Blood Calls. Caridad Pineiro

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СКАЧАТЬ what will you feel when you wake? the voice inside his head asked. But Diego knew there was no waking from this eternal nightmare. From the endless days filled with only one certain thing. Death. No end to the loneliness that had returned with Esperanza’s death. Especially not with a human, he reminded himself. With a last look at the woman, he fled the Blood Bank. Though hunger was abated, the encounter had left him unsatisfied. He dived into the night to find a different kind of delight.

      With the energy of the young woman’s blood rushing through his veins, Diego leaped up to the rooftop of the adjacent building. A harvest moon filled the night sky, illuminating the city below, lighting the night for him, as if knowing of his intent.

      A burst of vamp speed had him nearly flying over the rooftops, vaulting from one building to another in his haste to reach his destination. The air rushed against his body, but barely cooled the heat of the demon driving him. With one last, almost desperate jump, he was on the ledge of Ramona’s building, an old converted warehouse in a part of town that had yet to be gentrified. It was probably why she could afford to have the uppermost loft. It boasted skylights at various locations that flooded the space with light so she could paint.

      He imagined her down below, standing before one of her canvases, as he neared one skylight. Imagined her stroking the brush across the surface, and immediately the paintings she had completed came to mind, reawakening his earlier desire. A desire that taking the young woman hadn’t satisfied.

      He suspected only one woman could slake his need tonight.

      Slowly he crept to the skylight and glanced downward. The paintings were there, but that wasn’t what he wanted to see.

      He shifted to the next skylight—smaller than the first, but still generous enough to provide a view.

      She was there, below the glass, lying in bed, the sheets in disarray around her naked body.

      Diego groaned and reared back from the sight, knowing how wrong it was, and yet unable to deny himself this. This was all he could allow himself with her—this distant passion. Anything else would be wrong on so many levels.

      She was human.

      He wasn’t.

      She would die.

      He wouldn’t.

      He couldn’t keep her with him. He wouldn’t turn her and see her change. See all that he admired about her become twisted by the grief that would inevitably follow as the years passed and life went on around them. As loved ones and familiar things were lost.

      He had seen how it had affected Esperanza. How it had touched the lives of Ryder and all his other friends. He had encountered one too many vampires whose hearts had grown cold, or who had gone nearly insane from the loss of those for whom they cared, and all they held dear.

      He wouldn’t visit that kind of distress on anyone else. But he wouldn’t deny himself satisfaction this night, he decided, as he inched back to the edge of the glass and peered down.

      Her breasts were full and as beautiful as he had imagined, with dark coral nipples he hungered to taste. The sheet draped across her body just beneath her breasts, the dark maroon color highlighting the paleness of her skin and accenting the chestnut highlights in her hair.

      She shifted in bed and her long dark hair fell against her breast. She brushed the errant lock away, but then paused, her hand lingering there.

      Diego swallowed back a groan as she touched herself, cupping her breast and fingering her nipple until it peaked to a hard point.

      She was awake.

      With his vamp senses he could detect the rhythm of her heartbeat and breathing, which said she was conscious of what she was doing. He could hear the beat grow faster and see the pulse in her neck jump as she played with the tip, rotating it between thumb and forefinger. Pulling and pinching it as a lover might.

      After their brief interlude earlier that night, was she imagining that it was him?

      At the thought, his erection swelled painfully against his jeans, human desire overriding the demon. As wrong as he knew it was, he couldn’t pull away from the sight of her, couldn’t stop himself from reaching down and imagining it was her palm on him.

      His mouth watered as she moved her other hand downward, past the rounded curve of her hip visible above the sheet. He stroked harder as her fingers found her center beneath the sheets, and the beat of her heart surged in response.

      When her hips raised off the bed, he groaned and closed his eyes, imagining how he might grasp those hips and drive into her. How he might stroke her to a release the way he now pulled at himself, harder and faster as his vamp senses picked up the erratic breaths spilling from her lips. He heard the soft moan of desire followed by a sharp gasp as fulfillment chased through her body.

      He came then, violently and so swiftly he grew light-headed from the force of it.

      Dropping away from the skylight, he sat at the edge, spent. Humiliated at how little control he had exhibited. Only it had been so long since he had felt such need. And it wasn’t just since Esperanza’s death nearly eighteen months earlier. Diego realized that it had been too long since life and passion had filled his being. Since he had truly lived.

      At that, he bent his legs and buried his head in his knees, tears threatening as he realized the emptiness of his life. Of all that had been his existence for five hundred years.

      Just because one woman’s passion had roused him as never before. A woman he could never have.

      With a rough breath, he forced himself to rise and put things to right, but as he did so, he allowed himself one quick look before he left.

      One look too much, he realized, when he saw that she had curled up into a ball and was crying. Her tears tugged at his heart, but before he did something he would truly regret, Diego surged off the roof, the sight of her crying driving him away, since all he could do was bring her yet more tears.

      * * *

      Ramona dashed the tears from her face, chastising herself for her weakness. She should never have given in to the remnants of the dream—one filled with her and Diego making love.

      But she had let her need guide her, and the physical satisfaction she had given herself had been gratifying at first. Then the realization had come of how empty it was. Much like her life. Much the way her life would end.

      Empty and alone.

      She had spent her early teen years struggling to survive in the barrio, joining a small street gang for protection and company. With her dad gone and her mother slowly losing her mind, there hadn’t been anyone else to turn to.

      A bad mistake. Their petty thievery and rivalry with another gang had landed Ramona in juvie for a few difficult months. It wasn’t the time in the detention center that had been hard, it was worrying whether her mother was coping alone. Luckily, a caring counselor had helped her out and provided her mother with a visiting nurse.

      That and an art class during her incarceration had set Ramona on the path to a college scholarship. After, she had devoted much of her later teen years and early twenties to her art, perfecting it at the cost of a social life. Any time not in the studio was spent caring for her mother at home, until the Alzheimer’s worsened and her mom had to be institutionalized.

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