Chapter One

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Blood Calls to Blood
By Joan Z and Neichan

Banner by Texas Aries...see it posted under her name in "Faces" .

Mike woke up again in a cold sweat, cock hard and pulsing, aching for release. He staggered from the bed, gulping air, heading towards the bathroom. He braced himself on the counter and just breathed, deep anchoring breaths, his head hung down, eyes closed, and then opened to look at his white fingers as he clutched the edge of the counter. The vivid dreams were more frequent now, if he could call them dreams. Erotic nightmares would be more accurate. They were like nothing he’d ever experienced before.

It had started slowly, this pull to Henry. The vampire had been wounded, bleeding faster than was healthy, even for a vampire. Henry needed blood to heal, more than Vicki could safely give. Vicki asked him to help, her eyes were moist and she had come close to pleading with him before he reluctantly gave in.

He did it more to gain points with her and to banish the pain of loss from her eyes than because he wanted to save Henry. Though Henry had saved Vicki’s life and it wasn’t the first time, so he let the vampire grip a weak handful of his hair, bend back his neck to a painful angle and sink his teeth into his jugular to drink.

Thinking back on it he could see the beginning now, but then… It was nothing but a little apprehension, and a vague nausea at what he was letting happen. Waking up with the bite scar aching and a hard on was no different from any man waking up hard. He didn’t really connect the two at first.

Well, maybe he was a bit harder then usual upon waking, but there were no dreams then, at least none he could remember. There was the whisper of a touch, maybe ghostly lips lingering on his throat when he woke each morning, but it could have been no more then the brush of a blanket.

He had expected the apprehension to fade the same way it did after other high stress situations. He was a police detective; high stress was part of the job description. It never stuck around more than a day or two. There was always something else, something worse, some horrific new murder or death to drive it from his mind.

And something else had come along. But it didn’t eliminate the apprehension and then the dreams started.

He got shot, hit by a ricochet. It shouldn’t have been bad, wouldn’t have been except that the bullet nicked his femoral artery. He would have bled out in a minute, but it was Vicki’s case that he was following up on and the silent, watchful Henry was there with her.

Henry, in one spot and then another, seemingly not to have moved through the space between the two points at all, was suddenly there putting pressure on the wound. His hands were big, hard and fierce as he staunched as much of the flow as he could. “Do you want me?” Henry asked. A question Mike didn’t understand and couldn’t find the words to answer.

Mike just sat looking at the blood spurting between Henry’s fingers.

Henry spoke again, his voice modulated to a deep baritone that pulled Mike’s mind to attention. “I can stop the bleeding,” Henry said, “and save your life. Do you want me?” The vampire looked at him with ancient black eyes, His dark silken hair formed waves to frame his pale face. Henry waited and seemed to search Mike’s soul for the truth of it. Blood pulsed through his fingers with each beat of Mike’s heart.

“Answer me now, Celluci!” Henry ordered; his voice was terrible, deep and echoing with command. Mike tried to raise his hand and stop the words from smashing into his brain. They got through anyway, forcing him to think.

Mike was no fool. He knew the difference between a steady bleed and a pumping spurt. He could already feel his brain closing down and wrapping him in cool, wet cotton. He pushed through the maze of cotton walls that made up his thoughts and struggled to form words. “Do it,” he said and then laid back and closed his eyes. Surrendering to whatever happened next.

He didn’t see the vampire open his wrist and drip blood into the wound, but Mike felt the slow fading away stop, felt the heat spread across his wound and sink inside of him. The cotton in his brain seemed to thin and Mike stopped fighting death and let himself fall asleep.

When the detective woke up he was in a hospital room with a plastic bag of blood nearly infused. The dim, watery light of a Toronto dawn shone through his window. Vicki was there but he found himself looking around the room for Henry. He wanted Henry to be there, but Henry couldn’t be there in the light of day. Mike held onto that knowledge with both hands. He shoved away the odd feeling of disappointment that he felt at Henry’s absence, shoved it away and buried it deep. He shifted his concentration to Vicki.

