House of Dark Delights (16 page)

“God's bones,” growled Darius.

Charlotte nodded reassuringly to Elic, whereupon he clasped her waist and sheathed himself fully. He stood unmoving for a moment, as did Darius, letting her savor the feeling of being penetrated by two men. She felt incredibly full, utterly stuffed; the sense of possession was absolute, even more so than she'd imagined.

“Mind you don't spend till we do,” said Darius as he withdrew his cock and shoved it back in. “Else you get the whip.”

Elic muttered some exasperated imprecation under his breath, but he let it go.

Both men started thrusting then, falling into the same measured rhythm, Elic clutching Charlotte's waist, Darius her hips as she dangled like meat from the ceiling. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the bliss of two cocks stroking her tingling-hot flesh from within—and stroking each other, as well, for how could each man not feel the presence of the other inside her?

Their thrusts grew ever swifter and more erratic. It was utterly intoxicating—two hard male bodies, grinding and pumping, two men clutching, panting, groaning…

Don't spend,
Charlotte told herself, even as she writhed in mindless pleasure, feeling the inevitable approach of a climax she couldn't hope to forestall. She bit her lip as it gathered, thinking perhaps, if she kept still and didn't cry out, he wouldn't know. But so jolting were the spasms, in her ass as well as her quim, that her whole body rocked with them.

Both men stilled for one long, rigid, trembling moment. Darius cursed; Elic roared. Then came the extraordinary sensation of not one, but two cocks jerking and sputtering inside her amid a chorus of hoarse masculine groans.

Elic, breathless and damp with sweat, held her with shaking arms as Darius slid his cock from her ass a bit too swiftly for comfort. “Fucking little bitch,” he growled as he rebuttoned his trousers.

“Easy, Darius,” cautioned Elic as he eased himself out of her and gently lowered her legs. “She enjoyed it, same as we did, and why not? Why on earth should you—”

“Why are you standing up for her?”
Darius bellowed at his friend. “Greedy little cunt, I
told
her to wait for us. She claims she wants to obey, she wants to bow to my will, but I'm bloody hard-pressed to believe it.”

“Look, friend,” Elic said evenly. “You're not yourself tonight. You and I both know why. This thing has gotten its claws into you.” Gripping Darius's shoulder, he said, “You need to step back and look at things from a—”

“Don't!” Darius flung Elic's arm away, his face darkening, veins bulging on his neck, his forehead. “Don't tell me what I need to do. I know what I need to do.” Stalking past Charlotte to the wall of whips behind her, he said, “You can stay and watch, or you can leave. I suggest you watch. Then you'll see how things really are. You'll see her moaning with every stroke—and not because she wants me to stop—quite the opposite. Nothing excites her like a good, hard lashing. Isn't that right, Charlotte? Tell him.”

Elic met her gaze. She hesitated, then looked away, nodding.

“You're sure?” he asked quietly.

Another nod.

Dragging a hand through his hair, Elic said, “Very well, then.” He bowed, saying, “I thank you, my lady, for indulging me this evening. I wish you well.”

He walked away, rehooking his robe. Charlotte heard the door creak open, but she didn't hear it close.

“This'll serve you right,” said Darius as he came up behind her. She heard a metallic rattling, which puzzled her for a moment until she realized what he'd taken down from the wall: the chain whip.

Charlotte managed just one frenzied shake of the head when the first blow struck, followed swiftly by a second, a third, a fourth…Pain slashed at her as she twisted and flailed—real, searing, bone-deep pain, the shock of it so blinding that for a moment, she couldn't even scream, and when she tried to, the gag rendered her mute.

God, help me,
she prayed as blood ran from her ravaged back.
I don't deserve it, but have mercy, please…

“Stop! Jesus, stop!” shouted a man. Elic?

He hadn't left after all, Charlotte thought as her legs gave out and her head slumped forward. Uneasy, he'd paused in the doorway, just long enough.

There came the sounds of a scuffle, Elic screaming, “Look at her! For God's sake, look what you've done.”

Then a different voice—Darius's voice, low, stunned—saying, “Christ. Oh, my God.”

“Help me get her down from here.”

