“My boots give it away, I guess. And my ink?” I can’t help but grin. I must indeed look like a well-dressed hillbilly compared to him. An observer would find us an odd combination. On top of the tattoos and the informal attire, my hair is long and black, pulled back in a ponytail, and my goatee’s like a biker’s, long and bushy enough to braid. I most likely resemble a Hell’s Angel trying to look nice but not quite pulling it off. Marcus, on the other hand, is the picture of a wealthy, pampered European, with his white silk shirt, beige linen pants, expensive watch, golden neck chain, and designer leather dress shoes. Scottish highlander in my human years, Appalachian for most of my vampire existence, I can’t hide my rough edges even when I try. Especially from a gaze as steady and searching as his.
“And your beard betrays you,
paganus
,
rusticus
. You look like a Confederate general. You remind me of Enkidu. In need of taming, I think.”
“Enkidu? In the Sumerian
Epic of Gilgamesh
, right? The hairy wild man who came down from the mountains to be the comrade and lover of the great hero Gilgamesh.”
“You are better educated than I expected. That is correct. Let me see your bare chest, please, my mountain redneck, my Appalachian Enkidu.”
My cock hardens beneath the table. I’d forgotten how exciting it is to be told what to do by a man much stronger than I.
“Here?” I say, half turning toward the tables of diners.
“I own Rome. I do what I please. Tonight you will do what I please. Just a glimpse.”
Blushing, I pull my T-shirt up to my neck, baring my belly and chest.
Marcus takes a long, low breath, staring at my exposed torso. “Just as I imagined. Hairy as a savage. As an animal in need of a rider. Finish your drink, boy, and I will give you a tour of the Palatine. I will break you. I will make your chill skin sweat.”
II.
The ruins are fluted gray in the moonlight. Under flat-topped cypresses, upon the crest of the Palatine Hill, we explore the remains of imperial palaces long abandoned, strong with the scent of pines and, this late at night, closed to tourists. Rubble now, once the homes of Augustus, Tiberius, Septimus Severus, Domitian. The fragments of columns, arcades, fountains, even a small stadium. Below us, modern Rome steams in the night, the lights of traffic pouring along its streets like phosphorescent lemmings.
“Did you know any of them? The Caesars?” I stroke a clump of oleander bloom. It is silent here, save for the distant noises of traffic and the cheeping of summer insects in the bushes and trees about us. Moonbeams slant over Marcus’s white face as he moves closer to me.
“A few. Caligula raped me. He was assassinated long before I could take my revenge. I was turned in the reign of Claudius.” Marcus looks down at the ruined rocks of the Forum, illuminated by searchlights for the benefit of tourists, and toward the monumental buildings atop the Capitoline Hill. “Take off your shirt.”
I pull the garment over my head. Marcus takes it, laying it carefully on a jagged chunk of marble he first brushes off with the side of his hand. He turns to me now, resting his hands on my shoulders. “So you have come to Rome to pay your respects?”
I gaze up at him, trying not to tremble. “Yes, sir.”
“To the Caesars or to me?”
“Both.” It is hard to meet his gaze, yet impossible to look away. My victims must feel the same when I entrance them. “In all my centuries, I have never come to Rome. It is more beautiful than I ever imagined. I would like your permission to linger here, and to return when I please.”
“And you are ready to pay the price? For a nest in my realm? For the freedom to feed here? This is, I sense, a price you are unaccustomed to.”
“I am unaccustomed, but I am ready,” I say. “Sir.”
Marcus nods. Moonlight gleams off his teeth, a true smile, wide with triumph. His fingers find my chest, stroking the thick fur there. I wrap my arms around his waist, bow my head, and lean against him. He tugs at my nipples, then the rims of hair around them, then the tangled bush of my beard.
“Strip,” murmurs Marcus. He gives me a gentle shove backward. “And unbind your hair.”
Boots first, then jeans, then the leather cord in my ponytail, discarded one by one in dry grass. Entirely naked, vulnerable, I stand before him, in warm Roman breezes, in the scent of wildflowers, in moonlight. I stare down at my exposed body, at my inked and muscled arms, at my hairy belly and chest, my hairy legs, trying to see myself as he sees me. It has been many, many years since I have submitted to another vampire, or felt undead lust raking me with such sharp zeal. Marcus’s eyes are gleaming, the blue gone a fiery red. “Shaggy brute,” he whispers, tousling the long hair framing my face, rifling my belly fur, patting the face of the Horned God inked into my left arm, the barbed-wire band inked into my right. “Tattooed like your feral ancestors, those mad Celts. The antlered god of the Gauls, I see. God of beasts and mountains, yes? A hirsute, hard-cocked Dionysus. Apropos. My deity is Mithras. You will show him homage later.”
