Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (4 page)

THE RESURRECTION ROSE

Anne Tourney

E
VERY DAY MADAME FEEDS.
She pierces Lucy’s flesh at the wrist, thigh, sometimes over her left breast—yes, Madame even taps into Lucy’s heart—and draws her daily sacrifice. Each feeding takes Lucy from death to restoration; she is born again and again in the shadow of a rose. No one but ‘Madame de Mortoise’ knows about her essential rituals. In Lucy’s little town in the redwoods north of San Francisco, she is known only for her gift in growing flowers.

‘Madame de Mortoise’ is a rose.

It’s an April morning. The woods around Lucy’s house fill with cars long before she opens the nursery, and the customers park along the narrow roads and wait like lovers for her to open the gates. Lucy never lets the clientele rush her. In the greenhouse behind the tea rose arbor, something more urgent is waiting.

After her light breakfast, Lucy steps into her flip-flops and pads out into the garden. The other roses are a blur of transient blooms in fashionable colors. Contemporary blossoms with clever cultivar names: ‘Miss Priss,’ ‘La Femme Nikita,’ ‘Shock Me.’ But until she finishes her business in the greenhouse, none of the other flowers matter. By the time Lucy opens the greenhouse door, she is loosening the sash of her coral satin robe.

“I’m coming,” she murmurs.
“J’arrive, ma chere.”

‘Madame de Mortoise’ is looking sullen today. The steam of her funk fills the little glass structure, its transparent panels carpeted with her vines. She has spread her leaves like hundreds of tiny hands to block the early light, and her dark red blossoms—never lovely in the best of circumstances—are curled as tight as truculent brown fists. No small sips will do when she’s in a mood like this; she will want to feed straight from Lucy’s heart.

“What’s the matter, Madame? Bad dreams last night?”

Lucy kneels at the root of the rose. She tosses back her sleep-tangled curls, gold laced with gray, and lets her robe fall open. She cups her breasts with her hands, letting the freckled flesh spill over her palms. Her breasts aren’t as firm as they once were, but she’s had more than her measure of youthful years. Thanks to ‘Madame de Mortoise,’ Lucy has had more time than any woman deserves.

“Did you dream of my lover Etienne Dordogne,” Lucy asks, “and his hot, dangerous blood? Poor Madame. You woke up to your sweet, tame Lucy, in another century. No wine of the French revolutionaries for you,
ma chere
. Those nights are long gone.”

Lucy leans forward. The rose’s branches rustle furiously as the roots stretch to meet her, one giant crimson thorn extended. Vines creep across Lucy’s skin; coarse leaves tease her belly and nipples as her robe drops away. The glossy blade of the thorn is as long as a hunting knife— black at the hilt, shifting to purple, then crimson, then pink, and finally a pale, pearlescent green. Lucy closes her eyes. The thorn plunges into the top of her breast. She moans as the shaft sinks deeper, little by little.

Madame’s voracious branches turn into a living cage, gripping Lucy by the waist, wrists, and ankles as she twists under the caress of the flowers and the thorn’s penetration. Lucy is a captive. Her thighs open, and the smaller thorns move in to tease her pussy lips. Blossoms bat against her lips and cheeks; the petals slap her like silken palms. What human lover could ever pierce her so?

The thorn pierces her heart. Lucy shudders, but the trembling stops as the thorn passes into the secret chambers. Her eyelids flutter. Her mouth falls open, and pearls of spit bead on her lower lip. She remembers a deep kiss in the garden at Versailles, a school of nude bodies writhing like pale fish on pink satin, blood spilling into a silver chalice. Her breath deepens. Her blood pumps slowly, until her muscles reach a stasis approaching death.

Just before she topples into unconsciousness, a pulse begins to throb in the pit of Lucy’s belly. Its rhythm drums through her blood. Her skin tingles. Hundreds of pinpricks spread from her core to her limbs, hardening her nipples and melting her pussy. The tension mounts until Lucy can’t stand it anymore and begs for release.

“Take me, Madame,” she groans. “Take what you need, and let me go.”

The thorn shudders inside her. Madame is endlessly hungry; it’s not enough for her thorns to take Lucy’s lifeblood. The rose has to devour Lucy’s pleasure as well, extracting a climax that leaves Lucy shaking and shattered in Madame’s voracious arms. The rose parts the satin folds between her thighs, finds her clit, and taunts the pink bud to orgasm.

