Summary

Enigmatic guys are hot. Michael is of the opinion, though, that Wild Bill manages to take it to an entirely new level.

For some time, Michael has suspected that Bill has done more than just dabble in art. As with every other piece of his personal history, Bill plays his cards close to his chest. But when he lets on that a mural he painted before his change might still exist, Michael is dying to see it—and Bill has never been good at saying no.

Only fragments of the building remain, but it's possible Wild Bill's painting is still there. Unfortunately, there's a lot more in the ruins than Bill and Michael bargained for.

 

Excerpt

Steam hissed from dull chrome hulk of the autoclave and wended up the walls, where it seemed like it could work its way into the electrical system and short out the whole building. All the wiring was on the outside of the walls—the light switches, the conduits holding the wires, the two-pronged outlets without any ground hole. It was as if whoever’d converted the building from gaslight to electricity had never been fully convinced that electric power was more than a passing phase, and that soon enough they’d simply need to tear it out to make way for the next ridiculous fad.

I suspected Melba was responsible for the code-nightmare that hummed through her building. Directly responsible.

She must’ve taken my staring for admiration. “Yeah, I run a clean shop,” she said. Her voice was so low and rough the telemarketers probably addressed her as “sir.” If she even had a phone.

“Not like you can catch anything over the Dracula Bug,” she added, “but back when I trained, you could lose your arm to a staph infection. Then there goes your shop’s reputation, right down the can.”

“I don’t have the—”

“Don’t sass me, kid. You want ink or not?”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. “Sorry.”

She tied a red scarf around her curly brown bob. A few strokes of lipstick and she would’ve looked like Rosie the Riveter, with her men’s slacks and her rolled-back cuffs. Except the arms beneath those cuffs were covered with colorful sleeves of ink. Oriental flowers, dragons, traditional motifs like you’d see on someone’s grandfather—just as faded, too, though Melba’s skin was still smooth and firm.

“You do piercings, right?” Wild Bill appeared to be talking to one of the many panthers on the wall of flash. “Maybe I should get another tongue stud…or a Prince Albert.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Melba warned him. “Vamps shouldn’t pierce anything that might heal shut.”

He glanced back over his shoulder at us and leered. “Wouldn’t want to chip Michael’s pretty teeth, anyway.”

“You think you can shock me by talking about your pecker? Nothing shocks me. People think sex is shocking? That ain’t the half of it. I see coloreds and whites getting married now when they couldn’t even drink from the same bubbler before. I treated a whole battalion sprayed with mustard gas, skin practically fell right off ’em and they screamed louder than the amputees. And the smell….” Her gaze went somewhere far, far away.

“Which war?” I asked.

“The Great War.”

History had never been my strongest subject. I nodded gravely, as if I knew what she was talking about, and made a mental note to check Wikipedia later.

“All right, show me what you want.”

I peeled up the sleeve of my T-shirt and showed her the thorn armband Bill had drawn on me earlier.

“That’s not how it’s done—you draw it out on paper and I make a sterile transfer.”

“Bullshit,” Bill said amiably. He hiked up the side of his jacket and pointed to one of his tattoos—I’m not sure which. He’s got a hodgepodge of them that look a lot like the wall of flash. “That’s how I did this one.”

Melba gave him a withering look, which he ignored, then she said to me, “If you didn’t have the Dracula Bug, I’d wash it off you and make you start from scratch, and do it right. Good thing bacteria won’t stand a chance against it.”

“But I don’t—”

Her mouth was at my ear. I hadn’t even seen her move—it was like she’d appeared there. “That blood you brought with you to barter—you drank some of it. I can smell it on you. Maybe you still eat and crap and run around after sunrise, but that bug’s inside you all the same.” My heart started hammering in my throat, and she backed off to a more conversational distance. “Don’t look so blue. That’ll be a fine-looking tat.”

Melba pointed at an old dentists’ chair that looked like something out of a Marilyn Manson video. “Sit.”

I obeyed.

Metal clacked against metal. She pulled a straight razor out of the autoclave and began stropping it, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Both Melba and Wild Bill jerked around to look at me as if I’d just shouted, even though I hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t even moved. “No one told me straight razors were involved.”

“I just gotta shave the area. Don’t worry, I won’t cut you. I been doing this since your great-grandpa was nothing more than a gleam in his daddy’s eye.”

I squirmed. “No, that’s not it. I had a bad experience with a straight razor once.”

“Forget about it.” She pumped some surgical soap onto her fingertips and smeared it over the design. “This part don’t hurt at all. Now buck up and take it like a man.”

Wild Bill drifted toward the chair and peered over Melba’s shoulder.

I clenched everything—my teeth, my eyes, even my ass—as she swept the blade over me. I hardly felt it. But Marushka had been precise, too.

The shave was over in a second, and Melba wiped off the excess soap with a wad of gauze. I looked down at my bicep. She’d shaved me so precisely she hadn’t even taken off any of the marker. She said, “This next part, you will feel. I won’t think you’re sissies or nothing if you want to hold hands. I seen sailors cry on their buddies’ shoulders over the sting of the needle.”

“Make sure you leave the little hooks on the ends of the thorns,” Bill said. “That’s what makes ’em look wicked.”

“I know.” Melba inked her needle.

Wild Bill flanked me on the other side of the chair and curled a lock of my hair around his forefinger. “You don’t hafta do it just ’cos I drew it on you, y’know. You’re plenty hot without it.”

I reached up and caught his hand. “I want to.”

