I made it a personal challenge.
Adelie was on a couch in the far corner, her costume disheveled and hiked up. It wasn’t quite enough to show her off to the world, but the world wouldn’t have cared at that moment. Most of them were doing exactly the same thing she was. She had picked a very good specimen, and she was enjoying herself. Thoroughly.
“Oh, Gwen.” She sighed. “You should taste this one. I waited for him this year. The way the punch makes him taste…” Her undulations over this man never stopped as she spoke, and for someone who could be shy—for a vampire—about her sexual proclivities, I wondered how much of the drugged blood she’d had.
I smirked. “Save him for me.”
She put a hand on my arm to stop me from walking away. “No, taste him. Now.”
“You’re…” I raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”
“Mmm. He’s tasty, and he needs to come. I’ve finished three times up here.”
I giggled. She was very, very drunk.
I sat next to the man on the couch and checked him out. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but there was something about the strong features that was highly appealing. He had a lustful look in his eyes, stuck there almost. He was enjoying Adelie as much as she was enjoying him.
I stated conversationally, “My friend tells me your blood is delicious.”
He smiled. “She said the same to me. I do know her pussy is amazing.”
I took his arm and put it on my lap, deciding I would wind him up first. Lazily tracing circles around the skin on his wrist, I sought out the pulse with my finger first, and then slowly stroked my thumb over it. Bringing the wrist to my mouth, I changed from circling with my finger to using the tip of my tongue to create the same pattern. His breath beat in his chest as he watched me, his eyes wide.
Moving from the tip of my tongue to the broader part, I licked the salt from his skin. Even that tasted good, and I suspected I’d had a lot of blood, as well. Dropping my fangs as he watched, I scraped across his skin to where my thumb hadn’t stopped stroking his pulse and then pressed them down to the vein just below his skin. I wrapped my lips around the small wounds and pulled lightly on his blood.
“Sh-sh-shit,” he stuttered, and his eyes rolled back and closed. “Oh, shit. Again.”
With the taste of his blood, I had no problem complying. He was the flavor of perfectly prepared chocolate soufflé. A raspberry cream. A chocolate sorbetto. A hint of the finest figs, all with an underlying scent of male and man. This one probably had a vampire sire in his family somewhere, and they were long, long down the line, but the spice there was unmistakable.
“Oh, fuck yes,” he hissed.
I licked between each hard draw. He gasped and thrashed anew. This one liked a touch of pain with his pleasure, and I was happy to help. Adelie’s breathing sped up with her fourth approaching orgasm, and I wanted him to give her the best climax.
I drove my fangs in deep and drew on his vein as hard as I could without breaking him.
He screamed and thrust upward.
The blood taste altered once again to let me know he had come.
Adelie yelped with her own climax.
I sucked at his wrist as the two of them wrung the sex from each other.
This time, I sealed his wrist for good and laid it across his chest.
Adelie collapsed on top of him. “Mm. Gwen. Isn’t he wonderful?”
“Oh, I can see you enjoyed him.” I patted her on the shoulder as she made herself comfortable. “Don’t forget to go to bed at some point, Adelie. We have a Challenge tomorrow.”
“Mm.” She groaned as she looked at the man underneath her. “Get hard again, Rinaldo. I want to go again.”
I laughed as I walked away. Poor Rinaldo. He would be so sore tomorrow and have very little to remember for it. Adelie would probably leave him some nice memories, though. She loved her little human pets.
I meandered through the rooms, looking at the faces of the humans and vampires, some engaged in simple drinking, other in more torrid sex acts. There was nothing short of an orgy in another corner of the room. I started to count the bodies and laughed when I got to ten, and I wasn’t done. I gave up trying to count. They were moving too much and were enjoying the pile they were in.
When I spotted Cato in a different corner, with a woman who looked frighteningly like my mother, I had to leave the room before my night was spoiled.
I walked through the now virtually empty dining room to the dance floor. More humans and vampires to watch, and I did revel in this. Adelie had been right. This was a much better version of the Blood Rite. Everyone, even the humans, was enjoying themselves.
I wanted to throw myself into the utter debauchery of the show, but I had a Challenge the next morning and waking up still drunk and probably sore, was a bad idea. I permitted myself one more human, though.
Watching the bodies swirl and loop, I spotted a few men who interested me. They were all starting to look tired, and it was going to be time to either bed them for real or send them home. I wanted one that was not overly tired.
A man on the other side of the dance floor caught my eye. He wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t breathtakingly handsome, but as Adelie’s Rinaldo, something was interesting and alluring about him.
Crossing the dance floor, I took his hand. “A dance, sir?”
He spun me out onto the floor and pulled me back into his arms. “With a gorgeous woman like you? Of course.”
I smiled, humored by his flamboyant words.
“You are utterly beautiful.”
I laughed. “I am wearing makeup.”
“I can see it in your eyes.”
I let them spark red. “Can you?”
“Mierda, that’s hot. How did you do that?”
“Come closer, I’ll tell you.”
I quirked my lip in a smile as he lowered his head to my mouth.
Sinking my fangs into his neck, I drew on his vein—
I jumped back away from him in the next instant, and spit the blood all over his face.
Poison.
The human was poisoned.
I stared at him, horrified.
In the next second, he fell to the floor dead. Someone had been controlling him, keeping him alive until someone took a taste.
No, I corrected myself as I could still taste his blood on my lips, not just someone. Me. They’d found a man they knew I would find attractive and made sure he was in my path.
Moving to the wall, and keeping it to my back, I stared at the melee. There had to be someone in here who hated me or wanted me dead. The blood had been made with killing me in mind, I just knew it. It would be my luck. And they kept the human alive for me.
Were they still here?
I stuck to the edge of the room, my vampire senses as acute as I could force them—with all the drunken blood in my body. I was glad I hadn’t thrown myself into the revelries. I’d be dead if I had. Moving quickly into the mostly empty dining room again, I put my ass in a chair and my back against the wall.