Vigilantes of Love (7 page)

“Actually, it should be ‘and’ not ‘or,’” she announced, sliding closer, her flesh squeaking on my vinyl seats.

“Huh?”

“You’re the trick and I’m the treat.”

I had to laugh at that, but couldn’t for too long. She thrust one soft, wide-rimmed nipple into my mouth almost immediately.

“What do you like, baby?” she purred.

I moaned a little, sucking harder on her nipple.

One cool hand scratched through my hair, coming to a stop at the back of my neck. She squeezed. “Tell me,” she demanded, her grip uncomfortably tight. She had amazingly strong hands.

I broke away from the kiss, and looked up at her, embarrassment showing.

“I… I like to be told what to do,” I admitted. “I like to feel nails and teeth all over my body. I like to feel… um, raped, kind of.”

“Had a feeling,” she nodded, looking not at all surprised. Maybe it was my extra cash or my red face. Whatever gave me away, my dark kink didn’t phase her for a second.

“Take off your clothes,” she said. Her lips were pouty and red – an incredibly sensual combination – but I could see in her eyes that she was bored by this routine. How many guys wanted her to slap them around then fuck them, like they were little boys being Mrs. Robinson-ed, to climax? I didn’t want to know.

I did as she commanded, my heart skipping a beat as I slid out of my jeans. My cock bobbed out of my underwear like a lazy dog’s tail, and she grabbed me by its head. Not the most comfortable leash I’ve ever been on.

“Let’s go back here.” She pulled me, hard, to the bed in the back of the van, and pushed me down on the thin mattress.

“So you like it rough, huh? We can do that. Get on your hands and knees.”

I rolled over, presenting my ass to her. She promptly met it with the palm of her hand. “I think you need to warm up a bit before we start anything.”

I cried out at the next slap of her hand, reveling at the heat building in my ass and groin and spreading through my chest. My arms began to tremble.

“Roll over,” she commanded, and I did. My view of the world darkened as she straddled my face and bent to lick my belly.

“Eat,” she said, her voice growing throaty now. Maybe I was turning her on a little, even if it was only business. That made me glad – I liked to actually be friends with the company I kept on holidays. I could jack myself off anytime I wanted. Without human connection, that’s all this would be – glorified masturbation. I wanted something a
little
deeper than that.

I felt teeth suddenly gripping my cock, and I cried out, the sound smothered in the musky, slick muzzle she held me in.

I bit back, and a tremor ran down her thighs. Her teeth moved up and down, scraping me painfully, and my desire grew.

Her nails began raking my ribs, and I twisted in that weird mix of masochistic pleasure and pain beneath her. I slapped at her ass, and she bit me back, harder. I must have screamed.

I was worried she’d broken the tender skin of my cock, but worry quickly slipped away. Fear was taking its place. I suddenly felt trapped, helpless. And her actions grew more violent. Her nails felt like tiny razors, slicing hard at my skin. I could picture tissue-thin strips of skin rolling off my body. I tried to push her off of me. I was getting scared, even as my penis grew harder. Don’t they say that a man’s cock is often at its hardest right after death?

This was too much, I couldn’t handle it.

But her legs locked around my face, her nether lips seemed to loosen and kiss me deeper. My cock was engorged and powerful, thrusting on its own into the toothy heaven of her mouth. And just as I was ready to throw her from me with all my might, she released me, and came up to stare into my eyes.

“Now I’m going to fuck you,” she announced. “Don’t try to get away.”

She sat down on me, and I could feel the sore spots on my cock where she’d chewed me. If I survived this little adventure, I was going to be walking funny tomorrow. But right then, those raw spots only made the pressure she was exerting unbearably hot. She raked at my chest with her nails, and now I saw them as claws, digging into me. I cried out, and I saw in her eyes the cruel flames of power, of lust. She was totally turned on by my pain, and I could tell from the set of her jaw that she wasn’t going to stop. She wanted my blood.

