Red Grow the Roses (12 page)

And oh, he did. He laid into her upraised bum with the bunch of roses, sparing her not at all this time, painting her buttocks green and crimson as he thrashed her, striping the backs of her thighs. The stems couldn't take it for long, cracking and snapping off and turning to shredded string in his grip, the last remaining flowers pulped while all the time Lilla squealed, exhilaration mixed with her anguish, her backside dancing from side to side in panic. When the last stem fell apart he threw the ruined stubs aside and paused. She gasped into the loose bark, her mouth coated with dust. There was a moment's respite as he fumbled at his trousers, a movement she was only dimly aware of, and then he stepped round behind her and bore down on her stinging, burning rear, shoving his cock deep into her hole. She was wet with readiness, her soil well prepared for the root he was planting in her. He took her with four or five ruthless thrusts and she felt her core gather and clench.

‘There now!' he gasped – though whether to her or himself she couldn't tell – and thrust to the hilt as he bit her shoulder just by the nape of her neck. The pain was like lightning, the pleasure that followed as deafening as a clap of thunder. Lilla began to come as the jolt coursed down her spine; she was peripherally aware that he was coming too, a cold flood, shuddering into her as he gnawed.

The rolls of thunder rumbled through every part of her body, wave after wave, as he fed on, his hunger fierce. By the time he was slaked enough to lift his face, her shoulder felt numb and the tears of release that had escaped her had dried to stickiness on her cheeks.

‘Make me a vampire,' she moaned, ‘and we can do this for ever.'

He sat up, pulling out from her sex but slipping his fingers back in where his cock had been. She heard him swallow and clear his throat. ‘This is what you think it means to be a vampire?' he asked, his voice still thick with lust and rage. ‘This is your hope of eternity?'

‘Fuck yes.'

Lifting her by her pussy for a moment, he licked at the torn skin of her buttocks. His fingers withdrew on a slick of her juices and his own seed and he scooped the slippery mess further up the crack of her arse. Two fingers, closely pressed, found the aperture of her anus and, twisting, pushed into it. He didn't ask permission or persuade her flesh gently: he just opened her up. Lilla moaned in her throat, forcing herself to ignore the instinctive spasm of panic at his invasion and to relax. She was glad for the soft ground under her knees as she spread her thighs wider, the pursed mouth of her arse unfurling like the petals of a rose as she bore down.

There was a tiny grunt of satisfaction from behind her. His cock slithered in the trough of her pussy, rooting greedily. Fingers slid out again. Then – there – that was the head of his cock: hard and cool and polished as wood, as the handle of a trowel, pressing in on the ring of muscle that had tried so quickly to tighten again. It shouldered its way in, implacable, overcoming all resistance, until the glans was resting just within her.

Sweat gathered in the hollow of her back.

‘I used to be a painter, you know,' he whispered. Adjusting his knees and hands, he sought a better angle. ‘Understand: I was good. Driven, talented, inspired. The Royal Academy accepted me at twenty. My classical scenes hung in the best galleries, the most discerning households. I was sought after.' With a shift of his weight he bore in on her, his cock sliding past the portal of her arsehole and into the hot depths beyond, filling her up. God, but he felt so much thicker in her butt than in her pussy – and cold as stone. She imagined his unseen cock the colour of marble. She was sensitive to every tiny movement in there. Her sweating hands clawed at the bark and her pulse hammered in her ears.

‘Then I became … what I am now.' He started to thrust, not hard just yet, each stroke ruminative and punctuated by the rhythm of his words. ‘And I lost my talent. Oh, I can still paint. Technically … I have improved. But it's worthless. No vision. No muse. These days, all I do … is tend my roses. And fuck trollops … up the arse.'

His thrusts were threatening now. Lilla closed her eyes tight. She loved being shafted in the butt, but it was no less of an ordeal than being whipped. That was what she liked about it.

‘Look around you, Lillabet. How many great buildings were designed by vampires? How many symphonies have they created? How many poems? How many paintings … or new schools of art? Shall I tell you? None. All those years … and nothing to show. Nothing new. Inspiration comes only … to those who live brief lives.'

‘I was never going to write a great symphony,' she groaned. ‘I just want to live for ever.'

‘We're parasites. A dead end.'

‘You're perfect.'

