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Chapter Text

They’d both gone too long without blood. 

This evening Scab’s goal was to hunt down an animal that even Ivory wouldn’t reject. He had brought her all manner of small game over the past few nights, rabbits mostly, but these had been flung back at him with disgust. Larger quarries like pumas and wolves yielded no better results. This had led Scab to assume that it wasn’t about the quantity of animal so much as the quality; he needed one fine enough to whet Ivory’s appetite somehow. She needed to feed.

Scab crawled through a patch of brush and down into a ravine that he followed for some time, hoping that the water would lead to fresh game. Maybe even humans. His mouth watered just thinking about it, his teeth snapping together uncontrollably as the thirst racked his body. 

He heard movement ahead and froze on instinct. He waited. Listened.

Soft sounds ahead, too quiet and well calculated to be human. Scab opened his mouth and breathed in to taste the air. It was thick with animal blood.

He moved silently closer and came upon a flock of whitetail deer grazing among the brambles. His eyes scanned each one for imperfections. The largest had a scarred hide and chipped antler, and most of the others were sickly and flea-ridden apart from one. Scab bared his teeth when he saw a fresh fawn picking its way through the trees. It was too close to its mother to be taken by any other predator in these woods, but that proximity was nothing to a vampire. Particularly not one as starved as Scab. 

In a flurry of motion he pounced, gave chase, leapt, and took the fawn down. He could hear the rest of the herd’s hoofbeats fading into the distance as the fawn struggled beneath him.

He wanted nothing more than to dig into it the moment he broke its neck.

Somehow he resisted, though. The thought of Ivory waiting for him gave him pause. 

He took the scruff of the fawn’s neck in his mouth, drooling when he tasted the hot, gamey animal blood, and moved through the woods on all fours to make it back to Ivory more quickly. They had been holed up in a makeshift den beneath a hollowed out tree for two nights now. Scab had no trouble finding his way back to it. Even though he widened the range each time in hopes of stumbling upon a camp of humans, he never strayed too far from the hollow tree when he hunted. The idea of leaving Ivory for too long didn't appeal to him at all.

He let out a snarl when he approached to alert her of his presence when he arrived at the tree, and then slithered through the crevice in the earth beneath it that led to their little love nest. 

Ivory groaned in frustration when she saw the fawn in his mouth, baring her teeth in a hiss of rejection before Scab had even dropped it. 

“For the last time,” she snarled. “It must be human!”

Scab approached her tentatively and released his jaws, dropping the limp fawn at Ivory’s feet. She looked worse now than she had when he left, Scab noted. Ivory’s lips were dry and cracked, her breath heavy. She was still wounded, and those wounds were only growing more rotten without a fresh infusion of blood. 

He reached out toward the wound in her side that had been festering since they escaped the van Helsings, touched it, and felt wet blood there. Precious little of it. Scab raised his eyes to hers.

“Feed,” he said, lifting his hand to show her the blood. “You won’t last without it.”

Ivory took his hand in her own and pulled him in closer. Scab flinched reflexively, expecting a slap or a kick like he had grown used to from Julius or Dmitri, but she only smoothed the skin of his palm with her thumb and then raised his hand to her lips. With a savoring lick, she took back the blood on his fingertips. Scab found it intriguing, but had no patience for it. 

“Here,” he offered, picking up the fawn. He tilted the creature’s head back and held the still-warm throat to Ivory’s lips insistently. “Close your eyes. Think of the richest blood you’ve tasted, and pretend it’s the same. You’ll grow used to the taste…”

“It isn’t the taste,” Ivory snarled. She slapped the fawn out of Scab’s hands. He flared up and hissed at her, but she put him in his place with a growl so savage that it made Scab flatten himself against the wall of the cramped den. Ivory spat on the fawn’s speckled hide. “The taste is nothing to me,” she continued. “We Sisters drink for strength, for power. We don’t drink merely to gorge ourselves. There’s nothing in animal blood but madness.”

“Blood is blood,” Scab rasped. 

“You know better than that.”

“I know that something is better than nothing,” said Scab. He relaxed the curl of his lip and lowered his hackles, shifting close to her with his head bowed apologetically. “Feed, Ivory. Just this once, to regain some of your strength. Then we’ll move on, find a nice, juicy human for you…”

Ivory groaned at the thought and let her eyes close. She licked her lips with a parched tongue, keenly aware of the gnawing pain in her gut and the sting of the wounds she’d suffered at Scarlett van Helsing’s hands. Then she felt something else; Scab’s cold fingertips tenderly grazing the back of her hand. Ivory smiled. She had seen countless vampires underestimate Scab due to his small stature, lanky frame, and near-feral nature, but Scab had never been bested by any of them. In the absence of Julius, Scab’s savagery had been enough to secure him his position as leader of the pack. He was stronger than he looked, which Ivory liked very much. And he made up for his quirks and eccentricities with another quality that Ivory admired above all; devotion. 

She had to admit that she enjoyed the way he doted on her. It was, to her chagrin, charming. 

She opened her eyes to see him watching her, his fingertips tracing a soothing pattern across the back of her hand. His mouth was red from where he’d held the fawn in his jaws. Ivory liked that. 

“Just this once?” He urged again. 

“Fine,” Ivory grumbled with reluctance. Scab’s eyes lit up with frenzied delight when she agreed. He scooped up the fawn and settled in beside Ivory, their bodies folded together perfectly in the cramped space. He pressed the fawn into her hands and his lips to her ear. 

“Close your eyes,” he whispered. The eagerness in his voice made her smile, so she complied. She could feel his hands on her shoulders, squeezing encouragingly as he hissed, “Imagine a street filled with humans, each one ripe for the taking. Pick out the finest one…”

Ivory shifted to lean back into Scab’s chest, and then felt his fingers comb delicately through her hair. She nuzzled her open mouth against the throat of the fawn. The blood didn’t smell sweet at all, but she tried to imagine it. 

“Sometimes I find it helps to imagine someone I’ve always wanted to taste,” Scab said in her ear. 

“Like who?” Ivory asked. 

“Everyone who ever looked down on me.”

The predatory growl in his voice thrilled her. Ivory stretched, arching forward and then settling back into Scab’s arms again. She felt him winding around her—his neck draped lovingly over her shoulder, his arms creeping around her waist like weeds choking out a rose bush. Ivory growled deep in her throat and tried to imagine a human to whet her appetite. None of the figures from her past struck her fancy, so she imagined Scab instead, or at least what she thought he must have looked like as a human. He was lean and agile, his body tight, his skin pliant beneath her. She could see why Julius had wanted a taste of him. The image of sinking her teeth into him and draining him dry was uniquely appealing. 

Holding him in her mind’s eye, she bit down into the throat of the fawn and tried to gulp down as much of the rancid blood as she could before it revolted her. Scab encouraged her gently, his lips against the shell of her ear. “Yesssssss, that’s right. Drink deep, Ivory...”

Her mind’s eye was starting to get away from her as she fed. She could picture him on the ground beneath her, his skin still flushed and rosy with life, could imagine the way he would have squirmed under her as she took him. The image was enough to rip a savage growl from deep in Ivory’s chest. 

She tore into the fawn, her teeth razing the animal’s skin to tatters as she fed with newfound ferocity. Finally she had gulped down as much of it as she could stand and dropped the body unceremoniously in her lap, panting, her lips still dripping red. 

“Not as bad as I expected,” she said breathlessly. 

She felt Scab smile against her cheek. He snickered and said, “Like I said, it helps to imagine something delicious.”

“Mmm. Delicious,” said Ivory. Not a word she would have picked to describe him, though now she was curious about whether it might be true. She found Scab’s hands at her waist and wrapped them tighter around her, craning her neck back to look at him. 

The fresh blood on her lips was almost too much for him to ignore. He was mesmerized by the sight of it, by how irresistible it looked against the backdrop of her face. A shiver wracked his body as she lifted one hand to smear the mess from her mouth, then offered it up to him. She said nothing, but her eyes fixed him and didn’t let him go. He watched her for any sign of a change of heart as he accepted her gift, taking her hand in his own and lapping away the blood appreciatively. When he had finished, she let her palm rest against his cheek and stroked his jaw with her thumb. Ivory liked the way he relaxed into her touch.

They lay entwined in the dark, in silence. This was how they had slept the last two days, curled together in the gloom, safely hidden away from the punishing rays of the sun. 

Neither of them were used to sleeping in such close quarters. After all, life in the Sisterhood and the feral pack hardly encouraged cuddling. Most vampires were territorial, despite being pack animals, and both Scab and Ivory had slept comfortably through the sun in solitude since turning.

Being on the run had changed that abruptly. Their first day together had been full of awkward shuffling and snarling, elbowing each other in the face and gut out of spite as much as lack of space. The second day they had holed up in an even smaller hideaway—little more than a few slats of sheet metal propped up against a wrecked car—and circumstance had forced them to adapt to each other’s closeness. 

After that, things were different.

They were less hostile toward one another, which wasn’t saying much, given their nature, but which they both took note of separately. They’d stopped trying to intimidate one another for dominance; Scab had, reluctantly, accepted that Ivory’s clearer head and centuries of experience as a member of the Sisterhood put her in a better position to make decisions about their survival. That alone had eased the tension between them in the early days. As they fled further and grew weaker from lack of food, they leaned more on each other. Supporting one another turned into soothing one another during the long days, brushing the dirt off of each other as they crawled out to hunt fruitlessly during the nights. By the time they found the hollow tree, those motions had become as close to affectionate as either Scab or Ivory were capable of.

Ivory reflected on how comfortable she felt now, leaning back against him. His eyes had closed the moment the morning birds had started singing, just a few minutes ago, but Ivory could feel the telltale tremor in his hands going that indicated he was still awake. She got his attention with a whisper. “Scab.”

He hissed low in response. Ivory shifted in his arms to pick up the body of the fallen fawn and offered it to him. “You haven’t fed.”

Scab’s thirst was undeniable, but he shook his head. “You need to heal. I’ll find another.”

“You’re weak,” she growled. “I can feel it.”

He snarled in response, and tightened his grip around her enough to pinch the wound in her ribs. When she roared in anger, he held her still and shushed softly in her ear. “Weak, yes,” he agreed as she tried to push his hands away. “But in better condition than you. Still able to hunt for myself.”

Ivory hissed, disgusted to admit that he was right—as injured as she was, she couldn’t hunt. Couldn’t even escape the grip of a feral. Without blood, her wounds would never heal properly. Even the putrid animal blood was preferable to dying in this hole in the ground, weak and wounded. 

She let the growl die in her throat and relaxed against him again, prompting him to loosen his grip to allow her better access to the fawn in her hands. This time when she sank her teeth into it, Ivory imagined him again, human and helpless. She drank deep and then broke loose, twisting in his arms to face him with her jaws wide. She loved the way he shuddered under her. His eyes followed the trail of blood dripping from her chin and his mouth opened instinctively as he strained toward it. Ivory pressed one hand against his chest playfully to give him pause, which made him growl deep in his throat, but he went along with her teasing. His tongue trailed lazily over his lips as he looked up at her, and then his jaws shut with a snap. 

“Playing with your food,” he observed. 

“Tell me something, Scab,” she hissed, pressing the body of the fawn against him, the animal’s torn throat lined up temptingly with his own. “What did they call you in life?”

Scab’s lips curled back over his teeth. “What does it matter?”

“Call it professional curiosity,” Ivory said mischievously. She smeared the blood from her chin with her hand and raked it across his lips, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to resist it. That was another thing she enjoyed about Scab; how predictable he was. 

“Scott,” he offered up immediately, desperately, as he tried to follow her bloody hand with his tongue, only to be outmaneuvered as she gripped his jaw tight with it. Ivory smirked and leaned in, the growl in her chest resonating into his. 

“Scott,” she hissed, tasting it. 

“Means nothing,” he said through gritted teeth. He let his eyes rove over her mouth. He tried to gauge whether he could reach the blood on her chin with his tongue, then tried to gauge whether she’d tear his jaw off for giving it a shot. He settled for swiping his tongue over his lips again. He knew better than to press Ivory, and it was satisfying enough to see her enjoying the kill he’d brought her. As long as she was feeding, he was more than willing to let her toy with him. 

Ivory turned his head from one side to the other just for the sake of being in control, pleased with how compliant he was. She leaned into him until she felt his forehead against hers, felt his uneven breath on her lips. 

“Ssssssscott,” she repeated sharply. He growled in frustration and strained toward her with his jaws open and hungry, spurred on by the blood and the proximity. It was no use. Even injured, Ivory was faster than him. She laughed at him and pushed his head deftly to the side as she dug into the throat of the fawn. Scab shivered when he heard the bite so close to his own body, his skin prickling when he felt her hand cradling the back of his skull. He melted into her touch as though she were the sunlight itself. 

Ivory could almost ignore the rancid taste of the animal blood now. She closed her eyes and savored the feeling of having the feral leader at her mercy as she drank. Scab couldn’t hide how much he was enjoying himself, but Ivory was more interested in her own little fantasy—the one where he was still a human man named Scott, who was decidedly not enjoying himself.. 

She could almost taste him now, could almost hear him begging for mercy, the way she knew he must have done when Julius took him. He looked like the type. The very thought of it made her pull harder on the fawn’s throat, harder still, until soon she realized that there was no more blood to be had from the vein. She shoved the body aside and lapped at the blood that remained. A growl worked its way out of her as her mouth found those last drops across her hand, Scab’s collar, his neck—

“Ivory,” he choked out. 

She could feel his trembling hands clawing at the back of her armor, and she smiled wickedly against him. 

“You would let me, wouldn’t you?” She hissed as she let her lips trail blood over his Adam’s apple. “You would let me drink from you, right here and now, if I wanted to.”

His mouth opened wordlessly, but he could only nod his consent as he let his eyes roll shut. Years of holding his own among Julius’ pack of ferals had taught him to respect his place in the food chain. Ivory purred her words into his ear. 

“How chivalrous. A regular white knight, offering his throat up to the queen to gain her favor,” she mocked, slipping one of her bloodied fingers into his mouth and hooking his lower jaw with it to get his attention. “You entertain me, Scab. With your gifts of animals, your selfish selflessness.”

He lifted his eyes to hers as she pulled him in closer, leaning into her touch as the animal blood found his tongue. His teeth closed around her knuckle hungrily as he chased the taste. 