Her head came down, her mouth wide open, and I could see the points of her canines. What had I brought into my bed? She buried her teeth in my neck, and I came, buried inside her. With excitement and sadness I realized that we had passed the point of no return.

Suddenly, I flipped her so that I was atop her.

Her eyes widened in surprise as she saw the glitter in my own. I mashed my mouth to hers, and her hands began raking my back – not in her powerful sadism of moments before, but in terror.

I couldn’t pull back now. The sore spot on my neck from her teeth sung in my veins, of mating and feasting, and the two within me were entwined. I bit off the tongue that was struggling to push me from her mouth. She tasted so good!

The hot stream of blood triggered my transformation.

Teeth extended, hands turned to yellow-clawed knives, I ripped open her throat as she screamed one short burst of terror.

I hope, at least, that she came before she died. I was too swollen with bloodlust to ask her.

I suckled her bountiful breasts briefly before chewing them off. Then I followed that sweet white trail from sternum to belly to dark musky delta. I thrust my snout back in where I had been so recently lapping as a man, bit off the tender flaps of her vulva. Oh, they were succulent. And her scent – ripe with sex and blood – sent my head reeling.

With one claw I poked at her deep belly button, and then with a hooking motion, ripped the creamy skin away. Oh, the meaty smell! I dove in as if she were a deep blue pool, slobbering with hunger as I rolled my head through her kidneys, feasted on the steamy coils of her entrails.

At last, sated in both cock and belly, I sat back on my haunches, and with some return of intellect, looked at her once more.

Her body was as beautiful now, still and shattered, as it had been mounting my manhood in frothy lust. Her limbs lay akimbo; marble-white death framed against crimson. I leaned forward to lick a spot of blood from her still pouting lips.

I hadn’t wanted to harm her, but she took me too far. At the high point of passion, a man can’t control himself.

And I’m not, after all, wholly a man.

I felt the beginnings of regret, as my teeth receded a bit, and my hands thinned slowly back to the type of fingers meant to peck on computer keyboards from the hooked claws meant to filet live dinners.

I sighed, looking at the hard beauty of her face. She had been too good for her own good. I really had only meant to have a little sex and company tonight.

I try to reserve my wild holiday slaughters for Thanksgiving. But sometimes I can’t control my instincts.

I backed the van slowly onto an overgrown path and down a canal loading ramp so that its rear end bubbled up with water. I thought that perhaps it was best that I didn’t have a family to spend time with on holidays.

The noise level at dinner would be unbearable. And the mess to deal with afterwards! I also doubted if they’d consider it polite to fuck your food before eating it. Families can be funny that way.

I pulled the parking brake up, sloshed my way into the back of the partly submerged van and began using the slow current of the canal to help me clean up after dinner. The equivalent of doing the dishes.

Having company on the holidays can be a messy business.

After the fifth step, it was mundane.

Ahhh… but getting to the fifth step. That was the trick. That was what it was all about. The crowds below, they thought the tough part was in the center, once the safety net was removed. “Oh, such danger,” the ringmaster would cry. “Such daring-do.”

Such malarkey, Reind thought. Once you were moving, in the groove, you didn’t
need
a net.

The difficult part was in placing one step in front of the other when leaving behind the wooden platform. The first step was like a switch between stepping on sandpaper and high-gloss ice – with a slight movement, his foot left behind the immobile, grainy plywood to slip down a quivering, thin decline of twined, worn fibers. It was stepping through the door from plane cargo bay to open air. That step was the first trick. And the second, bringing your anchor with you.

The hardest was the step after the first. That’s where you gained or lost your balance. That’s where it became a walk or a fall. After the second step, there was no going back. You didn’t turn around on the high wire.

The third step was a beginning. The first complete motion forward on a new course. The fourth step was an affirmation.

After the fifth step, it was just walking.

Reind put his first foot down on the tightrope and felt the horsehair fibers catch on the Lyrca net of his tights. Comforting feeling, that. While an unpracticed person would simply feel his foot slip down on a waving thread of uncertainty, Reind could feel his sole wrap and grip on the tightly-wound fibers of the rope. It wasn’t like stepping on air. It was solid to him. Different than earth, maybe, but solid. If you were in tune.

