by Wade, Vixen
“I’m a female James Bond?” she asked, dubious. “Licensed to kill and with a clever, deadly…uh, gadget?”
“If a male of any species succumbs to your charms to the point of ejaculating, you will take his soul with his seed.”
“Oh.” She felt queasy. “But what about afterward? And doesn’t the King in Yellow have his own servants who can do this?”
“We can alter the mark later, rendering it neutral. But few females in all the realms touched by the Well of Souls is capable of pleasing Skavis, the Ogre Magi, to the point of earning a mark as his Concubine.” Bast paused. “Also, as a servant of the nemesis of my Lord, your loss will not affect the Yellow King. You are, to him, disposable, and thus the perfect agent.”
“Oh.”
“The protective geas-wards on that foul island are strong, strong enough to halt my own powers. In my own land of Egypt, Nyarlathotep was worshiped as the Black Pharaoh and he knows my ways and weaknesses from the Book of the Dead.”
“He is stronger than you?”
“He can counter my magic,” Bast admitted. “But his weakness is arrogance. His wards keep me from the portal, Cthulhu’s place of crossing, but they will not stop you.”
“Send me,” she said. She realized she had little choice anyway. Sooner started, sooner finished. “But if I succeed, promise to return me to my lord.”
“So be it,” Bast replied.
***
Veronica woke gasping.
Her lungs burned from near asphyxiation and she felt groggy, her thoughts coming slow and stupid. The air she gasped in was putrid, but also stank of brine. She was near the ocean. Still blinking confusion away, she shivered violently and realized she was naked. Her skin was blue from exposure, flesh smeared with dark stripes of mud. With a shudder she yanked her foot clear of a black water bog.
Her hair lay plastered to her skull, the dampness running down her back and limbs in icy threads. She huddled, tremors racking her body as she looked around.
She gaped, amazed, as her vision cleared. But in the next breath fear seized her, crushing amazement with disorientating terror. Only the violent chattering of her teeth kept her from screaming. She sat on the edge of a cold, brackish fen, covered in slimy muck and frigid from standing pools of foul-smelling water.
In front of her loomed an impossibility.
The city was little more than series of dim stone shapes in the gathering gloom, the crumpled walls and collapsed buildings constructed from great limestone boulders of uncut rock. The architecture exuded antediluvian age, of timelessness so far beyond the ken of man it was utterly alien.
Stone towers, stone buildings, stone streets, enclosed by the crumbling visage of a stone wall. Everywhere shadows lay thick as green lichen crept over surfaces in a slick fur and standing puddles gaped in black stagnant stretches on the ground. Window frames stared blindly out, empty and dark.
A low, chill wind breathed and sighed through alleys and avenues of strange geometry, moaning slightly and carrying the stench of seawater. Above her, perched on an obelisk of worn and cracked stone, a crow cawed, sending echoes through stone canyons. Twilight deepened into night. No hint of sun showed behind a ceiling of clouds gray as iron.
Veronica rose, heart still pounding. Behind her, deeper in the fen, she heard something heavy splash. A temperate savannah of tall marsh plants stretched out of the alkaline groundwater, running across an indistinct, unbroken horizon. Isolation seemed absolute.
She turned and looked over her shoulder as a sharp, shrill scream split the twilight. She jumped in shock. It rang out like a woman being tortured but she recognized the shriek of a hunting panther from her own home of Florida.
Still shivering, she stepped toward the stone jetty running from the ruined city out into the marsh. She had no wish to face a 160-pound predator naked and numb from exposure. But before she took two steps on the worn stone pathway, she halted.
Her fear of the fen and the things that hunted there was natural. She understood that threat, but her fear of the city was an irrational, reptilian-brained thing. It was the terror of the dark, the apprehension of a graveyard, the irrational angst of a rotting corpse.
It didn't make sense; the place was nothing more than silent, crumbling stone, but it felt real, and strong.
She swallowed, forcing herself forward. The small of her back, where Bast had placed her tramp stamp tattoo, burned. The mark of the Succubus remained, for her, unseen. She could only trust that it would work as promised.