“Oh, my God,” said Darius as the blood drained from Charlotte's head and the world swam from gray to black to nothingness. “Charlotte. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

Nine

F
INALLY
, THOUGHT
Anton Turek as he stood back to admire the sight of Ilutu-Lili bound and at his disposal, a sacrificial offering at the mercy of his whims.

After rendering her insensible, he'd wrapped her in her veil and carried her through the cave to the so-called
Cella,
a recess off the main passage that had been utilized, in primitive times, as a place of worship. Little wonder it had been chosen for that purpose, given the natural grandeur of its appearance. The mouth of the spacious alcove was rimmed in mineral icicles that had grown down from above and up from below. Some had merged to form columns in shades of cobalt, crimson, and orange that shimmered in the light from a pair of torches flanking the imposing entryway. Not torches of the primitive variety, Turek was pleased to note, but iron stanchions topped with round, cagelike cressets stuffed with flaming fuel—most likely pitch-soaked pine. They would burn a good long while without needing to be tended, which reduced the risk of unwanted company before Turek had finished with Lili.

Just inside ran the stream that meandered through the lower levels of the cave on its way out to the bathhouse. In a fortuitous fluke of nature, it was spanned by a bridge of rock with a relatively flat, walkable surface, enabling one to enter the
Cella
without wading through knee-deep water. To the right, the floor dipped into a shallow depression lined with a two-handled, tarnished bronze bowl that had been hammered to fit it perfectly; firewood and kindling were piled up in tall stacks against the wall next to a crook-shaped iron poker hanging from a hook in the stone. Overhead, in the center of the alcove's high, domed roof, was a vertical shaft, one of several in the labyrinthine cave that served as natural chimneys. This one, Turek had been told, terminated in a wooded crevasse so deep in the craggy, heavily treed mountain overhead that any smoke issuing from it dissipated long before it was ever seen.

The focal point of the
Cella
was an ancient effigy that loomed against the back wall between a pair of flickering torches—cressets again, atop tall iron spikes jammed into cracks in the bedrock floor. Some ten feet tall, the statue had been carved, along with the wide platform on which it stood, of the same dark volcanic rock from which most everything in this valley, save the bathhouse, was constructed. Its craftsmanship was simplistic to the point of crudeness, with a stylized face that put Turek in mind of a mask, each upraised arm bearing a cup to signify fecundity. There were two breastlike mounds on the chest, as well as a phallic protuberance rising between the massive legs. The hermaphroditic anatomy, in concert with the name neatly inscribed on the front of the platform,
DVSIVÆSVS
, suggested to Turek that this supposed fertility god had, in fact, been a dusios. Curiously, there was a second inscription carved—or rather, scratched—atop the first, but it was written in an alphabet Turek had never seen before.

Dusivæsus wore five rust-encrusted iron torques, one around each ankle and wrist, with the largest encircling his neck. The latter at first glance looked to represent a snake swallowing its own tail. On closer inspection, the serpent's mouth more closely resembled a yawning vagina, its half-consumed tail the head of a penis. Dangling from the neck torque was the pair of steel cuffs Turek had brought with him, locked snugly around the wrists of Ilutu-Lili.

Turek had stripped off Lili's veil and tethered her naked to the statue with her arms stretched overhead and her feet resting between those of Dusivæsus, the height of the platform putting her and Turek at eye level—or so they would have been, but for the way her head hung down, ropes of damp black hair cloaking her like a mantle. Turek lifted her chin, pushing the hair aside to admire that striking face and lush body, gold-sheened in the flickering torchlight. He cupped a breast, squeezing the warm, resilient flesh until she flinched, a kittenish little growl of distress rising from her throat.

His stomach responded with a grind of hunger; it had been days since he'd fed.

“
Wecken sie.
Wake up.”

She stirred groggily, her eyelids fluttering. “What…?”

“Naptime is over, my dear. We've much to accomplish this evening.”

Lili blinked at him, her eyes—those dark, dreamy, painfully beautiful eyes—widening as she took in his cool smile, the cavernous
Cella,
the stone figure to which she was trussed like a flayed lamb in a butcher's shop. She stood up straight, yanking at the cuffs with a clatter of steel against iron.

