Divine Bloodlust: The God and His Devout

The abandoned cathedral held the cold the way a mouth holds a name it refuses to swallow. Moonlight came through the broken rose window in strips of crimson and dull gold and laid itself across the altar as if the ruin still remembered how to dress a sacrifice. Felix walked the nave with an ash stake in both hands and the particular emptiness that had lived in him since long before his death. He was twenty-eight. He had been twenty-eight for eleven nights. Before the turning he had been a night sacristan, locking silver, snuffing candles, repeating offices until the words were only breath. Faith had been a schedule. It had never been a feeling. When feeling finally arrived, it arrived wearing Darius’s mouth.

Darius waited on the altar steps as if the place had been built to frame him. Three hundred years sat easily on a body that looked perhaps thirty-two: dark hair, a black coat gone pale with dust at the cuffs, a smile that treated the world as a private joke he had not yet decided to share. He watched Felix come and did not straighten. Gods, in Darius’s accounting, did not stand for petitioners.

“Little saint,” he said, and the stone made a liturgy of it. “Eight miles in the dark with a stick. I’m flattered. Most of the things that want me dead send a letter, or a mob, or at least a better tailor.”

“You are not a thing I want,” Felix said. His voice scraped. The stake was blessed by his own hand because no living priest would have touched it. “You are the sickness. I came to cut it out.”

“Which sickness?” Darius tilted his head. Gold flickered in his eyes, a hunter’s trick of the light. “The thirst? The way your cock answers when I say your name? Or the inconvenience of having a maker who will not pretend your emptiness was holy just because you kept it clean?”

Heat climbed Felix’s throat. He hated that Darius could see the flinch. He hated more that eleven nights of teasing—Darius in the rain, Darius at the foot of the narrow bed, Darius asking whether the newly risen preferred a psalm or a mouth—had worn the hate thin enough to show something else underneath. He lifted the stake.

“If anything in you remembers what a soul was, stand still.”

Darius laughed, low and delighted. “A soul. You used to be a blank page with a crucifix sketched on it in pencil. I gave you blood and you discovered ink, and now you want to stab the hand that held the pen. Come on, then. Purge me. I’ll even hold the pose.”

He did not hold the pose. He moved the way old blood moved, not a blur so much as a decision the air had already agreed to. One moment he lounged. The next his fingers closed around Felix’s wrist, cool and absolute, and the stake twisted until tendon sang. Felix snarled. His fangs dropped. His free hand drove for the throat.

Darius caught that too. He turned them, Felix’s back striking a pillar, both wrists gathered above his head in one easy grip as if the effort were a courtesy. Their faces were inches apart. Darius smelled of cold iron and old wine and, faintly, of Felix himself, because three nights ago he had taken a mouthful at the wrist and hummed like a man cellaring a vintage.

“There,” he murmured. “Holy fury. It suits you. It also makes you slow. A priest with a weapon still hesitates at the last inch, because he wants to be forgiven for wanting the inch before.”

“I don’t want forgiveness.” Felix’s pulse kicked, slow and traitorous, against Darius’s thumb. “I want the feeling gone. I want you gone. You hunt me. You put your mouth on me. You say my blood is sweet and you laugh while you say it. You look at me like an offering you already own.”

“Because you are.” Darius’s thumb stroked the inside of the wrist, mockery dressed as comfort. “And because your blood is the only thing in three hundred years that doesn’t taste like dust. Human blood is meat. Other fledglings taste like whatever fear I left in them. You taste like devotion that never found a god worth the knee. Incense. Salt. A prayer that didn’t know its own address. I like it. I have been very patient while you worked up the nerve to try to kill me with a piece of furniture.”

He plucked the stake from Felix’s loosened fingers and held the point between them, examining it with open amusement.

“Ash. Traditional. Useless against me, but traditional. Did you bless it yourself? Of course you did. Tell me, little saint—when you sharpened this, did you think about my mouth? Did your hand shake?”

“Yes,” Felix said, and the truth hurt worse than the grip.

Darius’s smile changed. Less joke. More hunger. “Good. Honesty looks better on you than murder.”

He snapped the stake. The crack rang down the nave. He tossed the halves aside. They skittered into a stripe of colored light and lay there, harmless as kindling.

“Purged,” he said. “Now we can discuss the unholy temptation you actually walked eight miles to put your hands on.”

Felix’s hands were free. He did not run. That was the failure, and he felt it arrive like a second turning: heat where there should have been nothing, a thickening in his pants, a pull low in the gut that his old prayers had never named because they had never needed to. Darius’s gaze dropped, noticed, and brightened with the particular cruelty of a man who enjoys being right.

