House of Dark Delights (17 page)

As Lili's veins emptied, rendering her weaker and weaker, her struggles gradually devolved into a feeble, desperate writhing. Though she was, by now, too delirious to realize it, her languid movements as Turek stood pressed into the cradle of her thighs, feasting on her, only served to stoke his carnal excitement, his cock rising like a curved spike against his belly.

How tempting it would be to hammer himself into her now, as he fed on her, he feverish with lust and fresh blood, she too frail to resist him but knowing what was happening, knowing he could fuck her at will and that she, the proud goddess who'd spurned him for weeks, was powerless to stop him. Perhaps, given her succubitic nature, he could even make her share in his pleasure, despite herself. How he longed to feel the cool and indifferent Ilutu-Lili moaning and bucking in his arms, like any hot-cunted wench getting a good grind.

But how much better it would be, how utterly rapturous, to wait until he'd drunk his fill, then take her as she drank from
him.
To be inside a female undergoing vampyric conversion was always marvelous, sexual passion imparting a sharp, breathless intensity to the transformational process.

Of course, with female follets—those rare ones who were not only willing but able to be converted, for some were immune—the results were unpredictable and often unsatisfying. Some members of the faerie races, especially the sheltered and naive forest types, found the experience so overwhelming that, like infants, they would close their eyes and sleep through the entire thing. Skoggra and their first cousins, wood-wives—delicate and lovely despite their razorlike claws—tended to lose control, leaving Turek slashed to ribbons. Even worse were the rusalki of Turek's homeland. While splendid fucks, they were so unrelentingly vicious—toward him as well as toward their prey—that he'd all but given up trying to turn them.

Ah, but succubi…No claws, no killer instinct, no tiresome naiveté, just an all-consuming, inexhaustible hunger for the joys of the flesh. To screw a succubus while she underwent the change was sheer ecstasy, in large measure because her pleasure fed his, and vice versa. He felt it all as if it were happening to him—the thrill of penetration, the tang of hot blood, the synchronous pounding of their hearts with every sex-thrust, the woozy euphoria as their life forces mingled, recasting her bodily humors in a new mold, that of the noblest of predators…the Upír.

The succubus occupied, in Turek's estimation, a unique and lofty position in the distaff pantheon of follets—and Ilutu-Lili, with her moonlit beauty, her lush sensuality and keen mind, was the de facto queen of her race. They belonged together, she and Turek. She didn't realize it yet, of course, but she would, once she'd shared his lifeblood and become as he was.

Through the blood-haze that held Turek in its thrall, he became dimly aware that Lili had grown heavy and limp in his arms.
Scheisse.
Lost in his reverie, he'd overfed. Were she human, she would be on the verge of death, if not lifeless already. He carefully extracted his fangs, unlatched his teeth from her flesh, and snapped his jaw back into place.

Her neck bore the imprint of his bite, so badly contused that his fang marks were all but invisible amid the purpling wound—or so they would have been but for the blood trickling from the pair of pinhead-size punctures, which Turek instinctively licked.

He lowered Lili's legs and stepped down from the platform. She hung slackly in her wrist cuffs, head slumped down. Pushing her hair off her face, he leaned her head against Dusivæsus's right breast.
“Wecken sie.”
He underscored the command with two sharp slaps on the cheek. “Come, my dear. You must feed now.”

She muttered something incoherent.

“You'll feel better once you've got some fresh blood in you. Just a sip,” he said in response to her drowsy look of disgust. “A drop, even. One drop of my blood is all it will take, one warm, sweet, miraculous little drop—and then you shall become as I am. But you must drink it of your own free will, knowing the outcome and accepting it, for the conversion to take effect.”

Lili stared at him through heavy-lidded eyes, shook her head blearily. “Never.”

It was remarkable that she could communicate at all, considering how much blood he'd drained. She was recovering with astonishing speed even for an immortal—just that much more evidence that Ilutu-Lili was an extraordinary being, worthy to take her place at his side until the end of time.

