Catnipped

by Olivia Myers

  “Then I will. It is very short.” Pierre held the letter up to the light and translated the few, short sentences:

  Dearest Georgio,

  I do not know where this letter finds you. I hope you will still be alive when it comes. It is twins. The doctor said both healthy, though one’s a bit slow looking a’ you. Mother sends love. She don’t know anything an’ I won’t tell.

  With love,

  Margarette Bly

  October, 1973

  “I don’t understand,” said Celia with exasperation. “A letter from Bly’s mother? Why would that be so important?”

  Pierre put his hand over his face, deeply troubled. “I can imagine it means nothing to you,” he said quietly, “but for poor Monsieur Bly, it is everything.”

  “Poor?” Celia sat up in bed, disgusted with rage. “Poor? The man who caused that miserable woman to put her hand into a fire to try and save a few scraps of paper? Poor? That monster?”

  “Yes,” Pierre nodded. “A poor and wretched man, because can you imagine what kind of a secret he must hide, what kinds of tortures he feels, if he will drive her to such cruelty? His own sister?”

  Celia was dumbfounded. “Diane? Diane is Bly’s sister? And you still call him a poor man? Why, he’s twice the monster I thought he was!”

  “A monster, but driven into his condition by a fate worse than monstrous. An unnatural fate.” A door slammed downstairs. Bly must have returned from taking Diane to the doctor. Pierre paid it no notice. He was intent on his story.

  “Nebelstatt is old,” he said. “It is a town that has lost much of its history and its stories, simply because it is too old to remember them. What it remembers is pieces of these stories, without their details. This brief note has confirmed one of these old stories—about the unnatural longings between a brother and a sister. Nature punished these longings. The brother went off to work in the mines. An explosion disfigured him so horribly that his family could not recognize him. The sister bore twins, one healthy and one as deformed in the mind as her father was in the body.

  “We have the story, and our note has given us the details,” Pierre said resignedly. “Diane and Thomas are these unfortunate twins. Thomas has tried to keep this misfortune secret but he has been drawn back by fate to face himself. How can we but pity him?”

  “Leave us, Pierre.”

  The vampiric voice cut the air like a razor. Celia felt her skin turn cold with the presence of Bly. He’d materialized behind Pierre without Pierre even realizing, like a shadow.

  “I do not know what more you can do,” Pierre said boldly. “I don’t know what you want with Celia,” but even his boldness was touched with melancholy, as though even the other man’s force of power was something pitiable.

  “Leave us.”

  Pierre turned a look of profound sympathy to Celia. He gave a look of reproach to Bly, and then he disappeared into the corridor. Bly slammed the door shut behind him.

  “What have you done with your sister?” Celia demanded.

  “She is not my sister.” In the intimacy of the room, without other interferences, Bly’s voice lost its coldness, its razor-edge. For the first time, it sounded to Celia like a human voice, inspired by human passion.

  “I know your story already,” she said. “You’ve heard it from Pierre. How can you deny it now? How can you deny the cruelties you’ve done to your sister?”

  “She is not my sister.” Bly took Pierre’s seat from the fireside and wheeled it to the bedside, next to Celia.

  Despite the humanity of his voice, Celia still feared his presence, so like a snake ready to strike, and she flinched involuntarily.

  “Don’t,” said the man. “Be calm. You must be calm if you are going to hear what I shall tell you.”

  “Pierre told me everything,” she spat in defiance. “I don’t care about fate and I don’t care about your past. What I saw you do to Diane is enough to convince me of who you really are.”

  “Who I really am,” said Bly. He laughed. It was a terrible, thunderous laugh, like the sound of glass breaking against glass.

  “Who you really are,” said Celia, dismayed but fierce. Her eyes blazed. “A pitiable man, a victim, but still a monster.”

  “Pierre is an idiot. You knew this when you met him at your university. You knew this here but you haven’t had the courage to say it. Though you have the courage to call me a monster. Please—” he said, anticipating Celia’s retort “—if a monster is a victim of his fate, you are as much a monster as I am. You are as pitiable as I am.”

  “I would not say that,” she huffed.