Maybe that was the best simile. Walking the tightrope was like performing a violin solo. Long, elegant strokes across thin strands of fiber.

Of course, if you flubbed a note on a fiddle, you didn’t end up so much dog food in front of an audience of hundreds. Usually. He thought of a spider, stepping without thought across skeins and strands of web.

Tarantula
, sang a dirge in his mind from a long-ago album by This Mortal Coil. That’s what he tread across. This Mortal Coil. A skein of filigree and shadow. The web of a tarantula. He smiled and hummed.

The second step fell true. He sighed, a breath of success. The audience didn’t know the peril of those first two steps. It was the job of the ringmaster to keep them from focusing on that while the tightrope walker gained his composure and rhythm.

Down there, past the round, red-and-yellow-painted elephant step in the second ring. That’s where the megaphone man made his plays. That’s where the man with the handlebar mustache barked his exaggerated cries of,
“Can you believe it, he’s about to step out on the wire without a net beneath him… quiet, ladies and gentlemen, this is very dangerous…”

That was exactly when Reind didn’t care anymore. That’s where the danger became safe. Sleight of hand and misdirection were the calling cards of the circus.

After the first few steps, he was home free. The adjustment zone at the intro; that’s where the tough stuff was. It was the job of the ringmaster to keep the audience focused on the center and the false bravado, where it was easy.

The third step was good, and Reind’s heart slowed.

Oh yes. Even after all these years of walking, his heart still kicked with a mule’s petulant anger when he put that first toe to the wire. His mind may have been stubborn, but his body wasn’t stupid. He knew that every walk could be his last.

But with step four, he knew that this was just another day. His bearings found, Reind moved steadily across the rope, one foot in front of the other, each step bearing down lower on the ever-so-slightly sloping rope, until he reached the center, and the object of the ringmaster’s over-exaggerated cries of excitement. Once he started that upward incline on the far side of center (over the spot where there was no net) it was like walking up a hill. From the ground, it actually looked fairly level. But it wasn’t, not quite. The second half of the walk was work, but it was easy. He began to think of Melienda, the night before. The way her fringed, gold lamé top had slipped from his fingers to the floor, a bouquet of tinsel. The way she’d shown him how a girl could really appreciate the controlled reflexes of a tightrope walker. She didn’t care if his mother was the Three-Breasted Woman of the Freak Show tent.

She loved his surety of self. She loved his lips for their deceiving softness.

He loved her eyes for their kaleidoscopic play of spark and dark and mystery. He loved her dimples for their expressive blushes.

God, he hoped she didn’t tell. This was a dangerous game. All of their other meetings had been during the break between their acts. They’d seen each other on the sly for weeks, but never had a night date before. When he slipped back into his tent to face Erin after midnight, he’d had to make up an excuse about helping Raymond with a faulty rope pulley. She’d yawned and shrugged, and turned away back to sleep. Did she suspect?

It was one thing for a man of the circus to love a woman of the same. It was another for a man of the circus to
cheat
on a woman of the circus with a woman of the same. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone talked to the wrong someone else. No matter how careful he was, tongues would wag. A circus was a family, and like any family, nothing stayed secret for very long.

Erin, Reind’s wife, was a ticket-taker at the front gate. She had no ‘talents,’ but she’d loved the smell of the damp bales of hay and the heat of popcorn in the air and the sticky promises that pink cotton candy gave and the front gate cries of,
“Step right up ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Barnett & Staley’s Amazing, Mysterious, Phantasmagorical, Traveling Circus. Hear the mighty trumpet of the elephants and the happy horns of the clowns. Taste the taffy of our apples and caramel of our corn. Twist your body in the House of Illusions. And for the truly terrifying, visit our Freak Show. Come and see the frightening Mr. Lee. Dare to meet the stare of Felina of the Five Eyes!”