Turek chuckled as she filled her lungs with air. “Go ahead, my dear. We're far too deep in this cave for anyone to hear you, but I find the sound of a woman's screams quite stirring to the senses.”

“Bastard,” she said in a voice quavering with outrage.
“Monster.”

“Correct on both counts,” he said. “But what particular breed of monster, eh? Have you managed to sort that out?”

Her gaze lit on his mouth, no doubt recalling the fangs he'd given her a good look at earlier. “Strigoi?”

He shook his head. “They are close relations, the Strigoi, but I am, in fact, an Upír of Carpathian lineage—the most venerable of the vampyric lines, if I do say so.”

She addressed him with a frank contempt he couldn't help but admire, given her predicament. “A bloodsucker, imagining himself venerable. It's almost laughable.”

“Ah, but you are not laughing, are you? You know, I think, why I have brought you here, what I have in mind for you.”

“I assume you mean to feed from me. Go to it, then.” She turned her head and raised her chin to bare the left side of her neck in a bold invitation that stole Turek's breath. Never before had his prey willingly volunteered to be taken. The gesture excited him in a far more visceral way than did mere hunger. His spine bristled as the little hairs all along it stood on end; a spasm quivered through his cock.

He stepped closer to brush his fingertips ever so lightly along her throat, feeling the carotid pulsing seductively just beneath the surface. She closed her eyes, waiting.

“Unafraid, are you?” Leaning forward, he glided the sensitive tip of his tongue along the artery's path, reveling in the hot thrum of blood beneath the flesh. “A curious reaction,” he said. “Or it would be, if you were human.”

She grew very still.

He stepped up onto the platform, seized her head with both hands and raised it, forcing her to look him in the eye. “I could suck you dry and leave you for dead, and within hours your veins would be humming with fresh blood, the color would blossom once again upon your cheeks, and you would arise and walk away, laughing at me. Is that not true, my sweet, devious little succubus?”

She held his gaze unblinkingly.

“I must admit,” he said, “I failed to see through you when you first joined us. Just another dasher who can't keep her legs together, that's what I took you for. I'd intended to use you as I use your sisters in harlotry at the first convenient opportunity.”

“By knocking me senseless with gin, then feeding on me as you vent your lust,” she said. “I'd have awakened in the morning too battered and bitten to notice the puncture wounds on my throat—”

“Or they may very well have been here,” he said, reaching up to stroke her inner wrist. “Or here.” He licked the inside of her elbow, feeling her shiver from the sensation. “Or even here,” he added, fondling the aureola around her left nipple. “It can actually take very little to satisfy me if my hunger has been recently slaked, and I do love to suckle at a ripe breast from time to time.”

“And if your hunger hasn't been slaked?” she asked. “If you're ravenous?”

“Do I drain my prey to the point of death?” He shrugged negligently. “More often than not, if I'm feeling peckish, but never with those whose demise would attract untoward attention. The nuns of the Order of St. Francis are quite secure in that regard, I assure you.”

“A murderer who only kills when he doesn't think he'll be caught is still a murderer,” she said. “How many have you butchered? Hundreds? Thousands?”

“Just as humans feed on the lower beasts, so vampyres feed on humans. 'Tis the natural order, the way of the world. I must say, I'm surprised to find you so sentimental about the welfare of humanfolk. After all, you've a bit of the vampyre in you already, no? You're a creature of dark passions and terrible, ungovernable hungers, as am I. We are really much the same, the succubus and the Upír—both predators seeking our own particular sustenance, which we derive from humans—willing or unwilling. We both do our prowling at night, for the most part. We are both singleminded in the pursuit of our prey. And we are both susceptible to the same means of destruction—immolation—which makes me suspect that your race and mine are perhaps more closely related than one would think.”

“How long have you known what I am?” she asked.

“It came to me gradually, from observing you. You're quite the debauchee, to be sure, but not like the others. Their carnal appetites are juvenile and easily gratified, whereas it became clear over time that yours…” Turek slid a hand down her belly to brush the very edge of her sex, smiling to himself as she cringed away from his touch. “Yours are as deep as the night, dark, complicated, inexorable. My suspicions about you, about what you might be, came to fruition when you took a fancy to that handsome young vicar who showed up without warning during our weekend at Bute's country house last month. His nephew, was it? Painfully earnest, went on at some length about the poor ‘unfortunates' selling themselves on the streets of St. Giles and Whitechapel, and our obligation to rescue them from their lives of sin. Joseph, I think his name was.”