  “Yes,” said Bly and Celia caught a trace of pathos in his voice, a deep and profound sadness she did not think he was capable of producing. “I know you wouldn’t. And that is your tragedy.”

  “What do you mean?” Celia asked. His tone was worrying her, its intimacy, its concession. “What are you trying to say?”

  Thomas Bly looked at her. His eyes were full of anguish and remorse and self-hatred. They burned so fiercely Celia feared his own passion would engulf him. “I am saying that that fool Pierre had everything wrong in the story except for the truth. The truth that this is not my tragedy. It is yours.”

  “What do you mean?” Celia’s voice was a ghost, floating into the cruelness of the sky.

  “I can only be brief,” Thomas Bly spoke like a man giving his last testimonial before the fall of the guillotine. “The story is much too large to tell you here.”

  Celia’s heart overflowed—but with what? With fear. With tenderness. With the desire for mercy. With misery. With love, the pure love for a fellow, suffering creature.

  “But you must tell me something.” Celia pleaded. “I never asked for a story! Only, tell me something so that I know what to believe!”

  “What to believe,” Thomas Bly repeated, twisting the words around in his mouth, as though he were sucking acid from them. “And what would you believe? Would you believe that the menaces of the past have risen up against us, are threatening to destroy us by the sins of their past life?”

  He thrust his savage, pale face into Celia’s and kissed her hard, painfully on the lips. It came as swiftly as a snakebite. “Now I’ve kissed you. I can betray you.”

  “Thomas!” she pleaded, her eyes filling with tears. “You must—you must tell me something!”

  “Very well,” he said, his passion ebbing. “Then let me be blunt in the telling. Diane is your sister, not mine. It is your parents, George and Margarette Barnette, who are the brother and sister that caused you and your twin sister such torment. They did not die when you were younger as you were told. Your father was crippled in the mines and passed his days away in pain, at his mother’s bedside. Your mother fared better for a time. Pregnant with a sailor’s bastard child, she married my father and then bore me. But he learned of her scandal as she lay dying of a fever. Only too late, because he’d fallen in love with the baby who was not his own!

  “After she died, my father went with me, his infant son, to live far away, but not before his family got news of the entire scandal and cut him out of the family. And for what? For shame! For the shame of being associated, for being related to a man who’d been passionate and taken for a fool! How could my father’s ignorance be his fault? How could he know what crime she had committed before he married her? Yet my grandfather’s didn’t care about fairness or justice when he disinherited my father—yes!—and let a family treasure, a castle that has stood for centuries, rot in disuse. He’d rather it rot than go to a man who would see it restored and renewed!

  “You see how brief and simple the truth can be!” Thomas Bly said, his face cracking wide in a hideous smile.

  His passion thrilled and horrified Celia. She felt as though the man before her could do anything. Could crawl inside her skin and control her. She felt her soul cascade into the passion of his fire. She felt her body glowing in the heat of his ardor.

  “And now!” said Thomas Bly. “Why, what is
there now? You have met your twin, my stepsister—a poor, mangled creature! I have done what I could for her in the years I’ve known her but she has lost touch with reality entirely. If she is not lost then she is nearly there. And as for us!” He seemed to notice Celia for the first time, being drawn into the flame of his magnificent being. “My other stepsister! What a happy reunion we’ve made! What a fortunate fate has brought us together! Come—kiss me again!”

  He flew towards her and kissed her passionately on the mouth. Celia didn’t have the strength to resist him. She was held down by her terror and fascination which had mingled within her into a passion of her own.

  “Thomas!” At first she tried to fight him off, but then she held him closer. “Thomas!”

  The man seemed lost in the craze of his desire, but he suddenly stopped. “Celia?”

  She pulled him to her again. “I want this,” she said. “I want you.”

  And then he moved against her, into her, again. He was pouring himself out for Celia, offering himself—a wretched, broken creature—so that she could make his destruction complete. He sucked her lips with abandon, willing Celia to destroy him, forcing his power into her.

