House of Dark Delights (8 page)

She cast Darius a sideways glance. He still stood leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, regarding her with that unnervingly serene absorption. She didn't quite know what to make of him. He didn't behave like a gentleman, didn't look like one or talk like one; yet he was no peasant. He was unlike anyone she'd ever met.

Charlotte realized she was staring, and wrenched her gaze from his. “Of course I was bored,” she said, as if that were the real reason she'd embraced the Hellfires' extreme brand of libertinage, or rather, the only one. “There are only so many tablecloths one can embroider, so many cups of tea one can pour…” She sighed disgustedly. “So many beef-brained stablemen one can seduce, before one starts to look elsewhere for diversion.”

“Why the Hellfires?” he asked.

“'Twas Sir Francis.” Buzzing with nervous energy, Charlotte lifted a handsome black riding crop from the wall. It aroused her anew, just stroking the braided leather handle with its wrist loop, feeling its weight and balance in her hand. “He was the first man I ever met—the only man—who regarded me as a person of learning and intellect, not just some light-heeled young widow. He knew I was a bit loose in the rump, of course, but he also knew I had a brain. I cannot tell you how refreshing that was. When he told me about the Hellfires, I begged to be a part of it. It all seemed so enlightened, so exotic and exciting.”

“And now?”

“Well, those mock masses are absurd, of course. It always escaped me why Sir Francis felt the need to cloak a bit of harmless sport in all that ritualistic drivel.”

“You didn't seem to feel that way before Lili was chosen to lie upon the altar in your stead.”

“How could you know that?” she asked. “You weren't there.”

“I can blend in when I choose to.” Pushing off the wall, Darius came toward her. He moved with an unhurried, feral grace, like a predator closing in on its prey in such a way as to keep that prey blissfully off guard. “Disenchanted with the Hellfires, are you?”

Stroking her hand along the length of the riding crop, she said, “It's all one great, smutty joke, isn't it? Hogs in armor, the lot of them. Schoolboys sharing bawdy jests, passing 'round dirty pictures. Half of them can't even raise the old rogering iron unless their mates are watching and cheering them on. The other half need a good flogging before they can rouse their passions.”

“It rouses your passions, too, does it not?” Darius was standing directly in front of her now, his gaze on the crop she was fondling with all too evident fascination. “The flogging?”

She shrugged with feigned nonchalance. “I shan't pretend I don't relish the opportunity to redden the occasional bum.”

“But not half as much as you might relish having your own bum reddened.” He took the crop from her, inspecting it in a leisurely way. “I think you wish there was someone who could take you in hand and deal out the punishments you so ardently desire…and richly deserve.”

Charlotte swiftly weighed and rejected the option of feigning outrage; this Darius was, for whatever reason, far too perceptive for such a disingenuous display. Instead, she merely said, with studied calm, “Deserve?”

“For kicking the cat,” he said.

“I told you, I thought it was a rat. It darted out at me, and I was startled, so I—”

“Why did it dart out?” he asked. “Because you disturbed it, perchance?”

“Well…”

“You were moving that.” He nodded toward the whipping stool as he ran his hand along the crop's slender stock. “To what end?”

Charlotte stared at him, heat scalding her face; she couldn't remember the last time she'd blushed.

He held her gaze. “You were curious. Yes?”

She groped for words, but what could she say?

Gesturing toward the stool with the crop, he said, “Carry on, then. You've got
me
curious now, too.”

She didn't move.

He took a step toward her, stroked her face lightly with the little leather paddle on the tip of the crop. The smell of the leather made her quim throb. She closed her eyes, swallowed hard.

Softly he said, “Put the stool in the middle of the floor, Charlotte.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because you want me to.”

He knew. Somehow, he knew everything.

She looked toward the door, still half-open; anyone could come down here and walk in on them. Before she could voice that concern, Darius crossed to the door, pulled it shut, and tugged a rusty steel plate down over the little window. He took a key from a hook on the wall, twisted it in the keyhole, and stowed it in a pocket of his breeches.

Charlotte felt both more secure now and more vulnerable. A stranger, someone she'd met mere minutes ago, had just locked her into a torture chamber. The situation should fill her with foreboding. There was a certain measure of that, to be sure, but mostly what she felt, God help her, was an intoxicating thrill of arousal underscored by a sense of rightness, a sense that she deserved whatever this enigmatic stranger would do to her, and more.