It was hard to fathom how such an ancient site had survived so long abandoned. It seemed impossible. As impossible as how she'd gotten there in the first place.
Forcing herself to breathe through her nose, she lurched up the cobblestone entry. Movement warmed her and she hoped to stave off the somewhat numbing effects of hypothermia as long as possible. Her eyes darted as she neared the wall.
The crow above her took wing at her approach, flying into the forest of pillars, columns, spires and towers.
In the corner of the wall she saw the matted fur of a rat as it scurried through a hole in the stone. At first she was taken aback by its size, but then realized she had other issues at hand.
As she came even with the cracked Barbarian some of the shadows lightened, revealing the hanging spikes of a rusted portcullis hovering like the fangs of an open mouth. A great chain of massive links ran, tight as a bowstring, to a heavy wooden winch.
Uneasy, Veronica stepped forward. There was a claustrophobic sense about the entryway. She scanned the walls and curved ceiling as she shuffled ahead, noting the black pockets of murder holes and arrow slits.
Her gaze followed the line of decaying, mossy stone and stopped. She froze. She heard the tinny echo of water dripping into stagnant pools. She swallowed hard against the sudden lump in her throat.
A gibbet hung from the ceiling, bars rusted and pitted, stained dark by the constant damp. Inside, the withered husk of a corpse crouched, crammed tightly.
Tattered rags clung to the emaciated figure and tendrils of shriveled flesh rotted off grotesquely colored bones. Long, dully silver hair clung to a nearly fleshless skull. It was impossible to tell the sex of the prisoner, so far gone was the rot. The eyes were staring blank sockets. Holes were chewed through the ribcage and a handful of greasy looking rodents crawled curiously around the bottom of the cage.
Queasy, Veronica turned away. She was not headed to any place good. It troubled her the body was fresh enough to be a complete skeleton and still molested by hungry scavengers.
The first evidence of habitation she'd found was a corpse tortured to death by hunger and exposure. It didn't take the wisdom of Methuselah to draw frightening conclusions about the nature of these ruins.
Suddenly, from out of the darkness of a crevice, a pair of eyes appeared. Veronica froze, mesmerized by the glowing yellow orbs. She felt the icy slush of fear adrenaline sluice through her belly as she realized how big the slit-pupils were; whatever crouched in that dark concave was much, much bigger than her.
A soft, deep chuckle emerged from the darkness, mocking and mean. Shaking, she took a step backward. The voice came, inhumanly deep and, though it spoke in a whisper, obviously uttered from a mouth far larger than a human being’s.
“Hello, pretty girl,” the creature rumbled softly. “What a tasty morsel you look.” Sensing her tensing in terror, the friendly façade disappeared instantly. “Run and I will catch you and kill you,” it warned. Veronica froze in place.
Slowly, the creature eased out of the inky shadow between the ruins of the bailey wall. It was massive and she gasped as it came into view. Once more her slacker ex-boyfriend and his incessant World of Warcraft habit provide her with an answer to a question she never thought she’d have to ask.
The beast emerged further, revealing a monstrous, crimson furred lion. The mane was a wild, terrible wreath around a scarred muzzle filled with fangs like knife blades and longer than her hand. Those horrible yellow cat eye
s pinned her, hypnotizing her.
The lion aspect was the least wondrous thing about the beast. From its back great batwings, leathery and demonic, sprouted, rising up and sweeping out like the hood of an angry cobra. The back end of the body was that of an eagle, brown-red feathered, with great yellow talons like a Roman short sword.
But most terrifying of all, sitting perched between the bat wings like a cocked and ready fist, the armored and segmented scorpion tail, poised, ready to strike. Viscous fluid, amber as honey, collected in marble-sized beads on a stinger long enough to pierce her body straight through.
It’s a motherfucking manticore, she thought, incredulous.
Why it should be in more fantastical than any other creature she’d already met (or fucked) on this strange, wild journey, she did not know. But it was horrible and beautiful and capable of killing her in one, clean strike.
