SexMagick

by ed. Cecilia Tan

  My obvious eagerness spurs them on; unable to wait, they take me two and three at a time, in every possible combination. I feel them going rigid at climax, but every time I open my eyes there are more waiting in line to use me. I lose track of the number of times I come, the number of men I have. I am only conscious of hands preparing me for entry, and cocks pushing against me, into me, using any available hole.

  * * * *

  We are all sated by the time that the first pale light of dawn fills the sky; the air smells of salt and the bitter smell of come. Weary, I raise my head and see that the wildfire has burned itself out across the water. I feel as if it has burned through me as well: a true consummation, indeed.

  Again the men form a circle around me, bowing their heads in a gesture of respect. The priest walks up to me, and drops to one knee, also bowing his head. He carries a copper bracelet which he bends around my wrist. The wristlet is a thick, polished band with a single decoration of garnets and topaz set in the shape of a flame.

  I have performed the ritual. If I had failed, I would have been thrown to the flames across the river as a sacrifice; but I have succeeded, and my reward is my heart's desire. Women who wear this bracelet are held in the highest regard in our society, as possessors of the Elemental Fire. As such we are beyond conventional sexual morality; no man may refuse our advances. Indeed, they often vie for our favor; our knowledge is legendary, our passion contagious.

  The single drum begins again, seeming to echo my heartbeat, and the men file out along the path I followed from the temple, a night and a lifetime ago. Only the priest remains, kneeling at my feet as a cavalier might kneel before his untouchable lady. The drum slows, then falls silent.

  Because of his role as the initiator of my ravishment, he must leave the priesthood, and can only atone by becoming my servant. If I refuse his service, it is a sign that the Fire is not yet appeased, and he will kill himself, or be killed by assassins in the pay of the temple, before the day is out, to ensure that the magic works. I could demand his sacrifice, in return for my own, and he would not question it.

  I was at his mercy; now he is at mine. I remember how his hands inflamed me, how his hot cock drove into me from behind, and his spurt left me warm and wet and open. Most of all, I remember the admiration in his eyes and voice, as he saw my true nature, and I smile.

  "Come with me, boy," I say, turning without seeing if he will obey and follow.

  SUMMONING

  Cecilia Tan

  In a fit of fury at me, my mistress Myrtle once said "The only thing worse than a predicament, is knowing that your own stupidity got you into it." She was wrong. It was even worse to know she would be waiting for me when I finally got out of it.

  But this tidbit of superior knowledge was no consolation either, as I considered my current position (on my back) and the keen blade at my throat. Myrtle would have the last laugh if I got my gullet slit, anyway. I kept still, and waited to see what the woman would do next.

  She eased herself back onto her haunches and smiled, still holding the knife. She was wearing more paint than anything else, some beads, some worthless talismans. The knife, however, had the scent of power about it. The woman sat all the way back and put it on the ground, the point still toward me. "You can sit up, you know."

  I did. Now I could see the markings on the ground all around me, mystical signs and sigils. She wiped the sweat from her brow and smiled again with such satisfaction I shivered.

  "What do you want of me?" I asked. There was probably some ritual greeting I was supposed to give, but it had been over a hundred years since the Summer Country had met with the mortal world, and I hadn't been long in it. No one had ever mentioned this eventuality to me. If this woman had the power to summon me from across the borderlands, she had some powerful magick indeed.

  Her smile was almost maniacal. "It worked," she said.

  "Pardon me?"

  "It worked," she repeated. For a moment she didn't seem to know what to say, her self-assurance sagging, but then she went on. "I didn't think this would work. I've been trying it every summer since, well, my years won't matter to you. For many years."

  I rested my arms on my knees, feeling my breeches growing damp from the dark loam under me. She never would have snared me if I hadn't been screwing around where I shouldn't have.

