House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  Lili ducked beneath the surface of the water and covered the distance between them with one fluid underwater glide. Standing before him, she twisted the water out of her hair. “‘What,’ not ‘who,’” she mused. “That means you already know.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. ’Tis only with other follets that I am unable to act upon my desires.”

  “With all follets, or…?”

  “With most of them. No matter how aroused I am, how much I want her, I wilt the moment I try to enter her. There are reputed to be exceptions, but I’ve yet to encounter one. I’ve been sheltered here for years, so I’ve met very few of my kind—our kind.”

  “I must say, it always strikes me as odd to hear another follet refer to follets in general as ‘our kind,’ given our variety, all the different races.” She took a seat next to him, submerging herself with a sigh of contentment. “There must be scores the world over, each with its own sub-races—and within those races, untold variations among individuals. When I happen across another follet, and am able to identify him as such, he’s usually so different from me that I wouldn’t begin to think of him as ‘my kind.’”

  “Yet, every race of follet is descended, in one way or another, from Frøya,” he said. “That makes us all cousins, however distant or removed.”

  “They don’t call her Frøya where I come from. They call her Ishtar.”

  “Darius calls her that, too,” he said. “Inigo calls her Hecate. Where are you from?”

  “Babylonia—or what was Babylonia. And you?”

  “The coast of Norvegr, what you call Norway. But I’ve lived here, at Grotte Cachée, for centuries.”

  “How many?” Rarely did Lili pry into the lives of others, follet or human, but there was something about being here with Elic—the womblike warmth of the water, the mist and darkness, and their remarkable affinity—that emboldened her.

  “How many centuries?” He looked away with an engagingly sheepish grin, skimming the hair off his face. “Eighteen.”

  “Eighteen?” She sat up, laughing incredulously. “You’ve been tucked away here, in this remote little valley, for eighteen hundred years?”

  “I do venture out into the greater world from time to time,” he said. “In fact, I enjoy traveling. But I couldn’t hope for a better home than Grotte Cachée. This is a haven for our kind. Our needs are seen to without our having to keep our true identities a secret every minute of every day. We have—”

  “We?”

  “There are two others,” Elic said. “Darius and Inigo. Darius was already here when I came, though it was some time before I met him, because he’s something of a recluse. He lives in a chamber deep in that cave,” Elic said, cocking his head toward the mossy entrance to the grotto behind him, from which emanated an almost imperceptible glow. “Has ever since I’ve known him.”

  “That must be why Lord Henry asked us to stay within a quarter mile of the entrance, where the torches are, if we decided to go exploring in there,” she said.

  “That, and humans tend to experience a certain…derangement of the senses if they venture much farther than that. So did you?” he asked. “Go exploring?”

  “God, no, I’ve had my fill of caves,” she said with a shiver. “I’ve had to live in them, or rather, hide in them, once too often. So cold and dank, even in the summer.”

  “Our Grotte Cachée is actually quite cozy, year-round, even with the stream running through it. Not that I’d care to make my own home there, and God knows Inigo wouldn’t. He’s far too enamored of his creature comforts—the quintessential sybarite, lives entirely for pleasure. He arrived with the Romans when they occupied this valley after the Gallic Wars.”

  “How came you to settle here?” she asked as she skimmed her hands across the glassy surface of the water to watch the trails and ripples.

  “Desperation.” Elic settled back with his head against the lip of the pool, gazing up through the skylight.

  “If you’d rather not talk about it…”

  “’Tisn’t a very pretty tale,” he said.

  Lili found Elic’s hand underwater and threaded her fingers through his, a gesture that felt as natural as if she’d done it a thousand times. “Tell me.”

  Turning his head to look at her, he said, “I was forced to flee my native land when the farmers came. The hunters and fishermen who’d been there before, they had understood me and my ways. They called me an álfr, which means elfe in my present tongue. ’Tis much the same in English, I think.”

  “It is,” said Lili, thinking, Of course. Elvenfolk—tall, stalwart, and fair-haired—were regarded as the most beautiful follets in existence.