‘Fool.' He added a savage thrust.

‘Bite me!' She pawed at her face in frustration. ‘Make me into one of you!'

‘You stupid girl!' he snarled, riding her hard now, nipping at the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades. Safe places, as she knew: despite his aggression he was still a gentleman. The first precursor of a new orgasm humped and flexed in Lilla's pelvis and she let rip with a gabbled string of words.

‘You have to! You have to! Turn me, you fucking bastard!'

He began to roar wordlessly, his pounding brutal. She started to claw at her own throat, gouging at the skin with her nails. ‘Bite my throat, you cunt!' she screamed. ‘You fucking coward! It's what you want! It's what you really want!'

He grabbed her hair and wrenched her neck over. There was blood under her nails now, though she barely felt the hurt. ‘Yes!' she cried as he fell on her, grabbing for her throat, his teeth slicing into the flesh, fire and light and everything her body craved exploding through her.

And a hot gush over her fingers.

‘Save me!' she choked, triumphant, blossoms of blue and black flame clustering at the corners of her vision. ‘You have to save me!' He clamped down hard over the wound and she felt the indescribable bliss of his kiss as the fireworks exploded and fell, smothering the world in darkness.

* * *

He crawled away afterwards, retching, his stomach a boiling cauldron. Fifteen years he'd managed – fifteen years without giving way to the shame of his base urges. Fifteen years of animal blood and black-market plasma and soy products. All alone. Fifteen years of self-respect, bitterly won. And now this. Now this.

He hadn't meant to. He hadn't. It had been a mistake. If she hadn't torn at her own throat like that …

There'd been far too much blood for him to drink once he'd sliced her jugular, no matter how eagerly he'd gulped it down. Too much damage for the wound to seal itself too. Most of the hot liquor had gone to waste and was soaking away, invisible, into the red-brown bark chippings.

Wakefield wiped at his face, utterly ineffectively. His hands were crooked into claws and trembled wildly, and his head buzzed. Dizzy and with limbs aching, he twitched with the desire for escape. As the hothouse spun around him he pitched over sideways into the dirt, but he didn't want to lie there and rest; far from it. He felt like running. Like bursting out of the stone confines of the building and running through the wet streets and never coming back.

I'm just not accustomed to it, he told himself, huddling up in a crouch, clasping his arms about his knees. He rocked himself back and forth, trying to soothe the demon within. I've fallen off the wagon and now it's rolling right over me. That stupid stupid
selfish
girl …

Turning his head, he looked over at Lillabet's still body.

She'd been convinced he would save her a second time. She'd been wrong. Once on the bridge, yes, but not here. Not this way.

He'd felt her die. He'd done nothing.

Shaking, he forced himself to his feet. He'd have to burn these clothes, he thought. He'd have to …

What do I tell Reynauld? Oh, God in Heaven: what do I do?

There was a rosebush with arm's reach and he ran his open palm up a long stem, the thorns raking through his skin but the pain hardly registering. His fist closed over the full flower at the tip, robbing the head of its crimson petals. Four stumbling steps took him to Lillabet's corpse, to look down on her slack and ashen face. For a moment his mouth twisted.

‘I am weary of days and hours,' he quoted, so soft a plaint that she might not have heard even if she had been alive; ‘Blown buds of barren flowers / Desires and dreams and powers / And everything but sleep.'

Opening his hand, he scattered rose petals as darkly red as a vampire's tears, drifting down gently to lie upon her face.

(Wakefield)

And this is Wakefield, who doesn't feed from humans. Who hides himself away, reluctant to face the turn of the years or his own predatory condition: aching, ashamed and tormented. And hungry. Always hungry. He doesn't even have more than fleeting contact with the staff of his company, for fear of the temptation they proffer. Of necessity, therefore, he is celibate and has to tend to his own sexual needs. His restraint is legendary among vampires, a topic discussed with awe and incomprehension and derision.

You are safe from Wakefield. Unless you enter his lair of your own will. Unless you provoke him. Then, beware his appetites, so cruelly suppressed.

