Elic lifted his big shoulders. “Does it matter? It isn’t as if there’s one who stands out above the rest.”
“They fancy themselves so forward-thinking,” Lili said, “so worldly-wise, but really they’re just children playing dress-up.”
“As are the Hellfires themselves,” Elic said. “You’ve been keeping company with them for what—two months now? I can’t imagine how you’ve tolerated them for that long.”
“’Tisn’t easy,” she conceded. “They can be a tiresome bunch, with their rituals and their whips. But by throwing in my lot with them, I’ve been able to satisfy my cravings without drawing too much attention to myself. ’Tis no easy matter for one such as I to pass for human. I tend to stand out, and that can be a dangerous thing. In almost every culture I’ve encountered for the thousands of years I’ve been alive, a female who lives for the pleasures of the flesh is reviled. I’ve been driven from my home countless times. I’ve been beaten, stoned, flogged, even hanged.”
Elic wrapped his arms around her, whispering her name.
“In most communities,” she said, “I’ve two options. I can do what desperate females have always done, sell myself to any man with enough coin to pay for me. In that case, although I’m still held in contempt, I’m understood and generally tolerated. But it is a miserable existence. It eases my lust, but depletes my soul. In my homeland, I was worshipped. A temple was built in the city of Akkad to honor me as the goddess of the new moon.”
“That disc of lapis on your anklet…”
She nodded. “A symbol of the new moon. I’ve worn it for over four thousand years. But those times are long gone. New deities have replaced the old—’tis the same everywhere. From goddess to whore,” she said bitterly.
“And your other choice?” he asked. “Besides selling yourself?”
Laying her head against his smooth, hard chest, she said, “I can choose the man I want, and wait until nightfall, and steal into his bed while he sleeps. There is a mashmashu I can say, some words in the old tongue, that will allow me to control him after he awakens. I can prevent him from moving altogether if need be—or rather, he can move, but just slightly—and that’s usually what I do. He’s aware of what is happening, what I’m doing to him, but powerless to stop me—not that he’d want to even if he could. The mashmashu ensures that his pleasure will be extraordinary, far more so than he could experience through normal human coupling.”
She had mashmashus for other purposes, too, ancient spells that could make a person feel things, or experience things, that defied the boundaries of reality—or rather, the reality that most humans were capable of comprehending. Rarely did she have cause to use such spells, but they were at her disposal should she require them.
“I can do something like that with my own ancient words,” Elic said, “except that the person I’m taking can move and speak. But if I like, I can make it all seem like a dream.”
“In my case, unfortunately,” she said, “he is left entirely aware of what has transpired—and entirely able to identify me afterward. For that reason, I sometimes take the form of a woman he knows, though I’d rather not, because of the concentration it takes. I can even determine, by searching his mind, what his notion of the ideal lover might be, in terms of appearance and comportment, and become her. In those cases, he might choose to interpret it as a dream, but usually it’s such a strong memory that he knows it really happened. Eventually I’ll find myself labeled a succubus. Things took an especially ugly turn when the Roman Church decreed that females of my breed were in league with Satan. Being labeled a whore was nothing to being labeled a witch. I can survive any form of torture or execution except burning, which is, of course, how witches are dispatched.”
“Or were,” Elic said. “The witch mania seems to have pretty much run its course, thank God.”
“Not quite. Three years ago, while I was traveling through Germany, I found myself rounded up along with two other women—innocent midwives who’d aroused the suspicions of the local bürgers by being just a bit too skilled in the healing arts. We were imprisoned in a village called Mühlbach, and sentenced to burn. They did burn the other two, poor things, but I escaped as they were building my pyre, by seducing my jailer. I fled to England. A woman can still be burned there for murdering her husband, but not for consorting with the Devil—or making it appear that she is by being too light in the heels. Of course, I still tended to attract a fair amount of attention, which was why I took up with the Hellfires once I discovered them. With them, I’m just another wanton among…”
Lili trailed off, staring through the doorway of the bathhouse into the darkness beyond. “Someone is walking this way,” she said.