  “At that time,” Elic continued, “before the rise of the Æsir, which is to say the principal gods and goddesses, álfafólk were considered deities, and treated as such. The humans offered me blóts, which were sacrifices of meat and mead—and beautiful young women. It was their way of ensuring that there would always be enough elk and seals and salmon to feed them.”

  “Did they…you don’t mean to say they killed these women.”

  Chuckling, Elic said, “They would hardly have been much use to me dead. Nay, they were very much alive, and not at all reluctant. They always told me they considered it an honor to give themselves to me.”

  An honor, Lili thought, and a thrill. What young woman in her right mind wouldn’t have leapt at the chance to perform her sacrificial duty with the likes of Elic?

  “’Twasn’t a bad life for one such as I,” Elic said. “But gradually, the wild places along the coast were plowed under by newcomers and turned into farms. One year, a terrible blight destroyed most of their crops. Having no one else to blame, they decided I must be a dökkálfr in disguise. They’re pure evil, the dökkálfr. They bring nothing but disease and misery. The farmers thought if they destroyed me, it would protect them from future misfortune. I retreated into the forest, scrounging for food—and making occasional forays into the villages at night in the hope of finding a female.”

  “Wasn’t that risky?”

  “Insanely so, but I need carnal release the way humans need to breathe. ’Twouldn’t be such a problem if I could achieve that release on my own, but I’m not made that way.”

  “Nor I, more’s the pity,” Lili said. “If I could pleasure myself, I wouldn’t have taken up with the likes of the Hellfires, I can tell you that. Unrelenting lust, which roars back the moment we satisfy it—’tis the price some of us must pay for immortality.”

  “Or near immortality,” he said. “Surely you’re susceptible to fire, like the rest of us—well, most of the rest of us. Darius is a djinni. Fire doesn’t harm him, but he can drown. And of course the various bloodsuckers each have their own particular Achilles’ heel—decapitation, sunlight, staking…”

  “No, I’m rather drearily typical in that regard. Fire will make short work of me. I rue the day humanfolk discovered how vulnerable we are to it.”

  Elic said, “I’m not sure how the farmers knew, but they did. They sent out search parties that winter, and one night they found me sleeping in a little stone hut deep in the woods. It was the home of an old hermit named Ingvarr, a human who’d been my friend for decades. He’d taken pity on me and insisted I share his roof until the spring. I should have refused his hospitality, but I was so cold and so exhausted, and…” Elic looked away, his expression grim. “They wrapped me in chains and beat my old friend to death while I watched—’twas his punishment for harboring me. They built a crude pyre in front of the hut and threw Ingvarr onto it, and then me next to him, still in chains. And then they lit it.”

  “Mamitu,” Lili breathed, staring at him in shock and horror.

  “My clothes and hair burned first. When my skin began to blister and char, the farmers decided there was no point in waiting ’round in the bitter cold, when they could return to their warm homes. As soon as they were gone, I gathered my strength and rolled myself off the pyre and into the snow.”

&nbs
p; Squeezing his hand, she said, “My God, Elic. It must have been agonizing.”

  “I’ve forgotten the pain, but I’ll never forget the utter despair that gripped me. ’Twas the first, and only, time in my life when I’ve pined for the comfort of death.”

  “I’m surprised you lived through it,” she said.

  “Evidently, it takes a somewhat more thorough roasting to do in the likes of me. Once I realized I was going to live, I managed to creep, inch by inch, into the hut. I lay there for days, half-delirious in my chains, while the burns healed.”

  “It took days for them to heal?” So powerful were the recuperative abilities of most follets that wounds, even the most grievous, generally repaired themselves within hours—a day or two, at the most.

  “The burns covered most of my body. I had to not only mend, but grow a great deal of new skin, all the while bound in chains. One morning, Ingvarr’s granddaughter, Sigrún, came looking for him. I knew her well, but at first she didn’t even recognize me, with all that fresh, pink skin and no hair or eyebrows. Sigrún’s husband, Valdís, was a blacksmith, and he freed me from the chains. They offered to shelter me in their home, but that was unthinkable, after what had happened to Ingvarr. I decided to leave Norvegr and look for another place to make my home. Valdís gave me some clothes and a hunting knife, and Sigrún packed me some food. I spent the next few years journeying in a southwesterly path, through Germania and into Gaul.”

