn ordered, standing there unmoving. “Seduce me like you’re a vampire in a horror story.”

  “You’re the helpless virgin victim, then, are you?”

  Finn gave a sharp, decidedly unvirginal grin. “Something like that.”

  Elijah laughed and began the task, stripping Finn with slow care, reveling in the gorgeous body being revealed, its lithe strength and power.

  “No, stop, what are you doing,” Finn playacted in a breathy voice, pretending to struggle against Elijah’s ministrations.

  “Shhh, don’t fuss,” Elijah whispered. He’d never, in all his time as a vampire, done this to anyone whom he’d drunk from. Never taken anyone against their will, nor forced any other kind of intimacy along with the bite. This was the realm of pure fantasy, and one he was surprised to find exciting for him. “This won’t hurt.”

  “Please… be gentle…” Finn sighed, arching so his neck was presented to Elijah’s gaze.

  For all their playacting and games, Elijah knew where the power here really lay: Finn was the one in control, setting every rule. Elijah had no choice but to follow them, or at least that was the lie he told himself.

  When he bit down, Finn’s blood welled into his mouth in a torrent, and it was shamefully easy to let it carry him away, to forget his hesitations and to instead simply lose himself in the pleasure and satiation, this feeling of his hunger finally being assuaged, the only moment of his endless starving nights when he stopped aching and instead felt filled up, replete.

  Elijah knew that in realistic, practical terms, there was nothing unique or remarkable about the heartbeats of musicians — that a pulse was a pulse, no more or no less magic than the next intoxicating pump of blood through veins and arteries.

  But if realism or practicality had been Elijah’s main criteria in seeking out heartbeats then he wouldn’t have been drawn so inexorably to musicians in the first place. Whether it had any basis in reality or not, their blood seemed to sing to him, thrumming with the same curious sorcery that demarcated a sound from a song.

  When it came time to break away from Finn, Elijah did so with a smile. “You’re supposed to swoon in my arms, I think.”

  Finn gave a quiet laugh, obviously a little too overwhelmed from the bite to joke properly, and let himself go limp in Elijah’s hold.

  Elijah carried him over to the bed and laid him down on his side, then began to leave a trail of bloody kisses down the center of Finn’s back.

  He reached the base of Finn’s spine and kept going, kissing lower, tasting deeper. Finn made a muffled sound, of protest or surprise, but Elijah ignored it and continued with his explorations. No amount of tasting and learning of Finn’s body would be enough to sate Elijah’s hunger for it.

  Finn made another noise as Elijah spread his cheeks and licked greedily between them.

  “Fuck, Elijah, Jesus,” Finn profaned, shifting like he couldn’t decide whether to try to get away from Elijah or grind closer. Elijah pressed his tongue flat in long lapping motions against Finn’s entrance, then made his tongue a point and began to lick inside.

  Finn’s body jerked again, making the same back-forward-both-at-once motion as before, so Elijah held him steady to keep him from moving either direction as the next slow press of tongue fucked into him.

  Elijah hadn’t had a lot of sex when he was a human
, so it was hard for him to judge how much of what he liked was innate to him and how much of it had been shaped by his later vampirism. Either way, he knew he loved doing things like this, using his mouth to bring someone pleasure, tasting them as they got off.

  He worked a finger in beside his tongue, slowly working Finn open, taking his time before adding a second one. Finn was moaning brokenly, sounding overwhelmed, his body beginning to shake as it approached orgasm.

  Elijah felt overwhelmed too, his eyes rolling back with how good it was to have this intimacy with another body, this sharing of pleasure.

  “Fuck, fuck!” Finn cried, body jerking hard as he climaxed. Elijah kept eating him out through it, maintaining the same rhythm with his fingers as well, until Finn was shuddering and boneless and spent on the bed.

  Elijah’s own unexpected orgasm caught him completely by surprise, pleasure washing over him in waves. He’d been so caught up in Finn that he hadn’t even thought about his own body. His whole world had narrowed to nothing but Finn, and losing himself in that had been the biggest pleasure of all.

  Elijah felt like he should have been bothered by that, but it felt too good to worry about.

  13

  FINN

  Although he’d never admit it, Finn liked lying together in bed with somebody almost as much as he enjoyed sex. Pillow talk was a lame thing to be into, but he couldn’t help it — there was something soothing about being able to just talk to someone with nowhere to be, lying there and enjoying the closeness of their body without the desperation of frantic, urgent touch.