In the Garden of Sin

by Louisa Burton

  “You’ve never even seen it. How do you know it’s dank?”

  Giving him that look, she said, “It’s a six-hundred-year-old stone castle.”

  “It’s just a large manor house, actually.” Although it was enclosed by stone curtain walls fifteen feet thick and festooned with electrified barbed wire.

  “It’s dank,” she said with finality. “And dark and spider-infested, and located a hundred miles from the nearest decent restaurant.”

  More than a hundred, actually. When Turek had had Gebirgshaus built back in the late 1400s, he’d visualized it as a sort of safe house for when he was being pursued; in fact, it was where he’d convalesced after the Post-Fuck-up Makeover back in ’82. To that end, he’d built it not in his Czech homeland but on Romanian soil in the high, craggy southern curve of the Carpathians, which erupted in a thousand-mile-long swath through several eastern European countries. The house and the land it stood on had been bestowed upon him by Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, in return for helping to mete out punishments to those who were foolish enough to oppose the great prince’s rule. The southern Carpathians were vast and desolate. Galiana would have no way of knowing where his refuge was, having refused all of his past invitations to visit it.

  “How long do you think you’ll be there?” she asked.

  As long as it took to coerce Lili into vampirism once she’d had enough of being chained up and tormented in Gebirgshaus’s dungeon, where so many of Vlad Tepes’s enemies had bled their last. “I thought I’d fly out next Friday and stay a week or two, maybe,” he lied. “I would ask you to join me, but I know what your answer will be.” In fact, if all went as planned, he would never see her again. He would have found a way, at long last, to pry her talons out of his flesh.

  “I don’t know,” she said, choosing another cigarette from the lacquered box on her glass-topped Noguchi coffee table. “Perhaps it’s time I finally saw this place for myself. I’ve always been a bit curious as to why it holds such allure for you.”

  Oh, fuck me. Leaning over to lift her gold lighter off the table—he’d never once seen her light her own cigarette in the presence of a male—Turek said, “You’re more than welcome to come, of course. You should know, though, that it’s one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the face of the earth, and very sparsely populated. You’ll go stir-crazy, for sure. And when it comes to feeding… well, I’ve had to make do with bears, lynxes, wolves…”

  “I haven’t tasted the blood of game in quite some time,” she mused, leaning back to savor her cigarette with a contemplative expression.

  “It’s nowhere near as nourishing as human blood,” he said, thinking Sheisse! “And it can taste pretty goddamned funky, depending on the animal. And these animals are usually crawling with fleas and ticks, and—”

  “I am well aware of the downsides, Anton. I think you forget sometimes how much older I am than you, how much more experienced in, well, everything. More than once I’ve been forced into hiding in unpopulated areas where I had to feed on wild animals. The novelty wears thin very quickly.”

  “Then, um, are you sure you want to be stuck at Gebirgshaus for weeks, with little or no access to human pigeons?”

  “Weeks? I thought you said a week or two.”

  “Oh. Yeah, well, um, I’m kind of viewing it as a sort of open-ended—”

  “You wouldn’t be playing me, would you, Anton?”

  “Playing you?”

  “Keeping something from me.”

  “Whoa.” He took a step back, raising his hands—which he quickly lowered when he saw how they were shaking. “How— how could you say that? How could you even think it?”

  Galiana studied him through a haze of smoke for about ten seconds, during which he didn’t draw a breath. She shrugged, tapped her cigarette into the ashtray, and said, “You seem unusually tense tonight. Wired up.”

  “I’m… I’m… not wired up, just—”

  “If you’re stressed out, you probably should take a couple of weeks to yourself. Go to your nasty old castle, chill out a bit. I think I’ll take a pass, though. Fleas and ticks, for Christ’s sake.” She shuddered.

  “Right. Yeah. Good. That’s good,” he said, dizzy with relief. “I mean, it’s for the best, all things considered. You really wouldn’t be happy there. I really think you made the right—”

  “Sleep well, marish,” she said.

  Grateful for the dismissal, Turek bid her good night and headed off to his bedroom, a Victorian-style enclave with blackout shades and heavily lined drapes on all the windows. They’d always kept separate rooms; Galiana shared her gray-walled, Bauhaus-furnished royal chamber with no one. When she was horny and wanted him to service her—for such was how he’d come to think of it in recent decades—she came to his room, used him, and left. Sometimes he dreamed that he was smothering; invariably he would awaken with her crouching over his face, rubbing her snatch against his mouth.