“Armed for an exorcism,” Darius said. “Hard for a god.”

“You are not God.”

“No.” He stepped in until the coat brushed Felix’s shirt. “I’m better. God doesn’t answer. I do. And I want a drink. Say no, if you mean it. I’ll let you walk back into your empty little room and sharpen another stick and lie to yourself until the next time you come looking for my teeth. But if you stay, you stay because you want what I take. I don’t fuck relics. I fuck men who choose me.”

Felix’s mouth opened on a refusal that would not form. The cathedral listened. His dead heart did something obscene and alive. “I came to kill you.”

“And you failed,” Darius said gently, “because you don’t want me dead. You want me in you. Blood and cock and the sound of your own vows breaking. Admit it and I’ll stop teasing. Or don’t, and I’ll tease you until you beg. Either way, Felix, I am not letting go of the taste of you tonight unless you tell me to.”

“Don’t,” Felix heard himself say. The word was small and ruined. “Don’t let go.”

Darius’s exhale was almost a laugh, almost a prayer of his own. “There he is.”

He took Felix by the jaw and walked him backward up the steps, not hurrying, letting each flagstone announce the retreat. The altar met the backs of Felix’s thighs: cold marble, chipped along one edge, still faintly sticky with the memory of wax. Darius pinned him there with a forearm across the chest and a thigh between his legs, and the pressure was a question as much as a claim. Felix could have shoved. He had a fledgling’s new strength and a saint’s stubbornness and neither of them moved to save him. His hands found Darius’s coat and held.

“Failing already,” Darius murmured against his ear. “I haven’t even undone a button. Your holy resolve is leaking down your thigh, little sacristan. Do you feel it? The lust under the vow. You spent years polishing an altar no one visited, and now you’re hard against the only god who ever showed up.”

“Stop talking.”

“No. You like the talking. It gives you something to hate while you grind.” Darius rolled his hips once, slow, and the friction dragged a sound out of Felix that had no business in a church. “Say you want my mouth. Say the stake was an excuse. Say your new feelings got in the way of the murder, the way I told you they would.”

Felix’s forehead dropped to Darius’s shoulder. The emptiness was still there. It had simply found a shape, and the shape was this man, this arrogance, this unbearable attention. “I wanted to end it,” he said into the coat. “I still want— I don’t know what I want. I know I can’t raise my hand against you. I know when you look at me I feel full and filthy and I would rather be filthy than empty. I know I came here hoping you would take the stake before I had to decide.”

“That’s a confession,” Darius said, pleased. “I’ll absolve you with my tongue.”

He kissed him then, and it was not gentle. Fangs clicked. Felix opened on a gasp and Darius took the gasp, took the lower lip, bit until copper bloomed bright and hot between them. Felix bit back. Their blood mixed, his brighter, Darius’s older and darker, and the taste hit Felix like a struck bell: iron, wine, the maker’s claim running down his throat while his own ran down Darius’s. Both of them groaned. Both of them chose it. Felix’s hands climbed into dark hair and pulled. Darius licked into him as if the kiss were a vein he meant to empty, mocking and starving at once, one palm spread over Felix’s throat to feel the swallow.

“Divine,” Darius said against his mouth, blood on his teeth. “I told you. You taste like a hymn that learned how to fuck.”

“Then drink,” Felix said, and the permission shook. “I want you to. I want all of it. Don’t make me ask twice or I’ll remember I’m supposed to hate you.”

“You can hate me while you come,” Darius said. “I don’t mind the liturgy.”

He turned Felix and bent him toward the altar only long enough to mouth the side of his neck, not biting yet, just breathing him in, then spun him back and pushed him down. Not a throw. A guiding weight, and Felix went to his knees on the stone because his legs had already voted. The broken stake lay somewhere in the dark behind them. In front of him, Darius opened his coat, unfastened his pants, and drew out a cock already thick and flushed, the head gleaming in the colored moonlight. He rested it against Felix’s lips and waited, arrogant as a statue, one hand loose in Felix’s hair.

“Worship,” he said. “Properly. Mouth and tongue. You know the postures. You’ve spent your life on your knees for less responsive deities.”

Felix looked up. Twenty-eight, ruined, hard, and clearer than he had been in any pew. “If I do this, you don’t get to pretend I was forced.”

“I wouldn’t cheapen it,” Darius said. “Open.”