“You wouldn’t just let me do it,” she hissed when she felt him reacting to the blood. She reveled in the way he trembled as she slipped another finger into his mouth. “You want it, don’t you, Scab?” 

He didn’t hesitate for a moment. 

“Yes,” he panted, surprising himself in his sudden desperation. He knew that she was playing him like a well-tuned fiddle, but he couldn’t deny how much he enjoyed it. Ivory radiated power in a way that rivaled few other vampires he’d seen. Even now, wounded and weakened with thirst, she was a nightmare to behold. 

She dragged her fingers down his chin to his throat and felt the unnatural pulse hammering under his cold skin. Something between a laugh and a snarl rippled out from between Ivory’s teeth as she leaned in and bared them invitingly against Scab’s lips. She breathed into him and toyed with the idea of giving in to temptation, just for the sake of establishing dominance over him once and for all. 

“If only you were from a more desirable bloodline than Dmitri’s,” she hissed into his mouth. “Then I might be willing to give you what you want.”

His insolent tongue sought out the blood against her bottom lip. Normally Ivory would have bitten it off without a second thought, but she needed Scab in good condition to hunt. Besides, she preferred him intact—at least for now. 

She decided to indulge him. She allowed Scab to lap the last traces of blood from her mouth, then her chin, before pressing him down into the dirt where he belonged again. Ivory reflected on how willing and malleable he had become in a mere matter of minutes. The thrill of fresh blood had appeased him in a way that she particularly enjoyed. 

They needed more.

“Tomorrow we’ll hunt together,” she said softly as her hands smoothed over his chest. “We’ll kill together, drink our fill.”

His lips curled into a brazen smile.

Scab let his body relax to her touch as she settled in against him to sleep through the day. The animal blood would heal her enough to move on by nightfall, he was sure of it. The fact that she’d had the energy to taunt him had been a significant improvement already. 

He felt his hands move unconsciously to play with her hair, twisting the strands between his fingers and smoothing out knots. He often did this while Ivory was resting in his arms. If he were human, he would be lost in thought—he still vaguely remembered what that felt like—but his mind had been empty in moments like this since the turning. There was a hollow place inside him, and it felt like Ivory fit somewhere in there, but he had no way of deciphering how. His mind was addled from hunger and stale blood. 

Better to leave the thinking to Ivory, he decided as his eyes closed. 

He nestled into her as the two of them clung together to escape the sun, and then let his mind go blank. 

Chapter Text

Ivory woke first when dusk fell. 

She always did. Her blood was more pure, more attuned to the cycle of light and dark. Scab was still twitching in his sleep beneath her like a dog dreaming of the hunt, though it had been years since his dreams had been purged. 

Ivory unwound her body from his. She noted how they were getting more tangled together during the daylight hours with each day that passed. It was something she didn’t know how she would explain to the Sisterhood. Scab had proven his worth as a vampire to them, but Ivory didn’t think that would be enough to justify keeping him quite so close. 

She stretched and then dragged herself out of the hole in the earth that they shared, pleased to find that the wound in her side had healed down to nothing more than a cracked rib or two. She was too weak to do more than stagger a few hundred feet from their den, but that was all she needed to scan the perimeter for prey. 

She sensed nothing. 

They would need to keep moving if they had any chance of making it to a better hunting ground by dawn. Animal blood had done all it could do for her. Any more would be too dangerous to her mind, and even more dangerous for Scab’s, such as it was. He was already halfway gone when they met. 

Ivory tasted the air as she stood guard. High up in the trees she could hear the tiny heartbeat of a night owl. Everything else in the forest was deathly still. An hour passed before Scab began to stir back in the den, and another half hour before she heard him scurry to the surface of the earth and shake the dirt loose from his clothing. 

“We have ground to cover,” Ivory growled when he was within earshot. 

“Good morning to you, too,” he sniped back. She turned to strike him, but held back when she saw how unsteady he looked on his feet. When one of his knees failed him, Scab caught himself on all fours to close the rest of the distance. 

Ivory let out a frustrated hiss. “You’re even worse than you were yesterday.” 

He knotted his fingers in her armor and pulled himself shakily back to his feet, nearly bringing them both down. Once the two of them were steady, his mouth split into a toothy grin.

“Still strong enough to hunt,” he managed. His optimism had little basis in reality. His voice was just as weak as his grip was on her, but Ivory could hear the thirst behind it, driving him forward even as his body began to fail. She couldn’t help but admire the way Julian’s ferals clung to life. They were as resilient as cockroaches. 

The two of them began to move without another sound, Ivory’s sense of direction leading the way while Scab’s survival instinct kept them on their feet. They prowled low to the ground, swiftly and silently, for the first few hours. As the night wore on with not a human in sight, Ivory realized that they weren’t going to make it back to the territory of the Sisterhood before their strength wore out. If they didn’t feed soon, starvation would be a real possibility. Their only hope was to hole up somewhere and hope that they came across a straggler they could pick off. 

They reached the desolate outskirts of an old human town that had long been drained dry, moving between abandoned gas station after abandoned gas station until Scab’s legs began to falter underneath the weight of them both. Ivory tried to stop leaning on him, but she was still too injured to maintain their pace. After a few yards, she stumbled and fell. 

Scab’s arms heaved her back to her feet. “Keep going,” he urged. 

She stumbled again. Instead of picking her up, he slithered beneath her and lifted her with his back, his hands scraping the ground for purchase. A guttural growl escaped him as he dragged them both through the dust and gravel behind another abandoned convenience store. 

“Stop,” Ivory ordered. It was clear that Scab wouldn’t give up until he collapsed. 

“I can smell them,” he snapped, straining against her even as she became a dead weight upon his back. “Humans...I can smell humans ahead. A few miles…” 

“We won’t make it,” she said.

“Speak for yourself!”

He was crawling through the dust now, pushing with his knees and huffing with effort as he pushed Ivory off and kept going. She took the opportunity to lay still and catch her breath. Watching him exhaust himself never ceased to entertain her. Even when his legs stopped working, she saw his fingers curl into the earth to bear his weight onward. As much as Ivory hated to admit it, she was impressed with his stamina. It was no wonder that he’d been able to survive so many beatings and still find his way back to Julius’s side. The thirst inside of him kept him going through sheer force of will. 

Regardless, he only made it another hundred yards before collapsing face-first into the asphalt with a wet smack. 

Ivory rested for another hour before she went to see whether he was still alive or not. He hadn’t moved from the middle of the road, and a buzzard had stopped to see whether it would have any luck getting at his eyes. Ivory swatted it away before rolling Scab over onto his back. 

His pulse was faint, but present. She grabbed one of his ankles and dragged him back behind the gas station. There was a pile of half empty oil tankers wedged into a ravine at the edge of the woods, and she had spied one that she knew they would both fit under. She stripped a hole in the length of chain link fence that lay across one side of the tanker, then crawled inside and pulled Scab in after her. 

Ivory positioned his limp body in the furthest corner of the hiding spot where she would be able to shield him if the sun found them. She settled in beside him and leaned in to murmur in his ear, hoping to rouse him back to consciousness.

“Naptime’s over,” she hissed. When he didn’t move, she shook him roughly. “Scab. Wake up.” 

A low noise escaped him, but it might have been a death rattle. He was barely there. 

Ivory shook him harder. “Come on, you lousy feral. You’ve got centuries of life in you yet. Wake up. You’re still in your prime.” Still, nothing. Ivory started to worry that she’d left him lying in the road for too long. Perhaps the buzzard had been an omen. 

She shook him once more, but her heart wasn’t in it. 

Ferals die all the time, it was inevitable , she thought to herself. Still, Scab’s loss was a huge disappointment. She’d grown fond of his company during the long days, and she’d been looking forward to having him at her side the next time she feasted. Well, not necessarily at her side. She could think of a few other places that would’ve suited her fancy. 

Ivory was just considering breaking a few of his ribs to make his corpse a more pliable pillow when Scab sucked in a gasp of air and started choking on it. He let out a dry, withering cough as he twisted in the dirt, his teeth flashing while he tried to get his bearings. He snapped blindly at Ivory’s hand when she reached out to him.

“Shh, shh, there now,” she hissed, pushing him back down. “Rest, Scab. You nearly left me.” 

He was shivering violently, which Ivory figured was at least an improvement from unconsciousness. She folded herself over him and took his face in her hands. In all her years of life, she’d never seen another vampire so close to the brink of death. Her hands moved gently across his forehead and back over his scalp as she assessed the state of him. When his eyes finally opened, she could see the fire in his blood fading. He greeted her with a long, exhausted hiss. 

“Ivory,” he breathed. He felt her fingertips massaging the back of his skull, felt her hair falling across his neck as she tried to soothe him. She was wasting her effort. 

“Say nothing. Save your strength,” she insisted, only to feel him shake his head in response. 

“Finished,” he said softly. “Ivory…”

She snarled and dug her nails into his skin as she pulled his face closer to her own, annoyed at how limp and lifeless he was. She shook him hard by the back of the skull, hard enough to make him grimace with pain. 

“You said you smelled humans,” Ivory reminded him. She bared her teeth encouragingly at him, hoping that the thirst would invigorate him again. “We’ll wait here, draw them in. It’ll be daylight soon, and they’ll be stirring before long. I need you awake to hunt.” 

He coiled one strand of her dark, matted hair between his fingers and smiled up at her. Maybe it was just the delirium of being so near death, but Scab almost thought that he could see concern for him in her eyes. A memory from another life flitted by as Ivory held him close.

“Ivory,” he said again. “You have to--”

“Ivory, Ivory, Ivory,” she grumbled, irritated that he wouldn't be quiet and rest. “What? What do you want to say so badly?” 

He looked almost at peace when he closed his eyes. 

“Leave me,” he said. “Out there in the sun. Take me there and leave me.” 

“You’re overreacting, Scab. Just rest.” 

“I can’t hunt. Leave me and let me die, just not in here,” he said, with an air of urgency. “Not in here. Not this...crawlspace.” 

She tried to drop him back to the earth, but he clung tight to her and pressed his forehead into hers. Ivory could feel him giving up, and she hated it. It was the opposite of everything she liked about Scab.

“Listen to me,” she said, taking his face in her hands and holding him close. She spoke low and with authority. “You won’t die here. Not when we’re so close. Fresh blood is within our reach, the Sisterhood’s territory grows closer each day...Hold out just until tomorrow night. One more night, and if we haven’t found blood by then, you have my word that I’ll do as you ask. I’ll make sure you die under the open sky. But not tonight. Understood?” 

“Yes,” he grumbled. Her thumbs worked small circles into his jaw, and he let it relax with a sigh. Yes, he could certainly handle one more day on the run with her before he gave up the ghost, especially if she intended to keep pampering him with such pleasant touches. He sank back down to the earth and she followed him, her thumbs trailing down, all the way down to the hollow of his throat. She pressed in lightly and made his breath catch. 

There was something itching at the back of Scab’s mind, something he knew he was supposed to say to her before he died, probably. He couldn’t figure it out while she was distracting him. Then again, words were for humans, not for their kind. If anything needed to be said, Ivory would cover it. Her hands told him that everything was going to be alright, and that was all that mattered. 

Dawn broke over the ravine and spilled into their hiding place, forcing them into a cramped corner together. With the sunlight came the humans, and those humans were more feisty than the weakened vampires had been anticipating. They howled and hooted as they sought to lure Ivory out, and then their cries changed tune when a pack of ferals came swarming down into the ravine. There was a brief moment in which it looked like Scab and Ivory had been saved, but then the ferals dragged her out. 

Scab flattened himself against the earth and stayed hidden while Ivory fought back. She was vicious in battle even having been deprived of blood for so long, running on nothing more than spite and years of training in the Sisterhood. She was spectacular, but even she was no match for the power of these new ferals. They were changed in a way that made Ivory’s skill in combat useless. Before long she was subdued and at their mercy, and Scab was helpless to do anything about it. If they’d bested Ivory in battle, he would be no match. 

The moment the feral leader’s teeth sank into Ivory’s throat, Scab sank his teeth into his own lower lip to keep silent. His eyes followed Ivory as she fell and he scanned her desperately for any sign of life as the ferals regrouped and moved on. 

Ivory’s body was painfully still. The more Scab examined the angle at which she lay and the severity of her wound, the more certain he became that she was gone. 

He didn’t exactly feel despair. An emotion that complex had been beyond him for some time now. But he definitely felt something in the empty space inside of him when he looked at Ivory’s lifeless body. Maybe it was just the certainty that he would miss feeling her touch him. 

Scab could smell the human bodies going cold, but feeding might not save him at this point, given how weak he was. Besides, was the use? His maker Julius was long gone, Dmitri was as good as dead, and now Ivory--strong, dangerous Ivory, the one who had never left his side--was gone too. 

He crawled out into the sun using the last of his strength and found her body with trembling hands, ready to burn beside her. She would be their funeral pyre, and he would be their torch. 

But then, just as he felt the sunlight eating at his skin, her eyes opened.

She had heard him grieving, almost weeping as he climbed on top of her to die, and it had charmed her to no end. She smelled his skin sizzling before she opened her eyes to see it. 

“You’ve changed,” he breathed. 

Her skin didn’t burn in the sun. In fact, Scab noted, she looked radiant in it. Every bloodstain on her face was lined in golden midmorning light. He couldn't help but look at her differently when he saw it. He could sense a significance in the way that she was looking at him now, too. It was clear that her eyes had been opened to something beyond his comprehension. 

“I’ll give this to you,” she had said, choosing to ignore his initial resistance. She knew that the turning would improve him. The new power she felt would raise Scab up to be her equal, no longer a ragtag feral. It would make him stronger, more intelligent. She knew now with newfound clarity that she wanted him at her side. All that was left was to show him the way forward.

Ivory could hardly maintain her veneer of calm as she assured him of their future together; she could think of nothing but the inevitable bite. Scab could sense the new, savage urge behind her lips as she spoke, and it sent a warning chill down his spine. 

He was more afraid than he’d been since the night Julius turned him. The sun was searing into his skull now, threatening to end him, and then Ivory was pushing him down just the way he liked as she parted her lips eagerly and went in for his throat. He flinched away, not ready for it, flashing back to how agonizing Julius’ assault had been all those years ago. 

She hushed him softly and overpowered him with delicate touches while he shivered beneath her. Ivory waited until his terror subsided, and then moved away from the vein in his throat. There would be plenty of time for that later, she thought to herself, after she brought him over. She saw him try to hide his face, blinking away tears in his eyes when he drew away. The sight of him so distraught was too much for her to bear. She almost felt sorry for him.