  After hiding the card of entrée in a secret drawer of his dresser, Turek stripped, showered, and crawled between two layers of cool, sleek Egyptian cotton, only to lie awake, his mind whirring.

  Hell yeah, he was wired up. He was getting ready to deceive and betray a three-thousand-year-old vampiress who would toast him to cinders—after dining on deep-fried cock with Chianti and fava beans—if she caught wind of his scheme. That kind of thing tended to focus the senses.

  Marish. She’d started calling him that after they hooked up together again in Paris during the Terror. He’d asked her what it meant, and she’d told him it was an endearment in the old Etruscan tongue, and that it meant something like “lover.”

  About fifty years ago, he’d gotten curious and tried to look up the exact definition. He’d checked a few libraries and well-stocked bookstores, looking for an Etruscan glossary, but it was an obscure dead language, and he came up empty. Maybe if he were to look in one of those big university libraries, he’d have better luck. Or maybe…

  He actually smacked his forehead when it came to him. “Oberarsch.”

  Throwing back the covers, he crossed to his writing desk and opened his laptop. Within seconds, he was scrolling down a web page titled “Etruscan-English Dictionary.”

  He homed in on the Ms: Malena, Malstri, Man…

  “Bingo,” Turek whispered when he found the entry for Marish.

  His grin faded when he read the definition. He stared at it, searing it into his mind lest he falter in his resolve to extricate himself, at long last, from the clutches of Galiana Solsa.

  Marish: servant; slave

  LUTU-LILI SMILED to herself when she saw Elle accidentally-on-purpose spill a little grog onto “Lord Dragoneye”—a square-jawed, prematurely gray New York trial attorney named Blaine something—while serving preprandial drinks to the costumed “barons and baronesses” lounging in the castle courtyard.

  Blaine leapt up, wiping at his rented doublet. “What the fuck…Clumsy wench!”

  “I’m so sorry, my lord,” Elle said with bowed head. “Pray forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? You ruined my fucking jacket.” Some of the attendees liked to throw around the “thees” and “thous,” but Blaine wasn’t one of them. “It isn’t forgiveness you need, it’s a goddamned lesson.”

  Grabbing her by the arm, he strode to the Correction Table standing next to the central fountain. The hefty antique held a place of honor among the various furnishings set up around the courtyard—spanking benches, fisting slings, even a whipping post—all of which had been used at least once since the official D and D kick-off luncheon at noon.

  The stone benches were also popular for disciplinary purposes; a pretty little wench was bent over the back of one at that very moment, being fucked by one baron while another looked on, casually masturbating as he sipped from his tankard. Frequent use was made of the courtyard’s hundred-eighty-year-old cherry trees, as well. A baron had chained a strapping, gold-clad footman to one and was tormenting the poor bastard by slapping his c
ock very lightly but persistently with a cat-o’-nine-tails while he moaned and shuddered.

  Inigo, in flamboyant lord’s attire and his favorite vintage top hat, had even found a use for the “toy cart.” This was a two-wheeled wooden drinks cart, its shelves loaded with playthings that weren’t always true to the the Renaissance period: handcuffs, blindfolds, gags, harnesses, butt plugs, dildos, an assortment of crops, whips, and paddles, and about a dozen different brands of lube on a silver tray. The fun-loving satyr had strapped a redheaded wench who called herself Isolde facedown over the top of the cart with her skirts thrown up and the tray of lube on her back. Isolde was a bisexual super-sub with a deep love of pain, degradation, and bondage. With that in mind, Inigo had been wheeling her around the courtyard for the past hour, offering her body as a “test dummy” for comparing the qualities of the different lubes.

  Everyone turned to watch as Blaine shoved Elle onto the Correction Table, which somewhat resembled an eight-foot picnic table, the kind with a long attached seat on either side. The main differences were that the seats were actually for kneeling on, and the whole thing was upholstered in scarred, well-worn red leather. Unlike the smaller whipping stools and spanking benches, the Correction Table could accommodate a number of subs at once, if need be.