Felix opened. The first slide was salt and heat and the humiliating rightness of it, Darius heavy on his tongue, the taste of skin under the taste of their shared blood. He took him deeper because he wanted the choke, wanted the proof that the emptiness could be filled with something that pushed back. His hands braced on Darius’s thighs. He sucked, messy and devout, tongue working the underside, cheeks hollowing, spit slicking his chin. Darius’s composure cracked on a growl. His hips rocked, shallow, then deeper when Felix moaned around him and tugged him closer.

“Look at my little heretic,” Darius said, voice frayed with pleasure. “Ash in one hand an hour ago. My cock in his throat now. You failed so beautifully. You couldn’t kill me because you wanted this—wanted to be used by the mouth that drinks you. That’s not weakness, Felix. That’s vocation.”

Felix pulled off, gasping, a string of spit breaking between his lip and the head. “You’re unbearable.”

“And you’re drooling. Again.”

He went down again, greedier, one hand working what his mouth could not yet take, the other cupping Darius’s balls, learning the weight of the man who had made him. Darius petted his hair with false tenderness and filthy praise, calling him altar boy, calling him cup, calling him the only prayer worth answering. When Felix’s jaw ached and his own cock throbbed neglected against his pants, Darius drew him off by the hair and hauled him up into another blood-bright kiss, letting him taste himself on that arrogant mouth.

“Pants off,” Darius said. “On the altar. I want you bent over it, and I want you to tell me yes like you mean the bruise.”

“Yes,” Felix said. He shoved his pants down, kicked them aside, bare from the waist in the cold air, cock flushed and leaking, ass clenching on nothing. He turned and braced his forearms on the marble. The stone shocked his skin. He spread his feet and looked back over his shoulder, fangs bared, eyes bright with a feeling he no longer had a rite for. “Yes. Fuck me. Drink me. Don’t be kind about it. I want it brutal and I want it from you, and if you stop to mock me I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Darius stepped in behind him, slick fingers—his own spit, a vial from the coat he had clearly brought because he had known how this night would end—pressing between Felix’s cheeks, circling, pushing in. The stretch burned. Felix hissed and pushed back onto it. “You’ll pray? You’re already praying. Your hole is fluttering like a litany.”

Two fingers, then three, crooked and ruthless, opening him while Darius’s other hand stroked his cock in a rhythm designed to unravel. Felix’s forehead hit the altar. He heard himself begging in fragments, please and more and maker, the old religious words tangling with the new ones. When the fingers left him empty he made a sound he would have confessed for a year, in another life.

Darius lined up and sank in with one long, merciless drive. The stretch went white-hot and then perfect, thick cock filling him to the root, hips flush to his ass. Felix’s hands scrabbled on marble. Darius held still just long enough for the choice to be unmistakable.

“Still yes?”

“Yes—God—yes, move, Darius, fuck me—”

“Not God,” Darius said, and began to thrust.

It was brutal in the way Felix had asked for: deep, punishing strokes that shoved him up the altar, the slap of skin echoing under the broken vault, Darius’s hands bruising his hips, dragging him back onto every inch. Felix took it and chased it, meeting each thrust, the burn melting into a bright, filthy pleasure that climbed his spine. His cock bounced, dripping onto the stone that had never seen a sacrifice like this. Darius leaned over him, chest to his back, and laughed breathlessly against his ear.

“Where’s your stake now? Where’s the purge? You’re split open on your maker’s cock and you’re grateful. Say it.”

“I’m grateful,” Felix gasped, and the admission tore something open that the turning had only cracked. “I’m—fuck—I’m yours. I tried to kill you and I couldn’t because I—because I feel you. I feel this. Don’t stop.”

“Never,” Darius said, and sank his fangs into the side of Felix’s neck.

The bite was a second fucking. Pain flared, then the pull, hot and rhythmic, Darius drinking in time with his thrusts, groaning into the wound as Felix’s blood hit his tongue. The taste undid him. His hips stuttered, then slammed harder, greedier, one hand fisted in Felix’s hair to keep the throat bared. Felix cried out, not in refusal, in overwhelm—each swallow tugged at his cock, at his gut, at the place Darius was battering inside him. Blood ran warm down his chest, over the altar’s edge, onto his own fingers. He reached back and held Darius’s hip, urging him deeper, offering the vein the way he had never managed to offer a soul.

“Divine,” Darius snarled against the punctures, lapping, biting again a little lower, drinking because he liked it, because nothing else in three centuries had tasted like this ruined devotion. “You were wasted on heaven. Heaven doesn’t know what to do with a flavor like you. I do. I drink you and I fuck you and I keep you.”

