I almost buckled at the sensation of her nail finding the faint bumps of scar tissue, stimulating the scar back into full play. My eyes closed as I remembered that the demon had taken Ivy’s face when it ripped out my throat, filling the wound with a dangerous cocktail of neurotransmitters to make pain into pleasure. “Yes,” I breathed, almost moaning. “God help me. It does. Please…stop.”

Her body shifted against mine. “I know how it feels,” she said. “The hunger racing from it to fill your body, the need it stirs, until the only thought burning in you is to touch the craving to fulfill it.”

“Ivy?” I whimpered. “Stop. I can’t. I don’t want to.”

My eyes flashed open at her silence. The drop of blood at the corner of her mouth was gone. I could feel the blood pounding through me. I knew my reactions were tied to the demon scar, that she was sending out pheromones to restimulate the pseudovamp saliva that remained in me to make pain into pleasure. I knew it was one of the survival adaptations vamps relied upon to bind people to them, ensuring that they had a willing supply of blood. I knew all of this, but it was getting harder to remember. Harder to care. It wasn’t sexual. It was need. Hunger. Heat.

Ivy put her forehead against the wall beside mine as if to gather her resolve. Her hair made a silk curtain between us. I felt the warmth from her through her body stocking. I couldn’t move, wire-tight with fear and want, wondering if she would sate it or if I would be strong enough of will to push her away.

“You don’t know what it’s been like living beside you, Rachel,” she said, her whisper coming from behind her hair as if from a confessional grate. “I knew you’d be frightened if you knew how vulnerable your scar makes you. You’ve been marked for pleasure, and unless you have a vampire to claim and protect you, they all will take advantage of it, taking what they want and passing you to the next until you’re nothing but a puppet begging to be bled. I was hoping you might be able to say no. That if I taught you enough, you would be able to drive a hungry vampire away. But you can’t, dear heart. The neurotoxins have soaked in too far. It’s not your fault. I’m sorry….”

My breath came in small pants, each one sending the promise of coming pleasure through me, flowing back to renew that which ebbed, building on those that came before. I held my breath, trying to find the will to tell her to get off me. Oh God, I was failing.