  Myrtle had been after me again, I'd heard her calling after me through the wood. I hated Myrtle's touch. She claimed she'd fashioned me from the stem of a rose and a sausage, and brought me to life because of, well, because of how much she liked sausage. And she was always hungry. She was beautiful as elves go, you know the story, eyes like stars, hair like the black net of the night that holds you inescapable until the golden morn. But why she'd made me for a mate, instead of seeking out one of the highborn in Titania's court, I was not sure. I suppose none would have her, a rejection which stung her enough that she had to detest me at least as much as she loved me, perhaps more.

  I had longed to escape from her. I looked at the knife on the ground. I'd hoped to avoid her for just another hour, to have just another minute to myself. I'd gone hiding in the borderlands, where her powers to find me were weak.

  And this mortal woman's were strong. I asked again, "What would you have of me?"

  She picked up the knife and waved it as she spoke. "You must not leave this circle. You are bound to this blade. Do you know what that means?"

  "No." I admired the blade from where I sat. It looked to have a handle carven of bone, and a blade that tapered to a graceful point. "I know nothing of human magicks."

  At that she laughed. "Human magicks!" She looked at the blade. "Look again, elf, sprite, pixie, whatever you are." She came forward and knelt beside me. "This dagger came from elfland with some ancestor of yours," she said. "He, or she, went back across the border with something that belonged to an ancestor of mine."

  I let myself feel the spark of magick off that blade. In the golden beams of the setting sun, it was far too blue to be plain iron or steel. "Um," I wanted to back away from her but I wasn't sure what her magic circle might do to me. They say only cold iron holds a faerie, but I wasn't taking chances. "Would you like me to return it?"

  Her smile was half-astonishment, half-amusement this time. "You're not joking, are you." She hunkered down a little bit lower, as if to tell me a secret. "Look, I don't think you get it." She held the blade closer to my face than I was comfortable with.

  I kept guessing. "Were you trying to summon the elf that did the deed?" I did back away, just a hair.

  "No, no, no." She examined the handle. "No, I'm supposed to be enacting the revenge of my ancestor on you."

  "Oh." If that blade was what she said it was, then she could certainly spill my blood with it. So, it looked like maybe I was going to escape Myrtle after all. It wasn't fair, to have so little of life before being reduced back to a twig and a bit of meat. "Are you going to kill me, now?"

  She rested the blade against her lip as she phrased her reply. "I'm not sure." She scratched a bit in the moist dirt with it. "I don't think so." This time her smile was apologetic. "You see, I've had to make this up as I went along. And it doesn't feel like killing you is the right thing to do."

  She stood up and I breathed a sigh of relief. She was shaking out her hair and scratching herself where the paint was flaking off of her ribs. When she had stepped out of the circle, I felt safe enough to speak again. "If you tell me more about the magick, I may be able to make a suggestion."

  "Oh no you don't, elf." She spat out the word like a curse. "You're my one chance in a million to get this to work. I'm not letting you botch it up with some faerie trick."

  I shrugged. "Suit yourself. I'm just curious is all."

  "Curious about what?"

  "About why you're trying to work a magick over something that happened before your great-great grandmother was born. If you'll pardon my asking, why go to the trouble?"

  She was gathering wood and sorting it at the circle's
edge into piles of twigs, sticks, and logs. "Ah, well, it's hard to explain."

  "I'm not going anywhere."

  She favored me again with a smile. "Somehow, I didn't expect an elf to have such a sense of humor."

  I tried to think of a witty rebuttal. I was thinking more about the fire she was building, and if was going to be for me. "Some would say I have a thorny wit."

  She went on a little longer gathering wood around the clearing before speaking again. "Well, I figure this knife is some kind of onus laid on my family. No matter how we try to get rid of it, it always comes back somehow. I tried, you see, figuring the magick wasn't real. I mean, no one believes in this stuff anymore. Sure, me and the girls get together once a month and dance under the moon, but nothing special happens. But here's the blade again, and here you are." She wound her black, wiry hair into a braid down her back. "And the curse is real, so maybe lifting it will be, too. For a long time I thought the knife was the source of the curse, but I think the true source is somewhere, or someone, in elfland. And the knife is going to be the tool to break it. Or, one of the tools," she said, nodding at me.

