It was a shit life, but when you only had one shot, you didn’t care if it was a long one. They burned their bodies, making them old before their time, spent their youth, threw away their childhoods for a shot at a better life than their parents had. After over a decade of work, this was all they had, a failed chance for all but a handful.
Passing through campus anger twisted faces, the bitter fury of Jerold’s supporters, sure that Cesare was desecrating hallowed halls. Jealousy ran under more than one person’s skin, black envy that wanted to be where he was, between the two gorgeous girls. More than any other was the disgust, kids that remembered his first months, when he was beat by chumps, wearing pissed pants, and smelled like old garbage and fresh shit. A few, all too few, had the inklings of fear when they looked at him. Without the girls at his side, their reputation shielding him, the jackals inched closer to his shadow.
Coming down the trail, he caught sight of the girls. Sitting across from each other, they emanated the kind of fuck off you only ever see on the bus in the morning. Alexandra read from her iPad while Anastasia idly flipped through her phone with a bored expression. They looked up at him with a smile before getting to their feet and dusting themselves off.
“What the fuck happened to your face?” Anastasia demanded a bare second before Alexandra could get it out.
Cesare touched his face, the swelling already in full swing. “I had to teach a lesson.” He smiled as he told them about the class while they walked through the corridor of thorns and into Raven's Rest.
Turning around, he met identical scowling faces. “Getting beat up to teach lessons isn’t what we had in min,” Anastasia said, eyes tracing over his face.
“It was a onetime lesson. I won’t be repeating it,” Cesare said dryly.
Alexandra peeled off to get changed while he followed Anastasia to her spot. He carefully didn’t indulge in the view down her shirt as she folded herself into a seat on the ground, her wicked smile too knowing for the view to be chance. “I changed the meditation; we’re moving onto another part of your training.”
Smile firmly in place, she gave him a nod of understanding, her sexual aura reaching out to caress hot fingers down his spine and over his chest. Arousal spiked between, Cesare’s blood heating with need. His eyes drifted away from her melted face, down to the luscious valleys of pure white skin. He didn't remember the buttons being opened that far down at school. A black lacy bra cradled her breasts, creating a gut wrenching sight of creamy flesh.
“I don’t mind you looking.” Cesare met Anastasia's smoldering eyes as she continued, “Certainly, a better view than my face, turn me on my knees and you won’t even have to see this horror show.” Deliberately playful, her voice made light of the fear that clawed and howled in her eyes.
Bending down, he laid a gentle kiss on her sandpaper lips. “It's you I love looking at, not your breasts. Your eyes bewitched me long before I ever saw your breasts.” Before he could retreat, she captured another kiss.
He stepped away and started making his way to Alexandra. She'd changed into what he was coming to know as her sparring uniform. A tight, black tank top showed off indelicate arms of hardened flesh, muscles roiled as she rolled her shoulders and clenched calloused hands. The tank top clung to her curves, showing that no matter her dedication to physical power she still had an impressive chest.
“I want you to train me.” A shy, queer vulnerability filled her eyes. This was important to her, as important as being touched or having someone to lean on when shit got deep.
Because it meant so much to her, he strangled the curse before it could be born. He smiled with all the gentleness he didn’t have for the world. “Alexandra, you just went toe to toe with a fucking legend. I don’t know what I can teach you.”
Taking a frantic step forward, she struggled to contain her fear. “I plateaued years ago, until I started training with you. But it’s not enough. I want you to train me like you do her.” Cesare hesitated, in that brief second, Alexandra rushed into the gap. “Look what you’ve done with her. She could barely boil water, now she’s melting stone. If you could do even half of that for me ....”
Fear rode her hard, she was terrified she didn’t mean as much to him as Anastasia, that he'd walk away from her like everyone else had. Stepping forward, he took her hands in his. “You know I’ll help,” Cesare said softly, savoring the fierce joy that burned in her eyes. “I’ll never turn my back on you. I don’t know what I can teach you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t give it everything I have.” She nodded, biting her lip as her eyes shined wetly.
Holding her hands, his thumbs ran over her fingers in a caress they pretended wasn’t happening, just as they pretended her eyes weren’t wet. “Why haven’t you progressed?”
He could see the moment she wanted to turn away from him, see her reject it in a savage desire to never run from him. “I was always lethal, hand to hand, guns, blades, Sanguinem Scientiam, murderous skills came easily to me, as if my mind and body were born for slaughter. I wasn’t stronger, I was a holy avenger beyond their touch. Class after class, I absorbed lessons in a fraction of the time other squires took, teachers and students falling to my hands and blades. And with each failed meat I left behind me, they feared me more.” She stopped, wetting her lips as she struggled with the words. Not with what she’d done but with telling him.
