Virgins and Vampires: Blood Falls (The Blood Falls Book 3)

“Something’s wrong,” Gigi muttered as she paced the library. I sat on the couch following her as she shuffled back and forth.

“How can I help?”

Gigi’s normally perfect golden curls separated and frizzed as she ran her fingers through them. “This is the third time—at least!—something like this has happened. Just…out of nowhere one or more people in this house…”

She stopped and stared out the window.

“Out of nowhere?”

She shook her head and waved her hands through the air as she made a noise. Not quite a gag. It was more musical than that. More like she was trying to vocalize her feelings. “It’s like they’re going fertile or something. Just overcome with lust. Primal lust. Not just hot-for-each-other lust. Like…” she spun around, eyes round, hands wide, “lust.”

“That’s what happened to me!” Bridge said from behind me.

Gigi’s eyes darted up. She shook her head. “I do not want details.”

That was fine because I already knew the gist of what happened to Bridge.

“So wait, this keeps happening?”

“It’s happening right now!” Gigi threw her hands in the air. “I was talking to Rhysa and all of a sudden Dray comes crashing in like a Viking on a killing spree! He was wild. Dark eyes, heat steaming off him like a furnace, and he scooped Rhysa up like a caveman and said something about his female and then they disappeared. I assume they’re at the treehouse making a lot of noise right about now.”

Bridge sat beside me, pale as the snow outside. “It was crazy. One minute I was walking down the hallway thinking about getting a snack and the next…it was like I walked into a cloud or, you know how in the morning sometimes the fog sits in patches on the ground? It was like that. Like I walked into a patch of fog. The air was warmer and it crackled like there was a little electricity in it. I was so turned on in an instant. And not just feeling good, but like I’d had a solid hour of foreplay. Instantly soaking wet and swollen and desperate. I was not in my right mind until all of a sudden it was like the fog lifted or drifted on or something. It feels like a dream when I try to remember it.”

My mind buzzed and my stomach dropped. “There are a lot of psychic markers in your description of the event.”

Gigi threw her hands in the air. “Now you know why I asked for you! Something funky is going on. Normally I say the more the merrier when it comes to sex, but not if it’s messing with our minds.”

“You don’t think it’s some sort of weapon do you?” Bridge gasped.

“That’s a really weird weapon,” Gigi went back to pacing, “unless they’re testing it on our strongest impulses first. Okay, so that isn’t a totally crazy theory after all.”

“Wait.” I put up my hands. “Don’t start jumping to conclusions just yet. Let’s talk to someone else who this happened to.”

“I saw Katonya in the living room,” Bridge offered.

“Then let’s start there.” Gigi marched out, a female on a mission.

We found Katonya sitting with Max and Ronan by the fire, drinking from each other. Ronan moved around to massage Max’s wide shoulders while they recounted the first incident.

“I was in Max’s room getting a book from him when all of a sudden I felt faint, then very warm and turned on. When I looked up, Max’s eyes had gone dark. We didn’t say a word. We just went at each other. Then Ronan returned from breakfast.”

The tall male nodded as he stood over Max. “I opened the door and it was like I walked into a different world. I was instantly hard as a rock. The room smelled of sex. It was hot and electric. I felt like I was inside a storm cloud or something.”

“Can you describe this electric feeling?” It had to be psychic energy.

Max rubbed his chin. “Little tingles on the surface of the skin. It seemed to jump between us too. That was part of the fun. Could I get the electricity to jump from me to them or them to me?”

They described almost exactly what happened when I was with Kris. “And have any of you ever been together before?”

“I’d never been with either of them before,” Katonya said almost shyly.

“Max and I fuck sometimes,” Ronan said with a shrug. “Why?”

“Has anything like this ever happened before? Or was this an entirely new experience for the two of you?”

Max chuckled. “I have never felt that electric thing before. And no matter how into it I’ve gotten, the lust fog has never swallowed me whole like that.”

Ronan shook his head. “Never.”

A psychic fog appearing at odd times around the house? “When was this?” I jotted down the approximate times for each encounter. We asked around, but no one else had an experience like it. Then we found Bo.

“I was over at House of Sato and they were talking about this,” Bo said.

Kris stood in the corner of the kitchen eating a bag of potato chips, watching me warily.

“And what were they saying exactly?” Gigi asked.

Bo shrugged. “That out of nowhere they were getting horny and fucking like they were fertile. There were two males in particular talking about it. They were out repairing a fence when it hit and some female happened to be out on a walk. They all just dropped right then and there and went at it against the trees and on the snow. They said they didn’t care that it was cold or anything.”

A memory of my aunt wandering into the dining room with twigs in her hair hit me. She said she’d just had amazing sex on her hike with two Sato males and their spirit doubles.

“Anyone else?” I croaked. The incident with Aunt Matylda happened the morning after Kris and slept together for the first time.

And Dray came for Rhysa right as Kris and I finished up in the barn.