From his back pocket, Marcus fetches something gleaming. “A surprise,” he says, holding it before me. I can feel it already, the shining power that can make my head swim and my muscles grow feeble. Silver. He’s brandishing a pair of leather-lined silver handcuffs. Open and ready to use.
I step back, unsure. “Sir? You never mentioned this. I never agreed—”
Marcus outflanks me in a split second, faster than I can further react. Again the difference in our powers gives me some sense of how outmatched my human victims must feel. He pulls my wrists behind me before I know he’s there. But rather than subdue me further, rather than locking the cuffs, he simply stops. I stand there, trembling. A blunt hardness that must be his erection bumps my back. It seems that subduing me is exciting him as much as being subdued is exciting me.
“Trust me, barbarian. I will make this sweet. I will make you enjoy this.” Marcus sniffs me and noisily licks his lips. “Ah, you are sweating now. You stink. You smell like mud and grass and woodland. You smell like the Gallic prisoners I used to take in Mamertine Prison, only yards from here. Your hair”—he takes a strand in his teeth and pulls—“and your unruly beard remind me of them.” He nips the skin over my spine. I can feel his chin’s scratchy stubble. “Dirty and wild…forest scum, so proud at first before they were chained and raped and broken. Warriors become slaves…they sobbed and shook beneath me. They lay in the prison’s straw and dung and wrapped their mighty arms about my feet and begged me for release. Will you sob for me?”
“No,” I say, teeth gritted. “I’m no slave.”
“But you will submit?”
“Yes.”
“You might sob yet. We shall see.” The cuff snaps over my right wrist, painfully tight. The leather saves me from that terrible burn, but the poisonous silver’s near enough to cause my knees to buckle. I would drop to the ground, but Marcus wraps an arm around my neck and heaves me upright. His knuckles graze my ass cheeks before the cuffs lock just as tightly about my other wrist. He releases me; groaning despite myself, hands firmly secured behind me, I sink to my knees and fall on my side in the grass. The silver weakness shudders through me, nauseating.
Marcus nudges my chin with his elegant shoe. Then he steps back, toes off each shoe, and strips, very slowly, laying each article of clothing in the grass with such care you’d think the fabric was fragile as glass. I roll with discomfort onto my cuffed hands to watch as his muscular body, as hard and perfectly defined as a gymnast’s, is revealed. Entirely naked, he stands over me, astride my waist. His body is pale, smooth, gleaming like the face of the moon, a study in Carrara marble, with a dusting of gold. “I was quite the athlete when I died,” he says, running hands over his curved pectorals, big brown nipples, and ridged stomach before taking his fur-clouded cock in hand. It lengthens rapidly in his grasp, escaping its skin-sheath. It is intimidatingly huge. The head glistens, slick and knobby, moonlit pommel of a sword. I am, I suspect, soon going to be hurting bad.
By now I’m hard as well. “I can see your appreciation, boy.” Laughing, Marcus presses a bare foot against my cock. “Stiff with shame, I see. I know men like you. I know them and I love them. There is a secret slave, very frightened yet very hungry, inside that coarse Scots warrior, is there not? Something tender, submissive, shy? A boy eager to suffer, to endure, to be enveloped and devoured and rocked like a child?”
I shake my head, but my denial has no power. There’s my body’s unarguably honest answer, beneath Marcus’s foot, hard between my thighs. He presses down, and I gasp.
“Not much fight in you with those cuffs, highlander?” He presses harder.
“No, sir. Silver saps my strength almost entirely. How did you—?”
“Handle silver without consequence? After my first thousand years it lost its power over me. Now it barely makes me tingle.” He lifts his foot from my crotch only to press his sole against my mouth. “Lick, boy. Let Caledonia at last give Rome her due.”
I run my tongue over his foot. Hard as embossed steel. Smooth and taut as the skin of ripe fruit. He nudges me onto my side. I moan as he pushes his big toe into my mouth.