  "But, what's the curse?" The last ray of sun disappeared beyond the horizon.

  "It's pretty simple, really. Well, it's just..." She blushed. "It's hard to explain." She fell silent as she made a flame from a colorful tube in her hand. It hissed as she held it to the birch bark, and then went out with a loud click. She put the firemaker into a sack.

  I watched her build up the fire as the shadows deepened in the forest, adding the twigs, then bigger sticks, and finally two logs propped against one another. Then she went away. I sat without moving until she returned, the woods black outside of the fire's light.

  "I know what I have to do," she said to me, the knife still in her hand, the paint still flaking from her skin. "Take off your clothes."

  I shivered a bit as I took off my tunic and my breeches. The night air gave me gooseflesh.

  She hesitated a moment, her eyes on my selfsame sausage hanging limp between my legs, then hardened her resolve. I saw the knife flash as she stepped forward into the circle. She stood before me, then, and using the flat of the blade, pushed aside one of the fleshy halves of her pubis, exposing the moist pink underneath. With her free hand, she beckoned me closer, and then gripping me by my hair, pulled my face close to her crotch. She pressed my lips against her. Then I felt the tip of the blade on my shoulder, "Lick me."

  My tongue pressed between my lips and between the folds of flesh on her. I moved it forward and back, with a care Myrtle never appreciated. This woman did, her grip tightening and her back arching as I went on. Her hips moved as I sawed at her slit with my tongue, flicking it over the pearl hidden there, now grown hard, and tasting salt.

  But then she broke away. "There must be more to it," she said.

  "More to what?"

  "Breaking the curse." She looked at the knife in her hand, and sounded sad. "Maybe I'll have to kill you after all. I know this damn thing has to be involved somehow..."

  I was already on my knees, perhaps that's why the begging came so easily. "Please don't," I said, "Please. I know what you want, I can give it to you, oh please don't kill me."

  She tilted my chin up with the point. "How do you know what I want?"

  Indeed. Because I could feel the fire deep in her belly, almost see it flickering over her skin. Or maybe that was the real fire. Because it was so much like what Myrtle was like, when she was hungry, only without Myrtle's taint to it. I sensed it with every sense. "Please," I said, again, unable to explain these things to her, these things that were a part of my being, part of why I was made.

  She let the tip droop. "You can't," she said. "The thing I want, the thing I need, I can't have. That's what was stolen from my ancestor long ago, a curse that has been passed down to all her daughters' daughters."

  I hung my head. This curse had Myrtle's stink about it. Was this why my mistress was shunned as a cuckolding partner by the court? Because she possessed a human woman's capacity for pleasure? Perhaps she possessed even more than one. Myrtle was voracious, insatiable. Perhaps too that was why this woman's magick had caught me, with Myrtle's blade, Myrtle's curse. I wanted to weep. If she spilled my blood, she spilled Myrtle's blood, and perhaps that would lift the curse. But I doubted it was so simple. "I'm sorry."

  She sighed. "It's not that I don't like you, don't feel so bad." She put a hand on my head, stroked my hair. "You do that very well, and I appreciate your trying, but..."

  Her tenderness had brought me to weep.

  "Look, I'll let you try it again, okay? But I'm telling you, it won't work. It's never worked." She sat down in front of me and spread her legs. "Go on, I'll command you to do it if that's what you need."

  I wiped my eyes, "No," and set to with my tongue again. I could feel the blood pulsing though her as I sucked at the soft flesh, and I lapped with her heart's rhythm. She began to move again, moaning a bit, working against my tongue. And I noticed as she fell into the rhythm, that the hand that held the knife had gone limp.

  I kept licking, but could feel at my chin that other mouth gasping, waiting to be filled. I pressed two fingers between her legs and they were sucked in. My tongue never stopped as I began to move my fingers.

  "Ah, that's good," she said, her muscles grabbing my fingers tight. "But I just had an idea, you see," She stopped herself with a nervous laugh. "I don't usually do men, but, well," She flailed her hands a little. "I just got this feeling." She couldn't bring herself to say it.

