Free Beloved Vampire by Joey W. Hill Page B

times. She stirred again, emitting a cry, and jerked. “Enough, habiba ,” he said, firm but gentle, and she settled.
    Immediately. Her body became almost pliant. On top of the shock of the tiger mark, and the scars, something else clicked into place. He rolled the lingering taste of her blood in his mouth, thought about her attachment to Farida’s memories. Her delusional mur murings. The way a woman wants to be possessed.
    Oh, Allah. What if she’d been a natural submissive, but innocent to it when Raithe took her, the bastard? It was the kind of virgin that was almost irresistible to a vampire, a woman who intuitively sought to serve a man’s love with her own, willing to trust the touch of the right Master. Seeing the abrupt, relaxed ease of her face, the idea even stirred his imaginings. He could see her sweetly on her knees, her total surrender tempting a male to never let her out of his sight.
    It would explain why Raithe had to have her, though a wiser vampire would have exercised impulse control. Son of a bitch.
    Whether true or not, Mason wished he could reach through the veil of death, jerk Raithe through it and devise ways to make him scream.
    Ah, hell. He needed to learn to control his emotions. “Easy,” he whispered as she made a fearful whimper in her oblivion. He adjusted her, cradling her in his lap as she slept on. The press of her soft backside against his thighs hardened his restive cock, awakened by his unbidden thoughts. Good thing she wasn’t awake.
    If it was true, it was useful only as a key to getting her back on her feet again. If it wasn’t true, it was all the same to him. The point was to help her.
    He turned his mind to more practical matters. Usually a third mark invigorated a servant, but he expected she would be in restorative sleep for the next day or so as her body readjusted. He was glad for it, because it would give him time to get her away from here.
    He would take her to his home in South America, a place where he would be better equipped to deal with her. Regardless of her sexual nature, when she woke and discovered she’d killed one Master only to be bound by another, her reaction was likely to be far from sweet or submissive.
    7
    F OR so many months, Jess had fought her way out of sleep. When it took her down, it tried to keep her there, help her follow the natural order and slip into the waiting hands of Death. Though she recognized it as the one friend she had, she treated it as an enemy. She’d fall into the arms of forever slumber as soon as she slept by Farida’s tomb.
    Now, though, something was different. She was floating out of sleep, light, easy, becoming aware of sunlight on her face, a warmth that made her press her lips together as if holding the heat of a lover’s mouth there. As she turned over on the soft mattress, her flexible limbs held her weight, shifted her, twined around pillows without protest. Her palm flattened, fingers spreading out.
    No pain. She didn’t hurt anywhere. She could be dead. Or it could all have been a dream. A horrible, horrible nightmare, and she’d open her eyes and be in her one-bedroom flat in Rome. On her way to the bathroom, she’d stumble over one of the stacks of books she kept piled up around her bed, watched by the mysterious yellow eyes of the many stray cats that she fed. They tended to wander in through open windows to perch themselves on the larger, heavier reference materials. She’d pull on her running clothes and head out for a quick five miles before getting ready for her workday at the university, dreaming of the day when she would go with the professors on the digs.
    It was the only way to process it. It had to have been a nightmare, one of the most hideous in the history of all nightmares. It had seemed like five years, because one could live a lifetime in a five-minute slumber. Proof that bending time was possible, since it happened in dreams all the time.
    Though the rest of her was light, supple, ready