Rejoining her, Darius nodded toward the whipping stool as if to say,
Go ahead.

She lifted the stool, which was remarkably heavy, and set it down in the middle of the floor.

“Take your clothes off,” he said.

She turned to stare at him.

“It has long been customary,” he explained, “when punishing females, or attempting to coax confessions from them, to make them undress. It tends to have a…humbling effect.”

Charlotte met his eyes for a moment, then looked down, her gaze lighting on the front flap of his breeches, stretched tight over a bulging erection. She felt suddenly starved for air; her heart thudded in her ears.

Darius noticed the direction of her gaze, but seemed unperturbed, perhaps even slightly amused. “Strip,” he said.

Charlotte took a deep, tremulous breath, and set about unlacing her bodice.

Three

I
MET YOUR
sister.” This was Sir Francis Dashwood's greeting to Elic in the chapel's shadowy little narthex, where Elic was waiting, along with the two footmen serving as acolytes, for the mass to begin. “Lovely girl.”

The Hellfires' chief friar had a speculative glint in his eye as he smiled at Elic. He was wondering, no doubt, whether Elic was privy to his covert little assignation with Elle in the withdrawing room.

“She told me it was a most rousing encounter,” Elic said.

“Did she,” Dashwood said with a little quirk of the eyebrows. “You two must be close.”

“We share everything.” Including the seed that Elle had tapped from Dashwood, and which Elic would transfer, before the night was over, to some estimable woman—which was his sole reason for participating as Abbot of the Day in this absurd mock mass, in order to have first pick of the Hellfires' female followers afterward. The seed formed an insistent presence in his lower belly, causing his bollocks to tighten in anticipation, his shaft to grow thick and heavy.

The monkish robe he'd been given to wear—white silk with a scarlet-lined hood, like that of the twelve “superior” Hellfires now murmuring quietly in the chapel—served to conceal his state of arousal. Beneath it, he wore nothing, as instructed—a blessed relief from the constriction of Elle's rigid, cone-shaped corset. The robe closed down the front with a mere four little hooks, for ease in opening when required during the dark rites and the banquet to follow.

The two brawny young men serving as acolytes had been outfitted for the occasion in white satin breeches and jackets. The darker of the two held a pair of lit black tapers in mammoth iron candelabras, the other a brass censer full of hot coals dangling from the end of a chain, and a matching incense boat. From their expressions of amusement as they whispered together, Elic gathered their attitude toward the impending ritual fell short of reverential.

As ridiculous as Elic felt enveloped in white silk, at least it was a fairly simple, straightforward garment. Dashwood, as chief friar and primary celebrant in the mass, sported gold buttons on his hoodless robe, a stole embroidered with phalli and demonic symbols, and a tall red cardinal's hat trimmed in rabbit fur. The hat was particularly remarkable, so much so that Elic had to chew on the inside of his mouth to keep from smirking. Oblivious of the figure he cut, Dashwood carried himself with regal bearing, clearly confident that he looked entirely as solemn and dignified as he felt.

How on earth, Elic wondered, could his distaff counterpart have found this man sexually alluring? For Elle had not simply appreciated Dashwood's amiable disposition and many accomplishments, as Elic did; she had
desired
him, intensely. Elic could not have re-created that desire in himself even if he wanted to, his bodily humors, which governed his sexual appetites, having reverted to the masculine. He recalled all too clearly, though, how much Elle had wanted Dashwood, how exciting it had been to feel him thrusting inside her, unhurriedly at first, then with quivering urgency as their pleasure crested together—all the while surrounded by revelers who had no idea what was transpiring beneath the great silken mass of her skirts.

Dashwood asked whether Elic was fully acquainted with his role in the upcoming ceremony.

“I am,” said Elic, withdrawing from a pocket of his robe the little red leather missal stamped
Order of the Friars of St. Francis,
which he'd been given during his induction into the Hellfires yesterday. It had been little trouble to memorize the verses and responses, given his familiarity with Latin from the half-millennium during which Grotte Cachée had been under Roman rule. What amused Elic about the order of service for the Hellfires'
missa niger
was that it was patterned after that of a standard Roman Catholic mass. If Dashwood was as contemptuous of religion as he purported, he would simply turn his back on its rituals, put them altogether out of his mind. Instead, he chose to celebrate his decadent ideology by conducting his own solemn, albeit obscene, versions of those rituals, thus betraying their true importance in his mind.