“I was put into controlled environments, no sparring, students kept safely beyond my hands, full knights standing by to … manage me. The sterile emptiness suffocated, strangled my growth, it froze me in place, locked in a place I’d conquered years ago.” The horror wasn't that she killed kids for fun, it was that she felt nothing for doing it. She wanted to kill, so she did. The words died as she locked onto him, waiting for the disgust.
He tightened his grip on her hands. How would the world react to a child killer? Horror for a young life snuffed before bloom, horror tainted thoughts of grief for parents stripped of a child. And the hate for a diseased creature that killed him for no reason, an animal given the flesh of woman, psychopathic and uncaring, a beast worth less than the bullet to put it down. Cesare could see it all, from the naked disgust to the rage that would spread across their faces.
But Cesare wasn’t normal. He’d watched brothers sell their sister for a hamburger. Sisters beat their brothers for fun and set them on fire as a party trick. Mom’s and dad’s that raped with gleeful abandon, passing them around for laughs. Evil doesn’t rush into a man’s soul, it’s woven in flesh, seared into bone, twisted around every strand of DNA. Some people are rotten and only maggots squirm in their perverse souls, better to put the cancer down young.
For all Cesare knew the kid might have been a golden child, full of light and life, with the cure for cancer waiting like a seed in his mind. It didn’t matter, the nameless kid wasn’t his friend, hadn’t stood by him and killed on his word. The kid hadn’t faced off against Viktor without question. Alexandra was a psychotic child killer, but that was a pale fact next to the shadowed glory of the bleeding truth that roared in his soul, she was his friend.
“I don’t care about nameless children, it’s you I’ll bleed for,” Cesare whispered, words soft and drenched in terrible truth. A grotesque truth, a maiming crippling thing to those that birthed it.
Taking a breath, she continued. “I’m not asking you to fight me. I was hoping you'd come up with something else that could help.”
Cesare held her hands, thumbs moving in an uninterrupted caress. His thoughts darted quicksilver like over her words. He wasn’t an idiot; he’d always known he took his life in his hands when they sparred or rather gave his life into her hands. She was stronger, faster, and could kill him by simply tapping into her powers, what she called Sanguinem Scientiam.
Wasn’t that what true friendship was? Giving your life into another’s hands with only your faith to hold onto. She’d held his life for months and she’d never let him down. Trusting a wild thing was maiming waiting to happen, nothing civilized could fathom the instincts that seared bright and hellish in a wild soul.
“You can’t teach a person to fight without fighting,” Cesare said, his faith laid bare between them.
Alexandra searched his eyes for a long minute as she grappled with his choice. “Is this because you aren’t human any longer?” Now it was her turn to tighten her hands on his in support. “I noticed it during the fight with Greg and Dan, but the fight with Viktor confirmed it.”
He could tell her he didn’t want to talk about it, hide it with misdirection and quiet lies. It would be a betrayal of everything they'd shared today, a mockery of every vulnerable moment Alexandra had given him. She’d opened her heart; he wouldn’t reward that with wiggling lies and a serpent’s tongue.
She reluctantly let his hand go, watching as he pulled down his shirt, showing off the black mark incised into the top of his breastbone. Fingers trembling, she traced the letter cut into his flesh. “You’ve mastered Aleph, the First One.” A warm rush of pride welled up in him at the naked awe in her voice.
Alexandra’s cold finger ghosted over the contours of Aleph. “I’m not it’s master, more like an ally. Like those birds that eat the bits of decomposing flesh out of an alligator’s mouth.”
Shaking her head, she kept tracing the figure on his chest. The symbol rested about were a pendant would sit between the collar bones. “The letters of God aren't something to take lightly. My people have fought for thousands of years to harness their sacredness to our cause. Some of our greatest holy men have tried to touch them, only to explode in storms of blood and flesh. They are the word of God made manifest; his language given not even to the angels birthed from his light.” Her palm covered the symbol, the cold feeling of her skin seeming even colder against his hot skin. “How?”
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She slipped into the quiet before he could say anything. “Don’t answer. I have obligations outside of my oath to you, my honor would compel me to answer their questions regardless of my feelings. It's enough you were proven worthy of a grace given to none before you. Gods favor shines on you, commander.” Smiling at him, her eyes lit with something he’d never seen before, too intense and bright for him to place in his life of shadows. “I knew you were special, God has chosen you for greatness.”
“What about feeding?” Aleph wasn’t just a parasite that gifted him with sight beyond sight, it was growing. Tendrils quested through his subtle body, penetrating flesh with primeval energies antithetical to life.
With a last caressing touch, she pulled her fingers back. “Nothing of God would hurt me.” Cesare wasn’t so sure, but he wasn’t brave enough to argue. Stepping back, their hands parted from each other, neither willing to face the pang that ran sharp and deep at the separation.