“Why do you suppose I went to the trouble of bringing you here?” he asked. “Were it a simple matter of hunger, I'd have chosen one of the others.” Taking her face in his hands, he said, with genuine feeling, “I don't just want your blood, Lili. I want
you.
I need you. I've been alone far too long, for my entire existence as an Upír.”

“H-how long?” she managed.

She was probably stalling for time, hoping to figure out a way to free herself from his clutches. Still, why shouldn't she know something of his past, if they were truly destined to share eternity together?

He said, “I was born—as a human—in Prague in 1329, and I became an Upír in June of 1348, while studying to be a physician at the University of Bologna. So next month will mark the four hundred first anniversary of my vampyric conversion.”

“A
physician
? You?”

“'Twas that or the priesthood. I wanted to help people,” he said with a sardonic smile. “I settled on medicine because it didn't require a vow of celibacy. Even in my altruistic youth, I knew my limits.”

“How…Why…?”

“Why did I trade in medicine for vampyrism? 'Twas the Black Death—it ravaged Italy that year. I tried to treat the poor bastards who'd been struck down, thinking surely God would keep me well so that I could continue His work. He had other ideas, though. One morning I awoke seething with fever, my hands and feet gone black, blood dripping from my mouth. I realized I'd be dead by nightfall. I knew a woman, Galiana Solsa—somewhat older than I, but dazzling, brilliant, reckless. She exuded danger like an aphrodisiac.”

“She was a vampyre?”

“So she'd told me.”

“She
told
you? Wasn't that risky?”

“We'd had a liaison some months before, very brief, but very impassioned. She'd wanted to turn me. She told me I could live forever if I were only willing to, in her words, harvest humans rather than healing them. I thought she was mad—literally. I thought, ‘Dear God, I'm in love with a gibbering lunatic.'”

“You loved her?”

Turek looked away with a studiously blasé shrug, wishing he'd had the presence of mind not to blurt that out. “I was nineteen, and she was magnificent—or so I'd thought until she started in about the harvesting and so forth. I ended the affair, much to her sputtering rage, and threw myself into my schooling—until the morning I woke up dying. I knew no surgeon could help me, so in desperation, I sent for Galiana. She scoffed at me as I lay there vomiting and shaking and oozing blood, all the while pleading for her to turn me. She told me I'd made my bed, that I ought to have taken her up on her offer when I had the chance, that sort of thing. 'Twasn't till I was on the verge of death that she finally turned me. She'd intended to all along, of course—just having a bit of fun at my expense, which I suppose she was entitled to.”

“Did you go back to being lovers?” Lili asked.

“God, no. She was much too vexed at me for having cast her aside. There's been no one since her, no one I've thought of as a lover, certainly, nor even a mistress.”

“What about friends?” she asked.

“Vampyres don't form friendships easily, and humans are for feeding and fucking. No, as I say, I've been alone for four centuries.”

A hint of something that might have been pity shadowed Lili's eyes for a fleeting moment, or perhaps it was just a fancy of Turek's imagination.

“And you,” he said, “you've been alone, too, no? Roaming the earth like a gypsy, trying desperately to conceal your true self, to pass for human. But you aren't human. You're different, Lili. You're better than them, a higher being, an immortal—a goddess.”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“A succubus, then.”

“A succubus,” she agreed. “But not a bloodsucker. Not a murderer. I'd rather die than become what you are.”

“Such pedestrian platitudes are beneath you, my dear,” said Turek as he rolled up the right sleeve of his robe. “I changed my tune, and I wager you will, too. And I think you'll be surprised at how readily you take to the vampyric way of life. Before this night is through, you'll be reveling in it. You will prey on humans to appease not just your lust, but your hunger as well. Yes, you will kill them, time and time again, and you will feel not a moment's remorse. We will prey on them together, you and I, sharing our quarry as we share all else. We will savor their blood as if it were the sweetest wine. But first you must savor mine.”

Turek raised his right wrist to his mouth and pierced one of the fat blue veins just beneath the surface of the skin, using the very tips of his fangs. Withdrawing them, he watched two slender red ribbons emerge from the minuscule punctures to crawl around his wrist like twin bracelets.

