Red Grow the Roses

by Janine Ashbless

  Naylor snorted. ‘Nah. Fixtures and fittings, doll. This was a church, remember.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’ She could make out some of the words now: Thou shalt not …

  ‘The Ten Commandments. Not that anyone takes any bleeding notice of any of them these days. “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy,” eh? “Thou shalt not covet.” The country would fall apart.’

  ‘There’s still one left,’ said Ben, stepping in closer and running his fingers down Sophie’s spine. ‘“Thou shalt not kill.”’

  Naylor sniggered. ‘Yeah, well. Our Good Shepherd is still keen on that one, that’s true.’ He jerked his head. ‘You like the beer, dollface? Is it to your taste?’

  Sophie opened her mouth but didn’t manage to reply, because on the word ‘taste’ he dipped his hand beneath the hem of her skirt and touched the neck of his bottle to the juncture of her thighs. The glass was chilly and she staggered a little; instantly Ben was behind her, steadying her – and making sure she couldn’t retreat. Sophie’s mouth went to an O shape as round as the mouth of the bottle that was pressing the mound of her sex – and then nudging to the split there, and the swollen petals that were so puffy with arousal. For a moment she resisted his entry and then Ben slipped his arms round her from behind, cupping her breasts and tipping her weight back against him, and at the same time Naylor changed angle and thrust the bottle between her thighs and then up, into the furrow of her pussy, sliding the bottle-mouth back and forth, cold and frictionless as only lubricated glass can be.

  Sophie gasped. She felt the little round mouth embrace her clit momentarily, like a kiss. Then it dived back again, into her molten flesh and then – changing angle again – up into the wet clench of her hole. He ran the bottle up into her all the way to its shoulders, watching her face all the time. Then he pulled it out. Milky streaks patterned the brown glass. He licked the bottle, swirling his tongue right around the rim, and sucked the glass.

  ‘Only two things taste better than beer,’ said he softly. ‘And one of them’s hot wet cunt.’ He took her own bottle out of her limp hand. Sophie sagged back into Ben’s embrace as he pinched and played with both her nipples through the thin layers of her clothes. She could feel his hardening cock, crushed against the soft jut of her bum and struggling to rise.

  ‘Nice tits, love,’ he breathed in her ear.

  ‘You’re up for this, aren’t you?’ Naylor asked, dipping the neck of his bottle into the cleft of her cleavage and rubbing the glass suggestively from swell to swell of her breasts. His lips were parted and shiny. ‘You’re game for it, I can tell.’

  ‘Mm,’ she whimpered, nodding.

  ‘Told you you’d get everything you wanted, love,’ Ben said hoarsely. ‘Everything and more.’ He nuzzled at her ear and took the lobe between his lips, nipping softly.

  ‘Ben …’

  Her head seemed to swim. Naylor had set the beers aside and was stripping off his clothes now. He shed his T-shirt and kicked his trousers off, revealing a slim smooth body, the only visible hair a black nest at his crotch that climbed in a narrow line to his navel. His beautiful smooth cock was already stiffly erect and nodding in the free air: it had a slight curve back toward his stomach and looked almost out of proportion to his delicate frame, so engorged was it. He stroked it like it was a hunting-dog waiting to be unleashed, as he stalked back to her and looked down into her face.

  ‘This is what you were hoping for, wasn’t it, doll?’ he asked, taking her hand and rubbing it over his cock. It seemed to pulse against her, its sticky mouth kissing her palm. ‘A bit of fun?’

  Sophie nodded.

  ‘It’s going to get a bit messy.’ His gaze lifted to Ben over her shoulder. ‘Clothes off, I guess.’

  They stripped her of everything: the purse hanging from her shoulder, the cherry-coloured dress from the boutique she couldn’t really afford on her wage, the lacy bra she’d bought only last week. All but her high-heeled shoes. Everything was tossed aside in a heap. Her boobs bounced free as Ben whipped the bra off and her nipples stiffened in the cool air of the church. She didn’t seem to be required to do anything but accept their hands and the liberties they took groping her as they pulled at her clothes, playing with her tits and ass and pussy, pinching slyly between caresses until she squirmed. Ben pushed her into Naylor’s grasp as he wrenched off his own clothes, clearly impatient now. She caught a flash of his body, golden fuzz marching up his stomach and down his legs, before another shove landed her back in his embrace. He caught her wrists and pulled them to the small of her back, guiding her hands to the vertical staff of his cock.

