Your pact is fulfilled, Lott

—Lucius

She whimpered when I took her to my arms, but was otherwise quite well behaved and still for me. My nightly commands had made her submissive and tame, although she shivered with a soft frightened sound when I lowered my head and stroked my fangs down the thin flesh of her throat. "Please. Please don't hurt me."

The sound tore at me. As much as she had been affected by the magic preparing her for me, I had been changed in strange ways as well.

"Never," I whispered automatically, letting my fangs elongate, but even as I said the word and readied for the bite to take a drink, I gasped.

Depravity awakened inside me. There was no other word for it, and the sensation surged through my body like a white hot flame of pure desire.

It was such desperate intensity as I had not felt since Mistress had died. I had to work to focus through it, stunned with whatever this was.

The demon had been quiet for so long, excepting after those nights, this girl had pulled us to her dreams, and yet now he spoke with clarity again. Take. Make!

Make. Oh yes, make. I had only been intending to feed, but that word was suddenly everything in that moment.

It resounded through my head over and over while Depravity snarled it, thrashing in my veins. And that word told me what was finally happening as well. We wanted to procreate, both of us.

I had just a second to wonder why he suddenly wanted to so badly that it was hurting us, and then I hissed and buried my fangs in her throat.

I just managed to cover her mouth with my hand to stifle her cry, and it was a cry of bliss on her part.

She lifted with evident ecstasy in my arms, and I took the first drink, only to pull back with a moan of pain. "Can't. Feed... On the innocent," I whimpered.

Every drop of her blood felt like acid down my throat, and this was something I somehow hadn't considered.

Of course, her blood would be poison to me. She had been locked up and sheltered all her life. She was what Doubt had said, an untouched sacrifice to demonic payment.

Depravity didn't care. Drink, Lucius, or I'll kill us both!

"It will kill me anyway." Even as I said the words, white hot desire was pulsing through me, needing to make her my fledgling even when her blood was a toxin. I couldn't drink it.

This was a law I had heard and never encountered, but her blood was painful, murderous.

It won't, damn you! Drink!

I choked, and a single tear escaped my eye with the pain I was about to suffer, but the demon would not be denied, and I bowed my head to that terrible fount and gulped in frantic draughts.

Every swallow scorched like lava, and every one seemed to make her hotter and wilder. She tilted her head to give me better access and cried out behind my palm.

She rose and fell like a beautiful tide in my arms, in the way that a female dances for pleasure. The scent of c*m made it easier for me to bear the acid I was being made to swallow, and I groaned into her throat when I felt her orgasm from the feeling alone.

It was something wondrous. The bite could be pleasure, and feeding a fledgling was immense pleasure, but nothing had described this, nothing.

She moaned until she couldn't anymore, until her heart stopped, and finally I drew the last drink of torture, and together we fell to the ground.

Depravity was true to his word, however. If not for him, her and I both would have died. Her and I both should have died.

But he took over, knowing what to do and how to finish.

He bit into my wrist and held it to her lips while he stroked her hair so lovingly that it stunned me. I had known him to be many things, but loving? I would have never thought him capable of it.

"Drink. From my blood to yours, from my life to yours. Drink and live anew."

She shuddered and then reacted to the blood in her face, pulling from death with a soft whine of hunger.

Her lips fastened around my wrist, and she took a tentative sip. The fangs punctured me immediately after, the first things to wake in her new body, and she latched to me, drinking with a starvation I knew well, that mindless hunger that ruled all thought and emotion.

To my amazement, Depravity seemed to nurse me in some way as well. He seemed to mentally feed me with magic that healed my body, even while a newborn fed from my blood supply. But every moment seemed to cost him.

You know the rest. Must... Recover...

I had never known my demon to sound so replete or to have a need to recover from anything. Even more baffling was the scent of the feeding creature in my arms.

"What did you make?" I whispered.

Because it wasn't a vampire, at least not entirely. His insane giggle was faint, and he sounded far away when he answered with the most uselessly cryptic reply.

Innocent virgin. Eternal punishment. Worst defilement.

And then he fell silent, and my blood went still while he slumbered.

Well, at least it told me why I hadn't run into the horrid taste of innocent blood. I didn't exactly keep virginal company and hadn't ever had a desire to find one of those before.

By nature, vampires were only drawn to feed on or Embrace the deserving. The only thing I could think of that made this different was the circumstances and the demon I was entwined with. But the effects were interesting.

The scent of the thing I held was one to make my blood burn, for a start. Every breath felt like desire, and I didn't know if that was a feeling of being a Sire, but I didn't think so.

This was painful, the way she smelled to a demon, and it was nothing like the scent of a ward. I lowered my teeth to her neck while she fed and stroked her with my fangs so that she purred mindlessly.

That scent grew stronger, drew me in even while it smelled like the most delicious parts of hell. Even the banks of the Phlegathon did not smell as wonderful as she did.

My attention was abruptly jerked away from my tending to her when I heard footsteps, and I hissed at the door like an animal over its young, growling at the sounds I heard.

Her father had arrived home, and he was yelling, screaming. "Where is she!"

The doorknob rattled, and I could smell his fear on the other side. It was something to make me grin with pleasure.

I waited for him to kick through the door and burst the lock free, let him see me holding her, let him take in the view of her feeding at my vein.

"Your pact is fulfilled, Lott," I said lightly. The shout of horrified despair was music to my ears when I willed her and I home together.

There was nothing so sweet as his sorrow, nothing so pure.

Except for the creature in my arms. I had prepared a room for her in my house, one that I thought she would adore, one to make her feel at home and welcome in her new life as a demon's ward.

Yet, I did not use it after the turn of events that occurred so unexpectedly. I couldn't.

I stared down at the newborn in my arms and carried her to my bed instead, where I laid her on top of the black satin.

In her white birthday dress, she looked as a bride gifted to me, a symbol of purity against the black of sin.

"What did you make, D?" I whispered it again, for I longed to lay beside her and nuzzle her throat, longed to take deep breaths of that wonderful scent that was only growing stronger.

What was more, that scent aroused me in a pervasively s*xual way, made me want her badly.

I had to wrap myself in the same self-control that my Mistress had once taught me, had to make myself sit in my chair beside the bed instead.

I didn't want to disturb my little fledgling because I well remembered the exhaustion after death and well remembered the cruelty of being made to travel when I was in that exhaustion.

She needed her sleep for the moment.

But I didn't leave her side either. I sat still instead, letting my head fall forward so I could close my eyes and listen and smell.

Everything faded except for the sounds outside the house, like the wind rustling the salted earth outside and the creaks of an old house settling, the sounds of my newborn rustling the sheets in her sleep.

Depravity snored like a sleeping dragon in my blood, a background to all the rest.

***