“It will all be over soon,” she whispered to him, reassuring him as she took his right hand in both of her own and rolled back his sleeve. Scab was still trembling, but he trusted Ivory to take care of him. She wouldn’t do it like Julius. She had always been gentle when she touched him. When he felt her lips against his wrist, he knew he wanted everything she had to offer. 

Her teeth sank into him with a delicious crunch. Scab’s entire body thrilled to it in a way that felt, at first, almost disgustingly human. His eyes rolled back into his skull as every nerve ending in his wrist lit up, sparked into action by the sudden intrusion. 

When she pulled hard on his veins, it overwhelmed him in the best way. The vacant spots inside of Scab’s mind began to flood with information that his initial turning had suppressed; strategy, manipulation, delayed gratification, self-preservation, what it felt like to think tactically again—all of it and more came back to life inside of him as this new sickness spread through his bloodstream, accompanied by an ache that Scab couldn’t get enough of. 

He could feel himself changing, his DNA rewiring itself all over again as Ivory took one last lingering mouthful from his wrist before releasing him. A laugh bubbled out from between Scab’s lips as he thrummed with new life. He savored the feeling of the sun on his scalp as he and Ivory nuzzled into each other, changed. 

“Now you understand,”  Ivory hissed into his ear when he pulled her close to savor the smell of her, the coldness of her with his newly invigorated senses.

“Yes,” Scab growled in response. His skin was on fire again, but the sun had nothing to do with it. He had spent years feeling hollow, but with one bite she had changed everything. 

The emptiness inside of him had been replaced with something else, something particular he’d forgotten since he’d turned. He couldn’t remember the word for it. He felt her press her body up against him and it sparked a terrible ache inside. 

“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” Scab murmured, hardly aware of himself. 

Energy radiated off of Ivory in waves, mesmerizing him as she forced him to lock eyes with her.

“What is?” She asked. She raised his wrist to her mouth again and began to lick the blood away from where she’d bit him. The skin had only just healed over, and she already wanted to break it again, but she had other plans for him first. They had all day, after all. Ivory intended to savor these first few hours in the sunlight.

“Whatever this is,” Scab snarled in frustration, flexing his hand sharply as her tongue ignited the sensitive skin of his inner wrist. “The word for...whatever is happening.” 

Ivory laughed and closed her mouth over his instead of giving him an answer. 

Scab tasted the blood first and recognized it as his own, but heightened in potency. After that he tasted something softer; the silken skin just behind her lips, sweetened with blood and with the fresh morning air. He leaned into the taste and let Ivory guide the way. The memory of the word flickered back into his mind as her lips locked perfectly to his own. Kiss .

“That’s what it is,” he muttered into her mouth, losing the first half of the sentence in an awkward tangle of tongues. He was rusty, true, but he figured Ivory must be rustier, given how much longer she’d lived as a vampire. If she was, Scab certainly couldn’t tell. Everything she did felt new and increasingly exquisite. 

“Stop talking, Scab,” she sighed. “I was just beginning to enjoy you when you were quiet.”

“It’s a kiss,” he informed her helpfully. 

“I know,” she said. His excitement at his newfound vocabulary words was adorable, she had to admit. A handful of years in Julius’ pack had wiped away more of Scab’s humanity than Ivory’s centuries in the Sisterhood had ever done. She couldn’t help but pity him. 

Ivory laid one of her hands over his heart and dug her nails in posessively, loving the snarl that it brought out of him. She liked his reactions better now. Teasing Scab had always been a good way to pass the time, but his responses were compulsory and based off of whatever base instincts had guaranteed his survival and dominance among the ferals. They had more to do with Julius or Dmitri than with Ivory. 

Now she had raised him up to walk beside her, and every hiss of pleasure or pain that left his body belonged to her. She looked forward to making sure he was properly trained.

She also looked forward to enjoying a few sensations she thought she’d forsworn since becoming a vampire. Ivory hadn’t felt anything resembling passion since her human days, but she could recognize the stirring in her body and blood for what it was. The fanatical devotion in Scab’s eyes suggested that he would be more than happy to indulge any and all of her curiosities. 

She leaned into him and he mirrored her perfectly, closing the distance in a heartbeat. He was as quick as she was now. Something about him being her equal in that regard made the thought of making him submit to her even more enticing. 

She rolled off of him to go and find one of the dead humans. The blood had gone cold long ago, but that didn’t matter. It was enough to slake the thirst. 

Ivory grabbed the first corpse she could find by the collar and dropped it across Scab’s lap. 

“Feed,” she insisted. “When you’ve finished, you know where I want you.” 

She left him there and started making her way up the steep side of the ravine, navigating the terrain with the ease of a practiced predator. Scab hated to see her go, but he certainly felt some sort of way about watching her leave. 

He tore what remained of the human’s throat out and groaned when his parched mouth filled with blood. It had been so long since he drank deeply. He could feel the blood stirring something primal up in his veins; an unquenchable need for more. It wasn’t enough to tear the throat out. He dug into the corpse’s chest to feast on the heart. The taste was so much more intense than he was used to. He wondered briefly if this was what Julius or Dmitri used to feel when they drank—the flavor was so much richer and more stimulating than before. He tore the human’s chest cavity to shreds and swallowed more of the heart itself than he meant to in his enthusiasm, but Scab figured he had earned a little enthusiasm. 

You know where I want you , she had said. Scab shivered in anticipation. He knew instinctively what she wanted of him, and he dropped the ruined human to follow Ivory like an eager dog at her heels. 

She was up on the top of the ridge when he found her, scanning the horizon with her arms crossed, her feet planted as if she intended to make a final stand there. He slipped up behind her and nuzzled appreciatively at her ear, greeting her in silence, and the purr deep in her throat told him that Ivory enjoyed the way his lips grazed across her skin.

Scab sank more than willingly to his knees for her. He let his head roll back into her touch as her fingertips smoothed across his scalp in a gesture that could only be called affectionate. Her eyes burned down into his when she graced him with a cruel smile. 

“That’s it, Scab,” she encouraged. Her voice was low and approving as her fingers traced his skin. He loved hearing her praise him. She could’ve ripped the heart from his chest if she wanted to, and he would have welcomed it. 

Ivory’s fingertips pushed him down, down, and now she was looming over him as he lowered his face to kiss the leather of her boots. His tongue left a ribbon of polished black along the dusty surface. 

She let him continue this little display of devotion even as she knelt down and pushed one knee into the small of his back to force him flat against the dirt road. He shivered underneath her as he closed his eyes to enjoy it and then felt her grind his face into the dust with the heel of her hand. The noise of unchecked pleasure that escaped him was so eager that it would have filled him with shame if another vampire had heard it. 

“Very good,” Ivory hissed. She stroked his cheek tenderly to reward his obedience, then leaned in and pressed her mouth against his ear. One nip to his earlobe made him writhe beneath her touch. “Now tell me what it is you want, Scab.”

He couldn’t remember the word for whatever came after “kiss”. He tried to open his mouth to search for it, but could only taste dirt. 

She pushed him over onto his back when he didn’t respond. When her body settled over his, straddling his hips, he felt that new and irresistible ache in a long-forgotten part of his anatomy. Scab’s breath hissed in sharp between his teeth when Ivory moved experimentally against him, her motions slow and sustained as she watched his composure fall to pieces beneath her.

His blood knew what to do, even if his mind and body were still catching up to the world of forgotten sensations. She could feel arousal stirring between his legs. 

“Remember now?” she purred encouragingly against his lips. 

He still couldn’t put his finger on it. His body felt like it was on fire and he knew there was something he wanted from her, or something she wanted from him, or both--the rumble of frustration that started low in his chest turned into a savage growl as Ivory teased him with an ever-patient laugh and a kiss so soft and swift he couldn’t quite catch her in it. 

“Tell me,” she said again. Her voice was less lenient now. “Think, Scab. You’re so close.” 

He shut his eyes and shook his head, even though he knew it meant risking her anger. 

“It’s--it’s on the tip of my tongue,” he hissed, an apologetic note creeping into his voice when he felt one of her hands close over his throat. She felt him swallow anxiously. 

He expected her to strike him for the failure, but instead she kissed his vulnerable throat again and again, starting softly at first to keep him relaxed. He shivered into her touch.

“Ivory,” he moaned when her lips found the sensitive patch where Julius had torn into him all those years ago. He sounded like he was on the verge of actual pain as she let her teeth explore the surface of his skin. It was everything Scab could do to gather together the words to beg. 

“Ivory, help me,” he managed. His fingers knotted themselves into the skirts of her robe in supplication. He wanted her almost as much as he thirsted. Nothing else had ever come close. 

“There, there, hush now,” she said against the side of his neck as she kissed him there. “I’ll give you what you need. Let me guide you.”

“Yes,” he pleaded. He could feel her hands leave his throat and trail down his chest. She closed her mouth over his jugular when one of her hands found the front of his belt buckle, and Scab couldn’t tell which he liked more. He closed his arms around her and clung tight as she started to undo his belt. 

He could feel both rows of her teeth press into his neck, gently at first, then with increasing pressure as he trembled beneath her jaws. Ivory stopped just before she broke his skin. The way he craned his neck back to allow her better access told her that he was ready and eager now. She licked her lips, excited to really taste him. Blood from the throat was always so much sweeter than the other veins, and now he was freshly fed and full of it. 

Ivory’s hands tore his belt free. 

At first Scab didn’t know what use she had doing that, but then she was unzipping the front of his tight, dark jeans, and when he felt her fingertips against the aching organ there, the memory of what it was for hit him in an instant. 

His mouth opened in a soundless cry. 

“T-touch me,” he gasped, even though he already felt her. “Ivory, I want…”

“Say it,” she murmured. She closed one hand around the base of his cock after freeing it, pleased to find his size satisfactory. She gave him one long stroke, smiling against the skin of his throat while he thrilled to her touch, and then pressed her hungry teeth against his vein. She was so close to tasting him now that she almost couldn’t hold back. 

An inhuman noise caught in Scab’s throat. He tried to press himself into her hand, but she kept him pinned down by the hips and didn’t let him move.

“Say it and it’s yours,” she teased. 

“—I want you,” he responded without thinking. Once he said it, everything else came back in a rush. The words he’d been searching for, the sensations, the memories, all of them and more flooded his mind and body. His hands trembled as he raked them over her back, her sides, her thighs; he remembered where they were supposed to go now, and knew exactly how Ivory wanted to be touched. 

She stroked him again and his whole body trembled as the words escaped him.  

“I want you to use me,” Scab hissed through his teeth. “I want you to fuck me.”

Ivory didn’t waste another moment. 

She slipped her teeth into his neck, keeping it quick and marginally painless for him, and savored the first delicious mouthful of blood as she hurriedly dealt with the clasps on her armor.

She felt the vibration in his throat before she heard the moan escape him. One of his trembling hands found its way to the back of her head and he pressed her into him harder, welcoming the pain of her bite. 

Ivory took another long, indulgent draught before withdrawing her teeth. Scab’s eyes followed her tongue as it trailed across her lips to savor the taste of him. She undid the last clasp on her armor just as she lapped the last of the blood from his skin.

His fingers fought to tear the final pieces of heavy leather armor away, the last thing separating them from one another, and then she felt his breath halt abruptly when her skin met his own. His pulse was pounding against her lips. Ivory loved his enthusiasm as much as she loved the idea of digging into him a second time. 

“Never expected you to be so sweet,” she murmured into his ear. 

Her teeth snapped shut over his vein again, but Scab hardly had a moment to appreciate it before he felt her hand between his legs again, this time holding him steady.

His eyes rolled back into his head and his world went red when she pressed herself down onto his cock, her body taking him in, embracing him in every sense of the word. He couldn’t even feel the bite now. He could only feel her pulling him deliciously in every direction. Scab wondered, briefly, if this would end with her tearing him apart. 

Ivory pushed him back down against the earth as her hips worked against him hard and slow. The sensation of him inside was as exquisite as the taste of him. She broke loose from his neck, all the better to enjoy the sight of him falling apart underneath her. The look of helpless, frenetic devotion on his face told her everything she needed to know. 

She increased her pace. It occurred to her that it had been at least two hundred years since she’d felt her body reacting to another. The scent of blood on him intoxicated her. His cock filled her up with each stroke of her hips. He was moving in time with her now, sensation clearly getting the better of him, and she decided to allow it, just this once—only because the serpentine roll of his hips against hers was striking something undeniably primal inside of her. 

When she felt herself approaching the crest of pleasure, Ivory rode him harder and closed one hand over his throat.

“Tell me what you want,” she ordered breathlessly. 

“You,” he said without elaboration. For what might have been the first time since the Rising, he sounded sincere about something. 

She tucked her face beneath his jaw and slid her teeth into him, urging him silently to do the same as she pulled him against her. She felt the telltale sting in her veins when he broke her skin and thrilled to it.

For just a moment, they were caught together like two vipers swallowing each other alive. The blood pumped from his willing heart right to her mouth, then from her heart back to his through the cycle of the bite. The sensation of drinking each other in was enough to push them both over the edge. 

Scab’s jaws clamped down on her hard as he felt the pleasure localize and then burst like a hot, white light. Ivory let out a guttural snarl almost immediately after, her own orgasm spurred on by the way Scab’s body gave out underneath her after the final shiver coursed through him. She wondered briefly whether she’d killed him with kindness, but she could still feel his teeth clinging inside her until she slumped down against him. His tongue lapped luxuriously at her jaw when he withdrew. 

Neither of them said anything. 

They lay there, tangled together, and enjoyed a silent moment with one another in the sunlight. 

On a faraway ridge, Axel Miller lowered his binoculars and tried not to throw up. Vampires walking in the sun was one thing, but vampires having sex was more than he wanted to deal with. Better to leave that one to Vanessa and pretend he’d seen nothing.

He shook his head in disgust as he headed back to the truck.

“Goddamn apocalypse.”

Chapter Text

No longer bound by the limitation of traveling only at night, Ivory and Scab pressed on toward the territory of the Sisterhood. 

Daylight was distracting. 

Ivory found herself appreciating details in the forest that had been lost to her in centuries of darkness. She could see prisms of light reflecting off of every angle between the trees. The woods had been wilder and wider in her human days, but they had never looked as radiant to her as they did now. She breathed in deep and tasted light on the air. 

