12. ~Xavier~

12

~Xavier~

I could hear them yelling as I remained curled up in bed staring at the ceiling.

The shouting match that had been going on for the last fifteen minutes straight didn’t show any sign of cooling down.

Not with two Type A and volatile-when-they-were-provoked personalities in Abigail Rose and Orpheus Hart going head to head.

“If you’d deigned to respond to any of the urgent messages I left you—through many different means, I might add—this could have been avoided!”

“We’re in the middle of a high-level emergency situation, youngling.”

“And once again, your daughter plays second to Exemplar .”

“How dare you?”

My dad’s voice came through, the voice of diplomatic reason as usual, “Let’s not focus on condemnation and blame. That won’t aid the situation in the least.”

“I’m not my father, Abigail. I can admit that I was also at fault. I should have kept a closer eye on her instead of allowing her space. I should have spelled her to calm her down so I could cast Constantine from her mind.”

“I know you’re not him. And it’s not your fault. Nor could you have done much of anything, not without venturing into the forbidden magical arts.”

“Black magic?” Talon asked, having been quiet until now. It meant he was drowning in his fear and upset over Alena being missing and with that monster.

He wasn’t the only one.

Except I wasn’t drowning.

I knew it was bad. I could recognize the emotion of it. But I just couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything.

After what I’d tried to do, numbness had been the only way to avoid attempting something like it again.

It was close enough to being dead if I couldn’t actually achieve that because I was being watched like a hawk now. Abigail had guards stationed throughout her mansion at my father’s request. Well, I doubted he’d actually had to request it of her, she would’ve just intuited that he needed it and done it for him.

“Yes, black magic.”

“Ore said he could’ve cast out Constantine’s control over her if it had been dark magic, but now we know it’s black magic, how do we do that?”

“Angel magic, baby bird.”

“Wait, so she can cast him out herself?”

“It’s not that simple, Tal. She won’t want to now he has his claws in her. The longer it goes on, the deeper he’ll dive until her reality is warped. Until all she’ll see is him.”

“My daughter won’t be that monster’s victim. I will cast him out.”

“Abi, you do that as an outside force and his magic could corrupt you.”

“She is my daughter, El. And Orpheus is correct, I should have protected her better. My intent to cast her aside and keep her from all of this, to make her believe I didn’t value her input was in a bid to guard against her becoming involved in this at all. But it was clearly the wrong tactic. And now my own flesh and blood will suffer for my mistake.”

“You’re not the only one whose mistake has caused their child pain, Abi. Constantine turned Xavier on my territory, on my watch.”

“He sent an army to overwhelm you.”

“And I could have annihilated them had the kill not been outlawed.”

“We cross that line and we become those we fight, my sweet.”

“Perhaps.”

“Or, just throwing it out there, you don’t have a uniform rule and judge situations on a case-by-case basis.”

“There are inherent dangers in that approach, Orpheus. We are not gods.”

“You’re a Fallen, you’re closer than any of the rest of us. And with the way things are, somebody needs to take on that role, or you’ll lose everything and end up sacrificing everyone in the name of upholding some arbitrary moral code.”

“The time to evaluate something so profound isn’t now, in the midst of war where tensions and emotions are high even among allies.”

“Abi is right, Orpheus. Exemplar must focus on retrieving Alena and Saryan, and I need your focus to be on my son while I am attending to these matters.”

That’s why Orpheus and Talon had shown up here?

Well, the other reason?

I’d thought it had solely been about Alena being taken by Constantine—or going with him as it really sounded like.

Of course Orpheus thought he could fix me.

Until Constantine, he’d never met a challenge he’d come up against that he hadn’t been able to best. I was sure that he didn’t even believe he’d lost that challenge against the almighty megalomaniac either, just that the defeat had been temporary and he’d ensure he bested that beast next time. Lofty goals, that one, no doubt.