  Blaine positioned Elle not facedown, as was more usual, but on her back with her bottom at the table’s edge and her slippered feet on the kneeler. Having chosen by the flip of a coin to play the sub this year, she was dressed, like the other wenches, in a provocative variation on classic Renaissance fair maidservant attire.

  The foundation of the D and D wench uniform was an ankle-length, ruffle-sleeved chemise of gauzy linen, its off-the-shoulder neckline gathered loosely with a drawstring. Laced over this was a boned velvet bodice with narrow straps and an under-the-bust neckline meant to frame the breasts beneath their film of sheer gauze. The color of the bodice indicated the wench’s sexual availability: green for barons only, gold for baronesses, or striped, like Elle’s, if she would submit to either. There was a buff-colored overskirt, but it was tucked so as to drape over the hips while exposing the rest of the lower body, front and back, through the filmy linen chemise; undergarments were, of course, forbidden. The only other items that could be worn were leather slippers and a hair ribbon.

  Waving over a pair of footmen, one a hard-cut Asian gymnast whose D and D name was Ailwin and the other a brawny American cop called Fulk, Blaine said, “You two, get over here and make yourselves useful.”

  He had Ailwin stand across the table from him to pin Elle’s wrists over her head, while Fulk, positioned next to him, was charged with lifting her legs straight up by the ankles, exposing her beautiful bare ass and that sweet, pink little pussy. It was the only pussy that had ever turned Lili on, really turned her on, in the thousands of years of her existence.

  It undoubtedly turned Blaine on, too, but it was hard to tell with his oversized bondage codpiece of quilted black leather accessorized with zippers and buckles.

  Fulk’s arousal was much more obvious, as the footmen’s codpieces were, in true early Renaissance style, triangular panels of the same knitted material as the buff-colored hose they wore with their short boots. At first blush, it looked as if they were wearing seamed cotton hip-hugger tights, but, in fact, they were separate leggings that were tied to each other in back and to the codpiece in front. Naturally, this was worn sans undershorts, the stretchable fabric conforming so snugly to the wearer’s male anatomy as to betray the slightest hint of tumescence. On top, the footmen wore color-coded jerkins half buttoned over puffy-sleeved shirts of the same transparent gauze as the wenches’ chemises. The shirts were kept as short as the jerkins so as not to interfere with the all-important esthetics of the groin and posterior areas.

  Blaine instructed Fulk to move aside while maintaining a grip on Elle’s ankles, and then he hauled back and smacked her. He spanked her hard and fast, his expression fierce, his face growing as red as her ass. Elle let out a breathy little cry with each blow, her eyes glittering. It wasn’t that she found pain or humiliation sexually exciting in and of itself; she could just as easily have gotten off on being the spanker as the spankee. Like Lili and Inigo, Elle was aroused by that which aroused her human sex partner. The more stimulating the encounter for the human, the more stimulating—and revitalizing—it would be for an incubus; or, in Elle’s case, for an incubus in the form of a succubus.

  “I almost hate to do this,” Blaine said breathlessly as he unbuckled his codpiece, “’cause it’s just what you want, isn’t it? It’s what all you little sluts want, especially after a good, hard spanking. But I’m not about to end up with blue balls on your account.”

  Ordering Fulk to keep Elle’s legs together and angled toward her head, Blaine knelt on the lower bench, grabbed her hips, and started fucking her with sharp, punishing strokes.

  “Fuck, your ass is hot from that spanking,” he rasped. “Oh, yeah, like a fuckin’ oven. And you are so fuckin’ wet. You liked that, didn’t you, whore? Didn’t you? Answer me.” He gave her hip a stinging slap. “Answer me.”

  “Aye, m-my lord. Oh… Oh… Mon dieu.” She arched her back, pulling her breasts upward and exposing her nipples, erect and flushed, above the gathered neckline of her chemise. Her face darkened, that telltale vein rising on her forehead. She groaned ecstatically as she came; Lili’s pussy throbbed in response.

  To hold Elle’s legs in the required position, Fulk had to lean over the Correction Table, one knee on the lower bench. His erection reared high, pulling at the ties of the codpiece. It was a good-size cock with a nice, thick head; there was a spot of dampness on the tip.

  “Can you hold her ankles like that with just one hand?” Lili asked Fulk.

  “I believe so, my lady.”

  “Take that out, then,” she said, nodding toward his erection, “and put it to use.”