Scab, on the other hand, would stop occasionally to stare directly into the orb of the sun and then remain transfixed there like a basking lizard, usually until Ivory pulled him back into reality to keep him moving. If he had any poetic thoughts about the way it scorched his retinas, he kept them to himself. 

Ivory wasn’t used to the idea of him having thoughts to keep to himself. 

It made her wary, she had to admit; perhaps she had been rash in bringing him over. Yes, he’d stayed by her side while they were both on the verge of death, but what of it? She had been his only chance for survival. He had been half feral, no threat to her, but this new power had sharpened his edges. There was no guarantee that he wouldn’t stab her in the back the moment they crossed into the Sisterhood’s territory, just for the sake of seizing power for himself. 

Then again, perhaps she was giving too much credit to a vampire so transfixed by the sun that he was content to let it blind him. 

They traveled through the better part of the afternoon before Scab dared trying to break the silence that had grown between them since the morning. He had been thinking long and hard about what exactly to say to her. 

Scab cleared his throat to get her attention as they passed through the next sunlit meadow, and then began as casually as possible, “Ssssssssso, Ivory—” 

“—Don’t,” she growled. 

“Don’t what?” 

“Don’t start.” 

He reached for her, his fingertips grazing hers before she abruptly pulled them away. The gesture confounded him. He let her move on a few yards before sulking after her. 

“I’ve done something to displease you,” he grumbled. 

“The only thing displeasing me is your inability to maintain comfortable silence.”

He clicked his teeth together and changed tactics. “Certain strategies have to be discussed before we reach the Sisters.”

“Such as what?” 

“A few things come to mind,” he tried. “Maybe we could start with, ah...how to explain what sparked our comfortable silence—”

He regretted his boldness immediately. The vampiress turned on her heel and produced a blade from her armor in an instant, forcing him to take a step back as she pressed it into his throat. Her ferocity wasn’t as quite pleasant to him now as it had been a few hours ago, but he had to admit he still enjoyed getting a rise out of her. 

A growl formed deep inside her as she turned the blade against him. Ivory let the edge draw one painful red line along the underside of his jawbone. 

“Listen carefully, because I don’t intend to repeat myself,” she snapped. “If I’d known you were going to get sentimental on me, I would have let the sun take you when I had the chance.” 

He tilted his head lazily into the knife as he smiled at her. “Mm, but you didn’t.” 

“Back down, Scab,” Ivory demanded, her voice taking on an animal quality that surprised both of them. She watched his smile twist disobediently. She wanted nothing more than to wipe it right off his face. 

“I can see it now, you know,” he hissed. “The distance you closed between us. I might as well have been your pet, those long nights in the woods. Like sleeping with a dog curled up at your feet. Is that what you had in mind when you let me lick you?”

She hated how much she enjoyed hearing him say that. She hated it even more when he slid out from under the knife and back up between her arms in one fluid motion, his hands finding her shoulders only to caress them, not to initiate a brawl. Ivory brought her blade to the back of his neck as he leaned close to breathe her in. 

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, his words rattling into her ear. “What an unfamiliar feeling. I can’t tell whether to thank you for it or not. And the more I think, the more I wonder.” 

His fingers danced across the front of her armor with an electric, excitable tremor. “What was it that made the high and mighty Ivory give herself up to me, of all people, veins and all?”

“You’ve been staring into the sun for too long,” Ivory sneered. 

“Strong Ivory,” he murmured against her. His fingers drummed the leather of her armor as her body shifted and coiled in response to the taunting tone of his voice. “Proud Ivory. Something made you want me at your side. Was it the way I touched you, or the way I let you touch me?”

“Such arrogance,” Ivory sighed. Scab couldn’t tell if it was an answer or an observation. 

He was already so close; Ivory saw no reason to deny herself the opportunity to shut him up. She tipped his head to the side and decanted him with one shallow bite, feeling his blood teem over her tongue as she sipped slowly. Her knife fell silently to the grass while she took Scab down to his knees, each draught forcing his body to become more pliant beneath her. The way she took her time tasting him was almost touching. 

Scab didn’t like the way his heart fluttered while she drank it in. 

He couldn’t stop himself from clinging to her armor for support. He almost didn’t want to. It was all too easy to give in and hold himself against the strong scaffold of her body. He wondered if this was the way a vine of ivy might feel while creeping up a brick wall. 

“You said we would rule together,” he reminded her, his breath escaping him when he felt her jaws tighten intimately against his vein. “ —ahh. Side by side. Sovereign of the Sisters, reaching down into the mud to raise up her favorite pet—”

He hissed in pain when she pulled hard against his heart with a guttural growl. She swallowed greedily, letting her teeth rip his skin a little when she withdrew, and then pushed him off of her. She struck him one across the face, hard, and watched him crumple to the ground. 

He only laughed, which fueled her anger. His hand went to his throat as the wound closed up and he wiped the rest of the blood away before flicking it into the grass. His teeth were bloody too when he smiled up at her. She’d knocked a few loose, but they snapped back into place as he swiped his tongue across them. 

“Tell me, Ivory,” he dared as she closed the distance. His words tripped over themselves as he hurried to get them out before she had time to strike him again. “—Did you think that if you kissed me, I would turn into a prince?” 

He closed his eyes to better withstand the pain, but to his surprise, she didn’t hit him. 

Ivory’s hands smoothed over his chest, then his shoulders, finally coming to rest at his neck as she knelt down to his level. She smiled against his lips, but she didn’t quite kiss him. No, she would save that for a time when he was better behaved. Instead she just enjoyed the way her touch made him shiver. 

Her lips trailed a path to his ear, and she bit it playfully before whispering into it. 

“It appears you’re right, Scab. You and I do have much to discuss before we return to the Sisterhood,” she said. 

He leaned into her with a purr, and she stopped it in his throat as her hands closed around his windpipe. He smiled, but then his smile faltered when she didn’t let go. A strained noise escaped him just before something inside his neck crunched beneath her fingers.

At first he struggled, his hands clawing at her. She could see either a curse or an apology trying to make its way out of his mouth just before she snapped his neck with one deft motion. 

She dropped him to the earth and then sat back into the grass to enjoy what she hoped would be at least a few more minutes of gentle peace and quiet. 

Ivory didn’t want to say anything to him. 

She wasn’t sure what to say, and part of her felt that she’d already said too much. She wasn’t quite ready to admit why she’d turned him. It was one thing to smack Scab around a little—he was durable enough—but it was another thing altogether to look him in the eyes, see the devotion there, and admit to him how it made her feel. 

Feel . Ivory’s face twisted into a snarl when the word crossed her mind. 

It wasn’t completely accurate. The sensation wasn’t as human as she had first feared; she recognized the animal nature of it now, and how tied it was to the fact that the two of them had come so close to starving in the woods together. It was natural that they’d bonded as a result. Scab had proven his usefulness, his vigor. Of course she had begun to enjoy the utility of having him around. The fact that he wasn’t entirely awful to look at, especially for one born to the feral brood of Julius, was just a convenient bonus. The fact that she liked how his body trembled when she touched him was also just a convenient bonus, but not one that she was keen on discussing in depth—at least not until she understood it better. 

The way her own body reacted to his was the only thing that still bothered her about the situation. Ivory had heard rumors of Dmitri’s attempts to procreate, but his hedonistic tendencies and his incestuous goals had taken root long before his vampirism. It was well known that vampires could only create others through the bite. Sexual intercourse, though theoretically possible, had little use. The loss of it hadn’t even crossed Ivory’s mind these past two centuries among the Sisters. 

The fact that she could feel arousal stirring in her now whenever she had Scab at her mercy was something that confused her as much as it intrigued her. Still, the last thing she wanted was to hear him try to talk to her about it. The urge to throw him down and have him again just to put a stop to it would be impossible to resist.

On second thought, Ivory mused, the urge to throw him down and have him again had crossed her mind more than once now. She wondered if it was worth postponing the journey to take care of that, if only for the sake of clearing her mind before she had to explain Scab’s presence to the Sisters, but she shook the thought from her head. She’d been missing for so long that the Sisters surely thought she was dead by now. Getting back to the temple as soon as they could was imperative. 

Scab’s body began to twitch awake beside her in the grass as his bones knit themselves back together piece by piece. Ivory heard him groan with pain, the noise wheezing through his crushed windpipe before it repaired itself. He lay motionless afterward. She could hear him breathing heavily, but he didn’t dare to get up. 

Minutes ticked by, and for a while Ivory thought that Scab had finally learned the benefit of being polite and quiet, but it was too good to be true. His voice broke the silence just as she settled into it. 

“Ivory?”

“Make it quick, Scab.”

“I’ve displeased you,” he said, quickly, his voice dripping with sweetness. He rolled over and crawled towards her, reaching out to give the leather sole of her boot an experimental tap. When she didn’t kick him, he crawled closer. She still wouldn’t look at him, but he went on, hoping that might change. “Julius was easy to please. Bring fresh meat. Dmitri was more difficult to please. Do his bidding, even if it meant death. I was able to please them, in time. I can learn to please you, too, my Ivory…”

“And you will,” Ivory said, looking down to fix him with her eyes. His head bowed low to the grass. “You’ll learn, even if I have to cut out your tongue.” 

She watched him crawl closer, holding his gaze even as she felt his teeth close against the inside of her ankle, just where the buckle of her armored greaves met her boot. Part of her knew that encouraging him any further would only make him bolder. Another part of her enjoyed the mischievous shimmer that his eyes took on as one of his hands wound its way through the grass beneath her knee to pluck at the straps of her armor. 

“I think you would regret that,” he whispered. She bristled up when he moved closer and then she dug one of her heels into the earth next to his face, making him recoil.

“Is that a threat?” Ivory demanded. 

“No, no, furthest thing from it,” he hissed plaintively. He laid a kiss on the heel of her boot to put her at ease again. “Consider it a promise.” 

Ivory watched him lick a path from the sole of her boot to the inside of her thigh, her breath halting for a moment when she felt his hands smoothing the skirts of her armor out of his way. She felt him close the space between them, felt his slender body move between her legs as he bowed his head reverently, but the groan of pleasure that had been building inside her only escaped when she felt his tongue caressing the bare skin of her upper thigh. 

The tip of his tongue traced lazy patterns over her skin until he brushed up against the hair between her legs. She hadn’t bothered to replace her undergarments since their tryst this morning, apparently, which Scab found enticing. He pressed a tender kiss between her legs where he could feel her pulse the hardest. 

With the first stroke of his tongue, Ivory’s thighs tightened deliciously around him. She arched into the grass and gasped, her body alight with sensation as his jaw worked against her most delicate places. She let out a loud and colorful curse in a long-dead language used only by the Sisters when Scab’s tongue found one of her sweet spots, and he leaned into it eagerly, loving the way Ivory’s hips pressed into him with a jolt. 

She gripped the back of his skull as she urged him on and then let her eyes roll shut to savor his attention. She didn’t notice that her nails were digging into him until she felt bone underneath. His fingers gently pried hers away and they interlaced against the cool grass as his tongue continued to explore her.

This was something Ivory had no human memory of. Back in her day the general consensus had been that female pleasure didn’t exist, despite evidence to the contrary, and none of her lovers had been gentlemanly enough to bother. Most had been brutes. 

She still considered Scab a brute, but at least his vampiric nature had taught him a few tricks to make up for it. His tongue was quick and dexterous, his jaws ever eager. It felt like he was worshipping her, and maybe he was. 

Ivory let out a moan that sounded somewhere between pleasure and fear when she felt his tongue dip deftly inside of her and then back out again. She could feel him smiling against her skin. His fingers curled into hers. 

“Don’t stop,” she hissed. Ivory didn’t want him to feel how badly her hips were shaking. 

“Mmm.” She felt a deep growl rumbling through him, felt it long before it reached his lips. For a moment she thought she could feel his teeth against her as he murmured, “Now you sound pleased with me.” 

“I usually am, until you start talking,” Ivory growled. She definitely felt his teeth against her this time, when he took a petty snap at her inner thigh, but either out of remorse or a well-placed fear of retaliation, he quickly set about apologizing with his tongue. When he slipped it inside her, the way that she gasped without finding her breath told him that he’d been forgiven. 

At first she bit back her cries, but that didn’t last long. He figured out how to pull them out of her.

Going slow didn’t make her shiver the way that he liked, so he picked up the pace and fucked her greedily with his tongue, feeling every part of her tighten around him. He snarled into her, and Ivory felt the vibration of it so deeply and intimately that it cut straight to her heart. 

She felt her pulse quickening, felt her body being swept over the edge by his ferocity. For just a few moments, Ivory allowed herself a break in the careful composure she’d spent two centuries crafting. She threw herself back into the grass and howled long and loud when Scab’s tongue pushed into her again and found whatever remained of her soul itself. Nothing else could have felt so exquisite. 

He didn’t stop the first time she came, or the second, but eventually the frenzy died down, once her shrieks of delight turned into sustained and keening groans. He found the former more interesting, apparently. Ivory’s hands were trembling worse than his when they found his face, and when she pulled him up out of the grass and kissed him, Scab could taste something new in her. 

When their lips broke apart, the rest of them didn’t. Ivory felt his forehead press against the scar tissue of her own where the symbol of her Order marked her. The taste of her own body on his tongue was unfamiliar and intoxicating. She savored it while he nuzzled against her.

Ivory would have been content to lay there all day. She even considered it, but shook it off again, irritated with herself for the very idea of dallying in the sunlight instead of continuing the trek back towards the temple of the Sisters. 

She sighed, closed her eyes, and then wound her arms tightly around Scab. The ever-present tremor in his body eased as she pulled him against her. 

“Hear me,” Ivory said softly into his ear. “When we reach the Sisterhood, we speak nothing of this. Not until I have had time to consult with the rest of them. There are things they won’t understand. We must be strategic, even with them. I want them to welcome you, but your kind and mine have a bloody history.” 

She felt him purr against her throat. 

“We are of the same kind, now,” he said.

“My place is with the Order.” 

“It doesn’t have to be. We can find a new place. Make one. Together.” 

“With a white picket fence, Scab? Don’t be naive.” 

Ivory felt the now familiar sensation of his lips touching the vein near her jaw. When they parted, his teeth pressed longingly against the skin. 