Although, challenging Abigail Rose regarding the laws of Exemplar was another that actually rivaled the Constantine one. He’d chosen the most opportune moment too, while she was vulnerable with the loss of her daughter, something I highly doubted was a coincidence. It seemed like he’d even made a dent too.

If I still cared about anything, I’d be majorly impressed.

As it was, I didn’t. At least… I didn’t want to. Overhearing their conversation, though, every single fucking thing about it… it was testing that to the max.

I forced myself to tune out.

Fortunately, my insistence on not feeding for days on end, unbeknownst to Wilhelm and my father who’d provided me with blood bags that I’d since thrown up, meant I was permanently exhausted.

It wouldn’t give me the ultimate peace that I desired, but if I managed to continue denying myself blood, I would be able to find temporary peace in desiccation that would put me in something akin to a comatose state.

That exhaustion made it easy to fall back to sleep pretty much as soon as I closed my eyes.

An appetizing scent roused me awake.

I opened my heavy eyes and looked out tiredly through the room that was no longer steeped in darkness.

In my weary and dazed state, it took me some time before I noticed the dark figure draped over an armchair from the seating area that had been dragged to my bedside. It had me putting a source to the appetizing scent too, as I took in the blood dripping from a wound gouged into his throat.

He was shirtless, all his markings on display, and the sight of the blood trickling all the way down his chest, over his abs, and pooling at the waistband of his black leather pants.

“Stop, Orpheus,” I croaked.

“Stop what?” he responded evenly.

“You’re preventing that wound from healing, using your magic to stop it.”

“I use my magic for everything. Just like you used to. You know, before you were turned and you became a whiny little cunt about it. Without it now, I bet it’s made you realize how foolish that was, how much time you wasted not using it every chance you got and to the full extent of your ability too.”

“You piece of shit!” I shot up in bed, a wave of dizziness besetting me and making me slump back against my headboard.

“So weak. So vulnerable.” He glared. “So pathetic.”

“Shut up.”

“Ooh, I’m shaking in my two-thousand-dollar boots, baby vamp.”

“Just get out,” I groaned, scrubbing my hand over my face. “I don’t want you here. My father was wrong, you can’t help me.”

“You do realize that this is all a part of Constantine’s plan, yes? To weaken you and break you down so he can remake you?”

“What?”

“During the battle, he called you his heir, not Elliot’s. He’s trying to remake you into the heir that he wants, someone who possesses the same abilities as him, one of the only. Definitely the only two we know of so far in the supernatural world. Vampire-sorcerer hybrids.”

“I’m no longer a fucking hybrid, am I?” I yelled.

“This situation isn’t permanent.”

“You don’t understand. The only way to return my magic to me is—”

“I’m well aware that you believe your father delving into black magic again—a lot deeper this time—is the only solution. But it’s not. Think about it for a moment… why would Alena agree to go with Constantine?”

“What are you—”

“When they were trying to track her earlier, while you were up here sleeping and wallowing like a useless shit, they tracked her essence around here at the time of your suicide attempt. Abigail suspects that Constantine brought her here in a dreamscape to witness the mess that you are and he got even more of a show than he’d planned. The next thing we know, she’s suddenly up and left with him—the one person who can easily return your magic to you.”

“You’re saying she made a deal to save me?”

“I’m saying she made a deal for you. I’m not saying that you need fucking saving, because you don’t.” He shot from his chair. “What you need to do is to get a fucking grip.”

“You have absolutely no understanding of psychology whatsoever. That has never become more abundantly clear.”

“I have an understanding of you.”

“The fuck you do.”

“You need to embrace the vampire and stop fighting against it. There is power and freedom to be had that you’re just discounting. There is hope in what you are now, even without your magic, the sensation of feeling truly alive. But it’s all being caged deep inside with your denial of the demon through your fear of losing control.” He came to the bed and perched on the edge, making me suck in a breath at the scent of his blood right up close.

All that dark power thrumming through his veins, calling out to me.