  “As you wish, my lady.” He untied the codpiece as Lili squeezed between him and the table, kneeling over it next to Elle. She whipped up the skirts of her blue and gold satin gown and spread her legs. With his free hand, the footman pressed his cock into her, gripped her waist, and pushed. She moaned in gratification as he filled her, sliding in easily because she was so slick and ready.

  Lili took Elle’s face in her hands and kissed her deeply. “You’re so beautiful when you come.” Looking over her shoulder at Fulk, she said, with as much authority as she could manage, “Make me come first, footman. If you don’t, you’ll spend the next twenty-four hours in a chastity belt.”

  “Aye, my lady”

  Bracing one foot on the bench, he reached around and fluttered a fingertip right next to her clit as he ground his hips. He really knew what he was doing. It felt like one of those dual-action rabbit vibrators with a rotating shaft attached to a clitoral stimulator. Lili came almost instantly.

  Fulk slammed himself into her with a shout, his fingers digging painfully into her hip. She felt him ejaculate, felt his pleasure shooting into her, speeding her heart, pumping her lungs…

  “Oh, God, don’t stop, don’t stop,” Lili begged as another climax gathered on the heels of the first. She sucked one of Elle’s nipples into her mouth, groaning helplessly. The two women came together, and Blaine, as well, amid a chorus of ecstatic moans.

  Lili slumped down with her head on Elle’s sweat-dampened breast, listening to the wild hammering of her lover’s heart as the stranger’s cock inside her slowly softened.

  “God, how I wish it was you inside me,” Lili murmured. “I love you so much. I wish…I just wish we could—”

  “Shh, don’t, love,” Elle whispered as she brushed her fingers through Lili’s hair, not because someone might hear— humans hardly ever put two and two together—but because there was no point in yearning for the impossible.

  “That guy’s staring at you again,” Elle said as she opened the arched door leading from the courtyard to the chapel withdrawing room. The uniforms for the wenches and footmen wer
e stored there, since they had no bedrooms of their own, and she’d asked Lili to keep her company while she changed.

  Lili tracked Elle’s gaze across the courtyard to a bench under a tree, where a good-looking young blond guy, one of the doms—a Brit, judging from his accent—sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees, a cigarette in one hand and a pair of handcuffs dangling from the other. His elegant fifteenth-century court attire was gorgeously made and historically accurate right down to the most minor detail—except for the Ray-Ban Aviators.

  “With those shades, how can you tell who he’s staring at?” Lili asked. But as soon as he saw her look his way, he dropped his gaze to fiddle with the handcuffs.

  Something that felt almost like a memory tickled the hairs on Lili’s nape and evaporated, leaving a slight chill in its wake.

  “We should give Archer a call and ask who he is,” Elle said. Emmett Archer, administrateur to Adrien Morel, Seigneur des Ombres, coordinated the invitations and guest lists for these types of events. He had an apartment in the castle, but for the next few weeks, until Morel and his new bride returned from their honeymoon, he would be living in the hunting lodge that was their home, dog-sitting the pair of mastiff pups he’d given them as a wedding gift.

  “He introduced himself to me as Anthony Prazak,” Lili said, “but Blaine called him—”

  “Blaine?”

  “The guy who had his cock inside you fifteen minutes ago,” Lili said. “The spanker.”

  “Blaine, huh?” Elle said with a grin as she held the door open for Lili. “He fucks like a Blaine.” She followed Lili into the little vestibule and through a second door, locking it carefully behind them lest one of the wenches or footmen walk in right in the middle of The Change. Although the subs weren’t allowed to go wandering about on their own, they had been known to break the rules from time to time—usually in the hope of being punished for it.

  The chapel withdrawing room had originally been intended for the use of priests celebrating Mass in the adjacent chapel, but since the chapel had never been consecrated, its sizable but homey antechamber had been put to a variety of other uses over the centuries. Currently, it was serving the purpose it did every year during D and D Week, that of a dressing room for the subs. The robing alcove, where vestments should have hung, was occupied instead by rolling garment racks, shoe racks, and plastic stacking bins filled with the components of wenches’ and footmen’s uniforms, arranged by size. There were also four three-way mirrors set up around the room, and a bank of lockers for the subs’ street clothes and other belongings.