  “Posing as a human, I assume.”

  “Aye, but I’ve always found it difficult to hide my true nature over an extended period of time. The longer I go without a woman, the more irrepressible my mating drive becomes. It makes me wild, rash. I tried to keep my contact with the Gallic tribes to a minimum, but eventually I was always found out and exposed, usually by the local druid.”

  “The druids, they were the priests, yes?”

  “The high priests—there were lesser ones. Each tribe had a different name for me, but they all regarded me as a demon of the worst order, a lust-crazed monster out to despoil their women. Several times, I was almost captured and burned, but I fought like the devil and always managed to escape. It didn’t help that the Romans were invading Gaul at the time, which meant I had to avoid cohorts of soldiers, too. I began to wonder if there was any place on Earth where I could live in peace, or if I would spend my entire existence wandering from one location to the next, trying desperately to appease my hungers while pretending I was something I wasn’t.”

  “That is how most of us live,” Lili said.

  “Is it how you live?” he asked quietly.

  She sighed. “As I said, I am drearily typical. How did you end up in this particular area of Gaul?”

  “I’d decided to go to Spain, and if Spain wasn’t hospitable, into Africa. Ideally, I wanted to find a place where they knew nothing about my kind.”

  “There are follets all over the world,” she told him, “even in Africa.”

  “I didn’t know that then. In any event, while traveling south, I encountered the volcanic highlands occupied by the Arverni tribe, the region we call Auvergne now.”

  “This region.”

  He nodded. “I was tempted to circumvent it because of the difficulty of negotiating such rugged terrain. But then again, it was easier to keep myself hidden, with all the dense woods and gorges and narrow little valleys. By that point, I’d resolved to allow myself no contact with people at all until I reached Spain.”

  “None at all?” she asked. “But what of your mating drive?”

  “Oh, I was half-mad with lust, but by that point, I knew enough about the Gauls to know that I couldn’t risk any more exposure, however minimal. I’d no desire to relive the experience of being captured and set on fire. I traveled through the thickest forests, which slowed down my progress but kept me out of sight. I thought I was safe because I didn’t seek out any humans. I didn’t expect them to seek me out—how could they even know I was there?—but they did. There was a small clan called the Vernae, an offshoot of the Arverni, who lived in this valley. They trapped me and brought me back to their village, but not so they could burn me. They wanted to use me to sire offspring with special powers to perpetuate their druidic line.”

  “You can sire children by human women?” she asked. Most follets, including Lili, couldn’t reproduce with humans; it was why she could disport herself as she wished with no risk of pregnancy. But given that Elic could only have relations with humans, perhaps he was one of the few who could father half-human offspring.

  He said, “I actually have a very strong urge to reproduce, and I can—in a manner of speaking.”

  “Either you can or you can’t,” she said. “’Tisn’t very complicated.”

  “In my case, it is. You see, I make no seed of my own, so if I couple with a woman in the ordinary manner, which is generally the case, there is no possibility of conception.”

  “‘The ordinary manner’? And what, pray, would be the extraordinary manner?” she asked.

  A little hesitantly, he said, “I…have the ability to take a female form in order to mate with a male of superior quality. As I change back into a male myself, the seed I’ve secured from him is enriched by certain of my own—”

  “You’re a dusios,” she said in a tone of wonderment. The term had been bandied about quite liberally in past times, becoming more or less synonymous with “demon,” but a true dusios, with the ability to shift genders, was a great rarity. “I didn’t know there were elfin dusii.”

  “Any race of follet can produce dusii,” he said. “’Tis a random aberration among nonhumans.”

  “Elle…,” she breathed, staring at his face—the sea-blue eyes and sensual mouth, the godlike beauty. “My God, you’re Elle. No wonder she looks so much like you. She is you.”