The most sedentary of the City's vampires, he remembers this land before it was built over, when as a youth he would come down with his father to hunt duck, with long-barrelled fowling-pieces over their shoulders and spaniels casting about at their feet. He was always keen on the wide green marshland, and the great wedge of the asylum meant no more to him at that time than a landmark to guide their feet back to the dry track at the end of the day. They are among his fondest memories, those days with his father: the yelp of the dogs, the grey light over the open water, the wet soaking into his tweed coat as he crawled on his belly through the sedges, the comradely walk home with the feathered bodies slung in braces. James Wakefield, owner of a string of drapery and haberdashery emporia, was proud of his son: the first of the line to be born into respectable estate, the first to speak like a gentleman and attend a good school where he learned Latin and was beaten with commendable regularity.

He remembers his father's distress and fury the day he announced he was going to be an artist, that he was submitting paintings to the Royal Academy.

He remembers that autumn in 1857 when, just before dawn and in the middle of a thick fog that tasted of coal dust and made his throat ache, he was crossing a park in the centre of the City and first saw her sitting on a bench, all alone, shawled in white with her long red hair coiled about her shoulders like a cat. Red hair fit to catch the attention of Rossetti himself. He'd stopped at a nearby bench and taken out his sketchbook, pencilling the lines of her delicate, pensive face. She hadn't moved, just sat there in the wreathing yellow mist like a statue. When he'd finished he'd walked away, but as he reached the wrought-iron gates of the park he'd found her somehow there before him, waiting.

‘Show me,' she'd murmured, her eyes huge and commanding despite her delicate stature. Then: ‘Is this what I look like?'

It was a very fair likeness, he'd told her, flushing.

‘Then you'll paint me. Tonight.'

That was not how it was supposed to happen. He didn't paint after sunset because the light was no good, and he chose his own models – working girls usually, unless he was on commission for a society portrait. His models sometimes made him uncomfortable with their coarse humour and their brash laughter, and he tried to be stern with them and deliberately scorned their sly offers to see to his other needs at the end of a long afternoon's sitting – for a consideration, of course. He laboured under too much dignity to stoop to that, imagining in horror how they might gossip and laugh about him between themselves if he did succumb. But there'd been something about this woman that was almost bewitching, and he'd ended up telling her his studio address and had waited there for her that evening, watching the street. She'd called herself Roisin; a suitably Celtic name for such a fey and ethereal women, he'd thought. He'd assumed she was a demimondaine, having been seen out with neither escort nor bonnet nor gloves, but she didn't sound or behave like any of the mistresses he'd met. An actress who'd lingered too long in the role of Ophelia, perhaps, he'd mused: many actresses were half-crazy on laudanum and gin. But he already had an idea for using her as a model for the fair maid Elaine, burning up with unrequited ardour for Lancelot.

She'd tapped at his door without ever appearing on the street below and when he'd admitted her to his studio she'd drifted around it like a ghost. Her clothes were decades out of date, he'd noticed, but the final detail had escaped him until she'd paused in front of an ornate mirror that he'd used as a prop for his version of The Lady of Shalott. ‘I cannot tell what I look like any more,' she'd whispered. ‘So you must paint me a portrait.'

That was when he'd realised that she cast no reflection at all. It had been a long time before his hands had steadied enough for him to pick up the charcoal and begin to sketch.

She'd sat for him for hours that first evening while he roughed out sketches from different angles and decided on the composition that suited best. Not once did she stir, except to blink. Once he'd got the basic outline down on canvas he'd shown her and she'd seemed pleased. As he'd shrunk back into the sofa she'd straddled his lap and kissed him, peeling his clothes open delicately to eat her way down his slim body, all the way to that part of him that stood stiff with fear. She'd been like milk in her pallor, he'd thought, except for that red hair: milk and blood that washed his senses clean away.

For weeks he'd drawn and painted nothing but her: not as Elaine but as Calypso, as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, as Melusine and Medusa. At the same time he'd worked on her portrait, applying every tiny brushstroke as precisely as possible, trying to capture the luminous pallor of her skin, the multitudinous strands of russet and chestnut and copper in her hair, the depths of her dark-blue eyes. In turn Roisin had been obsessed by him, returning to feed every night. He'd grown weak and pale and daily more afraid that she wouldn't leave him time to complete any of the works that burned in his fingertips. One night he had thrust her roughly away as she tried to mouth yet again at a prick that was raw with overuse, shouting that he needed to work, that she had to leave him alone.