“You’ve come a long way to die,” the beast noted. The stinger bobbed. “Though I do appreciate the opportunity for an easy meal.”
She swallowed. Running was hopeless. Fighting laughable. The situation devoid of hope, it was just toying with her, the way all cats will with their prey. Then she saw the beast’s corkscrew cock, poking out from the soft, downy-fur of its belly. She realized what she had to do. She wetted her lips.
“Great lord,” she began, bowing. “I know I am fit only to serve as a meal for you, but I do have one request.”
A long pink tongue came out of the mouth and licked lazily at its whiskers. “This should be amusing,” it said.
Turning, Veronica dropped to all fours among the rubble, and presented the creature with her sex. She arched her back and thrust her pussy at the monster in a desperate gamble. “Please lord,” she whimpered. “Before I die, let me know the magnificence of your cock. I beg you!”
There was a long, grim silence. She waited, imagining those razor claws ripping into her flesh, the barbed stinger impaling her in a savage series of strikes too quick to follow, pushing its hideous poison into her.
Abruptly, she felt a gust of hot, wet breath on her naked backside. She shivered, sensing the massive presence looming above her. A long, rough cat tongue licked her between the legs, from clitoris to the crack of her ass. She shuddered in pleasure.
“Please,” she whispered. “More.”
The tongue lathed her again, hot saliva dripping down the back of her thighs. Jesus, the rough texture played hell with her nerve endings. The feeling of the powerful tongue was like nothing she’d ever experienced.
“Oh, god!” she moaned. The feeling was insanely intense, the sensation devastating. She couldn’t resist, or fight. It simply set her dumb, animal nerve endings ablaze.
It licked her a third time, slower, then two shorter, quicker swipes. It was enough; she shrieked in a fervor state, the experience almost euphoric. Her signature, powerful squirting orgasm geysered out her cunt in a wild, aromatic spray.
The manticore snarled, and she trembled all over again, thinking that getting a face full of pussy juice had enraged the monster. The creatures front legs appeared on either side of her head as the bull-sized creature straddled her. Its hot animal belly slid along her back as it began yowling.
She realized the scent of her pussy, sprayed directly into the thing’s muzzle, had fully engaged its primal mating instinct. She was about to get a 900lbs fucking. The tip of the corkscrew penis reached the slit of her still dripping vagina.
In the next instant, a foot of forearm thick animal cock entered her. She screamed at the strange mix of pain and pleasure at what such a massive invasion did to her. Fully relaxed and dilated from her orgasm, she felt confident she could take the meat-pole, and perhaps even enjoy the experience. But the mythological monster wasn’t giving her time to entirely adapt, and her pussy, sloppy with her own cum-spray and lion spit, was forced open in a single, brutal thrust.
She grunted hard on the next thrust and felt the strange twisting structure of the thing’s phallus rub across her G-spot like a violin bow across strings. It rammed her again, she screamed again, but in the center of the pain there was a familiar building pleasure. She couldn’t believe it, but she was going to orgasm again.
It’s almost too bad this thing has to die, she thought. I’ve never been fucked like this before.
On each back stroke it felt as if her pussy were being pulled inside out, while on each down stroke the erection punched against the cervix as it rubbed along her G-spot. She was being rode hard and when it was done, she’d be put away wet…mostly likely in the thing’s belly.
The manticore began snarling wildly, the sound echoing through the weird, crumbling ruins of the city. She knew she had him. The strokes shortened, the rhythm tightening as it reached the brink.
Suddenly, inexpertly, wonderfully, the power of the Succubus filled her. The muscles of her vagina locked on the penis, pain gone, full dilation in effect. Clotted sperm gushed into her, filling her vagina to the point of overflowing in a single, wild squirt.
Now the nature of the Manticore’s yowling changed. Then the thing fell over and lay very still. Shocked, she got off her bruised knees and looked at the once formidable enemy. It lay limp, eyes glass marbles, jaw slack, scorpion tail slack, wings droopy curtains.
Soulless, dead.
“That’s one badass pussy, girl,” she told herself.
