Читать книгу: «Underworlds: Tales of Paranormal Lust»
Underworlds
Tales of Paranormal Lust
Contents
Title Page
Heavenly Shades – Charlotte Stein
Slave of the Lamp – Janine Ashbless
Katie – Angela Caperton
Sleepwalker’s Secret – Rose de Fer
They Come at Night – Elizabeth Coldwell
Period Drama – Lara Lancey
The Ursa Legacy – Anne Tourney
Riding the Ghost Train – Chrissie Bentley
Fancy a F**k? – Lisette Ashton
The Hunt – Penelope Hildern
More from Mischief
About Mischief
Copyright
About the Publisher
Heavenly Shades
Charlotte Stein
I can hear the prickle of a needle on vinyl from all the way up here, but this time I don’t flinch. My heart doesn’t try to scramble out of my chest. Instead, I just let myself float here, in the tepid water now filling my bathtub. I drift, like an island of perfectly slick, pale flesh.
While downstairs the music cycles up. First the violins, looping along one after the other. Then that crushed-velvet voice, pouring out of the record player and all the way up to me. Heavenly shades of night are falling, the singer croons, as I let my hand flow back and forth in the water. It’s twilight time, the song continues, and then I know for certain.
He is here.
It’s like his calling card, I suppose. The cue for him to enter stage right. That shushing beat starts, and after it come his footsteps on the stairs. Heavy and slumberous, somehow, even though he is neither.
He’s as quick as a snake and barely past six foot, body like a whip. Face like one, too. If I hadn’t seen underneath his clothes I’d think he was a pointed finger, muscle-less and mean. But I know different, now. I didn’t want to, but I do anyway.
And I suppose that’s the way of things, with him.
I don’t want to get out of the bathtub and put on the nightgown he gave me for such special occasions. I don’t want to wait for him in my bedroom, as pretty and clean as a picture.
But I do it anyway. In fact, I do more than that. I dry my hair, and brush it out into one long spill down my back. And then finally I look in the mirror, as I always do, and try to think what makes my face the one. What made him look at me and think: It’s her I’ll do this to. Not sunny Kelli Fisher, from number thirty-six. Not Mrs Levine, who’s still lovely and lissom and not half as plain as me. My face is like a blank slate, empty of anything that could move a man to madness. My eyes are like stones, my mouth is a barely there imprint.
And yet he comes to me all the same. He’s there when I pad across the hall and enter my entirely alien bedroom. It used to be a place of comfort in here; everything in it used to be familiar to me. But now it looks like the funhouse version of that space, shadows striping things at odd angles. Pictures hung where they shouldn’t be. The full moon barely penetrating into the room, even though I know that shouldn’t be the case. I know its light should be more than this weak little blurred thing that creeps over my carpet and scarcely touches my toes.
It’s like he drives it away somehow.
It’s like he drives my will away, too.
‘Come and dance with me, my little bird, my little one in particular,’ he says, and I think of those words over and over, as I force my feet over the carpet to him. My one in particular, he always says, because I’m special, I’m so special.
So why is it that I sob against his shoulder the minute he takes me in his arms?
Because I do. I make a sound like something dying and let myself sag into him, that strange wired strength in him holding me up, even as I try to sink down to the floor. I suspect he could hold me up if I was as heavy as twenty bags of concrete. I suspect he could lead me around like this, boneless and doll-like, if I fought with all of my might.
I fought the first time, after all. All the way back then, when I had only suspected. He’d come over to borrow a cup of sugar, and I’d thought to myself, half-giddily: If he really is some kind of creature of the night, he won’t be able to come into the house – so don’t invite him in.
And I hadn’t. Instead, I’d just tentatively passed the cup over the high holy threshold, waiting for him to reach forward and take it. And then, when he had, I’d done the worst possible thing I could have. The thing that caused all of this, the thing that made it be so.
I’d pulled the cup back at the last second, and watched him press his fingers to the invisible barrier blocking his way, as though it were a pane of glass.
It was too late for me then; I understand that now. He knew that I knew, from that moment on, and from that moment on my only job was to evade him – and I did. I raced the daylight home every day after it happened, but there’s always more twilight. There’s always more night waiting to descend on me at just the wrong moment, and it had descended even faster after he put that hole in my gas line.
Because he’s clever, you see. He’s not like the ones you see in movies, who creak out of their coffins and hypnotise you in nightclubs. He has to use his wiles, rather than some set of hoary old mystical clichés. He has to rely on a serial killer’s tricks to snare his prey.
And he snared me well. I walked all the way home from the middle of nowhere, knowing what he’d done. Knowing, but unable to do anything about it. The darkness had fallen so fast, and I simply wasn’t capable of running the five miles home.
Even if I had, I wouldn’t have made it in time. I didn’t make it in time.
And so here we are, dancing to the music I hear no matter where I am or what I’m doing. In the supermarket, trembling and near bloodless from the night before. Always tired now, always so weak, my mind drifting to the sound of that slowly dripping song, and his face. His eyes, like burned syrup.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please.’