  I knew what she meant. She wanted Myrtle's favorite part in there where it belonged. I started to press forward with it, but she held the knife, unforgotten, against my chest. She forced me onto my back and pinned me in place with it as she mounted me. "Now, move."

  I tried to move, to press into her, but she was too heavy for me to do much. Then she flicked one of my nipples with the point of the knife and I jumped into her. She did the other and another jolt of magick went through me, bucking my hips. I shuddered as she drew the sharp point along the skin over my ribs, raising gooseflesh but not cutting me. "Ah," she was saying as I squirmed beneath her, inside her, "that's definitely it."

  She ground her hips against me, then stopped and sat still, panting. She held the knife up. "This is nice, but it's still not lifting the curse," she said. "Maybe I am supposed to castrate you with it, keep you inside me forever?"

  I couldn't answer. Though our bodies were joined, her mind was leagues away from mine. I tingled from need, now that I had started inside her I was desperate to keep going.

  "Perhaps I need to kill you at the moment that you come," she went on, exulting in the heat and the power coursing through her. "Spill your blood onto me, transfer your pleasure to me?" She laughed. "This is really pretty strange for me, you know." She pressed the point of the knife against the hollow of my throat and I thrust into her, shuddering. As my body jerked, I felt the hot trickle down my skin and knew she'd pricked me.

  As a drop spattered the ground by my ear, I heard her gasp and squeeze me tighter with her thighs. She was riding me and I was moving as the blade scratched across my throat, and as another drop spilled she gasped again. She took the sharp point to my nipples again, then, pricking each one again and again until I was bouncing my ass against the ground with desperate thrusts. She ran the blade down my sternum, nicked me under the chin, and again, as each drop left the knife she gasped and shuddered. She left long thin lines of red down my arms, behind my ear, the prickle of the knife and the magick making sparks off my skin as I let the spell swallow me whole. Strands of her hair hung down into my face as she licked the tiny wounds on my neck and I convulsed under that tender touch.

  Then, she held herself still, and me as well with the point suddenly at my groin. She looked into my eyes and nodded, "Just a wee bit more..." Her hips began to grind again in double-time as the knife travelled up the length of my body leaving a red trail in its wake, and then she slashed me across the cheek. I
screamed as she screamed and in that especially long moment, when the magick was stretched to its limit, I saw the arc of blood droplets, my blood, Myrtle's blood, swinging through the air off the edge of the knife, the gleam of the blade like the tail of a falling star cutting the air, until the strand snapped, and she fell limp over me, panting, her dark hair obscuring my sight.

  When she didn't move for a while, I began to wonder if the magick had been too much for her. "Hello? Are you still there?"

  She sat straight up and I winced at her weight. "Oh," she looked down. "Sorry." She rolled into a sitting position off to one side. "So that's why it's such a big deal."

  "I'm sorry, what?" I guess we were both a little dazed.

  "Orgasm. No wonder it's such a big deal. I mean, it felt exactly like I hoped it would, and yet, I couldn't have really imagined it." She brushed some dirt from her hands, noticed she was still holding the blade. "I can't believe I'm saying this to a pixie." She looked at the blade.

  I looked, too. "Can I, uh, could I see it?"

  She handed it to me, and then went and put more wood onto the fire. My blood seemed to have stained it along the edge, but the glow was brighter than ever, pulsing with alight all its own. I imagined Myrtle howling somewhere on the other side of the briars and though I smiled, I also shuddered. I had one ragged feather from the wings of hope and I clutched at it--that Myrtle's desire for me would be gone, and that I might finally taste the freedom of life. I held the dagger tight in my fingers, thinking I might trade this trinket for my freedom. Stranger things have happened.

  She was looking at me. "Are you okay? You look a little ill."

  I forced a smile. "I'm fine." The sky seemed to be turning lighter, or perhaps it was just aglow with my anxiety. "Um, what now?"