'Good! As for the rest: I trust Gorvi not at all. And the brothers Killglance are deranged. Well, so is Canker for that matter. But crazy like a fox, aye!' 'And the Lady Wratha?'
'We shall see what we shall see. She is very beautiful.' Nestor was uncertain. 'She is a Lady.'
'Huh/' Zahar felt obliged to return; and, when Nestor looked at him: 'I have heard stories, Lord.'
'Then tell me all,' said Nestor. 'But some other time.' They were at the foot of the staircase where it swept up to Nestor's apartments. 'Sleep well, Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri,' said Zahar.
'Be sure of it,' Nestor answered, and climbed the stairs. A fire burned in his hearth; there was water in an earthen bowl; the two girls were in his bed, already asleep. After washing himself, Nestor climbed in with them. One of them murmured and reached for his member. He brushed her hand away. Time now for sleep. Time for the other later.
And between the vampire girls, soft and warm and musty, he slept like a dead man. Or one who is undead, anyway ...
V
Mangemanse - Spiders - Canker's Moon Lure
When Nestor woke up the girls were still there, still asleep. Neither Grig nor Zahar had come to awaken him, for he had not slept out his full eight hours. The thing inside him had awakened him, for it had needs of its own; rather, its needs were now Nestor's. It required to grow, wherefore he was required to be up and about, active, a vampire. And now he must take sustenance not only for himself, but also for his leech, his parasite.
Nestor had eaten well in Wrathspire and shouldn't be hungry, yet deep inside him there was a different hunger. In his stretching bones an ache; in his loins a ripeness requiring an outlet; and in this core which he'd never even known was a part of him, a great emptiness, a gnawing red hunger. It was blind and it was insistent, and he knew that it was red. It was salt and it was life and it was death .. . and undeath. Now that he was Wamphyri, it was his weird, unnatural nature.
His vampire women slept on. The soft loose breasts of one were in his face; the other was behind him, a leg draped across his thigh, the pubic covering of her quiescent core rough where it pressed against skin which grew ever more sensitive, even to the texture of shadows and the breath of bats. In the silence, Nestor could hear the hearts of the women pumping, the coursing of the blood in their veins.
From below, through the honeycombed rock of Suck-scar, he felt the motion of thralls where they patrolled, the murmur of far-off voices, the hum or chitter ... of great bats, yes! His own Desmodus colony, where they clustered in the crevices of a dark lodge of their own. While from outside, from above -
- He could feel the sear of the sun on Wrathspire! Which was one of the several things that had awakened him. His skin, previously itchy from the touch of the musty hair of the woman sleeping behind him, now crawled. He knew that the sun was up, burning on Wrathspire, and that his own days of sunlight were gone forever.
For a moment there was panic as all the memories of the last few hours of his life crowded where none had been before - as they ordered themselves and firmed from what might have been spumy dreamstuff into the rock of reality - and he knew where and what he was. Panic, as his own heart pounded a little faster, his limbs stiffened to immobility, and all of his vampire awareness reached out like a mist from him, like a presence in its own right, to gauge the day for danger. But there was no danger for this was his place, Suck-scar, and all that it contained was his.
Everything ...