“You treat the demon like it’s a separate entity from you and that fight is impossible and exhausting, X. It’s killing your spirit. Hence, what happened earlier. Hence you feeling without hope and purpose. The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth.” He slicked his fingers in his own blood. “The thing is, to embrace it, you need to lose control, to experience that sensation which you’ve spent three years denying and struggling against.”

I was about to tell him to shut the hell up and take his leave, but then he spread his blood-slicked fingers all over my lips.

A snarl left me and he took the opportunity to shove them into my mouth, along my tongue and over my teeth.

In the very next beat, those teeth became fangs as the demon took me.

“Don’t,” I growled, spitting out his blood.

“Come on, we both know you’ve always craved a taste of me.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking, what the demon will do to you.”

“It’s not all darkness with the vampire side. There’s beauty to be found in the demon, that which you haven’t begun to explore yet. Everyone has darkness in them. But as I’ve learned the hard way, denying it all completely isn’t the way to go. You lose so much of yourself that way.”

I started. “Those are Alena’s words to me. How do you know about that?”

“How I know isn’t important. The words are. Her beautiful words to you. She didn’t see you as beyond salvageable, as damaged. She saw you as a man, a man she clearly loves enough to risk her life and her sanity to save.”

“No. Stop it, Ore. She loved the hybrid. Really the magical side, and she just tolerated the vampire.”

“That’s you rewriting history in your deeply depressed and hopeless state. For the record, that last part of what she said is why you think you have nothing left. You’re denying it all, X. You’re denying yourself, your life.”

“Stop,” I ground out. “I can’t… I can’t hold out much longer. Go or I’ll descend on you.”

Instead of doing so, he spread more of his blood over my face. This time, my nose, my cheeks, my mouth, then gliding his bloodied fingers down my chest, creating an arousing sensation to test me even more, a sensation I’d only felt toward him once before, shortly after we’d first met and I’d been turned on by his forthright and powerhouse personality, the way he kicked ass, took names, and didn’t give a fuck about what anybody had to say about it.

The way I used to be before I’d been turned and everything had slipped away.

“Orpheus… I’ll hurt you.”

“Doesn’t seem like you can do much of anything with how weak you are.”

“As soon as I drink more than a couple of drops of your insanely potent and powerful blood, that will change.”

He climbed fully onto the bed, pouncing on me and slamming his hands down either side of my head, effectively caging me in. “Then drink. Descend on me. Hurt me.” His eyes flamed. “I can’t fucking wait.”

I frowned up at him. “You want this?”

He rolled his hips and I jolted as I felt his hard dick against mine over the covers.

“Hell,” I breathed.

He leaned in closer, his breath fanning over the side of my neck. “Come on, how many times have you wanted to tear into me for the shit I’ve done? This is your one shot, the one and only time my magic won’t thwart you.”

Damnation!

I shot out my hand and grasped his jaw in a bruising grip that had him hissing and his eyes lighting up—depraved bastard.

Exactly what I needed right now.

And of course he’d fucking known it.

More than anybody else who’d tried to help me.

He understood his darkness and that in others better than anyone I’d ever known.

A snarl escaped me and I didn’t try to hold it off this time, letting it out in all its destructive glory as I told him, “Buckle up, Dark Prince, this is gonna hurt. Gonna fucking decimate you.”

Once again, he showed no fear.

Dark excitement shone forth instead.

Well, the vampire aimed to change that.

He’d fear it all right.

Me. Us.

The demon and me as one. For the first time ever.

“You’ll live to regret it.”

With a burst of vampire speed, I had him on his back beneath me.

I lapped at his wound in a frenzy, licking around the site, down his throat, then moving down all over his chest.

He bucked beneath me as I flicked my tongue under his waistband, then slicked along the length of it to get every trace of his blood.

I squeezed his hard cock through his pants and dug my talons into his shaft.

“Motherfuck!” he cried out, deliciously.

Fucking yeah. Mmm.