“The doctor said you are one lucky bastard, Mike,” she told him. “That bullet nicked an artery, the biggest one in the human body. You should have been dead in less than a minute. But for some unknown reason a clot formed and stopped the bleeding. The doc seems to think it’s a miracle. He’s never seen anything like it.”

Thirty-six hours later, Mike was back home in his own apartment and three days after that he was feeling well enough to be limping around with a cane and developing a bad case of cabin fever. He was too restless to sit home alone, pushing away thoughts of Henry, he decided to go into work and finish up some reports that were waiting for him.

He had to take a cab; he was still under doctor’s orders not to drive. Aside from the smell of the dingy back seat it wasn’t so bad. At work it was even better. After the congratulatory pats on the back and hand shakes he forced himself to concentrate on his work and the vampire’s voice and face were forgotten for a while.

But they came back in spades at the end of the day, curling like tendrils of smoke all through his mind. Mike decided to get take-out for supper on the way home. By the time he got through the pick up line and left the restaurant the sun was already going down and his leg was hurting like a son of a bitch. Thoughts of Henry continued to insert themselves into his mind and what was worse; the vampire’s bite mark was throbbing, blood heavy, in a way he could only compare to arousal. He had had enough and decided to confront the vampire.

When he got to Henry's apartment door it seemed to open of its own accord. The quiet interior was soundless and empty in that first moment and an eerie chill ran through Mike. Then his searching gaze stopped on the figure in the foyer.

The immobile vampire stood looking at Mike, a statue of old marble faded to bronze by the low interior light. His expression was unreadable as he stepped aside to give Mike entrance into the apartment.

“Come in, sit down,” Henry said, the tone like silk, warm and yet cool as it caressed his ear.

Mike fought down the involuntary shiver.

“You need to get your weight off that leg. I can feel it hurting.” Henry’s big graceful hand held his own thigh in precisely the spot that Mike’s leg throbbed.

“I don’t want to sit down,” Mike snapped, letting the tight, hot anger he felt show in his voice. He hoped Henry was hurting twice as bad as he was. “I just came to tell you to get out of my head and stay out of my dreams. I don’t swing that way. Not even for too pretty boys who save my life. Got it?” The last was said through clenched teeth.

“You’re the one that came here to me, Mike, I did not go to you.” Henry said calmly, choosing not to react physically to Mike’s anger. He leaned a hip against the table behind him.

And that was part of the problem. Henry hadn’t cared enough to come to him. Mike squashed that thought like a bug. He didn’t want Henry to come visit him. That wasn’t what this was about. He wasn’t acting like some love struck teenager, stalking the vampire who hadn’t cared enough to… Mike Celluci was appalled at his thoughts. He lashed out verbally. “I’m not ‘coming’ to you. I’m only here to tell you that I know what you are trying to do and it’s not going to work. Stay out of my head! And stay away from me.” Mike turned to leave. “Get it through your thick skull, I don’t belong to you and I never will.”

Henry was suddenly in front of Mike, blocking his path. His black eyes ablaze and devoid of human white, all swirling dark and burning heat. “Then you stay out of mine.”

“I don’t have that kind of power,” Mike said. “I’m human,” admitting far more than he’d like in saying the truth aloud.

Henry tilted his head and licked his flushed lips. He was almost smiling as if in regret and Mike found the look uncomfortably arousing. “But you assume I do.”

“Recurring dreams, every night, always the same,” Mike said. “I wake up, the bite mark throbbing.” He didn’t mention the rest, the most damning evidence. “Yeah, I think you have the power. You may as well stop now; I’m not going to become your thrall. You aren’t going to talk me into you bed or anything else.”

Henry picked up Mike and shoved him against the wall. “If I wanted to take you against your will you would already be mine,” Henry growled, the truth of his words indisputable, as Mike was instantly and achingly hard. And then Henry backed away, lowering him with surprising care to the floor, he opened the door giving the detective leave to go.

“Blood calls to blood,” Henry said as Mike walked by. “There is nothing I can do to stop it. Whether you want it or don’t. No matter how hard you and I fight against it, detective, you are mine.” He shrugged, that Gallic lift of the shoulders that gave nothing away yet implied everything. “It is that way sometimes.”

The door shut firmly in Celluci’s face before he could find a scathing response.