“I can’t match you, but with my new advantages, I might be able to stay out of your way while you use the Sanguinem Scientiam.” Cesare shrugged, grin tugging at his lips. “Besides, Aleph grows with using, the more I draw on its power, the more acclimated I get, and the more I can draw.”
Alexandra shifted her center of gravity, balancing on the balls of her feet, feral smile crossing her face. “Show me your power, my Lord.”
A tingle of breathtaking arousal spiked through him at her words. He didn’t try to hide the blaze that caught fire in his blood, facing her with the truth written across his face. Her eyes traced his face, taking in the naked desire with bone deep understanding.
Aleph came to him in a wave of razored clarity, drowning crude, fleshy senses, asserting its dominance over his perceptions. The world aligned around him as he felt the warp and weft of existence. Strength flowed molten in his blood as the golden serpent opened his Root Chakra.
“Show me your face killer.” His voice called to the darkness, velvet shadows caressing over Alexandra.
Flesh receded from her face, vampiric nature devouring softness in its mad race to shed the human husk, revealing her skull in all its cadaverous glory. Thin, bloodless lips peeled back, fangs cutting their way from gums, sharpening into needle points before his eyes. She was death with living gold hair.
Rolling her shoulders she gave a brutal smile, she luxuriated in the strength of her birthright. An almost sexual joy transformed her face into something wild and unfettered. She gloried in her dominant power, as at ease with her nature as a lion burrowing into the splayed belly of a gazelle for soft meat. To kill and butcher, cut and rip, until only meat remained. She was a killing machine, a sadist starving for a meal of agony and degradation.
He smiled at the pureness of her joy. His words a whisper of darkness in the abyss of the night, the shine of your lover’s eyes as the moment inflames her flesh. “I love this part of you.” Poised, Alexandra locked onto him. “Stripped of illusions, wholly and totally you.” Joy so intense it flashed into pain flared in her eyes.
Blasting forward, she came for him with all the power at her command. Reality spun around him as he dodged to the side, he couldn’t move fast enough to stop the fist that hammered into his face, tearing his balance from him, thrusting him into a back-peddling stagger barely able to manage the kinetic energy. Alexandra followed it up with a kick that blew his leg off the ground, collapsing him onto one knee.
Surging up, he snapped a kick at her, but Alexandra was exponentially faster. Coursing through the air, she dodged the kick, flashing into his guard, her fist thudded into his stomach blowing him back with casual force. Bleeding the energy of her punch, Cesare’s elbow came up as she raced into range, ramming into the girl’s chin, setting Alexandra onto her back foot.
She was fast, so much faster than he could ever hope to be. If that was all she had, he'd still be fucked, but she was stronger than a gorilla on steroids. He could see why Viktor had trouble with her. She didn’t need technique with her speed. Facing a silver back gorilla, the best boxer in the world was less than hanging meat. Alexandra didn’t need to be good; she overwhelmed through sheer physical power.
She was still pulling her punches, otherwise he’d have broken ribs and a shattered leg. But then he was doing the same, going all out in a spar wasn’t the same as hunting a kill.
You didn’t fight a lion by running at it roaring a challenge. He couldn’t fight her head on, so he didn’t try. Cesare kept her moving, never letting her settle enough to unleash on him, forcing her to chase him. He danced around Alexandra, nipping at her sides with punishing blows, even if only a fraction of them got through.
Anger turn to fury as he locked her into a fight she couldn't win. If he let her take control the fight, it would be over in seconds. Even with her pulling her punches they still rattled his bones, rupturing soft tissue with frightening ease. But he was still up and fighting.
Cesare bent backward, body parallel with the ground, her sweeping kick flowing over his body. A contortion of liquid spine, slick as an ebony serpent. As the leg passed, he sprung up inside her guard. His punch thudded into her ribs before she’d set herself. She couldn't anticipate him because he didn’t use angles she’d been trained on. His attacks wove around her standard defenses with humiliating ease.
There was no thought, they would only get him killed. Nothing between the moment and the action. Only pure movement inside a moment that thrummed with power, pulsing with a fierce, uncontrollable joy, that howled and sang in his blood.
This was what he was born to do. To hurt and be hurt, violence on a clear day and slaughter in the darkness of the night. Sadistic pleasure surged like a black tide every time he sliced into her with his swords, a thrill akin to orgasm burst in him as he split her lips with a ravaging elbow. Twisted around sadism was his masochistic pleasure when she punished him four fold for every blow he landed.
Over it all was the contest for dominance. Who would be the strongest? The unstoppable lion or the clever wolf. The question burned their souls hot as the brand of Hephaestus. Arousal wove a tapestry between them, a sexual tension that stoked the fire of the fight into a blazing inferno that consumed them.
