Chapter 9: Morning Glory
The grey morning light did not so much brighten the room as it did dilute the darkness to a watery gloom. Paul awoke to the scent of sweat, sex, and something else—something milky and sweet, like clover honey left in the sun. His face was buried in the junction of Jud’s neck and shoulder, his cock still sheathed inside that impossible heat. It had softened during the night but remained held by the gentle, persistent clutch of Jud’s body.
He shifted, intending to withdraw, and Jud made a small, wounded noise in his sleep.
“Shhh,” Paul whispered, his voice gravel. “Just me.”
But as he moved, he felt it. A difference. The textures of Jud against him had changed. He pulled back the thin blanket.
Jud’s breathing hitched, and his eyes fluttered open, wide and unsure. “Paul?”
“Don’t move.” The command was gentle, awed. Paul’s hands, cold as ever, travelled down Jud’s torso. The wiry frame was still there, but the lines had softened. Jud’s hips, previously sharp angles under pale skin, had swelled into a fuller, more generous curve. Paul’s palm spanned the new arch of one ilium, then slid lower to cup the rounded firmness of a buttock. It was as if Jud’s body had decided, overnight, to become a more perfect vessel.
“What? What’s wrong?” Jud’s voice trembled with old fear.
“Nothing. Nothing is wrong.” Paul kissed his shoulder. “Look.”
He guided Jud’s hand down between his own legs. Jud gasped, fingers jerking back as if shocked. Then, with a hesitant curiosity, he touched himself.
Where there had been the familiar, soft folds, now there was a pronounced, flushed swell of outer lips, plush and fat. And from the hood, now swollen and prominent, jutted a thick, erect nub of flesh. It was the size of Paul’s thumb, pulsing under Jud’s tentative touch.
“Oh, God,” Jud breathed, not in prayer but in utter confusion.
“It’s beautiful,” Paul said, and meant it. He watched, fascinated, as Jud explored himself, his face a canvas of shock and dawning, intense pleasure. When Jud’s fingertip circled the head of the new clit, his back arched off the bed, a ragged moan torn from his throat.
“S-sensitive,” he choked out.
Paul’s cold hand replaced Jud’s, and he stroked slowly, firmly. Jud’s legs fell open, a wordless invitation. His chest heaved. Paul looked down and saw the other change: Jud’s breasts, always full, were heavier, the areolas darker, the nipples stiff and beaded with droplets of opaque liquid.
Paul lowered his head and caught a pearl of milk on his tongue. It was sweet, faintly metallic, utterly Jud.
“You’re leaking,” Paul murmured against his skin.
Jud covered his face with his hands. “I’m a fucking freak.”
“You’re mine.” Paul’s voice held a possessive gentleness that brooked no argument. He lapped at the nipple, suckling gently, and Jud’s hips rolled up against his hand, his cunt clenching around the shaft still nestled inside him. The sensation made Paul groan, his own cock twitching and beginning to harden anew.
He shifted, lining himself up, and pushed back in. Jud cried out, not in pain, but in overwhelming sensation. He was obscenely wet, his inner walls hotter and somehow tighter around the re-swelling length. Paul set a slow, deep rhythm, each thrust grinding the base of his cock against that newfound, sensitive flesh.
“This… this is because of you,” Jud panted, his hands scrabbling at Paul’s back. “Your… your seed. It’s changing me.”
“Yes.” Paul drank the admission from Jud’s mouth. He could feel it, a connection that went beyond physical. His vampiric essence, his cursed biology, was rewriting Jud’s from the inside out, and Jud’s body was accepting it, singing with it. The guilt was a distant thrum, drowned out by a roaring, protective need. He would fill this man, remake him, keep him.
The knot began to form, faster this time, a thickening at the root of his cock that stretched Jud exquisitely wide. Jud felt it and his eyes flew open, wild with a mix of fear and desperate want.
“Is it… does it hurt?” Paul gritted out, trying to still his hips.
“No. Don’t stop. Fuck, Paul, please, I need it.” Jud’s voice was raw, his legs locking around Paul’s waist. “Fill me up. Make it take. I want it to take.”
The vulgar plea shattered Paul’s control. He drove in, hard, and the knot popped past the tight ring of muscle, lodging deep. They were locked. Jud threw his head back, a silent scream on his lips as his orgasm ripped through him, his cunt milking Paul’s cock in powerful, rhythmic spasms. Paul followed, burying his face in Jud’s neck, not biting, just breathing him in as his release poured hot and endless into the receptive womb. He could feel Jud’s belly, already slightly rounded from the previous night’s claiming, press fuller against him.
For a long time, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. The knot held, binding them in a damp, intimate seal. Paul rolled them to their sides, never pulling apart. Jud’s head rested on his arm.
“I can feel you,” Jud whispered, awed. “Pumping into me. Still.”
“It doesn’t seem to stop for long.” Paul kissed his temple. His hand rested on Jud’s lower abdomen, possessive. “Are you afraid?”
Jud considered. The old terror was there, the lifetime of being used and discarded. But beneath Paul’s hand, his body hummed with a foreign completeness. “Yes. But not of you. I’m afraid this is a dream. That I’ll wake up on the floor of the chapel, alone.”
“This is real.” Paul’s knot began to slowly subside. He softened, but stayed inside. “I am the nightmare, Jud. And I have you.”