“Nothing so boring,” he rasped. Ivory felt the words more than she heard them. The way his body seethed against her told her just as much as his voice did. His words were little more than a glorified growl. “Something of our own creation, somewhere dark and cold, a place to build an army. A place where we can rule together, Ivory…”

She only laughed and let her head roll back to give him better access to her throat. She knew he wouldn’t dare break the skin until she urged him to. The way he raked his teeth across her jugular was nothing short of worship. 

Scab could taste the salt in her skin, and it intoxicated him. He let his mouth rove across all of the places he wanted nothing more than to bury his teeth into. Her hands pulled him in posessively when he reached the tender spot at the bottom of her jugular; her skin was so thin here, her vein close enough to the surface for him to feel her pulse against his lips. All he could think about was how close he was to her heart again and how badly he wanted to taste it. 

It was as if Ivory read his mind. 

He felt her lay a kiss on his forehead, and then heard her murmur, “Go on, you’ve earned it.”

His teeth were inside of her in an instant, almost before he had time to realize he’d taken the strike. A groan escaped his mouth as it filled with the taste of her.

She was more than delicious. He could taste the power of her bloodline, fierce and red and electric inside, and the intensity of it made his eyes water. All he wanted was more of her.

“Easy, go easy,” she hissed against him, prompting Scab to realize how tight his jaws had clamped around her. He relaxed and settled back in more gently. When Ivory sighed and softened underneath him, he could swear he felt her heart skip a beat between his teeth. 

He had never sunk his teeth into anything so delicately before. Scab had only ever fed on animals, humans and the occasional other ferals just to assert his place over them—he’d never bothered with keeping his prey intact. It took everything to restrain himself, but he had to admit that the sensation of her vein opening so willingly at the touch of his teeth was irresistible. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he suddenly understood the appeal of all those old vampire films. 

She seemed content to let him drink his fill, and he had to force himself not to overindulge. Scab had a feeling that this wouldn’t be his last opportunity to lose himself in the taste of her. 

A deep groan escaped from between Ivory's lips when she felt his teeth withdraw. Even after her skin knit itself back together, she could feel an exquisite ache in her vein where he’d pierced her. Drinking the blood of another vampire had always been a symbolic gesture among the Sisterhood, one that Ivory had used in many a ritual, but it had never felt like this before. There was a new and infernal intimacy blooming between her and Scab. Even if she’d wanted to deny it, there was no mistaking the evidence. Her blood and his were too interwoven to unknit now.

He was silent and almost still now, apart from the way his hands toyed and fidgeted with her hair as he listened to her heartbeat. Ivory realized, with no small amount of guilt, that if the Sisters rejected Scab she would have to concoct a scheme to keep him tucked away somewhere close—in some nearby abandoned crypt, or under her bed, maybe. She belonged to the Order, but as far as she was concerned, Scab belonged to her. 

She didn’t intend to give him up.

Chapter Text

She kept him close by from that point on, and the longer they walked, the more she found his incessant noise making tolerable. Any ferals that approached them backed off instantly at the sound of Scab’s horrific screams of challenge. Even his idle chatter began to charm Ivory’s senses when he started to ply her with questions about the Sisterhood. At first he was just making small talk, but over time Ivory sensed genuine interest creeping into his voice. She was happy to regale him with stories of their traditions if it kept him occupied. 

That was the one problem with Scab—he was a high maintenance travel companion. Smells and sounds distracted him more than they did Ivory. The snap of twigs in the brush would get his immediate attention, and the smell of blood on the air, human or animal, would turn him into an unfocused and salivating mess. Ivory made a mental note that putting him on a leash for future journeys might not be a bad idea. 

Then again, perhaps that would distract him even more. Every now and again Ivory could feel his fingers lace themselves with hers while they walked. It never lasted long, but in those moments he would lean into her and nip her hair or her shoulder affectionately. Ivory liked the animal simplicity of his gestures. 

Once they reached the edge of the Sisters’ territory, Ivory held up a hand to signal Scab to stop.

“Hear me,” she said, gravely. “We’ll be there by nightfall. If we’re lucky, the Sisters will just be waking when we arrive at the temple. I’ll be able to consult with them before they go off to hunt.”

If Scab had an opinion about what she’d said, he kept it to himself. He only nodded.

“Scab,” Ivory continued. “I would be misleading you if I told you that the path ahead was easy. The Sisters are not known for welcoming newcomers. And to welcome one of your nature would be...irregular.”

“My nature,” he repeated, as if the words were foreign to him. 

“You know.” Ivory gestured helpfully to his groin.

“Blood is the great equalizer,” said Scab. “I’ll prove myself worthy in the hunt.”

“It isn’t a matter of that.” 

“Then I will prove myself some other way.”

His confidence clearly amused her, but Scab could tell that it didn’t soothe whatever had disquieted her. She didn’t even growl or hiss when he put a hand on her shoulder and turned her face to his. It had occurred to him that Ivory might be trying to get rid of him, but any thought of that faded when Scab recognized the flicker of worry in her eyes. It was only there for a moment before it was replaced with the expression of cold steel that suited her so well. That was the one that Scab preferred. 

He hissed softly and pressed his forehead against hers, feeling the imprint of the Order’s symbol in her skin. Ivory said nothing, but she pulled him close and breathed in the scent of him. Blood and leather and cold earth. 

“They will find me worthy, whatever it takes,” he promised, in a voice Ivory almost didn’t recognize. She felt him smooth his hands through her hair, gently to avoid pulling at the tangles, and they came to rest at the back of her neck. His thumbs traced the sensitive skin behind Ivory’s ears. She let herself lean into the touch, and then her fingers found his belt loops, the better to pull him against her. 

“They may demand that I kill you,” Ivory admitted. “You’ve spilt the blood of a Sister before. You may have saved my life, but that isn’t enough to make you an ally.”

He only laughed. 

Ivory felt one of his hands slip down to her own. He knitted his fingers together with hers and then raised her wrist to kiss it. His lips lingered against her pulse, and there was no resisting him when she saw everything she desired reflected back in his eyes. There was only silence between them as he offered his own wrist to her lips. He held Ivory’s gaze and sank his teeth into her where the veins were thickest, growling excitedly when she did the same without breaking the stare. The darkness of her eyes intoxicated him as much as the blood did.

There was something almost too electric about seeing the hunger in each other’s eyes while flooded with the taste of one another. Their heartbeats fell into sync as the same shared blood circulated through both of them. 

When it was over neither of them knew how they had ended up on the ground, or how long they had been lost in each other. None of it mattered. The only thing worth noticing was how quickly Ivory pulled Scab close and held him fast, utterly unwilling to let go of him. She let herself fall against the earth and welcomed the weight of him against her as she kissed his throat, leaving bloody prints of her lips along his skin to mark him as her own. He welcomed being branded so delicately.

“Who would deny you this?” Scab murmured into her ear when her lips found his pulse. “Surely not your Sisters.”

He drew in a sharp breath when she pierced him again without warning, her teeth finding purchase in the side of his neck only for a moment before she pulled them out again. Her lips closed over the wound and she pulled appreciatively at it once before licking it shut. The way his heartbeat sped up beneath her teeth charmed her to no end. 

She didn’t point out to him that this sort of behavior was exactly why the Sisterhood might disapprove. Where Scab’s pack of vampiric lowlifes might have had a heyday with the rediscovery of their more basic urges, the Sisterhood was likely to consider such things a waste of time at best and an act of blasphemy at worst. Even if Ivory explained the connection that this new blood had sparked between them, they might view it as a distortion of the old ways. Traditions were everything to the Sisterhood, after all. 

“They may demand that I kill you,” Ivory repeated, more to herself than to Scab, her tongue running over her teeth as she pondered the taste of his blood. She couldn’t put a finger on what the sweetness reminded her of. She wanted to pinpoint it. It would either help her explain to the Sisters, or it would be a nice detail to remember him by if they butchered him. 

“They may,” Scab said into her ear. It sounded like he was taunting her. “And you might.” 

“You doubt that I’d follow through?” 

“Not necessarily. But I look forward to watching you agonize over it.”

Ivory pulled away to scowl at him. “Pardon?”

Scab was grinning. He raised one of his hands to rub his neck, cracking it loudly with a growl of pleasure as he found the spot she’d just bitten. When his hand fell on her shoulder, Ivory felt pressure there. At first the fact that he dared to push her down enraged her, but it was clear he’d anticipated that; he made a gentle little gesture of surrender and bowed his head, watching her to gauge whether she would allow it. 

It occured to Ivory that she really ought to stop allowing things like this. But it also occurred to her that she had yet to regret giving him free reign to express his affection, and she had to admit that she was starting to worry less and less about getting back to the Sisterhood by nightfall. 

If Scab was bold enough to warrant killing, better to make good use of him while she had him. 

Ivory leaned into his touch, growling as she pushed herself up from the earth and forced him to shift back. She readjusted him into her lap roughly, making him straddle her in a way that clearly didn’t come naturally to him, and gave him a lingering kiss to remind him that she was in charge before letting him press her gently back down. 

“Mm. Like bringing home a box of kittens and being told to drown them one by one,” Scab said in a voice so soft it was alarming, even to him. One of his hands encouraged her to stay down while he sat up with one smooth, snakelike ripple of his spine. Ivory wasn’t sure how he slipped his leather jacket off in the process, but she watched him throw it to the side. She had never noticed how much smaller he looked without it. She let her hands run across his sides and enjoyed how fragile he felt, how brittle and breakable he looked. 

He pulled one of the buckles of her breastplate loose with an indignant smirk. “So unfair. Being ordered to put down your own pets, break your own toys. Something tells me you're not the type to take that lightly. You’re not, are you?” 

Ivory felt his fingernails scrape down the front of her armor. 

“No, you’re not.” He stripped away the ratty striped shirt he’d been wearing for the past year or so among the ferals. He still smelled like old blood and iron underneath it. “That’s the kind of thing you’d take personally. The kind of thing you’d hold a grudge over.”

Ivory couldn’t help but find herself a little bit mesmerized by the way his skin responded to the touch of her fingertips. She let them rove over all of his sharp angles, feeling his skin prickle, feeling him shiver against her. She liked the fact that he stopped breathing for a moment when she let her hands come to rest against his hips and pulled him tight against her. 

Scab hissed softly and pressed himself into her touch. She was terribly good at controlling him.

“You wouldn’t let anyone do that to you. Control you like that,” he rasped as her hands tightened against his thighs, her nails digging into the dark denim of his pants. “Not even the Order. Not my Ivory...” 

A hungry growl started up in her throat when she felt him undo another buckle on her breastplate as though he had all the time in the world. He peeled the first layer of armor away once he’d undone the other buckles with the same tantalizing slowness. Finally she felt him touch her collarbone, his fingers trailing down over her sternum, over the slope of her breast before meeting the edge of her dark tunic. He pulled at the hem playfully before leaning in to kiss the sensitive skin near her heart.

He could hear it. Feel it. He could almost taste it. 

“Then again,” he sighed against her. “Maybe you’ll give in to their demands, and this will be the end. It would be sad. But how nice to think of you spending the next century wishing you could touch me again. Remembering the things we did to each other, pondering the things we never got the chance to do…”

Ivory’s hips rolled deliciously underneath him when his lips found the hollow between her breasts. The way he kissed her there reminded her of all those silly human books full of romantic poems. 

“Scab,” she hissed as she arched into his touch. “I’m beginning to find you almost tolerable.” 

He laughed against her skin before sinking his teeth into the soft flesh of her breast, prompting her to let out a sharp and barely-contained noise of delight. Ivory could feel her heart pounding against him, and the intimacy of the sensation shocked her. The spike of energy that flooded her body might have been adrenaline or arousal or both—she didn’t particularly care. All that mattered was how hard she could pull him closer, how tight she could grip his wiry hips while she ground them into her own. She felt her lips slide back over her teeth hungrily as a bestial snarl escaped from between her teeth. 

Within a matter of seconds she had torn the rest of her armor away, and she broke his bite off impatiently as her hands freed his cock and forced it into her. Ivory’s hips set a punishing pace, one that she was delighted to find him able to keep up with as she dug her nails into him to spur him on. She snarled insistently each time she urged him into her harder.

It felt better than it had the first time, and the first time had been enough to make both of them hungry for more. Scab was hissing her name now, surrendering his whole body to her while Ivory’s nails raked across his flanks in her eagerness to feel him deeper inside. Another snarl ripped out from her mouth as she snapped at him to get his attention, and then he felt her teeth catch his bottom lip and pull him into a bloody kiss. He shuddered and fucked her harder when her tongue invaded his mouth as if she owned it. Her hands were around his throat now, both of them, and she was kissing him ferociously and pulling him in with her thighs, as if every cell in her body wanted more of him. He sank his teeth into her shoulder to anchor himself to something—anything—and felt her do the same, and that was the last thing he could sense before everything whited out with pleasure. 

Ivory felt the muffled scream that he let out more than she heard it, because he bit down almost to the bone. His body twisted terribly, as though he were in overwhelming agony, and Ivory worked her hips against him hard while he finished before he collapsed against her.

She didn’t wait for him to catch his breath before forcing him down between her legs, and if he minded, his tongue didn’t show it. He didn’t bother trying to tease her. He went right for her most sensitive spots, and didn’t let up until he heard her let out a scream of her own. 

Scab had no intention of stopping there, but Ivory grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him to the ground before he could get any further. There was nothing human in her eyes anymore when he looked up into them. Her lips peeled back over her teeth and her hand closed around his throat hard, as if she intended to take it as a souvenir. 

She pushed him down and breathed him in, her body still on fire with sensation, his blood still streaked across her mouth as it opened with a primordial growl. She couldn’t tell whether she wanted to kiss him again or fuck him again or tear him limb from limb. All of the options felt equally appealing. The awestruck look on Scab’s face suggested that he felt the same. 

Ivory’s fingers tightened against his throat while she drew her knife from the pile of armor beside them. She brought the blade to rest against his cheek. He shivered when he felt how cold the edge was, and part of him felt ashamed at how much he enjoyed the sound and sensation of it scraping across his skin, down to his chin. She pricked him with the tip of the knife so gently that it might as well have been a kiss. 

“Tell me what they used to call you,” she snarled, her voice low and predatory. 

Scab tried to frown, but ended up wincing instead when he felt the expression aggravate the spot where the tip of the knife met him. He gritted his teeth and said, “I already told you that.”

“You’ll tell me again. You’ll do anything I tell you, won’t you—what was it? Steve?” She deftly twirled the knife in her hand, shook Scab’s head playfully from side to side, and lapped at the bead of blood the blade had left behind. 