  And Celia was drunk with the passion and the strength he poured into her. She knew it was a kind of love that drew them together. Love, and need—his need to be broken by her, and her need for the power that his body was channeling into hers. She knew now why she had resented Pierre, why she could not love him with the force with which she was loving Thomas. This impossible strength, this will, was not in Pierre’s power. It was only in Thomas’s. And now, it was in hers.

  Thomas climbed onto the bed with Celia. He tore off her shirt. The maniacal action made Celia cry but she attacked back with equal fervor, struggling to pin him down, tearing his clothes away until he became a mass of naked muscle on top of her still-clothed form. She would subdue him. She would take this passion into herself.

  Struggling, clawing, she managed to get free from where she was trapped beneath so she could position herself on top, straddling him. Her mouth locked to his in a wild, permanent kiss. Her tongue seared through his mouth, drinking him, consuming him. She grabbed his hair with her fists and held for all she was worth as her kiss cut him deeper and deeper.

  Thomas kissed her back, just as hard. His powerful hands worked the loose pajama bottoms down past her knees where he tore them away from her like they’d been on fire. She was burning him but he held her like fire in the power of his grasp and in the strength of his indomitable will. Her panties came next, discarded roughly like the pajama bottoms. Now he had all of her in his grasp. All of her white heat.

  Celia gave little shuddering cries as the clothing was torn away from her, as though it were a past life she was shedding. She was naked now, purified to enter the fire of his being. She ceased kissing his lips and maneuvered down his chest, past the massive pectorals, strong as armor plating, until she reached his cock, nearly splitting apart his briefs, it was so hard. As hatefully as he’d ripped away her clothing, she ripped away this last barrier, and at last cupped him whole in her hands, like a powerful animal.

  She touched him with her mouth. She wanted to show what control she had over him and so she teased him, lubricating his shaft with the softness of her tongue, taking only his delicate tip in her mouth and then pulling it back out again. It must have been torture for him. That was what she wanted. To show that she could torture him.

  But at last the torture grew too much even for her. She was done teasing. She would have him now. Celia mounted his body and moved his formidable hands onto her breasts. Instantly they began squeezing her. He seemed to know exactly what she wanted him to do. He knew exactly what she needed of him. Her clit was as soft and as moist as a sponge, but she was careful when she positioned herself. She wanted to show him that she could wait, that she was still in power, that she was capable of prolonging not just his torture but her own.

  And then finally, she let his huge girth slide inside her, filling her with the undisguised splendor of another living being. Celia gasped with the breath of two. The firm trunk inside of her was like the trunk of her own soul, taking root in the soul of the man beneath her. She rose, elevating herself, and she felt the weight of two rise with her, towering over earthly pain. And when she sank back down again, with a gasp and a little shudder, she felt the reconnection of her soul with his. The connection was savage and it was beautiful. Again and again she rose up and came down, pumping Thomas inside of her with each rise of her thighs, breaking him more and more with every blow, consuming him.

  “Come for me, Thomas,” she said. She felt her soul rising into the bliss beyond herself. She knew she had to have Thomas ejaculate to catch the fleeting bliss and cement it to her being. She needed his essence to become complete. “Come for me.”

  Thomas groaned, and Celia could feel his body, willing his release, willing the connection. It was slipping out of his power. She had taken it from him.

  “Celia,” his deep voice quaked. And then he shuddered, as though an earthquake were passing through his body. Celia shuddered as it passed through her, ricocheting through her muscles, and ending with an explosion deep within her—a white-hot burst of his being. She threw her head back and howled.

  ***

  Afterwards. In the dead of night. In the cold and clear sky that poured in through the windows, Thomas pulled on his trousers and told Celia that they would never see each other again.

  “Old sins have followed us, infected us,” he said. “We will be driven to inhuman and impure lives. We will suffer hell and madness if we pursue each other. We will suffer as Diane has already suffered. And I do not think there will be sanctuary for us as I have managed for her.”

  “Where is she?” Celia asked as he struggled into his clothes.

  “Safe,” Thomas said. His words were razors again. Celia had stripped the armor of his soul, but it was still there in his being, in his person. She resented him for it, yet she knew that he needed his armor to survive.