A weak, hiccupping laugh escaped Jud. “Poetic.”
“True.” Paul shifted, and with a soft, wet sound, he slid free. A trickle of their combined release seeped out onto the sheet. Jud shivered at the loss, the sudden emptiness. Paul saw it on his face. He dipped his fingers between Jud’s legs, gathering the fluid, and brought them to Jud’s lips. “Eat it. Taste us.”
Jud, without hesitation, took Paul’s fingers into his mouth, sucking them clean, his eyes unwavering on Paul’s. The submission was absolute, and it ignited Paul all over again.
He was hard in moments. Jud saw, and a lazy, satiated smile touched his lips. He spread his legs, his swollen pussy glistening, open. “You’re insatiable.”
“You have no idea.” Paul moved over him again, not entering yet, just rubbing the head of his cock through the slick folds. “This body you have… this perfect, responsive body. It’s a miracle. My miracle.”
“It’s yours,” Jud said, simply, echoing their vow from the night before. “It only works for you. It only wants you.”
That truth, stated so plainly, was the most profound prayer Paul had ever heard. He entered him again, a slow, reverent penetration that had Jud sighing as if coming home. They moved together in the dim room, the pace languid, deep. There was no urgency now, only a profound exploration.
Between kisses, Jud spoke, his words broken by gasps. “The people… mass…”
“Fuck mass.” Paul thrust, punctuating the blasphemy. “Let them pray without us today.”
“They’ll talk.”
“Let them.” He captured Jud’s mouth, drinking his moans. Their joining was quiet now, a steady rhythm of skin on skin, a sharing of breath. Paul felt Jud’s arms tighten around him, holding on as if to a lifeline in a torrential sea.
Later, as they lay spent again, the day finally brightening to a proper dull grey, Jud traced the old scar on Paul’s chest—a relic from a lifetime before Crockett Island, before the vestments. “What happens now?”
Paul stared at the water-stained ceiling. The hunger was there, a grinding ache in his gut he had been ignoring for days. He had taken a sip from Jud during their first joining, but it was a lover’s nip, not sustenance. His strength was waning. Jud’s transformation, this beautiful anomaly, would require energy he was not replenishing.
“Now,” Paul said, his voice hollow, “I have to find a way to feed. Without hurting anyone. Without… without you seeing what I truly am.”
Jud turned to face him. The fear was back in his eyes, but it was a clean fear, for Paul, not of him. “You’re not eating.”
“I can’t. Not from them. Not anymore.”
“Then from me.”
“No.” The refusal was instant, sharp. “I will not make you my cattle, Jud. I love you. That is not love.”
“But last night, you bit me…”
“A taste. A kiss. Not a feeding.” Paul sat up, the sheet pooling at his waist. He looked frail in the thin light, his pallor ghostly. “If I take what I need from you, it will weaken you. It could kill you. This…” He gestured to Jud’s changed body. “This process needs your vitality.”
Jud sat up beside him. He took Paul’s cold hand and placed it over his own heart, where it beat a strong, steady rhythm. “You feel that? That’s yours. All of it. You think you’re the only one who can be a sacrifice?” He leaned in, his lips brushing Paul’s ear. “Take it. I’m strong. And I need you strong. Please.”
The plea undid him. The moral fortress he had built over decades crumbled to dust under the weight of Jud’s willing surrender. The hunger roared, a red cloud at the edges of his vision.
He turned, his eyes fully black, veins rising stark against his skin. Jud didn’t flinch. He tilted his head back, baring the graceful line of his throat, where a brash purple bruise from the night before already bloomed.
“Do it.”
Paul’s mouth watered, a physical ache in his jaws. He pressed a final, tender kiss to the pulse point. Then his fangs slid out, longer and sharper than they had been before. He paused, trembling with the effort of control.
“I love you,” Jud whispered.
Paul sank his teeth in.
It was not the delicate puncture of the previous night. This was a deep, claiming penetration. Jud gasped, his body stiffening for a second, then going pliant against Paul as the euphoria hit—the vampiric venom, a narcotic cocktail of pleasure and compliance. Paul drank, swallowing deep, rhythmic pulls of Jud’s lifeblood. It was richer than any he’d ever tasted, complex and heady, infused with that unique clover-sweetness.
He felt Jud’s heartbeat slow, his breathing grow shallow. Enough. The command screamed from the last vestige of his soul. He wrenched his mouth away, sealing the wound with a swipe of his tongue. The marks were stark, twin crescents that would never fully heal.
Jud slumped against him, pale, his eyes glassy but open. A sleepy smile touched his lips. “See?” he slurred. “Not so bad.”
Paul held him, feeling the stolen strength flood his own withered cells, a terrifying vitality. He was powerful again. And he had just endangered the only good thing left in his eternal, cursed existence.
Outside, a wind picked up, rattling the loose pane of glass in the window. Somewhere on the island, a bell began to toll. Not the church bell. Something older, with a thinner, more desperate sound.
They both heard it. Jud’s smile faded.
Paul pulled him closer, his voice a low rumble in the restored solidity of his chest. “The world is still out there.”
Jud nuzzled into him, his breathing already growing stronger, his body already responding to the powerful, sanguine nourishment now shared between them. “Let it wait.”