  “I’m glad you know,” he said. “I didn’t like keeping that from you. My intent this evening was to capture Francis Dashwood’s seed, but now that I’ve got it, I’m at somewhat of a loss as to what to do with it. By rights, it should only be bestowed upon the worthiest sort of female. That was why I got myself appointed Abbot of the Day and took part in that absurd mock mass, so that I could have first choice of the women afterward.”

  “I was hoping you’d choose me,” said Lili as she touched his cheek, “even if it didn’t quite work out as you’d planned.”

  Turning, he gathered her in his arms. He smoothed the damp hair off her forehead, stroked her face, her mouth. Ducking his head, he kissed her, very gently, his lips warm and soft and sweet against hers. It felt so pure to her, and yet so thrilling, as if she were fifteen again, and feeling a man’s mouth on hers for the very first time.

  “You taste like chocolate,” he murmured.

  “’Tis my only vice.”

  He laughed at that, his chest shaking against hers; she laughed, too. They kissed again, with more passion this time, more purpose, as he caressed her throat, her breasts, the curve of her waist. He slid a hand between her thighs, grazing a finger very lightly along the seam of her sex. The flesh there felt so hot and sensitive; every brush of his fingertip provoked a little whimper of desire from her.

  “I wish…” She sighed. “I just wish we could…”

  “Shh…” Gripping her hips, he pulled her astride his lap and pressed her to him, his erection like a column of heat against her most intimate flesh.

  She said, “But you can’t…”

  “You can.”

  Elic rubbed against her, rocking her hips slowly but firmly. Lowering his head, he drew a nipple into his mouth, sucking and tonguing it with a deeply rhythmic pressure that heightened her arousal to an almost excruciating degree. Only a dusios, she thought, who knew firsthand the sensitivities of female breasts, could do this so well.

  “Yes,” she breathed, her thrusts growing faster, more erratic as water sloshed in waves over the edge of the pool. From his low groans and the straining of his muscles, Lili could tell that he, too, was in a high fever of arousal—and dou
btless a fair measure of frustration, given his inability to spend this way.

  Elic held her tight as she came, whispering things she couldn’t hear over the roar of blood in her head, and her own helpless cries of release. He tucked her head into the crook of his shoulder and stroked her back with a quivering hand. “Lili…you’re so beautiful,” he whispered into her hair.

  Reaching between them, she closed her hand around his erection.

  He bucked at her touch. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “Lili…”

  Gliding her fist up and down his length, she said, “Is it possible, if I were to use my hand, or perhaps my mouth…?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t spend save between a woman’s legs—a human woman. Never in my life have I so ardently wished it otherwise.” Gently removing her hand, he said, “Were you to continue that, ’twould evoke only pain, not pleasure. After I’ve tapped a man’s seed, I’m left in a state of fierce arousal until I can transfer it. Too much provocation when I’ve no outlet for my passions can leave me in agony.”

  “You’ll be in this state until you find a suitable woman to give the seed to?” Lili asked.

  “The problem is, there are no suitable women here, not right now.”

  “Surely you’ve found yourself in this fix before,” she said, “having—how do you put it?—tapped a man’s seed, but with no one appropriate to transfer it to. What do you do when this happens? Just pick the least objectionable female and hope she doesn’t become pregnant?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I use a condom, much as I hate to.”

  “Because they diminish your pleasure?”

  “That, and it’s a terrible waste of seed that I’ve gone to some trouble to obtain, but better to waste it than for the wrong woman to conceive a gifted child.”

  “Is that what you’ll do tonight?” she asked. “Use a condom?”

  Elic slumped down, his forehead resting against hers. “I wish…I…”

  “I know,” she said, fighting a pinch of unaccustomed jealousy at the prospect of this man—whom she’d only just met—lying with another woman tonight. An absurd reaction, of course, especially in light of her own sexual appetites, which were all-consuming and utterly ungovernable. Elic was as much a slave of his carnal humors as was she; regardless of their feelings, that would never, could never, change. “So…which of Francis Dashwood’s ‘nuns’ do you think you will choose?” she asked as coolly as she could.