“Ready?” Melba asked. I nodded, and she touched the buzzing needle to my arm. It did hurt—and in fact it felt more like she was cutting my skin than piercing it—but I’d been hurt a lot worse than that. It was nothing I couldn’t handle.

Wild Bill laced his fingers through mine and stared down at me with an intense expression I couldn’t even begin to read. Melba stopped inking, dabbed, and started another line. Ink, dab, ink, dab…the steady rhythm was hypnotic. The antiseptic smells of the surgical soap and the rubbing alcohol almost masked the scent of fresh blood, but that familiar copper tang was still there, beneath it all.

I closed my eyes and tried to will myself not to get aroused. It wasn’t easy. Blood and pain and vampire were in the air, my triumvirate of kinks.

Wild Bill was still staring when I opened my eyes. He mouthed the words, “I love you,” and I worried I might bust out of my jeans, because that was the cherry on top.

Two hours later, I was down on all fours in the back of the van with a new tattoo—a Wild Bill original—and my jeans around my ankles.

“The sight of you getting inked was something else,” he said. His breath was cool and moist against the small of my back, where he trailed tantalizing wet kisses.

I forced myself not to beg him to stop messing around and get down to business. As far as I was concerned the tattoo was all the foreplay I wanted, and now I ached with the need to come.

He knew it. How could he not? And so he took his sweet time tracing each of my vertebrae with his tongue, petting my ass with his fingertip but never pushing in. I squeezed the air mattress and it made a sound like latex balloons rubbing together, and I bit back the word “please,” which was trying to force its way through my vocal cords.

Bill’s kisses wended their way lower. They drifted down my ass cheek and settled on my balls, which hitched up at the touch of his mouth.

I breathed carefully and did my damnedest not to tear a hole in the air mattress. Please. It was killing me to not say it.

Bill sucked one of my nuts into his mouth and dragged his tongue back and forth over the underside of my sack.

“It would be really awesome if you fucked me,” I mumbled into my forearm.

“I’m getting to it.”

I made a frustrated sound and pushed my ass toward him. “Thought you said I looked good.”

“More than just good.”

“So what’s the holdup?”

He worked his tongue into the crease of my thigh, then spoke cool words against my hot, wet skin. “I’m savoring.”

My pre-come pattered against the taut air mattress. I steeled myself against the feathery touches, the lingering wetness of his mouth and tongue, and I tried to pretend that my whole groin wasn’t aching for sweet release. That lasted about five seconds. Bill licked his fingertip and traced the rim of my ass so gently it almost tickled—but not quite. Another viscous drop hit.

“You’re torturing me.” My voice was so rough it didn’t even sound like mine.

He put his mouth to my ass and spoke, and the gentle vibration of his breath teased each and every nerve ending. “Now you know how I felt, watching you with a foot-long boner in your jeans while that old broad inked you.”

He fluttered his tongue over my hole and my breathing went ragged. “Can I come before dawn does?”

“You feel that too, huh?” He sat up, squirted some lube into his hand, gave himself a quick overhand stroke, then pushed a slippery finger up my ass. I bit back a noise, and he lingered there, felt around longer than he needed to so he could draw out the anticipation another agonizing moment. Finally, he pulled his fingers out and his cock was pressing there. Bill’s hung, and it felt even bigger when he did me like that, doggy-style. “You’re trying not to moan,” he whispered.

I didn’t say anything. My jaw was clenched too tightly.

“I can hear it, when you’re trying to be quiet. Your breathing changes.” He eased in and out a few times to make sure the lube was where we wanted it, then he started going at it. Hard. “That trips my trigger like you wouldn’t believe, kid.” He angled deep and started to pound me, and I saw stars. The pain was delicious. “Watching you squirm brings out the predator in me.”

I grunted and considered touching myself. I could probably come from him fucking me, I decided, even though he wasn’t really buffing my prostate, not from that angle. Didn’t matter. I was a different animal than I’d been when I first met him. Different things got me off now, dark things—blood and pain and vampire.

I breathed deep and tried to scent the bloody ink tang of the tattoo, but it was gone already, dried and scabbed over. I could remember the feeling of the tattoo gun slicing lines through my flesh like a sharp razor, and my dripping cock ached when I opened up that memory.

Bill fucked me hard. “Feel that?” he said in his whiskey voice. As if I could feel anything else.

“You’re in deep.”

“And your guts are molten.”

He wound my hair around his fist so he could pull me even harder onto his cock, and that was it, that sent me. I yelled out in shock and pain as my cock started pumping, and I spurted over and over, throbbed my come out onto the air mattress while my ass clenched convulsively around him. “Fuck, yeah, fuck,” he muttered, and his thrusts went slick and juicy, and the whole van reeked of sex and vampire.

Sometimes I can go a few times, but right then I felt like a dishrag that had been wrung out so hard it was nearly dry. I barely had time to shove the fitted sheet out of the way before Wild Bill pulled me down onto the plasticky flocked surface of the air mattress and mashed me against his chest.

“That was a little too rough, huh?”

“Uh-uh. Just right.”

He sighed into the hair he’d just yanked and kissed the top of my head. “That ink looks righteous on you. Not just saying it ’cos I drew it, either.”

“Mm.” The words thank you had been banished a long time ago.

 

Series

Channeling Morpheus Ebook Novelettes

Payback
Vertigo
Manikin
Tainted
Rebirth
Brazen
Snare
Fluid
Swarm
Elixir

Channeling Morpheus Shorts
Heaven Sent - takes place after Manikin
Jackpot - takes place after Elixir
Canine - takes place after Elixir

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