  ‘Hold this,’ he said: ‘That’s right.’ Then his own hands went back round her, holding her under the jaw and around her waist.

  She wasn’t quite sure she liked that. Without the use of her hands to fend anyone off, she felt strangely vulnerable, and she whimpered when Naylor patted her breasts back and forth with stinging force.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; ‘does that hurt? Kiss it better.’ Falling to a crouch he caught her right nipple in his lips and sucked it long and slow and expertly. Pleasure crackled through her nerves, and she squeezed Ben’s cock hard in her hands. But it lasted all too brief a moment before Naylor lifted his mouth away and grinned. She saw his teeth, cruelly pointed fangs, just before he stooped back down on her breast and sank them in.

  It wouldn’t be quite true to say she was surprised, not really. She’d known, after all, from the beginning; she’d just avoided thinking about it. But she tried to scream anyway, except that Ben’s broad hand clamped over her mouth and the sound was trapped in her heaving chest. There was no outlet for the pain, the searing hot cut of his fangs puncturing her skin.

  Then the pain was gone, and something entirely different took its place. Sophie, pinned and thrashing, took a long time to grasp what it was, as it flowed through her right breast like melted sugar fizzing in every capillary – like worms of sparkling fire – like a hundred tiny meteors circling the burning sun of her nipple. She stopped fighting and sagged back against Ben, only half-aware that her hands were still clenched, sweating, around his erect cock, that Naylor was nursing on her tit, his throat working as he swallowed.

  Slowly, Ben slid his grip from her mouth to her lower jaw so that she could breath. She whimpered, ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck,’ her panic now swamped in the glorious sensation of the suckling, but horror making her pant.

  ‘“Oh Fuck No” or “Oh Fuck Yes”?’ murmured Ben. ‘Sounds like an “Oh Fuck Yes” to me, love.’ Lifting her left arm he sank his teeth into the fleshy bulge of her bicep.

  Again – a white flash of pain, a wave of coruscating pleasure.

  Then Naylor stopped feeding and lifted his mouth. There was surprisingly little mess on her breast, only two puckered puncture marks over her enflamed and aching nipple, each filled with a little ruby bead. No blood ran. But when Naylor licked his lips his tongue was red and wet.

  ‘Oh, please,’ she moaned. All her will seemed to have faded away as the wild chemistry of their saliva ran riot in her body tissues. Her right breast pulsed with the hungry need for Naylor to latch on again and her left breast ached to join it, even though her stomach recoiled from what it meant that their mouths were that colour.

  ‘You like that?’ he asked with a mocking scarlet smile.

  ‘It feels … nice,’ she whispered. She felt drunk with shock and her voice broke on the last word into a strange giggle she had no control over.

  ‘You do like it, don’t you?’ He nuzzled against her, grinning. ‘Naughty girl.’ His fingers slipped up between her thighs and paddled in the ooze of her sex juices. ‘Dirty fucking little girl.’

  ‘Look at this,’ chuckled Ben, brushing her turgid right nipple with his thumb; it was as swollen as if it’d been stung by a bee, and so sensitive that she gasped. ‘Just bursting with juicy goodness, aren’t you, love?’

  ‘Want another kiss, don’t you?’ Naylor lapped teasingly at her breast. ‘Let’s try something
a bit different, heh?’ Then he sat back on his heels, took her thighs in his hands and spread them, lifting one to drape over his shoulder. He and Ben took her weight easily, as she was pulled on to the kneeling man’s mouth and he buried his face in her crotch.

  ‘Oh!’ she wailed reflexively, as his tongue broke the split of her sex, as he lapped and sucked at the juices welling there. She tried half-heartedly to struggle but her body wasn’t co-operating, and even if it had done the two men were far too strong. For a long moment the sensation of his mouth was just one of simple pleasure and she stopped twisting altogether. That was when he bit down, and his fangs pierced the mound of her pubis either side of her clit. She spasmed once – and that was the last time, the last vestige of any resistance that night, because the bite was all ecstasy. Pleasure took no prisoners. Naylor sucked and she burned, and soon she was coming into his mouth, blood and juices together, and Ben was biting at the back of her neck and her shoulders, feeding greedily, the stabs of his teeth no longer even painful as her climax turned everything to gold. She thrashed wildly in their embrace, crying out. Naylor’s eyes flashed with triumph. And she couldn’t stop coming, even after the first burst was over – he kept sucking and she kept rolling down the waves of orgasm, each lifting her to the crest of the next. She couldn’t even draw breath.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Ben, gasping. ‘Give her a rest, Naylor!’