We wanted his reactions, his hurt, him at our mercy.

We wanted to fucking own him.

Satisfied no blood had been wasted, I rose back up, then sank my fangs into the site of the wound, driving deep and tearing it open all the wider, earning several shudders from him, letting me know I was hurting him.

I blew right through that warning that was usually there urging me to pull back and get control.

And then I began the draw, his blood spilling into my mouth, coating my fangs, my tongue, my whole being.

This much of it, I could feel it—all that dark power.

It was powerful like Alena’s but without all that purity and sweetness.

Nah, this was utter depravity and twisted pleasure I was devouring.

Getting lost in.

Getting off on.

Strength rolled through me. So much strength. All that weakness and exhaustion dissipated in moments and I felt revitalized.

More than that—I felt invulnerable. At the top of the fucking food chain.

As I continued feeding like a rabid fucking animal, tearing through his flesh in the process and earning more groans and shudders from him, his cock thickened in my hand.

I let loose, dry humping the shit out of it, fucking my dick against his, painfully hard and rough.

I employed my vampire speed and he cried out in a mixture of pain and pleasure.

I shredded his pants with my talons, then grasped his length skin-to-skin.

Yanking my fangs free roughly had him roaring, then coming all over my fingers.

Fuck, yes.

It was so messed-up for us to be doing this.

Everything was so messed up.

And the demon loved every moment of it.

I shoved him off the bed and he landed on his back all dazed because I’d taken so much of his blood.

That familiar warmth coiled inside me, startling me, and stopping me for a moment as I went to stalk toward him and fuck him up some more.

And then it burst out of me and I thrust my palm at the window.

A bolt of blue magic exploded forth, decimating the glass and puncturing a hole in the ward my father had put around my room.

“Forgot about that possibility, didn’t you?” he rasped, grinning.

“I don’t… I don’t understand.”

Startling me, he pushed to his feet, despite the fact that he shouldn’t be able to with how weak I’d made him from feeding so much.

He took it further and ran at me.

And then we were crashing through the window, down from the second-story and onto the patio below, out into the dark night.

He grunted as he landed on top of me and the glass table beneath gave way, winding him.

Before he could roll off me, I was there, hauling him up and slamming him against the brick wall.

His head lolled to the side.

“Fucking with me! Always! Well, who’s fucking with who now?”

“Show me,” he rasped, choking up blood, yet still chuckling in a dark and unhinged way that was pure Orpheus.

“Argh!” I roared, letting the demon consume me as I sank my fangs into the other side of his throat, ripped them out after a slight taste, then moved to raking my talons down his chest, shredding his shirt and his flesh in the process.

The torture had him slumping against the wall, becoming my plaything, and barely holding himself up.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Talon rushing out onto the patio.

I swung my head his way, sensing his threat.

But he just stood there watching us, not making a move against me. He looked really torn up about it, like he might throw up actually from the state of Orpheus.

The demon didn’t care. We didn’t care.

I yanked down my boxers, then shoved Orpheus to his knees and rubbed my dick all over his face.

Sweeping my hand down his bloodied chest, I licked up his blood, stuffing my knuckles into my mouth and devouring every drop as I degraded the fuck out of him.

Ecstasy slammed into me and I came all over his face, my hot cum spraying his hair, eyelids, nose, cheeks, and mouth.

I hauled him up and sank my fangs into his throat, tasting him once more, feeling the utter freedom and insane power of it all.

And then I pulled out and released him.

He collapsed to his knees, staring up at me all bloodied and used, smirking widely.

Fucking psychopath.

I pulled back the demon and staggered back, coming out of it.

Talon was there in the next second, skidding to his knees and cradling Ore, tending to his wounds.

I stared out at him, incredulous.

“Thank you,” I eked out, overcome by what he’d just allowed me to do, what he’d just given me.

“You’re my brother,” he choked out. “Can’t lose you.”

And then he passed out against Tal.