“One drop.” Turek offered his blood-banded wrist to Lili, who turned her head, her lips pressed tightly together. He grabbed her jaw and forced her to face him. “One tiny lick—that is all it will take to initiate the change.”

Eyeing him with revulsion, she said, “You
are
mad if you imagine that I would ever choose to become like you. You fancy yourself godlike, but to me, you're just some vile little bloodsucking insect—a mosquito with delusions of magnificence.”

“You are testing my patience,” he said between clenched teeth, his grip tightening on her jaw.

“No, not a mosquito,” she said, her voice frosting over with contempt. “They at least have wings. You're more of a louse, I'd say, or perhaps a bedbug, scuttling about in the dark, antennae twitching at the scent of blood…”

He cuffed her, whipping his palm hard across her face, which struck the statue with a dull crack of skull against stone.
“Blöde Fotze,”
he spat out. “
Dumpfbacke.
You asked for that.”

“Ah, yes,” she said as she looked up at him, ugly abrasions marring her forehead and cheek. “That's what bullies always tell themselves, especially bullies who like to hit women. If this is the kind of treatment I can expect from you, why on earth would I want to spend the rest of eternity at your side?”

“Things will be different after you've gone through the change,” he said, “very different. You'll be like me. We'll understand each other. We'll be
part
of each other, sharing everything—our bodies, our prey, our very souls.”

“I'll get to share my soul with the likes of you?” she asked with a little smirk that made Turek's hackles quiver. “That can't honestly be your best argument.”

Yet, to Turek's dismay, it was. The enticement he usually employed to woo converts—immortality—was only effective with humans and non-immortal follets. “I'd expected some resistance on your part,” he said. “You can't see any benefit to going through the change, but that's only because you don't understand our way of life, the lust for blood, the exultation of the hunt, the thrill of sinking your fangs into warm human flesh. And, of course, you care nothing for me—yet. But you will. Once you're a vampyre yourself, you'll come to understand me—dare I say, even hold me in the same esteem in which I hold you—and you'll thank me for turning you.”

“You can't turn me against my will,” she said. “And I assure you, there is no argument powerful enough to convince me to become what you are. I will never, ever taste a drop of your blood, Turek, and there is no way you can force me to do so. You can drain every ounce of my blood—I'll make more. You can beat me to a pulp—I'll recover.”

Turek smiled as he reached into the right-hand pocket of his robe and pulled out the squarish brown bottle he'd pinched from Will Hogarth's painting supplies before following Lili to the bathhouse.

“What is that?” she asked warily.

He uncorked the bottle and held it under her nose; she flinched.

“Spirits of turpentine,” he said, inhaling from the bottle as if it were perfume. “I'm actually rather fond of the aroma—though I can appreciate your distaste for it. As one also susceptible to fire, I understand your aversion to combustible substances.”

“An ugly threat,” she said in a thin, wavering voice, “and a curious one, coming from someone who claims to hold me in esteem. You say we're two of a kind, that we belong together, that you want to spend the rest of eternity with me.”

“And so I do,” he said. “Vampyres are creatures of passion—but also of ferocious pride. If, as you insist, I can't have you, then I shall see to it no one else ever will.”

Setting the bottle down, Turek withdrew from his left-hand pocket the petite, ornamental leg irons crafted to match Lili's wrist cuffs. She kicked and thrashed, but she was no match for his strength; in short order, he had her feet tethered to the statue's ankle torques. He lifted the hammered brass bowl from the fire pit and set it on the platform, to the side of where Lili stood, then built a fire so high that it would burn like the devil when he lit it.

If
he lit it, for of course he was hopeful that the threat of a fiery demise would prompt Lili to agree to undergo conversion. Should she persist in refusing, however, he would burn her to ashes.

Not that he was particularly eager to do so—she was, after all, an exceptional example of her race, and exquisitely beautiful—but far better that she should be destroyed than to spend the rest of her long, perhaps even infinite, existence laughing at the “bloodsucking insect” who'd had her in his clutches only to weaken and let her go.