“Scott,” he grumbled under his breath. He sounded more than a little hurt that she hadn’t remembered it. 

“Speak up.”

“It was—Scott.”

Scab couldn’t tell why it was starting to make him uncomfortable to say it. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Ivory’s knife had traveled lower and was starting to tickle his rib cage. Maybe it had something to do with the way she was licking her lips. The way she looked at him set off every warning light in his brain, but the way she straddled him while she twisted the knife was so intoxicating that nothing else mattered. 

Ivory growled long and low. She adored the way his body tried to arch into hers, eager for contact; then again, maybe he was just eager to get away from the tip of the knife. In the moment, Ivory didn’t particularly care which. 

She let the flat of the blade trail down one side of him, her eyes fixed on the bloody red stain it left. She lifted it, hypnotized by how deep the red hue of the blood was against her steel, and then licked the blade clean. 

When she was finished, she set the knife aside and took a moment to appreciate the sight of him desperate and smeared with his own blood. 

“I’ve been wondering what it was that made Julius choose you,” she hissed. She loved the way his body twisted and tensed when she ran her hands over him. “I can still taste the fear in your blood from when he turned you. How frightened you must have been, how ripe for the taking…”

She wanted terribly to sink her teeth into him, but instead she laid a contemplative kiss against his chest and let herself daydream about tearing it open to find his heart. She wanted to squeeze it dry. “Tell me, were you afraid, Scott?”

At first he growled in protest, but then he felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle with shameful pleasure when she leaned in to whisper in his ear, “Poor thing, you must have begged him to end it all. I can almost taste it on you. Did you die begging, Scott ?”

“Yes,” he admitted with a shudder. Hearing her say that name sparked something dissonant inside him. He couldn’t tell if he liked it any more or less than he liked the rest of Ivory’s little torture techniques, but it certainly fired up something unique in his body that he hadn’t expected.

He wheezed when she pushed him into the earth again hard enough to force the breath from his lungs. If she intended to bury him, she was making excellent headway. 

“I want to hear it.” 

Everything Ivory said sounded like a command, even when she lowered her voice. When she pressed a kiss against the side of his neck, it felt as dangerous and insistent as her knife. 

“I want to hear how you begged.”

Scab couldn’t even remember how he had begged Julius to spare him all those years ago. He could only think of all the things he wanted to beg Ivory for right here and now; for her to touch him, taste him, have her way with him. Her teeth nipped his ear hard enough to draw blood. 

“Ivory, please—” 

The rest of Scab’s sentence tangled itself around the blade she pushed between his lips, and she held him down when he reacted with a panicked attempt to escape her clutches. 

“Mmm, relax, relax,” she hissed into his ear, grinding herself into him to force his body into submission against his better instincts. Ivory felt his heart hammering in his chest. She hushed him softly and kissed his chin as he closed his shivering jaws around the blade. Scab did everything he could to relax into it. 

A keening whine escaped his throat when he felt the tip of the knife tracing his teeth. 

“It will only hurt if you make a sudden move,” she purred against him. “Just be still and beg for me, my pet. Is that too much to ask?”

He tried to say the word “please” again through his teeth, but hissed sharply when the edge of the blade caught his lip and split the skin. Ivory leaned in and kissed the blood away. She took the opportunity to appreciate how wonderful it felt to have Scab squirming beneath the touch of both her steel and her lips at once. She liked how compliant the knife made him.

By the time she slid the blade from his mouth, Scab had almost learned to enjoy it. He still groaned with relief when she pulled the knife from between his lips. He felt her move it against his throat, where he much preferred it instead of inside him, and his trembling hands sought out Ivory’s body for some kind of comfort. Instead she caught him by the wrists and pinned them down over his head effortlessly with one hand. 

“Do as you’re told.” 

“I’ll do anything,” he offered immediately. The pitch of his voice rose in desperation as Ivory’s powerful hips began to coax him into an intoxicating rhythm. “I’ll do anything you want, Ivory, just please, don’t stop…”

Ivory smiled and opened a vein in Scab’s neck with a quick flick of her knife. She tightened her thighs around him and let the blood gush, her eyes locked to it as it streamed down over his collarbone, and then she smeared it over his chest. Ivory had wanted to sink her teeth into every inch of him before, but the urge had never felt as strong as it did now. He looked irresistible with those ribbons of red painted across his delicate skin. 

In the back of Ivory’s mind, she subconsciously decided that the Sisterhood could wait as long as she damn well pleased. After all, Scab had asked so nicely; how could she deny him a reward? More importantly, how could she deny herself the reward of breaking him in?

She leaned in to kiss the open wound she’d left and a wave of pleasure coursed through her body when the heat of his blood touched her lips. Her touch was almost too soft; she didn’t even bother to sink her teeth into him. Instead her tongue laved across the broken skin, soothing the wound even as she drank. 

Scab’s whole body lit up underneath her lips. Whatever blood Ivory’s gentle and generous tongue wasn’t already lapping up had traveled directly to his cock, and at first he wasn’t sure why the correlation between those two things stirred him up so much. Before long he had imagined a whole new set of things to beg her for, and all of them involved how incredible her tongue felt. 

Her hips pressed against him longingly while she closed her lips over his vein and let his blood flood her mouth. She laid her knife aside, much to his relief. 

The way that he gasped her name when her hand found his cock sounded even lovelier to her than his begging. He could barely hold himself together when she started to stroke him in time with the roll of her hips. 

Ivory drank him in until she felt his body starting to weaken beneath her, and only then did she let go. The look of bliss on Scab’s face suggested that he would’ve happily let her wring every drop of blood from his body if she wanted to. 

She released his wrists and took a moment to toss her hair out of the way, letting Scab push his fingers through it worshipfully. He pressed his nose into the mass of tangles and breathed in the scent of old mausoleum marble and fresh woodland moss. Ivory found his enthusiasm amusing as always.

With a hiss she pressed herself against him and eased herself down onto his cock. The sudden heat and fullness of him inside her rivaled even the sweetness of his blood. Ivory couldn’t quite decide which she would rather pick, if she had to choose. She liked both qualities and enjoyed getting to appreciate them one after the other after the other. And so on. 

She tightened herself around him and loved how his whole body twisted in response. 

“Yes, please, yes, yes,” she heard him whispering into the mane of her hair, his voice broken and undone. “Ohh, please, Ivory, fuck me, fuck me however you want, please, please…”

“Mmm, keep begging,” she ordered as she gripped the back of his neck to control him better. He moved so easily underneath her now, his body obeying every cue she delivered. Not once did he try to set the pace; he was more than content to let Ivory grind him into the dirt as fast or as slow as she liked. She rewarded his good behavior by biting into her bottom lip and then kissing him hard, noting the way his body riled up underneath her when he tasted her blood. A few sharp thrusts of Ivory’s hips and a warning growl had him compliant again in no time. He was a quick study, much to her delight. 

She felt his teeth pull greedily against her lip and broke away to chastise him, but then changed her mind at the sight of him. His face was flushed and bloodied, his lips stained dark and red. His mouth was still open, but his eyes were shut, and the tremor that Ivory could see brimming through his body was inhuman and captivating. If there was anything left of whatever “Scott” used to be inside of him, it didn’t exist anymore—not in this moment, at least. The only thing left in him now was hunger. 

Ivory drank in the sight with a little burst of pride and then pushed one wrist into his mouth, wincing when he clamped down hard enough to split bone. If he was sorry, the animal noise he made while he seized her arm and pulled it against his mouth harder did nothing to communicate the apology. Ivory had never felt him pull so strongly on her veins before, had never felt his hips falter underneath her as his heels scraped the ground for purchase and found none. Even though his eyes were still shut, Ivory could see tears wicking at the corners of them when his jaws tightened. 

The pain flashed through Ivory’s forearm so sharply that at first she worried he had actually taken a bite out of her, but closer observation revealed that it was just the combination of his teeth and his nails digging in next to each other. He was coiled around her wrist like an adder, his hips moving just as smoothly, with the same primal intensity. Ivory let out a cry of delight when he struck something delicious inside of her, and that only encouraged him further. 

She growled a litany of curses and forced her wrist harder against his teeth as she rocked her hips into him with increasing desperation. Her whole body shook with pleasure, each thrust driving her closer as his cock found that one perfect spot deep inside. Ivory gritted her teeth to bite back a howl of ecstasy when she felt herself tipping over the edge, but it was useless—the strangled noise escaped anyway when she lost control and came hard, every muscle in her body clenching, her hips losing the rhythm she had built up as she finished. 

Scab’s jaws finally relaxed against her when her orgasm died down, and soon Ivory felt him laying apologetic kisses where his fingernails had broken through her skin. Then again, maybe that was wishful thinking; maybe he was just seeking out whatever blood remained. Regardless, Ivory pulled him close and purred into his ear while he lapped the last drops away. 

“I told you to keep begging,” she said, squeezing him hard with her hips. Despite still feeling sensitive from the intensity of her orgasm, Ivory started up a new rhythm for him to follow, more gentle than before. He clawed at her lower back and leaned into it. 

“Please, Ivory...”

“Please what?”

He licked the last of her from his lips, and his voice came out shaky and hesitant when he said, to Ivory’s surprise, “Please call me that again.”

At first she was confused—after all, she had been expecting him to beg for release, given the state of him. When she smoothed her hands over the back of his neck, he rolled his head submissively into her touch. 

“Call me that name again,” he whispered as he melted at the touch of her fingertips. “Please, Ivory, please—”

Her hands were around his throat before he had time to draw another breath, and he loved it. 

“Really? That’s what you want?” 

“I—fuck, please. Yes.”

Ivory rocked experimentally against him again, sliding herself all the way back down onto his cock with one prolonged, deliberate stroke and studying his face to see if he was serious. “Really, of all the things you could ask for, that’s your first request?”

“I’ll do anything,” he panted as he twisted underneath her. His nails dug into the small of her back, and Ivory loved the little chill it sent up her spine. “I’ll do anything you want.” 

She purred deep in her chest. His breath hitched in response to her fingers tightening around his neck, and his eyes closed again as if he were sinking into a dream. 

“That’s it, my dear, relax,” Ivory encouraged. She massaged the back of his neck, making gentle circles with her fingertips, her motions mimicking the way she was treating his cock. She was entranced by the fact that he was learning to respond to even the softest of touches. It wasn’t something she had expected from him in the beginning, certainly not when she brought him over from ferality.  She leaned in to press a line of kisses against his jawbone and murmured, “Tell me how much of it you remember. What did you do in life?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think.”

“Please, Ivory, I don’t know.” 

“Then think harder, Scott .”

She said the name like a curse, and maybe she meant it as one. The way his heart hammered under her fingertips suggested that it had struck a nerve. 

“I—soda bottles,” he stammered at last, as Ivory kissed his chin. “Factory. I worked the closing shift at a soda bottle factory.”

Something strange and vulnerable crept into his voice, something that Ivory had only ever associated with Dmitri. It was nostalgia, or as close to nostalgia as a vampire was capable of processing, perhaps. He sounded like he was recalling a distant childhood memory. Ivory saw the corner of his lip twitch into a smile. 

“That was the last thing I saw,” he mused. “Stacks of useless soda bottles. Hundreds of them. Racks of them. Julius found me trapped in the back of the cargo truck.”

Ivory figured that she could wait until later to tell him that she didn’t know what “soda bottles” were. Better to let him enjoy himself. 

“Tell me how afraid you were,” she ordered. 

“He told me he was going to kill me before it even started, right when the door came off its hinges,” Scab said softly. Ivory felt him trembling into her touch. His arms closed around her and held her close in a gesture that felt so warm and affectionate it scraped the edges of Ivory’s comfort zone. “But I was in there for so long. So long. I don’t think he killed me until the next day. He just wanted to make sure that I knew.”

“Fear sweetens the blood,” Ivory growled into his ear. She shook off the tender hug and increased the pace of her hips when she leaned in to break the skin of his shoulder with her teeth. She drank deep and felt his whole body cleave to her. She could still taste the same sweetness on him now. Part of her wondered if she owed Julius a word of thanks for letting Scab’s blood marinate in fear for so long. Whatever the cause of the taste, Ivory knew she wanted more. 

She traversed his shoulder and the side of his neck with one deep, possessive bite after another until she heard him howl with pain, and then snarled into his ear, “Let me hear it and I’ll think about letting you cum, Scott.”

She felt a ripple of panic quicken his body when she sank her teeth into him again, and when he spoke, the fact that his tongue tripped over the words made his fear even more enticing. 

“I can’t—I can’t take it anymore, please,” Scab managed between the flashes of pain. When Ivory’s teeth found the spot Julius had left marred, he felt her force him down hard and keep him there. She was using him so roughly now that it rivaled all of those hours in the back of the cargo truck. The pain was making him delirious, and he couldn’t remember now exactly which one he was; Scott or Scab, self-proclaimed king of every feral night creature from here to Seattle or self-loathing handyman from the boondocks of the Pacific Northwest. The only thing that felt real was Ivory. “I can’t take it anymore, please, end it. Please end it.”

“Beg me,” he heard her snarl, his blood bubbling between her lips, mangling the words. 

“Julius,” he tried. The pain in his neck was too intense to be anything else, but then, Julius had definitely never fucked him. Small mercies. “Ivory.”

“Say it again.” She broke away from his throat just long enough to force his head to the other side, then struck hard. 

“Please end it,” he groaned against her, everything else going blank now except for the sharp pain of her piercing him and the incredible heat and tightness of her pussy. He didn’t even know if he wanted it to end, but all he could do now was rack his mind for whatever recollection he had of begging Julius to kill him. He tried to let himself sink into the memory, but it was no use. The cocktail of pain and pleasure that Ivory’s body offered was overwhelming. “Please, please, I’ll do anything, I’ll give you anything, Ivory, just please, mercy—” 

He gasped, his words cut off when she withdrew from his throat. She kissed him with blood still dripping from her lips, and then grabbed him hard by the scruff of the neck to growl into his ear, “Who do you belong to?”

“You,” he offered without hesitation. “Ivory.”

“Again, louder.” 

“ Ivory .”

“That’s right,” she hissed into him. When she increased the pace of her hips, the noise he made was somewhere between a sob and a howl. It brought a wicked smile to Ivory’s lips. She laid a gentle kiss on his cheek and then pulled him in close. “You’ve been obedient. Such a good boy. Now cum hard for me, Scott.” 