The thorn withdraws, tumescent. The shaft throbs with Lucy’s life. A crimson bead drips from the tip, which is black now, like the root. No more pale green—this is not the Garden of Eden.

Lucy’s head reels. The leaves of the rose curl with satisfaction; the flowers unfurl as nourishment rushes to the petals. Madame’s branches withdraw, releasing Lucy back to ordinary life. Lying on the floor, panting, Lucy holds her hand over her heart as she floats back to reality. It feels like coming back from the dead, but that’s to be expected: every feeding is a passion cycle. Today, for some reason, the rose was more famished than usual. Famished and angry.

Is Madame restless? Does she want a more exotic life, to seek out the sexual intrigue and decadence that used to stoke Lucy’s libido long ago?

Lucy hopes not. She loves her cottage, nestled in the trees, with its rose gardens that descend across gentle green hills down to the cliffs that border the sea. These are years of serenity, something she craves.

But ‘Madame de Mortoise’ is dissatisfied. She is the only one who can lay a claim to Lucy’s heart; still, she wants more. Madame misses the court life, with its political machinations as delicate as the workings of an evil clock. She misses the orgies—sexual and political—of blood. It’s been too long since the rose tasted the wines of war in Lucy’s veins.

Centuries ago, when Lucy and Madame’s history was just beginning, there seemed to be no end to the ways they could feed from each other. Back then, the rose was a new plant, odd and unlovely, growing in a shadowed corner of the rosarian’s shed, hidden away from the palace’s formal gardens. It was the court rosarian who taught the girl about the flower’s mysterious hungers, how this special rose was nourished not by water and earth, but from blood.

In the mornings, Lucy would run to the shed where the rose grew and let the flower suck from the tender spot below her pink-tipped breast, letting it taste the juices of Lucy’s lust mingled with the sharp flavors from her adventures the night before.

But Lucy’s desires have mellowed; nowadays she prefers order to excess, inner peace to passion.

“We’ve had plenty of excitement in our years together, Madame,” Lucy grumbles as she climbs to her feet and prepares to face the twenty-first-century morning. “Don’t we both deserve a restful life?”

“Your life is not your own,” Madame reminds Lucy, speaking to her in the manner they’ve shared for over two centuries. “Remember, you
must
take care of my needs. Neither one of us will die alone.”

Some of Lucy’s customers might die if they don’t get their own horticultural fix soon. Lucy should have opened the nursery gates fifteen minutes ago. She hurries back to the cottage as quickly as her dizziness will allow. In her own private garden, behind the stone wall that circles her fairy-tale house, she sees two strangers browsing through the sunrise-tinted blossoms of her ‘Peace’ rose. Lucy jerks her sash around her waist, lifts her chin, and approaches.

“How did you get in here? This area is private.”

Unruffled, the strangers gaze at Lucy. They are as slim and elegant as deer in their tight black leggings and soft black leather jackets. A man and a woman, identically dressed, both wearing dark glasses even in the light of an April morning. Lucy feels like the intruder.

“Cute,” the woman says, flicking one of the fat ‘Peace’ blossoms with her fingertips, “but common. I assume you have much more rare varieties.”

Lucy bristles. “This is my personal garden. I plant what I like here.”

With their yellow and pink hues and sensuous, abundant blossoms, the ‘Peace’ roses resemble Lucy’s own body. Or at least the body she had many years ago.

The visitor smiles. Her lips form a thin crescent of scorn that reminds Lucy of a scythe.

A red scythe. Hasn’t Lucy seen that mouth before? She remembers that mouth whispering, plotting, kissing, feasting on her body and the beautiful bodies of other young nobles.

“Do you sell any refreshments? Soda, tea?” asks the young man. “Even a glass of tap water would do.”

His angelic face is chalky, lips puffy and pouting. He probably overworked his mouth, not to mention his liver, last night. His purple silk shirt, garishly loud among the delicate roses, is rumpled and marred with a dark stain, the collar unbuttoned to reveal a purple love bite on his ivory neck. The fly of his black trousers yawns open, revealing a flash of scarlet underwear. Still, he’s oddly delectable; Lucy wonders whether she’d rather scold him to zip up his fly or invite him back to her bedroom to investigate the slight bulge under his red shorts. She notes he looks much younger than his companion, and that warms her to him.

“I’ll make you some chamomile tea, if you like. With honey and lemon?”

“Sounds perfect.”

The young man smiles. It transforms him from a pouting cherub into an archangel. Even with his dark glasses, he is impossibly beautiful.

