Chapter 80: Claimed

JAXON

The blood hits my tongue and the whole world tilts sideways.

It isn't like anything I've had before.

Not suppression-thin, not animal-thin, not even the rich, careful trickle she's given me in small doses these past weeks.

This is old and deep. It tastes like centuries, like something that shouldn't still be moving through a vein and yet clearly, impossibly, was.

"What is this," I manage, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. "It tastes different from human blood."

"It is something better," she says, watching me with an expression I can no longer read as simple affection. "Something you needed."

The pulse behind my eyes — the one I've spent years learning to live around, to suppress, to bargain with — doesn't just stir this time. It lunges, so violent and sudden that I drop the vial, glass shattering against the tile, and the room goes dark at the edges in a way that has nothing to do with the lights.

\[Finally.\]

The voice isn't in my head anymore. It's in the room.

I turn, and he's there, in the corner, where a shadow has no business standing up and having a face.

He is old, endless and there is something about his shape keeps sliding when I try to look directly at it, like my eyes refuse to hold the whole truth of him at once.

I know this man. This is the Vampire king from the underworld that my parents have been trying their best to make sure doesn't take over my body.

This is the man that has laid a claim to my birthright since the day I was born.

"What—" I can't finish the sentence.

"You feel it now," the Vampire God says, and his voice moves through the room like smoke, curling into every corner. "You are mine, fully, completely. No more half-measures. No more drugs choking you into something small and manageable." He turns, and I feel the weight of his attention like a hand closing around my throat. "I have finally claimed you, Jaxon."

"Claimed me?" I look at the doctor, desperate for this to make sense, for her to look as horrified as I feel. She doesn't. She's watching him with something close to reverence.

"Thank you," the god says to her, inclining his head. "My faithful subject. You've done well, feeding him toward this. Patient and recise."

"It was an honor," she says, while bowing. This nurse actually used siphoning powers to command me to her office and make me fall in love with her!! She was in all along. She manipulated me!

Gosh! I'm so stupid!!!

"You!!" The word comes out strangled. "You did this on purpose. All of it. The blood. The — you knew this whole time!"

"I've been preparing you," she says, gentle, as if that makes it kinder instead of worse. "You weren't ready before. You are now."

The god's attention slides back to me, and I feel it like pressure behind my skull, like fingers pressing into the soft places of my mind.

"I have errands for you," he says. "Missions. Things only a vessel as strong as you can accomplish. You've spent your whole life running from what you are, Jaxon. Your parents have been spending money trying to keep me away. That ends tonight."

"I'm not — I'm not your vessel. I will not do your evil deeds."

"You are exactly that." His voice sharpens, and the shadows in the room bend toward him like the whole space is tilting into his gravity. "You have been since the day you were born with my blood running through yours. The drugs only ever delayed the inevitable. Now you're mine, fully, and I intend to use you."

Something inside me cracks — not physically, but somewhere deeper, some last wall I didn't know I was still holding up until it gives way.

My vision floods red, not metaphor, not exaggeration, actual red, the whole lab washed in it, and underneath the hunger for blood something else wakes up too — the other half of what I am, the half I've suppressed just as carefully, just as desperately, for exactly this reason.

Two hungers, colliding, and no suppression left to hold either one back.

"There it is," the god murmurs, delighted, almost fond. "Both of you, awake at once. I wondered how long you could keep them apart."

I look at the doctor, and for one horrifying second I don't see the woman I told myself I loved an hour ago.

I see something else entirely — something my body wants with a violence that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with the two starving things now loose inside me at the same time.

"You should be afraid of me right now," I say, and my voice comes out wrong, layered, something underneath it that isn't mine.

"I'm not," she says, and she isn't lying. She looks pleased. She looks like a woman watching a plan click perfectly into place.

"You should be."

"Jaxon..."

I don't remember deciding to move. One second there's distance between us, careful, deliberate distance, the kind I've maintained for weeks out of respect, out of restraint, out of every ounce of control I had left — and the next second there isn't any distance at all.

The god laughs, low and satisfied, from his corner of the room that isn't quite a corner anymore, watching the way you'd watch something you built finally start running the way you always intended.

"Good boy," he says.

The lights flicker once, and go out. I reach for the doctor and I hold her neck with my two hands. I have the intent of squeezing the life out of her.

My face is red and veiny and my mind is swimming with visions. Visions of her life. Visions of how she was also initiated into this. I am suddenly calm and my Succubus side takes over.

I don't feel rage and anger anymore. I feel horniness. A very intense one.

So, I reach down and kiss her violently.