  Naylor dropped her. The deprivation was instant and vertiginous: she felt like the sun had been torn from the sky. He stood up and faced her, lifting her and crushing her against Ben’s torso as if the other man were a wall, and then he pressed into her and lifted her thighs apart and thrust his cock up into her pussy and began to fuck, fiercely. His face was knotted into a mask of concentration, his eyes narrowed, his lips tight over his monstrous teeth. Sophie’s inflamed sex responded with gratitude to the impaling pressure of his cock inside her, to the battering he was giving her clit, to the pressure from behind as well as before. She began to groan with each thrust, the air forced from her lungs. Ben helped by slipping his hands under her thighs and holding her up, splayed, for Naylor’s easier access, and she could feel Ben’s cock under her ass-cheeks, rubbing along the spread cleft of her behind as the two men sandwiched her and pummelled her between them.

  Naylor slipped a hand round the back of Ben’s neck for better purchase.

  Taking his cock only momentarily stilled the burning itch of Sophie’s clit. Her body was already primed and charged, orgasm throbbing just below the skin and ready to burst out under pressure, so she came first. For all the two men’s fierce lust she hit orgasm before Naylor did, and her screams sent him over the edge, pumping into her. She felt the gush – she’d never felt ejaculation before, not inside her – and it was cold, even colder than their sweatless inhuman skin. Then Ben bit her again, on the angle of her shoulder and neck, and that rolled her into orgasm and lifted her again, burning like the sun. She nearly passed out.

  ‘Fuck, that’s sharp,’ whispered Ben.

  His ejaculation spent, Naylor stepped away and left Ben to lower her to her knees and let her fall slowly backward, her legs tumbling apart in disarray. Sophie’s head was swimming, and in the afterwash of her orgasm she felt faint. Too stunned to support herself, she hung limply at the full extension of her arms from wrists which were gripped easily in Ben’s off hand, and her head rolled back as black and red circles bloomed behind her half-closed eyes. His flexed arm didn’t even tremble. He took his stiff cock in his right hand and began to tug with the determined motions of a man who knows he’s ready to unload.

  ‘Open wide, love.’

  Sophie parted her lips and in seconds his spunk jetted out to splash on her – the first squirts on her breasts, the final couple on her face. They kissed her skin like drips of melted ice cream. When she licked it off her lips she found he tasted like fresh-turned earth, with a metallic, coppery tang.

  They’ll stop now, she thought weakly. They’ll have finished with me.

  They didn’t. They hadn’t.

  Ben’s erection didn’t even flag. He lifted her and flopped her forward on to her belly, then took her hips and pulled her ass up as he crouched over her. His teeth pierced the downy globes of her bum, first one side then the other, then he spread her cheeks and munched down on the hole of her ass, each bite a torment and then a beatification, each drawing no more than a single sucked mouthful of her blood. Sophie, her face lolling on the whitewashed floorboards, spasmed at each bite and tried to lift her head, but her arms felt as limp as dishcloths and she could hardly bring them up and plant her palms against the floor. As Ben stood, lifting her, and braced his thighs in a straddle so that he could slip his cock into her burning slot, she could do nothing but hang doubled-up from his grasp, spine and legs limp. It took Naylor sliding beneath her and pushing her up with one casual hand to lift her to even a horizontal position. And as Ben powered into her from behind, Naylor lapped at her dangling breasts once more.

  ‘Ah!’ gasped Sophie, as his mouth moved over the tingling ice-water splashes that Ben had left on her skin. Naylor laughed a low throaty laugh and bit her over and over again from below, Ben’s semen and her blood melting together on his tongue.

  Both men laughed as she wailed and came once more.

  The physically strenuous aspects of their recreation were easy for them: effortless. She was no heavier than a rag doll in their arms, and no more capable of rebellion. Her body drove them crazy, her blood intoxicating them so that they fucked her over and over again, as playful and heartless as young lions. Each time she came to climax they both bit her and drank, tasting the spike of her orgasm in her blood. Nor were they restricted, it seemed, in the number of their own orgasms, and in exchange for what they drank from her they washed her in copious outpourings of their own fluids. She took cock like she’d never taken cock before, until she felt like she was an empty sack they were trying to fill, until she was streaked and smeared and musky with come, her hair dishevelled, her make-up smeared.