  “You will see her in the town,” he said. “Talk to her. Hold her. Maybe you will never learn to recognize her, but she has already recognized you. She gave you her picture, didn’t she?”

  Celia nodded.

  “You won’t rescue her past identity, but you can remind her of it.”

  “And you,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly cold, as his was cold. “Where are you going?”

  “I would never tell you.”

  “What if you fall into trouble?”

  “I have already fallen into it. Now I shall climb out.”

  “I could help you, Thomas,” she said, and pressed her tender hand against his chest.

  “No,” he hissed and pushed away her hand.

  Celia felt shock, but it was replaced quickly by neutrality. There was no change in Thomas. He had become amorphous again. A ghoul.

  “I will be alone,” he said. “I have always been alone. I prefer it. But you, for you I leave the Bly family inheritance. It’s yours if you want it.”

  Thomas took a sizeable house key out of his pocket let it drop limply on the floor. His disgust was obvious. “I’ve left instructions for it to be transferred to Diane, and from Diane to the sister that she recognizes. If you want it. You can easily refuse and let it pass away into rubble.”

  “I want a family, Thomas,” Celia pleaded. “I don’t want your damn inheritance. I don’t want this rotting place.”

  “Then it is yours to refuse,” Thomas swept across the room and gathered his overcoat. He paused before the door. For a moment Celia was sure he was going to say something, admit some regret.

  But there were no final words. No last goodbyes. Only the sound of retreating footsteps and, at last, the crunch of snow beneath the million million eyes of the cruel, cold night. Every eye Celia knew was watching her, waiting, anticipating her fatal next step.

  And Celia stared back. She was in control. She could conquer all of these million million staring s
atellites, as she’d conquered the man who walked beneath them now in the dark hinterlands, off and away to an unknown and perilous future.

  THE END

  Forbidden Shifts

  The breeze rustling through the trees behind me. The bite of the cold air on my fur. The spots of rain that dripped on my ears and rolled down my nose. God, it felt good to be out again as a wolf.

  I couldn’t really form thoughts when I was shifted, except to consider what I was feeling and seeing and hearing. It was so satisfying to have everything stripped down to its most basic form. It was liberating not to have to worry about bills or worry about how I was going to pay the rent this month. It was even better to not have to worry about her.

  Lifting swiftly and immediately back into my human form, I scolded myself. I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to let my mind linger on Lindsay any more. It was stupid to think I had anything even resembling a chance with her.

  I was only a few feet from where I’d parked my car, and I walked over to it to get the clothes I’d stashed in the trunk. Driving a car naked, as I’d discovered, wasn’t exactly the best way to go about the whole not-getting-noticed thing. Opening the trunk, I pulled out some jeans and a t-shirt, and pulled them on. I was still speckled with sweat and rain, and my skin smelled like grass in the cool midnight air. But even as I tried to focus on pulling myself back into being a person, her face was there in my mind.

  Damn these post-shift hormones.

  Sure, I could blame it on the hormones. It wasn’t like there was anything more to it than that…at least, I could keep telling myself that.

  I’d been the beta in our pack for more than a year before I met Lindsay. Her father was the alpha, and he had always done a careful job of keeping her away from us, a bunch of horny, hot-blooded werewolves. But she turned up at the bar one evening, curious to meet the rest of her father’s pack, and Mark, her father, wasn’t around to keep an eye on us. I was smitten. Smitten in a big way. She was tall, as tall as me, with generously long legs and small, perky breasts, the kind that would have fit perfectly into the palm of my hand. And she spent the whole evening flirting with me as if her life depended on it. We bought beers, we laughed over our mutual love of stupid sitcoms and our teenage taste in music, and Lindsay invited me back to her place when the night was over. But I’d said no. I had to. Mark would have finished me if he found out I was putting the moves on his beloved daughter. What kind of beta would I be if I was screwing the boss’s kid? No matter how cute or charming or flirty Lindsay got, I had to make sure that Mark and the rest of the pack knew my loyalties lay with them, and not her. Plus, banging your friend’s daughter is probably bad form, even in the non-shifter world.