But I’m praying to the wrong God. This one has hair like a raven’s wing and hands as cold as stones at the bottom of an icy river, and when I beg him to give me my life back he just murmurs shhhh, shhhh, in a way that should be soothing.
And it almost is. Everything he does is almost soothing, almost tender – like a lover trying to coax me into the most sensuous bout of lovemaking. One hand pressed to my lower back, rubbing and rubbing there. The other in my hair, stroking so softly it makes me sob again.
It’s so close to something sweet, I think. So close I could almost believe in it, if it were not for the true purpose behind the thrust of his fingers through the newly cleaned strands.
He doesn’t like it to get in his way, when he gets a mouthful of me.
‘Oh, my little one,’ he says against the side of my face. But even without looking I know the teeth are there. I can almost feel the steely press of them as he comes close to kissing me, and as his breath ghosts, cool and strange, all over my skin.
‘Don’t,’ I say again, but the word is small and fluttering and he is powerful, so powerful. I can feel the twist of those muscles beneath the hand I’m pushing against his shoulder – though it’s more than that. He’s like a steel cage, in a way no man should ever be. He locks me in tight, and, though he coos and murmurs and tries to calm me down, in the end he always has to force it.
He holds me fast, that hand in my hair now like a vice. And, though I know what’s coming, I still squeeze my eyes tight shut for it. I brace myself, and then there’s just his icy mouth against my throat. That eagerness in him, suddenly – despite the fact that he’s never eager for anything.
He’s always slow, so slow and deliberate. After he’d caught me that first time, he stalked me like some crouching, clever beast that doesn’t actually exist. A raptor, I always think, but there’s nothing lizard-like about him – apart from the cold. And when you look at him, that cold isn’t there at all.
He looks heated, primal somehow. His hips practically rolled, as he backed me into a corner. And the second I tried to evade him by doing something stupid – like jumping into the swimming pool he never uses; of course he never uses it – he just walked right into the water as though it wasn’t even a step down.
Where are you going, Francesca, he’d said, like I was so silly to want to get away.
And I suppose he had a point. There’s no getting away, from him. I just have to hang there helpless in his arms, as his lips part and that razor sharpness grazes my skin. Every inch of me waiting for the worst feeling – the one the movies never suggest.
It’s like a crunch. His teeth slide into me and then there’s the strangest sensation afterwards … like he’s breaking my bones, somehow, even though I know he isn’t. There’s never more than two puncture marks on my skin afterwards, and no side-effects apart from the lethargy.
But that first shot of pain, so intense it’s almost like pleasure …
It’s unbearable. It’s unstoppable. It’s like a side-effect in its own way, because even when I’m alone I can remember and feel it almost exactly.
But the pain right now is remarkable, even by those standards. It narrows my body down to that one bright focus point, until I have to do something unbearable like gasp, harsh and guttural, at the ceiling, tears spilling in an entirely different way down my cheeks.
This time they come like a reflex, with barely any sadness behind them at all. And if I say his name at the same time, well, isn’t that like a reflex, too? Isn’t it like the begging I always do before he sinks his teeth in?
‘Merrith,’ I say, because he’d told me it once, after the blood had made him lazy and satisfied. Vulnerable, I always think, but that’s not true at all. He just seems it when he cradles my limp body against his, and tells me things I’m sure he never tells anyone else. Everyone else thinks he’s Jimmy Brecker, but he isn’t really. He’s Merrith, just Merrith, as though he came from a time beyond surnames and Christian names.
Maybe he really did, I think, as my life flows out of me and into him. And though it’s painful, this is the part where a different sort of sensation starts to take over. A pulling sensation, like he’s got a hand on some thread inside me and he’s just easing it on through.
It’s as debilitating, in its own way, as the bone-crushing first bite. It turns my legs to jelly; it makes me faint and fearful of myself. Sometimes I almost drift off like this, and there’s the ever-present terror that I’m never actually going to wake up again.
But there’s something else there, too. Sometimes I come around and I’m clinging to him in the same way he clings to me – like a lover, not a victim. One arm looped around his shoulders; a hand stroking down over the perfect curve of his spine. Every sense I’ve got so aware of my own body, as it turns to water in his arms.
By the time he’s done, I’m no longer standing. He’s holding me like this, with my pointed feet nearly all the way off the floor. And when he takes his first big breath – like a little kid would do, after drinking too much lemonade – I feel his body shuddering against the whole length of mine.
‘So sweet,’ he says, once he’s capable of speech. ‘So sweet when you let me have you like this.’
And though I try to tell myself not to, I think of the dual meaning of have. Of course I do – it’s like a compulsion, after all this time, of his hands and his mouth and the music, rich and strange. I sag against his shoulder and think of those liquid eyes of his, always searching through me like a hand sifting through pretty things.
‘My one,’ he says, and then he just licks long and languid over the still bleeding bits of me – everything about the move so tender that my mind immediately turns to animals, and the way they heal each other.
