More Than Mortal Read Online Free PDF

drapes concealed foil and tape that blacked out the windows. “You’ve only got to make it down to the third floor.”
    “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
    Of course he was trying to get rid of her, and for that she should be profoundly and mortally grateful. It was only his circumspection with regard to hunting in an unaccustomed environment that had saved her life.
    “Discretion is the better part of passion.”
    The blonde Swede had at least started looking round for her clothes. She stopped and stared at him blearily. “I thought that was valor?”
    “The same applies.”
    “So, passion is spent, and I am dismissed? Is that it?”
    Renquist’s expression was friendly but hard. He played the unashamed philanderer she imagined he was, the character she’d wanted when she’d first flirted with him down in the bar. “We both knew it was to be that way from the start, didn’t we?”
    “It’s nice to pretend for a while.”
    “I don’t think we have the time for pretense.”
    If Frieda did but know it, the entire night had been a pretense. The supposed passion she believed had left her satiated to the point of walking unsteadily had been largely chimeric—most of it completely in her own mind, with Renquist needing only to read her most covert fantasies to make them seemingly happen. The objective truth was he had only stared coldly as she lay on the wide bed of the room in the luxury hotel. She’d gasped and contorted, in the grip of mindbending and salacious illusion, while he watched with little more than an academic amusement at what he could achieve without laying so much as a hand on her. The mildest caress of her mind and memory raised sighs and shudders to full muscle spasms of repeated, wordlessly keening orgasm. Her hips twisted as she moaned and crooned in her native tongue and finally in no language at all. Her makeup ran as sweat beaded her face, and a fall of lusttossed
Nordic-blond hair half hid an expression of feral and greedy desire. When he decided the moment was appropriate, when she was totally beyond awareness of her surroundings, he sprang the small steel spike he always carried with him.
    The coupling of the physical act of piercing her flesh with the roller coaster of sexual hallucination on which he had set her all but threatened both her life and sanity. As her lips shaped wordless obscene and ecstatic syllables, as her head thrashed from side to side, threatening to dislocate the vertebrae of her neck, he found he had to forcibly hold her down in order to feed, and he wondered if he had perhaps overdone the intensity of suggestion. Then he felt her energy gradually dwindle, and he knew that she was drifting toward death. He quickly removed his mouth from her throat, sealing the wound with a flick of his tongue, and moved back from her, out of her mind, allowing her to wake, shaking and completely disoriented but believing that she had just been through one of the most memorable physical encounters of her life.
    Renquist reflected, as Frieda shakily dressed, how she would never be consciously aware of what had happened to her in this stranger’s hotel suite, or in what grotesque and outlandish way she had been used. When she left the room and returned to her bright and social consumer world, she would have no inkling she had ever been the partial victim of a nosferatu, a creature she had always believed, in her material rationality, was a thing of myth, legend, and low-budget movie. Only the dreams to come might hint at what had passed between her and Renquist; the dreams would almost certainly haunt her sleep from then on, maybe to the end of her short human life.
    She slipped on her shoes, fluffed her bed-tousled hair, and made a more determined move toward her exit. Renquist assumed she was going to the door, but instead she turned and went into the bathroom. He might have followed her, except the bathroom had mirrors that would
necessitate specially created illusions of his