“Archie.” Dashwood caught the eye of the acolyte with the candles and motioned him into the chapel.

The young man straightened his back and strode between the two fat columns that separated the narthex from the chapel proper.

“Slowly,” Dashwood whispered.

Archie duly adjusted his pace. When he was halfway up the center aisle, the white-robed congregants noticed him and rose to their feet, flipping up the seats in their small double bank of ornately carved misericord chairs.

Grotte Cachée's unconsecrated chapel, constructed when the castle was rebuilt in the early 1400s, was quite small, its walls and low, vaulted ceiling crafted from the same dark volcanic rock with which the castle had been built. Red glass lanterns, installed by the Hellfires along with various other trappings, cast a sinister, ruddy luminescence. The effect was reinforced by the smoke rising from braziers in which a mixture of herbs crackled over hot coals. The mousy stink of hemlock was predominant, but Elic's keen nose detected a bittersweet note that had to be belladonna, and a whiff of something else that smelled almost, but not quite, like tobacco: henbane.

The sanctuary at the far end of the chapel was a raised, semicircular niche, its curved rear wall draped in black velvet to cover a large stained-glass window. Against this funereal backdrop hung an oil portrait of a demonically handsome young man with wings and horns floating on a plume of smoke—a laughably romanticized rendering of Lucifer perfectly in keeping with the overwrought tone of the proceedings. Built onto a platform in the center of the sanctuary was an altar table of volcanic stone some eight feet long and half as wide, its top inlaid with a geometric mosaic of darkly shimmering black lava glass. Archie placed the candelabras to either side of a tiny black pillow on the left edge of the table, then struck a Chinese gong once with a hammer padded in black leather.

“Harry,” Dashwood whispered.

The other acolyte carried his censer and boat up the aisle, followed at stately intervals by Elic and Dashwood, who entered the sanctuary with heads bowed and hands clasped before them. On the altar table, arranged around the candelabras, were such accoutrements as a silver chalice topped with a black cloth-covered plate, a tiny silver ladle, a dish of fragrant olive oil warming over a little brazier, a small silver cauldron half-filled with water, and a jewelry casket of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of a six-pointed star within a circle. Most curious was a brass aspergillum such as those used for sprinkling holy water, which was shaped like a dildo with a bulbous, perforated glans. To these paraphernalia Elic added the missal, which he laid with feigned veneration on the black satin pillow.

Harry took his place next to an iron censer stand forged to look like a rearing serpent, while Archie struck the gong three times. The congregants turned en masse toward the narthex in anticipation of the Bona Dea's entrance—all save one, who stood motionless, staring straight ahead. Like the other congregants, including Elic, he wore his hood low over his face, casting his eyes into deep shadow. From his powder-paleness and the grim set of his jaw, Elic recognized him as Anton Turek.

Between the two columns flanking the entrance to the narthex there appeared a dark form that seemed to hesitate for a moment before advancing slowly up the aisle. Elic had assumed that Lili would make her entrance naked, but in fact she wore a mantle of fur-lined black satin that trailed heavily behind her. Over it she was swathed head to toe in a sheer black veil that floated and fluttered as she walked, making her look like a specter materializing from the smoky pall.

As she came closer, Elic saw that the mantle was secured at the throat with a pair of cloakpins connected by a chain, causing it to fall open and reveal, through the gauzy veil, the tantalizing promise of bare, golden flesh and a glimpse of the shadowy arbor between her thighs. She smelled like jasmine and desire.

Elic's cock filled and rose as he watched Lili walk toward him. As Elle, he had thought this woman lovely, but in an abstract, purely esthetic sense; more than her beauty, he had admired her character and intellect. As a man, he was struck by her in a far more corporeal way. She was a magnificent creature, exquisite in mind and body, serenely sensual, and, it would appear, in thrall to the appetites of the flesh—as, for better and for worse, was he.

Lili ascended the altar steps and turned to face the congregants, who executed a deep bow in unison. She turned back toward the sanctuary, whereupon Elic, Dashwood, and the two acolytes reverenced her in the same manner.

Reaching beneath her veil, the acolytes removed the luxuriant mantle and laid it on the table like an altar cloth, fur side up; it was mink, Elic saw, dyed jet-black. Escorting Lili onto the platform, they handed her up onto the table's right-hand edge. She sat with the veil stretched out behind her over the lustrous black fur but still cloaking her in front to her feet, around one of which she wore an anklet of hammered gold.