“Josiah,” Lili said quietly.

“I followed you that night when you slipped upstairs to his bedchamber and—”

“Impossible,” she said. “'Twas the middle of the night, and there was no one about. I was very careful not to be seen.”

“I followed you from outside the house, crawling along the brick walls while tracking your movements from within. I watched through young Josiah's window as you crept into his bed and whispered the words that rendered him immobile while you fucked him senseless. Lucky fellow, I thought, falling victim to the likes of you. Gets to eat his cake and have his virtue. He couldn't move, but he did manage a few halting words now and then. He called you…Eliza, was it?”

With a sigh, Lili said, “She's his housekeeper's daughter. He's infatuated with her.”

“An infatuation the upstanding reverend would never stoop to act upon, of course—but he might dream about her, yes? About her coming to his bed and doing things to him, dark, bestial things he'd never imagined in that unsullied mind of his. 'Twas a revelation, Lili, watching you entice him, over and over again, into a frenzy of lust. The way you used your hands, so slowly and softly at first, then your tongue and teeth, that juicy peach from the fruit bowl, the knotted scarf, the candle…Ah, and the things you whispered in his ear to rouse his passions…Bless me if it wasn't the most exquisite filth I'd ever heard. More than once, I thought the poor boy might die of apoplexy, the way he shook and panted while you kept him hovering on the edge, his face gone purple, fingers clawing at the sheets. How many times did he come off, do you recall? Five? Six? And each time just as violently as the first.”

Lili made no response to that.

“That was when I grasped what you were and resolved to possess you,” Turek said as he caressed her face, her throat. “Not just for one night of casual bloodfucking, but wholly, and forever.”

“You're mad.”

“I'm actually quite rational, as vampyres go.” Turek rubbed his thumb firmly along her right carotid to stimulate and plump it, making it easier to locate and pierce. “We incline toward lunacy, sad to say. Not the Upír so much, but the others.”

He tilted her face to expose the side of her neck, his fangs prickling as the little nerves there prepared to draw blood up through the conduits in his palate to his own depleted vessels. Bending his head, he chose a spot high on her neck where the artery was likely to be closest to the surface, and planted a soft, preliminary kiss there.

Lili hitched in a breath at the first light touch of his fangs against her skin. Not so blasé now at the prospect of being fed upon, she twisted and writhed, wresting her head from his grasp.

“Fight me all you want, my dear. I rather fancy it.” Grabbing a fistful of her hair, Turek jerked her head aside and pierced her throat.

She wrestled and kicked, crying out hoarsely as he worked his fangs through the shallow muscle, deftly puncturing the carotid sheath and the artery itself while taking care not to nick the jugular. So violent were her struggles that he was forced to unhinge his jaw and latch on hard to her throat, using his entire mouth—not a technique he liked to employ on such a beauty, given the unsightly bruising and teeth marks that would result, but with prey this frantic, it was the only way to keep his fangs seated. He lifted her legs to either side of him, both to thwart those painful kicks and to raise her to a more convenient height so that he wouldn't have to feed hunched over.

Lili's blood ran very warm, with a distinctive essence redolent of rainwater and figs. Turek moaned deep in his throat as he siphoned it, his fangs tickling as it pumped through them, gums pulsing. Like a nursing babe, he worked his tongue in a firm, steady rhythm so as to encourage the flow. Bracing his legs, he strengthened his grip on Lili as she strained vainly but heroically against the steel cuffs and the weight of his body crushing her to the statue.

Yes. Oh, here it comes…
Lili's blood percolated through Turek's brain in a rush of pinpricks that made him feel weightless, exhilarated, his vision stained red, heart thudding in his ears. His hunger faded, replaced by the intoxicating bliss of fulfillment as the crimson nectar flooded his tissues and organs, infusing them with blessed nourishment. His cock and nipples grew erect, tingling at the surge of fresh blood.