Is that what he is, really? An animal underneath, reacting to things in a blind, instinctive way? And, if so, is it really so bad if I do the same?
Because it’s perfectly true that I don’t know what I’m doing, when I push my fingers into his thick dark hair. It’s like I’ve lapsed into that heavy state of unconsciousness, even though I’m still awake. I understand that I’m still awake, as I hold that suddenly warm and wet mouth to my throat.
Of course I expect him to resume that hypnotic pulling – or at the very least to keep licking me in that way I don’t like at all, I swear I don’t. But instead he makes this sound that I don’t recognise – as though I’ve startled him – and arches away from me. Gets my face in one long-fingered hand, so that he can look down into my eyes.
‘You want me to?’ he asks, and for a second I’m sure he means the other thing. The one that I never think of, when he gets his hand on that thread and pulls. But then he carries on in that startled and completely new tone, those eyes of his suddenly naked. ‘You want me to taste you?’
And I think, Yes, yes, but not in the way you’re imagining.
Of course I know it’s too late then for me. Like when I made the choice to try to catch him out, and his fingers pushed against the invisible glass. I’ve pushed my fingers against an invisible barrier and just kept on going right through to the other side, where my hands are full of his hair and my body is completely aware of all the things he never does.
In truth, I’m not even sure if he knows what those things are any more – instead, there’s just a hole in him, where desire and lust and pleasure used to be. It’s like knowing someone who never needs to breathe. At some point, you expect them to want to. You expect them to suddenly jolt with the memory of something that once kept them living.
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even remember when I reverse what he’s been doing to me. He just hangs there in my arms, blankly staring, and lets me put my mouth on his. Lets me taste my own blood in his mouth, and come away just as he always does: streaked with red, stunned by the sensation of feeding.
But, unlike him, I don’t let myself lapse into that oddly vulnerable state. I don’t tell him my real name – what would be the point? He already knows it. And I don’t let him curl against me, to chase away the confusion and hurt all over his face.
I just do it again, in all the different ways I can think of to kiss. Open-mouthed and close-mouthed and soft and wet. Then maybe all of those things together, until he does something that shocks me more than his vampirism ever did.
He kisses me back. He kisses me back, as though he does know how to breathe after all. It’s just like riding a bike, I think, deliriously, but there’s another simile just hovering on the edges of my mind. One I don’t want to think about, at first, but then – isn’t that what I’ve been doing along?
I’ve refused to think about those hands on my back, roaming and running over me in the way they do again now. I’ve refused to think about the song, like the sort of thing you’d put on if you wanted to seduce a girl. I’ve refused to think of the word one, and what it usually means in romance novels.
But I think of all of these things now, because when I put my mouth on him all of them are reframed entirely. It’s not just a hint. It’s right there in my face – that his hands make me so swollen and slippery, between my legs. That the feel of his body against mine stiffens my nipples, whether I want it to or not.
And it’s not just because he’s a man, underneath it all. It’s because his name is Merrith, I think. It’s because he stares and stares at me as though I’ve suddenly become some entirely different creature, and the longer he does the stronger that feeling gets between my legs. Usually it’s just this syrupy sort of thing, born of the pulling sensation and the laxness and some internal confusion.
But now I can actually make it out distinctly, and put a name to it without shame. I’m aroused. I’m aroused because of the things he does to me, and because of that sense of an absent need in him. He doesn’t even know what sex is any more – but that’s all right.
I do.
‘It’s like this,’ I tell him, and then I take his hand just as the music cycles back up again. I slip my fingers around his waist, and lead him into a different sort of dance.
One that ends up on the bed.
Of course, he doesn’t do any of the things you’re supposed to, once we’re there. He doesn’t tear my clothes off, or tear his clothes off, or rut against me frantically – though it doesn’t matter really. There’s at least one of us doing all of those things, as greedily as I’ve ever felt myself be.
In fact, I’m not even sure if I have ever been this greedy. My fingers feel oddly numb and fumbly, unable to do something as simple as make my body naked. And when I try to do the same thing to him, the effect is tripled. Quadrupled. I’m practically paralysed by the sight of so much of him, so pale he’s almost translucent. Every muscle and line in exactly the right place, even though I’d kind of expected to uncover something strange.
Like maybe he’d turn out to be a satyr or worse, underneath his clothes. There’d be fur in all the places I haven’t yet seen, and hooves where his feet should be – but of course there’s none of that. He’s perfectly formed, perfectly man-shaped, and more than this … he’s remembering fast, for someone who seems so dazed.
Between his legs he’s thick and stiff. And though I suppose it should be this that frightens me, it isn’t. It’s the other thing, it’s the crunch, it’s the bitter bleakness of having that hole in my gas line and seeing the night come down, down, down. Whereas this, by comparison …
This is something I’m asking for. It’s the first thing I’ve asked for. And it seems the moment I do, he’s willing to give it. He even runs one cool hand over the length of my spread body, in an echo of the thing I do to him the moment I have the chance. I just reach up and feel every inch of his skin, feel his cock all perfectly right and normal, and in response he touches me there, too.
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