“Qui va là?” Elic called out.
“C’est moi,” replied a brusque male voice as footsteps approached. “Je vous avais recherché.”
“’Tis my friend Darius,” Elic told Lili. “He says he’s been looking for me.”
“The one who lives in the cave, yes?”
Elic nodded, his gaze lowering to her bare, albeit mostly submerged body. “I’ll ask him to leave,” he whispered.
“Don’t be silly,” she replied, amused but touched by his solicitude. “I’m hardly shy, and this is the entrance to his home.”
“He doesn’t generally come in this way,” Elic said. “Too much risk of bumping into humans. There’s another entrance hidden in the woods, closer to his chamber. He likes to use that.”
“Elic?” A darkly handsome fellow in shirtsleeves stood at the other end of the pool, squinting into the mist until his gaze lit on Lili. “Ah.” He backed up, schooling his expression, but not before she detected a grimace of disappointment at her presence in his friend’s arms. “Lili. I—I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize—”
“You know me?” she asked.
When he hesitated, Elic said, “Darius was in a more…feline mood when last you met.”
“Ah, yes, that watchful little gray cat,” Lili said. Darius’s ancient and mysterious race, the djinn, were blessed with the ability to assume animal forms. The most powerful among them could even, it was said, make themselves invisible at will.
Darius, clearly taken aback by Elic’s having revealed his shape-shifting powers to a presumed human, glared at his friend. “Elic, what the devil are you—”
“She’s one of us,” Elic told him.
Darius stared at her for a moment, then scowled at his friend. “You might have told me.”
“I just did. Is anything wrong?” Elic asked him. “You seem a bit…out of sorts.”
“You’ve no idea,” Darius muttered. Taking in the two of them, curled up together in the water, he said, “I had a favor to ask of you, but I can see that you’re…occupied, so—”
“Wait,” said Elic as his friend turned to leave, his hands fisted at his sides. Excusing himself to Lili, he waded to the opposite end of the pool and asked quietly, “Quelle faveur?”
Crouching down so that he was at eye level with Elic, Darius glanced at Lili and whispered for a minute in French, his voice so low that she could make out only the occasional word or phrase…belle et insatiable…elle veut deux hommes…
“Où est-elle?” Elic said. Where is she?
“Dans le cachot.” The dungeon.
“Le cachot?”
“Elle veut être là,” Darius said tensely. She wants to be there. With another glance at Lili, he said, “Mais si—”
“Non.” Elic looked down, shaking his head disconsolately. “C’est impossible,” he said with a frustrated sigh. “Je ne peux pas—pas avec Lili.” I can’t—not with Lili.
“Oui, naturellement,” Darius said soberly. “Je suis désolé.”
“J’aurai besoin d’un condom,” Elic said.
Darius shook his head, something like a smile banishing his grim expression just for a moment. “Elle est stérile.”
“Stérile? C’est bon.” Raking his hair back with both hands, Elic said tightly, “Je vous renc
ontrerai là.” I’ll meet you there.
“Merci, mon ami.” Rising, Darius said to Lili, “I apologize for my foul mood, mademoiselle. ’Twas an honor and a pleasure to have made your acquaintance. Dare I hope your stay with us will be a lengthy one?”
“Would that it were so,” she replied, “but the Hellfires are to depart tomorrow, and I with them.”
“I am sorry to hear it. Perhaps you can visit us again. Until then”—he bowed—“au revoir.”
“Au revoir.”
Elic continued gazing through the doorway for some time after his friend had disappeared into the darkness. Finally he turned to face her, but he didn’t meet her eyes as he said, “I must leave.”
“I know,” she said. “You must release your seed.” To some woman Darius had found, a woman who was “beautiful and insatiable,” and who wanted two men.
“Lili.” He crossed to her swiftly, banding his arms around her in an almost painful embrace, his face buried in her hair, his erection pressing rigidly into her stomach.