He pulled out abruptly. Felix whimpered at the loss. Darius turned him, lifted him onto the altar proper—Felix’s ass on the cold edge, legs spread—and drove back in face to face, folding him, kissing the blood from his mouth while he fucked him in short, savage strokes. Then he dropped back onto the altar steps, still inside, and dragged Felix down into his lap.

“Ride,” he ordered, blood on his chin, eyes blown black with hunger and something dangerously close to worship of his own. “Show me the devout boy can take his god without being held down. Use me. I want to watch you fail at emptiness.”

Felix planted his knees on the step to either side and sank, taking Darius to the hilt, head falling back. The angle punched a shout out of him. He rode hard, the way he had been told, thighs burning, ass clenching, bouncing on the thick cock while Darius’s hands spanned his waist and hauled him down harder. Blood smeared both of them: Felix’s neck, Darius’s mouth, their chests where they crashed together, streaks on Felix’s stomach, on Darius’s fingers when he wrapped a fist around Felix’s cock and stroked in counterpoint. They looked desecrated. They looked completed.

“Faithless little thing,” Darius taunted, thrusting up to meet him, the wet sound obscene in the nave. “All those years polishing chalices and you were waiting to be the cup. Look at you. Covered in the blood I like best, fucking yourself on the cock that made you. Where’s your God now?”

“Here,” Felix said, and the word shocked them both. He leaned in, fangs grazing Darius’s throat, not asking permission so much as offering the same hunger back. “You wanted a god. You’re arrogant enough to be one. Let me—”

“Bite,” Darius said, baring his throat with a king’s indifference. “Take what you need. Then thank me.”

Felix bit. Older blood flooded his mouth, rich and dark and dizzying, and he drank while he rode, while Darius fucked up into him and jerked his cock and laughed like a man who had won a war he had started for the pleasure of the surrender. They growled at each other between swallows—degrading, reverent, indistinguishable. Little saint. Arrogant bastard. Hole made for me. Mouth made for you. Pray louder. Felix did, broken syllables of old Latin collapsing into Darius’s name, into please, into don’t you dare stop, I’m close, I want to come while you drink me.

Darius surged up, still buried deep, and bent Felix back over the altar one last time, the fledgling’s shoulders on the marble, legs locked around his waist. He fucked him through the position change without pulling out, brutal and precise, and sank his fangs into the other side of Felix’s neck for the deep bite he had been saving. The pull was stronger. Felix felt it in his fingertips, in his cock, in the bright edge of euphoria that vampire bloodletting became when it was wanted: trembling, floating, every nerve lit. He held Darius’s head to his throat and begged him not to be careful.

“Come in me,” he said, wrecked and certain. “Fill me while you drink. I want to feel both. I choose it. I choose you.”

Darius’s rhythm broke. He drove in to the root and stayed, pulsing, flooding Felix with heat while his mouth kept its devout, greedy work at the vein, groaning as if the taste and the orgasm were the same sacrament. Felix came with him, untouched at the last second, spilling across his own stomach and Darius’s hand, clenching around the cock that owned him, vision whiting out under the twin flood of pleasure and the slow, sweet drain. Darius drank until Felix shook, until the euphoria crested and softened, then sealed the punctures with his tongue and gathered him up before the tremble could become a fall.

They stayed like that on the altar steps, Felix collapsed against his maker’s chest, blood cooling on their skin, Darius’s cock still inside him, softening, one arm locked around his back as if the god complex had finally found something it did not want to mock. Felix’s mouth moved against a bloody collarbone. The prayers came out broken and mixed, fragments of offices he had said for years with no one listening, and between them, over and over, Darius’s name where heaven used to be.

“You’re not empty,” Darius said quietly, the tease gone thin. “You were waiting for a thirst big enough to answer. I like how you taste. I intend to keep liking it. If you bring another stake, bring it to bed. I’ll snap it and fuck you over the pieces.”

Felix laughed once, wrecked, and pressed his lips to the pulse he had bitten. The cathedral held them. The moonlight did not judge. He had walked in to kill a god and had ended the night dripping with that god’s cum, throat throbbing from the mouth that preferred his blood to any vintage in three hundred years, devotion finally aimed at a body that answered.

And in the ruined nave it was no longer the fledgling who had come to worship, nor the maker who had come to be adored—it was the blood itself that had been the god all along, and both of them only its faithful, ruined priests.