“Don’t bother with the tea,” the woman says. “Charlot will survive; he’s been hungover before. Besides, we won’t be long. We just stopped by to have a peek at the ‘Madame de Mortoise.’”

“What?”

Lucy’s heart lurches.

“The ‘Madame de Mortoise.’ Rumor has it that you’ve got the only surviving plant.”

“I … I’ve never heard of it.”

“Please. You call yourself a ‘rosarian,’ and you’ve never heard of the ‘Madame de Mortoise’?”

“No. I’m sorry. I assume it’s an heirloom?”

The woman sighs. Her mouth droops in a moue of supreme boredom as she surveys the cozy garden, but her nostrils quiver, and her eyes, behind the shadowed lenses, rove back and forth. Lucy can feel her gaze through the black shades.

Words swim to the surface of Lucy’s memory. She can hear a verse she hasn’t thought of in ages, lines written for a woman whom Lucy hasn’t seen in more than two hundred years. Marie, La Comtesse de Mortoise, was as famous for her erotic appetites as she was for her beauty, and there wasn’t a man or woman at Versailles who hadn’t been frozen—with longing, fear, or both—by her eyes:

Behind her veil of ice

Lives a murderous curiosity—

Her eyes are restless mirrors

Of devouring luminosity

Lucy forgets to breathe. Marie … is it you? How could it be you?

Impossible.

By all accounts, the glorious body of the Comtesse Marie de Mortoise had been separated from her head by the smooth, swift hand of the revolution’s guillotine. How could a beheaded woman be standing here in Lucy’s garden, looking as sexy as she had two centuries ago?

Does Marie remember Lucy when she was the young, heartbreakingly lovely Lucille d’Arlennes?

If Marie has seen anything familiar in the half-robed woman standing in front of her, she’s hiding it well. Even if the countess had survived her execution, she might not remember Lucy among the hundreds of lovers who shared her bed. The boy with her is nothing but another of her dolls. He might as well be made of straw; once she’s done with him he’ll be no different from the princes who lost their birthright to her, or the poets who gave up their inner muses to devote their gifts to Marie.

“The ‘Madame de Mortoise’ is legendary. I’m amazed that you haven’t heard of it.”

“Believe me, I feel like an idiot.” Lucy’s laugh is weak.

“Quite an interesting story behind that rose,” the Countess goes on. “Madame de Mortoise was a courtesan at the court of Louis XVI. She was quite a politician, had many lovers at the court. But when she discovered that revolutionaries make better lovers than royals, her tastes changed. Some say she grew quite … voracious in her hungers, impossible to satisfy. Those same revolutionaries finally had her executed. A dark red rose was named after her, in honor of her beauty.”

“Perhaps the rose was named in honor of the Countess’s taste for revolutionary blood?” Lucy suggests. She tilts her head, waiting for the other woman’s reaction, but that face is as impassive as a porcelain mask under the dark glasses.

“Who knows?” The red scythe of a mouth rises in a facsimile of a smile. That ruthless, mocking curve of the lips is so familiar that it wipes away any trace of doubt in Lucy’s mind.

“It is true, Marie!” Lucy wants to shout. “Tell us how you and your friends used to dabble in murder! You played games with human lives the way others played with cards.”

“Tell her the other part of the legend,” Charlot says. “The juicy part.” His tongue flicks across his overblown lower lip.

“Madame de Mortoise did develop a predilection for the taste of blood, if you believe the old wives’ tales,” the countess says, in a tone so dismissive it could only veil a charade. “Soon she couldn’t get enough of it. She hired a band of bounty hunters to scour the streets of Paris, capturing revolutionaries and bringing them to her chambers. Once she’d taken her pleasure with them, she would stab them in the chest and drink directly from their hearts.”

“There’s more,” Charlot urges. “Tell her the rest.”

“The legend says that drinking blood gave her immortal life—”

“And whoever is pricked by one of the rose’s thorns becomes immortal, too!” Charlot bursts out.

Lucy smiles. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything nearly that exotic growing here. I can show you a few heirloom varieties, but nothing as old or as fascinating as this … ‘Madame de’ what?”

“Mortoise,” says the woman who was once a countess.

“Mortoise,” Lucy repeats, as if she’s never spoken the name before. “Well, I can’t offer you eternal life, but you’re welcome to look around. I’ll be opening the nursery in about five minutes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go inside and get dressed before my customers break down my gate.”