And all of them were experiencing the same psychic connection Kris and I shared.

“Hey, why don’t we take a few?” Kris said. “I need to talk to Rain.”

Gigi glared at him but nodded. Kris grabbed my elbow and pulled me into the cellar.

“What’s going on?” he scowled down at me. “I felt you freak out. And that’s freaking me out.”

I didn’t know how to say it out loud. My mind thundered with a thousand thoughts and it was hard to pick one out from the other. Until Kris gave me a little shake, cupped my face, and brought his lips down on mine. “Rain?”

“It’s me,” I whispered. “I’m doing this. Well, we are.”

He balked. “What?”

I didn’t want it to be true but the facts were pretty obvious. “The first instance was our first morning together. The one in the window.”

“When you went all superheroine on me.” He nodded, understanding.

“And since then it’s happened several more times. While we were in the garage it happened to Dray.”

Kris stepped back, his hand covering his mouth. “How is this possible?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like this.” It was like I was shooting my own psychic energy out into the world and anyone in the way got swept up in the wave.

“No one’s ever been as powerful as you, princess. You’re different.”

He had a point. “I understand the incident today. We were here and I probably wasn’t guarding my psychic wall as closely because I feel safe here and we were having a good time. But the others? How did it escape my room with all the enchantments?”

“Are you sure the enchantments work both ways?”

“Yeah…fuck.”

“What?”

“They work both ways because when I was maturing I found it very hard to control my emotions and sometimes they’d affect everyone in the House.” It was a rough decade. “If I was sad, everyone was sad. If I was angry, everyone was angry.”

“I get it.” He leaned against the wooden table and pulled off his hat, raking his fingers through his hair before replacing it. “But not anymore?”

I shook my head, remembering how embarrassed I was that everyone always knew what I was feeling. “No, I’ve learned to control it. Plus my wall is supposed to keep things where they belong.” Or not.

“Maybe it’s just because this is new. Like your emotions when you were maturing.” He reached out and gave my hand a tug. “There’s no reason to be embarrassed. We won’t tell anyone who doesn’t need to know. It’s not like you were making people fight. You made them feel good.” He settled me between his legs.

“No. Do not make me feel good right now.”

“I won’t. Promise. But I’ve got to make sure you’re okay first.”

Was I okay? No. Would I be okay eventually? Also no. “This is a problem, Kris. This isn’t supposed to happen. It could be dangerous.”

Kris frowned. “You know I just realized something. You talk about your gifts in the negative an awful lot. You House keeps you locked up and keep you hidden, act like your gifts are a problem instead of, well, a gift. I get that power like this needs to be treated responsibly, but I think they’ve been going about it all wrong.”

“I—huh?”

His beautiful grin snapped me out of my stupor. “You can make people feel things. Don’t lock it up and throw away the key. Don’t build another wall and another wall and another wall. Stop limiting yourself.”

“But…” That’s exactly what I was supposed to do. Lock myself up and slowly, carefully learn to use my gifts so I didn’t ever accidentally hurt someone else. That was the responsible thing to do.

Or was it?

Maybe Kris was right. Maybe all that did was limit me, isolate me, control me. What if I thought of my gift as a gift instead of a problem? What did that look like?

“Okay, talk me through this. How is this useful?”

Kris grinned, pulling me back into his arms. He kissed the crap out of me. So good it curled my toes and left me breathless. “Let’s start here. You feel amazing right?”

“Oh yeah.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yes?”

“And making others feel good is good.”

I shook my head, already hearing years of programming automatically playing back in my head. “No. Making anyone feel anything without their permission is bad.”

“Oh, so I shouldn’t tell you a joke without asking your permission first?”

I rolled my eyes because that was a ridiculous comparison. “Be serious.”

“I am! We tell jokes to make each other laugh. We do nice things to make someone else feel special. We cook food we know someone loves because we want them to be happy and feel good. We do stuff like this all the time. You’re just able to do it in a special way because you’re special.”

I pushed out of his arms; my skin crawled as I tried to bust through a lifetime of being told the exact opposite. “Emotions are different. Sex is very different from a joke or a nice dinner.”

“I disagree. You’re not in control right now because you didn’t even know you could do this. It’s like turning the TV on real loud because you think you’re home alone, but your mom was actually asleep on the couch. Unfortunate, but not done with malice. Now that you know you can do this, everything is different. You won’t send a psychic sex bubble bouncing around the house, but you might lighten a sad mood.”

Psychic sex bubble.

Psychic sex bubble…

“I created a limited space where psychic energy was different. They all said it was warm, humid. That it was electric. I thought it was the act of sex causing the electricity to travel with the bubble, but what if it’s just psychic energy being concentrated inside a bubble!” The fog description was close but wrong. Kris was accidentally right.

“Okay…how does that change things?”

I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t know! But it could be helpful, say, in a rift.”

His eyes widened. “Oh shit. You think?”

“I have no idea, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.”