The sound of the alarm violated the sacred space. Cesare gasped, sweat running down his face as he stepped back, facing the vampire with raw admiration. His eyes traced Alexandra's perfect lines and ghastly face, he'd never wanted her more than at that moment. She'd always been beyond him, her ability something he could only marvel at. Now he knew how large the gulf was between them. He was a puppy using trickery, deceit, and base luck, to avoid a lions killing skill. There was no way he'd ever be strong enough to make her submit, but gods, how he wanted to try.
A slow rictus of lust spread across her emaciated face, eyes burning with an answer to his hunger. Pivoting, he walked away, knowing if he stayed, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from going for her throat. It was torture to be so close and yet so far away. They were miles apart in ability and they knew it.
With every step, the furiously violent arousal bled off him. Anastasia’s eyes switched from Cesare to the vampire behind him. He never thought she was stupid, that would be a mistake you’d only make once. The Harab Serapel had an intuitive grasp of the tides between the sexes, the push and pull of flesh woven into their souls, and Anastasia was a past master at reading the ocean.
She led him to the dummies, patiently waiting for him to come up behind her before stepping into his arms. Snuggling against his chest, she pushed her ass into his growing hardness as she drew his hands along her hips. Resting them in their intimate place, she caressed his fingers. “You like the vampire?” Statement and a fact rolled into one.
He’d never hidden his feelings from her, never lied, or shown a false face. You didn’t lie to your friends and still call them friends. His breath washed across her tortured skin and the buds of her still growing ears. “I do. She excites me in ways no one else can. She accepts what you turn from.” There was no recrimination in his voice. He didn’t expect anyone to accept him. Even Alexandra didn’t accept all of him, only the slices she liked.
“I don’t understand that part of you, the animal. I see how you and her harmonize, it makes me wonder if you’re like her .…” Her hands were gentle over his.
He loved holding her like this. Feeling her heat wash over him, her smell fill his lungs. She was yielding softness and delicious curves, filling the aching spots of his body and soul. He loved but he wouldn’t settle for someone who only loved the lies she told herself about him.
“There’s not future for me and Alexandra,” Cesare said, without hiding the regret in his voice. “She’s married to her god, and she'll only share her bed with her husband, that won’t be a heathen like me. She’ll marry a Christian Vampire, with family, connections, and a pedigree going back to Christ. We'll never be anything but friends.”
He felt the tension leave her body as she absorbed the truth. “Just like you'll never be mine.” The words drew her head up, caressing hands tightening around his. “You’d date me but I’m not worth committing to. When school ends, you’ll leave me behind and we both know it. Your dreams are more important than I’ll ever be, power, prestige, and the best education money can buy. You have a world to conquer and a nothing from nowhere doesn’t fit. You’ve said it yourself; your looking for a steppingstone, not a yoke around your neck. I’ll always be an embarrassment, and we both know it.”
She had nothing to say, not when the truth was butchered in front of her, writhing in agony, entrails splayed and quivering with fading life. He’d skinned her secret doubts and worries and left the mewling things to squirm in the cold light of day. Because he was right, he had no place in the future she wanted, and that’s why she wouldn’t commit to him.
Sighing, she faced for the first time Cesare may know her better than she knew herself. She hated him a little for not hating the narcissism that ruled her sou. He accepted it as part of being with her and that somehow made it worse.
Cesare held her for a long minute before starting the lesson. Neither wanted to be anywhere else, but neither could move forward. Friends was just another word for sacrifice, we bleed our friends out as we abuse them with the impunity of self-centered gods.
“Call the flame princess,” Cesare said, using the name he'd given her so long ago. Anastasia’s breath caught at the name, coming out in a slow sigh. Her hands rose, sable flames jumping from the palms, glittering with unleashed viciousness, tearing into the world with ravenous appetite's.
“You saw the way Alexandra fought?” The words lead Anastasia back to the memory of the vampire’s speed and strength. “You contain more destructive force than she does, but it's worthless if you can’t hit her. They’d kill you as easily as drowning a puppy.” A dark tide pulled her into stygian depths, pictures appearing and fading with his words, her being absorbing them on a level deeper than consciousness.
She never reflected on the intimacy of the training. He wove a landscape into her mind, opened doors she’d shuttered to hide from her power. His words tamed the Ebon Flame, gave her the tools to shape it to her will. If she’d known their relationship would evolve into sharing her deepest mind with him, she never would have done it. But now, the trust came easier than breathing.
“The Ebon Flame moves with your thoughts, slaved to your will. It's nothing without you, you birth it into the world. You're the gate keeper, your soul the door, your need the key, through you does it feed.” The whispered words were a current pulling her deeper into the abyss of her power. “Feel the truth of the Ebon Flame, see the dark reflection of your soul. Born from your jealousy, rage, and thwarted desire. Take that power for your own and wield it as a whip to flay the souls of your enemies.”