He thought it would take a few moments, at least, but his body disagreed; the moment Ivory ordered it, he snapped. Everything whited out with pleasure and he howled Ivory’s name so loudly that a flock of nearby birds startled out of their tree. He could hear her laughing, feel her pull him in tighter as his body shook from the intensity. She held him in a grip of steel while she rode him, and didn’t relax until he slumped back into her arms like a lifeless thing, completely spent. He could feel her caressing the nape of his neck now, kissing his jaw. Even in the aftermath of what Scab considered the most extreme pleasure he’d ever felt in either of his lives, the way she touched him still felt exquisite.

“Very good,” she murmured against his skin. She ran her hands over his temples and down the back of his neck, and when he sank back down to the earth, she followed. 

“Ivory,” Scab said, to no one in particular. His mind was swimming. The pain was gone, and now her touches were nothing but soft and affectionate, lingering in the afterglow. He let his arms circle her waist and pulled her in snugly, burying his face in her hair. 

Ivory felt his body quaking before she smelled the salt. “Scab. Are you crying?”

“No,” he growled immediately, sniffing, choking on the word. 

“I’m not an idiot, I can smell it on you.”

“I—it’s nothing,” he snarled. Ivory felt him prickling defensively. 

“There’s no reason to lie.”

He pushed her away, but that did nothing to help his case. Now she could see the tears streaming down his face, still welling up in his eyes despite the glare he was giving her now. He wiped them away emphatically and bared his teeth at her. 

“It’s nothing,” he repeated. His voice was adamant. 

Ivory leaned in, ignoring the warning growl that he let out when she raised a hand to brush away the tears he’d missed. He curled his lips back as though he were going to strike, but her touch was so soothing that it mollified him. Ivory let her hand rest on his cheek and wiped away the next tear that fell. 

“It’s alright,” she said softly. “You don’t need to hide it from me.”

“It’s petty and human,” he growled.

“No, no. Not human. You’re better than that.”

He growled again, but he still leaned into her touch and relaxed. His eyes closed, and Ivory wiped another tear away. Finally he said under his breath, “No one’s ever done that to me.” 

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t. I just…” he tried to find the right words, but they were eluding him. “I’ve never felt that. Before. It was never...like that.”

“You flatter me too much, Scab,” Ivory laughed. She liked that it made him smile. 

“No, I don’t. But I should.”

She leaned in and kissed him. It was softer and sweeter than any of the other kisses they’d shared, and Ivory didn’t want it to end. Judging by the way Scab pulled her in close again, neither did he. 

Chapter Text

Needless to say, they didn’t make it to the temple of the Sisters by nightfall. 

Ivory felt guilty that she’d allowed herself to be distracted, but she couldn’t honestly say that she regretted it. She didn’t regret the hours she and Scab had spent laying in each other’s arms before setting back out on the road, either. Scab had carefully re-buckled the armor onto her and smoothed the braids in her hair when they finally untangled themselves. His touches sent warm shivers down Ivory’s spine, and that was reason enough for her to kiss him again. The sun was already coming up by the time they moved on. 

For a while they walked hand in hand like two idiotic humans infatuated with one another, and everything seemed right in the world. 

When they finally found what remained of the Sisterhood, the sun had broken beautifully over the Rocky Mountains. Daylight revealed darker things than the landscape; they could see smoke billowing in the distance where the Temple had burned, and Ivory could see all too clearly the tears on the faces of her Sisters when they dropped their masks to tell her what had happened to their home. Humans had come in numbers too large for them to fight off. It was a splinter group of the old Resistance that had caught them, still well-armed enough to be a threat despite their disorganization. Despite their prowess in battle, the Sisters at the Temple had been unable to defend themselves against the horde—after all, Ivory and their finest fighters had been sent off with Dmitri. 

Seeing Ivory so distraught at the loss of the Temple perplexed Scab, who had been perfectly happy living in an old parking garage and sleeping in a dumpster for the majority of his vampiric life. He understood her distress over the loss of her Sisters, though. He remembered the terror he felt when he watched the daywalker’s bite bring Ivory down, and he had only known Ivory for a handful of weeks. She had spent centuries with her Sisters, and the bond they had went deeper than blood. 

He watched her sink her teeth into each of the Sisters that still remained one by one, sharing the new power with each of them. Once they had been changed, Ivory rallied them to set off into the woods. 

Scab had expected them to head toward the remnants of the Temple, but Ivory took them in a different direction, weaving through the forest far to the south until they reached an old, overgrown mausoleum wedged into an outcropping of mossy rock. The door was solid stone, too heavy for a human to lift without machinery. Two of the Sisters pulled it open and the stench of decay and cobwebs poured out. 

A narrow flight of stairs led down to the crypt below. The air inside was cold enough to cut to the bone, and not a ray of sunshine reached the interior. Corridors led off to either side which led to rooms full of stone sarcophagi. Ivory deposited Scab into one of these rooms and gave him one brief, secretive kiss before stealing away to consult with the rest of the Sisterhood. 

Scab sat alone in the dark. He could hear them talking in hushed tones, could hear one of Ivory’s Sisters barking questions at her about why she’d brought home a feral. He considered interrupting them more than once, but Ivory had made it clear that he wasn’t to interfere with their deliberation. Even though it irritated him, he waited. 

They debated together for an hour before Ivory returned. She was alone. She cast one cautious glance over her shoulder to make certain of that before pushing herself up to sit on the lid of a sarcophagus. 

“We’ll remain here. Even the Temple’s catacombs were destroyed, blown to pieces by the humans. There are other strongholds of the Sisterhood, but this one is the most secure. The humans here believe themselves to be safe. It will be easy to hunt quietly. To rebuild,” she explained. “As for you, the others need a night to think. We’ll convene tomorrow to decide whether you stay or go.”

Scab crawled up behind her onto the lid of the sarcophagus. His fingers found her hair first and curled into it, and it was so soft and inviting that he couldn’t help but press his face into it. The smell of her blended perfectly into the cold, subterranean air of the crypt. 

“Go where?” he asked. 

“Away. Back to your underlings in Seattle, I imagine,” Ivory said. She could taste her own resentment in the words. The idea of letting the Sisters throw Scab to the wolves appealed to her less and less every minute, especially with his fingers coiling slow, soothing ringlets into her hair. 

“And you?” he asked. 

“I will rebuild the Order. Take the fight to the humans. Lead my Sisters to a better hunting ground, somewhere.”

“You don’t sound pleased.”

“No one ends up pleased by a compromise.” 

“Compromise?”

“They’ll spare your life, but only because I vouched for you. My loyalty to the Order is what grants me their respect. I won’t turn my back on them when they’ve agreed to let you live,” Ivory said disdainfully. “And if that’s their decision, you’ll go without causing trouble. That will be that.”

“Mm. Suppose I don’t.”

“You will.” 

She expected him to argue with her more, but she only felt him sigh into her hair. His fingernails combed their way between the curls and met her scalp. It was eerie feeling him scratch itches she hadn’t even been conscious of, but Ivory let herself lean into the relief. 

Scab pushed through her hair and nuzzled into the crook of Ivory’s shoulder. She could hear him smiling through the words when he said, “And if they allow me to stay, what then? Do I take some sort of vow, some oath of loyalty? Will you have to call me Brother Scab?”

“There are no Brothers,” Ivory reminded him gravely. “And the traditions of vampires don’t change overnight. You would do better to prepare for the worst, you’ll avoid more disappointment that way.” 

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said. His teeth nipped at her ear and his fingers tightened in the strands of hair at the nape of Ivory’s neck, just hard enough to send a chill through her body. “What will they ask of me if they agree?”

“No more than I would.” 

“Everything, then.”

“Everything,” she confirmed. She slid from the sarcophagus and turned to face him, finding his hands with her own. The way his fingers knotted together with hers so tightly made her want them back in her hair again. “Scab, if any part of you wants to walk away, you should—”

“—No, no, shh,” he hissed as he pulled her in close and pressed her face into his chest. He felt her relax into the embrace, which was lovelier than he had expected, given how prickly Ivory was about letting her guard down. He peppered her hair with harmless, empty bites and breathed in the warmth of her. When he felt her hands coil around his waist beneath his leather jacket, he murmured against her, “No more warnings.” 

“You deserve the chance to run, if you want. You don’t realize what you’re getting yourself into with the Sisterhood. With me.” 

She sounded almost guilty, as guilty as a vampire was capable of simulating. Scab’s fingers found her chin and lifted it until she met his gaze. Her eyes were dark and troubled, and as easy as ever to get lost in. Scab somehow resisted being spellbound by them long enough to say, “Even if I ran, I wouldn’t forget who I belong to.”

“Me,” Ivory sighed. The warmth in her voice was enough to make up for at least a century of lost sunlight. “You belong to me.”

“Always,” Scab said, letting one of his thumbs brush along the curve of her bottom lip. Ivory was much too beautiful to look distraught, Scab had decided; putting a stop to that once and for all would be a good start in proving himself to the Order. He waited until her lips parted to kiss her, and found himself pleasantly surprised by how softly she responded. The air of urgency between them had faded. Now she took her time with each touch and each playful little bite, and she did her best to savor the hushed noises of pleasure that escaped Scab’s lips between kisses. 

Her hands were as strong and insistent as ever, pulling him in and sliding his jacket off. Her fingertips lit up the skin of his arms while he helped her shrug off the sleeves. The sound of leather hitting stone echoed in the quiet of the crypt, and Scab said in a meaningful voice, “Did you tell them?” 

Ivory traced the lines of his forearms and let her head come to rest against his. “I didn’t have to. Mira said they could smell you on me even when you were out of the room.”

“Mm. Good.” 

Scab’s teeth touched her ear and he growled low as he breathed the smell of her in again.

“Good?” Ivory snorted disapprovingly. “Pleased that you were able to, what, mark your territory?” 

He bared his teeth against her skin and sneered, “I was thinking the opposite, darling .”

Something about the way he said it made Ivory want to hit him, but the term of endearment amused her, so she played along. Her fingers pulled at the torn threads of his shirt. “What a word. It sounds so idiotic when you say it.”

“And here I was, thinking I was finally being sincere,” Scab said, his voice oozing with sarcasm. His hands found her waist and his grip tightened hungrily. “Professing my—whatever the word was.”

“Devotion?”

“No, there’s another one.” 

“Does it matter?”

“It’s the better one.”

Scab clicked his tongue idly while he scoured his mind for it. He barely noticed when Ivory pulled the shirt off over his head. Her hands found his chest and tried to push him down against the stone lid of the sarcophagus, but she underestimated his flexibility by a long shot, and he ended up flopping down over the other side. He clicked his tongue against his teeth again and he stared upside down at the wall while Ivory’s fingertips traced his sides.

“You can think of it later,” Ivory purred. 

“Ah!”

He sat up with such a swift and snakelike motion that it caught Ivory off guard, and when she felt him catch her face in his hands suddenly she almost felt afraid. 

“ Llllllllove ,” Scab said between his teeth, grinning against her lips. He drew the word out like some ancient curse or incantation. Ivory could feel him growling deep in his chest, but the sound never escaped. Her pulse quickened uneasily. 

“Ooooh, you don’t like that one,” he mocked, his thumbs pressing into the points underneath her jaw where her heartbeat hammered. “Why so anxious, Ivory? Don’t tell me you’re having a feeling. You’ll break my poor little heart.”

Ivory shoved him back down again, hard enough to hear the back of his skull hit the other side of the sarcophagus. He only laughed. 

“I love it when you’re angry!” 

Ivory growled and climbed on top of him, pressing her nails hard into the exposed flesh of his stomach until he choked on his own laughter. 

“Shut up,” she ordered. 

“Or what, you’ll fuck me again?”

“I told you to shut up .” 

His body tightened underneath her when her nails broke the skin, and he pulled himself up enough to try to cling to her armor for support. Ivory forced his hands away and pushed him hard enough to hear his skull hit the stone with another crack, this one followed by a sharp yelp of pain. 

“How you survive to this day is beyond my comprehension,” Ivory snapped. “All you do is bite the hand that feeds you.”

“You like a little love bite, Ivory,” Scab purred, stretching under her, one hand reaching back to feel his skull repair itself. Ivory’s fingers were curling against him now, her nails digging in, drawing blood. It hurt, but it was everything he wanted. 

“This is what gets you off, is it? Heckling your allies?”

“I only get off by heckling you.”

“I wonder if you realize how dangerous your little games are,” Ivory snarled. “You’re only breathing because I prefer you that way. I still have more than enough time to change my mind. Mira and the others will be thrilled to carve off your head.”

“Don’t take the fun out of it,” Scab complained, hissing when she pulled her nails out and dug them in even deeper against the angle of his hip. His nerves spiked when he felt her scrape bone. “—ahhh, Ivory, too deep—”

“Is it?” She purred. “I think it’s just right.”

She pressed her nails in harder until he howled, and didn’t let up until she heard one of the Sisters yell from afar to get a room. Ivory reluctantly released him from her grip and licked the blood from her fingertips. Scab’s sigh of relief filled the chamber. 

“Already have a room,” he said. “All it needs is a door, apparently.” 

“Don’t sound so disappointed. I was planning to see how much of your pelvis I could get out before you apologized,” Ivory snapped. 

“Ah, then in that case, I don’t apologize. But you’ll have to find some quieter way to convince me.”

“You aren’t the type to come quietly.”

“Mm, pat yourself on the back for that.”

His fingers found hers and he pulled himself up to nuzzle against her throat. Ivory felt her annoyance subsiding when he started to lay soft kisses against her skin. Even though she hadn’t wrung an apology out of him, his touch was as sweet and submissive as she wanted. Ivory purred and leaned into it. 

Her arms wound around him and she let herself feel how lean his body was, tracing the definition in his back and sides and admiring what a nice specimen she had found. She didn’t even feel the urge to break him anymore. It was enough to wrap her arms around him and feel that lithe body in her hands, surrendering all too willingly to whatever she wanted. 

Scab kissed her ear and pressed his forehead into her temple. The sarcasm had faded from his voice. “Dmitri used to talk of love. He claimed to still feel it. Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“What does it matter? He’s dead.”

“I watched him weep over Antanasia,” Scab said into her ear, softly. “The same way I did, when I thought you were gone. It’s been troubling me.”

“Troubling you?”

“It makes me wonder.”