  They never fucked her mouth though.

  At the end they carried her to the pile of dustsheets and snuggled up around her, all three of them on their sides, their arms a languid tangle. She liked that: they felt warm now and she was cold, washed in a dark sea. Ben embraced her from the front, his cock wedged up her pussy, while Naylor impaled her ass from behind for the third or fourth time. It didn’t hurt: nothing hurt any more. Every inch of her body was numbly replete from their bites. Together they rocked her in slow luxurious rhythm as they fastened their teeth in her shoulders and sucked slow and long. Sophie felt herself falling toward sleep, the room spinning about her as consciousness ebbed. She tried to speak, though her mouth was dry and she had no idea what she wanted to say, only that she was possessed by a strange sense of regret, not even dismay, only the faintest sense that she was unravelling, her soul frayed to loose red threads that would never be whole again. But only a dry croak escaped her lips as she dissolved into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  ‘Whoa,’ said Ben, unfastening his mouth. His eyes were dark with repletion. He squirmed out from Sophie’s limp embrace and looked down at her. ‘Better stop.’

  Naylor rolled away on to his back and squinted at her, sucking his teeth. ‘Let’s just finish her off,’ he grunted. ‘The dregs taste the best; you know that.’

  Ben sat up on his haunches. His body was speckled and streaked with dark drops and he absently licked at a smear down the inside of his forearm. ‘Do you want to piss Reynauld off?’ he asked sweetly.

  ‘Well, now that you suggest it,’ answered Naylor with a switchblade grin, ‘that would be a bonus.’ He sat up though, and scratched at the little spills that had dried on his smooth chest. Ben snorted.

  ‘I’ll go drop her off on the embankment, shall I?’

  Naylor waved a hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve finished here.’

  ‘What about these?’ Ben looked around at the pieces of sculpture. ‘They’re good.’r />
  ‘Estelle’s sending somebody to pick them up.’

  ‘Estelle?’

  ‘Yeah. Wants them for one of her clubs, she says. Let her worry about the red tape.’

  Ben nodded, then as Naylor stretched and wandered off he walked over to the small pile of Sophie’s belongings and rummaged in her purse. First he extracted the bank notes, folding them between his fingers. Then, opening her cell phone, he thumbed the keypad three times and then held it to his ear, ambling about the room and shuffling one-handed into his jeans, hopping as he pulled them up over his legs. ‘Ambulance,’ he said after a pause.

  Naylor necked a beer chaser.

  After Ben’s first answer the woman’s voice on the other end of the phone connection kept talking, but he took no notice. He dropped the squawking phone on the sheets next to Sophie and looked down at her with a little smile. She didn’t stir. Pale as marble, she looked like one of Naylor’s sculptures. Her eyes were half-closed, showing crescent-moons of sclera. Her lips were blue, her features relaxed and peaceful. If there was no obvious movement of her ribs, the thready pulse at her throat – quite audible to him – attested that she was still alive for the moment. Her whole body was covered in paired puncture marks, everywhere but over the major blood vessels at the neck and the insides of her thighs.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ he whispered. ‘You were a blast.’

  But Sophie heard none of that.

  (Ben)

  And this is Ben, the golden boy, youngest of the six vampires in the City. Young enough that he can still pass for human and that he can still go out in daylight, though he wears long-sleeved shirts and sunglasses then and keeps to the shade of buildings because direct sunlight stings him. His hair is cut fashionably short and quirky now, and his eyes are warm and direct. His skin is still tanned from the sun that shone in 1967, a year of wild fashion, wilder youth and chemical revolution. The year he died.

  You wouldn’t know that Ben was different from anyone else, meeting him. Undeath hasn’t changed him much, not yet. His demeanour is relaxed and he likes a beer, and in fact it’s easiest to bump into him in a bar or a nightclub. Only in sudden strong light might you notice anything, because his eyes are so sensitive that he can see even in total darkness and under bright light the pupils contract to invisible pinholes, leaving his irises blank. But his eyes never were windows to his soul; even in life they were more like silvered mirrors, reflecting the gazer’s desire.