“I know, khababu.” She pressed her lips to his chest, his throat. “You have your destiny, just as I have mine.”
“Stay with me tonight,” he rasped. “Let me hold you in my arms, just for tonight.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I live in the northeast tower, at the very top.” He kissed her head, stroked her face. “Go there and wait for me. I shall join you as soon as I can.”
Don’t think about it, Lili told herself as she watched him striding back toward the chateau, his monk’s robe flickering like a white flame in the darkness. Don’t think about her, whoever she is. She was nothing to him, a mere vessel in which to relieve his lust.
A beautiful and insatiable vessel.
Don’t think. Turning, Lili stretched out onto her back, suspended like a leaf on the surface of the warm, soothing water. Just be.
The sliver of moon in the center of the skylight—the symbol of all she once was, and would never be again—taunted Lili until she closed her eyes, whispering, “Just be…just be…”
Her mind floated along with her body, which drifted on the subtle current until her head just touched the edge of the pool nearest the entrance. She lay there, weightless and dreamy…
Until a pair of hands gently cupped her head.
“Elic?” Lili opened her eyes to find herself staring into the upside-down face of Anton Turek, kneeling over her at the edge of the pool, his eyes glowing red in the swirling mist.
“Your Abbot of the Day seems to have abandoned you,” Turek said in a low, oddly sibilant voice. “You won’t mind if I step in and take his place.”
“Get away from me.” Lili seized his wrists, thrashing in the water as she struggled to free herself from his grip.
He tightened his hands like a vise, canting her head back so that all she could see was his lurid gaze against that chalk-white skin. Leaning closer, he whispered something under his breath in his own language while stroking his thumbs over her forehead.
Lili opened her mouth to scream, but it was as if her throat had grown suddenly thick and useless. Her lungs heaved, her heart hammered, but not the slightest sound could she force from her mouth.
Her hands, still clasped around his wrists, felt strangely rubbery. She tried to tighten them so as to free herself from his grip, but nothing happened, hard as she strained. Her legs, equally unresponsive, sank like dead weight into the water.
“Now you know how it feels, mein liebes,” he said softly, almost tenderly, “to be immobilized as you immobilize your own prey. Paralysis—’tis your weapon of choice also, is it not?”
Her eyes must have betrayed her alarm, because he said, “Oh yes, I know all about you. I know we are two of a kind, you and I. I know that we belong together.”
His lips drew back, revealing, in lieu of the ivory dental bridge he normally wore, a mouthful of yellowish stumps—save for the pair of narrow little incisors flanking his two front teeth, which curved into needle-sharp points, like the fangs of a snake.
“And soon,” he said, “we shall be together, for all eternity. Jetzt schlaf.” He touched his lips, cool and dry, to her forehead, inciting a strange, thrumming pressure in her skull. A white hiss filled her ears; her eyes drifted shut.
She fell, grasping and clawing, into oblivion.
Eight
THANK GOD, thought Charlotte as she heard the key turn in the door. Darius hadn’t been gone all that long, really—fifteen or twenty minutes—but it had felt much longer, with her stretched out on this rack, her limbs pulled taut, nipples smarting with every breath. And, of course, there’d been the fear that he would never return—that she would languish here, bound to this infernal machine until she’d given up the ghost. They would find her months from now, or years—just her skeleton, two little thumbscrews, that damned pear, and a white silk cravat—and wonder how the devil she’d gotten herself in such a fix.
That slap had shocked her more than hurt her, unlike the other punishments he’d dealt out, which had been administered with a ruthless but cool dispassion. The slap had been furious, impulsive, the act of a man whose self-control was slipping.
Darius entered the chamber, locking the door behind him. He regarded her in weighty silence for a moment before approaching. She was disquieted by the look in his eyes—black and brooding, almost murderous, yet with a hint of uncertainty that made him seem, if anything, even more dangerous.
He removed the thumbscrews from her nipples and the loops of rope from her wrists and ankles and ordered her to follow him to the rear of the dungeon, and to bring the cravat with her. She hastily shook out arms and legs and rubbed her rope-burned wrists—her stockings had protected her ankles—then assumed his prescribed stance and did as she’d been told.