“You can’t be serious,” Ivory sighed. She moved one hand to lift his chin and scanned his eyes for any sign of madness. There was nothing there. Just bright blue, as empty as a summer sky, full of nothing but curiosity and maybe a dash of anxiety. “Scab, it would be impossible. You’re falling for one of your own jokes.”

He looked ashamed for even suggesting it, but the lack of hostility in his expression gave Ivory pause. She frowned and said, “You don’t believe it, though, not really. You don’t really feel anything. Just hunger. That’s all it is.” 

“Is that what it feels like to you? Hunger?” 

Ivory didn’t want to admit that she could understand his meaning. She did feel something more than hunger when Scab brushed her hair back over her shoulder to kiss her neck again, but calling it anything else felt foolish. More than that it felt dangerous, given the fact that the Sisters could still take him from her. Ivory didn’t want the vulnerability associated with words like love. Two hundred years had hardened her heart enough that she didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of having a weak spot. 

“If they send me away tomorrow, will it be hunger keeping you awake at night?” Scab asked between his kisses. “Or will you just be lonely?”

“Lonely and love are not the same.”

“If they send me away tomorrow,” he continued, ignoring her. “Every time someone says the word love , what’s going to cross your mind?”

Ivory growled. “You.”

“Me.”

“The only vampire stupid enough to mention it.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine,” she snarled. She tightened her arms around Scab’s waist and pulled him in, her teeth pressing into the skin of his shoulder. He tensed up in anticipation, but she didn’t bite down. She only growled and enjoyed the way he shivered under her teeth. “All mine.”

“All yours,” he agreed as he slumped forward into her embrace. It was too easy to melt into Ivory’s arms, to give in to the sweet sensation of her tongue tasting his skin and the iron grip she held him in. When Ivory slipped off of the sarcophagus and pulled him to the stone floor, Scab couldn’t tell whether he’d just gone along with it or whether she’d picked him up and moved him there. He hissed when the cold stone tiles met his back, but soon enough Ivory was kissing him sweetly enough to banish the chill. 

Her hands raked over his chest, his ribs, his stomach, as if she wouldn’t be content until she’d touched every inch of him. By the time she reached his jeans, he was quivering with anticipation. Ivory smiled when she pressed her palm between his legs and felt him already hardening up for her. 

Scab’s nails scraped at the stone tiles in desperation when one of Ivory’s thighs pushed between his legs, and he couldn’t stop himself from chasing the friction that her body offered. She pulled him in harder by the belt, almost sharply enough to hurt him. Ivory liked controlling him, liked dictating the speed of his hips and the force of her thigh against his hardening cock, each detail of his pleasure up to her discretion. She watched him with increasing curiosity as he twisted with animal need in her grip. 

Ivory let one finger trail down Scab’s chest, past his navel to his belt buckle, and she traced the outline of it. She plucked thoughtfully at the steel.

“All mine,” she mused. A desperate whine escaped Scab’s throat when she pushed her thigh into him and ground his hips into the touch with enough force to break his spirit. “You would do anything in the world for me?” 

“I’d tear it apart for you,” he gasped.

“And you’ll do whatever they ask tomorrow.”

“Anything.”

The way his body responded when Ivory leaned in to kiss him was more rewarding than any of the pretty words he offered up. His lips parted for her with no resistance. While she traced the upper row of his teeth with the tip of her tongue Ivory could hear his nails raking against the stone floor, louder than a chalkboard. The noise brought a hungry growl out of her throat. 

She pushed Scab into the stone so hard that for a moment he felt one with it. A snarl began building inside him when Ivory’s tongue caught his own, one that came out sounding more needy and excited than he intended. Ivory didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he felt her smile against his lips when she heard it. Then he felt her fingers fighting with his belt buckle, his buttons, his zipper—he wondered for a moment if she had initially been confused by the zipper. It would have been too recent an invention for her to have encountered before, but she certainly wasn’t having any trouble with it. Scab’s thoughts about zippers were short lived; once Ivory’s hand freed his cock and closed around the shaft, nothing else in the world mattered except the sensation of her stroking him. He gave in to the pace that she set and found it all too perfect. He could tell how much Ivory enjoyed it when he played by her rules without being ordered; it was obvious that she liked rewarding his obedience even more than she liked punishing his sharp tongue. 

She kissed him rough and hard, and this time she didn’t release him until he snarled for her again. Ivory loved how broken the noise sounded, how breathy and urgent it felt against her lips. She basked in it for a few moments before catching his bottom lip between her teeth and biting down. The flash of pain only thrilled Scab even more.

Ivory took her time and teased him with kisses while she stroked him, playing with his tongue until she felt him hiss the word “please” into her mouth. He kept saying it after she broke away, and when her strokes sped up the word melted into a strained, speechless howl. 

Ivory’s tongue trailed over her teeth. The sight of him writhing at her touch never ceased to entertain her; he looked so helpless, so keen to please. It was always nice to watch his bratty attitude wash away at the touch of her fingertips. 

“Ivory, please…” Scab panted, his voice heavy with need. She could feel him shivering, and she loved it. Her teeth found his neck and she felt him crane his head back for her with a gasp of pleasure, all too eager to feel her break the skin. 

She pressed her teeth to his throat without digging in and let her tongue luxuriously explore his skin. Scab almost couldn’t take how sweet it felt, especially in combination with the way her hand worked so skillfully against his cock. 

“Ivory, more,” he managed through his teeth. A light laugh came from between Ivory’s lips as they traced the vein in his neck, and when she kissed his pulse Scab realized that he wanted her teeth inside him even more than he wanted release. His hands found the front of her armor and he pulled at it in desperation, startled by the need in his own voice. “Take me.”

Ivory couldn’t refuse him after hearing him beg for it. She laid another lingering kiss against his pulse, savored the way his heart hammered underneath her, and then sank her teeth into him with a low and hungry growl. She could hear her name on Scab’s lips as she drank him in. It sounded like he was calling out to some dark, absent goddess who’d finally reached down to favor him. When she tightened her jaws against him and pulled against his heart, Scab howled her praises so loudly that there was no doubt the other Sisters could hear him. Ivory didn’t even care. Let them hear, she thought—let them hear the way he worshipped her, the way he begged, the way he said her name as though it were magic. Maybe then they would understand why she was so adamant about keeping him. 

She deepened her bite painfully just to hear what kind of noise Scab would make, and the resulting cry that he let out delighted her to no end. He tasted even sweeter when the pain made his pulse spike. Ivory couldn’t get enough. 

When she broke away from his throat, the look of total submission on his face enchanted her to no end. Scab’s fingers tangled themselves in the buckles of her armor and he pulled her in as though his life depended on it. His mouth opened with a strained and almost silent sound. 

“That’s it, my pet,” Ivory said softly. She kissed the last of the blood from his neck and enjoyed the little whimper he let out. “That’s it, beg until you can’t anymore.” 

“I need you, please, need—”

“I know you do,” she hissed into his ear. She sped up her strokes and then pulled him in by the back of the neck with her free hand, pressing his lips against her throat. “Drink.”

Scab’s teeth broke through her skin, but she never felt him pull against her veins; the moment her blood touched his tongue, his body shook uncontrollably. His cock erupted in her hand at the very next stroke and he broke away, her name escaping his mouth in a strangled gasp. 

Ivory’s lips pulled back into a smile when she felt him coming undone. She coaxed him through the orgasm with strong, firm touches until his whole body went limp underneath her at last. His breath was heaving, his ribcage shivering, and by the time Ivory leaned in to kiss him, he still hadn’t quite returned to his senses. His mouth opened at the touch of her tongue despite the delirium of the afterglow. 

She kissed him until she felt him tearing at the straps of her armor with fast, feverish motions. Scab’s breath hissed in sharply when she caught one of his wrists and pushed it back down to the stone. He stared up at her with blind devotion written all over his face while she licked her own blood from his lips. 

“Such a good boy,” she purred. She wiped her soiled hand off on his chest, smearing him with the evidence of the deed. Scab arched into her touch. 

“Let me—” he hissed, his breath catching in his throat. He swallowed hard, the taste of her lingering on his tongue and threatening to overwhelm him, then gathered the last shreds of his willpower together to say, “Let me take you away from here, Ivory. Far away. Back to Seattle. You’ll be a queen there.”

She hushed him and shook her head. “No, Scab. This is where we belong.”

He tore his wrist from her grip and forced himself up against her with a deep growl, his fingers hooking into the front of her armor and digging in insistently. Ivory almost struck him back down to the ground, but the vicious expression on his face delighted her enough to give her pause. 

“I won’t go,” he snarled against her lips. 

“I thought you might say that, my pet.”

“I’ll tear your Sisters apart if I have to.”

“Will you, now?” 

Scab growled savagely when her arms wrapped around him and pulled him in. “Let me do it.”

“No, darling, no,” Ivory murmured. She kissed him softly to appease him. His teeth bared deliciously against her lips, and the sensation fired up all of her animal instincts. She could taste the blood and the need on his tongue. 

“I like hearing you call me darling ,” he rasped. He took a sharp snap at her lip and barely missed. “Say it again.”

“Now, now. Say please.” 

“No.” His fingers tightened into the straps of her armor insistently. “No, saying please is only a game. You know that.”

“Mmm, but you say it so nicely,” Ivory taunted. 

Scab’s teeth scraped her ear. His voice was dark and hungry. “Ivory...”

“Very well, my darling,” she sighed at last. 

He felt her hands against the back of his skull, caressing him, pulling him in to return his affection, or whatever it could be called. Scab couldn’t help but lean into her touch when he felt her nuzzle intimately against his shoulder and hold him close. Her voice was soft and sounded more than pleased when she said, “So distraught at the idea of having to leave me, aren’t you, Scab? Maybe you were right and you’ve fallen in love with me after all. Maybe it runs in the blood. If Dmitri was so deeply flawed, perhaps he passed it along to Julius, and he to you. Stranger things have happened, after all…”

Ivory’s fingers roamed over Scab’s shoulders and thrilled at the sensation of his muscles tensing and coiling at her touch. He felt ready to spring into battle. It was easy to forget that Scab was stronger than he looked, especially while he was begging her to have her way with him, but she knew that underestimating him had been the death of many a vampire. Ivory found his body count to be one of his most attractive qualities, to be completely fair. 

She tried to quell the growl that had started up inside of Scab’s chest with a few gentle kisses on his shoulder, but it only grew louder the more she touched him.

“How many of your Sisters do you think I can kill before they take me down, Ivory?” he snarled into her ear as his grip on her tightened dangerously. “I think two, at least.” 

“Don’t make empty threats.”

“Far from empty.”

Ivory hushed him softly. She found one of his hands with her own and pried it off of her armor with some difficulty. When she raised Scab’s wrist to her lips, at first she felt his fingers tighten against the side of her jaw as if he meant to crush it. His hand relaxed little by little, against his instincts, when Ivory kissed the hollow of his wrist. She heard his snarl die down to a low, simmering rumble when she closed her mouth gently over his pulse. 

She wanted to bite into him, but that would only stoke the fire. Instead she pressed her lips against the spot where she’d bitten him first, back when the daywalker had first changed her. His body softened a little when he felt her kiss him there. 

“I won’t go,” Scab insisted again, through his teeth. He let his eyes close while Ivory’s lips brought back the memory of the turning. He would never forget that first delicious sensation of her breaking his skin. She had held him afterward, comforted and cared for him in a way that no other creature had since the Rising. That wasn’t something he planned to give up, regardless of how the Sisterhood felt. 

His fingers curled affectionately against her cheek when she pinned him with a gaze so dark he got lost in it. Ivory’s eyes made him feel like he was staring straight into the night itself. 

“You intend to die just for the sake of being stubborn? Think of what a waste it would be, Scab,” she purred. “Your maker still walks the earth. You said so yourself. Don’t you want your vengeance? Don’t you want to taste his blood before your life ends?” 

“Yours would be more than enough.”

“You’ll be a king back among your kind. With Dmitri gone, with Julius gone, it’s all yours. Never thought you would be the next in line, did you?”

She watched his lips twitch into a smile at the thought of that. For a moment Ivory thought that his pride and ambition had gotten the better of him and assured his cooperation, but then she saw the smile sharpen into a cunning grin. 

“You’re right,” he said as he leaned into her and found her forehead with his own. “I’ll have an army of my own.”

“All the better to hunt down Julius.”

“Mmm, no, Ivory.”

She felt his cheek brush against hers just before he kissed it. He couldn’t hide the satisfaction in his voice when he murmured, “All the better to come back for you. The Sisterhood was never difficult to track. Besides, sniffing you out will be easy, won’t it? You’ll smell so familiar .”

Ivory pushed him away with a derisive laugh and rolled off of him, only to feel him catch the hem of her skirts to get her attention again. 

“I told you,” he said sharply. “I told you I’d tear the world apart for you.”

“You’d restart the blood feud? Lead your pack to ruin?” Ivory demanded. “You’d be no match for the Sisterhood.”

“Your Order is weakened.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Never. I'm professing my—whatever it was.”

Ivory narrowed her eyes and scanned him for any sign of trickery. All she could see reflected back in his face was hunger. Or, rather, “whatever it was”. 

She moved away and sat back against the stone sarcophagus, trying to measure exactly how great a threat Scab would be with an army of feral daywalkers at his heels. He was grinning back at her with a mischievous light in his eyes. Ivory saw his tongue flash over his lips to lick away the last of the blood she’d left on him. She could see the energetic tremor revving up in him again, and even though she knew he was thinking about the bloodbath he would bring down on the Sisters if they forced his hand, she liked seeing how excited he was at the idea of starting a war over her. 

Ivory found his shirt on the ground where she’d thrown it and pushed it over to him, but he didn’t put it on. He only smiled.

“Ivory.” 

“What?”

“Do you know what a zipper is?”

She looked at him in silence for a moment and then made her final judgment; yes, Scab would be a threat if they let him go. That was certain. After all, he had all manner of arcane knowledge of the modern era, which was enough to rival the ancient magic of the Sisterhood. 

“No,” Ivory said. “And while we’re on the subject, I have been wondering what a soda bottle is, too.”

Scab’s face lit up, and when Ivory beckoned him to come closer, he closed the distance on all fours and settled himself beside her against the sarcophagus. Ivory’s fingertips found his face and brought it to her own for one last kiss, and then she pulled one of his arms over her shoulders and the two of them nestled down in the dark.

Once they were comfortable, Scab gestured helpfully to his jeans. 

“Let’s start with zippers.”