Elic glanced up to find her regarding him with interest through the shroudlike veil. He'd seen that look many times before, when someone who'd already made the acquaintance of one of his alter egos met the other and found the resemblance astonishing. He gave her a slight smile, which she acknowledged with a little nod.

Dashwood executed another profoundly deep bow toward Lili and made a left-handed, backward sign of the cross.
“In nomine magni Dei nostri Satanas introibo ad altare Domini Inferi,”
he intoned. “In the name of our great God Satan, I shall enter the altar of the Infernal Lord.” He opened his robe and produced his half-hard member.

“Ad Eum qui laetificat meum,”
Elic responded.
To Him who gives joy unto me.

The acolyte Harry lifted the little dish from its brazier and offered it to Dashwood, who dipped his fingertips in the warm oil and smoothed it over his member.
“Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini Inferi.” Our sustenance is the Name of the Infernal Lord.

Who reigns on earth. “Qui regit terram,”
responded Elic as he dipped his own fingers into the dish, coating them with oil.

Elic turned toward Lili, who, in keeping with her instructions, leaned back with her weight on her hands behind her and her legs spread wide. The position caused the veil to cling to the contours of her flat belly and high, full breasts. Her nipples were wine-red through the whispery muslin.

Elic slipped his oiled hand up under the hem of Lili's veil until he reached the thatch shielding her sex, as soft and black as the fur on which she sat. She closed her eyes as he parted the tufts of hair, then the soft, damp purse within, sucking in a breath when he pushed two fingers deep inside. The flesh there was hot, snug, and already slippery, but he oiled it anyway, per his own instructions. He took his time about it, using slow, rhythmic strokes, gratified when he noticed her nipples stiffen and push against the veil.

“Domine Satanas, Tua est terra.”
Dashwood stroked himself to full erection, his gaze on the portrait of Lucifer as he delivered an encomium of praise to his dark lord and the world of luxury and gratification that was his creation and his domain.

As Dashwood concluded his statement, Elic reluctantly slid his fingers from Lili's sweet little
chatte,
stepping aside so that the chief friar could take his place between her widespread legs.

Entreating Satan for strength, Dashwood lifted the bottom part of Lili's veil, bunching it around her hips, and brought her closer by tugging the mantle on which she was poised.

“Et plebs Tua laetabitur in te,”
Elic responded.
And Thy people shall rejoice in Thee.
Elic moved behind Dashwood, gripping Lili's ankles as she stretched her legs out so that he could keep them positioned, during the
Introit,
“as high and wide as possible to either side of the chief friar,” in keeping with his duties as set forth in the little red missal.

Thanks to his being a good head taller than Dashwood, Elic had an unobstructed view as the chief friar seated the oil-sheened head of his cock just inside the
belle-chose
that had been prepared for him, while pleading with Satan to demonstrate his power.
“Ostende nobis, Domine Satanas, potentiam Tuam.”

Elic delivered his line, something about soliciting Lucifer's beneficence, as he grappled with the sudden, baffling urge to seize Dashwood and tear him away from the
altare
he was about to
introi.

Steadying Lili by clutching her hips, Dashwood entreated his Infernal Lord to hear him clearly—
“Domine Satanas exaudi orationem meam”
—as he rammed himself into her.

Lili, still leaning back on her arms, gasped at the abrupt impalement, her body arching as she threw her head back. Elic fretted for one missed heartbeat that she might have been hurt, until he looked at her veiled face and saw, in her eyes, an expression of utter bliss.

This was what she lived for, he realized—sexual possession, the thrill and succor of fleshly delights.

Elic managed, despite his maelstrom of conflicting emotions, to recall and recite his responsum.
“Et clamor meus ad Te veniat,”
he said.
And let my cry come unto Thee.

Lili opened her eyes and looked beyond Dashwood to Elic, curious, no doubt, as to the stress in his voice, or perhaps to the tension in his grip as he held her legs open for another man. Elic could not, for the life of him, wrest his gaze from hers as Dashwood slowly withdrew and resheathed his cock while offering a demonic version of the familiar salutation, “The Lord be with you.”
“Dominus Inferus vobiscum.”

“Et cum tuo,”
Elic replied, along with the entire congregation—the first time they had participated in the response, although they would do so throughout the remainder of the
missa niger.
A glance revealed that several of them were fondling themselves through their robes as they took in the lascivious ritual.