“Suck, barbarian.”
I do. I suck, lick, nibble. More toes join the first, my mouth crammed full. He tastes like metal and wind. I stretch my jaw, taking him in further.
Abruptly he pulls his foot from my face and steps back.
“Get up here, wild one, my Enkidu. It’s time to show your fealty.”
With effort I rise to my knees, and, kneeling, shuffle over to him. I’ve hardly opened my mouth before his bulky cock’s thrust inside me to the hilt, balls pressed into my beard. His hands grip my long hair, holding my head still while he rides my face. My throat expands, contracts. I choke and slobber. My gorge rises; I force it back. He pounds my mouth steadily, his pre-cum streaking my tongue with salt. Drool drips off my chin. I try to bring subtle techniques into play, try to lick the head, run my tongue up and down the shaft, but to no avail. Marcus wants nothing but a hole, a deep one. He batters the back of my throat the way Hebridean oceans batter sea cliffs, unceasing, inexhaustible.
Just when I think the savage throat-beating I’m getting will soon ensure me a white mouthful of foam, Marcus lifts me by the arms, spins me, and throws me onto my belly in the grass. He’s on top of me a split second after I hit the ground, one hand on the back of my neck, shoving my face against the earth, another wrapped around my chest. “Ah, yes. This is what you came to Rome for, is it not?” he whispers in my ear, his cock bumping my buttocks. “I enter you, you enter my kingdom? Yes? Yes?”
“Yes,” I groan. Heat-dead grasses scrape my face; Roman earth dusts my lips. I grit my teeth, readying myself for the pain.
But Marcus is taking his time. His lips brush my ear. “How long, barbarian? How long since you were taken this way?” Beneath me, his fingers trap a nipple. His nails begin to dig.
“Sir, my lover Matt sometimes…we switch. We even…we have silver cuffs at home.”
“Ah, so you bottom occasionally? Then this will not be as grand a trauma as I’d imagined? A pity. How long since another vampire took you then?”
“Half a century, sir. In Santorini.”
“Yes? The blood is strong there. Older even than mine.” Marcus’s hand leaves my neck, positioning his cock against my tightness. “You want this, do you not?”
Again, I know better than to lie. “Yes, sir. I don’t want to want it, but I do.”
“Beg me, my hirsute captive,” Marcus sighs. “Beg me to take you.”
I hesitate only for a second. That long-submerged part of me is rising, eager. “Please, sir. Please, Marcus. Take me…” I arch my ass, rub it against him, brush his hard belly with my bound hands. “I can’t fight you. I’m too weak. I’m your captive, sir. Do what you please.”
“And so I shall.” He slips down my body. His fingers play over my ass, tugging on the cheek and cleft hair, and then his hands clutch my hips and his teeth sink into my right buttock.
“Huhhhh,” I gasp into the grass. His lips clamp down, sealing the sudden wound, sucking hard. I can feel my strength receding further, the silver-weakness mingling now with blood loss.
The suction stops. Liquid smeared between my ass cheeks. Lubrication of my own blood. I grunt as his finger enters me. I buck back onto his hand. Another finger slides inside. “Open. Open for Rome,” Marcus whispers. His muscled weight, like a great sculpture, settles atop me, his cockhead pressing against me, his arm wrapped around my torso.
“Be easy, highlander. I will care for you well.”
I nod, trying to will myself open. His cockhead replaces his fingers, easing inside. Damn, so thick. Pain spasms through me, forcing out a whimper.
“Easy, boy.” To my surprise, Marcus does not simply shove it in and rape me, as the earlier mouth-pounding suggested that he might. Instead, to my relief, he moves the head in and out in short strokes. He pulls out, adds more bloody lube, pushes the head in again. More shallow strokes, till the pain at last recedes and he can sense my readiness. Then, very slowly, with surprising gentleness, he slides entirely inside, filling me completely. More waves of pain; I give a loud, deep moan. Marcus’s hand grips my jaw, palm pressed tightly over my mouth.
“Quiet now, boy. There, there. Yes.” Cocking his hips, he moves slowly in and out, in and out. I moan inside his muffling grip. “Ruffian. Lovely, smelly, hairy Scot. I will use you now, mountain man, will I not? Beg me to use you. Do you not want to be used? Used hard?”