The bay to which he led her was that which housed the whipping bench. Charlotte wondered for a moment whether he intended to use it again, until he told her to move it back into its corner. “And fluff up the straw beneath it,” he said, an order that Charlotte found baffling, but obeyed without comment.
When she turned back around, she found him maneuvering a pair of iron manacles hanging by chains from the ceiling; he was lowering them, she saw.
“Give me that,” he said, indicating the cravat.
Using his teeth, he tore the scarf into two strips, which he wrapped around her abraded wrists, tying them off like bandages.
She thanked him automatically, only to silently curse herself for disregarding, yet again, his admonition against talking.
Darius closed his eyes and shook his head, jaw outthrust, hands curling into fists, as if it were all he could do to keep from throttling her. “Did I say you could speak?” he said in a quietly menacing tone.
“I…I just—”
“Goddamn it, Charlotte!” His fury was confoundingly real, if the livid streaks staining his cheekbones were any indication. “The rules haven’t changed, yet you persist in flouting them, like the cosseted, willful little strum you are. And as for these”—he nodded toward her silk-swathed wrists—“I assure you your comfort is the least of my concern—quite the contrary. It’s just that these manacles were forged for a man, and I don’t want your hands slipping through.”
Raising first her right arm, then her left, he closed the iron loops around her wrists, locked them, and pocketed the key.
This isn’t so bad, she thought. To be sure, she could do without the stretching of her arms after all that time on the rack, but at least she could turn her body, move her legs.
As if he’d read her mind and was hellbent on subjecting her to the maximum possible suffering, Darius adjusted the height of the manacles so that only the pointy little toes of her brocade shoes touched the floor. He stalked away wordlessly, returning a minute later with a padlock in one hand and a device in the other that she took for a horse’s bit until he came closer and she got a good look at it. It was a curved strip of iron with chains dangling from either end and a rather phallic knob in the m
iddle.
“Open your mouth.” He shoved in the knob, wrapped the chains around the nape of her neck, beneath her braid, and locked them together—a bit more snugly, she thought, than was strictly necessary. The knob, which was fatter at the tip than at the base, didn’t just compress her tongue; it filled her mouth so completely that she couldn’t even breathe through it, much less produce any noise.
“Since you’ve proven incapable of holding your tongue on your own,” he said, “the iron gag shall do it for you. ’Tis a most effective apparatus, very popular among inquisitors for its ability to block out even the most anguished screams.”
There came a rusty rattling from the other end of the dungeon as someone tried to open the door, followed by the pounding of a fist. Through the thick oak slab came a man’s voice. “Darius?”
Panicked, Charlotte tried to meet Darius’s gaze, but he was already striding toward the door. She craned her neck to watch him, but the mammoth columns blocked her view as he unlocked the door and, to her astonished dismay, said, “Entrez.”
“Où est-elle?” asked the intruder. Where is she?
Dear God, thought Charlotte as two pairs of footsteps headed her way. It can’t be. He’d invited someone else down here to witness her abuse and humiliation at his hands. Her “covenant” was with Darius and Darius alone. How could he? How dare he?
Her dismay was compounded when the two men came into view and she recognized their visitor as Elic, the friend of Madame des Ombres who’d finagled Sir Francis into naming him Abbot of the Day. Most of the “monks” looked a bit foolish in those white silk robes, but Elic, with his height, his bearing, and his extraordinary beauty, looked positively magnificent. He was one of those men who exuded masculine sensuality, a true devotee of women who, she suspected, could fuck like a stallion while whispering the kind of heartfelt endearments every female was born wanting to hear. Charlotte had entertained the hope, before her self-imposed exile from the Hellfires earlier this evening—the very fervent hope—that she could capture Elic’s eye during the banquet and discover firsthand just how hot-blooded he was beneath that cool Nordic exterior. But now…
House of Dark Delights Page 14