And for how she felt—it was a rush of power, of strength and euphoria, rushing through her like cocaine. Manticore sperm leaked out of her. She turned to leave the guardian on the ground. She had more creatures to fuck.
And, if this was what taking monster souls felt like, then she was done for duty again.
***
Veronica walked through the Barbarian and came out of the tunnel to stare in wonder.
The crumbling architecture lay around her like overturned pieces on a chessboard: Towers fallen, houses caved in, walls collapsed and piles of rubble strewn in random heaps.
She stood at the entrance to a square. In the center sat a cracked and ruined fountain holding vile-smelling greenish water so thick with filth needles of falling rain made no ripples as they fell.
The bones of a horse, long picked clean and now covered with moss, lay sprawled, the ribcage serving as perch to another of the ubiquitous crows. Behind it, crowded like crooked teeth, the buildings and monoliths of the city bunched in tight warrens.
She hardly noticed.
The fountain's statue drew her eyes away from the remains of the horse. Despite the peculiarity of her ongoing experience she understood in that moment that fear can always grow worse.
The black marble figures, slick with malachite scum, stood hideously crafted. The male was a massive brute with the physique of a gladiator, the curled wings of a bat and a head like the body of a squid -- domed forehead, bulbous eyes in a sleek carapace and a fistful of twisting tentacles for a mouth.
At its hips a second figure jutted -- a human female bent backward, her legs around the first statue's hips in sexual congress, her arms flung out and her head canted oddly, thrown back, held by the waist in the creature's grotesquely outsized hands.
Her hair dangled in a permanent wave of ebony and her mouth was so far gaped in an eternal scream it nearly distorted the face beyond recognition as human.
Veronica stared at the horrific tableau in shock. She realized with sickening certainty that from the woman's mouth the fountain water would have streamed -- an endless liquid scream.
What manner of people would celebrate such depravity not only in a public place, but as the very monument at the entrance of their metropolis? Who could idolize such an act? She swallowed hard. She was no longer sure she was the least disappointed the city stood abandoned.
A chill, wet breeze carried a subtle, distant smell, a stink almost masked by the odor of the nearby sea. Veronica cocked her head. She knew that smell. It was the stench of death.
Slowly she knelt and picked up a chunk of masonry. The putrid stench of rotting flesh suggested a deat
h much more recent than the scattered bones of the dead horse. It promised danger. In a crouch she slowly scanned the square. Not every danger could be conquered by her pussy.
The square wasn't large, about the size of a paddock, with the blasphemous fountain at the epicenter and three major avenues running off between densely packed buildings. In a sudden flurry, the crow leaped into the air and flew, wings snapping hard.
A flash of motion flickered in her periphery and she spun, but saw nothing but the mouth of a narrow alley. The lane lay thick with shadow and falling rain did little to improve visibility.
It was growing darker. Somewhere above the low ceiling of rain clouds the sun sank. Twilight arrived. The realization made her nervous in ways she was unwilling to articulate to herself. She hadn't feared the dark since she was a child.
The building next to the alley held an empty square window overlooking the fountain square. For the briefest moment she caught a flash dart past the opening, but she blinked and it was gone, lost in rain and gloom.
Her mouth went dry. She knew the feeling of being stalked. She knew the feeling of a predator's eyes. She wasn't sure what was happening, but she was sure she didn't like it. She turned, looking for a pathway to run if she needed.
She heard a thunk behind her and spun, eyes searching the battlements. A stream of gravel poured out next to a cracked and weathered crenellation. The dribble petered out, spilling onto the cobblestone below.
They were on both sides, she realized. She didn't know who they were but she didn’t attribute altruism to their motivations. That abomination of a fountain statute belied any illusion of that. The last of the Manticore sperm leaking from her well thrashed pussy reminded her of just how powerful the opponents here could be.
She broke into a jog, still unsure of how to proceed but overcome by the need to move. Blind flight wouldn't help him, but neither would being surrounded in the open. This labyrinth of a decayed conurbation was the hunters’ territory -- but at least she would have a chance on the move.